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This is one of the more fun shows in recent memory. If you want to giggle while you learn, this episode is for you.
I just got back to town from a wilderness survival trip in Rocky Mountain National Park. I feel like a million bucks. If there’s one thing I recommend as an action step this week, it’s this: leave all your gadgetry at home, disconnect, and get outside!
Last but not least, our CavemanFeast iPhone and iPad app is still kicking butt on the iTunes charts. Apple even featured us in the U.S., Australia, and a few other countries. So thank you all for the reviews, we seriously appreciate the support!
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On today’s show with John we chat about:
How we’re all out of touch
Why aliens have orange eyes
Why great thinkers stand up
And we even act out tea time with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow…
Here’s the show.Sixteen years ago, Gene Church, a new father and a grieving husband, went to Montgomery with a baby in his arms and a bill in his pocket.
The year before, his wife Rose had died of complications from childbirth - complications doctors should have caught - and Church wanted to make sure that sort of mistake wouldn't happen again.
A simple blood test should have uncovered the problems his wife was having, Church said in an interview Monday, but insurance companies and the healthcare industry as a whole were pushing by whatever means possible to keep costs low and profits high. If the hospital didn't run the blood test, then there was no risk that they'd discover complications that would necessitate a longer stay in the hospital.
The test cost less than $5.
But Rose didn't receive one, and 36 hours after arriving at Helen Keller Hospital, her doctor signed off on her discharge. Eight days later, she died.
Church drafted the bill himself. It reinforced a federal law that guaranteed minimum coverage for new mothers and it mandated a basic level of treatment, including the blood test that might have saved his wife's life.
When he got to Montgomery he found a political divide that was just as acrimonious as it is today, if not more so. Don Siegelman had just taken back the governor's mansion for the Democrats, and Steve Windom had just become the first Republican lieutenant governor since Reconstruction. Democrats tried to strip Windom of his powers, leading to a filibuster in which Windom peed in a jug behind the state Senate dais before giving up control of the upper house.
"It was in that environment that I was trying to get this bill passed, so I was told that there was zero chance of getting it passed," he recalled this week.
He was told he had zero chance, but the bill passed both houses of the Alabama Legislature unanimously. With the governor's signature, "Rose's Law" was written into the Alabama Code (Section 27-48-2, if you want to look it up).
Church had also filed a lawsuit against the hospital and his late wife's OB-GYN, Dr. Larry Stutts.
That lawsuit lingered in the courts until it was eventually settled in 2005. As part of the settlement, the terms were undisclosed and Church says he agreed to a confidentiality agreement.
Church then moved on with his life and put that chapter behind him, or so he thought.
Fast forward 16 years
Church remarried and moved to Pensacola, Fla. Today he works with his brother, who manages a chain of retirement homes, but he says he spends most of his time running a nonprofit network of Catholic radio stations.
Then, last week, a family member of Rose sent his daughter, Logan, a text asking whether they had seen a bill in the Alabama Legislature to repeal Rose's law.
The bill's sponsor was state Sen. Larry Stutts - Rose's OB-GYN, who had approved her discharge from the hospital in 1998.
"My daughter didn't even know who Larry Stutts was," Church said. "I had to explain it to her while I was frantically trying to research this bill online."
Church said he had vaguely remembered hearing that state Sen. Roger Bedford had lost his reelection bid last year, but he had not known it was Stutts who had beaten him.
Even if he had known, he said that it would not have bothered him much. He has tried to let any grudges go. He recounted how, before Rose's funeral, Stutts had come to the funeral home, where he tried to shake Church's hand, but Church refused.
"The truth was, I was wrong about that," Church said Thursday. "I was hurting."
However, he says he's struck by what Stutts has now tried to do as a freshman state Senator.
"It was like he had to bury this law so that no one would ever know, and no one would have known had he left this alone," Church said. "Now he comes across as a very petty and vindictive man."
Church said that he has had conversations with other lawmakers, including some of the bill's cosponsors in the Senate, and he doesn't believe they knew what the bill did when they were asked to support it. They took the advice of a medical professional, but now that has backfired on them.
"Lawmakers I've talked to have been solidly on my side," Church said. "There is a tendency to look at this and think that it is a Republican versus Democrat or male versus female issue, but I like to remind people that when Rose's Law passed, it passed unanimously."
It's important to understand, too, that Stutts' bill would not repeal only Rose's Law, but also a bill passed in 2013 that would require physicians notify women who have been found to have dense breast tissue, which can mean an increased risk of breast cancer. Curiously, that 2013 law was sponsored by then-Sen. Bedford, who Stutts defeated.
On Monday morning, I left a message at Stutts' office seeking his side of the story, as did one of my colleagues. As of Tuesday morning, he had not returned those calls. However, last week he told WAFF that his bill would repeal "emotional legislation that doesn't improve care."
At least one of the new bill's cosponsors, state Sen. Jabo Waggoner, R-Vestavia Hills, says he didn't know about Stutts' connection to the law's history and that Stutts did not tell him and the other cosponsors about that history when he asked for their support.
"It hasn't gone anywhere yet, and it's probably going to be one of those bills that doesn't go anywhere," he said.
Church said that when his daughter Logan learned what was happening, she was ready to go to Montgomery to set lawmakers straight, but now it looks like that won't be necessary.
"The truth is unchanged since where it was 16 years ago," Church said. "I'm just asking people to do the right thing, and no matter people's political persuasion then, they did the right thing. Sadly there's now an individual involved who didn't want to do the right thing."A team of researchers led by Jeroen Tromp at Princeton University used a GPU-accelerated supercomputer to create a detailed 3D picture of Earth’s interior.
“This is the first global seismic model where no approximations — other than the chosen numerical method — were used to simulate how seismic waves travel through the Earth and how they sense heterogeneities,” said Ebru Bozdag, a coprincipal investigator of the project and an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. “That’s a milestone for the seismology community. For the first time, we showed people the value and feasibility of running these kinds of tools for global seismic imaging.”
Using advanced modeling and simulation, seismic data generated by 253 earthquakes scattered worldwide and 18,688 Tesla GPUs on the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the researchers imaged the entire globe from the surface to the core–mantle boundary, a depth of 1,800 miles.
For the next part of the work, the team is preparing for Summit, ORNL’s next high performance supercomputer that will be five times the computing power of Titan.
The team’s next model will introduce anisotropic inversions, which are calculations that better capture the differing orientations and movement of rock in the mantle. This new information should give scientists a clearer picture of mantle flow, composition, and crust–mantle interactions. They also plan to simulate higher-frequency seismic waves, which will allow the team to model finer details in the Earth’s mantle and even begin mapping the Earth’s core.
Read more >Walker's passing also has a direct and profound effect on the projects he had yet to finish or were yet to be released, no more so than with Fast and Furious 7.
The news of Paul Walker's tragic and fatal car accident on Saturday has just started to sink in with his fans and colleagues, not to mention those family members and friends who knew him best.
The last post to Walker's Twitter profile before his accident on Saturday was dated Nov. 29, and included a still from what appeared to be the set of Fast and Furious 7 :
The final words in the tweet — "Will you be ready?" — take on a far different meaning in the wake of Walker's passing. BuzzFeed has confirmed with a source close to the project that Fast and Furious 7 is still in production — and it's been slated for a July 11, 2014, release date for months — but the future of that film and the entire billion-dollar franchise now hangs in limbo.
Actors have died while their movies were in production before. Heath Ledger died in 2008 with several scenes left to film in director Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus — scenes that Jude Law, Colin Farrell, and Johnny Depp all stepped in to shoot in Ledger's stead. Oliver Reed died while making 2000's Gladiator, requiring director Ridley Scott to insert a digital recreation of Reed's face for a few key shots.
Neither of those options, however, are available to director James Wan for Fast and Furious 7. Walker died in a fiery car crash, reportedly in the passenger seat of a brand new Porsche GT — exactly the sort of car and very much the sort of crash that are stock in trade in the Fast and Furious movies.
It's unclear how many scenes in Fast and Furious 7 that Walker had left to shoot. But even if the 40-year-old actor had wrapped his part of the film, Wan has the deeply unfortunate job of finishing a movie in which one of his lead actors died under circumstances that are profoundly close to scenes in which that actor himself undoubtedly took part.
Walker's character is not easily written off, either. He had been a part of the franchise from the very beginning, when The Fast and the Furious — about Brian O'Conner (Walker), an undercover cop infiltrating a crew of drag-racing thieves, led by Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto — went from a B-movie afterthought in the summer of 2001 to one of the surprise hits of the year. The franchise has since charted an improbable trajectory, from the box office low of 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift — the only film in the series in which Walker did not appear — to the box office-busting run of last June's Fast and Furious 6, which has pulled in $788 million worldwide. It has become the crown jewel franchise for Universal Pictures, affecting the livelihoods of not just the actors involved, but also the many artisans and technicians who make the films possible.
From the start, the series' charm has been its focus on action sequences that eschew eye-popping CGI for a grounded realism (often still augmented with CGI) that gave its many, many car chase sequences a gritty kick. With each film, those sequences became more outlandish and elaborate, but Walker's unshowy acting — matched with Diesel's beefy stoicism — always kept the franchise tied to the its initial blue collar appeal. As O'Conner switched sides and joined Toretto's team — not to mention had a child with Toretto's sister (played by Jordana Brewster) — the films also became increasingly focused on the theme of family.
Walker's death shatters that family, both on screen and off. There are no good options for the filmmakers moving forward, and any assumptions about what happens now with the film remain simply conjecture. For one, understandably, Wan's focus is elsewhere at the moment:Get the Recipe Pressure Cooker Butternut Squash Risotto With Frizzled Sage and Brown Butter
One of the things that has most amazed me since I joined Serious Eats and started digging deep into recipes and techniques is how frequently a cooking method that works perfectly in one application can fail so miserably in another. Take this pressure-cooked butternut squash risotto as a prime example.
Earlier this year, I did some tests on pressure-cooked grains, and found that in most cases, the pressure cooker didn't cut down drastically on cooking time, nor did it significantly improve the taste or texture of the cooked grains.
Meanwhile, I've had some success in the past with using a pressure cooker and baking soda to rapidly brown vegetables. It's a trick that I first saw published in the Modernist Cuisine cookbooks. In the book, they use the baking soda to increase the alkalinity of carrots, then cook them in a pressure cooker before turning them into a rich soup—the combination of high pH and high heat greatly speeds up the Maillard reactions that are responsible for much of the good flavor of deeply browned foods. Kenji has also used the technique with success in his French onion dip recipe.
Working on this recipe, though, turned all of those observations and tricks upside down. When it comes to risotto, the pressure cooker proved itself to be one of the best ways to cook rice grains: It's both insanely fast and low-maintenance. But when it comes to butternut squash, the pressure cooker did me no favors. And don't even get me started on the baking soda.
Actually, I take that back. I do want to get started on the baking soda. Here goes:
How to Make Butternut Squash Taste Like Pretzels (a.k.a. How Not to Cook Butternut Squash)
Seeing as how a pressure cooker and baking soda have the ability to enhance browning and also reduce cooking times, it seemed like a good thing to test out on butternut squash.
To start off, I followed Modernist Cuisine's instructions for making pressure-cooked caramelized carrots, substituting the squash instead. This is what I ended up with:
It's not attractive, but let's not go by appearance. After all, my goal was to turn this squash into a purée that I would then stir into the risotto. If it had been delicious, I would have used it regardless of its color.
The problem, though, was that it was not delicious. I didn't know it was possible for a vegetable to taste like a pretzel, but that's exactly what this tasted like. In some ways, it makes sense: Pretzels are traditionally dipped in a highly alkaline solution made with lye, which is why they turn such a deep brown color and develop that particular pretzel-y flavor when baked. Clearly, I had generated similar flavors with my pressure-cooked, baking-soda-spiked squash.
The other thing that was strange about this squash was how it completely lacked sweetness. Normally, caramelization—the process by which sugar breaks down into sweeter and more complex-tasting compounds—occurs at the same time as the Maillard reaction, so that those deeply roasted Maillard flavors are accompanied by a rich sweetness (just think of almost any good roasted root vegetable).* But somehow, the development of the sugars had been halted in my pressure-cooked squash, leaving the Maillard reaction to proceed at an extreme clip all by itself. The imbalance was disorienting.
* You can read more about both the Maillard reaction and caramelization in Kenji's piece here.
As it turns out, this is a phenomenon that Kenji has written about before with regard to sweet potatoes. Just like the sweet potatoes that Kenji describes, butternut squash contains more complex starches that we don't necessarily perceive as sweet. As it cooks, those starches are broken down into simpler sugars that do taste sweet, but the process only happens at lower temperatures, between 130 and 170°F (54 and 77°C). Go above that, and the conversion of complex starches into simpler sugars comes to a halt.
That ends up being a problem in a pressure cooker: It gets too hot too quickly, and the flavor of the squash suffers as a result.
Having established that the pressure cooker wasn't going to work for the squash portion of this recipe, I switched to roasting. I even did some test batches with baking soda on the roasted squash. Without a doubt, it sped up browning, but I didn't care for the flavors it added to the squash—there was still that strange whiff of pretzel.
Enhancing Sweetness
For this risotto, I knew I wanted a rich, sweet butternut squash flavor, and from my testing thus far, it was becoming clear that a classic roasting approach was going to be my way of getting there.
When Kenji made his sweet potatoes that I mentioned above, he cooked them for about an hour in that ideal low-temperature range before roasting them to guarantee that as much of the starch as possible would be converted to sweet sugars.
I could have gone that route here, too—and you absolutely should if you have the time or inclination—but because this recipe is a pressure-cooked risotto, part of what I felt it should promise is reduced cooking times. While I didn't want to sacrifice flavor in the name of speed, I also didn't want to develop a recipe that undid one of its coolest features (i.e., quick risotto-cooking time) by adding other lengthy procedures.
Before I explain what I did to achieve that, I think I should first stress that the single most important thing is the ripeness of the squash itself. No matter what other tricks I have up my sleeve, an underripe butternut squash is going to fall flat. It can sometimes be hard to tell when looking at a whole one, but ripe squash should feel heavy for its size and sound hollow when knocked with your knuckles. Most importantly, once you cut into it, the flesh of the butternut squash should be a deep orange color.
To pump up the sweetness while adding depth and layers of flavor, I took a two-pronged approach here. First, I roasted chunks of butternut squash with some garlic, sage, red pepper flakes, and half an apple, then puréed them together until smooth. The apple ties in so well with these flavors, and contributes a bit more sweetness without overtaking the squash flavor.
I also blended in a tiny bit of miso, just to balance those sweet notes with a hint of something salty, savory, and complex.
Meanwhile, I also tossed some smaller pieces of diced squash in olive oil and maple syrup, then roasted those as well until browned and crisp. These little bits of extra-sweet squash get stirred in at the end, while the subtle maple flavor again plays toward the autumn theme here.
The Magic of Pressure-Cooked Risotto
I've lost track of the number of times I've had someone tell me that they've never made risotto because they're intimidated by the idea of having to stand over the pot and stir continuously for well over half an hour. The saddest part is, that isn't even true. Yes, risotto needs to be stirred quite a bit, but you can put that spoon down. It's really not as labor-intensive as some people make it sound.
Still, it isn't the quickest of dishes, nor the most hands-off, which is probably why even I don't make it at home all too often.
The pressure cooker changes all of that.
The risotto starts out like most others: sweating some minced onions in oil until they're tender but not browned.
Then you stir in the rice, and continue to cook it until the grains are all coated in the oil and have toasted for a bit.
They'll start to look a little bit like tiny ice cubes: translucent around the edges and cloudy in the center.
Just about when you think the rice and onions will start to brown and burn if you let them go any longer, you add some wine, then cook it until the raw alcohol smell has mostly cooked off. This usually coincides with the wine fully evaporating, right about when you yet again need to add a liquid before the whole thing starts to burn.
In a more traditional recipe, this is the point when you start ladling in broth, little by little, and stirring often as you go, until the rice is finally cooked and suspended in a thick, creamy sauce.
But not with a pressure cooker!
Instead, we dump in all the remaining liquid, give it a quick stir, and then close the pressure cooker.
Then we bring the cooker up to low pressure (usually about 10 psi on most pressure cookers), and just let it go for five minutes. As soon as the time is up, you can quickly depressurize the cooker by running it under cold water (if it's not electric), or by using the pressure-release valve if it is electric.
When you open the cooker, it won't look like a proper risotto at first.
But once you give it a stir, the creamy sauce will form. I've recipe-tested this with two different pressure cookers, one a stovetop model and the other electric. In the stovetop one, the consistency was just about perfect once I stirred it and added the remaining ingredients. In the electric one, it was still just a little bit too loose, so I turned on the cooker's heating element and cooked it for a couple more minutes to get that creamy sauce. If for some reason it's too dry, you can loosen it with a splash of broth or water.
Then I stir in my squash purée.
The photos here are of the electric cooker, so it was just a tad too soupy at first, but it took only a couple minutes to bring it together.
For even more flavor, I decided to make a small amount of brown butter with frizzled sage while the risotto cooked.
I set the fried sage leaves aside to use as a garnish, and drizzled the sage-infused brown butter into the risotto, followed by the maple-roasted squash pieces.
I finished the risotto with grated Parmesan cheese, which helps thicken the sauce just a bit more, then spooned it onto plates.
Top it with those fried sage leaves and a little more cheese, and it's ready to go.
What you end up with is a risotto packed with layers of flavor. And, whether we're talking about clothes or food, isn't layering what fall is all about?
Get the Recipe Pressure Cooker Butternut Squash Risotto With Frizzled Sage and Brown Butter View Recipe »
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“This was totally unexpected,” stated Rhys Taylor, a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences who led the research. “We frequently see gas streams in galaxy clusters, where there are lots of galaxies close together, but to find something this long and not in a cluster is unprecedented.”
The atomic hydrogen gas is about 500 million light-years away and was spotted with the William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Its origins are unknown, but one hypothesis postulateas that a larger galaxy passed close to smaller galaxies in the distant past, drawing out the gas as the larger galaxy moved apart again. Alternately, the large galaxy could have pushed through the group and disturbed the gas within it.
The research will be published shortly in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Source: Royal Astronomical SocietyTegucigalpa, Honduras
El hijo del expresidente Porfirio Lobo Sosa sería uno de los principales socios del "Chapo" Guzmán, según un reportaje publicado en las últimas horas en Noticiero Univisión.
Fabio Lobo sería el facilitador del trasiego de la droga desde Colombia a Honduras, con rumbo a México y de ahí hacia Estados Unidos. Centroamérica -por su ubicación- es un punto obligado en el transporte del ilícito, consideran los expertos.
Según el reporte, Lobo habría colaborado con el capo mexicano entre los años 2004 al 2014, ayudado por seis exmiembros de la Policía Nacional de Honduras.
En mayo del 2015, el hijo del exmandatario fue capturado por la DEA, Administración de Drogas y Narcóticos, en Haití y trasladado a Estados Unidos para enfrentar la justicia de ese país.
Un año después de su captura, Fabio Lobo se declaró culpable y habló acusando a su vez a los seis expolicías que hoy enfrentan orden de extradición.
+Las 5 claves en caso de policías acusados por la justicia de Estados Unidos
El próximo 15 de septiembre Lobo recibirá su sentencia de un juez de Nueva York que podría ser desde 10 años de reclusión a cadena perpetua.
Vínculos con Los Cachiros
Información en poder de EL HERALDO establece que agencias antidrogas de Estados Unidos le seguían la pista a Lobo Lobo desde hace varios años, incluso desde antes de que su padre fuera Presidente.
Esa labor de inteligencia permitió conocer que el imputado tuvo nexos con la banda de narcotraficantes de Los Cachiros, la principal organización de tráfico de drogas que existía en Honduras hasta su desarticulación.
Los Cachiros, una banda formada por la familia Rivera Maradiaga, fueron declarados como narcotraficantes por el Departamento de Estado de Estados Unidos y posteriormente solicitó la extradición de siete miembros de ese grupo.The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?
That’s a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in the business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan, was a co-author of the 2007 book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.
“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says. “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”
But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse.
In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering innovation.
Photo
To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”
In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.
When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”
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She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who moved to Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company. At the time, Eveready had become a household name because of its sales since the 1950s of inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But by the mid-1980s, the flashlight business, which had been aimed solely at men shopping at hardware stores, was foundering.
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While Ms. Rabe’s colleague had no experience with flashlights, she did have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and marketing from her years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the flashlight product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green — colors that would appeal to women — and began distributing them through grocery store chains.
“It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the old guard at Eveready,” Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, “the flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years after that.”
MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a transient “zero-gravity thinker” at Intel.
“I would ask my very, very basic questions,” she said, noting that it frustrated some of the people who didn’t know her. Once they got past that point, however, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas,” she said.
While Ms. Rabe usually worked inside the companies she discussed in her book, she said outside consultants could also serve the zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not identical to that of the group already working on the project.
“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”This is a great topic thanks Ollie, and one that I have a great deal of thoughts on (so brace yourself).
A successful user experience within a CMS I think is associated to four key areas which are aligned to either the platform being used (Umbraco, Sitecore, Drupal etc) or are the responsibility of the consultant configuring the given platform. The success (or failure) of a given project can hinge on the usability of the CMS.
No matter how great the website, if it’s unmanageable or if the administration associated to managing content is so onerous that our client is operationally hamstrung then reputations will be damaged, clients will be unhappy and projects will be deemed unsuccessful.
The four key areas are:
Platform Usability
Some CMS platforms have invested heavily in their usability and UX. It shows.
Take Umbraco and Sitecore for example, both systems are conceptually the same, content is modelled in a similar way, the API’s are similar and terminology (largely) is consistent between the two systems.
However, consider the two images below.
The Umbraco UI is simple and clear.
Interactions and CMS actions are applied through consistent, repeatable patterns (if you want to apply an action to a given page, right-click it and select the appropriate action)
There is typically only one way to perform a given action (you publish in a single way, you delete in a single way)
A CMS user is presented with an uncluttered user interface which presents only the actions that are relevant to the current context of the user at a given time
This isn’t to say that Umbraco is a restrictive, immature CMS; it’s incredibly powerfully, but the UX has been meticulously considered to the extent that Umbraco is a joy to use. Equally training is a breeze, no matter the size of the audience.
Consider how this contrasts to Sitecore which again is conceptually similar to Umbraco.
The UI is overly cluttered
Actions (publishing, deleting etc) can be performed in many different ways (in the ribbon, in custom menus etc)
Ribbon items are not always contextually relevant; it’s possible to have actions available in the ribbon that aren’t appropriate/relevant for the current page/item being edited. This creates a great deal of noise and confusion for the user
It should be said that Sitecore is a considerably more powerful platform, it’s more flexible, scalable and configurable than Umbraco and as such it’s more complex. However it’s through this additional level of flexibility where the usability issues derive from.
Platform Type
I’d like to add to your list of ‘types of CMSs’ if I might dare, as I think the third type is where the sweet-spot lies. I feel that a CMS which proves a successful user experience is one which leverages the maturity and investment of a pre-built CMS but which allows a bespoke CMS to be built on top of it (a hybrid if you will).
Take Umbraco which is incredibly mature, includes a rich API, provides enterprise features such as load balancing and localisation, but which provides nothing to a user out of the box. Upon logging in, the CMS is empty and it requires an expert to configure (from a UX perspective) it correctly. What it does provide out of the box is a framework of building blocks which allows content to be modelled in a way which feels bespoke – it inherently (if configured correctly) matches the content types appropriate to the given website. Equally it’s extensible to allow new features, content types and data types (text editors, media pickers) to be added and customised to suit the current project.
Content Modelling
How content is modelled within the CMS is probably the most important factor which can affect the user experience within a CMS. No matter how great the UI, how powerful the CMS, if it takes a user 45 minutes to create a page and publish it due to the number of steps they need to jump through to do so, then we’ve failed.
For example, imagine a situation where a website contains a blog and a blog is written by an author. When writing and publishing a blog the user needs to enter who the blog’s author is, which provides the following possibilities for content modelling (there are others, but these are the most appropriate here):
1 – De-normalised: Authors could be managed against the given blog page (author’s name, job title, and photo are ‘stored’ against the given blog article), providing ultimate flexibility regarding the author’s name and credentials. In this way, it’s possible to provide more contextually relevant job titles appropriate to the given blog article (a dodgy requirement I know). e.g. A given sales rep at a holiday company could be a ‘Villa Specialist’ on one page and a ‘Greece Specialist’ on another. However, this creates a great deal of duplication, an author may have published multiple blog articles and if the author gets married and their name changes, multiple pages need to be first found and thereafter updated.
Example content model being:
/blogs/blog 1/author 1
/blogs/blog 2/author 2
/blogs/blog 3/author 1
2 – Normalised: Conversely the author could be managed in a separate area of the CMS; a so-called ‘global area’. In this way, an author is picked to be associated with a given blog article. The author’s details are managed in a separate area of the CMS and when updated all articles associated with the given author are published with the new details; updates are quick and easy. However, this is achieved at a detriment to flexibility and less contextually relevant content may be presented to the user (holiday sales reps would have to be ‘sales rep’ on all pages).
Example content model being:
/blogs/blog 1
/blogs/blog 2
/blogs/blog 3
/global/authors/author 1
/global/authors/author 2
Equally, the direction of the picking can cause headaches, or cause a project to succeed, should blogs be picked from the author item, or should authors be picked from the blog items??? Both have their up’s and downs and the decision is relevant to our client’s needs.
Now, considering all of the above challenges it is possible to solve these issues and deliver a beautifully usable CMS, with a few compromises along the way. HOWEVER, content modelling is often left to the developer – not a UX specialist!!! Developers are great n’all (I used to be one), but they are not the best people to be making these decisions; their objectives and goals for the project are different and they’ll largely take decisions to solve their challenges rather than those of the users. I’m paraphrasing to make a point here, not all developers think like this of course, but it’s certainly a problem which occurs more often than not.
Data Types and Extensibility
Website content is natively composed of a collection of words and pictures, each content ‘type’ generally consists of a number of pieces of data. Take a blog article which may contain following pieces of data:
– Blog title: Text string (max 50 chars)
– Blog article: Rich Text
– Blog author: Author Picker
– Blog main image: Media Picker
– Blog published data: Date picker
The data types present within the CMS (e.g. text string, date picker, media picker) are typically limited and are provided by the CMS vendor/community. Additional data types are typically available as plugins and enrich |
, it's not even close. But for a league that is still lacking the century-long history of its counterparts in North America and around the world, MLS' original grudge match -- D.C. United vs. the New York Red Bulls -- deserves some love.
With all due respect to the newer rivalries (Seattle-Portland began in MLS in 2011; Montreal-Toronto and Red Bulls-New York City FC are even younger), the organic hatred that emerged between two of the domestic league's charter members -- the Red Bulls were known as the MetroStars then -- during the league's early days was a gift from the soccer gods. It started during the inaugural season in 1996, when the two clubs, separated by 200 miles of Interstate 95, met in an epic playoff series that D.C. won.
United went on to hoist that year's MLS Cup and two of the next three, too. The MetroStars, meantime, struggled to remain competitive. Yet whenever the two teams faced off during the late '90s and 2000s, there was a palpable excitement no matter where they were in the standings.
The matchup has lost some of its luster over the years, a product of the Red Bulls' 2006 rebranding and United's steady decline. It's still had its moments, though, including a memorable postseason pairing in 2012 and another meeting last fall. It also still has that 21-year history on its side. Nobody can say this one was manufactured.
"I think the D.C.-New York Red Bulls game is the ultimate Major League Soccer rivalry," DCU keeper Bill Hamid, a Virginia native who grew up watching the clubs' battles, told the league's website recently. There's no disputing it's the oldest, and when it comes to rivalries, that counts for a lot.
-- Doug McIntyre (@DougMacESPN)January 4, 2016 Comments (0) Views: 3100 Environment
Sprawling Malheur County could soon be in the spotlight as a mining hub — or a battleground of uranium and gold mining interests vs. environmentalists trying to protect its lonesome sagebrush landscape.
Australian-owned Oregon Energy LLC hopes to mine 18 million pounds of yellowcake uranium from the southeastern Oregon high desert 10 miles west of McDermitt near the Oregon-Nevada boundary. The go-ahead to mine the so-called Aurora uranium deposit could bring up to 250 construction jobs to the county, followed by 150 mining jobs.
Meanwhile, Calico Resources USA Corp., a subsidiary of a Vancouver, B.C., company, may seek permits this month to chemically extract microscopic gold from a high desert butte south of Vale called Grassy Mountain, a project likely to create another 100 jobs.
Mining history Gold: Mining once was a major part of Oregon’s economy and the most sought-after mineral was gold. Since its discovery in Oregon in the mid-1800s, miners have wrested an estimated 5.5 million ounces of gold from the state’s streams and underground “hardrock” mines. At today’s prices, that gold would bring about $1,616 per ounce. Half to two-thirds was found in northeastern Oregon. Baker County and Josephine County have had the most active claims. Uranium: Uranium was first discovered in Oregon in the 1930s and a small amount was mined on Bear Creek Butte, 40 miles southeast of Bend, in 1960. The White King and Lucky Lass mines near Lakeview came later and there are known deposits of uranium in Baker, Clackamas, Crook, Curry, Harney, Jackson, Lake, Malheur, Polk and Union counties.
The proposals will be the first real test of the 1991 chemical processing mining law passed by the Legislature in response to a debate over mining’s future in Oregon, said environmentalist Larry Tuttle. The law ushered in tough new bonding requirements to weed out marginal operators and guarantee environmental cleanup.
Approval of the Grassy Mountain project could trigger a deluge of new chemical mining in Malheur County. Up to a dozen gold deposits similar to Grassy Mountain dot the high desert between the Snake River town of Huntington and Jordan Valley.
The county, sparsely populated with only 31,313 people, could use new jobs, said County Commissioner Dan Joyce. Its unemployment rate in November was 10.3 percent, compared with 9.1 percent for Oregon and 8.6 percent for the nation.
Mining companies have passed up the county in the past because of Oregon’s environmentally conscious reputation, Joyce said. But this time, the sluggish local and state economies, higher mineral prices and technological advances in mining and cleanup could open a door to mining, he said.
“I’m thinking people are a lot hungrier now than they were,” Joyce said.
Uranium mine plan
Oregon Energy’s proposal calls for extracting ore from a mile-long, 600-foot wide, 250-foot deep open pit 10 miles west of McDermitt and 3 miles north of the Oregon-Nevada border. The mine, adjoining the former Bretz Mercury Mine, a contaminated open-pit site from the 1960s, would cost $200 million to develop and uranium extraction could continue for up to 20 years, said Oregon Energy President Lachlan Reynolds.
Plans call for the ore to be crushed and mixed with an acid solution in enclosed vats to leach out the uranium, he said. The acid would bond with the uranium and when dry become a sand-like powder called uranium oxide concentrate, or yellowcake. Yellowcake would bring $52 per pound and could fuel nuclear reactors or be processed into weapons.
Tuttle, spokesman for the Portland-based Center for Environmental Equity, foresees environmental problems.
The likelihood of sulfuric acid being used in processing the ore means it could remain in the mine tailings after milling, he said. The snag is that sulfuric acid tends to continuously leach out heavy metals that occur naturally in waste rock and tailings, contaminating ground water.
“Just because you are through with the processing, years later you still have the issue with that interaction,” he said.
But probably the biggest environmental hurdle for the Aurora mine would be the release of mercury, Tuttle said. “The whole Owyhee Reservoir has been affected by naturally occurring background mercury,” and uranium mining could release more, he said.
Gold mine proposal
Environmental considerations first thrust Grassy Mountain into the consciousness of Oregonians in the late 1980s and early ’90s when Newmont Gold Co. proposed introducing Nevada-style open-pit cyanide heap-leach gold mining there.
Low gold prices ultimately prompted Newmont to write off its $33.8 million investment and abandon plans to mine Grassy Mountain in 1995, but only after the site came to symbolize the conflict between economic development and environmental activism in eastern Oregon.
Calico Resources would take a dramatically different approach, said Andrew Bentz of Ontario, spokesman for Calico. The company proposes to sink an 850-foot underground shaft or tunnel to remove 1,000 tons of ore per day from Grassy Mountain, he said.
The operation expects to remove at least 425,000 ounces of gold from the mountain. The company’s investment and exploration costs probably will total $100 million before mining begins, said Calico project manager Andy Gaudielle.
Mineral-bearing rock would be milled for microscopic gold in a closed chemical process that wouldn’t include the bird-attracting open settling ponds of diluted cyanide that worried Newmont’s opponents, said Bentz, a retired Malheur County sheriff.
Mining and reclamation of Grassy Mountain would take about 12 years, unless new gold discoveries are made, he said.
Bentz believes Calico won’t face the level of environmental opposition that attended Newmont’s proposal.
Reynolds, the Oregon Energy chief, said mining companies no longer can operate in ways that caused the environmental problems of the past. Improvements in mining technology result in more efficient and environmentally responsible operations, he said.
“We will have to post substantial financial bonds to ensure that there is full reclamation of the site to an approved plan when mining ends,” Reynolds said.
Only 5 percent of the nation’s domestic-use uranium is produced within U.S. borders, although the United States takes more than 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, Reynolds said.
The most likely buyer of Aurora uranium would be a U.S. electricity utility, he said. He estimated the mine could become the source of up to 30 percent of uranium produced in the U.S.
What’s next
Public hearings will be held after the companies apply for permits to begin mining, said state geologist Vicki McConnell of Portland.
Sixty-one acres of Grassy Mountain is patented, private mining land, but substantial portions of both sites are on federal land administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Both sites are remnant volcanic regions where geothermal and hydrothermal activity has pulled heavy metals and other substances close to the surface, McConnell said.
Calico hopes to begin taking gold from Grassy Mountain in five years, but the regulatory pathway is likely to be longer for the Aurora mine because uranium is involved.
In addition to the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council, the U.S. Department of Energy and the federal Environmental Protection Agency must review the uranium mine.
BLM permits will be required for tailing piles and the use of desert roads for both the uranium and gold mining.
Oregon has a process in place to allow mining to proceed if resources can be extracted profitably and in a way that’s environmentally safe, McConnell said.
Whether that’s the case here has yet to be determined, she said. “Geologically, we know there is gold in Grassy Mountain and we know there is uranium in the McDermitt area,” she said.
SOURCE
Tags: Oregon, uranium, us newsPresident Trump signs an executive order at the White House in Washington on Tuesday. Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images
On Monday, ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued President Donald Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause, a constitutional provision that prohibits federal officials from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever” from a foreign state without congressional approval. The clause clearly bars Trump from receiving payments from foreign governments, including from state-owned corporations. Yet Trump’s business empire, from which he refuses to divest, is continually receiving emoluments from foreign states in the form of cash, loans, licensing deals, and building permits. (In 18th-century parlance, an “emolument” was any good or service of value.) So CREW has asked U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams to rule that Trump’s acceptance of these emoluments is unconstitutional and prohibit him from taking any more.
Make no mistake: This suit may well fail. If it does, it could help Trump, taking emoluments off the table as grounds for impeachment and allowing his administration to dismiss the issue as fatuous harassment. Democrats would lose a potent rallying cry, and the emoluments criticism would fade from the political arena. The suit is an audacious gamble; it could certainly backfire. But even if it does, it will have a silver lining—functioning as the opening volley in a sustained assault on Trump’s unlawful conflicts of interest.
CREW’s first hurdle is the sheer novelty of its claim. The Emoluments Clause has never before been tested in court—although the legal luminaries who joined CREW’s complaint appear convinced that judicial intervention is necessary. Eminent constitutional law professors Laurence Tribe and Zephyr Teachout, as well as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California–Irvine School of Law, are participating in the suit; so is Deepak Gupta, a Supreme Court advocate of considerable renown.
This imposing lineup of lawyers is clearly designed to send Trump the message that his conflicts of interest aren’t a frivolous distraction to be blithely waved away. The basic point, that Trump’s foreign payments present a grave constitutional concern, is clearly correct. And yet the merits of the suit itself may never be heard in Abrams’ courtroom, let alone the Supreme Court of the United States. That’s because CREW arguably lacks “standing”—a concrete and imminent injury that gives it the right to sue Trump. CREW asserts that it has standing because it investigates ethics violations, and constantly investigating Trump’s conflicts of interest will create a “drain on the organization’s resources.”
This theory rests on a 1982 Supreme Court decision called Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman that blossomed into a generous interpretation of standing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in which Abrams’ court is located. The judge may well decide, though, that this standing claim is simply a bridge too far, in which case she would be obliged to toss out the whole case. But Joshua Matz, an associate at Robbins, Russell who contributed to the Brookings white paper on emoluments that served as a kind of rough draft to the lawsuit, told me he found the theory “compelling”—and that the courts have a duty to act.
Matz hopes that the court finds Trump in violation of the Emoluments Clause and orders him to fully divest from his business; any other result, he said, would allow the president to maintain “financial interests that inevitably blur his loyalty with regard to foreign powers.” But that leads to CREW’s second big hurdle: The courts may decide that they have no business passing judgment on the president’s conflicts of interest, maintaining that they involve an inherently political question that courts are ill-suited to decide.
But in a conversation on Monday, Tribe told me he’s optimistic that the courts won’t punt on the case.
“This is a perfect example of something where the courts are quite ready to weigh in,” he said. “It’s clear that the old approach—treating every politically sensitive question as a potential ‘political question’—is gone. Once we get to the merits, the court will not say, ‘Ah, but we can’t decide that question; it’s only for Congress to decide.’ The Constitution states very clearly that foreign emoluments are absolutely forbidden unless Congress chooses to give its consent. And Congress has not given consent.”
I asked Tribe why he chose to litigate the issue, rather than pressure Congress to impeach Trump for accepting foreign payments.
“We are a country dedicated to the rule of law,” he said, “and those who spend their lives trying to interpret and understand and enforce the law naturally look at whether this is something we can get judicial help with.”
Moreover, judicial intervention may be the fastest way to remedy an extraordinarily serious problem.
“We want Trump to have the best interests of America at stake,” Tribe said, “and there’s no way of ensuring that under the current circumstances. He has divided loyalty. Right now, every time Trump makes a decision involving any of the dozens of countries where he has hotels or other enterprises, we can’t know what motivated it. Was it a desire to have better business relations with that country? A response to how much that country greased his palm? Or a desire to do what’s best for America?”
Tribe also sees the suit as a way to educate the public about Trump’s constitutional violations.
“Litigation can help bring important principles to light,” he said. “It helps me teach my students, and it performs an educational function vis-à-vis the public. Of course, I don’t take on causes that I feel confident I will lose purely for educational purposes. But win or lose, we’re going to help educate the public on something that’s very important.”
Even if the CREW suit fails because of standing or some other hurdle, it isn’t the only group seeking to tackle Trump’s conflicts of interest in court. The American Civil Liberties Union is searching for a plaintiff to sue under the Emoluments Clause—preferably a hotel that loses foreign business to Trump’s hotel, which would make for a strong standing argument. And lawyers around the country are hatching plans to use the courts to halt Trump’s lawbreaking well beyond Emoluments Clause breaches, challenging his planned crackdown on immigrants and disturbing rejection of transparency.
As Elie Mystal has written in Above the Law, these fights are critically important, even if they ultimately prove to be futile. While a majority of congressional Democrats debate appeasing or collaborating with Trump, these lawsuits demonstrate that, in Mystal’s words, “private citizens will use what they have to frustrate the Trump regime.”
The emoluments fight may quickly run into a brick wall. Or it may lead to a court order forcing Trump to divest from his businesses. Either way, the Trump administration will be on notice that his constitutional contraventions will not go unchallenged. With this suit, Tribe, CREW, and the lawyers of the resistance have effectively given Trump an ultimatum: Comply with the Constitution, or we’ll see you in court.Defense officials familiar with the situation say that the US will soon deploy another 1,000 ground troops into Syria, with the deployments expected to be part of the buildup ahead of the invasion of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa.
This 1,000 troops is in addition to other recent deployments to Syria announced by the Pentagon, and when completed is expected bring the number of US troops in Syria overall to close to 2,000. The official US limit of the number of troops that can be in Syria is 503, a number long since surpassed.
The exact timing of the new deployments is uncertain, but officials say it will likely be in the next few weeks. This deployment appears to be in excess to the 2,500 troops to be sent to Kuwait, which are expected to be drawn on by commanders in both Iraq and Syria to raise their respective numbers.
While these recent deployments are a lot larger than the near-weekly announcements of new deployments during the Obama era, the fact that several deployments are being announced in close succession suggests the Pentagon has continued the trend of splitting the deployment into segments to avoid announcing the overall size in one shot.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzThe Ralph Thorne Care Center at Wesley Towers is eagerly awaiting some new arrivals. They might come at any minute.
Until then, all eyes are fixed on an unassuming flower planter outside the center. Nestled inside, Petunia, a wild duck named after the flowers she nests in, keeps her clutch of nine to 11 eggs warm.
Resident Ellie Peterson has been keeping a watchful eye on Petunia from her window. She can�t always see Petunia from her window, but Peterson loves to talk about her. Every morning, the first thing Peterson does is open her blinds to try to spot the duck. She also enjoys watching people�s reactions when they see Petunia for the first time.
�Oh, I want to pet her on the head so bad,� she said.
Peterson grew up on a farm near Larned. Though she didn�t have ducks back then, she did have chickens. Peterson said having Petunia around reminds her of where she came from.
�I like animals,� she said with a chuckle. �I always said I was going to be a bird watcher when I get old.�
Petunia and her eggs are big news for the 53 in the Thorne Care Center. News has spread throughout the complex, even garnering the attention of the CEO.
Peterson, 77, and her husband Gene, 83, moved to Wesley Towers a little over a year ago. They had to leave behind their Chihuahua, named Poncho. Petunia has been a source of conversation for the couple.
�He�s blind and can�t see it, but he listens to me talk about it all the time,� she said.
Marilyn Drake, 93, said the duck reminds her of the time she spent on her farm near Alden with her husband.
Tanda Barnes, activity director for the care center, said residents are constantly asking her and other employees about Petunia.
�She�s our mascot,� Barnes said.
Barnes said due to the popularity of Petunia and her eggs, the staff tries to bring residents to the planter frequently.
�She�s probably the most photographed duck around,� Peterson said.
Van Miller, also a resident of the center, has been living there for 33 years and said he has never seen anything like this before. He likes to carry around a picture of Petunia with him.
Barnes said she and the rest of the staff will continue to keep an eye out for Petunia and hopefully the residents will have the opportunity to see the ducklings when they hatch.
�I think it�s just a nice little addition for our residents, and the joy and happiness they bring is totally worth it,� she said.Mewtwo (ミュウツー, Myūtsū?) is a fictional creature from the phenomenally popular and expansive Pokémon media franchise. It was introduced as the "final Pokémon" in the very first set of games in the franchise. It was included in Super Smash Bros. Melee as a playable character and in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U as a downloadable character.
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Character Description
Mewtwo is among the 151 Pokémon initially introduced in the First Generation, along with Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Charizard, Squirtle, and Ivysaur as the final 150th Pokémon catchable in the game, whereas Mew was only obtainable through special means.
Mewtwo is a fairly anthropomorphic Psychic-type Pokémon with a pale purple body and vaguely feline qualities, having been cloned from Mew. Like all Pokémon, Mewtwo's design concepts are illustrated in the Pokémon RPGs via the various Pokédex entries available within the games. However, the scientific power of humans failed to endow it with a compassionate heart. Thus, it has one of the most savage hearts among Pokémon, carrying a disposition vastly different from that of Mew, and thinks only of defeating its foes. Much like Bowser or Ganondorf, villains who appear alongside Mewtwo in Melee, Mewtwo is indirectly an antagonistic character hailing from the Pokémon franchise.
Powers & Abilities
Mewtwo is an extremely powerful Psychic-type Legendary Pokémon. As it is a Legendary Pokémon, there is only one Mewtwo in the entire Pokémon universe and has above average stats compared to an average Pokémon. Mewtwo was a failed attempt of cloning the Legendary Pokémon Mew by Team Rocket. Mewtwo destroyed Team Rocket's laboratory on Cinnabar Island and escaped into seclusion. It currently resides in the depths of Cerulean Cave though it does move around the Pokémon world, living in different places every once in a while such as the Unknown Dungeon in the Kalos region as it prefers to live in caves, far from humans. It is one of the few artically created Pokémon along with Castform, Porygon, Porygon2, and Porygon-Z. Due to this, Mewtwo is a genderless Pokémon and is neither male nor female.
As Mewtwo is a Psychic-type Pokémon, it's attack center mainly around its Psychic abilities such as Psychic, Future Sight, Dream Eater, and it's signature attack, Psystrike which is a unique attack in that it does physical damage to an opponent even though it's a Psychic-type attack which aren't typically physical based attacks. Mewtwo can also learn Shadow Ball (a Ghost-type attack), Flamethrower, Thunderbolt, Energy Ball (a Grass-type attack), Ice Beam and the list goes on (These attacks can only be learned through TMs). This is due to Mewtwo being artificially created, as Team Rocket tried to make it the most powerful Pokémon in the world. Mewtwo also has ESP and has telepathy, allowing it to read the minds of others and allowing it to speak telepathically even though Pokémon can't usually talk. Mewtwo can also perform mind control over its foes (as shown in the first Pokémon movie when it controlled Nurse Joy) and manipulate their mind and feelings. Mewtwo can also Mega Evolve into two different forms: Mega Mewtwo X and Mega Mewtwo Y. Mega Mewtwo X gains an additional Fighting-type making it a Psychic and Fighting-type with increased physical stats. Mega Mewtwo Y remains a Psychic-type but is even stronger due to increased special based attack stats, making Mega Mewtwo Y the strongest Pokémon to date.
Even though Mewtwo remains a powerful Pokémon, it does have a few weak points. It is weak to the Ghost-type, Bug-type and Dark-type Pokemon. Dark-types also have another advantage in that they are immune to Psychic-type attacks. Mewtwo is also rather frail in the defensive stats and it can't take hits too well, especially after Mega Evolving, into its Mega Y form. As it is a Legendary Pokémon, Mewtwo can't evolve into or from any other Pokémon besides being able to Mega Evolve.
Mewtwo was planned to be a playable character in the original Super Smash Bros., but it is unknown why he was eventually cut.[1]
As a playable character
Mewtwo made its Smash-series debut as an unlockable character in Melee. It is much more difficult to unlock than most other secret characters in Melee, however; it can be unlocked after either playing 20 straight hours of Vs. Mode matches (5 hours for four players), or playing 700 Vs. mode matches.
An easy way to unlock Mewtwo is to leave a versus match overnight. Upon return, just finish the match, and the Mewtwo challenge will begin. Defeat the challenge to unlock Mewtwo.
Despite being renowned for its power and battle prowess in the Pokémon Series, Mewtwo is often criticized by players because of his gameplay problems and negative build qualities (though since dedicated Mewtwo players have found new ways to use it, the criticism has softened in recent years), and it has a low rank in the current Melee tier list as a result, finding itself in 21st place.
In the Pokémon RPGs, from Pokémon Gold and Silver onward, every Pokémon species has a 1/8192 chance of being alternatively-colored, and such individuals are called "Shiny Pokémon" by fans. The shiny Mewtwo's coloration is green instead of purplish pink, and this is one of Mewtwo's alternate costumes in the game.
Trophies
Mewtwo, as a playable character, has three trophies - a main trophy acquired by clearing the Classic mode with Mewtwo on any difficulty, and the two Smash trophies are by clearing the Adventure and All-Star modes, respectively.
Mewtwo A genetically created Pokémon, Mewtwo is the result of many long years of research by a solitary scientist. Although Mewtwo was bio-engineered from a fossil of the legendary Pokémon Mew, its size and character are far different than its ancestor. Its battle abilities have been radically heightened, making it ruthless. Pokémon Red & Blue [09/98]
Mewtwo [ Smash ] As Mewtwo relies mostly on its powerful brain, there are times when it scarcely uses its arms and legs. Since Mewtwo spends much of its time floating, it flies far when struck. Shadow Ball traces a jagged path once released: the longer Mewtwo holds it, the more powerful it becomes. Mewtwo uses Confusion to spin its foes around. B: Shadow Ball
Smash B: Confusion
Mewtwo [ Smash ] Mewtwo is definitely not a speedy character, but its ESP-powered grab and throw moves are comparatively strong. Teleport has a short range, but doesn't leave it open to attack. It's best used as an escape move during disturbances. Mewtwo can daze a foe if it makes eye contact and uses Disable; the move is useless unless Mewtwo is facing its enemy. Up & B: Teleport
Down & B: Disable
As a Character
Despite not being a clone at all like the other cut characters, Mewtwo did not return in Brawl as a playable character, making it the only cut character that is not a clone. This resulted in a significant amount of fan outcry, despite Mewtwo's lack of popularity as a playable character in Melee, as the majority of players saw it as an unjustified cut. However, by intensive hacking, it was confirmed that Mewtwo was intended to return, but was scrapped due to time constraints.
Trophy Info
Mewtwo appears in Brawl as a collectible trophy. This trophy can be obtained by completing All-Star mode on Intense difficulty. The trophy describes Mewtwo's appearance in the Pokémon games, and makes no reference whatsoever to its appearance in Melee:
Mewtwo A Genetic Pokémon. This legendary Pokémon was based on a recombination of Mew's DNA, created by a scientist after years of research. However, Mewtwo greatly differs from Mew in both size and personality and it is said to have the most twisted and savage heart among all Pokemon. Mewtwo has incredibly high combat abilities and uses Psychic- type attacks. (GB) Pokémon Red/Blue
(GBA) Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen
Mewtwo once again did not return as a playable character in the initial version of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. However, when Greninja was being revealed, almost everyone thought that Greninja was Mewtwo. This was most likely due to them both having three fingers. Also, while charging the Water Shuriken, Greninja lacked webbing in between its fingers and its torso looked identical to Mewtwo's. This made everyone think that Sakurai purposely made Greninja seem like Mewtwo to trick his audience. This soon turned into a meme. However, during the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U 50-Fact Extravaganza on October 23rd, 2014, Mewtwo was confirmed to return as a playable fighter, becoming the first downloadable fighter in the Smash Bros. series. Consumers who registered both the 3DS and Wii U versions of the game on Club Nintendo before March 31, 2015 could get it for free as of April 15, 2015, while other players were able to purchase it starting from April 28, 2015. Gameplay-wise, its moveset remains mostly unchanged from Melee, aside from the addition of a Final Smash.
Trophies
Mewtwo Created from modified Mew DNA, Mewtwo was designed to be the ultimate Pokémon. It didn't take on any of Mew's kinder traits and only uses its intelligence to destroy its enemies. Or...so it seems. Perhaps it just feels frightened or even tormented, and that's why it lashes out. Whatever the reason, Mewtwo is not to be messed with. (GB) Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue (09/1998)
(09/1998) (GBA) Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen (09/2004)
Mewtwo Mewtwo puts its psychic powers to great use in this game. Not only does it have floaty jumps, but its telekinesis gives its attacks extra reach and its throws added power. However, its light body makes it easy to launch, so if you're willing to risk getting in close, it might just be worth it! (GB) Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue (09/1998)
(09/1998) (3DS) Pokémon X and Pokémon Y (10/2013)
Mewtwo (Alt.) Mewtwo's Confusion side special not only repels projectiles—it also reflects the damage back on your opponent. Its down special, Disable, stuns an enemy for longer the higher its damage is. Disable only works on foes that are facing Mewtwo. (GB) Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue (09/1998)
(09/1998) (3DS) Pokémon X and Pokémon Y (10/2013)
Mega Mewtwo X & Y It's almost no surprise that a Pokémon as powerful as Mewtwo wouldn't be limited to a single Mega Evolution. Mega Mewtwo X has strong arms and legs, while Mega Mewtwo Y has a whiplike, slender head. The differences aren't just physical - X brings improved fighting power, while Y can unleash even more psychic power. (3DS) Pokémon X and Pokémon Y (10/2013)
Trivia
Mewtwo, Dr. Mario and Roy are the only characters to skip a Smash Bros. installment, being cut from Super Smash Bros. Brawl and returning in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.
installment, being cut from and returning in. Mewtwo is the only playable legendary Pokémon in the Super Smash Bros. series. As such, it is also the only playable Pokémon without evolutionary relatives.
series. As such, it is also the only playable Pokémon without evolutionary relatives. Mewtwo is one of the two known playable Pokémon to be based on the known anime incarnations, other being Lucario. As of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, Mewtwo is the only playable Pokémon to have two different anime incarnations to appear in this game series: The first being from original series, and another is from Black and White movie Genesect and the Legend Awakened. Despite having an English voice set, most of Mewtwo’s voice are mostly grunts, unlike in Japanese version.Open Positions
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SDR - Sales Development Rep San Jose, CA We LOVE going to work and think you should, too! Are you our next Untangler? As a Sales Development Representative, you will be reporting to Director of Sales and will have the opportunity to grow into a full-fledged Revenue based Sales Person. In this role you will be responsible for targeting list of SMB prospects within US and Canada and turning them into warm, qualified leads for our sales team. You will be responsible for entering the sales data to Salesforce, Cold... learn more...
Senior Software Engineer - Cybersecurity Cloud Boulder, CO We LOVE going to work and think you should, too! Are you our next Untangler? Untangle is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Cloud Engineering team. This is a great role for a versatile full stack developer capable of working on multiple platforms and technology stacks. In this position, you will be an integral part of the development of web services and cloud infrastructure to support our product back-end and web console. This will include account and device... learn more...
Senior Software Engineer - Cybersecurity Boulder, CO We LOVE going to work and think you should, too! Are you our next Untangler? Untangle is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Cloud Engineering team. This is a great role for a versatile full stack developer capable of working on multiple platforms and technology stacks. In this position, you will be an integral part of the development of web services and cloud infrastructure to support our product back-end and web console. This will include account and device... learn more...
Software Engineer - Cybersecurity Networking / Firewall Boulder, CO We LOVE going to work and think you should, too! Are you our next Untangler? Untangle is seeking a Software Engineer to join our Firewall / Networking Engineering team. This is a great role for participating in open source projects. In this position, you will be an integral part of the development of world-class networking and security products. You will drive discovery and evalution of new technologies to maximize development efficiency and performance. You will get th... learn more...About
The Canadian Craft Coffee Advent Calendar
24 unique, amazing and ethically sourced coffees from a variety of independent Canadian craft coffee roasters. Beautifully packaged and ready to keep your Christmas season caffeinated!
Why?
Mainly because we wanted one! Yep, we looked year after year for a coffee advent calendar to feed our caffeine cravings through the month of December and found none. So we're trying to make one and we need your support!
Coffee drinkers deserve an advent calendar of their own! More importantly, they deserve an advent calendar that is stuffed with high quality coffee from a variety of high end roasters and that's what we're going to deliver.
We're partnering with independent Canadian coffee roasters from across Canada to provide you with a sampling of their roasts.
Each day will contain 2 oz of quality, whole bean, independently roasted coffee. That's enough to brew four cups of delicious coffee each day.
Whose Coffee is Included?
The Canadian Craft Coffee Advent Calendar includes coffee from a variety of roasters. Each day you will experience a new roast, and no two days will be the same. All of our partner roasters use ethically sourced coffee beans and roast their coffee in small batches in Canada.
Watch this space and check out our updates as we provide feature information on each of our roaster partners over the course of this Kickstarter - part of the fun of an advent calendar is discovering what's inside!
What is the Money For?
Creating a brand new product from scratch isn't easy or cheap. We had to start from nothing and create from a place of passion. Passion for coffee and passion for coffee drinkers to be able to experience amazing coffee from roasters across Canada.
Paying for the coffee
Printing the packaging
Packing the calendars
Shipping, shipping materials & Kickstarter fees
Costs already incurred (illustration, videographer, prototype)
We hope that a successful Kickstarter for 2015 will allow us to establish relationships with coffee roasters, shipping & printing suppliers, and most importantly, with coffee lovers around the world so that we can keep producing calendars to be enjoyed for many years to come!
Who are we?
We're Marc and Megan, a couple of coffee enthusiasts from Edmonton, Alberta. We've worked in coffee shops, drink a lot of coffee, and enjoy experiencing the different craft roasters that Canada has to offer. Like many of you, we've often wondered why we can't get a coffee advent calendar and decided that we needed to make one - both for ourselves and to share with others!
Shipping Details
The cost of shipping the calendar within Canada is $25, and to the United States it is $35. The price will automatically be included when you pledge. Double the calendars = double the costs. US backers, we hope you can take solace in the fact that since we're asking for Canadian funds you're paying less because of the current exchange rates! Ask us at any point if you have questions about shipping!Slack was being cheeky when yesterday it said voice chat would start testing “very, very soon”. Today the new “Calls” feature starting rolling out on Slack for desktop and on the Chrome browser.
It lets you start a private Slack Call or launch a conference call in a channel that anyone can join with a click. And in keeping with Slack’s lighthearted style, once you’re chatting, you can send visual emoji reactions that appear overlaid on your profile picture to others on the call.
Slack confirms to me that the feature is currently rolled out to less than 50% of users. Team admins can check if it’s available to them and turn it on here.
Slack already offered integrations with voice calling apps like Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and Bluejeans, but those required a separate installation and were quite clunky by comparison. Slack Calls just need to be enabled by your team’s admin, are super easy to use, and blend naturally |
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After forty years of life dedicated to AC/DC, guitarist and founding member Malcolm Young is taking a break from the band due to ill health. Malcolm would like to thank the group’s diehard legions of fans worldwide for their never-ending love and support. In light of this news, AC/DC asks that Malcolm and his family’s privacy be respected during this time. The band will continue to make music.
AC/DC are scheduled to start jamming possible new material in May. “We’re going to pick up some guitars, have a plonk, and see if anybody has got any tunes or ideas," Brian Johnson tells the Telegraph. "If anything happens, we’ll record it.”
Stay tuned for AC/DC news and updates on the health of Malcolm Young as reports are made public.Advice: My future mother-in-law won't stop calling and texting
Dear Carolyn:
I am getting married to a wonderful man, and mostly I get along with his family. I do have one recurring problem with his mother: She has this issue with communication. She calls him multiple times a day and texts him, and has this nasty habit of contacting me if he won't respond.
While it does bother me that she interferes so much, what really troubles me is that she treats me like his secretary. When we first started dating, she used to call me right away if he wouldn't answer her calls, sometimes when I was at work. He put a stop to that, but then she started texting me, saying it's important for him to call her.
My fiance has said things to her multiple times, but she hasn't stopped -- and in fact it's getting worse. She has even gotten the numbers of his past girlfriends and kept in contact with them.
How can I get her to stop with the text messages?
Frustrated Future Bride
Oh, Honey. And I never call people "honey."
You can stop the text messages many ways, but that won't help if you and your fiance don't face the real problem, which is his mother's complete failure to recognize or respect boundaries.
That's because blocking her texts won't block these: her multiple calls per day; her apparent belief that there's nothing wrong with call-bombing an adult child; her sense of entitlement to immediate access to said grown child; her abuse of the term "important"; her treating you as her son's secretary; her refusal to change her ways despite a direct request to; I could go on but I'm getting annoyed just typing it out.
Whether the mom has a case of untreated anxiety or runaway self-absorption or some diagnosable amalgam of the two, the fact that the behavior is escalating is your warning to treat it not as "this issue with communication," but instead as something that could damage your marriage -- and your relationship to your kids, if you have them. Just imagine her call patterns then.
Please talk to your fiance about what you both would like the relationship with his mom to be. Does he want this daily call deluge? Do you ever want her calling you to locate him? Does he want her deciding how you both spend time with her, or would he rather the two of you decided that? How often would he want to visit or speak to her by phone, under perfect-world conditions?
Once you and he start to see the terms of a healthy relationship emerge from this conversation, then please flick yourselves in the forehead and say, "This isup to us, and has been since Fiance became an adult."
He just needs to tell Mom he loves her, and also needs room to be himself without her voice in his head: therefore, he won't pick up the phone for multiple calls per day, and you won't relay her messages to him.
And then you both need to stop responding -- to the calls, texts, hyperbole outbreaks, or to the threats/guilt-tripping/game-playing that will follow this lockdown as surely as gas follows beans.
If your fiance won't agree to this, then bring it to counseling -- the urgency this time is real.Why We Shouldn’t Repeal The Second Amendment
Feb. 9, 2016 (Mimesis Law) — Ken Womble wrote yesterday that it was time to think about getting rid of the 2nd Amendment. It’s a bold position. It’s also completely wrong.
Ken takes the position the 2nd Amendment is a failure. He argues we are ignoring this failure and it’s time to talk about banishing this amendment, for the good of the people. Because some people don’t think the 2nd Amendment is as palatable now as the Founding Fathers did back in the day, it might be time to go ahead and get rid of it.
The Constitution leaves people with the power to enforce the rights it describes. I stole this line from one of Ken’s prior posts here at Fault Lines:
But leave it to the Constitution. It grants big rights, but leaves the specifics for us to determine.
Living under the United States Constitution involves an incredible amount of responsibility. Big, big rights. Powerful protections against the type of government we rebelled against to create this country. The further we get from that creation, the more we seem to forget why these rights existed in the first place. They were intended to check government abuse of power. The inability to figure out how to do that is not the Constitution’s fault, it’s our fault.
Weighing the usefulness of the 2nd Amendment by the “problems” it creates versus how much it is “worth” is not how we determine the continued existence of a fundamental right. And it’s going to get rid of all those other rights people love so much, or at least claim to love.
Ken says the 2nd Amendment is different from other rights. It is the only one that grants the right to possess a tool, as opposed to being a procedural right or creating a human right. Ken implies that makes it a lesser right. Which disregards the obvious. Why would the Founding Fathers give us valuable rights to protect us from government oppression of speech, unreasonable searches, unfair trials, and all of the other things the Bill of Rights was intended to do, yet create this weird right that just gives the right to possess a “tool”?
The answer is simple. The 2nd Amendment grants the people of the United States much more than the right to possess a tool. It gives the people a way to protect themselves. From the government or whoever else seeks to do them harm. Ken discards both of these ideas. Because you can’t beat the government. And, of course, for the children.
Our government certainly has a large military presence. They definitely have intercontinental ballistic missiles. They probably have flying death robots. But the idea that the government’s more sophisticated military might will win the day is belied by history.
America was originally no more than a colony of the “empire on which the sun never set”. The British had a powerful military force. They had well-trained, well-armed soldiers who had managed to take over most of the planet. America had a rag-tag bunch of farmers who wanted to be free. America won.
Is it practical to expect that a bunch of deer hunters will fight off a Navy SEAL team? Probably not. But that’s not the point. The point is that the government has to understand the possibility of armed rebellion. Even if the rebellion never occurs, its specter keeps the government in check. This country has the largest military force in the world. That military rarely goes to war. Our enemies understand it might not be worth getting an ass-whipping. Does our government view the armed citizenry the same way? Who knows? But do we really want to see how they will treat an unarmed citizenry? Because it will be too late if our trust in the government is misplaced.
Ken rightfully points out that the right to defend yourself with a gun comes with a complex set of issues. But he claims you have to pick your poison when it comes to gun rights. Either you can remain powerless to protect yourself from threats or you can accept suicide and dead children.
Suicide is easier with a gun. But the problem with ditching a constitutional right on that ground is that suicide is also easy without a gun. Suicide is a complex, and very sad, thing. The idea of someone feeling so hopeless they would prefer to see what lies in the unknown beyond, rather than live another day, is heartbreaking. But should that same person dictate the constitutional right to bear arms? And, if we somehow get rid of all the guns, will that person make a different decision on ending their life?
Children create a tougher argument. What asshole wants to let the children die? But the numbers don’t back up that claim. The Centers for Disease Control keeps track of accidental deaths. The article Ken cites in his post recognizes the numbers aren’t perfect because of limitations on recorded data. But look at the numbers anyway. In the 5-9-year-old age group, firearm deaths are a tiny percentage. The 10-14 age group is similar.
Cars actually cause exponentially more child deaths. Sure, there are plenty of reasons why we can’t compare cars to guns. But if you want to take something away purely for safety, why wouldn’t cars be the natural starting point?
Ken’s final point is that the right to due process and the right against illegal search and seizure protect us from the government, while the right to bear arms fails to accomplish the same thing. The problem with that argument is that it disregards the 2nd amendment while putting the other amendments on a pedestal they don’t belong on.
The right to due process guarantees, among other things, a fair trial. A fair trial in a speedy manner. With an effective lawyer who stays awake the whole time. And a sentence that reflects justice. See what happened there?
How about search and seizure? Does it really protect people from unreasonable police searches? What about the good citizens who had their house raided for nothing? Or the family whose child was disfigured in a drug raid on the wrong house?
None of those rights are particularly effective at protecting citizens from their government. You have to be very naïve to think there is actually a guaranteed fair trial. Or that you really aren’t in danger of an unreasonable search and seizure. But those aren’t reasons to abandon the rights. Instead, they should drive us to work hard on those specifics required to enforce those big rights.
Most people would raise hell if the government came out and said “from now on, everybody gets searched.” In fact, the people might even take up…well, I was going to say arms. But I guess once we repeal the 2nd Amendment we will need to take up something else.
The 2nd Amendment is important. All of the amendments are, but the 2nd is the one under fire right now. These constitutional rights are not instruction books on how to have a perfect society. They represent an ideal. The ideal is freedom.
Most people can’t define freedom, but they know it when they see it. It comes hard in America. It always has a cost. Want free speech? You have to listen to some asshole rant and rave and spew hate. Want to be protected from search and seizure? That dope dealer who got illegally stopped with enough crack to supply every playground dealer on the East Coast? He walks. Want fair trials? There isn’t enough evidence against the neighborhood rapist who you just know is guilty? He goes home a free man.
The 2nd Amendment is just as inconvenient as the rest of them. That doesn’t mean you get to get rid of it. Sure it’s different because it gives the people the right to possess a tool, just like Ken says. But that tool is what we can use to enforce the rest of those rights. That’s the real difference. If a right has to go, the right to bear arms better be the last one.
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TwitterKentucky’s GOP Rep. Andy Barr is willing to rubber-stamp the anti-immigrant, health-care-destroying Trump agenda. Now Democrats are lining up to give him an early retirement.
At a recent dinner hosted by the Lexington Medical Society, Kentucky Republican Andy Barr told a room full of 100 physicians that no patients would lose their health insurance or face higher premiums if the GOP’s health care repeal plan became law.
That’s just a lie, and one of the many reasons Democrats are lining up to run against him in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District.
And Barr’s willingness to lie to his constituents, and to embrace of the most extreme elements of the Trump administration, has Democrats in this red state eager to take him on.
State Sen. Reggie Thomas was the first Democrat to throw his hat in the ring, with Barr’s embrace of a health care bill that would ruin the lives of thousands of Kentuckians as a motivating factor.
“I don’t think people in this congressional district, number one, want to see their healthcare taken away, number two, see their insurance premiums rise or, number three, want to be denied health insurance,” Thomas said.
More recently, retired Marine Lt. Col. Amy McGrath announced that she, too, would like to hand Barr an early retirement. The first woman Marine to fly an F-18 in combat, bucking years of discrimination and numerous naysayers, McGrath released an introductory ad that has gone viral, and for good reason.
The video showcases her grit and determination, and proves she is not afraid to stand up to Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress.
“Some are telling me a Democrat can’t win that battle in Kentucky,” McGrath says in the ad. “We’ll see about that.”
Meanwhile, Barr is still fighting for a health care bill with a dismal 17 percent approval rating. He recently told reporters that “we’ve got to be persistent on health care.”
While he claims he would only support a bill that would lower cost and protect pre-existing conditions, his support of the House Republicans’ plan proves that he cares more about the approval of Trump than that of his constituents in Kentucky.
And it’s not only his harmful mendacity on health care that has Democrats eager to challenge him.
Barr has supported anti-immigrant legislation. He voted for a House bill that would penalize states and localities that enact “sanctuary city” laws, despite the fact that police chiefs across the country agree that sanctuary city policies help keep crime down.
Apparently forgetting the 2008 financial crisis, Barr also wants to give favors to Wall Street. He voted for a bill that would drastically curtail Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and which was described by one member of Congress as the “single worst piece of legislation I’ve ever seen.”
And Barr also has a marked and documented hostility to the rights of women to control their own bodies
The Republican Congress is starting their August recess as one of the most failed bodies in legislative history.
And Barr is an integral piece to that failure, caring more about Trump and his Wall Street cronies than his constituents in Kentucky.
But Democrats are lining up to stand up and fight back for the people of Kentucky’s 6th district, because they know one thing: Kentuckians deserve better.
Stand Up Fight Back is a regular series that focuses on Democrats at the federal, state, and local level who are taking real, concrete actions to further the resistance and fight for progressive values.Now that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owed $1.92 million to the recording industry for sharing 24 songs on KaZaA back in 2005, the case might seem to be closed. In reality, though, Thomas-Rasset still has numerous options for dealing with the verdict. Let's run them down.
Pay it
According to Thomas-Rasset, paying the $1.92 million damage award is simply impossible. As a brownfield development coordinator for the Mille Lacs band of the Ojibwe, Thomas-Rasset doesn't bring the cash home in wheelbarrows. "Like squeezing blood from a turnip," is how she described any attempt to collect on the judgment.
Settle
According to Thomas-Rasset's testimony during the trial, she could have settled back in 2005 for $5,000. The RIAA says that the amount was somewhere between $3,000-5,000; more importantly, it remains willing to settle the case.
Our understanding is that Thomas-Rasset has simply been unwilling to negotiate a settlement; she would rather pay nothing, continually claiming innocence. A judicially-ordered settlement conference before the trial produced nothing.
Kiwi Camara, Thomas-Rasset's lawyer, said yesterday that she would examine a settlement offer, but he wouldn't commit to anthing. Certainly, when facing a $1.92 million award, $5,000 looks like a bargain—the amount wouldn't even cover the plane tickets for recording industry attorneys to attend the trial.
But if you feel that the record industry is "extorting" you, this is no doubt an unappetizing plan.
Bankruptcy
The sheer, outrageous size of the damage award in the case is already prompting calls to change the law.
Bankruptcy is of course an option, but there are potential complications: not all debts can actually be discharged in bankruptcy court. Back in 2007, the EFF prepared a brief report on the issue, intended for lawyers who were arguing exactly these types of cases.
The report pointed out that copyright infringement judgments can be discharged, unless the infringement was ruled to be a "willful and malicious injury." (Note that although Thomas-Rasset was found liable for "willful" copyright infringement, this is a separate standard that requires a separate judicial ruling on her state of mind.)
The issue doesn't come up often with relation to copyright infringement judgments against individuals, of course, so it's not clear how this might unfold. The takeaway, though, is that clearing the debt in bankruptcy court is possible, but not guaranteed. Should Thomas-Rasset take this route and fail to have the debt discharged, settlement would suddenly look like a super-appealing alternative to having wages garnished for the rest of one's life.
The constitutional challenge
Though the case is "over," it's not actually over. The jury has made its ruling on the facts of the case, but Judge Michael Davis can still run on matters of law. One key matter, made even more relevant by the massive $80,000 per-song damage award, is the constitutionality of such a damage award. Is it an "excessive fine" under the Eighth Amendment?
That amendment says that "excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." Camara has already indicated that he plans to contest the award on these grounds unless Thomas-Rasset takes a settlement.
Would it work? Recall that after the first trial, Judge Davis took his opportunity to assail that verdict with these words: "Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent."
Given that that penalty is now eight times greater than it was in that case, we can certainly expect Judge Davis to give the issue a close look. Davis, the first African-American judge to head up the Minnesota US District Court, is no lightweight justice who was just fitted for his robe. He was appointed to a lifetime seat on the federal bench back in 1994 and has already served a term on the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—the most secret chamber in the country.
He showed no emotion at all during the verdict yesterday, of course, but based on his previous comments about this case, it's hard not imagine him holding out hope that a well-argued set of legal challenges comes his way and allows him at least some discretion in mitigating the award.
Appeal
Such motions would take place within the federal courts, but Thomas-Rasset could also appeal the entire case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, too. Federal appellate cases are generally high-profile, high-cost affairs, but the legal team of Camara and Sibley have indicated their continued willingness to represent Thomas-Rasset.
Change the law
The sheer, outrageous size of the damage award in the case is already prompting calls to change the law. Even among the Ars commentariat, plenty of readers believe that Thomas-Rasset did infringe the 24 copyrights at issue, but there was near universal disdain for the jury and for the law that allowed such an award.
But the outrage isn't confined to the blogosphere. The Washington lobby group CCIA, backed by AMD, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others, calls the verdict "ridiculous."
"Our copyright laws are overbroad, being misused and enforced with a zeal out of proportion to common sense," said CEO Ed Black. "When Sony BMG massively and illegally distributed music CDs containing spyware that compromised individual users' computer security and infected government and military networks worldwide, the FTC only ordered them in 2007 to reimburse end-users up to $150 for computer damages. Yet when Ms. Thomas shared 24 songs belonging to Sony BMG and other labels on the Internet, she was penalized $80,000 for each single track."
He concluded, "Copyright law was created in a different era for different business models. It needs to be reformed."
Judge Davis feels the same way and has already "implored" Congress to "amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer?to-peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court."
University of California law professor Pam Samuelson, an expert on statutory damages and copyright law, also called for reform in a fascinating paper released in April 2009.
In reference to the first Thomas-Rasset judgment, Samuelson concluded, "Some jurors in the Thomas case wanted to award $750 per infringed song, while others argued for $150,000 per song; why they compromised on $9250 per song is a mystery. In today’s world where the average person in her day-to-day life interacts with many copyrighted works in a way that may implicate copyright law, the dangers posed by the lack of meaningful constraints on statutory damage awards are particularly acute."
One key suggestion for reform: allowing judges to revise damage awards to below the current $750 minimum threshold in such cases.
Had the amount been a "mere" $750 a song, for an $18,000 total fine, the Thomas-Rasset case would have offered little incentive to reform the law. But when the first of the RIAA's 30,000+ actions goes to trial and the plaintiffs emerge with a $1.92 million award... legislators may take notice.
Listing image by Erik AraujoOne on One Patients Association at 923 6th Ave. in San Diego is being raided this morning by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to owner Kenneth Cole. Local media confirms it.
No word yet on arrests, but Cole said the D.E.A. is seizing One on One cash, marijuana, security cameras and other equipment.
In 1996 and 2003, California voters and the state legislature legalized marijuana for qualified patients, caregivers and their associations, but San Diego law enforcement follow the federal government’s line: marijuana is not medicine and is illegal.
Local police working with the D.E.A. have spent the last 17 months shutting down every medical marijuana access point in town. They’ve also been raiding small private collectives. Open for two years, One on One was the last permitted dispensary publicly operating in the city of San Diego.
Cole said the city’s efforts to shutter One on One had ceased as San Diego Mayor Bob Filner began promulgating reasonable regulations to allow for dispensaries in San Diego.
Last night, Cole – who has terminal bone cancer – testified at a San Diego City Council meeting in favor of regulating medical marijuana collectives in San Diego.
“This is [federal] retaliation for yesterday,” Cole said from his home. “This is straight retaliation for the City Council meeting.”
San Diego medical marijuana group United Patients’ Alliance is urging locals to get down to the Gaslamp District and protest immediately. (photo via Instagram @SamuelHodgson)EDMONTON, Alberta, April 27 (UPI) -- Canadian researchers say they've confirmed a relatively harmless inorganic form of mercury becomes a potent neurotoxin when released into the world's oceans.
A study led by University of Alberta scientists tested water samples in the Arctic Ocean and found that inorganic mercury, released from human activities such as industry and coal burning, undergoes a process called methylation in seawater and becomes toxic monomethylmercury.
Monomethylmercury, unlike inorganic mercury, is bio-accumulative, meaning its toxic effects increase as it moves through the food chain from small sea creatures to humans, a university release said Wednesday.
The methylation process occurs in oceans all over the world, the researchers said, and is thought to be initiated by microbial life forms.
Biological sciences researcher Igor Lehnherr said the process could account for a significant amount of the mercury found in Arctic marine organisms.
The research was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201610/1661/1155968404_5183279304001_5183264919001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true 2016 Dem women poised for record gains in Trump backlash Clinton wanted to bring more women with her, and the GOP nominee has only helped.
The irony is that Donald Trump may result in Democratic women having their best year ever.
In the final two weeks of the 2016 contest, Democrats are casting the GOP nominee’s insult-driven, misogynistic campaign as the embodiment of everything they say the Republican Party gets wrong on women. And their effort looks poised to deliver record-setting results.
Story Continued Below
It’s not just Hillary Clinton, who would of course be the first female president if she defeats him, or Nancy Pelosi, who has a slim chance of reclaiming the speaker’s gavel if enough Republican seats get sunk by Trump. In many of their most competitive races, Democrats are poised to win House and Senate seats that could easily bring the number of women to new levels in both chambers, along with potentially two female governors winning their first elections.
Even a conservative guess at Democratic gains would push women over the 20 percent mark in the House for the first time ever, notable because the number of Republican women in the House has dropped from a high of 25 after the 2004 elections, while the number of Democratic women has continued to rise. In the Senate, wins could put the number of women at 25 percent, including up to three Democratic women of color in a chamber in which, to date, just two women of color have served.
They’d be coming in amid a national conversation about women and women’s issues that Trump inadvertently jump-started long before that “Access Hollywood” B-roll and the sexual-assault allegations that followed. Karma, these Democrats say, amounts to a spike in women sending more women into office to get more attention to issues that affect women most.
“That would be awesome,” said Terri Bonoff, running for a House seat in Minnesota.
“It would be sweet,” said Catherine Cortez Masto, running for Senate in Nevada.
“A step in the right direction,” said Stephanie Murphy, who’s running for a House seat in Florida.
“A moral rejection,” said Suzanna Shkreli, running for a House seat in Michigan.
More women appear set to win because they’re running Democratic in what’s shaping up to be a Democratic year. But this wasn’t entirely happenstance: Before making her presidential campaign official last year, Clinton brought in Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List — a group founded 30 years ago to support female Democratic candidates — for the first of many conversations about recruiting and promoting other women running in 2016.
“Hillary wanted as many women as we could get to run at this moment in history and really make a statement to break through as many glass ceilings as possible,” Schriock said.
In the year and a half since, Schriock said, “every time she sees me, her first question is: ‘How are the women in the Senate doing?’”
“Hillary believes it’s critical that we have more women in the room where it happens,” said Clinton campaign deputy press secretary Jesse Ferguson.
That conversation began long before Trump calling women “pigs” and bragging about grabbing them became a major theme of the campaign, or before Trump’s labeling Clinton as “such a nasty woman” at last week’s debate became a point of pride. “Get this, Donald: Nasty women are tough, nasty women are smart, and nasty women vote,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Monday in New Hampshire. “We are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever."
“Man,” said Schriock, noting that this is the 100th anniversary of her native Montana electing Jeannette Rankin to be the first female member of Congress, “we never thought it was going to look quite like this.”
A Democratic woman will hold the seat of retiring California Sen. Barbara Boxer no matter which presidential candidate wins, while Democratic women are running strong in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire (the only competitive race where the Republican candidate is a woman as well), with improving numbers in the Nevada and North Carolina races and an outside chance in Arizona.
For the House, 21 of the 43 top-tier candidates in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “red to blue” competitive race program are women.
Getting more women elected is one of Pelosi’s stated goals.
“The hard part is money, and incivility. And if you increase the level of civility and lower the role of money, you will get more women,” she said.
Asked what she’d think if Trump helps lead to more women being elected than ever before, Pelosi lit up: “Wonderful!” she said.
Female candidates say they’re hearing about Trump all the time on the trail — from women who’ve encountered sexual harassment in their professional lives to women who’ve been assaulted, and women having a hard time believing Trump when he calls his crude commentary just “locker room talk.”
“This isn’t the first time they’ve been treated inappropriately by a man or have heard inappropriate things said,” Murphy said.
For Bonoff, there was the 70ish woman she passed on the escalator leaving the theater recently who gave her a thumbs-up.
“‘You go, girl,’” Bonoff recalled her saying.
“There’s a sense of camaraderie,” the candidate explained.
Female voters, said Cortez Masto, “are offended, and it’s the first topic of discussion, and it motivates them to get out.”
Before the outrage at Trump boiled over, these female candidates all said, they’d been having trouble getting their arguments to stick against their Republican opponents’ records on women’s issues. Now they and many others around the country are arguing that Trump embodies everything they say the Republican Party gets wrong with women — on reproductive health, paid leave, equal pay and much more.
“There is a set of women’s issues here that he and the rest of his party are so extreme on, that [they are] doing whatever they can not to talk about them,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
That’s become a factor in races for state legislatures too, with more than 90 women who are 35 and younger running — and, overall, more than 1,700 women running — according to counts kept by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the Washington group that oversees those races.
“The presence of Donald Trump at the top of the ticket encouraged many to step forward, and Donald Trump’s horrifying rhetoric and history toward women reminds all of us why electing women to positions of power is so important,” said Carolyn Fiddler, DLCC communications director.
Then there’s a new topic that advocates are hoping Trump has forced the country to grapple with — assault.
“Donald Trump has almost single-handedly re-energized the women’s movement in this country around the issue of sexual assault and rape,” Richards said. “It has really lit a spark that’s going to go on far beyond the election.”
This year’s races have been coming together for years. EMILY’s List has been supporting New Hampshire Senate candidate Maggie Hassan since she was a state senator and helped push her to run for governor. The group has also been boosting Illinois Senate candidate Tammy Duckworth and Arizona Senate candidate Ann Kirkpatrick since their first House races, as well as California Senate candidate Kamala Harris and Cortez Masto since their first attorney general races and North Carolina Senate candidate Deborah Ross since her first state legislature race.
And these Democratic women are hoping that a successful 2016 will help recruit even more women next cycle, as has happened before. “We are electing the third or fourth woman president to a state legislature right now,” Schriock predicted.
So, in a weird way, they’re thankful for Trump and what he’s brought out.
“We’ve seen women across party lines reject Donald Trump’s rhetoric,” said Shkreli, a prosecutor who launched her campaign for Congress only in July but quickly attracted some national attention. “We should breathe a sigh of relief that we can at least agree on that.”
Heather Caygle and Annie Karni contributed to this report.CORUMBA, Brazil (Reuters) - Jaguars still roam the world’s largest wetland and endangered Hyacinth Macaws nest in its trees but advancing farms and industries are destroying Brazil’s Pantanal region at an alarming rate.
Caimans rest on bank in Brazil's Pantanal wetland near the city of Corumba, January 14, 2009. REUTERS/Jamil Bittar
The degradation of the landlocked river delta on the upper Paraguay river which straddles Brazil’s borders with Bolivia and Paraguay is a reminder of how economic progress can cause large-scale environmental damage.
“It’s a type of Noah’s Ark but it risks running aground,” biologist and tourist guide Elder Brandao de Oliveira says of the Pantanal.
Brazil’s exports of beef, iron and to a lesser extent soy — the main products from the Pantanal — have rocketed in recent years, driven largely by global demand.
Less well-known than the Amazon rain forest, the Pantanal is larger than England and harbors a huge fresh water reserve and extraordinary wildlife, ranging from 220-pound (100-kg) jaguars to giant otters that mingle in water holes packed with nine-foot (3-meter) caimans.
The world’s largest freshwater wetland, it is almost 10 times the size of Florida’s Everglades.
Of the Pantanal’s 650 bird species, the largest has a wing span of nearly 3 meters (yards) and the smallest weighs only 2 grams (0.07 ounce).
During the rainy season the water level rises by as much as five meters (yards), creating a mosaic of dark-brown swamps with islands of shrubs and tall standing tropical trees. When the water first hits dry soil it loses oxygen and kills schools of fish as part of a nose-wrenching natural life cycle.
A melting pot for various ecosystems, the Pantanal has the greatest concentration of fauna in the Americas, according to The Nature Conservancy, a global environmental advocacy group.
But some species are in danger of disappearing, including the long-snouted giant anteater, which claws into anthills and flicks its two-foot tongue up to 160 times per minute to quickly gobble up stinging ants.
The giant armadillo and maned wolf are also on the list of endangered species because of their falling numbers.
Visitors to the Pantanal marvel at the idyllic scenery and the proximity and abundance of wildlife.
“I hadn’t heard about it before, it’s a bird-lovers’ paradise,” said Alkis Ieromonachou, a Cypriot tourist, eyeing a group of giant Jabiru storks from the deck of a bungalow.
The impact of modern farming is obvious even in the tourist resort, however, as a large herd of cattle wanders through the swamp, squashing floating lily pads.
Cattle ranchers cut trees on higher elevations and sow pasture in the lowlands, which are flooded for months. Many say they have been here for decades and can’t be expected to abandon the land and their livelihood.
“True, deforestation is a problem but 50 years ago when it began nobody thought of these things,” said Ademar Silva, head of the local association of farmers and cattle ranchers. “The government needs not only to punish bad behavior but promote new technology with financial incentives.”
ECONOMIC PRESSURES
Brazil’s beef exports have more than tripled in five years to $5 billion in 2008, with pasture often replacing forests. Experts say improving productivity, from currently around one head of cattle per hectare (2.5 acres), could prevent much deforestation.
“We’re using our natural resources fast and inefficiently,” said environmental economist Andre Carvalho at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, or FGV.
The environmental group Conservation International says 63 percent of the forest in elevated regions of the Pantanal and 17 percent in lowland regions have been destroyed.
Under a federal law dating back to 1965, ranchers can clear up to 80 percent of the forest on their property. Parks and protected areas make up only a small fraction of the Pantanal, and the rest is largely unprotected.
Demand for charcoal from Brazilian pig iron smelters has accelerated deforestation, environmentalists say.
“We set up shop precisely to use wood from the advancing agricultural frontier,” said Vitor Feitosa, operations director for MMX, a smelter located in the Pantanal town Corumba and owned by Brazilian billionaire Ike Batista.
Brazil’s pig iron exports have grown sixfold to $3.14 billion since 2003. Around 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of native forest are lost annually in Mato Grosso do Sul state, home to much of the Pantanal, an FGV study showed.
Marcos Brito, head of a charcoal manufacturers group with 15,000 employees in the state, claims most producers use wood cut and discarded by ranchers. But Alessandro Menezes, an activist with the environmental group ECOA, says they clear forests in exchange for the wood.
After being fined several times, MMX agreed not to buy Pantanal charcoal, but most smelters in the state still do.
Erosion resulting from deforestation has created large sandbanks on tributaries to the Paraguay river, such as the Taquari and Rio Negro, making them partially unnavigable.
“Rivers will change course, lakes appear or disappear — the size and shape of the Pantanal will change,” said Sandro Menezes, manager of Conservation International’s Pantanal project. “It’s very probable that local flora and fauna will become extinct.”
Already, there are signs that runoff water from nearby farms is altering the ecosystem’s delicate balance.
“We see trees flower and birds breed earlier — we believe it’s because of fertilizers in the |
. It can present in various ways including pink-to-red bumps, blisters, plaques and urticaria. [10]
Solar urticaria: UVR-induced wheals that occurs within minutes of exposure and fades within hours. [10]
Other skin diseases exacerbated by sunlight: Several dermatologic conditions can increase in severity with exposure to UVR. These include systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), dermatomyositis, acne, atopic dermatitis, and rosacea.[10]
Prevention Edit
Treatment EditPeople with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) live in a constant struggle. Their bodies do not match the image of what they should look like; the cure for this mismatch, sufferers feel, is to amputate parts of the body. And, with the removal of one’s physically healthy body part, comes a paradoxical feeling of completeness.
The rare condition often drives people to act as if they had a disability, by using wheelchairs or wearing prostheses or putting themselves in situations of danger, by performing amputations, either at home or in pseudo-clinics.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, though it also reflects a dissonance between the body and mind, is the phantom limb syndrome (PLS). The individual feels (typically painful) sensations in a nonexistent limb, even if he or she is aware that body part is no longer there. PLS leads to uncomfortable feelings, which include tingling, throbbing, burning, clenching and cramping.
Images and metaphors
Images and metaphors play a crucial role in describing the physical pain described by sufferers. Because the phantom limb cannot be understood or completely communicated, metaphors are used to help illustrate the pain felt. Examples include “insects crawling through the skin and veins” and “salt being poured into the skin.” Interestingly, PLS treatment makes use of the relationship between images and the condition, though in a more physical, rather than linguistic way. Robot-hands, vision-based therapy, and rubber-hand illusion are among the mind/body treatments used to eradicate the pain.
Both Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Phantom Limb Syndrome have been predominantly researched through biomedical models that struggle to find comprehensive reasons or cures. Thus, these conditions insist that we also debate them from a more nuanced view.
Reflections on the Embodied Text uses what is common in both conditions – the need for rupture and its paradoxical relationship with an individual’s desire to feel whole – as the starting point. Through the use of literature, fictional works, and psychoanalysis, this thesis aims to understand these perplexing psychosomatic conditions more thoroughly, in relation to one another.
Psychoanalysis and Literature
Neurology has taken over the field of diagnosis and treatment of these two conditions. But, since we are dealing with extremely complex somatic and physical dimensions, the analysis might benefit from a psychoanalytic and literary perspective. Individuals often state that neuroscience seems to have nothing to do with what they are feeling. By failing to distinguish the ‘mind,’ which involves a complex and intertwined relationship between the psyche and the brain, and the ‘brain,’ purely physical, the neurological perspective falls short at alleviating the pain and may, on the contrary, increase the feelings of alienation.
The mirror-box
Solutions that are based on the notion that the mind can alter the body showed more success. The mirror-box is a therapeutic device that alleviates phantom limb pain by superimposing a mirror image of the existing limb onto the absent one. While it is often not recognized as a valid treatment in the medical world, the mirror therapy can treat amputees’ psychosomatic conditions; it alters the psyche through a physical device that projects a kind of illusion, a mirror image.
Psychoanalysis
As in the mirror-box therapy, psychoanalysis also works by searching for meaning and ways of healing in the images and illusions in the patients’ unconscious. Thus, we can have some insight into BIID and PLS by using the mirror-box metaphor, to explore how the illusions through which we are formed can alleviate experiences of fragmentation.
By discussing PLS and BIID together for the first time, using the mirror-box as a metaphor, and examining how fiction connects the body to a particular notion of reflection, this thesis ultimately raises questions concerning the rooted notions of the ‘self.’
Read the full dissertation here.
Share your Science The Share your Science section aims at giving students and researchers a space to share their thesis to a broader audience. UA Magazine wants to increase the visibility of recent academic work and serve as a bridge between universities and societies.
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View our Privacy Policy.Wanted: willing puzzle fans to help solve the internet’s most complicated and enduring mystery. Only those conversant in hexidecimal cryptology, medieval Welsh poetry and classical music theory – among many others – need apply.
After a 12 month hiatus, Cicada 3301 – a complex collection of anonymously-set puzzles, without apparent purpose, that have nevertheless held thousands of amateur web sleuths rapt – has made a reappearance.
When the Telegraph first reported on the underground phenomenon last November, global interest intensified in the shadowy organisation – and the elaborate series of cryptographic puzzles apparently aimed at recruiting expert programmers.
And the Cicada’s re-emergence is exactly on schedule, too. The first set of puzzles, identified by images of the insect, appeared on January 5th 2012.
A message left anonymously on notorious website 4Chan simply read: “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test…”
After a series of increasingly complex riddles – ranging from cyberpunk literature to voicemail messages to posters affixed to streetlights around the globe – the mysterious organisation behind the tests went quiet. Only for another set of teasers to appear exactly one year later, on January 4th 2013.
Again, solvers were faced with another formidably eclectic range of subjects – from ancient Hebrew code tables to Anglo-Saxon runes to Victoria occultist Aleister Crowley. Within a few weeks the puzzles stopped, with only a select few allowed through to a hallowed “inner sanctum” of Cicada.
And, of course, no-one was left any the wiser as to the source or ultimate purpose of the puzzles. Were they part of an elaborate PR campaign for a new Alternate Reality Game? A recruitment drive by the CIA, NSA or MI6? Or just a bit of fun?
But while another set of posers was anticipated during the first week of 2014, this year was different. Such widespread coverage had led some commentators to wonder if, like the insect itself, the organisation might be scared back underground.
Worse, some feared it might lead to widespread “trolling” – hoaxers trying to pass off their own puzzles as legitimate Cicada tests, further muddying the water.
Indeed, the first week of January has seen dozens of messages appearing on messageboards purporting to be from Cicada – some of which were elaborate enough to be believable. And yet all of which have been proved fake.
Until, that is, just before 11pm on January 5th. A Twitter account previously used by the Cicada organisation released a message, bearing the faint image of a cicada, to its 700 followers.
"Hello," it read. "Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301."
Enthusiasts have since confirmed the message has the necessary PGP signature – a common encryption method used for privacy – to prove it is legitimately from Cicada 3301.
And so the hunt is underway once more. Already, a debate has begun online into the relevance of “Epiphany”, as January 6 is the Christian feast day known as Epiphany.
But by examining the image for steganography – a technique used to hide data inside images, sometimes used by paedophiles or terrorist organisations – solvers have already revealed a quote: "The work of a private man/ who wished to transcend,/ He trusted himself, / to produce from within."
Further analysis with a program called Outguess has revealed a link to Self-Reliance, a treatise on transcendentalism by American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When run through a cipher, the excerpt reveals the phrase “For Every Thing That Lives Is Holy” and a new image – a collage of artworks from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by the English poet and painter William Blake.
Specifically, it features a collage of his works Nebuchadnezzer, The Ancient Of Days and Newton – with a faint marking of a cicada tucked into the bottom of the picture.
But the images are arranged in such a way that some solvers are now debating whether the image is supposed to represent a Thelema star (a hexagram developed by Aleister Crowley) or an image of a Masonic Square.
Either way, the pursuit of a solution continues. Enthusiasts wishing to join in the debate can access an internet chat relay – while a Wiki is constantly updating and sharing progress, with helpful explanations.
And after three years, who knows – perhaps, in terms of determining the purpose and source of Cicada 3301, we may be finally getting closer to what that initial image promises: “enlightenment”.Image caption Investigations continue at the Franklaw water treatment plant
More than 300,000 households in Lancashire have been told to boil drinking water after contamination with a microbial parasite.
Routine tests by United Utilities found traces of cryptosporidium at Franklaw water treatment works outside Preston.
Some customers said they were not alerted quickly enough but the company said it had done "everything possible".
Traces of the parasite, which can cause gastrointestinal complaints, were reducing, said a spokesman.
Image copyright Nick Sykes Image caption Nick Sykes submitted this picture of a Tesco at Kirkham, near Blackpool, stripped of bottled water
The alert affects Blackpool, Chorley, Fylde, Preston, South Ribble and Wyre.
Blackpool resident Robert Parker said local shops had sold out of bottled water.
He emailed the BBC saying he was not given any advice from United Utilities and had drunk several glasses of water before hearing the health warning on BBC news.
"We believe that United Utilities have not taken the issue seriously enough and not made sufficient steps to advise customers. We have an online account with them and haven't received an email, which we thought would be the minimum response."
"My wife and I need to take regular medication and our only recourse is to now boil water and cool it off prior to use, not ideal."
Mr Parker said an email eventually arrived late morning.
United Utilities said, as soon as the contamination was confirmed, it used BBC Radio Lancashire, automated phone and text messages, social media, and even leaflet drops to warn its customers.
"We have done everything we possibly can, in the quickest time possible, to inform our customers," said a spokesman.
What is cryptosporidium?
Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Cryptosporidium can cause diarrhoea and abdominal cramps
A microscopic parasite which lives in, or on, other organisms
Found in soil, water or food contaminated with animal or human faeces
Infection occurs via contact with infected animals in farms or zoos or by drinking contaminated water
One of the most common causes of diarrhoea in humans
It most commonly affects children under five but people with impaired immune systems are at risk
Source: Patient.info
How does cryptosporidium parasite affect humans?
Infection with cryptosporidium can cause diarrhoea and abdominal cramps.
People with weak immune systems are likely to be more seriously affected.
Kate Brierley from Public Health England said: "There is no specific treatment for cryptosporidiosis. In most cases the symptoms of abdominal pain and diarrhoea settle in a few days.
"However, in a few cases cryptosporidiosis can be unpleasant with diarrhoea lasting for several weeks. It is important to drink plenty of fluids to avoid dehydration."
Bottled water
The NHS trust which runs the Royal Preston and Chorley and South Ribble hospitals said there was no evidence patients had been affected.
A Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spokesman said it had issued immediate guidance on the health risk posed by contaminated tap water and had sourced 50,000 litres of bottled water for patients and staff.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Virus expert Derek Gatherer, from Lancaster University: "We'll know in four to seven days if there are any cases of cryptosporidium infection"
"We are awaiting further advice from United Utilities before reinstating the use of the mains water supply."
Cryptosporidium exists in the environment in a form called an oocyst, which is less than a tenth of the thickness of a human hair.
Traces were found in recent samples of water from Franklaw works, a United Utilities spokesman added.
In a statement, the water company said investigations were continuing into how the water was contaminated at the treatment works.
It added that officials were putting cards through letterboxes of affected homes to supplement efforts to communicate the advice via social media, newspapers, radio and TV.Blue-green ink with good shading, and strong pink to purple sheen, even in thinner nibs and poor paper quality. This ink is handmade in Maryland.
This is a dryer-writing ink. If it writes too dry, you can dilute it with a mixture of 8 parts ink to 1 part distilled water to increase flow.
Henry David Thoreau was an American transcendentalist, essayist, poet, and author (among many other things) that is most widely known for his book, Walden. This work focuses on the simple living that he experienced for two years at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He is known for his ideas on minimalist living, reduced governments, and civil disobedience.
THE MASTERS of WRITING SERIES – these inks attempt to merge a famous writer from previous centuries with a color that brings them to mind. These inks are more unique hues that we made to fill gaps in the available ink world.The deep political divisions the law has engendered — just 38 percent of Americans view it favorably, according to survey findings released this week by the Kaiser Family Foundation — make assessing it a complex task. The evidence remains largely anecdotal; for every satisfied supporter, it seems, there is a disgruntled opponent.
Wayne Buchholz, a 47-year-old rancher in Rhame, N.D., saw his high-deductible insurance policy canceled; he bought a new policy for his family, he said, but the premium doubled, to $800 a month, and the $12,000 annual deductible is similar to what it was before.
“Liberals in Washington think that we are not smart enough to make our own decisions, that I’m too stupid to decide what’s good for me,” Mr. Buchholz said. “In the past, I deliberately chose to have a higher deductible and a lower premium because I believe that insurance should be there for costs we cannot afford. Now I have a high premium and a high deductible, and virtually no choice.”
But across the country in Baltimore, Theresa Thomas, 52, the director of a drug abuse treatment center, waited more than two hours at a recent health care enrollment fair to sign up for coverage for herself. She picked a plan that offered medical and dental coverage and was thrilled with her $179 a month premium, saying, “I’m walking out of here with a smile.”
The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision to allow states to opt out of Medicaid expansion, and the decision by roughly three dozen states not to establish their own exchanges, have created cross-border disparities in coverage. Technical troubles with the federal HealthCare.gov website have depressed signups in many states that rely on it. The political climate in some states also has helped determine whether people enroll.
Missouri and Texas, where opposition to the law is strong, are among states that have enacted tough restrictions on who can serve as “navigators,” or “certified assistance counselors” to guide consumers through the enrollment process. That has frustrated Mona Walls, who runs a small team of enrollment counselors in rural southeastern Missouri.
Self-employed people in her area — truck drivers and cosmetologists, for instance — seem eager to sign up, Ms. Walls said, but “negative press” and problems with the federal website have discouraged many consumers. At the small town educational sessions she runs, she often encounters people whose conservative political philosophy makes them uncomfortable about accepting federal subsidies to buy private coverage.Washington (CNN) Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify at a public hearing of the Senate intelligence committee Tuesday afternoon, the committee said in a statement.
This will be the first time Sessions has testified in Congress since he recused himself from the Justice Department's probe into Russian meddling in last year's election and the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Questions have arisen about Sessions' own involvement in the Trump campaign and his meetings with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US.
Pressure mounted at the start of the week following reports that Sessions offered his resignation to Trump because the President blamed Sessions for exacerbating his Russia problems by recusing himself from the probe.
"(Sessions) believes it is important for the American people to hear the truth directly from him and looks forward to answering the committee's questions tomorrow," a Justice Department spokesperson said.
As late as Sunday, the Justice Department signaled it expected Sessions testimony to be closed but said the final decision was up to the committee.
But behind the scenes, there was significant pushback from Democrats -- including Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman Mark Warner -- who raised objections with Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr that Sessions may be trying to skirt public scrutiny. Discussions between the members continued through Sunday and into Monday morning, two sources said.
The Justice Department ultimately agreed to a Tuesday public hearing in an attempt to show there's nothing to hide and nothing controversial about Sessions' interactions with Russian officials, officials said.
The White House on Monday suggested Sessions could invoke executive privilege during his testimony depending on "the scope of the questions."
"It depends on the scope of the questions," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said when asked whether Sessions would invoke executive privilege. "To get into a hypothetical at this point would be premature."
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, an intelligence committee member, said senators were still deciding whether Sessions would be asked to testify in a classified briefing after the public hearing.
The Texas Republican said that he was confident Sessions will put an end to the "myths" surrounding recent reports, with his testimony.
"I know him to be an honorable man, and I think this is just a chance for him to put all that to rest," Cornyn said.
The announcement caps the drama that started over the weekend when Sessions canceled two appearances Tuesday, citing former Comey's blistering testimony last week.
Comey told the intelligence committee in a closed session that Sessions may have had a third, undisclosed interaction with Russia's ambassador to the US, according to people familiar with the briefing.
"In light of reports regarding Mr. Comey's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it is important that I have an opportunity to address these matters in the appropriate forum," Sessions wrote over the weekend.
But intelligence committee members at first were unaware of a planned hearing.
This story has been updated.Real Life IRON MAN Gauntlet? Bodyguard
The old saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention.” The Marvel comics superhero Iron Man, AKA Tony Stark, created his first armored suit out of scraps and discarded technology in order to escape the captivity of terrorists. However, often it is tragedy that inspires that necessity. Such was the story behind the BodyGuard from ArmStar, an armored sleeve enhanced by modern less-than-lethal deterrent and communications technology.
The inspiration for the, according to its inventor David Brown, came out of a series of mountain lion attacks that happened in Orange County, California in 2004. “[They were] very close to my house, on a trail that I’ve been hiking since I was young. There were two women who were mauled and attacked, they survived, there was a man who was alone that day and he was killed.” Brown began to place himself in that situation, contemplating how he would have reacted to a mountain lion attacking him while he was alone. “Normally all I would have on hand with me out there was a water bottle, and you are not going to do too well with a water bottle against a mountain lion. So I thought, if you are going to be alone out there you are going to need something attached to your arm that’s [immediately] available when something happens.”
It's a question that everyone asks themselves after hearing about a tragedy: 'what would I do?' It is impossible to plan for every eventuality, and even if you try to, there is still that element of surprise that could render any preparation useless. David Brown considered all the options before developing the BodyGuard, “I thought about any [one] thing that most people would be wearing on their body, what they’d think could be a weapon. I thought about a gun or a knife in a little holster, [...] it would be a hand-held device. They’d have to pull it out and arm it, whatever it was, it would take a couple of steps, and those steps are moments that are crucial.” Brown also considered the practicality of such an item, that one would have to hold on to it while, in the 'origin' example, being attacked by a mountain lion, or in any personal safety crisis like a mugging. “[Then] fifty percent of your effort is going to be worrying about holding onto your weapon so you don’t drop and have it used against you.”
While he did not take direct inspiration from the Iron Avenger, what he did come up with to solve the worry of holding on to any kind of protection in a crisis bears some resemblance to the technology found in the Iron Man armor. Removed from the whole of the Iron Man suit, namely the powerful and versatile chest mounted Uni-Beam and the iconic helmet that contains advanced targeting and voice-interface technology, Iron Man's gauntlets are by themselves impressive pieces of hardware. In their and their parent armor's 'classic' incarnation, each are impregnable to any force save those on a cosmic scale, and a powerful repulsor weapon built into the palm is designed to work in concert with both the suit's on-board computer and Tony Stark's mind.
"I felt I was onto something [with the BodyGuard], being able to trigger it by just squeezing your hand [onto] a pressure pad in your palm, that’s such a primal reaction, you’re going to make a fist anyway, so the moment you did that you’d be firing your weapon.”
That weapon is a pair of electrodes build into the BodyGuard's forearm that crackles with electricity when triggered and delivers a shock to anyone clutching at the user. Brown explains the electrodes' placement and use: “Having the electricity on the backside of your arm, where even if you were being attacked three on one, having people piled onto you, when you trigger the shock, it’s not going to be going into your body, it’s going away from you. With a flailing motion you could get [your attackers] off of you and make a break for it. It’s not a perfect weapon, it just adds an option to someone who’s maybe not the best fighter in the world or trained in UFC style combat. So if you are disadvantaged by size or ability, the technology works together to help you.”
In conjunction with the electrical stun attack and the BodyGuard's construction from slash-resistant materials, it has a built-in suite of hardware that takes advantage of the advances in personal communication technology. Once the stunner in engaged, a small onboard computer begins to record video and audio while dialing 911 to summon police.
For David Brown it's all about protecting people, “I tend not to call it a weapon, though it tends to fall into that category. I call it a system instead, since it’s doing multiple things to help save your life. The camera is a non-lethal weapon, but I can make people stop fighting when it's revealed that it is filming and that video is going right to the police. In the past you could call 911 and then sure the cops are on their way, but they can’t see what’s going on. Now there’s video being recorded and there will be no disputing [peoples'] actions.”
The BodyGuard has so far gotten rave reviews from those have studied it and even used it in practical demonstrations. After a mock prison riot staged in West Virginia as an exercise to try out the BodyGuard, prison guards clamored for the device to protect themselves not only physically, but with its camera functions, from allegations of abuse from prisoners. magazine also lauded the device, naming it one of the top inventions of 2011.
"The real goal,” explains Brown, “is for it to be in the hands of civilians. They sell shotguns to civilians, why can’t they have this? Basically, it’s a glorified cellphone attached to your arm with a stun gun built into it. It’s not a Positron Glider. It is [technology] you could have right now, just attached to your arm in a way that can’t be taken from you. That’s all I did different.” Though it is in development for law enforcement officers and prison guards, and a military grade version is being estimated at costing between $2500 and $3000, David is adamant about its promise for ordinary citizens, “I want to see girls someday with the civilian ‘girl’ version if it, all pink and blue when they are out walking their dog, and they wouldn’t have to worry about being raped or kidnapped. When they put this thing on, they are safe.”
When asked about its passing resemblance to comic book tech, Brown admits, “I never really was a comic book reader, all the things I can do are real, I‘m using real technology,” instead he draws himself a different pop-culture parallel, “It’s like that old TV show,, I’m just some goofball from the beach. I’m not some kind of Tony Stark super-smart genius, I just thought this was a good idea and it could help some people out.”Florida woman on meth decapitated rabbit as horrified children watched
Tina Sandlin, 36, of Southport has been in jail since she was arrested Sept. 25 last year, and when she's released she will be going straight to an inpatient drug-treatment facility. Judge Elijah Smiley sentenced her to five years on probation, the first 18 months of which will be drug offender probation.
PANAMA CITY — A Panhandle woman who cut the head off a pet rabbit in front of her kids while high on meth won't do prison time after pleading no contest Friday to felony counts of animal cruelty and child abuse.
Sandlin will be eligible for early termination of her probation after 30 months if she meets her requirements, which include a provision that she have no contact with her husband.
She also is not allowed to have contact with her children until she has been released from the treatment facility and been sober for 90 days; at that point, a counselor for the children will determine the circumstances of any visitation.
Sandlin was arrested by Bay County Sheriff's deputies after she called two children into a bedroom at their home and decapitated a rabbit. The kids described a gruesome scene to an investigator with the Department of Children and Families. They said the white rabbit, a family pet, kicked as Sandlin held it by its ears and cut the head off with a knife.
Sandlin left her house and made no attempt to contact her family for a month after the incident, which occurred in July 2012. She confirmed the incident to investigators after her arrest.
Her husband, who successfully petitioned for a restraining order after the incident, told deputies that Sandlin shrugged her shoulders when he confronted her about it and told him she did it because she was bored.
The children, who are now 7 and 4, had nightmares about the incident afterward, Sandlin's husband told investigators.Why Does It Work?
Mainly for two reasons:
First, because the great majority of people is eager to help each other, and to give the found item back to its owner.
But also, because it is easy for people to get in touch with the owner once they have spotted the URL on the lost item.
How Much Does It Cost?
In short, it's free!
Nonetheless we need your support by mean of a donation — even tiny one. See the FAQ for more details.
How to Mark Your Belongings?
With a permanent marker. This is by far the easiest way for things like clothing, bags, comforters… It however has the disadvantage of not looking so great on valuable items.
With stickers. An intermediate solution between permanent marker and engraving. You then need to make or buy some stickers. See the FAQ about buying stickers or a label printer.
With textile labels. Certainly the best choice for clothing, as you may sew or stick labels on all of them. See the FAQ about the reuse of the same ID for several objects.
By engraving. This is the more permanent way to mark your valuable belongings. You can go to the nearest key cutter & shoe repair shop to ask for engraving your object.
One of My Items Has Been Found!
The person who has found the item will recognize the ID as being an URL. By typing it in an internet browser, the finder will be able to contact you to arrange how to get your belonging back to you.
I Have Found an Item!
Type the full internet address (URL) written on the found item in your browser address bar. If it doesn't work, you may type the object ID (last part of the URL after the '/') in the appropriate form.Office of Legislati ve Affairs
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC 20528
November 12, 2013 The Honorable Thomas R. Carper Chairman Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs United States Senate Washington, DC 20510 Dear Chairman Carper: Thank you for your recent letter requesting information related to virtual currencies. I appreciate this opportunity to comment on the Department of Homeland Se
curity’s
(DHS) expertise in this area. The most critical capability f or transnational organized crime is to quickly and quietly move large quantities of money across borders. The anonymity of cyberspace affords a unique opportunity for criminal organiz ations to launder huge sums of money undetected. With the advent of virtual c urrencies and the ease with which f inancial transactions can be exploited by criminal organizations, DHS has recognized the need for an aggressive posture toward this evolving trend. DHS, through its law enforcement components such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Secret Service, has been actively investigating the emerging threat and criminal exploitation of virtual currency systems that further transnational criminal operations. This effort includes t argeting the underground black markets on the I nternet that are operated by transnational crimi nal networks. The multi-prong strategy employed by DHS also targets the virtual currency platforms and the network of virtual currency exchange makers. The strategic plan to combat this criminal activity r elies heavily on building upon new and existing interagency partnerships as well as educating financial institutions, specifically their Anti-Money Laundering Departments, on this criminal methodology. DHS is committed to safeguarding the N
ation’s financial payment systems byBased on another audio clip from the "Battlefield Dallas" meeting that Battleground Texas just posted, it is evident that the TX GOP is no longer even trying to pretend that they're not waging a war on black voters:
Question: "What are the Republicans doing to get black people to vote?" Ken Emanuelson: "Well, I'm going to be real honest with you: The Republican Party doesn't want black people to vote, if they're going to vote 9 to 1 for Democrats."
I'll give Emanuelson that much: His reply was certainly honest. No pretense from him that the Republican Party is going to bother trying to persuade black Texans to vote for them. And just in case you think Emanuelson, a leading Dallas Tea Party organizer, was going rogue or something—he was speaking at the same "Battlefield Dallas" event where Steve Munisteri, chair of the Republican Party of Texas, acknowledged that Texas will be a battleground state
I'll wait while you click here to listen to Emanuelson's remarks yourself and read the excellent post by Cliff Walker, Political Director for BGTX.Originally posted at 11:58.m. July 22, 2013.
A San Clemente man was sentenced today to nearly 22 years in federal prison for conspiring to sell marijuana out of nine illegal storefronts in Orange and Los Angeles counties.
John Melvin Walker, also known as "Pops," pleaded guilty April 1 to conspiring to distribute more than a ton of marijuana and to maintain drug-involved premises.
Walker, 56, also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was ordered to pay $4.2 million in restitution to the state and federal governments.
Acknowledging multiple letters of support and tearful testimonies on
behalf of the defendant in court today, U.S. District Judge James Selna said he
had to consider "two John Walkers" before ultimately deciding on 21 years and
10 months in prison for the defendant.
"One is a family man and a good friend," Selna said, while the other is an "extensive drug trafficker." The judge added, "I have to sentence the whole John Walker."
Boris Del Cid pleaded for mercy for Walker, who he said stuck by him after a spinal cord injury left Del Cid a paraplegic.
Del Cid, his voice cracking at times, described his friend of a dozen years as "a compassionate, caring, kind-hearted, warm and loving human being."
Even when most of his friends drifted away, Del Cid said he could count on Walker to visit him twice a week in the hospital over his five-month stay. By the time he was released, Del Cid said, Walker had made his home wheelchair-accessible and would take him out to eat and to the movies to keep his spirits up.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine S. Bautista had a different take on the defendant, who raked in about $25 million over six years with his marijuana storefronts.
"He chose to continue to break the law" after federal investigators served search warrants on his businesses, getting "more sophisticated" and hiring an IT director to destroy incriminating emails, the prosecutor said.
"He may have worn two hats, but the other half showed how clever and dangerous he can be,'' Bautista said, noting that Walker's marijuana businesses were near schools.
In handing down the sentence, Selna noted the destruction of evidence, the size of the conspiracy, the need to deter others from committing the same crimes and the necessity of the fairness of the punishment compared with similar defendants.
Walker was among 14 indicted by a federal grand jury last October for involvement in the conspiracy. Most of the defendants have pleaded guilty, according to Bautista.
The dispensaries operated by Walker were identified as Alternative Herbal Health in Long Beach; Safe Harbor Collective in Dana Point; Garden Grove Alternative Care in Garden Grove; Santa Ana Superior Care; Belmont Shore Natural Care in Long Beach; Santa Fe Compassionate Health Care in Santa Fe Springs; Costa Mesa Patients Association; the Whittier Collective; and APCC in Capistrano Beach.
Investigators are continuing to chase down Walker's assets, Bautista said. Assets previously seized include the defendant's San Clemente home worth $1.7 million, multiple mobile homes in Mammoth Lakes, rental properties in Long Beach and his interest in two strip clubs, the prosecutor said.
One stash house in Long Beach contained $500,000 in cash that was seized by authorities, Bautista said. Waler also had several guns seized, such as an assault rifle similar to an AK-47.
Walker's attorney, Kate Corrigan, said her client inherited some of the weapons from his father and that authorities recovered some in their original packaging.
Corrigan read a letter from Walker to the judge that expressed remorse for his crimes.
"I live with this guilt on a daily basis," Walker said in the letter, in which he described looking at photos of his wife and 8-year-old daughter while sitting in a jail cell awaiting sentencing.
"I have caused considerable mental anguish to my wife and family,'' he said.
-- City News ServiceElysium Health cofounders Eric Marcotulli, Dan Alminana, and Leonard Guarente. Courtesy ElysiumHealth A startup that's developing an anti-aging supplement just raised $20 million to keep studying it and other supplements.
Elysium Health, the brainchild of former Sequoia partner Eric Marcotulli, former JPMorgan vice president Dan Alminana, and MIT biology professor Leonard Guarente, raised $20 million from investors including General Catalyst, which also recently led a funding round for cancer genetics startup Color Genomics.
Supplements are a multi-billion industry that can often be tricky for consumers to navigate. Since most supplements are not designed to treat a specific disease or ailment, they typically aren't regulated in the same way as pharmaceutical drugs. It's not too surprising, then, that many supplements currently on the market do not contain what they say they do. Plus, the science on the alleged benefits of many vitamins and supplements can be mixed.
This is where Elysium hopes to come in. On Tuesday, the company presented the results from its first randomized controlled clinical trial of its supplements. Those results are intended to show that the supplement is safe and that it appeared to help raise levels of a specific protein in the blood of people who took it.
Also, the company recently added three notable members to its scientific advisory board. These people include the Harvard geneticist George Church, the chairman of dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College Dr. Richard Granstein, and Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Paul Modrich.
How it works
Elysium's first product is called Basis. It aims to boost the levels of a specific protein called "nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide" (NAD), found in cells. Some studies in mice and yeast suggest that boosting NAD levels may help prevent aging-related decay in important structures in our cells called mitochondria.
Basis costs about $50 per month if you choose to pay as you go, while a one-time bottle will set you back $60. You |
image to curse the daily mail. FAV this image to bless anyone who dares to oppose it. pic.twitter.com/3l8BGbXLLy — Josie Long? (@JosieLong) May 31, 2017
What the Mail‘s writers perhaps haven’t realised is that the audience was picked independently of the BBC, by the ComRes polling company.
If the balanced group was jeering criticism of Jeremy Corbyn, it’s because the nation at large supports him.
Perhaps that’s hard for the Mail – and the Guido Fawkes blog – to take but Paul Mason gets it right in his tweet:
Elite shocked to find UK electorate not all toothy public schoolboys quoting Von Mises from memory and living on daddy's money https://t.co/3edCHWEHLE — Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) June 1, 2017
All the Mail has achieved with its headline is a further consolidation of support for Mr Corbyn and Labour.
The public have had enough of the Conservatives, who lie to cover up their failures and try to fool us into supporting further fails.
We want honest politics.
That’s why we’ll be voting Labour on June 8.
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Like this: Like Loading...Giancarlo Stanton just signed a 13-year extension with the Miami Marlins. Dwyane Wade will be entering his 13th season in NBA. Both players are the most vital stars of their respective teams.
While the Heat also have Goran Dragic, Chris Bosh, Hassan Whiteside, and the recently drafted Justise Winslow, for as long as Wade is a Miami Heat, the team and the city are going to revolve around him.
The Miami Marlins have young-and-coming stars in Jose Fernandez and Christian Yelich. They also have an All-Star in second baseman Dee Gordon, as well as another top flight outfielder in Marcell Ozuna, though he is suffering a down season.
But the Marlins, like the Heat, are nothing without their star. While basketball is a game that is more often dominated by one player than baseball, Giancarlo Stanton has shown the ability to be a game changer by himself. His 27 home runs are tied for the major league lead, despite him not playing since June 26th with a broken bone in his hand.
Wade has been apart of three Heat championship teams, playing a key role in each and every single one. Wade’s finals performance in 2006 has been written down as one of the most, if not the most dominant, Finals performance in NBA finals history.
But who is the bigger star in Miami? We examine in the following slides.Troubled teen apparel retailer American Apparel Inc filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday and said it had reached a restructuring support agreement with 95% of its secured lenders.
“This restructuring will enable American Apparel to become a stronger, more vibrant company,” Chief Executive Paula Schneider said in a statement.
Close video Wait, what? What happened American Apparel? Krystal Ball asks what took so long in Board’s decision to fire ex-CEO Dov Charney share tweet email save Embed
The company listed assets and liabilities of between $100 million and $500 million in its bankruptcy filing.
“By improving our financial footing, we will be able to refocus our business efforts on the execution of our turnaround strategy,” Schneider added.
Teen apparel retailers are struggling as customers switch to fast-fashion brands such as H&M, Forever 21 and Inditex’s Zara and online retailers such as Amazon.com Inc that offer deep discounts.
Companies such as Wet Seal, Cache Inc, Deb Shops, Delia*s and Body Central Corp have filed for bankruptcy in the last year.
American Apparel, founded in 1989 by Dov Charney whose ‘Made in America’ mantra found huge favor among young shoppers, has been in disarray after it fired him in December for alleged misconduct.
RELATED: American Apparel denies responsibility for ‘Instagram hoes’ post
Charney has since filed several lawsuits against the company, alleging defamation, representation in false light and claims for securities fraud.Marzieh Vafamehr's sentence was reported by an Iranian opposition website on Sunday. "A verdict has been issued for Marzieh Vafamehr, sentencing her to a year in jail and 90 lashes," Kalameh.com reported.
"Her lawyer has appealed the sentence, which was handed down yesterday (Saturday)," the report added, without giving further details.
Miss Vafamehr was arrested in July after appearing in "My Tehran for Sale," which came under harsh criticism in conservative circles.
The film, produced in collaboration with Australia, tells the story of a young actress in Tehran whose theatre work is banned by the authorities. She is then forced to lead a secret life in order to express herself artistically.
The Fars news agency said the movie had not been approved for screening in Iran and was being distributed in the country illegally.The VLONE x Nike Air Force 1 Low Is Releasing Soon
3.27 / 5 11 VOTES This post contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. The opinions and information provided on this site are original editorial content of Sneaker News.
Updated February 6th, 2017: The VLONE x Nike Air Force 1 Low releases on February 11th, 2017.
Nike Sportswear has made sure that you don’t forget how iconic the Nike Air Force 1 has been to the streetwear community with a number of exclusive collabrotions rolling in over the past few months. NSW has also brought back a number of legendary colorways in limited runs (think the LA, Chicago, New York, and Linen options all appearing throughout 2016). But perhaps one of the most sought after Air Force 1s of late has been the VLONE Air Force 1 Low from A$AP Bari and A$AP Rocky featuring collaborative touches from NikeLab in the form of a luxurious black tumbled leather and vibrant orange accents. The VLONE Instagram account announced that there’s some good news on the horizon as well, as a limited run of their VLONE Air Force 1 will be arriving at select retailers in the near future. What do you think of this premium NikeLab x VLONE x Nike Air Force 1 Low? We’re still uncertain about the Release Date specifics, but stay tuned right here on Sneaker News for more updates.
VLONE x Nike Air Force 1 Low
Release Date: February 11th, 2017
Color: Black/Total Orange-Black
Coming Soon A photo posted by V. lifestyle (@vlone) on Dec 23, 2016 at 3:34pm PST
–If law enforcement officials around the country are going to continue cracking down on marijuana grow operations, especially in heavily armed, unannounced raids, maybe they should consider hiring a botanist or two.
Earlier this month, Dwayne Perry of Cartersville, Georgia, was startled out of his bed by a low-flying helicopter. Moments later, WSB-TV reports, heavily armed officers and K-9 units with the Governor's Task Force for drug suppression showed up, apparently believing they were about to make a weed bust. What they found instead: okra. The vegetable.
Perry was confused and frightened by the incident. The officers were "strapped to the gills," he told the station. While Perry claimed his reputation may have been damaged by the mistake, he said he also realized that his life was put in danger because of it.
While law enforcement often trumpets successful anti-drug operations, agencies are less eager to admit when drug raids are marred by tragic miscalculations. Law enforcement's heavy-handed tactics have led to the death or injury of a number of innocent victims. Earlier this year, deputies threw a stun grenade in the crib of a 19-month-old, resulting in severe burns to the child. The sought-after suspect wasn't home at the time, and the officers ultimately avoided charges, with the sheriff suggesting the accident was unavoidable.
In another recent incident, a 59-year-old was gunned down by a SWAT team in a no-knock raid, as he believed his home was being burglarized for the second time in as many days. Officers were operating on a tip given to them by a meth addict.
Getting it right isn't always easy, but when the consequences of getting it wrong can be so dire, errors understandably attract criticism. Many of the stories below are the result of a combination of poor plant identification skills, questionable tips from the public and rushed or unprofessional conduct by law enforcement. These mistakes, even when made with the best intentions, show the risks associated with a war on drugs that often prioritizes harsh prohibition of both marijuana and other drugs over concerns for public safety, civil liberties and due caution.
Weed, But Not That Kind
The war on drugs has long been a cash cow for local law enforcement agencies that receive funding based on the number of arrests and the value of assets forfeited during drug busts. Critics claim this system of incentivization can make officers see what they want to see -- perhaps a grove of marijuana plants -- rather than what is actually there -- say, a field of giant ragweed.
In 2001, members of the Texas Capital Area Drug Task Force -- a controversial federally funded anti-narcotics unit that gained notoriety when it botched a number of high-profile raids in the early 2000s -- forced its way into a residence, after a circling helicopter said it had spotted a large marijuana grow operation on the property. Entering with guns drawn and without a warrant, the officers aggressively confronted the house's occupants, including a Vietnam veteran and a widow. Behind the house, the offending plant they found was ragweed. The mistake led to a lawsuit, which was eventually settled for $40,000.
It would be one of three botched raids by the task force in under a year. Two of the raids led to innocent fatalities, and eventually resulted in the task force being taken over by the governor's office.
Giant ragweed (seen in the file photo above) is not marijuana.
In 2010, cops in Corpus Christi, Texas, were similarly duped by an innocuous weed when they uprooted, tagged and transported 400 plants from a city park, believing it was marijuana. The plant was actually horsemint, meaning that taxpayers footed the bill for some glorified yard work that day.
Texas police are not the only ones to have been perplexed by herbs in the past. In 1994, officers in Connecticut mistook oregano, apple mint, catnip and other plants for marijuana after entering a vacant grocery store with a warrant to confiscate weed. They found no drugs.
The War On Gardening
Adlynn and Robert Harte, two former CIA employees living in Kansas, opened their door on April 20, 2012, to find a team of sheriff's deputies armed with assault weapons and bulletproof vests with a warrant to search their house for marijuana. The Hartes and their two children were detained and held at gunpoint while law enforcement raided their house. They found three tomato plants, one melon plant and two butternut squash plants growing in a basement hydroponic gardening setup built by Harte and his 13-year-old son, whom officers reportedly accused of being a pothead.
Harte stands next to his now-defunct indoor garden in the basement of his home in Leawood, Kan., Friday, March 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)
In November 2013, the Hartes filed a lawsuit against county officials, including the sheriff, alleging the only intelligence that could have led to the raid was a trip by Harte and his son to a gardening store and his wife's "brewing of loose tea leaves that they discarded in the trash." The lawsuit, seeking $7 million in damages, claims deputies failed to do a proper investigation to follow up on whether the family was actually growing marijuana.
The Hartes aren't alone in questioning whether such police techniques don't risk effectively criminalizing gardening. A few states over in Illinois, Angela Kirking, a face-paint artist, was also caught up in part of the same multi-state garden store operation last year. Three weeks after being observed by an officer leaving a local shop with a "green plastic bag containing unknown items," Drug Enforcement Administration agents, guns drawn, raided her house before 5 a.m., eventually turning up enough marijuana for a misdemeanor possession charge.
Kirking claimed she had visited the garden store to buy fertilizer for a hibiscus plant, and sued to have the search warrant thrown out. She argued that an innocent trip to a garden store shouldn't have served on its own as grounds for an investigation, which included officers rooting through her trash to find a small quantity of marijuana stems and examining her electric bills to conclude they were higher than normal. A county judge later ruled against Kirking.
Fiasco At The Garden of Eden
In August 2013, police in Arlington, Texas, conducted a SWAT raid on the Garden of Eden, a small organic farm that had clashed with its neighbors, who claimed the property wasn't clean enough.
The Arlington Police Department also reported receiving complaints that marijuana was being grown on the premises, a tip they pursued with aerial surveillance and a visit by an undercover officer that led to an unsubstantiated claim that a resident of the farm was in possession of marijuana. Despite the seemingly flimsy evidence, police then conducted a 10-hour raid, in which employees of the farm were reportedly handcuffed and held at gunpoint for at least 30 minutes. Officers came away with "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants... native grasses and sunflowers." No weed.
The would-be drug bust was itself a total bust, but police officials defended their actions because the militarized crackdown did lead to the correction of code violations, for which the city took the Garden of Eden to court earlier this year.
A Middle School Marijuana Grow Operation?
That's what police apparently thought they might find when four armed agents, backed up by a helicopter, showed up to the Camino de Paz Montessori School and Farm in Cuarteles, New Mexico, in 2010. After asking to inspect the school's greenhouse, in which students were growing plants as part of a math and science lesson, officers found tomatoes. The incident led some to question whether these sorts of raids were an appropriate use of funds.
You Say Tomato, They Say Marijuana
In Canada in 2008, armed Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided commercial fisherman Bruce Aleksich's business, expecting to uncover a large marijuana grow operation. They handcuffed everyone in the place and left them on the ground for more than an hour, Aleksich said. After checking the premises and vehicles for drugs, all the police could find were tomatoes. In a very un-Canadian exit, officers reportedly left without so much as an apology.
No tomato plant is safe.
Tomato and marijuana plants are similar in that they both have green leaves.
Okra (Again)
In another case of mistaken identity in 2002, La Porte Police Department officers who, according to the Houston Chronicle, had "experience identifying marijuana plants," obtained a search warrant for 88-year-old Irene Gilliam Hensley's property after being unable to tell the difference between okra and pot.
This is not marijuana. With five thick leaflets of varying sizes, the okra leaf actually looks significantly different from a pot leaf if you look at it at all.
Officers conducted the raid after receiving a tip that Hensley's grandson was growing marijuana. The information reportedly came from a 15-year-old cousin with whom Hensley's grandson had been feuding.
Questionable tips or eyewitness accounts often serve as the basis for botched or unnecessary drug raids. In 2008 in England -- where police response to marijuana cultivation is arguably less militarized than in the U.S. -- police received a tip that shopkeeper Amrat Kanji was growing pot in the attic of his store. Officers reportedly entered his business and rudely kicked customers out before heading upstairs to find the offending shrubbery, a curry leaf plant.
Curry leaves. Way to go, boys.
High-biscus?
Hibiscus doesn't look much like marijuana, but police confusion led to a scary incident for landscape contractor Blair Davis in 2004. Davis said he was headed to answer a knock at the door when it flew open and an officer pointed a gun at him and told him to get on the ground. Around 10 members of a county task force proceeded to enter his house and question him about the plants in his yard, none of which were marijuana. The officers left after an hour, leaving only a "citizen's information card." Davis said the officers could have used additional training in marijuana identification.
This is a Texas Star hibiscus bush. It only looks like marijuana if you really, really want it to.
The Canadian war on drugs can boast a still more aggressive crackdown on a flower patch, when in 2012 Alberta police confiscated more than 1,600 "marijuana" plants -- that were actually Montauk daisies. Officers reportedly made the bust without first consulting a local unit that's dedicated to investigating marijuana grow operations. Presumably, those officers would have known the difference between marijuana and a daisy plant.
Enough Kenaf
One might be able to excuse initial confusion here, as kenaf -- a plant that grows in stalks and is traditionally used for its fibers -- has leaves that look somewhat like those of a marijuana plant.
In Mississippi in 2005, however, Marion Waltman didn't even get a chance to plead his case before police officers began cutting down more than 500 kenaf plants that he was growing as deer food. There may not have been much he could have done, as officers conducted a field test on the plants that suggested they weren't marijuana, and then proceeded with the operation.
Waltman later sued the sheriff for destruction of $225,000 in property. The case made it to federal court, where a judge ruled that Waltman hadn't shown that the mistake was "deliberate indifference" on the part of the sheriff and his deputies, and that they were therefore protected by qualified immunity.
Your Weed Smells Of Elderberries
In 1992, a Florida family claimed they were "cursed at, threatened at gunpoint and ordered to lie face down in their yard while two dozen deputies swarmed their property" looking for marijuana and growing equipment. The search, conducted without a warrant, came when a deputy followed up on a tip and found what he thought to be marijuana. It was an elderberry bush, which explains why officers found no evidence of drugs or drug-related equipment.
Seriously, this looks nothing like marijuana.
The family sued the police department for the mix-up and eventually agreed to a $40,000 settlement that came complete with a public apology by the county sheriff.
When A Plant Isn't A Plant At All
Officer Claude Weinert's first police raid was a complete failure. Responding to a report of a fire in a south Chicago suburb, Weinert spotted what he though was a marijuana plant growing in the second-story window of a house. He got a search warrant, his first as a cop, and returned with "two patrol officers and three plainclothes narcotics officers" to conduct the raid. The bust turned up a plastic plant, covered in lizards. The homeowner's son had purchased it as a place for the family's seven pet lizards to hang out.
The Nose Knows
In Quebec in 2011, officers learned the importance of conducting a thorough investigation before authorizing a raid. Despite having thermal imaging that they said suggested the home of Oliver MacQuat was a marijuana grow operation, police said they based their initial suspicions on a strong, skunky smell, often associated with weed. In the end, however, the culprit was an actual skunk that lived under the family's shed. MacQuat filed a suit following the raid and eventually settled out of court.
Oops.
And in England in 2011, a couple in their late 50s drew police attention after neighbors reported that teenagers had been asking to buy marijuana at their house. After allowing a drug squad into their back yard, the confusion was proven to be the result of a patch of moss phlox in their backyard, which apparently smells enough like weed that it fooled a drug-sniffing dog, as well as a number of teens looking to get high.311 DAY 2018 / LAS VEGAS / 2 NIGHTS!
The Ultimate 311 Concert Experience returns to Las Vegas!
2 weekend nights!
Saturday March 10 & Sunday March 11
Park Theater at Monte Carlo
Park Theater is a brand new state-of-the-art 5,700 capacity venue – with incredible sound & lights & production.
The venue is half the size of our recent 311 DAY arena shows – making it an intimate & immersive 311 DAY experience from any seat in the house!
So, get your tickets early – and get ready for a very special event.
At the last 311 DAY we had fans in attendance from all 50 US States and 13 different countries. Lets do it again!
Below you will find info on the show, tickets, VIP packages, discounted hotels, etc.
We have 8 hotels giving us special 311 DAY discounted rates (see below)! Of course there are many hotel options in Vegas, so do as you see best.
Most importantly – get your tickets early – as you do not want to miss out on this special event…311 and their biggest fans from around the world unite!
SHOWTIMES
7:30PM Doors
9:00PM 311 showtime
A special evening with 311 (both nights) at Park Theater.
All ages.
CONCERT TICKET ON-SALE DATES
311 DAY 2018 will be at two-day ticket allowing entry to both shows (Sat & Sun).
Group Buy Pre-Sale: Friday, August 25. 10:00AM PST.
See section below for more info on Group Buys (12-20 people per order)
VIP Package Pre-Sale: Tuesday, August 29. 10:00AM PST.
2 ticket limit for Diamond VIP at www.Ticketmaster.com (password: VIP311DAY2018)
4 ticket limit for VIP Floor and VIP Seats at www.Ticketmaster.com (password: VIP311DAY2018)
See section below for VIP package details sold during the Pre-Sale. A great way to get the best tickets & more!
311 Pre-Sale: Tuesday, August 29. 12:00 Noon PST.
4 ticket limit at www.Ticketmaster.com (password: UNITY2018)
Public Sale: Thursday, August 31. 10:00AM PST.
Floor – 4 ticket limit. Seats – 6 ticket limit. At www.Ticketmaster.com
TICKET PRICING:
311 DAY 2018 will be a TWO-DAY TICKET allowing entry to BOTH shows (Sat & Sun).
PRICE INCLUDES BOTH NIGHTS.
GA Floor: $225 ($112.50 per show)
P1 & P2 Seats: $200 ($100 per show)
P3 & P4 Seats: $150 ($75 per show)
* Prices above do NOT include Ticketmaster service fees (which we do not control).
* 311 will play a special, extended show both nights.
Arena Seat Map, click here.
GROUP SALES
If you are a group of 12 – 20 people that are interested in sitting together, then you may want to consider the Group Buy option. The benefit of a Group Buy is to be able to keep your friends together to create your own party zone!
– We will offer a limited number of Group Buys.
– A Group Buy must consist of 12-20 people.
– Group Buys are for Reserved Seats (not Floor).
– Group Buys will be in Sections 302, 303, 304, 305, 306 and Rows M-P (green section of seat map)
– Group Buy tickets are $150 each + fees (covers both shows).
– For a Group Buy download the form below and email back to the venue (info on order form) between Friday, August 25. 10:00AM PST – Sunday, August 27, 3:00PM PST. First come, first served.
– Group leaders will be contacted before 6PM PST on Monday, Aug 28 with the confirmation of order processed or told that no group seats remain. So you will have word either way in advance of the other pre-sales.
To download the Group Buy form, click here.
(Once viewing the Order Form – Mac users, hover over the bottom of the Order Form and a download button will appear. PC users, see download button in upper right corner of Order Form).
VIP PACKAGE OPTIONS
A great way to ensure you get the BEST show ticket and more!
DIAMOND PACKAGE (25 available)
$440 per person ($220 per show). Includes the below:
Floor ticket (both nights)
First Entry Wristband (first entry into venue – before all others)
311 DAY FOIL show poster.
Commemorative 311 pin.
Commemorative 311 DAY playing cards.
FLOOR VIP PACKAGE (250 available)
$350 per person ($175 per show). Includes the below:
Floor ticket (both nights)
Early Entry Wristband (entry after 25 Diamond package guests / before public doors).
311 DAY show poster.
Commemorative 311 pin.
Commemorative 311 DAY playing cards.
SEAT VIP PACKAGE (250 available)
$325 per person ($162.50 per show). Includes the below:
Best Reserved Seat ticket (both nights – premier location)
Early Entry Wristband (entry after 25 Diamond package guests / before public doors).
311 DAY show poster.
Commemorative 311 pin.
Commemorative 311 DAY playing cards.
* Buyers of the Floor VIP package will receive “Early Entry-Floor” wristband & buyers of the Seat VIP package will receive “Early Entry Seats” wristband. The Seats wristband will NOT have access to the Floor.
*VIP Packages: Prices above do NOT include Ticketmaster service fees (which we do not control).
*Shipping charge is already included in the VIP package price.
*Merch items subject to change.
311 DAY FLOOR GUESTS
For the Floor entry procedure for DIAMOND VIP, FLOOR VIP and GA FLOOR (specific times and specific entry door locations at the venue), click here.
311 FAN PARTY & AFTER-PARTIES
FREE events for 311 fans to enjoy in Vegas!
FRIDAY, MARCH 9
311 FAN PARTY
8:00PM – 2:00AM
PBR Rock Bar (on Las Vegas strip at Miracle Mile Shops)
3663 S. Las Vegas Blvd.
Drinks, music and good vibes!
4 bars, full kitchen menu, beer pong, mechanical bull & other games.
Plus live music:
10:00 – 10:45pm Unity All Stars
11:15 – 12:00am Singles
12:30 – 1:00am Heavy Petting Zoo
And a 311 playlist to get pumped for the shows!
We hope to have 311 Amber Ale cans.
SATURDAY, MARCH 10 & SUNDAY, MARCH 11
OFFICIAL 311 AFTER-PARTIES
12midnight – 2:00AM
Double Barrel Roadhouse (next door to the Park Theater venue).
3770 S. Las Vegas Blvd.
Exit the 311 show and grab a drink with fellow fans!
311 Drink specials! And party playlist.
We hope to have 311 Amber Ale cans (and maybe 311 Beautiful Disaster draft).
HOTEL DISCOUNT DEALS FOR 311 FANS
For 311 DAY 2018, we have arranged special discounted hotel rates for 311 Fans at 8 nearby hotels. We suggest you hold a room in advance to get yourself covered. For this batch of hotels, the cancellation policy is 72 hours in advance.
For hotel discount deals at Monte Carlo, Luxor, Excalibur, MGM, Signature and NewYork-NewYork, Mandalay Bay & Delano – click here: https://aws.passkey.com/go/3112018
311 DAY MERCHANDISE
Merch locations & hours:
311 Day Merchandise will be available at the Richmond Meeting Room in the Conference Ceter at Monte Carlo hotel (hours below) & at the Park Theater venue (during hours of the show).
3/9 Fri: 4pm – 9pm at Meeting Room
3/10 Sat: 11am – 6pm at Meeting Room / 7pm – Midnight at venue
3/11 Sun: 11am – 5pm at Meeting Room / 7pm – Midnight at venue
*Hours subject to change – check back for updates.
*The 311 merch store at the Richmond Meeting Room in the Conference Center at Monte Carlo will most likely have a larger display & larger assortment of merchandise (compared to the smaller merch booths in the Park Theater venue). So, visit us at the Richmond Meeting Room to see the full line of goods!
311 MUSEUM & RAFFLE:
Come one, come all to the 311 Museum located in the Richmond 1 Meeting Room at the Monte Carlo Hotel (right next door to the 311 Merchandise Store!). The 311 Museum will feature: *A massive 311 poster art display (with posters spanning 311’s history). *A Chad Sexton drum kit. *Live painting by artists Munk One and Maxx242. **Plus a RAFFLE to win lots of amazing 311 prizes! Prizes will include 311 autographed goods, rare posters & much more! Many winners! (The Museum is located right next to the 311 Merch Store and will be open during the same hours as the 311 Merch Store. Prize winners will be selected at 3:11pm on 3/11 and contacted via text/email (you do not have to be present to win).
311 DAY POSTERS
The Poster Pre-Order sold out in flash. But fear not, limited quanities of all 3 designs (regulars & foils) will be at the merch booths in Las Vegas! Artwork by Darin Shock, James Flames & Maxx242. (Please note: If you bought a VIP Ticket Package you will automatically receive the Darin Shock poster with your VIP goods. Diamond VIP receive foil poster. Regular VIP receive regular poster.)
311 DAY LIVE WEBCAST
On March 10 & 11, 311’s two special shows for 311 DAY 2018 will be available via Live Webcast from the Park Theater in Las Vegas!
Order now and watch the shows live or on-demand (you’ll have 48 hours to watch it whenever you start viewing it).
PLUS you can order Mp3 audio files of the shows!
311 will play unique, extended shows on both Sat March 10 and Sun March 11. Showtime at 9:00PM PST.
Step 1: Be sure you have a Live311.com account or Nugs.net account.
Step 2: Place your order for one show or both shows at http://nugs.tv or the Nugs.net app for iOS, Android, and AppleTV.
Whenever you start watching the Webcast you’ll have 48 hours to watch it (and can watch it multiple times in that 48 hours). If you buy the “2-Night Pass” you get both shows.
Pricing will vary whether you choose Standard Def or High Def, 1 night or 2 nights, and MP3 audio bundle.
Don’t miss out on the excitement of 311 DAY 2018!
Pre-Order the Live Webcast at Live311.com
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE
If you’re going to 311 DAY 2018 in Vegas, then RSVP at our Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/311day2018/
FACEBOOK GROUP PAGE
Join the group! A forum for 311 Fans to chat about all things 311 DAY 2018. A great way to network, help each other out and make plans! https://www.facebook.com/groups/1165411260269313/
SEE YOU IN LAS VEGAS FOR 311 DAY 2018!!ArcMap allows for a large amount of customization. It’s just a matter of taking the time to set it up the way you want. If you want to add or remove a button from a toolbar, you can. Menus can be customized the same way, but for this guide I’m focusing on toolbars.
In order to start customizing toolbars, you need to be in Customize Mode.
Once the Customize window is open, you can begin manipulating the toolbars. Right click on a button, and you can now delete it, as well as a few other options.
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If you delete a button, and want to get it back you can click on the Commands tab of the Customize window and on the left side select the name of the toolbar which originally contained the button. The available buttons will appear on the right side of the window. Simply drag one up to a toolbar in order to add it back.
One of the first ArcMap customizations I make on a fresh install is adding the Start, Stop, and Save editing buttons to the Editor toolbar. It’s just a lot easier than going into the Editor menu every time.
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You can also add often used geoprocessing tools to a toolbar. In the Customize window, go to the Commands tab and on the left side scroll down all the way to the bottom. Click on Geoprocessing Tools, and then click the Add Tools button. Browse to the Toolbox containing the tool you’d like to add. The tool will then be available on the right side of the window. Simply drag it up to the toolbar you want to add it to.
By default, the standard ArcGIS toolboxes are located at:
C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.x\ArcToolbox\Toolboxes
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The final customization for this guide is setting up keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are extremely useful, and can reduce a lot of unnecessary mouse clicking. In the Customize window, click the Keyboard button at the bottom of the window.
In the Customize Keyboard window, in the text box at the top, type the name of the tool you want to add a shortcut for. Then on the left side under Categories click the name of the toolbar that contains the tool, and on the right side under Commands click the tool.
Next, click where it says Press new shortcut key, and choose the keyboard shortcut to assign for the tool. I prefer to use ALT + a number at the top of the keyboard. So, I have different tools assigned for when I press ALT + 1, or ALT + 2, etc. Once you choose the keyboard shortcut, remember to click Assign on the right side of the window.
Hope someone finds this helpful! Please leave any questions, or comments below.Glass fiber cables are indispensable for the internet – now they can also be used as a quantum physics lab. The Vienna University of Technology is the only research facility in the world, where single atoms can be controllably coupled to the light in ultra-thin fiber glass. Specially prepared light waves interact with very small numbers of atoms, which makes it possible to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to tiny trace amounts of a substance. Professor Arno Rauschenbeutel’s team, one of six research groups at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, has presented this new method in the journal “Physical Review Letters”. The research project was carried out in collaboration with the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Ultra-Thin Glass Fibers
The glass fibers used for the experiment are only five hundred millionths of a millimeter thick (500 nm). In fact, they are even thinner than the wavelength of visible light. “Actually, the light wave does not really fit into the glass fiber, it sticks out a little”, Arno Rauschenbeutel explains. And this is precisely the big advantage of the new method: the light wave touches atoms which are located outside of, but very close to, the glass fiber. “First, we trap the atoms, so that they are aligned above and below the glass fiber, like pearls on a string”, says Rauschenbeutel. The light wave sent through the glass fiber is then modified by each individual atom it passes. By measuring changes in the light waves very accurately, the number of atoms trapped near the fiber can be determined.
Atoms Change the Speed of Light
When scientists study the interaction of atoms and light, they usually look at rather disruptive effects – at least on a microscopic scale: Atoms can, for example, absorb photons and emit them later in a different direction. This way, atoms can be accelerated and hurled away from their original position. In the glass fiber experiments at Vienna UT however, a very soft interaction between light and atoms is sufficient: “The atoms close to the glass fiber decelerate the light very slightly”, Arno Rauschenbeutel explains. When the light wave oscillates precisely upwards and downwards in the direction of the atoms, the wave is shifted by a tiny amount. Another light wave oscillating in a different direction does not hit any atoms and is therefore hardly decelerated at all. Light waves of different polarization directions are sent through the glass fiber – and their relative shift due to their different speed is measured. This shift tells the scientists how many atoms have delayed the light wave.
Detecting Single Atoms
Hundreds or thousands of atoms can be trapped, less than a thousandth of a millimeter away from the glass fiber. Their number can be determined with an accuracy of several atoms. “In principle, our method is so precise that it can detect as few as ten or twenty atoms”, says Arno Rauschenbeutel. “We are working on a few more technical tricks – such as the reduction of the distance between the atoms and the glass fiber. If we can do this, we should even be able to reliably detect single atoms.”
Non-Destructive Quantum Measurements
The new glass fiber measuring method is not only important for new detectors, but also for basic quantum physical research. “Usually the quantum physical state of a system is destroyed when we measure it”, Rauschenbeutel explains. “Our glass fibers make it possible to control quantum states without destroying them.” The atoms close to the glass fiber can also be used to tune the plane in which the light wave oscillates. Nobody can tell yet, which new technological possibilities may |
down and the rivers rise up:
They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,
From Smithfield, or St 'Pulchre's shape their course,
And in huge confluent join'd at Snow Hill ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn-bridge.
Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, gnats, and blood,
Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.
It is a dire panorama of the city, from the slaughterhouses of Smithfield to St Sepulchre near Newgate prison. Nothing now separates the stucco houses of the wealthy from the offal in the market, nothing now can keep fresh water from foul.
It is a relief to turn to "Trivia" (1716) by Swift's friend John Gay. Where Swift intends us to be battered by his downpour, Gay offers his poem as a literary umbrella to be opened against the storm. Though Swift's deluge seems to presage the fall of civilisations, Gay thinks it worth fussing over suitable headwear. He determines that, in such small gestures, civility will survive.
The strategies he proposes for surviving London weather are strategies for life itself. It is a constant process of looking for shelter and staying alert to danger. Drop your guard for a moment and you may be left wiping from your forehead the dirt splashed at you by a passing carriage. There is seriousness, then, in Gay's apparently trivial discussion of clothes. The choosing of a coat becomes the arming of a hero or knight-errant on his way into the urban forest. This poet, who once served as a draper's apprentice, has a tailor's eye for fabric: "The Freize's spongy Nap is soak'd with Rain, / And Show'rs soon drench the Camlet's cockled Grain." These coats may look stylish when you set out from home, but will make a fool of you when sopping. Far better the ample Kersey wool "surtout" in which a walker may "brave unwet the Rain, unchill'd the Frost".
The "unwet" is Gay's theme, and the word is more evocative than "dry". The wet is out there, the rain is coming down, but Gay and his reader are protected. He refers to the "Paver's Art" because paving really is an art, creating solidity and order where once there was mud. He is drawn to different forms of shelter, noticing how the hat roofs over the wig, how the wall of buildings at the side of the street offers a refuge from the chaotic middle of the road. Shoes and pattens seem to him the very symbols of civilisation because they raise human beings up out of the mud.
Robinson Crusoe in his fur hat. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images
Robinson Crusoe on his island in Defoe's novel of 1719 is similarly attentive to the problem of keeping out the rain. Rapidly training himself in that most primal and sophisticated of arts – the art of building shelters – Crusoe constructs first a double-layered tent and then, in time, a "fortification" as stout and impermeable as he can make it. It cannot be quite watertight, but he engineers a drainage system to let any excess water out. In his dizzying state of solitude, unsure which of his perceptions can be relied upon, he worships the firm walls, which promise certainty. The island weather, more extreme than in England, threatens to wash away the solid objects that are his touchstones: his clay pots, his table, his handmade gardening tools. He must defend them, and he must waterproof himself. So Crusoe becomes a designer of rain gear. He makes a fur hat "to shoot off the rain" and finally, after much trial and error, he makes a giant umbrella which "casts off the Rains like a Penthouse".
When Crusoe leaves his island he takes three things with him as souvenirs. One is the parrot, who has been his constant companion; the other two are his hat and umbrella. These portable shelters are Crusoe's emblems. They are the signs of human craftsmanship and ingenuity combined in the struggle against water.
In the landscape of English literary history, the 19th century is the dampest place. Water pools here, comes up through the floorboards and drips and drips. Victorian rainfall levels were no higher than average (stretches of the 1850s were problematically dry) but Victorian writers perceived their world as a watery one. "I am in love with moistness" muses the narrator of The Mill on the Floss. It was with a sense of wistful envy that Stevie Smith in the 1930s looked back on those "damp Victorian troubles".
Alfred Tennyson condensed into his early poems the vapourous air of his native Lincolnshire. Water and poetry merge as liquid sound in "The Dying Swan"; the landscape of mosses, weeds, "willow branches hoar and dank", is "flooded over with eddying song". The Lady of Shalott sees in her mirror the dazzling sun that shines from an unclouded sky as Lancelot appears, but the weather breaks with the breaking of the spell and the cracking of the mirror. Going out into the world, she goes into a storm: "The broad stream in his banks complaining / Heavily the low sky raining." The sun had been enchanted weather, held in the looking glass. The summer day ends with the Lady freezing in her boat on a rising river, under low clouds, in the rain.
Tom and Maggie Tulliver in the floods in Mill on the Floss. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Drop by drop the water falls, though it echoes differently through the vast humming mass of Bleak House, the novel Dickens began in the dark November of 1851 and finished the following year, during three months of near-continuous rain in the autumn and winter of 1852. The heavy drops fall, "drip drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement", when we first meet Lady Dedlock, looking out blankly over a leaden landscape. "The waters are out in Lincolnshire", and it rains for the first 11 chapters before pausing and raining again. The animals in barns and stables watch the rain and dream of sunshine. Drops fall with the rhythm of footsteps on the haunted terrace, on and on, "drip, drip, drip, by day and night". It is an alternative to the tick-tock of clocktime, but more monotonous. Against the ticking clocks of progress, Tennyson and Dickens set up these other measures of time, achieving nothing, and with no promised end-points. Even when rain stops, it is remembered in the rampant growth of the summer garden at Chesney Wold, comically profuse, with peaches basking by the hundred above the heaps of marrows. The disused nails in the garden wall gesture to the rusty dereliction of Tennyson's moated grange in "Mariana" where "The rusted nails fell from the knots / That held the pear to the gable-wall".
Damp in Dickens is a long-term and slow-motion affair, nudging and seeping, haunting the summer with its mustiness, returning in the autumn to its sentry-watch drip, drip, drip. George Eliot writes, by contrast, of water that comes suddenly and decisively. After all the patient moral struggles of The Mill on the Floss, the flood changes everything in the last few pages. Maggie Tulliver's thoughts are interrupted mid-flow by another kind of stream, running cold around her feet, necessitating a long dash on the page and a jolt from quiet mental struggle to urgent physical action. A lantern is raised in the darkness so that we see her there: "in the rain with the oar in her hand and her black hair streaming". As Maggie rows through the night towards Tom, she has a few moments to think and feel again, but her feelings are changed and simplified. The water has swept away "artificial vestures", leaving a central understanding that "we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs". A few hundred words more, the stroke of oars in a rising current, indistinct shapes looming from the water, and she is gone. There were floods 60 years ago at St Oggs, we are told, and, though "nature repairs her ravages" and presides over calm intervals, we infer that floods will come again. Perhaps there is no judgment on Maggie in particular, but only the inevitable periodic rising of the stream.
Benjamin Britten's opera Noye's Fludde was first performed in 1958, in the church at Orford on the Suffolk coast, where in 1953 January floods had overwhelmed the small town. The libretto revived the words of a medieval mystery play which would have been performed as part of the Corpus Christi festival in the streets of Chester, acted out by the Guild of Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee. The watery story bridges easily across five centuries.
In Britten's musical version the deluge begins with raindrops pattering musically. String instruments start up the tune of "Eternal Father, strong to save", the opera's central survival song, a resetting of the stout Victorian hymn sung by sailors and coastguards: "Oh hear us when we cry to thee, / For those in peril on the sea." Plink and chink the raindrops fall, gathering momentum. The rainmakers are children, playing on "slung mugs" of different shapes and sizes suspended by their handles and struck like a dangling xylophone. It was a good 1950s sort of joke: not quite a storm in a tea cup, but tea cups creating the storm. So English rain and tea time are set to music. The audience, or "congregation", sing the hymn together in solemn ritual, posing their voices against the flood until the dove can be sent out.
There are no deaths in the opera. (Mrs Noah's drunken, gossiping friends presumably drown, but no one mentions that.) The emphasis is all on that which continues. The menagerie in the ark, with its assorted feathers, trunks and tails, is large and exuberant enough for the making of a new world. The audience has been saved from the flood as well of course. That is part of the point. The play itself has been a kind of ark from which we all emerge.
George Szirtes, in An English Apocalypse, imagined dramatic endings for the nation. "Death by Deluge" proposes as our end-point a tidal wave on an August day.
The North Sea had been rough
and rising and the bells of Dunwich rang
through all of Suffolk. One wipe of its cuff
down cliffs and in they went, leaving birds to hang
puzzled in the air, their nests gone.
Enormous tides ran from Southend to Cromer.
In the next lines we are high above England, higher than the aerial photographers and the homeless birds, watching the tide rush across Lincolnshire and The Wash, watching as it comes up the Thames valley, watching as it buries Dorset, and Land's End. The medieval loss of Dunwich (bells still ringing), is gathered up into this future catastrophe. Time is justifiably concertinaed, for human history is small when seen from the apocalypse. Szirtes's best touch comes right at the end of the end. The deluge, it transpires, has created something very English, more John Sell Cotman than John Martin: "All was water-colour, / the pure English medium, intended for sky, cloud, / and sea."
"Ours was just a period in the history of rain", writes Sean O'Brien, poet of northern damp, of green wetness in empty churchyards, of wide reflecting pavements and mushy flotsam in back alleys. He recognises that every period creates its own distinctive kinds of rain, whether it is oily yellow puddles under Victorian gaslight, or grey puddles in the weed-grown craters of postwar bombsites, or rain hitting hard against the glass and concrete surfaces of our modern world, which has done too much, perhaps, to block it out.
Travelling through England on delayed trains this week, I look out on our new era in the history of rain. There is beauty in it. A heron goes fishing in a field south of Banbury, watching over the lake that was grass last month, commandingly upright in a horizontal scene; gulls gather over inland seas, beating the bounds of their new and expanding world. There is struggle and fear in it. Artfully built shelters are flapping loose; water is seeping up as well as coming down. The train line I travelled yesterday is now flooded. Even that ingenious invention the umbrella begins to look like a lost cause.
• Alexandra Harris's book about weather and the arts will be published by Thames & Hudson next year.Well, hello there Dough Boy. Have you heard? Pillsbury® is getting into the gluten-free game and they’ve just released upon the world not one, not two, but THREE gluten-free classic dough situations. You’ve got your gluten-free chocolate chip cookie dough, your gluten-free pizza dough, and your gluten-free pie crust. I was lucky enough to receive all three in the post and got to experimenting.* Thank you, Pillsbury®!
While this is great news, I hope the good people at Pillsbury® don’t think I’m going to stop writing letters about developing gluten-free crescent rolls. Because come on, Christmas. In the meantime, there’s a whole lot of goodness that can created out of these ready-made doughs. I’m thinking ice cream sandwiches with those cookies, pizza night at home (hey, no cross-contamination!), and any kind of pie you can imagine. Me? I imagined a gluten-free chocolate chip pie. Yes, I did.
I’ve been one of those devotees to Whole Foods gluten-free crusts, virtually giving up on ever having a roll out type crust wherein I squish the ends around the pie plate. And that’s just sad. While I did not make this gluten-free crust on my lonesome (duh, Pillsbury® did), I was able to shape it, pat it, and feel just a little bit more like Grandma. If only I’d taken the fork to the edges to make it all purty! How did I forget that??? Anyway, it felt good. And kind of normal. And tasted amazing. Easy, breezy, gluten-free pie.
Before you think I’m totally hard core, please note that this chocolate chip pie is not in fact, made with gluten-free Pillsbury® pie crust AND gluten-free Pillsbury® chocolate chip cookie dough. Just the pie dough, folks. This time.
So here’s how you make this deliciousness happen. How do you think you could go crazy with Pillsbury® gluten-free doughs? Do tell.
*Full disclosure: this article is financially supported by Pillsbury®
Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Pie
adapted from The Amish Cook’s Baking Book
Prep time: 15 minutes Cook time: 1 hour
Ingredients
1/2 of Pillsbury® Gluten-Free Pie Crust
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose gluten-free flour
2 large eggs
1/2 cup melted butter
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Spray 12-inch pie pan with non-stick gluten-free spray. Remove half of Pillsbury® Gluten-Free Pie Crust from tub and knead until fully mixed.
2. Place dough on parchment paper and flatten with your hands. Take another piece of parchment paper and place on top of the gluten-free dough. Using a rolling pin, evenly roll out Pillsbury® Gluten-Free Pie Crust into a disc. Transfer pie crust from parchment paper into pre-sprayed pie pan. Shape edges of pie crust around pan as desired. Bake in hot oven for 10-15 minutes until lightly browned.
3. While pie crust is pre-baking, combine sugar and gluten-free flour in a bowl with whisk. Beat two large eggs, then add to flour and sugar mixture. Add melted butter and combine thoroughly. Mix in chocolate chips and vanilla.
4. Turn oven down to 350 degrees. Allow pie crust to cool for 10 minutes before pouring in chocolate chip pie mixture. Then bake for 40-45 minutes until top is golden brown.
Makes: 8 servingsSan Diego mayor Bob Filner speaks at a news conference in San Diego, California July 26, 2013. REUTERS/Fred Greaves
SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The San Diego City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to sue Mayor Bob Filner to shield the city from liability in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the mayor by his former press secretary.
The City Attorney’s Office said in a statement that the council voted unanimously in closed session on Tuesday to authorize the filing of what amounts to a new lawsuit against the mayor.
“If Bob Filner engaged in unlawful conduct and the city is held liable, he will have to reimburse us every penny the city pays and its attorney fees,” City Attorney Jan Goldsmith said in a statement.
Seven women have publicly accused Filner of unwanted sexual advances.
One of them, former press secretary Irene McCormack Jackson, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit on July 22. The City Council’s action is meant to protect city funds in that case.
The other women include a retired U.S. Navy admiral and a college dean.
The decision by the City Council on Tuesday to authorize a legal action against the mayor came on the same day the council was set to discuss a request from Filner’s private attorney, Harvey Berger, that the city pay the costs of defending the mayor in the sexual harassment lawsuit. That discussion was set for Tuesday evening. Goldsmith has declined to defend the mayor.
Filner, a 70-year-old Democrat, faces mounting pressure to resign over the allegations against him. Last week, he acknowledged a “failure to respect women” and vowed to attend two weeks of counseling beginning on August 5, but he has refused to step down.DETROIT - A new development company in Detroit is seeking approval from the city's Historic District Commission to build 27 new homes on Trumbull Avenue and Lincoln Street in the historic Woodbridge Farms neighborhood.
The move is supported by the district's residents who are working on the designs with the developer, Procida-Diggs.
Procida-Diggs plans to present its project before the commission at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
If approved, developers hope to begin construction by the spring of 2018.
Procida-Diggs plans to erect 19 homes on Trumbull Avenue starting at the corner of Brainard Street, working its way north, said Mario Procida, a co-principal on the project.
Each home, complete with a basement and a private backyard, will include three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. Procida calls the homes "Lutyens-esque," referencing British architect Edwin Lutyens.
This rendering shows the potential design and facade on 27 new homes slated for construction Trumbull Avenue in the historic Woodbridge Farms neighborhood in Detroit.
Lutyens operated between the late 1800s and into the 20th Century. He's responsible for crafting many idyllic country houses, public buildings and striking war monuments in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Procida told MLive that his homes have a "modernistic interpretation of historical references."
On Lincoln Street, Procida and co-principal Douglass Diggs want to build eight more homes with the same look and feel.
"It's going to have a major impact on the southern edge of Woodbridge," Procida said.
"We're excited by the opportunities that the single family project presents. Ultimately you have to build to the market. We know that our consumer is the customer here, many of them are going to going to come from within the community."
The community is also a key player in project's coordination and design - a bit of a rarity when it comes to Detroit's contentious history of development and urban renewal.
The parcel at 3700 Trumbull Ave. is the site of the former James Scripps Mansion. Scripps' family founded The Evening News, which would later become the Detroit News.
The 12,000 square-foot home was damaged by a devastating fire in 1985 and razed some time afterward.
It was later turned into a city park. The brick-iron entrance gate and the mansion's power-boiler house remain intact, however.
Procida-Diggs wants to restore the boiler house and offer it for sale, either as its own property or bundled with the sale of a nearby home.
The Woodbridge district was designated as a historic neighborhood in 1980. Most of the homes date back to the late 1800s, some bearing Victorian and turn-of-the-century architecture.
Angie Gaabo is the executive director of the Woodbridge Neighborhood Development Corporation, a non-profit made up of three Woodbridge neighborhood groups. She and other residents are working with Procida-Diggs, offering suggestions and giving feedback, since the project was proposed earlier this year.
"The city does not want developers to build faux historic architecture, and we agree with that approach," she said.
"We feel the design should be contemporary, but also of a good, high-quality design. There are ways to do that, and a lot of Detroit neighborhoods are still figuring out what that means."
Cooperation between residents and developers is often uncommon when it comes to new construction in historic neighborhoods. Gaabo said it was refreshing to strike an easy alliance with Procida-Diggs.
"We don't consider ourselves to be neck and neck with the developer," she said.
"They aren't trying to fight us tooth and nail, either. All we can do as residents is go before the commission and say we either support it or don't like the project. Even if the neighborhood does that, they can still approve or deny.
"My sense is that the (Procida-Digss) is trying to do something that everyone agrees on."
Procida considers cooperation a "good practice."
He and his partners originally wanted to demolish the power-boilerhouse, opening up another parcel for a new home. Gaabo was able to convince Procida to keep the house intact after some tinkering.
The developer went a step further when he announced restoration plans for the aging buidling.
"As a property owner we're a member of the community, and as a developer, we try to be a participating member of the community," Procida said.
"We try to develop by consensus. We think it's good practice. You can't always get everyone on the same page but we've tried to a certain extent, and their suggestions have improved or informed the design process."Sandown racecourse will tomorrow implement revolutionary running lanes and staggered starts throughout its eight-race program.
The landmark trial seeks to address the 'tight' style of riding common to Australian racetracks that is seen to place horses and riders at unnecessary risk.
It is also hoped that more European horses - who traditionally enjoy plenty of galloping room in their races - may be lured over for the 2015 Melbourne Cup should the innovation gain permanent traction.
Some of Australia's leading jockeys have slammed the experiment however, joining a growing chorus of racing identities bemused by administrative attempts to sanitise the sport.
The revolutionary lanes - which were applied to the Sandown surface on Monday - are wide enough to accommodate one-and-a-half horses across, so affording each runner a spacious passage throughout.
Inspired by track athletics events such as the 200m and 400m sprints, the introduction of staggered starting gates will ensure that each horse in the race runs the exact same distance.
The innovation means that horses drawn in the wider barriers will no longer be in danger of getting posted deep and covering extra ground when cornering, so leveling a playing field that for hundreds of years has advantaged inside draws.
Interference will also be virtually eliminated from races, with horses that stray out of their lanes facing disqualification in the stewards' room. It is understood that stewards intend to police lane breaches that occur rounding bends far more stringently than those that take place on straight sections of track.
In order to enforce the new rules each lane has been wired to interact with microchips carried in the horses' saddlecloths, providing visual data to stewards via the Trakus motion tracking system. Trakus was successfully implemented for the William Reid Stakes card at Moonee Valley on Friday night.
The green light for the trial was given last month after Chinese company SmartStart was able to deliver upon the manufacturing deadline for a unique staggered starting apparatus.
SmartStart created the staggered stalls after purchasing a 1999 patent originally intended for American harness racing (more here).
"After extensive research, we are confident that the introduction of staggered starts and lanes will ensure that the best horse is afforded every possible chance to win the race on its own merits," said Racing Victoria spokesperson for Innovation and Development, Ernest Malley.
"Punter confidence has become an increasingly critical issue in the Australian racing landscape, and we are firmly committed to minimising interference, protecting jockeys and providing punters with the fairest possible racing product."
Punter dissatisfaction over questionable jockey performance - such as in the fiery aftermath of Nash Rawiller's losing ride aboard favourite Kermadec in the Australian Guineas - was also cited by Malley as a factor in the decision.
"The age of social media has seen jockeys come under extreme attack from rank and file punters for perceived 'bad' rides on an almost daily basis.
"The fact that it will no longer be possible to cover extra ground during the run will take a large percentage of jockey error out of the equation. This helps protect riders and the sport itself from damaging rants on social media platforms such as Twitter."
In spite of apparent protests from the likes of Bowman, Williams and fellow senior rider Dwayne Dunn, the Australian Jockey's Association signed-off on the trial late last week.
"The Australian Jockey Association supports any initiative that prioritises the best interests of riders," a spokesman said.
The trial is set to be conducted across all four Sandown Wednesday meetings in April, with a decision regarding permanent implementation of lanes and staggered starts across Victorian tracks set to be handed down in early May.by BRIAN NADIG
Two pedestrian refuge islands which were installed last summer in the Six Corners shopping district have been removed because they reportedly were installed incorrectly.
“(The city Department of Transportation) will need to reinstall them. As you might imagine, we’re frustrated by this,” Alderman John Arena’s chief of staff Owen Brugh said in a statement. The area where the medians had been located has been paved over.
Information from the department was not available at press time. The islands were proposed in 2015 as part of a planned expenditure from the Portage Park Tax Increment Financing District.
Refuge islands are raised medians intended to provide pedestrians in a crosswalk a safe place to wait in the middle of the street when traffic is not yielding to them. Several islands are being installed on Milwaukee Avenue in Jefferson Park and Gladstone Park.Pesis Live
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Ottelut sivulla näkyvät käynnissä olevat pelit tai seuraavien pelien alkamisaika. Käynnissä olevilla peleillä on pelisivu, josta näkee kentällä olevan tilanteen. Kun olet pelisivulla kotiutusyrityksistä tulee pieni popup-ilmoitus. Mikäli haluat seurata useiden pelien ilmoituksia samaan aikaan, voit lisätä peli taustaseurantaan pelisivun lopussa olevasta valinnasta. Taustaseurannassa olevat pelit näkyvät keltaisella pohjalla ottelut sivulla. Asetukset sivulta voi valita mitkä ilmoitukset taustaseurannassa olevista peleistä haluat vastaanottaa.
Pelisivun vasemmassa yläkulmassa olevasta napista aukeaa pelin pöytäkirja. Oikeasta yläkulmasta aukeaa Twitter-paneeli #pesis-kanavalle, josta saattaa löytää hyödyllistä tietoa. Voit myös itse kirjoittaa twitteriin, varsinkin jos olet kentällä ja pelissä tapahtuu jotain mielenkiintoista.
Tilastot ja lyöntijärjestys
Yhdistetystä lyöntijärjestys- ja tilastonäkymästä näet pesillä olevat pelaajat, viimeisimmät pöytäkirjamerkinnät, lyöntivuorot ja pelin tilastot.
Ensimmäisessä sarakkeessa on pelaajien viimeisin pesätilanne. Ympyröity pesänumero tarkoittaa, että pelaaja on kyseisellä pesällä. Numero ilman ympyrää on pelaajan viimeisin pesä johon hän pääsi tai yritti päästä. Punainen pesänumero merkitsee, että pelaaja paloi kyseiselle pesälle. Kotipesä on merkitty K-kirjaimella. Vihreä K tarkoittaa, että pelaaja toi juoksun
Toisessa sarakkeessa on pelaajaa koskeva viimeisin pöytäkirjamerkintä. Merkinnän jälkeinen numero on lyöjä.
Onnistunut kärkieteneminen/lyönti
Onnistunut kärkieteneminen/lyönti Haavoittunut kärkietenijä/lyönti
Haavoittunut kärkietenijä/lyönti Palanut kärkietenijä/lyönti
Palanut kärkietenijä/lyönti Kaksi kärkilyöntia (kunnarista)
Kaksi kärkilyöntia (kunnarista) Eteneminen kärjen takana
Eteneminen kärjen takana Haavoittuminen kärjen takana
Haavoittuminen kärjen takana Palaminen kärjen takana
Palaminen kärjen takana Eteneminen harhaheitolla
Eteneminen harhaheitolla Vapaataival
Pelaajan nimi on mustalla, mikäli pelaajalla on lyöntivuoro jäljellä. Jos lyöntivuoroa ei ole nimi on harmaalla. Lyöntivuorojen merkintä saattaa joskus mennä sekaisin, erityisesti jos jokereita on vaihdettu lyömään numerolla. Lyöjä on merkitty sinisellä ja ympyröidyllä L-kirjaimella
Loput sarakkeista ovat tilastoja. Ruudun leveydestä riippuen kaikki sarakkeet eivät ole välttämättä näkyvissä. Kääntämällä puhelin vaaka-asentoon sarakkeille on enemmän tilaa.
Up Ulkopelipaikka
Ulkopelipaikka Tu Tuodut juoksut
Tuodut juoksut KL Kärkilyönnit
Kärkilyönnit KL 1% Kärkilyönnit ykköspesälle
Kärkilyönnit ykköspesälle KL 2% Kärkilyönnit kakkospesälle
Kärkilyönnit kakkospesälle KL 3% Kärkilyönnit kolmospesälle
Kärkilyönnit kolmospesälle KL K% Kärkilyönnit kotipesään
Kärkilyönnit kotipesään Ly Lyödyt juoksut
Lyödyt juoksut KL % Kärkilyöntien onnistumisprosentti
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Huomaa myös pesäpalloaiheisten nettisivujen ylläpitäjille tarkoitetut tilastot ja sarjataulukot http://pesislive.fi/static/doc/index.htmlBack when Sony Pictures were looking to cast their Peter Parker, Donald Glover was one of the names which came up through a campaign on Twitter. Despite not landing the role, there is an easter egg featuring the actor in the reboot and here's what he had to say about that.
STARRING:
Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker/Spider-Man
Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy
Rhys Ifans as Curt Connors/The Lizard
Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben
Sally Fields as Aunt May
Denis Leary as George Stacy
RELEASE DATE: July 3rd, 2012.
Donald Glover's race made him a controversial casting choice with fans when he decided to campaign for the coveted role of Peter Parker. However, both director Marc Webb and star Andrew Garfield have since expressed admiration for the star of, with the former recently letting slip the fact that they had included an easter egg featuring the actor somewhere in Peter Parker's bedroom.Talking to MTV Splash Page, the actor said:While he may know something about the easter egg, he wasn't willing to let slip any specifics.He jokingly added,It’s too early to gauge the ultimate impact of the devaluation of the yuan on Washington state, which counts China as its largest trade partner and a growing source of tourist and real-estate investment dollars.
Washington state’s apple growers have been looking forward to a great upcoming season, fueled by a bountiful crop and by China’s opening its market to all varieties of U.S. apples.
But this week came some sobering news about that market: China, in a surprise move, devalued its yuan in the hopes of bolstering its slowing economy.
That, overnight, makes Washington state apples more expensive for the Chinese. But by itself, the currency shift — 4.4 percent this week through Thursday — isn’t enough to cause worry among Washington’s apple growers.
Washington trade with China* • Washington goods exported to China: $16.7 billion • Chinese goods imported to Washington: $8.8 billion • Percentage of Washington exports that go to China: 20 • Washington top goods exported to China: Aerospace, oil seeds, cereals, wood & wood products *In 2013 Source: Washington Council on International Trade
Rather, the big concern is if the move “is signaling weakness of the economy in China and what it means in terms of the purchasing power of the middle class in China,” said Rebecca Lyons, international marketing director for the Washington Apple Commission.
It’s too early to gauge the ultimate impact of the devaluation of the yuan on Washington state, which counts China as its largest trade partner and a growing source of tourist and real-estate investment dollars.
On the negative side, the devaluation could make Washington companies that export to China less competitive. It could also raise the cost of making real-estate investments in this state, and traveling here.
On the flip side, Chinese investors seeking a more stable safe haven for their money could decide to invest more in this state.
So far, China’s currency devaluation is a “pretty small move after a long period of appreciation,” said Tim Duy, professor of economics at the University of Oregon. “I don’t know that this, in and of itself, significantly rocks the boat. I wouldn’t expect there to be large impacts to exporters from Washington or Oregon.”
“I’m more worried about what this says about China’s economy and demand for goods and services going forward,” said Duy, who added that the changes are pointing to “a marked slowing of China’s economy. Many firms exporting into China were basing their plans on a much faster rate of growth. This will disrupt those plans.”
The apple commission’s Lyons says she hasn’t heard much concern from growers yet.
Fruit growers here see China as a growing market for its goods, with a rising middle class concerned about the safety of the food supply and willing and able |
Imran jodi, earlier seen in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, didn't go down well with the viewers.
"Definitely it was not upto our expectations. You feel sad when a film doesn't work but this is a reality of our industry. If you can't handle it then you are in the wrong business," the 30-year-old told reporters while talking about the film's box office performance.
A Karan Johar production, Gori Tere Pyaar Mein was directed by Punit Malhotra.
"When we did Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, people liked the pairing. I think if a film fails everyone has to think about it - be it the writer or director. Everyone needs to analyse the problem area," he said.
"It's not fair to put the blame on only one thing - pairing. It is very wrong to even say that marriage affects a heroine. If a film has failed, then there was some problem with the film," he added.
Meanwhile, Imran will start shooting for this next film Bhavesh Joshi early next year.
IANS
Updated Date: Dec 03, 2013 19:04:41 ISTAlpha 0.5.9 released. Important features: Passive regen, most actions now require stamina as a resource, player status UI, bug fixes, new advancements, crops, produce, foods, spells, and modifiers.
Posted by lugdunon on Dec 11th, 2013
Alpha 0.5.9 released. Important features: Passive regen, most actions now require stamina as a resource, player status UI, bug fixes, new advancements, crops, produce, foods, spells, and modifiers.
SlideDB App of the Year
WOW! Lugdunon has made it to the top 50 mobile apps of 2013, and is therefore eligible for finalist voting on SlideDB! Please consider casting a vote in our direction for the 2013 AOTY.
Passive Regen
Passive regen has finally been implemented! This means that your characters will regenerate their health and stamina over time. The rate at which health and stamina are regenerated can be enhanced via advancements, equipment, and modifiers.
Stamina!
Stamina now finally plays a role in the world of Lugdunon, and it is a fairly major role. The majority of the actions that your player can perform now require a certain amount of stamina. From crafting to combat to farming you will find yourself depleting your reserves of stamina.
Stamina can be regained via passive regen, as well as consuming certain types of food, since food can now restore stamina as well as health.
Player Status UI
One feature that Lugdunon was sorely lacking up until now was the ability to easily monitor your health and stamina outside of the party unit frames. A new player status UI, that sits just above the action bar solves this problem. Comprised of a health bar on the left, a stamina bar on the right, and an ability charge bar in the middle, this new UI element should suffice.
The unit frame UI has also been updated to add a stamina bar in addition to the pre-existing health and charge bars.
New Advancements
Two new advancements chains are available in 0.5.9, allowing players to enhance the rates at which they regenerate health and stamina. The chains each progress in three stages, offering +5, +10, and finally +20 to their respective regen rates.
New Crops and Produce
Three new crops are now available for cultivation: mustard, sage, and rosemary. New farmers will now start out with 32 seeds of all three in addition to their current starting inventory items.
New Foods
The three new crops can be used to cook four new foods:
Each of the new foods benefits stamina in some way.
New Spells and Modifiers
Two new spells, complete with scrolls and scroll research recipes, have also been added. These spells each bestow a helpful modifier, boosting a character’s maximum health and stamina for a short time.
Miscellany
Capes now bestow a bonus to stamina regen when equipped.
The server list now displays the server’s location as a country name, instead of the previously used country code.
The item crafted metric reporting code has been fixed so that the statistics pane of the achievements UI will render now. Each entry in the item crafted metric will display the crafting discipline icon to the left of the item name.
Audio assets are now loaded asynchronously. Since the music assets are some of the largest items loaded, this should reduce the initial load time a bit. Also, three new songs have been added!
To listen to each of the tracks in game, you can type the following commands into the chat console:
/ex game.playMusic("MUSIC.DULCIMER");
/ex game.playMusic("MUSIC.BACKGROUND.NOISE");
/ex game.playMusic("MUSIC.HOW.THEY.RUN");
/ex game.playMusic("MUSIC.RIP.TO.NORFOLK");
/ex game.playMusic("MUSIC.WUBWUBWUB");
Fixed a few issues with metrics reporting. Also, the time played and last played values are now updated in real time and are accurate.
A new REST service was added for listing the server’s player base, along with a few vitals:
bibracte.lugdunon.net:41976/rest/net/lugdunon/players
The full change log for 0.5.9 is available here.NT Photography/Getty
Here’s one thing to impress your friends with the next time you order a takeaway: new and exotic ways to slice a pizza.
Most of us divide a pizza using straight cuts that all meet in the middle. But what if the centre of the pizza has a topping that some people would rather avoid, while others desperately want crust for dipping?
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Mathematicians had previously come up with a recipe for slicing – formally known as a monohedral disc tiling – that gives you 12 identically shaped pieces, six of which form a star extending out from the centre, while the other six divide up the crusty remainder. You start by cutting curved three-sided slices across the pizza, then dividing these slices in two to get the inside and outside groups, as shown below.
diagram adapted from arxiv.org/abs/1512.03794
Now Joel Haddley and Stephen Worsley of the University of Liverpool, UK, have generalised the technique to create even more ways to slice. The pair have proved you can create similar tilings from curved pieces with any odd number of sides – known as 5-gons, 7-gons and so on (shaded below) – then dividing them in two as before. “Mathematically there is no limit whatsoever,” says Haddley, though you might find it impractical to carry out the scheme beyond 9-gon pieces.
diagram adapted from arxiv.org/abs/1512.03794
Haddley and Worsley went one further by cutting wedges in the corners of their shapes, creating bizarre, spikey pieces that still form a circle (the image below shows this happening with 5-gons). “It’s really surprising,” says Haddley.
diagram adapted from arxiv.org/abs/1512.03794
As with many mathematical results, its usefulness isn’t immediately obvious. The same is true of another pizza theorem, which looks at what happens when a pizza is haphazardly cut off-centre.
“I’ve no idea whether there are any applications at all to our work outside of pizza-cutting,” says Haddley, who has actually tried slicing a pizza in this way for real (see below). But the results are “interesting mathematically, and you can produce some nice pictures”.
Joel Haddley
Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1512.03794MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. - Medical marijuana in Florida remains in limbo since state lawmakers ended session without an agreement on a measure to carry out a voter-approved constitutional amendment legalizing it, but at least one South Florida dispensary isn't waiting for permission.
Trulieve is one of a handful of medical marijuana dispensaries in South Florida, all now stymied by lawmakers' failure to craft rules for the industry.
"They're just delaying the inevitable, really, and in the end, it's just hurting more people than it's protecting," a Trulieve customer told Local 10 News.
He uses a concentrated oil to keep a kidney disorder in remission.
Trulieve dispenses creams, oils and now, in the absence of a new law, added whole-flower cannabis.
Lawmakers adjourned late Monday night. By Tuesday morning, there was a new product on the shelf -- 3.5 grams of marijuana in bud form.
It's in the mesh pods to use in vaporizers and perfectly legal. But who's to stop patients at home from removing the bud inside to smoke it -- a use that is currently against the law?
Central Florida attorney John Morgan, who spearheaded the constitutional amendment, is asking Gov. Rick Scott to call the Florida Legislature back to Tallahassee for a special session.
Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran has said he would like a special session, but Senate President Joe Negron and Scott have been noncommittal on the issue.
Copyright 2017 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.MEGABOT toy robot depicted in the Big Hero 6 motion picture.
Just rotate the face to reveal the opposite emotion, exactly like in the movie!
___________________________________________
-Modeled in 3ds Max 2013 and rendered with V-Ray 2.5.
-Poly count on Subdivision Level 0 and enough to render, Level 1 is excellent and Level 2 a bit unnecessary.
-Rendered on Subdivision Level 1
-HDRIs included
-Materials and Objects named correctly and intuitively.
-Centered at 0,0,0
-Real-World Scale (Approximately 22 centimeters height)
-Standard and V-Ray Materials
-Includes:
-Sitting Position (.max and obj)
-Attack Position (.max and obj)
-Standing Position (.max and obj)
-Ready for use/ visualization/ rendering on 3ds Max.
-Texture taken directly from shots of the movie and completely redrawn on Photoshop:
Texture Sizes (.jpg):
-4096x4096
-2048x2048
-1024x1024
-Includes Photoshop (.PSD) file with organised workflow and separated layers
_____________________________________________
Hope you enjoy your purchase!
THIS IS *NOT* A REAL PHYSICAL TOY, IT'S A COMPUTER GENERATED MODEL.December 2, 2011
ORLANDO – The Orlando Magic have announced they will play a pair of preseason games against the Miami Heat. Orlando will host Miami at Amway Center on Wednesday, December 21. Tip-off is 7 p.m.
The two teams will also play in Miami at AmericanAirlines Arena on Sunday, December 18. Tip-off is 6 p.m.
The best way for fans to guarantee seats for the 2011-12 campaign is by purchasing Orlando Magic season tickets. Season tickets, partial plans, group and single-game Amway Center suite rental opportunities are on sale now. Ticket highlights include: 2,500 seats priced $20 or less, 8,000 seats priced $40 or less and 9,000 seats priced $50 or under. The NBA and its teams will have more than one million tickets available to fans for $10 or less over the course of the season.
The Magic will also hold their “Select-a-Seat” event at the Amway Center on Saturday, December 10 from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Fans will have the opportunity to purchase season tickets and partial plans, while choosing the best seat location. It will also be the only way to guarantee tickets for the preseason game against Miami before they go on sale to the general public. Single-game tickets will go on sale the week of Monday, December 12.
For ticket information, log on to www.orlandomagic.com https://www.orlandomagic.com or call the Orlando Magic Box Office at 407-89-MAGIC.“The apathy is appalling,” said Zhang Boshu, a political philosopher who lost his job at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences three years ago for criticizing the government’s human rights record.
With a mounting toll of 69 self-immolations, at least 56 of them fatal, many Tibetans are asking themselves why their Han Chinese brethren seem unmoved by the suffering — or are at least uninterested in exploring why so many people have embraced such a horrifying means of protest.
The silence, some say, is exposing an uncomfortable gulf between Tibetans and China’s Han majority, despite decades of propaganda that seeks to portray the nation as a harmonious family comprising 56 contented minorities.
“It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about,” said Wang Lixiong, a prominent Tibetologist and social theorist whose writings have drawn the unwelcome attention of public security personnel, including a contingent of police officers who kept him sequestered inside his Beijing apartment this week as the party congress got under way.
Mr. Wang and others say a subtle undercurrent of antipathy toward Tibetans suffuses the worldview of educated Chinese. That sentiment, they say, has been nurtured by official propaganda that paints Tibetans as rebellious, uncultured and unappreciative of government efforts to raise their standard of living.
One prominent filmmaker, speaking more candidly than usual, but only under the condition of anonymity, noted that many Chinese are alternately fascinated and repulsed by Tibetans. “We Han love their exotic singing and dancing, but we also see them as barbarians seeking to split the nation apart,” he said.
Photo
Whether it be antipathy or apathy, many Chinese have been unconsciously swayed by government propaganda that describes the self-immolators as “terrorists” even as unrelenting censorship blocks any public airing of their grievances, which include complaints about restrictions on Tibetan Buddhism and educational policies that, in some areas, favor Mandarin over Tibetan.
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“I think the authorities have deliberately created a barrier between the two cultures,” said Hu Yong, a professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication.
Mr. Hu said such attitudes were reinforced by China’s army of Tibet specialists, nearly all of whom are employed by government-affiliated institutions and who faithfully parrot the party’s official narrative on Tibetan history and politics.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
Rigorous censorship has ensured that news about the protests rarely makes it onto the Internet, let alone into the mainstream news media. The Chinese media has reported only a handful of the self-immolations, and people who transmit news from Tibetan areas face harsh punishment.
The fear can be paralyzing for many Chinese intellectuals. “No one wants to be accused of being a separatist,” said Mr. Zhang, the former academy member.
But neither fear nor censorship fully explain the silence of Chinese liberals, most of whom are adept at skirting the great firewall and many of whom regularly step across imaginary red lines to lob verbal critiques of the Communist Party. Tsering Woeser, a blogger of mixed Tibetan and Han ancestry, said many Chinese see Tibetans as the “other”; she said even friends have been known to cite a well-known Chinese proverb to explain their indifference to Tibetan grievances: “If you are not of my ethnicity, you cannot share my heart.”
Ms. Woeser said that even her most open-minded friends are confounded by Tibetans, with their fierce religious devotion, their demands for greater autonomy and their aching for the return of the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing regularly dismisses as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Chinese intellectuals, she added, see Tibet as a forbidding, restive land, but also inseparable from China. “The Han are obsessed with issues of sovereignty,” said Ms. Woeser, who is married to Mr. Wang, the critic barred from leaving his home. “They want to claim Tibet as part of China, but they are not terribly concerned with the Tibetan people or their culture.”
Even if the self-immolations are confined to a region thousands of miles away, Beijing officials were taking no chances this week as party elders gathered for the once-a-decade change in leadership. During the opening day of the party congress on Thursday, several security guards inside the Great Hall of the People held fire extinguishers between their knees as they sat in the back row of the auditorium.
Outside on Tiananmen Square, firefighters stood at attention with fire extinguishers at their feet, even if the vast granite-clad plaza was devoid of anything flammable. A New York Times photographer who snapped pictures of the firefighters was confronted by the police, who forced her to delete the images.
At a session held on Friday by delegates from the Tibet Autonomous Region, Liang Tiangeng, a top party official, dismissed a foreign reporter’s question about whether the government had plans to address the self-immolations. After extolling the happiness of the Tibetan people, he noted that even developed and democratic nations were plagued by suicides.
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“People kill themselves, they set fire to themselves, they shoot themselves every day,” he said. “I think some media organizations are trying to sensationalize the very few cases of self-immolation that have happened in Tibetan area because they have ulterior motives.”When yet another Arabic translator was thrown out of the Army this month for being gay, Jon Stewart nailed the self-destructive Catch-22 of “don’t ask”: We allow interrogators to waterboard detainees and then banish a soldier who can tell us what that detainee is saying. The equally egregious Defense of Marriage Act, a k a DOMA, punishes same-sex spouses by voiding their federal marital rights even in states that have legalized gay marriage. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the widower of America’s first openly gay congressman, Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, must mount a long-shot court battle to try to collect the survivor benefits from his federal pension and health insurance plans. (Studds died in 2006.) Nothing short of Congressional repeal of DOMA is likely to rectify that injustice.
The civil rights lawyer Evan Wolfson, who is executive director of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, notes that the current stasis in Washington is a bit reminiscent of early 1963, when major triumphs in the black civil rights movement (Brown v. Board of Education, the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery bus boycott) had been followed by stalling, infighting and more violent setbacks. Victories were on their way but it took the march on Washington and Martin Luther King ’s “I Have a Dream” speech to galvanize John Kennedy and ultimately Lyndon Johnson into action. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson had to step up big time — and did — to prod Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (now under imminent threat from the Roberts Supreme Court).
It would be easy to blame the Beltway logjam in gay civil rights progress on the cultural warriors of the religious right and its political host, the Republican Party. But it would be inaccurate. The right has lost much of its clout in the capital and, as President Obama ’s thoughtful performance at Notre Dame dramatized last weekend, its shrill anti- abortion -rights extremism now plays badly even in supposedly friendly confines.
Anyone with half a brain in the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. knows that gay bashing will further dim the party’s already remote chance of recruiting young voters to replenish its aging ranks, much as the right’s immigrant bashing drove away Hispanics. This is why Republican politicians now say they oppose only gay marriage, not gay people, even when it’s blatant that they’re dissembling. Naked homophobia — those campy, fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage ads, for instance — is increasingly unwelcome in a party fighting for survival. The wingnuts don’t even have Dick Cheney on their side on this issue.
Most Congressional Republicans will still vote against gay civil rights. Some may take the politically risky path of demonizing same-sex marriage during the coming debate over the new Supreme Court nominee. Old prejudices and defense mechanisms die hard, after all: there are still many gay men in the party’s hierarchy hiding in fear from what remains of the old religious-right base. In “Outrage,” a new documentary addressing precisely this point, Kirk Fordham, who had been chief of staff to Mark Foley, the former Republican congressman, says, “If they tried to fire gay staff like they do booting people out of the military, the legislative process would screech to a halt.” A closet divided against itself cannot stand.
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But when Congressional Republicans try to block gay civil rights — last week one cadre introduced a bill to void the recognition of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia — they just don’t have the votes to get their way. The Democrats do have the votes to advance the gay civil rights legislation Obama has promised to sign. And they have a serious responsibility to do so. Let’s not forget that “don’t ask” and DOMA both happened on Bill Clinton ’s watch and with his approval. Indeed, in the 2008 campaign, Obama’s promise to repeal DOMA outright was a position meant to outflank Hillary Clinton, who favored only a partial revision.
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So what’s stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson said to me last week, they lack “a towering national figure to make the moral case” for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner two weeks ago — he and his political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to “make it official” — it seemed all the odder that he hasn’t engaged the issue substantively.
“This is a civil rights moment,” Wolfson said, “and Obama has not yet risen to it.” Worse, Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage is now giving cover to every hard-core opponent of gay rights, from the Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean to the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, each of whom can claim with nominal justification to share the president’s views.
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In reality, they don’t. Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. The most common rationale for his current passivity is that his plate is too full. But the president has so far shown an impressive inclination both to multitask and to argue passionately for bedrock American principles when he wants to. Relegating fundamental constitutional rights to the bottom of the pile until some to-be-determined future seems like a shell game.
As Wolfson reminds us in his book “Why Marriage Matters,” Dr. King addressed such dawdling in 1963. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait,’ ” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ”
The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did. If “American Idol” can sing out for change on Fox in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in the White House.Trips on all Metlink trains across the region will be free for everyone all day from 5.00 am on Sunday 30 October.
“We’d like to thank everyone for their ongoing support for the rail network, particularly ratepayers, whose ongoing funding makes our region’s commuter train service a great asset to our region,” says Wayne Hastie Greater Wellington Regional Council General Manager Public Transport.
The’ Ride for Free’ Sunday also marks the end of the project to modernise the train fleet, which finished this month with the last of the 83 Matangi 2-car units entering service.
“People’s ongoing support for the train network allows us to provide a comfortable and reliable service that more people are using each year,” says Dr Hastie.
“If you haven’t caught the train the past few years, you’ll be surprised how comfortable and quiet they are. So come and try them out. They are a stress-free alternative to dealing with traffic.”
“Getting information about the train service is easy by visiting the timetable section of our website or your local station.”
Dr Hastie says more the ongoing investment in the train network makes taking the train a more attractive option and helps free up congestion on the region’s roads which is good for the environment and the economy.
“We’re following a simple formula: when there is a comfortable, reliable and punctual service, more people use public transport.”
Dr Hastie says customers will see more improvements coming down the line with the new performance-based contract with new train operator Transdev.
“We designed the contract to give the best service for our customers, with some tough performance standards around punctuality.
“Transdev are doing a great job of meeting those standards. Very few services are running outside their time and we are receiving a lot of positive feedback from customers.
Media contact 021 914 266.Lets start by saying I have 7 pets from 6 different species. I named them and told my Santa she had the chances to choose what species she would gift. But my Santa made sure they were all dressed in style!
I hinted in my likes that I'm often on /r/SnakesWithHats and would love hats for my snakes. My santa didn't stop at making hats for my snake, she knitted (?) a hat for my gecko, a sweater for my rat, and made a sign/hat to show the contempt of my turtle.
She also sent a toy for my ferret a angry bird. Timon loved it! The dog eventually grabbed it and it is now missing an ear.
A lot more info with the pictures.
Thank you santa for that amazing gift. My boyfriend and I had a real good time taking pictures of everyone. That gift is just overwhelming and you actually made me tear up. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the time and love you have put into making all this.With only six matches remaining (and a long two week wait until the 9 September match in New York) on the Timbers schedule, I figured this is a good time to more precisely decide what it will take to make the playoffs but also in what slot. Come along with me on this haphazard FanPost. First, the resources:
Above the Red Line
Simply, will the Timbers be in the playoffs? And at what amount of points do they need to be in the playoffs?
To the first answer, the odds are in the Timbers' favor right now, and the number of points that tips between more likely than not is 46.
538 - 89% SCS - 90.8% BS - Magic # = 17 BS - Actual Despair # = 1.45 (Basically need to have this ppg to remain above 6th place)
Interestingly, the probability went down because San Jose won over the weekend, but it also dropped a few points for Houston, Vancouver, and Dallas on that win in LA alone.
And why 46 points? Look at the SportsClubStats page for the Timbers. It breaks down the Monte Carlo simulations by points. There is a definite change between a probability at 39%/43% at 45 points (only 4 points more in six matches) versus 61%/67% at 46 points (5 points in six matches, or 1-2-3 or 0-5-1). Two wins, 2-0-4 at a minimum for 47 points, is a playoff probability of 80%. Every draw after that jumps nearly 10 percentage points. For the record 55 points gets the Timbers in with mathematical certainty right now.
Match to Match
Looking at each match individually gives us another insight into the road to the playoffs. Just know that the Timbers' current ppg of 1.46 is almost exactly the average strength of the opposition left (1.45 ppg). Game to game shows different possibilities.
@ NYC
This game has a loss written all over it. The Pigeons are 2.31 ppg at home (9-3-1). The last home loss was in April. 538 gives them a strong 54% chance of winning.
@ RSL
RSL have gotten their pieces back and are looking really dangerous. I don't like the outlook here. Hopefully the Timbers' pieces are all back to fight this rising beast. As for playoff contention, unless two of the following tank (Portland, Houston, Vancouver, San Jose, Dallas), RSL have no chance to get in the playoffs. They'll try, and may succeed only because of their easy schedule. Opposition ppg is lowest in the league at the moment at 1.11.
ORL
Given Orlando's troubles/form (2 pts in 7 matches in August), they may well be so far behind once they get to Portland that this game is for pride, even though they may not be mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. 538 has Portland likely winning at 60%.
@ SJE
I thought for sure that this would be a difficult one to win, but San Jose is no different from Portland at home (2.00 v 2.00). 538 surprisingly has the win probability at 38% and 37% respectively. This is a playoff game primer.
DCU
All but assured this game is 3 points. Don't bother looking at their 3-0-0 form on three goals. That's unsustainable and they're so deep in the hole playoffs are not going to be possible by the time they play Portland. I expect them to be mathematically eliminated from contention by this week. 538 gives Portland a 60% likelihood of a win, like Orlando.
VAN
If Vancouver draws Seattle. The Cup is OURS! This game will only be for playoff positioning. Vital 3 points! 538 says 53% to Portland, 23% to Vancouver.
Playoff positioning
It sure looks like the Timbers are going to bag 3 wins in their 3 home games. That'll be enough for 50 points and easily get the Timbers above the line. According to SportsClubStats, a straight 3-0-3 will likely land the Timbers most likely in 4th or 5th (39%; 31%). If the Timbers manage a draw or two, 3-1-2 or 3-2-1, then at 51 or 52 points the Timbers will slot in at 4th (39%) or 3rd (39%) respectively.
If they only gain 2 wins in the last six (2-0-4), it's still playoff positioning, with 6th place at 45% and 20% below the red line.
What to aim for?
In the playoffs only? RSL to win, everyone else to lose, win at least two games (or tie all six I guess).
Best (and feasible) playoff position? Win 3 games, especially against San Jose and Vancouver, and earn a draw or two somewhere. Squeak in at 2nd, but likely earn 4th on the two wins.
Conclusion
No more weekday matches, all weekend. Crowded schedule for a few WC opponents like Dallas and Kansas City. Two EC opponents have to come a long distance to Portland. Timbers are in a comfortable position. Not the easiest nor the hardest path to the playoffs. And a fighting chance to host the play-in match.You can check out the Nightmare Night's convention here: www.nightmarenights.net/ I'm really starting to enjoy mixing the art of casting with the art of hand fabrication! It makes for some really amazing works of art!This pendant is made entirely of sterling silver! The comet, moon, wing and horn were hand crafted out of sterling silver sheet and wire; and the rest of Princess Luna was cast in sterling silver. The stone in the comet is a pear shaped Swiss blue topaz.The pendant measures approximately 2 1/2 inches in height, by 2 inches in width. Her accessories and eye are antiqued black, and the rest of the pendant has four different finished: The moons and comet were sand blasted, then dropped into a tumbler for my signature semi-polished finish. Her wing and body are a satin sand blast, while her mane is a matte brushed finish. The comet tail is a coarse brushed finish.Man charged after seven-hour siege in south-west Sydney
Updated
A man has been charged after a siege in Sydney's south-west, which lasted more than seven hours, ended peacefully.
Emergency crews were called to Devlin Street in Ashcroft just before midnight on Friday following reports a man was armed with a gun.
Tactical operations police surrounded the property and negotiators were brought in after reports of a man inside the unit making threats.
A perimeter was set up around the area and residents were told to stay inside their homes.
Negotiators spent most of the night speaking to the 47-year-old, who surrendered shortly after 7:00am.
After searching the property, police seized a number of firearms and other items.
The man was assessed at hospital before being taken to Green Valley police station and charged with two counts of assaulting a police officer.
He was also charged with using a weapon to prevent arrest, possessing unauthorised and prohibited weapons and firearms, possessing a military-style weapon without a permit and possessing ammunition without holding a licence.
The man was refused bail to appear at Parramatta Local Court on Saturday.
Topics: police-sieges, police, ashcroft-2168
First postedRemember the letter-writer last week whose employee had quit and said in her exit interview that the team environment was too cliquish? She ended up adding more details in the comments on the original post, including that some employees had been mocking the employee who quit on SnapChat, and when someone complained to HR, the letter-writer wanted to move the person who complained to another team.
Here’s the update.
I was fired today without severance. When my letter was published, I was already on suspension based on the exit interview investigation, poor management practices and complaints from other areas, none of which I believe are accurate. HR and the management team stated I had mismanaged my team and the ex-employee. I had given assignments meant for her and assigned to her by my director to other members on the team because I wanted to develop them, including my newly promoted senior. As a manager, I knew my team better. Giving special assignments to her, even though it was her role, screwed over my long term team members who would complain to me. I had also downgraded her end-of-year evaluation. I don’t think she deserved the praise she received from the sales staff, my directorand client executives. Her work just wasn’t that good to me. I thought if my team and I froze her out, she would leave. I called it un-managing.
My team found her quietness and her ability to develop sales presentations and connect with each client was very show-off-like. When she asked for help, we didn’t take it seriously because we thought she acted like she knew everything and she was making us look bad by always going above and beyond for no reason. My team and I had worked together for 5-6 years so I knew them, their work and their personalities better than anyone else so I took what they said with more seriousness. I also thought that her years of experience were irrelevant; she didn’t have anything beyond a bachelor’s degree (most of us were smart and dedicated enough to get a masters) and her experience was in a different subset of insurance.
HR and my regional vice president stated she had been hired to fill a role for a growing segment of our business and should have functioned as a team consultant. I used her as an associate so it didn’t make waves with the rest of the team. By losing her, we lost clients and leverage in the marketplace. Our sales territory couldn’t afford to lose any more business under my “mismanagement” and the HR was worried about damage to the brand name. During her employment, my director and I had several meetings on her role as she also dotted line reported to him. I had continued to be insubordinate because ex-employee, in my opinion, didn’t fit in and needed to earn her way to what my director had envisioned for her. If her role had panned out, she would have been higher up than me after two years when I had been there for five.
HR told me the brewery beer runs were against company policy and I should have stopped the SnapChats, especially those who had it on their company phones. I disagree that it was bullying because she wasn’t on Snap so if she didn’t see it, how is this bullying? I also don’t know how/if I should have monitored this with my team. My entire team was fired. The reasons for the firings included alcohol at work, even though we were physically at the brewery, inappropriate social media behavior, and not meeting the code of conduct.
I’m not sure the lesson(s) I’m supposed to learn; I feel like I was the scapegoat for a favored employee’s reason to leave. Being dedicated to your work doesn’t mean you can’t have fun at the same time. My former team and I are wondering if we can take action against ex-employee — her exit interview damaged our reputation, our team, and our careers.
With this letter-writer’s permission, I’m also printing here some of the email exchange that I had with her after receiving this update.
Me: I’m sorry to ask this, but I’m trying to figure out if this is real or not. There |
, instead of competition.
Decision-Making and Organisational Structures
Free agreements underlie the relationships between participating people and projects – not formal “democratic” elections and votes, in which a majority could push through their own agenda at the cost of minorities.
The approach of Sociocracy 3.0 may be helpful here: see Sociocracy 3.0 in Details (and in particular the section on Circles and Decision Marking as well as Organizational Structure).
In this approach, “circles” allow individual projects to coordinate with one another (they could be called “coordination circles”). The circles are staffed according to the four-eyes principle: two delegates from every involved project are sent into a circle – for example, the maintainer and someone chosen by the project team.
Decisions within a circle are made by consent. Consent doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is happy with the decision, but that everyone can live with it. Anyone with strong objections can block a decision by stating and explaining their objection. The circle cannot ignore objections for which a reason has been given; in this way, a decision is only possible if the circle can allay the concerns so that the objection is withdrawn.
All of the coordination tasks relevant to the commons association, such as drawing up the overall budget and guideline values as well as taking on new projects, are carried out by corresponding circles.
Coordination circles also serve as mediators for related projects within a commons association, those handling a particular type of provision. For instance, within a bigger commons association, you could have several CSA projects reaching mutual agreements with each other in a coordination circle.
Another responsibility of the circles is to create transparency towards the individual projects and the members. They are in charge of publishing the decisions that are made within the projects and in the association, as well as the costs incurred, planning processes etc.
The internal structure of an individual project can also be organised in the form of circles.
Safeguarding Resources against Privatisation
Resource management is guided by the principle: commons and possession instead of property. The things that aren’t commons – i.e. not collectively used and cared for – can become the possessions of individuals, meaning that they can use and, where applicable, consume them. But alienable property (that which can be sold or rented out) plays no role.
Consumer goods (such as food, electricity) are distributed among and consumed by the members, according to their needs and the agreements that have been made.
Goods that are used on a long-term basis (such as houses/living space) can be used by members as long as they need them (unless something else has been arranged), after which they return to the association. As a general rule the users are expected to contribute to the necessary expenses for the duration of use. Just as with housing co-ops of the Mietshäuser Syndikat, the contributions (“rent”) must be sufficient in total in order to produce the good in question (or to acquire it) and to maintain it in the long term, but they don’t have to be equal for all users. Instead, they are shared out by agreement, such as in the offer rounds.
Such long-lasting goods as well as means of production should be protected for the long term as commons. In order to prevent them from being privatised later on (for example, if the project leaves the association), a security measure is available that is modelled on the practice of the Mietshäuser Syndikat. Specifically, the commons resources are formally co-owned by the individual project that produces or uses it, and by the association. They can only be sold with the agreement of both owners, and the association makes it clear in its statutes that it will only give this consent if all of its individual members agree to it. That should make the threat of privatisation de facto impossible, since every person belonging to the association has an inviolable right of veto.
In this way, formal property is “neutralised”. The respective projects have full usage rights, but don’t have the right to bypass the association and sell the goods they use, or to exclude others from using goods that they personally don’t need (anymore).
Any knowledge and information produced (software, building plans etc.) are released as Free Software/Free Knowledge. If in doubt, licences that have a copyleft clause (GPL, AGPL or CC-BY-SA) are preferred, in order to make sure that any derivatives also remain free.
Regionalism and Super-Regional Cooperation
A commons association covers a particular region, typically a city (and its surrounding areas perhaps), a group of neighbouring towns or cities, or a rural region. For example, there could be an association for Berlin-Potsdam, for the Ruhr area, for Wendland, for Vienna etc.
Different commons associations can coordinate with each other, and there can be coordination circles for this purpose as well. This coordination should take place not just at the level of entire associations, but also on the level of each individual industry. For example, the CSAs could coordinate with each other super-regionally and organise common supply chains, such as the production of tools.
So that they don’t eventually become too big and unwieldy, commons associations can each set a maximum size that they don’t wish to exceed – for example, 300,000 people. If the membership figures exceed this limit, then the association breaks up into two or three smaller associations by mutual agreement, with each one of them taking on a particular part of the region formerly covered by the old association. The newly created associations are formally independent of each other, but can nevertheless still work together in some ways, just as there is super-regional cooperation between different associations anyway.
Where the Low Threshold Comes From
The stated aim of our approach is to keep the barriers to entry small, to make everything as attractive as possible, including for people who aren’t enthusiastic about current approaches like communes and CSAs. There are several factors that contribute to this low barrier to entry that we’ve been striving for:
People decide for themselves how much or how little they want to participate in the collective economy – everything is possible, from only using one particular offering (such as CSA food) through to living in a housing co-operative and being provided for almost entirely by association projects.
Similarly you decide for yourself how intensively and in what way you get involved – whether you just make a financial contribution (and how much you want to give), whether you do some work in the projects as an occasional volunteer, or whether you want to take on an intensive role in one of the projects (which at least in the initial stages will often be a paid role).
You can choose for yourself the areas that you want to engage in, depending on your own interests and abilities and what there is available to do. Those areas don’t have to have anything to do with your own consumption – I can for example consume CSA food and take care of children (without necessarily having children myself).
You can get involved at any time and then leave again with no disadvantage. (Whereas in some communes you have to put in your entire wealth – and if you leave, then you’ve lost it.)
This last point doesn’t stop individual members from being able to make low-interest or interest-free credit available to projects or to the association, which can enable longer-term planning security. In this case a fixed term can be arranged (meaning you won’t get your credit back earlier) or alternatively the notice periods can be set in such a way that individuals or small numbers of people dropping out can’t put the project in danger, in order to counteract the potential for blackmail in decision-making. (Otherwise lenders could make a threat: “If you don’t do what I want, then I’ll leave and take my money out.”)
Short Summary of the Concept’s Essential Features
The aim is a commons association with a collective economy that is based on needs and contributions. The participants receive primarily non-monetary benefits: goods of all kinds that they need or want.
Money circulates to the extent necessary, but nobody should be excluded for lack of sufficient financial resources. There can also be fairly paid jobs, but only as long as they are necessary for carrying out the tasks required. The goal is to phase them out completely over time.
There is no exchange – instead, people contribute to the common pool and costs as well as benefits are shared according to collective agreements (“From exchange to contributions”). To this end, the participating projects draw up their own budgets, which are then combined together in an association-wide budget (including both the monetary and labour needs).
Who contributes what, and how much, are decided in offer rounds that extend across projects. The goal is a needs-based economy in the old Greek sense of “oikonomia”: the provision of necessary and useful goods (cf. Aristoteles macht aus der Ökonomie eine Wissenschaft [DE]).
Another goal is to organise a kind of reciprocal trust that enables individuals to participate in collective provision, without compulsion or competition and without the worry of being excluded.
Points to Discuss Further
This proposal cannot – and does not intend to – “prescribe” all of the details of how a commons association should be organised: a lot of things will only become clear in practice, when such associations start to spread. The following are some points that still require some discussion or which could perhaps be solved differently to the solutions suggested here.
One point which is still not completely clarified is how the offer rounds are carried out within an association, which after all could potentially involve thousands or even hundreds of thousands of members. Obviously, getting everyone together in one room will quickly prove impossible. One idea for a solution developed by the SolE project is to use nested offer rounds: for example, an association with 10,000 members could have 100 separate offer groups (“small groups”), each with 100 members. Each small group is expected to raise the sum of the guideline contributions for its members as a whole, but exactly how those contributions are distributed among the individual people is arranged at a face-to-face meeting of the small group’s membership. The contribution expected from each small group would, however, be fixed and non-negotiable.
A variant of this concept is to understand the contribution required of the small groups as a guideline as well, and to allow each small group to deviate from it upwards or downwards. As per the Sociocracy principle, each small group then sends two representatives into a circle to establish whether the small groups’ contributions are sufficient in total, and to renegotiate them where necessary. Here the concept of self-organised solidarity is used more consistently, albeit with the disadvantage that small groups might have to be called back several times if their contributions have turned out to be too low in total.
An alternative may be to carry out the offer round for the entire association over the Internet instead of in personal meetings. The individual members would then make an “offer” via the software. As soon as everyone has made an offer, they learn whether the total amount is too little, enough, or too much, and can then modify their offer upwards or downwards – and this continues until there is enough. Just as with the other processes, the individual contributions (offers) can remain confidential. People only need to know that the overall total is enough, but not how much other people are contributing.
A relatively innovative element in our concept is the idea of income-dependent guideline values. It is still an open question as to whether this idea conflicts with the low barrier to entry that we are striving for, since everyone would need to disclose their income. It doesn’t necessarily have to be public, but it would have to be disclosed to a trustworthy group of people in the association who calculate the individual guidelines from this data and then delete it. It remains to be seen whether this would still deter people. It’s conceivable that the income won’t be asked for exactly but rather in five or ten tiers.
Or the association could dispense entirely with asking people their income and use income-independent guidelines instead. The contributors could then adapt the suggestion at their own discretion: people who have more, give more; people who have less, give less. Admittedly the differences between individual contributions emerging from this method would probably be much smaller than if the real income differences were used as the basis of the guidelines.
In order to achieve a fairer approximation of the paid contributions to the real income differences, the association could, while still not asking people for their income levels directly, supply some advice for estimating their contribution: “The average income in our region is XY. If your income is double/half of this, could you perhaps contribute double/half as much?”
A further open point is whether other duties can be expected of people alongside participation in the offer rounds. Above this was rejected: “unpaid engagement is welcome …, but it’s entirely voluntary rather than mandatory ”. There are, however, CSAs that oblige their members to make a certain amount of labour contributions. How does that fit in – do such projects absolutely need to change their practice in order to become part of an association?
The idea of labour assignments in individual projects is problematic because it doesn’t “scale” very well (amongst other reasons). If I benefit from the products of a dozen projects, I cannot make separate labour contributions to every one of these projects without hopelessly overburdening myself and probably losing interest in the whole thing. Clearly such compulsory assignments have to remain the exception and not the rule. In principle it would nevertheless be possible for the association to agree that its members have to actively participate in one or two of the member projects instead of just contributing financially. But it would still be up to individuals to decide exactly which projects and activities they would engage in.
Such rules are conceivable, but ultimately we have to wonder whether an encouragement to participate (“we would be pleased if…”) wouldn’t actually be more pleasant and perhaps also more motivating than a mandatory regulation (“as members you must…”). It’s also possible that any necessary tasks that aren’t undertaken by paid workers could also be divided up via offer rounds: nobody is personally obliged to take on particular tasks, but collectively all of the tasks have to have somebody who will carry them out.
With some communes, the whole wealth of the participants is collectivised (that is, transferred to the commune), at least gradually. With some recent communes the rule is that ten percent of your personal assets has to be collectivised/redistributed each year. Whoever has been there for more than ten years and then leaves the commune, takes away only the average of all the wealth that was paid in (in the simplest case). Alternatively there can be fairer solutions based more on need (exit contracts), but this takes a lot more discussion to organise.
For a commons association, this kind of collectivisation would probably not be practical. This is because most participants in the initial stages are using the association as just one source of support – they get some of their goods from the pool, and they continue to buy the rest of them from the market. It is conceivable, however, that some housing co-ops that belong to the association could carry out this sort of wealth collectivisation, and then also organise a communal fund for anything that doesn’t come from the association.
We have set up a mailing list for the discussion of commons associations and for coordination of steps towards their practical realisation.
Related Concepts
The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is a Catalan cooperative that aims for a comprehensive provision of services for its members.
Time banks and LETS schemes are a simple approach to the organisation of a communal solidarity-based economy; however, they are based more on individual calculations than on collective cooperation and solidarity. We do not advocate their practice of individual “billing” (where the contributions I make are balanced against what I consume: without sufficient contributions of my own, I can’t consume/use anything). Still, the similarities and differences should be borne in mind.
In the Keimform blog last year, Martin Siefkes suggested the concept of “Peer Networks” (see Eine Idee für den Übergang and 10 Prinzipien des Übergangs [DE]), which anticipate some of the core ideas of the commons association idea presented here, though there are many differences in the details.
Images: Spring Fed Images, Lance Asper, Annie Spratt; Thomas Schaefer, Ján Jakub Naništa, Elaine Casap, Clem Onojeghuo and Cooperativa Integral CatalanaWhite House aide Sebastian Gorka sent a warning to West Wing staff on Saturday about leaking information: Don't mess with President Trump's new chief of staff.
"This is John F. Kelly. This is a man you do not toy with," Gorka said during an appearance on "Fox and Friends."
The national security aide, who has been a visible surrogate for Trump on cable news recently, said the mood in the West Wing has changed for some since the retired four-star Marine general and Homeland Security chief took the helm Monday.
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"For those like myself that have nothing to hide, we're doing business as usual," Gorka said when asked if aides felt Kelly had clamped down on White House operations.
"For those who may have not been abiding by federal law when it comes to sensitive and classified information, I think they've got the message and I think you will see things change very rapidly," he added.
Gorka said Kelly has warned executive staff that "loose lips sink ships and if you leak there will be consequences."
Trump has long decried leaks of sensitive information to media, such as specifics of his Oval Office conversations with world leaders earlier this year, as well as details surrounding the palace intrigue around the White House.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsFormer Trump refugee director did not notify superiors about family separation warnings Court rejects challenge to Mueller's appointment Trump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report MORE announced a government-wide crackdown on leakers on Friday, including a review of Justice Department policies on subpoenas for media outlets that publish such sensitive information.
While plans to announce the crackdown had already been in the works, the announcement came a day after full transcripts of Trump's calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia were leaked to The Washington Post.
Gorka on Saturday defended Sessions as a "serious man" focused on cracking down on intelligence leaks, noting his meeting with the attorney general the previous day.
"He will get to the bottom of the leaks," Gorka said.
The attorney general has faced criticism from the president in recent weeks over his recusal in the probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, raising questions about his future in the administration.In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a nice dotted background with a metallic look in a few easy steps that imitates a metal plate with holes in it.
We’ll be using checker board pattern, newspaper filter, shadow filter and a few cuts to achieve our goal.
1. Start with a black background 600x600px design as in the next image. It is a good ideea to give a name to your image and save it. I named mine dotted_bg_tutorial.xcf and renamed the start layer background.
2. Add a new transparent layer and name it dots. Change the foreground color to a dark grey (#3a3a3a), then go to menu -> Filters -> Render -> Patterns -> Checkerboard and set size to 10px.
After clicking ok we’ll have the following image:
3. Now go to menu -> Filters -> Distort -> Newsprint and set the parameters as follows (cell size to 10px – the same as the checkerboard cell size, angle to 0, lock_channels on and antialias oversample to 5):
Click ok and we’ll get something like this:
4. Now on the Toolbox window click Select by Color tool (Shift + O) and click inside one of the dots. This will select all the dots from the image. Delete the selection.
The same effect can be achieved using Color to Alpha from the Colors menu.
Now we have allot of transparent dots as in the next picture (hide the background layer to see the result):
5. Lock the alpha channel of the dots layer and select the linear gradient tool (black to white) from the Toolbox.
Apply the gradient fill to the dots layer from bottom to top, and unhide the background layer.
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We are almost ready.6. Now go to menu -> Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow and enter the parameters as follows:Click ok and we’re done.In one of the many licentious anecdotes from Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic, the Gilded Age artist throws a party in his Gramercy Park “House of Fantasy” so raucous that his neighbors across the street — who happen to be painter George Bellows and his family — call the cops. When an officer arrives, he is lured into in with libations, and Robert Winthrop Chanler is soon seen sporting the merry policeman’s hat.
An eccentric who lived the bohemian artist lifestyle to the hilt, as well as an artist whose work was prized by the elite and celebrated in the influential 1913 Armory Show, Chanler was an icon of his time. Now his name is almost forgotten. Recent restoration of his huge plaster murals has encouraged a new appreciation for his otherworldly art, where exotic animals sketched from his own Manhattan menagerie were painted in metallic hues, often joined by cosmic shooting stars and planets. His popular double-sided screens also portrayed his own invented myths that evoked a darker side of nature.
Discovering the Fantastic, recently released by the Monacelli Press, has essays based on presentations from the 2014 Chanler symposium organized by the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, Florida. The museum is housed in the former estate of Chicago businessman James Deering, and still has Chanler’s incredible swimming pool ceiling, where shells are embedded in a plaster mural of sea creatures, alligators, and swirling waves.
However, plaster and water don’t mix well for preservation. After further damage from 2005’s Hurricane Wilma, the Florida museum undertook an extensive restoration of the pool mural. The action was followed by other Chanler projects. In 2010, Coe Hall Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park on Long Island commissioned artist Polly Wood-Holland to recreate Chanler’s lost 1921 mural of tropical birds and foliage. Then the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in Manhattan performed restoration on their own deteriorating Chanler ceiling and fireplace at the former studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Earlier this year, that space opened for its first regular public tours (as covered on Hyperallergic). Each of these initiatives has reminded the art community and wider world of Chanler’s strange work.
Discovering the Fantastic is the first thorough book on Chanler’s career since his death in 1930. The attention from these restoration campaigns, as well as the centennial of the Armory Show in 2013, helped spark the reemergence of Chanler’s art in the public eye. During his life, he was a very public figure, born into the Astor family, with ancestors donning old New York names like Winthrop and Stuyvesant. He had a couple of disastrous marriages, covered extensively by the press, and posing for a portrait in his studio became the stuff of legend.
Betsy Fahlman, professor of art history at Arizona State University, cites in her book essay the portrait sitting of photographer Carl Van Vechten in April of 1928, a scene of absurdist debauchery that would surely make Salvador Dalí jealous.
After a lunch featuring “bowls of succulent rice and curry and huge pitchers of Bronx cocktails,” Van Vechten steps up on a stage. Blues music wails from a record player, Yorkshire terriers wrestle alongside, while in another corner “a poet composes verse on the top rung of a meaningless ladder; in the center of the floor a flamboyant female is making Shanghai gestures.” And there is the artist himself, whom Van Vechten vividly describes:
All the time Bob is painting, painting like hell!! He slings paint against the canvas, hurls it in sadistically until you wonder why it doesn’t go clean through, while he carries a running commentary of his method: “Work like hell. Never know anything. More I learn, more I forget. No good painter ever knew anything. Bad painters know. Try this blue for shadow on the nose: may come out right. Can’t be sure. Rotten! Try red. Try green. Hell!”
These Samuel Beckett-worthy absurdist scenes make Discovering the Fantastic a surprisingly enjoyable read for a hefty art tome, although the omnivorous tastes of Chanler’s work are just as extraordinary. From the pool grotto, with its rippling plaster dimensions, to the flame-consumed fireplace at the Whitney Studio, Chanler’s creations appear as whimsically cinematic as a Georges Méliès silent film, and as over-the-top opulent as a rococo chapel.
His colossal paintings, like “Hudson-Fulton Fête” — a 25-by-15 foot green and silver scene with old and new ships sailing against the Manhattan skyline, while sea gods, octopi, and dolphins ride the waves — have a density of playful illustration that shares some kinship with Duke Riley’s more recent sprawling illustrations.
A painting of a leopard leaping onto a deer from the Armory Show has the animals moving with the fluid forms of Matisse figures, but the setting, with its detailed foliage, seems right out of the Middle Ages tapestries Chanler studied at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Klimt-like gold gave his depictions of peacocks a contemporary feel, while the subject was directly influenced by the proud, wrathful birds in James McNeill Whistler’s 19th-century “Peacock Room.”
And then there are his Japanese lacquer-inspired screens, which often have a hint of malevolence in their seemingly serene subjects. For example, a 1914 screen, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has a prickle of porcupines on one side, and a “Nightmare” on the other, where bats, skeletons, a clown, crocodiles, an octopus, and floating souls are consumed in crawling layers of inky paint.
Scholar Laurette E. McCarthy points out in her essay that Chanler’s screens made up a huge portion of the US art in the 1913 Armory Show, with between 24 and 25 on view, and all positioned near the entrance. She notes this was partly due to his connection with the elite who funded the show and lent works, yet it also pointed to what was considered essential about early 20th-century art. “For many this is what made art modern; modern art was more of a mindset, located not necessarily in the art created but in the creativity and originality of the artists themselves,” McCarthy writes.
Chanler was nothing if not original, as a somewhat manic 1900 photograph of the artist conveys. He has the end of a paintbrush in his mouth, a jaunty beret on his head, a sword in each hand, and a crown, urn, and other curios looming in the background. Even when he painted a trope like an American Indian bison chase — his “Modern Buffalo Hunt (Hunting Buffalo with Automobiles)” — it featured men riding in cars and on tractors as they roared after the animals. His collection of society portraits, meanwhile, included occultist Aleister Crowley alongside the usual salon figures.
After his death following a heart attack on October 24, 1930, at the age of 59, it must have seemed like Chanler’s name would live on forever, or at least through the 20th century. Gina Wouters, curator at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, writes that numerous factors caused this “fall into oblivion,” from “basic practicality to general cultural shifts”:
Bard College chose not to advance with an exhibition in the 1970s because of the difficulty of bringing Chanler’s work to the public eye. His murals and installations and his screens are nearly all in private estates and collections, the very audience for which they were intended. His work was not created for the masses, but rather for a refined stratum of society.
Wouters adds that the change in art tastes between the World Wars further made his bombastic art unfashionable. Then there was the fact he self-identified as a decorative artist, leaving his boundary-blurring art marooned far from a more central place in art history.
Chanler was not the only Gilded Age flame to extinguish in the later decades of the 20th century. Popular studio model Audrey Munson, for instance, who posed for nearly every one of the era’s prominent artists, nearly disappeared, spending the last decades of her life in a mental institution. Discovering the Fantastic, along with the recent preservation of Chanler’s work, may not mean a return to the heights of popularity he enjoyed in his lifetime, but it does present a powerful argument for remembering. If you visit his House of Fantasy today at 147–149 East 19th Street, there likely won’t be any Jazz Age parties, and the tropical fish, ravens, gila monsters, monkeys, sloths, rattlesnakes, and other animals known to populate his menagerie have long since departed. Yet above the door is a relief of colorful giraffes, a gift from his artist friend Charles Cary Rumsey. Traces of Chanler remain, and for each are stories of extravagance, and some of the most creative art of the early 20th century.
Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic is out now from the Monacelli Press.Juno’s Upcoming Run over the Great Red Spot
I love the image of Jupiter below because of the detail — a mosaic of 27 images taken on closest approach by Cassini in 2000, it shows visible features down to 60 kilometers across. Nine images covering the entire planet were acquired in red, green and blue to provide color much like what our eyes would see if we were there. The Great Red Spot, nestled among the clouds of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and water, is obvious. But we’ll soon learn much more, for the Juno spacecraft is scheduled to fly directly over the Great Red Spot on July 10.
Image: This true color mosaic of Jupiter was constructed from images taken by the narrow angle camera onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on December 29, 2000, during its closest approach to the giant planet at a distance of approximately 10 million kilometers. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
Launched on August 5, 2011, Juno completed its first year in Jupiter orbit on July 4, a reminder of how well shielded its instruments are in this tough environment. Rick Nybakken is project manager for Juno from JPL:
“The success of science collection at Jupiter is a testament to the dedication, creativity and technical abilities of the NASA-Juno team. Each new orbit brings us closer to the heart of Jupiter’s radiation belt, but so far the spacecraft has weathered the storm of electrons surrounding Jupiter better than we could have ever imagined.”
Indeed. Data collection from the Great Red Spot, a centuries-old, 16,000-kilometer wide storm, will be part of the spacecraft’s sixth science flyby, with perijove (the closest point in the orbit to Jupiter’s center) occurring on July 10 at 0955 EDT (1355 UTC). At this point, Juno will be about 3500 kilometers above the cloud tops. Less than 12 minutes later, the spacecraft will have moved directly above the huge storm, passing about 9000 kilometers above the Great Red Spot’s clouds, with all eight instruments as well as the JunoCam imager active.
Earth-based telescopes have provided continuing observations of Jupiter in coordination with Juno, and on May 18, 2017, both the Gemini North and Subaru telescopes (both on Mauna Kea) simultaneously studied the planet in high resolution at different wavelengths, helping to provide data on atmospheric dynamics at various depths at the Great Red Spot and other regions of Jupiter. The image below was taken at infrared wavelengths, where the Great Red Spot appears brightest and high-altitude clouds and hazes become strikingly evident.
Image: This composite, false-color infrared image of Jupiter reveals haze particles over a range of altitudes, as seen in reflected sunlight. It was taken using the Gemini North Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Imager (NIRI) on May 18, 2017, in collaboration with the investigation of Jupiter by NASA’s Juno mission. Juno completed its sixth close approach to Jupiter a few hours after this observation. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA/NASA/JPL-Caltech.
You can see a prominent wave pattern north of the equator, with two bright ovals that are anticyclones that appeared in January of this year. Both are evidently an indication of an upsurge in storm activity that has been observed in these latitudes in 2017. Another bright anticyclonic oval can be seen further north. And note the hook-like shape on the left side of the Great Red Spot, an indication of intense winds stretching out atmospheric features. More traces of this wave-like flow pattern can be seen sweeping off its eastern (right) side.
“Observations with Earth’s most powerful telescopes enhance the spacecraft’s planned observations by providing three types of additional context,” said Juno science team member Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “We get spatial context from seeing the whole planet. We extend and fill in our temporal context from seeing features over a span of time. And we supplement with wavelengths not available from Juno. The combination of Earth-based and spacecraft observations is a powerful one-two punch in exploring Jupiter.”
Image: This false-color image of Jupiter was taken on May 18, 2017, with a mid-infrared filter centered at a wavelength of 8.8 microns, at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, in collaboration with observations of Jupiter by NASA’s Juno mission. The selected wavelength is sensitive to Jupiter’s tropospheric temperatures and the thickness of a cloud near the condensation level of ammonia gas. Credit: NAOJ/NASA/JPL-Caltech.The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza serves up a very fine piece of reporting today that sheds new light on how the GOP-controlled House has only grown more dysfunctional even as the GOP has expanded its majority.
The conclusion that follows inescapably from Lizza’s reporting is a familiar one. It is that all the dysfunction has been caused less by a roughly equivalent failure by both major parties to make the incremental concessions needed to reach common ground, and more by a searing intra-GOP argument over whether the Republican Party should make such concessions to reach the common ground that has always been sitting right there in plain sight.
The piece recounts how Republicans, egged on by the House GOP’s conservative wing, badly miscalculated that they could force Obama and Dems to make spectacular concessions by holding firm after the government shut down in 2013. That’s familiar ground.
But I wanted to flag a particular anecdote from the story that reveals the underlying dynamic rendering the GOP intransigent with an uncommon level of clarity. Lizza chats with GOP Rep. Raul Labrador, a very influential House conservative, who defends the soundness of the shutdown strategy and blames others for failing to execute it properly:
Unlike many Republicans, Labrador did not see the shutdown as a permanent stain on the Party. He grabbed one of two large poster-board polling charts leaning against his desk; it was titled “Before /After 2013 Shutdown” and showed the Republican Party’s approval ratings quickly recovering. “Within a couple of months, people forgot what happened,” he said. “So our favorables went back up, and our unfavorables went back down.”… Labrador then pointed to another chart, which showed that the G.O.P.’s favorable ratings this year dropped from forty-one per cent, in January, to thirty-two per cent, in July. “This is what happens when we do nothing,” he said. “This is the new G.O.P. majority in 2015, when we stand for nothing.” The problem, in his view, was that the Party was “governing,” he said, adding air quotes to the word. “If people just want to ‘govern,’ which means bringing more government, they’re always going to choose the Democrat.”
That is a remarkable theory of the case: Republicans lose ground when they govern along with Democrats, because achieving bipartisan governing compromise inherently represents capitulation to Dems, in the sense that when government functions, it affirms the Dem vision.
Now, in one way, there’s something to this. As Thomas Schaller explains, having government not do anything is at times an openly held Republican objective, and in this sense, a system in which change is very hard to achieve, such as ours, gives Republicans a built in structural advantage. Boehner himself has said that the way to judge Republicans is not by “how many new laws we create,” but by “how many laws that we repeal.” Thus, for Republicans, if a Democrat is in the White House, the system is working if it thwarts that Democrat’s agenda.
But Labrador here takes this a step further. Boehner would like to repeal the Obama agenda, but that doesn’t mean he never wants Republicans to participate in governing. Thus, after finding that protracted crises didn’t achieve that repeal objective, Boehner, on his way out, presided over a big deal designed to vastly minimize the possibility that short-term crises (over the debt limit and/or government funding levels) would damage the country (and of course the GOP, too). New Speaker Paul Ryan seems similarly committed to avoiding such crises.
But Labrador rejects this approach for two reasons. First, because it is an article of faith that shutdowns won’t hurt the GOP: the party shut down the government in 2013, and that was followed by the Great and Glorious 2014 victory! Of course, this proves nothing about what would happen if there were a shutdown now, since 2014 unfolded amid a shriveled midterm electorate, and next year’s elections will take place amid a presidential year one. And second, because compromising in certain areas, rather than employing maximal intransigence, in hopes that adhering to it in a determined enough fashion will eventually force Dem capitulation, itself constitutes a failure to sufficiently “stand” for something.
This belief, that all that’s needed to force Dem capitulation is sufficient resolve, is deeply flawed. It’s premised on a failure to understand that for Democrats, the incentives — having favored Republicans in 2011 — are now all aligned against any Dem capitulation in such a crisis, no matter how protracted and destructive it might prove. But Labrador, speaking to Lizza, offered an answer to this, too:
The innovation that Labrador and his colleagues brought to the Republican conference was a willingness to use tactics that Boehner and his allies saw as beyond the pale. “We don’t want a shutdown, we don’t want a default on the debt, but when the other side knows that you’re unwilling to do it you will always lose,” Labrador said. In his view |
“The church is full to the brim of people like me who have made bad decisions and have had a change of heart. I would hope that those running DCM would have the strength of leadership to recognise they have made a mistake and reconsider their decision.”
Richard Dawkins says UK cinemas should screen the Lord's Prayer Read more
However, one of the UK’s leading advertising figures backed the ban. John Hegarty, who co-founded the top agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, said it was right to have a ban on political and religious advertising in cinemas.
“People pay money to go to the cinema, very diverse audiences, and they really don’t want religion dictating to them,” he said. The subject matter was completely different from brands, such as trainers or soft drinks. “Religion deals with profound philosophical belief.”
If an advertisement on behalf of the church was accepted, he said, it would be difficult to draw the line at adverts for Scientology or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Banning the Lord’s Prayer from cinemas is nonsense on stilts | Giles Fraser Read more
“The C of E is perfectly entitled to make its views known, but it should do so from the pulpit. But of course they can’t get many people to go to church so they want to take their message to the cinemas,” Hegarty said. However, he added, “in the end they’ve got even more publicity through this ban”.
However, the cultural commentator Peter York said an advert from the C of E should be permitted as an exception. “You can’t have an established church and then say all religions are the same. As a nation we’ve collectively endorsed the C of E, even if it is by default.”
The advert, made by justpray.uk, shows a sequence of people in different settings saying the Lord’s Prayer. It has been launched on YouTube and is hosted on the C of E’s website.Boy Lifts Book; Librarian Changes Boy's Life
Enlarge this image toggle caption StoryCorps StoryCorps
Olly Neal grew up in Arkansas during the 1950s. He didn't care much for high school. One day during his senior year, he cut class — and wandered into the school library.
As he told his daughter, Karama, recently, he stumbled onto a book written by African-American author Frank Yerby. And the discovery changed the life of a teenage boy who was, in Neal's memory, "a rather troubled high school senior."
The book was The Treasure of Pleasant Valley — and it had an alluring cover, especially for a teenage boy.
Neal remembers it being "risque — a drawing of a woman who appeared to be wearing something that was basically see-through. But the symbolism was really great for me at that age of 16."
There was just one problem: If Neal took the book to the checkout counter, he was sure that the girls who worked on the counter would tell his friends.
More Details Olly Neal attended the Robert Russa Moton Training School in Marianna, Ark.
This story takes place before integration. All of the students and teachers were African-American.
"Then my reputation would be down, because I was reading books," Neal said. "And I wanted them to know that all I could do was fight and cuss."
Finally, Neal decided that he ought to steal the book, in order to preserve his reputation. So he did.
A week or two later, Neal had finished the book — so he brought it back to the library, careful to replace it in the same spot he had found it.
"And when I put it back, there was another book by Frank Yerby," Neal said.
"So I thought, 'Maybe I'll read that, too.' So I took it under my jacket," Neal said.
"Later, I brought it back, and there was — by God, there was another book by Frank Yerby. So I took it."
He read four of Yerby's books that semester — checking out none of them.
But Neal's sneaky behavior turned out not to have been so sneaky after all.
Attending his 13-year high school reunion, Neal ran into the school's librarian, Mildred Grady. She had seen him trying to steal The Treasure of Pleasant Valley years ago.
Bonus Audio: Cataloging Comics Enlarge this image toggle caption StoryCorps StoryCorps Librarian Sharon Holley tells her husband, Kenneth, about an early hint at her eventual career: 'I had a real extensive comic book collection.'
"She told me that she saw me take that book when I first took it," Neal said.
"She said, 'My first thought was to go over there and tell him, boy, you don't have to steal a book, you can check them out — they're free.'
"Then she realized what my situation was — that I could not let anybody know I was reading."
Grady told Neal she decided that if he was showing an interest in books, "she and Mrs. Saunders would drive to Memphis and find another one for me to read — and they would put it in the exact same place where the one I'd taken was."
So, every time Neal decided to take a book home, the pair would set off to the city to find another book for him.
"You've got to understand that this was not an easy matter then — because this is 1957 and '58," Neal said. "And black authors were not especially available, No. 1. And No. 2, Frank Yerby was not such a widely known author. And No. 3, they had to drive all the way to Memphis to find it."
But the women's efforts paid off: Neal went on to attend law school and later became a judge, retiring as an appellate judge of the Arkansas Court of Appeals.
When Grady died, her son asked Neal to tell everyone gathered for her funeral the story of how the librarian nurtured his reading habit as a teenager.
"I credit Mrs. Grady for getting me in the habit of enjoying reading, so that I was able to go to law school and survive," Neal said.
Produced for Morning Edition by Vanara Taing. The senior producer for StoryCorps is Michael Garofalo.Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (2003) is a non-fiction, biographical work by American writer Tracy Kidder. The book traces the life of physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer with particular focus on his work fighting tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru and Russia.
Summary [ edit ]
The book is written from the view of author Tracy Kidder. It is set mainly in Haiti and Boston, Massachusetts. Kidder first met his subject, Dr. Paul Farmer, in Haiti in 1994.[1]
Farmer was born in Massachusetts and grew up as one of six children in a poor household in Florida. He studied at Duke and Harvard, where he earned his M.D and Ph.D.[1] The rest of the book details Farmer's life and accomplishments, including his work with the health and social justice organization Partners in Health, especially in Haiti, Peru, and Russia.[1]
Kidder describes Paul Farmer as follows:
"And I was drawn to the man himself. He worked extraordinary hours. In fact, I don’t think he sleeps more than an hour or two most nights. Here was a person who seemed to be practicing more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy. A challenging person, the kind of person whose example can irritate you by making you feel you’ve never done anything as important, and yet, in his presence, those kinds of feelings tended to vanish. In the past, when I’d imagined a person with credentials like his, I’d imagined someone dour and self-righteous, but he was very friendly and irreverent, and quite funny. He seemed like someone I’d like to know, and I thought that if I did my job well, a reader would feel that way, too."[1]
The book is primarily a biographical work broken into five parts.
PART I: Doktè Paul
Introduces Farmer's work at the Brigham in Boston, Massachusetts and at Zanmi Lasante founded by PIH in Cange, Haiti.
PART II: The Tin Roofs of Cange
Describes Farmer's family background and gives accounts of Farmer from sources close to him. Farmer's dedication to PIH led to the breaking off of his engagement to Ophelia Dahl, the daughter of noted author Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal. The two have remained close confidantes, and Dahl has continued to work for the PIH organization.
PART III: Médicos Aventureros
In 1995 MDR-TB claimed the life of a close friend known as Father Jack, in Lima, Peru. PIH co-founder, Dr. Jim Kim convinces Farmer to extend PIH into Peru, where they fight against the rigid orders of the DOTS program. This was regulated by the World Health Organization, and largely supported financially by an American benefactor, Tom White.
PART IV: A Light Month for Travel
Follows Farmer from Haiti to Cuba, Paris, Russia, and other locations in his quest to treat infectious disease.
PART V: O for the P In 2000, PIH learns it has been awarded a $45 million grant, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to combat MDR-TB in Lima, Peru, along with other organizations. "O for the P" refers to an expression within PIH that is a shortened form of saying “a preferential option for the poor”.[2]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Edition Adapted for Young People [ edit ]Rock legend Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame has asked many interesting questions (in song). This one (posted on his website) might be one you don’t expect: “Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?”
Will educators, parents, and children view free and open source as a way to create a kinder, sharing, and cooperative relationships with one another in the United States and around the world?
Yes, some are. In fact, there are numerous free and open source products available today. And many of these reach a global audience.
ePals is a free social learning network that makes it easy to connect people locally, nationally, or globally. Its mission is to support lifelong learning. It is aimed at primary and secondary schools, though homeschoolers or unschoolers are welcome. With people from over 200 countries participating, the global scale of ePals is unprecedented. Students, teachers, and families are able to connect with others down the road or across the globe through blogs, forums, email, wikis, projects, or calendars. Classrooms of children or groups of homeschoolers in the US and China are able to share and work on projects together.
Similar to ePals but on a much smaller scale, Dweeber is a free social networking site for teen homework, aimed at students aged 13 to 17. With Dweeber, teens can work together on homework, solve problems, talk about issues, or share ideas to improve projects. They can work with peers in a classroom or with others from around the US (and sometimes around the world).
Elgg and Mahara are open source social networking sites that are increasingly used in education. The University of Brighton runs an Elgg social networking website for both coursework and to act as a digital social community for students.
Mahara is a combination of an open source e-portfolio and social networking system. It's an easy and organized way of creating, saving, and sharing knowledge. Users can also establish social networks and online communities through discussion forums, blogging tools, and groups. Users can upload videos, pictures, word documents, and journals and freely share them with people of their choice.
Social networking sites, such as ePals, Dweeber, Elgg, and Mahara, are changing the ways young people engage with information, how they interact with the world, and help them understand one another better. These social networking sites are allowing students to communicate with others across the country or globe in ways we never thought possible a generation or two ago. Though critics of social networking point to the erosion of digital civility, declining reading habits, reduced attention spans, and the negative effects of peer pressure on teens in particular, they do so by neglecting these free, open source social networking sites being used in educational and informative ways.
ePals, Dweeber, Elgg, and Mahara are helping children learn how to use social networking in a safe, ethical, legal, responsible, educational, and engaging way. These social networking sites help broaden childrens’ exposure to a diverse range of people and ideas--the same kind of diversity they will be facing in the technologically savvy, social-media-embracing workforce they have to join one day.
Familiarity with these social networking sites, and comfort with collaboration and communication on a large scale can be a source of empowerment for students. And that should provide an answer to Roger Waters' question.Wagging the Moondoggie, Part I
October 1, 2009
by David McGowan
“It is commonly believed that man will fly directly from the earth to the moon, but to do this, we would require a vehicle of such gigantic proportions that it would prove an economic impossibility. It would have to develop sufficient speed to penetrate the atmosphere and overcome the earth’s gravity and, having traveled all the way to the moon, it must still have enough fuel to land safely and make the return trip to earth. Furthermore, in order to give the expedition a margin of safety, we would not use one ship alone, but a minimum of three … each rocket ship would be taller than New York’s Empire State Building [almost ¼ mile high] and weigh about ten times the tonnage of the Queen Mary, or some 800,000 tons.”
Wernher von Braun, the father of the Apollo space program, writing in Conquest of the Moon
I can see all of you scratching your heads out there and I know exactly what it is that you are thinking: “Why the hell are we taking this detour to the Moon? What happened to Laurel Canyon? Have you completely lost your mind?”
*Sigh*
It all began a few months ago, when I became very busy at my day job as well as with family drama and with what turned out to be a very time-consuming side project, all of which made it increasingly difficult for me to carve out chunks of time to work on the remaining chapters in the series. Over the next two months or so, I pretty much lost all momentum and soon found it hard to motivate myself to write even when I could find the time.
That happens sometimes. Though it sounds rather cliché, ‘writer’s block’ is a very real phenomenon. There are many times when I can sit down at the keyboard and the words flow out of my head faster than I can get them down on the page. But there are also times when producing just one halfway decent sentence seems a near impossible task. This was one of those times.
I found a new source of inspiration, however, when my wife e-mailed me the recent story about the fake Dutch Moon rock, which I and many others found quite amusing, and which also reminded me that I had a lot of other bits and pieces of information concerning the Apollo project that I had collected over the nine years that have passed since I first wrote about the alleged Moon landings. After taking that first look, back in 2000, I was pretty well convinced that the landings were, in fact, faked, but it was perfectly obvious that the rather short, mostly tongue-in-cheek post that I put up back in July of 2000 was not going to convince anyone else of that.
So I contemplated taking a more comprehensive look at the Apollo program. Toward that end, I pulled up my original Apollo post along with various other bits and pieces scattered throughout past newsletters, threw in all the newer material that had never made it onto my website, and then combed the Internet for additional information. In doing so, I realized that a far better case could be made than what I had previously offered to readers.
I also realized that a far better case could be made than what is currently available on the ‘net.
I was rather surprised actually by how little there is out there – a couple of books by Bill Kaysing and Ralph Rene, a smattering of websites and a variety of YouTube videos of varying quality. Virtually all of the websites and videos tend to stick to the same ground covered by Kaysing and Rene, and they almost all use the same NASA photographs to argue the same points. So too do the sites devoted to ‘debunking’ the notion that the landings were faked, and those sites seem to actually outnumber the hoax sites.
While suffering through the numbing uniformity of the various websites on both sides of the aisle, it became perfectly clear that the hoax side of the debate was in serious need of a fresh approach and some new insights. So I began writing again. Feverishly. That does not mean, however, that I have abandoned the Laurel Canyon series. I intend to get back to it quite soon.
And truth be told, while the Apollo story may initially appear to be a radical departure from the ongoing Laurel Canyon series, it actually isn’t much of a detour at all. After all, we’re still going to be living in the 1960s and 1970s. And to a significant degree, we’re probably still going to be hanging out in Laurel Canyon – because who else, after all, was NASA going to trust to handle the post-production work on all that Apollo footage if not Lookout Mountain Laboratory?
I am very well aware, by the way, that there are many, many people out there – even many of the people who have seen through other tall tales told by our government – who think that Moon hoax theorists are complete kooks. And a whole lot of coordinated effort has gone into casting them as such. That makes wading into the Moon hoax debate a potentially dangerous affair.
Remember when Luther (played by Don Knotts) gets taken to court and sued for slander in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken? And don’t try to pretend like you’ve never seen it, because we both know that you have. So anyway, he goes to court and a character witness is called and the guy delivers credible testimony favoring Luther and it is clear that the courtroom is impressed and everything is looking good for our nebbish hero, Luther. Remember what happens next though? On cross-examination, the witness reveals that he is the president of a UFO club that holds their meetings on Mars!
The courtroom, of course, erupts with laughter and all of that formerly credible testimony immediately flies right out the window.
I have already received e-mails warning that I will suffer a similar fate (from people who heard me discussing the topic on Meria Heller’s radio show). Not to worry though – I have somewhat of an advantage over others who have attempted to travel this path: I don’t really care. My mission is to ferret out the truth, wherever it may lie; if at various points along the way, some folks are offended and others question my sanity, that’s not really something that I lose a lot of sleep over.
Anyway, a whole lot of people are extremely reluctant to give up their belief in the success of the Apollo missions. A lot of people, in fact, pretty much shut down at the mere mention of the Moon landings being faked, refusing to even consider the possibility (Facebook, by the way, is definitely not the best place to promote the notion that the landings were faked, in case anyone was wondering). And yet there are some among the True Believers who will allow that, though they firmly believe that we did indeed land on the Moon, they would have understood if it had been a hoax. Given the climate of the times, with Cold War tensions simmering and anxious Americans looking for some sign that their country was still dominant and not technologically inferior to the Soviets, it could be excused if NASA had duped the world.
Such sentiments made me realize that the Moon landing lie is somewhat unique among the big lies told to the American people in that it was, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively benign lie, and one that could be easily spun. Admitting that the landings were faked would not have nearly the same impact as, say, admitting to mass murdering 3,000 Americans and destroying billions of dollars worth of real estate and then using that crime as a pretext to wage two illegal wars and strip away civil, legal and privacy rights.
And yet, despite the fact that it was a relatively benign lie, there is a tremendous reluctance among the American people to let go of the notion that we sent men to the Moon. There are a couple of reasons for that, one of them being that there is a romanticized notion that those were great years – years when one was proud to be an American. And in this day and age, people need that kind of romanticized nostalgia to cling to.
But that is not the main reason that people cling so tenaciously, often even angrily, to what is essentially the adult version of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. What primarily motivates them is fear. But it is not the lie itself that scares people; it is what that lie says about the world around us and how it really functions. For if NASA was able to pull off such an outrageous hoax before the entire world, and then keep that lie in place for four decades, what does that say about the control of the information we receive? What does that say about the media, and the scientific community, and the educational community, and all the other institutions we depend on to tell us the truth? What does that say about the very nature of the world we live in?
That is what scares the hell out of people and prevents them from even considering the possibility that they could have been so thoroughly duped. It’s not being lied to about the Moon landings that people have a problem with, it is the realization that comes with that revelation: if they could lie about that, they could lie about anything.
It has been my experience that the vast majority of the people who truly believe in the Moon landings know virtually nothing about the alleged missions. And when confronted with some of the more implausible aspects of those alleged missions, the most frequently offered argument is the one that every ‘conspiracy theorist’ has heard at least a thousand times: “That can’t possibly be true because there is no way that a lie that big could have been covered up all this time … too many people would have known about it … yadda, yadda, yadda.”
But what if your own eyes and your innate (though suppressed) ability to think critically and independently tell you that what all the institutions of the State insist is true is actually a lie? What do you do then? Do you trust in your own cognitive abilities, or do you blindly follow authority and pretend as though everything can be explained away? If your worldview will not allow you to believe what you can see with your own eyes, then the problem, it would appear, is with your worldview. So do you change that worldview, or do you live in denial?
The Moon landing lie is unique among the big lies in another way as well: it is a lie that seemingly cannot be maintained indefinitely. Washington need never come clean on, say, the Kennedy assassinations. After all, they’ve been lying about the Lincoln assassination for nearly a century-and-a-half now and getting away with it. But the Moon landing hoax, I would think, has to have some kind of expiration date.
How many decades can pass, after all, without anyone coming even close to a reenactment before people start to catch on? Four obviously haven’t been enough, but how about five, or six, or seven? How about when we hit the 100-year anniversary?
If the first trans-Atlantic flight had not been followed up with another one for over forty years, would anyone have found that unusual? If during the early days of the automobile, when folks were happily cruising along in their Model T’s at a top speed of 40 MPH, someone had suddenly developed a car that could be driven safely at 500 MPH, and then after a few years that car disappeared and for many decades thereafter, despite tremendous advances in automotive technology, no one ever again came close to building a car that could perform like that, would that seem at all odd?
There are indications that this lie does indeed have a shelf life. According to a July 17, 2009 post on CNN.com, “It’s been 37 years since the last Apollo moon mission, and tens of millions of younger Americans have no memories of watching the moon landings live. A 2005-2006 poll by Mary Lynne Dittmar, a space consultant based in Houston, Texas, found that more than a quarter of Americans 18 to 25 expressed some doubt that humans set foot on the moon.”
The goal of any dissident writer is to crack open the doors of perception enough to let a little light in – so that hopefully the seeds of a political reawakening will be planted. There are many doors that can be pried open to achieve that goal, but this one seems particularly vulnerable. Join me then as we take a little trip to the Moon. Or at least pretend to.
“If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings – we’re talking purely hypothetical here – the timing was certainly right. The advent of television, having reached worldwide critical mass only years prior to the moon landing, would prove instrumental to the fraud’s success.”
Wired Magazine
Adolph Hitler knew a little bit about the fine art of lying. In Mein Kampf, he wrote that, "If you're going to tell a lie, make sure it's a really fucking big lie."
Truth be told, I’m not exactly conversant in the German language so that may not be an exact translation, but it certainly captures the gist of what the future Fuhrer was trying to say. He went on to explain that this was so because everyone in their everyday lives tells little lies, and so they fully expect others to do so as well. But most people do not expect anyone to tell a real whopper … you know, the kind of brazen, outlandish lie that is just too absurd to actually be a lie. The kind of lie that is so over-the-top that no one would dare utter it if it was in fact a lie.
That is the type of lie, according to Hitler, that will fool the great masses of people, even when the lie is so transparently thin that it couldn't possibly stand up to any kind of critical analysis by anyone actually exercising their brain rather than just blindly accepting the legitimacy of the information they are fed. Take, for example, the rather fanciful notion that the United States landed men on the Moon in the late 1960's and early 1970's. That's the kind of lie we're talking about here: the kind that seems to defy logic and reason and yet has become ingrained in the national psyche to such an extent that it passes for historical fact.
And anyone who would dare question that ‘historical fact,’ needless to say, must surely be stark raving mad.
Before proceeding any further, I should probably mention here that, until relatively recently, if I had heard anyone putting forth the obviously drug-addled notion that the Moon landings were faked, I would have been among the first to offer said person a ride down to the grip store. While conducting research into various other topics, however, it has become increasingly apparent that there are almost always a few morsels of truth in any 'conspiracy theory,' no matter how outlandish that theory may initially appear to be, and so despite my initial skepticism, I was compelled to take a closer look at the Apollo program.
The first thing that I discovered was that the Soviet Union, right up until the time that we allegedly landed the first Apollo spacecraft on the Moon, was solidly kicking our ass in the space race. It wasn’t even close. The world wouldn’t see another mismatch of this magnitude until decades later when Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini came along. The Soviets launched the first orbiting satellite, sent the first animal into space, sent the first man into space, performed the first space walk, sent the first three-man crew into space, was the first nation to have two spacecraft in orbit simultaneously, performed the first unmanned docking maneuver in space, and landed the first unmanned probe on the Moon.
Everything the U.S. did, prior to actually sending a manned spacecraft to the Moon, had already been done by the Soviets, who clearly were staying at least a step or two ahead of our top-notch team of imported Nazi scientists. The smart money was clearly on the Soviets to make it to the Moon first, if anyone was to do so. Their astronauts had logged five times as many hours in space as had ours. And they had a considerable amount of time, money, scientific talent and, perhaps most of all, national pride riding on that goal.
And yet, amazingly enough, despite the incredibly long odds, the underdog Americans made it first. And not only did we make it first, but after a full forty years, the Soviets apparently still haven't quite figured out how we did it. The question that is clearly begged here is a simple one: Why is it that the nation that was leading the world in the field of space travel not only didn’t make it to the Moon back in the 1960s, but still to this day have never made it there? Could it be that they were just really poor losers? I am imagining that perhaps the conversation over in Moscow ’s equivalent of NASA went something like this:
Boris: Comrade Ivan, there is terrible news today: the Yankee imperialists have beaten us to the Moon. What should we do?
Ivan: Let's just shit-can our entire space program.
Boris: But comrade, we are so close to success! And we have so much invested in the effort!
Ivan: Fuck it! If we can't be first, we aren't going at all.
Boris: But I beg of you comrade! The moon has so much to teach us, and the Americans will surely not share with us the knowledge they have gained.
Ivan: Nyet!
In truth, the entire space program has largely been, from its inception, little more than an elaborate cover for the research, development and deployment of space-based weaponry and surveillance systems. The media never talk about such things, of course, but government documents make clear that the goals being pursued through space research are largely military in nature. For this reason alone, it is inconceivable that the Soviets would not have followed the Americans onto the Moon for the sake of their own national defense.
It is not just the Soviets, of course, who have never made it to the Moon. The Chinese haven’t either. Nor has any other industrialized nation, despite the rather obvious fact that every such nation on the planet now possesses technology that is light-years beyond what was available to NASA scientists in the 1960s.
Some readers will recall that (and younger readers might want to cover their eyes here, because the information to follow is quite shocking), in the 1960s, a full complement of home electronics consisted of a fuzzy, 13-channel, black-and-white television set with a rotary tuning dial, rabbit ears and no remote. Such cutting-edge technology as the pocket calculator was still five years away from hitting the consumer market.
It is perfectly obvious, of course, that it was not consumer electronics that allegedly sent men to the Moon. The point here though is that advances in aerospace technology mirror advances in consumer technology, and just as there has been revolutionary change in entertainment and communications technology, so too has aerospace technology advanced by light-years in the last four decades. Technologically speaking, the NASA scientists working on the Apollo project were working in the Dark Ages. So if they could pull it off back then, then just about anyone should be able to do it now.
It would be particularly easy, needless to say, for America to do it again, since we’ve already done all the research and development and testing. Why then, I wonder, have we not returned to the Moon since the last Apollo flight? Following the alleged landings, there was considerable talk of establishing a space station on the Moon, and of possibly even colonizing Earth's satellite. Yet all such talk was quickly dropped and soon forgotten and for nearly four decades now not a single human has been to the Moon.
Again, the question that immediately comes to mind is: Why? Why has no nation ever duplicated, or even attempted to duplicate, this miraculous feat? Why has no other nation even sent a manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon? Why has no other nation ever attempted to send a manned spacecraft anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit?
Is it because we already learned everything there was to learn about the Moon? If so, then could it reasonably be argued that it would be possible to make six random landings on the surface of the Earth and come away with a complete and thorough understanding of this heavenly body? Are we to believe that the international scientific community has no open questions that could be answered by a, ahem, ‘return’ trip to the Moon? And is there no military advantage to be gained by sending men to the Moon? Has man’s keen interest in exploring celestial bodies, evident throughout recorded history, suddenly gone into remission?
Maybe, you say, it’s just too damned expensive. But the 1960s were not a particularly prosperous time in U.S. history and we were engaged in an expensive Cold War throughout the decade as well as an even more expensive ‘hot’ war in Southeast Asia, and yet we still managed to finance no less than seven manned missions to the Moon, using a new, disposable, multi-sectioned spacecraft each time. And yet in the four decades since then, we are apparently supposed to believe that no other nation has been able to afford to do it even once.
While we’re on the subject of the passage of time, exactly how much time do you suppose will have to pass before people in significant numbers begin to question the Moon landings? NASA has recently announced that we will not be returning, as previously advertised, by the year 2020. That means that we will pass the fifty-year anniversary of the first alleged landing without a sequel. Will that be enough elapsed time that people will begin to wonder? What about after a full century has passed by? Will our history books still talk about the Moon landings? And if so, what will people make of such stories? When they watch old preserved films from the 1960s, how will they reconcile the laughably primitive technology of the era with the notion that NASA sent men to the Moon?
Consider this peculiar fact: in order to reach the surface of the Moon from the surface of the Earth, the Apollo astronauts would have had to travel a minimum of 234,000 miles*. Since the last Apollo flight allegedly returned from the Moon in 1972, the furthest that any astronaut from any country has traveled from the surface of the Earth is about 400 miles. And very few have even gone that far. The primary components of the current U.S. space program – the space shuttles, the space station, and the Hubble Telescope – operate at an orbiting altitude of about 200 miles.
(*NASA gives the distance from the center of Earth to the center of the Moon as 239,000 miles. Since the Earth has a radius of about 4,000 miles and the Moon’s radius is roughly 1,000 miles, that leaves a surface-to-surface distance of 234,000 miles. The total distance traveled during the alleged missions, including Earth and Moon orbits, ranged from 622,268 miles for Apollo 13 to 1,484,934 miles for Apollo 17. All on a single tank of gas.)
To briefly recap then, in the twenty-first century, utilizing the most cutting-edge modern technology, the best manned spaceship the U.S. can build will only reach an altitude of 200 miles. But in the 1960s, we built a half-dozen of them that flew almost 1,200 times further into space. And then flew back. And they were able to do that despite the fact that the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo flights weighed in at a paltry 3,000 tons, about.004% of the size that the principal designer of those very same Saturn rockets had previously said would be required to actually get to the Moon and back (primarily due to the unfathomably large load of fuel that would be required).
To put that into more Earthly terms, U.S. astronauts today travel no further into space than the distance between the San Fernando Valley and Fresno. The Apollo astronauts, on the other hand, traveled a distance equivalent to circumnavigating the planet around the equator nine-and-a-half times! And they did it with roughly the same amount of fuel that it now takes to make that 200 mile journey, which is why I want NASA to build my next car for me. I figure I’ll only have to fill up the tank once and it should last me for the rest of my life.
“But wait,” you say, “NASA has solid evidence of the validity of the Moon landings. They have, for example, all of that film footage shot on the moon and beamed live directly into our television sets.”
Since we’re on the subject, I have to mention that transmitting live footage back from the Moon was another rather innovative use of 1960s technology. More than two decades later, we would have trouble broadcasting live footage from the deserts of the Middle East, but in 1969, we could beam that shit back from the Moon with nary a technical glitch!
As it turns out, however, NASA doesn’t actually have all of that Moonwalking footage anymore. Truth be told, they don’t have any of it. According to the agency, all the tapes were lost back in the late 1970s. All 700 cartons of them. As Reuters reported on August 15, 2006, “The U.S. government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ … Armstrong’s famous moonwalk, seen by millions of viewers on July 20, 1969, is among transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaluoma said. ‘We haven’t seen them for quite a while. We’ve been looking for over a year, and they haven’t turned up,’ Hautaluoma said … In all, some 700 boxes of transmissions from the Apollo lunar missions are missing.”
Given that these tapes allegedly documented an unprecedented and unduplicated historical event, one that is said to be the greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century, how in the world would it be possible to, uhmm, ‘lose’ 700 cartons of them? Would not an irreplaceable national treasure such as that be very carefully inventoried and locked away in a secure film vault? And would not copies have been made, and would not those copies also be securely tucked away somewhere |
However, something of interest is how the versions that were dosed with fresh yeast seemed to help protect the product from some off flavours associated with oxidation.
These beers performed a bit better than the counter pressure filled bottles in terms of papery notes, and appeared to be a bit more floral as well. However, these were also two separate batches of beer, so we cannot for sure know that it wasn’t the extra hop additions which are responsible for this. Though, if we compare the floral notes of the re-yeasted beers with the Brite beer packaged via beer gun (same batch of beer) it seems to have had an impact.
Something that is also somewhat interesting is how the beer that was packaged with whatever yeast was left in solution performed worse. The beer had been cold crashed before running through the filter, so there is a good chance that there weren’t enough cells in solution or they weren’t able to take up as much oxygen as the freshly yeasted samples.
Conclusion
While not entirely conclusive, adding fresh yeast before packaging might be an option to help improve shelf life of a product. For people in the competition scene, this could be very helpful in decreasing the risks of products oxidizing during storage or shipping.
The additional information regarding the bottle conditioned beer that was served without yeast means that it should be possible to try and replicate this test at a homebrew level. The amount of equipment needed to replicate the test should be fairly minimal with the most expensive components being a hemocytometer and microscope to help control yeast dosing rates. The other other pieces of required equipment are 1mL pipettes and a pipette pump.A BOMB squad has been called to an army barracks in Edinburgh after a suspicious package was found close by.
Cops rushed to the scene near Redford Army Barracks and are currently investigating.
2 A bomb squad is investigating a suspicious package near an army barracks in Edinburgh
2 Cops rushed to the scene near Redford Army Barracks and are currently investigating
The bomb disposal unit was scrambled after the package was found at a nearby bus stop.
Police were alerted to the "unattended item" on Colinton Road shortly before 11am.
Guards are thought to have raised the alarm after seeing the package near the bus stop.
Officers closed Colinton Road between Colinton Mains Road and Redford Road shortly before the bomb squad arrived at 11.50am.
RELATED STORIES EURO 2016 BOMB ALERT Terror as French airport is evacuated in city where England play Iceland tomorrow EMBASSY BOMB SCARE US embassy in Oslo, Norway evacuated as suspicious package sparks bomb scare MID-AIR DRAMA Drunk gran jailed for sparking terror scare after claiming fellow flier was ISIS member and had bomb Terror scare British Airways flight from London to US evacuated after 'bomb threat'...as Greenwich student reveals her fear bomb scare Homes evacuated after 'bomb making equipment' discovered in house in quiet street
A robot has been carrying out an investigation.
Local news reported a "loud bang and puff of smoke" a while later - indicating the bomb squad had blown up the suspicious package.
A police spokesman said: "Police are in attendance in Colinton after an item was discovered unattended in the street on Colinton Road.
"The section between Colinton Mains Road and Redford Road is currently closed while initial enquiries are carried out."
Army barracks across the UK have been on high alert since the attempted abduction of an RAF officer this summer.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368.Happy Friday readers! Last week I posted a tutorial on how to press your loose pigments and as promised, I've returned with a review on various palette options. I've tried different kinds of palettes to get a gist of quality as well as availability and affordability. I'll be starting with the most popular options and then offer some budget friendly alternatives towards the end. This post is quite long so let's get into it!
Z-Palettes are probably the most popular option. They are made from recyclable materials (the website says plastic but it seems to be more of a heavy duty cardboard wrapped in a shiny, patent-like material) and feature a clear window on top to showcase your pressed pigments inside. These are available in a variety of styles and sizes.
Large Z-Palette, Damask Print style from Makeupgeek.com
Small ($14 USD) - 3.18″Lx 3.18″W x 0.25″D
Fits 9 round 26mm pans, includes 10 metal stickers,
Medium ($17 USD) - 5.875″L x 3.25″W x 0.375″D
Fits 15 round 26mm pans, includes 16 metal stickers.
Large ($20 USD) - 7.44″L x 4.13″W x 0.25″D
Fits 27 round 26mm pans, includes 20 metal stickers.
Extra Large ($28 USD) - 8.256″L x 6.16″W x 0.56″D
Fits 35 round 26mm pans, includes 20 metal stickers.
Dome Style ($25 USD) - 8.06″L x 5.44″W x 0.75″D
Fits 33 round 26mm pans, includes 20 metal stickers.
This option is great if you are interested in depotting rounded products such as Mac Highlighters.
These palettes are more widely available (They're sold by Amazon, the Makeupgeek site, and from Z-Palette directly) than some of the other options, but the prints do tend to run on the more plain side. The usual designs I see are animal prints so that may or may not be to your liking. Quality wise, they do feel sturdy but I can see them wearing out from wear and tear over time, especially if you fold the front cover under frequently. I've had mine for about a year and a half now and it's held up well so far.
AnotherSoul palettes are well-known in the indie cosmetics scene and are available through their are well-known in the indie cosmetics scene and are available through their Etsy shop. In terms of quality, these are the best palettes I've tried. The magnets are strong and the craftsmanship on each palette is excellent. The only con is that not all designs are water-resistant so you'll want to be careful not to get these wet or stain them with product if you get a non-resistant model. Design options range from baroque styles, to florals, to your occasional fun print.
Basic and Pro style palettes, stacked for size comparison.
Double Sided Travel Palette ($14.99 USD) - 4"L x 3"W
Fits 36ct 15mm round pans, 12ct 26mm round pans, or 8ct 26mm square pans.
Double Sided Medium Palette ($19.99 USD) - 6"L x 3"W
Fits 54ct 15mm round pans, 20ct 26mm round or square pans.
Basic Palette ($14.99 USD) - 7"L x 4.5"W
Fits 60ct 15mm round pans, 20ct 26mm round pans, or 15ct 26mm square pans.
Basic Palette w/ Water Resistant Paper ($16.99 USD) - 7"L x 4.5"W
Fit is the same as the regular basic palette.
Pro Palette ($26.99 USD) - 9"L x 5"W
Fits 91ct 15mm round pans, 32ct 26mm round pans, or 28ct 26mm square pans.
Deep Palette ($29.99 USD) - 9"L x 5"W
This palette style is twice as deep as the basic palettes.
Fit is the same as the Pro Palette in terms of eyeshadow count.
Double Sided Luxe Palette ($42.99 USD) - 9"L x 5"W
This palette style is twice the size of the Pro palettes as it is double-sided.
Fits 182ct 15mm round pans, 64ct 26mm round pans, or 56 26mm square pans.
Cost-wise these run about the same as the Z-palettes (barring the Luxe palette, which is a great value since it essentially works out to be two Pro palettes in one.) One thing that I do really like about this shop is that they offer double-sided palettes which helps make them more cost-effective. These palettes do not come with metal stickers so you'll want to purchase them separately if your pans aren't magnetic. Shipping runs from $3.50 to $6.50 USD for domestic orders, and $8.00 USD to $14.00 USD for international orders. If you are an avid presser, I strongly suggest springing for either the Pro or Luxe palettes since it's much more cost-effective.
MiniMintPalette is a more budget-friendly option found on is a more budget-friendly option found on Etsy. Each MiniMint palette is one of a kind and designs are never duplicated. Palettes are available in three sizes:
MiniMint (6x4 inch) custom palettes
Square Mini ($5.50 USD) - 3"L x 3"W
Fits 16ct 15mm pans, 4ct 26mm round or square pans.
Square Mint ($7.00 USD) - 4"L x 4"W
Fits 9 26mm round or square pans.
MiniMint ($10.00 USD) - 4"L x 6"W
Fits 15 26mm round pans.
Mint (4x4 inch) palette, open and closed.
At any given time, there are 3-10 different palettes available in the shop. Unfortunately this doesn't give you a ton of options in terms of design. However, the owner Jenny does offer custom designs for the same price! I recently got in touch with her about getting some custom palettes done since I wanted to pick up a couple of palettes and wasn't crazy about the designs available at the time. Jenny got back to me within an hour. On a Thursday evening. At midnight. She sent me a link to the available stock designs and I got to pick out the patterns I wanted. Designs were heavy on florals but there were all different kinds available. There are literally 100+ designs to choose from so there's something for everyone. I let her know which ones I wanted and she had my listing up by Saturday. From there, my order was shipped and I had them in my hands by Wednesday. The whole process from start to finish was made and received in six days. I've never had a faster turnaround time in my whole indie buying experience. Taking into account that these were custom designs, that's downright outstanding. Throughout the whole process, Jenny was extremely helpful and prompt at responding to any questions I had.
Jenny includes free samples in every order, as well as label stickers. I've received Innisfree Face Masks and false lashes as Gifts With Purchases with my orders. MiniMint also has a program where if you buy 10 palettes, you get a mini or mint style palette for free. Quality-wise, these do trail behind Anothersoul palettes just a tad. They don't have the same luxurious feel or heft to them. However, they're still very well-built and all of the designs are coated to be water-resistant, which is something that Anothersoul is lacking. Also, the price can't be beat. MiniMint is quickly becoming my favorite palette shop for their custom options, affordable price point, and excellent customer service. Domestic shipping runs from $2.40 to $2.90 USD and international is between $7.50 and $10.00 USD.
Budget-Friendly Options:
If you have a lot of mini sizes or full sizes to press but don't want to spend a ton of money on getting palettes, you could go with generic empty palettes like these from Ebay. Now the quality on these is not the best. The palette itself is alright. The pans do feel a bit flimsy and cheap but all in all, it still definitely gets the job done. Each palette contains 28 empty 25mm pans. The lowest price I've seen on these Ebay palettes is $7.22 each. You'll want to account for shipping time though since nearly all of these are mass-produced in China and take a while to arrive.
Alternatively, you can also order an empty duo palette from MAC for $8 to house your pressed pigments. Here is the link to purchase. Now this palette is not magnetized so you'll need to pick up magnetic stickers or strips to adhere your shadows. If you have either of those items on hand, this is probably one of the cheapest options, especially if you utilize both sides of the palette.
Finally, another option recommended to me by some of my indie-loving friends is Artbin Magnetic Boxes. Here is the link to purchase on Amazon. This listing provides you with six palettes for $5.00 shipped, making this the most affordable option of all. If you don't particularly care about having cute patterns on your palettes and are more interested in usability and affordability, this is the option for you.
If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me! I tried to make this is as comprehensive as possible. All in all, my favorite palettes are from MiniMint, with AnotherSoul right behind them.
xx CarissaFacebook Cuts Off Friend-Finding Access to Vine, Twitter’s New Video App
That was fast!
Within hours of Twitter launching its Vine video-sharing application on Thursday, Facebook has cut off access to Vine’s “find people” feature, which lets used to let Vine users find their Facebook friends using the Vine application.
What does that mean? It’s basically an annoyance, a hindrance on an easy way to connect with all your existing friends using the service. It would have been a good way to jump into a new product, rather than manually trying to find all of your friends using the app.
No comment from Twitter beyond the error message we’re seeing pop up when we try to use the Facebook friend finding feature in the app, and no immediate response from Facebook as of yet.
But the cutoff isn’t exactly surprising, given Instagram recently snipping Twitter cards integration, and Twitter cutting off access to Instagram’s “Find your Friends” feature. Welcome to the new, competitive landscape of social tech companies.
The loser in all of this? Sorry, user, but it’s you.FansUnite Roadmap Released
Darius Eghdami Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 17, 2017
The FansUnite team is excited to announce our sports betting platform’s official roadmap and development milestones. We invite all bettors, contributors and prospective community members to check it out here.
We’re taking aim at the World Cup in June 2018 for a beta test of our platform, because we want our community to be able to bet on this marquee event on the world stage. This beta will serve to stress test the system and also include the full spread of betting options you know and love. Participants selected for this closed beta will be compensated with free FAN tokens to bet with, and all winnings will carry over to full wagering on all major sports leagues in September 2018.
We understand how important it is to bettors that we maintain all the betting options they’re familiar, which is why we won’t limit ourselves to p2p betting and will offer parlays, teasers, accumulators and other exotics with our full release. In addition, we will never limit players and welcome all arbitrage bettors to come try and win our tokens.
For more on how we’re going to be able to offer industry leading lines and maintain a winner’s and arbitrage bettor welcome policy, please join our Slack and stay tuned for our next blog article by Stephen Rothwell, Head Trader at FansUnite.KOLKATA: After nearly two decades in service, the Insas rifle — the mainstay of Indian security forces — is on its way out.Launched in 1994 by Rifle Factory, Ishapore (RFI), the weapon underwent further development over the years and faced its acid test during the Kargil conflict five years later. Now, RFI is in the process of winding up the production line and concentrating on development of a multi-caliber weapon designed by the Armament Research and Development Establishment ( ARDE ) in Pune."The Insas rifle proved its worth over the last 20 years. It will continue to serve for some more time till the multi-barrel rifle goes into production. We still recall the day when RFI supplied the first batch of 4,000 rifles to the Army in March, 1994. There were initial hiccups but the glitches were gradually ironed out. There was extreme pressure during the Kargil Conflict as damaged and jammed weapons returned to the factory and fresh lots had to be sent out. Workers at Ishapore worked day and night to repair and clean the guns and make them battle-ready," an official said.After meeting the country’s war reserves, RFI started meeting the demands of central paramilitary forces. Finally, state police forces also replaced their 7.62 mm self loading rifles with the lighter 5.56 mm Insas."At that time, it was the only answer to the AK-47 assault rifles used by terrorists and enemy soldiers. The 7.62 mm SLRs — also manufactured at Ishapore — were far too heavy and un-maneuverable for the infantry soldier to react fast enough. The concept of battle also changed. It was no longer thought necessary to kill an enemy soldier with a heavy-caliber 7.62 mm slug. Strategists suggested that it would be better to injure the enemy with a lighter 5.56 mm one and leave him. This would burden his comrades as they wouldn’t be able to leave him lying behind in that condition. Today, a more advanced weapon in required," the official added.A multi-caliber assault rifle (MCAR) can be used to fire different rounds, depending on the range a soldier wants to achieve and the damage he wishes to cause. In November, 2011, the Army floated a tender for the supply of MCARs. Apart from supply, the deal envisaged manufacture of the weapons in India under licence. Several international arms manufacturers participated in the tender."This is a major challenge for us. The Army wants over 65,000 MCARs in the first lot and 100,000 more to be manufactured under licence in India. We will have to come up with a rifle that can clear user trials. If this doesn’t happen, the Army will have to depend on supplies from abroad. Even if one were to assume that the deal is clean, it would be a big blow for a factory like ours. We can’t survive without bulk orders from the defence forces. We are now working very hard to develop an indigenous MCAR as per the ARDE's design," another official said.On a warm Sunday afternoon when I was five years old, I went fishing with my grandfather on a small Michigan lake. No one knows just what happened, but my memories are vivid though fragmentary. I can still see my grandfather standing in the boat and feel the icy water climbing slowly up my ankles and legs. Sometimes even now when I'm swimming, I imagine cushions and cans floating in the water and smell the peculiar odor of outboard engine fuel that hovered over the water on that day so long ago.
I woke up in a large, unfamiliar bed, the sheets wrapped so tightly around me that I couldn't move. I heard someone say the word undertaker, and for a moment I thought that I must have died. But I was alive. My grandfather had held me up out of the water and had lifted me onto the top of the capsized boat--my memory of these crucial moments is more of sensations than emotions. My grandfather had died saving my life.
I have often wondered what effect this early experience of death had on me. I sometimes wonder whether the emotional heaviness I often feel, that seems part of my nature, can be traced to that first intimate meeting with death. I also sometimes wonder whether my professional life as a long-time student, a professor, a therapist, and a writer about the soul has roots in this early encounter with death.
Modern life is widely engaged in flight from and denial of death. Some people are preoccupied with thoughts of how they are going to die and with ways in which they might prevent that specific form of death. Some imagine that their death will wear the mask of cancer, others a failed heart. Some business and political leaders seem so far from thoughts of death that they feel no pangs about pouring poisons into our rivers, threatening the life and health of their own children.
Paradoxically, denying death as it appears in daily life is life-threatening in itself. The modern tendency to justify life by working hard makes us busier and less aware of the need for quiet and doing nothing. We look for the fountain of youth in chemicals, genes, and medical procedures rather than in a style of living that is sensitive to death and therefore not self-destructive.
The chief emotional complaint of our time seems to be depression, whether it reaches a clinical level of seriousness or is more the tonality of our ordinary lives felt as sadness, aimlessness, emptiness, or indefinable loss. Depression is the death-mood of the soul, the turning away from life. Emotionally we place a high value on having a cheery, upbeat disposition. When depression arrives, we are doubly defeated--once by the weight of the mood and again by our failure to remain successfully happy.
We might give death a place by not becoming too heroic in our efforts to be chronically cheerful, by speaking honestly from our sadness, and by refusing to adopt the many modern methods available for escape from sadness. Positively, we might allow the more shady and hollow moods to shape our life, at least temporarily. When struck by our sadness, we might seek out some solitude, withdraw constructively, and concentrate on issues--crime, poverty, and injustice--that quite properly make us sad.
Some scholars say that the roots of religious expression are to be found in the ways a people honors its dead. At the personal level, too, religious sensibility can be grounded in a direct and constructive approach to the many ways in which death plays a role in life. The sense of mortality that illness brings may remind us of our need for religious vision.
To see the positive place of death in life requires a religious sensibility, because secularism believes only in the future. How important it is to remember the dead, pray for them, tell their stories, and keep in touch with them in memory. When a culture loses its religious sensibility, many important values get split into highly emotional, destructive, and excessive versions of themselves. People may go made in search of vitality, in crazed entertainment, travel, and political ambition. On the other side, they may find death-substitutes in the stupor of drugs, mindless television, and deadening work.
The key is to keep life and death, in all the ways these two archetypes are lived in ordinary life, so closely related that it is difficult to tell one from the other. Then we may fully live and perhaps not see death as literal defeat. To accomplish this fusion we need deep faith and expansive vision. Ultimately it is a grace given to those who surrender to the life-death reality that makes up our inner and outer worlds. As a steady influence, death gives daily existence a deepening, anti-heroic quality, toning down the anxious and frenzied pursuit of self-justification, allowing the sheer pleasure in being alive to provide a sense of connection and purpose.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says: "Come to Me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For My yoke is easy and My burden light."
Thomas Moore is a Jungian psychotherapist and former Catholic monk. He is the author of 'Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life' (1993), Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships' (1994), and 'The Soul of Sex: Celebrating Life As an Act of Love" (1998).Recent weeks have produced various horror stories of the workings of dodgy private providers of vocational education and training, including the latest: a recall of certificates due to sub-par standards in these institutions.
Vocational training is crucial for both young Australians and the future of our economy, yet in recent years private providers who face little oversight or scrutiny have turned the sector upside down.
The problems with private providers
Private providers are amassing huge profits at taxpayers’ expense, the quality of the system is declining and students may face large debts for courses they either didn’t complete or were not of a high standard.
Unscrupulous practices by some private providers include:
aggressive marketing with a common “buy now, pay later, plus free iPad” hook
subcontracting out course content, teaching and assessment to other providers, including unregistered providers
up-selling students into courses they hadn’t intended to enrol in
delivering courses in fewer hours and online
significant merger and acquisition activity, with large enterprises owning portfolios of registered and unregistered training brands, which are out of the regulator’s line of sight.
Direct online marketing email
These practices were brought sharply to light by a government review of Vocation, a large provider which had over 24,000 new course enrolments in 2013. At the time of the review, Vocation’s government funding was forecast to grow to A$1.2 billion by 2017.
The review resulted in the forfeiture of A$19.6 million after identifying unscrupulous practices. These included an over-reliance on third-party student referrals, enrolling students in courses inappropriate to their needs and delivering a low-quality training experience. After initially declaring to investors that the review would be immaterial to earnings, the company has been forced into multiple trading halts on its free-falling shares to ensure adequate transparency over its operations.
Privatisation was supposed to improve the range and quality of training offerings, make the sector more responsive to the needs of industry, and to provide greater transparency. None of these promises has been met. The lack of transparency seen with Vocation is far worse for unlisted providers and for unregistered providers party to subcontracting arrangements.
All of this has contributed to a loss of public trust in the vocational training system and huge damage to the long-term sustainability of TAFEs.
The annual report of the Australian Skills Quality Authority last year found that 75% of Registered Training Organisations failed to meet minimum standards on a first inspection.
Private providers are strangling TAFE
TAFEs have historically been the main provider of training, especially in regional Australia. They offer a range of career-focused courses for students not going to university.
In recent years the states, headed by Victoria, opened up government funding to all training providers, public and private, who vie for it. This has meant public TAFEs have had to compete for the funding previously allocated to them.
This has led to a proliferation of private providers – now over 3000 – hoping to get a share of this lucrative taxpayer-funded training.
Unlike universities, there are no caps on what private providers can charge students for courses through the VET FEE-HELP scheme, under which students incur a debt similar to the HECS debt for a university course.
We have seen huge profits accruing to private providers, which are far in excess of what a company in a genuinely competitive market could reasonably expect. For example, Australian Careers Network, another large private provider, recorded a 51% profit margin in 2014, while several other providers recorded profit margins of over 30%.
In Victoria, TAFEs now have just 27% of enrolments. Other states are also seeing TAFE’s share of funding drop. TAFEs still provide the majority of training to disadvantaged students and those in regional areas, as well as many courses in traditional skill shortage areas, which do not deliver as big a profit margin to private providers.
So how can we fix this?
The standard answer is better regulation, but there are huge doubts as to whether this could work. This is not just because of the huge number of private providers, whose business models are so complex that regulators will always struggle to keep up.
Education is what economists call an “experience good” – meaning it’s impossible to judge the value of a course of study until you’ve completed it and tried to use it to get a job or undertake further study. That’s why, in a fast-changing marketplace fuelled by taxpayer subsidies, trying to regulate by giving more information to students will not work.
The VET FEE-HELP scheme means that courses are “buy now, pay later”, which makes it easier for unscrupulous operators to sell students courses that are low-value or useless. For young students who are eager to find work, it is easy to take at face value the promises made by private training organisations and realise too late that they have made a mistake.
In order to reverse this trend there must be a minimum hours requirement to stop year-long courses being completed in just a few weeks, providers should not be allowed to sub-contract training to unregistered third parties, who are effectively out of reach of regulators, and more scrutiny is needed of how for-profit training organisations are marketing themselves to potential students.
We also need to recognise that the public sector, through TAFE, should remain at the heart of vocational training and that it needs support to remain a sustainable provider of high-quality, trusted vocational qualifications. Where private providers have lagged, TAFEs continue to service the needs of students from disadvantaged backgrounds (including those in regional areas), and are more likely to offer higher-cost courses in skills-shortage areas.
TAFEs just can’t fairly compete with private providers who can choose to offer only profitable training courses and to educate only students of their choice - usually those who can pay high fees and from relative advantage. Some recognition of this public role of TAFEs needs to be built into the funding system.
A cap on the funding available to private operators would give TAFEs some certainty about their operations and ensure they remain the custodians of high-quality vocational training.
If a more sustainable funding model for TAFE is not found, then it is very likely that public confidence in the entire system of vocational qualifications will be fatally eroded, robbing future generations of a chance to improve their skills and find quality jobs.
We need to recognise that the rhetoric of privatisation has not matched reality, and work out how to shift to a system that reliably delivers what students expect – a high-quality course at a fair price.Finally, with the Winter Meetings starting on Monday, we have the baseball offseason beginning to take shape. As a baseball nerd, I actually enjoy the height of the offseason as much if not more than the regular season.
Currently, in White Sox circles, the sentiment toward the offseason has been overwhelmingly gloomy and for good reason. The team is coming off its third straight losing season, a feat they haven’t had to suffer through since a 1997-1999 stretch. Even then, the team won 80 games in two of those seasons. Those in the White Sox fan community have grown tired and there has been the development of what seems to be a narrative-driven sulking fest.
For as long as a I have followed them, the White Sox ownership has been plagued with the label “cheap” by their fan base. Sure, the team dons the great city of Chicago on their chest when they play on the road, but they are and for decades have been the second team in the country’s third biggest market. Frankly, that’s painfully evident by the team being 24th, 28th and 26th in attendance from 2013-2015, but that’s not a rabbit hole I care to go down.
Instead, I want to acknowledge the changes taking place, both with the “cheap” label and the recent end-all, be-all complaint towards the team’s incessant loyalty within the organization. The narrative has become so ingrained in the White Sox fan community, that the knee jerk reaction to the team bringing on former Gold Glover and World Champion outfielder Aaron Rowand as a minor league outfield instructor is to poke fun at ownership. As if every teams’ minor league instructors aren’t full of people familiar with the organization. I will admit, loyalty has certainly been an issue for the White Sox in the past. But if you’re the White Sox, how do you shed that label? Well, you don’t. You win and people will stop complaining. So the White Sox will continue to be labeled and lambasted by overreactions to media headlines until the losing subsides.
Getting to the point, the White Sox have a new-found emphasis on developing homegrown talent. If you follow Rick Hahn’s interactions with the media you’ll notice his rhetoric is littered with quotes alluding to that. When our Rob Young interviewed Rick Hahn on a conference call, Hahn mentioned the need to model off the Atlanta Braves growth of internal talent. We have seen the beginning of that process take place.
International Market
Why the narrative did fit:
For the better half of the first decade of the 2000’s, the White Sox international talent acquisition was hamstrung, to put it lightly, by the bonus skimming and financial manipulation perpetrated by former international executive Dave Wilder. The scandal not only left the White Sox with nothing to show for their international efforts, but it put their chief international executive in jail with a two year sentence and left regional ruin in its wake. Wilder, who was the right hand of Kenny Williams at the time, almost single-handedly retarded the development of the White Sox' Latin American talent stream. So when loyalty served the White Sox with a terrific black eye, they looked elsewhere to fill the hole it beget.
How the process has bucked the narrative:
Following the 2011 season, the White Sox nabbed the Blue Jays’ Director of Latin American Operations Marco Paddy to join the front office and oversee International Operations. Coincidentally, Paddy started his career with the Atlanta Braves before the Blue Jays acknowledged his work and offered him a promotion. Paddy was well-respected across baseball for his scouting efforts south of the border and as someone whose “other team” is the Blue Jays, I can say their fans were very disappointed when Paddy was lifted from their team to join the White Sox.
Now the name Marco Paddy is not a name that is going to excite fans by any means, because Paddy, and anyone of his likeness, operates in almost complete public ambiguity. Not only that, but when Paddy signs his 16 and 17 year olds of choice, it takes several years for those players to reach the upper levels of the minors. Paddy’s initial signings are just now reaching their 20’s. Paddy has caused some ripples in the last few years with the signings of high-profile July 2nd signees Micker Adolfo and Franklin Reyes. While he’ll need plenty of time before his work can be judged effectively, Paddy made an immediate contribution when he gave a thumbs up on Jose Abreu before the White Sox doled out the largest contract in franchise history to their All-Star first baseman.
Today, all of us at Future Sox know that there are more intriguing guys at the lower levels of the White Sox system than there have been in quite a few years. However, it should be noted that the White Sox do not value the amateur international avenue as much as their competitors. Scouting director Nick Hostetler told me in our conversation that the White Sox had been so bothered by the happenings in the Latin American market they entertained giving up their operation as a whole. Everyone has heard the horror stories of players trying to make their way to states like the one that scared the White Sox off of Starling Marte. Away from the sketchy individuals that have to be dealt with, signing the premier players comes with spending material amounts of money on 16-year-old kids. That’s quite a timeline with plenty of variables that bring on weighty risks. Regardless, there is a great opportunity for teams in the upcoming July 2nd amateur signing period with ten teams restricted from signing players for more than $300,000. Paddy is given great autonomy with his gig and while it would come as a surprise, he can make a sizable contribution this upcoming July if the team feels so inclined.
Amateur Talent:
Why the narrative did fit:
Ever since Kenny Williams left his role in player development and moved up to run baseball operations, the White Sox haven’t ever been confused as a team with a “top” farm system. From the 2000 team that was sewn with homegrown talent up until 2012, the White Sox were usually competitive, and over.500 every season but three. Almost every July the White Sox were in the hunt for players and used prospects as currency more than anything because they couldn’t afford to make the big splashes in free agency. Kenny Williams was famously quoted for his line “you can’t spend a dollar when you only have 50 cents.” As a result, the White Sox put the Rule 4 draft on the back burner to allow for more spending on the Major League roster. Off the record, a White Sox executive told me that the White Sox had remorse for the strategy of drafting low ceiling, high probability college performers who could be had for cheap. Hindsight shows us this strategy, and lack of consideration for the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), left the White Sox in a tough spot following the 2012 season.
How the process has bucked the trend:
Entering to the 2012 season, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement brought changes to the draft that included a “pool system” that was very owner-friendly and significantly increased parity in acquiring top talents. In 2013, the White Sox drafted Tim Anderson and Tyler Danish in the first two rounds. Anderson is the best positional prospect the White Sox have had since Gordon Beckham and Danish is cemented in the top ten of the system. What is more interesting from that draft is the White Sox shrewd use of financial allocation to secure over-slot signees Trey Michalczewski (Future Sox #6 prospect) and recently honored Arizona Fall League MVP Adam Engel, who Nathaniel Stoltz had previously compared to Mike Trout in regards to his build and athleticism. While Michalczewski and Engel were drafted in the 7th and 19th round, those rounds are in no way indicative of their potential and being able to add these types of prospects that late necessitates putting up some cash. So despite the conception of the team being unable to draft, the first draft with Rick Hahn at the helm features plenty of prospects who have since raised their stocks and a new found willingness to spend on domestic amateur talent.
In 2014, the White Sox drafted the best player in the draft in Carlos Rodon and turned around in the second |
I would like to insert the obligatory paean to call such and such hotline if you’re feeling suicidal, but truthfully most of those lines are staffed by people whose personal beliefs usually agree with the very forces causing so much pain. In my hometown, the suicide hotline is run by a battered women’s shelter, for example. Given the spike in suicide rates for men following divorce, and how common false accusations are as a tactic in divorce, whoever OK’d this was a lunatic…yet it seems to be common. Shouldn’t I be concerned that men in a fragile state are served properly? Is pointing out a conflict of interest a bad thing now?
Wanting to change this situation, to improve the chances that men will survive until retirement, usually gets you an accusation of hating women. Why? I don’t know. Any thoughts?
I also don’t know why people seem so complacent with the structural failure of our society. It’s hard to imagine anyone could be unconcerned, for example, with an underclass in the UK so large that Single Motherhood has become a career choice. It’s equally hard to imagine people can ignore the role education (or more succinctly, the lack thereof) has played in a fifth of young British men being not only unemployed, but officially considered unemployable. It’s beyond comprehension that people would buy this as being “natural”, isn’t it? They don’t even seem to blink when they find out it’s specifically men and boys permanently relegated to the underclass. Some pablum about “colored folk” dragging down the average (how progressive…and don’t “those people” have daughters?), and it seems people go back to sleep. Do you think people are this complacent without being conditioned to be so?
It is of the utmost importance, by all accounts, to regard the destruction of generations of men, the shredding of rights and the vanishing of futures (and children, sometimes) as most tragic. After all, aren’t women complaining they can’t find a good provider to marry? Don’t their children need replacement father figures?
Failure to regard the state the male sex has been reduced to as nothing more than a bummer for marriage-minded women will result most often in accusations of misogyny.
Should I “man up” or is it OK to point out the denial of “person” status to men inherent in such a viewpoint? Is it bad form to point out the frequency of such a viewpoint in popular culture? How about the disapproval alternative viewpoints receive?
Concern for the health and welfare of men, without equal or greater concern for the health and welfare of women (even though women receive far greater care and attention, politically and medically) is also forbidden in polite company. Cynical manipulation of the regard men have for women is to remain unremarked upon, on pain of banishment, and no further outbursts about women having rights and men having responsibilities will be tolerated without reprisal in forums across the land. As our national leaders have scolded: we need to “man up”. At least, so the media tells us. Because of patriarchy, apparently.
Do I have it right so far? Does this mesh with what you’ve been taught? Am I confirming that men’s activists have nothing to complain about? That we’re really just mad at losing privilege?
Like the privilege to see your own kids? Like the privilege of presumption of innocence? Like the privilege of property rights and legal protection? Like the privilege of being regarded as a human being? Yeah, I suppose some are mad at losing that sort of stuff.
Let me ask a couple more things while I have you here.
What would you do if you took these concerns to people who have entire organizations dedicated to fighting these battles, people who could have tackled the problem in months, or even weeks…and had them deny those problems exist? And then had similar groups block attempts to find out if they really were issues, or worse, hide information confirming them?
What would you do if these people who insist on being the last word in equality issues flat out refused to hear a word of it? Would you give up, or would you try other avenues? What if politicians followed suit, and flat out refused to even investigate? Or even denied their own data if it suggests men might need help?
Would you heed these same people’s later demand for use of a “proper tone” when addressing them, once they couldn’t continue to deny the reality? Would you care at all how those people felt about you? Would you need their approval to have legitimate concerns, do you think?
What would you do if no one would lift a finger to even find out if there might be something wrong? Would you yell until they wake up, or would you let them sleep?
Are you not even a little bit curious how things can have reversed this much for men in 50 years? Are you honestly buying the idea that men can’t adapt? And when are we going to get around to making someone actually prove all this social engineering was a good thing. Heck, don’t you think someone should have actually analyzed patriarchy theory before we started tearing down society?
Why are some people so afraid of having their ideology questioned, and why are alternative viewpoints considered borderline illegal? When did Western governments become secular theocracies? What does our society more resemble, a Democracy or a Police State? Has any of this made you curious? Do you care at all? Can you honestly say you didn’t know this stuff already? And most importantly, why aren’t you mad as hell?By Wayne Whittaker, Boston Bruins Correspondent
Do you remember Rob Tallas?
How about Blaine Lacher? Bill Ranford? Jon Casey? Jim Carey? John Grahame? Hannu Toivonen? Jeff Hackett? Steve Shields?
I know, I know. Dark memories. I’m very sorry to have just put you through that. But apparently, there are people among us who have no memory of just how embarrassing the goaltending in Boston had been for large portions of the past two decades.
Sure, there have been exceptions. Byron Dafoe had a pretty good run, as did Andrew Raycroft for that one year. And of course, Tim Thomas. But the post-Moog/Lemelin era of the early 90s through the mid-2000s was a very spotty and fragile period for Boston netminders.
Tim Thomas really did a number on the confidence of Bruins fans. Beyond the occasional weak goal, his reign from 2007-2011 is one of the best in franchise history: Two Vezina trophies, a William Jennings trophy, Conn Smythe award, and Stanley Cup.
So Thomas departs, Tuukka Rask takes over the starting job and posts a 1.92 goals-against average,.928 save percentage, 14-4-3 record and two shutouts. Obviously fans then fire up their cell phones and scream at some radio DJs for 10 minutes about how the Bruins should trade Rask.
Wait, what?
No seriously. This is a thing that is apparently happening. The 20-6-3 Boston Bruins have occasionally lost frustrating games this season, some in baffling fashion, and some fans are pointing the finger at Rask.
Nevermind the 22nd ranked powerplay, 12th ranked offense, spotty defense or the mounting injuries. These fans are looking right past those explanations, and are insisting that Rask is the problem.
In his losses, Rask has averaged a 3.57 goals-against average. That GAA is still better than the season averages of Scott Clemmensen and Brian Elliott, and is pretty close to the work of Miikka Kiprusoff, Jose Theodore, and Steve Mason.
In his wins, Rask posts a 1.14 GAA. He’s never given up more than 2 goals in a Bruins victory this season.
Rask has given Boston the chance to win far more often than he’s robbed them of that opportunity. The Bruins lost one of the best goaltenders on the planet to conspiracy theories or whatever, and have been able to rebound without any hiccups or set-backs. That’s remarkable.
Anton Khudobin, to his credit, has been outstanding as well. So good, in fact, that he’ll probably be a starting goalie on another NHL team next season. He won’t be the starter in Boston, because that job belongs to Tuukka Rask.
The ‘Stanley Cup Of Chowder’ blog has further evidence of Rask’s greatness, if you so desire.
The truth is that Rask won’t gain the trust of some fans until he carries the team on his back for a playoff series. The 2010 Philadelphia Flyers comeback is still on the mind of skeptics, and until he makes that timely save in the third period of a game seven, the skeptics and critics will refuse to be silent. Which is unfair to Rask, but is also expected.
“I mean it’s in the past. As I’ve said before, we won the whole thing the year after,” Rask said, following Boston’s last game against Philadelphia. “Things happen in hockey. For a goalie, if you start thinking that certain matchups are better for you than the others than you’ve lost half the battle. It was just a game like any other.”
Don’t let the calm demeanor fool you, Rask is a fiery competitor who definitely has something to prove to his doubters this spring. The 26-year old hasn’t had a taste of post-season play since May of 2010, and if his regular season is an early indication, doubters may not have much to call-in and complain about in weeks to come.
—
Follow Wayne on TwitterA crowd-funding campaign has raised over $55,000 in under 24 hours to help pay for a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for democratic action and new dialogue on Turkey.
The Indiegogo campaign – "Full Page Ad for Turkish Democracy in Action: OccupyGezi for the World" – called on contributors to raise a stated goal of $53,800, and asks people to "wake up". The campaign has 1,344 backers so far.
"We want the world to hear from Turks themselves about what's happening in Turkey," reads a campaign mission statement. "We want the world to support us as we push for true democracy in our country."
The campaign is steered by three individuals – Murat Aktihanoglu, Oltac Unsal and Duygu Atacan – who claim to represent the "Turkish People" with "no organizations, parties or affiliations".The sprawling Napa Valley vineyard and home that Robin Williams left behind just hit the market for $25.9 million, RumorFix has learned. Robin called the estate that sits on 639 acres in Sonoma, California “Villa Sorriso,” or “Villa of Smiles.” The spectacular property has 18 acres of premium vineyards, more than 100 olive trees, a nine-stall horse barn, riding trails, a spring-fed pond and a four-bedroom caretaker’s house, according to our friends at Redfin. Inside the 20,000 square foot home was built for entertainment with a billiards room, massive wine cellar and home theater with stadium seating.Other great features of the mansion included a 65-foot infinity edge pool and a tennis court. Robin tried to sell the estate in 2012 for $35 million, and relished it in April 2014 for $29.9 million, now it's listed for $4 million less.The troubled Commonwealth Games in Delhi have been hit by a new problem: thousands of condoms blocking drains at the £150m athletes' village.
Games organisers have said they will work round the clock to clear the prophylactics from pipes at the accommodation blocks housing more than 7,000 athletes and officials.
Mike Fennell, president of the Commonwealth Games Federation, sought to put a positive spin on the story at a news conference, saying: "If that is happening, it shows that there is use of condoms and I think that is a very positive story. Athletes are being responsible."
"If they are so active then that's very good," a spokesperson for the organisers said. "We are promoting safe sex."
One official told the local Mail Today newspaper, which broke the story, that more than 4,000 condoms had already been taken from free vending machines since athletes started arriving 10 days ago.
The condom blockage follows an outbreak of gastrocolic problems such as diarrhoea among swimmers this week. Fennell said an urgent inquiry had been ordered into whether contaminated water at the event's newly refurbished swimming pool was responsible for 15 Australian and English swimmers becoming sick.
"If there is something that is unsafe, you can't swim in that water. It's a matter we have to deal with with the greatest of urgency," said Fennell, who has been criticised for his handling of the chaotic runup to the games.
The Indian organisers have insisted that water in both the main pool and the warm-up pool at the aquatic complex was tested, with nothing untoward found. "We don't know why they have fallen ill but it is not the water. Not all the swimmers have fallen sick. Maybe this group went out to eat something somewhere," a spokeswoman said.
A spokesman for Australia's swimming team, Lachlan Searle, said "about a half-dozen" swimmers had been affected by stomach problems. At least three Australians are thought to have gastroenteritis.
Caroline Searle, the England team spokeswoman, said fewer than one in 10 of England's 541 athletes had been affected by a "mild 24-hour stomach condition" since arriving in Delhi.
"Not everybody all in one sport has been ill. There are little pockets across all sports. The levels of mild 24-hour stomach conditions are in fact lower than we anticipated," she said. "We are not complacent as they may well rise in coming days but no athlete has so far been forced to miss any session through illness."
The England hockey team has been affected.
Crowds have continued to be thin at most of the venues but Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the local organising committee, said 125,000 tickets had been sold in recent days, promising full stands in coming days. Earlier in the week he suggested free tickets might be distributed to school children or the poor to fill seats.
The chaotic Indian preparations for the 19th Commonwealth Games sparked talk of a boycott of the event, which is thought to have cost between £3bn-£6bn to stage. Sunday's opening ceremony briefly allayed the criticism but a series of transport issues, technical malfunctions and problems with food have fuelled further negative coverage.
Distributing thousands of free condoms to athletes has been a tradition since the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. At the Sydney Olympics in 2000 athletes quickly used up the 70,000 free condomsprophylactics, forcing organisers to supply another 20,000, while in Athens four years later the provision was doubled to 130,000. At both the Beijing Games in 2008 and the Vancouver winter Olympics in February 100,000 condoms were provided.DESCRIPTIONS
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Items may be stretched to get maximum measurement
Slight discrepancies in measurements can occur
CONDITION
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All items are handmade / used / vintage. Expect wear from age and use. Descriptions will best describe and provide photos of heavy wear but if you have any concerns, please ask before purchasing. Returns will not be permitted based on a difference in opinion of condition.
STORAGE
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All items are stored in a pet free + smoke free environment. This does not guarantee items have not been previously exposed to these elements prior to coming to our shop.
CLEANING
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PACKAGING
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Items are well packaged in layers of protective materials depending on the type of item. Some orders are squeezed into tight packages to help keep shipping costs low but are always packaged with the utmost care.
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No warranty is applied to any item. All items are handmade, used, and/ or vintage and the shop cannot provide a guarantee that the item can withstand all further wear. Items will be sent in the condition described and any further wear will be the responsibility of the buyer - absolutely no returns will be permitted based on wear that occurs after purchase.
SHOES
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All shoes are vintage - aged 20+ years - and used. The shop cannot guarantee that they will withstand all future wear. Please note that glues can give and shoes can break. Shoes are shipped in the condition described in the listing. Any damage that occurs after they leave the shop is the responsibility of the buyer. Purchase at your own risk.
PERMITTED RETURNS
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If a return has been permitted based on gross misrepresentation, the buyer will be responsible for return shipping. Item must be shipped back within 2 business days of return approval. If the condition of the item has been altered - washed or worn - no refund will be issued and the item will only be shipped back to buyer at buyer's expense. All shipping charges are non-refundable.
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Shop will remain active while seller is on vacation. All vacation notices will be posted in the shop announcements section. If a sale is made during this time, the buyer will be messaged a ship date. If there are any concerns about an order, please message the shop at time of purchase.On Friday, Gov. Rick Scott, R-Fla., signed into law a bill to implement pro-solar Amendment 4, which Florida voters overwhelmingly passed on the August 2016 primary ballot after solar advocates launched a large grassroots campaign.
The implementation bill, S.B.90, recently passed both chambers of the Florida state legislature unanimously. According to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), the bill reduces burdensome state taxes on residential and commercial solar installations by exempting 80% of their value from the tangible personal property tax. It also exempts 80% of the value of a solar installation from the assessment of real property taxes for commercial properties; a 100% exemption already exists for residential properties, SACE notes.
“Broad support from conservatives, the business community, the solar industry, and environmental organizations brought together volunteers, an array of elected officials and everyone in between, in a truly non-partisan effort to bring pro solar Amendment 4 into law,” says Susan Glickman, SACE’s Florida director.
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) adds that S.B.90 also includes consumer protections strongly supported by the solar organization.
“This legislation will help Florida take its rightful place as a solar star,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and CEO. “The state’s market doubled last year, and we expect this new law will help Florida become one of the top five solar states in short order. We are particularly enthusiastic about the strong consumer protections in the legislation that provide transparency to customers and clear rules of the road for solar installers. We thank Governor Scott, Senator Brandes and Majority Leader Rodrigues for their leadership on solar and support for our industry’s growth.”
State Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, says that by signing S.B.90 into law, Scott has “answered the will of the voters.” Brandes adds, “I look forward to continuing our work to diversify Florida’s energy economy so we can live up to our title as the Sunshine State and lead in renewable energy.”
State House Majority Leader Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, says, “I am proud this legislation will move Florida closer to being a leading state for new solar jobs. We were able to pass a balanced bill that will boost solar in Florida while ensuring customers are protected, thanks to constructive input from groups like Vote Solar and Solar Energy Industry Association, who helped get this important legislation over this finish line.”
“Governor Scott’s approval comes on the heels of overwhelming support for solar progress over the last year. In August, nearly three of every four voters embraced the opportunity to move solar forward in the Sunshine State. During the legislative session, every lawmaker, on both sides of the aisle, delivered on that promise,” says Scott Thomasson, Southeast director for Vote Solar. “Governor Scott’s approval signals that Florida is open for businesses, jobs and private investments.”
Amendment 4 wasn’t the only major solar victory achieved through grassroots efforts in Florida last year. After passing that ballot initiative last August, voters also rejected Amendment 1, a utility-backed proposal, in November. A number of rooftop installers, including SolarCity and Vivint Solar, entered the Sunshine State not long after the votes last year, and now Sunrun says it, too, will be expanding into Florida.
Sunrun cites the show of state-level policy support for its decision, and the company says it will start its expansion into Florida by offering services and creating jobs throughout Orlando and Tampa this year.
“There is strong demand for rooftop solar in Florida, so we are thrilled to bring this affordable clean energy solution to homeowners,” says Lynn Jurich, CEO of Sunrun. “Rooftop solar benefits both homeowners choosing to take control of their energy needs and communities by creating new jobs and a cleaner, more robust energy grid.”
According to GTM Research and the SEIA’s U.S. Solar Market Insight Report, Florida’s solar market grew by more than 200% in 2016 while solar jobs surged 25% in the state. Florida is the 12th largest solar market and has the fifth most solar jobs in the country.With Barack Obama's presidential term winding down, there's a renewed push to convince the president that he should pardon Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked classified details about the U.S. government's surveillance programs.
This campaign comes, coincidentally, with the release of a new Oliver Stone film — a largely glowing portrayal of the fugitive — and a damning U.S. House Intelligence Committee report about his activities.
Three major human rights agencies — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Association — recently joined together to launch thepardonsnowden.org campaign, calling on Obama to pardon Snowden, who is currently living in Moscow, "and let him come home with dignity."
'Should be hailed as a hero'
"Snowden should be hailed as a hero. Instead, he is exiled in Moscow, and faces decades in prison under World War One-era charges that treat him like a spy," a message on the website states. "Ed stood up for us, and it's time for us to stand up for him."
Dinah PoKempner, left, general counsel for Human Rights Watch, listens as Edward Snowden speaks via video link from Moscow during a news conference to call upon Obama to pardon Snowden before he leaves office. (Mary Altaffer/Associated Press)
The campaign's supporters include actors Daniel Radcliffe and John Cusack, professor Noam Chomsky, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, musician Peter Gabriel and billionaire George Soros.
"I think we owe Mr. Snowden a huge debt of gratitude, because if it wasn't for him, we would never become aware of the massive scale of surveillance taking place by government intelligence agencies," said former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, who also signed her name to the pardonsnowden.org campaign.
Yet, despite this renewed interest and all the high-profile support, it seems highly unlikely that Obama will grant any kind of clemency to Snowden.
"Despite the current media focus on Snowden's case, the president hasn't given any indication that he's seriously considering it," said Jeffrey Crouch, an American politics professor at American University and author of The President and the Pardon Power: A Bibliographic Essay. "Obama has scrupulously avoided pardoning high-profile offenders. A Snowden pardon may indeed happen one day, but I doubt that this president is eager to be the person to grant it."
A polarizing figure, Snowden has been hailed as a courageous whistleblower by his supporters. But his detractors have branded him a criminal and traitor whose leaks, they believe, compromised U.S. security.
The White House has given no indication it's ready to offer Snowden a pardon, and has repeatedly said that Snowden's conduct put American lives at risk, and that he needs to return to the U.S. to face the charges against him.
According to the House Intelligence Committee three-page summary, Snowden, in June 2013, absconded with 1.5 million documents, perpetrating "the largest and most damaging public release of classified information in U.S. intelligence history."
Thousands of those documents, which were subsequently leaked to journalists, revealed massive domestic surveillance programs, including the collection and storage of U.S. landline calling records — times, dates and numbers but not content of the calls.
Critics of Snowden, including the committee, argue that most of the documents he took had nothing to do with domestic surveillance but instead related to military, defence and intelligence programs — information that could be used by U.S. enemies.
Faces 30 years in prison
Snowden has been charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. If found guilty, Snowden could face 30 years in prison.
P.S. Ruckman, a political science professor and editor of thePardon Power blog, said an important clue into whether Obama would pardon Snowden is the president's general record on clemency.
"That's the telling factor here," Ruckman said. "And I tell you what — if you're asking for a pardon from this guy, he's pardoned fewer people than any president since John Adams."
Obama has so far pardoned 70 people. Compare that to other relatively recent two-term presidents: George W. Bush (189) and Bill Clinton (396).
In a news conference at the Pentagon last month, Obama said that by the end of his term his pardon record would be "roughly in line with what other presidents have done."
Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency. He stole over 1.5 million documents and subsequently leaked thousands of files, exposing massive domestic surveillance programs being conducted by the agency. (Patrick Semansky/Associated Press)
During his presidency, Obama has instead focused on commuting sentences, mostly for non-violent drug offenders. (The White House, on its website, indeedboasts that Obama has commuted more sentences than the previous 10 presidents combined.).
"No one's expecting some waterfall of pardons, much less controversial pardons," said Ruckman. "I mean, no way, I just don't see that happening."
'Would poison the well'
Most of the sentences Obama commutes are below the radar, but the potential for controversy is still there, Ruckman said.
Obama wants to continue with his commutations but "he doesn't want to screw it up by throwing in a Snowden pardon. It would poison the well," Ruckman said.
A president has the power to pardon anyone accused of federal criminal acts (with the exception of someone who has been impeached) for any reason, or no reason at all. The pardon can also be applied before a case, during a case or after conviction.
Seeking a pardon is a complicated and bureaucratic process. An individual would apply to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, who then contacts the judge and prosecuting attorney related to the case. The application then goes to the FBI for a background check, back to the pardon attorney, who then makes a recommendation to the deputy attorney general. Then a recommendation is made to the White House counsel before it ends up on the president's desk.
President Barack Obama has so far pardoned 70 people, focusing instead on commuting the sentences on non-violent drug offenders. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)
But for a high-profile case like Snowden's, the pardon attorney may not even be consulted, according to one former U.S. pardon attorney.
"That kind of a case, a foreign policy case... traditionally those are handled elsewhere in the Department of Justice," Margaret Love said.
Ruckman said Snowden doesn't seem to be offering anything too substantial to justify a pardon, like information he may have obtained while in Russia. Instead, his case rests on his belief that his intentions were noble.
"I think if you're the president and the Department of Justice, if anything, you're going to say 'What do you have to give us? If you have something to give us then we can talk turkey.'"
But Cavoukian said she's holding out hope that Obama, possibly on the last day of his presidency, will issue Snowden a pardon.
"I'm just praying for this outcome — but the odds are against me."SEAN HANNITY: ‘Unhinged’ Al Franken Harassed Me — Security Was Forced To Step In (AUDIO)
Sean Hannity says embattled Democrat Senator Al Franken screamed endlessly at the Fox News host until security officers stepped in.
Here’s what Hannity told his listeners on Thursday:
“You know, I have an experience, look, obviously it’s not like what you guys went through. One day I went down to the green room at the Fox News channel and Barry Farber, who you know is one of the great radio pioneers and I went to see him. It was in the Hannity and Colmes days. I’m trying to have a conversation with Barry Farber and Al Franken is in there screaming at me and I’m like alright I don’t want to talk to you, I’m here to see my friend. Finally it gets to the point that I can’t even have it and I said alright Barry good to see you my friend, God bless you, give him a hug and walked out. [Franken] is screaming at me, following me and the halls of Fox are filled with security guys and literally he would not stop. They called the code and then security literally surrounded this guy.”
Franken is being accused of sexually harassing not one, but two women. Los Angeles anchor Leeann Tweeden accused Franken of kissing and groping her without consent when they were traveling on a USO tour in 2006.
According to Tweeden, “He repeated that actors really need to rehearse everything and that we must practice the kiss. I said ‘OK’ so he would stop badgering me. We did the line leading up to the kiss and then he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”
The second accuser is Melanie Morgan of Media Equalizer.
Yes, it’s true. I was stalked and harassed by Al Franken. I will have details @MediaEqualizer shortly,” tweeted Morgan.
https://twitter.com/MelMorgan1350/status/931221482671300609?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2017%2F11%2Fgo-second-woman-accuses-al-franken-stalking-harassing%2FMatthew Baron (pictured) has been cleared of assaulting his fiancee
A Cambridge PhD student has been cleared of assaulting his fiancee after he broke off their engagement when she had an affair in the Galapagos Islands.
Matthew Baron, 26, was accused of punching Sophia Cooke in the face and arm as well as smashing up her car radio using her iPhone.
A court heard he claimed the postgraduate zoology student had a vendetta to 'ruin him' personally and professionally and found Miss Cooke's version of events to be 'inconsistent and not credible'.
The trial at Huntingdon Law Courts in Cambridgeshire centred around an argument after Miss Cooke told him she cheated on him on the islands, just off the coast of Ecuador.
Baron, a palaeontologist of Christ's College, Cambridge, was alleged to have smashed up her car radio before breaking her smartphone into pieces.
He also stood accused of punching his postgraduate zoology student fiancee to the lip and arm and threatening her, as well as spitting at her face and mouth.
Corinne Saunders-Silk, prosecuting, said the incident took place at Fen Drayton Lakes - an RSPB nature reserve - on February 12 this year.
She told the court how Baron and his girlfriend became engaged in May last year but in December, she had visited the islands for part of her studies at the University of Cambridge.
She told Baron she had been unfaithful, which sparked an argument and caused Baron to call off the wedding and end the relationship, the court heard.
Miss Cooke, who grew up in Bristol, said she had 'ruined his life' because'she cheated on him', reports the Telegraph.
Describing the alleged assault, she said: 'I remember thinking I was going to die.'
Miss Cooke told the court: 'He punched me on the side of the nose. I fell onto my bottom.
'I put my hands up expecting to find blood and was surprised there was none. I could taste his spit in my mouth.'
Sophia Cooke accused her fiance of hitting her and leaving her with a split lip and swollen nose
Mr Baron, originally from Hartlepool and who lectures at the university, told the court he was 'devastated' after she broke the news to him following her six-week trip to the islands.
He said: 'I cried. I was heartbroken. I had really trusted her and loved her and I had just had this bombshell.
He told the court: 'She said, "If you tell anyone that I have cheated I will ruin you. I will tell everyone you have been a violent monster"', reports the Telegraph.
Giving evidence, Miss Cooke claimed she was left with a split lip, a swollen nose, a sore back and bruises to her arms and groin after the 'attack' by Baron - in which she said she feared for her life.
She claimed she was forced to climb up a tree to get away from Baron and, at one stage, even contemplated swimming across the lake to escape him.
However, she denied claims by Emma Hayfield, defending, that she fabricated the story to 'ruin' Baron after he said he would be calling off the wedding.
Taking to the witness stand, Baron denied causing any injuries to his fiancee but accepted lashing out in a moment of shock and damaging her car radio.
Miss Cooke told her fiance that she had been unfaithful on the Galapagos Islands
He claimed his fiancée was a 'fantasist' and made up the entire scenario to 'ruin' him both professionally and personally - adding: 'It would save her telling her family that the wedding was off because she was having an affair.'
Baron fought back tears as he told magistrates how the accusations had affected his life and his future career.
He said: 'My position at Cambridge is almost untenable. People look at me like I'm sub-human.
'Nine times out of 10 when a girl says a guy beat her up, it happened, but in this case that is just not what happened.
'She's actively tried to make it not capable for me complete my PhD. She has ran with this, and tried to turn everyone else against me. My friends and my family are the only thing that's got me through.
'This prolonged assault was entirely fictitious.'
During the trial, various character references in support of Baron were also handed to magistrates, and his college tutor Dr Helena Brown even took to the witness stand.
Dr Brown told how Baron was an 'exemplary member of the college', who was reliable, trustworthy, and extremely well liked.
She added: 'He is an outstanding academic scholar. He is also a popular and an inspiring teacher to our undergraduate students in Cambridge.
'During Matthew's time as captain of the college football club, he has made significant efforts to raise awareness of gender awareness and equal opportunities for female students.
He was yesterday cleared of assault but was convicted of criminal damage after smashing her car radio.
Following the one-day trial, magistrates handed Baron a conditional discharge of 12 months. He was also ordered to pay £620 in court costs, which included £300 in compensation. Miss Cooke will not face any criminal charges.Goofs
According to the canon of modern vampire stories, the scene where Abby comes in uninvited and begins to bleed to death shouldn't have happened: Owen had already invited her into the apartment in a previous scene, and if a vampire is invited in once they never have to be invited again. But this detail is a relatively new addition to vampire lore, and only applies to specific depictions. Historical mythologies have stated that all supernatural beings are unable to enter a house unless they are invited, but the first novel about vampires ('The Vampyre', John William Polidori, 1819) did not mention this requirement, which was first applied to vampires in 'Dracula' ( Bram Stoker, 1897) - but permission was required each time the vampire entered the house. Modern vampire stories in television and film ( True Blood Buffy the Vampire Slayer ) changed this requirement, such that permission to enter need only be granted once. In 'Let Me In' (and in the source novel and film), permission must be granted every time. See moreThe FDIC has a big problem on its hand. Some would say it is a too big to fail problem. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation looks over 8,000+ banks and protects the deposits at these banks. Yet this seemingly large number is merely a front for where the assets are congregated. The top 4 banks of Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citibank make up 55 percent of all banking assets. This number is absolutely large. FDIC backed institutions have $13 trillion in total assets. Even yesterday as Wall Street demonstrated the dangers of concentrated power in a few big investment banks, rumors were flying around that some of the bigger banks made sizeable gains in their trading portfolios. This brings up many questions for average Americans who are under the impression that their bank is actually keeping their money safe and sound instead of placing major bets |
ilitated”. The vice minister of land and resources, Wang Shiyuan, said that much of the contaminated land is in grain-producing areas.
According to state media this accounts for approximately 2% of China’s total farmland. The environmental protection ministry has estimated that 12 million tonnes of grain are polluted by heavy metals every year.
Concerns among the Chinese public have been growing in recent years over the extent of soil pollution caused by overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and contamination by heavy metals from industry. While soil pollution is more difficult to verify and tackle than other forms of pollution, there have been frequent reports of incidents. In May 2013, it was reported that rice grown in China’s central Hunan province was found to be contaminated with cadmium.
Soil pollution such as air and water pollution is becoming more widely discussed and there is increasingly more open debate within state media. Earlier this month, the 21st Century Business Herald, a business newspaper in China, called for a database on soil pollution to be made public and said that people had been “kept in the dark about the serious health threat for too long.”Taco Bell says it will crack nothing but cage-free eggs at its 6,000 U.S. locations by 2017.
The fast food chain said the announcement comes after "several years of planning."
Changing up supply chains to offer ingredients customers consider healthier and more sustainable is a popular trend in the fast food industry.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, both of which are Yum Brands (YUM) chains, have also committed to removing artificial ingredients. Taco Bell said Monday it plans to finish that switch by the beginning of 2016.
"Ingredient transparency is more important than ever to the next generation of Taco Bell customers," Taco Bell executive Liz Matthews said.
In September, McDonald's (MCD) said it will switch to cage-free eggs at its 16,000 U.S. and Canadian restaurants over 10 years.
And Burger King, owned by Restaurant Brands International (QSR), committed in 2012 to switching its egg supply within five years.
Food companies, including Kellogg (K) and General Mills (GIS), have also promised to convert to using only eggs from hens with access to open spaces.
There is no formal definition of cage-free. Some products with that label may come from hens that have very limited access to the outdoors or live in overcrowded spaces.
But animal-rights activists have celebrated the announcements because uncaged chickens can still "engage in natural behaviors."
Taco Bell's decision "will quickly improve the lives of countless animals and further cement the future of egg production as being one without cages," Josh Balk, the Humane Society's director of food policy, said Monday.Actually, Naysayers, Change Is Inevitable
Sooner or later, every urban reformer is confronted with some local leader or newspaper commenter who rejects ideas to improve the way cities work, on the grounds that, essentially, cities don’t work that way now.
Today on the Streetsblog Network, Steve Patterson at Urban Review STL summarizes this phenomenon nicely:
The phrase “the reality is…” is often followed by statements reinforcing the status quo. This is usually presented as a rational perspective, but I see it as justification for not rocking the boat. Those who take this approach dismiss those of us who vision something other than what we have now as merely academic exercises. Take downtown as one example. A dozen years ago these same types said things like “the reality is…” “downtowns are dead”
“if people wanted lofts the market would’ve responded”
“Sure people want lofts in NYC or Chicago, but St. Louis isn’t either of those” These naysayers are excellent at explaining why the rest of us can’t reach our visions, freely giving every reason why what we want won’t possibly work. They keep saying these things even when others get together and find ways to do things differently. Smart money is in the suburbs, they’d say. But things change. Downtown, and urban neighborhoods, are still getting investment while many suburban areas struggle.
Change, as they say, is the only constant, and people who seek to halt or deny often end up on the wrong side of history.
Elsewhere on the Network today: Stop and Move writes that the Frenso Bee’s recent investigation of pedestrian deaths is mostly an exercise in shamelessly blaming the victims. Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space reports that Nantucket is seeking ways to reduce car traffic and preserve the quality of life that has made it a tourism destination. And Boston Biker shares a video from the Detroit Art Show, where a group of art students crashed the proceedings riding phantom bicycles.Patients with mental as well as physical illnesses are hard to treat. The Show-Me State has figured out a better, cheaper way, using funds from Obamacare. Will Republicans in Washington kill it?
Theo Welling Theo Welling
About a decade ago, Pat Powers’s life began to spin “out of control,” as she puts it. Powers, a soft-spoken Missouri native, was stressed out from working at Walmart and two other part-time jobs to make ends meet. She was also suffering from diabetes and severe anxiety and depression. She found her way to Crider Health Center, in St. Charles, Missouri, west of St. Louis, a federally funded community health facility that provides a host of physical and mental health services to Medicaid patients like Powers, all under one roof. There, a psychiatrist, realizing that Powers could not juggle multiple jobs and hope to get better, got her onto disability as he worked to stabilize her mental health issues. A physician also prescribed medication for her diabetes.
Yet despite the treatment, Powers still couldn’t tame what she called her “nervous breakdowns”—emotional storms that left her seeking help in Missouri emergency rooms. While she fought to regain her emotional stability, her diabetes only got worse.
The problem was that the care Powers was receiving wasn’t well coordinated, and she wasn’t receiving the guidance and support she needed. Her psychiatrist and the doctor treating her diabetes weren’t communicating sufficiently, and no one knew whether she was taking her prescribed medications (it turns out that she wasn’t, at least not regularly).
The management at Crider, which is part of the Compass Health Network, was aware of the lack of coordination, and like thousands of health care professionals around the country, they were seeking ways to fix it. But like any facility trying to survive on Medicaid’s penurious reimbursement rates, the funding wasn’t available to do much more. Meanwhile, the lack of investment in coordination was, ironically, costing taxpayers a bundle. In 2011 alone, Powers racked up more than $10,000 in care, primarily in emergency rooms.
Powers is a member of a group with a dubious distinction: the “5/50” population, short for the 5 percent of patients who account for approximately 50 percent of the nation’s health care costs. These are people who typically suffer from two or more chronic, complex health conditions. (See Anna Gorman, “Home Remedy.”) Many are elderly. Some, like Powers, also have mental health issues that make treating their physical ailments especially challenging.
“They could be hearing voices, they could be in a manic phase and not be able to focus,” Pam Haynes, a nurse care manager at Crider says of her patients. “Some people don’t understand, for example, that a piece of paper they are given by a doctor is a prescription and that you actually take that to a pharmacy…[They] might go back to the hospital in three days and say, ‘I’m still having the same problem. What am I supposed to do?’”
Things began to turn around for Powers in 2012. That’s when Crider and twenty-five other community mental health centers around Missouri began to receive two years of enhanced federal funding to test integrated care for high-need Medicaid patients as part of Medicaid’s Section 2703, a provision of the Affordable Care Act.
Section 2703 grants help health care providers defray the costs of becoming “health homes”—that is, organizations that offer a range of carefully integrated services, including clinical and behavioral health care, along with supportive social services—care thought to be particularly effective for high-need, high-cost patients like Pat Powers. Crider used its share of the funds to, among other things, hire and train nurse managers to help patients set goals and guide their care. It also brought in integrated care managers to help all of the health home’s various care providers—and often outside social service agencies—work in concert for every patient. Those social services might include home visits, and support addressing tough issues like homelessness, unemployment, and social isolation.
In Powers’s case, health home care involved sharing information about her medications, hospitalizations, diet, diabetes management, and even employment and housing status. “Like a lot of my clients here, she struggled with basic things, like ‘What’s a carbohydrate’ and how to eat for her diabetes,” says Mary Puetz, the dietician on Powers’s team. By working together, the team helped Powers lower her A1C (a measure of blood glucose) from a dangerous 9.0 to a more manageable 7.4 (6.5 is considered normal) and her cholesterol from 210 to 172. “They helped me understand my depression and cope with things that I stress on, and they helped me with my weight control and diabetes,” says Powers. “Now I’m taking my medication…and I lost ten pounds.” They also helped her find a part-time job. Now, instead of showing up at emergency rooms, she shows up to work the buffet at a local restaurant. “I feel better about myself,” she says with evident pride. “I know I can handle any situation I come across.”
Missouri health care officials arranged for primary care doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and others to be located in the same building so that patients could have “one-stop shopping.” But putting these professionals under the same roof did not guarantee that they would work together. They were neighbors, but not yet teams.
The 2703 program is one of the many types of care delivery and payment reform buried in the ACA, and it’s been notably successful in improving patient outcomes while driving down health care costs in many states. Yet as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration try to make good on their promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare—ostensibly because of its high cost—the 2703 program is at no small risk of getting wiped out.
The idea of coordinating care for better results is hardly new. The concept dates back to at least the 1960s, when some pioneering physicians became concerned that ever-increasing medical specialization and the growth of complex chronic diseases among the elderly required a more integrated and scientifically driven approach to health care. These physicians organized the first large-scale health maintenance organizations (HMOs), in which primary care doctors would coordinate care in large, multi-specialty medical group practices that would be part of a system of hospitals, labs, and pharmacies. But the HMO experiment largely fizzled out, and numerous other attempts to encourage integration also failed to take off. One reason is that most health care payment systems, be they private insurance companies or government programs like Medicare, make it difficult for providers to be reimbursed for much of the work—like home visits and coordination meetings—that integrated care typically requires. Another obstacle is cultural: organizations are hard to change, and doctors, nurses, and other health care providers were trained to work in silos. The level of care integration—or “wraparound care,” as some experts call it—is a challenge to achieve.
Health care professionals in Missouri understood the need for integrated care, especially after a 2006 report by Joe Parks, a researcher and the current director of MO HealthNet, a division of Missouri’s Department of Social Services, showed that patients with serious mental illness were dying twenty-five years earlier than the rest of the population. “They were dying of things we could help with—chronic health problems,” recalls Nancy Gongaware, a senior vice president of outpatient health care at Missouri’s Compass Health Network, “but we needed to develop a new way of taking care of them.” Among other things, Missouri health care officials arranged for primary care doctors, dentists, and psychiatrists, along with social workers, dieticians, and others, to be located in the same building so that patients could have “one-stop shopping” for all their health care needs. But just because these professionals worked under the same roof did not guarantee that they would work together. They were neighbors, but not yet teams.
The opportunity to go further came when Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Missouri, under then Governor Jay Nixon, was one of the first six states to apply for the ACA’s new 2703 grants. Eventually, nineteen states, including the District of Columbia, would do the same.
Now, instead of showing up in emergency rooms, Pat Powers shows up to work the buffet at a local restaurant. “I feel better about myself,” she says with evident pride. “I know I can handle any situation I come across.”
For years, health policy experts have known that “a lot of the expense in health care comes from poor care coordination,” says Cheryl Damberg, who studies payment reform for RAND. The ACA established policies supplying billions of dollars that fast-tracked experiments in new and better ways aimed at comprehensive health care, while achieving savings through that improved care.
According to a review by the Missouri Department of Mental Health, the results of the 2703 grant program in that state have been impressive. The more than 23,000 Missourians who have received care under the health home initiative met or exceeded six of nine benchmark goals for disease management after the ACA-supported expansion. For patients with diabetes alone (America’s most costly disease, at approximately $332 billion a year), the number with controlled blood glucose levels rose from 18 percent to 61 percent. The percentage of patients with hypertension and cardiovascular disease who controlled their blood pressure went from 24 to 67 percent, and their good cholesterol levels soared from 21 to 56 percent. On the cost side, hospitalizations and emergency room visits for this group dropped 14 percent and 19 percent respectively. This saved the state $31 million just in the first year of the program, and the savings have continued, according to Natalie Fornelli, manager of integrated care at Missouri’s Division of Behavioral Health. In 2015, Missouri’s health home program won the American Psychiatric Association’s Gold Achievement Award for community health services. The program is now considered a national model.
If there is a downside to the health home initiative, it is that too few Missourians benefit from it. That’s largely because of the politics of Obamacare. While Governor Nixon, a Democrat, had the statutory ability to request the 2703 grant funds, and did so aggressively, Missouri’s GOP-controlled legislature adamantly opposed accepting federal Medicaid expansion funds under the ACA. As a result, 632,000 Missourians remain uninsured, including 40 percent of the one in ten Missouri residents with serious mental illness. That situation is unlikely to change anytime soon, unless Missouri’s new Republican governor, Eric Greitens, who replaced term-limited Jay Nixon in January, can convince his legislators to change course—an uphill climb at best. Last April, the legislature went in the opposite direction, passing a bill requiring Medicaid recipients to pay an $8 copay for any ER visit that is not deemed an emergency, or any missed doctor’s appointment. Former Governor Nixon vetoed the law in July. It will go to Greitens next.
At the national level, the fate of the 2703 program is also in doubt. It’s possible that, as Republican lawmakers in Washington and the Trump administration wrestle with the complexities of repealing and replacing Obamacare, they’ll conclude that failing to continue the 2703 grants will likely cost more in tax dollars than it saves, even as it would deprive hundreds of thousands of poor, mentally ill Americans the coordinated treatment that can save their lives. But, as Sidney Watson, a professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law and an expert on health care access for the poor, observes, Trump’s new Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, “has expressed a lot of skepticism about the Medicare and Medicaid demonstration centers.”
Still, the advances made at places like Crider Health Center are real and ongoing, even if, without more 2703 grants, they’re unlikely to spread to other community mental health centers. The improved care at Crider has certainly done a world of good for patients like Pat Powers. “Without it,” she says, “I wouldn’t be here. I’d be gone.”The twin sister of an Ontario girl who successfully underwent a liver transplant this week is expected to undergo the same surgery in coming weeks, doctors say.
Binh Wagner, whose twin sister Phuoc is recovering at Toronto's SickKids Hospital after receiving part of her father Michael Wagner's liver on Tuesday, is still in need of a suitable organ donor.
Both girls have Alagille syndrome, a disorder that affects internal organs, particularly the liver.
Dr. Gary Levy, director of the living donor liver program at Toronto General Hospital, said that more than 400 potential donors from around the world have come forward in recent weeks. He said many of the offers have come from within Ontario, but that people as far away as New Zealand have submitted their medical histories for review.
"We anticipate in the next little while, seven to 14 days, we will define several individuals who can step forward and be a donor for Binh, the second child," he said at a news conference Thursday morning.
While he declined to provide a specific timeline for when Binh may undergo the procedure, the medical team handling the Wagner case anticipates "it will occur in the next month, maybe earlier."
Twins Binh, left, and Phuoc Wagner have Alagille syndrome, which affects the function of their livers. One of the girls had a transplant this week, while a donor is still being sought for the other. (Wagner family/Canadian Press) Without a liver donation, Binh could eventually die from the disorder. The three-year-old is not in a life-threatening scenario right now, said Dr. Binita Kamath, a hepatologist at SickKids Hospital, who assisted with Phuoc's procedure this week.
Kamath said her medical team chose Phuoc to receive her father's liver donation based on the severity of symptoms she was experiencing and the degree to which the condition was affecting her quality of life. Wagner could not donate to both girls.
The Wagner family, from Kingston, Ont., took part in the process, but the ultimate decision was made by Kamath and her team.
'Courageous souls'
Both Phuoc and her father are recovering separately and are both in stable condition, Levy said. Wagner will likely spend at least a week under supervision at Toronto General Hospital before he can go home. His liver will regenerate to its full size within eight to 12 weeks.
The mother of the girls, Johanne Wagner, said she was overjoyed with the result of the procedure this week and the positive prospects for Binh.
Three-year-old Phuoc after coming out of surgery at SickKids Hospital in Toronto, following a liver transplant. (Wagner family/Facebook)
"I would like to thank the very courageous people who have come forward to volunteer to be live liver donors. That takes a lot of courage," she told reporters.
"I'm hoping once this ordeal is behind us, once Binh has received her precious gift, that many of those courageous souls will leave their names on the list and volunteer to be anonymous donors to all the people who are waiting for an organ."
Those people that have offered to donate a piece of their liver to Binh have the option to possibly be matched with another recipient if they are not chosen, Levy said.
Currently, there are about 1,500 people in need of a liver transplant in Ontario. Levy said that nearly 85 per cent of patients waiting for a donor at Toronto General die before they can undergo the procedure.Rome - Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) search and rescue vessel Bourbon Argos is currently navigating the northern coast of Sicily with about 700 people on board, towards the port of Reggio Calabria, where it should land Saturday early morning. Despite lengthy discussions with Italian authorities and efforts by the Italian Coastguards, the Bourbon Argos was not authorised to disembark the 700 migrants in Sicily due to lack of capacity of the reception system.
On Wednesday 15 July the Bourbon Argos rescued 678 people from six different boats and received one more patient transferred for medical reasons from an Italian Coastguards vessel. Among the migrants rescued were people from Bangladesh, Cote d'Ivoire, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Somalia.
“The MSF team has worked round the clock and has provided care to those needing medical attention. The vessel is completely overcrowded and the migrants are staying on the deck in a very limited space,” says Alexander Buchman, MSF coordinator on the Bourbon Argos. “For the last 24 hours this has caused tensions between the people and posed serious security concerns aboard the vessel.”
Despite good coordination with the Italian Coastguards and all the efforts done by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC), Italian authorities did not authorise the Bourbon Argos to disembark in any of the Sicilian ports due to lack of capacity of the reception system. On Thursday evening, MSF was finally given permission to disembark 150 migrants out of the 700 in the port of Trapani, on the Western coast of Sicily. However, MSF decided not to proceed with a partial disembarkation as in such an overcrowded environment it could pose serious security risks. Many of the people on board expressed their fear of being “brought back to Libya” and the situation on board was already extremely tense.
Only seven patients who needed urgent medical attention were disembarked, together with their family relatives. Two cases were particularly serious: an adult female, transferred from the Italian coastguard vessel, suffered from hypertension and hypovolemia with abdominal pain, and needed urgent medical hospitalization; and a 12-month child with pneumonia, fever and dyspnea, to whom MSF provided antibiotic treatment, needed urgent hospitalisation for further diagnosis and treatment.
“For two days, we have been trying to understand where we would be allowed to land, coordinating and working round the clock with the Italian Coastguards, while having to maintain an acceptable level of security on board,” adds Buchman. “This caused serious security risks aboard the vessel and forced 700 people in distress to spend two entire nights on the deck in very difficult conditions.”
On Friday morning, after lengthy negotiations, the Bourbon Argos was directed to the port of Messina, Eastern Sicily. This decision was eventually changed a few hours later and the final destination is now Reggio Calabria. The Bourbon Argos is currently navigating the northern coast of Sicily – so as to keep the Italian shores in sight and not feed fears among the migrants on board – and is due to arrive to Reggio Calabria on Saturday morning early.
“The lack of preparedness of the Italian reception system is having very concrete consequences that we are seeing first hand,” adds Loris De Filippi, President of MSF Italy. “We are in July, and the arrivals are not likely to stop anytime soon, so this problem has to be addressed now. Concretely, the Ministry of Interior has to allow disembarkation in the closest Sicilian ports in order to allow vessels to return as quickly as possible to the search and rescue zone to carry out further rescues.”Do you know your favorite Cubs player's walk-up music?
A walk-up song says a lot about the player as he strides to the plate. It reflects his personality, establishes his presence at the plate and, maybe, even inspires some baseball heroics. In other words, walk-up songs are not chosen lightly.
As the Cubs hunker down for their postseason run, we've curated a Spotify playlist of the music they've chosen to soundtrack their October. You can jam out just like you're there with them on the North Side:
But Chicago's not the only team searching for a championship title. To listen to other postseason teams' walk-up music, follow MLB on Spotify here:
And you can test yourself: How well do you know the Cubs' tunes? The players have carefully chosen their walk-up songs (or, in some cases, the pitchers have chosen their mound music). But have you been carefully listening?
Check out the full list of Cubs' walk-up music below:
Jake Arrieta: Super Duper - "Angela" (Mound), Slightly Stoopid - "2 AM" (Plate), Major Lazer - "Lean On" (Bullpen)
Albert Almora Jr.: Jacob Forever - "Hasta que se Seque Malecon", "Classic Man" - Jidenna, "So Fresh, So Clean" - Outkast
Javier Baez: Snow - "Informer", Farruko - "Visionary"
Kris Bryant: Kris Kross - "Warm It Up"
Trevor Cahill: Limp Bizkit - "N 2 Gether Now"
Aroldis Chapman: Rage Against the Machine - "Wake Up"
Chris Coghlan: "Stone Cold Steve Austin Entrance Song", "Hulk Hogan Entrance", "Break the Walls Down (Chris Jericho Entrance)"
Willson Contreras: Victor Manuelle - "Que Suenen Los Tambores", Omega - "Chambonea", Tambor Urbano - "Leo Leo Lee"
Carl Edwards, Jr.: Notorious B.I.G. - "Big Poppa"
Dexter Fowler: Drake - "Jumpman", James Brown - "Doing It to Death (Gonna Have a Funky Good Time)", Kanye West - "Fade"
Tim Federowicz: The Notorious B.I.G. ft. Ja Rule - "Old Thing Back", 50 Cent - "If I Can't", Drake - "6 Man"
Justin Grimm: Brantley Gilbert - "Take It Outside", The Who - "Baba O'Riley", Flo Rida - "GDFR"
Jason Hammel: Pearl Jam - "Alive"
Kyle Hendricks: Aerosmith - "Sweet Emotion"
Jason Heyward: Kungs vs, Cookin' On 3 Burners - "This Girl", Travis Scott - "Through the Late Night", Rick Ross ft. Kanye West - "Sanctified"
Munenori Kawasaki: Crazy Design - "El Teke Teke"
Tommy La Stella: Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons - "December, 1963 (Oh What a Night!)"
John Lackey: Garth Brooks - "Friends in Low Places"
Jon Lester: Jason Aldean - "We Were Here" (Mound), Jake Owen - "Barefoot Blue Jean Night" (Plate), Justin Moore - "Rebel Kids" (Plate)
Miguel Montero: Ricky Martin - "La Mordidita"
Mike Montgomery: Lupe Fiasco - "The Show Goes On", The White Stripes - "Seven Nation Army"
Anthony Rizzo: Martin Solveig, GTA - "Intoxicated", Brett Eldredge - "Drunk on Your Love", Taylor Swift - "Bad Blood"
Hector Rondon: Chino y Nacho - "Tu Me Quemas"
David Ross: Jay-Z ft. Mr Hudson - "Forever Young", Tone Loc - "Funky Cold Medina"
Addison Russell: Chance the Rapper - "No Problem", Joey Bada$ - "Devastated", Audio Push, Lil Wayne - "Space Jam"
Jorge Soler: Snap! - "The Power", Future - "Wicked"
Pedro Strop: Dioli - "Penelope (Ella Me Dice)", Secreto 'El Famoso Biberon' - "De Amor Nadie Se Muere", El Alfa - "No Hay Forma"
Travis Wood: Justin Moore - "How I Got to Be This Way"
Ben Zobrist: Julianna Zobrist - "Alive"LONDON (Reuters) - World governments have failed to meet a 2010 target to halt biodiversity loss and action must be taken to preserve the species and ecosystems upon which human life depends, a United Nations report said on Monday.
In a move endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly, more than 190 countries committed in 2002 to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.
But the report said: “There are multiple indications of continuing decline in biodiversity in all three of its main components — genes, species and ecosystems.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: “The consequences of this collective failure, if it is not quickly corrected, will be severe for us all.”
Natural habitats in most parts of the world are shrinking and nearly a quarter of plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction, said the Global Biodiversity Outlook-3 report.
The abundance of vertebrate species fell by nearly a third between 1970 and 2006 and crop and livestock genetic diversity is declining in farming.
“Biodiversity underpins the functioning of the ecosystems on which we depend for food and fresh water...Current trends are bringing us closer to a number of potential tipping points that would catastrophically reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide these essential services,” said Ban.
The report said there had been significant progress in slowing the rate of loss for tropical forests and mangroves in some regions. But freshwater wetlands, sea ice habitats, salt marshes and coral reefs all show serious decline.
FOOD, WATER, MEDICINE
“Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The report said climate change, pollution, habitat change, overexploitation and invasive alien species were the five main drivers of biodiversity loss and warned the provision of food, medicine, fresh water and crop pollination could be at risk.
The report, based on the work of 110 national reports, also highlighted areas where the 2010 target had prompted action.
It said more protected areas on land and in coastal waters had been created and conservation efforts had targeted some species. At least 31 bird species would have become extinct in the past century without them.
Some 170 countries now had national action plans.
“This suggests that with adequate resources and political will, the tools exist for loss of biodiversity to be reduced at wider scales,” it said.
An international meeting in Nagoya, Japan, in October will consider goals for the next decade.
The U.N. Environment Programme said a lack of economic value attached to the multi-trillion-dollar benefits provided by ecosystems had contributed to the loss of biodiversity.
It said restructuring of the global economy after the financial crisis provided an opportunity to introduce regulation and market incentives to help stem the losses.
(Editing by Angus MacSwan)Jeb Bush apologized to top donors Wednesday, acknowledging the failures of his now suspended presidential campaign.
The former Florida governor joined members of his national finance team in a conference call, according to the Hill. “I’m sorry that it didn’t turn out the way I intended when I launched the campaign,” Bush said. At one time, Bush’s war chest of campaign donations was over $100 million.
He admitted that running as a “reform-minded conservative” wasn’t enough to secure the Republican nomination in 2016. Much of Bush’s campaign was overshadowed by the rise of billionaire Donald Trump, who has energized the GOP base with his firebrand rhetoric.
“The reality is we’ve had a year of disruption, a year of outsiders making a compelling case to people who are deeply disaffected and angry,” Bush said. “I just didn’t get the breakthrough I needed in early states and felt it was important to not move on without a clear path to winning.”
Bush talked highly of his campaign experience, but still took an opportunity to knock at the press. He said he was happy to be off of the trail and that he would enjoy spending time with his wife Columba back home in Miami, the Hill reports.
“I was amazed at the press coverage of the campaign and lack of reality to how I felt the campaign was,” Bush said. “To me, it was an incredible joy and incredible honor and privilege to be a candidate for president.”
Who his large donor base will throw their support behind in the race has been a question since he dropped out after a defeat in the South Carolina primary. Bush, however, did not endorse a candidate Wednesday.
Contact us at editors@time.com.The Houston Dash have offered new player agreements to 10 players and has exercised options on seven players following the 2017 NWSL season, the club announced today.
Federation players, which include forwards Carli Lloyd with the U.S. Women’s National Team; and Janine Beckie and Nichelle Prince with the Canadian Women’s National Team, will remain on the Dash roster.
The club also announced that it would not exercise the option on Kelly Conheeney and she will now enter the NWSL Re-Entry Wire. The league announced earlier today the full details on how teams can claim a player on the re-entry wire within a 24-hour period that will end on Tuesday.
The status for the players on the 2017 active roster can be found below.
Option Exercised: Bruna Benites, Jane Campbell, Meghan Cox, Claire Falknor, Andressinha, Kristie Mewis, Janine Van Wyk
Extended new contract offer: Poliana Barbosa, Amber Brooks, Rachel Daly, Sarah Hagen, Caity Heap, Bianca Henninger, Cami Levin, Kealia Ohai, Cami Privett and Cari Roccaro
Placed on Re-Entry Wire: Kelly Conheeney
Federation Players: Janine Beckie, Carli Lloyd and Nichelle PrinceIn speech honouring Margaret Thatcher, former Australian PM says instinct to ‘love your neighbour’ is ‘leading much of Europe into catastrophic error’
Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has called on Europe to take on Australia’s border security policies or risk “catastrophic error” and urged Western nations to “stand up for ourselves”.
In his first major speech since being forced out, Abbott said Europe should close its borders to migrants.
“The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in,” he said.
Delivering the second Margaret Thatcher Lecture at London’s Guildhall, Abott said the invitationwas evidence that there was “at least a hint of Thatcherism about my government in Australia”.
Tony Abbott's Margaret Thatcher speech: 'Now I'm at a bit of a loose end …'Read more
He used the speech to reinforce his government’s legacy. He listed stopping the boats, budget repair, the removal of the carbon tax, the royal commission into trade union corruption, free trade agreements and “calling out” Vladimir Putin on the downing of MH17 as his key achievements.
But his main message to London and Europe centred on border security and the assertion of Western civilisation. Abbott urged Europe to emulate Thatcher’s style, because Thatcher shaped the world rather than passively responding to events.
“Her focus, were she still with us, would be the things of most consequence, managing the nation-changing, culture-shifting population transfers now impacting on Europe; winning the fight in Syria and Iraq which is helping to drive them; and asserting Western civilisation against the challenge of militant Islam.”
Under Abbott, Australia adopted a strict border control system, turning away boats carrying migrants and refugees before they reached the country’s shores.
In his speech, Abbott, a former trainee priest, argued against the Christian tenet of love thy neighbour when it comes to asylum seekers.
“Implicitly or explicitly, the imperative to love your neighbour as you love yourself is at the heart of every Western polity … but right now this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error,” Abbott said.
Using arguments familiar to Australians, Abbott said that once refugees arrive in Europe and in Australia, they have crossed a number of borders and “however desperate, almost by definition, they are economic migrants”.
'People smuggling is a global problem, and Australia is the only country that has defeated it' Tony Abbott in London
“While prime minister, I was loath to give public advice to other countries whose situations are different, but because people smuggling is a global problem, and because Australia is the only country that has successfully defeated it, twice under conservative governments, our experience should be studied.”
Abbott said Australia’s border policies required “some force”.
“It will require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at our consciences — yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever,” he said.
“We are rediscovering the hard way that justice tempered by mercy is an exacting ideal, as too much mercy for some necessarily undermines justice for all.”
He added: “No country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself. This is the risk that the countries of Europe now run through misguided altruism.”
He also urged European governments to be vigilant with home-grown terrorism.
“Of course you can’t arrest your way to social harmony but home grown terrorism does need a strong response,” Abbott said.
“Of course the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t support terrorism but many still think that death should be the punishment for apostasy”.
He said Western countries needed the self confidence to “stand up for ourselves and for the universal decencies of mankind, lest the world rapidly become a much worse place”.
Abbott, who was a student at Oxford University when Thatcher was in office, has long named the former British prime minister as a leader to emulate, along with Ronald Reagan and John Howard.
Suggesting that some in the audience might be disappointed that his own prime ministership in Australia lasted only two years, Abbott named the events and policies he admired under her leadership.
Vale, Tony Abbott – both a unique man and a unique failure | David Marr Read more
Thatcher “refused to accept the postwar consensus that Britain’s great days were gone”, said Abbott.
“On the Falklands, she did not see an Argentine grievance to be negotiated, but a monstrous violation of British sovereignty,” he said.
“On council houses, she did not see a government service, but a neglected asset that would be better looked after by owner-occupiers taking pride in their own homes.
“She didn’t see unions protecting workers so much as bullying their employers into bankruptcy. She didn’t see state-owned enterprises as national champions so much as an endless burden on taxpayers.
“There was a moral dimension and an intellectual clarity that made her a hero to liberal conservatives everywhere rather than simply another successful politician.”A good Wi-Fi network is hard to find, but six Londoners were willing to pay the ultimate price -- based on the Terms and Conditions they agreed to, anyway.
In an experiment sponsored by security firm F-Secure, an open Wi-Fi network was set up in a busy public area. When people connected, they were presented with lengthy terms and conditions.
But to see just how little attention we pay when checking that agreement box, F-Secure included a "Herod clause" -- one that offered up free Wi-Fi in exchange for the company's permanent ownership of |
vessel, or COPV — most likely failed when liquid oxygen filled a void created when the vessel’s liner buckled, and breaking fibers or friction ignited and led to the rupture of the second stage.
The COPVs are immersed inside the liquid oxygen tank on the second stage.
The sudden explosion destroyed the Falcon 9 rocket and the Israeli-owned Amos 6 communications satellite already mated to the top of the launcher.
An FAA spokesperson said Friday that federal regulators have signed off on the result of the investigation.
“The FAA accepted the investigation report on the Amos 6 mishap and has closed the investigation,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Spaceflight Now. “SpaceX applied for a license to launch the Iridium Next satellites from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The FAA has granted a license for that purpose.”
The mission is scheduled to blast off next week from Space Launch Complex 4-East at Vandenberg with the first 10 satellites for Iridium’s upgraded voice and data relay network.
The launch is expected no sooner than Monday at 10:22 a.m. PST (1:22 p.m. EST; 1822 GMT).
SpaceX’s launch team conducted a static fire test Thursday — the same type of countdown rehearsal during which the Sept. 1 explosion occurred — with the rocket slated to launch with the Iridium Next satellites.
But Iridium’s satellites were not on-board the rocket for the test.
Ground crews planned to install the 10 satellites — built by Thales Alenia Space and Orbital ATK — on the Falcon 9 rocket inside SpaceX’s hangar this weekend for a launch attempt next week.
The Sept. 1 mishap was the second Falcon 9 rocket failure, coming about a year after a booster disintegrated in flight with a Dragon supply ship heading for the International Space Station.
Engineers traced the cause of the June 2015 failure to the same second stage helium pressurization system blamed for the Sept. 1 accident.
Investigators concluded a substandard strut holding a helium vessel inside the second stage’s liquid oxygen tank failed around two minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral. The helium tank broke free, destroying the Falcon 9 rocket and its cargo payload, including a NASA docking port designed to receive new commercial crew capsules at the space station.
SpaceX officials said the helium pressurant will be loaded at warmer temperatures in future countdowns to prevent buckling of the tank’s aluminum liner.
The latest version of the Falcon 9 rocket burns super-chilled “densified” liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants, giving the launcher a performance boost.
The FAA license approved Friday covers all seven Falcon 9 launches planned for the Iridium Next constellation, along with landings of the Falcon 9 first stage on a barge positioned downrange in the Pacific Ocean.
The $3 billion Iridium Next program aims to replace all of the company’s existing satellites, which were launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s and are now operating well beyond their design lives.
3G cellular services will be supported by the Iridium Next fleet, which will consist of 81 satellites, including spares.
The operational Iridium constellation requires 66 satellites — 11 spacecraft in six orbital planes — for global coverage serving more than 800,000 subscribers.
The Iridium satellites relay phone calls and messages around the world, bouncing signals from satellite-to-satellite for clients like the U.S. military, maritime and aviation companies, oil and gas operators, and customers in construction, forestry, agriculture and mining.
Email the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.Public Services and Procurement Canada insisted Friday that bonuses for executives responsible for the Phoenix pay system remain under review and have not been approved, after a department official said some involved in the project would get the incentive pay.
The official, speaking on background Friday, told CBC News that performance pay had been approved for some executives involved with the troubled payroll system.
But the department's media relations manager, Me'Shel Gulliver Bélanger, later contacted CBC News to apologize for any confusion and stressed that bonuses for the top decision-makers responsible for Phoenix were still under review.
Bonuses for some department executives have been approved.
In a statement sent to CBC News earlier this week, spokesman Nicolas Boucher said, "a decision was made by Deputy Minister Marie Lemay to process some PSPC executives' performance pay on Nov. 23, 2016."
"The amount of money given to executives will be posted on [the Treasury Board Secretariat's] website in the future."
The department did not say at the time how many executives were approved for performance pay. Gulliver Bélanger said Friday she couldn't confirm that those receiving bonuses had no involvement with Phoenix.
More than 80,000 affected
Since Ottawa launched Phoenix, more than 80,000 public servants have been underpaid, overpaid, or not paid at all.
Union officials believe the number of public servants who have experienced pay problems is much larger, as the 80,000 case backlog only includes employees who came forward with an issue before July 1.
To the frustration of union officials and public servants, the government has not released the number of workers who have experienced pay problems since that date.
The government has hired more than 200 compensation advisers to help resolve the pay issues, and has opened a call centre with more than 100 agents to field questions from public servants.
The government is reviewing the system's launch, and the decision on bonuses for some of the more senior executives will be delayed until that analysis is complete.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Lemay said she expected the review to be completed this spring.The Latest Call for a Gay Holocaust Comes From Kansas
In the latest of what feels like a sudden explosion of hate speech from the pulpit is a call for mass murder of gay people from a Kansas preacher.
The leader of the New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, pastor Curtis Knapp, told parishioners that the government should round up LGBT people and kill them, according to audio posted by the Good As You blog.
"'Oh, so you're saying we should go out and start killing them?'" the pastor asked rhetorically. "No, I'm saying the government should. They won't, but they should."
The statement comes on the heels of a call for LGBT concentration camps from pastor Charles Worley in North Carolina. That sermon followed one by another North Carolina pastor named Sean Harris, who laughed at the idea anyone could be transgender and suggested cracking the wrists of a son who acts effeminate — a statement he later claimed was some kind of joke.
Also making the rounds today is a cell phone video of a child being cheered on by his Indiana church while singing, "Ain't no homo going to make it to heaven."
The Human Rights Campaign quickly denounced the comments and the string of others like it, saying extremists were "hijacking" religion.
"These are extreme and brutal messages that do not represent the beliefs of most people of faith," said Sharon Groves, HRC’s director of religion and faith. "People like Charles Worley and the parishioners of Apostolic Truth in Indiana are falsely perpetuating the word of God and stand to do real damage to religious institutions in the process.”
Listen to audio and read the complete statement from the Kansas preacher below:
"And should be put to death, that's what happened in Israel, that's why homosexuality wouldn't have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversions, it tends to limit people coming out of the closet. 'Oh, so you're saying we should go out and start killing them?' No, I'm saying the government should. They won't, but they should. Say, 'I can't believe you, you're horrible, you are a backwards Neanderthal of a person.' Is that what they are calling scripture? Is God a Neanderthal backwards morality? Is this his word or not? If it's his word, he commanded it. It's his idea, not mine, and I'm not ashamed of it."Hey, guys!
Here’s a new DIY project for Easter themed toy photography. I made a pair of mini bunny ears for my Nendoroid. Even though I purchased Good Smile Company Nendoroid More: After Parts 2 years ago, I seldom use it for my collection unless I’m in a bit hurry to do a shoot.
Making this mini bunny ears is easy. The materials are available at a local craft store and our home. The fur fabric is a scrap piece of cloth from the past. You can ask fabric sellers about this cloth, there are different kinds from cheap to expensive ones. I wouldn’t recommend you to buy the expensive kind though. If you have a scrap of this cloth somewhere in your house, look for it first than to buy a new one.
If you don’t have a craft wire, use paper clips instead. Be resourceful! Make sure to watch the video to give you an idea.
More photos coming up this week!
***
Filmed with Sony A6300 & Sony A6500
Photos snapped using Sony A6500 with FE 50mm f2.8 MacroGuild Wars is a game that I’ve sunk an incredible number of hours into, and it still manages to hold my attention. I’ve decided to craft a realistic Fellblade Greatsword.
The Fellblade first appeared in the original Guild Wars, found as a rare drop only in the Underworld, Fissure of Woe, and other end-game areas. It has a distinct silhouette, and should be a relatively easy build.
In Guild Wars 2, the Fellblade is a reward you can unlock through achievements in the original Guild Wars. Also in Guild Wars 2, there is an Exotic, named weapon that shares it’s silhouette with the Fellblade, called “Lord Taeres’s Shadow”.
There are some design decisions I need to make to get this underway. The original Fellblade and this new Exotic Model are both considered one-handed swords, while the unlock-able GW2 Fellblade is a two-handed Greatsword. Also, all weapons scale in size depending on the character wielding it, from the three foot tall Asuran to the eight foot tall Norn and Charr.
First I have to decide on the model, and then the real-world size. In this case, functionality is the deciding factor.
The design will be based on the unlock-able GW2 model, but the size will be appropriate for an Asuran, while designed to be held with both hands.
I have some oak half-round made up for the handle. While this blade won’t be full-tang, the weld connecting the small guard, blade and handle core will be very strong. In this case, the blade will be 3/16″, and the guard and handle will be 3/8″ to help balance and give a the weld some geometry to attach to. Total weight will be over 9 lbs.
Getting the raw materials will be easy, but finishing up such large edges will be hard. I’ll want to invest in a new grinder, and the inside hook will be tricky, so I’ll want to develop a jig. Hopefully I can get this done this month!
CLICK HERE FOR PART 2=~=Also available on FimFiction!:Survivor Shy dA Gallery: [link] Survivor Shy FAQ: [link] Follow my Tumblr! (WIPs, other stuff):I also took way too long with this.It's about time I got a new update done, blame my laziness, I do. But at least this scene marks an important point in my progress, as it now allows me to pretty go wherever I please in the storyline and create a scene. But let's not forget the voting thing I started before I finished this. I've collected the tallies, and the winning option is Number 3: The Prologue option! This means that I shall begin working on the Prologue scene next, and get it out as soon as I can. Are you excited to have the Prologue finally coming? You should be. Option 4: The follow-up scene for 'Applejack' was only one point behind, so I'll most likely do that after I've made the Prologue scene.Anyway, this particular scene was a challenge. I resketched it a few times (which you can see on my Tumblr) because the early sketches were horrible. I'm hoping that this scene is very interesting, because of how much time I spent sketching it until I was happy with it. I enjoyed drawing Fluttershy, if only because I had the perfect excuse to draw a bellybutton on her (they're just cute when drawn on the ponies, okay?), and also have an interesting pose to work with. I hope to one day get good enough at drawing poses to not spend days merely sketching and reworking them, but baby steps.As for the write-up. I was honestly stumped on how to write for this scene. I knew what I wanted to happen, but it was a challenge to put it all together and not sound stupid, while also being pretty tired. I'm sorry if you catch any errors, and I'll fix them if you report them.Finally, be sure to tell me what you think! I use feedback as a fuel source, because fizzy drinks, chocolate milk, and Sunny D are seriously lacking in the inspiration department for me. So be sure to leave your comments below!The people who live up near the Hollywood Sign are often called NIMBYs for their fierce fight to block tourists from using public roads to access a public park. They've tried to convince Google Map and other navigation software to direct tourists elsewhere. They actively campaigned for a councilmember they thought would cater to their interests. But how often do you actually get to sit and listen to them explain, in their own words, why this is such a big deal? (Unless you go to a lot of community meetings or read their websites, that is.) Three activists each did separate interview with the Andrew Davis of the Millennial Project, who previously made a video on how hard it is for people to hike to the sign. The interviews are interesting, at the very least, evoking both a sense of empathy and a sense of, "Wow, you really think the Hollywood sign should be moved?" Let's begin.
Sarjane Schwartz has lived in Beachwood Canyon for 40 years, and she is one of locals who wants access cut to the Hollyridge Trail—that's how you get to the Hollywood sign—cut off to the public, according to Curbed LA.
In the beginning, Schwartz said she used to enjoy when people would come to see the sign. They would be from all over the world, and have pleasant chats, then go their separate ways. This would happen perhaps twice a week. In recent times, however, she says the sheer volume of people coming into her neighborhood has become unsafe. "Now there are 60, 70 people an hour," she said. "It's just untenable." She blames this on the commercialization and promotion of the sign, as well as the internet.
Tony Fisch, a 16-year resident of the Lake Hollywood neighborhood, doesn't like the Scenic Vista viewing area created by Councilman Tom LaBonge. Both he and Schwartz blame LaBonge for promoting the sign, and both campaigned for David Ryu to get the seat LaBonge vacated when he retired. Now, they're both expressing disappointment about Ryu's lack of action when it comes to shutting down various access points, and Fisch says he feels ignored by Ryu (Ryu is not texting him back apparently). Both address fire as a concern, saying that the narrow, winding roads are hard for fire crews to navigate, especially with all the traffic and tourists. Some of the roadways don't have sidewalks, meaning tourists are in the streets. Schwartz said she is frequently asking tourists to put out their cigarettes, and that some of them are hostile towards her. She also mentioned a lack of infrastructure, saying tourists knock on her door and ask to use the bathroom or worse, just go wherever.
Christine O'Brien, who has lived in the area for decades, says she prefers to take the historical perspective. In the 1923, 'Hollywoodland' was a high-end real estate development, and that's also what the sign, built as an advertisement for the development, read. In the '40s, the Sherman Company, who built the development, decided to donate the portion of land containing the sign to Griffith Park. The sign lost the 'land' part in 1949, as city officials wanted it to refer to the area, not so much the housing development. So, what she's saying is that this area was never meant to be a popular tourist attraction. She writes about the history of the area and her views on it here.
As far as solutions go, one big one for the trio is changing the access point to another area that has infrastructure, such as Bronson Canyon.
"We're not restricting anybody from using the park, we're just saying go through a proper entrance," O'Brien said, likening this issue to the way the filmmakers entered her home via a front door, not a window. One of her solutions, however, includes closing all unofficial openings, then moving the sign—perhaps renting it to Universal Studios or Warner Brothers.
"They could build a mock-up of the sign, take the letter H—which is a 50 foot tall letter—put it somewhere. Give them this letter, let them touch it and feel it, educate them on it, educate them about the sensitivity of the area. Get it away from this area," she said.Georgia Regents University is a mostly health sciences-oriented school located mainly in Augusta. Last week, this school with the wonderfully gloomy acronym GRU made news by managing to misspell the word “College” on 14 diplomas.
As The Augusta Chronicle reports, the small class of summer graduates in the Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences got diplomas which spelled the word “college” with three L’s: “Colllege.”
A student eventually spotted the error and alerted school officials. (It’s unclear if this student was one of the diploma recipients.) The erroneous diplomas have since been reprinted and distributed to the newly-minted graduates.
Pamplin College graduate Arianna Vazquez called the blunder “laughable,” according to The Chronicle.
“Maybe they should have more spell-checkers,” she added.
“Everyone makes mistakes, I guess,” said another graduate, Richie Iannacone. “I was disappointed, but it was a funny disappointment.”
School spokeswoman Christen Carter told The Chronicle that an unidentified administrator had misspelled the word on a computer template, leading to the slip-up on the 14 diplomas.
GRU maintains a bunch of academic subunits in addition to the Pamplin liberal arts college. There’s a medical school, a nursing school, a business school, etc. Tuition ranges from about $8,000 per year to about $45,000 per year, depending on what degree you are seeking and whether or not you can claim Georgia residency.
The school is technically new. It came into being in January 2012 when Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State University merged. The Georgia Board of Regents named the merged entity “Georgia Regents University,” a bland moniker which pretty much everybody can’t stand.
While the error is embarrassing, school officials at GRU can take solace in the fact that they are not alone. Back in January, the bookstore at Missouri State University (another relatively newly-named school, incidentally) gave away a few thousand bags containing the words “Missouri State Univeristy.” (RELATED: Incompetent bookstore misspells ‘university’)
A marketing team at Missouri State made the mistake, so the school was out $34,000.
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J. Christian Adams: DOJ using the law as 'a way to punish your opponents' [VIDEO][Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Ozy Frantz. I do not necessarily endorse everything it says, but I do contingently agree with a lot of it. Content note for profanity, social justice stuff, manosphere stuff, and graphic descriptions of sex. I trust that any debate this kicks up will be marked by courtesy and good manners on all sides, in a spirit of sincere collaborative truth-seeking – SA]
I. Introduction
A. What is the purpose of this post?
This is the Anti-Heartiste FAQ. It is meant to rebut some common beliefs within the “manosphere” about how human sexual interaction works. I am primarily arguing with the blogger Heartiste, as he is one of the most famous and influential writers within the manosphere, although I do briefly argue with other writers. I am also going to ignore the macro-level beliefs about how human society works, on the grounds that they are mostly derived from these micro-level observations about human sexuality and fall down when no longer grounded in them.
A1. What does Heartiste believe about human sexual interaction?
Men are primarily attracted to women who are young, thin, and hot; this accounts for approximately 90% of men’s criteria for dating women. The other 10% is femininity, sexual voraciousness, and non-promiscuity. Women have a dual sex drive, often referred to as “alpha fucks, beta bucks.” Women are primarily sexually attracted to “alpha males,” who are assholes, conventionally masculine, and popular among other women. When they are young and hot enough to hope to secure commitment from alphas or when they are ovulating and thus capable of having children, women pursue “alpha fucks.” Beta males are generally middle-class or above and do not have alpha male traits. Women seek betas when they are older or less attractive, or when they aren’t ovulating, in order to secure commitment and extract resources. Ideally, women want to get pregnant by alpha males and make betas take care of the child. There are also omega males, who are undesirable to women for any purpose.
B. I am Heartiste, and I don’t actually want to go to all the bother of reading this whole post, I just want to know what your characteristics are so I can direct ad hominem attacks at you properly.
I am 22 years old. I am 5’9″ and my weight fluctuates between 120 and 126 pounds. I have 32A breasts and a waist-to-hip ratio of.7. Pictures are available here. I have had 30 sexual partners. I am polyamorous, which means I openly and honestly date multiple people at the same time. I have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, social phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. I have a degree in sociology and gender studies. I am currently a camgirl, which means I take off my clothes and masturbate for money on the Internet. I live with my primary partner Scott; I am also dating Esther, who when asked to describe herself for this essay called herself a “sad weird fat girl with incredible boobs”.
I am a nonbinary trans person, but I was born with a vagina, a female-typical hormone balance, and as far as I am aware two X chromosomes. I currently possess all of these traits and will probably do so indefinitely. That means I am not a trans woman. I am heading in the totally opposite direction than trans women are. I cannot possibly be transitioning because of my autogynephilia, because if I were an autogynephile I would be like “wow, I fetishize having the body parts I was born with, this is incredibly convenient!” instead of being like “aaaaa! Get them off me!” There has previously been confusion about this, so I am making it as clear as possible.
C. You’re just one of those feminist game deniers who think sex differences don’t exist.
Nope! Actually, I am going to take this FAQ from the POV that game tactics all work exactly as stated by their advocates. What I hope to show is that even if you assume that Heartiste is totally right about his practical advice– if you should neg, qualify, do takeaways, send women ‘gay’ as a response to their text messages, and all the rest– his conclusions about how the dating marketplace works simply do not follow.
In addition, I do actually think that sex differences exist. I think that level of violence, libido, probably certain aspects of sexuality such as getting off on narrative versus getting off on visuals, and probably some stuff with emotions are all inherent, biological gender differences. I am not willing to rule out other differences nor to state that I believe in them.
It is a very boring prediction of feminist theory that the genders behave differently from each other. After all, if you divide children into two random groups and tell half of them to be courageous and half of them to be gentle, one half is probably going to be courageous and the other is going to be gentle. It is tiresome when people (both feminists and antifeminists) pretend that the existence of gender differences proves that these gender differences are not socialized. Over the course of this article, I will highlight legitimate gender differences which I think are probably social in nature rather than biological. Of course, all complex behavior has both social and biological elements: for instance, I will argue that women’s lack of interest in casual sex has both a biological and a social component.
II. Men
A. Beauty
1. Beauty norms have to be inborn on account of it feels like I have no volitional control over my boner.
First, by the time you have your first boner at puberty, you have already experienced more than a decade of environmental influence. You’ve learned a language, how to walk and use the toilet, fashion, how to maintain a conversation, what interests are approved of in your peer group. Most of those things are now second nature to you. Is it that impossible that you learned a sexuality too?
Second, environmental influence can make things happen that feel like you can’t control them. Music sounds good to you because you’ve learned how to listen to it (just think about your mom saying “that’s just noise!”) but it doesn’t feel learned that it makes you want to get up and boogie. Girls like pink because we’ve associated pink with girls (it was different as few as a hundred years ago), but try to argue with a six-year-old at a toy store. At the extreme end, PTSD is obviously the result of the environment– you need a traumatic event to trigger it– but flashbacks and hyperarousal often feel inevitable and uncontrollable. Indeed, many fetishes are obviously environmental in origin, unless one assumes that genes for fetishes for rubber, stuffed animals, and Catholic schoolgirls lay latent in the genome for tens of thousands of years.
2. But I and my friends all agree who the hottest girls at the bar are.
If I and my friends all went to a bar and started talking about who the hottest girl was, we would probably agree it was a girl with no makeup, a Star Wars T-shirt, and glasses. I suspect this is a sign that friends tend to be similar to each other, not a sign that beauty norms are inborn.
coughcoughtypicalmindfallacycough
3. Are beauty norms a cultural universal?
In China, women bound their feet, crippling them. Love poetry was written about the beauty of the “lotus foot,” which was as small as three inches, and the swaying way a woman walked. (See, for instance, this collection of Chinese erotic poems.) In Mauritania, women are sent to camps where they are force-fed tens of thousands of calories a day in order to become attractively obese. In Renaissance England, women painted their faces white with lead, poisoning them. Oh, and one for the gay men: in ancient Greece small penises were considered heroic and manly and large penises laughable.
It seems to me you have three options here. First, you can agree that beauty norms are to a degree culturally variable, including our own. Second, you can believe that a bunch of people crippled their daughters and wrote love poetry about how beautiful it is just to fuck with Westerners or something. Third, you can say that the Chinese were mistaken for a thousand years about evolution wanting them to get boners for girls with bound feet, and mysteriously 21st-century Americans are the only culture who has figured out the correct evolved sexuality.
2. Oh, so you’re one of those people who thinks that we only believe in beauty norms because the evil patriarchy is brainwashing us, and if we didn’t we’d think that every body is beautiful.
There are actually options between “all ideas of beauty are inborn” and “all ideas of beauty are socially constructed.” For instance, one could say that our ideas of beauty are the product of biology and environment working together. You know, the way every other complex behavior is.
I do think some beauty standards are probably inborn and fairly immutable. Symmetrical faces are not simply preferred in the US and the UK: Chinese and Japanese people prefer symmetrical faces, as do the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe. (In fact, the Hadza prefer symmetrical faces more strongly than Americans do!) This is some evidence that humans ‘naturally’ prefer symmetrical faces.
Another prominent example is waist-to-hip ratio. Initially, the evidence for WHR as a cross-cultural universal seems pretty slim. Kenyans prefer a.7 WHR, the same as modern Americans. However, Ugandans prefer a.5 WHR, significantly lower than Americans. Malaysians don’t care about waist-to-hip ratio, only caring about BMI, as do the Japanese. Hunter-gatherers seem to not care about waist to hip ratio. However, replications of the latter study suggest that when the hunter-gatherer preference for heavier women is controlled for, waist-to-hip ratio has an independent effect. I personally find the latter study incredibly interesting and think it has a lot of potential to save WHR; however, it has a very small sample size, so take it with all relevant grains of salt. Nevertheless, it provides some suggestion that WHR is culturally invariant. (I would also like to point out that “hunter gatherers like fat women, which confounds tests for WHR and attractiveness designed for thin-preferring Americans” is also a pretty solid point against the Fat Is Universally Hideous hypothesis.)
However, I think most beauty standards are the result of a more complex interaction. (Here is the wild-ass guessing with no empirical backing section.) For instance, men might be attracted to features that are familiar to them, high-status in their culture, or associated with their parents or other people they love. In Song China, women with bound feet are high-status; in modern America, thin women with large breasts are high-status, and thinness indicates other high-status traits such as wealth and free time to attend to one’s health. A similar origin produces wildly different beauty standards. Similarly, men might default to a certain preference– maybe they like brunettes– but this is culturally mutable– if they’re exposed to a lot of sexy blonde women and posters saying Blondes Have More Fun, they’ll start liking blondes. Alternately, the “sexy daughters” hypothesis (a variant of a Heartiste favorite, the “sexy sons” hypothesis): men want their daughters to be beautiful so they can get better mates, so they choose partners who fit the local standard of beauty.
3. Are pretty girls healthier?
Studies do not seem to have found meaningful correlations between rated facial attractiveness and physical health. While the second study has some correlations, they are small and fail to reach significance and are totally hyped by their abstract.
This is very odd, of course, because as I said earlier the evidence points towards symmetrical faces being a cross-cultural beauty standard. There are several possible explanations. Symmetrical faces might indicate health in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, but industrialized countries have improved health. (I believe one common hypothesis is that symmetrical faces show you aren’t infected by parasites.) Maybe humans like symmetry for other reasons, and that generalizes to sexual attraction. Maybe it’s some other cause (sexy daughters hypothesis!).
Alternately, maybe facial symmetry does indicate something interesting about health, but that’s confounded by all the other factors our culture has incorporated into facial attractiveness. This study suggests that current health and facial symmetry are basically uncorrelated, but facial symmetry is correlated with childhood health. Another study argues that facial asymmetry may be related to developmental instability, which is negative. This is interesting but tentative.
4. Does it make evolutionary sense for men to target pretty girls for casual sex?
Let’s think that you’re a man in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Human babies are extremely resource-intensive. It is generally not possible to raise a child by oneself: a woman alone will either realize this and commit infanticide, or risk both herself and her child starving to death. If you are engaging in long-term mating, then you are going to invest resources in the baby. However, if you’re engaging in short-term mating, you’re not. If your child dies, all the effort you put in and risks you took for the the short-term mating strategy are lost. Therefore, men ought to have evolved to be attracted to women with sufficient resources that they could take care of a child: women with doting and wealthy fathers, women with husbands, women who kicked ass so hard at gathering they could feed themselves and a child, women with unique skills at, I don’t know, flintknapping or shamanism or something such that people will give them food. Therefore, in the modern environment, men ought to be into rich or married women and be willing to sacrifice a considerable amount of prettiness for wealth. Only in long-term relationships should they begin to care about prettiness and whatever that indicates, since they can make up for lower resources on the part of the woman. Conversely, women who are engaging in short-term mating ought to be primarily interested in pretty dudes who will pass on good genes to their children.
I am not saying that this is an actually accurate model of how human evolution worked. I am just pointing out that this evolutionary just-so story is exactly as plausible as all of Heartiste’s evolutionary just-so stories and has opposite predictions, and that I feel like the reason that no one is coming up with that model is less related to plausible speculation about evolution and more about “shit, we have to explain why humans are genetically programmed to act the way I do.”
5. Is 95% of what men want in a relationship partner youth, beauty, and thinness?
Man, if that were true why do I keep getting hit on online by dudes who are uncertain about whether my sex is female?
(For the record, I continue to be female-sexed in pretty much every conceivable way. I just felt like I ought to repeat that, because of the amount of confusion in neoreactionary circles about the “what genitals does Ozy have?” point.)
But that is not really excellent evidence! It is possible that most of the dudes who hit on me online are Boner Georg who is an outlier adn should not be counted. (In fact, that is certain.) So let’s look at the studies!
If Heartiste had said that men are more interested in physical appearance, in general, than women are, I would basically have nothing to say here. That seems pretty much correct. However, there is an important difference between “men care about appearance more than women do” and “physical appearance is 95% of men’s criteria in selecting a romantic partner.” The latter is a much stronger claim and not remotely backed up by the evidence.
The most obvious way to find out whether men are 95% interested in physical appearance is to ask them. This study with an extremely large sample size found that men did rank good looks and facial attractiveness as more important than women did. However, across genders, the most important traits were all non-physical: things like intelligence, values, and communication skills.
On the other hand, it seems like asking people to rank their top three traits in a sexual partner is a strategy that will lead to a lot of social desirability bias. Surely if we examine studies that relate to social behavior– speed dating, correlations of attractiveness to how popular someone is among the opposite sex or how liked they are by someone they’re interacting with, experiments that manipulate the attractiveness of a stranger– we will find that the difference is much much larger. Perhaps 95%?
Oh, the sex differences are actually smaller in studies that examine social behavior. That’s awkward.
In fact, this unpaywalled study which examines speed-dating finds that there is basically no gender difference between men and women in how much physical attractiveness affects saying ‘yes’ to someone in speed-dating.
I believe the correct response here is “<3Science<3 has once again dropped to its knees and slobbered the knob of Ozy, vindicating the Ozyan observation that physical appearance is not ninety-five percent of what men care about, you dumb fuck.“
Interestingly, gender equality seems to make the gender differences in self-reported desire for a physically attractive partner stay the same, while it makes gender differences in self-reported desire for a partner with a particular personality go down. Which suggests that… men are biologically programmed to claim to be into hot women and not actually be? Or something? Very puzzling.
Again, I am not saying there is no difference between how much men prioritize physical appearance and how much women prioritize physical appearance! There clearly seems to be a difference. What I am saying is that it is not true that physical appearance is 95% of what men care about and 5% of what women care about. That is probably true of Heartiste, but that is not true of all men. I would like to thank Heartiste for making extreme claims and thus making my debunking of them easier.
B. Thinness
1. Aren’t all men in all cultures into thin women?
In addition to Mauritania and hunter gatherers, discussed above, I would like to discuss classical art. Heartiste has said that Rubens is a fatty-fucker so we’re not allowed to use him as an example. Fortunately, a feminist blogger has created a helpful “if classic works of art were photoshopped to look like modern magazine stars” set of pictures, from throughout European art history, without a Rubens in sight.
Now, to be clear, these women are mostly overweight or the thin end of obese. (The BMI Project has helpful examples of what overweight and obese women look like; most people think obese looks significantly fatter than it actually does.) They are not the sort of person that one associates with “fat woman.” However, Heartiste has been more than willing to call Lena Dunham, who is about the same size as those women, “a frumpy, dumpy, plumpy formless flesh entity”. In addition, he tends to use phrases like “the distended porcine holes of these beached whales” to talk about overweight women. So at the |
include even more cuts across our schools, hospitals, and the workers who provide the services Saskatchewan families rely on.”
READ MORE: Premier Wall announces plan to save 3.5 per cent across public sector pay starting with MLAs
With Forbes and McCall absent from the meeting, the board was unable to vote of the 3.5 per cent pay reduction for MLAs.
Instead of spreading the 3.5 per cent compensation reduction across the entire public sector, the NDP are demanding the government reduce ministerial bonuses by 20 per cent and reduce the amount of MLAs by five in the next election.
“Just yesterday, NDP interim Leader Trent Wotherspoon said the NDP would support the MLA pay cut,” said Jeremy Harrison, one of the Saskatchewan Party government members on the Board. “Now, the NDP have gone on strike to block this pay cut. It’s absolutely ridiculous. They need do their job and support this pay cut, which their Leader said they would do.”
In attempts to find a 3.5 per cent reduction across the rest of the public sector, Premier Brad Wall said Tuesday that the government would work with the unions through collective bargaining to find the savings.
This could be done through a variety of methods, including a pay decrease or unpaid days off.
Twenty-five of the province’s 40 collective agreements are either open or expire at the end of March. Current agreements will not be renegotiated until contracts expire.
“The Sask. Party is playing games and trying to pretend they are taking the same hit as everyone else,” said Forbes. “A 3.5 per cent cut for an MLA or a Premier who has been accepting tens of thousands of dollars every year in top up from his party’s wealthy out of province donors, is very different than a pay cut or jobs loss for a single mother, a senior, or a family struggling to get by. It’s wrong for the Sask. Party to play coy while attacking Saskatchewan people like this and we are going to stand for it.”
The base pay for an MLA in Saskatchewan is $96,183. A 3.5 per cent reduction would make the new base MLA salary $92,817.
Below is the letter that the Sask. NDP sent to Member and Corporate Services in regards to the 3.5% salary cut:Russell Brand is selling sweatshirts made in Third Word factories by workers earning just 25p an hour, it emerged last night.
The multi-millionaire comedian and self-styled revolutionary claims the company that provides him with the £60 sweatshirts sold on his website is ‘ethical’ and works to the ‘highest environmental standards’.
Brand – who claims to be an anti-capitalist who advocates the overthrow of ‘corporate tyranny’ – also promises customers that all profits from his merchandise go to charity and that he ‘doesn’t make a penny’.
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A certain style: Brand models a 'Trews' sweatshirt on his website
Claim: Brand's website says the sweatshirts are 'produced in the UK'
Counter claim: However, a label inside the sweatshirt reads'made in Bangladesh'
On his website he says they are screen printed and produced in the UK.
In fact, the plain sweatshirts are being made by impoverished slum-dwellers in Bangladesh who are forced to work long hours for very little pay.
Their 25p-an-hour wages are barely a quarter of the living wage and some receive as little as 10p for each sweatshirt they make.
Last night, politicians and campaigners called Brand a ‘grade-A hypocrite’, accusing him of double standards.
The Mail has discovered that those who make sweatshirts for Brand’s website work for up to 11 hours a day.
The starting monthly wage is 6,200 Bangladeshi taka (TK) a month, or around £52. This works out at around £1.98 a day, excluding overtime.
The minimum legal wage for Bangladesh is TK5,300 (£44.21) per month. That is far short of the TK25,687 – around £214 – which campaigners say is the minimum living wage.
Claim: The website says that the profits go to charity
Reality: Just £1.37 goes to charity out of a £65 purchase price
The workers are paid 4p an hour more than minimum payable by law in Bangladesh – a country known to have among the worst factory conditions in the world.
Factory workers told the Mail they work six to seven days a week and can barely afford to support their families. One worker, Nishat Begum, said her life comprises of little more than work and sleep.
She lives near a textiles factory in Bangladesh with her husband Hassan and their two young children in a one-room tin shanty in an impoverished slum area of Dhaka. Hundreds of colleagues live in the same area.
The couple both work a six or seven-day week, though the factory’s 6,000 workers are expected to work overtime if there is a backlog of work.
A bus picks them up to take them to the factory in Gazipur, on the northern outskirts of Dhaka, in time for their shift to start at 8am.
They are meant to finish at 5pm. But, they say, on many days they are told that they must continue working for four or six more hours, so that the factory can finish their work.
Brand claims all profits from his sweatshirts are reinvested in good causes, but the only one he names is his own cafe, in trendy Shoreditch, east London (pictured)
Nishat, 30, started out on wages of just £21 a month. Eight years later, she now takes home £56, but says it is a struggle to get by on so little.
‘I don’t know why I have only got this amount of increment after working for such a long time,’ she said. ‘But then finding jobs is hard here, so we have to compromise. At one point, they had promised us bigger rises. But it was just a promise.
‘A pay rise policy is absent. I spoke with our manager once but he said I must wait. I am still waiting. In the absence of a union, it is hard to get a manager to listen to one individual worker.’
Hassan, 42, works in another part of the factory. He joined at the same time as Nishat and now earns about £3 a month more than her.
‘It is a low wage. We know that the factory manufactures for big foreign companies who sell them for big prices, but what can we do?’ he said. ‘As small workers, we are powerless.’
Tory MP Conor Burns said last night: ‘This proves what we knew all along that Russell Brand is a Grade-A hypocrite.’
Andrew Percy, another Conservative MP, also described him as a hypocrite, adding: ‘Perhaps he should trade his millionaire lifestyle for those of workers in Bangladesh who get paid a pittance and live in appalling conditions.’
Poverty: Workers at the factory outside Bangladesh said they have to work 11-hour days for just 25p an hour
Family home: A female factory worker eats her dinner after a day making sweatshirts in the factory
This is the factory where staff described working 11 hour days for just £1.98 per day to make clothes
Anna McMullen, of the campaign group Labour Behind the Label, said: ‘Many garment-producing countries have minimum wages that are less than half of the value of a wage that is enough to allow a family to live with dignity.
‘Paying even TK2,000 (£16) more than the minimum wage in Bangladesh will still mean that families live in poverty.’
The scandalous conditions endured by Bangladesh’s garment workers was brought to international attention in 2013 by the Rana Plaza tragedy.
The eight-storey factory in the capital Dhaka collapsed, killing 1,134 people. Many were making clothes for large Western brands who take advantage of low wages to boost their profits.
Brand recently criticised multinational retail giant Walmart for failing to pay US workers the £16,500 minimum wage – 317 times the lowest wage in the Bangladeshi factory.
He complained that it was ‘hard enough doing them sort of jobs without shafting people for every single penny’.
Brand, worth an estimated £10million, explained in an interview that they included ‘the constant subjugation of the world’s poor, the outsourcing of manufacturing industries into the Third World’.
Interview: Brand, wearing a Trews t-shirt, interviews Ed Miliband
Pricey: The sweatshirts cost a minimum of £60 but buyers can choose to pay more if they wish
The Belgium-based company which manufactures sweatshirts for Brand, Stanley & Stella, has admitted it had problems with illegal overtime in the Bangladesh factories.
The factory's other clients include Next, Tesco and Sainsbury’s – exactly the sort of big name corporations Brand routinely berates.
Stanley & Stella insists its workers are paid more and forced to do less overtime than in rival factories
A spokesman said: ‘The most important thing that makes our business a sustainable business, it is that we commit to have continuous improvements pushing forward all kind of barriers.’
The company said it was working to reduce illegal levels of overtime at the factory and had ended contracts with other factories which refused to stop pushing workers into 90-hour weeks.
Industry regulator, Fair Wear Foundation, says the factory is one of the best employers in the country and pays more than other less scrupulous operators.
Since Thursday, Brand has been asked a series of questions about the sweatshirts but has refused to make any statement, instead referring all questions to his lawyers.
Last night his legal team admitted he did not know who his merchandise had been made by, where they were made, or by who.
Brand used a trendy London retailer called YR Store to produce the garments who the lawyers say is obliged by their client to be committed to ‘the highest ethical and environmental standards’ and had confirmed to him that they are.
Cutting costs: Bangladesh has the lowest minimum wage in all of Asia, which is why its factories are often selected by large Western manufacturers in order to cut costs
The lawyers say that not all the sweatshirts are sourced from this company and that Brand will investigate the conditions and ‘if the Mail’s allegations are correct,’ will ‘ensure that these garments are sourced in a different way.’
It is not the first time the anti-capitalist crusader has faced accusations of hypocrisy.
In December, having demanded more low-cost housing, he flew into a rage when it emerged that he lived in a £2million home in trendy Hoxton, east London, owned by a firm based in a tax haven while demanding more low-cost housing.
He angrily called a TV reporter a ‘snide’ for suggesting he was part of the housing problem because the super-rich buying up property in London were driving up prices for everyone else.
Despite demanding an ‘orgy’ of banker bashing, urged people to refuse to pay taxes and calling profit a ‘filthy word’, he appeared to have no problem with raising nearly £1million from wealthy capitalists including investment bankers to make a documentary about himself.
Investors were enticed with generous tax breaks to support the film, portraying Brand as a ‘troubled visionary’ seeking to change the world.Democrats are rejoicing. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delayed this past week’s planned vote on the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare. But liberals should hold the champagne. McConnell will be back. His entire political career — the meaning of 40 years of professional energy — depends on it.
Four years ago, HuffPost reporter Jason Cherkis and I spent several weeks profiling McConnell. We found a man with almost no ideological commitments. McConnell believes in power — specifically his own. He is a tactician, not an intellectual leader. His lodestar isn’t economist Milton Friedman or James Buchanan. It’s Niccolo Machiavelli.
And despite his reputation in Washington as a brilliant political mind, McConnell isn’t a very accomplished Machiavellian. He has no great federal legislative achievement to bequeath to future generations (or, at least, biographers). His major work to date is his title. After battling to become Senate majority leader, he now needs to decorate his crown. It doesn’t particularly matter which jewels he selects, but it will be a very sad crown without any at all. Repealing Obamacare would be a big sparkler.
If the dangers of government spending or socialized medicine keep McConnell up at night, his record in Congress doesn’t show it. The man currently trying to ram through a bill that would make health insurance unaffordable for 22 million more Americans used to shower his home state with federal funding for health care projects as a matter of routine.
For decades, McConnell poured federal money into the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era nuclear power relic that had become technologically obsolete by the 1980s. McConnell’s maneuvering kept it open, preserving a source of well-paid union jobs in southwestern Kentucky. When the workers came down with severe health problems from toxic exposures at the plant, McConnell responded by giving them free government health care. This isn’t a secret in Kentucky. He brags about it in campaign ads every election season.
He also secured dentistry for poor pregnant women, prenatal counseling programs and initiatives targeting heart disease, all on the federal dime. These were patchwork programs, only available in Kentucky. But no principled opponent of government health care could approve of them.
McConnell has taken the same federal-funds-for-me-but-not-for-thee approach to scientific and medical research, flooding the public University of Louisville with research dollars even as he backs nationwide budget deals slashing government investment in medicine.
None of these spending efforts are legislative landmarks. The University of Louisville has a shrine to McConnell at its library. The so-called Mitch McConnell Center for Political Leadership is full of photos of him with other famous people. It has a replica of the desk used by 19th century lawmaker Sen. Henry Clay and a placard stating how much McConnell reveres The Great Compromiser from Kentucky. But there is no Interstate Highway System, no GI Bill, no Medicare, no Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill to congratulate McConnell on.
McConnell’s largesse for Kentucky has been pragmatic, what he needed to provide to get into the Senate and stay there. His passion is the accumulation of political power. To what ends that power is to be deployed is a question for whatever coalition backs McConnell ― he is their strategist, not their theologian.
His first foray into Washington leadership came in the 1998 electoral cycle, when he chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It was a promising year for the GOP. Democrats were defending a host of vulnerable red-state Senate seats ― Arkansas, Nevada, Ohio and the Carolinas were all in play ― and Republicans thought they had strong odds in Wisconsin, Washington and California. McConnell raised over $37 million in soft money — a record at the time — and blew it. The Republicans didn’t add a single seat to their majority. In McConnell’s second election on the job, they lost five seats to Democrats and then ceded their majority in May 2001 when Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords left the GOP and began caucusing with the Democrats.
McConnell’s grand strategy of blanket obstruction under President Barack Obama couldn’t stop Obama’s re-election and ultimately ended with an earthquake in the Republican Party. President Donald Trump was elected on a platform opposed to free trade and tough on banks, obliterating the Republican economic message of the past 40 years.
Before Trump, Republicans generally liked free trade. McConnell had one asterisk on his anti-Obama opposition: He actually wanted to help Obama pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with 11 other nations. Yet even with a sympathetic president and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, the GOP leadership somehow couldn’t get it done. The weight of this responsibility falls more heavily on House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) than on McConnell, but it remains an impressive failure for the senator.
McConnell did steal a Supreme Court seat for Republicans by simply refusing to consider any Obama nominee ― a creative and risky maneuver. Justice Neil Gorsuch is thoroughly conservative and will influence American law for years to come. But that win was the exception, rather than the general pattern, and presidents receive much more credit for court legacies than senators do.
McConnell’s track record is just not that of a brilliant strategist. His reputation for genius rests instead on the ineptitude of his opponents.
After The Washington Post’s devastating June 23 report on the Obama administration’s mishandling of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Democrats may finally begin to see that their standard-bearer for eight years had some serious weaknesses in dealing with political opponents. Obama routinely gave in when it wasn’t necessary ― caving to the banks on foreclosure fraud, to Fox News and Breitbart on driving out Shirley Sherrod … and to Republicans on nearly everything during his first term. At the end of 2012, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) literally threw Obama’s “fiscal cliff” proposals on a fire, knowing that the president didn’t have to make the concessions to McConnell that he planned to offer. Had the fiscal cliff deadline passed, Reid and Obama might have enacted their own bill with whatever they wanted. Instead, Obama dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to hand Republicans a package of conservative goodies so he could call the agreement bipartisan. And McConnell racked up another “victory” off an opponent’s own goal.
So today’s health care battle carries greater significance for the Senate majority leader than for anyone else in Congress. McConnell still has no ideological dog in this fight. But he has to prove to his fellow Republicans that their faith in him is correctly placed. And he has to prove to himself that his decades-long power struggle hasn’t been in vain. He may well lose, but he will not walk away from a fight on which his legacy depends.Greetings, everyone! It's time for another episode of OurDailyPodcast. This week the co-host of The Solid Verbal podcast, Ty Hildenbrandt, joins us to talk about the BlackOUt and much, much more. Ty is a HUGE friend of the show, providing a lot of behind-the-scenes assistance, advice, and support as we worked to get the show off the ground and build a following. His friendship has been absolutely invaluable to us, and we're thrilled that he could join us for an hour (or a little more)! Without further ado, here are the show notes!
Oklahoma Blacked Out!
We jump right into the action this week with discussion of Baylor's 41-12 victory over OU. Ty takes his medicine.
Picks of the Week
With the exception of our game, Ty's the man at picking. He got all of the games right. Except ours. Which I tried to convince him why we would cover… He just wouldn't listen. That's too bad.
Bear Droppings! and Community Feedback
We only had two calls on That Good Ol' Baylor Phone Line, which is pretty much our fault. We didn't send out any requests until way late for calls, so you guys didn't have a reminder. But go ahead and save this number into your phones so that you can remember for next week: (774) 25-SICEM (257-4236). Then set yourself a reminder for like 9:30 or 10 pm Saturday. Then you won't forget!
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Seriously, if you haven't checked out The Solid Verbal, you really should listen to it. It's the podcast that is the benchmark for college football podcasts, and we're thrilled to have Dan and Ty as friends of this show. Give them a follow, and listen to their podcast if you don't already.
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UPDATE: Added a Poll question to the show notes for Targeting Penalty Discussion!ADVERTISEMENT
"I'd like to make it like Starbucks," says Talia Eisenberg, standing on the back patio of her new Manhattan bar dedicated solely to electronic cigarettes.
The bar, the Henley Vaporium, is the latest manifestation of the emerging e-cigarette trend. A 2,700-square-foot space nestled on the border of NoLita and SoHo, among pop-up art galleries and boutique clothiers, the Vaporium caters not only to e-cig users — "vapers" — but also to hardcore smokers looking for a healthy way out and casual curiosos eager to taste test vaporized gummy bears.
Electronic cigarettes are most commonly used as a substitute for the real thing, a tool for smokers to wean themselves off the traditional variety while still getting a nicotine fix. (There is a robust, ongoing debate in the medical community about the health benefits of e-cigs, though the consensus so far is that they're far better for you than regular cigarettes.) Yet as with any intoxicant, there's an entire community of devotees with a science fiction lexicon all their own — "e-juices," "Mods," "vapes," and "mAhs," or milli-amp-hours, to name a few.
"All different e-liquids have a different sweet spot where the temperature where it's vaped at, it tastes better," says Ed Beauvais, a 42-year-old architect, after explaining the intricacies of his USB-rechargeable, variable-voltage, 2,600 mAh Mod — a fancy, rectangular smoking device that lets a user adjust the vaping temp to his liking. "Everybody's taste is different. Everybody has a different place where they like to vape."
A former smoker, Eisenberg used early electronic cigarette models to kick the habit. But the proto-devices were long, clunky, and "didn't have the throat hit of a real cigarette," leading her to found Henley two years ago as a purveyor of more refined devices and, now, proprietary e-juice flavors. The Vaporium is her first brick-and-mortar extension of the brand, one she hopes will steer others into a healthier, smoke-free lifestyle.
Talia Eisenberg (center) enjoys a vape at the bar. (Jon Terbush)
There are 44 million smokers in the U.S. dragging some 7,000 chemicals from each cigarette, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those smokers, an estimated one in five have tried e-cigarettes.
Eisenberg's primary goal is to up that number, helping people quit smoking and generally live healthier lives. To that end, the Vaporium also serves cold-press juices, gluten-free cupcakes, and a fully vegan menu with items like kale salad. (Though there is no kale salad e-juice.)
The bar is more than that, though. In addition to luring people away from traditional cigarettes, it seeks to erase the e-cig's geek stigma and turn the product into a trendy oral accessory — think of it as a healthy, pocket-sized hookah bar.
The Vaporium, Eisenberg hopes, will "create a whole unique experience" around something that, admittedly, is "basically water vapor" with artificial flavors. I tried a Blue Raz Cotton Candy e-juice, which tasted, more or less, like a warm, airy freeze pop.
It's thus "forward-thinking" while also "Willy Wonka-like," she says.
There are no rivers of chocolate at the Vaporium, nor any alcohol, for that matter — booze apparently "doesn't fit with the concept." Still, the bar has a whimsical air to it, from the Cardinal red floor and dodecahedron disco balls, to the mismatched vintage furniture of landfill-bound items reclaimed by a Brooklyn shop specializing in "art, design, commerce, and environmentalism." Then there are the attendant vapology experts, called Vapologists.
Michael, a Vapologist on hand for the Vaporium's opening night gala Thursday, says he's been vaping for two months now. In a white lab coat and backwards snapback hat, Michael explains how he guides patrons through the flavor and device pairings, and handles any other customer service needs they may have.
"It's product knowledge," he says, "knowing how much of what flavor to vape."
Like Eisenberg, he says vaping helped him dump cigarettes. Though less effusive about the vaping lifestyle, he, too, sees the Vaporium as a place where people with a common interest can "come lounge and hang and just kick it."
"We want to show people this is cool," he says.
While there are similar bars elsewhere around the country — a Washington shop also uses the Vaporium moniker, and several people I spoke with say vaping nightlife is big in California — the Henley Vaporium is New York City's first.
"We're the hookah bar of the now," Eisenberg says.
The Vaporium sells everything a vaper could want, including all manner of e-cigs, eGos, Mods, clearomizers, and atomizers. They offer refill cartridges at varying nicotine strengths, from 0-24mg, at between $10 and $15 a pop.
Then there's the galaxy of flavors, from the expected (cherry, watermelon, vanilla) to the absurd (Jamaican Me Crazy, Nutty Buddy, Happy Ending) all the way to the wonderfully abstruse (Rebel, Sublime, Mr. Miyagi.)
Back on the patio, Adam Pickman sits puffing Hapaya — papaya with hibiscus undertones, the "Nectar of the Gods" — from a silver Mod thick as a Mag-Lite.
"There's another level out there," he says, comparing his industrial device to the slim dog whistle I've been given. "It's more for the connoisseur."
Pickman is the founder of Clevervape, an e-juice company he started about four months ago. A one-year vaper and former smoker, he likens e-cigarettes to any other ritualistic relaxant.
"It's a release — a nice cup of coffee or a good vape," he says.
Beauvais (at right) agrees that the act itself is soothing — "I like the manipulation of smoke, the vapor coming out of my mouth" — and says it's no different from any other vice, albeit perhaps a healthier one.
"People either consciously or subconsciously realize they don't get everything they want in life," he says. "Having something they can get instant gratification from is necessary to satisfy that part of their lives."
As for Eisenberg, she maintains the Vaporium is primarily about health. Making vaping cool is an added bonus, she says, one that will only aid the first goal by "making it enjoyable to be healthy."
"We have 30-year smokers who have switched over and are suddenly running again," she says. "I feel like I'm doing something good for the world when that happens."A man whose burglary of a St. Paul home was foiled by two women and a pink-handled handgun was sentenced Friday, Jan. 4, to nearly 11 years in prison.
Described by his own attorney as a “career criminal,” Marty Mark Childs has at least nine prior felony convictions, including residential burglary, theft and attempted escape.
He had been out of prison on a previous burglary sentence less than four months when he walked through an unlocked back door of a house in the 1300 block of Fremont Street on Sept. 16. It was mid-afternoon, and Rebecca Larson, 56, was in the driveway washing her car.
Her 34-year-old daughter, Melissa Hickman, was asleep inside.
Larson went in the house to get something and saw Childs in the kitchen standing next to her open purse. “What the hell are you doing in my home?” she said, according to the criminal complaint against Childs.
He held a wad of crumpled cash toward her, saying, “Here’s your money back. The cops sent me.” He tried to leave, pushing Larson’s chest to get away, but she pushed him back and locked the door.
She then yelled to her daughter, “Get your gun.”
Hickman picked up her Taurus 9 mm handgun, which had pink grips, and came into the kitchen. She saw her mother struggling with Childs. Larson forced him to the floor “where he remained at gunpoint until police arrived and arrested him,” the complaint said.
Childs told police that one of the women put her foot behind his neck and kneeled on his back when he was on the floor — pinning him down.
Childs pleaded guilty Oct. 2 to first-degree burglary. A second charge of first-degree burglary was dropped at sentencing as part of the plea deal.
The victims, who sat in court wearing pink tops, said through a statement read by a prosecutor that the incident robbed them of their sense of safety in their home.
Ramsey County District Judge Salvador Rosas gave Childs credit for 111 days served in jail and ordered him to have no contact with the victims.
Emily Gurnon can be reached at 651-228-5522. Follow her at twitter.com/emilygurnon.A South African preacher persuaded his congregation to drink petrol after claiming he had turned it into pineapple juice.
Pastor Lesego Daniel performed the supposed'miracle' in Garankuwa, near Pretoria, having poured the liquid into a bucket and dropped a match inside, causing it to set alight.
Pastor Daniel then told his congregation he had turned it into fruit juice and encouraged them to line up and take a sip from the bottle.
A bizarre video from the Rabboni Centre Ministry shows people crowding around the preacher and having the yellow liquid poured into their mouths.
A warning at the start of the video states: ‘If you cannot turn water into wine, don't try this'.
Pastor Daniel, meanwhile, informs his congregation: ‘I want to prove to you, with the flames that will burn here, that it shows what can be achieved if you have faith.'
'What you see, you have to believe it,' he adds, before drinking some of the liquid himself.
It's unclear what happens to the members of the congregation after they swig the liquid.
Ritual: One member of the congregation drinks the petrol. (CEN) More
Pastor Lesego Daniel of the Rabboni Centre Ministry told his congregation that the petrol had been turned into pineaple juice. (CEN) More
Down it: One member of the congregation drinks the petrol. (CEN) More
[Grieving mother told to remove partner's headstone - because it has two kisses]
[World's best selfie: Newlyweds bag top award for altar snap taken seconds after swapping vows]
The controversial preacher made international headlines in January when he was photographed persuading followers to eat the grass at his ministry.
He said that humans with faith eat anything to feed their bodies and can survive on whatever they choose to eat, and persuading them to eat grass and drink petrol was simply a way of proving the point.
The outrageous stunts may have been dangerous, but his congregation claim it helped cure their various ailments.
One woman claimed eating grass stopped her having a sore throat, while another said it healed her after a stroke. Interviewed by local media one of the congregation, Rosemary Phetha, said: 'Yes, we eat grass and we're proud of it because it demonstrates that, with God's power, we can do anything.'
Photos showed that followers who had eaten grass then allowed Pastor Daniel to walk across them as they spread out on the floor.
The grass eating however failed to impress many with one outraged commentator saying: 'Is this a scene in a movie? This can't be real. God created animals to chew grass and made human beings to dominate over animals. Any person who reduces human beings to animals is definitely not of God.'
And another person wrote online: 'Why is he stepping on people? This is inhumane. Shocking.'
Story continuesJudging new governments is hard. Without decisions taken, let alone results delivered, we are left to judge the early months of an administration by the purpose that motivates it. On this measure how does the first three months of Theresa May’s government measure up?
First and foremost of course this government is about delivering Brexit. But, just this once, let’s leave Brexit aside – after all that’s a choice made by the British people not Theresa May. Instead, let’s consider the second pillar of her government – an intention to focus support on ‘just-managing families’. This is a group she has broadly described as working but not well off, with low incomes but not the very poor who are reliant on benefits.
So who are the roughly six million low and middle income families that fit this description? Five-in-six of these families having at least one member in full time work, with nearly four-fifths of those workers earning less than the typical worker’s wage of £21,000. And while they represent a third of the workforce, only a minority are in professional jobs and they are half as likely to be graduates as those on higher incomes.
These families are also doing the vital (and expensive) job of reproducing Britain – 40 per cent have kids. As a result tax credits do matter to this group – averaging £3,500 a year for just managing families with children.
If that is who ‘just managing’ families are, how exactly are they managing in 21st Century Britain? Badly is the short answer. Here’s three things to keep in mind.
First, this part of Britain has seen no income rise in the last decade. While individual households will obviously have received some pay rises during that period, a like for like comparison of families in this group over time shows a lost decade of growth – typical incomes for the group in 2014-15 only just surpassed the level in 2004-05. Now most of Britain hasn’t seen strong income growth over this period, but this group has been particularly badly hit by the combination of a slowdown in earnings growth in the mid-2000s, big falls in incomes following the financial crisis, and cut backs to tax credit support in recent years.
These changes have overcome the boost to incomes that the fast employment growth of recent years has provided, or the signature tax cuts of the last parliament. After all for many of this group their ability to boost their incomes is severely constrained by the fact that they only keep 27p of each additional pound earned if they pay tax and receive tax credits.
Second, living standards are also about outgoings. Housing is the biggest expenditure that families face, and it’s hard to overstate how damaging the impact of rising house prices, falling home ownership and thus soaring housing costs has been.
These families are now spending almost a quarter of their income on housing, up from 18 per cent in 1995. To put this catastrophe in perspective it’s the equivalent of a 14p income tax rise for a dual earning low to middle income couple with children. If a government openly announced a policy like that there would be riots on the streets, but it is successive governments’ failure to see homes built that lies behind much of the ‘just managing’ status of these families.
Third, what do overall spending patterns by low and middle income families mean for their ability to save? This is a key determinant of a families’ sense of whether they are just managing or making progress. On average these families actually spend 101 per cent of their income each week, with nearly half going on the basics of housing, transport and food. The result is that most report having no savings or assets at all and two-in-three families have savings equivalent to less than one month’s net income. This matters a lot for how families manage difficulties, be they large unexpected bills (a broken washing machine) or reduced income (less hours at work).
So the last few years have not been easy ones for just managing families. Squeezed incomes, soaring housing costs, and difficulty getting your head above water to put any savings aside – all are good reasons for the new government to look very long and hard at what is going wrong in what our country offers this group. It is therefore a worthy focus for the new government. But it is not an easy one. Just as with Brexit we’ll have to wait and see what policy substance the government has to address these major challenges. After all it is worth remembering that Gordon Brown entered Downing Street promising an agenda focused on Britishness and constitutional reform. A financial crisis and expenses scandal later that agenda fell by the wayside.
But just because it is difficult doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. Substantively and politically a focus on just managing families is the right response to the state of Britain today, not least because in the end Theresa May’s government will not only be judged by the Brexit they deliver but the Britain they build.Frustrated Royal Mail customers say they are fed up with long queues and delays at a Sheffield sorting office.
‘Awkward’ opening hours at Sheffield South Delivery Office and its increased business since the closure of the Ecclesall Road branch in July 2016 have some people branding their experience picking up mail a ‘nightmare’.
Royal Mail Sheffield South Delivery Office
Some have reported almost hour-long waits in long lines of people – which are open to the elements.
Businesswoman Shauna Naylor, who owns Hypnotherapy in Sheffield, said she waited 47 minutes on Friday morning.
“It’s quite amusing how bad it’s got,” the 34-year-old said.
The delivery office on Woodseats Road is open six days per week, but customers say the hours are not long enough.
Royal Mail Sheffield South Delivery Office
It is open from 7am to 12pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and 7am to 8pm on Wednesdays. On Saturday, the branch is open from 7am to 2pm.
Jenny Grimley, of Albert Road, Heeley, said queues started early morning.
“I went on Friday at 7am, and even when you turn up that early, there are still people queuing,” Mrs Grimley said.
“When you work, it’s very difficult to get there while it’s open.”
Royal Mail Sheffield South Delivery Office
Another man who contacted The Star claimed the company did not attempt to deliver parcels to his property.
The man, who wished to remain anonymous, said Royal Mail staff did not check he was home before leaving the delivery slip in his postbox, forcing him to make the journey to the sorting office to collect parcels.
This is despite him taking time off work to stay home and collect the packages.
A local businessman, who also commented anonymously, urged people to buy shares in Royal Mail, attend the company’s annual general meeting and ‘ask some very difficult questions’.
“Like, why has the service dropped and why is the efficiency of the system failing,” he said.
“You can hold private organisations to account a lot more than public ones.”
A Royal Mail spokeswoman has apologised to customers over the delays.
“This has been due to an increase in the number of undelivered items received,” Morag Turnbull said.
“We have introduced a new duty structure to ensure there is adequate staffing in the enquiry |
’s good to hear. Like I said from the start, there wasn’t any intent to go in and hurt the guy. I know him a little bit, from playing against him in junior, and I know he’s a good guy. It was what it was, I’m sorry it happened, I’m sorry I missed a game and I’m happy that our team came out and got the win. I’m looking forward to Game 3 here.”
Question: Is there anything that you could see and learn while watching Game 2?
STOLL: “Just areas of the ice that are open, that are available. I don’t think it’s anything new that we didn’t know from scouting this team. But you definitely see things. It was good to watch the game. Obviously I would have liked to have been out there playing, but it was what it was, and it’s over now so I’m looking forward to Game 3.”The man initially named as the attacker who mowed down pedestrians and stabbed a police officer outside Parliament is in fact still in prison for an unrelated matter, his brother has said.
The brother of Abu Izzadeen, formerly known as Trevor Brooks, called into Channel 4 News to say he could not be the attacker, after he had been named earlier in the broadcast.
Izzadeen was born in Hackney in east London and converted to Islam just before he turned 18, in 1993, originally changing his name to Omar. He has previous convictions for terror related offences.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Channel 4 said in a statement: "On tonight's Channel 4 News, senior home affairs correspondent Simon Israel quoted a source as saying that the name of the Westminster attacker was believed to be Abu Izzadeen, formerly known as Trevor Brooks.
"During the course of the programme, conflicting information came to light. Channel 4 News is currently looking into this."
Mr Israel tweeted: “The source I trusted, but ultimately I made a mistake. This time I got it wrong. Abu Izzadeen is in prison.”
Channel 4 News editor Ben De Pear tweeted: “Tonight our trusted Correspondent @simonisrael made a mistake in naming the wrong person as the suspect in the parliament attack.
“in years of award winning coverage @simonisrael has rarely been wrong; tonight he was. Abu Izzadeen is in prison & not the suspect”.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowMore solidarity letters arrive from Russian, Korean dockworker unions
In addition to recent solidarity letters from dockworker unions in Germany, New Zealand, the European Union, Japan, and around the world, more letters have been sent to PMA President and CEO Jim McKenna — this time from Yong Soo Chi, President of the Korean Federation of Port Workers’ Union (KFPTWU), and Vasilii Kozarenko, Chairman of the Dockers’ Union of Russia.
Like the messages of solidarity from around the world, the letters are clear: “We have pledged to provide active solidarity support to the ILWU and its members by any and all legal means available to us, if necessary, in order to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion.”
The dockworkers unions are united in the International Transport Workers’ Federation, uniting 700 unions, and representing more than 4.5 million transport workers from 150 countries.UK-based Sky Vision has acquired the global rights outside of the U.S. for duelling robot competition series BattleBots.
The show, into its second season on ABC in the States, follows the action as 48 homemade robots from around the world enter the “BattleBox” in the hopes of emerging victorious in assorted robot tournaments.
Sky is going to shop the first 6 x 60-minute season, which ran in the summer of 2015 on ABC, at MIPTV, as well as the second season of 11 episodes, which will be available later this year.
In addition, Sky Vision will be looking for partners at the Cannes market for a new European production hub for the series, with the BattleBox arena set-up for the California production of the U.S. series also available for international broadcasters.
Whalerock Industries and BattleBots Inc. coproduce the American version of the show.
“The team at Sky Vision is incredibly excited to be representing a show with the iconic status of BattleBots,” said Barnaby Shingleton, director of entertainment and factual at Sky Vision. “There is a huge following for the U.S. tournament globally, and the production values of the ABC show are second to none, making this very much the market leader in robot entertainment. This is a real treat for broad family audiences.”
“BattleBots is the ideal property for today’s audience as it sits at the intersection of three of the most powerful entertainment trends in the current cultural zeitgeist: sports, gaming and technology,” added Chris Cowan, head of unscripted television at Whalerock Industries. “We can’t wait for the world to witness the power of head-to-head robot combat in its purest form.”In part two of their overview on Scottish political culture, James Foley & David Jamieson break down Scottish Labour candidate Richard Leonard's socialist prospectus, what lessons can be drawn from the resurgent English left and 'the marsh' of Scottish social democracy...
In this parliament, Scottish Labour might emerge as the most likely candidate for serious new thinking on capitalism, thanks largely to the second-hand influence of Corbynism in England. It’s worth reflecting on how strange this would be. Only three years ago, the Scottish party had swung further to the right than ever before, electing, in Jim Murphy, a leader with pronounced neoconservative leanings. A member of the Henry Jackson Society, Murphy proved how closely New Labour could move towards the oil and gas wing of American imperialism, even a decade after the Iraq War disaster, while still proclaiming “democratic socialist” values.
Scotland was the area most opposed to Corbyn in internal party elections, which reflects the roots of Corbynism outside of the party’s main core of candidates and officials. Scotland never received a large influx of new members, partly because of the national question, but mostly because of Better Together, an alliance with the Conservatives which made Labour toxic to a huge layer of potential recruits and helped shift internal party opinion further to the right. Even as recently as May 2017, the party’s strategic focus was on electing Better Together chief Blair MacDougall in middle class East Renfrewshire, formerly home to Murphy. Notably, the one seat that survived the party’s apocalyptic 2015 election was the exceedingly leafy Edinburgh South, where Ian Murray MP was a bitter factional opponent of Corbyn. Scotland, then, proved to be the most enduring outpost for the classic version of New Labour: “middle Scotland” outlasted “middle England”.
While Corbynism in England has a mixture of younger, social movement activists and older, long-suffering socialists, the latter group dominates much of the Corbyn message in Scotland. Richard Leonard, a newly elected MSP, is the pro-Corbyn candidate to replace Kezia Dugdale; revealingly, his message is, “I’m too long in the tooth to be a Corbynista”. He's expected to win, which would complete the unification of the party under an all-British left-wing leadership. Intellectually, Leonard has been close to the Scottish Left Review and the Labourist wing of the Morning Star, and has helped produce, alongside John Foster, some detailed and important analyses of external control in the Scottish economy. His personal project has been to reconcile the Christian socialism of his hero, Keir Hardie, with Marxism, an approach outlined in “Socialism: More Than a Creed”, where he tries to reclaim Labour’s founder as a model of twenty-first century politics.
Like Hardie, Leonard favours a brand of Home Rule for Scotland. Specifically, he associates with the Red Paper Collective’s plans for “progressive federalism”. In a series of pamphlets, they have set out their vision, which largely revolves around economic planning and power relations in the Scottish and British economies. This work has brought a welcome focus on issues often neglected by the independence campaign, especially the politics of ownership and workplaces. However, what’s unclear is how their economic proposals are actually linked to federalism: the knots and complexities of the latter are never really untangled. So far, they have left three “wicked” issues hanging. First is how more devolution, or federalism, links specifically to the issues they actually want to talk about, planning and/or economic redistribution. Second is what failed in Labour’s last model, and how their plans would rectify it. The third is what should be done with England, an entity that is several times larger than the others put together and has its own distinct politics of grievance.
Leonard and colleagues are largely interested in planning and economic redistribution, which thoroughly dominates their papers on federalism. This raises the question: how are these two aims connected? Is the link between federalism and economic democracy necessary or accidental, and is it positive or negative? There are hints at answers to these questions in their writings, but nothing definite. In Scotland, many believe that more devolution will inherently lead to more equal outcomes, usually citing positive examples from Holyrood such as tuition fees and the partial eradication of the bedroom tax. However, Neil Davidson, the only theorist to bring much analytical rigour to these questions, reaches precisely the opposite conclusion: he suggests that greater devolution is part of the essence of the neoliberal project, the delegation of responsibility further and further away from the nation state.
Davidson’s theory isn’t necessarily the last word on this question, but, so far, it is the only serious left-wing account of the issue. The Red Paper, with their intellectual roots in 1970s planning debates, are certainly aware that devolution can weaken economic democracy, and has often been designed for this purpose. They insist that it should not, which, they argue, is what distinguishes “progressive” federalism from its other variants. But this implies that federalism is inherently desirable, and since it’s not clear what separates the essence of federalism – progressive or not – from devolution, it’s not always clear why. For this reason, much of our account here is inevitably guesswork, an attempt to fill in some blanks.
Superficially, the way to distinguish federalism from devolution is with the question of sovereignty. Andrew Heywood, in a standard politics textbook, compares the two: “although their territorial jurisdiction may be similar, devolved bodies have no share in sovereignty; their responsibilities and powers are derived from, and are conferred by, the centre”. With devolution, the state delegates its power down to lower levels, but, remaining sovereign, it may withdraw it at will. By contrast, typically, federalism would acknowledge a fundamental arena of last-word power particular to Scotland’s people. Of course, the notion of popular sovereignty in capitalist states is always imaginary, but Catalonia shows the distinctions are often extremely meaningful in practice. It’s not clear whether Leonard and colleagues intend to draw this contrast, since their essays are not really focused on constitutional questions.
Assuming they do mean it, the implications of such a position would be vast for the whole edifice of the British state, which has never been based on any form of popular sovereignty, real or imagined. This question of Britishness hangs in the background but is never actively confronted. In one essay, Pauline Bryan starts by saying: “State structures and constitutions are not neutral. They are moulded by class forces and over time are adjusted to produce particular outcomes.” This is indeed the crucial point, but her examples are exclusively from the European Union and the Scottish Parliament, with what Tom Nairn called “Ukania” left in parentheses. One explanation is that the Paper are unconsciously British nationalist: there is a tradition in Scottish Labour leftism of equating the UK state with internationalism, and their analysis does seem somewhat confined to Scotland and its role in the “British road to socialism”. However, it’s more likely the Paper’s authors are fearful that any radical critique of the British state becomes a concession to the SNP, leading, by successive steps, down the road to Scottish nationalism.
Paradoxically, though, because their ultimate rationale for federalism isn’t explained, it often feels like a grudging acceptance that Scottish Nationalism should be met halfway, with the lure of greater Scottish control used to simultaneously divide the SNP and Labour centrists and help the Labour Left achieve its actual, bread and butter goals. This would imply that while their economic proposals dominate their account of federalism, they have little to do with federalism per se; instead, they're simply the necessary steps to ensure federalism is progressive. If this interpretation is correct, we are entitled to raise doubts about the limits of their programme. True, economic planning and workplace democracy are essential to progressive politics, and often neglected – but why stop there? Important as these issues are, they do not constitute the limits of a progressive critique of state power.
The latter would require, at minimum, examination of borders, national identity, gender and war. In contemporary politics, these issues are not mere superstructures but rather increasingly inherent parts of how capitalist states manage workplaces, the labour market and the social wage. They are also the issues most likely to provoke intense ideological conflict and divisions on the Left, but this doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Quite the opposite. It means ignoring them will lead to inevitable trouble down the road: just ask the SNP about their currency policy.
The Red Paper’s goals would be much clearer if they reached an explicit understanding of what went wrong with Labour’s last administrations. We mean nothing moralistic here. Virtually everyone agrees about the slaughter in Iraq, the foolishness of private finance initiatives, and the ultimate collapse of Blair/Brown’s bargain with the City. There is no need to slander the Labour Left by association. Equally, New Labour did make progress on child and pensioner poverty, albeit under propitious conditions, and did, by half measures, tackle the “backwardness” of certain institutions like the House of Lords. One part of these reforms was devolution. The ultimate rationale for it was to tackle growing regional inequality, a marked feature of UK capitalism since the 1970s that particularly accelerated in the 1990s, and to restore a sense unity around the central state. Clearly, neither aim has been achieved with any success.
The Red Paper shares an awareness, often lacking in Scottish politics, that the true geographical conflict is between London and the South East and everywhere else in Britain. We would take this further, and suggest London’s uncontrolled growth is a central factor both behind the perceived success of the British economy and also behind Brexit, Scottish nationalism and the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. The greatest achievements in thwarting London and promoting the regions occurred in the post-War era, with a highly centralised, unreformed imperial state. Quite why New Labour’s regional model failed so profoundly is never explained: perhaps the trauma of Blair’s long administration remains too raw for the Labour Left to really explore it. Explanations for the failure of devolution that rely on bad faith, however, must be ruled out. It’s not enough to say New Labour was biased towards the rich, or that the SNP’s nationalism deluded people, and to count this as a sufficient explanation. This is why Davidson’s model is appealing: it accounts for the neoliberal direction of devolution in structural terms.
If New Labour’s bad faith is a weak explanation for its failures, equally the good faith of Corbynism is not enough to guarantee a political mandate for radical economic reform will be honoured. Scottish Labour, always more marked by Stalinist influence than by the New Left, tend towards a British exceptionalism and thus rarely discuss the problems of genuinely left-wing governments elected elsewhere. It seems fair to conclude that Corbyn is in a weaker position than leaders like Tsipras or Mitterrand. Labour’s leader, unlike the latter two, is considerably to the Left of all but a handful of his parliamentary group. They have made every attempt to overthrow him, long before he even fought an election.
Added to all the standard problems for social democratic leadership under neoliberalism, then, Corbyn has a mutinous core to his party, composed of those who actively hanker for a return to what they perceive as a golden age of Blairism before Bush. This group has the sympathy of all pro-Labour media outlets and many of the institutions that surround the party (although, crucially, not the unions). So far, Corbyn has had extreme good fortune: with Trump as US President, liberals are temperamentally opposed to supporting American aggressions. This has allowed him to pursue an anti-austerity agenda increasingly untroubled by conflicts over British involvement overseas. However, under, say, a Clinton leadership, the conflict between Corbyn’s pacifism and the hawkish liberal “internationalism” that blends so well with British nationalism, a creed which intellectually dominates among the insiders of UK politics, would be intense.Dear Vladimir,
On behalf of the Communist Party and the people of China, I would like to sincerely thank you for your recent actions in Ukraine.
When I saw Red Army troops marching into Crimea, my memory flashed back to the Budapest Memorandum the United States signed with the Ukrainians in 1994. In that agreement, the Americans promised that if Ukraine forfeited its nuclear weapons, then the United States would protect it from any future invasions.
This is the test, I said to my colleagues. If the Americans let comrade Putin invade and annex Crimea, and they pretend the Budapest Memorandum never happened, then they have faded into geopolitical irrelevance.
The Ukrainians cried out for America to honor its promise, but, Vladimir, you marched in there gung-ho! You pried Crimea back into Russia’s embrace. And against you and your troops, Mr. Obama deployed only rhetoric—and a set of sanctions softer than tofu.
It was a beautiful sight for these eyes of mine to witness. And one joy scatters a hundred griefs.
Mr. Obama did nothing to stop you from forcefully taking Crimea. My nation now knows we can use force to dominate the disputes we have in the South China Sea.
You understand why I have presented my support for you in this matter somewhat softly, so far. One of our ancient proverbs says a man cannot help shoots grow by pulling them up higher. It is not the correct hour to upset too many Westerners. But make no error, comrade: I—and 1.35 billion of my fellow communists—stand at your back.
Of course, neither the Russian Bear nor the Chinese Dragon currently has the military might to withstand open combat against the United States. But we both have something of which Washington is totally bereft, as you have proven. We have the will to fight. What does muscle matter, dear Vladimir, if it is never flexed? I thank you for proving that Washington’s days of flexing its muscle and wielding its butterfly sword are ancient history. You have drawn the punctuation mark on the conclusion of Pax Americana.
As that era ends, you and I are free to expand our territories and our influence in a way that we have never before enjoyed. Mr. Obama did nothing to stop you from forcefully taking Crimea. My nation now knows we can use force to dominate the disputes we have in the South China Sea.
Regarding this topic, you’ll have to pardon me if I give myself a bow of congratulation since I feel that I may have partially inspired your brave Crimean moves. I know you must have watched closely from the Kremlin back in November when I declared a massive expansion of China’s airspace into waters claimed by South Korea and Japan. We used this action to intimidate two of our most significant neighbors, to punish two American allies, and to openly challenge Mr. Obama’s Asian pivot.
Washington could have declared China’s claim to be null. Mr. Obama could have told America’s commercial airlines to act in solidarity with those of Japan, and defy my orders. America could have demonstrated that if a nation unilaterally tries to K.O. the status quo, then the West will counter with a united, strong, multilateral response.
But instead the reaction from the White House was delightfully laughable! They told America’s commercial airlines to obey my command. Then the administration politely asked me to refrain from enforcing my territory grab too forcefully. Mr. Obama left South Korea and Japan naked in the Chinese typhoon.
America has become a paper tiger. And under pressure, it will fold like origami.
It was a decisive moment for me, and I like to think it helped to persuade you that this is Asia’s hour. Who will stop us, Vladimir?
But I humbly admit that it was your unilateral takeaway of Crimea that ramped Asian aggression up to the next rung of the ladder. China couldn’t be more grateful to you for proving what many here in Beijing have long suspected: That America has become a paper tiger. And that under pressure, it will fold like origami.
Thank you for drawing back the silken curtain on Washington’s broken will—for you and I, our governments, our peoples, America’s allies and the whole world to see. The kanji script is on the wall.
For years, China has yearned to shake things up and demonstrate our superiority over our neighbors. We’ve wished to begin by grabbing some disputed, resource-rich islands, and also by putting an end to the childish “Taiwan” business. After all, you can’t catch a cub without going into the tiger’s den. Once we can set this precedent and consolidate these interests, we feel there is no limit in southeast Asia that can keep us from reaching our full potential for power. You have shown us that the time to pounce is now, and that when it comes to American allies and influence, it is open season.
We are weighing how the Japanese will respond after they outsourced their defense to the U.S. following World War ii. The Philippines, Taiwan and South Korea are in a similar situation: Asians who are reliant on Washington’s gunpowder and rice. But with the American battleship full of holes and rapidly sinking, they are left with two options: Bend a knee to Beijing, or gather their katanas for battle.
Already, with the Americans focusing—ineffectually—on you and less on containing China, Japan is taking steps in the direction of military self-reliance. For Japan’s katanas to be a real deterrent to China, of course, they would have to include nuclear weapons. The Japanese have the potential to rapidly create a nuclear arsenal, but we are amassing the political, economic and military power to pressure them into a scenario of our choosing, whether or not they develop nuclear weapons.
However, I calculate that it will not have to come to war among the Asians.
After all, what is the long-term aim? Beneath their cowardly kowtowing toward the U.S., don’t the Japanese and Koreans yearn to overthrow the world order that the West created almost as much as do the Russians and Chinese? Don’t they agree that the hour has come for the First World to experience some Third World conditions? I suspect they feel that they have burned incense to America for too long already.
I’ll tell you something now, Vladimir, which is not a statement any of my predecessors would have been able to say to any of your predecessors: In order to vanquish the Western order, China will submit to your leadership. Let us replace the West with the East.
After your moves in Crimea, my colleagues and I deeply respect you, and believe that you could be the one to thaw the ice between China and Japan, between Korea and Japan, between India and China.
It is no secret that Beijing would ultimately like to see the whole world remade in the Chinese image. As our ancient proverb says, There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it. But, for now, we will settle for taking the West down a few rungs of the ladder. And we know we can’t do it as a solo effort. Another of our proverbs says that only when all contribute firewood can they build up a strong fire. And paper can’t wrap up fire.
After your moves in Crimea, my colleagues and I deeply respect you, and believe that you could be the one to thaw the ice between China and Japan, between Korea and Japan, between India and China.
If Beijing’s goal was only regional dominance, we would fare on our own. But to have a real effect on the global power balance, China, Russia and other Asian nations must all contribute firewood, and present a unified front. And the Chinese will let you be the shogun to lead that front. We are prepared to write your name on the wings of a dragon.
I believe that Ukraine was only an appetizer in the great meal you have planned. I couldn’t resist chuckling when I saw the White House report that it is “skeptical” that your Red Army build-up on Ukraine’s border was for peaceful purposes. Skeptical, Mr. Obama? Skeptical? Why ever for? His childish words make the bird in my heart sing and chirp. What a gift the American voters have given us with this president. Not only is he systematically dismantling the nation’s power, but his diplomacy is an endless source of entertainment for my colleagues and me.
I’ll be visiting you in May, and my hope is that we can push Russo-Chinese relations soaring to unprecedented heights—to the altitude of the black-footed albatross! I know that because of thick tensions with your customers in the West, you are gazing eastward in this hour as never before. You have just signed a major energy deal with India, and China is very thirsty for Russian oil and gas, too. The People’s Republic also wants to buy your SU-35s fighter jets more than ever. It is my sincere hope that, in light of recent events, we can finally dislodge our long stalled negotiations over these matters. Let’s make it all happen in a timely fashion, dear Vladimir. China is ready to do its part in backing you. Let’s make this the Asian century!
Respectfully and with support,
Xi Jingping, President of the People’s Republic of China
P.S. I admit that I was slightly uneasy with the referendum tactic you used in Crimea. As you know, Beijing is working to bring Taiwan officially under our flag, so the idea of justifying separatism by popular referendum is not a pleasant one to me. Nevertheless, I know you felt compelled to put on a bit of “democracy show” for the West, so I can’t fault you for it.Large number of weapons, ammunitions belonging to PKK seized by police in Turkey’s east
VAN
Turkish security forces seized a large number of weapons and ammunitions belonging to the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in the eastern province of Van on June 11, Doğan News Agency has reported.Security forces detected a suspicious lorry while on their patrolling duty and wanted to stop it in Van’s Gürpınar district. The driver of the lorry refused to stop and later eventually escaped. The lorry was later found abandoned in a rural area in the Taşdöndüren neighborhood.Some 25 infantry rifles, 40 chargers, 197 hand-bombs, five RPG-7 type rocket projectors, 50 anti-tank ammunitions of rocket projector, two Bixi type machine guns, 10 deadshot binoculars, 100 mechanic fuses and 36 packages of plastic explosives were seized during the search in the lorry.An investigation has been launched into the incident.Change is a beautifully, well designed and simple app that helps you convert currencies easily. All you need to do is choose your currency and slide right or left to compare other currencies.
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M&M's are set to get more delicious with the introduction of CARAMEL ones.
This good news comes years and years of weird variations on the milk chocolate theme.
The popular confectionery has made some solid choices with its popular peanut, pretzel and crispy versions.
It's also been met with less success with mint and almond flavours.
That's all in the past though, as our prayers have finally been listened to and caramel filled M&Ms are being rolled out in the US, hopefully soon to come to these shores.
This is all well and good - except for one disturbing detail on the packet.
It looks pretty standard, doesn't it?
There's a jazzy new blue bag, complete with the Red M&M and the Yellow M&M messing around.
But just think about it for a second.
LOADING Can you see it?
mmS are advertised as sentient beings.
They think, they feel, they talk and act independently of one another.
With this in mind, that's one of their fellow M&M's they're ripping apart.
Not only are the Red and Yellow M&M DISEMBOWELLING one of their own, but they look as if they're taking great pleasure in doing so, in some sort of cannibalistic trance.
Read More How many of these chocolate bars do you remember? Man reveals bizarre collection of treats going back 25 years
LOADING Introducing the new Caramel M&M
If you can suspend your disbelief further, it also seems as if the Orange M&M is aware of the painful death which awaits him.
According to the official website, he dreams of being put on the endangered species list.
Admittedly, this is an odd ambition to harbour, but it sort of makes his demise seem tragically inevitable.Riot of April 5, 1932
From The Daily News, April 6, 1932
Parliament Building Wrecked by Missiles
Baton Charge Starts Destructive Riot
Public Demonstration Turns to Riot When Order to Police to Use Batons as Doors are Forced Awakens Anger of the Crowd — Windows and Doors Smashed in Colonial Building, Nearly Score Police and Civilians Injured
PREMIER ESCAPES WRATH MOB THROUGH PROTECTION [of] CLERGY
Every window of the Colonial Building is glassless: the Prime Minister practically a refugee, the law of enforcement of the city turned over to the authority of ex-service men, as the result of discord which marked the culmination of weeks of protest and dissatisfaction with maladministration of the government. A huge demonstration of citizens in peaceful and law abiding protest yesterday afternoon witnessed a sudden transition, through tactless management by those in authority, to an outbreak of violence that was understandable if it could not be condoned.
At 2:15 p.m. yesterday the Majestic Theatre was filled with men and women, and Duckworth Street was a mass of moiling humanity waiting the start of the parade to the Colonial Building to present to the Honourable the House of Assembly the resolutions passed the previous night, calling on the Legislature to investigate certain charges made against the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State.
Before the parade started the audience in the Majestic was addressed by Mr. H. A. Winter, K.C., who outlined the procedure to be followed, and implored the people not to make any infraction of the law or breach of the peace, for if they did then the whole spirit of the movement would be nullified.
An announcement was made that ex-service men, Naval Reservists and members of the Mercantile Marine were to fall in first, and after these citizens in general. The route was along New Gower Street to Queen Street, down this street to Water Street, along Water Street to Prescott Street, up Prescott Street to Duckworth Street, along Duckworth Street to Cochrane Street, up Cochrane Street and Military Road to the Colonial Building. About 2,000 started in the parade and by the time they arrived at the House some 1,500 others joined in, both men and women.
Before the delegation from the Committee, Mr. J. M. Howell, Rev. W. E. Godfrey, Mr. J. H. Devine, H. A. Winter, K.C., were admitted to the House, the Guards band played several selections. At 3:30 p.m. the delegation was admitted and presented their petition. Whilst they were standing at the bar of the House, there was a commotion outside of the doors of the House and Rev. Mr. Godfrey was called out. Those outside awaiting the decision of the House, became impatient and started to break in the doors, to find out the cause.
The committee, when they were notified that disturbance was growing outside, came out and attempted to reform the parade back to the Majestic. In an effort to lead off with the flag, some of the crowd sought to prevent its removal, and a struggle occurred. Someone started the National Anthem, ex-officers of the regiment rallied around, and there was a short lull, but the struggle for the flag was renewed and it was torn from its staff and taken inside the building. The parade to a considerable number, led by the Guards band and members of the committee, returned to the hall to report the result of their visit to the chamber. These were much surprised on leaving the hall to learn that serious trouble had broken out at Colonial Building.
Soon there was a breach in the doors and as men started to force their way in, the police inside, some twenty or more, with batons drawn, hit every head that appeared. Then police, under orders, charged down the steps driving bystanders before them, many of them innocent spectators. This seemed to get the crowd going. Soon there was turmoil and the youths present got out of hand, and pelted stones and other missiles through the windows. The mounted police, because of the horses, and their efforts to keep order, made further trouble. Constable Lake, who was mounted on one of the horses, was forcibly dragged off the horse and when on the ground, hit with pickets and stones. Some of the spectators interfered and he was lifted off the ground, and put in a motor and taken to the General Hospital. Constable Layman and a civilian named Healey are also in the General Hospital. At an early hour this morning the Hospital stated that Constables Lake and Layman are suffering from scalp wounds, and Mr. Healey from an injured foot. None of these men are seriously injured.
The representative of the Daily News was on the ground floor of the building when the police charged those assembled outside the House, but from reliable eyewitnesses, the following was secured. The police, evidently acting under orders, with overcoats off, and batons drawn, charged the people hitting right and left, and doing much bodily injury. As a result of this charge O'Mara's Drug Store alone treated 15 injured, including a small child of 10 years old who was hit on the head and his ear cut.
By this time the youths in the crowd had made pretty good headway, with what apparently they thought was their job, of smashing all the windows in the building, the doors also, and the window sashes. Stones and pickets out of the park fence were used. Vandalism ran rampant. The rooms occupied by Miss Morris, Librarian of the Legislative Library, were ransacked. Her piano was taken out of her room to the park, where it was completely wrecked. Her private papers and books were destroyed, and the fittings completely wrecked. Two deliberate attempts were made to set the building on fire. In both cases the incipient fires were nipped before there was any headway. The Colonial Building last night was nothing but a wreck.
A considerable time after the House had been adjourned by the Speaker, members of the House one by one came down stairs. When leaving the building, none of the members of the House were molested. The crowd outside were awaiting the exit of the Prime Minister and the Inspector General. About 5 o'clock Mr. Cashin and Sir William Coaker left the lower flat of the building and went to Government House, where he tendered his resignation to the Governor. On Mr. Cashin's return, from the steps of the Colonial Building, he announced that fact and stated that the Prime Minister would resign today. He also said that the House will convene this afternoon at 3 p.m., and asked all the men to go home and return at that hour. The mens' demand was that the Prime Minister should resign immediately and not wait. All during this time the members of the Constabulary were not allowed to leave the building, being pelted with stones and sticks every time they made any attempt to come out.
About 7:30 p.m., the Prime Minister left the building, accompanied by Mr. L. E. Emerson, and Mr. Myles Murray, and surrounded by 10 or 12 men. Just as the Prime Minister got to the waiting car he was recognized and the crowd made a rush. Those with him hurried him down Colonial Street and pushed him into a residence. Rev. Fr. Pippy stood on the steps of the house and with him were Rev. W. E. Godfrey, Rev. Fr. Gibbs and Rev. C. H. Johnson. When a search of the house was made the Prime Minister had made his escape through a back door. Before he made his exit from the house, Rt. Rev. Msgr. MacDermott, all the priests at the Palace, Rev. H. L. Pike, Rev. Dr. Wylie Clark and other clergymen were in the grounds surrounding the House exhorting the men to return to their homes.
About 8:30 p.m. the Inspector General made his escape by way of the rear of the building, and sometime after 11 p.m. when the War Veterans patrol came on duty at the Colonial Building, the members of the police force left.
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force them to make enormous withdrawals against their credit card, essentially, and pay the new owners of the company. And that’s essentially what they did. They took over a floundering company that was sort of in between and faced with threatening changes in the industry, and they forced them to cash out entirely and pay all their money to the new owners.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, just for the record, Governor Perry’s comment about Mitt Romney was very interesting. He said, “They’re vultures that sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton.”
MATT TAIBBI: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what they do. Again, they borrow money, they take over the company, the company now has this massive new debt burden. So, if the couple was already in trouble, if it was already having trouble meeting its bottom line, suddenly, not only does it have its old problems, now it has, you know, $300 million in new debt service that it has to pay. So it might be, you know, paying millions and millions of dollars every month.
A great example is Dunkin’ Donuts, whose parent company was taken over a couple years ago by a combination of Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group. Dunkin’ was induced to do one of those dividend recapitalizations. They had to pay half-a-billion dollars to their new masters. And just to pay the debt service on the loan they took out to make that payment to Bain and Carlyle, they’re going to have to sell like two-and-a-half million cups of coffee every month just to pay the debt service. So, that’s extraordinary. They are—they’re essentially vultures who hang out waiting for companies to get sick, then they forcibly take them over, and they extract fees, commissions and dividends, by force, essentially.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, Democracy Now! spoke to two workers from what’s now Sensata Technologies, which Bain Capital is majority owner. A hundred seventy workers there at the Sensata plant in Freeport, Illinois, are calling on Romney to help save their jobs from being shipped to China. The plant manufactures sensors and controls that are used in aircraft and automobiles. This is Tom Gaulrapp, a former—well, he’s a Sensata worker now, talking about the response that they’ve received.
TOM GAULRAPP: We’re there trying to save our jobs, and we were called communists. For trying to save our jobs from going to China from the United States, we were called communists. They—if there hadn’t been a large police group in there, I’m sure we would have been more threatened. They started this “U.S.A.” chant. It’s like, yes, we’re all for the U.S.A., too. That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to keep well-paying manufacturing jobs from being moved out of this country to China. And they make it sound like we’re not patriotic. And it boggles the mind as to what they’re thinking.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Tom Gaulrapp, and he’s describing going to an Iowa Romney campaign event last week—Romney was maybe seven rows in front of him—and asking about their jobs, their company owned by Bain, being sent to China. In fact, some of them went to China, the workers, to train the workers in China, so that they could take over their jobs. Their last day will be the Friday before the elections. They’ll be on the unemployment line to apply for unemployment on Monday. On Tuesday, they vote. Can you comment on this situation, Matt?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no, it’s absolutely typical of a private equity transaction. I think one of the glaring misconceptions about this kind of business that’s persisted throughout Mitt Romney’s campaign for the presidency is that what these companies do is turn around and fix companies, that they’re in the business of helping these companies. Romney constantly uses this term, that he—that, you know, “help.” “I’m either helping this firm, or I’m helping it turn around.” He wrote a book called Turnaround. But they are not in the business of turning companies around and creating jobs. That is a complete mischaracterization. What they’re in the business of doing is repaying the investors who lent them the money to take over those companies. The workers are completely irrelevant in this scheme.
Romney is—you know, the old-school industrialists, like Mitt Romney’s father, they were men and women who built communities. They had factory towns. They were very anxious to leave, you know, hard legacies that people could see: hospitals, churches, schools—you know, the Hersheys of the world, the Kelloggs. But these new owners have absolutely no allegiance to American workers, American places, American communities. Their only allegiance is to the investors and to themselves. And so, it’s not at all uncharacteristic to have these situations where people are pleading for their jobs or they’re saying, you know, “We’ll tighten our belts, if you just make this concession and keep us.” That’s irrelevant to the Mitt Romney-slash-Bain Capital-slash-Carlyle Groups of the world. They’re entirely about making profits. And if that means shipping jobs to China or eliminating jobs, that’s what they’re going to do. And that’s the new generation of corporate owners in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt, last month, Mitt Romney gave a series of TV interviews defending his role at Bain Capital. This is Mitt Romney speaking to CNN’s Jim Acosta.
MITT ROMNEY: There’s nothing wrong with being associated with Bain Capital, of course. But the truth is that I left any role at Bain Capital in February of '99. And that's known and said by the people at the firm. It’s said by the documents, offering documents that the firm made subsequently about people investing in the firm. And I think anybody who knows that I was out full time running the Olympics would understand that’s where I was. I spent three years running the Olympic Games. And after that was over, we worked out our retirement program, our departure official program for Bain Capital, and handed over the shares I had. But there’s a difference between being a shareholder, an owner, if you will, and being a person who’s running an entity. And I had no role whatsoever in managing Bain Capital after February of 1999.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Mitt Romney on CNN. Matt Taibbi, he’s referring to the—that time gap, 1999, when he said he left, to 2000, 2001, 2002. The significance of this?
MATT TAIBBI: You know, I don’t think it’s terribly important whether he was actively sitting at the helm during that time or whether he was just passively accepting the vast amounts of money that were sent his way as the result of the deals that were concluded at that time. Again, Mitt Romney—well, I’m sorry, Bain Capital took over KB Toys during that disputed time period and made an enormous profit. I think their profit was something like $100 million out of that deal. And Mitt Romney shared in that, in that largesse, even whether he was, you know, actively strategizing or not. You know, the groundwork for deals like that had been laid in the decades before that where he was actively involved in deals like taking over a company like Ampad, which was a very similar deal to the KB deal. So, it’s irrelevant to me, and I think it should be irrelevant to everybody, whether he was actually working there or not. He shared in the profits and clearly didn’t have a problem with any of those deals.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi, you have said that Mitt Romney’s fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government.
MATT TAIBBI: Yes, there’s a tax deduction for all that borrowed money. So, when Mitt Romney or Bain Capital, when they want to go take over a company like KB Toys and they borrow $300 million to do it, and that new debt becomes the debt of KB Toys, when KB pays the debt service, the monthly service on that debt, that service is deductible. And if that were not true, if they did not have that deduction, these deals would not be economically feasible. They wouldn’t be possible. I spoke to one former regulator from the SEC, who worked both in the SEC and as an accountant at a Big Four accounting firm, and he reviewed a number of these deals in both a public and private capacity. And he said, without that deduction, he’s never seen a deal that would have been economically—a private equity deal that would have been economically feasible. So, this entire business model depends upon a tax break.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Romney’s role in Bealls Brothers and Palais Royal. And how is Michael Milken involved with this?
MATT TAIBBI: Sure. And just generally speaking, these private equity deals, they’re made possible by these sort of get-rich-quick, easy-money schemes that started appearing on Wall Street in the '80s. Again, in the old days, the real power in the American economy was—belonged to the industrialists, the guys who—men and women who actually made things, because they had—they were the primary sources of cash and revenue. But in the ’80s, we started to develop all these new methods of simply creating money out of thin air. And the first great one in the ’80s was Mike Milken's junk bonds. And this ability to conjure instant millions gave people, like the fictional Gordon Gekko, the power to take over, you know, mighty companies—airlines, you know, industrial companies—whereas 10, 15, 20 years ago, somebody who didn’t have his own fortune would never have been able to take over those companies.
And that’s what happened with this transaction with Bealls. Romney used Mike Milken’s junk bonds to take over a couple of department store chains, which he subsequently merged. And even after finding out that Milken was under investigation and would shortly have to go to court to defend himself on fraud charges, Romney pressed ahead with the deal anyway and ended up making, you know, another tidy profit on that deal.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt, finally, what do you feel reporters here at the Republican National Convention should be asking Mitt Romney about his time at Bain?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, I just think that the—
AMY GOODMAN: And what his plans are for the presidency?
MATT TAIBBI: Sure. I just think the one unanswered question that reporters just don’t ask either of these people is—they’re making their entire platform about debt. Paul Ryan, his entire political profile is based on this idea that he’s an enemy of debt and a, you know, budget slasher. And Mitt Romney has—again, he’s banked his entire campaign rhetoric on the sort of prairie fire of debt theme. And yet, this is a guy who spent—who made his fortune creating debt. Somehow, this question has not been asked to him. How is that not hypocritical? It hasn’t been asked of either of them, and I would like to see the mainstream press at least ask that question. I think it’s an ideal debate question that should be asked somewhere down the line.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi, I want to thank you very much for being with us, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent article in Rolling Stone is “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” Matt Taibbi is author of the book Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we go to the floor of the convention. Stay with us.Despite Maurice Jones-Drew reporting to the Jacksonville Jaguars, the plan is for the team to start running back Rashad Jennings in Week 1 against the Minnesota Vikings, a team source said Sunday.
The decision to start Jennings is based on his preseason play and the fact that he has been at training camp, the source said.
The frustration from the Jaguars' brass over Jones-Drew's holdout is dying down, even if it appears the holdout was fruitless.
Jones-Drew finally met with coach Mike Mularkey on Sunday, a team spokesman told NFL.com and NFL Network's Steve Wyche. The two had spoken on the phone during the offseason, but not much since the start of the Jaguars' training camp.
"I had a really good visit this morning with Maurice and I welcomed him in," Mularkey later said in a statement. "It was good to finally speak face to face. I can tell he's ready to go, so we'll be working with him to get him up to speed as quickly as possible."
Jones-Drew will take a team physical Sunday.
While MJD will be at the Jaguars' facility Sunday, other team members have the day off, meaning Jones-Drew will likely just meet with coaches.
Follow Ian Rapoport on Twitter @RapSheet.President Donald Trump changed his story Saturday on why he fired Michael Flynn as his national security adviser, now suggesting he knew at the time that Flynn had lied to the FBI as well as to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russians during the presidential transition.
That was a turnabout from his initial explanations that Flynn had to go because he hadn't been straight with Pence about those contacts. Lying to the FBI is a crime, and one that Flynn acknowledged Friday in pleading guilty and agreeing to co-operate with the special counsel's Russia investigation.
Trump's tweet: "I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide! —@realDonaldTrump
Earlier, he emphasized that U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller's charges against his former national security adviser Michael Flynn indicated no collusion between his election campaign and the Russians.
"What has been shown is no collusion, no collusion," Trump told reporters after leaving the White House for a flight to New York, where he will attend a trio of fundraising events.
Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia and he agreed to co-operate with prosecutors delving into the actions of Trump's inner circle in 2016 before he took office.
Under the plea bargain deal, Flynn admitted in a Washington court that he lied when asked by FBI investigators about his conversations last December with Russia's then-ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, just weeks before Trump took office.
Prosecutors said the two men discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia and that Flynn also asked Kislyak to help delay a UN vote seen as damaging to Israel. On both occasions, he appeared to be undermining the policies of outgoing President Barack Obama.
Trump's transition team knew: Prosecutors
They also said a "very senior member" of Trump's transition team had told Flynn to contact Russia and other foreign governments to try to influence them ahead of the UN vote.
Sources told Reuters that the "very senior" official who knew about Flynn's contact with Russia was Jared Kushner, a key member of Trump's transition team and now the president's senior adviser.
Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He has previously said Kushner has voluntarily co-operated with all relevant inquiries and would continue to do so.
Other U.S. media reports identified former adviser K.T. McFarland as the person. Reuters was unable to verify the reports.
Tweet leaves unanswered questions
It's unclear now why Trump would cite lying to the FBI as a reason for firing Flynn. Doing so suggests the president knew at the time that Flynn had done something that is against the law, and therefore the investigation could not be as frivolous as he's been portraying.
It's also unclear how he would know that, if information about Russian contacts had not reached him, as he has been implying in his own defence.
The tweet prompted some Democrats to say it amounts to obstruction of justice by Trump. California congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat, tweeted: "THIS IS OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. @POTUS now admits he KNEW Michael Flynn lied to the FBI. Yet Trump tried to influence or stop the FBI investigation on #Flynn."
THIS IS OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. <a href="https://twitter.com/POTUS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@POTUS</a> now admits he KNEW Michael Flynn lied to the FBI. Yet Trump tried to influence or stop the FBI investigation on <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Flynn?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Flynn</a>. <a href="https://t.co/8JqGBxgou0">https://t.co/8JqGBxgou0</a> —@tedlieu
But it may not add up to a charge, Paul Brandus of West Wing Reports told CBC News Saturday.
"I'm not quite sure at this point if there's a clear smoking gun that would point to obstruction of justice," said Brandus, an independent journalist based in the White House. "It's just vague enough that he can probably wiggle his way out of it. We'll wait and see what happens."
Flynn left the White House in February, only acknowledging that he had given an incomplete account to Pence of his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. After Trump forced Flynn out, he asked FBI Director James Comey to end the bureau's probe in the matter, according to Comey's account. Comey refused, and Trump fired him, too.
Trump has been publicly dismissive of Comey and of special counsel Robert Mueller's continuing investigation, and was often generous in his appraisal of Flynn, except to say his adviser could not stay on the job after misleading his vice president.
Michael Flynn, on the right, who was forced out as Donald Trump's national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials prior to the president's inauguration. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
At the time, Pence said Trump was justified in firing Flynn because Flynn had lied to him. Neither Trump nor Pence indicated concern then that the FBI had not been told the true story. At the time, Pence said Trump was justified in firing Flynn because Flynn had lied to him. Neither Trump nor Pence indicated concern then that the FBI had not been told the true story.
Pence, who served as head of Trump's transition, has not publicly commented on Flynn's plea.
White House officials did not respond to questions Saturday about Trump's altered explanation as to why he fired Flynn.
Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn - Ty Cobb, White House lawyer
Flynn's decision to co-operate with Mueller's team marked a major escalation in a probe that has dogged the U.S. president since he took office in January.
Mueller's team is also looking at whether members of Trump's campaign may have sought to ease sanctions on Russia in return for financial gain or because Russian officials held some leverage over them, people familiar with the probe say.
There was nothing in the court hearing that pointed to any evidence against Trump, and the White House said Flynn's guilty plea implicated him alone.
A protester shouts about former U.S. national security adviser Flynn after the court hearing in Washington. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
"Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn," said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer.
Flynn, a retired army lieutenant general, only served as Trump's national security adviser for 24 days. But Flynn had been an enthusiastic supporter of Trump's election campaign and the president continued to praise him even after he left the administration, saying Flynn had been treated "very, very unfairly" by the news media.The latest media shock from the polls is that millennials have given up on democracy.
A quarter century ago only one-sixth of those between 16 and 24 years of age said democracy was “fairly bad” or “very bad.” But today that has increased to almost one-quarter among millennials, according to the World Values Survey as reported by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk in a recent edition of the Journal of Democracy.
The main reason was that millennials do not think they can influence policy under democracy.
Why the surprised reaction? If the national candidates refuse to discuss the most important issues and keep repeating similar inanities to avoid unpopular realities, wouldn’t cynicism be the proper response?
Donald Trump has endorsed an increase in the minimum wage, following Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—and apparently everyone else in a national consensus to raise the minimum rate of pay.
At the same time, the most liberal city in the U.S. issued a study it commissioned on the effects of raising its minimum wage. Seattle increased its rate from $9.47 to $11 an hour last year and found that the average hourly wage for workers has now gone up from $9.96 to $11.14, which sounds good (although wages also improved for everyone else due to increased prosperity in the city generally).
Still, the same old fly was in the ointment. Those who remained employed did get more per hour but they worked fewer hours and so received less overall pay. Estimates for them varied on whether total earnings increased or decreased by a mere $5 a week. The really bad news was that the universal finding by economists was confirmed: unemployment increased, resulting in 1.2 percent fewer jobs for former minimum wage rate employees.
The tooth fairy did not deliver. So naturally with the labor participation rate the lowest in 30 years, everyone nationally is on board for even higher minimum wages.
How about everybody’s favorite government program, Social Security? Bernie and Hillary have pledged to increase spending for the popular seniors program and The Donald is “gonna save your Social Security without making cuts. Mark my words.”
Spoilsport financial columnist Allan Sloan returned to his Washington Post haunt about that time to present the same old news that Social Security has been in the red since 2012, with more funds going out than coming in. This red ink will widen every year into the foreseeable future if no reforms are adopted. In this case there is some excuse for the popular view that all is rosy, since the government rather hides the facts by claiming the system’s trust fund bonds keep it solvent.
Sloan concedes the trust fund balance is at an all-time high and will not run dry until 2030. Unfortunately, one cannot trust the trust funds. The bonds only count if the government cashes them in and to do this costs the government big money. The Treasury in fact had to borrow $214 billion over the past three years to keep the checks going out. The government reported a $23 billion surplus last year but it actually had to borrow $70 billion to redeem its own bonds, with no free lunch here either.
And the unfunded liability of Medicare dwarfs Social Security’s, and adding other popular entitlements, there is a 30 year deficit of $100 trillion—compared to only $120 trillion in total assets today. Trump’s response is to promise to spend and borrow “at least double” Clinton’s $275 billion on infrastructure. This is the debt former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen called “the most significant threat to our national security,” more than terrorism.
The Commerce Department has reported that the U.S. Gross Domestic Product of all goods and services produced in the U.S. grew by an inflation-and-seasonally-adjusted 1.2 percent in the second quarter. The experts had predicted a 2.6 percent increase. The consumer spending that accounts for two-thirds of the index increased by 4.2 percent but future-leaning business investment decreased to produce the net loss. Indeed, business investment has been negative for three straight quarters. The Wall Street Journal calls it business “on strike.”
At the Democratic Convention, President Obama had just assured that the economy was “stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started.” Compared to what? The George W. Bush “recovery” increased GDP at a 2.8 percent level and everyone considered it a recession. Previous recoveries increased GDP from a 3.6 percent low to a 7.6 percent high.
Government spending—which both candidates want to increase—led to an economic decline of 0.10 percent of GDP this past quarter. Trade—which everyone wants to decrease—accounted for one of the few gains in the report, a 0.23 percent increase in national wealth.
Perhaps the all-powerful wizards at the Federal Reserve will fix it all. Morgan Stanley chief global strategist Ruchir Sharma calls the Fed “the central bank of the world” but finds its “loose policies” building up vast reserves makes it unable to act. “Now every time the Fed tries to tighten, the dollar starts to strengthen and global markets seize up, forcing the Fed to retreat.” Since even Sharma is “unclear” what to do, no wonder the campaigns are silent. One thing is for sure: the little guy that both candidates are going to protect cannot save with a zero interest rate.
Bored with economic issues? A British Medical Journal study found that the third leading cause of death in the United States is medical error, 700 deaths a day or 9.5 percent of all annual deaths. Physician Ben Kocher, who worked with the president on health insurance reform, now opposes the enlargement of facilities under that law as less medically safe. The U.S. suicide rate is now the tenth leading cause of death, increasing 24 percent between 1999 and 2014. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Alex Crosby traces this mainly to family background—child abuse, parental substance abuse, incarceration, and mental illness. Are health matters worth discussion beyond repealing or increasing Obamacare (if any private firms will keep offering it)?
Major Cities Chiefs Association police statistics for America’s largest cities showed increased homicides in two dozen major cities, with especially large increases in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Las Vegas. The Brennan Center for Justice found higher rates for Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington. FBI Director James B. Comey noted the “perception” that “police are less likely to do the extra marginal policing that suppresses crime” in the wake of reaction against police racial shootings might have some truth.
One candidate blames foreign Muslims and the other says black lives matter. There is no discussion of how current national racial policy exacerbates already difficult local situations.
And of course, there is foreign policy. Is Putin on the warpath or can he be dealt with? How about China, the Middle East, or terrorism?
The silence on the campaign trail is deafening. It all seems about a wall, immigration, emails, empty words about breaking sexual barriers, and more failed national programs to assist the winsome poor—and of course insults, which all are good for TV but make for meaningless elections.
Why should anyone be surprised that millennials are frustrated about democracy? They cannot influence important decisions when no one discusses them, or lies about the reality when they do. Indeed, Aristotle warned us 2,000 years ago that this was the fate of democracies when they learn they must sugarcoat the truth.
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies, is the author of America’s Way Back: Reclaiming Freedom, Tradition and Constitution, and was Ronald Reagan’s director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during his first term.One of the things I hate about today's world is that we take everything for granted. We communicate through light and electricity, fly in metal vehicles, and listen to music recorded decades ago through airwaves—yet everyone is like "whatever." Which is why I love this video of two old women flying for the first time.
The action starts to ramp up at the 6 minute mark. Watch till the end, because their emotions after the flight, while they are recounting the experience, are pure gold.
I really can't blame her for crying out of pure emotion. Just watching her own reaction made me teary—but maybe I'm too much of a softie.
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Or maybe not.
Maybe we should all go around the world pondering the amazing wonders that surround us and the science that makes them happen. Because it's all freaking amazing, really.
The fact that light appears when I turn on a lamp at my house is something that still blows my mind if I really think about it. Electricity—perhaps made by making some uranium explode to heat up water to move a turbine that moves a dynamo (what the hell!)—travels for miles and miles until it reaches this thingamajig that turns it into photons! Heck, I get amazed at the fact that someone invented a mechanism for my door that is opened by this key with a particular geometry. Or that I'm living suspended in a structure several feet above the ground built at the beginning of the last century! And I'm made out of these things called cells that have evolved through a gazillion years!
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I need a vacation.
SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on FacebookStory highlights "Obama Care" was printed on packages of heroin
"It's just a branding so you can say if this brand is good or bad."
Four people arrested Friday in Hatfield, Massachusetts
What do heroin and Obamacare have in common?
Nothing -- save for more than 1,200 packets of heroin that had the words "Obama Care" and "Kurt Cobain" printed in red on the packaging that Massachusetts State Police say they uncovered in a drug bust.
State police said the labels are nothing more than marketing ploys.
"It's a branding by the particular drug dealer so when the drug gets out to the population, you know what it is," said Police Lt. Daniel Richard. "It's just a branding so you can say if this brand is good or bad. It's like putting Pepsi or Coca-Cola on a bottle."
Trooper Joseph Petty stopped a vehicle with four people in the Town of Hatfield on Friday morning after noticing the vehicle was committing several traffic violations.
Tyler Robenstein and Ashley Beaulieu of Vermont and Marquese Jones and Sherod Green of New Jersey were taken into custody and face conspiracy to violate drug laws and possession charges.
The driver, Robenstein, was charged with speeding, unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle and failure to change lanes for an emergency vehicle, police said.
The Hampshire County Jail in Northampton said late Saturday afternoon that Robenstein and Beaulieu had been released on bond. Jones and Green were still being held.Mithrim Montes, home to Titan’s tallest peak
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI
NASA scientists have identified the highest peak on Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
Located within a mountainous area called Mithrim Montes, the moon’s tallest peak is 3,337 metres high. The data was sent back to Earth by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been examining Saturn and its moons since arriving at the planet in 2004.
Data shows that most of Titan’s tallest mountains are situated close to the equator and are about 3,000 metres tall. Many other peaks of this height were identified within Mithrim Montes, as well as in the region known as Xanadu.
These results are part of an investigation to look for the forces that have shaped the moon’s landscape.
"As explorers, we're motivated to find the highest or deepest places, partly because it's exciting. But Titan's extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution," says Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate who led the research.
Cassini data shows that Titan has rain and rivers that erode its surface over time. These processes probably occur slower on Titan than on Earth because there is less energy from the Sun to accelerate them.
The results also reveal a great deal about the evolution of Titan occurring below the surface. Titan has an icy crust above an ocean of liquid water. When a period of mountain creation on the moon ends, the liquid water allows the crust to relax and settle. Deep below the surface, the water-ice bedrock of Titan is softer than the rock on Earth. As a result, it was not expected that mountains on Titan would be as high.
This suggests, according to NASA, that active tectonic forces could be affecting Titan’s surface and causing such tall mountains to occur even on an icy, ocean body.
"There is lot of value in examining the topography of Titan in a broad, global sense, since it tells us about forces acting on the surface from below as well as above," says Radebaugh.NEW LOUD SOUND
96dB in Orp as a continuous blast.
Please note this sound is not as loud as what Orp will produce.
96dB in Orp as a user actuated "BeepBeep".
Please note this sound is not as loud as what Orp will produce.
WHAT WE'VE HEARD ABOUT ORP:
Here's a small sample:
"I ring my bell all the time, but it's not loud enough! I sometimes want a real horn, especially around cars. The Orp looks really promising and could help level the playing-field out on the roads."
-Jonathan Maus, BikePortland.org Editor and Publisher
ORP Smart Horn brings bike light and horn together as one-
"Taking back the road one head-turning honk at a time, the Orp Smart Horn hopes to curb biker incidents with a redesign of the classic bike bell". -Paul Ridden, GizMag.com ". -James Thorne, COOL HUNTING.com "When riding in traffic it often isn’t enough to hope that you are being seen, sometimes you need to let the cars know you’re there". -Peter Suciu, BikeRadar.com "...we rarely see contraptions like this. Orp is a new Kickstarter project that jams a light and horn into the same device. Great idea..." -Colin, BikeRumour "I like the two levels of noise the Orp has and the attention grabbing light is nice addition as well." -Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson, Kent's Bike Blog
"The Orp is something that I’d be happy to attach to my handlebars."
-Andreas, London Cyclist
" Smart horn - a light, a horn, and a hell of a warning..." -Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson,-Andreas, -Sarah Barth, Road.cc,
"Simple and genius!"
-Troy Turner, Yanko Design
"A bike light that does it all – swaps easily from bike to bike, charges via USB for people on the go, and makes an alert sound in varying degrees of intensity. It sounds too good to be true."
-Ayleen, ORbike.com
ORP -This is a little animated jingle that an Orp enthusiast made. It is completely unsolicited. Click on the links and check it out.
Danielle Hayes and team, WMAJ
"Of a more compact design in the ORP Smart Horn being developed by Tory Orzeck. This two tone, 96db horn mounts on your handlebars and also conveniently doubles as a headlight so your dash doesn't get all cluttered up with additional gadgets."
-Byron Kidd, TokyoByBike.com
"It got him thinking about safety. Horns and lighting devices existed but not, that he knew of, as a single product -- one that could possibly make a difference on a loud, busy street filled with cars."
-D.K.Row,The Oregonian -should be The Orpegonian
"The product is called the Orp and is a pretty ingenious little device; it contains a very powerful light and an very loud horn."
Dave Bank, Wired's Geek Dad
"On top of the sound[s] it plays, the Orp works as a strobe lamp, using LEDs to pump out 87 lumens. The hope is to make cyclists visible and audible to drivers who might otherwise strike them accidentally."
Alex Davies, Business Insider
"While I know that Frodo and Bilbo will never have to fight the evil Smorn in their travels towards Mordor, it is nice to know that Strider would be able to find them if they pulled the Wail Tail in a time of need."
John Biggs, Tech Crunch
--------------------------------------------------------------
CONNECT WITH ORP
You know Orp is all over the web but we know you need more. Help spread the word and follow Orp on Facebook and Twitter!
ORP PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATING LIGHT AND SOUND
ORP IS THE SMALLEST, LOUDEST BIKE HORN EVER.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
FIRST, THE PROBLEM: bikes are almost invisible to cars and trucks
High gas prices, global warming, and increasing waistlines have encouraged many of us to ditch our cars and get on our bikes.
We live here in Portland, Oregon, considered one of the most bike friendly places in the world. There are bike paths, bike lanes and designated bike friendly roads throughout the city. But no matter what, our rides mean sharing the road with cars.
Having said that, bicycle versus vehicle accidents have steadily increased in Portland as more people take to the road on their bikes.
Our project was prompted by both this phenomena as well as a few particularly well documented accidents in Portland involving cyclists and commercial trucks. The problem was that the cyclist was neither seen nor heard. Both were Right Hooks:
THE IDEA: Make bikers more visible and /or more "hearable".
THE SOLUTION: A combination dual tone, high decibel bike horn and front beacon light.
This is our latest 3D Orp prototype minus the surface mount printed circuit board. In production, Orp's skin will be a better matte finish.
ORP ANATOMY
It's super small. It's super bright. It's super LOUD.
The current bike bells on the market work reasonably well on bike paths and quiet streets. However, in louder, traffic clogged streets, the bell just doesn't have the decibels to pierce through the ambient traffic noise let alone a highly insulated modern car.
The decibel scale is logarithmic. Every 3 decibels is twice as loud. Think Richter scale for earthquakes.
This graphic shows Orp's sound output relative to other sound makers.
Friendly sound - 76dB in Orp
Please Note this sound is not as loud as what Orp will produce.
Loud Sound - 96dB in Orp
Please note this sound is not as loud as what Orp will produce.
NEW LOUD SOUND - 96dB in Orp Continuous Blast
Please note this sound is not as loud as what Orp will produce.
NEW LOUD SOUND - 96dB in Orp as a user actuated "Beep Beep"
Please note this sound is not as loud as what Orp will produce
This sound is closer to a typical vehicle horn and is very similar to a Vespa scooter horn in real life.
Really long story short, we developed this |
1 to 2002 (Bad to Good): SoS was more difficult in 2002. Head coach Scott Tice was sacked during the 2001 season and Mike Tice took the reins for the final game and all of 2002. Tice installed his own coordinators, including OC Scott Linehan. Linehan’s offense is usually seen as being pass oriented (look at what he’s doing in Detroit), but in his first two seasons in the league, both in Minnesota, his offense ranked in the top 10 for running attempts and led the league in rushing yds in 2002. Under Linehan, Sophomore RB Michael Bennett became a Pro Bowler in 2002. With only the LT changing in the offensive line, it seems like most of the improvement here was the installation of a competent coaching staff that could unleash their players’ talents.
Washington 2011 to 2012 (Bad to Good): SoS was more difficult in 2012. No coaching changes, deep into the Mike Shanahan era. In 2011, Washington lacked a consistent starter with Evan Royster, Roy Helu, Tim Hightower, and Ryan Torain all opening games. 2012 saw the start of RGIII’s NFL career. Perhaps because of the installation of the rookie QB, OC Kyle Shanahan’s play calling reversed course from his history of favoring the pass and in 2012, Washington ranked 3rd in the NFL in rushing attempts, and only 30th in pass attempts. Aside from the change in QB, the offensive line was more stable in 2012, particularly on the left side, with the return of Pro Bowler Trent Williams from a 4 game suspension in 2011 due to failure of league drug tests. So improvement this year seems to be improvement in OL and OC play calling that may have been driven by reliance on a rookie QB.
Carolina 2007 to 2008 (Bad to Good): SoS was easier in 2008. Coaching staff was unchanged. The O-Line was much improved, with 4 of the 5 regular starting O-lineman being replaced from 2007 to 2008. Sophomore RB DeAngelo Williams had a breakout year behind this O-Line.
Passing:
Major Drop-offs:
San Francisco 2004 to 2005 (Bad to Worse): SoS was easier in 2005. Complete coaching staff overhaul. Rookie Alex Smith became the starting QB for most games in 2005. All Tackles in the OL were replaced from 2004 to 2005.
Oakland 2005 to 2006 (Average to Bad): SoS was more difficult in 2006. Change in head coach and OC. Starting RB Lamont Jordan tore his MCL in game 10 of the 2006 season. Little consistency in OL from 2005 to 2006.
Minnesota 2004 to 2005 (Great to Average): SoS easier in 2005. OC Scott Linehan was replaced with Steve Loney. Never heard of him? It was his one and only season as an OC in the NFL. QB Dante Culpepper, coming off of a Pro Bowl season, was replaced with Brad Johnson after Culpepper sustained a season ending knee injury in late October. Significant changes in the starting O-Line, including the loss of Pro Bowler Center Matt Birk for the entire 2005 season to a hip injury.
Major Improvements:
Denver 2012 to 2013 (Great to Record-Breaking Amazing): SoS in 2013 was comparable to 2012. Change in OC. Two members of the O-Line were replaced (Though Peyton Manning is basiccally his own OC). One of the replacements played at an all-pro level in 2013 (Louis Vasquez), in addition to the pro bowl talent they had the previous year (G Zane Beadles, all-pro T Ryan Clady). Receiving corps was also improved (Wes Welker replaced Brandon Stokley, Julius Thomas replaced Joel Dreesen). It was just a perfect storm of improvements.
New England 2006 to 2007 (Average to Great): Randy Moss came to New England by way of Oakland. Wes Welker also arrived in New England from Miami. Based on this and Tom Brady’s performance last year, Brady seems pretty dependent on having a high quality receiving corps.
Denver 2011 to 2012 (Bad to Great): It’s not surprising that Denver has made two major step changes upwards since 2011. The SoS was more difficult in 2012 as compared with 2011, but Denver’s leading passer in 2011 (Tim Tebow) was replaced by future hall-of-famer Peyton Manning.
Takeaways
1. Strength of schedule seems to be a terrible predictor of major changes in offensive productivity.
2. Loss of truly exceptional talent at any position can have a dramatic impact on offensive productivity.
3. Losses in the offensive line should not be discounted. A poor O-line can cripple a rushing game and lead to hurried and inaccurate passing.
4. Offensive coordinators with known track records may impact their new teams in predictable ways. Unknown OCs or OCs coming up from college level seem to be a crap shoot. I’ll try to look more closely at this in a future post.
5. Passing performance seems most dependent on QB ability (ie, Peyton’s move to Denver), but can also be decimated by a poor or injured receiving corps (ie, Brady’s improvement in 2007 and drop-off in 2013).
AdvertisementsReal Madrid According to the Euro Club Index
Publicly, Real Madrid are not giving up on La Liga, but the reality is that not even statistics can help 'Los Blancos' now. With 13 games to play, the Euro Club Index only gives Real a 2.5% chance of winning the league, whilst Barcelona are the big favourites with a massive 95.9%.
"The ECI index", says Alfredo Gatius, a data analysis expert, "shows a team's relative potential to win titles or specific games and is calculated through statistical methods, taking into consideration the results of the games played by the team in La Liga, the cup, the Champions League, the Europa League... both historically and in recent seasons."
Despite the fact that Real Madrid's chances of winning La Liga are minimal, the capital club is the second favourite to win the Champions League: 27% versus 35% for Barça.ROME (Reuters) - Italy recalled its ambassador to Egypt for consultations on Friday after Egyptian investigators in Rome failed to provide evidence needed to solve the mystery of the murder of an Italian student in Cairo.
Italian Ambassador to Egypt Maurizio Massari arrives at the morgue in Cairo, Egypt, February 4, 2016. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany
Ambassador Maurizio Massari was called to the capital for “an urgent evaluation” of what steps to take to “ascertain the truth about the barbaric murder of Giulio Regeni”, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Egyptian authorities met with Rome prosecutors on Thursday and Friday, handing over some, but not all, of the evidence Italy had requested.
The prosecutors said in a statement Egyptian investigators had still not handed over such evidence as details from Cairo cell towers that had connected to Regeni’s mobile phone.
Regeni, 28, vanished from the streets of Cairo on Jan. 25. His body was discovered in a ditch on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital on Feb. 3, showing signs of extensive torture.
Regeni’s mother said last week that her son’s body had been so disfigured that she had only been able to recognize him by the tip of his nose.
Human rights groups have said the torture indicates he was killed by Egyptian security forces, an allegation Cairo has repeatedly denied.
“Recalling the ambassador for talks means that Italy confirms its commitment with itself and the Regeni family: We will stop only before the truth, the real truth,” Renzi told reporters on Friday, adding that Italian prosecutors said this week’s meetings had been “disappointing”.
Italian officials have openly ridiculed different versions of Regeni’s death put forward by Egyptian investigators, including an initial suggestion that he had died in a traffic accident.
Last month, Egyptian police said Regeni’s belongings, including his passport, had been found in the possession of a band of thieves that were killed in a shootout with Egyptian police. Investigators in Italy quickly dismissed that story.
Italy’s move to escalate the diplomatic dispute is likely to further strain relations between the two countries, and it is a setback for Renzi’s diplomatic efforts to make Italy the main European partner for Egypt.
Egypt will “assess in a comprehensive manner” the situation when its investigative team returns home, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in a statement. Egypt had not yet been officially notified of Italy’s move to recall its ambassador, nor for “the reasons behind this decision”, he said.
Renzi had offered to be “a bridge” to Europe when Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited Rome in 2014, saying the two countries were strategic partners in the Mediterranean for fighting Islamist militants and combating people smuggling.
Apart from common political aims, Italy has significant economic interests in Egypt, including the giant offshore Zohr gas field, which is being developed by Italy’s state energy producer Eni (ENI.MI).
A delegation of Italian businessmen led by then-Industry Minister Federica Guidi cut short a visit to Cairo and returned home when Regeni’s body was recovered in February.Directions
Dough
In a large bowl add flour (start with 2 cups of flour is more needed add as you mix), egg, salt, oil, yogurt, apple cider, baking powder. Using a wooden spoon mix until a dough is formed is sticky add in 2 tablespoon of flour at a time until its combined.
Drop the dough onto a clean surface and begin to knead until smooth (about 2- 3 minutes). This dough is very smooth and soft. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and rest it for 5 minutes, meanwhile lets prepare the filling.
Filling
In a saucepan add milk, when just about to simmer add in sugar and semolina, whisk the mixture while cooking this will avoid any lumps that may form, once thicken add in 2 tablespoon of cornstarch dissolved in 1 tbsp of water, as soon as you pour it in whisk well the mixture will become very thick. Remove from the heat and add rose water. Let cool.
Rolling
Divide the dough into 10 equal parts, make small balls and set aside. In a small bowl add cornstarch ready to use. Roll out eat ball into 5 inch disc. Start by placing on disc on the surface add 1 teaspoon of cornstarch spread using you fingers making sure that the surface of the disc is covered well.Add another disc on top and repeat with cornstarch. Repeat this process in till all the disc are stacked on top of each other.
Assembling
Preheat oven to 190 C and position a wire rack in the middle of the oven.
Using a rolling pin roll out the stack into a 13 by 15 inch rectangle. Cut 4 by 4 inches square this dough will make about 12.Put a 1 and 1/2 teaspoon of filling in each square and old it to make a triangle. Place all the triangles onto a baking sheet.
Brush each triangle with butter and bake for 10 minutes, take out the baking sheet and brush them again with butter. bake for another 5 mines. the triangles will b golden brown.Remove from oven and let cool.
Simple syrup
In a small saucepan combine water and sugar. cook until the sugar is dissolved and the syrup is thick, remove from heat add rose water and let cool.
Spoon the simple syrup onto the triangles garnish with nuts and serve warm.Brazilian President Michel Temer is seen at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay
BRASILIA (Reuters) - The rapporteur for a Brazilian lower house committee examining a corruption charge against President Michel Temer recommended on Monday that the body vote to put Temer on trial.
Deputy Sergio Zveiter’s recommendation was widely expected. The full 66-member committee is likely to vote later this week on the charge against Temer before the full house vote.
Under Brazilian law, two-thirds of the lower house’s 513 members must approve the charge against Temer for it to move to the Supreme Court. The top court then must vote on whether it accepts the charge. I it does, Temer will stand trial and immediately be suspended from the presidency for up to 180 days. House Speaker Rodrigo Maia would temporarily take the presidency in that case.The last time that representatives of the Sheldon Adelson-backed Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG) penned an op-ed for The Hill, I suggested Mr. Adelson seek a refund due to quality concerns.
Yesterday brought another missive from CSIG, credited to former NY Gov. George Pataki and James Thackston in USA Today, even more fraught with errors, omissions, misrepresentations and straw man arguments galore.
Here is a (non-exhaustive) list covering 23 of the most substantial problems with the piece.
Why lead with the truth when you could lead with something scarier?
Let’s start with the first paragraph:
Online gambling might be coming to a computer near you, and while it may seem like the only risk is on the player, the FBI fears it will be used by terrorists and organized crime rings to launder money.
Problem #1 sits right at the top, where the duo warns that “online gambling might be coming to a computer near you.”
Online gambling – in unregulated, unlicensed form – has already come to a computer near you and has been there for well over a decade. If you believe that online gambling presents the threat that the authors describe, then regulation is the only sensible answer to that threat.
Problem #2 is a bit more damning: While Pataki, et al. claim that the FBI “fears” online gambling will be used by terrorists, the FBI never mentions terrorists or terrorism in its letter.
Nor could I find any reference to terrorism funding in the myriad press releases from the FBI covering the various online gambling indictments secured by the agency.
What the FBI actually said
The op-ed continues, and so do the issues:
In a September 2013 letter to Congress, the FBI warned that while many industries are vulnerable to money laundering, Internet gambling goes a step further by providing an anonymous forum for bad actors to move money undetected.
Problem #3 is the Pataki, et al. claim that the FBI has “warned” about the dangers of online gambling.
A warning implies a proactive statement or action by the FBI. But what Pataki, et al. are referring to is an FBI letter (read it here) written in response to a Congressional request for information about the possibility of money laundering via online gambling.
I feel confident in my recollection that there were not any “warnings” issued by the FBI when New Jersey, Nevada or Delaware were considering online gambling regulation, nor when all three states launched regulated online gambling sites.
And with Problem #4 we again find Pataki and Thackston mischaracterizing the FBI letter by implying that the FBI believes online gambling “provides an anonymous forum for bad actors.”
The phrase the FBI actually used: “increased anonymity,” which is miles away from the completely “anonymous forum” Pataki, et al. assert.
Read the whole FBI letter here. And then read why their letters are an obvious argument for regulation, not against it.
Fact: regulated online gambling sites require customers to provide social security numbers, utility bills, voided checks and submit to a variety of other identification verification procedures before creating an account or depositing and withdrawing funds.
Again, it’s the unregulated online casinos and poker rooms – which require few to none of those steps – where the threat exists, if it exists at all.
Problem #5 is that the FBI admits in their letter that everything they describe is preventable, saying: “Many of these methods could be detected and thwarted by a prudent online casino […] some sophisticated methods would be difficult to readily identify or deter.”
Of course, this bit was omitted by Pataki, et al. And it’s obvious why.
Difficult does not equal impossible. It just equals difficult. And there is a massive financial incentive for casinos and their technology partners to accomplish difficult things in the regulated market for online gambling.
Problem #6 is that despite billions of dollars in regulated online wagering spread over several years in regulated international markets, there has yet to be one documented case of the purported threat CSIG describes.
The FBI doesn’t cite one. CSIG can’t cite one. It’s 100% hypothetical.
Won’t somebody think of the innocent Americans?
It gets worse:
So, could innocent Americans find themselves gambling with dangerous criminals or terrorists and unknowingly help them move money? In New Jersey alone, which just legalized Internet gambling two months ago, the number of accounts has already reached nearly 150,000. And Internet gambling is rapidly expanding across the country, with other state legislatures looking at it this session.
Even a novice high school debater would probably blush at the boldness of the first line. Problem #7 is that innocent Americans cannot find themselves in the situation described.
There’s a reason why Pataki and Thackston can’t bring themselves to actually answer their ridiculous rhetorical question affirmatively. It’s naked fear-mongering that they don’t even bother to attempt to support.
In fact, the far-fetched scenario for laundering money they later outline makes it clear that “innocent Americans” can’t “help” criminals move money. They’re an impediment to criminals moving money.
The paragraph wraps up with another staggering misrepresentation of reality. Problem #8 is the assertion that regulated online gambling is “rapidly expanding across the country.”
Except that only a tiny sliver of the population has access to regulated online gambling, while the whole country has access to unregulated sites. And the idea that the expansion is rapid is false on face. The debate over regulating online gambling in the U.S. has been going on for more than a decade.
Writing something down doesn’t make it true
I’m going to group the next four sections of the op-ed together. They basically outline Thackston’s theory of how money could be laundered using online poker. Review it for yourself and then consider the following:
Problem #9 : None of Thackston’s work has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been peer-reviewed or published in any of the dozens of academic journals covering gambling.
: None of Thackston’s work has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been peer-reviewed or published in any of the dozens of academic journals covering gambling. Problem #10 : Thackston has never produced any actual, tangible examples of the hypothetical crimes he describes.
: Thackston has never produced any actual, tangible examples of the hypothetical crimes he describes. Problem #11 : The amounts of money Thackston describes moving are miniscule relative to the amount of effort required to move them. In one example, Thackston outlines a system that requires 4 money launderers and 128 “mule” accounts to move $50,000. And, remember, taxes and pay for the mules have to come out of that money as well.
: The amounts of money Thackston describes moving are relative to the amount of effort required to move them. In one example, Thackston outlines a system that requires 4 money launderers and 128 “mule” accounts to move $50,000. And, remember, taxes and pay for the mules have to come out of that money as well. Problem #12: Thackston never identifies who his money “mules” are. Here’s why: They don’t exist. To move a lot of money, you can’t use mules with low income, or the sudden flow of seed money and gambling winnings will stick out like a sore thumb. It’s also hard to imagine using mules in a high income bracket, because you wouldn’t be able to provide the necessary financial incentive to get them to commit multiple felonies. But remember, Thackston’s premise requires hundreds of mules just to move five figures (pre-cost).
Logic dictates that launderers seek the lowest-friction route to clean money possible.
So let’s compare laundering money at regulated online casino with the process of laundering at a physical casino to quickly illustrate why no “resourceful” (as the FBI letter describes them) money launderer would choose the online option:
Problem #13 : Laundering online is high-cost. You have rake, you have the fact that subtle collusion and chip-dumping will often result in losing pots to players outside of your scheme and you have the taxes on the winnings that now must be paid as online casinos issue W2Gs to the players and the IRS. You also have the cost of getting the cash to the mule in the first place and then getting the cash back to the launderer. Of each dollar you launder, what exactly is left after all of that? And how much better would you do walking into a casino with cash and walking out with winnings?
: Laundering online is. You have rake, you have the fact that subtle collusion and chip-dumping will often result in losing pots to players outside of your scheme and you have the taxes on the winnings that now must be paid as online casinos issue W2Gs to the players and the IRS. You also have the cost of getting the cash to the mule in the first place and then getting the cash back to the launderer. Of each dollar you launder, what exactly is left after all of that? And how much better would you do walking into a casino with cash and walking out with winnings? Problem #14 : Online laundering results in an insane number of points of possible exposure. Money goes to the mule, into a bank account, to the online site, is passed from mule to launderer, is cashed out, is removed from bank and transferred back to the launderer. That’s seven transfers, five of which leave a clear and permanent digital trail, compared to two transactions at a casino with little or no paper trail.
: Online laundering results in an insane number of. Money goes to the mule, into a bank account, to the online site, is passed from mule to launderer, is cashed out, is removed from bank and transferred back to the launderer. That’s, five of which leave a clear and permanent digital trail, compared to two transactions at a casino with little or no paper trail. Problem #15: You can’t move very much money via regulated online poker. When you start talking about games involving thousands of dollars – the minimum necessary to move any significant amount of money – you’re talking about a very narrow band of games and players. To collude and chip-dump at these games would require extreme caution simply because you can’t hide in the crowd. And to be properly bankrolled – necessary to successfully affect the collusion – you’d need to move ridiculous amounts of money to your mules as a precursor to the laundering, exacerbating problem #14. Of course, live casino play doesn’t suffer from the same problem of producing a permanent record of your play.
Thackston’s scenario may be possible. But in the real world, we don’t make policy based on what’s possible. We make policy based on rational calculations concerning plausibility, risk and reward.
It’s also possible that money launderers use eBay and Amazon to launder funds. In fact, doing so would require a third of the steps and a much smaller team of “mules.” And, as the FBI notes, banks and physical casinos can and do serve as “venues for money laundering.”
But we’re not shutting down Amazon and eBay. And we’re not closing down the banking system or shuttering physical casinos.
Why? Because we’ve determined as a society that those risks are acceptable and that regulators and law enforcement can be trusted to do their jobs and ferret out the illicit use if and when it occurs.
Seriously, guys, that’s not what the FBI said
It gets worse:
We should take the FBI at its word. There are sophisticated technologies that can be employed by terrorist groups and criminal organizations to move money undetected, conceal their physical locations, and entangle unwitting online players.
It would be nice if Pataki and Thackston took the FBI at its word. But they don’t. Instead, they resort to putting words in the mouth of the FBI. Remember:
Problem #16 : The FBI letter never mentions terrorism. Nor has the FBI ever linked unregulated online gambling to terrorism in the various indictments the agency has secured. Nor did the FBI issue any warning regarding terrorism when New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware launched regulated online poker games.
: The FBI letter never mentions terrorism. Nor has the FBI ever linked unregulated online gambling to terrorism in the various indictments the agency has secured. Nor did the FBI issue any warning regarding terrorism when New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware launched regulated online poker games. Problem #17: The FBI never claimed that laundering would be “undetectable.” Remember, the furthest they went was to say detection could be “difficult.”
The FBI never claimed that laundering would be “undetectable.” Remember, the furthest they went was to say detection could be “difficult.” Problem #18: Hate to beat a dead horse, but neither the FBI or CSIG provides one tangible example of this happening in the unregulated market, let alone the regulated one. If it’s such a threat, why isn’t it happening?
You forgot to mention how online gambling funds Obamacare
Pataki, et al. save the best-worst for last:
The FBI’s warning is part of a growing body of evidence that demonstrates the dangers the expansion of Internet gambling poses to our national security. Internet gambling is moving full tilt without any consideration of the many and varied law enforcement impacts. Congress needs to do the responsible thing to protect American families and the innocent bystanders caught up in criminal schemes online. It must move swiftly to restore the long-standing federal ban on all forms of Internet gambling.
Ah, Problem #19, the mythical “growing body of evidence.” Was their trouble that there was simply too much evidence to choose from? Is that why they failed to include any of it? I suspect not.
And the familiar boogeyman of Problem #20: the danger to “national security.” If it wasn’t for those pesky facts.
Like that the FBI never linked regulated online gambling to any sort of national security threat. Like that unregulated online gambling exists in all 50 states and has easier linkage with international groups. Like that the FBI and the DHS did not intervene to stop regulated online gambling in any state so far and has given no indication that they plan to do so.
Pataki et al. couldn’t help slipping a reference to “full tilt” in there, which I appreciate. But Problem #21 is that Internet gambling regulation is moving at a snail’s pace, not at full tilt. The debate has been ongoing since before the UIGEA passed.
We’ve had over a decade to consider the law enforcement impacts. They have been considered. Some of the most trusted and vetted regulatory agencies on the planet have considered them and acted accordingly.
And, of course, that leads to Problem #22. Pataki et al. want us to be concerned about the “many and varied law enforcement impacts.” But besides money laundering, which is basically a non sequitur, and “terrorism,” which law enforcement clearly doesn’t see as a concern, they don’t take the time to list any of those impacts, their scope, their likelihood and so on.
The pièce de résistance comes when Pataki et al. call for a restoration of the “long-standing federal ban on all forms of Internet gambling.”
Problem #23: There was never such a thing (that’s not what the Wire Act did or does). And it doubtful that Congress actually has the authority to enact such a thing.
Who loses if CSIG wins
Like any new policy, online gambling regulation should be debated. But CSIG doesn’t want a debate of facts and logic.
They want to create an echo chamber of misrepresentation and fear. And that does a disservice to Americans who are asking for nothing more than the ability to play poker and casino games in a safe, regulated environment online.Even if they vote Republican? Yeah, didn’t think so.
(CNSNews.com) – Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Emanuel Cleaver on Thursday said that African-Americans who don’t vote “ought to give us their color back.”
“That’s why I become so angry at any African-American who refuses to vote. They are not worth the color if they don’t vote. They ought to give us their color back. Their African-American credentials need to be snatched if they don’t vote,” Cleaver said at a CBC forum on voting rights
“That’s an insult to the ancestors and the people who brought us to where we are right now. There’d be no Black Caucus but for the black men and women who fought and died that we might have an opportunity to gather here in Washington that there would be 42 members of the Congressional Black Caucus,” the Missouri Democratic congressman said.Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been named Uber's top executive Sunday, taking the difficult job of mending the dysfunctional ride-hailing giant and turning it from money-losing behemoth to a profitable company.
Uber's fractured eight-member board voted to hire Khosrowshahi, capping three days of meetings and the withdrawal of once-top candidate Jeffery Immelt, former CEO and still chairman of General Electric, two people briefed on the decision said. They didn't want to be identified because the decision had not been officially announced as of Sunday night.
Khosrowshahi has been CEO of Expedia since August of 2015. The online booking site is one of the largest travel agencies in the world.
He will replace ousted CEO Travis Kalanick and faces the difficult task of changing Uber's culture that has included sexual harassment and allegations of deceit and corporate espionage. Uber also is losing millions every quarter as it continues to expand and invest in self-driving cars.
The company currently is being run by a 14-person group of managers and is without multiple top executive positions that will be filled by Khosrowshahi.
Khosrowshahi has served as a member of Expedia's board since it was spun off from IAC/InterActiveCorp. two years ago. An engineer who trained at Brown University, Khosrowshahi helped to expand IAC's travel brands which were combined into Expedia, the company's website says. He also serves on the boards of Fanatics Inc. and The New York Times Co.
He immediately will face troubles on many fronts, including having to deal with multiple board factions that had once pushed Immelt and Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman. Several factions of the board are suing each other.
Whitman, an investor in Uber, denied multiple times publicly that she was interested in the job. Although she spoke to some board members remotely Friday night, they could not guarantee an end to their infighting or that Kalanick would not become board chairman, said another person with knowledge of the board discussions. That person also didn't want to be identified because board discussions are supposed to be private.
Khosrowshahi also must bring together a messy culture that an outside law firm found was rampant with sexual harassment and bullying of employees. He also must deal with driver discontent, although Uber already has started to fix that by allowing riders to tip drivers through its app.Failed 287(g) Program Leads to Racial Profiling and Should Not Be Renewed, ACLU Says
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union today called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to end its 287(g) program, which delegates federal immigration authority to state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide. The controversial program has been critiqued by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Migration Policy Institute. The program has also been severely criticized by civil rights groups for promoting racial profiling of Latinos. Nearly all of the 287(g) agreements are set to expire on or around September 30 unless renewed by ICE.
“The time has come for DHS and ICE to end this failed program once and for all,” said Joanne Lin, ACLU legislative counsel. “Infamous sheriffs, including Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona and Alamance Sheriff Terry Johnson in North Carolina, have used the 287(g) program to target Latinos for traffic stops, to arrest Latinos for minor traffic violations and to establish checkpoints near Latino neighborhoods. It is time for DHS and ICE to get out of the business of partnering with sheriffs who use racial epithets and foster a culture of racial bias.”
The ACLU joined faith, labor, immigration advocacy and other civil rights organizations in sending a letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and ICE Director John Morton urging them to terminate the 287(g) program. The letter explains that the program damages the integrity of ICE’s operations by lacking “transparency and federal oversight, leaving the program susceptible to inefficiencies, insufficiently-monitored racial profiling, and pretextual arrests by law enforcement agencies.”
The letter is available at:The Colonial Period spanned from the 16th Century to the period after World War II. It is often romanticized as a period of exploration and adventure when merchant ships laden with the spoils of exotic lands returned to European ports. However, the reality of colonialism was the exploitation, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous people, and the industrialization of global human trafficking.
The abuse and degradation that indigenous people suffered under colonialism and imperialism resulted in devastating consequences that persist to the present day. The real damage done is too great to simply be used as an analogy, but the pattern, ideology, mentality and operating practices of colonialism persist today across the globe… and in our industries.
Colonialism is now seen by many as a discredited form of rule, but technology companies today are increasingly colonial in their actions. This can be seen in the veneer of sovereignty they seek to cultivate, how they work across borders, their use of dominant culture as a weapon, and the clear belief that “superior” technology is a suitable excuse for lawlessness, exploitation and even violence.
Sovereignty
Photo CC-BY Patrick Nouhailler, filtered.
Technology companies are increasingly being treated like sovereign nations. A nation with sovereignty has a right to conduct its internal affairs without interference from other nations. A nation’s sovereignty is recognized when the borders, people, and central government of that nation are recognized by other nations, and one of the traits of a sovereign nation is the ability to have diplomatic relations with other sovereign nations.Once the disc golf calendar hits the last months of the year, we walk into the annual disc golf hot stove season. Just like the off seasons for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and others, this is the time when we see professionals change teams with a new sponsorship heading into the new year.
One of the busiest people during this time of year is Jonathan Poole. Poole, the Team Manager for Innova Discs, is tasked with finalizing sponsorships with current and new competitors for the upcoming season.
We talked with Poole about the overall state of disc golf sponsorships, what it takes to become sponsored, and more.
Another disc golf season has come to an end and we’re in the middle of disc golf’s version of the hot stove season. We see many of the top competitors remaining with their respective sponsors, but it is becoming more and more common to make some moves before the true competition season begins. As the Innova Team Manager, this must be a busy time for you. What is your role during this hot stove time period?
“Innova evaluates each of their sponsored athletes and ambassadors at the end of every season. We also sort through hundreds of additional requests for sponsorship, to see who might make a solid addition for the upcoming year. This process can take several weeks to complete.”
We get many sponsorship requests here at ATDG, but it surely isn’t the number of requests Innova gets during the course of a year. When you’re looking at competitors to potentially sponsor, what characteristics are you looking for?
“One of the most important things we look for is ‘why’ they want to represent Innova. It is easier to build a meaningful relationship with someone who understands your brand, and sincerely wants to represent your company above all others.”
You also have a few tiers of sponsorships, correct? How do each of the levels differ from each other?
“Levels vary in terms of the number of discs a player is eligible to receive, entry fees provided, travel stipends, etc. Each level is earned based on things such as player rating, number of events played, world ranking, tour money, tour points, and other comparable statistics.”
In your mind, what is better, reaching out to Innova for a sponsorship or letting the play on the course speak for itself?
“Both are extremely important. With hundreds of great players out there seeking sponsorship, you simply have to compete off the course as well. We need to see evidence that you believe in yourself and have some goals in mind for the future. We need players to articulate why Innova should choose them and not someone else. How you handle your business off the course speaks volumes about you in ways that your tournament stats cannot.”
Have you ever had your eye on a potential athlete for a sponsorship only to pull the plug late in the process?
“The only player that comes to mind is Ricky Wysocki when he was in between Prodigy and Latitude. I spoke to Rick a few times, more as a friend than anything else. Rick was unsure what he wanted at that time so I offered him the best decision-making advice I could. But since it was not obvious that Rick wanted to re-join Innova we opted not to make him an offer.”
Who are you welcoming to Team Innova for 2016? What do they bring to the team?
“We are excited to welcome our current team members back in 2016. This was a fantastic year in terms of camaraderie and success on the course. Our goal now is to preserve the good team vibes we have already established.”
You’ve also placed a big emphasis on the Innova Junior team over the last few years with many of the team members becoming well known names at the big disc golf events. While the big names in the Open and Women’s Open division are notable, how important is it to focus on the next generation of disc golfers?
“Working with our juniors and their families has been one of the more rewarding disc golf experiences. It is important to keep an eye out for young talent, but we also want to help mentor our juniors in other areas of their lives as well. We want this experience to help them develop confidence, composure, humility, and other characteristics that will benefit them throughout their lives. And we are rewarded by their playfulness and enthusiasm for the game. They are fun to watch and to be around in general.”
Speaking of the Junior team, we’ve seen Paul McBeth be a common visitor and supporter |
pars. (8) and (9).
1988—Par. (6). Pub. L. 100–690, § 7511(c), added par. (6).
Par. (7). Pub. L. 100–690, § 7512(b), added par. (7).
1986—Pub. L. 99–500 and Pub. L. 99–591 renumbered section 2255 of this title as this section.
Par. (5). Pub. L. 99–628, which directed that par. (5) be added to section 2255 of this title, was executed by adding par. (5) to section 2256 of this title to reflect the probable intent of Congress and the renumbering of section 2255 as 2256 by Pub. L. 99–500 and Pub. L. 99–591.
1984—Pub. L. 98–292, § 5(b), renumbered section 2253 of this title as this section.
Par. (1). Pub. L. 98–292, § 5(a)(1), substituted “eighteen” for “sixteen”.
Par. (2)(D). Pub. L. 98–292, § 5(a)(2), (3), substituted “sadistic or masochistic” for “sado-masochistic” and struck out “(for the purpose of sexual stimulation)” after “abuse”.
Par. (2)(E). Pub. L. 98–292, § 5(a)(4), substituted “lascivious” for “lewd”.
Par. (3). Pub. L. 98–292, § 5(a)(5), struck out “, for pecuniary profit” after “advertising”.
Par. (4). Pub. L. 98–292, § 5(a)(6), substituted “ ‘organization’ means a person other than an individual” for “ ‘visual or print medium’ means any film, photograph, negative, slide, book, magazine, or other visual or print medium”.Recently, NADDIC GAMES unveiled a lot of new content for Closers Online for the next 100 days in a press conference. They are going to add some fascinating stories first with new characters, new E team, NPC and etc. As you can see in the picture below, the new team LOGO looks like a wolf.
The first character Nata and the second Levia Silhouette in the shadow both are said to be playable in game. Nata is a handsome guy whose weapons are the twin sickles. Though we cannot see Levia clearly in the video, she is a female character for sure.
Upcoming scheduled contents of Closer Online for the next 100 days:
1. New playable character Nata
2. New scythe user playable character Levia
3. New dungeons, new area
4. SEASON 2, New stories
5. Yuri, Seha, J rebalanced and revamped
6. UM system removal
7. revamp tons of in game stuffs
8. Titles, room decoration, achievements
9. PvP revamp
10. Circle update
New BOSS
NPCAs a spinoff of The Walking Dead, one of the most popular shows on TV right now,has a name that proves it isn’t trying too hard to differentiate itself from the flagship series. But while the two shows will have the same zombie apocalypse as the overarching catalyst for the drama, the pair will definitely be distinct in their nature and formatting. And while AMC hasn’t exactly been the most forthcoming with details, we’ve rounded up everything we know aboutAMC has been pretty coy about when they’re aiming to air Season 1 of Fear the Walking Dead, simply saying it’ll be debuting in late summer. Considering there are only six episodes in the first season, and that Season 6 of The Walking Dead will hit the network in October, it's no surprise thatwill begin airing on August 23 at 9 p.m. ET.was picked up to series in the beginning of March, months after its pilot order, and AMC gave fans their first look at the show a few weeks later, during’s Season 5 finale “Conquer.” Unfortunately, this was very much a teaser in the strictest definition of the word, offering up a brief gist of what we can expect, rather than anything involving the show’s characters. Check it out below.
AMC then released a behind-the-scenes look at the show as the season officially went into production. This clip doesn’t feature any actual footage from the episodes, or any cast members, but co-creators Robert Kirkman and Dave Erickson verbally lay out how this show will work in comparison to its predecessor.
Thanks to Comic-Con, we now have our first full look at what the series will be like, and to say it looks intense would be an understatement.
What Will Fear The Walking Dead Be About?
Where Will Fear The Walking Dead Take Place?
Who Was Cast In Fear The Walking Dead?
Will The Two Shows Ever Crossover?
How Much Fear The Walking Dead Can We Expect To See?
Unlike, this new series isn’t based on any of Robert Kirkman’s comic books, and will be a brand new survival adventure. And instead of kicking off in the weeks after the zombie apocalypse had taken the country by storm,will be a prequel of sorts, starting off in the earliest days of the outbreak, before people are fully aware of what’s happening. We can assume that rather than focusing on characters running around trying their damnedest to stay alive, this show will devote the first chunk of its story to people slowly coming to grips with the fact that zombies are real and are taking over. But Kirkman and Erickson plan on havingcatch up with’s timeline at some point in the future.Whilestarted off in and around Atlanta before taking the action down the road, eventually ending up in Alexandria, Virginia will be set in Los Angeles, California. Considering there are millions more people living in L.A. than there are in Atlanta, it’s safe to say that this location change is going to have a pretty big effect on how things play out. It seems like the walkers would never stop coming, and some of them might even be famous.The premise behind the spinoff is centered on a handful of people who come together as the zombies begin to take over. The first person cast was Gang Related star Cliff Curtis as a divorced high school teacher named Travis. Then Gone Girl ’s Kim Dickens signed on to play Madison, a high school guidance counselor. Both are parents who have to make extremely hard choices in order to keep themselves and their families safe.’s Frank Dillane will play Madison’s son Nick, who has problems with drugs and other immoral circumstances. The 100 ’s Alicia Debnam-Carey will play Nick’s sister Alicia, who has dreams of getting out on her own. Most recently, Orange is the New Black ’s Elizabeth Rodriguez was hired to play a regular named Liza, although facts about the character are being kept under wraps. Similarly, nothing is known about Ofelia, the character to be played by’s Mercedes Mason. Don’t expect to see those latter two characters when the show starts, however, since they were brought in after the pilot was filmed.So far, Kirkman and the other members of the creative team have said that they don’t plan on doing any straightforward crossovers between the series, which are taking place in different time periods. However, it’s been confirmed that certain elements ofwill show up in, such as key points of information. Kirkman stated that they’re trying to create an “overall tapestry” between the shows, and that people will be able to rewatch Season 1 ofand see details that inform how things are being played out on the other show.Rumors have swirled that characters from early on in, such as Noah Emmerich's doctor Edwin Jenner and Juan Gabriel Pareja's Morales, would make appearances in. However, neither of those have been confirmed.Whengot its season order, AMC wanted two seasons right off the bat. Season 1 will be comprised of 6 episodes, while Season 2 will feature a larger episode order and will air at some point in 2016.Miguel Ángel Palacios was just 19 years old when he lost his life at the hands of a drunk and armed man that wanted to hurt an innocent miniature Pinscher dog named Jerry.
The homicide happened in Envigado, Colombia on May 4, 2014, at 6:00 a.m. Palacios and his brother Juan Pablo learned of a neighbor, 33-year-old Jesús Antonio Castaño, who had been drinking all night long and that morning threatened to sever the dog’s head with a machete. Jerry does not belong to Castaño, but at the time of the incident, the drunk criminal had been caring for the dog.
Palacios, a Colombian native born in Miami, avid animal lover, and volunteer at the local animal shelter (Corporación Canes Perdidos/Lost Dogs Rescue) had been visiting Envigado during a school break. When he learned of the animal cruelty that was about to take place, he rushed over to the neighbor’s home and tried to prevent the crime.
The inebriated man, Palacios and Juan Pablo had a heated discussion that escalated to a physical fight where Castaño used the machete and a pocket knife to inflict various lacerations on the animal lovers. The cops were called to the residence and all three men were rushed to a nearby hospital to be treated for injuries.
Both young animal defenders and the drunk animal abuser had a series of lacerations, however the injuries Palacios suffered were too extensive, and he lost his life the following morning.
“We are devastated with the news,” said Diana Carolina Ortiz, director of Lost Dogs Rescue. “Miguel Ángel loved life and all animals and he always wanted to rescue all abandoned dogs that crossed his path.”
Palacios’s mother, Lina María Montoya, was shocked to learn about her son’s death, but since the tragic event took place, Montoya has been comforted by Colombians and international animal lovers who have reached out to her.
World-wide animal lovers want to make sure Palacios’s death does not become another senseless death.
Authorities arrested Castaño as soon as the man was released from the hospital and he now faces criminal charges he must answer and pay for.
As for Jerry, his life was spared and his rightful owner, Albeiro Cortez, decided to honor the young animal activist by giving Jerry to Montoya. After all, Palacios died defending an innocent animal that wasn’t even his own pet.
“I love Jerry,” said Cortez, “he is a loving pet who earned our love, but I understand how difficult this must be [for Palacios’s family] and I know that Jerry will help them remember Miguel Angel and help them heal.”
Miguel Angel is being honored by 25 animal rescue groups who have come together to help Montoya establish a new rescue group called “Miguel Angel’s Ark.” This organization will fight to defend and save homeless and abused animals. Something Palacios believed in and worked towards accomplishing every day.After a very fun week of finding fights in my Republic Fleet Firetail, I came to the realization that this ship is INCREDIBLY underrated. The fits you will see here are using a mix of dual webs and dual prop; artillery and autocannon guns respectively. The ship itself is going for a whopping 10 million ISK in Jita and fully fit will run around 20 million ISK. The first thing you will notice as you venture out in your trusty rusty Firetail is that you completely control the range of any engagement that happens within webbing range. Using two webs and a scrambler will allow you to very easily keep a target stuck seven kilometers away. That is, if you don’t make piloting errors. (spoiler alert, I do.) The one drawback is its inability to catch up to a fast kiting ship, so plan your engagements accordingly.
The second variation is the dual prop setup; which is used to counter those pesky kiters our dual web ship can’t reliablly chase down and tackle. An overheated MWD cycle will allow you to get into range of a scram and web and lock your target down. I also find that this fit will keep you alive longer in nullsec as there are bubbles and interdictors waiting to catch you unawares.
Long story short: Fight the fight you want to fight and on your terms. Use dual webs to counter short range brawlers and dual prop to pin down those nimble kiters. Try to avoid Garmurs and Svipuls, I have had bad experiences with both.Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Assam on January 19. (PTI photo)
With Assam heading for elections - expected to take place around April - the BJP is all set to announce its first alliance with the Bodoland People's Front in lower Assam.The announcement is expected to be made on January 19 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Kokrajhar - headquarters of the autonomous Bodo Territorial Council - and announces a possible economic package for the Bodo council.The Bodos - a plain tribe - dominate four large districts in lower Assam and determine the fate of 16 seats.In 2011, with 12 elected lawmakers, the Bodoland People's Front or BPF had supported the Congress government, primarily because of the efforts of Himanta Biswa Sarma, the former minister in the Gogoi government who's now joined the BJP.But now the equation seems to have changed. Beyond the Bodo stronghold, the BJP would also rely on the BPF to influence the Bodo vote in districts that have a sizeable Bodo population, especially the ones on the north bank of the Brahmaputra.The BJP is also reported to be in talks with United People's Front - a rainbow coalition of parties representing different tribes - that claim to have an influence over 30 seats. But the Union Sports Minister Sarbananda Sonowal who heads the BJP in Assam played down these reports. "We are talking to everyone. Nothing had been finalised yet," Mr Sonowal told NDTV.Assam is a high stakes battle, both for the BJP and the Congress. Having ruled Assam for 15 years now, it's almost a prestige battle for the Congress to retain the state. The BJP, on the other hand, has seen a surge in its support base and won half of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in 2014.While the party has launched 'Mission 84' to win a majority of the 126 assembly seats, several senior ministers have started visiting the state. Last month, Sushma Swaraj and Smriti Irani addressed public rallies and today Rajnath Singh landed in Assam for a two-day trip. This will be followed by the Prime Minister Modi's visit where he will also address the BJP's youth wing. "Prime Minister is an icon for the country's youth and our endeavour would be carry his message to the youth of Assam tomorrow bring about a change in the state," Mr Sonowal told NDTV.Backyard Beekeeping Approved In Los Angeles
Enlarge this image toggle caption Damian Dovarganes/AP Damian Dovarganes/AP
Overturning a 136-year-old ban, the Los Angeles City Council voted on Wednesday to legalize urban beekeeping.
Once the ordinance is signed by the mayor, Los Angeles will join cities including New York, San Francisco and Washington in allowing beekeeping. There is even a beehive on the White House grounds.
The ordinance will limit beekeeping to backyards of single family homes and establish buffer zones, and beekeepers will have to provide a source of water at their hives, according to the Associated Press.
According to an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times by Noah Wilson-Rich, author of The Bee: A Natural History, the repeal of the beekeeping regulation is long overdue:
"On June 10, 1879, Los Angeles lawmakers banned beekeeping within city limits. According to Mark Vallianatos, who teaches environmental policy at Occidental College, their rationale was frankly preposterous. Having noted the affinity between bees and fruit trees, they reasoned that bees attacked and damaged fruit, and concluded that outlawing bees was the best way to preserve crops. "Soon enough scientists debunked this ridiculous theory — bees are vitally important pollinators — and by 1917, the Los Angeles Times was calling the no-beekeeping policy 'an ancient and still-unrepealed city ordinance.'"
While critics worry about the dangers posed by bee stings, supporters point out that bees already live in the city in the wild. The AP adds, "Feral hives that are discovered in public areas usually are wiped out because of worries that they might contain Africanized bees — hybrids of tamer European honeybees and a hardier but more aggressive strain."
In the op-ed, Wilson-Rich counters this claim:
"Hives maintained by beekeepers are less dangerous than wild hives; beekeepers effectively tame hives through re-queening — the process of removing an aggressive queen and manually adding a docile queen."
The vote is welcome news to scientists who warn that declining bee populations, due to such factors as climate change and loss of habitat, will damage crop yields, as NPR's Allison Aubrey reported in April.PUEBLO, Colorado — Colorado’s GOP national committeewoman Vera Ortegon, a Hispanic woman, gave a rousing address to the crowd of thousands here in support of Donald J. Trump for president on Monday afternoon.
“Many of you know me as Vera Ortegon,” she said as she opened up her speech, about an hour before Trump took the stage. “I’m your national committeewoman. But I also want to be known as one of the Deplorables. I am a Deplorable woman. I am a Deplorable Hispanic. I am a Deplorable legal immigrant. And I am Hillary’s worst fear because I am a Deplorable highly educated woman.”
As the crowd went wild, Ortegon asked: “How many of you want to be called a Deplorable?”
The building erupted in applause. Ortegan went on:
That is exactly what I thought. I may not be a former Miss Universe. But I will vote also in November. My first presidential vote was for Ronald Reagan. And in November I will vote for Donald J. Trump. People ask me why I am going to vote for Trump. Let me know tell you why, and I may not have enough fingers on my hands, but number one: If you know any Hispanics, you know we do not sugar coat anything. We speak our mind and we say it like it is. Trump is not well known for sugar coating things—it’s not bone of his attributes—but I tell you, he speaks his mind and he says it like it is. And I tell you, Hillary, that is not the case with her.
The crowd burst into chants of “lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”
“Two, Trump loves America,” Ortegon said. “He will work very hard to Make America Great Again. I don’t know about you, but I am really tired of this last eight years. Leadership, leading from behind, wow, that’s an oxymoron for me. Leaders lead. Leaders make difficult decisions.”
Her third reason for supporting Trump, she said, is that “Trump will protect the vets.”
“Trump will protect our armed forces, and Trump will protect our law enforcement officers,” Ortegon said.The conference was far bigger than in recent years, with 1,200 delegates attending The conference was far bigger than in recent years, with 1,200 delegates attending
For anyone interested in the practice of democracy, this year’s Labour Party conference in Brighton was a fascinating event. That didn’t appear to include most of the journalists paid to report on it, who evinced no curiosity about developments on the conference floor, preferring instead to focus on the usual manufactured outrages and gossip from outside the hall. That was a shame, because while in 10 years’ time no one will remember that Laura Kuenssberg was accompanied by a bodyguard, the 2017 event will go down as the conference at which party democracy started to make a comeback.
This was a conference full of conflicting dynamics, but with an overarching story of left delegates gradually asserting themselves as they learned the ropes. An enormous 1,200 delegates attended, many for the first time, making this the biggest Labour conference in memory. Around two-thirds of the delegates from local constituency parties were firmly of the left, judging by the results of contentious votes, and far more were broadly supportive of Jeremy Corbyn.
In the ballot for two seats on the party’s National Constitutional Committee, the left candidates won 71 per cent of the delegates’ vote. For experienced leftists accustomed to decades of losing, it was a dizzying experience to suddenly be in a commanding position.
The fact that the left has emphatically won Labour’s civil war was obvious from the reception that greeted the leader’s every appearance and the endless (overdone) chants of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. It was also seen in the spontaneous standing ovations, given to Diane Abbott mid-way through Corbyn’s speech, to Len McCluskey for just taking the stage (leaving him visibly moved, his hand on his heart), and to Dennis Skinner after delegates demanded he be chosen to speak from the floor. John McDonnell might have considered himself hard done by, only receiving three standing ovations during his speech.
This jamboree was a world away from the previous year’s conference, when the left was in a minority among constituency delegates, despite the party re-electing Corbyn as leader with 62 per cent of the vote. Ironically, that year’s attempted coup against Corbyn was a major spur to the left securing its majority this time round, as left members realised it wasn’t enough just to elect the leader. Adversity has fuelled the Corbyn movement.
The left’s dominance in Brighton was down to organisation. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy played its traditional role, helping local parties submit motions and rule changes and coordinating tactics at conference. But this year it had a powerful ally in a newly effective Momentum. In the run-up to conference Momentum encouraged members to become delegates and gathered their details, enabling it to provide real-time guidance during the conference itself via their phones. This organisational effectiveness afforded it great influence.
Democracy from above?
Party democracy has been a long-time aspiration for Corbyn, but bureaucratic blockages meant little progress was made in his first two years as leader. That is now changing, but there is not yet a fully worked out vision of how a democratised party will work. The evidence from the 2017 conference suggests that Corbyn’s version of democracy is far from a free-for-all.
Having organised for months in advance of contentious votes over rule changes, many grassroots activists felt deflated when their efforts were displaced by an old-fashioned deal brokered by the leadership at the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in the week before Brighton. Instead of fighting it out on the conference floor, local parties were asked to withdraw proposed rule changes such as the so-called ‘McDonnell amendment’, intended to reduce the proportion of Labour MPs needed to nominate a leadership candidate to ensure someone from the left has a chance to succeed Corbyn.
In a compromise, the NEC agreed to lower the nomination threshold from 15 per cent of Labour MPs to 10 per cent, rather than the 5 per cent that would otherwise have been voted on. Crucially, the NEC decided to expand itself with three more seats for constituency parties and one for trade unions, giving Corbyn a majority on the powerful committee. And it toughened the party’s rules around prejudice, including antisemitism, in what the Jewish Labour Movement claimed as a victory, but which was really a partial climbdown by the group.
Most significantly, the NEC announced a wide-ranging review of party structures, to be undertaken by Corbyn’s political secretary Katy Clark. This brought the possibility of sweeping democratisation, but it would come from above, shaped by the leader’s office, rather than being won bit-by-bit through rule changes at conference.
The NEC deal was skilful, traditional party management from the leadership – securing big wins while avoiding a row – but it risked demotivating Corbyn’s activist supporters. As conference got underway it looked like the biggest obstacle for the pro-Corbyn contingent would be the absence of obstacles. Delegates who had come ready for a fight initially found there wasn’t much to fight over.
Separately, the leader’s office won a behind-the-scenes battle over Labour’s policy on Israel-Palestine. The call for ‘an end to the blockade, occupation and settlements’ made in the 2017 election manifesto was outrageously omitted from the annual National Policy Forum report, which constitutes Labour Party policy once agreed by conference. On day one in Brighton, in the daily Conference Arrangements Committee report, the text mysteriously reappeared. While left delegates were delighted, no one knew quite how it had happened. In fact, the leadership, which was livid at the omission, had simply put its foot down. The bureaucracy may also have calculated that had it not conceded, the section would have been challenged, or ‘referenced back’, by delegates in any case (see below).
Brexit fix?
One story from the conference floor did make it into the press: that ‘Momentum blocked a full debate on the EU,’ as Nick Cohen put it. Talk of party democracy was a sham, bellowed the entire media, the Labour right and elements on the far left, if conference could not vote on the ‘most important’ issue of the day. According to Marina Hyde in the Guardian, delegates were denied the chance to take a ‘contemporary motion’ on Brexit by ‘a classic old-style fix’ supposedly ‘masterminded’ by Momentum founder Jon Lansman.
There was fluid democracy on the conference floor… it was the opposite of a stitch-up
What actually happened was rather less exciting. In a ‘priorities ballot’ constituency delegates themselves voted overwhelmingly to debate motions on the NHS, social care, housing, and rail instead. The allegation of a ‘fix’ arose because these four topics were recommended by Momentum. But this is also known as ‘organising.’ And – shock horror – the right was organising too. On the day of the priorities ballot, Labour First, the coordinating group of the party’s ‘old right’, distributed a ‘Voting Guide’ leaflet recommending delegates choose to debate Brexit. It was difficult to discern why Momentum’s actions were inherently more fiendish. Perhaps it was the temerity of using electronic communications instead of paper leaflets. Or maybe the problem was simply that considerably more people were listening to them.
It was true that among delegates there were disagreements over Brexit – including among pro-Corbyn delegates – and that one reason for not prioritising the issue was a pragmatic desire to avoid a split. But many also distrusted the motives of those keenest to push the matter to a vote – whether that was Progress seeking to bind the leadership to a policy of permanent single market membership; Labour First engaging in its trademark factionalism; or left elements, most prominently the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, agitating for the party to commit to freedom of movement. (A significant number of delegates might have supported the latter demand, but it was unlikely to have been the focus of the Brexit motion anyway.)
According to the incessant whining noise that goes by the name of Richard Angell, Corbyn-supporting delegates were too stupid to know they were being manipulated. They ‘only rejected the topic [of Brexit] because they trust the Momentum leadership and followed their instructions,’ without realising that the ‘position is dishonest,’ he wrote. In reality, delegates perceived perfectly well what was going on. When one speaker suggested from the podium that the ‘real intention was to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership’ he got a standing ovation from the majority of the hall.
Although MPs like Chuka Umunna and Progress chair Alison McGovern moaned that ‘our party isn’t going to be able to consider the biggest issue facing us,’ there was actually a lengthy, scheduled debate on Brexit. And while Workers’ Liberty complained that ‘conference has spent a lot of time discussing Brexit… but not voted on anything,’ there were in fact two votes.
Conference voted through an NEC statement setting out the leadership’s Brexit position. But more interesting was a vote taken at the request of a delegate from Nottingham South. She called for party policy to be ‘referenced back’ to the National Policy Forum, saying the UK should ‘remain in the customs union and the European Economic Area’. Had conference wanted to, it could have seized this chance to send a message to the leadership. Instead, the vote against the ‘reference back’ was, in the words of the chair, ‘overwhelming’.
The votes suggested that nothing like a majority of constituency delegates (never mind the trade unions) thought it was a good idea to tie the party to the mast of single market and customs union membership when the politics of Brexit is fluid and changing. Even if enough delegates had prioritised a motion on Brexit, it is unlikely it would have passed.
Reference back!
The attempt to ‘reference back’ party policy on Brexit did turn out to be significant, but for a different reason. The power to ‘reference back’ individual sections of the annual National Policy Forum report was new, the result of a rule change won at the 2016 conference. Previously, delegates were only given the option to accept or reject the National Policy Forum report in its entirety. If it was rejected, Labour would effectively have no policies. Unsurprisingly, it never was. In this way, policy making was kept at arms length from the conference – a legacy of New Labour’s determination to marginalise the party.
In the run up to the 2017 conference, regional Labour staff briefed delegates that no one knew what would happen if a section of the National Policy Forum report was ‘referenced back,’ but it sounded scary. Conference might break down. The world might stop spinning. On the first day of conference, no one attempted it.
On the second morning, the delegate from Nottingham South asked to ‘reference back’ the section on Brexit. Although her attempt failed, a taboo was broken. The process was revealed to be easy. You just shouted out ‘reference back’ and went up to the stage to explain why.
That afternoon a delegate from Taunton Deane asked to ‘reference back’ a section on welfare policy because it failed to ‘explicitly commit to scrap all planned welfare cuts.’ Momentum sent out word to support him. Delegates were suspicious – without foundation – that the chair would attempt to sidestep the vote. There was tension in the hall. A show of hands had to be taken several times.
The bulk of constituency delegates were in favour. But the voting power at conference is split 50-50 between the constituencies and affiliated organisations, meaning that despite enjoying a clear majority among the local party delegates, the left could only win votes with the support of at least one, and usually two, of the big unions (Unite, Unison and GMB). When the affiliates were asked to do a show of hands separately, it was clear that some unions, including Unison, supported the ‘reference back’. It was carried. For the first time, conference had sent a section of Labour policy back to the National Policy Forum to reconsider.
This was fluid democracy on the conference floor. The delegate from Taunton Deane, Fraser Amos, was not from the left but from Open Labour, a ‘soft left’ or consensus-seeking group. Momentum hadn’t known that he intended to challenge Labour’s welfare policy, and decided to support him on the spot. This was the opposite of a stitch-up. Indeed, the effect was to begin to unpick the stitched-up National Policy Forum process.
The feel of proceedings was unrecognisable from the New Labour days. With more time set aside for delegates to speak, there was an energy in the room, a participative spirit
On the third morning, delegates arrived in the hall with new confidence. For an extraordinary hour conference verged on open rebellion. For a while it felt like proceedings might fall apart entirely. There was a call to ‘reference back’ the Conference Arrangements Committee report, effectively the agenda for the day, because an emergency motion on the issue of suspensions from the party had not been chosen for debate. The vote was too close to call by a show of hands, but was lost on a card vote (where the number of members or affiliated members a delegation represents is counted), with most of the unions in opposition.
Even the treasurer’s financial report – usually a dull conference formality – sparked heated debate. The first delegate to respond demanded to know how much the party spent on the Compliance Unit, the body responsible for suspensions and expulsions.
When the discussion moved on to policy, a section of the National Policy Forum report on education was successfully ‘referenced back’ on the grounds that it didn’t commit to ‘bring schools back into democratic control’. A paragraph on NHS privatisation was ‘referenced back’ because it talked about stopping ‘excess private profits’ (why only excess profits?) and making the NHS the ‘preferred provider’ (why not the only provider?)
Although these votes did not change party policy in themselves, they were significant victories. The effect of a ‘reference back’ is to tell the National Policy Forum to go away and try again, and present something better to the following year’s conference. The mechanism could prove key to re-establishing conference’s long-lost authority over policy. To avoid endless calls to ‘reference back’, the National Policy Forum will have to produce reports that delegates agree with. It will no longer be able to neuter policy without challenge.
Democracy from below
It was striking that constituency delegates became more assertive day-by-day. Their caricature as Corbyn ‘cultists’, interested only in pleasing the leader – ‘children who cannot handle the robust debates of a free society’, in Nick Cohen’s words – could only be advanced by people who either didn’t understand, or had no interest in, what unfolded on the conference floor.
On the penultimate afternoon in Brighton, 64 per cent of constituency delegates supported a rule change that put them at odds with Corbyn, who wanted the motion to be withdrawn so Katy Clark would have a free hand in her review of party structures. While the rule change – which would have removed the need for motions from constituency parties to focus on ‘contemporary’ issues – didn’t pass due to opposition from the unions, delegates were well aware that in supporting it they were going against the recommendation of the NEC and the leadership.
There was palpable frustration in the hall at having to ‘remit’ other rule changes in favour of the pre-agreed package won at the NEC. There were shouts of ‘Don’t do it!’ when speakers went up to withdraw their constitutional amendments – especially when it came to the original ‘McDonnell amendment’. Far from being a cult, the conference had a mind of its own.
Aside from the votes, the feel of proceedings was unrecognisable from the New Labour days, when ministers would deliver drab perorations to half empty halls. With more time set aside for delegates to speak, there was an energy in the room, a participative spirit. Conference was unpredictable, at times edgy.
The healthy lack of deference was encapsulated in a moment following deputy leader Tom Watson’s speech. At its finale the entire shadow cabinet came out for a group photo amid a standing ovation. But as soon as the feel-good display of unity was over a delegate got up to remark that Watson had gone on for 22 minutes having been allotted just 5.
The breadth of knowledge and talent within the party’s ranks could be glimpsed from the three-minute speeches made by delegates. Several talked about specific problems within schools, social care services, or the railways. It was, at times, genuinely impressive, and occasionally emotional. Instead of broadcasting their own views, shadow ministers sat and listened, imbibing the priorities and instincts of a transformed party.
In my book The Candidate I traced the different political strands that wound together to form the Corbyn movement – the Bennites, left trade unionists, and social movement activists. These various traditions could be visibly observed at the rostrum. An experienced trade unionist putting forward their demands would be followed by a Disabled People Against the Cuts campaigner delivering an impassioned speech. A veteran leftist asking for a procedural clarification would be followed by a one-time Occupy activist decrying homelessness. The various strands were knitting together, live on stage.
All of this was still a fair distance from the ideal of a democratic, truly sovereign conference. ‘Referencing back’ to the National Policy Forum is no match for setting policy directly. The number of contemporary motions debated was small. But, after a two-year lag while the left got its organisational act together, this was the first Labour conference to bear the imprint of the Corbyn era. It was a confident first step on the path to a democratic party. And it was the delegates themselves that forced the pace.
Alex Nunns is the author of The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power. An updated edition covering the 2017 general election will be out before Christmas.Class of 2014 Indiana signee James Blackmon Jr. finished third in voting for the state’s Mr. Basketball award behind Trey Lyles and Trevon Bluiett, The Indianapolis Star announced today.
Lyles, a Kentucky signee, won the award with 117 votes and was followed by Bluiett, a Xavier signee, with 108 votes.
Blackmon Jr., who played his senior season at Marion after playing his first three high school seasons at Ft. Wayne Luers, finished third with 95 votes.
Lyles (Indianapolis Tech, Class 4A) and Bluiett (Park Tudor, Class 2A) both won state championships this past season.
Blackmon Jr., who is ninth on the state’s all-time scoring list with 2,387 points, has two busy weekends ahead. This coming Saturday he’ll play in the Nike Hoop Summit in Portland, Oregon and he will then play in the Jordan Brand Classic on Friday, April 18 in Brooklyn.
Filed to: James Blackmon Jr.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
A number of PlayStation 4 owners appear to have non-functional units that all suffer the same problem, a so-called blue light—or blue pulse—of death. We can't tell how many and assume it's a small but noteworthy minority.
The problem is being cited in scathing Amazon reviews, a trickle of Twitter complaints and a stack of videos on YouTube—as well as in more than a dozen e-mails and Tweets received by Kotaku since the console's launch on Friday.
Sony hasn't offered any official comment to Kotaku on the matter, but a representative on the official PS4 support forums did post a lengthy set of step-by-step troubleshooting tips today. That post, on a thread entitled "[INFO] Blinking Blue Light PS4 Issues," doesn't offer any surefire fix.
From what I've heard, those with this issue have found that the best solution still involves sending the |
sidewalk. The facilities' structure, architectural enclosures and equipment mountings are acoustically and vibrationally designed to minimize adverse impact on the high-rises which will house hotels, residences, offices and schools. This presents the subway selected design drawings from 2007 and recent as-built photos. Site J - West 33rd and 34th Streets and 11th Avenue 34th Street Entrance, combined utilities facility in background High-rise to be constructed over and adjacent to subway ventilation-electrical facility Site K - West 36th Street and 11th Avenue Site A - West 26th Street and 11th Avenue Photo 7 November 2014 by Cryptome West and south walls unfinished awaiting construction of high-rise around the facility. High-rise terrace to be on roof of the facility. Site M - West 41st Street and 10th Avenue Under construction, 9 November 2014, by CryptomeThe vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union may still be months away, but already the scare stories have started. One that is particularly revealing is the question about who should be allowed to vote in the in/out referendum. The Mail on Sunday reported Tory concerns that one million Europeans who are not UK passport holders could be allowed to cast their vote. Conservative MP Philip Davies told the paper that there was “massive concern that the referendum could be rigged to deliver a desired outcome. But it would be unjustifiable if EU nationals were allowed to take part in this vote”.
Such is the concern that Eurosceptic Tories have challenged David Lidington, the minister for Europe, to make sure these European foreigners are not allowed to vote. At present, EU citizens living in this country can vote in the local and European elections but not in the general election. Tory rebels want the referendum to be run under general election rules. What could be fairer?
David Cameron warned he could lose ministers over EU referendum campaign Read more
What these MPs neglect to mention is that even now you do not necessarily need to be a UK passport holder to vote in a general election. Indeed, for decades the UK has allowed citizens from other countries the right to select members of parliament, a right that even extends to citizens of three EU countries. They are part of a much larger group of 72 countries that includes all Commonwealth territories, British overseas territories and British crown dependencies. Fiji and Zimbabwe may be suspended from the Commonwealth but their citizens resident here have not lost their right to vote in UK elections. The three special EU countries are Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. They enjoy this privilege because while they may now be part of the EU, they once had an older allegiance to a much greater union: the British empire. The sun set on the empire long ago, but its legacy lives on.
What makes all this fascinating is that while Eurosceptics are happy to raise all sorts of scare stories about the EU, these other voters are an issue they are reluctant to discuss. Indeed, as far as the UK electoral franchise is concerned, this is now the great elephant in the room, as I was made well aware during the recent election. At one husting, I had the chance to raise this issue with three panellists from the main parties: Michael Gove for the Tories, Ivan Lewis for Labour and Baroness Kramer for the Lib Dems. Lewis disapproved of my even raising the issue. Baroness Kramer, who did not seem to know that non-citizens could vote, justified it on the grounds that this was a wonderful example of British eccentricity. Gove just said that he did not want to see any change in the franchise.
More fascinating was how Ukip reacted. Some weeks before the election, at a British Future event, Douglas Carswell, now the only Ukip member of parliament, made a very reasoned speech to show that Ukip was not an anti-immigrant party. But when I raised this issue, he made it clear that this was not a question Ukip would touch, remarking that the British system was so complex that to lift the carpet would mean all sorts of things would crawl out. How strange to hear this from a party whose leader, Nigel Farage, makes so much of the fact that he is prepared to go where no other politician dares.
As far as the UK electoral franchise is concerned, this is now the great elephant in the room
Indeed, if Farage were the revolutionary he claimed to be, he could turn to the country whose points-based immigration system he is always advising us to copy: Australia. Before 1984, British citizens living in Australia were allowed to vote in its elections. After that you had to be an Australian citizen to do so, although British citizens who were entitled to vote before 1984 retained their right.
I am not saying we should change our electoral system. I am merely intrigued that the issue is not discussed. It is all very well to say this is part of Britain’s great imperial legacy. But in recent years the question of non-doms, another imperial legacy, has been widely debated with Labour proposing to abolish it. So why not this? In refusing to even have a debate, we are in danger of allowing Ukip and other Eurosceptics to raise scare stories of how foreigners are usurping British rights when, in fact, reflecting this country’s complex history, it already extends all sorts of rights and privileges to foreigners. It seems to depend on who the foreigners are.Story highlights North Korea's nuclear program advancement has been a major concern on Capitol Hill
President Donald Trump threatened to unleash "fire and fury against the country
(CNN) Several key congressional leaders say they have yet to hear from the White House on the administration's North Korea strategy as President Donald Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric threatening "fire and fury" against Pyongyang.
While intelligence committee and "Gang of Eight" members report some engagement on North Korea, Democrats say the lack of updates from the White House on the tense situation in the Korean Peninsula is alarming.
"We are not receiving updates or briefings at all. The legislative branch of the US government is hearing about these developments on Twitter at the same time as Kim Jong Un," said Ben Marter, a spokesman for the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois.
A Democratic aide said the engagement from the administration on North Korea was "not much and not enough," saying there was "limited member engagement and only some staff level engagement."
The recent advancements of North Korea's nuclear program have been a major concern on Capitol Hill this year. In April the White House took the rare step of inviting all 100 senators to the White House for a classified briefing on North Korea.
Read MoreIn 1979 the All-Nippon News Network affiliate in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, Nagoya Broadcasting Network, aired an anime series that changed the face of the anime industry. That series was Mobile Suit Gundam. When the series first aired, like so many other new properties, it wasn't a blockbuster, but it successfully captured the imagination of an entire generation. Since then, Mobile Suit Gundam has grown into a franchise that has produced nineteen different TV series, nineteen OVA (original video anime) series, over eight feature films, excluding the compilations films, has been featured in multiple videogames and card games, and created the entire genre of garage kit models know as Gunpla, among other endeavors. It's truly a juggernaut in the anime industry and rivaled by very few properties. The cultural impact was significant enough that in 2009 to celebrate the franchises 30th anniversary a life-size replica of the RX-78-2 Gundam from Mobile Suit Gundam was commissioned and built. The replica stood in Odaiba's Shiokaze Park, Tokyo, between July 11, 2009 and August 31, 2009 and drew fans from across Japan and the world.
The RX-78-2 Gundam has since been relocated to the Diver City Tokyo Plaza shopping center. It's an amazing monolith and a testament to the popularity of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise and still draws fans from around the world. Unfortunately, a chain barrier surrounds the Gundam and visitors can't get close to it or touch it, let alone get high enough to see the finer details of the head, torso, and arms. It's been suggested with the power of modern computing and engineering a person could build a functional Gundam. Yet, considering the hypothesized costs to build one—nearly ¥80 billion or $700 million—and it's been hypothesized that a person couldn't withstand the force generated from one footstep of the Gundam, the investment would be for not.
Diver City Tokyo Plaza isn't just home to the life-size replica of the RX-78-2 Gundam. One of the three Gundam Café locations in Tokyo is no more than 100 meters from it. While not as large as the Akihabra location, it features a gift shop and small lounge for customers to enjoy menu items delightfully named after characters and other things from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. There are also memorabilia items on display and on sale, but they commend a hefty price in the hundreds of U.S. Dollar range.
Both the RX-78-2 Gundam and the Gundam Café are a nice tourist stop for fans of the franchise, but one would be hard pressed to pass up the opportunity to visit Gundam Front Tokyo as well. Located on the seventh floor of Diver City Tokyo Plaza, it houses two museums, the main gallery and the Gunpla Tokyo museum, an official gift shop, and the Strict-G clothing store.
The main exhibition hall of Gundam Front Tokyo only has nine gallery items, excluding the beautiful murals, but they are all wonderful in their own right. The largest gallery piece is the planetarium-like Dome-G Theater. The theater features a rotation of short films every hour and the current the lineup is Competition of New Gundam Red or White, Kidō Senshi Gundam UC Neo Zeong, Odaiba ni Arawaru, and Gundam Dive One of Seventy Two. However, these films are also rotated out every few months making each visit to the Dome-G Theater a unique experience. Mind you, though, you can get a sense of vertigo or strain your neck looking up at the screen, so exercising caution before entering the theater is advised.
The second largest gallery piece is the life-sized bust of the ZGMF-X20A Strike Freedom Gundam from Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny. At present a cutout of Kira Yamato, the protagonist of Mobile Suit Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny, can be seen in the cockpit. When Gundam Front Tokyo first opened on April 19, 2012 patrons could have their picture taken inside the cockpit. Sadly, that service is no longer available. It's quite a shame, too, because it was one of the few opportunities to step into a Gundam's cockpit. Perhaps Gundam Front Tokyo will reinstate that service, but until then Kira will remain standing there.
To the left of the Strike Freedom Gundam is a life-sized model of the FF-X7 Core Fighter from Mobile Suit Gundam. Surprisingly, the Core Fighter is rather small at only 8.6 meters in length and a wingspan of 6.8 meters. Audio of Katz, Letz, and Kikka directing Amuro Rey to their escape pod from the final episode of the series plays in the background and is quite fitting. Looking at the Core Fighter, though, begs the question: could an aircraft that small actually fly inside Earth's atmosphere? Extraordinarily, the answer is yes. In fact, the smallest piloted biplane to achieve flight was the Starr Bumble Bee II on May 8, 1988. It's amazing a biplane only 2.7 meters in length with a wingspan of 1.68 meters achieved this, but it has been documented. Yet, the Core Fighter is a jet aircraft and not a biplane. Thus, we must ask if a jet aircraft that small can achieve piloted flight. Again, yes. The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin was the smallest piloted fighter jet to achieve this on August 23, 1948. What's astonishing about the XF-85 Goblin was how it was smaller than the Core fighter at only 4.5 meters in length with a wingspan of 6.4 meters. Pretty cool!
For those who enjoy scale models though, Gundam Front Tokyo features a 1/7500 model of the space fortress A Baoa Qu. It stands 4.5 meters high with a maximum diameter of 3 meters and is magnificently crafted. Those proportions make the actual fortress nearly 33.75 kilometers in length with a diameter of 22.5 kilometers. While this may seem astronomically large, A Baoa Qu would actually be one of the smaller asteroids in our solar system. By comparison, the largest asteroid, though it's also classified as a dwarf planet, in our solar system, Ceres, is 42 times larger in diameter than A Baoa Qu. Still, the model is a sight to behold and demonstrates how large A Baoa Qu was compared to the SCV-70/LMSD-71 White Base assault carrier or any Mobile Suit featured in the final two episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam.
Next to the model of A Baoa Qu is a small cubby, the Battle System, which simulates being inside the cockpit of a Mobile Suit. While there is no seat, it's large enough to fit at most two or three people, though it's ideal for one person, and certainly has the cramped feel of a cockpit. A monitor is situated in the front and plays video from different Mobile Suit Gundam series. It's a wonderful gallery piece to have your picture taken in.
However, the best locations in Gundam Front Tokyo to have your picture taken are the Character Photo Spots and the Real Photo Spot. The Real Photo Spot is no more than a mockup of a Gundam's cockpit, but the mural in the back gives the impression you are in the thick of a sortie.
In turn, the three Character Photo Spot booths have a selection of over 100 characters from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise you can take your picture with. These include main characters such as Amuro Rey and Char Aznable from Mobile Suit Gundam, Camille Vidan from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and Kira Yamato or minor characters like Graham Aker's alias, Mr. Bushido, from Mobile Suit Gundam 00. With such a large selection of characters one could make a game of taking a picture with every character of the franchise voiced by Shūichi Ikedaor Takehito Koyasu.
The final major gallery piece of the main museum is the Gunpla Factory. It's a small gallery in and of itself and displays the development, molding, and casting process for Gunpla (Gundam plastic model) kits before they are brought to market. Some of the notable features in the gallery are the evolution of the RX-78-2 Gundam models, the molds used to create the casts, a piece of machinery that melts the plastic into the casts, and a video guide of the Shizuoka Prefecture Bandai Hobby Center. A handy guide of the staff ranks at the center is also on display and it's rather humorous how the markings resemble military insignia. It's perfect for those who love the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise and enjoy bringing its merchandise to fans.
For a small ¥500 fee you can also create your own Gunpla package in the Gunpla Labo attached to the Gunpla Factory. Granted, the only available package is for the GFT Gunpla Factory RX-78-2 Gundam, but you are allowed to color it any way you like. The price also includes a simple RX-78-2 Gundam model for patrons to assemble.
If you are a Gunpla fan, though, the Gunpla Tokyo museum is a dream come true. The museum houses every Gunpla commercially produced by the toy manufacturer Bandai, including the limited productions. It's incredible seeing the evolution of the products with every gallery piece and the detail of the newer models is phenomenal, especially on the 1/60 Perfect Grade models. Perhaps not highly sought after today, though, the 1/100 Master Grade Hyper Mode Master Gundam and 1/100 Master Grade Hyper Mode G Gundam are two examples of limited edition Gunpla on display. While the basic frame and parts of the Hyper Mode models are exactly the same as their counterparts, fans of Mobile Fighter G Gundam will certainly enjoy seeing them. There are, of course, Gunpla displays scattered throughout Gundam Front Tokyo as well, including, but not limited to, the 1/144 High Grade RX-78GP03 Dendrobium, the Cosmos Fleet, and the 1/144 High Grade KUMA-03 Beargguy III.
The Gundam Front Tokyo Official Shop sells a number of unique items, but the sheer quantity of Gunpla, especially limited edition models, is astonishing. Two of the newest additions include the 1/144 Real Grade MSZ-006-3 Zeta Gundam Unit 3 ver. GFT Limited Color and the 1/144 Real Grade MSN 001-2 Delta Gundam II ver. GFT Limited Color. While most of the items available at the Official Shop make wonderful gifts, the clothes sold at the Strict-G clothing store are nothing to scoff at. Many of the items are T-shirts, but you can find an assortment of neckties, pins, and jackets, among other accessories for sale. Be forewarned though, like other licensed merchandise many of these items are rather expensive.
Gundam Front Tokyo is a fun little destination for fans of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. It may be small by comparison to one of the Japanese National museums located in Ueno Park, Tokyo, or even the Train Museum located in Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture, but it's certainly hours of fun. If you are using a cellphone or smartphone to take pictures, though, you may have to take multiples as the lighting is rather poor and flash photography is not allowed. While more gallery pieces would be appreciated, such as dioramas or life-sized replicas of the bridges from different assault ships and cruisers, what is available is enjoyable. The Gunpla Tokyo museum is also a nice stop for those who love Mobile Suit Gundam models. The fact every commercially sold Gunpla is displayed is amazing and one could spend hours examining the make, design, and detail of each one.
Gundam Front Tokyo is five minutes from the New Transit Yurikamome line's Daiba station and 3 minutes from the TWR Rinkai line's Tokyo Teleport station. Both the main gallery and Gunpla Tokyo are open between 10:00 AM to 9:00 PM seven days a week, but admission to the main gallery ends at 6:00 PM. Tickets can be purchased in advance on-line right here. Tickets are also available on location. Advance ticket prices are: adults and high school students: ¥1000, middle school students, elementary school students, and children: ¥800. Ticket prices at the entrance are: adults and high school students: ¥1200, middle school students, elementary school students, and children: ¥1000. Additional information is available at gundamfront-tokyo.com.Science. It’s a wonderful thing. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the cigarette lobby – it’s that you can use “science” as a tool for anything. Tobacco is definitely harmful. But many people have been told, for many years, that caffeine is almost as bad for you. But it’s not. Though you can take these results, like a bitter cup of coffee, with a grain of salt.
What we’re really looking at here is the health benefits of caffeine consumption. Coffee itself has many psychological benefits. Because it tastes nice, and is a pleasurable experience. But we’ll largely ignore those. You might have been told by all sorts of killjoys, and naysayers, that caffeine is bad for you. Well here’s the almost irrefutable proof that it isn’t. So tell them where to stick their cup of bad advice (see the bonus item on the list) while you enjoy your next cup of caffeinated goodness.
Image Credit: Flickr
1. Caffeine is good for your heart.
In a study published this week in the American Journal of Cardiology an Israeli medical team have discovered that caffeine (three coffees a day worth) is good for the heart. It stops heart attacks and strokes.
“The study found that caffeine consumption improves the functioning of the endothelium by 30 percent, reduces by 40 percent the C-reactive (CRP ) protein in the body, a leading predictor of heart attacks and stroke, and increases by 25 percent the amount of adiponectin, a protein which prevents heart attacks and strokes.”
This study is not an isolated case – it follows a string of recent studies that have downplayed previously held convictions about coffee being bad for one’s heart. An American study of almost 60,000 Finns aged 25-74, published in January 2011, found that caffeine consumption didn’t increase the risk of heart failure. And a German study from April 2010 found drinking between four and eight cups of coffee a day improved one’s cholesterol.
2. Caffeine is good for your head.
The effects of caffeine on the brain are well documented. And we’ll get to the issues of memory and Alzheimer’s in a minute. But it seems caffeine consumption will also help prevent the development of nasty head cancers. Scientists found that five or more cups a day can significantly reduce your chances of developing a nasty head/spine tumour called glioma, at least according to a combined study between researchers from Harvard and the Imperial College, London from January 2010, which found tea and coffee can reduce the risk of developing the cancerous tumours.
“Caffeine has different effects on the brain, some which could play a role in brain carcinogenesis, and coffee has been consistently associated with reduced risk of liver cancer, thus suggesting a potential anticarcinogenic effect. A total of 335 incident cases of gliomas (men = 133, women = 202) were available from three independent cohort studies. Dietary intake was assessed by food-frequency questionnaires obtained at baseline and during follow-up.” “Consumption of five or more cups of coffee and tea a day compared to no consumption was associated with a decrease risk of glioma (RR = 0.60; 95% CI: 0.41–0.87; p-trend = 0.04).”
Caffeine will also significantly lower the potential development of Parkinson’s Disease, see this study relating to Alzheimer’s that references the Parkinson’s/caffeine relationship, and this abstract for another study.
3. Caffeine is good for your memory.
Caffeine can help your memory if you’ve got a normal, fully functioning, brain. And it’ll also, apparently, stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. This edition of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease is available in full on the web, and is devoted to the relationship between caffeine and the brain. This Science Daily article offers a summary of the findings in that journal.
This study of the available scientific literature found that caffeine is good for the normal function of your memory – but mainly if you’re tired. And because it’s a stimulant. It isn’t hugely beneficial in that sense. But it’ll help if you’re not alert. Here’s a quote:
Caffeine does not usually affect performance inlearning and memory tasks. Occasionally, caffeine effects on memory and learning, facilitatory or inhibitory, were found. These effects were rather the result of complex interactions with dose, subject, and task variables. They may result from effects on encoding, or attention devoted to the information, rather than being direct and specific effects on the storage or retrieval ofinformation in short-term and working memory. Caffeine can apparently improve performance directly over a wide variety of mental tasks, and indirectly by reducing decrements in performance under suboptimal alertness conditions. The efficacy of caffeine under states of reduced alertness is quite consistent.
Translation: Caffeine will help your brain function when it’s tired.
Image Credit: Flickr
Better news, if you’re trying to justify your coffee habit, is the research into degenerative brain disorders. Another article from the same journal quoted above came up with a slightly different finding.
“Thus, caffeine restores memory performance in sleep-deprived or aged human individuals, a finding replicated in rodent animal models. Likewise, in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), caffeine alleviates memory dysfunction, which is in accordance with the tentativeinverse correlation between caffeine intake and the incidence of AD in different (but not all) cohorts. Caffeine also affords beneficial effects in animal models of conditions expected to impair memory performance such as Parkinson’s disease, chronic stress, type 2 diabetes, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, early life convulsions, or alcohol-induced amnesia. Thus, caffeine should not be viewed as a cognitive enhancer but instead as a cognitive normalizer.”
Again, the take home message seems to be coffee will bring you back to normal from an abnormal spot. Which is a good thing. Better to be normal than sub-normal. This actually meshes nicely with another study into the stimulating effect of caffeine, which found that after an initial high when you first start drinking coffee, your morning coffee returns you to a functional baseline (ie treats withdrawals) rather than actually perking you up.
Although, yet another article from that journal waxes lyrical about the benefits of caffeine consumption. It deals more specifically with caffeine’s effect on synaptic plasticity.
“The cognitive enhancing properties of caffeine have long been recognized, and are experienced daily by regular coffee drinkers. Although it has been more difficult to demonstrate these cognitive enhancing effects in a formal experimental setting, caffeine improves mood and enhances psychomotor and cognitive performance in healthy volunteers, particularly on tasks measuring typing speed, simple reaction time, sustained attention,memory, and logical reasoning, as well as simulated driving.”
Need for Speed anybody? But the best news on the Alzheimer’s Disease front is that aged, Alzheimer’s effected mice that drink caffeine regularly show marked improvement in memory, while mice that grew up drinking caffeine were “protected against memory impairment”… prompting this statement (in this article):
“These results indicate a surprising ability of moderate caffeine intake (the human equivalent of 500 mg caffeine or 5 cups of coffee per day) to protect against or treat AD in a mouse model for the disease and a therapeutic potential for caffeine against AD in humans”
Here’s another article that looks at caffeine and dementia. Again. Finding that caffeine protects your brain. So it’s good for your head. Ok. Onto the next bit of the body.
4. Coffee is good for your throat
Did you know that drinking coffee, at least if you’re Japanese, seems to reduce the risk that you’ll develop cancer in the throat area.
“We conclude that coffee consumption is related to a lower risk of oral, pharyngeal, and esophageal cancers in the general population of Japan. Although cessation of alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking is currently the best known way to help reduce the risk of developing these cancers, coffee could be a preventive factor in both low-risk and high-risk populations.”
Boo-yeah.
5. Caffeine is good for your energy levels.
Everybody knows this. Olympic athletes aren’t allowed to have too much caffeine in their blood, and a whole industry exists to pump youngsters full of the stuff. The bad news is that the best results, performance wise, come when you consume pure caffeine, not coffee.
6. Caffeine is good for your gall bladder.
From what I can tell, this one is a little in dispute. But a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999 found that caffeine is an effective prevention method for gallstones. And who wants those.
“During 404,166 person-years of follow-up, 1081 subjects reported symptomatic gallstone disease, of whom 885 required cholecystectomy. After adjusting for other known or suspected risk factors, compared with men who did not consume regular coffee in 1986 and 1990, the adjusted relative risk (RR) for those who consistently drank 2 to 3 cups of regular coffee per day was 0.60 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.42-0.86) and for those who drank 4 or more cups per day the RR was 0.55 (95% CI, 0.33-0.92). All coffee brewing methods showed a decreased risk.”
7. Caffeine is good for your lungs.
Well. Especially if you have asthma. According to a couple of studies anyway. The first one found that caffeine improves lung function in asthmatics.
“Seven trials involving a total of 75 people with mild to moderate asthma were included. The studies were all of cross-over design. Six trials involving 55 people showed that in comparison with placebo, caffeine, even at a ‘low dose’ (< 5mg/kg body weight), appears to improve lung function for up to two hours after consumption.”
The second, that caffeine acts as an asthma preventer.
“Subjects who drank coffee on a regular basis had a 29% reduction in the odds of having current asthma symptoms (odds ratio, 0.71; 95% confidence interval, 0.55 to 0.93) when compared with non-coffee drinkers. The effect exhibited a significant dose-response relationship, with the number of cups of coffee consumed per day being inversely related to asthma prevalence. This relationship was independent of age, gender, and cigarette smoking.”
8. Caffeine is good for your pain.
This is true in a couple of ways. Firstly. Caffeine helps post exercise recovery. So says a study by University of Georgia researcher Victor Maridakis (see this abstract for the paper published in the Journal of Pain).
“One and two days after an exercise session that caused moderate muscle soreness, the volunteers took either caffeine or a placebo and performed two different quadriceps (thigh) exercises, one designed to produce a maximal force, the other designed to generate a sub-maximal force. Those that consumed caffeine one-hour before the maximum force test had a 48 percent reduction in pain compared to the placebo group, while those that took caffeine before the sub-maximal test reported a 26 percent reduction in pain.”
This confirmed the findings of an earlier study, published in the same journal. Which found that when a bunch of teenage males were asked to engage in a spot of cycling the post-exercise pain was reduced when treated with caffeine.
“Leg muscle pain ratings were significantly and moderately reduced after a high dose of caffeine. This observation suggests that prior reports showing caffeine improves endurance exercise performance might be partially explained by caffeine’s hypoalgesic properties. It also suggests that moderate intensity cycling exercise has promise as a useful experimental model for the study of naturally occurring muscle pain.”
Another study found that caffeine and ibuprofen are the best combined treatment for headaches. And not just caffeine withdrawal headaches. Tension headaches as well.
“Ibuprofen and caffeine administered together provided significantly greater analgesic activity than ibuprofen alone, caffeine alone, and placebo. Ibuprofen and caffeine administered together demonstrated significantly shorter times to meaningful improvement in headache relief than ibuprofen or placebo; significantly greater total analgesia than ibuprofen alone, caffeine alone, or placebo; and significantly greater peak relief than ibuprofen alone, caffeine alone, or placebo.”
Sounds good to me.
9. Caffeine is good for your liver.
A study found that coffee – not just caffeine – has a positive impact on the health of your liver. Especially in the prevention of cirrhosis. So if you’re an alcoholic – it pays to have a simultaneous coffee addiction.
And. Another study found that drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day will significantly reduce the chances you have of developing liver cancer. And that can only be good news.
“Four cohort and 5 case-control studies, involving 2260 cases and 239,146 noncases, met the inclusion criteria. All studies observed an inverse relation between coffee consumption and risk of liver cancer, and in 6 studies the association was statistically significant. Overall, an increase in consumption of 2 cups of coffee per day was associated with a 43% reduced risk of liver cancer (RR, 0.57; 95% CI, 0.49-0.67). “
10. Caffeine is good for baldness.
Well. Not that sort of baldness.
This one’s a stretch. There other benefits for caffeine consumption that may deserve to make the list. But. Seriously. If you rub caffeine into your scalp you may be able to prevent baldness. And that can only be a good thing. Especially if you look over your shoulder at your father and grandfather at family portrait time and think there’s no hope for you…
Here’s the abstract for the study. We’re talking about people suffering from Androgenetic Alopecia (AGA), which is the fancy name for run of the mill male pattern baldness.
Androgen-dependent growth inhibition of ex vivo hair follicles from patients suffering from AGA was present in the human hair organ culture model, a constellation which may serve for future studies to screen new substances against androgen-dependent hair loss. Caffeine was identified as a stimulator of human hair growth in vitro; a fact which may have important clinical impact in the management of AGA.
Some of the reports I read suggested for best results the caffeine needs to be massaged into the scalp. And the good news is that you can buy some caffeine shampoo.
Bonus: Decaff is good for your colon.
An Oxford study found that decaff, quite appropriately, is only really good for looking after your rear.
“Consumption of caffeinated coffee, tea with caffeine, or caffeine was not associated with incidence of colon of rectal cancer, whereas regular consumption of decaffeinated coffee was associated with a reduced incidence of rectal cancer.”
Summing up
Coffee is good for you. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. And here’s a pretty good little visual reminder of where coffee sits on the calorie scale too, in case you need any ammunition to throw back at your critics.
Image Credit: FlickrAt Wednesday's White House press briefing, deputy press secretary Eric Schultz wouldn't call the Taliban a terrorist group, instead referring to it as "an armed insurgency."
"The Taliban is still conducting terrorist attacks. You can't really say the war has ended as far as they are concerned," ABC's Jonathan Karl said at the briefing.
"Well, I'd also point out that the Taliban is an armed insurgency, ISIL is a terrorist group. So, we don't make concessions to terrorist groups," Schultz said.
"You don't think the Taliban is a terrorist group?" Karl asked.
"I don't think that the Taliban, um, uh -- the Taliban is an armed insurgency. This was the winding down of the war in Afghanistan and that's why this arrangement was dealt," Schultz responded.
JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: You say the United States government does not give in to demands, does not pay ransom. But how is what the Jordanians are talking about doing any different than what the United States did to get the release of [Bowe] Bergdahl -- releasing prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay to the Taliban, which is clearly a terrorist organization?
ERIC SCHULTZ, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY: As you know, this was highly discussed at the time and prisoner swaps are traditional end-of-conflict interaction that happens. As the war in Afghanistan wound down we thought it was the appropriate thing to do. The president's bedrock commitment as commander in chief is to leave no man or woman behind. That's the principle he was operating under.
KARL: Isn't that what the Jordanians are operating under?
SCHULTZ: Well, I think Jon --
KARL: I mean the Taliban is still conducting terrorist attacks. You can't really say the war has ended as far as they are concerned.
SCHULTZ: Well, I'd also point out that the Taliban is an armed insurgency, ISIL is a terrorist group. So, we don't make concessions to terrorist groups. We feel --
KARL: You don't think the Taliban is a terrorist group?
SCHULTZ: I don't think that the Taliban, um, uh -- the Taliban is an armed insurgency. This was the winding down of the war in Afghanistan and that's why this arrangement was dealt. Our view is, as the president said at the time, is as commander in chief when he sends men and women into armed combat he doesn't want to leave anyone behind.OPINION: When I was nine years old I was bullied terribly by a girl in my classroom. My teacher's way of solving the "problem" was to keep her and I after school and have us clean paintbrushes together in the hope that a bit of quality time spent together would somehow magic all the bullying away. All she did was tip a bucket of dirty water over my shoes when the teacher wasn't looking, mouth the words "I hate you" and then she skipped happily home.
So my heart broke when I read about a Christchurch father, so driven to desperation over the bullying of his own daughter, 9, that he erected an anti-bullying sign outside her school. I don't blame him one bit. My own situation was only resolved when my mother, tired of her daughter coming home in tears or faking one illness after another to get out of another school day, marched up to the school herself, came to my classroom door and told the teacher she wasn't going to leave until my bully was dealt with.
I think the sheer shock of seeing her sit down at a tiny little school desk and refuse to budge, coupled with the realisation that the problem was much worse than first thought, compelled the school to act. The girl's own mother was summoned to the school, counselling was offered and things improved from there.
READ MORE:
* Father erects anti-bullying sign after repeated assaults
* Anti-bullying protest at school
* Kiwi students report second-highest rate of bullying
I don't know why my classmate decided to start bullying me, maybe she didn't really know herself. I don't know what makes anyone be a bully, from a president right down to nine-year-old girls. And while we can't always control the actions of a bully we can control our own reactions to them.
If you are a school teacher it should be a no-brainer. If a child says they are being bullied, assaulted, threatened or frightened at school, then anything and everything in your power should be done to protect the victim.
The father in Christchurch says he met six times to address repeated assaults of his daughter. Six times. And yet the assaults continued. The bullying, the father says, had been ongoing for about 18 months. That is 18 months too long. The school's apparent lack of action shows just how much work we still have to do to make sure bullying is taken seriously, and dealt with properly, especially when young children are involved.
Do I think the dad did the right thing by putting the sign up? Absolutely he did the right thing. He drew a very clear line in the sand and said 'enough is enough' and to me that is worthy of our highest praise, not criticism.
Did he make the problem worse for his daughter? Well, she has endured 18 months of physical and emotional abuse from girls she |
good chance on staying on the front page for a few days. Now, the list gets updated on a daily basis, so the chances of a new game getting any front page attention is much lower—especially when you combine this shorter front-page timespan with vastly greater number of titles for sale.
Steam’s storefront.
As a result, some developers are looking to other platforms, such as the Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PS Vita. Take Towerfall Ascension, for example. The small indie title launched on PC and PS4 last month and, since then, it’s hit $500,000 in sales—a majority of which were on the PS4. Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is also set to launch directly on the PS4, forgoing an initial PC release.
Last February, Sony announced that developers would be allowed to self-publish on the Playstation 4 for the first time. Not to be outdone, Microsoft dropped the traditional publisher model for its Xbox One shortly thereafter. It’s generally more expensive to create games for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, but that also means these platforms are far less saturated.
On the PS Vita, games like Thomas Was Alone and Spelunky have seen some serious success. Interestingly, many developers have been actually been turning towards Sony’s struggling handheld platform. With an install base of only 8.2 million, it’s a far cry from the hundreds of millions of iPhone users. But the attach rate on PS Vita is incredibly high per player. Every PS Vita owner, on average, has purchased more than ten games, meaning that its been adopted by the type of hardcore crowd that craves great little indie titles.
Steam’s over-saturation could have one other deleterious effect on indie game makers. Most of these teams are made up of a few developers. But with increased competition, teams are struggling to gain media attention. And that means a bigger part of the budget has to be taken away from development and invested in marketing.
Photo by Flavio Ensikibattlestat/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)Hand guns that were turned in by their owners are seen in a trash bin at a gun buyback held by the Los Angeles Police Department following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, in Los Angeles, California, December 26, 2012. REUTERS/David McNew
Last Friday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was in no mood to talk gun control in the wake of the Lafayette theater shooting. "There will be an absolute appropriate time for us to talk about policies and politics," he said. But it wasn't then.
He didn't want to talk about it a month earlier, either, in the aftermath of the Charleston church shootings. "Now’s not the time," he said, criticizing President Obama for "trying to score cheap political points" for bringing up gun control in a speech.
But it's not just Bobby Jindal. In recent years, politicians and commentators from across the political spectrum have responded to mass shootings with an invocation of the phrase "now is not the time," or a close variant. The Obama White House said it in response to the Newtown shootings, though it later made an unsuccessful push for tighter gun laws. Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason.com, invoked it in response to the Washington Navy Yard shootings. It's a refrain the NRA finds itself singing often.
There are good reasons for legislative restraint in the aftermath of emotional tragedies. You probably don't want lawmakers drafting bad legislation in a panic to do something, anything, in response to a public outcry.
On the other hand, as the shootings continue and the body count rises, the inevitable counter-argument becomes: if not now, when? Jindal didn't want to talk gun laws last month, after Charleston. He doesn't want to talk about them this month, after Lafayette. It's only a matter of time before the next national tragedy strikes and sets the national gun clock back to zero again. And it will likely happen sooner than you think.
The Mass Shootings Tracker, a crowd-sourced tally of mass shootings maintained by the GunsAreCool subreddit, shows that we haven't gone more than eight days without a mass shooting in the U.S. since the start of 2015 -- that doesn't leave a lot of time to grieve and regroup between shootings. We've averaged exactly one mass shooting per day since the start of the year. Forty eight days saw more than one mass shooting take place. On 18 days there were at least 3 shootings. On three days this year -- April 18, June 13 and July 15 -- there have been five shootings.
Of course many of the incidents in the Mass Shooting Tracker fly under the national radar. The Tracker intentionally defines "mass shooting" (4 or more people injured by gunfire) more broadly than the federal government does (3 or more victims killed by gunfire). This allows it to incorporate more of the garden variety gun violence that happens due to gang and other criminal activity, particularly in urban areas.
This has caused the Tracker to come in for some criticism from some quarters. It counts "a lot of shootings where people aren’t killed, criminal gangs are involved, and cases take place out of public view," according to a recent blog post by John Lott, an independent researcher and Fox News columnist who is generally opposed to stricter gun regulations. He'd prefer to "focus on the cases that people are most concerned about, in the way the government defines them."
But there's an implicit assumption here that only some types of gun violence really deserve such attention or policy focus -- that we should only closely look at it when gunshots ring out in say, suburban schools and movie theaters, rather than on urban streets.
Lott argues that gang members killing each other over turf are motivated by different reasons than disturbed individuals who decide to shoot up theaters. But the outcomes -- people dead, people wounded -- are the same. And if we want to understand the full extent of gratuitous gun violence in this country, it makes sense to consider the full range of examples of gun violence. It's worth pointing out that the Lafayette theater shooting doesn't even meet the federal definition of a mass killing, which requires three or more victims to die at the hand of a gunman.
In the end, it often seems that the goal is to put off the conversation about the role of guns in America or quibble about methodology while the number of people killed or injured by guns rises. On the other hand, some people, like the Telegraph's Dan Hodges, argue that we've already had the conversation, and that it's already over. They may be right.Alliance MMA — currently the only mixed martial arts organization that is publicly traded — has acquired Suckerpunch Entertainment, one of the top management companies in the business representing several top fighters, including current UFC featherweight champion Max Holloway.
Alliance MMA is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ that just recently purchased a number of regional mixed martial arts promotions as well as an online ticketing agency and a live streaming service for the organizations under its umbrella.
According to Alliance MMA president Robert Haydak, adding a management branch to the company was just a logical step and it didn’t take him long to target Suckerpunch as a brand he wanted to add to the business.
Article continues below...
“Taking a look at Alliance MMA, we’re constantly looking for different revenue streams in the MMA space that provide value to our shareholders and Alliance MMA. We identified Suckerpunch a while back, Brian (Butler) and the other Bryan (Hamper), I’ve had a relationship with for a number of years when I was leading CFFC (Cage Fury Fighting Championships) and I always recognized those guys as really solid guys. Guys in the industry that had a great reputation and always took care of their athletes first,” Haydak told FOX Sports when announcing the new partnership with Suckerpunch.
“It’s the same mindset we have at Alliance MMA that we want to look after the athletes first. We try to treat them like family as much as possible, so the guys at Suckerpunch really embodied what we were looking for at Alliance MMA. We feel there’s a tremendous value to Alliance MMA but also to our shareholders as well.”
Brian Butler started Suckerpunch Entertainment in 2007 while working with former UFC lightweight champion Jens Pulver as well as former UFC and WEC star Jeff Curran before expanding the company to manage dozens of fighters competing in promotions all over the world.
Now Suckerpunch Entertainment handles a slew of current UFC fighters, including Holloway, former strawweight champion Carla Esparza as well as Felice Herrig and several more as well as a stable of up and coming athletes competing on the regional circuit.
While the last nine years have been very successful for Suckerpunch, Butler says teaming up with Alliance MMA was the next natural step to stay ahead of where the MMA industry is moving as a whole in 2017 and beyond.
“I think everybody’s seeing there’s so much change in the sport today with the UFC being sold and acquired and just the popularity of the sport. It’s at a point now where there’s going to be a shift in the tide of the business and five years from now I think it’s going to be a completely different landscape,” Butler explained when speaking to FOX Sports. “So joining Alliance more of a not staying stagnant and not sitting and waiting and reacting. I want to be out in front of the business instead of sitting and waiting to see what’s going to happen.
“It’s an exciting time in MMA and having Alliance come along and put some organization to the regional side of the business. It’s something that we wanted to be a part of.”
Bryan Hamper and Brian Butler from Suckerpunch Entertainment
Butler says a big part of the attraction teaming up with Alliance MMA was the network that the newly formed organization has been building on the regional fight scene. Alliance MMA has purchased several notable organizations including Cage Fury Fighting Championships, Shogun Fights and many more while building a network to help athletes gain the most exposure through the various promotions to eventually get noticed by the UFC or other top flight MMA organizations.
“The best part about it is there’s going to be a real structure for the athletes on the rise whereas before it was really hodge-podge, mom and pop and luck of the draw. Now there’s a system like the NCAA so it’s really great,” Butler said.
Bryan Hamper, a partner at Suckerpunch Entertainment who helps scout and recruit new talent to the organization, believes this new partnership is a natural fit for the management company as well as the growth of the fighters on the regional scene under the Alliance MMA umbrella.
“Signing up and coming talent and developing prospects into contenders has always been my focus at Suckerpunch. Under the Alliance umbrella we are going to be able to focus on cultivating talent and aligning prospects with top level regional shows to showcase their abilities and get the exposure needed to get to the next level. We believe the Alliance model is the future of MMA,” Hamper said.
As far as how Suckerpunch Entertainment operates, Butler says nothing much is going to change for his athletes and how they are managed, but now he just has a lot more tools at his disposal to help build their brand thanks to the team at Alliance MMA.
“On a day-to-day basis, nothing will change. We’re still going to operate as Suckerpunch Entertainment, we’re still going to be scouting out new talent and we’re still going to manage the fighters that we manage,” Butler said. “The fighters aren’t really going to notice anything.
“The one thing that I am looking forward to is just having a more expansive network with everybody in the industry on the national and regional level that will help us direct and funnel our true prospects to the UFC or to Bellator or any other major organization in a much more efficient manner.”
Haydak doubled down on that statement by also noting that Alliance MMA is much more than just an organization building regional promotions under its brand name.
“We have an infrastructure, we have assets in-house now, we have our own production team, we have our graphic designers, we have a social media team. We have all the assets in house to not only help the athletes Suckerpunch has now but also the athletes that come on in the future,” Haydak said.
“We all know the marketability of an athlete will help propel his or her career that much faster and those are some of the assets Alliance MMA has today that we bring to Suckerpunch athletes.”
Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports
One question that will certainly come up due to this new partnership is the potential conflict of interest between an MMA promotion and a management company housed under the same ownership. There have been numerous instances in the past where a promotion is headed up by a manager, who also represents fighters competing in that same organization.
Butler is quick to answer that charge by noting that each organization owned by Alliance MMA is still independently operated. According to Butler, the benefit of the new partnership is allowing Suckerpunch to have access to those network of promotions to ensure the fighters are getting the best possible opportunities nationwide rather than just locally.
“The reality is every promotion and every company under the Alliance brand is still independently run by the people that run it. I don’t have any control or say the promotions just the promotions have no say about who we manage,” Butler said. “The reality is the business is about networking.
“The reason why Suckerpunch is so successful and we’re able to keep our fighters busy is because we have a strong network and we have good relationships with people. What Alliance MMA is doing is kindling a relationship with everybody in the network that has the same goal.”
Haydak also noted that currently, a very small percentage of fighters represented by Suckerpunch are actually competing in organizations owned by Alliance MMA. At the same time, Haydak says that Alliance MMA is being very transparent with this new partnership so there is no conflict of interest now or in the future.
“Currently right now less than 3-percent of Suckerpunch roster is competing in the Alliance so it’s not like there’s an overwhelming number or anything like that and it’s not going to be our focus,” Haydak said. “When you look at the MMA industry, it’s not a secret that a number of promoters also represent athletes. We’re acknowledging what we’re doing and we’re also being very transparent in taking a proactive stance that we want to do right by the athletes.
“We’re transparent as you can get. We’re a publicly traded company. There’s no smoke and mirrors.”
Haydak says that adding Suckerpunch Entertainment was the next logical step for Alliance MMA but the new company isn’t finished with acquisitions by any means. The company hopes to continue growing and adding value to all of the brands under their ownership from the in-house production company to the medical staff they’ve brought on board to make it easier for athletes to get the necessary check-ups completed before fighting.
It’s all part of the Alliance MMA mission to grow the sport from the ground up and make everything better for the athletes who compete in the sport.
“If it brings value, then we’re going to give it a look,” Haydak said. “Simple things like in-house we have medical coordinators, so whether they’re fighting within Alliance or a Suckerpunch athlete, we know it’s a tedious process and it’s often times for fighters it’s a pain. So we’re trying to make it easier for fighters and let them focus on the task at hand.
“We’re always going to look to add value for the promotion and for our shareholders.”Hey folks, Harry here... tomorrow a really truly inadequate genre film comes out that literally broke my heart months ago when I saw it. I'll be writing my review tonight where I'll try to put my disappointment and outright anger to bed. That said, I've been waiting to hear some word upon a film that I've been dying to get word on. Tarsem's IMMORTALS. Today, I got the following piece in from "Lord of the Things" and he's quite high on the film. Now begins my full on obsession with seeing this film as soon as humanly possible! The review is spoiler free... and pays a lot of attention to the use of 3D. I hope you enjoy...
Immortals 3-D
If you use this, you can refer to me as “Lord of the Things.”
Lord of the Things here, just came out of a screening of Immortals, our audience was apparently the first or one of the first to see it in 3-D.
I’m sure you have other reviews about the film itself, so I will be focusing on the 3-D usage throughout. I will also keep this spoiler free.
To set the scene, I went in with high expectations. I was a big fan of Tarsem’s ‘The Fall’ but have not seen The Cell. I was familiar with the legend of Theseus but am hardly a Greek Scholar.
Immortals blew away my expectations, I have only a few small gripes but overall I thought it was one of the best, most realistic portrayals of ancient life.
Most people would find it hard to believe I would use the term ‘realistic’ to describe a myth, but everything throughout the film rang closer to ancient history then 300. This is a brutal, hard R film. Tarsem does not pamper the audience in any way. If you are expecting honor or chivalry you will be disappointed, Tarsem captures the chaos and brutality of fighting without glorifying it.
Now, to get to the use of 3-D. Immortals is built around its scenery, Tarsem is a master of setting and placement. I was personally scared that his use of 3-D would diminish his shot selection, but Tarsem uses the 3-D to create an environment I have never quite experienced in a theater before. The 3-D is prevalent throughout the film but never distracting, and it provides depth to the massive scenery shots. I have never seen a film where 3-D is used as skillfully and uniquely as Immortals. Leaving the theater this was the biggest surprise, not that I enjoyed the film but that I enjoyed Tarsem’s use of 3-D.
Overall, this film will make a lot of people happy. It is the hardest R film I have ever seen, and it weaves together some of the most impressive fight scenes in recent history with eye popping visuals and discreetly effective 3-D. I would recommend this film to everyone over 18, but be careful bringing any children. The media may hound this film for its violence, but keep in mind that never before has a director used a technology (3-D) to create a unique world. If you liked the look and feel of Avatar, Immortals has all of the strengths, none of the weaknesses, and superb direction. I just wish the casting had been a bit more enlightened.
Lord of the Things out.A Coalition Government has not exactly been a happy experience for the British public, who voted in the majority for two avowedly centre left parties opposed to austerity, and then found one of them (the Lib Dems) ditching its manifesto pledges and forming an austerity government with the Tories.
Nor has it been a happy experience for either partner, with the Lib Dems losing the vast majority of their 2010 support because they sold out their principles for five years in ministerial limos, and the Tories losing a chunk of their voters, members and even MPs to UKIP because they were unable to deliver a government even remotely as right wing as their core support had been led to believe they would get from their previous rhetoric.
In light of this salutary lesson, I have a simple proposal for Ed Miliband and Labour. We should simply rule out forming a coalition with any other party after the General Election. We should tell voters we will either govern alone, or not at all. Governing alone might mean achieving a majority or it might mean forming a single-party government without a majority if there is a hung parliament. The latter could involve a “confidence and supply” arrangement where another party or parties agree to not no confidence us and allow us to pass budgets. Or it might involve a more case-by-case, vote-by-vote management of the Commons where the whips might for instance do ad hoc deals with a different party on defence and security issues to the one they construct a majority with for votes on Europe and social policies. If we get reasonably near the 326 seats winning post we can just act like we have an effective majority because Sinn Fein don’t take their seats and the SDLP as a sister party at European level have a default position of sustaining a Labour government.
Making a dramatic and categorical statement about this would have a number of benefits:
1) It would seize the headlines and force the Tories to reveal their own hand regarding coalition negotiations.
2) It makes it clear that voting Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru or Green is not contributing to some “broad front” centre-left coalition as we won’t go into government with them.
3) It defines the election more clearly as a binary choice between a Labour-only government or a Tory or Tory-led one, which will make left-leaning voters less likely to vote for smaller parties and make a hung parliament less likely.
4) It demonstrates self-confidence that we can win a majority or at least get very near to it.
5) It is consistent with Labour’s historic position – we have only participated in coalitions in wartime, and have governed alone without a majority in 1924, 1929 and February 1974.
6) It means we keep the party united. The folk memory of Ramsay MacDonald’s betrayal in leaving Labour to form a National Government is one of the most important aspects of Labour’s collective identity. At all costs we have to avoid the kind of split that might happen if we negotiated a coalition deal that was unacceptable to the party grassroots.
7) It means we will try to get our manifesto policies through the Commons and if we fail it will be because the other parties voted against our ideas, not because we bargained them away in coalition talks to win power. This is more democratic – voters will either get the manifesto they voted for, or not, not a hybrid with some Labour measures and some we opposed but subsequently accepted in a deal.
8) The Lib Dems should not be able to stay in government by flipping coalition partners if they have been rejected by the electorate and lost many votes and seats. That would be profoundly undemocratic.
The sooner we make such an announcement, and make it forcefully, the better for our chances of winning.When you’re working with our weight loss centers, you’re not only getting strategies and nutritional services, you have access to a built-in support system as well as information and recipes shared by our other members. This week’s low-carb recipe features avocados, which are currently in season and are an excellent source of healthy fats, vitamins A, C, E, K and B6.
Avocados also boast a large amount of potassium and are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, with 160 milligrams per cup of alpha-linolenic acid, making them a heart-healthy choice that provides protection against diseases and chronic illnesses. They have a high fiber content, both soluble and insoluble, making them an ideal choice for weight loss programs, as they fill you up and promote healthy digestion.
This zesty, filling salad is great on its own or as a side dish with any lean protein, such as chicken, shrimp or a grass-fed filet. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to make. Try it and let the staff at our weight loss centers know how you liked it and if you have any recipes you would like to share!
If you like this dish, make sure to check out our other low carb recipes here! We post a new one every week so be sure to bookmark our blog and keep checking back.
Also, if you have any other tasty egg salad recipes you'd like to share we'd love to hear them in the comments below or on our Facebook and Google+ pages!All the hype said that Jonesy was fun. The hype said that Jonesy was engaging. The hype said that it was a blast to read, that the artwork was gorgeous and new, and that the dialog and premise were fun and refreshing.
Well, after sticking my greasy nose into issues 1 & 2 of Sam Humphries’ Boom Box book featuring its titular character, I can officially say this: the Hype was right-motherfucking-on.
As we all know by now, issue 1 was so great it has moved on to a second printing, so how about issue 2? Still dope.
In this story things open with Jonesy’s fantastic first-page splash yelling at you, the reader. Jonesy’s former-nemesis-now-pal Susan runs into the crazy cupid while Jonesy is slaving away in her father’s donut booth at the town’s annual Talent Show.
In fact, the interactions between Jonesy and her dad are absolutely priceless – the different levels they operate on as goofy-but-lovable father and embarrassed-but-loving daughter mirror any good real-life comparison. In fact, Humphries really shines when Jonesy and her dad talk:Hundreds of sandbags and countless hours of back-breaking labour have enabled two history enthusiasts on Newfoundland's Bonavista Peninsula to recreate an element of daily life for soldiers in the Great War.
Neal Tucker and his nephew Daniel recreated a trench in Elliston, to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.
The Tuckers quickly found that just preparing for trench warfare was gruelling work.
"It's more than I anticipated," Neal Tucker said. "Couple sandbags — no problem. Twenty, 30, 50? It takes a toll."
Modelled on design from 1916
The trench in Elliston is modelled on a design from 1916, albeit with modifications to handle pressure-treated lumber, which was not available a century ago.
The Tuckers hope their trench becomes an attraction for visitors to Elliston, which is already known for puffins, icebergs, coastal scenery and the newly opened Home From The Sea sealers' memorial.
Neal Tucker said he hopes future visitors glean a sense of what soldiers endured in battle.
"We read about it in books, we hear about it in movies, but just to go through here and just get an idea, just to walk along here and see what it must've been like, gives a person some small idea of what it was like to be in a trench,” he said.Institute for Fiscal Studies says that in-work benefits help close the gap between rich and poor over a worker’s lifetime
A leading thinktank has warned the government it risks worsening inequality during workers’ lifetimes by cutting tax credits and reducing income tax rates for the richest.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the long-term positives of higher in-work benefit payments were clear, citing a study of workers’ finances over the past 70 years. In the absence of higher income tax rates, top-up payments from tax credits and other in-work benefits were the main reason the income gap closed over a worker’s lifetime.
The study will add to the pressure on George Osborne to explain how the mix of tax and benefit changes in recent budgets will avoid widening the income gap between rich and poor.
The chancellor was criticised after the July budget when he said that a higher minimum wage – which he called the “national living wage” – would offset the effect of widespread tax credit cuts. At the time, the IFS warned that the £4bn extra income resulting from the rise in the minimum wage would fail to balance £12bn in welfare cuts.
In its latest report, the tax and spending thinktank said policymakers needed to be aware that the impact of the cuts would be felt over a worker’s lifetime, entrenching the wedge between the rich and lower-income workers.
It said that perceptions of an underclass of families out of work for most of their lives was misplaced and that almost all workers were in employment for a majority of their working lives.
This finding meant that tax credits for people in work had the biggest effect on closing income inequality. The report said tax credits also avoided creating a bigger poverty trap, which deters jobseekers from finding work when their out-of-work benefit incomes rose above wage levels.
Barra Roantree, one of the report’s authors, said: “The sharp distinction often made in policy debates between working and non-working families is not especially useful: in reality very few individuals are permanently out of work, the poor are not always poor and, albeit to a lesser extent, the rich are not always rich.”
He said income taxes on the richest earners were effective at generating income for the government and reducing inequality, in sharp contrast to the government’s view that higher tax rates on the better off fail to produce higher receipts.
The figures include most personal taxes and benefits, but do not take into account business taxes or the benefits from public service spending.
The report pointed out that while existing studies showed almost two-thirds of individuals paid more in taxes than they received in social security in a single year, more than nine in 10 individuals paid more over their lifetime.
Part of the reason for the reduction in tax burden related to the way the tax and benefit system takes from an individual at one age and gives back to them at another. It said large numbers of people were in and out of work or in receipt of social security benefits for particular problems such as sickness or bereavement.
“In a single year, 64% of individuals in the UK pay more in taxes than they receive in social security. But most individuals experience considerable change over their lifetimes: for example those not in paid work in one year are often in work in another year,” the IFS said.
“Extending the period of analysis from a single year to an entire lifetime increases the percentage who pay more in taxes than they receive in social security to 93%.”Between Christmas and New Year, the 70th anniversary of an event, which in no small way helped change the course of history, passed almost unnoticed. On December 26, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?”
This wasn’t Churchill’s finest oratorical effort, but it was clever. As well as denouncing the forces of darkness and the enormity of their aggression, it was an invitation to ordinary Britons, suffering the horrors of war at home, to reflect on the challenge ahead. He was, in effect, asking fellow citizens: “Of what are we made?”
Seven decades later, one wonders how the great man would view the kind of people the British have become. What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which he urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.
For evidence of our self-inflicted abasement, look no further than this month’s ruling from Europe’s Court of Human Rights that Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist preacher, regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s main inspirational leaders in Europe, cannot be deported from Britain to his native Jordan because his trial there might have contained evidence obtained by torture.
According to a recent government report, some 3,775 former foreign prisoners, who were in line for deportation by the UK Border Agency, have been released from custody and are living here, most thanks to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a family and private life. A Nigerian rapist was due to be sent home after losing a series of appeals in British courts over his jailing for an attack on a 13-year-old girl. But Strasbourg’s worthies insisted that they must protect the culprit’s “social ties” with Britain, which had blossomed while he defied expulsion.
Are we really powerless to resist this nonsense? It would seem so.
One reason is the complicity of Britain’s home-grown human-rights obsessives and jackboot egalitarians who, in the words of sociologist Peter Saunders, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, “seek nothing less than hegemony for their moral values and beliefs”. This requires the unconditional surrender of adversaries and the criminalisation of those who dare to oppose. It’s a war of attrition through relentless assaults on popular consciousness by masters of subversion.
Their goal, according to Prof Saunders, is “eroding the ideals of independent thought, self-reliance and personal responsibility and replacing them with the language of thought-crime, group rights and equal outcomes”. This is modern Britain, where a foreign-born paedophile cannot be put on a plane back to Pakistan but traditional Christians are arrested for disobliging comments on homosexuality — a triumph of intolerance over faith.
After 13 years of the Brown Terror, during which reckless state borrowing and out-of-control consumer debt masked economic and social failure, the Coalition is trying to reverse a pernicious tide of grievance culture and something-for-nothing expectations. George Osborne claims: “We are reducing welfare entitlements, imposing new conditionality on benefits and capping overall awards.” That, at least, is the aim, but an insurgency of human-rights lawyers, grandstanding bishops and professional do-gooders is defending every ditch. Only this month, a Romanian living in the UK, who claims to make a living selling the Big Issue, but qualifies for more than £25,500 a year in benefits, was told by a court that she was not receiving enough. Despite objections from the local council, she was awarded an additional annual housing allowance of £2,600. Chancellor, please take note.
Do not conclude, however, that the immigrants are to blame for this mess. Who among us faced with a choice between penury in a Bucharest rat-hole and £500 a week in handouts plus a subsidised home would not be on the train to London? The only surprise is that so few are already here.
What’s more, the influx of foreign workers is forcing us to confront a problem which those seeking to blame high levels of unemployment entirely on public-spending cuts would rather ignore. Why does London have the highest rate of youth joblessness in the country when so many services in the capital are underpinned by newcomers?
Last week, Pret a Manger, which pays above minimum wage, admitted to the London Evening Standard that only 19 per cent of its payroll is British (in London the figure is far lower). Are we really saying that our education system is so poor and work ethic so diminished that Britain can no longer produce staff suitable for a sandwich shop? That is the conclusion of many business folk to whom I put this question, though they prefer sanitised phrases such as a “deficit of lifestyle skills” instead of the less euphemistic “welfare addiction”.
Given that 70 per cent of Britain’s state-educated pupils do not even take GCSE history, never mind pass it, one can bet confidently that the majority of young people trying to enter a difficult jobs market will never encounter the Churchill question: what kind of people do others think we are?
Perhaps that’s a good thing. The answer is deeply discomfiting.
'Jeff Randall Live’ is broadcast Monday-Thursday at 7pm on Sky News.Last Friday, we reported that the ensemble cast of Marvel's Alan Taylor-directed sequel, Thor: The Dark World had grown with two new additions. British actor Clive Russell & Welsh/American actor Richard Brake was believed to have landed “minor” roles in the film, however, Deadline has revealed both of their roles to be quite pivotal.
The infamous site is reporting that Clive Russell will portray the God of War, Tyr, older brother of Chris Hemsworth's titular God of Thunder and biological son of Anthony Hopkins' all-father Odin. And Richard Brake has signed on to play a captain of the elite group of Asgardian warriors, that appeared in the original blockbuster, known as Einherjar.
According to wikipedia, Tyr has "rebelled against Odin several times due to his love of battle & fought Thor due to resentment of Thor's relationship with Sif and the fact Thor usurped his role as Asgard's greatest warrior. Once he was nearly exiled for this." That may explain his absence from the original Kenneth Branagh-directed film.
From left to right: Richard Brake, Clive Russel
Clive Russell, 66, has appeared in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and its 2011 sequel, numerous British television series, and he was recently cast as Ser Brynden Tulley the Blackfish in HBO’s 3rd season of Game of Thrones. Richard Brake, 47, is best known for playing the DC character Joe Chill in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. And he's also appeared in Hannibal Rising, Water for Elephants, & alongside Ray Stevenson in Outpost.
Exploring Thor's relationship with the Asgardian all-father Odin, as well earthbound companion Jane Foster, “Thor: The Dark World” follows the God of Thunder to The Nine Realms beyond Asgard and earth. And as his evil half-brother, Loki, returns for Asgardian justice, a new threat rises. Also rejoining Thor are his fellow Asgardians, Lady Sif, gatekeeper Heimdall and Warriors Three, as they encounter mythical Norse creatures among evildoers.“Thor: The Dark World” stars Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Jaimie Alexander, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano, Stellan Skarsgard, Ray Stevenson, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Rene Russo, with Alice Krige & Kat Dennings. And Alan Taylor (“Game of Thrones”) takes over directorial duties from Kenneth Branagh, who helmed the first “Thor” film. From a screenplay by Don Payne and Robert Rodat, “Thor: The Dark World” is set for release on November 8, 2013.So, the big news in medical AI research is that the Stanford ML group under Andrew Ng has released a paper on chest x-ray interpretation that claims human performance at identifying pneumonia.
First up, very cool!
Second up, I have concerns. Vague and not so vague discomforts.
So, after having a few days to wrap my head around the paper, here is some of my reactions. Note that I will review this paper more thoroughly at a later date as part of my “end of human doctors” series, but for now I wanted to dive in a little bit. This will be a mostly medical discussion, but I promise it will be an important one for anyone who works with medical data. I should also point out that the majority of this discussion isn’t about the Stanford work, but instead is about the publically available dataset from the NIH team of Wang et al.
Full disclosure, cards on the table and all of that: my team has a paper where we claim radiologist level performance |
with the skin, and can damage lungs and the digestive system if it is ingested. This may cause death. One of the rivers affected has been treated with chemicals - calcium and magnesium nitrates - to try to counter the alkaline effects.
It affected some 40 sq km (15.4 sq miles) of mainly agricultural land, engulfing several villages.
National Police Chief Jozsef Hatala said Hungary's national bureau of investigation (MNY) would lead the investigation "given the complexity and importance of the matter".
MAL Rt, the Hungarian company which owns the plant, said earlier there had been no sign of the impending disaster and the last examination of the reservoir pond on Monday had shown nothing untoward.
It also argued that, by EU standards, the sludge had not been considered hazardous.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was quoted by AP as saying the plant and reservoir had been inspected only two weeks earlier and no irregularities had been found.
Herwit Schuster, a spokesman for Greenpeace International, described the spill as "one of the top three environmental disasters in Europe in the last 20 or 30 years".
Land had been "polluted and destroyed for a long time", he told AP.
"If there are substances like arsenic and mercury, that would affect river systems and ground water on long-term basis," he added.
Horror flood
Janosne Stumpe, 76, suffered chemical burns to her legs.
I grabbed the roof beams [of the pigsty] and I was hanging there until the rush went away Janosne Stumpe, flood survivor, 76
She told AFP news agency of literally having to cling on for dear life when a 2m wave of sludge bore down on her home as she was tending her pigs in Kolontar.
"My son said the end was coming, and I thought it was too," she said.
"I quickly jumped on a case, but the flood washed it out from under me so I grabbed the roof beams [of the pigsty] and I was hanging there until the rush went away."
Her son, she added, was "still in hospital with very, very serious burns".
Janos Zlinszky, from Hungary's environmental watchdog, told BBC World Service the impact of the spill on the countryside was striking.
"It's like when you paint a landscape red," he said.
"It's really incredible. I mean, for kilometres wide, there is like a huge paintbrush. If you take a map and with a big paintbrush, just draw a zigzag line through it."ISIS are believed to have blown up a major gas field in Syria, triggering an earthquake around the ancient city of Palmyra.
The Shaer gas field – one of the biggest in the central province of Homs – has been the site of fierce fighting between ISIS jihadists and Syrian government loyalists.
A monitoring group said ISIS reportedly blew up several of Shaer's pumping stations just as the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre recorded a 4.4-magnitude earthquake in the area.
'There were three huge explosions there carried out by ISIS on Monday,' said Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. He had no immediate word on casualties.
Ancient columns in the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO world heritage site which was recaptured from ISIS by the Syrian government army in March. The city was reportedly struck by a 4.4.-magnitude earthquake on Monday after ISIS blew up a major gas field around 30 miles away
ISIS seized the Shaer field (pictured) last week, but Syrian armed forces and pro-government militias have fought hard to get it back
The explosions reportedly even shook Palmyra, the ancient oasis city about 30 miles southeast of Shaer, according to reports posted on Twitter.
Syria's army recaptured Palmyra from ISIS on March 27 after about 10 months of jihadist rule over the city.
ISIS seized the Shaer field last week, but Syrian armed forces and pro-government militias have fought hard to get it back.
Syrian state news agency SANA on Monday evening said government forces had seized a hilltop just west of the field. The agency did not mention the blasts.
A picture posted on Twitter purportedly shows ISIS fighters near the Shaer gas field. ISIS have targeted oil and gas facilities in Iraq and Syria to fund its self-proclaimed Islamic 'caliphate'
A monitoring group said ISIS triggered 'three huge explosions' at the Shaer gas field (above) on Monday
ISIS has targeted oil and gas facilities in Iraq and Syria to fund its self-proclaimed Islamic 'caliphate'.
More than 270,000 people have been killed since Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011 with protests against President Bashar al-Assad.
It comes as an expert warned that ISIS had an 'almost limitless' supply of chemical weapons such as mustard and chlorine gas.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who has recently returned from training Kurdish fighters how to use gas masks, said he had witnessed the effects of chlorine attacks first hand.
A Syrian soldier poses next to the bodies of ISIS militants killed during fierce fighting for control of the Shaer gas field, one of the biggest in the central province of Homs
Pictures posted on Twitter reportedly show tanks and other equipment seized from Syrian government troops by ISIS during battles over the Shaer gas field over the last few weeks
He told ITV News: 'ISIS, over the last two years, seem to be developing a chemical weapons capability.
'In the last few months, the Peshmerga say they have been attacked over 20 times by Islamic State using mustard agent, which they appear to be making themselves, and chlorine, from probably the largest chlorine factory in the Middle East in Mosul.
'So they have almost limitless amounts of this stuff and they appear to be very keen to use it.
'Chemical weapons are the ultimate terror weapon even though bullets and bombs cause more damage.'
ISIS is believed to have set up a special unit for chemical weapons research made up of Iraqi scientists who worked on weapons programmes under Saddam Hussein, as well as foreign experts.If you were planning on taking advantage of this snow day by breaking out the skates and doing some outdoor skating at Hillsboro's Orenco Station Plaza, you're going to need to readjust your plans. That's because the skating rink is closed today, according to a tweet put out by the City of Hillsboro, "due to anticipated snow and ice."
It's just like Alanis said, "It's like too much ice at your ice rink."
Note: That is not a line in the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic," but it should be.
The Hillsboro Tribune reported the tweet, saying that the rink, the only open-air ice rink in the Portland area, is expected to open again tomorrow. Tomorrow, of course, it's expected to rain. Today is the snow day. Just imagine ice skating in the snow. Now stop imagining it because it's not going to happen.
-- Lizzy Acker
503-221-8052
lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyackerThe global financial crisis has finally made its way to this small Swiss valley. When Hans Stadelmann talks about currency speculators, it seems like two worlds are colliding.
There is Stradelmann, the 44-year-old cheese maker standing in his small factory, which smells of freshly cut Appenzeller cheese. Five men are working at the boilers, making the most popular Swiss cheese in Germany according to a traditional recipe handed down through the centuries.
And then there are the international financial markets, that abstract global entity whose actors have decided that the Swiss franc is a safe investment and, in doing so, have pushed the currency's value to record levels against the dollar and the euro. A year back, one euro was worth 1.35 francs. Two weeks ago, the value was 1-to-1.
This presents a problem for Stadelmann. About 40 percent of his products are exported, most of them to EU countries. In order to keep his earnings level in francs, he's being forced to charge higher prices in euros -- and not all of his customers are willing to pay them.
"I'm already selling less, and I'm afraid it's going to get much worse," Stadelmann says.
And it's not just his company he's worried about. "I get my milk from 50 small family farmers," he says. "If I close up shop, I'd be destroying the livelihoods of 50 families."
Swiss Buying Imported Cheese
Stadelmann is powerless against the financial markets. He knows it, and it only makes him worry more. Investors across the world are finding safe haven in the Swiss franc, and the country's export industry is paying the price. Exports from the Alpine nation tumbled by about four billion francs (3.5 billion or $5 billion) in June, and exports to the EU, the country's most important trading partner, were down almost 15 percent.
Even Swiss consumers have been merciless. Since imported products have gotten cheaper, they have even been buying foreign cheese. Though Stadelmann belittles cheeses imported from Holland and Germany as "chewy globs," he still can't hide how much he's worried about his industry.
Of course, it might be hard to take the complaints of the Swiss seriously, especially since they come from one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Per capita economic output is roughly 73,000 francs, the national debt is only 38.3 percent of GDP, and the unemployment rate is only 3 percent.
But the Swiss fear the end of their success story. Over the course of the past year, the value of the franc has risen 20 percent against the euro. "With an appreciation of 2 to 5 percent, export-dependant companies can go under -- and they know it," says Jan-Egbert Sturm, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. "But what's happening now is really bad."
Switzerland's economy wouldn't be able to cope with it if the euro dipped below 1.1 francs, Sturm warns. For this reason, the Swiss National Bank has attempted to get the franc back to a reasonable level by flooding the market with freshly printed money and thereby devaluing the currency.
Wholesalers Feeling the Squeeze
Stadelmann, the cheese maker, benefits from high milk subsidies and long-term delivery contracts with his wholesalers. But worries are even greater at that level, the next step in the supply chain. "It's a matter of survival," says Josef Hardegger. "We are deep in the red."
Hardegger's company exports 8,000 metric tons of Swiss cheese each year and employs roughly 100 people. "For the past year and a half, my business partners have only wanted to talk about prices," Hardegger complains. "The rise in the franc's value preoccupies me from early in the morning till late at night."
The fact that the franc has been steadily rising in value since January 2010 makes this particularly difficult for him, Hardegger says. After every time he has negotiated new prices with his dealers and supermarkets in the euro zone, the euro has fallen in value again against the franc, cutting his profit margins even further. "I'd be happy if the exchange rate against the euro could just stay unchanged for a few months," he says.
Trapped by Image
This uncertainty has also affected Rivella, the Swiss soft drink producer. The company sells 20 percent of its products abroad. Three years ago, it decided to focus more heavily on the market of Germany, its northern neighbor. So far, Rivella drinks are only available in a few German cities, but the company wants to gradually put them on shelves throughout the country. "We have a multi-year plan," says Axel Kuhn, who is in charge of international markets at Rivella.
But the appreciation of the franc has complicated that plan. While almost all of the company's expenses are paid in francs, revenue from Switzerland's neighbors would come in weaker euros. If the franc stays so strong, Kuhn says prices would have to be raised. But, at 1.29 to 1.45 per liter, Rivella is already one of the most expensive soft drinks on the market.
Some large Swiss firms are thinking of solving this problem by moving production abroad. But that's not an option for Rivella because it might hurt its image. "In a certain way," Kuhn explains, "a bit of Rivella belongs it to everyone in Switzerland." Most Swiss have grown up with the sweet drink, and, on average, they drink 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of it each year.
A Blow to Tourism
The franc's appreciation has also hurt Switzerland's tourism industry. Of course, the country has always been an expensive place to vacation, but it is now running the risk of becoming a place for only the very wealthy. Business has dropped by about 5 percent, says Jürg Schmid from the Swiss Tourism Federation. Things could get even worse this winter because the industry has so far been benefiting from long-standing bookings.
"The ski resorts will probably have a harder time than us," says Marcel Perren, the director of tourism for the city of Lucerne. "But we can't work magic," he says. "Prices for guests coming from the euro zone have risen 20 percent, and we have nothing to do with it."
In the meantime, dinner at a restaurant in Lucerne can quickly cost 50 euros per person, or twice what it is in Germany. Such prices have led to a decrease in the number of German tourists coming to Lucerne. Compared to 2010, the number of Germans spending the night in the city has dropped by almost 10 percent. The number of Italian visitors has dropped by about 12 percent.
Still, Lucerne has been able to make up for some of these losses because it has grown more popular with Asian tourists. Indeed, the flood of tourists from China, Thailand and India has transformed its tourism industry. The Asian tourists stay in one or two star hotels and spend less money in restaurants, but they make up for it with the luxury products they take home to relatives.
Heidi Vogt, a tour guide in the city, has also noticed the change. "Fewer people are coming from Italy and England," she says. Although she has three colleagues in her team who speak Chinese, they have seen a drop in the number of tours being reserved. "The Chinese bring their own guides with them," she says.
Perren, the city's director of tourism, tries to keep positive about the appreciation of the franc, but his confidence sounds forced. "The situation demands Swiss creativity," he says, "and we are facing a serious challenge."Microraptor gui includes impressions of feathered wings (see arrows) Fossil ofincludes impressions of feathered wings (see arrows)
Since scientific research began on dinosaurs in the early 1800s, they were generally believed to be closely related to modern reptiles, such as lizards. The word "dinosaur" itself, coined in 1842 by paleontologist Richard Owen, comes from the Greek for "fearsome lizard". This view began to shift during the so-called dinosaur renaissance in scientific research in the late 1960s, and by the mid-1990s significant evidence had emerged that dinosaurs were much more closely related to birds, which descended directly from the theropod group of dinosaurs[1] and are themselves a subgroup within the Dinosauria.
Understanding of the origin of feathers developed both as new fossils were discovered throughout the 2000s and 2010s and as technology has enabled scientists to study fossils more closely. Among non-avian dinosaurs, feathers or feather-like integument have been discovered in dozens of genera via both direct and indirect fossil evidence. Although the vast majority of feather discoveries have been in coelurosaurian theropods, feather-like integument has also been discovered in at least three ornithischians, suggesting that feathers may have been present on the last common ancestor of the Ornithoscelida, a dinosaur group including both theropods and ornithischians.[2] It is possible that feathers first developed in even earlier archosaurs, in light of the discovery of highly feather-like pycnofibers in pterosaurs.[3] Crocodilians also possess beta keratin similar to those of birds, which suggests that they evolved from common ancestral genes.[4]
History of research [ edit ]
Early [ edit ]
Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He compared the skeletal structure of Compsognathus, a small theropod dinosaur, and the 'first bird' Archaeopteryx lithographica (both of which were found in the Upper Jurassic Bavarian limestone of Solnhofen). He showed that, apart from its hands and feathers, Archaeopteryx was quite similar to Compsognathus. Thus Archaeopteryx represents a transitional fossil. In 1868 he published On the Animals which are most nearly intermediate between Birds and Reptiles, making the case.[5][6] The first restoration of a feathered dinosaur was Thomas Henry Huxley's depiction in 1876 of a feathered Compsognathus to accompany a lecture on the evolution of birds he delivered in New York in which he speculated that the aforementioned dinosaur might have been in possession of feathers.[7] The leading dinosaur expert of the time, Richard Owen, disagreed, claiming Archaeopteryx as the first bird outside dinosaur lineage. For the next century, claims that birds were dinosaur descendants faded, with more popular bird-ancestry hypotheses including 'crocodylomorph' and 'thecodont' ancestors, rather than dinosaurs or other archosaurs.
In 1969, John Ostrom described Deinonychus antirrhopus, a theropod that he had discovered in Montana in 1964 and whose skeletal resemblance to birds seemed unmistakable. Ostrom became a leading proponent of the theory that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. Further comparisons of bird and dinosaur skeletons, as well as cladistic analysis strengthened the case for the link, particularly for a branch of theropods called maniraptors. Skeletal similarities include the neck, the pubis, the wrists (semi-lunate carpal), the 'arms' and pectoral girdle, the shoulder blade, the clavicle and the breast bone. In all, over a hundred distinct anatomical features are shared by birds and theropod dinosaurs.[citation needed] Other researchers drew on these shared features and other aspects of dinosaur biology and began to suggest that at least some theropod dinosaurs were feathered.
At the same time, paleoartists began to create modern restorations of highly active dinosaurs. In 1969, Robert T. Bakker drew a running Deinonychus. His student Gregory S. Paul depicted non-avian maniraptoran dinosaurs with feathers and protofeathers, starting in the late 1970s. In 1975, Eleanor M. Kish began to paint accurate images of dinosaurs, her Hypacrosaurus being the first one shown with its camouflage.[8]
Before the discovery of feathered dinosaur fossils, the evidence was limited to Huxley and Ostrom's comparative anatomy. Some mainstream ornithologists, including Smithsonian Institution curator Storrs L. Olson, disputed the links, specifically citing the lack of fossil evidence for feathered dinosaurs.[citation needed] By the 1990s, however, most paleontologists considered birds to be surviving dinosaurs and referred to 'non-avian dinosaurs' (all extinct), to distinguish them from birds (Avialae).
Fossil discoveries [ edit ]
One of the earliest discoveries of possible feather impressions by non-avian dinosaurs is an ichnofossil (Fulicopus lyellii) of the 195-199 million year old Portland Formation in the northeastern United States. Gierlinski (1996, 1997, 1998) and Kondrat (2004) have interpreted traces between two footprints in this fossil as feather impressions from the belly of a squatting dilophosaurid. Although some reviewers have raised questions about the naming and interpretation of this fossil, if correct, this early Jurassic fossil is the oldest known evidence of feathers, almost 30 million years older than the next-oldest-known evidence.[9][10][11]
Sinosauropteryx fossil, the first fossil of a definitively non-avialan dinosaur with feathers fossil, the first fossil of a definitively non-avialan dinosaur with feathers
After a century of hypotheses without conclusive evidence, well-preserved fossils of feathered dinosaurs were discovered during the 1990s, and more continue to be found. The fossils were preserved in a Lagerstätte—a sedimentary deposit exhibiting remarkable richness and completeness in its fossils—in Liaoning, China. The area had repeatedly been smothered in volcanic ash produced by eruptions in Inner Mongolia 124 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous epoch. The fine-grained ash preserved the living organisms that it buried in fine detail. The area was teeming with life, with millions of leaves, angiosperms (the oldest known), insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, mammals, turtles, and lizards discovered to date.
The most important discoveries at Liaoning have been a host of feathered dinosaur fossils, with a steady stream of new finds filling in the picture of the dinosaur–bird connection and adding more to theories of the evolutionary development of feathers and flight. Turner et al. (2007) reported quill knobs from an ulna of Velociraptor mongoliensis, and these are strongly correlated with large and well-developed secondary feathers.[12]
Citipati osmolskae specimen, at the A nestingspecimen, at the AMNH
Behavioural evidence, in the form of an oviraptorosaur on its nest, showed another link with birds. Its forearms were folded, like those of a bird.[13] Although no feathers were preserved, it is likely that these would have been present to insulate eggs and juveniles.[14]
Not all of the Chinese fossil discoveries proved valid however. In 1999, a supposed fossil of an apparently feathered dinosaur named Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, found in Liaoning Province, northeastern China, turned out to be a forgery. Comparing the photograph of the specimen with another find, Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing came to the conclusion that it was composed of two portions of different fossil animals. His claim made National Geographic review their research and they too came to the same conclusion.[15] The bottom portion of the "Archaeoraptor" composite came from a legitimate feathered dromaeosaurid now known as Microraptor, and the upper portion from a previously known primitive bird called Yanornis.
In 2011, samples of amber were discovered to contain preserved feathers from 75 to 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous era, with evidence that they were from both dinosaurs and birds. Initial analysis suggests that some of the feathers were used for insulation, and not flight.[16][17] More complex feathers were revealed to have variations in coloration similar to modern birds, while simpler protofeathers were predominantly dark. Only 11 specimens are currently known. The specimens are too rare to be broken open to study their melanosomes, but there are plans for using non-destructive high-resolution X-ray imaging.[18]
In 2016, the discovery was announced of a feathered dinosaur tail preserved in amber that is estimated to be 99 million years old. Lida Xing, a researcher from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, found the specimen at an amber market in Myanmar. It is the first definitive discovery of dinosaur material in amber.[19][20][21][22]
In March 2018, scientists reported that Archaeopteryx was likely capable of flight, but in a manner substantially different from that of modern birds.[23][24]
Current knowledge [ edit ]
Non-avian dinosaur species preserved with evidence of feathers [ edit ]
Sinornithosaurus millenii, the first evidence of feathers in Fossil of, the first evidence of feathers in dromaeosaurids
Caudipteryx fossil with feather impressions and stomach content Cast of afossil with feather impressions and stomach content
Sinornithosaurus millenii Fossil cast of a
Several non-avian dinosaurs are now known to have been feathered. Direct evidence of feathers exists for several species. In all examples, the evidence described consists of feather impressions, except those genera inferred to have had feathers based on skeletal or chemical evidence, such as the presence of quill knobs (the anchor points for wing feathers on the forelimb) or a pygostyle (the fused vertebrae at the tail tip which often supports large feathers).[25]
Primitive feather types [ edit ]
Integumentary structures that gave rise to the feathers of birds are seen in the dorsal spines of reptiles and fish. A similar stage in their evolution to the complex coats of birds and mammals can be observed in living reptiles such as iguanas and Gonocephalus agamids. Feather structures are thought to have proceeded from simple hollow filaments through several stages of increasing complexity, ending with the large, deeply rooted feathers with strong pens (rachis), barbs and barbules that birds display today.[26]
According to Prum's (1999) proposed model, at stage I, the follicle originates with a cylindrical epidermal depression around the base of the feather papilla. The first feather resulted when undifferentiated tubular follicle collar developed out of the old keratinocytes being pushed out. At stage II, the inner, basilar layer of the follicle collar differentiated into longitudinal barb ridges with unbranched keratin filaments, while the thin peripheral layer of the collar became the deciduous sheath, forming a tuft of unbranched barbs with a basal calamus. Stage III consists of two developmental novelties, IIIa and IIIb, as either could have occurred first. Stage IIIa involves helical displacement of barb ridges arising within the collar. The barb ridges on the anterior midline of the follicle fuse together, forming the rachis. The creation of a posterior barb locus follows, giving an indeterminate number of barbs. This resulted in a feather with a symmetrical, primarily branched structure with a rachis and unbranched barbs. In stage IIIb, barbules paired within the peripheral barbule plates of the barb ridges, create branched barbs with rami and barbules. This resulting feather is one with a tuft of branched barbs without a rachis. At stage IV, differentiated distal and proximal barbules produce a closed, pennaceous vane. A closed vane develops when pennulae on the distal barbules form a hooked shape to attach to the simpler proximal barbules of the adjacent barb. Stage V developmental novelties gave rise to additional structural diversity in the closed pennaceous feather. Here, asymmetrical flight feathers, bipinnate plumulaceous feathers, filoplumes, powder down, and bristles evolved.[27]
Some evidence suggests that the original function of simple feathers was insulation. In particular, preserved patches of skin in large, derived, tyrannosauroids show scutes, while those in smaller, more primitive, forms show feathers. This may indicate that the larger forms had complex skins, with both scutes and filaments, or that tyrannosauroids may be like rhinos and elephants, having filaments at birth and then losing them as they developed to maturity.[28] An adult Tyrannosaurus rex weighed about as much as an African elephant. If large tyrannosauroids were endotherms, they would have needed to radiate heat efficiently.[29] However, due to the different structural properties of feathers compared to fur,[30] as well as a larger surface area per cubic square meter, it is extremely unlikely even the largest theropods would suffer overheating issues from an extensive feather coat.[citation needed]
There is an increasing body of evidence that supports the display hypothesis, which states that early feathers were colored and increased reproductive success.[31][32] Coloration could have provided the original adaptation of feathers, implying that all later functions of feathers, such as thermoregulation and flight, were co-opted.[31] This hypothesis has been supported by the discovery of pigmented feathers in multiple species.[33][34][35] Supporting the display hypothesis is the fact that fossil feathers have been observed in a ground-dwelling herbivorous dinosaur clade, making it unlikely that feathers functioned as predatory tools or as a means of flight.[36] Additionally, some specimens have iridescent feathers.[37] Pigmented and iridescent feathers may have provided greater attractiveness to mates, providing enhanced reproductive success when compared to non-colored feathers. Current research shows that it is plausible that theropods would have had the visual acuity necessary to see the displays. In a study by Stevens (2006), the binocular field of view for Velociraptor has been estimated to be 55 to 60 degrees, which is about that of modern owls. Visual acuity for Tyrannosaurus has been predicted to be anywhere from about that of humans to 13 times that of humans.[38] However, as both Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus have a rather extended evolutionary relationship with the more basal theropods, it is unclear how much of this visual acuity data can be extrapolated.[citation needed]
The idea that precursors of feathers appeared before they were co-opted for insulation is already stated in Gould and Vrba, 1982.[39] The original benefit might have been metabolic. Feathers are largely made of the keratin protein complex, which has disulfide bonds between amino acids that give it stability and elasticity. The metabolism of amino acids containing sulfur can be toxic; however, if the sulfur amino acids are not catabolized at the final products of urea or uric acid but used for the synthesis of keratin instead, the release of hydrogen sulfide is extremely reduced or avoided. For an organism whose metabolism works at high internal temperatures of 40 °C or greater, it can be extremely important to prevent the excess production of hydrogen sulfide. This hypothesis could be consistent with the need for high metabolic rate of theropod dinosaurs.[40][41]
It is not known with certainty at what point in archosaur phylogeny the earliest simple "protofeathers" arose, or whether they arose once or independently multiple times. Filamentous structures are clearly present in pterosaurs, and long, hollow quills have been reported in specimens of the ornithischian dinosaurs Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong.[42][43] In 2009, Xu et al. noted that the hollow, unbranched, stiff integumentary structures found on a specimen of Beipiaosaurus were strikingly similar to the integumentary structures of Psittacosaurus and pterosaurs. They suggested that all of these structures may have been inherited from a common ancestor much earlier in the evolution of archosaurs, possibly in an ornithodire from the Middle Triassic or earlier.[44] More recently, findings in Russia of the basal neornithischian Kulindadromeus report that although the lower leg and tail seemed to be scaled, "varied integumentary structures were found directly associated with skeletal elements, supporting the hypothesis that simple filamentous feathers, as well as compound feather-like structures comparable to those in theropods, were widespread amongst the whole dinosaur clade."[45]
Display feathers are also known from dinosaurs that are very primitive members of the bird lineage, or Avialae. The most primitive example is Epidexipteryx, which had a short tail with extremely long, ribbon-like feathers. Oddly enough, the fossil does not preserve wing feathers, suggesting that Epidexipteryx was either secondarily flightless, or that display feathers evolved before flight feathers in the bird lineage.[46] Plumaceous feathers are found in nearly all lineages of Theropoda common in the northern hemisphere, and pennaceous feathers are attested as far down the tree as the Ornithomimosauria. The fact that only adult Ornithomimus had wing-like structures suggests that pennaceous feathers evolved for mating displays.[47]
Phylogeny and the inference of feathers in other dinosaurs [ edit ]
Cladogram showing distribution of feathers in Dinosauria, as of 2015
Fossil feather impressions are extremely rare and they require exceptional preservation conditions to form. Therefore, only a few non-avian feathered dinosaur genera have been identified. All fossil feather specimens have been found to show certain similarities. Due to these similarities and through developmental research, many scientists believe that feathers have only evolved once in dinosaurs.[citation needed] Feathers would then have been passed down to all later, more derived species, unless some lineages lost feathers secondarily. If a dinosaur falls at a point on an evolutionary tree within the known feather-bearing lineages, then its ancestors had feathers, and it is quite possible that it did as well.[citation needed] This technique, called phylogenetic bracketing, can also be used to infer the type of feathers a species may have had, since the developmental history of feathers is now reasonably well-known. All feathered species had filamentaceous or plumaceous (downy) feathers, with pennaceous feathers found among the more bird-like groups. The following cladogram is adapted from Godefroit et al., 2013.[48]
Grey denotes a clade that is not known to contain any feathered specimen at the time of writing (although this does not imply that members of the clade lacked feathers).
See also [ edit ]Chechnya’s president has reportedly vowed to eradicate the republic’s gay community before the start of Ramadan. Both Chechen and Russian leaders, however, have denied in recent days that Chechnya’s LGBT community is under attack.
Sir Alan Duncan, Britain’s deputy foreign secretary, warned of the threat in a speech to Parliament on Wednesday, according to U.K.-based LGBT news site PinkNews. “He has carried out other violent campaigns in the past, and this time he is directing his efforts at the LGBT community,” Duncan, who is himself gay, said. “Sources have said that he wants the [LGBT] community eliminated by the start of Ramadan.”
Made clear in the Commons today that reported attacks on #LGBT people in Chechnya are utterly contemptible — Sir Alan Duncan (@AlanDuncanMP) April 20, 2017
This year’s celebration of Ramadan, the most important holiday for Muslims around the world, begins on Friday, May 26. Chechnya is a predominately Muslim area of the Russian Federation.
There have been numerous reports of members of Chechnya’s gay community being rounded up and murdered since February. The New York Times published personal accounts of Chechnya’s anti-gay pogrom Friday. In one chilling story, a man called Maksim was set up by agents who posed as a friend in an online chatroom. When he went to meet his friend, a fellow gay man, he was beaten by the authorities and then strapped to a chair with electrical wires on his hands. He was fiercely interrogated.
“They yelled, ‘Who else do you know?’” Maksim said, as they repeatedly shocked him. “It was unbearably painful; I was hanging on with my last strength. But I didn’t tell them anything.”
But such reports have been met with skepticism or outright denial by government officials. During a Wednesday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kadyrov said there was no reason to believe any “provocative” reports about the anti-gay purge. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov also told reporters Thursday that investigators have found no evidence to support a recent report by Novaya Gazeta, a Russian investigative newspaper, that detailed a recent anti-gay operation that resulted in the death of three men.
Last week, Magomed Selimkhanov, a member of the State Duma from the Chechen Republic, responded to the reported persecution by dismissing the idea that gay people even exist in Chechnya. He was quoted in the daily newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets as saying: “There are no gay people in Chechnya, so no one can have any views about them. I personally believe that they belong two meters underground.”
Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director for Human Rights Watch, told the Times that security agents in Chechnya brutally detain suspected homosexuals for up to several weeks in some cases. In interviews with gay men who later fled Chechnya, Lokshina said some “returned to their families barely alive from beatings.”
Meanwhile, several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and HRW, issued a joint letter to members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe over the human rights situation in the region.
“The Parliamentary Assembly should adopt a strong resolution that addresses the persistent impunity and deteriorating human rights situation in the region, in particular the human rights crisis in Chechnya,” the letter said. “Your voice will matter for those who work to defend the victims of violations and abuses in the North Caucasus.”Rules For Green Radicals: The Alinsky Way of Governing
What happens when those in power adopt ‘rules for radicals’ to attack their less powerful opponents.
Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, recently caused a stir by sending letters to seven university presidents seeking background information on scientists and professors who had given congressional testimony that failed to endorse what is the conventional wisdom in some quarters regarding climate change. One of the targets was Steven Hayward, a colleague of mine at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy.
Though the congressman lacked legal authority to demand information, his aggressive plan, which came to light in late February, should not be a surprise at a time when power holders from the White House on down are employing similar means against perceived enemies.
Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. “I’m a Saul Alinsky guy,” he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, “that’s where I learned this stuff.”
What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors’ knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.
But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalva’s staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due date—asking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companies—using official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalva’s congressional office. This is a page from Alinsky’s book, in both senses of the |
came this year – then in theory, we might be able to predict what kind of season Gaudreau has next year.
Obviously, there are a lot of different factors to take into account here – players’ age, for one thing (Satan was at the end of his NHL career for his comparable season), or switching teams entirely (Hemsky) – and this is hardly a proven metric, so consider this a thought experiment.
Here are the players’ numbers for their following seasons:
Player Season Age Goals Assists Points Points per game Rel CF% Rel SCF% ZSO% Andrew Ladd 2011-12 25 28 22 50.61 6.63 3.95 57.90 Kyle Brodziak 2011-12 27 22 22 44.54 0.25 0.82 37.88 Ales Hemsky 2014-15 31 11 21 32.42 -0.47 -1.96 58.11 Miroslav Satan 2009-10 34 9 5 14.37 2.90 2.30 29.00 Sam Gagner 2009-10 20 15 26 41.60 3.91 3.43 48.22 Matt Duchene 2010-11 19 27 40 67.84 0.13 2.29 53.89 Jordan Staal 2009-10 21 21 28 49.60 2.95 1.71 49.38 Nino Niederreiter 2014-15 22 24 13 37.46 2.10 1.80 42.93
With the older players – Ladd, Brodziak, Hemsky, and Satan – scoring was mostly down, with the exception of Brodziak. At the same time, possession was mostly down as well, except in Ladd’s case. His possession statistics shot way up, even though he wasn’t putting the puck in the net nearly as much; this can be attributed to his high increase in offensive zone starts.
Hemsky and Satan are the oldest of this group, and provide the results that can most likely be nixed due to extreme circumstances Gaudreau is unlikely to face: namely, Hemsky went to a completely new team, and Satan was on the verge of NHL retirement. Satan barely played in the NHL that season, while Hemsky perhaps wishes he barely had as well, because his year was a disaster.
Looking at the younger guys
It’s the younger players – Gagner, Duchene, Staal, and Niederreiter – who are more interesting, and whose futures Gaudreau could end up mimicking. Their offensive outputs increased (Staal aside, who remained consistent): in particular Duchene from his rookie year, where he went from.68 points per game to.84.
A jump like Duchene’s may not happen, but at the same time, there are factors pointing towards Gaudreau scoring more next year. In theory, he’ll have the same linemates he did for the second half of the season, and that was a combination that worked wonders together.
He’ll also have a full year’s worth of experience under his belt. Remember Gaudreau’s complete inability to get on the board until he was a healthy scratch six games into the season? This is a little unfair, but if you exclude those first five games he played, he would have been at.85 points per game in his rookie season.
There shouldn’t be a need to healthy scratch him in his second year.
Possession is more of a mixed bag among the younger guys, though. Gagner and Niederreiter’s offensive zone starts both went down, but while Gagner’s relative corsi and scoring chances still rose in response, Niederreiter floundered, and his relative scoring chances in particular dropped. Duchene and Staal, on the other hand, started receiving more offensive zone starts, and Duchene’s relative corsi plummeted – although his scoring chances went up – while Staal’s possession improved, but his relative scoring chances dropped.
All in all, it’s a very mixed bag.
What to expect?
First off: Gaudreau is probably going to score more. All of the younger players who had similar years to him did just that, and with a year of experience under his belt, Gaudreau should only improve. He’s definitely not as his peak yet.
Secondly: offensive zone starts are probably going to play a role. When Ladd’s went up, so did his corsi; when Brodziak’s went down, so did his.
Gagner and Niederreiter both received additional responsibilities when their offensive zone start ratio dropped, and while Niederreiter’s relative scoring chances appropriately dropped with it, Gagner rose above, and continued to improve.
Duchene and Staal both received additional sheltering, and it had opposite impacts on their game: Duchene scored more, but his possession plummeted; Staal’s scoring remained the same, his possession improved, but his relative scoring chance data fell.
Gaudreau was already very sheltered in his rookie season, and it’s unlikely he gets sheltered further; especially now that he has not only proven he can play in the NHL, but because Sam Bennett will be around to potentially take over that role. The good news: of all the younger guys, Gaudreau was most similar to Gagner, who improved across the board despite receiving additional responsibilities.
The best case scenario for Gaudreau, then, is to ultimately follow up his season the same way Gagner did his. And Gagner was the fifth most similar to him, while being closest to age and circumstance. Gaudreau is already the better scorer, but if he can replicate what Gagner did, then he should be in for an excellent sophomore season.Day 1743 of Winchesterbros fansite staunchly refusing to include Misha’s PCA win on their site, at all, despite many queries from fans.
UPDATE- This just in, Winchesterbros will not now nor possibly ever post Misha’s PCA win to their site because…….well it’s better if you just see why.
So there you have it. A mod of the site simply refuses to post his win, because even though the majority of those of us wondering why didn’t start to tweet to them until a week after he won it, we were “harassing and hating” on her/the site. Did that happen? Maybe. All it would have taken was a simple tweet explaining why it wasn’t on there and why the other *three* mods weren’t available if she wasn’t for the questions to stop. But i can guarantee you 95% of us just wanted to know why they weren’t, and when they would. It’s been pointed out that there was a Facebook post made about it, but if there ever was, nobody can seem to find it. Multiple scourings of their Facebook page have turned up no mention of it at all. If anyone can find it though, please let me know. Regardless, this is the truth, straight form the source. This is the oldest and largest Supernatural fansite and Supernatural fans will see no article about Misha Collins’ PCA on it, because one of it’s mods has decided that it isn’t “Newsworthy” and that it doesn’t deserve to be on there. Yup, they’re very professional, aren’t they? No double standards at all there.OAKLAND, Calif. -- The Golden State Warriors have hired Mike Brown, the former head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Los Angeles Lakers, as an assistant on coach Steve Kerr's staff.
The Warriors announced Wednesday that Brown will replace Luke Walton, who left to become the Lakers' coach.
Former Cavaliers and Lakers coach Mike Brown has been added to Steve Kerr's staff in Golden State. David Manning/USA TODAY Sports
Brown has a 347-216 career record in eight seasons. He took the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals in 2007 and won Coach of the Year in 2008-09 after helping Cleveland win 66 games.
Brown was also an assistant in San Antonio when Kerr played for the Spurs.
Golden State also signed second-round pick Patrick McCaw. McCaw was selected 38th overall by Milwaukee in last month's draft before the Warriors bought his rights for about $2.4 million.A bike path across the Everglades, even a green one intended to do little damage to the fragile ecosystem, is drawing fire from a group of indigenous people and other critics who say the proposed 76-mile long ribbon of asphalt is an insult to them and nature.
“It opens the door to more development in the Everglades,” said Betty Osceola, a member of the Miccosukee Tribe, which lives in the Glades. “Once you give them that door and open it, they’re going to walk right on through and keep opening more and more doors. It won’t stop.”
Osceola and Bobby Billie, leader of the Panther Clan of the Miccosukee Simanolee Nation, who lives in the Big Cypress Preserve, are leading a weeklong protest march along the proposed biking and hiking route adjacent to Tamiami Trail. Plans call for a 12- to 14-foot-wide path that would stretch from the rural fringe of Miami-Dade to Collier County.
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On Wednesday, day four of a walk expected to end Thursday at the Miccosukee Resort casino along Krome Avenue, about 20 protesters walked silently — “to hear nature and hear it speak to us,” said marcher Karen Dwyer — while stepping over beer cans and plastic bottles that littered the right of way.
“We’re seeing this as a desecration,” said Houston Cypress, a member of the Miccosukee Otter Clan and an organizer of a group called the Love the Everglades Movement. “It’s so invasive. Why not use resources already in place?”
Plans for the River of Grass Greenway have slowly gained traction in the eight years since a group of Naples cyclists suggested installing a paved path to link the coasts and provide a more intimate look at the vast wilderness. In 2009, the National Park Service won a $1.5 million grant and asked Miami-Dade County to take over planning.
Ironically, the path was touted as a way to open up the Everglades without leaving a heavy footprint.
“It’s really a jewel of the area and nobody sees it except at 60 mph,” said Joe Webb, a project manager for Miami-Dade County’s parks department.
But what may seem like a sliver of asphalt from Miami’s crowded skyline looks like another highway to residents who live along one of the area’s few paved roads.
“It is a huge thing. It’s just another scar on the land,” said David Shealy, who owns the Trail Lakes Campground where he operates the Swamp Ape Research Center. He dates his family’s arrival in the area to the 1890s.
Even with a feasibility study expected to wrap up this summer, planners say they are far from constructing the path and have yet to secure the money for design and construction. The estimated cost of the project has increased from about $75 million to as much as $140 million, according to a January presentation by Miami-Dade’s parks department. Among other things, the study will look at existing conditions and determine whether a trail is compatible. The study will also identify environmental concerns — a matter of particular concern to Everglades National Park.
“We generally support this in concept, but believe important questions remain to be answered,” Superintendent Pedro Ramos said in an email.
Planners say the path could lessen damaging road traffic while opening up the central Everglades, the heart of the ecosystem where wetland marshes give way to tall stands of trees draped in moss in the Big Cypress Preserve. Eventually, the county hopes the path will connect to a proposed 500-mile network of bike paths that would include Biscayne National Park. The Tamiami stretch would connect a number of popular spots including the Shark Valley loop, the Turner River Canoe Trail, the Fakahatchee Strand as well as Miccosukee and Seminole tribal lands.
Osceola and others worry — wrongly so, Webb says — that the path would bring electricity and therefore more development to a remote area largely protected by the national park territory and state conservation land. Driving west on the trail in Miami-Dade County, the only businesses in sight are a half dozen airboat and tourist stops. They also fear the path would interfere with Everglades restoration work to repair water flow south.
But Webb said part of the plan looks at how the path would work with restoration efforts and calls for it to be built in the right-of-way that runs alongside the Tamiami Trail or on nearby levees.
“We understand the sensitivity,” he said. “Our little path is secondary.”General Dynamics Electric Boat has been awarded a $5.1 billion contract to undertake the detailed design work for the U.S. Navy’s next generation of ballistic missile submarines – the Columbia-class (SSBN(X))
According to the Pentagon notification, “the Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) contract award is for the design, completion, component and technology development and prototyping efforts for the Columbia-class Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBNs). This work will also include United Kingdom (U.K.) unique efforts related to the Common Missile Compartment.
“The Columbia-class submarine is the most important acquisition program the Navy has today,” said Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer in a statement.
“This contract represents a significant investment in maintaining our strategic deterrent into the future, as well as our ongoing partnership with the United Kingdom.”
In a statement, Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) praised the work of the Navy and EB.
“Every day, countless individuals – from the shipyard to suppliers to workforce development experts – are working to ensure that our region is ready to meet the multi-generational challenge of designing and building this new submarine,” he said.
“This milestone today is a testament to their work, but a reminder that we still have a lot to do as Congress and the Navy look to grow our undersea fleet.”
The contract award follows a January Milestone B approval for the program to enter the detailed design and engineering phase of the program.
“A program this large and complex will undoubtedly face financial and technical challenges in the years ahead, but it will eventually result in what is arguably the most advanced weapon system ever developed,” Eric Wertheim, author of U.S. Naval Institute’s Combat Fleets told USNI News on Thursday.
The recapitalization of the ballistic missile submarines is the Navy’s top acquisition priority and is poised to make a major dent in the Navy’s shipbuilding accounts.
According to a recent Navy cost estimate from earlier this year, the lead ship is expected to cost $10.4 billion – including $4.2 billion in detail design and non-recurring engineering work, as well as $6.2 billion for ship construction – and follow-on ships to cost $5.2 billion, all in 2010 dollars, USNI News reported at the time of the milestone B award.
An August estimate of the total program cost obtained by the Congressional Research Service put the total cost of the program at $122.3 billion in 2010 dollars.
The class of 12 boomers will replace the current class of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines as part of the U.S. nuclear deterrent triad along with ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombers.
Columbias and the planned four-vessel U.K. Royal Navy Dreadnaught-class of SSBNs share a common missile compartment that will field Trident II D5 nuclear missiles.
The U.S. boomers will feature a new life-of-boat reactor, a quiet electric drive and field 16 Trident II D5s.
The Navy estimates the future USS Columbia will be operational by 2030.On his radio program yesterday, Bryan Fischer made the case that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be put to death following his conviction for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing in the most Fischer-esque way possible: explaining that Noah’s Flood was the result of society not using the death penalty.
As Fischer explained it, “God had prohibited the death penalty prior to the Flood” and it resulted in so much chaos and bloodshed that God was left with no choice but to kill almost all of mankind.
“When people say we ought to just get rid of the death penalty, we just ought to get rid of capital punishment and society would be so much better off,” he said, “well, we tried that; we tried that from the creation to Adam until the Flood … And what happened? It was chaos. It was vigilante justice. And people began killing other people simply because they got insulted or because they got injured or because they got wounded. So there was no sense of proportionality, justice was a matter of each man talking the law into his own hands. It was total chaos and the result was the entire world had become so corrupt that God had to wipe the whole thing out and start over”:UPDATE: Tracer’s pose has been changed to something somewhat similar to what it was originally, so this particular outrage about her specifically is not a huge deal anymore, but I still maintain this general viewpoint about changing things to suit the minority of players and sex in video games.
I’d imagine this will be a touchy subject to some, but it’s something that’s been running through my head on and off for quite some time now. I’ve somewhat addressed sexual content in games before (check my Directory), but I’ve never really spilled out everything I want to say. For some reason, Blizzard’s removal of a simple pose in Overwatch, for a female character named Tracer, struck a chord in me and made me want to just… talk. It’s not, by any means, some life-changing, eye-opening occurrence for me, personally. It’s more like the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is just a tangent that’s been building up in me. I can’t guarantee a coherent layout to this post, as it’ll be very stream-of-consciousness, but I’ll try my best.
First off, about Blizzard’s removal of the pose; Tracer is not the only character with it. In fact, she’s not even the female character with the biggest butt who can do it (see: Widowmaker). Male characters can do it, too. Tracer was given special treatment, because she, specifically, was pointed out by the player who complained about the pose, claiming sexual objectification. Despite dozens of other people in the same thread saying otherwise, Jeff Kaplan responded with confirmation that he’d remove it, and even apologized for it – in the same thread as the many who asked to keep the pose intact. Since then, the Overwatch Beta Feedback forum on Battle.net has been flooded with statements asking to reverse the decision.
I’ve seen people saying things like “video games aren’t a democracy and the devs can do what they want” and “it’s not censorship if they change it willingly.” First off, who’s to say it’s a willful change, not fueled by fear of moral outrage or critical backlash? Second, if a single complaint was all it took for them to remove the pose, then why did they give it to Tracer to begin with? Why’d they give it to her if their conviction towards their own game’s design is so weak? “They care about player feedback and want to make everyone happy”, I hear some say. If that were true, Kaplan should have listened to the dozens of other people scrambling to urge him to keep the pose – not the one or two people trying to make a mountain out of an anthill. Obviously, that would have pleased the majority, and the people who don’t care either way would continue to not care. “Pleasing everyone” is simply not possible in any consumer-based or art-based industry where subjective perception of the product is key.
This type of behavior continues to set the awful precedent that you can easily change anything you want about any game you wish by raising your eyebrow and claiming “sexism” or “racism” or any “-ism” that bares a negative connotation. This type of behavior has way too much power over the people who should simply have all the creative freedom they want. It goes deeper, as one person in the thread claimed that, despite Tracer being 26 years old in-universe, her emotional and intellectual development could be stunted due to being adrift in time. Now, humanizing a fictional character is reasonable, and necessary to sympathize with/relate to them within the context of their plot, but trying to give them real life human rights to protect them from their own creators is taking it a step too far.
Another damning aspect of this issue is this part of Kaplan’s message: “The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented.” An admirable statement… Unless you happen to like that pose for Tracer – which, again, was most of the people in that thread – then fuck you.
This whole debacle bridges me to my next statement, which is the crux of this post: sex in video games is not inherently immoral or detrimental to the medium in the general. The presence of sex in video games doesn’t make people perceive the entire industry to be “immature”. If someone does perceive it that way, they’re the closed-minded ones. Sex is a basic need in all human beings – we all want or need it, barring asexual individuals. Sex is present in every consumer-based artform. Film has it. Photography has it. Literature has it. “Music” (or just audio in general) has it. Sex can be bought and sold all over the world. Video games are not a special snowflake form of entertainment that needs to be coddled because it’s the youngest. Video games have nothing to prove. It’s a 100 billion-dollar (annually/globally) business and growing.
Pornographic games are exactly that – porn. They’ve porn first and video games second. A game is not automatically aimed at people of all ages and demographics by virtue of being a video game. And, like with real porn, you ignore the types you’re not into. Simple as that. As a lifelong gamer, one of my absolute biggest pet peeves is a person playing a game despite already deciding that they hate it before they even pick up the controller, and, surprise, they trash it when they’re done (usually about an hour or less in). It’s a confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy, and pretending to be an authority on that game after your predetermined hatred only misleads and is fundamentally dishonest.
Sex in video games isn’t even a recent occurrence. Have we forgotten Custer’s Revenge back in 1982? There was an outrage about that game, too; including some hyperbolic morons trying to insist it incurred a “rape epidemic” against Native American women. How about the Leisure Suit Larry franchise? To this day, I see people citing their own children for reasons of their concern (this includes the person who complained about Tracer’s pose) and I can only wonder if they forgot that ESRB ratings exist. Yes, ratings boards like ESRB or MPAA can be full of shit sometimes (like giving an AO for sex, but not grotesque and excessive violence), but they’re there for a reason.
Sure, sex in games used to be extremely odd from an arousal standpoint back when human characters were just globs of pixels. But now, 16 years into the 21st century, 3D models can be made to be alarmingly realistic with software available for free. The gap from flesh and blood to pixels and polygons will only close more and more as years pass to the point where photorealism is accomplished with ease. That’s how technology progresses. Now, with virtual reality on the horizon, sex in video games will feel more tangible than ever.
You’re not helping the video game industry grow in a natural manner by lobotomizing it and keeping it stuck in a perpetual state of political correctness. Just let it do its own thing and it’ll evolve on its own – in all directions. It’ll reach a point where the industry will be so huge, you’ll nave no incentive to go back to any company or series you’ve abandoned; assuming it’s not at that point already.
Recently, the UN tried to crack down on Japan for having media – live action and otherwise – that contains sexual violence against women. Japan responded logically by saying “stop trying to give real life human rights to fictional people” (paraphrasing, of course). This notion was supported by many Japanese women, including yaoi manga artists and novelists, college professors, and lawyers. They even went the extra mile to say that male characters are often victims to sexual violence too, and should therefore not be considered a problem exclusive to women. Fiction does not violate any human rights. If anything, fiction is definitively removed from human rights entirely. Trying to censor or remove fiction does not help real, living, breathing people who have suffered any sort of abuse or objectification. I’m glad one first-world country has some sense regarding this topic.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading my rant. I hope it was understandable, and I hope you see where I’m coming from. I’m not trying to purposely step on toes. I’m just venting my thoughts on things that I feel shouldn’t need such a passionate response to begin with, but here we are.
For full disclosure, my beliefs on sex in media also extends to cartoons. Not just hentai, but western stuff as well. Don’t even try to bullshit me and insist cartoon porn was a recent thing too. Betty Boop was considered a sex symbol in the fucking 1930s.
AdvertisementsWith the introduction of the Lumia 630 and 635 models, we have our first look at the next generation of low cost Windows Phone devices, and the Lumia 630 is a phone with many firsts for this segment. It’s the first phone launched with Windows Phone 8.1 from any manufacturer. It’s also the first phone released after the acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft, though the phone was announced at BUILD prior to the final paperwork was completed on the acquisition. This is the first Windows Phone ever with an optional Dual SIM model. This is also the first Windows Phone which incorporates a SensorCore branded pedometer. It’s the first Windows Phone which replaces the hardware back, home, and search keys with on-screen equivalents, and unfortunately it’s the first Windows Phone which is lacking a hardware camera button, ambient light sensor, and proximity sensor. This is definitely a device of firsts for Windows Phone, but not all of the firsts are good news.
and to say that this one device changed the Windows Phone landscape forever would be an understatement. Microsoft was trying very hard to try and capture some of the high end smartphone segment, but with a smaller app store and generally lower specifications than competing devices running Android or iOS, it was a tough sell. Suddenly Nokia released a device which was a capable smartphone and could be had for a low price – often less than $100 off contract. At the time, competing Android phones in that segment would often be running very old versions of Android, have very low specifications, or both, and of course Apple doesn’t play in this segment. Within a single year, the Lumia 520
Clearly the high volume for Windows Phone was the low cost, off contract devices. Though Nokia (now Microsoft) still continues to make and sell higher end devices such as the Lumia Icon (930) and 1520 phablet, the low end of the market is where the volume is, and many of the changes to Windows Phone over the last year have been to help drive down costs of the devices by removing the requirements for certain sensors, hardware buttons, and creating a reference platform with Qualcomm to allow ODMs to easily create Windows Phone devices. We are seeing the same thing happening with Android as well, with the low cost segment practically ignored by all OEMs until Motorola launched the Moto G which is a capable smartphone for a budget price, and now with the Moto E they are aiming even lower. The Lumia 520 is still a capable competitor at a low price, but the landscape has changed in the past year, and good enough is no longer enough.
By name, the Lumia 630 is the successor to the Lumia 620. But truly it is a successor to the Lumia 520, as the Lumia 620 still outdoes both the 520 and 630 in features.
Low End Lumias Nokia Lumia 520 Nokia Lumia 620 Nokia Lumia 625 Nokia Lumia 630 Display Size 4.0" 3.8" 4.7" 4.5" CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus
MSM8227 Krait Dual-Core 1.0 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus
MSM8227 Krait Dual-Core 1.0 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus
MSM8930 Krait Dual-Core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400
MSM8226 Cortex A7 Quad-Core 1.2 GHz RAM/NAND 512 MB / 8 GB + MicroSD 512 MB / 8 GB + MicroSD 512 MB / 8 GB + MicroSD 512 MB / 8 GB + MicroSD Cellular Connectivity HSPA+ 21.1 Mbps HSPA+ 21.1 Mbps LTE Cat 3 100 Mbps HSPA+ 21.1 Mbps Corning Gorilla Glass No No Yes (GG2) Yes (GG3) Clear Black No Yes No Yes Glance Screen No Yes No No Front Facing Camera No Yes Yes No Rear LED Flash No Yes Yes No Near Field Communication No Yes No No Sensors Ambient Light Sensor
Accelerometer
Proximity Sensor Ambient Light Sensor
Accelerometer
Proximity Sensor Ambient Light Sensor
Accelerometer
Magnetometer
Proximity Sensor Accelerometer
Sensor Core
The 630 loses a lot of features over the Lumia 620 in an effort to hit an even lower price point than the 620 did. It keeps the ClearBlack display (more on that later) but loses practically everything else. The Front Facing Camera is gone, the rear LED flash is no more. Near Field Communication (NFC) was in the 620, but is no longer in the 630. In fact, as seen in the above chart, the 630 even loses out over the 520 with the lack of proximity sensor, and more importantly the ambient light sensor. All of this was an effort to keep the Bill of Materials down to allow the device to be sold for a lower price, and on that front they did do well with the Lumia 630 having an off-contract price of around $160, compared to the Lumia 620 which was about $240 when it launched.
The biggest omission in my opinion though is the lack of Glance Screen support. For those that haven’t used a Lumia with Glance, it arrived last year with the “Amber” firmware update, and first debuted on the Lumia 925. It’s been updated several times, and the most current version of Glance is simply fantastic. With Windows Phone market share not being very high, it’s probably a good idea to go over Glance. The Glance screen is simply the phone displaying some information on the display when the device is powered off.
Lumia 620 Glance (left) vs Lumia 1020 OLED Glance (center) vs Lumia 630 no Glance (right)
With all versions of Glance, the clock and several phone settings such as vibrate or charging would be displayed on the screen. With updates to the firmware, other features soon came such as the ability to display lock screen notifications on the glance screen as well, so you can tell if you’ve missed calls, texts, or other notifications with the device off. With the last update to glance, the detailed lock screen notification for Windows Phone (in my case, my next appointment in the calendar) will briefly appear on the Glance screen when you either turn off the phone, or if the phone senses your hand over the phone. The detailed info goes away at the first Glance refresh to keep the power consumption down. You can optionally enable Glance periodically at an interval, or with a peek mode where it will only enable Glance when it senses your hand over the display.
Glance works by utilizing panel self-refresh to be able to display some items with the display off. This feature is better with AMOLED displays, because they can display a small amount of white text with minimal power draw, but even so Nokia has made the Glance screen optional on LCD equipped devices as well, including the Lumia 620. As for why it’s missing, as with everything it comes down to cost. The Lumia Icon (930) is also missing Glance because Nokia couldn’t source a panel with memory for a reasonable price, but the 630 has the added caveat of not including either ambient light or proximity sensors to disable Glance when the phone is in your pocket. We're not sure if the 630 display includes memory or not but it could certainly be a contributing factor to it being unavailable on this model.The Turkish lira has depreciated almost 9 percent this year, recalling memories of the financial crises that the country struggled through in the 1990s and early 2000s. Following a sharp devaluation in the value of the lira then, that crisis lasted several years until the economy got back on its feet again with tight monetary measures.
The current political turmoil in Turkey and the slowing economy has again shaken confidence. Turkish businessmen told DW that if the Turkish lira continues to slide, it could jeopardize new investments and hamper growth. The economy slowed for the first time in seven years in the third quarter of last year.
Central bank intervention
The expectations of a rate hike from the US Federal Reserve and Moody's report on Turkey's banking sector say security problems in the country are increasing macroeconomic pressures, pushing the lira to an all-time low of 3.77 against the greenback on January 9.
The lira extended losses and was trading at 3.8950 against the dollar on Wednesday morning, bringing total losses this year to almost 9 percent. The lira was trading at 4.07 against the euro in early morning trading on Wednesday.
The Turkish lira has been under pressure due to rising regional tensions, political uncertainties in Turkey amid widening concern about the crackdown following the July 15 failed coup, and a strengthening US dollar after the election victory of Donald Trump. The currency has been among the biggest losers among its emerging peers this year.
The central bank intervened on Tuesday to halt the slide in the lira by cutting foreign exchange reserve requirement ratios by 50 basis points for all maturities. This step would provide additional liquidity of approximately 1.5 billion dollars to the financial system, the bank said in a statement.
The central bank also lowered bank borrowing limits to 22 billion lira for the Interbank Money Market as of January 11, 2017.
The bank said that it was closely monitoring the excessive volatility in the markets and that additional steps might be taken depending on market developments.
The slide of the Turkish lira is unsettling markets
Rate hike expectations
In November the Turkish central bank raised interest rates for the first time in nearly three years to support the lira, lifting its benchmark rate by 50 basis points. However, this hasn't changed the lira's weakness, but increased pressure to tighten monetary policy further.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has previously described himself as an "enemy" of interest rates and determined to boost growth, railed against rate hikes, putting pressure on the central bank.
Odeabank economist Sakir Turan told DW that the lira's slide hinges on a rate hike by the central bank. However, avoiding steps to shore up the currency could push inflation to double digits and hamper growth in the coming quarters, he said.
Government suspects operation
The government, meanwhile, seems convinced that the weakening of the lira is due to a currency market operation.
Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli said with regard to Moody's banking sector report that "it doesn't have a rational foundation. If it's not rational, then it's subjective; in fact, it was an attack."
Ratings agency Moody's said on January 9 that Turkish bank profits will be hit significantly this year by increased non-performing loans, and it warned of a "general worsening" in the investment climate in the country.
Cemil Ertem, an adviser to President Erdogan, told Anatolia Agency that "demand for foreign exchange is shallow, speculative and stems from abroad. There is an operation in place for the lira to lose value."
'Perception of crisis'
Turkey's private sector is worried about a weakening lira and sees it as the biggest obstacle to investment.
Hikmet Tanriverdi, President of the Istanbul Textile and Apparel Exporters Association, told DW that Turkish companies with debts in foreign currency are suffering large losses.
"Foreign exchange volatility in Turkey creates the perception of a crisis in society and the business world. Therefore, new investments are being postponed and consumption will fall. Nobody wants to do anything without clarity," said Tanriverdi, adding that the rating of companies, which fail to repay debts, are being downgraded, hampering their financing options.
Tanriverdi also said that if the lira continues to slide this could lead to a rise in prices.
Turkish consumers could soon be faced with the specter of inflation
Executive decrees create tensions
The Turkish business community also faces pressure due to increasing political uncertainties following the July 15 coup attempt. Ali Kibar, Chairman of Kibar Holding, which had seven billion dollars in revenue in 2016, and which has been carmaker Hyundai's partnering company in Turkey for more than 20 years, told DW that executive decrees may have played a role in the lira's slide since they had an impact on legislation affecting companies.
The Turkish government detained businessmen and seized assets in the post-coup crackdown after President Erdogan vowed to choke off businesses linked to U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he blames for the July 15 coup attempt. Gulen has denied any links.
"Even after the state of emergency is over, there will be uncertainty about what will happen to these seizures and to the appointed administrators of these companies. This is a problem for companies. Constitutional changes are being discussed in parliament and that's another crucial issue. We need an environment of trust immediately," Kibar said.
Turkey's parliament voted Tuesday to press on with debate about a constitutional reform package that would expand the powers of President Erdogan, which is another step towards an executive system that opponents fear could fuel authoritarianism.
Some 120,000 people have been suspended or dismissed since the coup attempt, although some of them have since been restored to their jobs. More than 41,000 have been jailed pending trial out of 100,000 who have faced investigation.Story highlights Chief of ADL says he's "shocked, saddened but... not surprised" by the attack
A teacher and 3 children are shot dead at a Jewish school in Toulouse
Security in that region is at the highest possible alert level
A French Jewish group |
, chief economist of the surveys. Consumer confidence sank dramatically in the hard-hit Northeast and Midwest and rose in the South.
Overall, consumers' assessment of current economic activity and their expectations for the future both fell.
Earlier this week, the Conference Board, a business research group, said that its consumer confidence index fell a bit this month but remained at the highest levels since before the Great Recession began in late 2007.
A big drop in gasoline prices -- which left money in consumers' pockets and contributed to their improving outlook -- has reversed in recent weeks: Gasoline prices have risen to an average $2.37 a gallon nationwide from $2.04 a gallon a month ago, according to AAA.
-- The Associated PressThe number of new jobs created in September surpassed expectations by about 33,000. Unemployment hits 6-year low
Unemployment fell below 6 percent for the first time in more than six years, dipping to 5.9 percent in September with the economy adding 248,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported on Friday.
The last time unemployment was below 6 percent was in July 2008, when it was 5.8 percent.
Story Continued Below
The number of new jobs easily surpassed expectations — analysts had predicted 215,000 jobs created last month, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Friday’s robust jobs report comes at an opportune time for the White House as it makes a final push ahead the midterm elections to highlight the economic recovery during the Obama administration. This is the last jobs report before voters go to the polls on Nov. 4.
( Also on POLITICO: President Obama refocuses on economic themes)
“The data underscore that six years after the Great Recession — thanks to the hard work of the American people and in part to the policies the President has pursued — our economy has bounced back more strongly than most others around the world,” Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement.
President Barack Obama delivered a similar message earlier in the week. After stumping for Democratic Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn in Chicago on Thursday, Obama addressed business students at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management with a speech that hit on themes like middle-class opportunities, minimum wage and equal pay.
“All told, the United States has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan and every other advanced economy combined,” Obama said. “It is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than when I took office.”
Friday’s report included healthy revisions to the previous months’ payroll figures. The number of jobs gained was revised up from 212,000 to 243,000 for July and from 142,000 to 180,000 for August, for an additional 69,000 jobs in those two months than initially reported. In other positive news, the average weekly hours worked also increased to 34.6 hours.
( POLITICO Pro: Jobs report disappoints)
While the addition of new jobs beat expectations in September, several details of Friday’s data continued to be troubling.
The labor force participation rate — an important measure of the health of the jobs market — dropped from 62.8 percent to 62.7 percent, with 97,000 people leaving the labor force. That means the drop in unemployment can in part be attributed to fewer people looking for jobs.
The number of long-term unemployed — those out of work for 27 weeks or more — was little changed, decreasing by 9,000 since August.
The average hourly earnings also did not improve, ticking down to $24.53 in September from $24.54 in August. Wages have been a persistent weak spot in the U.S. economy and a cause for pessimism among American workers, remaining stagnant even as unemployment has been on a steady decline.
The lack of growth in wages helps explain why voters are not more optimistic about the economy even as other data points paint a brighter picture.
“It is hard to see how the economy will upshift significantly without better earnings and income data,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and president of the American Action Forum.
The White House has repeatedly called on Congress to clear legislation to raise the national minimum wage — an effort that’s been met with resistance from Republicans and business groups.
Republicans have countered by chiding Democrats for not taking up bills passed by the House that the GOP argues would help businesses and, in turn, workers.
Everyday, “I hear from people in my district who say no matter how hard they work, they still struggle to make ends meet,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement on Friday. “Instead of trying to convince Americans that things are great, Washington Democrats ought to show they’re serious about helping middle-class families get ahead, not just get by.”
This latest jobs report is also the final set of monthly employment figures to be released before the Federal Reserve’s policy-setting committee meets later this month, when it is expected to announce the end of the central bank’s asset-purchase stimulus program, known as quantitative easing.
The program, now in its third round, was first implemented at the height of the 2008 financial crisis with the aim of keeping long-term interest rates low to help spark spending and investing. The Fed’s latest round of quantitative easing is down to $15 billion monthly Treasury and mortgage bond purchases. At its peak, the central bank was buying $85 billion in assets each month.
The strength of the labor market and the endurance of the recovery will drive when Fed officials decide to increase short-term interest rates, which have remained near zero since late 2008. Analysts widely believe the first rate hike could take place as early as spring 2015, and stronger-than-expected economic growth and hiring could prompt the Fed to act sooner than anticipated.
“The rebound in U.S. payrolls and further fall in the unemployment rate in September boosts the chances that the Fed will first raise rates in March of next year rather than waiting until June,” Capital Economics senior U.S. economist Paul Dales said in a research note Friday.HOMESTEAD, FLA. — Lee Wille DeJesus, 23, is in jail facing second-degree murder charges after his son died from injuries he suffered during a boxing lesson. Lee Wille DeJesus told investigators he put on boxing gloves and punched his 2-year-old son up to 15 times on his face, head, torso and shoulders. The last punch was so hard that it knocked Wiley Brown off the bed where he struck a wall before hitting his head on the tile floor. The complaint also states that even though DeJesus witnessed his son become unresponsive and having seizures, he waited 30 minutes to an hour before calling 911 only after noticing his son’s lips were turning blue. DeJeesus would initially lie about the boy’s injuries, claiming a babysitter was responsible. Under questioning he would admit to punching on the boy. He was originally charged with aggravated child abuse and neglect, but after Brown was listed as brain dead and on life support with no chance of recovery, those charges were upgraded. Prosecutors plan on filing first-degree murder charges as soon as Brown dies. DeJesus is in jail on suicide watch. He was denied bond on Wednesday.
Help The Dreamin Demon go ad free! Support us on Patreon!And now for what may be the most prosaic post in Eternal Recurrence history: examining your stapler! Yes, your stapler. A simple object you’ve used thousands of times and probably feel like you’ve mastered. Well, think again. Your stapler may possess a mysterious feature…
Here’s what the base, or anvil, of a stapler looks like prepared for normal operation:
But push up on that metal plate and it rotates:
Turn it 180 degrees and it displays an anthropomorphic smiley face:
But that’s not the point! Now the staple bends outward instead of inward, like this (top normal, bottom reversed):
Wow! My friend Caleb showed me this yesterday, though even he was unsure of why staplers do this. Wikipedia has the answer:
Pinning This method is by far the least known and utilized stapling method. It is used to temporarily bind documents or other items, often cloth or clothing, for sewing. In order to pin, the anvil must be shifted so that the staple bends outwards instead of inwards. The staple binds the item with relative security, but can be easily removed by pulling the staple along the plane of the paper. This method varies between staplers, as some anvils need to be simply pushed forward to allow pinning, while others must be rotated. Some staplers implement pinning by bending one leg of the staple inwards, while bending the other outwards. Some modern staplers do not even include support for pinning.
Since learning of this feature I’ve shown it to lots of people and only one of them was aware of it. So informal poll time, blog readers. You’re an intelligent mob and have been around your share of staplers. How many of you knew they could do this?
Bonus link: I’m sure you’re dying to go play with a stapler now, but you may not have one nearby. No worries, the internet offers a handy virtual stapler for all of your virtual stapling needs.Image credit: sxc.hu
A look at Spring-heeled Jack
Columnist: Paul Dale Roberts Posted on Wednesday, 31 December, 2014 | 9 comments Columnist:
Article Copyright© Paul Dale Roberts - reproduced with permission.
Before I was even a ghosthunter, I was doing investigations on my own. In 1994, I went to London, England and went to the sites where the infamous Spring-heeled Jack frequented. If you don't know who Spring-heeled Jack is, let me tell you. Spring-heeled Jack was first sighted by witnesses in 1837. He was described as a monster that was able to leap incredibly high. He could leap from rooftop to rooftop or cemetery fences that were 12 feet high. He was seen all around London and other small towns nearby such as Liverpool. He had clawed hands, eyes that were bright flaming red and witnesses said that blue and white flames would at times come out of his mouth. Some witnesses said he spoke perfect English and at times wore a helmet. When looking at his face, his face appeared as 'devilish'. He was truly a frightening creature to look at. His clothes were described as white oil skin and tight fitting. Some witnesses say he wore a cloak.Two attacks that Spring-heeled Jack committed left England in shock and disarray. October 1837 Mary Stevens was confronted by Spring-heeled Jack and she was kissed on the face. She was fondled by Spring-heeled Jack's clammy cold hands. Jane Alsop was also attacked by Spring-heeled Jack and he scratched her repeatedly on the neck and arms.When I went to London, I made contact with Richard Baynes. I met Richard on the Jack the Ripper East London tour. I overheard him speaking to his girlfriend about Spring-heeled Jack and it peaked my curiosity. When I went to England, I had made plans to visit Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey, Piccadilly Square, Tower of London, Thames River and other famous sites, but when I got to talking with Richard, this is what he told me from my best recollection:"Paul, Spring-heeled Jack is still with us. In May of 1987, I was looking from my balcony. It was dusk and I could make the shadow of a man leaping from one rooftop to another. I saw him leap across 3 rooftops total and then vanish. I know what I saw and I believe to this day it was Spring-heeled Jack."I asked Richard where those rooftops were and went with my ex-wife Patricia and son Jason to the locations and tried to determine how long the length of the leaps must have been. I estimated the so-called Spring-heeled Jack must have leapt 10 feet from roof to roof with possibly an 8 story drop, if he were to miss his target. Richard seemed very sincere and I can only wonder what he saw on that day? I visited Lavender Hill in London to see the area where Spring-heeled Jack was sighted and tried to take my mind back to the days of the sightings. I could only wonder how so many people saw this creature and their stories seemed so precise in their descriptions. When they described the events, they were consistent and there were no apparent contradictions. How can so many witnesses be lying? Was it some kind of mass hysteria? Perhaps what they were seeing was an interdimensional creature. I don't believe they were witnesses to something extraterrestrial, as no UFOs were seen during the sightings. It appeared that Spring-heeled Jack would appear and vanish mysteriously. It seems that Spring-heeled Jack was able to enter a portal into our reality and jump into his own reality.My last investigation into Spring-heeled Jack was my visit to Newark, New Jersey in 2005. A man I will simply call 'John' emailed me and told me that he saw Spring-heeled Jack in 2001 at his home. A man with devilish looks, an outfit that almost looked like a tuxedo was peering at John through his front yard window. As John stared back at this man, it appeared that he leapt straight up into their front yard tree. John went outside with a kitchen knife and looked into the tree where Spring-heeled Jack was standing on a top branch. Spring-heeled Jack looked down at John and John noticed his eyes were glowing red. Chills went up and down John's spine and as he continued to look, Spring-heeled Jack faded out into nothingness. John never knew about the legends of Spring-heeled Jack, but had contacted me after reading a blurb I did on a UFO story, where I briefly mentioned Spring-heeled Jack.I met John at my hotel in Newark and after he told me the story, he never witnessed this creature again. I asked him if he had any other paranormal experiences and the only thing he could recall that was somewhat paranormal is that he thought he would be in a car accident soon and even dreamed of a car accident. About one week later after his thoughts of an impending car accident, he was involved in a head on car accident that landed him in the hospital with broken ribs and a broken foot.By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 1, 2014
It is inevitable that when a complex situation erupts everybody will try to map their own specialities onto it. At the present time, where environmentalism is such a primary Western concern, it was perhaps always likely that the Syrian war would attract those determined to see this menace in every corner. It has happened before, with Darfur declared, “The First Climate War“. There were other possible causes—the Sudanese regime’s orchestration of the Janjaweed killer brigades, for example—but climate change’s impact received a great deal of attention.
Serious people speculated that climate change had ravaged Syria and was behind the drought that preceded the uprising. No matter that the reality is that those who attribute any one disaster to climate change are on ground no firmer than Councillor David Silvester in meteorological terms. But in Syria to speculate about climate change was to create a mystery where none existed.
Despite an abundance of water, between 2006 and 2010 there was a serious drought, which displaced more than 1.5 million subsistence farmers, depriving them of ninety percent of their income. The major cause was a depletion of groundwater. In the new “open” economy after Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father, the regime’s retainers were freed of restraint; they drilled more water than was sustainable to enhance their short-term gain. This happens in partially transformed economies where the monopolised corruption of the State becomes decentralised. The theft of common resources by the State has in-built incentives for sustainability based on considerations of regime longevity. But decentralisation means “state agents acting as independent monopolists”: this makes corruption “more widespread,” reduces State revenue, and promotes competition among these agents that incentivises them to “steal everything”. Combined with the end of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 2005—not only a valuable source of income from narcotics and money laundering, but from remittances, product of an aggressive form of “labor colonialism” that exported a million Syrians who would otherwise have been unemployed—this left cities swollen with dislocated and jobless young men. Enraged already, the (largely Sunni) internally displaced people were further provoked by the regime’s sectarianism: what few jobs there were—in the oil industry in Hasaka, for example—went to Alawites imported from the coast.
In January, a paper published by Francesca de Chatel, a Dutch specialist on water issues in the Arab world, vindicated this view. “[T]here is very little solid evidence” that climate change “will lead to more frequent and harsher droughts, [or] higher temperatures and lower and more unpredictable precipitation levels.” Indeed,
The only available evidence that global warming will lead to more extreme weather events relies on modeling. Data do not really sustain this hypothesis so far.
Moreover,
where there are so many other evident causes of the current conflict, it seems unproductive to focus on the possible role of climate change.
In a region where the only liberal democracy is the one State that attracts the “Apartheid” label, the leaders of this campaign of defamation and delegitimation missed the nearest analogue to South Africa’s foul ancien regime: the House of Assad in Syria. The levers of actual power are disproportionately in the hands of Alawis, who are 12% of the population at the very most and likely much less. Hafez al-Assad had brought on-board a “Sunni loyalist elite“—individual commanders in the army and the bourgeoisie of Aleppo and Damascus—to obscure the “blatant sectarianism” of the regime, but under Bashar even these Sunnis were further marginalised. Not all Alawis have benefited, of course: it is a Mafia system of “patronage, frequently based on extended family networks” that has the run of the country, and to the extent power has been shared with other communities, it was just enough to implicate them, so that when rebellion came they could not walk away from the regime.
This discriminatory order was a major component of the resentment that led to the uprising. The immediate trigger was the devastated economy, the harvest of the “open” economy that formalised the privatisation of Syria’s economy; already held by the Assad family and its retainers, they now dropped the pretence that industries and sectors were “State-owned”. The most infamous case is probably Rami Makhlouf, a maternal cousin of the dictator’s, who owns up to 60% of the whole economy.
There is some persuasive evidence that the regime’s handling of the drought had some influence in triggering the rebellion, but this only restates the problem. The “frequency of droughts had not increased over the last 20 years,” Ms. Chatel notes, and it was “not the drought per se, but rather the government’s failure to respond to the ensuing humanitarian crisis” that led to trouble. The regime had also in part causing the drought by over-drawing water:
[T]he desert naturally adapts to droughts and wet periods. … Experiments carried out over a period of ten years … in the eastern desert conclusively showed that the mismanagement and overexploitation of resources lay at the root of desertification, not drought or climate change.
To blame overpopulation or water-scarcity, as the regime does, is to actively mislead.
Over-population is a real problem—Syria’s population jumped from 3.3 million in 1950 to 22 million on the eve of the uprising—but that too was partly the regime’s doing: it banned contraceptives and handed over the cultural space to Sunni Islamists who preached the necessity of large families.
As to the water-scarcity, it is “50 years of resource mismanagement and overexploitation [that] caused the depletion of resources, which in turn led to growing disenfranchisement and discontent in Syria’s rural communities.” The 2006–10 drought “exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis” but the drought was merely “the culmination of 50 years of sustained mismanagement of water and land resources”. The regime’s “failure to adequately respond” surely made this worse, but the situation was “already disastrous”.
Ms. Chatel adds:
[O]verstating [climate change’s] importance is an unhelpful distraction that diverts attention away from the core problem: the long-term mismanagement of natural resources. Furthermore, an exaggerated focus on climate change shifts the burden of responsibility for the devastation of Syria’s natural resources away from the successive Syrian governments since the 1950s and allows the Assad regime to blame external factors for its own failures.
In short, as in Sudan, a focus on climate change exculpates the regime.
The regime’s disastrous economic mismanagement and its sectarian character—even in response to the drought—was what provoked the population. Tyranny—and the spectacle of tyranny’s downfall in Iraq, Tunisia, and Egypt—rounds out the causes of this uprising.
As Ms. Chatel so pithily concludes:
“The possible role of climate change in this chain of events is not only irrelevant; it is also an unhelpful distraction.”Chapter I. Autobiography
Once, when the Patriarch had arrived at Pao Lin Monastery, Prefect Wei of Shao Chou and other officials went there to ask him to deliver public lectures on Buddhism in the hall of Ta Fan Temple in the City of Canton.
In due course, there were assembled in the lecture hall Prefect Wei, government officials and Confucian scholars, about thirty each, and bhikkhus, bhikkhunis, Taoists and laymen to the number of about one thousand. After the Patriarch had taken his seat, the congregation in a body paid him homage and asked him to preach on the fundamental laws of Buddhism. Whereupon, His Holiness delivered the following address:
Learned Audience, our Essence of Mind (literally, self-nature) which is the seed or kernel of enlightenment (Bodhi) is pure by nature, and by making use of this mind alone we can reach Buddhahood directly. Now let me tell you something about my own life and how I came into possession of the esoteric teaching of the Dhyana (or the Zen) School.
My father, a native of Fan Yang, was dismissed from his official post and banished to be a commoner in Hsin Chou in Kwangtung. I was unlucky in that my father died when I was very young, leaving my mother poor and miserable. We moved to Canton and were then in very bad circumstances.
I was selling firewood in the market one day, when one of my customers ordered some to be brought to his shop. Upon delivery being made and payment received, I left the shop, outside of which I found a man reciting a sutra. As soon as I heard the text of this sutra my mind at once became enlightened. Thereupon I asked the man the name of the book he was reciting and was told that it was the Diamond Sutra. I further enquired whence he came and why he recited this particular sutra. He replied that he came from Tung Ch'an Monastery in the HuangMei District of Ch'i Chou; that the Abbot in charge of this temple was Hung Yen, the Fifth Patriarch; that there were about one thousand disciples under him; and that when he went there to pay homage to the Patriarch, he attended lectures on this sutra.
He further told me that His Holiness used to encourage the laity as well as the monks to recite this scripture, as by doing so they might realize their own Essence of Mind, and thereby reach Buddhahood directly.
It must be due to my good karma in past lives that I heard about this, and that I was given tentaels for the maintenance of my mother by a man who advised me to go to HuangMei to interview the Fifth Patriarch. After arrangements had been made for her, I left for Huang Mei, which took me less than thirty days to reach.
I then went to pay homage to the Patriarch, and was asked where I came from and what I expected to get from him. I replied, "I am a commoner from Hsin Chou of Kwangtung. I have travelled far to pay you respect and I ask for nothing but Buddhahood." "You are a native of Kwangtung, a barbarian? How can you expect to be a Buddha?" asked the Patriarch. I replied, "Although there are northern men and southern men, north and south make no difference to their Buddha-nature. A barbarian is different from Your Holiness physically, but there is no difference in our Buddha-nature." He was going to speak further to me, but the presence of other disciples made him stop short. He then ordered me to join the crowd to work.
"May I tell Your Holiness," said I, "that Prajna (transcendental Wisdom) often rises in my mind. When one does not go astray from one's own Essence of Mind, one may be called the 'field of merits'.
I do not know what work Your Holiness would ask me to do." "This barbarian is too bright," he remarked. "Go to the stable and speak no more." I then withdrew myself to the back yard and was told by a lay brother to split firewood and to pound rice.
More than eight months after, the Patriarch saw me one day and said, "I know your knowledge of Buddhism is very sound, but I have to refrain from speaking to you lest evil doers should do you harm. Do you understand?" "Yes, Sir, I do," I replied. "To avoid people taking notice of me, I dare not go near your hall." The Patriarch one day assembled all his disciples and said to them, "The question of incessant rebirth is a momentous one. Day after day, instead of trying to free yourselves from this bitter sea of life and death, you seem to go after tainted merits only (i.e. merits which will cause rebirth). Yet merits will be of no help if your Essence of Mind is obscured. Go and seek for Prajna (wisdom) in your own mind and then write me a stanza (gatha) about it. He who understands what the Essence of Mind is will be given the robe (the insignia of the Patriarchate) and the Dharma (the esoteric teaching of the Zen school), and I shall make him the Sixth Patriarch. Go away quickly.
Delay not in writing the stanza, as deliberation is quite unnecessary and of no use. The man who has realized the Essence of Mind can speak of it at once, as soon as he is spoken to about it; and he cannot lose sight of it, even when engaged in battle."
Having received this instruction, the disciples withdrew and said to one another, "It is of no use for us to concentrate our mind to write the stanza and submit it to His Holiness, since the Patriarchate is bound to be won by ShenHsiu, our instructor. And if we write perfunctorily, it will only be a waste of energy." Upon hearing this all of them made up their minds not to write and said, "Why should we take the trouble? Hereafter, we will simply follow our instructor, Shen Hsiu, wherever he goes, and look to him for guidance." Meanwhile, Shen Hsiu reasoned thus with himself. "Considering that I am their teacher, none of them will take part in the competition.
I wonder whether I should write a stanza and submit it to His Holiness. If I do not, how can the Patriarch know how deep or superficial my knowledge is? If my object is to get the Dharma, my motive is a pure one. If I were after the Patriarchate, then it would be bad. In that case, my mind would be that of a worldling and my action would amount to robbing the Patriarch's holy seat. But if I do not submit the stanza, I shall never have a chance of getting the Dharma. A very difficult point to decide, indeed!" In front of the Patriarch's hall there were three corridors, the walls of which were to be painted by a court artist, named Lu Chen, with pictures from the Lankavatara Sutra depicting the transfiguration of the assembly, and with scenes showing the genealogy of the five Patriarchs for the information and veneration of the public.
When Shen Hsiu had composed his stanza he made several attempts to submit it to the Patriarch, but as soon as he went near the hall his mind was so perturbed that he sweated all over. He could not screw up courage to submit it, although in the course of four days he made altogether thirteen attempts to do so.
Then he suggested to himself, "It would be better for me to write it on the wall of the corridor and let the Patriarch see it for himself. If he approves it, I shall come out to pay homage, and tell him that it is done by me; but if he disapproves it, then I shall have wasted several years in this mountain in receiving homage from others which I by no means deserve! In that case, what progress have I made in learning Buddhism?" At 12 o'clock that night he went secretly with a lamp to write the stanza on the wall of the south corridor, so that the Patriarch might know what spiritual insight he had attained.
The stanza read:
Our body is the Bodhi-tree,
And our mind a mirror bright.
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour,
And let no dust alight.
As soon as he had written it he left at once for his room; so nobody knew what he had done. In his room he again pondered: "When the Patriarch sees my stanza tomorrow and is pleased with it, I shall be ready for the Dharma; but if he says that it is badly done, it will mean that I am unfit for the Dharma, owing to the misdeeds in previous lives which thickly becloud my mind. It is difficult to know what the Patriarch will say about it!" In this vein he kept on thinking until dawn, as he could neither sleep nor sit at ease.
But the Patriarch knew already that Shen Hsiu had not entered the door of enlightenment, and that he had not known the Essence of Mind.
In the morning, he sent for Mr. Lu, the court artist, and went with him to the south corridor to have the walls there painted with pictures. By chance, he saw the stanza. "I am sorry to have troubled you to come so far," he said to the artist. "The walls need not be painted now, as the Sutra says, 'All forms or phenomena are transient and illusive.' It will be better to leave the stanza here, so that people may study it and recite it. If they put its teaching into actual practice, they will be saved from the misery of being born in these evil realms of existence. The merit gained by one who practices it will be great indeed!" He then ordered incense to be burnt, and all his disciples to pay homage to it and to recite it, so that they might realize the Essence of Mind. After they had recited it, all of them exclaimed, "Well done!" At midnight, the Patriarch sent for Shen Hsiu to come to the hall, and asked him whether the stanza was written by him or not. "It was, Sir," replied Shen Hsiu. "I dare not be so vain as to expect to get the Patriarchate, but I wish Your Holiness would kindly tell me whether my stanza shows the least grain of wisdom." "Your stanza," replied the Patriarch, "shows that you have not yet realized the Essence of Mind. So far you have reached the 'door of enlightenment', but you have not yet entered it. To seek for supreme enlightenment with such an understanding as yours can hardly be successful.
"To attain supreme enlightenment, one must be able to know spontaneously one's own nature or Essence of Mind, which is neither created nor can it be annihilated. From ksana to ksana (thought-moment to thought-moment), one should be able to realize the Essence of Mind all the time. All things will then be free from restraint (i.e., emancipated). Once the Tathata (Suchness, another name for the Essence of Mind) is known, one will be free from delusion forever; and in all circumstances one's mind will be in a state of 'Thusness'. Such a state of mind is absolute Truth. If you can see things in such a frame of mind you will have known the Essence of Mind, which is supreme enlightenment.
"You had better go back to think it over again for couple of days, and then submit me another stanza. If your stanza shows that you have entered the 'door of enlightenment', I will transmit you the robe and the Dharma." Shen Hsiu made obeisance to the Patriarch and left. For several days, he tried in vain to write another stanza. This upset his mind so much that he was as ill at ease as if he were in a nightmare, and he could find comfort neither in sitting nor in walking.
Two days after, it happened that a young boy who was passing by the room where I was pounding rice recited loudly the stanza written by Shen Hsiu.
As soon as I heard it, I knew at once that the composer of it has not yet realized the Essence of Mind. For although I had not been taught about it at that time, I already had a general idea of it.
"What stanza is this?" I asked the boy. "You barbarian," he replied, "don't you know about it? The Patriarch told his disciples that the question of incessant rebirth was a momentous one, that those who wished to inherit his robe and Dharma should write him a stanza, and that the one who had an understanding of the Essence of Mind would get them and be made the sixth Patriarch. Elder Shen Hsiu wrote this 'Formless' Stanza on the wall of the south corridor and the Patriarch told us to recite it. He also said that those who put its teaching into actual practice would attain great merit, and be saved from the misery of being born in the evil realms of existence." I told the boy that I wished to recite the stanza too, so that I might have an affinity with its teaching in future life. I also told him that although I had been pounding rice there for eight months I had never been to the hall, and that he would have to show me where the stanza was to enable me to make obeisance to it.
The boy took me there and I asked him to read it to me, as I am illiterate. A petty officer of the Chiang Chou District named Chang Tih-Yung, who happened to be there, read it out to me. When he had finished reading I told him that I also had composed a stanza and asked him to write it for me.
"Extraordinary indeed," he exclaimed, "that you also can compose a stanza!" "Don't despise a beginner," said I, "if you are a seeker of supreme enlightenment. You should know that the lowest class may have the sharpest wit, while the highest may be in want of intelligence. If you slight others, you commit a very great sin." "Dictate your stanza," said he. "I will take it down for you. But do not forget to deliver me, should you succeed in getting the Dharma!"
My stanza read:
There is no Bodhi-tree,
Nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is Void,
Where can the dust alight?
When he had written this, all disciples and others who were present were greatly surprised. Filled with admiration, they said to one another, "How wonderful! No doubt we should not judge people by appearance. How can it be that for so long we have made a Bodhisattva incarnate work for us?" Seeing that the crowd was overwhelmed with amazement, the Patriarch rubbed off the stanza with his shoe, lest jealous ones should do me injury.
He expressed the opinion, which they took for granted, that the author of this stanza had also not yet realized the Essence of Mind.
Next day the Patriarch came secretly to the room where the rice was pounded. Seeing that I was working there with a stone pestle, he said to me, "A seeker of the Path risks his life for the Dharma. Should he not do so?" Then he asked, "Is the rice ready?" "Ready long ago," I replied, "only waiting for the sieve." He knocked the mortar thrice with his stick and left.
Knowing what his message meant, in the third watch of the night I went to his room. Using the robe as a screen so that none could see us, he expounded the Diamond Sutra to me. When he came to the sentence, "One should use one's mind in such a way that it will be free from any attachment," I at once became thoroughly enlightened, and realized that all things in the universe are the Essence of Mind itself.
"Who would have thought," I said to the Patriarch, "that the Essence of Mind is intrinsically pure! Who would have thought that the Essence of Mind is intrinsically free from becoming or annihilation! Who would have thought that the Essence of Mind is intrinsically self-sufficient! Who would have thought that the Essence of Mind is intrinsically free from change! Who would have thought that all things are the manifestation of the Essence of Mind!" Knowing that I had realized the Essence of Mind, the Patriarch said, "For him who does not know his own mind there is no use learning Buddhism.
On the other hand, if he knows his own mind and sees intuitively his own nature, he is a Hero, a 'Teacher of gods and men', 'Buddha'." Thus, to the knowledge of no one, the Dharma was transmitted to me at midnight, and consequently I became the inheritor of the teaching of the 'Sudden' School as well as of the robe and the begging bowl.
"You are now the Sixth Patriarch," said he. "Take good care of yourself, and deliver as many sentient beings as possible. Spread and preserve the teaching, and don't let it come to an end. Take note of my stanza:
Sentient beings who sow the seeds of enlightenment In the field of causation will reap the fruit of Buddhahood.
Inanimate objects void of Buddha-nature Sow not and reap not.
He further said, "When the Patriarch Bodhidharma first came to China, most Chinese had no confidence in him, and so this robe was handed down as a testimony from one Patriarch to another. As to the Dharma, this is transmitted from heart to heart, and the recipient must realize it by his own efforts. From time immemorial it has been the practice for one Buddha to pass to his successor the quintessence of the Dharma, and for one Patriarch |
a nonissue for most home schoolers," he says. "They're getting a lot of it."
Jesse Orlowski seconds Kelly's sentiment.
Home schooled from the age of three, the 18-year-old San Diego native played baseball for two years in high school, started a flag football league, is a "big fan" of swing dancing, and is an active street performer.
[Get three tips to engage your teen in summer learning.]
"I had a lot of time to pursue outside interests… to really zone in on things," Orlowski says. "If I wanted to make something happen I usually could, with a little wiggle room."
Extracurricular activities were not the only opportunities Orlowski seized. The flexibility of home schooling allowed him to focus on his passions: math and science.
As a junior, Orlowski convinced a physics professor at San Diego State University to let him sit in on an upper-level electrodynamics class. He later helped that professor with research projects.
"I can go out and say, 'OK, what class do I want to take, from what professor, at what college in San Diego?' and then I just go out and try and contact them," he says. "Most people would be skeptical at first and then I'd meet with them and they'd say, 'Alright, let's give this a try.'"
Orlowski enlisted the help of admissions counselor and author Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz, who previously worked in the office of the dean of students at Stanford University, to help craft his home-schooling experience into a high school transcript.
[Ask these questions at freshman orientation.]
Home-schooled students often choose academic and social pursuits because they find them important and meaningful, and college admissions officers are drawn to that authenticity, Shaevitz says.
"They have to take account of time… that other students have structured," she says. "The possibilities of showing all the kinds of things that colleges are looking for -- curiosity, confidence, resourcefulness, ability to deal with challenges -- you name it. That's a part of being a home-schooled student."
Rather than a hindrance, home-schooling was an asset, Orlowski says, one that landed him acceptance into 10 top-tier schools, including Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Orlowski will attend MIT in the fall and plans a double major in math and physics. His advice to other home-schooled teens:
"The flexibility that home-schooling gives you, you can leverage that into getting all sorts of opportunities," he says. "Seize the day by using home-schooling as a springboard to college admissions."
Stay up to date with the U.S. News High School Notes blog.Activists in Belarus are facing increased surveillance from the government, according to a new report from Amnesty International, and telecommunications companies are facilitating it. The report, published today, sheds light on how powerful surveillance has forced many activists underground, while underscoring the importance of encryption as a way to evade censors.
The report from Amnesty International, a London-based human rights watchdog, is based in part on interviews with more than 50 activists, including LGBT rights advocates, human rights workers, independent journalists, and lawyers living in Belarus or in exile. It describes how the government's large and secretive surveillance program has been used to stifle dissent and free speech, whether by eavesdropping on email or phone conversations, tracking the locations of activists, or seizing private information to prosecute or blackmail them. As a result, many activists have begun avoiding email and phone calls altogether, making it increasingly difficult to carry out their advocacy work. Nearly all of the activists interviewed said they now protect their data with encrypted email services, chat apps, and hard drives — tools that Amnesty describes as an "essential" part of their work.
"Most people are afraid to speak openly on the phone."
"Most people are afraid to speak openly on the phone," one independent journalist told Amnesty. "It's like part of your mindset. You assume from the beginning that you live in fear, that everything is bad, that you cannot control or influence it."
Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, frequently described as "Europe's last dictator," has gradually tightened his government's control over the internet in recent years, in what rights groups say is an attempt to stifle opposition. A law passed in 2014 expanded the state's power to block websites without first requiring judicial approval, and in 2015, Belarus announced a directive that would allow the government to block online anonymization tools like virtual private networks (VPNs) and the Tor encryption service. Amnesty notes that there's no sign yet that the government has begun to block Tor, though Joshua Franco, lead author of this week's report, says that activists fear a crackdown.
In the US and Europe, much of the debate surrounding encryption has centered on terrorism and national security. Law enforcement agencies have argued that tech companies should provide them with "backdoor" access to the encrypted data of suspected criminals, but Apple and other major companies have said that doing so would jeopardize the security and privacy of their users. In a phone interview, Franco said that the plight of Belarusian activists sheds light on the benefits of encryption, which he says are too often overlooked.
"That's really strong evidence, to me, that the emphasis on terrorism and crime when we speak of encryption is really misplaced and incomplete," said Franco, a technology and human rights researcher at Amnesty. "You need to see the role this is playing for people trying to do legitimate activism in a place like Belarus, where without this encryption they'd be in real trouble."
© Max Sarychau
The engine behind Belarus' surveillance apparatus is SORM — a powerful surveillance system, first developed by the Russian KGB, that allows authorities to monitor email and phone communications in real-time. All internet and mobile providers operating in Belarus are required by law to make their systems compatible with SORM, and to retain user data for up to five years. Authorities can remotely access the data without notifying telecoms or customers, and under vaguely defined legal justification.
The three largest mobile carriers in Belarus are MTS, a Russian-Belarusian joint venture, Life:), which is 80 percent owned by the Turkish company Turkcell, and Velcom, a subsidiary of Telekom Austria Group. In response to Amnesty's inquiry, the Swedish company Teliasonera, which owns 38 percent of Turkcell, said it has expressed "the importance of freedom of expression and privacy" to Turkcell, and that its policies state "that governments should not have direct access to a company's networks and systems." Telekom Austria Group said it is obliged to follow Belarusian law, and that it had raised "challenges" to government surveillance practices, though it did not provide examples.
Other telecoms did not respond to Amnesty's inquiries, but the report says that there is no public evidence to suggest that they are taking steps to mitigate or account for surveillance in Belarus, and that they therefore "appear to be failing in their duty to exercise due diligence regarding these human rights concerns."
"an asymmetrical battle with powerful surveillance apparatuses."
"It is simply not enough for them to point to the law as justification for this," says Edin Omanovic, a research officer at Privacy International who was not involved in the Amnesty report. "As a hugely profitable industry, they have a responsibility to actively resist the use of such a surveillance model in a much more coordinated and substantial way," including transparency reports and challenges to government requests.
Experts fear that the situation for activists in Belarus and neighboring countries may only worsen. Adrian Shahbaz, research manager at the US-based rights group Freedom House, notes that the government has recently put out tenders for equipment that would enable it to trace VoIP communications and access data that has been deleted on smartphones.
"Throughout the region, authorities from Moscow to Tashkent are determined to find new ways to undermine tools such as Tor or VPNs in order to take greater control over the flow of information online," Shabaz said in an email. "Encryption technologies are often the only tools that activists possess in an asymmetrical battle with powerful surveillance apparatuses."
Encryption has provided a way for activists to circumvent mass surveillance in Belarus, but Franco says that it still hasn't allowed them to reach the audiences that their advocacy depends upon.
"Lots of activists were complaining to me and saying, ‘look, we know about security, we know about encryption, we know how to keep this sensitive information secret,'" Franco says. "‘But at the end of the day, if we keep everything secret, we're just a secret group. So how do we actually do the activism that we're trying to do?'"On Sept. 14, 1408, Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Björnsdottir were married. The ceremony took place in a church on Hvalsey Fjord in Greenland that was only five meters (about 16 feet) tall.
It must have been difficult for the bride and groom to recognize each other in the dim light of the church. The milky light of late summer could only enter the turf-roofed church through an arched window on the east side and a few openings resembling arrow slits. After the ceremony, the guests fortified themselves with seal meat.
The marriage of the Icelander and the girl from Greenland was one of the last raucous festivals in the far northern Viking colony. It all ended soon afterwards, when the last oil lamps went out in the Nordic settlements in Greenland.
The descendants of the Vikings had persevered in their North Atlantic outpost for almost 500 years, from the end of the 10th century until the mid-15th century. The Medieval Warm Period had made it possible for settlers from Norway, Iceland and Denmark to live on hundreds of scattered farms along the protected fjords, where they built dozens of churches and even had bishops.
Their disappearance remains a mystery to this day. Until now, many experts had assumed that the cooling of the climate and the resulting crop failures and famines had ushered in the end of the Scandinavian colony. But now a Danish-Canadian team of scientists believes that it can refute this theory of decline.
From Farmers to Seal Hunters
The scientists conducted isotope analyses on hundreds of human and animal bones found on the island. Their study, published in the Journal of the North Atlantic, paints the most detailed picture to date of the Nordic settlers' dietary habits.
As the research shows, hunger could hardly have driven the ancestors of the Vikings out of their settlements on the edge of the glaciers. The bone analyses prove that, when the warm period came to an end, the Greenlandic farmers and ranchers switched to a seafood-based diet with surprising rapidity. From then on, the settlers focused their efforts on hunting the seals that appeared in large numbers off the coasts of Greenland during their annual migrations.
When settlement began in the early 11th century, only between 20 and 30 percent of their diet came from the sea. But seal hunting played a growing role in the ensuing centuries. "They ate more and more seal meat, with the animals constituting up to 80 percent of their diet in the 14th century," explains team member Jan Heinemeier, a dating expert from the University of Aarhus, in Denmark.
His fellow team member Niels Lynnerup, an anthropologist and forensic scientist at the University of Copenhagen, confirms that the Vikings of Greenland had plenty to eat even as the climate grew colder. "Perhaps they were just sick and tired of living at the ends of the earth and having almost nothing but seals to eat," he says.
The bone analyses show that they rarely ate meat from their own herds of livestock. The climate had become harsher on the island starting in the mid-13th century. Summer temperatures fell, violent storms raged around the houses and the winters were bone-chillingly cold. For the cattle that had been brought to Greenland, there was less and less to eat in the pastures and meadows along the fjords.
On the smaller farms, cattle were gradually replaced with sheep and goats, which were easier to rear. The isotope analyses show that pigs, valued for their meat, were fed fish and seal remains for a while longer but had disappeared from the island by around 1300.
The farmers, who had switched their focus to seal hunting, apparently did hardly anything to avert the decline of their livestock economy. The scientists' analyses of animal bones show that the Greenlanders didn't even try to help their cattle survive the long, icy winter by feeding them something of a starvation diet of bushes, horse manure, seaweed and fish waste, a widespread practice in regions of Northern Europe with similar climatic challenges until a few decades ago.
It also appears that epidemics were not responsible for the decline of farm life on the island. The scientists did not discover more signs of disease in the Viking bones uncovered on the island than elsewhere. "We found normal skeletons, which looked just like comparable finds from Scandinavian countries," says Lynnerup.
Increasing Isolation
So, if it wasn't starvation or disease, what triggered the abandonment of the Greenland settlements in the second half of the 15th century? The scientists suspect that a combination of causes made life there unbearable for the Scandinavian immigrants. For instance, there was hardly any demand anymore for walrus tusks and seal skins, the colony's most important export items. What's more, by the mid-14th century, regular ship traffic with Norway and Iceland had ceased.
As a result, Greenland's residents were increasingly isolated from their mother countries. Although they urgently needed building lumber and iron tools, they could now only get their hands on them sporadically. "It became more and more difficult for the Greenlanders to attract merchants from Europe to the island," speculates Jette Arneborg, an archeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen. "But, without trade, they couldn't survive in the long run."
The settlers were probably also worried about the increasing loss of their Scandinavian identity. They saw themselves as farmers and ranchers rather than fishermen and hunters. Their social status depended on the land and livestock they owned, but it was precisely these things that could no longer help them produce what they needed to survive.
Although the descendants of the Vikings had adjusted to life in the north, there were limits to their assimilation. "They would have had to live more and more like the Inuit, distancing themselves from their cultural roots," says Arneborg. "This growing contradiction between identity and reality was apparently what led to their decline."
An Orderly Abandonment
In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from the late period.
"The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener pastures in areas that are more promising economically," Lynnerup says. "It's always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind."
In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland, Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and estates for returnees from Greenland.
However, the Greenlanders didn't leave their houses in a precipitous fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop, valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner, and that the residents took any valuable objects along. "If they had died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would certainly have found such precious items long ago," says Lynnerup.
The couple that was married in the church on Hvalsey Fjord also left the island shortly after their wedding. In Iceland, the couple had to provide the local bishop with written proof that they had entered into a bond for life under a sod roof according to the rules of the mother church. Their reports are the last documents describing the lives of the Nordic settlers in Greenland.iran blasts fatwa against rahman defends prophet film
New Delhi: After music composer AR Rahman was issued a fatwa for insulting Islamic values, the Iranian government has come out in support of the film ‘Muhammad: The Messenger of God'.
The government through its embassy in New Delhi has defended the film, asserting that it does not insult Islamic values. A day before this, Rahman himself also clarified that he composed music for Iranian film-maker Majid Majidi in “good faith”.
A section of scholars had also opposed the fatwa issued by Sunni Muslim group, Raza Academy, which had not only pronounced Muslims associated with the film as “infidels” but also urged other Muslims to protest against the film.
The embassy's release stated, “The film of Majid Majidi is an artistic work and any opinion about it should be expressed only after seeing it... launching hot discussions before seeing the film may be wrong, illogical and incorrect.”
It further stated, “No insult has been committed to Islamic values in the film... The system of the Islamic Republic of Iran, from the very beginning, has always been the standard bearer in the defence of Islam."
According to a newspaper report, it is learnt that neither Raza Academy's general secretary Saeed Noori nor Mufti Mahmood Akhatrul Qadri, who issued the fatwa, had seen the film.
Maulana Zaheer Abbas Rizvi, secretary, All India Shia Muslim Personal Law Board, said clerics should be cautious before issuing fatwas. He said, “It was needed that someone like Majidi made such a film. Rahman associating with this film only gives credence to the belief that it is not blasphemous and avoids raising contentious issues.”People are silhouetted as they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with binary code and a Central Inteligence Agency (CIA) emblem, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica October 29, 2014. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A panel investigating the CIA’s search of a computer network used by U.S. Senate staff will not recommend disciplining the agency officials involved in the incident, according to the New York Times.
The review panel is looking into the search by agency officials of staffers from the Senate Intelligence Committee who were investigating the CIA’s use of torture in interrogations of detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
The Times, citing current and former government officials, said the panel was likely to fault the Central Intelligence Agency for missteps.
But the newspaper said the decision not to recommend anyone for disciplinary action was likely to anger members of the Intelligence Committee, who have accused the agency of interfering with its investigation of agency wrongdoing.
CIA officials searched the Senate computers in late 2013 as the committee finalized its report on the agency’s handling of detainees. Staffers concluded in a report released Dec. 9 that the agency misled the White House and the public about its tactics and acted more brutally and pervasively than previously acknowledged.
Five CIA officials involved in the computer search have already been cited by the agency’s inspector general for the improper searches, but have defended their actions as lawful and at times ordered by CIA director John Brennan, the Times said.
The CIA review panel was appointed by Brennan and consists of three CIA officers and two people from outside the agency — former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and President Barack Obama’s former White House lawyer Robert Bauer, according to the paper.
Brennan has apologized for the CIA’s monitoring of the committee after earlier defending the agency actions. Federal prosecutors have also declined to pursue a criminal investigation over the dispute.
While the panel’s recommendations were still being finalized, officials told the newspaper that the five officers involved had been told they will not be recommended for punishment.First Order infantry begin with an assault in Memorial Hill, a tactical staging ground overlooking the castle defenses. Turbolaser emplacements deep in the Resistance lines make the skies around the fortress too dangerous for First Order Atmospheric Assault Landers to deposit troops near the walls, so the stormtroopers make their way through the woods toward the high ground and move into position to destroy the Resistance guns. A furious melee erupts around the high ground.
Assuming the First Order take the hill, they next set their sights on the turbolaser emplacements blowing their landing craft from the sky. As the firefight unfolds around the AA guns and players accumulate Battle Points, Flametroopers and iconic heroes begin to emerge on the battlefield. There's plenty of space in the open skies above Maz's castle, and dogfighting action rages overhead as TIE/fo and TIE/sf fighters take in Resistance T-70 X-wings.
The First Order continues its advance. With their turbolasers knocked out, AAL's land and drop more stormtroopers, and the Resistance digs in for the desperate final act, a last-ditch defense of the castle itself. Battle spreads into the legendary cantina area, playground for some of the galaxy's most colorful characters. Lightsabers flash, jetpacks thunder, and Wookiee Warriors roar as the verdict of battle is rendered.
Takodana is just one of eleven maps coming to Star Wars Battlefront II's Galactic Assault mode. Star Wars Battlefront II is coming November 17.
Want more Star Wars Battlefront II? Visit the game’s website!
Stay in the conversation of all things EA: Read our blog, follow us on Twitter and Like us on FacebookSAN JOSE, Calif. – San Jose Earthquakes Academy goalkeeper and Alamo native JT Marcinkowski has been called to United States U-18 National Team duty ahead of friendlies against Mexico and Canada.
Marcinkowski will join the USA in camp from April 4-13 at the U.S. Soccer National Training Center in Carson, Calif. The Americans host Canada on Tuesday, April 8 and Mexico on Saturday, April 12.
The camp roster features a largely domestic crew, including seven players who represented the United States at the Copa del Atlantico hosted by the Canary Islands in February. Marcinkowski started for the USA in 1-0 losses against Spain and Argentina during the Copa del Atlantico.
The squad’s only foreign-based player, Kyle Scott (Chelsea), returns to the U-18s for the first time since helping the team claim second place at the Limoges tournament in France last October.
After the April camp, the U-18s will next convene at the end of May for the Lisbon International Tournament in Lisbon, Portugal.
Roster by Position:
Goalkeepers (3): Christian Herrera (Real Salt Lake AZ; Las Cruces, N.M.), Jonathan Klinsmann (Irvine Strikers; Newport Beach, Calif.), JT Marcinkowski (San Jose Earthquakes; Alamo, Calif.)
Defenders (8): David Chavez (De Anza Force; Redwood City, Calif.), Justen Glad (Real Salt Lake AZ; Tucson, Ariz.), Malcolm Jones (LA Galaxy; Chino Hills, Calif.), Quentin Pearson (Colorado Rapids; Longmont, Colo.), Pablo Pelaez (San Diego Surf; San Diego, Calif.), Mauricio Pineda (Chicago Fire; Bolingbrook, Ill.), Alex Ramos (LA Galaxy; Reseda, Calif.), Tommy Redding (Orlando City SC; Oviedo, Fla.)
Midfielders (9): Mukwelle Akale (Minnesota Thunder; Minneapolis, Minn.), Kyle Scott (Chelsea; Bristol, England), Collin Fernandez (Chicago Fire; Downers Grove, Ill.), Patrick Jean-Giles (D.C. United; Lorton, Va.), Cameron Lindley (Chicago Fire; Carmel, Ind.), Stephen Payne (Chicago Magic PSG; Birmingham, Ala.), Sebastian Saucedo (Real Salt Lake AZ; Casa Grande, Ariz.), Ben Swanson (Crew Soccer Academy; Grove City, Ohio), Jackson Yueill (Minnesota Thunder; Bloomington, Minn.)
Forwards (4): Coy Craft (FC Dallas; Frisco, Texas), Sebastian Elney (Boca United; Boca Raton, Fla.), Christian Lucatero (Houston Dynamo; Pasadena, Texas), Jorge Ruiz (LA Galaxy; Mission Hills, Calif.)From The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune - The Birth of Flight, Reborn
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 12, 2000; Page A01 Spruce and ash have been found for the aircraft's ribs, though some Pacific coast wood will replace the West Virginia original the Wright brothers hauled to Kitty Hawk. The aluminum engine block has been cast: The Wrights were experimenting with lightweight engines way back then. No problem there. It is the muslin that will be hard to find--the tightly woven ladies underwear cloth called "Pride of the West" that the turn-of-the-century tinkerers decided would cover the wings of their flying machine. This morning, a retired Virginia airline pilot, backed by a national aviation organization, is scheduled to announce the kickoff of a quest to construct, and for the first time fly, an exact reproduction of the famed aircraft Wilbur and Orville Wright launched at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. The announcement is set for 10 a.m. at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum. There, Ken Hyde, 61, of Warrenton, who is heading the effort, will detail what is billed as the centerpiece of the Wright brothers centennial in 2003. The plan is to reproduce the Wrights' "machine" right down to the muslin, test it in an old Air Force wind tunnel and fly it at Kitty Hawk at 10:35 a.m. Dec. 17, 2003, exactly as the brothers did a century earlier. The project has the blessing of the National Park Service, which has given permission for the reenactment at its Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, and the good wishes of the Smithsonian, which has the original Wright 1903 Flyer on display. It is being funded by the Experimental Aircraft Association, of Oshkosh, Wis., a 170,000-member organization founded in 1953 by private builders of homemade airplanes. It will cost more than $1 million, association President Tom Poberezny said yesterday, but "the Wright brothers deserve it." Plus, he said, theirs was the first home-built airplane. Much of the load, though, will be on Hyde, whose family's aviation roots go back to the barnstorming days of rural Virginia and who, over the past three decades, has built a sophisticated aircraft restoration complex on a 25-acre spread outside Warrenton. And it will be Hyde, an American Airlines captain for 33 years and Boeing 727 pilot, who, if all goes as planned, must learn to fly the Wrights' bizarre design--in which the pilot is prone--without breaking his neck. Though brilliant, the 605-pound plane was a contraption. Its two chain-driven propellers were in the back. The elevator, which modern planes have in the tail, was up front. And it was controlled, in part, by a padded "cradle" the pilot moved with his hips. It was extremely unstable. Hyde also found that the Flyer's construction was a bit of a mystery. "We know what the Wrights did," Hyde said. "We just don't know how they did it." The process was shrouded in some secrecy, entangled in years of litigation and further clouded by Wilbur's sudden death from typhoid in 1912. To solve it, Hyde has been engaged in a mind-bending piece of reverse engineering, a journey back down the path of invention, working his way into the heads of the two men in coats and ties who left their footprints in the North Carolina sand dunes a century before. He found clues among letters, telegrams and personal papers scattered across a half-century. He discovered, among other things, that unsigned copies of letters ending "very truly yours" were probably by Orville; that smudged and corrected correspondence often came from the Wrights' loyal secretary, Mabel Beck; and that the Flyer's engine ran on a forgotten kind of gasoline called "65 test." He found two keen minds in men who were not just the "lucky bicycle mechanics" of history. "They were bicycle mechanics for sure," Hyde said during an interview last week in his workshop. "But they were aeronautical engineers. They were scientists, craftsmen and also test pilots. These guys really set in motion the basis for the way we build airplanes today." And they were as obsessed with their project as Hyde is with his. "For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man," Wilbur wrote in 1900. "My disease has increased in severity... [so that] I feel that it will soon cost me an increasing amount of money, if not my life." In the fall of 1903, at the peak of their aeronautical research, Wilbur Wright, 36, and his brother, Orville, 32, the sons of a United Brethren Church bishop, traveled to a remote and wind-scoured stretch of North Carolina's Outer Banks. Inveterate mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, they had made toys, a newspaper press and bicycles before becoming fascinated with the possibility of human flight about seven years before. They had pored over previous studies on the subject, found much of it erroneous and begun conducting their own experiments. Using wood, wire and lightweight muslin, they built a series of increasingly complex gliders, which they began testing near the Outer Banks village of Kitty Hawk. They were an odd pair, these unmarried brothers in starched collars and suits, watched by fishermen as they fiddled with oil cans and machinery on one of the most isolated stretches of land in the country. Now a sprawling resort area, Kitty Hawk, in photos of that time, looked more like the windblown surface of Mars than Earth. The brothers traveled there in September, weathered what probably was a hurricane and freezing cold in November, and by December were finally ready. They had fitted their craft with a specially designed four-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine that ran flat out all the time and had a tin gas tank with less than a gallon of fuel. It was a glider no longer. On Dec. 14, they flipped a coin. Wilbur would go first. He quickly got airborne, but only for about three seconds, and came crashing down. It was no good. Three days later, it was Orville's turn. At 10:35 a.m. Orville, wearing a suit, tie and cap, lay face down in the hip cradle and, as a preset camera clicked a picture, took off on the world's first successful airplane flight. It covered 120 feet and lasted 12 seconds. Though the pair would make three more flights that day--the last 852 feet and 59 seconds--it was Orville's that made history. On the wall in an office of Ken Hyde's business, an oil-stained pair of aviation goggles hangs over a picture of a young man in leather flying togs standing before a biplane. They are the goggles and likeness of Hyde's late father, John, and it is because of him, Hyde said, that "I grew up with an airplane in the garage." "Captain Johnny" Hyde, as he was known, was, like the Wrights, a lover of things mechanical. A longtime railroad station manager around Nokesville, he tinkered with radios and, fascinated by aviation, learned to fly as a young man in the era of the barnstormers. He passed down the fascination to his son, who learned to fly as a teenager, became a tinkerer himself and went on to a rich career as an airline pilot. Last week, Ken Hyde's eyes filled when he spoke of the wonder of his life in aviation--which he traces back through his father to Kitty Hawk--and his desire to give something in return. As he stood in blue jeans and a denim shirt, amid the clatter of his workshop and the clutter of wood and fabric, sprockets and flywheels, he explained what he did. In 1992, with his aircraft restoration business thriving, he hit upon the idea of reproducing for posterity several of the Wrights' early models, including the famed '03 Flyer. The Wrights were famous, he reasoned. This ought to be easy. Indeed, over time he would reproduce Wright gliders from 1900 and 1901 and two display versions of the brothers' 1911 Model B, en route to the Kitty Hawk aircraft. But it wasn't easy. "I thought it would be a piece of cake, you know--just go down and get some drawings and build this just like you would any other airplane," he said. Instead, "it became quite a chore... more of an archaeological dig," than anything. The Wrights "always intended to tell the story," Hyde said, but then Wilbur died. "And he was the writer of the two." So Hyde set about gathering reams of Wright data--now packed in fat black binders that jam the shelves of an upstairs office--from libraries and museums across the country. Superb data came from a major Smithsonian restoration project on the original Flyer in the mid-1980s, he said. But the plane had been through a lot. It had been severely damaged at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and again, by a flood in Dayton, in 1913. It had been refurbished by Orville in 1928, put on display in England for three decades, and had survived the World War II blitz in an underground shelter 100 miles from London. It was given to the Smithsonian in 1948, the year Orville died, and to the Air and Space Museum in 1976. There, this morning, it will hang above the ceremonies designed to honor the dapper mechanics who made it a revolution that is still under way.Very Serious Tom Friedman:
If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day.
Yes, Mr. Friedman. Good idea! Let's give the next president, you know, four days to hastily assemble his entire cabinet and staff in time to govern the world through the worst financial crisis since whenever... starting Thursday. Smart -- then again, it would certainly help the establishment press to build their "failed Obama presidency" narrative.
Or how about this: Why don't the very serious commentariat demand that our current president do his damn job for a change rather than running out the clock. Naturally, this won't happen because the current narrative is all about Clinton drama. And notice the end of the article -- Friedman closes with a quote about a potential Obama mistake. Very serious!
By the way, notice that Friedman is also channeling our favorite financial diva Suze Orman. Nag people about their spending!
I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish..."
Eight month emergency fund, young people! Eat tuna! No mention whatsoever that the Iraq invasion and occupation, which Friedman vocally supported and endorsed, is helping to bankrupt America. We're still spending $10 billion a month over there, but eat tuna sandwiches, you lazy stupid young people!
Friedman, Drudge, Halperin and the like are writers who everyone in Washington reads. Now that's a good reason to panic.Disney Consumer Products has unveiled a lineup of product partners for the new Marvel Netflix series, "Daredevil."
As an edgy new addition to the Marvel Universe, the new "Daredevil" merchandise program focuses on adults with a stylized interpretation of the property.
"Daredevil" debuted on Netflix in April and a second season has already been ordered for 2016. Product will begin arriving on shelves soon and carry through to next year.
The products will incorporate key art including the "Marvel’s Daredevil" logo, Daredevil’s new red suit and the Nelson & Murdock Law Firm logo, along with classic comic book artwork.
To jumpstart the new program, DCP has collaborated with key licensees who will translate the gritty tone of the series into lines ready for retail. Mad Engine, C-Life, and Mighty Fine will introduce new apparel; Bioworld will debut hats and accessories; while Funko will roll out a line of collectibles; and CafePress will launch 116 different designs across a wide variety of different products. Other partners on board include Rubie’s Costumes, Silver Buffalo (travel mugs and wall art), and Trends International (posters).
Products will be sold in most major retailers, with a focus on specialty players such as Hot Topic, F.Y.E., Spencer’s and comic book stores.
“The overwhelmingly positive reaction from fans and critics alike has led to a huge demand for 'Daredevil' merchandising,” says Paul Gitter, senior vice president, licensing, Marvel, DCP. “While momentum for the series continues to build, we are working quickly to expand our robust licensing program that stays true to the tone of the series and allows fans cool ways to express their passion for 'Daredevil.'”: Metacritic has responded to the study, claiming that the information is "wildly, wholly inaccurate." The full statement can be found on Facebook.]The website Metacritic weights the scores of different video game critics and publications when calculating its aggregate'metascore' for any particular title.Each critic/ publication is assigned one of six different weightings of 'importance', with some publications exerting considerably more influence over a game's final'metascore' than others.This was revealed by Adams Greenwood-Ericksen of Full Sail University at a talk titled 'A Scientific Assessment of the Validity and Value of Metacritic' delivered at the Game Developer's Conference in San Fransisco this afternoon.Metacritic confirmed to Greenwood-Ericksen during the course of his research that the site applies different weightings to incoming critics and publications' reviews in order to calculate its 'averaged' numerical score for any particular title.However, it would not reveal how the weightings were assigned to different publications or on what criteria one critic was given a greater weighing than another.The course director and his students then set about modelling the weightings based on data pulled from the site. Finally, after six months of work, the researchers compared their modeled scores to the actual scores and discovered that across the 188 publications that feed into Metacritic's video game score work, their findings were almost entirely accurate.Greenwood-Ericksen stated they wanted to carry out the research as Metacritic scores are "very important to a lot of people" and pointed out that, when publishers withhold financial bonuses when a game doesn't reach its Metacritic target, livelihoods are tied up in the site's work.He also reminded attendees that often a publisher's Wall Street stock can change on the basis of a Metacritic score., and as |
the District of Columbia (MPDC). Federal law enforcement agencies also sometimes request assistance from various other state and local law-enforcement agencies throughout the United States.
Presidential medals [ edit ]
A presidential medal from the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905
Beginning with George Washington, there has been a traditional association with Inauguration festivities and the production of a presidential medal. With the District of Columbia attracting thousands of attendees for inauguration, presidential medals were an inexpensive souvenir for the tourists to remember the occasion. However, the once-simple trinket turned into an official presidential election memento. In 1901, the first Inauguration Committee[52] on Medals and Badges was established as part of the official Inauguration Committee for the re-election of President McKinley. The Committee saw official medals as a way to raise funding for the festivities. Gold medals were to be produced as gifts for the president, vice president, and committee chair; silver medals were to be created and distributed among Inauguration Committee members, and bronze medals would be for sale for public consumption. McKinley's medal was simple with his portrait on one side and writing on the other side.[53]
Unlike his predecessor, when Theodore Roosevelt took his oath of office in 1905, he found the previous presidential medal unacceptable. As an art lover and admirer of the ancient Greek high-relief coins, Roosevelt wanted more than a simple medal—he wanted a work of art. To achieve this goal, the president hired Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a famous American sculptor, to design and create his inauguration medal. Saint-Gaudens's obsession with perfection resulted in a forestalled release and the medals were distributed after the actual inauguration. Nonetheless, President Roosevelt was very pleased with the result. Saint Gardens' design, executed by Adolph A. Weinman, was cast by Tiffany & Company and was proclaimed an artistic triumph.[54] Saint-Gaudens' practice of creating a portrait sculpture of the newly elected president is still used today in presidential medal creation. After the president sits for the sculptor, the resulting clay sketch is turned into a life mask and plaster model. Finishing touches are added and the epoxy cast that is created is used to produce the die cuts. The die cuts are then used to strike the president's portrait on each medal.[55]
From 1929 through 1949, the official medal was struck by the U.S. Mint. This changed in 1953 when the Medallic Art Company was chosen to strike Walker Hancock's portrait of President Eisenhower. The official medals have been struck by private mints ever since.[54] The Smithsonian Institution and The George Washington University hold the two most complete collections of presidential medals in the United States.
List of inauguration ceremonies [ edit ]
The 58 inauguration ceremonies marking the start of a new four-year presidential term of office and also the nine marking the start of a partial presidential term following the intra-term death or resignation of an incumbent president are listed in the table below.
Notes [ edit ]
^ Events (Inaugurations) sort alphabetically by president's last name. a b c d Term began Sunday, March 4. ^ Term began when President Harrison died on April 4. ^ Term began when President Taylor died on July 9. ^ Term began when President Garfield died on September 19. ^ Term began when President Harding died on August 2. a b c Term began Sunday, January 20.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]– A Denver County Court judge had to be subdued and removed from a courtroom last Friday and he is now on leave from his job.
Multiple sources say County Court Judge Kerry Hada was acting erratically and inappropriately in court last Friday. Sources say Chief Judge John Marcucci asked Hada to leave but he refused, prompting Marcucci to summon sheriff’s deputies. Those deputies removed Hada from the courtroom.
“We can’t comment on any situation at this time,” Marcucci told CBS4 Wednesday afternoon. “We’re just not in a position to comment.”
Hada presides over a criminal courtroom and has been a judge since 2008 when he was appointed by then-Mayor John Hickenlooper. He was an Army Ranger and is widely respected in the Asian-American community. Hada received his law degree from the University of Denver and is a frequent guest speaker at area schools.
Following the Friday courtroom meltdown, Denver police and their SWAT team responded Monday night to a Southeast Denver hotel on a call of a “welfare check.” Hotel administrators say an employee had concerns about the welfare of a hotel guest. A number of hotel guests were evacuated from their rooms and police said they took a man into custody. There are numerous indications now that the man taken into police custody was Judge Hada.
Denver courts administrator Terrie Langham did not respond to multiple calls and emails from CBS4 seeking information on the Hada situation. However his clerk said Hada is on an “extended leave,” which began last week.
A friend of Hada who asked not to be identified said Hada was dealing with a “health issue” and was seeking medical treatment.
CBS4 Investigator Brian Maass has been with the station more than 30 years uncovering waste, fraud and corruption. Follow him on Twitter @Briancbs4.A city property owner posted a sign about drug dealers on his window.
This sign appeared at 32 S. Penn St. in York shortly after a smaller version of the sign, which was painted directly onto a window, was shattered. 'He just wants the drug dealers to go,' the homeowner's mother, Madeline Snyder, said Thursday. (Daily Record/Sunday News - Angie Mason)
Madeline Snyder pulled her car over in the first block of South Penn Street in York on Thursday morning and snapped a photo of her son's home.
Boards nailed over his large front window were painted with a message:
"Deer crack dealer you kin sell crack on this block and the York police will not stop you." A smiley face is painted at the end of the sentence.
"It scares me," Snyder said.
Her son, who she said doesn't want to comment for fear of causing more problems, doesn't want to start trouble with the police.
"He just wants the drug dealers to go," she said. Police, she said, can't seem to do anything.
York City Police Capt. Wes Kahley said police became aware of the sign Tuesday evening. At that point, the homeowner had painted a similar message directly on his window.
"Through the evening, somebody put a brick through the window," Kahley said.
The city police log indicates Jeffrey Snyder reported a broken window at 32 S. Penn St. at 9:40 p.m. Tuesday. On Thursday, the windows were boarded up with the new message. No one answered the door.
Several neighbors declined to comment, saying they don't want any trouble.
York City Police Detective Andy Shaffer, who runs the city's vice unit, said police spent a lot of time in the first two blocks of South Penn Street last year.
Police executed more than 10 search warrants for illegal drugs and made at least 25 arrests in those blocks, he said. Recently, prostitution arrests were made nearby on Market Street.
Police know there is a problem, Shaffer said.
"We are still actively working it despite what the sign says," he said.
Kahley said the neighborhood will be covered by a patrol unit dedicated to the city's west end, which will start in March.
York Mayor John Brenner said if the property owner wants to talk, he'd listen.
"Putting up a sign like that, frankly, doesn't do anything to help the quality of life in the neighborhood," he said. Police will continue to do their best in the area, he said.
Kahley said there are better ways to vent frustration than to post a sign. Speak to police or go to city council, he said.
"We want the same thing," he said. "We need his cooperation and everyone else's in the area."
amason@ydr.com; 771-2048
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The York City Police log is available at www.yorkcity.org. Click on "police log lookup" on the right.The union is part of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet which has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.
A union leader who played a key role in steering Tunisia from the Arab Spring uprising to democracy says he is “overwhelmed” to be a Nobel Prize participant.
Houcine Abassi, secretary general of the Tunisian General Federation of Labour (UGTT), told the AP news agency on Friday: “It’s a prize that crowns more than two years of efforts deployed by the quartet when the country was in danger on all fronts.”
“I am happy.”
The prize was awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet, made up of the UGTT, the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts, the Tunisian Human Rights League, and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers.
Abassi described how the quartet joined together to try to “bring the country out of crisis.” The quartet steered the country through the difficult period after the overthrow of dictator Ben Ali in 2011. The legitimacy of the union – seen as an honest broker by all sides – helped prevent Islamist unrest derailing the country in 2013.
“The Arab Spring originated in Tunisia in 2010 and 2011, but it quickly spread to other countries in North African and the Middle East,” said Kaci Kullmann Five, the chairwoman of the Nobel Prize committee. “In many of these countries, the struggle for democracy and human rights has come to a standstill or suffered setbacks. Tunisia, however, has seen a democratic transition based on vibrant civil society, with demands for respect of basic human rights.”
Tunisia, the first country to overthrow its dictator in the Arab Spring, in January 2011, is the only one that now has a functioning democracy. The Arab Spring started five years ago after street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight to protest harassment, humiliation and theft by municipal officials.
It lead to the swift overthrow of Ben Ali, and quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and other countries across the region. However, many countries lacked robust democratic institutions, and the revolution became a conflict between Islamist insurgents and the authoritarian deep state: Egypt lives under a new dictatorship, Libya has collapsed, Syria has descended into civil war, and Saudi Arabia is bombing Yemen.
Tunisia’s democracy is currently in a better state than any other in the Arab world, and this is largely due to the strength and credibility of the UGTT.
With its large membership and representative local structures, the UGTT was the only institution that rivalled Ben Ali’s ruling party in its presence in Tunisians’ everyday lives. Its democratic structures and internal electoral practices allowed for greater freedom of expression inside the organisation than in society. To many Tunisians, the UGTT represents them better than any of the political parties and enjoys more legitimacy.
The UGTT was founded in 1946 as part of the Tunisian struggle for liberation from France. Founder Farhat Hached was assassinated by French agents in 1952, leading to riots across three continents. He is still considered a hero of Tunisian liberation.
Before the Arab Spring, the UGTT retained more independence than most unions in Arab countries, and maintained credibility by consistently fighting for for workers’ rights and social justice.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial LicenseObama talks to adviser Michael Froman, who was just nominated as US Trade Representative, at the 2010 G8 summit. Photo via the White House Flickr account
Last week, in an utterly unsurprising story, the president of the United States appointed a crew of rich friends with Wall Street ties to key government posts, some of them major fundraisers and donors to his campaigns. They hardly made major headline news—the payback game is an old, old DC tradition—but these nominations underscore again just how empty all of Barack Obama’s lofty promises to change the political culture were.
Obama’s populist shtick was more pronounced in the 2012 election than it was back in his first presidential campaign (even if he left the most gut-wrenching indictments of Mitt Romney’s business record to his nominally independent Super PAC, Priorities USA), so the speed with which he has reverted in the early months of the second term to shamelessly currying favor with entrenched financial interests is jarring. After opportunistically latching on to the rhetoric of anticapitalist movements worldwide, Obama’s 99 percent-loving campaign has given way to an administration that revolves around an all-too-familiar brand of capitalism—and capital-obsessed neoliberalism. Once upon a time, Obama was apparently devoted to reining in the influence of money in politics, but after a couple of elections and some time inside the machine, he doesn’t seem to care about it at all. Instead of fighting against casual corruption, he’s been complicit in it.
Last Wednesday, this took the form of the president choosing millionaire venture capitalist Tom Wheeler to helm the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler hauled in hundreds of thousands of dollars for each of Obama’s presidential campaigns, even going so far as to move his family to Iowa ahead of the 2008 caucuses, after which he told one reporter that the six weeks he spent there “are going to rank right up there as the best six weeks of my life.” They certainly appear to be paying off nicely.
Wheeler’s résumé also includes a long, successful stint as an investor and lobbyist for the industry he’s been tasked with regulating. Is there any chance he’ll crack down on his former peers? “I know a lot of people who are going to do fabulously well as lobbyists because Tom Wheeler is gonna be chairman of the FCC,” one veteran Democratic Senate aide told me.
On Thursday, the pro-business dog and pony show continued when Obama named Penny Pritzker, the Chicago businesswoman and heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune, as his next Secretary of Commerce. Pritzker has been behind Obama from way back—she helped corral Wall Street donors to join what was still a rather quixotic campaign in 2007. And though she’s generally described in the press as a Democrat, she and her husband have spread the wealth around to some Republican campaigns as well, like both of the George W. Bush presidential tickets. After all, money knows no political party.
Whether she will be confirmed to the relatively trivial economic position is unclear, but scrutiny over her family’s shady dealings and hatred of unions led to Pritzker withdrawing her name from consideration for the position in 2008. So what, exactly, has changed since then to make her acceptable? The answer is pretty straightforward: Obama’s name will never be on the ballot again, and he’s not worried about placating his left-wing allies anymore. That would also explain his reported plans to push ahead with cuts to Social Security that are vehemently opposed by his liberal base. (Though he’s totally taking back the House in 2014, right guys? That’s when the real, liberal Obama will finally come out!)
In the same press conference where he announced Pritzker’s nomination, Obama said he was appointing former Citigroup executive (and his former law-school classmate) Michael Froman as US Trade Representative. Even if Matt Taibbi’s notorious 2009 Rolling Stone story—suggesting Froman made many of the administration’s key economic hires—may have overstated his role, I’m told potential appointees were, in fact, crossing that banker’s desk. And we know the outcome: an economic policy team that used kid gloves in its dealings with big banks and other financial institutions. Meanwhile, Mary Jo White, the recently confirmed chairwoman of the SEC who promised to leave behind her days as a Wall Street apologist in the new gig, is off to an unsettling start when it comes to regulating complex financial instruments like derivatives.
Obama retains the support of most progressive interest groups, which are working furiously to help him advance immigration reform (generally favored by big business and also supported by some Republicans) and gun control. But his chief claim to liberal greatness since passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 is probably the policy “evolution” that led him to support marriage equality—and that position is also supported by most major corporations. After all, the Defense of Marriage Act causes a lot of bureaucratic problems as well as moral ones, and Wall Street donors have been instrumental in pushing gay marriage into the political mainstream. So Obama’s personal progress on that issue has been consistent with changing corporate mores as much as any concept of justice.
“In 2008 you could sort of hope [Obama] was not going to be phenomenally corrupt,” said another Democratic congressional aide. But, “He believes corporations should run the world. Obama was hired to destroy liberalism and he succeeded.”
The big argument taking place among Beltway reporters and bloggers in recent weeks has been over how much power Obama has when it comes to the gridlock besetting the government. But the genuinely challenging politics of advancing big-ticket items like immigration in the face of unprecedented partisan polarization should not obscure more troubling—and personal, rather than institutional—facts. The growth of income inequality has worsened under Obama, no one has been put in jail for destroying the economy, and cash is sloshing around elections more than ever before. While the mildly redistributive impact of health-care overhaul remains admirable, getting rid of the one part of the sequester that only affects rich businessmen by restoring funding for air-traffic controllers is not.
So while it is true that our political system is dominated by a bunch of conservative old white men from sparsely populated states and a Senate that probably shouldn’t even exist, Obama isn’t necessarily part of the solution. So far in his second term, he’s beginning to validate the left-wing caricature of himself as a technocrat tool of financial elites intent on earning a shitload of money after he leaves office.
Matt Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer whose reporting about politics has appeared in Slate, Salon, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and New York mag. You can follow him on Twitter: @matthewt_ny
More on America's 44th President:
A Red Line for Syria: Obama Is Trapped by His Own Rhetoric
Obama = Yazid
Cornel West Plans to Vote for Obama in November and Protest His Policies in FebruaryNews » Legalize 2012 Initiative in Final Drafting Stage
Laura Kriho, one of the major proponents of Legalize 2012 and a vocal opponent of the controversial Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act of 2012, says that the final draft for the Legalize 2012 Initiative will be publicly available in the near future and will be open for review before it is given to officials for acceptance and signature gathering.
Kriho and her cohorts began the Legalize 2012 before Proposition 19 had even come up for vote. At the time, they said that whether Prop 19 passed or not, it was not what they or the people of Colorado really wanted out of a legalization initiative. So they didn’t use it as a model.
According to the Legalize2012.com website, final draft legislation should be available for public review sometime this month (December 2011) and will be submitted to the Secretary of State for approval in January. Signature collection would then begin in February and if enough are gathered, turned in by August 2012.
“Fear not! For those of you who want to see cannabis taken out of the hands of the Department of Revenue armed regulatory agents and end the long compliance nightmare that is making it impossible for anyone but the very rich to participate in Colorado’s highly-regulated cannabis industry (oligopoly), the Legalize2012.com campaign is working to write a “true legalization” ballot initiative for the November 2012 ballot that will guarantee more reasonable regulations,” says the campaign’s website.
With polls showing that 49% of Colorado citizens supporting full legalization of marijuana, the group contends that the “fake legalization” legislation being proposed by NORML, MPP and others is meant to divide cannabis supporters and give power to the Department of Revenue (tax men) rather than the people. They are proposing, they say, nothing short of “re-legalization” for cannabis.
Legalize 2012 has one goal: to put a citizen’s initiative on the 2012 Colorado ballot to amend the state’s Constitution to re-legalize cannabis and hemp for all uses. They say that Colorado’s current medical marijuana laws favor regulators and policing and allow for an unprecedented fingerprinting and tracking scheme that violates privacy rights and upholds cannabis as an illicit substance rather than helping move it towards acceptance and legalization.
Legalize 2012 is funded primarily through $4.20 money bombs via their website and directly at their Boulder, Colorado headquarters.
[source Legalize 2012]
Tags: 420, Colorado, legalization, legalize 2012, mpp, NORMLNOTE: This post is discussing a legal case, it is not political.
The City of San Francisco has sued three online firearm accessory retailers including Dylan Saunders who runs 7.62 Precision. Why you ask? For having California magazine repair kits listed on their website (illegal in SF and soon to be banned the rest of California) and having a shipping option for San Francisco in the checkout.
Dylan has worked in gun industry for a long time and been a good friend to Phil, myself and TFB. We were incredibly saddened to hear about this lawsuit.
Dylan said …
We were selling California magazine repair kits when it was legal. After they changed the law we stopped. We set the item to out of stock, not available for backorder, and set it to be an item unavailable for purchase. We set the page and category to not display on the website. The item page could not be navigated to on our website and the category did not exist. As far as we knew, the page could no longer be seen by anyone. Apparently, because the item was linked to a manufacturer that was still active on the website, the defunct page could be viewed through a web search. It was non-functional, and no orders could be made, but I am being sued because they were able to find the page. I can hire a law firm that was successful in defending several companies in a previous lawsuit by the same people for the same reason, but I have no money right now. My business was temporarily shut down because of other reasons and we have not been taking orders for quite some time. We were not selling these items, but the city of San Francisco does not care, it is an abuse of the court system to persecute firearms companies. If I am unable to come up with a retainer in a few days to hire this law firm, there will be a default judgment against me for anything the city of SF asks for, and they are asking for unspecified damages and judgements, as well as what they have specified.
The case files can be accessed here (Enter the case number CGC17557010).
Dylan has set up a GoFundMe to accept donations to help him retain a law firm.
He will give product from his inventory to anyone who donates more than $25. He wrote …
The sales on the website have been shut down for quite some time but I have a large inventory of holsters and magazines, as well as some accessories. I will be giving items from my inventory of equivalent value to anyone who donates $25 or more. In other words, if someone donates $50, I want to send that person a $50 holster or some magazines, etc. I will send a product or combination of products worth up to 115% of the value of any donation, by request of the donor.
We wish Dylan the best of luck.The Dip is a minor antagonist yellow and green chemical created by Judge Doom. It is a mixture of turpentine, acetone, and benzene. These are essentially the three main ingredients in paint Thinner, which Doom uses to remove a toon's paint, thereby removing their existence. Doom kills the red toon shoe in the dip and it shows paint (toon blood).
At the bar, Doom was about to put Roger in the Dip. Benny the Cab was injured when Doom poured Dip on the street.
Wheezy poured 5000 gallons of heated dip in the dip machine. Psycho and Wheezy controlled the dip machine to kill Jessica and Roger, while Greasy drove the dip machine, Stupid reached on the top of the machine, and Smart Ass fought Eddie. Stupid, Wheezy, and Greasy laughed themselves to death, Smart Ass falls into the dip and dies, and Pycho falls on the steam roller on in the dip machine.
Doom is eventually reavealed to be a toon himself. He dies from being sprayed by the Dip, which is washed away by fire hydrant water.
Victims EditWhat color is our blood inside of our bodies? Question Date: 2013-04-26 Answer 1:
This is an interesting question and one that has been surrounded in a bit of controversy due to a myth that has been circulating (get it...circulating) for a long time. The myth is that... that blood is red when it is filled with oxygen and blue when it does not have any oxygen in it. This myth is completely false, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. I've known well educated adults to be fooled by this one and it simply is not true. The truth is this... as we all know, blood is what carries oxygen to your various parts of your body. It receives oxygen from the lungs, flows through the body and then delivers this oxygen where it is needed before making the round trip back to the heart where it is passed again to the lungs. The oxygen dissolves in your blood, binding to the red blood cells. Human blood is always red. The only difference is that when it is oxygenated, it is a bright red, and when it is depleted of oxygen, it is a darker red. The myth of blue blood may have several origins, 1) veins, which carry the blood once it is low on oxygen, look blueish green, but that's because of the tissue that makes up the veins and is not due to the blood itself. 2) there is a term "blue blooded" which, especially in previous eras, used to refer to someone who was of royal or noble class. So, if your family was rich or notable, people may have said that you had "blue blood". Despite these things, nobody's blood has ever been blue. You can double check this the next time you are at a doctor's office and need to have a blood sample taken. If you are brave enough to look at the blood being drawn, it is notable dark red, it is the blood from your veins that is low in oxygen. If you want to know more, try this on for size... the red color of our blood is red because our cells contain tiny amounts of iron (which is contained in a molecule called hemoglobin which you may have heard of). Iron turns red when it combines with oxygen, just like when a piece of metal rusts, it turns a red-ish orange. It is also the color of Mars, the "red planet" for exactly the same reason. The dirt on Mars has a lot of iron. Some animals though, use a different mechanism to transport oxygen. Instead of using iron, they use copper. Copper also likes to bind to oxygen. If you've ever seen an old historic building with the green-ish blue roofs... those are copper... well, they used to be, now they are just rusted copped. So copper turns green-ish blue when it combines with oxygen. And so animals that use copper to transport oxygen have... you guessed it... blue blood! Most notable, lobsters, spiders and snails have blue blood. But certainly not humans. I hope that answers your question, and maybe makes you curious about a whole much more. -Yours in Science, Answer 2:
Blood that is leaving the heart and going to the rest of the body has just recently been oxygenated, and is therefore red. Blood heading back to our hearts after making a trip around the rest of the body has released the oxygen (i.e. is de-oxygenated) and is a darker red. Answer 3:
Our blood inside our bodies is red, same as it is outside - the color is due to iron oxide (rust) which is attached to a protein called hemoglobin. You can tell this by holding your hand up to a light and looking through it - you will see a red glow, the color of your blood filtering all of the non-red light from the light source beyond your hand. Answer 4:
Blood is red, just like you see when you have a cut. It’s a dark red when it is not carrying a lot of oxygen. It is a brighter red when it is full of oxygen. What we see when we look at our veins depends on things like our skin color. The vein is made of connective tissue that is bluish white. Then we have layers of skin cells. Most of us have some pigment or color in our skin. Some have a little, some have a lot. All of this changes what we see. If you looked at a green soda bottle, you might not know that the soda inside was clear or yellow. It is the same with our blood. If you look at the veins of a person with pale skin, the blood looks blue. If you look at the veins of a person with dark skin, it looks very dark. But all of our blood is the same color. What does blood do for us besides carry oxygen around? It has many different jobs. See how many you can imagine. If you are interested in things like blood, you may want to study physiology.
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UCSB Terms of UseOne of China’s elite educational institutions, Tsinghua University in Beijing, is the world’s top school for both engineering and computer science, authoritative ranking survey U.S. News & World Report announced Tuesday.
While Tsinghua has previously held U.S. News’ top spot for engineering, this marks the first time the school has overtaken the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to be named the world’s best in computer science. Tsinghua was also ranked sixth in materials science and 10th in chemistry.
Other Chinese universities to be ranked highly for engineering include the Harbin Institute of Technology at No. 6 and Zhejiang University at No. 7. Zhejiang University also made the global top 10 in computer science, behind ninth-ranked Hangzhou University of Science and Technology.
U.S. News & World Report evaluated 1,250 universities in 74 countries for its 2018 rankings. The top four overall spots went to U.S. institutions Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, and the University of California–Berkeley, in that order, with the U.K.’s Oxford University rounding out the top five.
Tsinghua, meanwhile, ranked fourth in Asia behind two Singaporean universities and the University of Tokyo, and 64th overall, just ahead of Beijing rival Peking University.
“The schools that rank the highest in the Best Global Universities rankings are those that emphasize academic research, including by partnering with international scholars to produce highly cited articles,” said Robert Morse, chief data strategist for U.S. News, in the company’s press release.
For its 2018 global rankings, U.S. News said it placed greater emphasis on international collaboration, rewarding schools that partnered with their foreign peers to write and publish papers. Other variables considered for the company’s rankings methodology include research reputation, number of publications, and citation frequency.
Tsinghua University did not immediately respond to Sixth Tone’s interview request on Wednesday.
Additional reporting: Lin Qiqing; editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.
(Header image: A view of a memorial arch at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Sept. 2, 2015. Wang Zichuang/VCG)Republicans launched an internecine Twitter war on Thursday morning that, as trivial as it sounds, could signal real problems for President Trump’s policy agenda -- particularly the effort to avert a government shutdown that will begin in less than a month unless agreement on a new spending bill is reached.
It began early in the morning, when CBS broadcast an interview with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Asked about the Republicans’ failure to pass their plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act last week, Ryan expressed concern about driving Trump into compromise with the Democrats.
Related: How Trump and the GOP Are Handing Congress Back to the Democrats
“What I worry about... is that if we don't do this, then he’ll just go work with Democrats to try and change Obamacare, and that's hardly a conservative thing,” he said.
For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.
He later added, “I know he wants to get things done with the Republican Congress, but if this Republican Congress allows the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I worry we'll push the president into working with Democrats.”
Ryan’s apparent opposition to bipartisan cooperation drew a sharp rebuke from Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, a fellow Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
We have come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president NOT to work with the other party to solve a problem.
— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) March 30, 2017
Related: Looks Like Trump Won’t Be Getting Any Money to Build His Wall This Year
But that wound up being a sideshow after the tweeter-in-chief stepped into the center ring. A little past 9 a.m., Trump lashed out at both Democrats and the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right element in the House of Representatives that helped defeat the American Health Care Act last week.
The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017
Trump’s call to “fight” against part of his own party in 2018 -- an election year -- was extraordinary even for him, and one member of the Freedom Caucus quickly hit back. Michigan Congressman Justin Amash, a Freedom Caucus member tweaked Trump on Twitter, suggesting that the president has already been corrupted by the “D.C. Establishment.”
It didn't take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump. No shame, Mr. President. Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. Establishment. https://t.co/9bDo8yzH7I
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 30, 2017
Again, this all seems trivial on its face, but here’s why it could have some real consequences as the country approaches the expiration of the continuing resolution currently allowing the federal government to keep operating.
Related: Trump Takes Another Swing at Controversial Budget Cuts
To pass a spending bill Trump and Ryan are going to need the cooperation of either the Freedom Caucus or a significant number of House Democrats -- the two factions that the speaker and the president appeared to be working hard to alienate on Thursday morning.
Don’t forget, it was less than a week ago that Trump tried to blame Democrats for the failure of AHCA. Trump bemoaned the fact that when it came time to vote on the bill, which had been negotiated exclusively by the House Republicans and the administration, with no input sought or accepted from the other side of the aisle. “We had no Democratic support... They weren’t going to give us a single vote,” Trump complained.
To have Paul Ryan just days later suggesting that it would be a terrible thing for the President to work with Democrats doesn’t exactly prepare the ground for a useful dialogue with the people whose help he may need in the near future to avoid a government shutdown.
The reason he may need Democrats to pass a funding bill is that the other group President Trump antagonized on Thursday has more than enough votes to block one if they choose to do so.
Related: Tax Reform: A Must Win for Trump and the Republican Party
Legislation to fund the government creates a sort of choke point in the legislative process, because when federal agencies have to shut their doors, not much else gets done in Washington. For that reason, spending bills tend to attract controversial riders that extreme elements in the Congress such as the House Freedom Caucus want to try to muscle through. In the recent past, Republicans have tried to use them to defund the Affordable Care Act or Planned Parenthood.
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It is time again to play... Alabama Jeopardy!
So remember to phrase your responses in the form of a question. Buzz in and have at it. The first category is... Boondoggles of Epic Proportions.
Give me Boondoggles for $200, Alex.
Answer: This boondoggle will cost as much as the Keystone Pipeline by the time it is done, with a total price tag (somewhere between $5.1 and $5.4 billion) that will dwarf the sewer debt that drove Jefferson County into bankruptcy.
Question: What is Birmingham's Northern Beltline, Alex?
Uh-huh.
Boondoggles for $400, Alex.
Answer: Known as Alabama's Highway to Nowhere, this road will do almost nothing to relieve congestion in Birmingham's most traveled highways (by far the most traffic is at and around Malfunction Junction downtown), but will eat up about 56 cents out of every road-building dollar in the region.
Question: Birmingham's Northern Beltline?
Right again!
Thanks Alex. Boondoggles for $600.
Answer: Although Mobile, Huntsville and other areas have tremendous road and bridge-building needs, this project - one of the most expensive interstate jobs in the entire country - will use money that could relieve congestion and shore up dozens of roads and bridges all over the state.
Question: I feel like I'm being redundant, but what is the Northern Beltline?
Righto!
And for $800, Alex.
Answer: The first 20-mile phase of this boondoggle - linking I-59 to I-65 in far northern Jefferson County -- is expected to be finished by 2040, at a cost of more than $3 billion (or almost eight times the cost of Alaska's infamous "bridge to nowhere.") The final completion of the loop around Birmingham is not even on the drawing board because there is no funding for it.
Question: Is it the Northern Beltline?
And finally, Boondoggles for $1,000, Alex.
Answer: When I-65 is linked to I-59 in 2040, this highway will allow Atlanta drivers to reach Nashville faster, and Nashville drivers to reach Atlanta faster, but it won't help Birmingham drivers do anything faster.
Question: Can it be the Northern Beltline, Alex?
Of course it can. It is the question to so many of our answers.
One could criticize the Northern Beltline for all the reasons above and more. The costs or the environmental concerns. The fact that much of the land along the route is owned by the big business interests that have made the beltline a priority in the first place.
One could even argue that dumping $5 billion in this project is |
mileage in mechanical. In ladies- initially we were a men’s-only brand, since the 1990s we had some smaller men’s sizes that we called Ladies and now with the Formula 1 ceramic we have true watches for ladies for sure.
From the first glance we still recognise a Formula 1, but it’s a hugely feminine piece
C11: I like the ceramic finish
JCB: Oh, it’s the best ceramic in the world: it’s really the best quality that you can find in ceramics.
C11: Do you think you can use ceramic on a Men’s style?
JCB: What would you suggest?
C11: You could do like Chanel have done with the J-12, which has both a men’s and ladies version…
JCB: Yes, I think it would be interesting to try on brushed steel with black, a men’s watch as a chronograph.
C11: Yes, and ceramic is great for a bezel
JCB: Ah, the bezel is not painted. It’s entirely ceramic which is very rare, because most ladies ceramic watches on the market have painted bezels.
This one is pure ceramic; the most difficult part to do in ceramic is the bezel, so that’s why the other brands are painting it. And this is ceramic as well [ceramic bracelet inserts], it’s ultimate quality, but it’s a Formula 1 as well, so the Ladies range has a lot of potential.
So geographical, mechanical and ladies have a big upside, and obviously I would be happy if I could be the guy who could take those further steps.
“Haute horology”, which will never be our core business, but which is a great business, is also something that we can develop further. I think that the V4 is interesting – it sells! So we are again killing a sacred cow that says if you are a USD1000 brand you can not sell a USD100,000 watch: wrong. If the USD100,000 watch is consistent with your DNA, if it’s innovative enough, if the design is daring enough and the brand is trust-worthy for its quality and its reputation, then it works.
So, I will never make TAG Heuer a “haute horology” company, it’s not our area, but I see TAG Heuer as the only prestige, mainstream watch company that also has a small division making exceptional time pieces- you have the V4, maybe one day we’ll have the Pendulum, so this is fascinating, because usually it’s either/ or. TAG Heuer can be both.
Not only this, but it can also be the world leader in men’s premium eyewear, which we are after eight years. In mobile we are just starting the adventure and apparently it’s not a bad idea- the first feedback that we have is very strong. It’s all watch-making [skills] except for the radio, I mean the sapphire crystal, the cutting [of the keys], the finishing of the back is exactly like making bridges, so we are really applying to eyewear, to mobile our micro-mechanic skills that we have in making our own movements and making our own cases.
So unlike most of our competitors, TAG Heuer can also be much more than a watch brand only- and it’s also because people ask for it. Because the brand represents a lifestyle going beyond watches, which can be expressed consistently with products that are not watches, but like our watches combine artfully high technology and daring designs and which build on the legitimacy of mastering micro-mechanics.
And for those reasons, obviously I would be the happiest man on earth if I could be the leader for another 10 years.
C11: One last question: I know that there is one request that collectors would have, which is to do another Autavia- one that was more a replica of the famous 70s model.
Well, it’s very easy, because we have the Calibre, it would be the 11 again, we have the case, so its more about the dial and the bracelet.
And a lot of people are also asking me for the Monza again [The Monza re-edition from the late 90s] – the Monza is a unique piece and very legitimate.
***
And with that tantalising prospect, our time was up- or it was supposed to be, but we then discussed watches for another 10 minutes or so- just as any two watch fans would.
It’s clear that while Jean Christophe Babin arrived at TAG Heuer from outside the watch industry, he has developed a real passion for the company, its history and for its watches.
His personal favourites? Of the current line his personal preference as an enthusiast- not as a CEO- would be the Monaco 24 and the new 300 SLR- one avant-garde TAG Heuer and one model that looks back to the Heuer glory days, which is a pretty good metaphor for the progress that TAG Heuer has made under his stewardship and the renewed appreciation and respect for its heritage.Novartis now using MF59 in Fluad influenza jab, investigational swine and bird flu vaccines
(NaturalNews) Compulsory vaccination has long been a requirement to serve in the U.S. armed forces, and it is well documented that many of the vaccines administered to servicemen over the years have been experimental in nature, meaning they contained untested adjuvants and other questionable additives. But it has recently come to our attention that the highly toxic vaccine adjuvant squalene MF59, which was first given to servicemen back during the first Gulf War and later linked to causing Gulf War syndrome, is now being added to some civilian flu vaccines.At a 2010 gathering of the American Rally for Personal Rights in Chicago, registered nurse and retired Air Force Captain Richard Rovet warned his listening audience about the dangers of squalene MF59, the devastation and horrors of which he witnessed first hand during his time in the service. The experimental oil-in-water adjuvant, which was forced on all servicemen beginning in 1999 via the mandatory anthrax vaccine, caused many of Capt. Rovet's comrades to suffer severe and permanent side effects. One of Capt. Rovet's closest friends, in fact, was actually killed as a result of squalene MF59."For the past 64 years, the United States Military and other agencies within our government have used our servicemen and women as test subjects, oftentimes in secret and without informed consent," explained Capt. Rovet. "In December of 1994, the United States Senate released a report titled, 'Is military research hazardous to a veteran's health? Lessons spanning half a century'... [that] outlines the unethical use of servicemen and women as test subjects, guinea pigs."After establishing that squalene MF59 was admittedly experimental, Capt. Rovet went on to explain how the U.S. government willfully ignored all documented evidence showing that the anthrax vaccine, and squalene MF59 in particular, was directly responsible for triggering an epidemic of Gulf War syndrome that left hundreds of thousands of servicemen seriously injured or dead. Not only this, but the U.S. Department of Defense actually ordered that both the anthrax vaccine and a related botulism toxoid vaccine, both of which contained experimental squalene MF59,be annotated in soldiers' medical records -- they were instead generically identified as "Vac A" and "Vac B" in order to conceal their identity."Roughly one in four of the 697,000 veterans, my brothers and sisters who served in the first Gulf War, are afflicted with Gulf War illness... [and] study after study shows a higher rate of Gulf War illness in vaccinated veterans. That's a fact," added Capt. Rovet. "Military members can be ordered to take medicines and vaccines against their will, or be imprisoned and discharged from the armed forces with a criminal record for the rest of their lives, right up there with rape perpetrators."Just before bursting into tears while recalling the atrocities he witnessed as a result of this experimental vaccination conspiracy, Capt. Rovet urged those in attendance at the rally to be on the lookout for squalene MF59, as he believed at the time that it would soon be added to civilian vaccines. And sure enough, Switzerland-based drug giant Novartis admits that squalene MF59 is currently being used in its Fluad influenza vaccine, which is used in Italy, as well as in pandemic influenza vaccines like Aflunov that are currently in development.You can view a Novartis document admitting its use of squalene MF59 here:It is important that the public be made aware of the true history behind squalene MF59, and its pattern of causing serious injury and death. Novartis has obviously whitewashed the adjuvant's safety record, and the mainstream media has yet to address this very serious issue. But the science speaks for itself."Folks that fought alongside us in the Gulf War who did not take the anthrax vaccine have no incidence of Gulf War illness," concluded Capt. Rovet.To learn more about the experimental anthrax vaccine, be sure to check out the book,by Gary Matsumoto:You can also view Capt. Rovet's full speech here:WARSAW (Reuters) - When Apple Inc rolled out its iPhone in the United States, some fans paid big money to be among the first to get their hands on the device. In Poland, people are getting paid to line up.
“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” a spokesman said.
As part of a marketing campaign ahead of the iPhone’s Friday launch in Poland, the country’s largest mobile operator Orange is paying dozens of actors to stand in queues.
Apple sold about one million of the new iPhone models in the United States around the July launch weekend, but buyers in Poland may be reluctant to pay hefty monthly charges.
There were no queues at T-Mobile’s Era stores, which will also due to launch the iPhone on Friday.Chelsea advanced to the 4th round of the FA Cup on Sunday after a comfortable 4-1 win over lower league Peterborough United. Antonio Conte made no less than nine changes to his starting lineup, giving chances to youngsters Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Nathaniel Chalobah, Kurt Zouma, and Michy Batshuayi, as well as Ola Aina off the bench. It’s not always easy for new players to come into a much changed and cobbled-together side, but all the youngsters did really well today.
Conte says it is fantastic to have Zouma back and he praises the performances of Chalobah, Loftus-Cheek, Batshuayi and Aina. #CFC — Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) January 8, 2017
There have been plenty of questions over the futures of both Batshuayi and Loftus-Cheek, with both players increasingly linked to loan moves away from the club for the second half of the season. Conte however wants to keep both of them.
Conte says Batshuayi today showed great work-rate and fitted into the way he wants the team to play. #CFC — Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) January 8, 2017
Conte says it was important for Batshuayi's confidence that he scored and now he must continue in this way. #CFC — Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) January 8, 2017
Antonio Conte says he wants to keep Ruben Loftus-Cheek at Chelsea - full interview to come later pic.twitter.com/81iQjhYUjI — Ian Abrahams (Moose) (@BroadcastMoose) January 8, 2017
Conte has in fact been looking for ways to boost the numbers in his squad, which has led to the recall of Nathan Aké from AFC Bournemouth. Aké has done really well at the Cherries lately, not to mention the options that he provides with his versatility.
Conte says Nathan Ake has been recalled from loan because he has shown he deserves to be in the Chelsea squad. #CFC — Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) January 8, 2017
Conte says Ake could play in the back three or midfield and he will look in training to see if he could also play wing-back. #CFC — Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) January 8, 2017
The trio will no doubt play in the next round of the FA Cup later this month (opponent to be determined in Monday night’s draw), but hopefully they’ll get some chances in the Premier League as well.Border City is being designed as a bridge between nations, a novel approach to creating international unity at a time when some politicians call for building walls. Proposed by architect Fernando Romero of the firm FR-EE at the London Design Biennale, this visionary project is to be developed along a region of border covering parts of Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua.
The plan is centered around an extant border crossing and aligned with other crossings in the area as well. It may sound far-fetched, but Romero is already negotiating with private land owners in the region as well as developers and investors. He hopes to make the city a reality within a decade.
Romero believes our existing concept of borders is “primitive” and sees and urgent need to move past binary understandings of such divides. Already, many global centers of economic activity are centered not around cities but rather clusters of metropolitan areas, often along national borders.
“This is a long-term vision, a vision that is not about building walls but about thinking more ambitiously about the mutual relationship [between two countries] and about what borders really mean between countries” said the architect. It is also a reflection of current reality, where there already “exists a very strong mutual dependency of economies and trades.”
The urban plan consists of interconnected hexagonal-shaped grids, each with their own center and linked to existing transportation corridors and border crossings. If his proposal is fully realized, the city could even become a special economic zone (see also: Hong Kong and Andorra) that would enjoy semi-independent governance.
Even without that kind of designation and semi-autonomy, however, there would still be big benefits to residents and businesses in terms of easy access between countries due to optimized transit and city planning. Many “twinned” border cities along the Rio Grande have already benefited from close ties despite extant borders, despite the lack of centralized and ground-up plans to optimize connectivity.
“What you’re seeing here is the first binational city to be designed from zero between the United States and Mexico,” said Romero. “This is one of the most active borders in the world in terms of commerce and traffic of goods but also in terms of human activity and employment.”Will the hypocrisy and wasteful management of American taxpayer money ever cease in Washington? One could answer that question with a "no" if the answer was based on the actions exhibited by some agencies in Washington right before the government shutdown and those shortly thereafter.
In a brilliant maddening move by the State Department, "a five-year contract was awarded to a man named Simon Pearce for $5 million dollars to create more than 12, 000 high-end custom crystals and barware for US embassies."
As Downtrend.com reports:
take our poll - story continues below Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story?
Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? * Yes, they've gotten so much wrong recently that they're bound to be on their best behavior. No, they suffer from a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Jussie who?
Email *
Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Trending: Ex-CNN Reporter Amber Lyon Explains How They Fake The News A maddening example of the Obama Administration's complete disregard for the nation's fiscal woes has come to light thanks to a story in a local Vermont paper. As Congress and the Administration were struggling to come to an agreement on a budget and the government was on the verge of shutting down, the State Department went on a spending spree. A five-year contract was awarded to a man named Simon Pearce for $5 million dollars to create more than 12,000 high-end custom crystals and barware for US embassies. Mr. Pearce is, of course, thrilled with his luck to get such a lucrative contract just under the wire. However, the rest of the United States is struggling to see the logic behind this move.
At the end of the fiscal year, federal departments and agencies rush to finish off their allotted funds. They operate under a policy in Washington known as "use it or lose it." When a federal entity does not use part of its budget, it loses it forever. So, they waste away instead of being forced to slim down. That's what happened in the 2012 fiscal year when government contracts ballooned from $45 billion prior to the last week in September to a whopping $100 billion in the final days of the fiscal year. While it may be standard practice, this wasteful spending feels more like the band playing while the Titanic sank. The Administration's cries about fairness and responsibility do not apply when it is shoveling millions of taxpayer dollars out the door for fancy crystal.
According to the Valley News:
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Agencies, which oversees State Department funding, was instrumental in helping Simon Pearce get the contract. Leahy wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry in support of the bid by Simon Pearce, a news release says.
"It is wonderful to have such an exquisite example of Vermont craftsmanship on display and in use in our embassies around the world," Leahy said in the release. "Marcelle and I have visited many of those embassies, and knowing that Simon Pearce's products will be there is something that all Vermonters should be proud of," Leahy said.
Yes, Vermont residents can be proud of their Democratic Senator who supported wasteful spending by a federal department in Washington; taxpayer money these Vermont residents contributed to the federal waste pot along with the rest of us.
While I understand it is important to have nice stemware and china at our embassies in order to host diplomats and dignitaries from other countries, $5 million dollars for custom crystals and barware is very extravagant. It boils down to an average of $416.67 for each piece. Lenox.com sells some very beautiful and eye catching stemware for all occasions with prices ranging from $19.95 to $60.00 each piece. Their barware and barware sets are also stunning and reasonably priced per piece. Any number of the designs selected could be etched with a custom design for each embassy, bringing the cost per piece still well under the average price per piece of this $5 million fiasco.
If I recall correctly, Nancy Reagan ordered 4,320 pieces of Lenox China which amounted to enough place settings of 19 pieces for 220 people. By the time of the Reagan presidency, state dinners had grown so large, the china at the White House could not accommodate the number of guests. Mrs. Reagan was criticized for her spending of a little over $200,000 for the china; however, the china was not furnished with taxpayer money but was paid for by the J.P. Knapp Foundation.
I'm sure my simple economic solution to their extravagance would be laughed at as kings and nobles tend to view any idea or opinion by a simple peasant as unworthy of contemplation. Such is the state of our government at the present time. Refreshments and drinks must taste better when served in custom crystals and barware. I, personally, would not know since being a simple peasant from the south, we sometimes partake of the House wine of the South from the Mason jar or the jelly glass.
Imagine if the State Department had used that $5 million dollars to provide additional security at Benghazi or used that money to enact a rescue mission. Things would have certainly turned out differently. But, none of this was the case as it was more important to squeeze those pennies til they squealed so they could in turn be squandered on an extravagant expenditure at the end of the year.Vehemently denying that BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi violated the model code with his 'khooni panja' remark during an election rally on 7 November at Dongargarh Rajnandgaon in Rajasthan, the BJP today said that party will go through the Election Commission notice and will reply in detail on time.
"We have received the notice this morning. However, I underline that in our understanding there is not any violation of the Model Code of Conduct by Narendra Modi whether in his speech or statement. But we will give a detailed reply on time," BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman told reporters in New Delhi.
The Election Commission has asked Modi to reply by 16 November to its notice. The Election Commission said:
"Whereas, it has been, prima facie, observed that by making the aforesaid statements, you have violated the provisions of the Model Code of Conduct, referred to above; Now, therefore, you are hereby called upon to explain by 5 pm of 16th November, 2013 as to why action should not be taken against you for aforesaid violation of Model Code of Conduct. lf no reply is received within the prescribed time, it will be presumed that you have nothing to say and the Commission will take appropriate action without any further reference to you."
The BJP spokesperson also lashed out at the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi for allegedly poking in matters concerning the BJP.
"Rahul should focus on Congress rather than the BJP. He is trying to play the communal card. Like other Congress leaders Rahul is also playing appeasement politics," Sitharaman said.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.This #METOO isn’t going to work out the way you want.
Already corporations are working to protect themselves. Men who have spent the better part of their lives working for success are not going to grovel at your feet. Its cost vs benefit evaluation time.
Those men who are out of control blue pill habitual gropers will be sidelined or separated by corporations, even if they are successful and bring in money between groping or raping. Why? Because they could cost the corporation millions in insurance and legal payouts. That’s not good business.
This is red pilling corporations. The men who are left in successful corporations are having their livelihoods threatened. Instant red pill. I have already been in meetings where men are discussing this. No recordings made. In fact I was asked to scan for bugs and everyone had their smartphones checked, put in RFID proof bags.
Items discussed:
1) protection from false accusations. Discussions on in-office or on-body hidden camera options with legal counsel on what is allowable. Discussion of email and text retention when communicating with any female co-worker. Discussion of cost.
2) protection from interaction with female co-workers. No male workers should be in individual meetings with any female co-worker. All meetings will need to have a minimum of 3 participants. No individual one on one training of any female co-workers. Assign it to a qualified female co-worker.
3) hiring. Do nothing more than the absolute minimum requirements for diversity quota’s.
I know what you 3rd wave THOTS are thinking. Misogyny!! Nothing discussed was about not giving equal pay, not hiring QUALIFIED workers or abusing female co-workers. So f~~~ off.
Well so here we are sweet cheeks. Your #METOO campaign has forced corporations to deal with your bulls~~~. Now instead of a co-worker men have been forced to choke down red pills and realize you are a THREAT to their careers. You done stepped in the s~~~ when you threaten to take away a man’s effort and career.
There will be less chances to snag a beta provider by dating where you work. Men can’t take the chance. Oh and forget about legitimate extra training by men. Want to flirt with men at work? Well the ones you want (beta bucks) are going to be packing recording devices to protect themselves. So better reel in the flirty slut talk while at work.
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Fiction
The Death of Pythagoras
Bruce Pennington tells us how Pythagoras became a has-bean, while another Bruce Pennington drew the portraits…
Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western philosophy. For half a millennium he was a superstar. He is professed to be the founding father of mathematics, music, astronomy and philosophy; he is even alleged to have coined the words ‘mathematics’ and ‘philosophy’.
Pythagoras is found at the cusp dividing written history from the verbal record. It does not help our knowledge of him that he insisted that nothing of his teachings be written down, and that his followers be sworn to secrecy. His life and ideas are shrouded in myths, distortions, exaggerations and outright lies, and it is impossible to know which is which. Yet his intellectual reverberations have persisted for two-and-a-half millennium. Scholars have rallied behind their favorite reconstructions of the historical artifacts and fragmented writings, sometimes passionately.
Many scholars adhere to the belief that Plato usurped and then rearticulated the Pythagorean vision. For instance, in Plato’s Phaedo, just before drinking his hemlock, Socrates explores the possible destinies for the soul, which was one of Pythagoras’ main preoccupations, as we shall see. And in his Timaeus Plato explores and expands the conception of the cosmos as mathematics – the idea upon which much of Pythagoras’ fame still rests in modern times. The most famous tenet of Pythagorean thought is, ‘All is Number’.
Not everyone believes Plato a plagiarist. Another group see Plato and his contemporaries as reinventing a cultish and obscure Pythagoras into a legend, a semi-divine being out of whom all philosophical wisdom sprang. There also exist all shades of gray between these two extremes. As a result, in the centuries that follow the Golden Age of Greece, ‘Neo-Pythagorean’ and ‘Neo-Platonist’ often refer to the same intellectual schools, the name used depending upon one’s perspective.
As the centuries progress, we find medieval curricula divided into the Trivium (‘the three roads’) and the Quadrivium (‘the four roads’). The Quadrivium was based upon the Pythagorean view of the cosmos, and was the study of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy.
Later still, the Copernican Revolution echoes the ancient Pythagorean view of the earth’s relationship to the sun. In fact Nicholas Copernicus never refers to his worldview as the ‘Copernican System’; he labels it the Astronomia Pythagorica. Soon afterwards, Johannes Kepler, also a self-conscious Pythagorean, makes his discoveries motivated by the assurance that the universe is constructed in a mathematical form. This idea, embraced and enhanced by Galileo, is from then on a consistent thread throughout the history of science. Science confirms again and again that the Universe has some kind of intimate affection for Number. This is precisely what Pythagoras taught so long ago.
Unfortunately the ideal of the awe-inspiring genius Pythagoras may well be, and probably is, fiction. Pythagoras’ life, too, is composed of romantic tales, and fragments of tales, frequently told and often enhanced. Ironically the one theorem for which most people know his name – the one about the sides of a right-angled triangle – is now believed to have been discovered by the Egyptians, not by Pythagoras. Adjoined to this idea is the story, everywhere told, of his disciples, the ‘Brotherhood’, celebrating this discovery with the slaughter and feasting of an ox: sometimes exaggerated to as many as twenty oxen! But this cannot be true either when one considers Pythagoras’ lifelong devotion to vegetarianism.
The depiction of his death is no exception to the fantasising. In fact, there are as many as ten versions in the ancient literature relating how, when, and where Pythagoras died. For what it’s worth, the story that follows is based on the historical fragments. The pieces, though, are arranged by me to explore new possibilities. This is my story of the death of Pythagoras.
© Bruce Pennington 2010
Although the death of Pythagoras hinges midway between myth and history, it hung on the weightiness of a mere bean. Whether lima, pinto, or fava was never recorded, but Pythagoras died for that bean. It was a bean which contained within it a new view of the cosmos which would infiltrate the crevices of people’s beliefs, insinuating itself into the world and persisting for more than a millennium.
There were many rules to follow if you were to be accepted into the Pythagorean Brotherhood. Fail in any of these and you were likely to be cast out from them with great ceremony. A mock funeral would be performed and you would no longer exist in the minds of the Brotherhood. One rule that could never be broken was the edict to refrain from eating beans. This stemmed partially from the Pythagorean precept that each person should strive for tranquillity and peace, savoring the harmony which mirrored the harmony of the heavens, the outer boundaries of the universe. But eat a plateful of beans and see what this brings you! The gurgling and squeezings of your intestines becomes anything but tranquil. Further, one Pythagorean goal was to purify the body and psyche so that one could return to the sun and rise even beyond the sun to the stars and the Milky Way, for which purification beans were counterproductive. But there was a deeper reason for omitting beans from the diet. It was believed that to eat a bean was akin to eating human flesh.
As a young man Pythagoras was influenced by three great teachers, the first a man not much older than he, whose name was Pherekydes of Syros. The two had similar outlooks on life, and both were mystically inclined. Having traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and into India, Pherekydes learned the doctrines of reincarnation and the immortality of the soul, and brought these new-found beliefs home to the Greek isles to teach those willing to listen.
Pherekydes was quite taken with Pythagoras’ energetic inquiries and quickness of mind. Entranced, he told Pythagoras that he recognized him as the reincarnation of Aithalides, son of the playful yet mischievous god Hermes. Aithalides was considered the first human to walk the earth – a Greek Adam. As a result of such high praise and esteem from his teacher, Pythagoras accepted every facet of reincarnation, even expanding on the concept, adding that there were 216 years between each reincarnation. 216 was a number of great power within the Pythagorean Brotherhood. It equals six cubed. Six represented the number of marriage, being the product of the first even or female number, and the first odd or male number. It was also believed that human gestation takes 63 days. Furthermore, like reincarnation, six is ‘circular’, because all powers of six end in six. And what do you think the cubes of a Pythagorean 3-4-5 right-angled triangle sum to?
Hermes so loved his son that he gave him the gift of recollection or anamnesis, whereby Aithalides would remember all the details of his prior lives as he passed from one body to another. With some thought, and perhaps a little imagination, Pythagoras was able to remember all his previous lives. He recalled that prior to being the first human he was a series of plants and animals. Following his life as Aithalides, Pythagoras was reborn as the great warrior Euphorbus of Homeric fame. As recorded in Homer’s Iliad, Book 17, Euphorbus was mortally wounded in battle by Melenlaus during the Trojan War.
Two hundred and sixteen years after Euphorbus died on the battlefield, Hermotimus was born. He wanted to prove to all that he possessed the gift of Hermes, and ventured upon a quest to the city of Branchidae. There he sought out the Temple of Apollo, where Melenlaus had hidden the shield of Euphorbus after dedicating it to the god. Hermotimus eventually found the decayed shield. The only part that remained was the ivory embossing.
Next, and immediately prior to Pythagoras’ life, was the life of the simple Delian fisherman Pyrrhus. He too was reported to have remembered everything. Finally it was time for Pythagoras to spend his time among men as Pythagoras. Thus Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, which rests in the Aegean Sea along the coast of what is now Turkey. The island was considered the birthplace of the beautiful yet temperamental and vengeful goddess Hera, who was both sister and wife to Zeus. Many stories are told about her, such as her wrath towards the innocent Hercules, due to Zeus’ infidelity with Hercules’ mother.
Pythagoras’ father was Mnesarchus, a Tyrrhen who earned his living as a merchant and shipowner. His livelihood took him throughout the islands of the Mediterranean, often with young Pythagoras aboard. Originally, Pythagoras’ mother was called Parthenis, the Virgin. Reminiscent of another story, the Delphic oracle informed Mnesarchus that his wife was about to give birth to a wonderful and important child. As it turns out, while Mnesarchus was off on one of his long voyages, Parthenis was secretly seduced by Apollo. Afterwards she was renamed Pythais, in honor of Apollo, who had destroyed the python guarding the oracle at Delphi, making the place his own.
Pythagoras had proof of his Heroic birth, and revealed this proof whenever it was to his advantage: upon his left thigh was a vast golden birthmark. Birthmarks were believed by the Greeks of the time to be a sign of divinity. Gold was associated with Apollo and thus the golden birthmark was accepted as proof of Pythagoras’ relationship to this radiant god.
Not surprisingly, Pythagoras formed a lasting attachment to his flattering mentor Pherekydes. Many years later, upon hearing that Pherekydes lay dying on the island of Delos (made famous by the gods’ request to double the size of their cubic temple), Pythagoras rushed to care for him. As Pythagoras knocked at his door, Pherekydes hesitantly pushed out a fleshless finger to warn Pythagoras of the seriousness of his disease. Pherekydes was dying of phthiriasis – he was being eaten alive by lice.
© Bruce Pennington 2010
Another early teacher who enormously influenced Pythagoras’ life and ideas was Thales, one of the Seven Sages of Antiquity. Thales was an old man when Pythagoras sought him out, and his advice was for Pythagoras to follow in his footsteps and travel to Egypt to learn all he could from the priests there. Young and impetuous, Pythagoras was quick to follow this advice. He looked like a freak as he departed for Egypt with long flowing hair and beard he never cut or shaped. He wore an oriental turban, and Persian trousers made of linen – neither ordinarily seen on the island of Samos, or elsewhere in Greece. In Egypt he was quick to learn to cover his feet in papyrus for shoes. No animal skins were ever used. He spent the next 22 years there, and was a witness to the Persian conquest of Egypt. Greek visitors to Egypt, including Pythagoras, were collected into slavery by the conquering army and transported into Babylon. There Pythagoras’ adventures and occult studies were allowed to continue, probably due to his charisma and talents. He was never mutilated to prevent his fleeing, as were so many slaves, for he had little inclination to depart, and instead assimilated himself into this strange culture and continued to grow. Six years later he was able to buy his freedom. For Pythagoras, it was finally time to journey home to the island of Samos.
Due to his ever-strengthening belief in the transmigration of souls, Pythagoras was obliged to become a vegetarian, to avoid the chance of accidentally eating a friend or relative. It’s reported that one day Pythagoras encountered a man beating his dog. As the dog whimpered and yelped in fear and in pain, Pythagoras recognized the noises as the voice of a recently departed friend. He physically intervened upon the man to release the dog, thus allowing his reincarnated friend to escape a life of misery.
Pythagoras the vegetarian did not only abstain from meat, he didn’t eat beans either. This was because he believed that humans and beans were spawned from the same source, and he conducted a scientific experiment to prove it. He buried a quantity of beans in mud, let them remain there for a few weeks, and then retrieved them. He noted their resemblance to human fetuses, thus convincing himself of the intimate relationship between beans and humans. To eat a bean would therefore be akin to eating human flesh. Equally, to crush, smash, or dirty a bean would be to harm a human. Thus the very strict rule to abstain from beans.
One bright day a vigorous Pythagoras came upon an ox which was feeding upon beans in a pasture in the region of Tarentum in the south of Italy. Pythagoras informed the startled herdsmen that this must be stopped. He strode across a muddy field and began to speak to the ox in a quiet voice, murmuring into its ear for a long time. Observing all this, the herdsmen broke into fits of laughter. Yet they reported later their startled observation that Pythagoras had convinced the ox to never again desire beans. The locals and visitors to the area thereafter considered the ox to be sacred. The ox, persisting with his new beanless diet, lived to a very old age, well past the lifetime of an ordinary ox.
It took a while for Pythagoras’ career to take hold, and he only found true success when he brought his ideas and his ardent followers to the |
the car,” says Edge.
The drug was first developed to treat Alzheimer’s disease, but it failed—partly because inhibiting Notch, which regulates many genes within the body, causes side effects.
In the study, an oral dose of the drug improved hearing and increased the number of hair cells in deaf mice, but it also had significant side effects. So the team tried delivering the drug directly to the inner ear, where it should be unlikely to reach the rest of the body, says Edge. “When we treated [the mice] with the local delivery of the drug, they seemed perfectly healthy,” he says. “But before this would be able to be used in patients, we would have to make sure of that.”
A month or so after treating the mice, Edge—working with stem cell biologists Kunio Mizutari and Masato Fujioka of Tokyo’s Keio University School of Medicine in Japan—found that some of the supporting cells in the animals’ ears had turned into hair cells. The mice that received this treatment recovered about 20 percent of their hearing at low frequencies, says Edge.
The results are an important confirmation of previous indications that regeneration is possible in adult mammalian ears, says Alan Cheng, an ear, nose, and throat doctor and scientist who studies hair cell regeneration at the Stanford School of Medicine. “But it will require a lot more work to validate its utility in different models of damage—to say in any definitive way that patients can benefit from it,” he says.
To see how much the drug improved hearing, the researchers placed a small amplifier into each animal’s ear canal and, working in a soundproof room, looked for electrical activity in the brain stem in response to sounds. “The mice, before treatment, don’t respond no matter how much sound we put in,” says Edge. After the treatment, however, the team could detect electrical activity in response to loud, low-frequency sounds.
There is still a lot of work to be done before this drug, or a similar compound, could be used to treat human patients. “The recovery of hearing that we found is quite small,” says Edge. “In human terms, the mice went from profoundly deaf to being able to detect fairly loud sounds at a low pitch.” Next, the team will explore whether the drug can regenerate hair cells damaged by trauma other than noise, such as exposure to toxins.
Cheng also notes that while the mice were given the drug soon after noise exposure, most people will not seek diagnosis or treatment until long after the damage occurs. Hearing loss in humans generally isn’t diagnosed “until days or weeks have passed,” he says. “Whether the treatment is useful in a delayed fashion has to be teased out.”ILULISSAT, GREENLAND – JULY 24: The village of Ilulissat is seen near the icebergs that broke off from the Jakobshavn Glacier on July 24, 2013 in Ilulissat, Greenland. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
While examining satellite images of Greenland’s massive Jakobshavn glacier over the weekend, members of the Arctic Sea Ice Forum noticed something odd: Between August 14 and August 16, it appeared as though a huge chunk of ice — which some guessed might be the largest ever observed — broke away from the glacier’s face.
Members of the forum estimate that the total area of ice lost from the edge of the glacier (that is, the area lost when looking at the top surface of the glacier from above, using the satellite images) was around 12.5 square kilometers, or nearly five square miles, according to a post on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog, which is operated by ice enthusiast Neven Curlin. If correct, this would be one of the largest such chunks of ice ever to split from the glacier.
“Calving,” which is when ice breaks away from the edge of a glacier or ice sheet and tumbles into the water, is not unusual for this area in Greenland. A combination of rising air and sea temperatures in the Arctic have made calving events more severe in recent decades, and in fact, the Jakobshavn glacier is one of the fastest flowing glaciers in the world, meaning it bleeds ice into the ocean at one of the highest rates of any ice sheet on Earth. As of 2012, the glacier was pouring out ice at a speed of 150 feet per day, nearly three times its flow rate in the 1990s.
But last weekend’s event was big enough to turn heads, and the Arctic Sea Ice Blog post suggested that this incident might be the biggest calving event on record. However, some scientists aren’t so sure — and their doubt highlights some key uncertainties in human interpretations of ice calving events.
“Overall, I don’t think that they really can nail the ‘largest’ [calving event] or not,” wrote Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, in an email to the Post. According to Alley, the time resolution on the satellite images, which are spaced by a full day, is poor enough that the ice loss could have occurred in several smaller events rather than one large one. Alley adds, “I wouldn’t get too excited on this, even though it is not good news.”
However, Jason Box, a glaciologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, says he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this calving event is the largest to occur. And Eric Rignot, a principal scientist and ice expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that whether or not the event is the largest on record, he’s “struck by the sheer size of this calving event,” which he says is evidence that the glacier is continuing to retreat at “galloping speed.”
Major calving event at Jakobshavn isbrae, Greenland on Aug 14, 2015. The glacier retreat is galoping inland. http://t.co/Eb28J79f6v — Eric Rignot (@erignot) August 18, 2015
Rignot also agrees that the calving may well have occurred in a series of smaller events — it’s hard to say for sure in this case.
The uncertainty highlights that even though Greenland is a huge contributor to sea level rise right now — adding about a millimeter per year, even more than Antarctica — and contains a potential 20 feet of total sea level rise, scientists aren’t always able to monitor all of its losses with high precision. Granted, it would have been possible to make more precise observations “in those places that scientists have set up the right monitoring equipment that takes measurements frequently,” Alley writes. In fact, as Alley points out, there is some such monitoring equipment on the other side of the glacier operated by David Holland, a professor of mathematics at New York University — but in this case, it looks as though the satellite images present the most detailed information so far.
As a consequence, scientists have a little less to work with when making calculations about processes related to ice loss — sea level rise, for instance, which is exacerbated by large volumes of ice falling into the ocean and raising the water level. Gaps in our knowledge about glacier activity can also translate to uncertainties in the scientific models we use to predict their future behavior — and there’s already a fair amount of debate about how polar ice will continue to respond to a warming world.
Another scary point is the fact that the lost ice appears to have moved the face of the Jakobshavn glacier back to a new record limit — and experts say the further the glacier withdraws, the faster it is likely to lose ice in the future.
As more ice breaks away, the edge of a glacier moves further and further back, a process known as “retreating.” A calving event moves the retreat line back, but as ice additional ice slides forward to take its place, retreat lines can shift around from one year to the next. But it looks as though this new calving event, whether it was the largest documented or not, may have moved the retreat line back to a new record limit.
However, there’s some disagreement about how important this is, too. “It looks like the ice has retreated still farther upstream, but not hugely, and mostly continuing a long-term trend,” Alley wrote in his email.
But Box contends, “It’s impressive to see the Jakobshavn glacier retreat further, to a new record position upstream.” He also adds that the glacier bed tends to be deeper upstream, so the face of the glacier is starting to retreat into areas of deeper ice. These areas can be unstable, as warming temperatures can cause the glacier to start melting from the bottom up, effectively dislodging the ice from the glacier bed and making it easier for pieces to break off.
Rignot agrees that “this is probably the kind of event that we’re going to see more happening on this big ice stream as it retreats further into the deep ice.” And, in fact, it looks as though the glacier’s retreat has continued into the new week. As of Monday, the most recent satellite images showed an even further retreat upstream, evidence that more ice has been lost in the past few days.
Debates aside about the size and mechanisms of these events, Rignot says events like this one are significant because they give scientists a glimpse into the future of the world’s ice sheets. “Jakobshavn, right now, is kind of showing us what it looks like,” he says.
Also in Energy & Environment:
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For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.By Michael LoCoco
Imagine you’re at a car dealer. You get in the car. You’re not sure you’re going to buy, but you’re interested. The dealer has had great commercials on the radio and TV, and you’re excited. The prices are cheap. You’ve needed a car for a while. You get in the first car you’re interested in and it won’t start. You’re disappointed and you turn to the dealer who tells you not to worry; these glitches are to be expected and to come back the next day. When you return the cars still won’t start. You repeat this pattern for a week and eventually give up. Welcome to Healthcare.gov.
I consider myself to be a sophisticated individual. While I am aware of my limitations, I am, as Yogi might say, smarter than the average bear. Given this fact, I’d like someone from the Obama administration, perhaps Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, to explain to me the absolute dumpster fire that is the Obamacare Exchange online site, Healthcare.gov.
Again, I am fairly certain I’m not some kind of Cro-Magnon. I graduated from my University with a degree in Philosophy. I attend a top tier law school. I have thus far managed to avoid destitution. However, if Obamacare is difficult for me to navigate, I have little hope for those who haven’t been as blessed as I with the education I have received.
Some disclosure: I am 25 years old. My wife is 24. She is currently 7 months pregnant with our first child. I am the target demographic for Obamacare. While I currently have insurance through my law school, it won’t last after I graduate. I am hopeful I’ll receive health care through my employer, but I haven’t made it this far in life by making assumptions. Consequently, I decided to take the Obamacare exchange for a test-drive to see what my options might be. I have been rebuffed.
Through a week spent online, in livechats, and on the phone, I haven’t made it past the log-in phase. I don’t understand it myself. The President and his staff keep assuring me that for this system to work, they need people like me and my family to enroll. It’s not that I’m not interested; it’s that I haven’t been allowed.
I should take this time to point out that assuming the federal government had the administrative savvy to co-opt one-sixth of the American economy is the height of hubris. I should also highlight that, whatever anyone might think, the 50 employee threshold, the 30 hour requirement, and the uncertainty that is stifling hiring are better subjects for study. I might mention my increasing annoyance at how grateful I should be that I can stay on my parents’ insurance until I’m 26 (to which I should add that my baby won’t be covered, and that I would very much like the economy to improve so I can buy my own insurance). However, that’s not the point of this article. The point is not to take a position on the law; it’s to point out, very simply, that I am Obamacare’s target demographic: I am intelligent, tech-savvy, and (evidently) patient. This article is to underscore that this administration is incapable of running something as complicated as the entire health care market.
To forestall any of the insipid mewling of Obamacare’s proponents, I understand glitches are often to be expected. This isn’t a case of glitches. This is a case of incompetence. Though I am no programmer I have a passing familiarity with the concepts. I searched the web, places like Reddit and other communities in which Obamacare’s glaring and obvious coding errors were mentioned with annoyance by those who are in favor of the law. The Obama Administration points out that they didn’t have time or didn’t anticipate the interest (note that they keep mentioning interest and visitors to the site and not the actual number of people buying). With respect to the President, I don’t buy that. They had years, years, to prepare this website. This isn’t a base on the moon. It’s a website and it’s broken. They are expecting, indeed touting the fact, that millions will buy insurance through the exchanges, yet they didn’t expect millions to visit the site? I could have told them to expect interest.
I am not a mere observer. I have registered accounts on Healthcare.gov and then not been permitted to log-in. I have had livechats during which the operator informed me she couldn’t fix my problem (thanks for your effort, Ana). I spent 40 minutes on hold before I had to go to work and hang up. I am a face among the group needed to make Obamacare work, but I can’t do it and not for lack of trying.
So what is the deal, Ms. Sebelius? Why the hang-up, Secretary Lew? What’s the problem, President Obama? Mr. President, you apparently had no knowledge of Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, or the IRS scandal. You clearly haven’t fixed the economy or the Syria situation. So, what exactly do you do? This is your baby; surely you were involved. It’s frustrating to me how opaque this administration is, and if it’s frustrating to me then it has to be frustrating to those with less patience or savvy who might be trying to apply.
I’ve been honest from the start; I’m just trying to test-drive the system before I’m fined, taxed, or in some other way penalized for not purchasing the product. I appreciate innovation. I can accept change. But if Healthcare.gov is what passes for improvement these days, I’m disappointed. If it were a car dealership, I’d have already left the lot.
Michael LoCoco is a 3L at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and a graduate of the University of Dallas. He and his wife Courtney are expecting their first child in December.Former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe decided Wednesday to hold off on suing the team, opting to continue discussions.
Kluwe had threatened to sue Wednesday for more than $10 million because the team won’t release the full investigation into his claims about what he calls its culture of discrimination. Kluwe and his attorney, Clayton Halunen, have said that “substantial” evidence was left out of the 29-page summary that the team released of the six-month investigation involving special teams coordinator Mike Priefer’s anti-gay remarks during the 2012 season.
But on Wednesday, Halunen said he had spoken with Vikings lawyer Joe Anthony and that they had agreed to recommend to their clients that they keep talking. “We will not be taking any action pending the completion of those discussions,” Halunen said.
Both sides weren’t sure how long the discussions will last. Halunen said he wouldn’t comment on the parameters of the upcoming conversations.
It was Kluwe’s legal team that reached out to the Vikings in an attempt to restart discussions, team spokesman Jeff Anderson said. He said the team believes it has comprehensively investigated Kluwe’s claims, put forth in a Jan. 2 article on the sports website Deadspin, that Priefer made an anti-gay comment in a team setting.
Last week, the Vikings suspended Priefer for three games. Priefer, who denied the remarks earlier this year, apologized in a statement. He must also attend sensitivity training. If he does, his suspension could shrink to two games. Also, the Vikings will donate $100,000 to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.
“We have taken the appropriate action to ensure that we continue to have a workplace environment that respects tolerance, diversity and inclusion,” Anderson said. “We are willing to listen to Mr. Halunen’s continued concerns but will have no further comment in the interim.”
On Saturday, the NFL came out in support of the Vikings and their investigation. League spokesman Greg Aiello’s statement read: “We support our clubs enforcing their workplace policies and commend the Wilfs for doing a thorough investigation and taking appropriate steps in response to the findings.”
In the 29-page document summarizing the findings of the Vikings’ independent investigation — led by former U.S. Department of Justice attorney Chris Madel and former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson — the national law firm Littler Mendelson, hired by the Vikings to assess the report, concluded that Priefer made an anti-gay comment to players, although there was no record of his having made other such comments.
The investigation also provided details on Kluwe’s being insensitive in team settings. The report notes Kluwe made light of the Penn State football sex-abuse scandal, which Kluwe confirmed Friday on Twitter. He tweeted that he and “over half the team” made Penn State “rape” jokes in front of coaches, for a month or more.
The investigation began after Kluwe’s initial accusation in the Deadspin article. He said Priefer said before a meeting: “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.”
At that time, Priefer issued a statement that read in part: “I vehemently deny today’s allegations made by Chris Kluwe. I want to be clear that I do not tolerate discrimination of any type and am respectful of all individuals.”It seems there is a new doctrine rapidly gaining acceptance at universities across Canada: Silencing people you disagree with is OK, as long your tactics of disruption and obstruction are not violent.
In recent months, there have been a growing number of incidents of university presidents blithely condoning the silencing of speakers who have unpopular views (or at least views that are unpopular with a vocal minority).
To cite just one example, this past March a mob of loud protesters effectively shut down a presentation at McMaster University by University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson. They rang bells and beat drums, chanting “Shut him down!” and “Transphobic piece of s–t!” Peterson could not be heard in the classroom. He eventually went outside, and the loud mob followed. Peterson had been invited to speak at McMaster about freedom of speech and political correctness.
More worrisome than the noisy mob was the response of Patrick Dean, president of McMaster University. Dean characterized the loud bell-ringing, drum-beating and disruptive chanting as “peaceful protest.” He said McMaster should allow such activities, and will continue to allow them in future.
McMaster’s president characterized loud bell-ringing, drum-beating and disruptive chanting as “peaceful protest,” and said McMaster should and would allow such activities
This same thinking clearly prevails at the University of Alberta. In the case of UAlberta Pro-Life v. University of Alberta, heard in Edmonton June 8 and 9, 2017, the university argued before the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench that a loud, unruly, physically disruptive mob should be entitled to shut down campus events, as long as the mob is non-violent.
The U of A is defending its decision not to discipline any of the students who blockaded a pro-life display on campus in March 2015, notwithstanding that provisions in its Code of Student Behaviour expressly prohibit disruption, obstruction and inappropriate behaviour. The code states that its purpose is upholding the freedom to speak, study, learn, write and publish in the pursuit of truth. The code states that for these freedoms to exist, “it is essential to maintain an atmosphere in which the safety, the security, and the inherent dignity of each member of the community are recognized.”
Nonetheless, the U of A maintains that students who physically obstructed a stationary display with sheets and banners, making it nearly impossible for a campus club to express its opinions, were legitimately exercising their own freedom of expression. This position is especially disingenuous given that, in March of 2015, campus security repeatedly told the blockaders they were violating the code, and then-university president Indira Samarasekera had previously publicly stated that the suppression of unpopular views would not be tolerated.
After condoning the violation of the code by blockaders, the U of A went on to demand a $17,500 security fee of the pro-life students if they wanted to set up a display again
In court, the U of A argued that freedom of expression encompasses all behaviour short of violence. But the university’s own code bans not only violence, but inappropriate behaviour, such as disrupting classes and obstructing university-related functions. The code serves to curtail “behaviours which if left unchecked would, to an unacceptable degree, infringe upon the freedoms described above and thus threaten the proper functioning of the University.”
Adding insult to injury, after condoning the violation of the code by blockaders, the U of A went on to demand a $17,500 security fee of the pro-life students if they wanted to set up a display again in the future. The university is effectively censoring students who wish to peacefully convey a controversial message that no person is required to accept or agree with. Yet nothing stops the university from demanding $17,500 from the blockaders, whose behaviour and identities are well known to campus security, and who boasted publicly on social media about their “success” in silencing their opponents’ expression. Rather than enforcing the code’s provisions against students who physically obstruct campus events, the university blames the victims of this misconduct.
Would the U of A condone holding up sheets to prevent students in a classroom from seeing a professor’s power-point presentation about an unpopular theory? Should the professor be required to pay security fees because of his ideas? Why should it be any different for a student club that has the university’s approval to set up a display on campus?
If the U of A wins in court, its victory will almost certainly come back to haunt the university. Students will realize they can violate the code with impunity and silence those with whom they disagree.
Calgary lawyer John Carpay is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (www.jccf.ca) which represents the students in their court action against the University of Alberta.Ex-cop now charged with child porn possession
A Sammamish resident and disgraced former California police officer has been charged with possession of child porn.
According to charging documents, Joseph P. Padgett's estranged wife told police she found a large cache of child pornography while cleaning out a gun safe in their Sammamish home.
Writing the court, a King County detective described a disturbing trove of images found on five computers and four external hard drives found inside the safe.
Searching the devices, investigators found "hundreds of images of obviously underage girls posed provocatively, in lingerie or naked," the detective said in court documents. Other images showed children -- one thought to be a 4-year-old -- having sexual contact with adult men.
Speaking with police in November, Padgett's estranged wife told investigators she'd opened the safe in July and found child pornography, according to charging documents. She notified the Sheriff's Department and, on Nov. 11, detectives seized the materials.
In his statement to the court, the detective said several photos of Padgett, 48, were found on the devices. The detective also noted that several photos of Padgett and two girls were particularly concerning.
"While the pictures are not criminal, they are alarming to look at," the detective told the court. "The way Joseph is embracing the girls suggest(s) a high degree of intimacy and that he has a sexual interest in them.
"The images of Joseph with the girls that have been (manipulated with Photoshop) to give the girls large adult female breasts also confirm his sexual interest in them."
Federal court records show Padgett was previously involved in a land-use lawsuit that garnered some national attention against the City Of Monte Sereno, Calif. The city has since appealed a ruling in Padgett's favor, which saw him awarded $600,000 in fees and costs.
Asking that Padgett be held on $75,000 bail, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Corinn Bohn said Padgett's actions "cause concern for the safety of children within the community."
"The defendant has no permanent address and describes himself as a transient living out of his car," Bohn told the court. "The defendant is known to possess firearms and is former California law enforcement."
According to San Jose Mercury News reports from the time, Padgett -- identified there as Joseph Padgett III -- was forced to resign from the San Jose police department after he was caught in 1993 secretly videotaping himself during sex with three women. Padgett, according to the report, was convicted on five misdemeanor counts.
During the police search of Padgett's Sammamish home late last year, officers found similar videos along with the child pornography, the King County detective told the court. Investigators also recovered "dozens, if not hundreds" of Padgett posing alone in the nude.
Charged with a single count of possessing child pornography, Padgett remains jailed on $75,000 bail.[EDIT] I created a forum to collaborate on gateway code.
http://homeautomation.proboards.com/board/2/openha...
A few years ago, I became a dog owner for the first time. I didn't like leaving Cody in the kennel alone all day. I had a webcam on him, but I couldn't watch it all day long. What if he was in some kind of distress? What if there was a emergency at the house, like a fire?
I wanted some way of getting an immediate email notification when he barks, or when something bad happens. So reading lead to tinkering, and tinkering eventually lead to making this full blown home automation system based on open source hardware (Arduino) and open source software (OpenHAB). I know I know, yet another "Arduino Home Automation" project, right? But I promise I'm not going to turn on a light from a smart phone. I'm more focused on extensive networked sensors, timely alerts, and aesthetically appealing presentation of events.
Here's the basic idea. With Arduino, it's really easy to connect boatloads of cheap sensors. Using this setup, that boatload of cheap sensors can now be on the internets. They can email you when things get too hot, too cold, too smokie, too gassy, or too bright. And your dog can email you by barking. You can also view the status of sensors on your smart phone. These sensor nodes are wireless, so you're not constrained by the location of ethernet ports.
Here's how it's put together.
This Instructable will be a tutorial for how to build a variety of long range wireless sensors, and how to integrate these sensors into a sophisticated open source home automation server. Aside from looking at a mobile app to see what's happening, you'll also receive timely email and audio notifications. This is a long Instructable, but you can jump to the sensor you're interested in building.
These elements are the focus of the design:
Low Cost. Each sensor node costs less than $20 to make, so you can inexpensively scale up.
Flexibility. Arduino based nodes allow anyone to extend the system to their particular sensing needs. You're not tied to only the examples I'm providing, even though I strive to provide many examples.
Very good reliability, up-time, and wireless sensor range.
I'm providing both a battery powered and wall-power sensor node design
So, here's the list of sensors in this Instructable. I want to provide a home with the full range of human senses. Your home should be smart and sensitive.
Dog Bark (Any Loud Noise) Sensor
Get email notifications of loud noise. I use it to get an email if my dog barks in the kennel, so that I can open up my kennel webcam and see why he barked. There is also a counter to try to quantify how much he has been barking.
Washer-Dryer Sensor
Get an audio reminder when washer/dryer cycle completes - something like a "Washer Complete" announcement in the living room. No more forgetting laundry in the washer or wondering if it's done yet. Use the smart phone app to check if the cycle is complete or if the load has been picked up.
Light Sensor
Detect whether the light got left on or not. Displays the status of light on the smart phone app.
Area Intrusion Monitor
A PIR sensor monitors a room and sets off audio alarm / email notification when it senses a moving body.
Dog Tracker
Get notified if your dog runs away, track he's GPS location on google maps, and also map where he poops.
Gas/Fire/Smoke Sensor
Although this should not be the primary fire alarm, it can be used to send an email notification to you when the sensor senses smoke, fire, or LP gas commonly used in gas-powered stoves.
Temperature / Humidity Sensor
Temperature and humidity is reported to the mobile app. Optionally, you can enable email notifications when temperature dips below/above some preset value. Helpful for detecting furnace or air conditioner failures. You can also view a historical chart of temperature data using OpenHAB.
Water Leak Sensor
Get an email notification and audio alarm when a water leak is detected.
Just kidding, I got nothing for taste. I just like that picture. A couple more sensors that don't fit in neat categories.
Security - Door / Window / Drawer / Mailbox sensor
A battery powered reed-switch sensor that can set off an audible alarm, or send an email notification to your smart phone. Can be used to monitor doors, windows, mailboxes, or drawers. It also logs the time the event happened, as well as the remaining battery capacity on the sensor.
Garage Door Monitor
This is handy if you can't see your garage door from the house. Use a smart phone to check whether your garage door is opened or closed. You can also set it to play an audio reminder at, say 10PM, if the garage door is still opened.
With these sensors, everything from your dog to your washer & dryer can be part of the Internet of Things in a practical and useful way.
If there is any other home sensing thing you'd like an example of, add a comment and I'll try to get a sensor for it or use an existing sensor to fill the need. I'm trying to make a collection of sensors for most situations. It's only in the aggregate that this system makes sense - a bunch of one-off sensors don't really create a coherent home automation project.
Thanks for visiting my Instructable!Image caption The 'tax drum' tactic has been described as crude but effective (Photo: K Venkatesh)
The authorities in the Indian city of Bangalore are literally on a roll when it comes to recovering property taxes from long-standing defaulters.
They have deployed a group of workers to drum outside the homes and offices of people who have not paid taxes.
The aim is to shame defaulters into paying the dues that they owe.
Corporation officials said that they were using this unconventional and noisy method to recover taxes that have not been paid for years.
The more the noise, the more the embarrassment for the owner Bangalore official
They say that taxes owed to the city corporation amount to nearly $40m (£25m).
"The taxes recovered will be used to help provide better civic amenities in the city," corporation Commissioner Siddaiah told the BBC.
Already a group of drum beaters has been seen in action outside office premises rented out by a multinational company.
The owner is alleged not to have paid taxes for more than three years.
"We made enough noise outside to draw the public's attention," Mr Siddaiah said.
"The more the noise, the more the embarrassment for the owner as well as their tenants," said one official.
"In a way, this is shock treatment."
'Crude but efffective'
Officials say routine notices that were sent out have been largely ignored by defaulters.
At a one upmarket home in the central district of Bangalore, the drummers were in action for more than an hour.
The agitated house owner rushed out to confront them but it did not stop them from performing.
It is alleged that the defaulter owed the corporation thousands of dollars in back taxes.
"I thought at first that it was a roadside drama happening. It is in a way a very crude method but I guess it will be effective," said Ms Nalini, a passerby.
Officials warned that if defaulters continued to evade their responsibilities, the corporation will be forced to seal off their properties.Steve Koczela is President of the MassINC Polling Group, which conducts extensive polling in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN) The "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" is becoming the very thing it was created to find: something that undermines voter confidence.
The "voter fraud commission," as it's commonly called, is actually not charged with finding instances of voter fraud, according to the executive order that outlines its purpose. Instead, it is charged with finding most anything that enhances or undermines "confidence in the integrity of the voting process" and voting system vulnerabilities that could lead to fraud.
It seems that charge is broad enough to include facts, rumors, and outright conspiracy theories -- and the latter two seem to be key areas of focus.
In the lead up to the commission's meeting in New Hampshire this Tuesday, Kris Kobach, the commission's chairman, penned an op-ed for Breitbart News in which he recycled a legend well known in Massachusetts and New Hampshire politics.
"It has long been reported, anecdotally, that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire's same-day registration and head to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes," he wrote. "Now there's proof."
This "proof," he suggests, is data on same-day voter registrations for the 2016 election, which show that around 6,000 of those voters held out-of-state IDs. Kobach argues that the fact that many of these same-day voters still don't have New Hampshire IDs ten months later could be a sign of fraudulent voting.
But even in the short time since Kobach's claim, his analysis has not held up to scrutiny.
The Washington Post points out that he failed to account for one group of voters that has a reason to hold out of state licenses: college students in New Hampshire who attend from out of state. And indeed, New Hampshire Public Radio found that the towns with the highest rates of voters with out-of-state IDs were college towns.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who sits on the commission, told the Union Leader that the data didn't amount to proof of fraud and has suggested that the out-of-state licenses do have other possible explanations
These allegations are nothing new -- they're familiar to anyone who has spent any time in politics in either state. And they've been fueled by politicians such as former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who claimed that Bay State voters followed him across the border in 2014 when he relocated to New Hampshire for a second run at the Senate. Former Republican Governor Judd Gregg says he remembers hearing the rumors as far back as 2008.
The 2016 election brought the claim back to life. "I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who's worked in New Hampshire politics," said White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who briefly worked on Brown's 2014 Senate run.
Governor Chris Sununu said the same, telling Boston radio host Howie Carr "when Massachusetts elections are not very close, they're bussing them in all over the place" -- though he later walked back the claim. President Trump also tweeted about the "serious voter fraud" that had occurred in New Hampshire.
Despite all of this, The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog found no unusual turnout surges in 2016 that might be explained by buses from Massachusetts, and Former New Hampshire GOP chair Fergus Cullen dismissed the claim, calling it as old as buses themselves in an interview with USA Today. "It's been made in many elections," he said. "But it is completely baseless, completely false."
Despite the lack of supporting evidence, the rumor lives on, and that's enough to keep the commission chasing shadows.
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Indeed, the thought of busloads of itinerant fraudsters certainly fits the bill as something that would "undermine confidence" in voting. But ironically, the commission is probably doing more to undermine confidence than the rumor itself, with Kobach pushing conspiracy theories through a national megaphone. This, in turn, offers justification for more restrictive voting laws to address the perception the commission is helping to create.
Perhaps saddest of all is that there are many ways that actual experts could help boost confidence in the electoral process, making it more fair, equitable, and transparent. With the growing threat of systemic hacking, along with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and ballot access challenges, which limit Americans' ability to cast their votes, there are some very real issues that threaten our elections and our democracy that need attention.
By ignoring these much larger threats and focusing instead on unproven campaign gossip, the commission is missing an opportunity to reassure voters that our elections are fair and protected. So if Kobach wants to find what's undermining voters' confidence in voting, he need only look in a mirror.Version 1.4.1 jPanelMenu is a jQuery plugin for easily creating and managing off-canvas content. Just click on the menu button (the top left of this page) to see it in action. Check out the changelog to see what’s new. Download jPanelMenu Or view the project on Github
How Do I Use This Thing? Start off by including the jPanelMenu.js file in your page. (Bonus points for using the minified version [jPanelMenu.min.js], or for bundling the jPanelMenu code into your own JavaScript file to reduce size and HTTP requests |
unbound to any candidate.
According to the latest Associated Press estimate, Trump is set to receive 89 of New York's 95 delegates, while Ohio Gov. John Kasich is set to pick up three. The remaining three delegates are yet to be allocated, while Cruz was shut out completely.Mind The Gap (Year): A Break Before College Might Do Some Good
Postponing the start of college for one year is becoming more common. As WGBH's Kirk Carapezza reports, more schools are encouraging students to take a gap year — and even helping pay for them.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The idea of a gap here, postponing the start of college, has become a bit more common in the U.S. and a handful of colleges and universities are now actually encouraging accepted students to take a year break before starting classes. While the experience is still out of reach for most students, more schools are expected to support and even help pay for gap years.
From WGBH in Boston, Kirk Carapezza has more.
KIRK CARAPEZZA, BYLINE: Starting next year, Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, will give incoming freshmen the opportunity to do a year of international or national service prior to beginning their studies. Alan Solomont heads the College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts. He says American is facing a crisis in its public institutions.
ALAN SOLOMONT: The most important question that we should be asking future generations is: What are you going to do to serve?
CARAPEZZA: Under the program, Tufts students will stay in touch with faculty throughout their service year. When the year ends, they'll talk about their experiences together. Solomont says it's important to give financial support to those students who want to take a gap year but can't afford one.
SOLOMONT: We are going to make it available to students of all economic backgrounds.
CARAPEZZA: Tufts isn't alone. More and more elite schools are packaging gap years. Princeton and UNC-Chapel Hill, for example, have started to offer fully subsidized service programs so that more low-income students can get similar experiences to their affluent peers.
MARA DOLAN: A lot of students need a gap year. They're not ready to begin college.
CARAPEZZA: Mara Dolan is a higher education consultant. She doesn't find it ironic that more schools are telling students to take a break and then overseeing their experience.
DOLAN: It's certainly consistent with the idea of what a college education provides, which is something more than a degree. It's developing the whole student so that they can become higher functioning individuals, when they go out in the world.
CARAPEZZA: Despite these efforts, though, gap years are unrealistic for most families. Buying plane tickets and passports and visas before spending a whole year overseas can be expensive for students and the vast majority of public colleges and universities.
ANTHONY CARNEVALE: Extending this down towards the bottom 2,000 colleges in America, the first barrier will be they simply can't afford to do it.
CARAPEZZA: That's Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce He cautions that every year students stay out of school dramatically increases their chance of dropping out.
CARNEVALE: If we're talking about well-heeled kids who get to make a lot of mistakes - take a lot of risks in their college career - and will make it because they have the backing from their parents and the school, I think it's a very good idea. I would be worried about it for less advantaged kids.
CARAPEZZA: That's because research shows creating any kind of gap in formal education is most harmful to low-income, non traditional students. While gap years are becoming more common, they're still quite rare in the U.S. Fewer than two percent of students who get accepted to schools decide to take a year off before attending.
LYDIA COLLINS: Can I just have this trail mix, please?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah.
CARAPEZZA: Inside the student center at Tufts, freshman Lydia Collins grabs a snack between classes and then charges her campus debit card.
COLLINS: So not real life.
(LAUGHTER)
COLLINS: I'm always very thankful for the amount of vegetables and fruit that are always available here, because last year it was a lot of rice, beans and potatoes.
CARAPEZZA: After being accepted at Tufts, the 19-year-old from Evanston, Illinois, packed her bags and moved to Ecuador. She taught English and worked in a micro-finance organization and helped businesses get loans.
COLLINS: I wanted to understand foreign aid. And I also wanted to learn about myself and throw myself out of my comfort zone, before spending a lot of money at college.
CARAPEZZA: Tufts and other universities hope these new gap year programs will push other students to get out of their comfort zones and learn skills like leadership, self-awareness and empathy - skills that educators and economists agree the country desperately needs.
For NPR, I'm Kirk Carapezza in Boston.
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Dec. 20, 2012, 10:43 PM GMT By From wire services
Peter Madoff will serve 10 years in prison for his role in his older brother's multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, a U.S. judge said on Thursday.
Peter Madoff, 67, pleaded guilty in June to criminal charges including conspiracy to commit securities fraud for falsifying the books and records of the investment advisory company founded by his brother, Bernard Madoff.
He agreed at the time not to oppose a request by prosecutors for a maximum 10-year prison sentence and agreed to an order requiring him to forfeit a symbolic $143.1 billion. U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain approved the sentence on Thursday.
"I am deeply ashamed of my conduct," Peter Madoff said at the sentencing. "I accept full responsibility for my actions."
The sentencing comes four years and a week after Bernard Madoff first revealed his epic fraud, which occurred over several decades as the former NASDAQ chairman built a reputation for delivering unparalleled investment results, even in bad times. The revelation came only days after the business sent out statements that made investors think their investments had grown to a total of more than $65 billion.
Customers lost about $20 billion, according to the trustee charged with recovering money for the victims.
Of 13 individuals charged criminally in connection with the fraud, Peter Madoff is the only one, other than his brother, who was a member of the Madoff family. Bernard Madoff, 74, was sentenced in 2009 to a 150-year prison term and was ordered to forfeit $170.8 billion.
Peter Madoff, a lawyer, had been chief compliance officer and a senior managing director at the firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.
Prosecutors say Peter Madoff helped create false and misleading documents designed to make it appear that the firm had an effective compliance program. If the firm had such a program, prosecutors said it would have shown that no real trades were taking place.
Peter Madoff also transferred millions of dollars within the Madoff family to avoid tax payments to the Internal Revenue Service and also put his wife on the firm's payroll in a no-show job.
Peter Madoff said at his plea that he had no idea his brother was running a massive Ponzi scheme, paying off longtime investors at times with money from newer investors.
"My family was torn apart as a result of my brother's atrocious conduct," he said. "I was reviled by strangers as well as friends who assumed that I knew about the Ponzi scheme."
The judge said she did not believe Peter Madoff's claim that he knew nothing about his brother's fraud, calling it "frankly not believable," and urged him to tell the truth, even after sentencing.
But he conceded that he followed his brother's instructions and helped him decide which favored friends, clients and family members would receive the $300 million that remained in the company's accounts. The checks were never sent.
Peter Madoff, who joined his brother's firm after graduating from Fordham Law School in 1970, has been free on $5 million bail after he agreed to surrender all of his assets.
Prior to sentencing, his lawyer, John Wing, said in a memorandum that Peter Madoff will "almost certainly live out his remaining days as a jobless pariah, in or out of prison." He called him a victim of his loyalty to his brother, saying he had been mistreated by the sibling who was eight years older and was viewed as "the prince" by his mother.
As part of a forfeiture agreement, Madoff's wife, Marion, and daughter Shana must forfeit nearly all of their assets. The government said those assets and assets that will be forfeited by other family members include several homes, a Ferrari and more than $10 million in cash and securities. It said his wife will be left with $771,733. Besides the Madoff brothers, no other family members have been arrested.
Though Peter Madoff had been the firm's chief compliance officer for nearly four decades, the government marked his start in the conspiracy as 1996, when he created false and misleading compliance documents and false reports for the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The crime worsened after August 2006, when the business was registered with the SEC as an investment adviser, requiring annual filings to guide the SEC's examination programs. Prosecutors say Peter Madoff made "numerous false statements" to create the false appearance that the business represented a small number of highly sophisticated clients.
Since the fraud was revealed, a court-appointed trustee has reached agreements to recover approximately $9.3 billion and is hoping to recover another $3 billion over the next 18 months. About $3 billion has been approved for redistribution to victims through an ongoing claims process.
Five others face trial next year, including Bernard Madoff's longtime secretary. All have pleaded not guilty.
Information from Reuters and the Associated Press was included in this report.Volunteers help distribute meals and supplies at an Occupy Sandy center on November 22, 2012 in the Staten Island borough of New York City Photo by Ramin Talaie/Getty Images.
The Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, a historic church in Brooklyn currently doubling as Occupy Sandy HQ, was the victim of an apparent arson attack early Sunday morning.
The church at 520 Clinton Avenue, rebuilt in 1914 after a fire, stored supplies and donations for relief work across the city, including thousands of toys for children in the hardest-hit areas. The alleged arsonist took gasoline stored at the church for a Rockaways holiday party, poured it around the front entrance of the building, and set it on fire, according to the New York Post. Three volunteers were in the church at the time of the fire. They escaped uninjured and called 911.
The New York Times spoke to church curate the Rev. Christopher Ballard, who said that the building suffered “significant damage” from the fire. The wooden doors at the front entrance burned, and the foyer is damaged. The sanctuary escaped relatively unharmed, however. Most of the donations stored in the church had been cleared for Christmas services, but those remaining were unscathed as well. As for motivation, both police and church officials don’t have an explanation yet. “Somebody decided to take those canisters, dump them on the doors of the church and set the gas on fire,” Ballard said, adding, “We don’t know why someone would do this, what darkness is in someone’s heart.”
Occupy Sandy, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, began relief work in the city soon after Hurricane Sandy hit in late October. The mutual aid cleanup effort received a lot of praise for outshining the response of larger organizations like FEMA and the Red Cross in many neighborhoods with the worst damage.
On Monday, Occupy Sandy volunteers turned their attention to cleaning up the damaged church, which still held Christmas Eve services, DNAInfo reported.OSCE officially accuses Russia of occupation of Ukraine 18 1.07.2014, 17:02
11,640
The resolution was adopted at a session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.
At the session on July 1, 2014, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (PA OSCE) voted for the draft resolution proposed by US Senator Benjamin Cardin that condemns actions of the Russian Federation in relation to Ukraine. As many as 92 Assembly members voted in favour of the resolution.
The document, in particular, condemns “the clear, gross and uncorrected violation of the Helsinki principles by the Russian Federation with respect to Ukraine, including the particularly egregious violation of that country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”, RBC reports.
The amendment condemning the occupation of the territory of Ukraine was adopted during the debate.
The resolution condemns military aggression and “various forms of coercion designed to subordinate the rights inherent in Ukraine’s sovereignty to the Russian Federation’s own interests, to have been unprovoked, and to be based on completely unfounded premises and pretexts”. The OSCE views the 16 March 2014 referendum in Crimea as an illegitimate and illegal act, and calls upon all participating states to refuse to recognize the forced annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and “further to support and adhere to mutually agreed and fully justified international responses to this crisis”.
The OSCE calls upon Russia to end its intervention in Ukraine and to bring itself into compliance with the Helsinki principles in its relations with Ukraine and with all other participating States. An amendment calling upon Russia to desist from military overflights of the Nordic-Baltic region, immediately withdraw its military forces from the borders of the Baltic States and “cease its subversive activities within the ethnic Russian populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania” was adopted.
The resolution supports the efforts and initiatives of the OSCE to respond to this crisis, and calls on all OSCE states to provide both resources and political support and to allow the OSCE to work unhindered throughout Ukraine, including Crimea. The OSCE expresses a continued willingness to provide the substantial assistance to Ukraine in these and
other matters.The Pope's top PR man has declared that the Vatican is in the midst of its own "WikiLeaks" scandal after a flurry of confidential Papal documents were fed to the media by apparently disgruntled cardinals.
The leaks have ranged from documents covering allegedly murky operations at the Vatican bank, to an investigation into a Cardinal's apparent certainty that the pope will be bumped off by November this year.
The steady stream of embarrassments are being seen as evidence of a power struggle within the church as one group of elderly men pits itself against another group of elderly men to replace an even more elderly man. Possibly with an elderly Italian.
Papal PR Frederico Lombardi SJ issued a statement yesterday, declaring: "Nowadays we must all have strong nerves, because no one can be surprised at anything."
He went on to declare that "the American administration was affected by WikiLeaks, now the Vatican too has its disclosures, its leaked documents, which tend to create confusion and bewilderment, and to throw a bad light on the Vatican, the governance of the Church and, more broadly, on the Church herself.
"There is something very sad in the fact that documents are dishonestly passed from the inside to the outside in order to create confusion..." he added. "We must, therefore, stand firm, not allowing ourselves to be swallowed up by the vortex of confusion, which is what ill-intentioned people want, and remaining capable of using our reason."
Lombardi said leaks about an overhaul of the way the Vatican orders its finances were apparent attempts to discredit the prime movers behind those efforts.
Notably, Lombardi did not appear to declare that any of the leaks were actually false, except for the "delirious and incomprehensible reports" regarding an alleged assassination conspiracy, which "as I said immediately at the time, is nonsense, madness, and does not deserve to be taken seriously."
Incomprehensible indeed. No one has mounted a serious assassination attempt on the pope for at least 30 years.
On the subject of an apparent power struggle, the papal PR declared: "Whatever may be written in today's newspapers – the true concerns of those with positions of responsibility in the Church are the serious problems facing the men and women of today and tomorrow."
An alternative explanation is of course that it is Satan himself who is leaking the documents. The Church's top exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, declared two years ago that the Devil himself was stalking the corridors of the Holy See and was ultimately behind the wave of scandals convulsing the Catholic Church. The possibility that the very personification of evil has now extended his armoury to include the dark arts of selective press leaking is truly terrifying.
Most of the leaks have been aired in the Italian press, with some observers speculating that this is essential a local disagreement.
One Australian Archbishop told a Catholic blog that he was not aware of any crisis: "Maybe somebody’s sending things to me in emails and so on, but I don’t read those things." ®A mysterious metal orb spewing out biological material was recently discovered by U.K. researcher Milton Wainwright, an astrobiologist studying dust particles in Earth’s atmosphere, who suggests that the tiny object may be an alien device designed to seed life on earth.
The metal shell of the alien “seed” is made out of titanium with some vanadium mixed in and is filled with organic compounds, Wainwright says.
“It is a ball about the width of a human hair, which has filamentous life on the outside and a gooey biological material oozing from its centre.”
This is the first time something like this has been seen and its design suggests that an advanced alien species created it Researchers have suggested that the biological material within the seed could contain DNA strands essential for creation of life.
It was recently discovered that DNA can survive that harshest of conditions when a tiny strand of DNA on the exterior of a TEXUS-49 rocket was sent into orbit from Sweden in 2011. While in orbit, it withstood temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius and came back to Earth essentially unharmed.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, the director of the Buckingham Center for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham in England, said that the tiny ‘alien seed’ was further evidence of intelligent life in the universe.
Wainwright says that the alien device may be a complete microorganism ” sent to Earth by some extraterrestrial civilization in order to continue seeding the planet with life.”
“This seeming piece of science fiction — called ‘directed panspermia’ — would probably not be taken seriously by any scientist were it not for the fact that it was very seriously suggested by the Nobel Prize winner of DNA fame, Francis Crick.”
Panspermia is the theory that life is spread throughout the known universe on the backs of comets or meteorites.
Wainwright said that unless they could track down the alien civilization and the details of its creation, the seed theory was unprovable. Nevertheless, Wainwright is sticking to his guns and has evidence to support his theory.
“For the moment, we are content to say that the life-containing titanium sphere came from space, possibly from a comet.”
The alien ‘life seed’ left an impact crater on the balloon that indicates that the alien device came into Earth’s atmosphere at a high velocity and could not possibly have been a returning particle.
Wainwright said that the “impact crater proves that the sphere was incoming to Earth from space, an organism coming from Earth would not be travelling fast enough when it fell back to Earth to cause such damage.”
NASA is similar research in hopes of discovering similar evidence of life outside of our solar system, which Wainwright hopes will further support his theory.
Scientists have long balked at such theories but as mounting evidence continues to collect, researchers are discovering more and more traces of alien life in the universe.
Professor Wickramasinghe, has been a long time advocate of the idea that alien life has been bombarding the earth from comets and asteroids and that “evidence from meteorites, from samples of bacteria from space and from space observation is making resistance more difficult.”
“Proving that the Earth is in a constant exchange of matter with the larger cosmos would have implications not only in terms of our identity, but could also give us insight into alien viruses which may be important for our group identity, evolution and survival itself.”
Do you believe that life on earth could have originated in outer space, or is Wainwright’s theory too far out?This article shows how to quick-start with SPA applications development using Django and React/Redux.
It’s hard to imagine a Django application without user authentication and authorization. So we start with a simple application that can authenticate a user and perform an authorized request to an API.
In addition, you will see how to setup redux-router, local state persistence with redux-persist and write a simple UI with reactstrap (bootstrap 4 binding for the React)
In the first part of the tutorial we will create a simple Django backend with JWT token authentication. Second part shows how to setup React/Redux frontend application and the third part shows how to implement JWT refresh token workflow.
At the end, you will have tiny, ready to extend application with Django back-end and React/Redux front-end.
To work over first part of the tutorial, you need to have Python 3.6 installed (under Ubuntu ensure that you have python3.6-dev and python3.6-venv packages)
What is JWT
JSON Web token is the stateless authorization method. Server-generated tokens may be kept on the client only. A JWT token itself could contain an additional payload inside. It could be a username, email or user permissions signed by a server side key. That became very handy when you going to split your Django monolith into different servers without shared users database or even perform authenticated requests to backends implemented in other technologies.
You can read more about JWT internals in the 5 Easy Steps to Understand JSON Web Tokens (JWT) article
JWT authorization endpoint can offer two token types — a short-living Access Token and a long-living Refresh Token. Short-living Access Token could be used to perform API calls over different services, whereas the long-living Refresh Token suited to obtain new Access Token when previous going to be expired.
Long-living tokens allows you to ask the user for his username and password only one time once he authenticates for the first time, and the user will stay logged for a while
Constant refresh of short living access tokens allows keeping in sync token payload (remember the user name or permissions)
Another reason to have two kinds of tokens is the ability to block a user from receiving new Access tokens.
The server side
The servers side project is pretty straightforward. Start with new virtual environment and install required Django packages
$ mkdir backend/ && cd backend/
$ python3.6 -m venv env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ pip install coreapi django djangorestframework \
djangorestframework-simplejwt
$ pip freeze > requirements.txt
$ django-admin startproject config.
We installed coreapi package, to allow to auto generate an API schema describes what resources are available, what their URLs are, how they are represented and what operations they support.
And the django-rest-framework-simplejwt package that implements JWT authorization and authentication with Refresh and Access tokens.
Let’s edit config/settings.py to enable it
INSTALLED_APPS = [
...
'rest_framework',
]
# Rest Framework
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
),
'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
'rest_framework_simplejwt.authentication.JWTAuthentication',
'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
),
}
We added rest_framework into INSTALLED_APPS settings, protect by default all API resource with IsAuthenticate guard, and enable JWTAuthentication alongside with SessionAuthentication. We going to use standard django session authentication to get access to the protected schema view.
Let’s edit config/urls.py to enable authentication endpoints
from django.conf.urls import url, include
from django.views import generic
from rest_framework.schemas import get_schema_view
from rest_framework_simplejwt.views import (
TokenObtainPairView,
TokenRefreshView,
)
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^$', generic.RedirectView.as_view(
url='/api/', permanent=False)),
url(r'^api/$', get_schema_view()),
url(r'^api/auth/', include(
'rest_framework.urls', namespace='rest_framework')),
url(r'^api/auth/token/obtain/$', TokenObtainPairView.as_view()),
url(r'^api/auth/token/refresh/$', TokenRefreshView.as_view()),
]
We’ve got enabled a schema view, session authentication URLs from the django-rest-framework, and TokenObtainPairView with TokenRefreshView for JWT authentication.
At the last step, let’s make a simple echo API endpoint, to test calls from our front-end. when we would be authorized. For the demo project, we could add this directly into config/urls.py
from rest_framework import views, serializers, status
from rest_framework.response import Response
class MessageSerializer( serializers.Serializer):
message = serializers.CharField()
class EchoView(views.APIView):
def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
serializer = MessageSerializer(data=request.data)
serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
return Response(
serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
urlpatterns = [
...
url(r'^api/echo/$', EchoView.as_view())
]
Now we can run the server
$./manage.py migrate
$./manage.py createsuperuser
$./manage.py runserver
Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 login and see auto-generated schema of our API.
Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/auth/token/obtain/ enter credentials, and see that we got new Access and Refresh tokens in response
And on the http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/echo we could check our echo endpoint.
So, we a ready to create a front-end. Let’s go to the Part IIposter="https://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201703/826/1155968404_5357908711001_5357860267001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Spicer: Trump wants media’s help in choosing where to donate his salary
President Donald Trump plans to donate his salary to charity at the end of the year, his press secretary said Monday, and he wants the reporters who cover him to decide what he does with it.
During his campaign, Trump, himself a billionaire, pledged not to take the presidential salary of $400,000. Sean Spicer told reporters at Monday’s afternoon briefing that Trump still plans to the give money away, though he hasn’t yet.
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Spicer added that the White House would like reporters to advise the president on his decision, in a remark that amounted to a slight dig at the press corps.
“The president’s intention right now is to donate his salary at the end of the year, and he has kindly asked that you all help determine where that goes,” Spicer said. “The way that we can avoid scrutiny is to let the press corps determine where it should go.”
Reporters have been aggressive in covering the administration and topics like the conflicts of interest presented by Trump’s business empire, prompting Trump and his advisers to criticize the press and claim that they have been scrutinized unfairly.
After Spicer suggested that they weigh in on the salary question, reporters in the briefing room laughed, and the press secretary added: “In all seriousness, I think his view is he made a pledge to the American people, he wants to donate it to charity, and he'd love your help to determine where it should go.”
A reporter jokingly suggested that Trump donate the money to White House Correspondents Association personnel.
“That would be a great way to do it,” Spicer replied.Do you like it when your husband starts having sex with you while you are asleep or wakes you up by touching you and initiating groggy, sleep-fueled sex? If you do, you are not alone. This is actually a fantasy many women seem to have.
Some people think it is sick. Other think it is hot. But hey, we could be talking anything sexual, right? Sexual fantasies run the gamut and they are good to talk about because finding out you are normal for liking something kinky is kind of a relief. This discussion was on the Cafe Mom forums this past week as well.
It's a good question. Many women said they want to be left alone while they sleep. Others love the idea of being awakened by sex. Like anything else it seems like the best answer is the one where every person decides for themselves.
AdvertisementSimply said, Moonbow, or Lunar Rainbow, is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon rather than from direct sunlight. It’s considered as a rare occurrence because there were too much requirements such as lightness and distance of the moon that limits the formation of a moonbow.
Nah, that sounds absolutely nothing for photographers, who have no limitation when it comes to photography. Either it’s accidental or intentional, photographers has tackled their challenges and successfully captured the magical moonbow. And for sure, in the showcase below we are gonna show you their magnificent works with their own comments added.
Check them out so you don’t miss one of the most wonderful scenes in our mother Earth!
Hawaii Moonbow. “Our last night in Hawaii there was a full moon and it was sort of misting outside. The kids said I had to go down to the beach and see an amazing sight. I’m sure glad I did! We got to see a rare moonbow.” (Image Source: Stephen_Payne)
Kamuela Hawaii Moonbow. “It was cold, windy and raining but I toughed it out. After getting some images the CF (CompactFlash) card failed and all the pictures were gone. Undaunted I dug into my camera bag and pulled another card! I had just enough time to get two pictures off before it disappeared!!!” (Image Source: Ethan Tweedie)
Double moonbow in Dorgali. Moonbow is rare enough, this guy has really good luck to witness double moonbow! (Image Source: *Tamata*)
Original Moonbow. This is what human eye perceives moonbow. Moonbow is difficult for the human eye to discern colors because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes. As a result, they often appear to be white. – Wikipedia (Image Source: JoeOVCC)
Moonbow 1. “I finally made it to Cumberland Falls State Park in Corbin, Ky tonight. Every month, within 2 days of the full moon, this falls becomes the only place in the Western hemisphere with a predictable moonbow. This is a single 5 minute exposure at f8 ISO 800.” (Image Source: Michael Hensley)
Have You Ever Seen Anything Like This. “Out for a midnight walk in a storm last night, I could see an odd appearance in the sky. It looked like “something” coming in, however, it gradually formed a perfect arc. Surely not a rainbow, I thought?” (Image Source: www.paulalsop.com)
Lunar Rainbow. “This picture was taken looking south, the Southern Cross can be seen to the left of center along with some of the brighter stars in the constellation of Centaurus.” (Image Source: Starry Night Skies Photography)
Yosemite National Park Series
You have to believe that among 80% moonbow photographs I searched, most are taken in the Yosemite National Park, a United States National Park spanning eastern portions of Tuolumne, Mariposa and Madera counties in east central California, United States. If you want to photograph the moonbow, this is one of the best places to capture its appearance.
Moonbows – Yosemite Landscape Photography. “Moonbows really are a magical natural occurrence, and I had so much fun staying up to the wee hours of the morning in some of Yosemite’s most special locations.” (Image Source: shawnreeder)
Moonbows – Yosemite Landscape Photography. Undoubtedly, Shawn Reeder has one of the best photography works in the Yosemite National Park’s moonbow series. There’s also a great video showcasing the moonbow in action, a must-see! (Image Source: shawnreeder)
Moonbows – Yosemite Landscape Photography. Same place, with more parts of the moonbow taken. (Image Source: shawnreeder)
Moonbows – Yosemite Landscape Photography. Very precious shot, is there another moonbow? (Image Source: shawnreeder)
Lower Yosemite Falls Moonbow. “3 nights before full moon, I was out testing my spinning rain deflector on Yosemite Falls. These are single frames from a time lapse series.” (Image Source: YosemiteSteve)
Lower Yosemite Falls Moonbow 2. Another gorgeous shot taken in the same place but different position. (Image Source: YosemiteSteve)
Lower Yosemite Falls Moonbow 2011. The night scene of the Yosemite falls is charming with moonbow. (Image Source: YosemiteSteve)
Lower Cascade Moonbow. Great and rare angle to photograph the moonbow, YosemiteSteve is really professional in photographing moonbow in Yosemite National Park. (Image Source: YosemiteSteve)
Cascades Moonbow. The falls is spectacular, so is the moonbow. (Image Source: YosemiteSteve)
Moonbow At Lower Yosemite Fall. A very clear shot on both moonbow and the scene, really love the detail. (Image Source: kyrie09)
Misty Night At Yosemite Falls. “It was very misty. Really misty. Good thing I had fashioned a grocery bag into a rain shield.” (Image Source: TravelnFotog)
Moonbow 2009. This piece is rare as the moonbow in it only appears on the side of the cliff, where the mist appears, making it more unusual! (Image Source: fotografo2006)
Reflection
What I experienced most in doing this showcase post is, moonbow is really rare, but its photos are even rare! Don’t get me wrong, I mean those photos with really decent quality. I believe it’s because of the misty environment that often breaks the camera, or very short appearance time of the moonbow that troubles the photographer from doing the best shot for this magical phenomenon.
So next time if you want to capture the moonbow, do research very well and make the capture really quick and precise! If you’ve captured it successfully or you’ve a good one to show off, please, do share with us in your comments!In light of the Hobby Lobby ruling, religious groups everywhere are jumping at the chance to deny women fundamental health care on the basis of the owners’ religious beliefs.
The Satanic Temple is using the same principle to do just the opposite.
In case you’re not familiar with them, The Satanic Temple is an organization whose mission is to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will.” In their next pro-human move, the group has just announced that it will assert a religious exemption from state-mandated “informed consent” abortion laws, and they say the Supreme Court’s decision strengthens their case.
Informed consent laws, currently in place in at least three states, require abortion providers to give their patients “official information” about the abortion process before they can perform the procedure. Unfortunately, these materials are not only laden with false and misleading information, but they’re usually nothing more than biased, accusatory propaganda meant to shame and scare a person out of getting an abortion. According to The Satanic Temple, some of these required materials have claimed a link between abortion and breast cancer and a fictional depressive “post-abortion syndrome.”
This move is the first step in a broader initiative The Satanic Temple will embark on to advocate for women’s and reproductive health. However, according to a press release, the group says that vocally opposing informed consent materials is nothing new.
While The Satanic Temple [is] not the first organization to criticize state-mandated abortion materials as false and/or biased, they are the first to offer an exemption from such materials on religious grounds. Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves points out that the controversial Hobby Lobby ruling bolsters their cause: “While we feel we have a strong case for an exemption regardless of the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that religious beliefs are so sacrosanct that they can even trump scientific fact. This was made clear when they allowed Hobby Lobby to claim certain contraceptives were abortifacients, when in fact they are not. Because of the respect the Court has given to religious beliefs, and the fact that our beliefs are based on best available knowledge, we expect that our belief in the illegitimacy of state-mandated ‘informational’ material is enough to exempt us, and those who hold our beliefs, from having to receive them.”
As an adherent to the principles of the Satanic Temple, my sincerely held religious beliefs are: My body is inviolable and subject to my will alone.
I make any decision regarding my health based on the best scientific understanding of the world, even if the science does not comport with the religious or political beliefs of others.
My inviolable body includes any fetal or embryonic tissue I carry so long as that tissue is unable to survive outside my body as an independent human being.
I, and I alone, decide whether my inviolable body remains pregnant and I may, in good conscience, disregard the current or future condition of any fetal or embryonic tissue I carry in making that decision.
To put this plan into action, the group has created a letter addressed to healthcare providers that explains its religious opposition to the legally mandated distribution of anti-choice materials. Those beliefs, as outlined in the letter:
It explains further that a refusal to abide by this request constitutes a violation of an individual’s First Amendment rights:
As you know, your medical treatment of me requires my informed consent. My informed consent is based solely on scientifically true and accurate information that is relevant to my decisions regarding my health and pregnancy in accordance with my sincerely held religious beliefs. I regard any information required by state statute to be communicated or offered to me as a precondition for an abortion (separate and apart from any other medical procedure) is based on politics and not science (“Political Information”). I regard Political Information as a state sanctioned attempt to discourage abortion by compelling my consideration of the current and future condition of my fetal or embryonic tissue separate and apart from my body. I do not regard Political |
Actresses Paz Vega, left, and Nicole Kidman on May 14 Hide Caption 51 of 60
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Photos: 2014 Cannes Film Festival: Red carpet 2014 Cannes Film Festival: Red carpet – Model Laetitia Casta on May 14 Hide Caption 59 of 60A California university’s decision to put a limit on the number of American citizens it enrolls -- while placing no such restrictions on illegal immigrants who want to attend the school -- is drawing sharp criticism from education activists.
The regents in the University of California system recently instituted Regents Policy 2109 in response to state lawmakers threatening to withhold from the university system nearly $20 million if school officials didn’t cap the number of out-of-state American students. The university's response to the state government’s threat was to limit the percentage of out-of-state American students in the student body to 18 percent on most campuses.
The move is being criticized as discriminatory against Americans.
“The UC system, like many others around the country, is routinely giving preferential treatment to illegal aliens at the expense of American students, many of whom are attending at great sacrifice of their parents,” Kyle Olson, founder of Education Action Group, told Fox News.
“It is disturbing to know the UC system is not even sure how many illegal students it has enrolled and is enabling by not enforcing our immigration laws.”
The University of California currently has 16.5 percent of its student body comprised of out-of-state students. It’s estimated that there are roughly 3,700 illegal immigrants studying in the UC system.
Officials for the University of California say that the school system is simply being consistent with state law.
“This policy applies to students who, under California law AB (Assembly Bill) 540, qualify as state residents for tuition purposes,” Ricardo Vazquez, spokesman for the University of California, said to Fox News. AB 540 allows students to pay in-state tuition fees if they meet certain requirements.
Olson says the policy may actually hurt the state and its students.
“Ultimately, and ironically, the California government is actually penalizing Californians by not counting illegals as out-of-state students and thus allowing them to, in effect, take seats away from in-state students,” he said.We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man–the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.
Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”
In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.” In “Mockingbird,” Atticus was a role model for his children, Scout and Jem–their North Star, their hero, the most potent moral force in their lives. In “Watchman,” he becomes the source of grievous pain and disillusionment for the 26-year-old Scout (or Jean Louise, as she’s now known). While written in the third person, “Watchman” reflects a grown-up Scout’s point of view: The novel is the story of how she returns home to Maycomb, Ala., for a visit–from New York City, where she has been living–and tries to grapple with her dismaying realization that Atticus and her longtime boyfriend, Henry Clinton, both have abhorrent views on race and segregation.
{snip}
The depiction of Atticus in “Watchman” makes for disturbing reading, and for “Mockingbird” fans, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. How could the saintly Atticus–described early in the book in much the same terms as he is in “Mockingbird”–suddenly emerge as a bigot? Suggestions about changing times and the polarizing effects of the civil rights movement seem insufficient when it comes to explaining such a radical change, and the reader, like Scout, cannot help feeling baffled and distressed.
{snip}
One of the emotional through-lines in both “Mockingbird” and “Watchman” is a plea for empathy–as Atticus puts it in “Mockingbird” to Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” The difference is that “Mockingbird” suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while “Watchman” asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.
Original Article
Share ThisMumbai: Tanmay Bhat's video of a mock conversation between legends Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar has provoked a howl of protests. While several political parties have demanded action against the comedian, the Mumbai police has even contacted Google and YouTube for blocking the video.
While Tanmay is going on a rant and weighing in his business opportunities by posting, "Please pay me @Snapchat", Lata decided to maintain a dignified silence until now.
Read: Tanmay Bhat, AIB ‘mentally deranged’, take severe action: Shiv Sena
In an interview to Spotboye, Lata spoke about the disparaging remarks, “I have not seen the video, neither do I have any inclination to do so. I will not comment about it. By the way, I don’t know who is Tanmay Bhat.”
While she maintained a brave front, people close to her claim that she is extremely disturbed and shocked to see that she was targeted.
Read: Banning is not enough, Tanmay should be arrested: Censor Board chief Pahlaj Nihalani
Titled ‘Sachin v/s Lata Civil War’, Tanmay, in a video posted on Facebook on May 26, took jibes at the 86-year-old melody queen and the 43-year-old cricketing legend.
Bollywood has also reacted sharply to the comedian's portrayal of the music and cricket icons with many actors slamming the video made by a member of online comedy group AIB, saying it was in poor taste.
Read: Cops ask Facebook, YouTube to block Tanmay's video mocking Lata, Sachin
Film wing of Raj Thackeray-led MNS, Chitrapat Sena, has also urged the police to block the video and its link online. The MNS also threatened to beat him up.
Its president Ameya Khopkar, who went to the cyber cell of Mumbai police to lodge the complaint, said "The MNS will not allow Tanmay Bhat to conduct shows in the city, and police should arrest him as quickly as possible."
Taking strong exception to the video, the Shiv Sena asked Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to take stringent action against AIB and Bhat for allegedly seeking to vitiate social harmony by mocking the national legends.
Sena leader Neelam Gorhe wrote to Fadnavis seeking action against those behind the video which she said was made by people with "deranged mentality".
"Such people try to misuse the popularity of icons like Sachin and Lata tai for their own publicity," said Gorhe.
"I have also written to Mumbai Police Commissioner seeking action against Tanmay Bhat and AIB," she said. Shelar said he has spoken to the Police Commissioner and sought action against Bhat and AIB.
Watch the video here.This volume is a hugely important contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century philosophy. When assessing an average 'Oxford Handbook' we would often judge it on how well it orientates the reader to current scholarship on the particular subject. However, for many important aspects of British philosophy in the nineteenth century the scholarship is almost non-existent. As W. J. Mander rightly notes in the introduction, when we hear a reference to nineteenth-century philosophy, we are far more likely to think of 'the great systems of continental thought' than the British tradition. Nonetheless, this volume aims to show that this tradition boasts a remarkably rich and varied range of philosophical resources that will repay careful attention, and that it deserves the level of scholarship that the British traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are beginning to enjoy. In a review of another recent volume on nineteenth-century philosophy Frederick Beiser argued that 'No period of the philosophical past stands in more need of an original historian than nineteenth-century philosophy. The standard tropes and figures do no justice to its depths, riches, and powers'. One of this present volume's greatest virtues is that it answers Beiser's plea by getting beyond these standard tropes and figures and by offering an impressive number of very original contributions to the history of nineteenth-century philosophy.
Mander's collection does an outstanding job of introducing a wide range of philosophical figures and ideas that will be unknown even to most historians of nineteenth-century philosophy and consequently brings to light much of the period's unknown 'depths, riches, and powers'. The volume also includes excellent contributions on well-known philosophers and orientates the reader to the secondary literature on these figures (e.g. J.S. Mill, Marx, Sidgwick). The result of this combination is that the volume provides a clear and comprehensive picture of how nineteenth-century philosophy was practised and understood during the period. Furthermore, Mander claims in the introduction that by presenting nineteenth-century philosophical ideas that are sometimes clouded in obscure and antiquated language in a clear manner, the essays show both the contemporary relevance of its ideas and concepts and also that its philosophers are often 'addressing the same problems as concern us today' (1). Nevertheless, it seems to me that the Handbook is at its most interesting when it shows the broad and varying conceptions of philosophy that were being promoted during this period and just how wide its intellectual horizons were. Rather than simply showing what answers they had to today's questions, the volume may also show the reader what other questions she could or even should be asking.
The Handbook is divided into six parts: (1) Logic and Scientific Method; (2) Metaphysics; (3) Science and Philosophy; (4) Ethical, Social, and Political Thought; (5) Religious Philosophy; and, (6) The Practice of Philosophy. As Mander states, these classifications come from our contemporary perspective, and we should not expect the work of the philosophers discussed to neatly fit within them. Nonetheless, the individual authors should be commended for their great sensitivity in presenting the aspects of a philosopher or school of philosophy that fits within these categories while concurrently making clear how these aspects fit within a larger philosophical perspective that refuses such strict classifications. The only part that does feel slightly strained is 'Religious Philosophy', which include two chapters (both still excellent) where the main focus does not seem to be on religious philosophy at all (Anthony Kenny's 'John Henry Newman', which primarily focuses on epistemology, and James Vigus's 'The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge', which discusses Coleridge's attempt to move beyond Kant to develop his metaphysics). Perhaps the value of this is to remind us that even those disciplines that seem today the furthest removed from religious philosophy were frequently engaged with during this period for religious reasons.
For the remainder, however, the divisions work well and the grouping of the articles helps to present a detailed account of the development of British philosophy that is unparalleled in other texts. Take, for example, Jenny Keefe's chapter on J. F. Ferrier. In a work on British Idealism, Ferrier may be considered as the first of a great metaphysical tradition and in that sense pioneering. Yet in an unsympathetic text on Scottish Common Sense philosophy, he may be read as signalling the tradition's downfall and for being partly responsible for this by derailing it and returning to metaphysics. The placement of the chapter allows one to assess Ferrier's work in the wider nineteenth-century context without it being fed exclusively into either of these narratives. This is just one of many ways that this volume is a whole greater than its parts. Although it can be dipped into to aid research on a particular aspect of British thought, it can very profitably be read cover to cover and enjoyed with relatively little repetition of content.
'Logic and Scientific Method' includes five chapters: James Allard's 'Early Nineteenth-Century Logic'; David Godden's 'Mill's System of Logic'; Steffen Ducheyne's 'Whewell's Philosophy of Science'; Jeremy Gray's 'Some British Logicians'; and Phillip Ferreira's 'Idealist Logic'. This section is perhaps the closest the Handbook gets to a traditional overview text. Gray's chapter is divided into six sections, which survey some of the most important developments in logic during the century, covering De Morgan, Boole, Jevons, Venn, Carroll, and Hugh MacColl. Allard's contribution tells the story of how formal logic in the nineteenth century, after having suffered from 150 years of serious neglect, was revitalized by Richard Whatley's 1826 Elements of Logic. The success of Whatley's text was partly due to a change in attitude to 'liberal education' and the emergence of the understanding that such an education demanded a 'properly trained mind'. His formal logic was important exactly because it would aid this training. Allard's elegantly-written chapter then discusses the debates between William Hamilton and Whatley, and Hamilton and De Morgan, which would stimulate Boole's more profound logical innovations. The scene is set nicely for Godden's article on Mill's logic and how Mill developed his empirically grounded thought on this topic in response to Whatley. Godden presents a clear and readable account of Mill's attempts to develop a logic based on the understanding that we must always begin with experienced particulars. Mill's inductivism is regularly referred to throughout this volume, and this chapter does an excellent job of providing the reader with part of the essential context for many nineteenth-century philosophical debates.
The most original scholarly contributions in this part are Ducheyne's chapter on William Whewell and Ferreira's contribution on Idealist Logic. Both show how the British debates were augmented by the importation of philosophical ideas from Germany. Ducheyne discusses Whewell's conception of the methodology of the philosophy of science and the debate within Whewell scholarship about the extent of Kant's influence. Ducheyne presents a balanced assessment and shows that while Kant's philosophy did play a crucial role in the development of Whewell's thought, he believed Kant had failed to show how 'a priori principles' and 'physics with empirical content' could be bridged. He thought his own crucial achievement was to complete this bridging. In addition to this discussion, Ducheyne demonstrates the broad range of Whewell's interests by covering his views on hypotheses, confirmation, and tidology.
Appropriately, the section ends with a chapter on a much-ignored aspect of nineteenth-century philosophy: British Idealist Logic. In any attempt to provide a general conception of an entire school's thought, there is a danger it may ignore important differences among its members. Ferreira does a good job of preventing this by focusing on Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet, and by clearly identifying what is common to all three while also emphasising their own developments. He begins by showing why Green rejected both the theory of 'general ideas', since they remove us from reality by eradicating the individuality of our ideas, and the Millian theory of presented 'atomic' ideas, since this ignores the essential role of the activity of the mind in the production of a particular mental 'this' or 'that'. This leads to the theory of the 'concrete universal', which posits that the content of experience has both particular and universal functions. From this, he goes on to discuss in more depth the theory of judgment (and its relation to the metaphysics of the absolute) in the work of Bradley and Bosanquet, and how the development of their theory of inference responds to the faults of both associationism and the traditional syllogism. As Ferreira himself states, the definitive history of British idealist logic is yet to be written, but his achievement is to have convincingly shown that there would be much to gain from it being so.
The four chapters in 'Metaphysics' are amongst the collection's best: 'Hamilton, Scottish Common Sense, and the Philosophy of the Conditioned' by Gordon Graham; 'J.F. Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic' by Jenny Keefe; 'The Philosophy of Shadworth Hodgson' by the volume's editor; and, 'Bradley's Metaphysics' by Pierfrancesco Basile. They build on the contributions from the first section to provide an account of how British thought moved on from the empiricist inductivism of Mill and the Common Sense philosophy of Reid's school to the profound metaphysical systems of the Idealist school. I am unaware of any other volume that presents this historical narrative in such an impressive and detailed way, and it provides many often missed links in the chain. However, the absence of a chapter dedicated to Green's role does seem a shame. This is compounded when we remember that one of the volume's main aims is to show that nineteenth-century British thought deserves more detailed scholarly attention. Excellent scholarly works on Green's thought have recently been published, and important debates are starting to emerge. A chapter dedicated to these discussions would have been a major asset. This relatively minor quibble aside, another insight gained from the section as a whole, as Mander notes, is that the contemporary assessment of Mill's victory in the Hamilton-Mill debate is not reflected in the debate's immediate reception and the'return to metaphysics' that followed. Graham's article presents a clear overview of both Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned and the Hamilton-Mill debate. One of the chapter's merits is that it shows that Mill and Hamilton were engaged in very different conceptions of philosophy, and that assessing the debate to some extent depends on examining their relative virtues. It reminds us that there was no agreed conception of the particular intellectual ambitions of philosophy and of the importance of evaluating our own understanding of its ambitions.
Although mentored by Hamilton, Ferrier took Scottish philosophy far closer to the metaphysics of the absolute than Hamilton would have deemed acceptable. Keefe masterly shows that despite the different assessments of this move ('godfather of British idealism' vs. 'traitor to the Scottish Common Sense philosophy'), he presents an impressive systematic philosophy. She admirably illustrates how his work is an 'eclectic combination' of aspects of both the Scottish and German schools and the importance of Ferrier in the move from the dominance of one tradition to the other. She presents a well-balanced assessment of his philosophical contributions and points to areas of interest (such as his theory of ignorance) that deserve the reader's attention even if a discussion of them is beyond the remit of the chapter. If the volume is to succeed in convincing the reader that the nineteenth century's British tradition deserves the attention given to other periods, it must encourage her to turn to the primary sources. Keefe's chapter should do exactly that.
Mander's article on Shadworth Hodgson is impressive for the same reason. He justifies the chapter by stating that although philosophical canons'self-reinforce their own narrowness' it is worth remembering how much rich and influential work lies 'just outside their bounds' (173). Hodgson's work does not fit neatly within any of the standard categories used to identify philosophers of the nineteenth century, but his original work on 'pure experience' and 'time perception' greatly influenced philosophers as important as William James and Husserl. Beyond Mander's own justification, Hodgson is a name that James scholars will know well, even though they will probably be unfamiliar with the details of his complex system. Mander has done this community a great service by providing such a clear overview of his thought. Furthermore, his hints towards the connection show that there is much to be written on James and Hodgson's relationship and its importance for the former's development of the theory of pure experience and his radical empiricism.
Bradley's name is probably the most familiar of the four covered in this section, and Basile's contribution on his metaphysics is one of the volume's best chapters. Both Bradley scholars and those unfamiliar with his work will benefit from this piece since not only does Basile provide a clear overview of his thought, he also makes an important contribution to Bradley scholarship by discussing his complex relationship with German philosophy. Basile argues that Bradley develops a 'non-Hegelian' form of idealism, but does not suggest he is free from German influence. Bradley's reaction against the German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart was crucial for the development of his metaphysics. While the view that the British Idealists were merely a group of 'neo-Hegelians' has been shown to be historically inaccurate, the importance of German philosophy for the development of British Idealism was still clearly great. However, to properly understand the importation of German thought onto British soil during this period, we need to understand the philosophies of not just Kant and Hegel, but also Herbart, Lotze, and Trendelenburg. Helpfully, there are hints of a more sophisticated understanding of this German-British dialogue throughout the volume (e.g., Ralph Waller on James Martineau). In addition, Basile's rich chapter includes a clear discussion of Moore and Russell's grave misunderstandings of Bradley's metaphysics, as well as the problems that Darwinism presents for Bradley's theory of the Absolute. Basile's assessment of Bradley's failure to deal with Darwinism is, we shall see, also relevant for the volume's third part that immediately follows his chapter: 'Science and Philosophy'.
Five of the six chapters in the third part principally deal with the impact of evolutionary theory: John Hedley Brooke's 'Evolution and Religion'; Michael Ruse's 'Evolution and Ethics in Victorian Britain'; John Offer's 'Herbert Spencer'; Mark Francis's 'The Evolutionary Turn in Positivism'; and David Boucher's 'British Idealism and Evolution'. The sixth, by Gary Hatfield, however, is dedicated to 'The Emergence of Psychology'. The key insight gained from reading the first five articles together is how many different conceptions of 'evolution' were in currency throughout the century. It was used in a Darwinian sense for sure, but also in Lamarckian and Spencerian ways, and even in a sense that mirrors its etymological meaning of 'unfolding', which has a closer affinity with preformation than Darwinism.
The section starts with Brooke's rich and readable intellectual history of Darwinism's cultural impact, the problems that it presented for theology, and the various criticisms levelled at the position (e.g., Bishop Wilberforce's) as well as the attempts at appropriation (e.g., Asa Gray's). Ruse's piece continues this story by showing that Darwinism, like Christianity, was a story of origins, and therefore could offer, in some ways, an alternative to it. As a replacement it requires an ethics, and Ruse focuses on the different kind of ethics that emerged from the new understandings of evolution presented by Spencer and Darwin. His discussion of how seriously Darwin took ethics is particularly interesting. By focusing on the relationship between ethics and the life sciences, Ruse contributes one of the best examples in the volume of how historical scholarship on nineteenth-century philosophical debates can inform and influence our contemporary thinking, and of how questions dealt with during the period have arisen again at the forefront of philosophical discussion.
Spencer's work is dealt with in more depth in Offer's dense and comprehensive piece. As well as presenting a detailed exposition of his philosophical system as a whole, he identifies its often-underestimated merits as well as its defects and lacunae, and orientates the reader to contemporary debates surrounding Spencer's work. For Offer, Spencer deserves reappraisal for his pioneering interdisciplinarity and his attempt to account for ethical and sociological theorisation through a biological grounding. Because of the wide promulgation of what Offer sees as misguided characterisations of Spencer's thought, he fights an uphill battle, but the argument gains strength from following Ruse's piece. As Ruse suggests, analytic philosophy has historically been wary of its relationship with biology (he guesses due to its appropriation by the pragmatists and Russell's distaste for the latter), but now that this wariness has largely faded, a detailed reassessment of historical thinkers who have been committed to understanding this relationship would be of great profit.
Francis's and Boucher's chapters both show how an important school of nineteenth-century thought attempted to deal with the 'evolutionary turn'. Francis discusses G. H. Lewes's and Leslie Stephen's attempts to incorporate biology into positivism, but he is careful to be clear that the kind of biology being introduced is frequently not Darwinian evolution, and that this 'naturalisation' of positivism comes from a diverse range of sources. Boucher presents the controversial argument that the British Idealists were not unsympathetic to evolution. However, unlike Francis, Boucher is not sensitive enough to the different conceptions of evolution being used at the time, and this means that his argument seems at times to trade on equivocation. The general thrust of the chapter seems to show that they believed Hegel was a better evolutionist than Darwin. Nonetheless, as Basile argued in his critical exposition of Bradley, the kind of evolution that sees the universe as 'unfolding' or 'homeward bound' is very different to the Darwinian concept of the hierarchy of beings as 'a precarious achievement of natural history' (206). It is indeed a'reactionary' conception, not a sympathetic one. The interesting question is to what extent were the idealists influenced by a properly Darwinian understanding of evolution not a pre-Darwinian one. The problem is, I think, exacerbated by the treatment of the British idealists as having a single consistent view on the matter. Boucher certainly is right to argue that there were British idealists that were sympathetic to Darwinism, but unfortunately in this chapter it is not easy to disentangle their views from those that understood 'evolution' in a very different way.
The section ends by moving from evolution to psychology. Hatfield's outstanding contribution argues against the received views of the beginnings of psychology as a discipline that have been presented from both the standpoints of the history of philosophy and the history of psychology. He shows that the emergence of 'experimental' philosophy involved both continuity and change and has roots in the history of empirical psychology, going all the way back to Aristotle's De Anima. Hatfield focuses on the nineteenth century British psychological activities that took place in a variety of different institutional and disciplinary contexts and how psychology benefited from the range of different methods and approaches to it. Accordingly, Hatfield argues, this variety was a sign of an enviably healthy intellectual landscape in which psychology flourished.
The volume's fourth part is its largest and broadest. Its seven chapters work well together and present an illuminating picture of the diverse approaches to ethical, social, and political thought in the nineteenth century and the ways that these three branches relate and overlap with each other. The chapters are: Philip Schofield's 'Jeremy Bentham and James Mill'; Dale E. Miller's 'John Stuart Mill's Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy'; Barbara Caine's 'British Feminist Thought'; David Leopold's 'Karl Marx and British Socialism'; Andrew Vincent's 'The Ethics of British Idealism'; Avital Simhony's 'The Political Thought of the British Idealists' by; and Bart Schultz's 'Henry Sidgwick and the Irrationality of the Universe'. The section begins with Schofield's discussion of Bentham and James Mill's empirically-based theory of morality and how this formed the basis for their accounts both of the ideal aims of government and of how we should best encourage governments to work towards these aims and prevent them from abusing their power and promoting their own interests at the expense of the community as a whole. This chapter nicely presents the historical background for Miller's impressive scholarly piece on J. S. Mill. Mill has received much more scholarly attention than most of the other philosophers discussed in this volume, and Miller does an excellent job of presenting the current debates while arguing for his own specific, controversial, charitable, and convincing account of Mill as a sophisticated kind of ideal-code rule utilitarian.
Although she is clear that there is 'no readily identifiable body of nineteenth-century feminist thought' (384), Caine's contribution presents a fascinating account of the diverse range of feminist views and forms of writing developed throughout the nineteenth century. Caine discusses the importance of fiction, socialist ideas and Robert Owen's conception of social organization based on cooperation for the emerging feminist movement, and also how the importance of the particularity of womanly qualities was emphasised in a way that would be criticised by twentieth-century feminists. Importantly, the reception of Wollstonecraft and the way she was rejected by the mid-Victorian era feminists due to her'scandalous life', but reappropriated at the end of the century thanks to the emergence of the 'new women' movement, guides the very interesting and complicated narrative of the development of different strands of feminist thought. Owen is also discussed in Leopold's contribution on Marx in which Leopold argues that Marx was much more engaged with and had a greater impact on British political life during the nineteenth century than has been appreciated. Most of the discussion is dedicated to Owen's influence on Marx, and Leopold makes a convincing case; however, there is little about the specific character of Marx's own philosophical ideas.
The two chapters on British Idealism by Vincent and Simhony, on its ethical and political thought respectively, work very well together. As Vincent rightly notes these dimensions are hard to disentangle from each other. This is because the British idealist's complex conception of the social organism as a concrete universal forms the essential foundation for both. This relationship, however, works to this volume's advantage. Vincent's broad overview of idealist ethics nicely presents the context for Simhony's compelling contribution, which identifies a number of specific British idealist interventions in political thought. Importantly, Simhony shows that there is a distinctly 'idealist approach' to political philosophy, but she does this while also being clear about key distinctions between the different idealists' approaches. British idealism offers a 'third way' between 'whole-sale laissez-faire capitalism' and'state socialism', she argues, but the British idealists themselves offer 'third ways'. Accordingly, she makes a very convincing case for the continued relevance of the idealist debates and shows that there is much to be gained from engaging with them.
The fourth part ends with an impressive and sophisticated overview of Sidgwick that provides not only an account of his ethical thought, which stresses the non-traditional nature of Sidgwick's relationship to utilitarianism and his attempt to combine it with 'ideal intuitionist' morality, but also a summary of Sidgwick's less-known contributions to politics, economics, and even psychics and metaphysics.
As already stated, the fifth part on 'Religious Philosophy' is less cohesive than the earlier parts. Nonetheless, the individual contributions retain the high level of scholarship maintained throughout the volume. They are: 'The Philosophy of James Martineau' by Ralph Waller; 'John Henry Newman' by Anthony Kenny; 'The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge' by James Vigus; 'Scottish Religious Philosophy, 1850-1900' by Alan P. F. Sell; and, 'British Idealist Philosophy of Religion' by William Sweet. Both Kenny and Vigus argue that his thinker is deserving of greater attention as a philosopher. Kenny shows that Newman's work has been ignored partly because of his religious aims, but he convincingly argues that Newman's valuable contributions to topics concerning belief, knowledge, and certainty can be fruitfully studied independently of the religious context. Vigus argues that now that Coleridge's complete works are available, we can recognise Coleridge as a typically 'post-Kantian' philosopher. Just as 'poetic' writers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Hölderlin have now been recognized for their philosophical contributions, so should Coleridge. Vigus attempts to show this through an exposition of Coleridge's attempt to argue that the ideas of reason are constitutive rather than merely regulative through his understanding of Kant's corpus mysticum. He argues that Coleridge picks up on an understudied issue in Kant's philosophy that, if thought through coherently, can lead to an understanding of ideas as constitutive. Vigus presents an intriguing account of Coleridge's philosophy (particularly his theory of the imagination) and some hints to the value of studying him as a philosopher. Nonetheless, it is clear that the very style of Coleridge's writing makes such a study a daunting task, and the chapter will not convince everyone that it will be worth the pain.
The final section on 'The Practice of Philosophy' includes just two chapters: 'Poetry and the Philosophical Imagination' by Leslie Armour and 'The Professionalization of British Philosophy' by Stuart Brown. Armour attempts to show the important relationship that existed in the nineteenth century between poetry and philosophy. Poetry was considered, he argues, as serving a visionary function that could help philosophers break free from the fixed conceptions of accepted and existing systems. Armour presents a very useful overview of the important metaphysically inclined poets, and both their philosophical influences and influence. However, he deals with a dizzying number of authors and ideas, and the discussion is sometime hard to follow. Brown traces British philosophy's professionalization and how a discipline almost dominated by amateurs at the start of the century had almost completely removed itself from them by its end. He traces the ways the practices of universities themselves reformed during the century, the specific societies essential to philosophy's professional development (such as the Aristotelian Society) and the importance of Mind. He also compares the development of philosophical 'careers' between generations to show concretely the rapid rate of change experienced during this period. Brown's is a valuable and careful work of intellectual history that nicely ends a very valuable and important contribution to nineteenth-century British philosophy.
The Handbook provides a great deal of fecund material for future debates and should, I hope, inspire many to engage in further research on this period of thought. It certainly succeeds in showing that there would be much to be gained from such work.Pac-12 Networks and AT&T U-verse signed an agreement Saturday morning that will provide customers of the fast-growing digital TV provider access to our programming immediately, including Saturday's five football games kicking off at 11 a.m PT. Technology is nifty that way.
Under the agreement, AT&T U-verse will carry the following Pac-12 networks:
Pac-12 Network on channel 759 SD/1759 HD
Pac-12 Bay Area on channel 760 SD/1760 HD
Pac-12 Los Angeles on channel 761 SD/1761 HD
AT&T U-verse will make Pac-12 Networks content available to customers on PCs, tablets and smart phones in the near future.
With the deal, Pac-12 Networks now is available on four of the top six distributors in the U.S., and more than 50 television providers overall. Existing partners continue to launch Pac-12 Networks in more markets around the country including Comcast in Chicago, Time Warner Cable in the Midwest, and Cox in New England and the Washington DC area, among others. If you're new to the Pac-12 Networks family, here are a few useful tools:
Use our channel finder to know where we are on your dial.
Here’s the Pac-12 football schedule with TV info and links to more sports too. Pac-12 Networks will televise 750 events in 2013-14, including 35 football games, 150 men’s basketball games and hundreds of Olympic sports.
Here’s the complete Pac-12 Networks TV schedule with all our original programs, studio shows and live events.
Details for each program in our lineup are found on individual show pages.
Lastly, meet our hosts, Ashley Adamson and Mike Yam, and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott. Welcome aboard.Visit To A Hemp Farm In Co. Meath
Dublin Hemp Museum Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 29, 2017
By Brian Houlihan
Hemp growing in Co. Meath
(Please consider becoming a patron to support the creation of more unique content)
Recently Declan and I from the museum visited a farmer in Co. Meath. While primarily visiting to see his hemp we couldn’t help become enthralled by the 6 acre farm as a whole. Glyn is originally from Wicklow but moved to Meath a number of years ago. Since then he has started to transfer his land into something unique.
Glyn is hoping to turn his home into an open farm so that members of the public can enjoy |
b", "c", "d", "e"), "c", true}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b", "c", "d", "e"), "e", true}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b"), "e", false}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList(), "e", false} }; } // takes parameters from the methods in MyContainsTestProvider @Test @Parameters(source = MyContainsTestProvider.class) public void testContains_usingSeperateClass(final List<String> list, final String a, final boolean expectedResult) { assertEquals(expectedResult, testSubject.contains(list, a)); } public static class MyContainsTestProvider { public static Object[] provideContainsTrueParameters() { return new Object[]{ new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b", "c", "d", "e"), "c", true}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b", "c", "d", "e"), "e", true}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b"), "b", true}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a"), "a", true} }; } public static Object[] provideContainsFalseParameters() { return new Object[]{ new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b", "c", "d", "e"), "f", false}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b", "c", "d", "e"), "z", false}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList("a", "b"), "e", false}, new Object[]{Arrays.asList(), "e", false} }; } } }
And the little class that is the test subject of this unit test.
public class JUnitParamsTutorial { public int add(final int a, final int b) { return a + b; } public boolean contains(final List<String> list, final String a) { return list.contains(a); } }
The first thing to notice in the test class is:
@RunWith(JUnitParamsRunner.class)
... which will run this test with JUnitParams, allowing the use of its specific annotations.
Moving on a bit, you will see the tests, which each have the @Test and @Parameters or @FileParameters annotations on them. @Test is used to define methods as tests. The test methods each have input parameters like you would have in a normal method and are to be used in setting up the tests and possibly contain expected results.
@Test @Parameters({"1, 2, 3", "3, 4, 7", "5, 6, 11", "7, 8, 15"}) public void addProducesCorrectValue_versionOne(final int a, final int b, final int expectedResult) { assertEquals(expectedResult, testSubject.add(a, b)); }
In this test, four sets of three parameters are being passed into the test. This test will execute four times using each set of parameters per run through. The parameters were used to pass the expected result of each set while the remaining were used to pass into the test subject. If you were expecting all of your results to be true, then assertTrue could be used and the expected result does not need to be passed into the test. This test also demonstrated one of the ways to pass parameters into a test, and more methods will be discussed below.
There are a few ways to define parameters for tests. Parameters that are passed into tests using the @Parameters annotation must be Object[]s, and tests using the annotation @FileParameters must be CSVs. The different means to pass in parameters are shown below.
In the annotation: @Parameters({"1, 2, 3", "3, 4, 7", "5, 6, 11", "7, 8, 15"})
The parameters must be primitive objects such as integers, strings, or booleans. Each set of parameters is contained within a single string and will be parsed to their correct values as defined by the test method's signature.
In a method named in the annotation: @Parameters(method = "addParameters")
A separate method can be defined and referred to for parameters. This method must return an Object[] and can contain normal objects.
In a method not named in the annotation: @Parameters
When the annotation is left blank, it will look for a method that has the same name of the test it is attached to prefixed with parametersFor. So if your method is called testA, the parameter method will be called parametersForTestA.
In a class: @Parameters(source = MyContainsTestProvider.class)
A separate class can be used to define parameters for the test. This test must contain at least one static method that returns an Object[], and its name must be prefixed with provide. The class could also contain multiple methods that provide parameters to the test, as long as they also meet the required criteria.
CSV: @FileParameters("resources/JUnitParamsTutorialParameters.csv")
A CSV can also be used to contain the parameters for the tests. It is pretty simple to set up, as it's just a comma separated list. I spent most of the time trying to get the correct path to the file itself…
In summary, I quite like using JUnitParams and try to use it when it is applicable to the tests I am writing — normally, tests that can have a variety of different inputs or have varying outputs. There is one main thing that annoys me when using JUnitParams, though. Debugging can be pretty frustrating, as you cannot easily run one set of parameters at a time when desired, forcing me to comment out the parameters I don’t want to debug into, which isn’t a problem for normal tests, which can be run one at a time. Another, smaller issue I have is that both Eclipse and IntelliJ cannot jump to straight to each individual test when double-clicked on in their test views, although Eclipse has a few extra problems with JUnitParams that IntelliJ doesn’t run into.
For more information on JUnitParams, have a look at their GitHub page, which contains some examples, although some of them are a little out of date and are not usable anymore.
The example code that I used in this post can be found here.Apr 15, 2015; Minneapolis, MN, USA; Minnesota Timberwolves guard Andrew Wiggins (22) dribbles the ball in the first quarter against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Target Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
As Wolves fans, we watched Andrew Wiggins from Day One of his NBA career. We saw the flashes in December, the gradual improvement early in 2015, and the clear “figuring it out” stage late in the season.
We saw how much he grew, and we saw the areas that still need plenty of improvement. While the handle and long-range jumper were better than advertised, Wiggins’ occasionally struggled with indecision and shot selection on offense and his defense left a little something to be desired.
That said, it was a fine rookie season. Wiggins certainly seems to be on a similar path to players like Kevin Durant, and while he may never be quite as inefficient as true superstars like KD, Paul George, Kawhi Leonard, and other top-flight wings, it’s still on the table.
Some of the national folks are now breaking down Wiggins’ rookie year in a bit more detail. Here’s an excerpt from a great piece by Tim Cato at SB Nation:
As young and athletic as Wiggins is, his game rightly should be focused on getting to the rim as often as possible. But passing up open three-pointers or declining to spot up behind the arc when he’s off the ball isn’t helping, either. Of all the good things Wiggins did in April, shooting the three wasn’t one of them: he attempted just nine, making one. He shot 36 percent before the All Star break but only 16 percent coming back from it. If Saunders is in any way discouraging Wiggins from taking the shot, that’s absurd…
This is a hot-button issue for many Wolves fans, and we’ve covered it extensively here at Dunking With Wolves. Three-point shot attempts will be closely monitored this season, and Wiggins is one player that needs to be shooting from beyond the arc with greater frequency.
Elsewhere, the possibility of an Anthony Bennett trade is still being discussed, although no progress is apparently being made.
It’s not surprising, as there is little about Bennett and his contract status that is appealing. He probably isn’t going anywhere and at this point, Wolves fans simply need to cross their fingers and hope that they don’t pick up his Year Four option before the deadline in October.Eighteen months after his wife, Julia, died from breast cancer, Craig Sullivan went on a mission -- to find another great love.
He considered dating sites and matchmaking services, but somehow, to the 49-year-old, that method of finding a partner seemed cliché.
With a little inspiration from The Police song "Message in a Bottle," the man from North Lanarkshire, Scotland, came up with the perfect plan.
Craig Sullivan used the "Message in a Bottle" technique in hopes of landing a date. Facebook/Craig Sullivan
"That started me thinking. If I could find some good places to throw some bottles, they might wash up on your shore," Sullivan wrote in a blog post. "You might open one and read a message."
On July 20, Sullivan went on a week-long journey around the United Kingdom, determined to spread his love letters far and wide.
"I don't have expectations that this will lead somewhere or that it has to have a romantic conclusion," Sullivan added. "It's the journey and the unknown future that's the most exciting part."
Unfortunately, not everyone was as thrilled by the idea as Sullivan.
Several of those who received the love letters accused Sullivan of littering and polluting the environment.
"Hi Craig, I love how romantic your idea is but please reconsider putting all of these into the sea, lots of us spend hours picking up beach," one woman responded in a letter of her own.
"How about joining a big beach clean, you may pick up a hobby & meet someone there too? We deserve love & clean beaches," another replied.
Sullivan was reported to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) after releasing about 200 of the bottles into the River Cree in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, according to BBC News. Sepa said the bottles were removed from the river by locals.
Craig Sullivan spread 2,000 messages in bottles in bodies of water around the United Kingdom. Craig Sullivan
Sullivan told BBC News he stopped releasing the bottles after he received a notice from Sepa, along with several angry responses from people around the U.K.
"The abuse was not very good. In several instances it got out of hand. It was never my intent to harm the environment. It was more accident, naivety as well as stupidity in the execution," Sullivan told BBC News, explaining that most of the bottles washed up on a beach in Wales or got caught in a net at the River Cree.
But Sullivan doesn't regret his decision.
It has been more than a week since he dumped the bottles and the 49-year-old says he's already received 50 responses from women who have shown an interest in getting to know him.
"I am genuinely sorry for upsetting people, but I do not regret what I did," Sullivan said.Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com
Milo Yiannopoulos could stand to lose his job as editor at Breitbart News over newly unearthed comments he once made about pedophilia, the FOX Business Network reported.
According to the financial network “there is a fierce internal debate at Breitbart over whether he should remain with the website over his latest comments,” with some at the right-wing site telling Fox News that Yiannopoulos could be dismissed as early as end of the day Monday.
Yiannopoulos was disinvited from Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Monday after a video of him talking about pedophilia resurfaced over the weekend. In it, Yiannopoulos can be heard saying that some relationships between adults and 13-year-olds are consensual and joking that his own experience as a victim of molestation made him good at oral sex.
Also Read: Milo Yiannopoulos Responds to Backlash: 'I Am a Gay Man, and a Child Abuse Victim'
In response to the backlash, Yiannopoulos explained that his comments have been taken out of context.
Fox Business reports that some inside Breitbart say the decision on whether to keep Yiannopoulos “will ultimately be a business one” and that senior executives there are weighing how “damaging his comments are to the Breitbart brand.”
“Breitbart already has advertising issues regarding its association with the Alt-Right, and this doesn’t help the business side,” a person with “direct knowledge of the debate inside Breitbart” told Fox Business.
Also Read: CPAC Cancels Milo Yiannopoulos as Speaker Over Pedophilia Comments
Meanwhile the Washingtonian reports that “at least a half-dozen” employees are prepared to leave the company if Yiannopoulos isn’t “promptly” fired. The site quotes an unnamed senior editor at Breitbart.
“The fact of the matter is that there’s been so many things that have been objectionable about Milo over the last couple of years, quite frankly. This is something far more sinister,” the senior editor says. “If the company isn’t willing to act, there are at least half a dozen people who are willing to walk out over it.”
A spokesperson for Breitbart declined TheWrap’s request for comment.
You can watch the complete Fox Business report in the video above.
Related stories from TheWrap:
Milo Yiannopoulos Denies Defending Pedophilia After Shocking Comments Emerge (Video)
Milo Yiannopoulos Fact Check: Are Trans People 'Disproportionately Involved' in Sex Crimes?
Bill Maher Defends Booking Milo Yiannopoulos on 'Real Time'Greg Abbott may not on the ballot on at least one precinct’s balloting machines in Bexar County, Breitbart Texas has learned. Lt. Governor Candidate David Dewhurst appears to have been listed on the ballot in place of Abbott at one polling location.
A Bexar County resident posted a supposed image of the ballot, with Abbott’s name absent, on Instagram.
The Bexar County Election Administrator’s Office has confirmed the complaint. “We’re aware of the situation and trying to resolve it,” a spokeswoman at the office told Breitbart Texas.
But a source with the Republican Party of Texas, who spoke to Breitbart Texas on the condition of anonymity, said that the Texas Secretary of State has not been able to confirm the authenticity of this supposed incident.
The San Antonio Express-News additionally reported that one Bexar County election official believes the photo was photoshopped. “I think it’s a photoshopped deal but we are checking,” said Jacque Callanen, Bexar County Elections Administrator, told the Express-News.
Logan Churchwell of True the Vote — a nonprofit vote-monitoring organization — told Breitbart Texas that the absence of Abbott’s name is not a machine calibration issue. “What has happened is that someone in Bexar County who programmed the voting in at least one precinct input David Dewhurst in the field for ‘Governor’ instead of inputting Greg Abbott,” Churchwell said. “The issue is not related to the machine itself — somebody made a data entry error.”
According to Churchwell, the voter was at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Antonio.
At this point, it is unclear if the error was intentional or an honest mistake.
The issue is currently being looked into. The Bexar County spokeswoman told Breitbart Texas, “Everyone has to be on the ticket, we’re a democratic society.”
*Disclaimer: Logan Churchwell used to be employed by Breitbart News.
Follow Kristin on Twitter @KristinBTate.Buy Photo Center Electric co-founder Jay Adelson (right), native Detroiter, entrepreneur and venture capitalist based in San Francisco, and Andy Smith, General Partner of Center Electric, pose for a photo at Techstars Mobility office in Detroit. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
Jay Adelson was born in Detroit, raised in Southfield, high school at Cranbrook, college at Boston University, became a serial Internet entrepreneur, CEO of Digg, and at age 37, appeared on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Last week, Adelson, now 44, was back in Detroit, scouting the local tech scene as cofounder of a year-old venture capital fund called Center Electric, focused on the Internet of Things.
He and partner Andy Smith are now raising $70 million to $100 million to invest in early-stage companies — and Adelson told me they expect to deploy more than half of it in Michigan.
The twosome were here last week in Michigan for an “immersion day” event, arranged by Ann Arbor-based Renaissance Venture Capital Fund to help lure more investment into Michigan. Renaissance, which was created by Business Leaders for Michigan, has raised more than $120 million since 2008 to invest in national VC funds.
As part of their visit, Adelson and Smith met with Whirlpool and Roush Industries. They also met with the Techstars Mobility start-up accelerator in Detroit and with technology transfer officials at University of Michigan.
So what exactly, I asked, is the “Internet of Things?” Why is it a big deal?
And why do Adelson and Smith, a couple of Silicon Valley hotshots, think it might soon become a big driver of economic growth in Michigan?
Buy Photo Center Electric co-founder Jay Adelson (right), native Detroiter, entrepreneur and venture capitalist based in San Francisco, and Andy Smith, General Partner of Center Electric. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)
Smith, a former executive at several tech firms and coauthor of the 2010 book “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” described IoT as the third wave of the Internet revolution. The first was based on the personal computer and the second on mobile devices with screens, such as phones and iPads.
This third wave — that will connect over 50 billion devices in the next five years, from cars to washers and industrial robots — will depend not just on screens and gadgets and software apps. But it will also require a massive buildup in hardware infrastructure to support a world in which Internet connectivity is a basic expectation, like electricity or water.
“When you talk about uplifting the Internet to handle 50 billion devices, you need to be very long-term focused. The requirements, in terms of ability to manufacture and deploy at large scale in terms of hardware, are unmet by the current marketplace,” Adelson said. “You’re talking about a need to build billion-dollar independent companies. The employee base you need for that has to be an employee base that understands that you have a long-term relationship with a company.”
“And frankly, you get that here from people in Michigan in an unparalleled way. Some of it is the auto culture... What could be much more complicated than building a car in terms of integrating systems, data, everything,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of competency here that’s found nowhere else in the nation.”
Chris Rizik, CEO of the Renaissance fund of funds, said once VCs get here and see all the “activity going on here and all the university research, they will realize this is a place with great technology where they can do some successful investing.”
A throwback name
Adelson and Smith have lived and spent their careers mostly in California, but Adelson explained that name of their VC fund hearkens to a business on the Detroit-Southfield border that his great-grandfather founded in the 1940s, to sell electric supplies to construction contractors.
Center Electric Co. at Eight Mile and Greenfield ultimately failed in 1993, a casualty of the savings and loan crisis that rocked the construction industry.
“They lost the business, they lost their home, my family lost everything,” said Adelson, who had left Michigan for college a few years earlier.
“But here’s the great story,” he added. “Because of the way my father took care of customers and vendors from a credit standpoint — it was such a good relationship — there was a great outpouring of support that carried my family through that hard time.”
His parents moved in with other family members for awhile, his dad got a job with another electric supplier and his mom was later hired by a real estate developer who had been a long-time customer.
“The lesson we learned was that you don’t need to sacrifice a moral compass in business,” he said. “I’ll never forget that.”
Adelson is mindful of that lesson as he and Smith — with their VC approach — try to foster a more humane, sustainable business culture than what they’ve seen evolve out West.
“What’s happened in Silicon Valley is that we’ve fostered a culture where your talent is mercenary,” he said. Entrepreneurs and engineers can working in a place 12 months, see their stock-options vest and move on to the next company.
“The venture culture and pressure for short-term returns has sort of promoted this,” he said. People talk a lot about this problem in Silicon Valley, Adelson said, “but I felt like in order to have impact on that, you have to stop blogging about it – and instead start a venture firm and behave differently.”
‘Collective amnesia’
Previous immersion-days visitors have included Boston based Atlas Venture, a big life-sciences investor, plus IT-focused firms Pelion Ventures from Utah and Edison Ventures from New Jersey. All have since made return trips to explore possible deals, Rizik said.
Adelson, while not committing yet to invest in specific Michigan companies or set up an office, sounds pretty gung-ho about the likelihood.
“People forget that the Internet started here,” he said. “It’s just like we have collective amnesia about where this all happened. If it weren’t for Merit Network and University of Michigan, the Internet would never have been commercialized in the first place.”
“I feel that the connected car is definitely coming from Detroit; it’s not something that’s just going to come from Silicon Valley,” he said, although there’s some things to be learned from the IT world about faster iteration of product cycles.
It will be intriguing to watch what Center Electric does in Michigan, because it sounds like the two partners will definitely be back. “We’re not afraid to jump on a plane,” Smith said. And Adelson said his parents, now retired, and a sister and cousins, are all still in metro Detroit, so he has built-in reasons to visit.
“Our philosophy,” he added, “is that we’re not going to invest in a company if we can’t somehow affect the outcome, if we can’t de-risk it ourselves. It’s not like we have superpowers, but if our experiences don’t offer value, then we probably shouldn’t be investing there.”
Venture capital firms take deep look at Michigan with ‘Immersion Days’
■ What are Immersion Days? Regional business groups will host national venture capital firms to take a close look at emerging entrepreneurial activity. In Michigan, they were launched by Renaissance Venture Capital fund of funds and in the Cincinnati area by Cintrifuse in 2012. Last week's visit to Michigan by Central Electric was cohosted by Renaissance, along with the Michigan Venture Capital Association.
■ Callbacks? Renaissance and Cintrifuse say national firms have returned for follow-up visits for investment opportunities. Renaissance, based on private dollars without the bureaucratic strings of government-funded programs, was a model for Cintrifuse. But Renaissance manager Chris Rizik said Cintrifuse started immersion days and Renaissance copied it.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1N4Gf1fA group of'super moustronauts' with remarkable abilities was yesterday launched into space.
These mice lack a gene that normal mice have, called Muscle Ring Finger 1 (MuRF-1), which causes muscles to deteriorate.
Scientists hope that by analysing the super mice in microgravity, they will be able to create drugs for use by humans to prevent muscle loss on Earth.
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A group of'super moustronauts' was yesterday launched into space with remarkable abilities.These mice lack a gene that normal mice have, called Muscle Ring Finger 1 (MuRF-1), which causes muscles to deteriorate. Pictured is a mouse on a model of the ISS
The 10 mice are the first mammals, excluding humans, to spend a month in space. The typical stay for mice for previous missions has been around two weeks.
MuRF-1 is responsible for marking proteins for destruction in both human and mouse muscles. It also plays a key role in accelerated muscle loss through ageing and other chronic diseases.
For their mission, Nasa has created special homes for the mice to live in on the space station, which include systems to stop their food and water from floating around.
'By flying a mouse, whose typical lifespan is much shorter than humans', you can follow the course of bone and muscle loss over a much greater percentage of the mouse lifespan than you can in humans,' Michael Roberts, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space's senior research manager, told Francie Diep at Popular Science.
Nasa has created special homes for the mice to live in on the space station, which include systems to stop their food and water from floating around
THE ANIMAL SPACE RACE Six national space programs have so far flown animals into space: the Soviet Union, the United States, France, China, Japan and Iran. They were used as surrogates to test the suitability of the space environment for human habitation. Fruit flies were the first animals to be sent into orbit when they were put on board a U.S.-launched V-2 rocket on February 20, 1947. Two years later, Albert II, a Rhesus Monkey, became the first monkey to go into space. In November 1957 Russia sent Laika the dog into orbit aboard the Soviet Sputnik 2 spacecraft. Then, on January 31, 1961, Ham became the first chimpanzee launched into outer space as part of the Nasa space programme.
This is of particular interest to space agencies who are racing to get the first humans on Mars. Any astronaut undertaking the journey will need to spend long stretches in space.
However, microgravity in space means that astronauts no longer need to use certain muscles, causing them to slowly waste away.
'Muscles are the storage space for amino acids, the only reservoir for them,' said Sam Cadena, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research program manager. 'If you lose muscle, you lose health.'
As well as the mice, Sunday's cargo shipment to the ISS included a 3D printer, a device for measuring Earth's ocean winds, 30 fruit flies and metal samples for a golf club manufacturer.
Much-needed spacesuit batteries are on board as well, along with the usual supply of food, clothes and electronic gear.The authors of the much-discussed Bitcoin Sidechains paper “Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains,” released in October, have formed the company Blockstream to develop new ways to accelerate innovation in digital currencies, open assets and smart contracts. In November, Blockstream closed a $21 million seed funding round with nearly 40 investors, including well-known pioneers of the Internet and financial services sectors.
The Bitcoin Sidechains paper envisages an ecosystem of “sidechains” separate from the main Bitcoin blockchain but interoperable with it. A sidechain can carry bitcoin as currency, in which case users will be able to seamlessly transfer bitcoin between the sidechain and the main blockchain. At the same time, the sidechain can implement changes from Bitcoin Core. For example, a sidechain can implement more powerful scripting features or more watertight privacy.
For a readable explanation of sidechains, see “A simple explanation of Bitcoin ‘Sidechains,” by Richard Gendal Brown, executive architect for banking innovation at IBM UK.
“[A]t any point, whoever is holding these coins on the sidechain can send them back to the Bitcoin network by creating a special transaction on the sidechain that immobilizes the bitcoins on the sidechain,” explains Gendal Brown. “They’ll disappear from the sidechain and become available again on the Bitcoin network, under the control of whoever last owned them on the sidechain.”
The deployment of sidechains interoperable with Bitcoin requires the implementation of suitable hooks in Bitcoin Core. That will inevitably take some time, but it’s worth noting that some Blockstream team members are also Bitcoin Core developers.
In February, developers Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja released a first draft version another much-discussed paper, proposing a decentralized Bitcoin Lightning Network where related transactions can take place instantly on “micropayment channels” off-chain, and only the final settlement is processed by the blockchain. According to the authors, lightning networks would enable bitcoin scalability, efficient micropayments, and near-instant transactions.
The implementation of lightning networks would also require appropriate tweaks to Bitcoin core. Some developers have noted that there is a certain degree of affinity between sidechains and lightning networks.
“Other approaches seek to modify Bitcoin protocols in various ways,” wrote Robert McGrath. “For example, Sidechains aim to create alternative blockchains hanging off the main blockchain, which would help limit the costs of the main blockchain. Another variant is the Lightning network, which aims to allow some transactions to be performed “on the side,” and on send the results to the main blockchain.”
Rusty Russell, an Australian developer known for his work on the Linux kernel, wrote a series of blog posts about interesting features of lightning networks. “The key revelation of the paper is that we can have a network of arbitrarily complicated transactions, such that they aren’t on the blockchain (and thus are fast, cheap and extremely scalable), but at every point are ready to be dropped onto the blockchain for resolution if there’s a problem,” he said. “This is genuinely revolutionary.”
Now it appears that the development efforts for sidechains and lightning networks are coming together. Russell, who joined Blockstream a few weeks ago, is working on lightning networks, and one of his first actions was to set up a Blockstream-hosted mailing list for “Discussion of the development of the Lightning Network, a caching layer for bitcoin.” The new mailing list archives are freely accessible.
“They hired me,” Russell said on Reddit. “We agreed I’d be working on developing lightning. I set up a mailing list and am developing a toy prototype to explore the ideas. Will put on github once that’s ready (two weeks?) but it’s a long long way from anything someone could use. I’m excited about lightning, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”A Tory MPP is in hot water for suggesting a female nominee to the Ontario Energy Board do “something about this coffee” at Queen’s Park. Randy Pettapiece (Perth-Wellington) made the comment Tuesday morning during a standing committee meeting where Rumina Velshi, an engineer who has two master’s degrees, was also present.
Tory MPP Randy Pettapiece's comment — described as "a clumsy attempt at humour" — to a female engineer during a committee meeting Tuesday prompted an apology by the Perth-Wellington representative. ( Karen Longwell / Northumberland )
Liberal MPP Daiene Vernile said she and other MPPs were in “disbelief.” “I was compelled to jump in,” added Vernile (Kitchener Centre). “This is a woman with incredible academic and professional credentials, and that he would order her to go to the kitchen — ‘go to the kitchen,’ he said — and do something about the coffee was demeaning, degrading and, I think, sexist.” Velshi is the mother of Alykhan Velshi, Tory leader Patrick Brown’s new chief of staff.
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She told the Star via email that Pettapiece apologized to her after the meeting, and that she was not offended. “It was a clumsy attempt at humour,” she said. “During the committee meeting, his comments about my qualifications were entirely positive.” In a statement, Pettapiece said he was sorry about what was said. “They were made in the spirit of previous comments I, and other members, have made regarding the quality of the coffee. Nevertheless, I apologize to anyone I may have offended. Immediately following the committee proceedings, I apologized to Mrs. Velshi about the regrettable remarks.” The exchange began after MPPs were asked to discuss a motion regarding Velshi’s appointment. “Maybe with her background, she could go to the kitchen and get them to do something about this coffee?” Pettapiece said.
Vernile responded: “You want a woman to get coffee for us, is that what you are saying?” To which Pettapiece replied: “No, do something about it, the taste of it,” later adding he said it because of “her scientific background.”
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Vernile said while “the coffee is not good in that committee — however to put that in front of Ms. Velshi is insulting.... It was just inappropriate.” “I have to wonder about the bigger picture, too,” Vernile added. “This is not the first time that this caucus has had an issue with inappropriate remarks being made about female colleagues.” She was referring to MPP Jack MacLaren, who took sensitivity training after telling a crude joke aimed at a female MP during a charity fundraiser last March. Vernile is expected to raise the matter when the committee meets next week, and is looking for a formal apology from Pettapiece to the committee.A 15-year-old Swedish girl who ran away with her boyfriend to join ISIS has been rescued for a second time, in a raid carried out in Mosul, Iraq, by Kurdish special forces last week.
Marilyn Stefanie Nevalainen, from Boras, western Sweden was pregnant when she left her home country along with her 19-year-old ISIS-supporter boyfriend in May last year.
She was rescued from ISIS by Kurdish forces in late October, but escaped from her saviours to go back to her partner, and gave birth to a son days later, Swedish media reports.
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Marilyn Stefanie Nevalainen, from Boras, western Sweden was pregnant when she ran away from her foster home in April last year, along with her 19-year-old ISIS-supporter boyfriend
Ms Nevalainen was first reported missing in June by both her biological parents and her foster family, after tricking the latter that the former had allowed her to go to Stockholm for a few days.
She was last seen at a train station on May 31, where she and her 19-year-old boyfriend were dropped off by her foster family, where she had been living since February.
According to Swedish media, the couple had married in a Muslim ceremony in Stockholm in early 2015.
The couple reportedly travelled via Denmark and Bulgaria, before entering Syria via Turkey, and joined an ISIS-linked group on arrival.
The first attempt to free Ms Nevalainen was carried out at the end of October, when she was heavily pregnant, but the teenager somehow managed to return to her boyfriend near Mosul.
Back to ISIS: The teenager was rescued from ISIS by Kurdish forces in late October, but escaped from her saviours to go back to her partner, and gave birth to a son
TALES OF A TROUBLED TEEN: MARILYN NEVALAINEN'S BLOG Ms Nevalainen appears to have been an avid blogger in her pre- and early teens, and her musings tell the tale of a troubled young girl. In one post written at the tender age of 13, she writes about having meetings with social services, before announcing that she is going out for a smoke. In another, she appears to have been in trouble with the law, as she blogs ahead of a police interview. On Sunday, 22 December, 2013 she writes: 'Haha, gonna totally flip on these cop w****s tomorrow, I can feel it already. Don’t give a s*** about the s*** I'm gonna get, don’t regret anything of what I have done… Haha, kisses’ And in one post written just one year before her marriage to a strict Muslim ISIS fighter, she offers her opinions on drugs. 'As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think drugs are that bad. Not that I’ve tested everything there is, but still. In my opinon, the drugs you can smoke shouldn’t be called drugs! Because what do those drugs do exactly? Nothing! They just make you dopey as fuck – at least for me! 'I stick to dope if I’m doing drugs, so according to me, there’s nothing bad about drugs, as long as you know what youre doing, it’s chill!'
A few days later, she gave birth to a son, whose whereabouts are not yet known, Aftonbladet reports
Ms Nevalainen has now claimed that she was'misled' into running away from home by her boyfriend, an ISIS jihadist fighter who has since reportedly been killed in a Russian air strike.
The teenager was rescued in a raid by Kurdish special forces last week, the autonomous region's security council said in a statement on Tuesday.
The 16-year-old travelled from Sweden to Syria last year and then crossed the border into Iraq, where she was rescued near the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul on February 17 by forces from the Kurdish counterterrorism department, the statement added.
The Kurdish security council identified the rescued teenager as coming from the town of Boras and said she had been misled into making the journey to Syria by an Islamic State member in Sweden.
'The Kurdistan Region Security Council was called upon by Swedish authorities and members of her family to assist in locating and rescuing her from ISIS,' the statement read.
Ms Nevalainen, is currently in the Kurdistan region and will be handed over to Swedish authorities so she can return home once necessary arrangements are put place, it added.For those of you who don’t know, I have two little brothers: Matt and Isaac. I’m four and six years older than both, but we’ve always been very close. In fact, I stayed home a lot in high school because that is where my brothers were and I loved spending time with them. I might’ve missed out on a lot of fun with friends, but I don’t regret it.
Our childhood was always happy and full of outdoor activity. Our woodland home was the greatest playground any kid could ask for. We made forts, shot grasshoppers with BB guns, pushed down dead birch trees, and eventually turned the backyard into a paintball course after receiving our first markers on one particularly awesome Christmas.
My parents followed suit because that is what my parents did. Everything we tried, they tried as well. My Dad bought his own marker and then picked one up for my Mom as well. Eventually our friends found out and began to matriculate over to join the fray. A weekly five-on-five match was fairly common at the Viau house followed by ice cold Coke and EXTRA sloppy joes.
We did everything together and had a very hard time leaving home as a result. In fact, doing so is still difficult for all involved. We’re spread across the country now and don’t get together nearly as much as I wish, but when we do it is evident that things haven’t really changed. We still do everything as a family, only now the “everything” is archery.
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claim, National Public Radio reports that a zettabyte is equal to “the amount of data that would fill 250 billion DVDs.”
Back to those bulging Stasi filing cabinets. Imagine that a typical filing cabinet with 60 files of 30 pages per file takes up about 4.3 square feet of space. Each 30-page file would equal roughly 120 MB of data. Given the amount of storage available to the NSA in its Utah location, if all the data stored there were printed and stored in traditional filing cabinets, those cabinets would occupy nearly 6.6 million square miles!
Nothing like the Stasi, indeed.
Secret Police Minus the Police Powers
Is there any clearer lens through which to view the future than the past? Is not the United States of 2013 eerily and tragically traveling along a similar trajectory to that followed by the formerly free Germans and the communist Stasi that ultimately deprived them of their liberties?
In describing the growth and survival of the East German surveillance state and the Stasi’s activities that undergirded it, Scott Horton wrote that East Germany was a country “in which the power and authority of the intelligence services to spy on their own citizens rested on an elaborate network of laws that empowered surveillance and eroded the rights of citizens specified in the country’s constitution.”
Again, the Stasi and the Cold War communist East German regime had nothing on the NSA and 21st-century America.
From the enactment of the Patriot Act to the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, Congress after Congress and consecutive presidents have usurped powers the scope of which are unknown in the written record of government.
Before launching into a report on the myriad methods being used by our own federal government to keep us under the constant vigilance of its never-blinking eye, the reader needs to have in the front of his mind the standard to which the federal government must be held.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution mandates:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Recent events demonstrate that for over a decade, our elected representatives (and the courts, for that matter) have disregarded the Constitution and built a domestic spy apparatus that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the blueprint provided by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution.
Throwing a Wrench Into the Works
On August 1, former low-level networking subcontractor Edward Snowden entered Russian territory.
Russian President Vladimir Putin permitted Snowden to take up temporary residence in Russia. At home, President Obama charged the young man with espionage, a curious charge given that even the president admits there is no evidence that Snowden transferred any sensitive information to a foreign government, an essential element of the crime he is accused of committing. No matter. President Obama is not known for hewing to the Constitution or the law.
The cache of documents Snowden holds was leaked to the Washington Post and to The Guardian (U.K.) and contains compelling evidence of the NSA’s wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment through the dragnet surveillance of phone records and monitoring of Internet traffic.
With the assistance of Glen Greenwald of The Guardian, Snowden has leaked one constitutional violation after another committed by the NSA. All of which, it must be understood, was done with the cooperation of the president, the Congress, and the courts. The strength of the evidence of collusion among the three branches of the federal government in the de facto repeal of the Fourth Amendment is overwhelming.
Tyranny Erected in Cyberspace
Among the most disturbing disclosures found within the reams of Edward Snowden’s revelations was the surrender by major telecommunications companies of the otherwise private phone records of millions of Americans — none of whom was, as required by the Constitution, suspected of committing any sort of crime.
According to a court order labeled “TOP SECRET,” federal judge Roger Vinson ordered Verizon to turn over the phone records of millions of its U.S. customers to the NSA.
The order, issued in April by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and leaked on the Internet by The Guardian, compels Verizon to provide these records on an “ongoing daily basis” and to hand over to the domestic spy agency “an electronic copy” of “all call detail records created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”
This information includes the phone numbers involved, the electronic identity of the device, the calling card numbers (if any) used in making the calls, and the time and duration of the call.
In other words, millions of innocent Americans have had their call records shared with a federal spy agency in open and hostile defiance of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of the right of the people to be free from such unreasonable searches and seizures.
What is reasonable? Legally speaking, “the term reasonable is a generic and relative one and applies to that which is appropriate for a particular situation.”
Even if the reasonableness threshold is crossed, though, there must be a warrant and suspicion of commission of or intent to commit a crime. Neither the NSA nor Verizon has asserted that even one of the millions whose phone records were seized fits that description.
When contacted by The New American, a spokesman for Verizon declined to comment on his company’s compliance with the order.
Such a demur is expected in light of the provision of the order that prohibits Verizon, the FBI, or the NSA from revealing to the public — including the Verizon customers whose phone records now belong to the Obama administration — that the data is being given to the government.
Glen Greenwald of The Guardian details the data being seized by the NSA:
The information is classed as “metadata,” or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such “metadata” is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data — the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to — was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.
While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.
Perhaps the most disturbing take-away from the leak of this secret court document ordering Verizon to hand over customer call logs and other data to a federal surveillance agency is the fact that the government considers the protections of the Fourth Amendment to be nothing more than a “parchment barrier” that is easily torn through. The Obama administration regards the Constitution — as did the Bush administration before it — as advisory at best.
Of course, being a subcontractor in the construction of the surveillance state pays handsomely. As reported by The New American, on August 16, Verizon announced that it was awarded a 10-year, $10-billion contract “to provide cloud and hosting services” to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Apparently, crimes against the Constitution pay, and they pay very well.
Social Media Surveillance
Have you updated your Facebook or Twitter accounts lately? If so, the government likely knows what you posted, when you posted it, and who read what you wrote.
According to a statement posted on Facebook’s website June 14, government agencies — including federal, state, and local authorities — requested user data on between 18,000 and 19,000 account holders.
The remarkable disclosure of government requests for users’ private information follows successful negotiations between Facebook and other tech giants and the federal government.
Over the past few weeks, Facebook, Google, and other technology companies who were implicated in the revelations of the covert NSA surveillance program known as PRISM have petitioned the feds to allow them to disclose their level of participation in surveillance requests received from government entities.
Under PRISM, the NSA and the FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time,” as reported by the Washington Post.
One document in the Snowden revelations indicated that PRISM was “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.” Snowden claimed that the program was so invasive that the NSA and the FBI “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
Most of these requests by the government are made under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Not surprisingly, when the government asks the special surveillance court to approve their snooping, judges give them the go-ahead.
In fact, in April, the Department of Justice revealed to Congress the number of applications for eavesdropping received and rejected by the FISA court: In 2012, of the 1,789 requests made by the government to monitor the electronic communications of citizens, not a single one was rejected.
Following the negotiations that opened the way for Facebook to report its cooperation with requests to hand over user information, Microsoft made a similar surveillance disclosure. A blog post on the Redmond, Washington-based company’s website declared:
For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities (including local, state and federal).
According to the information Snowden released, both companies that disclosed government surveillance requests — Facebook and Microsoft — were giving the government access to the private information of millions of users.
They were not alone, however. Yahoo, Google, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple all allowed the agents of the federal surveillance state to secretly snoop on their users.
Every Keystroke Recorded
On July 31 Glen Greenwald published another drip in the ocean of Snowden leaks. Under a program known as “XKeyscore,” the NSA monitors and records every e-mail written by every American, again without a warrant and without probable cause, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment.
Greenwald, after examining a PowerPoint presentation included in the information he received from Snowden, explained the scope of XKeyscore: “One presentation claims the [XKeyscore] program covers ‘nearly everything a typical user does on the internet,’ including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.” “Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing ‘real-time’ interception of an individual’s internet activity,” he added.
How does it work? Greenwald explained that, too: “An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKeyscore to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages. Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used.”
It is important to note that XKeyscore doesn’t record phone conversations. There is evidence, however, that the NSA records every one of those, as well, and stores the content in one of its many data warehouses, such as the one in Utah that goes online within weeks.
Of course, there is no doubt that mobile phone conversations are being recorded.
The federal government is remotely activating the microphones and cameras in Android smartphones and Windows laptops, according to a report published by the Wall Street Journal on August 3.
Citing a “former US official,” the Journal says court documents reveal that the FBI is using a variety of “hacking” tools to ramp up the scope of the surveillance of millions of Americans, keeping many unwittingly under the watchful eye of Washington.
One of the Journal’s anonymous sources described a part of the FBI called the “Remote Operations Unit.” Agents in this specialized unit prefer, if possible, to install the remote control software by uploading to the target’s computer using a USB flash drive. When the g-men-come-hackers can’t get access to the target’s computer, they install the surveillance software over the Internet “using a document or link that loads software when the person clicks or views it.”
It is not only possible for the federal government to listen to your conversations using the microphone in your Android smartphone and watch you while you sit in your own home on your own computer, but they do so regularly and can do so very easily.
Purportedly, the FBI has been using these methods of surveillance “for over a decade,” but their use has come to light only recently by way of “court documents and interviews” with people familiar with the programs.
Is the NSA Policing Itself?
In what likely amounts to another middling misdirection, on August 15 the Washington Post reported that an internal audit of the NSA revealed that the agency violated its own privacy protection rules 2,776 times.
NSA Compliance Director John DeLong tried putting a positive spin on the report. During a press conference on August 16, DeLong assured the media that the NSA is not involved in “willful violations” of the law.
“People need to understand there’s no willful violations here,” he said. “We really do look for them, detect them and correct them.” “No one at NSA, not me or anyone else, thinks they are okay,” he added.
He additionally claimed that the number of incidental violations of privacy laws is “minuscule … a couple over the past decade.”
Minuscule or not, why is such a disclosure irrelevant? Consider the following analysis published by Ron Paul on his Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website:
Though it made for sensational headlines last week, the 2,776 NSA violations of its own intercept guidelines over the course of one year are irrelevant. The millions and millions of “authorized” intercepts of our communications are all illegal — except for the very few carried out in pursuit of a validly-issued search warrant in accordance with the Fourth Amendment. That is the real story. Drawing our attention to the violations unfortunately sends the message that the “authorized” spying on us is nothing to be concerned about.
E-mail and Snail Mail
The U.S. government is not content to monitor your phone calls and your Internet activity; it’s now reading your snail mail, too.
A story in the New York Times published Wednesday, July 3, tells the story of Buffalo, New York, resident Leslie James Pickering. Pickering reports that last September he noticed “something odd in his mail”: a “handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home,” the Times story claims.
The card — a picture of which appears in the Times story — appears to read: “Show all mail to supv [supervisor] for copying prior to going out on the street.” Pickering’s name was written on the card, as well as the word “Confidential,” written in green ink. Apparently, Pickering was the unwitting target of a “longtime surveillance system” the Times calls “mail covers.”
It doesn’t stop there, however. While snail mail surveillance has been a tool of law enforcement for over a century, the program that targeted Pickering is called Mail Isolation Control and Tracking. As part of this surveillance tactic, the “Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.”
When combined, the NSA and the U.S. Postal Service can keep every form of communication — electronic and conventional — under constant surveillance, without probable cause.
All Movements Are Monitored
Beyond the government’s ability to watch and record every activity carried on in cyberspace, its capacity for keeping an eye on the real world comings and goings of citizens is immensely more jarring and less publicized.
The U.S. government exercises control over a massive and technologically advanced camera-based surveillance system that has the capacity to keep the urban population of this country under the watchful eye of government 24 hours a day.
TrapWire is the name of this network of cameras and other surveillance tools. Unlike other elements of the central government’s cybersurveillance program, word about TrapWire was not leaked by Obama administration insiders. The details of this nearly unbelievable surveillance scheme were made public by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group founded by Julian Assange.
Exactly what is TrapWire? According to one description of the program, from the online Russia Today:
Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.
Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence.
As with so many of the federal government’s unconstitutional efforts at placing each and every citizen of the United States under the never-blinking eye of those who consider themselves our caretakers, TrapWire is sold as being a necessary weapon in the War on Terror.
Taxes as a Political Tool
Other departments in the executive branch have done as much to keep an eye on potential enemies of the state as the NSA, albeit in their own distinct manner.
Earlier this summer, it was reported by many outlets (including The New American) that the IRS was persecuting Tea Party and other conservative groups by conducting intrusive and illegal investigations of these groups’ applications for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status.
Although according to the White House the discrimination ended in May 2012, on August 9, 2013, the Washington Examiner reported that an unnamed IRS official testified in a closed-door hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee that “the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups.”
The implications of this abuse are incalculable. In a statement to The New American, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said, “The power to audit has become a political weapon. Nobody wants a government where the taxing authority is used politically.”
The use of taxing authority as a political weapon was not confined to conflicts with non-profit petitions.
In January, Christine O’Donnell, former candidate for Joe Biden’s former Senate seat in Delaware, was informed that Delaware state officials had on several occasions accessed her federal tax records to obtain potentially embarrassing information on a tax lien that was first reported in a newspaper article.
The lien, it was discovered, was erroneously filed, and the snooping was discovered.
During congressional hearings on the matter and on IRS corruption in general, a spokesman for the IRS told Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that a Delaware state investigator was given permission to open O’Donnell’s IRS records.
Based on nothing more than a newspaper story, O’Donnell’s political foes were able to gain access to her very private tax information. Most Americans, it would seem, would prefer that the information contained in their IRS file would remain private. The fact is, however, if an agent of the government (state or federal) wants to rifle through that file, the IRS requires very little in the way of probable cause of wrongdoing. Being a member of a group whose politics don’t jibe with the establishment is apparently sufficient grounds for this very invasive, illegal, and unconstitutional surveillance.
Despite the government’s intrusions into Americans’ private business, many Americans dismiss its activities, saying, “I’ve done nothing wrong. Why should I worry?” This is the question often put to opponents of the federal government’s surveillance activity. Furthermore, many Americans accept the surveillance state with rationalizations such as: “The government is protecting us from terrorism, so I think it’s fine that they keep an eye out for extremists. If they happen to listen to my phone calls or read my e-mail, that’s just the price we pay for safety.”
In light of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment, these mentalities look at the surveillance from the wrong angle.
Americans are endowed by their Creator with the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures. When the government takes away these rights, then there is no liberty, regardless of pretexts and purposes put forth by the federal government.
While it’s true that most Americans have “done nothing wrong” criminally speaking, it is equally true that most of us have done many embarrassing things that we would prefer not to have put in a file for future use by political enemies — inside or outside the government. What are these possible peccadilloes? Think bad credit, poor scholastic performance, Web surfing habits, sensitive medical diagnoses, etc.
It is most important to remember that there is no evidence that the government’s massive surveillance and deprivations of rights has made us any safer. What, then, is the true purpose of the surveillance?
It isn’t security. Demanding freedom in exchange for safety is the economy of tyrants. When the federal government — or any government — robs citizens of their basic civil rights, then that government has become despotic by definition.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” President Obama, on the other hand, told Americans that we cannot have a nation that is 100 percent safe and 100 percent private. To be safe, he says, we have to make hard choices.
He’s right: We must choose whether to allow our constitutional rights to be subjected to daily diminution or to stand up and demand that the totalitarianism end and liberty be restored. The question is: How?
Federalism Protects Fundamental Freedom
One unwarranted wiretap, one unwarranted seizure of a phone record, one search of records of an individual’s digital communications is too many. If we are a Republic of laws, then the supreme constitutional law of the land must be adhered to. The standard is not whether or not the spies or their bosses think the deprivations are “okay.” The standard is the Constitution — for every issue, on every occasion, with no exceptions. Anything less than that is a step toward tyranny.
Taken together, the roster of snooping programs in use by the federal government places every American under the threat of constant surveillance. The courts, Congress, and the president have formed an unholy alliance bent on obliterating the Constitution and establishing a country where every citizen is a suspect and is perpetually under the never-blinking eye of the government.
The establishment will likely continue construction of the surveillance until the entire country is being watched around the clock and every monitored activity is recorded and made retrievable by agents who will have a dossier on every American.
The fight can yet be won, though. Americans can attack the sprawling surveillance state on several fronts. First, we must elect men and women to federal office who will honor their oaths of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Then, once in office, each of them must be held immediately accountable for each and every violation of that oath.
Next, we must fill our state legislatures with men and women who will refuse to enforce any act of the federal government that exceeds the boundaries of its constitutionally granted powers. These lawmakers must force the federal beast back inside its constitutional cage and never accept even a degree of deviation from the blueprint drawn in Philadelphia in 1787.
Though the hour is late, there is still hope. Beginning today, Americans can refuse to re-elect any lawmaker who has voted to fund the NSA or any other federal agency whose existence is not specifically permitted by the Constitution. We can unite, as our forefathers, in the ennobling cause of the end of tyranny and the promotion of those unalienable rights granted to us — and revocable only — by our Creator.
This article is an example of the exclusive content that's only available by subscribing to our print magazine. Twice a month get in-depth features covering the political gamut: education, candidate profiles, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, guns, etc. Digital as well as print options are available!Casillas: Broke his left hand in January
Casillas has not played for Jose Mourinho's side since fracturing his left hand in their 5-0 win over Valencia in January and only returned to training on Thursday.
Spain's World Cup and double European Championship winner had wrestled back his starting place from replacement Antonio Adan before the injury but that setback forced Mourinho into signing fellow 31-year-old goalkeeper Diego Lopez from Sevilla.
Lopez looks likely to continue in goal in Manchester but Casillas could find himself on the replacements' bench with Madrid due to arrive in the north-west on Monday before training at City's Etihad Stadium to continue preparations for the second leg.
Real and United drew 1-1 at the Bernabeu in the first leg after Cristiano Ronaldo cancelled out Danny Welbeck's early header.
Madrid defeated arch rivals Barcelona 2-1 on Saturday afternoon, but are still 13 points behind the league leaders, meaning their main focus on reclaiming the European Cup for the first time in 11 years.
Despite the fact United have an away goal, Brazil playmaker Kaka was confident Los Blancos would reach the quarter-finals at the expense of the Premier League leaders.
"Every player wants to play a match like this," he told Real Madrid's official website. "We came off the first leg in the Bernabeu with the feeling that we could have won the game and that we can equalise the draw in England and win.
"Manchester is really strong but we're going to Old Trafford with confidence. It's a traditionally European squad that always goes far in the competitions
they play in. They also have really solid individual players like (Wayne) Rooney and (Robin) van Persie.
"The stadium is fantastic, just like the ambience and the fans."This photographer took a portrait of one Torontonian from every country in the world
This photographer took a portrait of one Torontonian from every country in the world
Photographer Colin Boyd Shafer has always been drawn to ambitious projects: he’s shot the Turkish uprising, Myanmar’s political exiles and interfaith couples from around the world. His newest project, Cosmopolis, is his most formidable yet. Through 2013 and 2014, Shafer tried to photograph a Torontonian from every country in the world. To date, he’s covered 195 nations—though he’s still missing 10 small countries like East Timor, San Marino and some South Pacific Islands. He shot each subject in a setting of their choice, with an object that linked them to their past. “When you’re a white Canadian, it’s very easy to disconnect yourself from migration,” says Shafer, whose own roots stretch back to the U.K., Spain and the U.S. “I hope this encourages everyone to take a step back and think about their own migration history.” Here, the stories of eight new Canadians from Shafer’s expansive project, on now until January 8 at 18 Toronto Public Library locations.
Andrea
From Pointe Noire, Congo
Photographed at his office, an engineering consulting firm
Andrea’s family moved to the Ivory Coast after he finished high school for his father’s job; in 2002, they moved to Tunisia during the First Ivorian Civil War. After high school, Andrea completed his studies at Concordia University, and has finally settled in Toronto with a job at an engineering consulting firm. Andrea likes to teach his colleagues about the Congo. “I am sure that it reduces the misconceptions people usually have about Africa.”
This picture shows Andrea with his grandma, father and sister. “There is an African saying: l’eau chaude n’oubli pas qu’elle etait froide avant. It means ‘knowing where you come from will benefit you and guide you perfectly for future choices.’”
Eileen (Shafer’s grandmother)
From Stoke on Trent, United Kingdom
Photographed in her home
Eileen and her husband wanted to work in a Spanish-speaking country, but in a surreal twist of fate, her husband accepted a job in British Columbia in 1957, thinking it was Colombia. They left Canada within a year arriving, but returned in 1961, and Eileen’s been here for more than 50 years since. “This is my special spot,” she says of the chair her late husband, John (he died in 2011), made after she hurt her hip.
This album contains childhood photos of her three kids. “Whenever the children were bored or sick, it was always, ‘Can I look at the albums?’ They all knew that ‘if the house sets on fire…grab the photograph albums!’”
Jina
From Pyongyang, North Korea
Photographed at a park in North York
Jina’s family was forced out of the North Korean capital when her father criticized the government. She escaped the country soon after, swimming through the freezing December waters of the river that separates North Korea from China. She met her husband there through a Korean church, and they decided to move to Canada together. Despite having no money or ID (she’d left it with her family in North Korea so that they could tell people she died in a car crash), she was able to get a Chinese passport and a flight.
Jina lost an heirloom necklace during her escape, but whenever she wears something she thinks her mother wouldn’t allow—like this purse—she thinks of her.
Atif
From Khartoum, Sudan
Photographed at Old City Hall
Atif was blacklisted in Sudan for joining a political opposition party. A friend who lived in Toronto told him about life in the city, and Atif set his sights on Canada. When he obtained official permission to fly over, he remembers feeling like the world was his. Once here, he participated in protests outside Old City Hall to bring attention to the plight of the Sudanese. “Toronto police officers were on site,” he recalls, “and rather than reprimand us, they allowed us to continue.” At the time this picture was taken, he was working in security.
Drinking coffee with friends is a big part of Sudanese culture, but Atif didn’t like Tim Hortons at first. Now he drinks it regularly—after seeing Torontonians with their cups every day, he figured, “If I want to be Canadian, I should do it too.”
Oyu
From Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Photographed at her office, a real estate investment trust corporation
Oyu had an uncle in Canada, but her family still waited six years to be approved by the Canadian Embassy. She now works in accounts payable at a real estate investment trust corporation and dreams of becoming an accountant.
In Mongolia, Buddha statues were commonly placed next to pictures of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Oyu purchased this statue for her parents from one of the Tibetan and Nepalese handicraft stores on Bloor Street West.
Esther
From Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Photographed at the Church of Christ in Brampton
Esther was a social worker in Papua New Guinea, where she felt human rights weren’t a government priority. Simply walking by herself after dark could spell danger; the country is often regarded as the worst country in the world for gender violence. Once she moved to Canada, she felt safe and believed she had more opportunities. After arriving, she met another woman who was also from Papua New Guinea who had been living in the GTA for almost 30 years. That woman introduced her to the Church of Christ in Brampton, where Esther socializes and feels at home.
It takes Esther as long as a month to make bags from ropes (like this one). She uses dried, twisted fibres that are taken from the yell tree and scraped until they’re soft.
Laleh
From Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
Photographed at BMV
Laleh moved to Toronto with her family when she was 13. “I think it is probably the only city that feels like Italy in one corner of the town and China in another,” she says. “It lays the world under my feet.” She’s spent countless hours in the BMV bookstore near Yonge and Dundas, looking for authors and books she enjoyed back in Turkmenistan.
Older Turkmen women often wear traditional scarves like this one—it reminds Laleh of her past.
Florent
From Grenoble, France
Photographed at St. Lawrence Market
“I left France to see what was on the other side of the ocean,” Florent says. He came to Toronto through an overseas job opening at his company, and says he always feels welcome here. He likes to shop for fresh vegetables or grab a peameal bacon sandwich at St. Lawrence Market on Saturday mornings.
This bottle of lavender oil, a gift from his parents, reminds Florent of his home in Provence.Innovation in the current Congress is practically a dirty word, as almost nothing encouraging it has made it past both houses. Most notably of all, the Innovation Act has been stalled in the House for years, despite massive bipartisan support for it. However, thanks to the general ineffectiveness of Congress, and the efforts of a few malicious actors trying to protect the vampiric industry known as patent trolling, such legislation remains on hold.
Fortunately, while Congress may be paralyzed, the judiciary is anything but. Indeed, one wonders if the patent trolls are beginning to regret their argument that changes to the patent system should be left up to the courts — because the courts are nigh-universally finding against them! Last week, yet another such devastating decision arrived.
First, a little background. Last year, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in TC Heartland v. Kraft that severely limited the ability of plaintiffs in patent cases to choose a venue in which to file their suits. This was extremely significant, because one of the major strategies of patent trolls was to file extortionate lawsuits in a handful of district courts with a record for blatantly unfair favoritism toward plaintiffs. The Big Kahuna in this strategy was the East Texas District Court, whose catering to the patent bar led to defendant companies (usually in the technology sector) offering desperate bribery tactics for juries, such as building ice rinks in the small town where the court was located. The single judge of this court — Rodney Gilstrap — also amassed a singular talent for ignoring precedent that was unfriendly to patent trolls.
There was just one problem with TC Heartland: The patent bar tried to argue that it only applied to patent lawsuits brought after the case was decided. In other words, those who were still undergoing litigation that began before TC Heartland was handed down couldn’t try to get the venue of their trials changed using the doctrine from TC Heartland because it wasn’t available at the time their cases started. If permitted, this reading would have wreaked havoc on courts, and on the legal strategy of everyone but the most predatory patent owners.
What a relief, then, that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals dashed this opportunistic interpretation into a thousand pieces by ruling that yes, TC Heartland could be relied upon by defendants seeking to change where their cases were argued. The result is that many cases that were deliberately filed in inappropriate venues selected only for their friendliness to the patent bar will now be sent to courts without such a record of blatant favoritism. And, in the process, the legal strategy of picking the nastiest possible venue for a defendant, without regard to its jurisdiction, will wither and die.
This is a victory not just for patent defendants, but for the rule of law, and for innovation in America, generally. Patent cases will be much more likely to be adjudicated by the genuinely impartial, thus restoring faith in the legal system’s ability to resolve them. Moreover, in view of the attempt by the pharmaceutical and patent troll lobbies to weaken other legal mechanisms that frustrate their designs, this is a particularly sweet reminder of just how weak the legal footing of such actors really is, regardless of how many junk statistics or bad arguments they put forward.
Nevertheless, however pleasant their effects, legal steps like this are limited by the fact that they occur in response to individual, specific cases. Sweeping policy change is still the order of the day to fix our patent system and to eradicate those who abuse it once and for all. However, in the meantime, let us celebrate the courts doing their part to keep the vultures at bay.The University of New Brunswick will reinstate women's varsity hockey at the Atlantic University Sport and U Sports Canada level starting in the 2018-2019 season, bringing an end to a human rights complaint filed in 2009.
The announcement, made on Monday morning, is part of an agreement reached between UNB, the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission and former UNB women's hockey player Sylvia (Bryson) Dooley.
Dooley had filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission about the university's 2008 decision to disband the varsity women's hockey hockey team it had operated since 2001 and give the program a lower club status. She argued the decision amounted to gender discrimination because UNB's men's hockey team was maintained.
On March 2, the Labour and Employment Board issued a ruling in Dooley's favour, compelling the university to reinstate a women's varsity hockey team by 2017.
UNB had applied for a judicial review of the ruling and had also struck a task force in June to review the matter. The task force recommended the parties enter a settlement conference to attempt to resolve the issues in dispute.
This has always been what we were after, what we thought was right. - Sylvia Dooley
As part of the agreement announced Monday, UNB has agreed to withdraw its application for a judicial review.
The university will also revisit its gender equity policy and provide the commission and Dooley with its revised policy by Sept. 1, it states.
"This has always been what we were after, what we thought was right," Dooley told CBC News on Monday. "So we're very pleased that this will finally happen."
'It was the principle of it'
Dooley noted that 2018, when the team is reinstated, will mark just over a decade since it was stripped of funding and downgraded, but she said her lengthy battle has been worthwhile.
"It was the principle of it and doing what's right," she said.
The University of New Brunswick will reinstate women's varsity hockey at the Atlantic University Sport and U Sports Canada level starting in the 2018-2019 season, bringing an end to a human rights complaint filed in 2009. 1:01 "Being able to pursue athletics and academics at the same time was just so important and such a significant part of my university experience, and kind of the feeling that we're building something."
UNB will also:
Hire a full-time head coach, who will be provided with "resources to build the team and recruit student athletes."
Invest in the infrastructure of the Aitken Centre to create a new coach's office, therapy room and locker room for the women's varsity hockey team.
Provide resources for equipment and player supplies.
Provide athletic financial awards.
Dooley said she was pleased the matter was resolved through the settlement conference rather than proceeding to UNB's appeal.
"I felt that would be a more positive way to move forward," she said, describing the process as "very respectful."One line in a welcome letter to new students has stirred up an online flap at Concordia University in St. |
problems are not limited to the chemistry between leaders that seems to get the most press attention at summit meetings, or to Trump’s boorish behavior, which has become a fixture at such meetings. Nor are they limited to the broader perceptions of Trump personally, as striking as those perceptions are.
As documented by the Pew survey, there is less confidence in Trump to do the right thing than in Xi Jinping of China or Vladimir Putin of Russia. The three adjectives that respondents most attached to Trump were “arrogant,” “intolerant,” and “dangerous.”
Broader difficulties are suggested by how the Pew results show that the standing of the United States itself has fallen with the advent of Trump. Compared with the last such poll during Obama’s presidency, favorable views of the United States dropped from 64 to 49 percent and unfavorable views rose from 26 to 39 percent.
The Trumpian slogan of “America first” tends to disguise the larger implications of such results. Set aside for the moment the falsity of that slogan, given that subcontracting segments of foreign policy to the Israelis or Saudis (or glossing over whatever Russia may be up to) is not putting America first. The slogan, and the set of attitudes underlying it, implies a nonchalance about foreign attitudes and a belief that Americans need not care what foreigners think. That belief misses much of how foreign attitudes and perceptions, which influence foreign government policies, can redound, for good or for ill, on U.S. objectives.
Successful foreign policy involves getting other states to act in ways that advance or protect the interests of one’s own state. To the extent that the people and policymakers in those other states have “confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world affairs,” they are more likely to act in the way the U.S. president would like them to act. Lacking such confidence, they are that much less likely to act in accordance with U.S. wishes.
This principle applies regardless of the content of U.S. policy and grand strategy. It is the reason the plunge in this kind of confidence from late Obama to early Trump is important.
The survey results also provide perspective on criticisms and standards applied to previous administrations. Criticisms of Obama about supposedly surrendering U.S. leadership look especially strange now, considering what has come after him.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is author most recently of Why America Misunderstands the World. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)SCP-646
Mucus scraped from SCP-646.
Item #: SCP-646
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-646 is kept in customized Containment Unit 9277 in Bio-Site 66. The floor is to be rinsed daily, and drain grates are to be checked weekly for buildup.
Personnel are to wash SCP-646 once every two weeks with warm water and gentle scrubbing tools. Basic Low-Hazard decontamination showers are to be performed by personnel after this wash.
Subject does not seem to require sustenance; a daily serving of 10 kilograms high-quality edible material is allotted to promote (relative) activity.
All species of offspring are to be examined and logged. If any presiding researchers identify offspring they deem worthy of further research, personnel are to follow appropriate protocols. All unwanted offspring are to be immediately destroyed.
Description: SCP-646 is a large, translucent grey, bloated creature measuring roughly 5.6 meters in length, weighing between 3400 and 3700 kilograms. At one end of its body is the approximation of a torso, with a prominent ribcage and a wide, round head. Seven sets of three-jointed limbs are located evenly spaced down the front of the body; a long series of udder-like organs are located between these limbs. The body tapers to a blunt point with a cloaca-like orifice, the entire frame heaving and shuddering irregularly. The shadows of various internal organs (lungs, hearts, and a digestive tract) can be seen through SCP-646's flesh. The flesh is quite smooth and malleable, and a clear, harmless mucus constantly oozes from its skin.
SCP-646 is constantly producing unrelated, infant organisms. For the purposes of this document, SCP-646 is in a state of "giving birth". When one infant creature has been born, another will appear within SCP-646 and the birthing process will begin again. Births do not seem to cause it any discomfort, and all offspring are completely unremarkable apart from their anomalous origin. Interestingly, oviparous animals such as birds and fish are born whole, outside of an egg. There is no logical order behind what species of animal will be born next; it seems that absolutely any multicellular animal that has ever existed on Earth can be birthed by SCP-646.
It is unknown how SCP-646 is producing these infants at this time, as there is no gestation period between births. The current intake of material by SCP-646 cannot account for the mass of the infant animals or its constant slime discharge. Research is pending.
SCP-646 shows no signs of sapience, and is mostly docile unless actively provoked.Bernstein reports: "...while Medicare has drawn more attention in the election campaign, seniors and their families may have even more at stake in the future of Medicaid changes..."
Many seniors qualify for Medicaid and Medicare, Medicaid cuts could be devastating. (photo: Seniors Today)
Election May Decide Medicaid's Future
By Nina Bernstein, The New York Times
edicaid has long conjured up images of inner-city clinics jammed with poor families. Its far less-visible role is as the only safety net for millions of middle-class people whose needs for long-term care, at home or in a nursing home, outlast their resources.
With baby boomers and their parents living longer than ever, few families can count on their own money to go the distance. So while Medicare has drawn more attention in the election campaign, seniors and their families may have even more at stake in the future of Medicaid changes - those proposed, and others already under way.
Though former President Bill Clinton overstated in his convention speech on Wednesday how much Medicaid spends on the elderly in nursing homes - they account for well under a third, not nearly two-thirds, of spending - Medicaid spends more than five times as much on each senior in long-term care as it does on each poor child, and even more per person on the disabled in long-term care.
Seniors like Rena Lull, 92, who spent the last of her life savings on $250-a-day nursing home care near Cooperstown, N.Y., last year, will face uncharted territory if Republicans carry out their plan to replace Medicaid with block grants that cut spending by a third over a decade.
The move would let states change minimum eligibility, standards of care, and federal rules that now protect adult children from being billed for their parents' Medicaid care.
Now, like a vast majority of the nation's 1.8 million nursing home residents, Mrs. Lull, a retired schoolteacher with dementia, counts on Medicaid to cover most of her bill. But her daughter Rena, 66, also a retired schoolteacher with a lifetime of savings, no longer knows what she can count on in her own old age.
"I get choked up thinking about this," she said, recalling how her widowed mother had depleted $300,000 on five years of care in the community and one year in the Otsego Manor nursing home, before qualifying for Medicaid. "I'm so scared about what's going to happen to me."
The presidential election may decide Medicaid's future. But many states faced with rising Medicaid costs and budget deficits are already trying to cut the cost of long-term care by profoundly changing Medicaid coverage, through the use of federal waivers.
Waivers sought or obtained by 26 states, including New York, California, Illinois and Texas, would affect some three million people, most of them eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare. Plans vary, but typically they try to cut costs by giving private managed-care organizations a fixed sum for a lifetime of care, from doctor and hospital visits to help at home to nursing home placement, expecting that more care will take place in less expensive settings.
Over all, 31.5 percent of Medicaid's $400 billion in shared federal and state spending goes to long-term care for the elderly and the disabled. That ranges from less than 8 percent in Hawaii, where nursing home use is low, to more than 60 percent in North Dakota.
Many people assume that Medicare will cover long-term care, but at most it covers 100 days of rehabilitation, not so-called custodial care - the help with activities of daily life, like eating and bathing, that the aged can need for years.
To be eligible for Medicaid, however, a person typically can have no more than $14,800 in assets, and though some lawyers specialize in setting up trusts that shelter certain assets, the federal government has periodically closed loopholes that allowed it.
Mrs. Lull, who married her Ithaca College sweetheart, also a teacher, when he was in the Air Force in 1944, and carried their twin girls home in a laundry basket, is required to pay all but $50 a month of her $969 income from Social Security and a pension toward the Medicaid cost of her shared room. Her case is typical, in that she cared for her husband before his death at home at 83.
Few Americans buy private long-term care insurance, and such insurance was dropped from the Affordable Care Act last year as actuarially unsound or unaffordable.
"More than $80,000 a year on average for a nursing home - who can sustain that?" said Robyn Grant, director of public policy and advocacy for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long Term Care. "We're forced, most of us, to go onto Medicaid. People don't realize this."
No state has a more ambitious plan to overhaul Medicaid than New York, which has the biggest Medicaid budget in the country - $54 billion - and spends about 41 percent of it for long-term care, almost half on nursing homes. Jason A. Helgerson, the state's Medicaid chief, calls the redesign "a multiyear march away from fee-for-service" that he says will flatten the spending rate even as the population ages.
By 2015, New York will start requiring some 78,000 nursing home residents to choose one of several managed care plans or be enrolled randomly. The plans are already enrolling tens of thousands of elderly and disabled New York City residents who now receive more than 120 hours a week of government-paid help at home, with those in other downstate counties next.
"We in New York are committed to using this as a force for good," Mr. Helgerson said, noting that such services, including the largest home care program in the country, have long been exempted from managed care. "By keeping people healthy, by keeping them out of unnecessarily restrictive, institutional settings, we can keep the program sustainable in the long run."
Around the country, however, some health policy analysts doubt that managed care will save money, and advocates for the aging and disabled worry that the sickest and most vulnerable people may be hurt in the process.
"Managed care isn't going to help - it's just more money going off the top," said Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney in the Washington office of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, who has written on the importance of Medicaid to Medicare beneficiaries and their middle class relatives. "The managed care company has to take its cut."
There is too little evidence available to evaluate whether managed care itself really saves money in long-term care, said H. Stephen Kaye, a professor at the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco.
"One of the problems with the rush to do this is there isn't a lot of knowledge about what measures should be used or how to track this," Dr. Kaye said, noting that his analysis of 15 years of data from many states concluded that the gradual expansion of home and community services saves modest amounts, but that a rapid expansion can actually cost a state more.
While home care is generally much cheaper than nursing homes, Dr. Kaye said, states may wind up unleashing a pent-up demand for home care from eligible people who would never have entered a nursing home anyway. And, he added, the financial incentives for home care do not guarantee quality.
"It needs to be monitored with a lot of oversight," he said.
In July, John D. Rockefeller IV, the Democratic senator from West Virginia who came up with the language allowing some of the most ambitious waivers, wrote Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, asking her to "take immediate steps to halt this initiative." He complained that instead of rigorous demonstrations aimed at improving care, some states were shifting whole populations into untried programs.
A spokeswoman for the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it was "working carefully to develop new ideas to better coordinate care with appropriate safeguards to protect beneficiaries."
Under the block grant vision of Medicaid, that federal role in oversight would end. Richard J. Herrick, president of the New York State Health Facilities Association, a trade group, says that since Medicaid rates have been cut well below cost, he would welcome a change in rules that would let nursing homes bill families for their elders' care, in addition to what Medicaid pays.
Advocates for the elderly say that such a change would increase the burden of care already carried by many families.
Wendy James spent nine years and thousands of dollars struggling to keep her mother safe at home with her in Yonkers, in Westchester County. Her big mistake, she says now, was not filing a Medicaid application sooner.
Her mother, Elaine, 76, formerly a secretary in a doctor's office in Manhattan, had to quit work when she developed symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. As the illness worsened, Ms. James's father, now 80, retired from his job in a department store to help care for his wife. When she needed an adult day program in a nursing home, which rose to $2,400 a month, the family paid out of pocket. And Ms. James, 37, who works for a medical billing company, paid up to $1,000 a month for her mother's medications when she hit her Medicare prescription "doughnut hole."
A 2009 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that direct, out-of-pocket spending by individuals and families accounts for 22 percent of the $178 billion spent on nursing homes.
Mrs. James is now in a New Rochelle nursing home, where Medicaid pays the bill. Her husband travels daily to spoon-feed lunch to her in the nursing home's chaotic day room. Ms. James feeds her mother every evening after work, rubbing her cheek to remind her to swallow.
"I did what I had to do for her," said Ms. James, the youngest of three siblings. "She was the best mom before she got sick."Almost Heaven Golden Retriever Rescue and Sanctuary, Inc. (AHGRRS)
A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization
"Where Old Gold Shines" P.O. Box 648
Capon Bridge, WV 26711
Phone: 304-856-1600 (Volunteer owned phone. Phone calls will be answered when possible)
Hours: By appointment only - NO one will be admitted unless they are approved adopters - NO exceptions For the fastest response to your inquiry, please email us at ahgrr@frontiernet.net Click Here to take a Virtual Tour of AHGRRS. AHGRRS has been saving lives since 2002 and plans to continue accepting as many orphan dogs as space and finances allow. Your donations help keep our doors open to those who need us most. We have Adoptable Dogs in need of homes and many permanent residents who will never know the joy of living in a family environment because they are so damaged, old, or sick that they are best suited to living out their lives with us - here at the Sanctuary. Please consider giving a homeless dog a home. Visit our Resident and Adoptable Dogs and if there is a dog you would like to offer a forever home, please submit a completed application (CLICK HERE for Adoption Information and Application). If you cannot adopt at this time, but would like to help, please consider one or more of the following:
Donating needed item(s) on our Wish List
Sponsoring one of our residents. No donation is too small - all are deeply appreciated. Use the PayPal button or mail to AHGGRS at P.O. Box 648, Capon Bridge, WV 26711
Supporting one of the Fundraisers listed below Almost Heaven's 2019 Wish List No donation is too small and all are always deeply appreciated. Use the PayPal Donation button (at right) or Send to: Almost Heaven Golden Retriever Rescue
P.O. Box 648, 704 Old Mill Road
Capon Bridge, WV 26711 Cash - Donations help pay our taxes, utilities, licenses, repairs, transportation costs, veterinary services, and kennel help Wish List Items can be purchased at https://www.chewy.com/ or https://www.walmart.com/ and delivered to us at: Almost Heaven Golden Retriever Rescue
704 Old Mill Rd
Capon Bridge, WV. 26711 Food: Iams Minichunks Dog Food
Proplan Sport....SALMON based
Any brand canned dog food Dog Treats (we prefer Small to Medium Sized biscuits as we have quite a few "weight challenged" residents): Milk-Bone Original Dog Biscuit Medium
Biscuits
Pupperoni
Pigs Ears Chew Toys: NO tennis balls, please
Nylabones
Kong Toys (including Kong balls) Health: Heartworm Preventative
Flea Protection Products Crates: 54" Midwest Solution Series "Ginormus" Double Door Dog Crate
OR 42" SMONTER Heavy Duty Strong Metal Dog Cage Pet Kennel Crate Playpen with Wheels, I Shape (please, NOTHING smaller)
OR 42" ProSelect Empire Dog Cage - The "Cadillac" of Heavy Duty Crates Replacement Crate Pans for 42", 48", & 54" Crates
Special Requests: Air Conditioners for our 2018 Spring and Summer: we need 8,000 and 5,000 BTU units. Please nothing bigger than 8,000 - our electric system Cannot handle it.
Heaters - DeLonghi HCX9115E Slim Style Convector Heater - Older Model or Dr Infrared Heater Portable Space Heater, 1500-Watt (Available at amazon and walmart for about $100)
Fans - High Velocity Only Laundry Supplies: Any Laundry Detergent
Bounce Dryer Sheets (reported to help repel fleas, gnats, and mosquitos) Cleaning Supplies: Lysol Liquid Cleaner
Lysol Spray
Lysol NeutraAir
Lysol or Clorox Wipes or Chlorox Spray and Chlorox Wipes
(we go through several cans and boxes every week) Gift Cards: Gasoline
Grocery - Food Lion or WalMart
Home Depot or Lowes
Pet Stores
Target
Amazon Donation Note Card in Honor or Memory of a Special Person/Event How about honoring that special person with a donation to AHGRR? Make a donation to AHGRR in honor of a special someone or in memory of a special pet or person and we will send them a lovely golden angel note card to let them know they have been honored in such a wonderful way. The card exterior will be our standard logo in grayscale with a personalized message inside per your instructions. Order using the PayPal button below or by mail specifying your personalized message to include in the card to: AHGGRS at P.O. Box 648, Capon Bridge, WV 26711 Type personalized Donation Card message in the box below and click "Pay Now" button: Below is a sample of the note they will receive. Front of Note Card Inside of Note Card -
Personalized With your information AmazonSmile ~ Shop to Support Almost Heaven Do you shop at Amazon? Almost Heaven Golden Retriever Rescue & Sanctuary (AHGRRS) is one of the listed charities on AmazonSmile, through AmazonSmile you can Shop to benefit AHGRRS! What is AmazonSmile? AmazonSmile is a website operated by Amazon that lets customers enjoy the same wide selection of products, low prices, and convenient shopping features as on Amazon.com. The difference is when customers shop on AmazonSmile (smile.amazon.com), the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to the charitable organizations selected by customers. How does AmazonSmile work? When first visiting AmazonSmile, customers are prompted to select a charitable organization from almost one million eligible organizations. In order to browse or shop at AmazonSmile, customers must first select a charitable organization. For eligible purchases at AmazonSmile, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price to the customer’s selected charitable organization. eBay "Giving Works" ~ Buy & Sell to Support Almost Heaven Going Shopping? Like to shop Online? Check out the great deals available on eBay Giving Works to support Almost Heaven Golden Retriever Rescue & Sanctuary (AHGRRS)! We are one of the listed charities on eBay Giving Works, where you can Shop, Sell and Donate to benefit AHGRRS through eBay, with the eBay Giving Works program. Heres how: BUY – You can find whatever you’re looking for on eBay. When you do, shop for items that benefit us. You can get a great deal and support AHGRRS at the same time! Shop now to support AHGRRS: http://donations.ebay.com/charity/charity.jsp?NP_ID=22930 SELL – You can also support AHGRRS when you sell on eBay. Just designate our organization to receive 10-100% of your final sale price the next time you list something great. Did you know charity listings often get more bids and higher prices than regular eBay listings? Boost your sales and support AHGRRS while you’re at it! Plus eBay gives back to you, too, with a fee credit on your basic selling fees. Sell now to support AHGRRS: http://donations.ebay.com/charity/charity.jsp?NP_ID=22930This article is over 7 years old
Libyan rebels say city will be starved of fuel after light aircraft drop bombs on oil tanks
Libyan government forces have bombed four large oil tanks in Misrata, destroying the city's only source of fuel, according to rebels.
Light aircraft normally used for spraying pesticides were deployed for the overnight attack in Qasr Ahmed, close to the port, rebel spokesman Ahmed Hassan said today.
Bombs were dropped on four large storage tanks, destroying them and sparking a huge blaze that spread to four more, he said.
"We cannot extinguish it because we do not have the right tools," Hassan told Reuters.
"Now the city will face a major problem. Those were the only source of fuel for the city.
"These tanks could have kept the city for three months with enough fuel."
Nato was notified by the rebels about the planes before the attack but did not respond, said Hassan.
Misrata, the last remaining city in the east held by the rebels, has been under siege by Gaddafi's forces for more than two months.
It has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between loyalists and rebels.
Government forces last month flew at least one helicopter reconnaissance mission over the city, according to the rebels.The New York Red Bulls' budding rivalry with the Philadelphia Union could continue to grow on Saturday night. (Photo: Getty Images)
HANOVER, N.J. – It will be a brutal stretch for the New York Red Bulls, a stretch of three games in seven days that starts this Saturday night at Red Bull Arena against the Chicago Fire.
The good news for the Red Bulls, who play at home on Saturday before going on the road to Kansas City on Wednesday and then Philadelphia on Saturday, is that they are a deep team that is getting deeper.
Outside of the centerback position, the Red Bulls have quality depth up and down their roster. And over the past two weeks, they’ve welcomed back wide players such as Gonzalo Veron and Mike Grella from injuries.
There are plenty of options and depth for this Red Bulls team and their head coach to choose from. But there are still plenty of challenges juggling lineups and rosters over the next week.
Head coach Jesse Marsch admitted that he “can kind of go from game to game. We have a little bit of an idea of who’s going to be available for what matches and what lineups might be used."
Though he cautioned that recovery and sharpness plays a role in these decisions.
“I think this first game, we’ll kind of take it as the first game of the series and put our best team out there. And then after that, we’ll have to make some adjustments and we have some guys coming back from injury at the right time, so building up their fitness and making sure we have a group that is ready to regenerate and go again,” Marsch said on Wednesday. “And then guys who haven’t played as much lately, that they’re ready to push and when they’re called upon they are sharp and ready to go. I think all those things will be important.”
One intriguing name to watch out for to perhaps take the next step over the next week is Hassan Ndam.
A centerback, Ndam is an offseason signing who was playing high school soccer last year for Montverde. He’s blended in easily into the USL squad, the Red Bulls reserve team.
Physical and able to read the game well, Ndam trained with the first team on Wednesday.
“I think he’s made really big improvements in the early stages of the USL season and that’s been really great to see,” Marsch said. “He’s still a young guy and he knows he has a long way to go but his approach has been really professional and very mature for an 18-year old. There may be an opportunity here, this week even with the three games coming up, to see if it makes sense to have available for one of these matches. We’ve been really happy with Hassan, really happy.”
QUICK NOTES
· Sal Zizzo, injured late last week and unavailable for the win over the Columbus Crew last Saturday, trained with the Red Bulls on Wednesday. His calf strain appears to be progressing.
“I think there’s a high probability that Sal can be available for this weekend,” Marsch said.
· As for the aforementioned Mike Grella (knee), he trained for the first time in several weeks although he likely won’t be available this weekend against the Chicago Fire. He could be an option for the away matches in Kansas City and Philadelphia.An eyewitness recorded a sideshow on upper deck of the Bay Bridge on July 17, 2016. (CHP San Francisco / Facebook)
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — A San Leandro man who was allegedly driving one of three vehicles spinning donuts on the Bay Bridge on Sunday pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges and infractions in San Francisco Superior Court Thursday.
Moises Rosales, 20, was arrested Sunday after the California Highway Patrol received reports of three drivers weaving through traffic at high speeds on westbound Interstate Highway 80 around 3:30 p.m.
The vehicles, a black Ford Mustang, white Ford Mustang and black Chevrolet Camaro, all with paper dealer plates, stopped traffic on the western span of the bridge and began doing donuts across all five lanes. The incident was captured by another driver who took cellphone photos and contacted the CHP.
CHP officers were able to stop the two Mustangs a short time later at the western end of the bridge. One driver, Rosales, was arrested while the other was cited and released.
Rosales had his car impounded. It is unclear what happened to the driver of the Camaro.
At least two other sideshows have taken place on the Bay Bridge this year. In April, nearly 50 cars were reportedly involved in a sideshow that shut down traffic on the eastern span. Another muscle car shut down traffic while doing donuts on the western span during a sideshow in February.
TM and © Copyright 2016 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2016 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Bay City News Service contributed to this report.Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov stated that the United States is trying to use the 'chlorine' issue to continue to put pressure on Damascus.
© Sputnik / Evgeny Biyatov Syrian Coalition Using ‘Implausible Excuses’ to Skip Moscow Talks
MOSCOW, February 2 (Sputnik) — The United States is trying to put the Syrian government under pressure using the information on chlorine production facilities allegedly captured by jihadists, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told RIA Novosti on Monday.
In December 2014, the Syrian government warned the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that suspected Islamic State militants had seized a number of industrial resources in the country where chlorine-containing substances were stored.
"The United States is trying to use the 'chlorine' issue to continue to put pressure on Damascus," Gatilov said.
© AP Photo / United media office of Arbeen Syria's Chemical Weapons Disarmament Completed
He stressed that the issue of chlorine is not directly linked to the matter of Syrian chemical disarmament.
Syria joined the OPCW in 2013, following sarin attacks near Damascus, for which both the Syrian government and rebels have traded blame. In January, the country began dismantling underground bunkers, tunnels and hangars used for production and storage of chemical weapons.
Earlier on Monday, Gatilov said that the disarmament was complete and there remained no serious issues preventing the destruction of Syria's chemical stockpile.Dec 29, 2016 | By Benedict
Russian scientists are planning to install and operate a 3D bioprinter aboard the International Space Station, according to an official source. They believe that microgravity conditions could actually improve the bioprinting process.
Roscosmos could send a 3D bioprinter to the ISS
3D bioprinting and 3D printing in space. On paper, these two technologies appear to be at opposing ends of the 3D printing spectrum. One is at the forefront of biological innovation and could potentially save millions of lives; the other, while useful for small fixes, could be seen by skeptics as something of a publicity stunt. Sound harsh? The creators of the Additive Manufacturing Facility, the plastic-printing 3D printer currently operating on the ISS, have more-or-less admitted as much—by offering companies on Earth the chance to 3D print custom items up in space. Do the astronauts need these items? No, but businesses can generate excellent publicity by having their wares “made in space.”
Of course, 3D printing in space does have practical uses. For example, small replacement parts can be fabricated immediately in order to fix defective machinery. This makes a huge difference when one considers the alternative: waiting for the next spacecraft launch from Earth to deliver the tiny part. Still, given the massive hype surrounding additive manufacturing, especially in and around 2014, one cannot help but feel that Made In Space, NASA, and involved parties might have put a 3D printer in space regardless of the need for one.
At first glance then, the idea of putting a 3D bioprinter in space seems even stranger than sending an FDM 3D printer up there. Given the fact that 3D bioprinting is not yet capable of 3D printing transplantable human organs (that could theoretically be used in emergency surgery on astronauts), one wonders how putting the technology in space would benefit anyone. Perhaps the peace and quiet of space would be beneficial for researchers?
The Additive Manufacturing Facility from Made In Space: useful?
In actual fact, the Russian scientists behind this latest idea seem to have some fairly concrete reasoning behind their plans: they believe that significant progress in bioprinting can be achieved by placing equipment in microgravity conditions, since the lack of gravity could potentially help to keep deposited cells in place. And what better place to test out this hypothesis than space itself?
Valentin Uvarov is department head for commercial projects of manned space exploration at Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Russia’s leading space manufacturer. In a recent interview with newspaper Izvestia, Uvarov explained the plan in full, telling the newspaper that his organization was planning to conduct an experiment that would use magnetic field manipulation to 3D print living tissue on board the ISS. The project has passed an initial review, which concluded that the technology is indeed feasible.
“Our next stage is to develop and approve technical specifications and design documents for scientific equipment, which would be used for the experiment,” Uvarov said. “But before this equipment gets on board the ISS, we have a long and difficult process to complete: creating and testing it on the ground, developing experiment procedures, and teaching the crew.”
3D bioprinting companies like Organovo are making progress in developing 3D printed human organs
If the hypothesis about bioprinting in microgravity conditions turns out to be true, then 3D bioprinters could—when the technology is perfected—be installed on the ISS and spacecraft to provide biomedical support to crew on interplanetary missions.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, will now review the proposal from Energia, before deciding whether to press ahead with the space bioprinting mission. There is, at present, no forecast as to when the experiment might be carried out.
Posted in 3D Printing Application
Maybe you also like:U.S. space capabilities in 2030 need to look very different than they do in 2016 if the military wants to keep its edge in Earth orbit, a top Air Force space official said.
"Our current enterprise is not resilient enough to survive a war that would extend into space," said Maj. Gen. (sel.) Stephen Whiting, the director of integrated air, space, cyber and ISR operations at Air Force Space Command.
Speaking at a recent breakfast hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Whiting said one of the biggest challenges is that the space assets the U.S. has now are very vulnerable to attack.
"Most of our current space systems were designed when space was considered a benign environment," he said. "Little thought was given to system protection or defense."
Maj. Gen. (sel.) Stephen Whiting, top Air Force Space Command officer, said the U.S. military needs more resiliency for satellites and ground systems if it expects to keep its edge in orbit. Photo Credit: Air Force In order to keep down cost and weight, several military capabilities were often grouped together and launched on the same satellite. That’s created some satellites that might have communications, navigation and timing, or missile warning and surveillance systems, all onboard the same craft.
"Today’s large and relatively unprotected systems offer a tempting target for any potential adversary seeking to level the playing field by denying us the warfighting advantage our space systems deliver," Whiting said. "Other countries understand the competitive advantage we derive from space. They view our reliance on space as a key vulnerability, and they’re working hard to exploit it through kinetic, non-kinetic, and cyber tools designed to deny, degrade, and destroy our space capabilities."
The Air Force is launching the Space Enterprise Vision, or SEV, a roadmap to 2030 that will include bolstering space resiliency.
One of those key steps, Whiting said, will be disaggregating satellites so there aren’t so many critical systems on a single unit. Another option would be hardening satellites against an attack.
The Air Force also wants to move to a "faster and more predictable" launch schedule that will include launches scheduled at regular intervals, rather than the current model of tying rocket launches to specific payloads.
Whiting described it as a "freight train to space" model, likening it to ground transportation that is always ready to move cargo when needed. He said he expects the launches would make use of both military and private-sector launch capabilities.
"The idea is that there are regular launches that we can predict, and we know exactly what orbital altitude they’re going to, and we can quickly mate a payload to them that needs to go," he said.
But one thing the service is going to have to do first is to standardize the interfaces and operating systems of both satellites and ground control. Previously, each satellite was built in a vacuum, with software and controls often specialized for just that unit, and each with a specific ground-based infrastructure.
The service is now looking at creating common operating systems – or at least compatible systems – that will allow easy communication and transfer between different satellites.
"One of the key things we’re going to need is to standardize the interface between our payloads and our boosters," Whiting said. "We want to reduce the preparation time to get the rocket out to the pad and then launch it."We value Old Town so much that we actually protect it with a historic district designation so that it won’t be lost.
If we valued the way this part of the city was built so much, you’d think we would want people to build more neighborhoods like it. And maybe we do. But our laws make that impossible.
Like most cities in America, Pocatello’s city code sets minimum parking requirements for all types of new development, and the reality is that these parking minimums forbid anyone from ever building a neighborhood that looks remotely like Old Town anywhere in Pocatello.
Take a look at the numbers. Office and retail uses require 1 parking space for every 250 square feet (SF) of floor area. When you include the driving lanes, landscaping, etc., each parking space requires at least 300 SF of parking lot (with a very efficient layout). That means, according to the code, your parking lot is required to be larger than your building. For restaurants, bars, and medical offices, a parking space is required for every 200 SF of floor area, meaning the parking lot must be at least 150% the size of the building. Similarly, apartments require 2 spaces per unit, and considering that a lot of the older apartments are less than 600 SF, they would require more parking lot than building space as well.
This is all assuming single-story buildings. If you want to build two stories, of course, the parking lot has to double, and so on for each additional story beyond that. It should be clear from these ratios that we could never allow a full block of side-by-side single story storefront shops along a sidewalk. The block would have to be at least half parking lots, probably more. A block of two story buildings is even farther from the realm of possibility.
Let’s assume some well-intentioned developer wants to create a pleasant, walkable |
to 20 percent from 35 percent, a doubling of the standard deduction for individual income tax filers and the elimination of several widely claimed deductions for individuals. The framework put down a marker but left dozens of questions unresolved, many of them potentially worth billions of dollars to businesses and the federal government.
Business groups are meeting frequently with key Republicans, seeking to shape the bill, but no snippets of legislative text have yet become public.
However, party leaders cannot finalize a bill until another budget hurdle is cleared — the Senate and House must agree on a consensus budget document, which will include instructions for how much a tax bill could reduce federal tax revenues over the next decade. That document, which would be an agreement between the House and Senate, is crucial to allowing Republicans to change tax law without any Democratic support. Such agreement could come quickly or drag out over a week or more, depending on whether House members agree to the Senate version or demand substantial changes to it.
Republican leaders hope to finalize and introduce the House version of the tax bill as soon as early November, allow amendments from both parties in committee and on the House floor, and pass something by Thanksgiving. Senate leaders hope to pass a bill by December or early next year.
Democrats say that process does not allow time for careful consideration of the bill, or for the sort of bipartisan compromise that marked the 1986 effort.
“I can’t imagine that something this momentous would be done without hearings, when you consider they’re about to fundamentally alter the architecture of the nation’s revenue collection,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.As the unemployment rate increases, and Wall Street goes back to it’s traditional bonus model, this is not going to be well received. Bush is long gone, so the public is naturally going to look at Obama’s team who is negotiating with AIG on the issue. At times like this it’s hard to imagine how average Americans can accept “retention bonuses” for one of the most incompetent businesses in the country that represents everything that went wrong during the crisis. The AIG team may very well leave if they don’t receive their bonuses, though good luck finding new employment in this environment. When does everyone else get their retention bonus?
AIG has been talking with Washington’s newly-appointed compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg about the bonuses, which are due to be paid on July 15, said the source. The company is reviewing its compensation plans with Washington as it tries to avoid the national furor set off by $165 million in retention bonuses paid to employees of a financial products unit in March. Much of AIG’s $99 billion in losses last year stemmed from derivatives written by that unit. Feinberg was appointed last month to oversee the compensation of top executives at seven firms that have received large federal bailouts.
And to think we have a long way to go before this crisis is over. How many more bonuses are coming from this black hole?Want to get away from home for the holidays? Dreaming of a white Christmas? These 10 destinations in North America, nominated by a panel of 10Best travel experts and voted the best by our readers, transform into winter wonderlands during the colder months, making them ideal for a snowy holiday escape.
Visitors who head to Yellowstone National Park during the colder months will find fewer crowds and a completely different national park experience. Snowcoaches, snowmobiles, skis and snowshoes help guests get around the park, where frigid temperatures transform the park's geological features into a very unique winter wonderland. Photo courtesy of National Park Photo
Internationally renowned as the Rocky Mountain playground for the world's glitterati because of its legendary ski slopes, Aspen is a favored winter vacation retreat boasting not only a host of outdoor activities, but a rich cultural scene as well. Fresh snowfall, crackling fires and warming winter cocktails enchant visitors both on and off the slopes. Photo courtesy of Matt Inden/Miles
Surrounded by snow-capped peaks, Ouray – a former mining village – is most famous for its dramatic ice falls cascading into the box canyon. Ice climbers come from around the world to conquer this frozen landscape of Ouray Ice Park, but the alpine scenery throughout is worth the trip. Visitors can warm up with mountain views in Ouray Hot Springs after a cold winter's day. Photo courtesy of Thinkstock
Park City offers the feel of a historic Wild West mining town with the amenities of a world class ski resort. Main Street is lined with top-notch bars and restaurants, while the Sundance Film Festival each January is one of the hottest tickets in town. Winter activities include snowmobiling, skiing, dog-sledding, snow-shoeing and ice skating. Photo courtesy of Park City CVB
Most famous as a New England summer beach resort, the town of Ogunquit is also one of the region's most charming towns come winter. The annual Christmas By the Sea Festival features a warming bonfire on the beach, while a Christmas tree made from lobster traps illuminated in twinkling lights at Perkins Cove makes for a perfect Maine photo op. Photo courtesy of Thinkstock
Winter in the Sierras doesn't get much better than at beautiful Lake Tahoe, where snow-blanketed peaks descend toward the frigid waters of the lake. Snow-centric sports abound, including dog-sledding, ice skating, and snow-mobiling, and the many small towns serving the lake – both on the California and Nevada side – offer cozy bars and restaurants to warm up after a day in the snow. Photo courtesy of Tahoe South
Most famous as a summer resort, Michigan's Mackinac Island is equally charming under a blanket of winter snow. Visitors can go snowmobiling or ice sailing, shop at a Christmas Bazaar, listen to carolers at the annual tree lighting ceremony or simply enjoy the calm and quiet in a town largely isolated from the rest of the country come winter; the only access once the water freezes is an ice bridge from the mainland. Photo courtesy of Mary McGuire | Mackinac Design Follow / Flickr
German heritage is obvious in Frankenmuth, located 75 miles north of Detroit. Thanks to Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, one of the world's largest Christmas stores, the holiday spirit is alive year-round in this Bavarian town, but it's particularly festive after a fresh dusting of snow. Photo courtesy of Christopher Woodrich / Flickr
Montreal, arguably North America's most European city, brings all the fairy-tale romance of Paris without a transatlantic journey. Anyone who'd been to this lovely French Canadian city knows just how romantic it can be, particularly during the winter months. When temperatures drop, Montreal transforms into a postcard-perfect Christmas village complete with sleigh rides and skating rinks where couples glide along hand in hand. Photo courtesy of Tourisme Montréal
Quebec has been named one of the world’s best holiday destinations, and the combo of history, lights, snow and great shopping easily explain why. In December, Old Quebec turns into a real-life Christmas village. Visitors can stroll through the decorated streets, or take a guided historical tour that ends in a Christmas market. In face, Quebec features a variety of holiday markets, including European-inspired. Quebec also offers holiday foodie tours, and is home to one of the world’s seven Holy Doors. Photo courtesy of Ville de Québec
The top 10 winners in the category Best Winder Wonderland are as follows:
Quebec City, Quebec Montreal Frankenmuth, Mich. Mackinac Island, Mich. Lake Tahoe, Calif./Nev. Ogunquit, Maine Park City, Utah Ouray, Colo. Aspen, Colo. Yellowstone National Park
A panel of experts partnered with 10Best editors to picked the initial 20 nominees, and the top 10 winners were determined by popular vote. Experts Larry Bleiberg, Eric Grossman, Anna Hider (Roadtrippers) and Gerrish Lopez were chosen based on their extensive experience covering travel in North America.
Other nominated destinations included Breckenridge, Durango, Lake Louise, Lake Placid, Leavenworth, New York City, Snowshoe, Stowe, Telluride and Vail.
Congratulations to all our winning winter wonderlands!Press Release:
Today, Narragansett Beer announces the re-release of the wildly popular “Jaws” can just in time for Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” and “Jaws” actor Robert Shaw’s birthday. For a limited time, all 12-, 18- and 30-packs of 12-ounce cans of Narragansett Lager will feature the same design and logo made popular by the shark-infested thriller.
The can’s retro imagery, nostalgic to the millions of beer-drinking baby boomers who came of age at the time, became permanently ingrained in American culture with the release of Jaws in 1975. In the film, Captain Sam Quint, played by Oscar-nominated actor Robert Shaw, who would have turned 86 on Aug. 9, famously crushes a can of Narragansett Lager to intimidate Richard Dreyfuss’ character. At the time, ‘Gansett was prevalent throughout the Northeast, including Martha’s Vineyard where “Jaws” was filmed, producing over one million barrels of beer per year.
While this classic can design may recall memories of the good ol’ days, the quality of its contents also speaks to the brand’s rich heritage. Narragansett Lager is the brewer’s flagship beer, its original recipe tracked down by former Brewmaster Bill Anderson when the company was revived in 2005 by CEO Mark Hellendrung. Since then, it has been recognized by BeerAdvocate.com as the No. 1 rated domestic premium lager and awarded the gold medal for best lager by the Great International Beer Festival.
The 12-ounce limited-edition retro can is available for purchase throughout New England where 12-, 18- and 30-packs are sold (SRP: 12-packs: $9.99 – $11.99; 18-packs: $12.99 – $14.99; 30-packs: $18.99 – $20.99).
ABOUT NARRAGANSETT BEER:
Narragansett Beer…Brewed since 1890. ‘Gansett is a straightforward, quality beer that has been a New England tradition for generations, producing a classic family of award-winning American lagers & ales. Today, ‘Gansett is produced at top-rated breweries in Providence, R.I., Rochester, N.Y., and Buzzard’s Bay, Mass. and is one of America’s top 50 regional brewers and the fastest-growing in the Northeast. Narragansett is available for purchase in local restaurants, bars, and liquor stores throughout New England, New York, New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin and Nashville, Tenn.Archive photo of Abdallah Abu Rahmah protesting the wall in Bil’in taken on May 17, 2005. (Photo: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org)
On International Human Rights Day in 2008, my husband Abdallah Abu Rahmah was in Berlin receiving a medal from the World Association for Human Rights. Last year on the same day, December 10th, Abdallah was taken away at 2am by Israeli soldiers who broke into our West Bank home. Abdallah was arrested for the same reasons he received the prize – his nonviolent struggle for justice, equality and peace in Israel/Palestine.
My husband is a school teacher and farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in. When Israel built its apartheid wall here, it separated Bil’in from more than half of its land, in order to facilitate the expansion of the illegal settlement Mattityahu East. In response, Abdallah and fellow villagers began a campaign of nonviolent resistance. Every Friday for the past five years, we’ve marched, with Israeli and international supporters, to protest the theft of our land and livelihoods.
In September, 2007 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the route of the wall in Bil’in was illegal and should be changed. Over two years later, the wall remains, unmoved. Many were discouraged, but Abdallah told them that the pressure of our campaign and international support could bring down the wall.
As the grassroots struggle grows here, the efforts to end our actions have intensified. The army has been instructed to use weapons against the protesters and arrest participants. Our beloved friend, Bassem Abu Rahmah, was murdered by Israeli soldiers as he tried to talk with them, while participating in a demonstration. Seventy-seven others have been arrested in violent night raids.
Among the other arrestees is Abdallah’s cousin Adeeb Abu Rahmah, who, like Abdallah, never missed a demonstration and was never violent. Adeeb, a father of nine, has been in prison for five months, with no end in sight. Since the first time our home was invaded, our seven year-old daughter Luma has been waking up screaming, and five year-old Layan wetting her bed. Only our nine month-old son Laith still smiles and giggles, but I cry when he calls for his father.
Leaders like former President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leaders of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, have visited our village. They stood with Abdallah at Bassem’s grave last August. Mr. Tutu told us, "Just as a simple man named Gandhi led the successful nonviolent struggle in India and simple people such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King led the struggle for civil rights in the United States, simple people here in Bil’in are leading a nonviolent struggle that will bring them their freedom."
The afternoon before his arrest, Abdallah prepared a speech to be read on his behalf to the World Association for Human Rights since Israel would not allow him to travel to Germany for the ceremony. Abdallah wrote:
"I wish I could be with you to share in the joy of our colleagues receiving this year’s prize and to celebrate with you the 20th anniversary of the removal of the Berlin Wall. But the occupation not only robs us of statehood, land, and so often of our lives, it also deprives us of many beautiful moments."
"My mother passed away in a hospital in occupied East Jerusalem, our historic capital, in August but the Israeli occupation refused me a permit to be with her. An Israeli friend held a mobile phone to my mother’s ear so that I could say good bye to her and thank her for all the love she has given me. In the darkness of all these difficulties the occupation imposes on us, the solidarity of justice-seeking people like you all over the world gives us strength."
"Unlike Israel, we have no nuclear weapons, and no army, but we do not want or need those things. With your support and the justice of our cause, we will bring down Israel’s apartheid wall."
Twelve hours after Abdallah was taken to a military jail from our home, I listened as President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize and spoke of "the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice." I thought of Bassem, Adeeb and my husband, and wondered if President Obama will take action to support our struggle for freedom.
Majda Abu Rahmah is a school teacher for children with special needs from the village of Bil’in in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.The chancellor of California State University (CSU) said Wednesday the school will do whatever it can within the law to prevent illegal immigrant students from being deported.
During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants and said he would crack down on “sanctuary cities” that actively resist federal immigration laws. Trump has shown no signs he plans to back down on immigration, and now, CSU chancellor Timothy White says his school is prepared to stand up to the new president. (RELATED: NYC Council Member Short-Circuits Defending Sanctuary Cities)
“Our police departments will not honor ICE immigration hold requests,” White told a CSU board of trustees meeting Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Our university police do not contact, detain, question or arrest individuals solely on the basis of being … a person that lacks documentation.”
White’s announcement come one week after a public statement he made on the 2016 election that indirectly but clearly regarded Trump’s victory negatively.
“Today, many in our community may feel anxious and perhaps vulnerable about their personal future, the future of those they care for and the future of our nation. It is our duty – as a community – to listen to each other and support each other through this time,” White said.
With some 470,000 students scattered across 23 campuses, CSU is one of the largest university systems in the U.S. It isn’t known for sure how many illegal immigrants attend the school, but last year about 10,000 students received a waiver that allows illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition.
On the other hand, CSU has suffered controversy in the past by allowing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to do job recruiting on campus. Many activists have called for the border patrol to be banned from California campuses entirely to preserve them as a safe space for illegal immigrants.
Despite the vow to resist Trump, CSU said in a follow-up statement the school is not a “sanctuary campus,” a designation many activists have called on schools to adopt. One of its primary objections to the term wasn’t ideological, though, but rather pragmatic.
“The word ‘sanctuary’ is a confusing term that lacks a universal legal or educational definition and, as such, if used could lead to misunderstanding and misplaced reliance,” the school said in its statement.
If the university truly does defy Trump, the administration would have some options for fighting back. Most obviously, Trump could attempt to deny CSU access to federal student loan funds, a move that would utterly devastate the school’s finances. Trump could also seek to have Congress pass new legislation compelling college and other local police forces to assist in the enforcement of immigration law when requested.
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Thames Water: regulator says data from utility cannot be taken at face value
The utilities regulator has dealt a further blow to Thames Water’s reputation by saying information issued by the company cannot be taken at face value.
Ofwat criticised the utility alongside three other companies for “shortcomings in the data handling” that mean customers and the watchdog “cannot be sure the information presented is complete and accurate”.
Aileen Armstrong, Ofwat’s senior director of finance and governance, said: “As customers, we want to be able to trust what we get from our water company, be that the water out of the tap or what they tell us. Unfortunately, on the second of those, our checks suggest we might not be able to take everything at face value.”
The other water companies criticised by Ofwat were Bristol Water, Dee Valley Water and Southern Water.
Ofwat’s report comes days after Thames Water admitted letting down customers by failing to meet its leakage targets and said it would halve planned price increases next year. This means the average annual bill will be about £8 less than it would otherwise have been for 5 million households.
Ofwat said there were “serious concerns” over Thames Water when it came to two categories: following the regulator’s financial monitoring framework and a broad assessment of “outcomes” – meant to measure whether consumers, politicians and regulators can understand what companies are doing to meet customer expectations.
“We concluded that the significance of our concerns in two assessments meant that the company did not instil sufficient confidence about its ability to deliver, monitor and report performance,” it said.
Thames Water said it was disappointed by the regulator’s decision to classify the company in its lowest assessment category, arguing that it had made “extensive efforts … to be open and transparent about the performance of our business”.
“We will be working hard to rebuild trust and achieve self-assured status as quickly as possible,” the company said.
Ofwat recommended that Thames Water develop better assurance plans, which are designed to give customers confidence in the accuracy of company data. It expects Thames Water to release the results ahead of a consultation by the end of January, and publish an action plan online by the end of March.
Armstrong said: “These businesses provide essential public services and they need to assure customers they are doing the right things in the right way. If they are to gain and keep the trust of customers, they need to have high-quality checks on their information and present it fairly, clearly and completely.”
Thames Water has faced a series of negative headlines this year. In March, it was fined a record £20m for allowing 1.4bn litres of raw sewage into the Thames between 2012 to 2014. The company has also come under pressure over excessive executive pay.
The group is bringing in Ian Marchant, the former chief executive of the big six energy company SSE, as chairman to clean up its corporate governance failings. He will replace the long-serving Sir Peter Mason in January.
The company also announced that it would close its Cayman Islands subsidiaries. Thames Water, which has not paid corporation tax in the UK for the past 10 years, said there was no tax advantage from the two Cayman subsidiaries, but management is understood to accept “it just looks wrong”.ST. LOUIS – St. Louis Blues Executive Vice President and General Manager Doug Armstrong announced Wednesday that Blues Assistant Coach Scott Mellanby will depart from the organization to explore other career opportunities.
“We thank Scott for his hard work and dedication in our organization over the past two seasons,” said Armstrong. “He is a true professional and we wish him nothing but the best in his future endeavors.”
"I would like to thank the Blues organization for giving me the opportunity to coach in the National Hockey League," said Mellanby. "After two years of coaching I realize my passion is in the hockey operations department, which I would like to pursue. I have enjoyed my time here as a player and as a coach and wish nothing but the best for the Blues and their fans."
Mellanby, 45, has served as a Blues Assistant Coach for the past two seasons during which the team posted a combined 87-55-22 (196 pts) regular season record including the second best record in club history and a trip to the Conference Semifinals in 2011-12.
A former 21-year NHL veteran, Mellanby spent four seasons in St. Louis appearing in 235 games with the Blues.So, I have discovered that when you formally make an announcement that you’re converting to Judaism, it angers your friends who are fundamentalist/evangelical/not-practicing-but-still Christian. It is apparently more stressful for them to hear that you’re rejecting Jesus-as-Messiah than to have you not believe in anything at all.
But I’ll save that for another post, eh?
Right now, I want to talk about leaving Christianity. I was approached by a friend who says I’ll soon be a part of someone’s research about leaving Christianity. I am glad that more Christians I know are taking up the challenge. Speaking of that, Dan Wilkinson over at Unfundamentalist Christians wrote a post (just now!):
Ooh, this one is interesting. If you don’t know who Ken Ham is, he’s the guy behind the Creation Museum. I’ve actually been there. The museum is interesting and you can tell they put a bit of effort into the displays. But oy. Yeah.
Ham is apparently convinced that young people, like me, leave Christianity because of evolution. He writes:
This debate will help highlight the fact that so many young people are dismissing the Bible because of evolution, and even many young people who had grown up in the church decided to leave the church because they saw evolution as showing the Bible could not be trusted
Wilkinson says what I would say, which is to call this a bunch of junk. Dan says,
Mr. Ham, they’re leaving the church because of people like you: people who fervently create walls, erect barriers, establish rigid rules for what one must believe in order to be a Christian. They’re leaving the church because your version of Christianity has nothing whatsoever to do with right practice, and everything to do with “right” belief. They’re leaving the church because by essentially demonizing everyone who doesn’t agree with you, you’ve made believing in Young Earth Creationism* more important than Jesus’ explicit explicit commandment to love God and neighbor.
Exactly. Well, there’s more than that. But for me, one attraction of Judaism was the ability to debate and the encouragement to use my brain. I am led to believe that my ability to reason is a gift from Gd and that to not use it is a waste of the resources He created. It is acceptable and encouraged to debate in Judaism. It’s okay to ask questions. I never felt that way in Christianity, which takes the very literalist view of the Bible.
I don’t want to say that my choice of Judaism was entirely because of Christianity, because it isn’t true. My soul wants the Torah no matter what other religion exists. But the way some Christians treat the LGBT community, other faiths, and minorities doesn’t really help any. Young people in my generation are exposed to such awful “liberal” ideas like equality, wanting to help the suffering around the world (and here at home!), and poverty. We want our religion to care about the environment, about our future, about each other. We’re tired of hateful intolerance. So yeah, we drop what doesn’t work. On the other hand, I think we are more spiritual than the previous generation. We crave spirituality and meaning; we want the traditions and the rituals that the previous generation eschewed.
If Christianity, or any religion, can balance tolerance and love with meaningful spirituality, then I think the young people will stay. It’s really that simpleOther Star Trek Trivia Articles
1. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the phoenix which arose from the ashes of the aborted Star Trek Phase II TV series ( something we've covered in depth here ). The story from the movie was adapted from the proposed pilot episode of the TV series, with some extra padding.2. Paramount set an original budget of $8 million for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which really wasn't a bad figure. But Gene Roddenberry realised that audiences of 1979 would be expecting some very impressive effects, especially after seeing Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Knowing how much these special effects would cost Roddenberry persuaded Paramount to dig deeper. With some initial hesitation they doubled the budget, but had Paramount known the final cost of the movie (which we'll get to later) it's quite possible they would've pulled the plug then and there.3. After Robert Wise was hired as director, he immediately put shooting on hold while he had many of the sets and the uniforms redesigned (oh, those uniforms! The cast hated them, they required assistance to be removed and, bonus fact, one of William Shatner's conditions for returning in any sequel was for the cast to have new uniforms). But the cast, who were still under contract for the Phase II TV series, were all still getting paid every week. Finally in late Summer of 1978, ten weeks after shooting should've begun, Paramount insisted that principal photographystart. Wise began filming, but initially he would only shoot in the daytime, for no more than 12 hours (in part as a delaying tactic whilst additional sets were built). This resulted in the production falling behind the new revised schedule after only two days. It never got better than that! Each and every week the shoot became more and more behind schedule, and the budget went higher and higher.4. Uhura's communications earpieces are the only original props from Star Trek: TOS to appear in the movie, and that is only because once filming finally got underway a production assistant realised that someone had forgotten to make the new ones. Thankfully the originals were found in storage.5. The original story was written by Alan Dean Foster, with the finalised screenplay credited to Harold Livingston. Livingston famously feuded with Gene Roddenberry and was unhappy that Roddenberry was doing re-writes on his script and sending them to the studio. After leaving the production for three months thanks to the fighting, Livingston returned and had a clause written into his contract stating that Roddenberry couldn't do any more work on the script than he already had - but not able to help himself, Roddenberry still did rewrites on the sly.In his book 'Movie Memories' William Shatner said at one point the cast were getting script revisions every two hours, alternating between Roddenberry and Livingston. Although Shatner readily admits that many of the rewrites came about because he and Leonard Nimoy were requesting them as they felt the new dialogue they were being given (daily) was not true to their respective characters. Shatner dubbed the whole process "Star Trek: The Emotional Picture". After two months of filming Livingston and Roddenberry still hadn't settled on what was going to happen in the third act. With the production massively over schedule Leonard Nimoy stepped in and began mediating between the two writers, spending alternate evenings with them after shooting and mapping out the closing scenes. Shatner recalls one scene which he, Nimoy and Robert Wise all wanted to include (in which the Enterprise crew starts to leave the bridge in order to show the Ilia probe it is acting like a little child) was rejected by Roddenberry, so Nimoy and Wise persuaded Livingstone to write it instead, and shot it on a day when Roddenberry was absent from set.6. It was detailed in the script, but never mention in the film, that Willard Decker was actually the son of Commodore Matthew Decker from the 1967 TOS episode The Doomsday Machine.7. After filming wrapped Robert Wise decided to check on the special effects. Up to that point he had not seen a single demo shot, which concerned him. Wise soon realised that the special effects house employed were really not up to the job, so John Dykstra and Douglas Trumbull were hired at the eleventh hour, and worked around the clock to get the job done.8. By this point in time Star Trek: The Motion Picture was so over budget that Paramount executives were keeping a running daily tab on the production. The final figure came in in the region of $35 million. To put that into some context, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan cost $11 million, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock cost $17 million, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home cost $25 million, and a whole decade later we still have Star Trek V: The Final Frontier coming in cheaper at $28 million. It wouldn't be until 1994 and Star Trek: Generations when a Trek movie would cost that much again. Paramount had trusted Gene Roddenberry with his beloved franchise, despite the fact that he had never produced a feature film. After the massive overspend on Star Trek: The Motion Picture they knew better than to let him be so hands on ever again.9.! According to Robert Wise and Jon Povill (the associate producer), the version released on December 9th 1979 was essentially "a rough cut" which no-one had seen in its entirety before shipping to movie theaters. Wise later said that he completed the final edit just a day before the premiere, and had to personally take it with him to Washington. The reels were still wet when they were loaded onto the projector!10. To make up for that "rough cut", in 2001 Robert Wise returned to Star Trek: The Motion Picture to complete his Director's Edition. He re-edited the film and presented it as he had originally intended, or at least how he had hoped he could've. Running 4 minutes longer than the original theatrical cut, it includes several redone special effects scenes which could not be finished in 1979 due to both time and the overspend. Where possible these scenes were recreated with the use of the original models. A new CGI "model" of the Enterprise was created, using the original physical model as reference, and a completely original model of V'Ger, as it appeared when the surrounding clouds had dissipated, was created based on the cross-sectional reading of the ship that appeared on a screen in the movie.11. Mark Lenard plays the Klingon Captain in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Making him the first actor to play three different alien species in the Star Trek franchise. Most famously he's known as Spock's father, Vulcan Ambassador Sarek, a character he played several times between 1967 and 1991, but before that he had portrayed a Romulan Commander in TOS 1966 episode Balance of Terror.12. The Klingon words spoken by the Klingon captain were actually invented by actor James Doohan (Commander Scott). Although it was linguist Marc Okrand who later devised the grammar and syntax rules for the Klingon language (along with more vocabulary words in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) and wrote a Klingon dictionary, he based all his work on those few Klingon lines devised by Doohan for this movie, meaning they even made sense retrospectively. James Doohan also devised the Vulcan words heard during the Kolinahr sequence. They were actually shot in English, but it was decided to change the dialogue into Vulcan. So Doohan wrote lines to fit the existing lip movements, with some of the subtitles rearranged to make this less obvious.13. When Captain Kirk addresses the crew prior to launching, many of the people playing extras were not actors but rather noted Star Trek fans invited to the production. Amongst them was Bjo Trimble, co-organizer of the letter-writing campaign that kept the original Star Trek series alive for a third season. Although they were all paid for their participation, the majority of the checks were never cashed, presumably they were framed and sit in pride of place on a wall somewhere.14. Star Trek: The Motion Picture holds a (depending on your choice of eatery) impressive accolade. After a national roll out of their Happy Meal in the Summer of 1979, McDonalds offered their first movie-promotional tie-in toy that Christmas. The first such promotion was the Star Trek meal, with the packaging consisting of various images and games related to the film, as well as a comic strip adaptation of the movie.15. During production, whilst the movie's budget was going skyward, Paramount did a deal with the US television network ABC. They helped towards the financing of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in exchange for the first airing of the film. To get the most for their money, ABC added many additional scenes to pad out the three hour (with commercials) time slot. Amongst the 12 extra minutes of footage were scenes with Uhura defending Kirk's taking over command, the Ensign who beamed up before McCoy, the tear on Spock's cheek as he cried for his 'brother', and Kirk space walk scene with the studio rafters in the background and in a different spacesuit than in the final version!. This version was later released on VHS under the title of "Special Longer Version".On Thursday, Donald Trump announced his pick for ambassador to Israel: a bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman. Friedman, who has been a personal friend of Trump’s for about 15 years, has no government experience to speak of.
What Friedman does have is opinions — specifically, what appears to be the most hard-right approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of any US ambassador to Israel in history.
Friedman has called the two-state solution “a suicidal ‘peace’ with hateful radical Islamists hell bent on Israel’s destruction.” American Jews who support that approach, are in Friedman’s eyes, “worse” than kapos — Jews who helped the Nazis run concentration camps in exchange for special privileges. Here’s the full quote, from a May op-ed in the right-wing Israeli publication Arutz Sheva:
Finally, are [American pro-peace lobby] J Street supporters really as bad as kapos? The answer, actually, is no. They are far worse than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas – it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.
Friedman has, by his own telling, used this comparison repeatedly. When asked to repudiate it earlier in December, he refused. “Mr. Friedman declined to disavow the comments and even intensified the sentiment,” the New York Times reports.
So Friedman openly sides against longstanding American policy towards Israel, insults Jews who disagree with him in some of the most offensive terms possible, and has zero formal diplomatic experience.
It's important to note that his potential boss — secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson — has spent decades working in the Arab world and is likely far more sympathetic to the widespread concerns among its leaders about the settlements. The peace process itself, meanwhile, is completely dormant, and President Barack Obama — both personally empathetic to the Palestinians and willing to have invested enormous amounts of time toward trying to revive the talks — has failed to do so.
It's still hard to imagine a more destabilizing pick for one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts in the world.
Friedman’s writing reveals someone who identifies with the hardest of Israel’s hard right
The column about kapos wasn’t Friedman’s only contribution to Arutz Sheva; in fact, he appeared to be a semi-regular contributor until this summer (when he started advising the Trump campaign on Israel policy). A casual read through Friedman’s column reveals someone who personally identifies with the maximalist positions of the pro-settlement Israeli right, and who has personal disdain for traditional American policy and even elements of the United States.
Friedman’s February 2016 column, titled “End the Two-State Narrative,” argues that the two-state solution has always been a con. The Palestinian Authority, he argues, have tricked Israelis and Americans into believing that they want an independent state in order to extract cash payments from the Americans. The US government goes along with this, he implies, because it is institutionally anti-Semitic.
“The US State Department — with a hundred-year history of anti-Semitism — promotes the payoff of corrupt Palestinians in exchange for their completely duplicitous agreement to support a two-state solution,” Friedman writes. US-brokered negotiations with the Palestinians, he concludes, are “a discussion of an illusory solution in search of a non-existent problem.”
Bear in mind, here, that Friedman has just been tapped to work in the State Department. Essentially, he is accusing the career staff he has just been appointed to supervise of participating in an anti-Semitic extortion racket aimed at weakening the Israeli government.
In his August 2015 column, Friedman argues that Israel should consider the entire West Bank — which he refers to as “Judea and Samaria,” a term favored by the Israeli right — Israeli territory. “Judea |
Prestigious Round Display Case
The coin is housed in a prestigious round wooden display case, with stunning detail on its lid and packaged in a beautifully illustrated shipper.
Numbered Certificate of Authenticity
Each coin is accompanied by a numbered Certificate of Authenticity.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
just the right kind of OCD, it's even more than that. Some gamers are way too busy figuring out who could make the best use of this hair-tie and how many fire gems they can carry without dropping potions to ever bother with stopping the bloodmarch of Drogos, the Lizard God.
"Listen: The Sundered Berserkers are going to have to stop their own pillaging, OK? I'm alphabetizing potions."
And in nearly every RPG, you'll encounter the same problem: Eventually, you'll wind up with an item just as overpowered as it is rare. It's almost
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too good to use. So what do you do with it?
The answer, as every gamer out there has just quietly realized, is "nothing." You save it. Forever.
Every game of Left 4 Dead ends with an untouched First Aid Kit, every Pokemaster is left still clutching the Master Ball as the credits roll, and after Necron falls, poor Zidane has to make a few calls and see if the local thrift stores accept Dark Matter. If you've ever ended a Square-Enix game without an Imperial Fuckton of Megalixirs cluttering up your inventory, then you were likely either drunk or suffering from severe head trauma to the part of your brain that manages impulse control.
And now you will never again be apart.
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So how does that help you in real life? Simple: All you have to do, as a gamer, is apply this logic to your savings account. Every paycheck is a Megalixir, and somewhere out there is a boss so tough that you'll eventually need it, so you'd better hang on to it for now. And if you never end up using it, so what? You just proved you were too badass to ever require it in the first place. Congratulations: You just unlocked the Comfortable Retirement Achievement.
That's right: Every epic struggle for the fate of the Never-verse, every dire quest to save Edenia from the Shoggoths, every snowy trip into the Frozen Wastes -- they've all just been extended metaphors for your 401(k).The oral mucosa is lined by stratified squamous epithelium and has topographic differences that correlate with physical demands or a higher degree of specialization. For example, the epithelium lining the floor of the mouth, the ventral side of the tongue, the buccal mucosa, and the soft palate is nonkeratinized; however, the epithelium associated with the gingiva and hard palate is usually keratinized. The dorsal surface of the tongue is also keratinized, but it is referred to as specialized mucosa because of the presence of papillae. The dorsum of the tongue, the hard palate, and the gingival tissues are keratinized to better respond to masticatory demands.
Hyperkeratinization (excessive formation of tenaciously attached keratin) may be present in a variety of clinical conditions, including genetic, physiologic, inflammatory, immunologic, premalignant, and malignant conditions. The change may result from a local insult, including chemical, thermal, or physical irritants. This article focuses on the oral hyperkeratinization that results from friction. Friction (the constant rubbing of 2 surfaces against one another) in the oral cavity may result in the development of clinically observable white patches.
Various names have been used to describe particular examples of frictional keratosis (FK). These include frictional keratosis arising from excessive force while brushing the teeth (toothbrush keratosis); the constant rubbing of the tongue against the teeth (tongue thrust keratosis); the constant sucking, pressure, and irritation of the teeth against the buccal mucosa along the plane of occlusion (linea alba); and the habit of chronic cheek, tongue, or lip biting (cheek- or lip-bite keratosis). [1] Injuries to the oral mucosa, using items such as a pen, toothpicks, or fingernails, may result in frictional keratosis.A man has had to be rescued by firefighters in Germany after becoming stuck inside a stone vagina.
The man, who is said to be an American exchange student, got wedged in the statue at Tubingen University.
According to German newspaper Schwäbisches Tagblatt, five emergency service vehicles and 22 firemen had to help free the man.
They claim he climbed into the sculpture, by Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara, as part of a dare.
Erick Guzman posted the pictures on photo-sharing website Imgur.
"I was there!!! He just wanted to take a funny picture," said Guzman
"The fire department was not really amused, and he was really embarrassed."
The sculpture, called Pi-Chacan, was erected in front of the Institute of Microbiology and Virology at the university in 2001.
Its name means "make love".
It is thought to weigh more than 30 tonnes and is valued at more than 120,000 euros (£96,000).
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter and Radio1Newsbeat on YouTubeMore than 20 years after its original debut, a PlayStation classic returns to the spotlight. Wipeout Omega Collection launches Tuesday on PS4.
Prepare for the blistering speed and iconic style of a long-running PlayStation racer. Wipeout Omega Collection is here.
The Omega Collection features content from Wipeout HD, Wipeout HD Fury, and Wipeout 2048 — all fused into one staggering blend of speed and sound. Featuring 26 circuits, 46 unique ships, and an upgraded soundtrack, Wipeout Omega Collection is required racing for adrenaline junkies. Plus, the collection is enhanced for PS4 Pro.
For a full list of games coming to PlayStation next week, read on. And enjoy The Drop!
New Releases: Week of June 6, 2017
PS4, PS Vita — Digital, PS4 Version at Retail
Saddle up for some retro-styled dungeon-crawling goodness with Cladun Returns: This is Sengoku! Meet classic heroes from Japan’s Sengoku Era as you help the souls of the dead settle their unfinished business.
PS4 — Digital, Retail
A virus threatens humanity. Valkyrie Force, move out! In this RPG, fight using customized weapons, team attacks, Overdrive mode, and more! But beyond battle, you’ll have to interrogate teammates to find who’s been turned in order to save the world.
PS4 — Digital, Retail
The world’s leading off-road racing series is back! Dirt 4 puts you at the wheel of the most powerful machines ever made as you face the toughest roads and circuits on the planet in rally, rallycross, and landrush.
PS4 — Digital, Retail
Return to Morrowind in this new chapter of the award-winning online role-playing series, The Elder Scrolls Online. Embark on a dangerous journey through legendary locales, and save Morrowind from a deadly Daedric threat. Includes the first game of the series.
PS Vita — Digital
Become a modern farmer in Farming Simulator 18! Plant, harvest, and trade in crops, including for the first time sunflowers. Diversify your activity with animal husbandry and forestry. Develop and expand your very own farm… wherever you go!
PS4 — Digital
Introducing Jump Stars, the bonkers new local multiplayer party game which pits player against player in a bizarre, violent game show as they collectively compete to save their skins.
PS4 — Digital
Neighborhorde is a couch co-op shoot-em-up where you and your team of friends use toys as weapons and game-changing superpowers to survive evil robots and zombie Abe Lincolns.
PS4 — Digital (Out 6/7)
Perception is a first-person narrative horror adventure that tells the story of Cassie, a blind heroine who uses her extraordinary hearing and razor-sharp wits to unravel the mysteries of an abandoned estate that haunts her dreams.
PS Vita — Digital
Set around a city being consumed from within by disease, Plague Road tells a story of a lone doctor who abandoned his home and now returns to learn the fate of those he left behind.
PS4 — Digital
Randall wakes up in a distopyan world in which people are content living under constant surveillance and absolute control. Players take on the part of Randall, a powerful telepath with a touch of schizophrenia. His abilities allow him to control and play as every single character on screen, seamlessly swapping between them, exploiting the power that they have.
PS VR — Digital
Dodge cars, dogs, and tornadoes as you grow your subscriber base and expand your paper route in this arcade inspired newspaper delivery game.
PS4 — Digital, Retail
Experience Superbeat: Xonic, the new music game sensation that’s bound to have you on the edge of your seat! Enjoy the stunning visuals and effects as you play your way through 68 unique songs and unlock tons of hidden rewards and items. Perform and perfect awesome combos and show the world you’re the best by climbing the Ranking system!
PS4 — Digital, Retail
Play through the eyes of Renée, a 16-year-old girl who suffers from the symptoms of mental illness. She is searching for answers to the many questions from her past, while exploring the place where she spent most of her youth. Guide Renée through a dark and emotional journey where the lines between entertainment, storytelling, and reality blur.
PS4 — Digital
Become Victor, hunter of demons. Forge your own hero on a quest to liberate the cursed city of Zagoravia. Decide how you play at any moment, even in the heat of battle. Modify your demon slaying loadout as you dodge deadly attacks, leap from towering locations, and take on hordes of hideous beasts and cunning boss monsters.
PS4 — Digital, Retail
Wipeout Omega Collection brings together all the content from Wipeout HD, Wipeout HD Fury, and Wipeout 2048, enhanced for PS4 and PS4 Pro.
If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast- June 5 at 8/7c (HBO)
Good Bones- June 6 at 10/9c (HGTV)
American Grit- June 11 at 9/8c (Fox)Introduction
I’ve been a pen collector for nearly my whole life, but a year or two ago found the wonderful goodness of fountain pens. I started out with the classic Lamy Safari and moved my way up. When I saw my first Nakaya, I knew I would have to buy one. The Nakaya brand is an offshoot of Platinum–pen craftsmen who previously worked at Platinum work with in Nakaya to create customized pens.
These pens are beautiful.
Nakaya’s claim to fame is the hand-crafting that goes into their pens. In the case of my urushi lacquered finish, each layer was hand painted on. If you were to communicate your wishes to the Nakaya company, you could have your own customized pen. There are options for names, images, and more to be added to your pen.
Body
There are many options for different finishes and bodies for a Nakaya, but I’ll focus on the long cigar I purchased.
I went with the shiny urushi finish in kuro-tamenuri, which means that the base coat is a dark red and the top layers of lacquer are black. While there does not seem to be any danger of severe scratches, I am not worried anyway. I expect wear will make the finish even more beautiful. Do keep in mind that Nakaya does not intend this pen to be posted. The “long” size is large enough that I never even thought it was necessary to post. I chose the cigar (clipless) mainly to keep the beautiful lines of the pen minimalistic, and I think it succeeded.
Also despite the large size of the pen, it feels wonderful in the hand and it is not heavy at all. A review I read described the Nakaya as feeling warm in the hand, and I have to agree. It is a joy to hold.
Nib
I bought my pen from nibs.com with a rhodium-plated, hard M nib. I had it tuned by Mr. Mottishaw with no extra modifications. I expected a slightly wider nib, but I have to say that I am completely happy with it. It is not quite as springy as my 18k Pilot VP, but it is certainly more forgiving than a Lamy steel nib. I have only had a few skips which may have to do with the paper I used or the extremely light pressure I tested with. In every normal circumstance, this nib is fantastic. It is smooth with good feedback, and right in the middle of wet and dry. It won’t soak through paper, but it doesn’t take much to get going. I like Mr. Mottishaw’s work.
Just look at that beautiful nib.
Filling System
The one drawback pen users find with the Nakaya pens is the filling system. For a pen that starts at $550, one would expect more than a cartridge converter system.
It is worth noting that this means that the system is easy to clean, holds a good amount of ink, and lends itself to service well. I am happy with the converter (although it is slightly stiff) and I don’t see it as a drawback. I forsee no immediate problems with my converter, and if I do have them, I am not worried.
There are also options to buy hand-painted converters if you so choose.
Specifications
Material: urushi/hard rubber
Tipping size: 0.49 mm
Weight: 28.5 g
Closed length: 6.63 in
Barrel length: 4.78 in
Barrel width: 0.59 in
Section diameter: 0.41 in
Ink capacity: ~0.5 mL
Price: $600Under the Radar Films – Evil Dead Trilogy (Sam Rami)
When I was a child growing up in the 80s and early 90s, horror films were what brought my family unit together (except Dad who hated them). A confusing time indeed, both my grandmother and mother were obsessed with slasher films and horror films in general. Most kids were watching Flight of the Navigator or some Disney shlock. For me, it was Sleep Away Camp, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Hellraisers….everything from bad to worse. At the time I was terrified with my active imagination. I remember watching the first Nightmares on Elm Street and I couldn’t sleep for a week…I even started thinking my poor old grandfather could be Freddy. I would pray to God in bed, begging him to let me sleep, promising that I would never watch another. The next weekend, I would run down to the video store and rent another.
When you think about it, the slasher films from the 80s could have easily been produced by Barbra Bush for propaganda purposes. For example, any teenagers having sex would be killed first by decapitated, the poor stoner kid smoking a bag of rag weed gets it next, and anyone who went against the police or authority would be sliced and diced. As a tween, this scared the living shit out of me way more than any after school special bullshit. My mom would rent them with us every weekend. I am not sure what was stranger, the fact my mom rented these films and loved the killing or the fact she would make my brother and I turn our heads away at the sex scenes (at that age, preinternet, I suffered through violence in the hope to see any sex act or nudity). Because, at least for me, the violence was less interesting than dope smoking sex acts. However, I still have a morbid fascination with horror films but I notice, even as an adult, I wonder if I should cover my eyes at any sign of a breast. Most of the slasher films fit this formula to a tee but there were some subversive and innovative approaches to the genre. By flipping it upside down, Sam Rami has created a series that has stayed the test of time and have become undeniable horror movie classics.
The Evil Dead films brought a freshness to the horror genre. Some filmmakers, like Sam Rami, have the ability to thrive on creativity in making low budget films. Rami went so far as to create his own zoom/fast cut/tight shot style that has since been mimicked and appropriated by other famous directors like Guy Richie. All formulaic approaches were literally tossed out into the WOODS. Each film progressed in vision and many fans will argue which film is the best. But for me, all three films are one in the same. It’s the telling that varies, the bits and moments of shock and awe with outrageous humour. Similar to Sergio Leoni’s Fist Full of Dollars Trilogy or Robert Rodriguez’ Mariachi Trilogy…the story comes second to the world the filmmakers create…pure fantasy. Super violent, highly stylized, dark skit comedy. It’s a roller coaster ride of thrills and chills; and just like a great roller coaster ride, it begins fast, gets out of control, and then its over just as fast as it begun. The Evil Dead films, including Army of Darkness, wore their B movie charm on their sleeve but I would argue that all three of those films have become masterpieces in DIY filmmaking. Made with heart, innovation, and talent.
Tim RayneLos Angeles Galaxy midfielder Robbie Rogers, kicks the ball as Juventus forward Sebastian Giovinco gives chase during the second half of their International Champions Cup soccer match, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2013, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
WASHINGTON -- New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) announced Wednesday that Major League Soccer was launching an effort to protect current and future gay players from discrimination and harassment, following discussions with his office.
MLS will expand training for players and will post a Player Code of Conduct in home and visitor locker rooms underscoring that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is not allowed.
The league also will centralize the process for filing harassment and discrimination complaints by designating a lead MLS contact person. MLS pledged to protect from retaliation any person who makes a complaint or who cooperates in an investigation.
"Harassment and discrimination in the workplace -- whether in an office building, on the soccer field or a baseball diamond -- are illegal," Schneiderman said in a statement. "My office is committed to ensuring equal protection under the law for all employees no matter where they work, and I applaud Major League Soccer for working cooperatively with us to promote a culture of inclusion. Together, we are sending a powerful message that discrimination and harassment will not be tolerated in any form in the world of major league sports."
The new measures are part of the league's "Don't Cross the Line" anti-discrimination initiative, which launched last year.
The initiative "is a strong statement that we are a league that stands against discrimination,” said the MLS chief administrative officer, JoAnn Neale. "We are committed to providing a safe environment where everyone is treated equally, and with dignity and respect."
In February 2013, soccer player Robbie Rogers shook up the sports world and announced he was gay.
"I have been afraid, afraid to show whom I really was because of fear," Rogers wrote on his website. "Fear that judgement and rejection would hold me back from my dreams and aspirations. Fear that my loved ones would be farthest from me if they knew my secret. Fear that my secret would get in the way of my dreams."
Rogers said at the time that he would take a break from playing soccer. In May, he signed with the LA Galaxy and became the league's first openly gay player.
Schneiderman has worked with the National Football League and Major League Baseball on similar anti-discrimination efforts.
In April, the NFL said it would make sure its teams knew about the league's policies. Schneiderman stepped in after media reports said draft picks were being asked about their sexual orientation.BCCI and OPPO unveil official new Team India jersey
Aadya Sharma FOLLOW FEATURED COLUMNIST News 49.76K // 04 May 2017, 13:09 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
The BCCI, along with the new official sponsor OPPO India, have unveiled the new kit of the Indian cricket team. Rahul Johri, CEO of the BCCI, revealed the brand new jersey at an event held at Mumbai’s JW Marriot Sahar hotel.
The new jersey has the same layout as the previous one worn by Virat Kohli and his team in the ODI series against England earlier this year, with a dark blue shade on the sides along the arms, and a lighter hue on the chest and back. A thin strip of tricolour runs from the collar to the sides of the arm, with the Nike logo and the BCCI crest on either side. OPPO, who replaced Star India as the official jersey sponsor, will feature in the centre of the blue jersey.
OPPO, the smartphone manufacturing company paid Rs. 1,079 crore for a deal that extends for a period of five years. The company will be paying an amount of Rs. 1.56 crore for every game featuring in an ICC tournament, and Rs. 4.61 crore per bilateral game involving the Indian team.
Also read: The evolution of the Indian Cricket Team jersey in the past 23 years - Slide 16 of 16
The new kit was launched by BCCI CEO Rahul Johri in Mumbai
When Virat Kohli and his men walk out in England to defend their Champions Trophy title, they will be seen wearing the brand new jersey, with the new sponsors highlighted on the front of their kit.
OPPO claimed the bid to be the new sponsor by outbidding fellow Chinese smartphone manufacturer and current IPL sponsor, Vivo, who offered $115 million for the five-year period. OPPO bid $162 million for a five-year period starting in April and claimed the rights.
Team India will wear the new jersey during the ICC Champions Trophy 2017
After OPPO won the bid in April, Rahul Johri was quoted as saying, “On behalf of the BCCI, I would like to congratulate OPPO Mobiles India Pvt Ltd., on winning the rights and welcome them to the BCCI family. OPPO Mobiles and the BCCI share a common vision and I am confident that we will work together to further grow Indian cricket.”Instead of struggling to keep the euro zone together, default may be less painful in the long run for the people of overindebted countries
SUSANA VERA / REUTERS A man walks past a closed-down business in Madrid on March 27, 2013
The euro-zone crisis has slipped off the radar screen during the past couple of weeks as gun control and the Boston bombers have dominated U.S. news. But none of the euro zone’s problems have gone away. Political crises beset France, Italy and Spain. Smaller countries, from Portugal to Cyprus, face even more pressing financial troubles. Germany grows less and less willing to foot the bill for bailouts. And for the first time, serious public figures in Europe have begun openly discussing the pros and cons of allowing countries to default on their national debt.
There is, in fact, a historical case for tolerating default. Argentina suffered a financial crisis in 1999 that led to a period of high unemployment. Over the next several years, it became harder and harder to maintain the value of currency. In 2002, the country defaulted on more than $100 billion in debt. Inflation soared, and workers’ purchasing power plummeted. Savers lost a big chunk of their money. But a year later, growth bounced back to an 8% to 9% annual rate, and wages rose even faster.
The same issues arose during the 2008 banking crisis. Ireland bailed out its banks, while Iceland couldn’t afford to and allowed a partial default. The results were that Ireland had no inflation, but unemployment topped 14% as growth ground almost to a halt. By contrast, in Iceland the currency lost almost half its value and inflation reached 5.4%. However, economic growth picked up slightly and unemployment didn’t rise much above 6%.
(MORE: Why the Case for Austerity Took a Big Hit)
In all these cases, policymakers had to choose whether working people or financial interests should be the ones to suffer most during a serious economic crisis. Default hurt affluent savers and financial institutions, but proved to be better for ordinary workers over the long term. What is happening now in Europe is that populations are resisting further austerity. In response, politicians and technocrats are beginning to question whether default might ultimately be less painful than doing what will be required to keep the euro zone together. Consider the latest developments in these six countries (from west to east):
Since Germany has financed the largest share of bailouts to date, the country’s willingness to keep doing so is key to the survival of the euro zone. From that perspective, a couple of recent developments are ominous. Two weeks ago, a group of economists and university professors launched a new German political party committed to the “orderly dissolution of the euro.” National elections for the lower house of Parliament are expected to be held by late September.
Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that countries in the euro zone must be prepared to give up some control to European financial institutions. Her words will almost certainly provoke further resistance from countries with high unemployment. Yet any softening of Merkel’s stance will help the new anti-euro party draw voters away from the governing coalition in the upcoming elections.
(MORE: Why Austerity Is a Dangerous Idea)
With the social fabric tearing in many countries, default is looking increasingly attractive. The top priority for poor countries will be to revive short-term growth even if there is a longer-term cost. And at some point, it will be cheaper for affluent countries to clean up the financial mess caused by defaults than to keep passing the hat for those in trouble. Mainstream opinion is seriously considering the idea that everyone may end up better off if problem countries simply leave the euro zone with as little fuss as possible. And once such an exit becomes thinkable, it may well become inevitable.The decision to replace a learning management system is not simple. It has ramifications in terms of dollars and staff resources and requires a change management strategy. Before an organization makes the decision, it must determine whether a new system will meet its stated requirements and relieve problems.
Despite the complexity of the decision, many companies are planning to take action. Dissatisfaction with learning management systems is at an all-time high. Organizations’ intent to replace has risen from 33 percent of companies surveyed in 2011 to 47 percent in 2012, according to “The Race to Replace: Results From the 2012 LMS Trends Survey” from the Brandon Hall Group.
There are a number of reasons behind the dissatisfaction. System age and type of implementation top the list. Some 58 percent of companies that implemented their LMS five or more years ago intend to replace it. Technology has evolved significantly over that time, and the business climate itself is quite different. Perhaps most importantly, users expect more from technology now.
However, switching isn’t limited to the old-time systems; data shows similar levels of dissatisfaction among companies with implementations from one to two years old. The acquisition frenzy of the last two to three years could be a factor, because service levels and support can drop or change dramatically after an acquisition.
Most companies (64 percent) with multiple installed learning management systems are also looking to replace current systems and consolidate. The benefits of SaaS and cloud services — ranging from reduced IT and administrative requirements, easier updates and lower maintenance — are also factoring into replacement decisions. More than half of companies with installed systems are looking to replace their learning management systems.
When it comes to features and functionality, satisfaction plummets. Approximately one-third of those surveyed rated satisfaction with their LMS features at a 1 or 2 on a five-point scale, with 1 as extremely dissatisfied and 5 as extremely satisfied. Only 10 percent of respondents gave their LMS feature sets a 5.
The aforementioned factors set the stage for a replacement decision, but learning leaders should do their own internal research. The following questions can help to determine the problem:
• Is it reporting? According to the survey, regardless of company size, length of implementation or type of system, lack of reporting functionality is the most-cited reason for deciding to switch.
• Does the LMS have an outdated appearance? Looks matter. This reason was a close second. Many heritage vendors struggle to keep up with the modern look and feel users now expect.
• Is the LMS easy to use? This factor is likely related to a system’s appearance. The important takeaway is that a system’s “under the covers” power matters little if users don’t find it easy to adopt and use.
• Are vendors supportive?
Thoughts From the Trenches
Once the learning leader makes the decision to switch systems, it pays to solicit independent references. They can identify potential problems and help to facilitate the transition.
Home Care Institute provides training to approximately 25,000 health care and hospice professionals employed by 230 companies. Since each client company gets its own customized and branded learning portal, the company’s business success is directly tied to its LMS. In July 2012, company President Lu Post began evaluating other LMS options.
“We’d had our current LMS, one of the first SaaS providers, for many years and had enjoyed excellent support and service,” said Post. “However, after it was acquired for the second time, we noticed a big difference in support. We were experiencing issues that had direct impact on our customers’ businesses and couldn’t get resolutions.”
While Post did not use a formal request for proposal in her evaluation process, she did have a list of essential requirements, such as the ability to easily create branded, fully functional portals; to manage and track employee skills and competencies for each client; to meet a diverse range of reporting requirements; to be easy to manage; and to look and feel “new.”
Post decided on an LMS that met all of her primary requirements and brought new efficiencies to content management and competency mapping. The transition was accomplished in six weeks.
“We had an assigned project manager and a programming expert. We did twice-weekly calls. Working together we were able to load all content, build all portals and set up permissions, build client curricula, move all client historical data and train our team and clients,” she said.
Post said others considering a replacement should take their time with the transition, if possible. “We had to move fast because of end-of-year compliance reporting. But, if you can, take your time because the process involves learning a new platform while still supporting a problematic one.”
She also said to hold off notifying the current LMS provider of the decision to switch until the last possible moment. “Once they find out you’re leaving, that’s the end of your support.”
Andi Campbell has considerable experience in LMS selection and replacement. As vice president of learning and development for LPL Financial for five years, she took her team through two different migrations. Now, in her new role as director of learning and employee development for LAZ Parking, she’s involved in her second implementation of the same vendor’s LMS.
Campbell had a short list of mandatory requirements for an effective LMS replacement and transition, including easy data migration, cost, social collaboration capabilities, service, single sign-on and efficient integration with other internal systems.
Campbell prioritized flexibility and ease of use in content handling. Given that LAZ Parking doesn’t have a large legacy content library, the new LMS had to easily upload and manage videos, simulations and other user-generated content.
“Since most of our employees work in the field, learning mobility is also extremely important,” she said.
For those considering a switch, Campbell cautioned against overcomplicating the process. Be clear on top priorities and have five key-use scenarios developed before contacting a new vendor. “Always stay in charge of the conversation. And watch out for extras. In my opinion, vendors shouldn’t charge more for mobile or social modules.”
Campbell also recommends working with a vendor that will allow a full system test with no strings attached or charges. “I found that several vendors would let you play in a sandbox, but then would charge you $30,000 above the purchase contract to keep the work that you’ve done.”
Finally, Campbell said she would urge decision-makers to take advantage of LinkedIn and other social groups to get the real scoop on customer experience. “The client references given to you by a vendor will be carefully selected and likely biased. You need to go out on your own to tap into the everyday customer experience.”
Greg Redekopp, employee development coordinator for Basin Electric Power Cooperative, relied on analyst research and consulting during the selection process. “They immediately helped us narrow the search and cut through the market hype. They also helped us focus on our key priorities for current as well as future needs.”
Making the Leap
Before making a replacement decision, learning leaders should perform a critical audit of the current system without letting emotion or politics get in the way. Evaluate complaints and determine their actual impact. Is some dissatisfaction the result of insufficient training or unused functionality? What functionality is “nice to have” and what is imperative? Talk with the current vendor to determine if there’s anything that can be done to resolve areas of dissatisfaction.
In addition to getting clarity on priorities and key-use case scenarios, get a detailed understanding of all costs and resources involved in the operation and maintenance of the current system to provide a solid point of comparison. Do a risk/benefit analysis that lays out the positives and negatives of staying with the current system and those associated with moving to a new system.
Also, learn as much as possible from peer experiences. Mine social sites and groups for advice and recommendations, and network at conferences and professional events. People are often willing to share insights and recommendations.
While evaluating other systems:
• Examine the three R’s: robust, relevant, reporting. Report tools should provide easy customization without professional services. Ideally, reports should be easy enough to pull that managers can do their own reporting at will.
• Evaluate the system’s look and feel. If the system appears outdated or is difficult to use, adoption will suffer.
• Think about system integration. What types of systems are in use that would require LMS integration? What about possible future systems? Understand how the system integrates, the expertise required to do the work and any associated charges. Ideally, ask the vendor to prove ease of integration through demonstrations and client references.
• Consider the content, data and processes needed to migrate. Get details on how the migration would be done, whether it is typically done internally or externally, the time required and any associated costs.
• Think long-term. A company has a long-range business plan, and the learning function should too. If the organization decides to replace its LMS, the new system also should align with the company’s vision, not just its current needs.
• Consider the vendor’s culture. Often, the source of customer dissatisfaction is a result of a cultural misalignment. For instance, if a company likes to have input into product planning and personalized support, it may want to buy from a smaller vendor. If the company culture emphasizes defined procedures, it may be better off buying from a vendor with highly defined standards based on years of industry experience.
The market offers many options for consideration. In some cases, customers can achieve the holy grail of software replacements: a reduction in licensing and operating costs with improved functionality.
During the last few years, technology advancements have made replacements easier. So, while the decision to replace an LMS isn’t one to take lightly, breaking up is doable and often beneficial.
Stacey Harris is vice president of research for Brandon Hall Group. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.PUBLIC servants face compulsory redundancies unless they accept a new deal on cuts in pay and pensions, the Government has warned.
PUBLIC servants face compulsory redundancies unless they accept a new deal on cuts in pay and pensions, the Government has warned.
Brendan Howlin, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, asked that unions need to be given space to get members to accept the new package, that will result in some €300m in savings this year and a billion by 2015.
He appealed for public sector workers to back the agreement, struck following weeks of "difficult and long" discussions with industrial relations mediators who broke the deadlock between Government and trade unions which had previously rejected the Croke Park II deal.
"I hope if we get an agreement that we will be able to give the same guarantees we've giving to workers in the public sector to date that there will be no compulsory redundancy," said Mr Howlin.
"But that's contingent on people signing up to the deal."
Some of the measures in the revised package include nurses working longer hours, pay cuts of up to 8% for those earning more than 65,000 euro and teachers losing supervision and substitution payments.
More than 20 unions and organisations representing public servants, including frontline workers, now have to go back to members to reject or accept the draft proposals, with some expected to re-ballot workers.
Mr Howlin paid tribute to Kieran Mulvey and his team at the Labour Relations Commission for their stamina and skill during the lengthy talks, which ran overnight.
The Government had warned an agreement must be struck on a possible renegotiation of the talks or legislation would be enacted to enforce measures.
Mr Howlin said that legislation was approved by the Cabinet earlier today and will be published on Thursday.
It is understood most unions were shown the act, which will pave the way for pay and pension cuts for high earners as well as other measures to enable the Government to achieve its savings if the proposals are rejected by workers.
Mr Howlin acknowledged that the country's 300,000 public servants had already contributed to Ireland's economic recovery and reduced their standards of living in recent years, but vowed it would be the Government's last ask.
"It is a building process to get to today," the minister said.
"I'm glad that the structure is there. I'm not taking anything for granted with regard to the ballot that's still out there. But I'm asking public servants to walk with us on this final leg of the path. I think it's really important."
Unions who voted against the original Croke Park II deal include Unite, Siptu, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO), the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (Asti), the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI), the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), the Irish Medial Organisation (IMO) and the Civil and Public Services Union (CPSU).
Separately, the TUI and Asti last night voted for industrial action, up to and including strikes, if the Government moves unilaterally to cut pay or worsen conditions.
Mr Mulvey said while some negotiations were ongoing, he hoped the process was coming to an end.
"It's been a difficult set of negotiations over the last |
the Legislature, the judiciary and the executive,” as California Attorney General Edmund G. “Pat” Brown characterized Article IX, Section 9 of the state Constitution in 1957.
The 1879 voter-approved revision of the California Constitution declared the university a “public trust” and gave its governing Board of Regents near total autonomy. The idea was to shield UC from the “hands of the Legislature,” backers said at the time.
But in return, many in the Legislature have been ticked off at UC and its self-governance ever since — especially at times like this, when university officials behave in ways lawmakers don’t like.
“The autonomy from more than 100 years ago is a worn-out strategy that doesn’t work anymore,” said state Sen. Cathleen Galgiani, D-Stockton, who is proposing a constitutional amendment that would punish UC whenever it pays administrators too much.
Galgiani said she has long been frustrated by the regents’ “tone deaf” decisions to raise pay while cutting student services, and to give highly paid administrators even more money. But she said it was state auditor Elaine Howle’s probe of UC President Janet Napolitano’s office, released April 25, that prompted her to introduce her bill last week.
Howle’s audit found, among other things, that Napolitano’s office paid its executives and administrative staff “significantly more than their public sector counterparts” and said the office “could save millions of dollars in salary costs” by paying salaries comparable to what their counterparts at CSU and other government agencies earn. The auditor also discovered that employees are often given raises without taking on additional responsibilities.
Galgiani’s bill to rein in the university is one of many such efforts by lawmakers and governors over the years to get around UC’s hard shell of autonomy and take aim at its soft underbelly.
The weapon is money.
The $32.5 billion university — with 10 campuses, five medical centers, three national laboratories and one just-audited Oakland headquarters — gets a tenth of its budget from California’s general fund, or $3.4 billion. (Most other revenue comes from medical centers, government contracts, sales and student fees.)
Last year alone, lawmakers introduced at least 14 bills in an attempt to get UC to change policies. As usual, many of last year’s bills contained the threat of reduced funding to UC if it didn’t comply.
Just one of the bills survived and became law.
Among the bills that died was one that would have withheld state funds from UC unless it stopped admitting out-of-state students using a lower academic threshold than for California residents — a practice uncovered in 2016 by another state audit.
Another bill would have forced UC to cap salaries at $500,000 a year or lose state funds.
The only one that became law required UC to support entrepreneurship activities — in exchange for an extra $2.2 million.
“The primary tool that the Legislature has to make sure UC is meeting (lawmakers’) priorities is through the budget process,” said Jason Constantouros, a higher education consultant with the state’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office.
In May, for example, the regents are expected to limit out-of-state enrollment for the first time, despite the widely held view among university administrators that the higher-paying students benefit UC financially.
They are doing it — and enrolling an additional 2,500 state residents in the fall — after state lawmakers made those things a requirement for UC to get an additional $18.5 million in the 2016-17 state budget.
Not surprisingly, UC officials are fiercely protective of their autonomy and lobby lawmakers against the annual barrage of efforts to chip away at it.
So when Howle recommended in her audit of the UC president’s office that the Legislature take over its funding instead of allowing the president’s office to absorb money from the campuses — which the audit said it took too much of — UC officials objected.
Monica Lozano, chair of the 26-member appointed Board of Regents, told lawmakers at a hearing on the audit last week that “the best means to accountability is with the guidance of the regents.”
Napolitano’s spokeswoman, Dianne Klein, told The Chronicle: “For almost 150 years, we’ve had a degree of constitutional autonomy that has served the university very well. To give the Legislature direct control, we think, would be a mistake.”
John Douglass, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, agreed. In a 2015 paper on the history of UC’s autonomy, the scholar concluded that self-governance — and steady funding by the state — have been the essential ingredients in creating “one of the world’s premier research universities.”
But none of that has stopped lawmakers from trying to step in.
If Galgiani’s proposed Constitutional amendment is approved by the Legislature, voters would then be asked to decide whether to prohibit UC from raising tuition and paying “substandard wages” to cleaning and maintenance workers in any year when more than 600 UC administrators earn a salary higher than the governor’s.
This year, Brown earns $190,103, according to the California Citizens Compensation Commission. Galgiani said that after peeling off all academic, medical and research employees, there remain 712 UC administrators who earn more than the governor.
When academic, medical and research employees are added back in, a Chronicle salary analysis of UC employees’ total compensation shows that 9,640 employees earned more than Brown’s gross salary of $182,791 in fiscal year 2015-16.
That’s a 63 percent increase from five years earlier, when 5,931 UC employees earned more than $173,987 — the governor’s salary then.
Given the history of such bills, Galgiani’s may have little chance of success.
Yet when Howle included 33 recommendations in her audit for how UC should reform the troubled financial practices of its president’s office — including “adjusting” the range of executive salaries and benefits — Napolitano said in her written response that most were “reasonable” but that she expected to analyze the impact of “narrowing our salary ranges before committing to doing so.”
Lozano, the regents chair, gave a slightly different answer when faced with state lawmakers in person last week. She said the president’s office “will be adopting all of the state recommendations.”
The state Constitution says it’s the regents’ choice.
Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimovRacist graffiti found etched into sidewalk outside 141-18 Cherry Ave. in Flushing, Queens. NOTE: The racial slur in the right corner of this image has been blurred by CBS New York (Credit: City Councilman Peter Koo's office)
A City Council member in Queens is outraged after anti-Asian graffiti was found scribbled into sidewalk cement in Flushing.
City Councilman Peter Koo said his office was made aware of the vandalism after photos were posted to Facebook over the weekend.
The remark, which includes a racial slur, was carved into wet cement on the sidewalk outside of the Cherry Manor Condos at 141-18 Cherry Ave.
Koo’s office said a community center, a daycare, three after-school programs, a church and multiple residences all reside within a half-block of the location.
“It is critical that the community take an immediate stand against this kind of hate speech wherever and whenever it surfaces. We embrace our diversity here in Flushing as a strength that should be celebrated and nurtured, and we will stand vigilant against racism in all forms,” Koo said in a statement.
The councilman said as soon as he was made aware of the hateful remark he contacted the city’s Department of Transportation and the building’s owner, who agreed to fix the sidewalk as soon as possible.
A DOT crew buffed out the sidewalk Tuesday morning, completely removing the vandalism.
“I would like to thank the NYC Department of Transportation and First Property Investment, LLC for acting swiftly to eliminate this hate speech. I would also like to thank the many vigilant community members who spoke up and contacted my office when they learned of this vandalism, and I strongly encourage everyone in our community to speak out to proper authorities when confronted with hate speech of any kind,” Koo added.
The NYPD’s 109th Precinct is investigating the vandalism.“There are times I wish I never looked at Mike Webster’s brain. It has dragged me into worldly affairs I do not want to be associated with – human meanness, wickedness and selfishness. People trying to cover up, to control how information is released. I started this not knowing I was walking into a minefield. That is my only regret.”
These are the words of Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu, a Nigerian physician, forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who first discover and publish a link between American football and the brain damage – Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), in former players.
Omalu’s work has changed a sport, and helped provoke a billion-dollar lawsuit and inspired a Hollywood film, Concussion (in which Will Smith played the role of Omelu) that was nominated for a Golden Globe.
But Omalu who knew little about American football attracted many enemies. American Football club owners and fans love their game very much that they saw Omalu as a threat to the game. They rejected his findings and questioned his right as a Nigerian to link their beloved American football to a brain trauma.
“I really wish I wasn’t brought into this…Lead a quiet life, enjoy my life, die a simple death. But now I have no choice. My life has been impacted in the most negative way. People are reacting very emotionally to me. They don’t like me. Call me all types of names but I am simply speaking to the truth,”
he said.
The Discovery of CTE
Omalu first discovered the CTE when examining the body of Mike Webster, a former pro football player with the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers while working at the coroner’s office in September 2002.
Webster had displayed patterns of distressing behaviour before his death from a heart attack at age 50, and Omalu was curious as to what clues the former player’s brain would reveal.
After careful examination of the brain, Omalu discovered clumps of tau proteins, which impair function upon accumulation. It was similar to “dementia pugilista,” a degenerative disease documented decades earlier in boxers, though it had yet to be connected to football players.
After confirming his findings with top faculty members at the University of Pittsburgh, Omalu named the condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and submitted a paper titled “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player” to the Medical journal Neurosurgery.
Omalu’s discovery was discredited by the mouthpiece of the National Football League (NFL) and the Mild Traumatic Brian Injury (MTBI) Committee discredited Omalu’s research as “flawed” and refused to acknowledge a link between the sport and the brain damage in former players.
However, Omalu gained an important supporter in Dr Julian Bailes, chairman of neurosurgery at the West Virginia University School of Medicine and a former team physician for the Steelers. With Bailes and lawyer Bob Fitzsimmons, Omalu founded the Sports Legacy Institute (later renamed the Concussion Legacy Foundation) to continue studies of CTE.
Omalu pressed forward with his examination of Terry Long, another former football player who had committed suicide at age 45, and discovered the same buildup of tau proteins. His follow-up paper to Neurosurgery was published in November 2006.
Despite the NFL’s public evasiveness, Omalu and his supporters scored a victory when Mike Webster’s family was awarded a significant settlement in December 2006.
Omalu’s Nigerian and Academic Background
Omalu was born in Nigeria during the civil war of 1968 in Idemili South, a small town in eastern part of Nigeria. The sixth of seven children of a civil engineer and a seamstress, Omalu was admitted to the Federal Government College in Enugu at age 12 and at age 15 he began medical school at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN).
After earning his first of 10 degrees and board certifications in 1990, Omalu interned at University of Jos Teaching Hospital (UJTH), before being accepted to a visiting scholar program at the University of Washington in 1994 at the age of 25. He then served his residency at Harlem Hospital Center, where he developed his interest in pathology.
In 1999, Omalu moved to Pittsburgh to train under noted pathologist Cyril Wecht at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. Omalu holds eight advanced degrees and board certifications, later receiving fellowships in pathology and neuropathology through the University of Pittsburgh in 2000 and 2002 respectively, a Master of Public Health (MPH) in epidemiology in 2004 from University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.
Movie and Book with Will Smith
Will Smith was one NFL fan who allowed Omalu’s findings to challenge his thinking and, in preparing to play Omalu in the 2015 film Concussion, he watched him perform four autopsies and saw first-hand how he would play music and talk to the deceased person.
Will Smith said, “I was inspired by Bennet’s courage and faith…He combines that into one gorgeous human being. I was ecstatic to find that depth of character. I love that guy.”
Dr Omalu released his book, Truth Doesn’t Have a Side on the 9th of this month with the forward written by Will Smith.
Dr Omalu whose curriculum vitae spans 65 pages, listing things like the discovery of a traumatic brain disease in football players, professional papers on West Nile virus and numerous autopsies in criminal cases is ranked among top pathologists in the United States. In 2013 he was offered the job of Chief Medical Examiner in Washington, District of Columbia, the chief position investigating deaths in the United State. Though this job would have made Dr Omalu the US federal government’s top forensic pathologist, working with powerful government agencies like the CIA, he declined the offer.
He is currently chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, California and is a professor in the UC Davis Department of Medical Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Omalu who only became an US citizen in February 2015 is married to Prema Mutiso, originally from Kenya. They live in Lodi, California and have two children, Ashly and Mark.
Sources: Wikipedia, Telegraph, Biography.com
AdvertisementsThe Houston City Council passed a sweeping ban on synthetic marijuana Wednesday, outlawing the sale and use of the designer drug sometimes referred to as kush and hoping to choke off its supply by targeting the way the product is marketed and labeled.
Police have struggled to enforce a 2011 state law against the product - often labeled "potpourri" or "herbal incense" - because that law targets the products' chemical makeup, which dealers have tweaked into hundreds of variants to avoid prosecution.
This year alone, said James Miller, head of controlled substances at the Houston Forensic Science Center, the city crime lab has seen 15 different synthetic cannabanoids, only six of which are regulated.
Meanwhile, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency has labeled Houston a key market and source of synthetic marijuana, and local officials, residents and business owners have become alarmed at the unpredictable effects the drug can have on users, many of them homeless residents buying it for as low as $1 from convenience stores.
Miller said the city's forensics lab tests or fields requests from Houston police officers to examine the designer drugs daily, adding what most concerns him is the rapid evolution of the chemicals being sprayed on the plant material, which simply delivers the chemical additives into the user's system. The chemicals, he said, are sophisticated compounds being developed to trigger hallucinations and strong emotions.
Trudy Wollgast has worked at the city's sobering center, an alternative to jail for inebriates, since 2013. Kush users were infrequent and mellow in demeanor when she started, but have become more common, she said, as well as more aggressive and unpredictable. Weekdays see 10 to 15 users, with perhaps 20 to 30 on weekends, she said.
"They're violent, they have uncontrolled outbursts, they have psychotic episodes," she said. "We recently had a 35-year-old male that was relatively healthy smoking kush. We sent him to the hospital because he was complaining of chest pains, shortness of breath; he ended up having a heart attack."
Mayor Annise Parker stressed the drug can cause permanent brain damage and immediate, dramatic behavioral effects
"It is an epidemic," she said. "It is the fastest growing drug of choice across the United States, and it is many, many, many times more potent than natural marijuana and, in fact, it has no relation to marijuana other than it stimulates some of the same receptors in the body. It can cause stupor, but it can also cause aggression and agitation, and it's causing a lot of concern across the community."
Fines can add up fast
Enforcement will begin immediately, with each packet carrying a fine of up to $2,000.
"This will give HPD the tools to go in to the convenience store, the gas station, the smoke shop, wherever it's being sold, and tell the owner, 'Either you get rid of these packages now or we're going to cite you for each and every package,'" City Attorney David Feldman said. "At $2,000 per package, that can get pretty substantial."
Feldman has acknowledged, however, that such bans elsewhere have been difficult to enforce. Nearby cities such as Pearland, Pasadena and La Porte also have targeted kush.
Houston's ordinance makes the synthetic drug illegal in several ways: if the substance is presented as incense but contains ingredients not related to incense; if the packaging implies in writing or the vendor implies verbally that the product mimics the effects of marijuana; or if the packet does not list all the product's active ingredients.
Any officer would be able to walk into a store and cite the owner for displaying kush and seize the drugs if the packages list no ingredients or claim they will get the user high. However, stores likely are violating the ordinance by not publicly displaying the products, Feldman said, meaning undercover police work will be required to examine the packets and prove those violations. Lab testing also would be required to prove the packet contains chemicals that have nothing to do with its advertised use.
Nonetheless, Feldman said many stores will stop carrying the drugs rather than risk thousands of dollars in fines, and said those that persist will be easy targets for police, who already know the problem shops.
"The cops know where this stuff is being sold because it could be legally sold," he said. "I don't see it as being a burdensome effort. You can just target periodically. I suspect you're going to see a concerted effort to do that."
Former users back ban
Former kush users implored council at its public session on Tuesday to pass the ban.
Amanda Howell, now 23 and studying to be a chemical dependency counselor, said she began smoking the drug at 18 and within months was unable to get out of bed or bathe herself. The drug was easier to get than alcohol, she said, and was ubiquitous among her peers.
"This is more dangerous than anything we've seen before," she said, "and people don't even know what it is."
Billy Ford told the council he had smoked only a small amount of kush when he took off running down the middle of a downtown street, where he was clipped by several cars. Friends informed him later of the incident, which sent him to the hospital; he had no memory of the event.
"I smoked marijuana, I smoked crack. There's nothing like kush," he said. "You go downtown right now, there's so many people down there smoking kush. You can buy one for $1. I wish y'all can do something about it."
The City Council passed the ban unanimously and without discussion.
Councilman Jack Christie said, "Ninety percent of the crime in this city has to do with drugs, simple as that.
"It fries their brain to where they're shooting people, driving through their stores in pickup trucks. We've got to stop the chemicals going into these kids' brains, and adults, too."Aboulia or abulia (from Greek: βουλή, meaning "will"),[1] in neurology, refers to a lack of will or initiative and can be seen as a disorder of diminished motivation (DDM).
Aboulia falls in the middle of the spectrum of diminished motivation, with apathy being less extreme and akinetic mutism being more extreme than aboulia.[2] The condition was originally considered to be a disorder of the will,[3][4] and aboulic individuals are unable to act or make decisions independently; and their condition may range in severity from subtle to overwhelming. It is also known as Blocq's disease (which also refers to abasia and astasia-abasia).[5]
Symptoms and signs [ edit ]
The clinical condition denoted aboulia was first described in 1838; however, since that time, a number of different definitions have emerged, with some contradicting others.[6] Aboulia has been described as a loss of drive, expression, loss of behavior and speech output, slowing and prolonged speech latency, and reduction of spontaneous thought content and initiative.[7] The clinical features most commonly associated with aboulia are:[6]
Difficulty in initiating and sustaining purposeful movements
Lack of spontaneous movement
Reduced spontaneous speech
Increased response-time to queries
Passivity
Reduced emotional responsiveness and spontaneity
Reduced social interactions
Reduced interest in usual pastimes
Especially in patients with progressive dementia, it may affect feeding.[8] Patients may continue to chew or hold food in their mouths for hours without swallowing it.[8] The behavior may be most evident after these patients have eaten part of their meals and no longer have strong appetites.
Differentiation from other disorders [ edit ]
Both neurologists and psychiatrists recognize aboulia to be a distinct clinical entity, but its status as a syndrome is unclear. Although aboulia has been known to clinicians since 1838, it has been subjected to different interpretations – from 'a pure lack of will', in the absence of motor paralysis to, more recently, being considered 'a reduction in action emotion and cognition'.[6] As a result of the changing definition of aboulia, there is currently a debate on whether or not aboulia is a sign or a symptom of another disease, or its own disease that seems to appear in the presence of other more well-researched diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease.[6]
A 2002 survey of two movement disorder experts, two neuropsychiatrists, and two rehabilitation experts did not seem to shed any light on the matter of differentiating aboulia from other DDMs. The experts used the terms apathy and aboulia interchangeably and debated whether or not aboulia was a discrete entity, or just a hazy gray area on a spectrum of more defined disorders.[6] Four of the experts said aboulia was a sign and a symptom, and the group was split on whether or not it was a syndrome.[6] Another survey, which consisted of true and false questions about what aboulia is distinct from, whether it is a sign, symptom, or syndrome, where lesions are present in cases of aboulia, what diseases are commonly associated with aboulia, and what current treatments are used for aboulia, was sent to 15 neurologists and 10 psychiatrists. Most experts agreed that aboulia is clinically distinct from depression, akinetic mutism, and alexithymia.[6] However, only 32% believed aboulia was different from apathy, while 44% said they were not different, and 24% were unsure. Yet again, there was disagreement about whether or not aboulia is a sign, symptom, or syndrome.[6][citation needed]
The study of motivation has been mostly about how stimuli come to acquire significance for animals. Only recently has the study of motivational processes been extended to integrate biological drives and emotional states in the explanation of purposeful behavior in human beings. Considering the number of disorders attributed to a lack of will and motivation, it is essential that aboulia and apathy be defined more precisely to avoid confusion.[6]
Causes [ edit ]
Many different causes of aboulia have been suggested. While there is some debate about the validity of aboulia as a separate disease, experts mostly agree that aboulia is the result of frontal lesions and not with cerebellar or brainstem lesions.[6] As a result of more and more evidence showing that the mesolimbic and the mesocortical dopamine system are key to motivation and responsiveness to reward, aboulia may be a dopamine-related dysfunction.[7] Aboulia may also result from a variety of brain injuries which cause personality change, such as dementing illnesses, trauma, or intracerebral hemorrhage (stroke), especially stroke causing diffuse injury to the right hemisphere.[9][10]
Damage to the basal ganglia [ edit ]
Injuries to the frontal lobe and/or the basal ganglia can interfere with an individual's ability to initiate speech, movement, and social interaction. Studies have shown that 5-67% of all patients with traumatic brain injuries and 13% of patients with lesions on their basal ganglia suffer from some form of diminished motivation.[2]
It may complicate rehabilitation when a stroke patient is uninterested in performing tasks like walking despite being capable of doing so. It should be differentiated from apraxia, when a brain injured patient has impairment in comprehending the movements necessary to perform a motor task despite not having any paralysis that prevents performing the task; that condition can also result in lack of initiation of activity.
Damage to the capsular genu [ edit ]
A case study involving two patients who suffered from acute confusional state and aboulia was conducted to see if these symptoms were the result of an infarct in the capsular genu. Using clinical neuropsychological and MRI evaluations at baseline and one year later showed that the cognitive impairment was still there one year after the stroke. Cognitive and behavioral alterations due to a genu infarct are most likely because the thalamo-cortical projection fibers that originate from the ventral-anterior and medial-dorsal nuclei traverse the internal capsule genu. These tracts are part of a complex system of cortical and subcortical frontal circuits through which the flow of information from the entire cortex takes place before reaching the basal ganglia. Cognitive deterioration could have occurred through the genu infarcts affecting the inferior and anterior thalamic peduncles. The interesting thing about this case study was that the patients did not show any functional deficit at the follow-up one year after the stroke and were not depressed but did show diminished motivation. This result supports the idea that aboulia may exist independently of depression as its own syndrome.[11]
Damage to anterior cingulate circuit [ edit ]
The anterior cingulate circuit consists of the anterior cingulate cortex, also referred to as Brodmann area 24, and its projections to the ventral striatum which includes the ventromedial caudate. The loop continues to connect to the ventral pallidum, which connects to the ventral anterior nucleus of the thalamus. This circuit is essential for the initiation of behavior, motivation and goal orientation, which are the very things missing from a patient with a disorder of diminished motivation. Unilateral injury or injury along any point in the circuit leads to aboulia regardless of the side of the injury, but if there is bilateral damage, the patient will exhibit a more extreme case of diminished motivation, akinetic mutism.[9]
It is well documented that the caudate nucleus is involved in degenerative diseases of the central nervous system such as Huntington disease. In a case study of 32 acute caudate stroke patients, 48% were found to be experiencing aboulia. Most of the cases where aboulia was present were when the patients had a left caudate infarct that extended into the putamen as seen through a CT or MRI scan.[12]
Diagnosis [ edit ]
Diagnosis for aboulia can be quite difficult because it falls between two other disorders of diminished motivation, and one could easily see an extreme case of aboulia as akinetic mutism or a lesser case of aboulia as apathy and therefore, not treat the patient appropriately. If it were to be confused with apathy, it might lead to attempts to involve the patient with physical rehabilitation or other interventions where a source of strong motivation would be necessary to succeed but would still be absent. The best way to diagnose aboulia is through clinical observation of the patient as well as questioning of close relatives and loved ones to give the doctor a frame of reference with which they can compare the patient's new behavior to see if there is in fact a case of diminished motivation.[7] In recent years, imaging studies using a CT or MRI scan have been shown to be quite helpful in localizing brain lesions which have been shown to be one of the main causes of aboulia.[6]
Illnesses where aboulia may be present [ edit ]
Alzheimer's disease [ edit ]
A lack of motivation has been reported in 25–50% of patients with Alzheimer's disease. While depression is also common in patients with this disease, aboulia is not a mere symptom of depressions because more than half of the patients with Alzheimer's disease with aboulia do not suffer from depression. Several studies have shown that aboulia is most prevalent in cases of severe dementia which may result from reduced metabolic activity in the prefrontal regions of the brain. Patients with Alzheimer's disease and aboulia are significantly older than patients with Alzheimer's who do not lack motivation. Going along with that, the prevalence of aboulia increased from 14% in patients with a mild case Alzheimer's disease to 61% in patients with a severe case of Alzheimer's disease, which most likely developed over time as the patient got older.[8]
Current treatment [ edit ]
Most current treatments for aboulia are pharmacological, including the use of antidepressants. However, antidepressant treatment is not always successful and this has opened the door to alternative methods of treatment. The first step to successful treatment of aboulia, or any other DDM, is a preliminary evaluation of the patient's general medical condition and fixing the problems that can be fixed easily. This may mean controlling seizures or headaches, arranging physical or cognitive rehabilitation for cognitive and sensorimotor loss, or ensuring optimal hearing, vision, and speech. These elementary steps also increase motivation because improved physical status may enhance functional capacity, drive, and energy and thereby increase the patient's expectation that initiative and effort will be successful.[2]
There are 5 steps to pharmacological treatment:[2]
Optimize medical status. Diagnose and treat other conditions more specifically associated with diminished motivation (e.g., apathetic hyperthyroidism, Parkinson's disease). Eliminate or reduce doses of psychotropics and other agents that aggravate motivational loss (e.g., SSRIs, dopamine antagonists). Treat depression efficaciously when both DDM and depression are present. Increase motivation through use of stimulants, dopamine agonists, or other agents such as cholinesterase inhibitors.
Society and culture [ edit ]
A case of aboulia after a transient ischemic attack in the frontal lobes is depicted in the episode "House Training" of the drama series House, M.D..
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]This article is from the archive of our partner.
After a brief press conference with Vice-President Biden at the White House on Wednesday, President Obama bucked the conventional wisdom and signed into law several executive actions intended to reduce gun violence in the United States. As we've noted, Obama can't avoid major legislative battles with these measures, but some are sure to have immediate impact. Here's the full list, followed by instant reactions and some more presidential memos from the White House today:
Gun Violence Reduction Executive Actions
Today, the President is announcing that he and the Administration will:
1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.
2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.
3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.
4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.
5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.
6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.
7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.
8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.
10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.
11. Nominate an ATF director.
12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper training for active shooter situations.
13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.
14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.
15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.
16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.
17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.
18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.
19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.
20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.
21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.
22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.
23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.In 2016, Caltech researchers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin proposed evidence for the existence of a new planet, and a search for Planet Nine ensued. In February, campus graduate students Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein introduced a novel search technique.
Planet Nine has little in common with Pluto, the planet Brown is often accused of “killing,” because his research led to its declassification.
According to Batygin, Planet Nine is about 10 times “more massive” than Earth, takes 10,000 to 20,000 years to orbit the sun and — unlike other planets in the solar system — has an elliptical rather than circular orbit.
“We haven’t seen Planet Nine directly. … We do, however, know that it’s there based on the gravitational influence it exerts upon the field of debris beyond Neptune, called the Kuiper belt,” Batygin said.
Objects in our solar system with distant orbits — more than 400 years — appear clustered together in space, Batygin said. The only “viable explanation” for this “anomalous” physical clustering is a distant planet’s existence, according to Batygin.
The problem for researchers now lies in locating Planet Nine.
“It’s much, much harder than finding a needle in a haystack — it’s like finding a needle in a billion haystacks but with the advantage that you’re allowed to use computers to help you search,” said Yale professor of astronomy Greg Laughlin, who with graduate student Sarah Millholland used simulations to further define Planet Nine’s orbital parameters.
Brown, Batygin and other astronomers’ search for Planet Nine often involves meticulously scanning the night sky with a telescope, the direct method used to locate Uranus and Neptune.
Rather than capturing new images, Medford and Goldstein are repurposing past data through a new software developed with their faculty advisor, adjunct professor of astronomy Peter Nugent.
Looking at about a million images previously collected from a San Diego-based telescope, software overlaps the images and subtracts known objects such as stars: locating objects that change from night to night in a specific section of the sky.
Their system then guesses the direction of the planet’s orbit, shifts the millions of images along the possible ellipses and adds them together.
“In doing so, you hope to bring out from the background signals or planets that would otherwise be invisible in any one single image,” Medford said.
According to Medford, around 10 billion ways to combine the images exist. Even if the methodology doesn’t locate Planet Nine, it could narrow the search area or help locate new objects.
“I think it’d be the absolute coolest way to discover Planet Nine because they’re looking within existing data,” Batygin said.
Laughlin places the odds of finding Planet Nine around fifty-fifty. He believes locating Planet Nine — “a discovery that’d be just about the biggest thing that could happen in astronomy, and maybe all of science in the near term” — may lie in the combination of different researchers’ theoretical, simulation and data-mining approaches.
According to Medford, finding Planet Nine could indicate the solar system is “much bigger than we think.”
“If something that big formed that far out, then our idea of the early conditions of the early solar system is maybe missing some pieces,” Goldstein said.
Christine Giuliano at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @christinegiul.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Reaching age 100 is a big milestone, but a Quad City woman who spends her time helping children across the world is hitting 1,000.
For the last three-and-a-half years, Lillian Weber has been making simple dresses with her own touches, for a group called “Little Dresses for Africa.”
Related: 99-year-old woman is on a mission to help children
Stitch-by-stitch, Lillian has made hundreds of dresses. All the while, she’s had a goal to make her 1,000th dress by her 100th birthday. On Thursday, March 12, 2015 she accomplished her goal, well before her self-set deadline.
Lillian’s daughters say their mother works the dress making into her routine, and she does it just because she wants to help the little girls who will wear them.
Making dresses helps the girls, but her work poses as a message to the rest of us.
“Nine times out of ten, they always say, “Well old people don’t do anything,” but they do,” Lillian said.
Once the milestone dress was complete, Lillian said she had a plan, which you could probably guess.
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of the next generation of McCullums started to be forged. When aged about six and seven, Brendon and Nathan would accompany their dad to training, but he was never a pushy father. He didn't need to be, really, as it was clear his sons would chart their own paths.
"They were always around when I was playing, and used to take part in a lot of fielding practice when they were young kids. But it was very much a natural course of events. If they ever wanted extra time in the nets I'd happily go with them."
Paterson remembers Brendon as someone with vast self-confidence. "He has always carried himself that way," he says, "but it never verged into cockiness. Everyone knew he was something special but he was also one of the lads."
At stages during the T20 and one-day series, it was very much Brendon McCullum v England. He struck three blistering half-centuries in the one-dayers, and a match-winning 74 in the Hamilton T20. If they are to compete in the Tests, McCullum will again have to lead the way.
Do that he will. "He loves challenging himself against the best," Stuart says. "He measures himself against the best. He's never completely satisfied with his own performance, and that's an attitude he has had all the way through his career. He never takes anything for granted."
Andrew McGlashan is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.CLOSE William Shatner, the fabled Captain Kirk, tells USA TODAY's Bill Keveney that music is "essential" to the 'Star Trek' TV shows and films. 'Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage,' a 50th anniversary concert series, kicks off this weekend in Florida. Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
If anyone ought to know about the influence of 'Star Trek,' it's William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk. 1/14/16 12:18:43 PM --- WILLIAM SHATNER--- Studio City, CA, U.S.A: Portrait of William Shatner in his Los Angeles area office. Shatner begins a multi-city tour called " Star Trek The Ultimate Voyage Concert Tour". "Star Trek" celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Photo by Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY staff ORG XMIT: RH 134363 William Shatner 1/14/2016 [Via MerlinFTP Drop] (Photo11: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY)
Star Trek’s 50th birthday is turning into quite the Enterprise.
Events tied to the golden anniversary of the huge TV and film franchise, which began with a weekly NBC series on Sept. 8, 1966, are ready to launch.
"We are talking about one of the most influential franchises of all time, but also one of the most beloved with arguably the most passionate and invested fan base in the world," says Liz Kalodner, executive vice president of CBS Consumer Products, which is presenting the events (details at StarTrek.com). “This year is about the fans and honoring them and creating experiences for them" in art, science and culture.
On a practical level, Star Trek’s influence can be seen in everything from space exploration to flip cellphones (the communicator) to virtual reality (the holodeck), but it inspires philosophically, too, says William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk.
“What’s out there? What’s going on? Are they coming this way? Are we going that way? Dark matter. Ninety percent of the universe is unknown. Unknown!” Shatner says, shifting from mysterious whisper to animated wonder. “The magic of the universe was brought to a lot of people’s eyes and ears by Star Trek.”
Upcoming events include:
• Star Trek — 50 Artists. 50 Years: An exhibit, to be unveiled at San Diego's Comic-Con in July, will feature Trek-inspired art by 50 artists, including Mr. Spock himself, the late Leonard Nimoy. It will feature illustration, photography, graphic design and other art forms, and travels to other locations worldwide.
Chris Pine, left, and Zachary Quinto are Kirk and Spock for a new generation of 'Star Trek' fans. (Photo11: Zade Rosenthal, Paramount Pictures)
• Trek Talks: Think TED Talks inspired by tricorders, alien species and the Prime Directive. Starting in July, schools, science museums and entertainment venues around the world will feature experts leading discussions on topics examined in Star Trek, including space exploration, medical technology and cultural diversity.
“It made such a difference to television as well as to the world's perspective, if you think about a crew of aliens and humans of various ethnicities all working together on the bridge in harmony in the '60s,” Kalodner says. Later Trek series featured a woman and an African-American man at the helm.
• The Starfleet Academy Experience: Fans can enroll at Starfleet Academy in a program opening in May at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa and in June at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York. “Cadets” will take part in a interactive environment, learning about engineering, medical diagnostics, communication and navigation from a Trek perspective.
In addition to a 50th anniversary convention planned for August in Las Vegas, the initial Star Trek fan gathering in New York, held in 1972, will be commemorated on Labor Day weekend with Mission New York, an event that will bring interactive exhibits and celebrity guests to the East Coast.
The official celebration is already under way with Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage, a 100-city concert tour featuring an orchestra playing the franchise's music accompanied by relevant scenes from the many films and TV series (startrekultimatevoyage.com).
Nostalgia clearly is part of the appeal, but Star Trek is hardly dormant on the screen. The latest film, Star Trek Beyond, opens in theaters in July and a new series launching on CBS's All Access streaming platform is due early next year.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1RJiQYXPoor Michelle Bachmann can’t seem to catch a break lately.
Less than a week after Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, of all people, poked holes in a Fox report on her November 5th tea party healthcare protest which utilized falsified footage to inflate the attendance, a Washington D.C. based watchdog is calling for a House probe of the Republican congresswoman from Minnesota.
“CREW contends that Rep. Bachmann misused her official congressional website by urging people to come to the Capitol to protest the legislation despite House rules restricting members from using their websites to engage in ‘grassroots lobbying or solicit support for a Member’s position,” states a press release on the website for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Rep. Bachmann’s website urged people to come to the Capitol rally ‘and tell their Representatives to vote no’ on the health care reform bill.”
CREW excutive director Melanie Sloan adds, “Taxpayers fund members’ websites and because of that those sites may not be used to organize a public rally for or against any particular legislation.”
CREW also asked OCE to determine if Rep. Bachmann and other members violated House rules by failing to acquire a permit for the Nov. 5 rally and by falsely calling the event a “press conference,” though no questions were asked by the media. Politico quoted from a Republican Study Committee email directing staff members to “please make sure your boss does not term this event a rally.” A Capitol Police spokeswoman confirmed the lawmakers had no permit for a demonstration. In a TV interview, however, Rep. Bachmann urged opponents of the bill “to come to Washington, D.C. by the car load.” “Whoever heard of a press conference without questions?” asked Sloan. “Calling a rally a press conference to circumvent congressional rules is like calling a Hummer a Prius to meet fuel efficiency standards.” Sloan continued, “The OCE needs to make clear that members must abide by all rules, even those they find politically inconvenient.”
The Hill reports,
Bachmann’s office, however, has so far steered clear of these criticisms. When Democratic strategists first lobbed those charges at Bachmann last week, her spokeswoman told reporters the Minnesota Republican’s Web site merely “encourages the American people to exercise their right to petition” — hinting that the congresswoman’s advertisements were within the confines of House rules. Her spokesperson was not immediately available Tuesday for comment.
Links to CREW’s letter requesting a probe and exhibit docs can be found at this link and here.Bigger is apparently better for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
That's our takeaway after seeing the "enhanced" helmets for the Bucs, unveiled during Thursday's edition of "NFL Total Access."
The Bucs' new helmet (center) is seen with its two predecessors. (Alix Drawec/NFL)
Former Bucs great Warren Sapp and current Bucs star Gerald McCoy were in the building to reveal the helmet, which features a significantly larger logo, minor stylistic alterations and a chrome facemask.
Take yourself back to 1997. You were trying to convince yourself you liked The Prodigy. Then a news flash: The lowly Bucs had ditched their orange creamsicle duds in favor of red and pewter. Pewter! The Inigo Montoya guy was dumped in favor a mean-looking pirate flag held in place by a menacing cutlass.
Perhaps not coincidentally (or definitely coincidentally), the fortunes of the organization shifted immediately, capped by a Super Bowl victory in 2003.
Coming off a 4-12 season, the Bucs are hoping for similar magic in 2014. Use the comment section to share your thoughts on the new design. Be nice to each other.
On the latest edition of the "Around The League Podcast," the guys speculate on big names who could be cut, then talk offseason forecasts for the Packers and Raiders.McGovern is also thought to be planning a more luxurious and different-bodied Range Rover to take on the upcoming Rolls-Royce Cullinan.
In 2014, Wolfgang Ziebart, then group engineering director, hinted at JLR’s electrification plans, predicting that the market for EVs was going to split into inner-city vehicles and a “second or third car for a wealthy family”. Ziebart suggested the latter segment had potential for JLR and that any EV would be the size of a “Jaguar XJ” and “aimed at the US and China”.
In fact, Autocar understands that the first Road Rover model is being developed in parallel with the next-generation XJ. The underlying structure for both of these vehicles is a new-generation aluminium architecture that can accommodate both battery packs and piston engines.
It’s thought that the new XJ and the Road Rover will both be pure-electric vehicles with twin electric motors and on-demand all-wheel drive. The Road Rover will emphasise extreme luxury — the huge success of the current S-Class has proved that SUVs have not pushed super-luxury saloon cars out of the market — and it is also expected to have height-adjustable suspension for a degree of all-terrain ability. A range of at least 300 miles is predicted, as well as a 0-60mph time of less than 5.0sec.
JLR has to compete head-on with premium-brand rivals such as Porsche and Audi, which are both launching luxury EVs in the next two years. Perhaps the closest rival to the new Road Rover is Audi’s E-tron Sportback, which is due to be launched in 2019. This also has all-wheel drive and an expected driving range of 300 miles in ideal conditions.
There is no hard news on whether the Road Rover will have its own stand-alone design language. However, it is likely to build on the look of the Velar, emphasising taut and very clean surfaces, and it will have more of a shooting brake profile than other high-end electric SUVs.
The new XJ and Road Rover, along with Jaguar’s electric I-Pace compact SUV, will be part of JLR’s plan to meet stringent new Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) sales targets in California.
The calculations behind the ZEV programme are extremely complex and intended to ensure there are at least 1.5 million electric or hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles on California’s roads by 2025. It is thought that JLR will need to ensure that somewhere between 16% and 25% of all its sales are of battery-electric cars by 2025. Moreover, at least nine other US states have adopted California’s ZEV plans, putting extra pressure on car makers.
The adoption of a new brand for a range-topping electric vehicle might be seen as an unnecessary risk, especially considering the profile and strength of the Range Rover brand. However, there are a number of reasons why JLR bosses concluded that an electric Range Rover was a stretch too far.Available October 7, 2014
Preorder Today!
DVD: http://bit.ly/RozenZDVD
About Rozen Maiden Zuruckspulen
Each decision we make in life leads us down a different path. Have you ever wondered what would be if the path not chosen weren’t lost to the chaos of the universe? For Jun Sakurada, just such an opportunity is presented to him in his darkest hour: a chance to communicate with a future version of himself who did not win the key and bring forth the Rozen Maidens, and a chance to fix the shattered remains of his own world.
For Jun-who-did-not-win, the messages from his younger self represent a beacon of light in his mediocre and disappointing existence. When the adult Jun discovers a box with parts and building instructions for a familiar red-dressed doll, the goal becomes clear: revive Shinku in his world to save both worlds from succumbing to the evils of Kirakisho, the seventh Rozen Maiden in a desperate search for a body and master. The Alice Game will become a war of dimensions as two worlds hang by the threads of fate.
Director
Emily Neves
English Vocal Cast
Jun (Middle School) Shannon Emerick
Jun (Adult) Corey Hartzog
Megu Emily Neves
Shinku Luci Christian
Suiseiseki Brittney Karbowski
Hinaichigo Hillary Haag
Suiginto Jessica Calvello
Souseiseki Kara Greenberg
Nori Nancy Novotny
Tomoe Juliet Simmons
Kanaria Monica Rial
Saito Margaret McDonald
Yamaguchi Houston Hayes
LaPlace’s Demon David Wald
James Jay Sullivan
Yuna Ashley Miller
Kirakisho Carli MosierAdvertisement Sheriff: 4 adults, 2 children dead in 'horrific' scene 4 other children from home ran to neighbor's house Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Four adults and two children were killed in a domestic situation at a Greenwood County home Tuesday night -- and four other children ran from the scene of the shooting to a neighbor's home, according to the sheriff.Watch Myra Ruiz's reportGreenwood County Sheriff Tony Davis described the scene as "horrific."Davis said the bodies were found in the home on Callison Highway after someone called 911 from inside the home and said they were going to hurt themselves.While officers were in route, a neighbor called 911 and told dispatchers that the four children from the home came to her house, and that they heard a shot fired, deputies said.Deputies said when they arrived at the house, they tried to get a response from those inside the home. When they could not, the SWAT team entered the home at 7:30 p.m. and found the bodies, said Davis.Davis said he believes the children killed in the shooting were 9 and 10 years old. The names of the victims have not been released.Davis said all of the victims were shot."It's a situation that just takes your heart. It's sad. It's horrific," Davis said. "Your heart just goes out to the family members and everyone involved," he said.The Greenwood Index-Journal has identified the alleged gunman as 27-year-old Bryan Sweatt. He was among the dead, according to the paper. A family member confirmed to News 4 that Sweatt was the shooter.According to court records from the Greenwood County Clerk of Court, Sweatt had two active criminal cases, one for petty larceny and the other for burglary.Court records also show Sweatt had 22 previous criminal charges dating back to the years 2005 and 2010. Those charges included assault and battery, forgery, burglary and malicious injury.Deputies say they believe the gunman was dating one of the victims, but they have not yet named Sweatt as the shooter.Bernard Rush went to check on the children at the neighbor's house this morning. He said they were all doing OK. Rush said the children who were freed by the shooter were all girls and all related to the victims."This is just an experience you don’t believe," said Rush. "For all the family members to be gone at one time. And that somebody could do this to somebody else.”Rush said the children are all with other family members now.Jeff Hicks, who has lived in the neighborhood for five years, told News 4 the couple who lived in the home had several grandchildren.He said the family had a dirt track on their property and children were frequently there riding 4-wheelers."They were good people. It's unreal that situations get this bad. It's awful," Hicks said.With no African-Americans awarded any of the state’s first 15 medical marijuana licenses, Maryland’s Black Legislative Caucus is evoking the imagery of Colin Kaepernick’s fight for equality.
The war of words between Donald Trump and black NFL players carrying on the legacy of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick came to a head again this weekend, with huge swaths of the league kneeling before or during the national anthem to protest racial inequality and the unprovoked murder of black people at the hands of police. Now, in their fight for equality in the state’s burgeoning medical marijuana industry, the Maryland legislature’s Black Caucus has suggested that they will “take a knee” if lawmakers don’t expand the program to even the cannabusiness playing field.
According to the Baltimore Sun, after Maryland’s first 15 cannabusiness licenses were awarded without a single African-American recipient, the Black Caucus called for a special session to address the diversity discrepancies. That session never happened, and now, Black Caucus members are threatening to disrupt the entire legislature if an equality-fueled cannabis industry expansion is not adapted in January.
“No one should expect us to have any trust if it doesn’t go the way that we have been told it will go,” Caucus Chairwoman Cheryl Glenn said.
Glenn said that multiple legislative staffers, including the offices for House Speaker Michael Busch and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, have assured her that the expansion bill, which would add five, presumably black-owned, cannabusinesses to the state’s fledgling marketplace. If those promises are not kept, Glenn and her Caucus peers are ready to make their voices heard loud and clear.
“We’re not going to go along to get along,” Delegate Bilal Ali, a Baltimore Democrat, said. “Lesson time is coming up.”
Maryland’s population is about one third African-American, and the state’s medical marijuana legislation specifically requires regulators to consider racial diversity when awarding licenses, and yet, the first state-sanctioned plants are already in the ground, with no African-American business owners currently allowed to set up shop.
At the state’s highest legislative level, Republican Governor Larry Hogan directed his office to compile a study to definitively see whether cannabis firms owned by people of color faced a harder road than businesses owned by white people. That study has not yet been completed, and serves as a legal barrier to awarding licenses that consider the applicant’s race.
Still, Maryland’s black legislators are tired of waiting for a bureaucratic study to confirm what they can already see.
Separate from the legislature’s expansion proposal and the Governor’s research, a lawsuit from a number of prospective black-owned cannabusinesses, that at one point temporarily put a halt to the state’s entire industry, is still being fought in court to this day.
Because the temporary injunction did not stick, the 15 licensed businesses have begun operations, with the Black Caucus left fighting to create an even platform on a tilted stage.
“We have not shirked away from calling it what it was, and we felt that, once again, black folks were put at the back of the line,” Glenn said.Banks, telcos, and even governmental agencies in the United States, South America, Europe, and Africa are being targeted by hackers in a series of ongoing attacks that are extremely difficult to detect.
According to a new Kaspersky Lab report, at least 140 banks and other enterprises have been infected by malware that’s nearly invisible. Although this is the official number as of right now, given the difficulties involved in spotting this malware, the number could be much, much higher, Kaspersky specialists warn.
This is the same type of infection that Kaspersky found on its own corporate network a couple of years ago, an infection unlike anything they’d seen before. Duqu 2.0, as it was dubbed, was believed to be derived from Stuxnet, the sophisticated computer worm that was supposedly created by the US in collaboration with Israel to sabotage the nuclear program in Iran. Duqu 2.0 managed to remain undetected on Kaspersky’s network for at least six months.
New attacks
Now, a similar infection is spreading like wildfire among countless companies, including many banks. These hard-to-detect infections use legitimate system admin and security tools, such as PowerShell, Metasploit, and Mimikatz to inject malware into computer memory.
Kaspersky has chosen not to name the institutions that are currently under attack for obvious reasons, but they did mention that they come from 40 different countries. The United States, France, Ecuador, Kenya and the United Kingdom are the five most affected nations.
What makes these series of attacks particularly nasty is the fact that on top of being nearly impossible to detect for long periods of time, it is unknown just who could be behind it all - whether there’s a single group of individuals or numerous hacker groups. Unless someone claims the attacks, there’s going to be a long wait before the security researchers and authorities figure out just who’s responsible.
How does it work?
The first discovery of this particular malware took place in late 2016. Then, a bank’s security team found a copy of Meterpreter on the physical memory of a Microsoft, domain controller. The forensic analysis revealed that the Meterpreter code was downloaded and injected into memory with the help of PowerShell commands.
The Microsoft NETSH networking tool was also used by the infected machine to transport data to servers controlled by the attacker. Mimikatz was used by the attackers to obtain admin privileges necessary for such actions. To clean up the logs a bit, the PowerShell commands were hidden in the Windows registry, thus making it all difficult to track.
It seems that the method was used to collect passwords of system administrators and for the remote administration of infected host machines.
While the number of attacks is quite large, this seems to be the method used across most of them, which helped identify the extent of the situation.This American Life host and radio superpersonality Ira Glass went to see a play and came away more vexed than Claudius walking out of The Mousetrap in Elsinore.
@JohnLithgow as Lear tonight: amazing. Shakespeare: not good. No stakes, not relatable. I think I’m realizing: Shakespeare sucks. — Ira Glass (@iraglass) July 28, 2014
But it’s not a one-off thing! Glass says he’s been building to this conclusion for a long time, straining like Caliban under Prospero’s yoke:
Same thing with the great Mark Rylance shows this yr: fantastic acting, surprisingly funny, but Shakespeare is not relatable, unemotional. — Ira Glass (@iraglass) July 28, 2014
So what’s going to happen? Will bespectacled literary nerds have to choose between Chicago’s adopted son Ira and our old friend Stratford Billy? That’s like Prince Hal having to choose between getting drunk with Falstaff and cleaning up his act for his dad the king!
Be not afraid, gentles — reporter Lois Beckett is on it, with a retelling of King Lear specially updated for Ira Glass’s post-Renaissance storytelling sensibilities. It’s This American Lear.
Update: Jesse Lansner did a second, extended Storify collection of “This American Lear,” including some of the other reactions to Glass’s and then Beckett’s tweets. On Twitter, Beckett called this “the director’s cut.”FFC-Acrush is one of the hottest idol groups in China, but it’s not just because of their handsome visuals; it’s because every member in this “boy group” is a girl!
Many female idol groups have dabbled in tomboy concepts, including MAMAMOO…
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…Girls’ Generation…
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…and f(x).
With the exception of f(x)’s Amber, the most famous “tomboy” on the K-Pop scene, most female idols don’t keep their androgynous concepts for very long.
In fact, boyish girl group concepts can be a hard sell. Former girl group Global Icon debuted with a tomboy concept that gained a small, dedicated following, but wasn’t well-received overall.
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To appeal to a wider audience, they tried switching to a more feminine concept before eventually disbanding.
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FFC-Acrush, on the other hand, has gained a large following for their on-going masculine concept.
Unlike most other girl groups, FFC-Acrush’s gender-bending concept isn’t just for a particular song or performance. It’s the entire basis for their group!
FFC-Acrush has been rocking their androgyny for a solid year now. The members sport men’s pants and shirts instead of the usual girl group tops and dresses.
All the members have very short hair, styled in a typically masculine way.
Their boyish looks have a lot to do with the way their stylists do their makeup.
Their eyebrows are thick, their eye makeup is gender-neutral, and they do not wear brightly colored lipstick.
These girls easily pass for flower boys, and redefine the meaning of “girl crush”!
When it comes to their crossdressing concept, FFC-Acrush goes the extra mile.
Not only do the members look like men…
…they also have boyish vocals!
While many typical girl groups have high, feminine voices, FFC-Acrush’s voices are much lower when they sing in songs like “Action”.
Their powerful, hip-hop choreography is also something you’d expect to see in a boy group’s video.
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Check out FFC-Acrush’s music video to see why everyone is crushing on these gender-bending gals!A few weeks back, Google said that it would continue to support Chrome on Windows XP after Microsoft ended support for the aging operating system. The move is a bit controversial as supporting a browser on an unsupported OS could lure users into a false sense of security as the browser may be up to date with the latest security patches but the underlying OS could be wide open.
But the browser space is not limited to only two platforms, and Mozilla has told Neowin that it intends to continue to support the OS after Microsoft ends its support for XP.
Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."
This means that for users of Windows XP, who have not upgraded their decade-old OS, they will have two supported browser options once Microsoft ends support for XP (and subsequently Internet Explorer on XP): Chrome and Firefox.
It’s quite obvious as to why Google and Mozilla will support their browser on XP after Microsoft ends support; millions of users will still be using the outdated OS. Where there are users, there are developers eyeing for their attention and in the insanely competitive browser market space, both companies are fighting for any user they can attract. So when Microsoft leaves those with outdated machines in the past, Google and Mozilla want to give them an option to browser securely, even if their OS is vulnerable.
While we doubt Microsoft will change its mind and extend XP's supported lifecycle, it will be interesting to see if IE does drop in market share after April 2014.
Image via Mozilla“Native names were banned,” explains Jaime in a new documentary, Lantéc chaná by Argentinean director Marina Zeising. “And they would cut off the tip of the tongues of girls who spoke Chaná.”
Blas Jaime.
This 71-year-old former Mormon preacher didn’t pass the language on to his daughter and for many years did not speak it. His life changed when he revealed he spoke Chaná and researcher Pedro Viegas Barros found out.
“The Chanás do not exist,” was Viegas’s first response. Although skeptical, he traveled from Buenos Aires to Paraná in the south of Argentina to see Jaime. There he found that the language Jaime had retained from nights spent learning with his mother matched the only written testimony of the language of the Chaná. Dámaso Larrañaga wrote the document in 1823 based on interviews with elders from the tribe, which for millennia lived as fishermen, subsisting only with what the river gave them.
The indigenous language was believed to have died out more than 100 years ago
“Timú” says the Chaná to the son. “Atá” is water, “ata má” means river, and “vanatí ata ma” is the children of the river and streams.
“Beada” - Jaime’s favorite word - means mother and “beada á” means Earth. “Vanatí beada,” means the tree is the son of the Earth, while its branches are called “palá.”
The first Chaná-Spanish dictionary was published in 2014
Viegas heard Jaime speak those words for the first time in 2005. From that moment on, they embarked on a journey to reconstruct the language and culture of the Chaná to ensure that it does not disappear. In 2010, the language was added to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. In 2014, the pair published the first Chaná-Spanish dictionary. Zeising’s film is the latest effort to recover the past of one of the many indigenous groups that inhabited the far south of South America before the Spanish arrived.
“When my daughter, Evangelina, decides to take charge of passing on Chaná, I will return to the Church,” says Jaime after seeing the documentary. He narrows his dark eyes, rests on his cane and quietly regrets not having taught his daughter the language when she was a child. When he tried to do so later, his daughter refused.
The Chaná were a matriarchy
“She told me she didn’t want to be an indian,” said Jaime, “and that people were going to abuse and insult her.” This is a common sentiment among descendants of indigenous groups in Argentina, a country that didn’t recognize the rights of its native peoples until 1994. Evangelina changed her mind once she became a mother. She began to study Chaná and now helps her father teach students who want to learn the language.
In addition to knowing Chaná, Jaime would like Argentineans to also adopt some his ancestors’ values. “The main thing would be respect for women,” said Jaime, recalling that the Chaná people were a matriarchy where women were responsible for imparting justice and passing down the culture from mothers to daughters. “We also respect children and Mother Nature. The Chaná believe that the Earth is a living thing and that its blood flows through the rivers and streams,” says Jaime.
English version by Debora Almeida.(Times of Israel) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly to launch a new, last-ditch effort in the next few days to persuade the United States to credibly revive the military option against Iran.
If this proves unsuccessful, Channel 2 reported, Netanyahu will have to decide whether to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by this winter at latest, because after that, the report indicated, the assessment is that Israel’s window for military intervention will close.
Israel desperately wants to see the Obama Administration harden its position on Iran immediately — to convey to Iran that if it does not halt its nuclear program, its regime will not survive. Instead, however, Jerusalem sees what it considers an overly tolerant and patient attitude by Washington DC to Tehran, the Channel 2 report said.How Lenin’s Bolsheviks Brought Communism to Russia
Betrayal of democratic reforms started a war that killed 12 million
All throughout 1917, the toils of war and cascading revolutionary activity overturned the Russian Czarist government and established the left-leaning but democratically principled Provisional Government. The new authorities made preparations to hold elections. For the many political philosophies and groups then existing in Russian intelligentsia, it was an exciting prospect.
In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II was deposed and forced to abdicate following major bloodshed in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. But the vast nation, containing many different cultures and races across about 20 percent of the world’s land area, had never been a democracy and was unprepared to implement a universal, secret electoral system.
By May, the Provisional Government had not been able to carry out an election, and dissent was mounting from all sides. The date was delayed multiple times and public opinion sank further.
After several violent anti-government actions throughout the summer, the radical Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin armed itself and mobilized. In their infamous October Revolution, 100 communist militiamen took the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing two people, and seized the Russian capital.
As a communist, Lenin despised democracy, calling it a capitalist tool of oppression. Yet to mollify the still-powerful opposition, the Bolsheviks agreed to go forward with elections.
The Bolsheviks would convene the Assembly, but were ultimately unwilling to accept its results. As claimed in one initial report, the proposed Russian parliament “must right the historical wrongs… and protect the working class from exploitation.”
In a speech at the time, Lenin’s right-hand man Leon Trotsky proclaimed: “Long live an immediate, honest, democratic peace. All power to the Soviets. All land to the people. Long live the Constituent Assembly.”
There are conflicting reports on whether Lenin believed he would win the elections, or if he and his Bolsheviks were merely feigning support. In any case, their language provided an excuse for the Bolsheviks to later dissolve the Constituent Assembly.
Bolsheviks held power through underground Soviets, or councils of urban workers and soldiers. Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” was incompatible with the proposed democracy.
Lenin (center, with dark fur hat and coat) and other communist leaders with Red Army soldiers who participated in crushing the anti-Bolshevik Kronshtadt uprising. (Leon Leonidov)
In November, elections for the Constituent Assembly were held and confirmed the Bolsheviks’ fears that they—the self-appointed leader of the Russian Revolution—would not win a popular vote. Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the total vote of 40 million Russians, losing badly to the Socialist Revolutionaries who had broad support from the peasant masses.
As described by Tony Cliff, a British communist writer, Lenin derided the election results, saying that “obsolete laws” had given the Socialist Revolutionaries (labelled as right-wing by the Bolsheviks) “undue weight.”
In the article “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” Lenin expressed his anger with the peasant population: “The country cannot be equal to the town under the historical conditions of this epoch. The town inevitably leads the country. The country inevitably follows the town.”
When democracy worked against the Bolsheviks, Lenin turned to violence. According to Cliff, revolution and the struggle between “capitalist” and “proletarian” forces boiled down to counting “the machine guns, the bayonets, the grenades at their disposal.”
The Bolsheviks were rejected by the rural peasants, but they gathered a large following among urban workers and soldiers who had deserted from the ongoing fight against Germany in World War I. Lenin and his political party had the military force to take power.
The Russian Civil War is readily understood as a fight between socialist “Red” and conservative “White” Russian forces, but this mischaracterizes the nature of the conflict and its participants. Tens of millions of Russian peasants, opposed to Lenin’s dictatorship, were the most numerous among victims in a war that by some estimates killed over 12 million people, or more than all combat deaths in World War I.
Bolshevik economic policies, or “war communism,” starved millions of people in the Russian countryside when their grain was seized. And after the civil war, millions more were fated to perish in the brutal projects of Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin.
Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists. The Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged. Read the whole series at ept.ms/TheDeadEndCom
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.OCAD University announced Thursday it will name its part of the dramatic cultural-condo complex proposed by David Mirvish and Frank Gehry after the late Princess Diana.
The proposed Princess of Wales Visual Arts Centre at OCAD University is a 25,000 square foot facility and one of two cultural centrepieces of the project unveiled in October by theatre impresario Mr. Mirvish and Mr. Gehry, the renowned architect behind the Art Gallery of Ontario’s redesign.
Their vision would overhaul a stretch of King Street by tearing down the Princess of Wales Theatre and erecting three residential towers, a new Mirvish Collection museum, retail space and OCAD U’s new building.
“The Princess of Wales has long been associated in Toronto with excellence in the arts,” Sara Diamond, president and vice-chancellor of OCAD U said in a statement.
“This new arts-dedicated facility provides a means to honour a legacy that associates the creative and socially transformative virtues of art with the Princess of Wales’s legendary dedication to young people, intergenerational exchange and social concerns such as violence, poverty and HIV education.”
The school, formerly known as the Ontario College of Art & Design, has obtained approval to transfer the Princess of Wales name, which was originally granted to the Mirvish family for the theatre.
OCAD U relayed the contents of a letter sent on behalf of Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry: “Their Royal High |
along with Pharrell and Shay Haley.
The Neptunes have four Grammy awards and twenty-four Billboard Hot 100 top 10 singles. Some of the Neptunes biggest hits include “I’m A Slave.4 U” by Britney Spears, ‘Hot in Here” by Nelly, and Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”.
30. Nelly
Net Worth: $60 Million
Nelly got his start in 1993 with the hip-hop group St. Lunatics and it wasn’t until 2000 that he released his first music as a solo artist with his album ‘Country Grammar’. He has sold over 21 millions albums and released numerous hits including “Hot in Herre”, “Country Grammar” and “Ride Wit Me.”
29. Busta Rhymes
Net Worth: $65 Million
Since his start as a member of Leaders of the New School at the age of 17, Busta Rhymes has gone on to release nine studio albums. In 1996, he released his solo debut ‘The Coming’ and it reached #6 on the Billboard charts. The album featured “Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check”
28. Joseph Simmons (Rev Run) – Run D.M.C.
Net Worth: $70 Million
Rev Run is one third of legendary hip-hop group Run D.M.C., but also gained additional fame through his reality tv show ‘Run’s House’. In Run D.M.C. he shared rapping duties with Darryl McDaniels (DMC).
27. Swizz Beatz
Net Worth: $72.5 Million
No surprise to see one of hip-hop’s biggest producers make the list. Swizz Beatz has been a household name for years and first made a splash in 1998 for his production on the “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem”. While he also raps, his biggest earnings have come from his trademark production on hits such as “Fancy” by Drake (featuring T.I.), “On to the Next One” by Jay-Z, and “Check on It” by Beyonce (featuring Slim Thug).
26. MCA (Adam Yauch) – Beastie Boys
Net Worth: $75 Million
MCA (Adam Yauch) was a co-founder and member of the legendary group Beastie Boys. The group began as a punk rock band, but found success as a hip-hop group. Their first major label release Licensed to Ill became the best selling hip-hop album of the decade. The Beastie Boys sold over 50 million records worldwide.
25. Will.i.am
Net Worth: $75 Million
Will.i.am’s initial success came as a founding member of The Black Eyed Peas. The group has sold over 33 million albums and 58 million singles worldwide. He has also released four solo albums and produced for a number of artists including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Michael Jackson.
Will.i.am has also been active as a tech entrepreneur. His artificial intelligence startup i.am+ has raised $123 million to date
24. Akon
Net Worth: $80 Million
The Senegalese-American songwriter, singer, producer, and actor has an estimated net worth of $80 million. He’s had two #1 singles, “I Wanna Love You” (featuring Snoop Dogg) and “Don’t Matter”.
He also has launched “Akon Lighting Africa” (ALA), a project aimed at bringing electricity via solar energy to a number of villages in Africa.
23. Nicki Minaj
Net Worth: $80 Million
The Queen of Rap is the highest ranking female on the net worth list. Ever since signing with Young Money in 2009, Minaj’s career has skyrocketed. Her sophomore album ‘Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded’ debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and she has had 17 top ten singles.
Minaj has also appeared as a judge on American Idol (season 12) and has had endorsement deals with Pepsi and MAC Cosmetics.
22. Pitbull
Net Worth: $80 Million
Pitbull began his career as a rap artist, but transitioned over the years into pop music. Mr. Worldwide has had numerous number one tracks including “Give Me Everything” (featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack and Nayer), and Timber (featuring Kesha).
Outside of music, Pitbull has endorsed a number of consumer products such as Bud Light, Dr. Pepper, and Kodak.
21. Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock)
Net Worth: $82.5 Million
Adam Horowtiz a.k.a. Ad-Rock was a member of the Beastie Boys (the group disbanded in 2014). While best known for his contributions to the iconic hip-hop group, Horowitz has also acted in several films and tv shows including ‘Roadside Prophets’ and ‘Lost Angels’.
The Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.
20. Michael Diamond (Mike D)
Net Worth: $82.5 Million
Michael Diamond a.k.a. Mike D was in a number of bands prior to forming the Beastie Boys with Adam Yauch. The group has sold over 50 million records worldwide.
Outside of music, he has invested in real estate with a Brooklyn townhouse he purchased in 2013 going up for sale in 2015 for $5.65 million.
19. Timbaland
Net Worth: $85 Million
Super producer Timbaland has worked as many if not more major artists than anyone on this list. From Missy Elliott to Sam Smith to Aaliyah to Beyonce to Kanye West to Drake to Madonna to Coldplay, the Virginia born artist has become the go to producer of the 2000s. Some of his biggest hits include “Give It to Me” (featuring Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake), “Promiscuous” (Nelly Furtado), “Apologize” (One Republic), “Pony” (Ginuwine), “Sexy Back” (Justin Timberlake), and “Work It” (Missy Elliott).
In 2018 it was reported that Timbaland purchased two waterfront condos in Aria on the Bay in Miami for $4 million.
18. 50 Cent
Net Worth: $92.5 Million
50 Cent became a household name after the release of his debut album ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’. One of the most anticipated albums in hip-hop history, lived up to the hype with several songs (“In Da Club”, “21 Questions”, and “P.I.M.P.”) hitting number one on the charts. The album ended up selling 12 million records in 2003, the year of its release.
Outside of hip-hop 50 Cent made news for his investment in Glaceau (Vitamin Water). The rapper reportedly earned between $60 million to $100 million after the company was sold to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion.
17. Birdman (a.k.a. Baby)
Net Worth: $95 Million
At 49 years old, Birdman is one of the elder statesmen on this list but as co-founder of Cash Money Records his place on this list should be secure. In 1991 he feuded the label with his brother Ronald “Slim” Williams and together they went to sign some of hip-hop’s biggest artists (Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Young Thug, Drake). Cash Money Records is reportedly the most successful record label in hip-hop history with over 50 million records sold.
In 2010, Birdman founded an oil and gas company, Ronald Oil and Gas, with his brother Slim.
16. LL Cool J
Net Worth: $105 Million
LL Cool J broke into the entertainment world as a hungry rapper from Queens, New York. His debut album ‘Radio’ went platinum and featured classic hip-hop tracks “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” and “Rock the Bells”. He has gone on to release 13 albums and has won two Grammy awards.
Fast forward to 2019 and LL Cool J is more known for his role as an actor. He has had a recurring role on the CBS tv show ’NCIS Los Angeles’ and has starred in the films ‘Any Given Sunday’ and ‘Mindhunters’.
15. Drake
Net Worth: $120 Million
Although Drake’s debut studio album ‘Thank Me Later’ was released in 2010, he’s quickly amassed a fortune. He initially gained fame through his role on the tv show ‘Degrassi: The Next Generation’, but his music propelled him to superstardom. He has sold over 95 million records globally.
Drake has endorsement deals with Nike, Sprite, Apple Music, and the Toronto Raptors. He also is the co-founder of October’s Very Own (OVO), a collection of businesses in apparel and music.
14. Lil Wayne
Net Worth: $135 Million
Lil Wayne (a.k.a. Weezy) has been in the spotlight since he was signed to Cash Money Records as an 11 year old. Since then, Wayne has sold over 100 million records globally and become one of hip-hop’s biggest stars. All twelve of his albums have been certified at least gold and he’s had four number one albums (‘Tha Carter III’, ‘I Am Not a Human Being’, ‘Tha Carter IV’, ‘Tha Carter V’).
Lil Wayne purchased a $17 million waterfront mansion in Miami Beach in 2018. The home sits on top of a 23,760-square-feet and features seven bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms.
13. Snoop Dogg
Net Worth: $139 Million
Snoop Dogg burst on the hip-hop scene as a 21-year-old when he appeared on Dr. Dre’s “Deep Cover.” Over the years Snoop became a household name releasing 14 solo albums and selling over 37 million albums globally.
Outside of music, Snoop is also one of the biggest proponents of cannabis and is the co-founder of Casa Verde Capital, a venture firm investing in cannabis related companies. The company has closed $45 million in funding.
12. Ice Cube
Net Worth: $150 Million
One of the founding fathers of gangsta rap, Ice Cube first gained fame as a member of the group N.W.A. He left the group in 1989 and pursued a solo career that would produce classic songs such as “It Was a Good Day” and “Check Yo Self”.
As successful as Ice Cube has been in music, he’s matched if not surpassed his earnings in film. He wrote the screenplay for the Friday and has starred in numerous blockbuster films including ‘Barbershop’ and ‘Ride Along’. He also is the founder of the Big3, a professional 3-on-3 basketball league that consists of many former NBA players.
11. Pharrell Williams
Net Worth: $150 Million
Pharell Williams is a rapper, producer, singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur. The multi-talented artist from Virginia, rose to fine as one half of the production team The Neptunes. The Neptunes are one of the most successful production teams in music and have created hits including “I’m a Slave 4 U” by Britney Spears, “Grindin’” by the Clipse and “Drop It Like It’s Hot” by Snoop Dogg. Williams has won 10 Grammys.
Pharell has also found great success as an entrepreneur. His Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream clothing lines were amongst the biggest brands in streetwear. He also has partnered with a number of Fortune 500 companies including American Express and Adidas.
10. Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls)
Net Worth: $160 Million
The Notorious B.I.G. was only 24 years old when he was murdered in a drive by shooting in 1997. One of hip-hop’s greatest rappers only had two official studio albums released when he was alive but his legacy has lived on. Both his albums ‘Ready to Die’ and ‘Life After Death’ were certified as multi-platinum records. He also had two number one singles, “Hypnotize” and “Mo Money Mo Problems”.
The Notorious B.I.G. estate is headed up by Biggie’s mother Violetta Wallace and also includes his widow Faith Evans. The estate oversees B.I.G.’s likeness with the approval of his hologram at live shows being one of the most known uses.
9. Ronald “Slim” Williams
Net Worth: $170 Million
Although Ronald “Slim” Williams stays out of the spotlight in comparison to his brother Birdman, his net worth finds him higher on the list. Considered by some to be the brains behind Cash Money Records, Slim is the executive producer of most albums on the label. Slim also owns the liquor brand GT Vodka.
8. Eminem
Net Worth: $173 Million
Eminem has garnered 15 Grammy wins and sold over 220 million albums around the world. After toiling on the underground hip-hop circuit for years, the Rap God broke out in the mainstream in 1999 with the release of ‘The Slim Shady LP’. The album featured a number of hits including “My Name Is” and “97 Bonnie & Clyde”.
Eminem’s stardom grew even further with the release of his biopic ‘8 Mile.’ He starred in the film and he went on to win an Academy Award for the song “Lose Yourself.” The film grossed over $240 million.
Like many artists of his stature, Eminem earns a significant amount of his yearly revenue via touring. His Monster Tour with Rihanna reported earned over $36 million.
7. Usher
Net Worth: $180 Million
Note: Usher’s place on this list is debatable. In the next iteration we might pull him since he’s a singer/songwriter versus a rapper.
R&B superstar Usher was singing in local competitions since the age of 12 and released his self-titled debut album Usher at 16 years old. Over the years Usher has released a boatload of chart toppers including “U Remind Me”, “U Got It Bad”, “Yeah!” (featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris), “Scream”, and “Love In This Club” (featuring Young Jeezy).
Usher founded the label US Records, a subsidiary of J Records under Clive Davis. He also signed Justin Bieber via Raymond Braun Media Group (RBMG), a joint venture with Scooter Braun. Outside of music, Usher also reportedly is an investor in the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Another large source of income for Usher has been endorsements. He’s been the face of MasterCard and Yoobi, a school supplies company.
6. Kanye West
Net Worth: $205 Million
Kanye West has come a long way from his days as a struggling artist peddling beats to any artists that would listen. West would drop out of Chicago State University to focus on music and by the late 90s began producing for some of hip-hop’s bigger artists. Then in the early 2000s, West began producing for Roc-A-Fella Records and it was then that his career began to takeoff.
West has sold over 120 million records worldwide although his celebrity grew even further with his marriage to Kim Kardashian in 2014.
Outside of music, West has an exclusive partnership with Adidas for his clothing brand Yeezy. The company has been valued in the billions giving it the Silicon Valley title of a unicorn.
5. Master P
Net Worth: $225 Million
While Master P may no longer be in the limelight at this stage of his career, the New Orleans born rapper, entrepreneur, and former professional basketball player is still worth a boatload of money.
Master P generated most of his wealth through founding No Limit Records. The label was a powerhouse in southern rap and sold over 80 million records worldwide. His biggest single is “ Make ‘Em Say Uhh!”
4. Russell Simmons
Net Worth: $340 Million
One of hip-hop’s elder statesman, Russell Simmons has had business interests in all aspects of the industry. Most notably Simmons is the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings. Home to some of the biggest names in hip-hop including Nas, Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Kanye West. Simmons also produced hit tv shows ‘Def Comedy Jam’ and ‘Def Poetry Jam.’
Outside of music, Simmons has found success in film and fashion. He produced ‘The Nutty Professor’ a film starring Eddie Murphy that grossed over $270 million in box office sales. In 2004, he sold his clothing lines Phat Farm and Baby Phat for $140 million.
3. Dr. Dre
Net Worth: $787 Million
Dr. Dre first made noise as a member of west coast gangster rap pioneers N.W.A. While he was lesser known at the time then others in the group such as Eazy-E and Ice Cube, Dre would go on to have the most successful solo career. His debut solo album ‘The Chronic’ and his sophomore album ‘2001’ went multi-platinum.
In 1996, Dr. Dre launched his own label, Aftermath Entertainment and he went on to sign Eminem and 50 Cent.
Dr. Dre’s biggest financial windfall happened as a result of his Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. The Beats brand was acquired by Apple for $3 billion in 2014 and it temporarily made Dre the richest man in hip-hop.
2. Sean Combs (Diddy, Puff Daddy)
Net Worth: $835 Million
The former title holder of richest artist in hip-hop is now in second place. Sean Combs broke into the music industry as an intern at Uptown Records, but after being fired in 1993 he started his own label Bad Boy Records. The label would become home to some of hip-hop’s biggest artists at the time including Notorious B.I.G., Craig Mack, Faith Evans, 112, and Total.
Sean Combs launched the Sean John clothing line in 1998 and by 2003 the company had received a $100 million investment from billionaire Ronald Burkle. Sean John would become one of the biggest fashion lines in hip-hop.
In 2007, Combs helped the development of the Ciroc vodka brand for a 50% share in profits. The brand was valued at nearly $600 million in 2016.
1. Jay-Z
Net Worth: $910 Million
Jay-Z overtook Diddy as the world’s richest rapper in 2018. While he’s still known first and foremost as a hip-hop artist, Jay-Z has been successful in a variety of business ventures. He is founder of the Rocawear clothing line, owner of the 40/40 Club, and founder of Roc Nation Sports.
Jay-Z is the record holder for most number-one albums by a solo artist and has received 21 Grammy Awards. He has sold over 55 million albums worldwide (as of 2014).
In 2007, Jay-Z sold the rights to Rocawear brand for $204 million to the Iconic Brand Group.
In 2013, Jay-Z launched Roc Nation Sports, an agency that would go on to represent some of the biggest stars in sports including Robinson Cano, Kevin Durant, Dez Bryant, Todd Gurley.
Jay-Z is currently the majority owner of music streaming service Tidal, which at its last valuation was reported to worth $600 million.
Original post below (July 29, 2012)
Celebrity Net Worth recently compiled a list of the 20 richest living rappers. At first we were sure that reading their list was going to make us feel very, very bad about the current state of our checking accounts, but no worries — each of these rappers is so wealthy that it’s impossible to put into perspective. It remains unclear what research methods Celebrity Net Worth used, and technically not all of the rappers on the list are living (R.I.P., Adam Yauch). There are a couple of surprises (Nelly?) a lot of obvious inclusions (Jay-Z, Diddy), and Birdman is still Lil Wayne’s boss when it comes to cash flow. All together, the people on the list control over three billion dollars. That makes them the.0001% or something. Check out the list below. #20 Rick Ross – Net Worth $25 Million #19 Tie between T-Pain and T.I – Net Worth $30 Million #18 Nelly – Net Worth $55 Million #17 Busta Rhymes – Net Worth $60 Million #16 Ludacris – Net Worth $65 Million #15 Beastie Boys – Net Worth $75 Million Each #14 Timbaland – Net Worth $75 Million #13 Pharrell Williams – Net Worth $77.5 Million #12 Tie between LL Cool J and Akon – Net Worth $80 Million #11 Kanye West – Net Worth $90 Million #10 Lil Wayne – Net Worth $95 Million #9 Ice Cube – Net Worth $100 Million #8 Snoop Dogg – Net Worth $110 Million #7 Birdman – Net Worth $115 Million #6 Eminem – Net Worth $120 Million #5 50 Cent – Net Worth $250 Million #4 Dr. Dre – Net Worth $260 Million #3 Master P – Net Worth $350 Million #2 Jay-Z – Net Worth $475 Million #1 Diddy – Net Worth $500 Million Related: The 25 Richest Musicians Of 2012Analysis shows which BART stations have most, least crime
A passenger walks up to the platform last week at the Bay Fair BART Station in San Leandro. Bay Fair had the highest rate of violent crime of any BART station in the first 10 months of 2014. BART police attributed the spike in crime to the actions of the Band Camp gang that committed crimes in the area this summer. less A passenger walks up to the platform last week at the Bay Fair BART Station in San Leandro. Bay Fair had the highest rate of violent crime of any BART station in the first 10 months of 2014. BART police... more Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 19 Caption Close Analysis shows which BART stations have most, least crime 1 / 19 Back to Gallery
Busy Powell Street Station sits at the junction of the Tenderloin and tourist-heavy Union Square and is frequented by vagrants, panhandlers and pickpockets, as well as tourists, shoppers and commuters.
And Powell is the BART station with the most total crime. Yet on a per-passenger basis, riders are more likely to encounter crime at stations in southern Alameda County or eastern Contra Costa.
A Chronicle analysis of BART crime statistics over the past two years found that while crime is spread around the 44 stations in the regional transit system, it’s not always the worst, or best, where you’d suspect. The analysis looked at 10 months of crime statistics, January through October, provided by the BART Police Department at The Chronicle’s request.
Systemwide, the report shows mixed results over the past year. Violent crime rose 5.6 percent from 2013 to 2014 during the 10 months, with assaults causing serious injury up 27 percent and lesser assaults and batteries up 26 percent. Calls for police assistance were up 10 percent, and vehicle thefts increased by 31 percent. But there were no homicides, robberies decreased 32 percent, and felony arrests were down 6 percent.
Officials at BART — which has struggled over the past couple of years with two strikes, an increasing number of breakdowns and a surge in ridership that has led to overcrowded trains — paint the crime statistics as a positive. They say that while ridership was up 7 percent over the past year, the severity of crimes seems to be down, arrests and citations up, and the overall crime rate, particularly for violent crime, is low.
“We drive over 400,000 people a day,” said Jeffrey Jennings, a deputy chief for the transit agency’s police force. “A small city every day. We do a good job of keeping people safe.”
The transit system, which passes through parts of four counties and 26 cities, has had no homicides this year and two last year. Jennings said BART’s crime figures tend to mirror what’s happening in the communities trains pass through — but at far lower rates.
“BART is way safer than most people give it credit for. We do have our fair share, but look at the type of crimes we have,” said Jennings, who joined BART two years ago from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office. “Most are crimes of opportunity — purse snatches, phone snatches. There are very few armed robberies or strong-arm robberies.”
Powell Station, one of four BART stops beneath Market Street in downtown San Francisco, is not only among the system’s busiest stations, it also has the most crime. Powell ranks high in several categories of crime reports. The station recorded more violent crimes than any other station in the system as well as the most calls to police in both 2013 and 2014.
One of the reasons Powell has higher numbers, Jennings said, is that the BART Police Department has a substation there, providing a steady presence of officers. The agency has also stepped up enforcement in Powell and the other downtown stations since July, when it started a controversial crackdown on people who lie or sit with their legs extended.
“It’s one of the anomalies of law enforcement,” he said. “You have a greater presence, you have more arrests. But over time, hopefully, the numbers go down.”
When the number of passengers passing through each station is taken into account, however, Bay Fair, Hayward and Fruitvale stations in Alameda County and Concord and North Concord/Martinez stations in Contra Costa County top the list of stations where riders were most likely to encounter violent crime.
Bay Fair station, on the southern end of San Leandro, sits next to the Bayfair Center mall and has a transit hub for AC Transit buses. Like Powell, it’s also home to a BART police substation.
Jennings attributed the high crime numbers at Bay Fair, as well as at the other stations in the Hayward, San Leandro area, to Band Camp, a gang that rode BART and committed crimes in the area during the summer months. BART police joined local law enforcement agencies to crack down on the gang.
Appropriately for the tech-savvy Bay Area, BART is increasing its reliance on data to drive enforcement and emphasizing enforcement operations that include undercover officers and stings.
Following a model developed in New York in the 1990s, BART police use statistics to determine where on the 105-mile system to deploy its 20 to 30 officers. Jennings meets weekly with commanders from the five enforcement zones to talk about statistics, trends and where and how to assign officers.
“We use the data to find out what’s going on, to ID the hot spots,” said Officer Ken Dam, the department’s data analyst.
Dam said he looks not only at which crimes are occurring and where but also during what time of day, on which days, and using what techniques. He also identifies parolees and probationers in the area to see if any of them match the types of crimes being committed.
“Then we do directed policing,” he said.
That can include undercover or sting operations or simply assigning more police officers and community service officers to a particular station, Jennings said. For instance, if the department determines that car break-ins are occurring at certain stations at certain times, he will flood those stations with community service officers, who are not sworn officers, to keep an eye out and alert police.
BART police have used sting and undercover operations more extensively — and successfully — this year, Jennings said. Since January the agency has conducted 24 data-driven operations, including undercover actions.
“That’s part of the reason our numbers are up,” he said. “We have more arrests, more citations when we do this kind of enforcement.”
While Powell and Bay Fair rank consistently high in the statistics, other stations also stand out — in good and bad ways.
•Bay Fair, Hayward, Fruitvale, Concord and North Concord/Martinez stations were the top five stations for violent crime per capita in 2014.
•Bay Fair, El Cerrito del Norte, Hayward and Civic Center joined Powell to round out the list of five stations with the most violent crimes in total.
•Civic Center, Coliseum, Bay Fair and Pittsburg/Bay Point followed Powell as the stations with the most calls for police help.
•The worst station for theft in 2014 was Hayward, followed by Coliseum, Fremont, Pittsburg/Bay Point and San Leandro.
Coliseum Station was the undisputed leader in vehicle thefts, well ahead of the other 33 stations with parking lots or garages. But Jennings expects that may change. The Coliseum lots have been surrounded with security fencing, he said, and an officer is stationed full time at the station or inside its lots.
On the other end of the statistical spectrum are the stations that stand out for their lack of crime. Glen Park station had the fewest violent crimes per passenger and also showed near the bottom in total number of police calls and total violent crimes in both 2013 and 2014. San Francisco International Airport Station, which is on heavily policed airport property, is also low on most of the crime lists along with Orinda and South San Francisco stations.
The station with the fewest stolen vehicles so far in 2014 was Lake Merritt, which reported no car thefts. Pleasant Hill, Glen Park, San Bruno and South San Francisco reported two stolen vehicles each. Glen Park, it should be noted, has just 52 spaces, while most have more than 1,000 and some more than 2,000.
Considering the breadth of the system, the number of cities it passes through and the large number of passengers, Jennings said, BART passengers don’t need to ride in fear of becoming a victim of crime, he said, though he advises riders to be aware.
How certain is he? He lets his 15-year-old daughter ride BART as long as she’s accompanied by a friend.
“I am very confident in the safety of BART,” he said.
Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
Staying safe
on BART
Download the BART Watch app, which allows you to report an incident, call BART police or send them photos.
Program (510) 464-7000, the BART police emergency line, into your phone. It’s faster than dialing 911 from BART.
Be aware of your surroundings. Put down your phone and pay attention.
Zip your purse and don’t put it on the ground.
Travel in pairs, especially during the holiday season.
Use community service officer escorts to cars during the holiday season at certain stations.
If fearful on a train, move to the first car, nearer the operator.
Remove valuables from view in cars — even change in the ashtray.
Park where there is light.
Don’t hesitate to report anything suspicious.In the last 65 years, the Shinran Statue has known two homes. Its latest home is a fenced stoop on Riverside Drive outside of the New York Buddhist Church. But before that, the Shinran Statue stood proudly outside of a temple in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
More specifically, the statue stood only 1.5 miles from the center of the atomic blast that decimated 70 percent of the buildings in the city and took the lives of 150,000 people. Amazingly, the statue emerged from the explosion unscathed, still standing guard at the burning temple.
Following the war, a Japanese man shipped the statue to New York where it has stayed since 1955. The statue has been free from radiation since it began its stay in the United States and has never posed a danger to visitors.
Today, the 15-foot bronze statue stands as a monument to world peace and the frightening power of the atomic bomb. Its weathered bronze exterior is visible in front of the Buddhist Church, and its amazing legacy is preserved in the nation responsible for its near destruction.(Almost) Everyone agrees that Black Sabbath was and is still the biggest inspiration for a vast majority of the Heavy bands we listen to every day. Stoner, Doom, Sludge, whatever the genre, many current bands worship The Prince of Darkness and his 3 acolytes, Iommi The Lord of the Riff, Geezer, and Mr. Bill Ward.
A lot of these bands worship so much Black Sabbath they even decided to cover one (or several!) of their songs, or should I say, “masterpieces”!
So here are the TOP 51 Black Sabbath covers done by Stoner /Doom / Sludge bands. I know many more bands covered the first Heavy Metal band ever, but if I chose to do this I’d still be searching for them… I also decided to sort them alphabetically, by the band who did the cover. I could have done this from my least favorite to the ultimate Black Sabbath cover, but my tastes won’t necessarily reflect the ones of everyone coming to read that list (and also because I’m a lazy motherfucker 😛 ). I also want to say a big thanks to all the people who helped me gather this monster list on Facebook or Reddit.
So why 51? Because the 51st is also a cover, but a very particular one… 😉
Oh! And you’ll also find a playlist of those great covers at the end of the post.
Enjoy Fuzzers!
1. 1000mods – Snowblind
2. Apostle of Solitude – Electric Funeral
3. Black Capricorn – Solitude
4. Black Oath – Electric Funeral
5. Bongzilla – Under the Sun
6. Brown Sabbath – Planet Caravan
7. Bullring Brummies – The Wizard
8. C.O.C. – Lord of This World
9. Candlemass – Black Sabbath Medley
10. Cathedral – Solitude
11. Cathedral – Wheels Of Confusion
12. Cult Of Occult – Children of the Grave
13. Cultura Tres – Black Sabbath
14. Doomdogs – N.I.B.
15. Eyehategod – Sabbath Jam
16. Firelord – Children Of The Grave
17. Goatsnake – Who Are You?
18. Gonga – Black Sabbeth
19. Graves at Sea – Orchid/Lord Of This World
20. Grifter – Fairies Wear Boots
21. Iron Monkey – Cornucopia
22. Isis – Hand of Doom
23. Kal El – Hole In The Sky
24. Karma To Burn – Never Say Die
25. Kyuss – Into the Void
26. Melvins – Symptom Of The Universe
27. Monkey3 – Electric Funeral
28. Monolord – Fairies Wear Boots
29. Monster Magnet – Into the Void
30. Mother Corona – Into The Void
31. Orange Goblin – Hand of Doom
32. Orange Goblin – Into the Void
33. Planet Of Zeus – Behind the Wall of Sleep
34. Red Wizard – The Wizard
35. Sergeant Thunderhoof – Sweet Leaf
36. Sky Valley Mistress – Paranoid
37. Sleep – Lord of This World
38. Sleep – Snowblind
39. Solitude Aeturnus – Heaven And Hell
40. Spirit Caravan – Wicked World
41. Stone Axe – When I Came Down
42. Subvert Blaze – Wicked World
43. Telestrion – A National Acrobat
44. The Hellacopters – Dirty Women
45. The Muggs – Tomorrows’ Dream
46. The Shrine – Symptom Of The Universe
47. Thou – Black Sabbath
48. ThunderHawk – War Pigs
49. Ulver – Solitude
50. Usnea – Into The Void
[sociallocker]
51. Mac Sabbath – Frying Pan
Haha this band named “Mac Sabbath” just chose to cover Black Sabbath songs wearing McDonalds costumes and modifying the lyrics to some funny stuff related to the Fast-Food giant… Then enjoy this cover (you guessed it) “Iron Man”! 😀 😀 😀
[/sociallocker]
Here is a huge playlist of this TOP if you want to listen to them all night long in one go 😀
Don’t hesitate to share this with your friends just below, Thanks!At this month's board meeting, a resolution was passed to move XMLBeans to the Attic, due to inactivity and no response from the Project Management Committee. The Attic home page [1] contains some details about its purpose - it is the destination for Apache projects that can no longer provide oversight or muster votes for a release. It isn't a reflection on the contributors or the codebase, and is intended to be non-impacting to users. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, or if you are available to work with the Attic to help with the transition of resources. Regards, Brett (on behalf of the ASF Board) -- Brett Porter brett@apache.org http://brettporter.wordpress.com/ http://au.linkedin.com/in/brettporter http://twitter.com/brettporter --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@xmlbeans.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@xmlbeans.apache.orgZaka emergency personnel clean a bloodstain from the ground at the scene where Israeli security forces shot dead a Palestinian assailant who tried to stab a man at Gush Etzion junction, near a West Bank settlement on Tuesday, police said, a location that has seen many attacks during two months of violence. December 1, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli security forces shot dead two knife-wielding Palestinian assailants on Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, Israeli authorities said, as a wave of Palestinian stabbings, car rammings and shootings entered its third month.
Nineteen Israelis and a U.S. citizen have been killed since Oct. 1. Israeli forces have killed 97 Palestinians, of whom 58 were identified by Israel as assailants or caught on camera carrying out attacks, while others were shot in clashes with police and troops.
A police spokeswoman said a Palestinian man who tried to carry out a stabbing attack on Tuesday at a busy junction in the Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements in the West Bank was shot dead. Gunfire from an Israeli officer trying to secure the scene slightly wounded a bystander, she said.
Near the Jewish settlement of Einav, also in the West Bank, a Palestinian woman was shot dead by an Israeli officer whom she had attempted to stab, the army said.
Palestinian allegations that Israel is trying to alter the religious status quo at a Jerusalem holy site - known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, where al-Aqsa mosque stands, and to Jews as the Temple Mount - have fueled the violence.
Non-Muslim prayer is banned around al-Aqsa and Israel has said it will not change that, but an increase in visits by Jewish religious activists and ultra-nationalist Israeli politicians to the complex have contributed to Palestinian fears.It |
supportive of her human rights message, but officials at the London headquarters have offered no solutions to the problem with the host country.
“I think they didn’t see it coming,” Lin said. “It’s a hard decision because China is a sponsor.”U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Lance Cheung
Peace one day, war the next: It's the life of a combat pilot. And because Operation Odyssey Dawn—the U.S.-NATO effort to curtail Muammar Gaddafi's suppression of a revolt in Libya—so far relies exclusively on air power, American airmen are again at the sharp edge of history. PM spoke to U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle and A-10 Thunderbolt II ("Warthog") pilots to see the unfolding operation from their perspective.
Pilots take a keen interest in international affairs, particularly at Lakenheath Royal Air Force Base, which hosts the 48th Fighter Squadron. Two variants of multipurpose F-15s operate from the air base, training weekly with NATO partners to perfect air superiority missions and deliver accurate air-to-ground weapons. "We support exercises for both the Air Force and NATO," says one 27-year-old F-15E pilot, call sign Slam. "It almost of doubles our workload. But when things like this pop up, we've been training for it."
(The Air Force asked PM to only use call signs to identify pilots, to prevent harassing phone calls or violent reprisals to themselves or their families. We accepted: Gaddafi has been known to employ terrorists and hit men to reach foreign targets.)
The first sure sign of impending violence came when the United Nations voted to approve the formation of a no-fly zone and protective cordon for Libyan civilians and anti-Gaddafi rebels. "Our ears perked up when the UN Security Council resolution was kicking off," says Slam. "It did happen quick…It was less than a week, so we probably had not too much more warning than you did. But we're prepared to handle that."
For Slam and his rear-seat Weapons System Officer, call sign Axel, the next stop was a briefing room in England. "We had to prepare for the missions we were about to embark on. There was intel briefings, and the leadership broke down a game plan on how to mitigate [anti-aircraft] threats, enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians down here. After that we deployed to Aviano [Air Base, in Italy.]"
The pace of operations is regulated by mandatory sleep cycles. "We go into crew rest about 12 hours before we fly," Slam says. "We get rested up and then we'll start getting some idea of what the mission will be that day."
By the time the crew is ready to hear the details of the mission, called the flight briefing, commanders have often selected specific targets already. The airmen were instructed not to discuss specific missions, but officials say that U.S. warplanes have engaged radars, anti-aircraft missiles, airfields and ground forces. "During the flight briefings we'll find out more specifically what we'll be striking that day," Axel says. "After that, we'll'step to fly' and then go make it happen. It's been a variety of targets that we're striking to protect civilians and help us implement the no-fly zone."
In addition to engaging planned targets, the pilots' rules of engagement also permit them to attack targets that are taking aggressive action against U.S. planes or Libyans on the ground. "We execute both types of missions, and it's not really more one than the other," Slam says.
As continued missile and airplane strikes degraded Libyan air defenses, new warplanes joined the fight. Last weekend. A-10 aircraft arrived to add muscle to the ground attacks against Gaddafi's armored vehicles, armed pickup trucks and truck transports. It was time for one 30-year-old pilot, call sign Cab, to join the war.
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U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Melanie Norman
U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Melanie Norman
Cab serves with the 81st Fighter Squadron, based at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, but is stationed in Aviano to participate in Odyssey Dawn. "We came in after the first wave," he says. "The squadron just got back from Afghanistan recently, so we already kind of on a war footing. They told us where to go and we were there in a couple of days."
For Cab, his recent combat experience augmented the joint training that the 81st conducts with allied NATO pilots, including those flying over Libya now like the Dutch and French. "Almost everything we do is with NATO in mind. And working with International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, that's almost like NATO, right? We're working right alongside those guys. I've flown [on strike missions] with some of the guys who were in Afghanistan. It's transparent to us who's got command and control. As far as A-10s are concerned, we're used to it in Afghanistan."
The A-10 is ugly airplane that is beloved by U.S. and NATO infantry troops for its ability to fly low and tear enemies apart with precise 30mm rotary cannon fire. It was designed to kill Soviet tanks, but in recent years the airplane has remained a valuable tool for providing close air support.
Close air support is a touchy subject during Odyssey Dawn. It's always better to have a human on the ground, a Joint Tactical Air Controller (JTAC), to direct the bombs and gunfire coming from above. But in Libya, where the UN mandate does not include supporting the opposition fighters to oust Gaddafi, there is no acknowledged airstrike coordination between rebels and NATO—though that official statement may be ignoring (as the NY Times reported today) clandestine British Special Forces teams or CIA operators who can direct air strikes. What we do know is that an entire fleet of networked surveillance aircraft are relaying the location of ground targets to pilots, who can use sensors that can peer through clouds and smoke, day or night, to hone in on them. Open desert strikes would be easy under these conditions; precision strikes in towns and cities would be more difficult.
Cab is understandably, and rightfully, unwilling to part with any information that could compromise himself, his allies or his mission. When we asked if the advanced imaging systems used on the A-10 and other airplanes could identify targets of opportunity without guidance from trained personnel below, he said: "No targeting pod can fill the shoes of a JTAC. But we did it Gulf War one—'hogs were there without JTACs on the ground. I can't really say much more."
No pilot, even one in a single-seat warplane like the A-10, ever flies alone. There are hundreds of Air Force personnel at Aviano making these missions happen—including weapons handlers, air traffic controllers, escort jamming warplanes and the crews of refueling tankers. "Pilots are kind of like sideline players," Cab says. "We've got a couple hundred people working for us where we're deployed. The airplane I fly is the same age as I am, so I have to give a specific shout-out to the maintainers here because they are kicking ass."by
The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership can now be viewed by the public, thanks to the New Zealand government, and it is every bit as bad as activists have been warning.
The TPP, if enacted, promises a race to the bottom: An acceleration of jobs to the countries with the lowest wages, the right of multi-national corporations to veto any law or regulation their executives do not like, the end of your right to know what is in your food, higher prices for medicines, and the subordination of Internet privacy to corporate interests. There is a reason it has been negotiated in secret, with only corporate executives and industry lobbyists consulted and allowed to see the text as it took shape.
The threat from the TPP extends beyond the 12 negotiating countries, however — the TPP is intended to be a “docking” agreement whereby other countries can join at any time, provided they accept the text as it has been previously negotiated. Moreover, the TPP is a model for two other deals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, and the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA), an even more secret “free trade” deal being negotiated among 50 countries that would eliminate any controls on the financial industry.
The elimination of protections is precisely what U.S. multi-national corporations intend for Europe by replicating the terms of the TPP in the TTIP, a process made easier by the anti-democratic nature of the European Commission, which is negotiating for European governments. Already, higher Canadian standards in health, the environment and consumer protections are under sustained assault under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The TPP is an unprecedented corporate giveaway, going well beyond even NAFTA, which has hurt working people and farmers in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
More than 300,000 jobs in the U.S. alone may be eliminated by the passage of the TPP. The Wall Street Journal, in an article celebrating victory for multi-national capital, nonetheless reported that330,000 manufacturing jobs would be lost, basing this estimate on an estimated US$56 billion increase in the national trade deficit. That forecast is based on a U.S. Department of Commerce estimate that 6,000 jobs are lost for every $1 billion of added trade deficit.
Bad news on both sides of the Pacific
The Canadian union Unifor estimates that 20,000 Canadian jobs in auto manufacturing alone are at risk from TPP. Canada will also be forced to open its dairy and poultry industries. There is fear that Canadian dairy farming may collapse and the outgoing Harper régime promised $4.3 billion to compensate farmers from expected losses.
The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, while acknowledging that community pressure forced governments to resist some of the most extreme measures, worries that the U.S. concession to Australia that the extension of monopolies on biological medications will be five years rather than eight will prove ephemeral. The group reports that the text “refers to eight years and to ‘other measures’ which would ‘deliver a comparable market outcome,’ and to a future review. It is not clear how this will be applied in Australia.” The U.S. will retain its 12-year exclusivity period, while other countries can choose five or eight years, so there will likely be continued pressure from pharmaceutical companies for all to adopt a longer period.
A product would not have to be produced locally to qualify as a locally made product. As much as two-thirds of an automobile’s components could be manufactured in China, for example, and it would still qualify for preferential treatment if one-third is made in any TPP signatory country. But “buy local” rules would become illegal, including for government procurement.
There are no enforceable provisions for environmental, health, safety or labor protection. Public Citizen, in its analysis of the TPP text, reports:
“The language touted as an ‘exception’ to defend countries’ health, environmental and other public-interest safeguards from TPP challenges is nothing more than a carbon copy of past U.S. free trade language that ‘reads in’ to the TPP several World Trade Organization (WTO) provisions that have already been proven ineffective in more than 97 percent of its attempted uses in the past 20 years to defend policies challenged at the WTO. In two decades of WTO rulings, [the articles purporting to protect laws necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health] have only been successfully employed to actually defend a challenged measure in one of 44 attempts.”
The ratio under TPP is likely to be even lower as the TPP promises the most extreme rules in favor of corporations of any “free trade” deal. Even the extremely weak “exception” does not apply to the entire investment chapter of the TPP. Precedent here is bad — as the secret tribunals that decide cases brought by corporations against governments hand down their one-sided agreements, these decisions become a floor for the next decision, pushing the interpretation further in favor of corporate domination.
Democracy canceled by corporate power
Under the TPP, corporations are elevated to the level of national governments and, in practice, could be said to be elevated above governments. The TPP text mandates that “customary international law” be applied for the benefit of an “investor” — that law is not found in any statutes, but rather has been established by previous decisions of secret tribunals interpreting NAFTA and other “free trade” deals. Worse, the TPP places essentially no limits on who qualifies as an “investor” eligible to be compensated for potential profits that may not materialize due to a regulation or safety rule.
Although the rules codifying benefits for multi-national capital are written in firm language, there is no such language for protections. The Sierra Club reports that the TPP mandates that only one of the seven environmental agreements found in previous “free trade” deals be fulfilled, an alarming development as previous environmental requirements have been routinely ignored. Among the many deficiencies in the TPP, the Sierra Club said:
“Rather than prohibiting trade in illegally taken timber and wildlife — major issues in TPP countries like Peru and Vietnam — the TPP only asks countries ‘to combat’ such trade. To comply, the text only requires weak measures, such as ‘exchanging information and experiences,’ while stronger measures like sanctions are listed as options. … Rather than obligating countries to abide by [rules to] prevent illegally caught fish from entering international trade, the TPP merely calls on countries to ‘endeavor not to undermine’ [fisheries-management protocols] — a non-binding provision.”
The TPP fails to even mention the words “climate change”! More than 9,000 corporations would be newly empowered to sue governments because a law or regulation hurt their profits. Worse, the TPP would mandate that the U.S. Department of Energy automatically approve all exports of liquified natural gas to all TPP countries. This would guarantee more fracking; already under NAFTA the province of Québec has been sued in an effort to overturn its fracking moratorium. That may only be the beginning, according to 350.org:
“The agreement would give fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground. If a province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In short, these rules undermine countries’ ability to do what scientists say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
You’ll have no right know what you eat
Food safety would fare no better. The TPP’s race to the bottom would require that the lowest inspection standards of any country be applied, forcing a lowering of other countries’ standards, and end protections against untested genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in your food. Food & Water Watch reports:
“The TPP includes a new provision designed to second-guess the government inspectors who monitor food imports. … The food and agribusiness industry demanded — and received — stronger [rules] that make it harder to defend domestic food safety standards from international trade disputes. … Agribusiness and biotech seed companies can now more easily use trade rules to challenge countries that ban GMO imports, test for GMO contamination, do not promptly approve new GMO crops or even require GMO labeling. The TPP gives the food industry a powerful new weapon to wield against the nationwide movement to label GMO foods. The language in the TPP is more powerful and expansive than other trade deals that have already been used to weaken or eliminate dolphin safe tuna and country of origin labels.”
Health care will also come under direct assault, forcing other countries more toward the U.S. system, under which health care is a privilege for those who can afford it rather than a human right. Government programs to hold down the cost of medications are targeted for elimination in the TPP. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, which has been sounding the alarm for years,said:
“TPP countries have agreed to United States government and multinational drug company demands that will raise the price of medicines for millions by unnecessarily extending monopolies and further delaying price-lowering generic competition. … [T]he TPP will still go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries, which will be forced to change their laws to incorporate abusive intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical companies. For example, the additional monopoly protection provided for biologic drugs will be a new regime for all TPP developing countries. These countries will pay a heavy price in the decades to come that will be measured in the impact it has on patients.”
The text of the TPP is subject to approval by legislative bodies in various countries, and while time is limited and the approval process is streamlined to facilitate approval in several of them, the Trans-Pacific Partnership can be defeated. This is not a national issue. Working people will be hurt everywhere, with jobs disappearing in developed countries and sweatshop misery for other countries — this is why multi-national capital, where ever it is based, is pushing for the TPP. If it is to be stopped, it will be through the combined activity of activists on both sides of the Pacific. We have no time to lose.Barney Frank (MSNBC)
Barney Frank blamed “low information” voters for the congressional gridlock that has now made outsider candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appealing to them.
The former Massachusetts congressman appeared Monday night on MSNBC Live with Jose Diaz-Balart, where he said too many voters fail to participate in democracy and lack basic knowledge about constitutional government.
“The fact is, if you are seriously committed to a set of public policy goals, then you are voting all the time and you also, and I think this is part of it, you have people who don’t understand, frankly, the nature of the American political system,” Frank said.
He said governing majorities require two elections to assemble, but he said Republicans won congressional midterm elections in 2010 and 2014 because too many Democratic voters sat out to punish President Barack Obama for failing to quickly accomplish everything they’d hoped.
“That’s why we have gridlock, and I think what you have is, frankly, people that don’t understand that, and it is a case of people blaming a ‘system’ when the system is simply the accumulation of their own behavior,” Frank said.
Sanders and Trump have captured the support of many Americans who don’t typically vote but are now angry that the political system doesn’t work for them, but Frank said those voters should blame themselves.
“People are reluctant to blame themselves,” Frank said. “People like to find somebody else to blame, so they’re now saying, ‘See, Sanders pointed out it’s that system’s fault,’ and I think that’s unfortunate.”
He said general election polls were a perfect example of this lack of understanding.
“If you look at the final election polls, Sanders does better than (Hillary) Clinton,” Frank said. “(There’s) a very simple reason for that: All of the Clinton people asked say they’ll vote for Sanders. Because of this kind of lack of information and, I think, misunderstanding of how you really get change done in America, a large chunk — a third, I saw recently quoted — say they won’t vote for Clinton. That’s why he does better now.”
Frank said Sanders’ criticism of Clinton demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of her role in the Obama administration.
“I wish some people had been prosecuted (for Wall Street fraud), but the Secretary of State doesn’t indict people — that’s President Obama,” he said. “The health care bill, President Obama. His view on the inadequacy of financial reform is President Obama.”
He predicted that Sanders supporters would turn out to vote against Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz in November, but he suggested they wouldn’t vote again in two years.
“You have people who, I believe, do not understand how hard it is to make change, the importance of not just being idealistic but being sensibly pragmatic about it and keep your ideals — and Sanders is getting their support,” Frank said.
Watch the entire interview posted online by MSNBC:TOMMY SMITH: "The most important goal though is maximum points from these next two games, and if we apply ourselves, there's no reason why we can't do that."
Vice-captain Tommy Smith says the All Whites will never forget the horror of Honiara but it's time to "exorcise the demons" tonight in Noumea.
The Ipswich Town defender will be reunited with English premier league players Ryan Nelsen and Winston Reid for the opening game of the World Cup qualifying series against New Caledonia.
Nelsen and Reid were absent in June when the All Whites crashed to a surprise 2-0 semifinal defeat to New Caledonia at the Oceania Nations Cup tournament in Honiara.
That shock result cost them a place in the 2013 Confederations Cup finals in Brazil - and a $1.8 million payday.
Smith captained the All Whites in Nelsen's absence - and while he treasured the "honour of captaining my country" - the result still rankles.
"I don't think we will ever forget about it," he said from Noumea yesterday. "It hurt and it's still there. We've got to go out and exorcise the demons from that day and there's no better way to start than against the team that knocked us out."
Herbert, however, is calling on his players to channel their emotion.
"I think we've got to very professional about it and make sure the minds are right. The emotion that came out of the Nations Cup is something that'll be around for a long time. It would be disappointing if people didn't have a strong feeling about it and wanting to put it right.
"It's how you manage that now and put in a performance that is good enough to win over here. We're very keen to get it back on track with strong, positive, winning performances."
Both teams have bolstered their ranks for the World Cup qualifier. With Nelsen and Reid reprising their 2010 World Cup finals combination with Smith, the All Whites' defence will be tougher to break down.
Herbert has noted New Caledonia has "brought back several players from France", including striker Georges Gope-Fenepej. The 24-year-old joined Ligue One club Troyes on a one-year contract after scoring against the All Whites in Honiara where he and Bertrand Kai gave Smith and his backline colleagues a torrid time.
Smith agreed New Caledonia would be stronger "if they're bringing players in".
"That's something we will have to be wary about, but hopefully we will have the better footballing nous and use that to better advantage."
The 22-year-old is looking forward to reuniting with Nelsen and Reid.
"They are playing at a higher level than I am, so I can learn things from them that can improve me as a player."
Smith felt the "extra responsibility" of leading the All Whites while Nelsen was out injured had added to his game.
"Some people don't like the added pressure but I think I thrived on it," he said. "And now, there's no better player to learn off than Ryan. He's very approachable, if I have anything I need to ask him, he's always happy to talk.
"Even when I'm at home in England I can give him a call and he's there to talk to me."
Nelsen and Smith were in the New Zealand Olympic Games team and Smith would dearly love to follow his skipper and Reid into the premier league next season.
"First and foremost, I want to try to keep my place in the Ipswich side. This is my seventh year there and my main goal is to help the club get better. If I can get into the premier league with Ipswich Town that would be brilliant. They gave me my first contract in professional football."
Smith is excited about the "attacking talent" in the All Whites squad with 2010 World Cup regulars Rory Fallon, Shane Smeltz and Chris Killen now challenged by Chris Wood, Kosta Barbarouses, Jeremy Brockie and Marco Rojas.
■ There is no live TV coverage but www.oceaniafootball.com will carry play-by-play updates from 7pm.
New Caledonia: Rocky Nyikeine (gk), Jeremie Dokunengo, Emile Bearune, Georges Bearune, Kalaje Gnipate, Olivier Dokunengo, Dominique Wacalie, Miguel Kayara, Jacques Haeko, Cesar Lolohea, Bertrand Kai, Roy Kayara, Noel Kaudre, Jean-Patrick Wakanumune, Dick Kauma, Iamel Kabeu, Joel Wakanumune, Yohann Mercier, Georges Gope-Fenepej, Steeve Ixoee (gk), Luther Wahnyamalla, Marc Ounemoa (gk), Pierre Nyikeine.
New Zealand: Mark Paston (gk), Winston Reid, Tony Lochhead, Ben Sigmund, Tommy Smith, Ryan Nelsen (capt), Leo Bertos, Michael McGlinchey, Shane Smeltz, Chris Killen, Marco Rojas, Glen Moss (gk), Dan Keat, Ivan Vicelich, Jeremy Brockie, Kosta Barbarouses, Tim Payne, Michael Boxall, Chris Wood.According to reporter Victor Gil, it would appear as if Real Madrid and Arsenal have come to an agreement to ship out Alvaro Morata to London in order to get some regular playing time which he isn't finding with his current club. The report is stating that the deal was brokered prior to the Champions League final and that it could be announced in the coming days. While the Morata-to-Arsenal rumors have been floating around for months and through a variety of sources (from Bleacher Report to the Daily Star to ESPN), nothing has been 100 percent confirmed yet. In fact, the recent hot rumors have him going somewhere in Italy, both as a sale/loan option at Inter as well as a throw-in for any kind of deal involving Paul Pogba or Arturo Vidal. Additionally, there have also been rumors of him joining Sociedad on a loan and even some reports linking him to German clubs.
This rumor states that there will be a two year repurchase window should Real Madrid look to bring him back, the same way they brought back Dani Carvajal. A full transfer would've cost Arsenal €25m but since this clause exists it only cost them €10m. In theory, this is a good move for both the player and the club. He would get more minutes at Arsenal than he is now since it appears to be easier to unseat Olivier Giroud for playing time than Karim Benzema. Additionally, he'd be exposed to a different playing style than what he's been accustomed to in Spain and he'll be learning under Arsene Wenger, the man who managed Thierry Henri, Dennis Bergkamp and Robin van Persie.
However, this does bring up questions for Real Madrid in the more immediate sense. Morata is the backup striker to Karim Benzema and while Benz has avoided injuries for the most part of the season, he wore down at the end and it was apparent that the club needs a solid #2 at the position. With Morata heading out, they need to find a matured backup who is content to be a rotation option for a year, maybe two, without wanting a long term deal so that the door remains open for Morata to return.
Ideally, this would be a repeat of the Carvajal situation where a young player goes abroad to finishing school and comes back as a better performer. Morata has shown glimpses of being a solid striker, maybe not elite but certainly solid enough to back up Benz, but he needs consistent minutes to iron out some concerns which were evident in the last few weeks of the season.PARIS — Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France on Tuesday cited a deep divide in the country, likening it to a state of “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid” that has left part of the population on the cultural fringe.
Mr. Valls, often regarded as the most popular politician in the leftist government of President François Hollande, has been known for his outspokenness and tough stance on radical Islam. A day after the end of the attacks in the Paris area that left 17 people dead at the hands of three Muslim extremists from France, Mr. Valls spoke of waging a war “against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”
But during a traditional New Year’s speech on Tuesday, Mr. Valls acknowledged that France had a deeply rooted problem that, he implied, had resulted in a divided society.
“These last few days have emphasized many of the evils which have undermined our country from within, or challenges we have to face,” he said. “To that, we must add all the divisions, the tensions that have been brewing for too long and that we mention sporadically.”Rising temperatures and the resultant stress on India’s agricultural sector may have contributed to increase in suicides over the past 30 years, research shows
Climate change may have contributed to the suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers and farm workers over the past three decades, according to new research that examines the toll rising temperatures are already taking on vulnerable societies.
Illustrating the extreme sensitivity of the Indian agricultural industry to spikes in temperature, the study from the University of California, Berkeley, found an increase of just 1C on an average day during the growing season was associated with 67 more suicides.
Indian traders boycott Coca-Cola for'straining water resources' Read more
An increase of 5C on any one day was associated with an additional 335 deaths, the study published in the journal PNAS on Monday found. In total, it estimates that 59,300 agricultural sector suicides over the past 30 years could be attributed to warming.
Temperature increases outside the growing season showed no significant impact on suicide rates, suggesting stress on the agriculture industry was the source of the increase in suicides.
Also supporting the theory was that rainfall increases of as little as 1cm each year were associated with an average 7% drop in the suicide rate. So beneficial was the strong rainfall that suicide rates were lower for the two years that followed, researcher Tamma Carleton found.
Farm sector suicides in India decreased last year, but remain at epidemic levels in some states and are a source of immense pressure on legislators.
One drought-hit state, Maharashtra, reported 852 farmer suicides in the first four months of this year, while in 2015, one of the worst years on record, about 12,602 farmers killed themselves across India. Overall, more than 300,000 farmers and farm workers have killed themselves in the country since 1995.
In recent months, a site in central Delhi has been strewn with evidence of the despair felt by the Indian agricultural sector.
Skulls and bones said to belong to farmers who killed themselves have been piled at Jantar Mantar, within walking distance of the Indian parliament.
They were brought to Delhi by farmers from Tamil Nadu, a state suffering its worst drought in 140 years, which the protesters claim has triggered hundreds of suicides in the past months.
Worse than the parched crops were the bank loans that loomed over many farming families, said Rani Radhakrishnan, one of the protesters.
In February, owing 80,000 rupees (£945), her husband stood outside his bank branch in the city of Trichy, and consumed a toxic concoction. He died on the spot.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tamil Nadu is suffering its worst drought in 140. Protestors claim it has triggered hundreds of suicides. Photograph: Julian Chung for the Guardian
“He had talked about things like this [suicide] happening with others, but never about doing it himself,” she said.
The next week, Radhakrishnan and her daughter-in-law stood outside the bank brandishing wads of rupees. “We told them, we have repaid your money, now will you give us back my husband’s life?” she said.
Last year the Indian government launched a £1bn insurance scheme to protect against crop failures and try to halve farmer and farm worker suicides.
Maharashtra, Punjab and the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, have all passed farm-debt waivers at enormous cost to the public purse to appease the demands of the agricultural sector, which commands strong political sway.
Carleton said her research showed little evidence Indian farmers were changing their practices to accommodate rising temperatures.
“Without interventions that help families adapt to a warmer climate, it’s likely we will see a rising number of lives lost to suicide as climate change worsens in India,” Carleton said.
The true suicide rate was probably higher, she added, because deaths are generally underreported in India and, until 2014, suicide was considered a criminal offence, discouraging honest reports.
“The tragedy is unfolding today,” she said. “This is not a problem for future generations. This is our problem, right now.”
• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Helplines in other countries can be found hereThis week's top 20:
20. Unrest on the Palouse
This past weekend in Tuscaloosa there was a reunion of about two dozen former Texas A&M players who survived coach Bear Bryant's brutal first training camp. They would become famous and celebrated. A book based on their 10-day ordeal in 1954, "The Junction Boys," would become a best-seller.
Mike Leach is 2-8 in his first season at Washington State. Tony Medina/Getty Images
Meanwhile, at Washington State, where first-year coach Mike Leach is trying to establish his own football culture, a different kind of assessment of his methods is under way.
Rather than writing a book, the Pac-12 and the Washington State athletic department eventually will write a report based on their independent investigations of alleged player abuse by Leach and his coaching staff. The investigations were requested by Washington State president Elson Floyd after former star wide receiver Marquess Wilson was recently suspended indefinitely, quit the team and then released a statement accusing the Leach regime of "physical, emotional and verbal abuse."
There were no gray areas in his language.
"[WSU's coaches have] preferred to belittle, intimidate and humiliate us. My teammates and I have endured this treatment all season long. It is not 'tough love.' It is abuse."
We stress alleged for all the obvious reasons. Wilson is the only WSU player to have made such public accusations. And depending on what account you read, Wilson's effort in practices and games had come under examination and resulted in his demotion from the starting lineup. So there certainly is some wiggle room to question the motives and timing of Wilson's statement.
19. Unrest on the Palouse, Part II
Wiggle room or not, Floyd was absolutely correct to ask for an investigation. You can't screw around with something like this. After all, this is 2012, not 1954.
Leach isn't the first coach -- and he won't be the last -- to come into a program and impose his will and standards. There are new rules. New, tougher offseason and in-season workouts. New football sensibilities.
I guarantee you it happened at Ohio State with Urban Meyer, at Texas A&M with Kevin Sumlin. It happened when Will Muschamp took over at Florida, when Brian Kelly took over Notre Dame. And I also guarantee you that some players quit or were "encouraged" to transfer to other programs.
Washington State needed a change. That's why it hired Leach, whose spread offense and throwing star-sharp honesty and sarcasm are legendary.
"I think this change is overdue," said WSU athletic director Bill Moos to the Los Angeles Times. "We got a real task. Mike doesn't waver. He is not wishy-washy."
Or as Leach told the newspaper: "We don't say, 'Hey, you 125 guys, how do you want to practice today?' This isn't a democracy."
No, it isn't. And it shouldn't be. Coaches coach. Players play. It's not NATO.
18. Unrest on the Palouse, Part III
But what Wilson is alleging goes beyond Leach's recent postgame comments, when he described his players as "empty corpses" and "zombies." Or when he suggested some of his players' efforts "bordered on cowardice."
Marquess Wilson leads Washington State with 52 catches and 813 receiving yards. James Snook/US Presswire
Those words raised eyebrows, but players everywhere will tell you they've heard worse -- from all coaches -- in the privacy of a locker room. That's why Wilson's charges are so unsettling and why they deserve the attention Floyd is giving them.
Meanwhile, Moos' initial response to Wilson's departure and allegations was more distant and, in some ways, more disappointing. There was no concern or urgency in Moos' statement. Instead, he wished Wilson well and said Washington State had "procedures in place to monitor student-athlete welfare."
Really? Because Wilson went public with a scathing statement alleging otherwise. And he did so against Moos' $11.25 million hire.
The Junction Boys would likely disagree with what Wilson did. They might question his resolve and his honor.
But in this case, Wilson's allegations deserve to be examined, just as Leach deserves the opportunity to clear his name.
Anyway, an investigation is so not 1954. And that's a good thing.
17. Perfection alert
The provider of the following information, College GameDay researcher Chris Fallica, is not a nerd. At least, not in the traditional, "Big Bang Theory" cast member sort of way.
He's a subtle nerd. He's a big guy (his nickname is "Bear") with a meaty voice and he can tell you who's running in the sixth race at any track in the country at any given time. It's scary.
But he takes this algorithm stuff seriously. And right now, Fallica's calculations predict this about the three remaining undefeated teams eligible for postseason play:
Kansas State has the best chance to enter the bowls with an unbeaten record (64.3 percent), followed by Notre Dame (52.2) and Oregon (42.8).
The chances of all three finishing unbeaten is 14.4 percent (up from 7.4 percent a week ago).
And remember, there are a combined seven games remaining to be played by those three teams. The biggest toss-up, according to Fallica, is the Nov. 24 Notre Dame at USC game (50-50).
Of course, don't bet the house on this stuff. Fallica is good, but things happen, such as Texas A&M over Bama. Last week, the Crimson Tide had the best chance to finish undefeated (67.4) and then they got Johnny Manziel-ed.
16. Tweets of the week
You can tell it's the offseason. MLB players are chirping about college football.
From Oakland A's pitcher Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) to Bama quarterback AJ McCarron: "You wanna cry |
the report confirmed that microtrash hadn’t been an issue recently, it did show multiple incidents of condors landing on oil pads.
“If they become used to oil development in their habitat, they’ll become more inclined to land on homes, roofs, and radio towers, where they can pick up trash,” Kuyper said.
He said that the lawsuit is demanding that federal agencies better recognize the impacts that current and potential oil development could have on California condors.
“Our most recent action was notifying these agencies that once again their evaluation of impacts to endangered wildlife is incomplete and not consistent with the best available science and thus violates the Endangered Species Act,” Kuyper said. “Ultimately, we’re asking them to simply comply with laws that are on the books that are designed to protect our country’s wildlife.”
Brenna Swanston can be reached at bswanston@santamariasun.com.Robert Griffin III has come to DC with more fanfare than...well...anyone. Many have already labeled him a savior, rookie of the year and have gone so far to have their avatar on twitter or Hogs Haven switched to a picture of Griffin holding the Lombardi Trophy. It is certainly an exciting time to be a Redskins fan, but lets pump the brakes for a moment. The statistical success of Cam Newton last year has Skins fans salivating for the 2012 campaign. Can Griffin have immediate success? Absolutely. But comparisons to ($)Cam Newton should not be drawn. But what are reasonable expectations for RG3 and the Redskins offense for his rookie campaign?
Recently, ESPN's KC Joyner did a piece on the Top 5 improved offenses and defenses across the league. The Redskins were ranked as the fourth most improved offense in the league. Joyner cited the Redskins ranked 23rd last year in vertical yards per pass (9.7) despite Rex Grossman and John Beck ranking third in the league in attempts. The expectation is that Griffin will raise that stat to about 11 which, in turn, puts the Skins right at the league average and results in an extra 260 yards of offense over the course of the year.
Also, RG3's legs cannot be understated. Last year the Redskins were third worst in the league in only picking up 58 yards in scramble yardage. Griffin should vault the Redskins to about 275 yards in scramble yardage this upcoming year. All-in-all Joyner predicts the Redskins offense to improve by 535 yards in 2012.
So who ranks first in offensive improvement? The answer may surprise you...
Joyner has the Steelers and Colts in a tie for second in the improvement of their offenses. Perhaps you thought Andrew Luck's squad would be first? Wrong. The honor goes to the team that didn't trade for Robert Griffin III in the Cleveland Browns. With the additions of Brandon Weeden, Trent Richardson, and Mitchell Schwartz the Browns are expected to improve by 563 yards this year.Every able bodied free Avesian man is required to keep weapons, practice with them at least twice a year and when the need arises take up said weapons. With a high ratio of slaves to freemen in their small kingdom it's a necessity in case of servile revolt. Nowadays most make do with a musket (many of which are now made on the islands as a number of refugees from the Black Ports had managed to expand the local firearms industry considerably) and a mace, axe or dirk with a basic helmet. Those with more money generally have better equipment. Many consider the militia duties a chore outside of home defense while others take to it with enthusiasm, getting the best (or at the least showiest) weapons and armor they can and putting in more than the minimum. Said groups are organized into militia companies led by members of noble houses. Many of said nobles have something of a historical bent to them and buy gear modeled on those made in the style of the First, Second or Third Empires or other historic powers. But regardless baring a few veterans, settled mercenaries and pirates and bar fights said forces are untested, both officers and men. Even those officers who focus a fair amount of time into the job are generally more playing at it.Published on 2 November 2009 17:57, Adelina Marini, Sofia
Bulgaria will have to secure 300 mn euro from the budget when the realisation of the Nabucco gas pipeline starts with which the EU hopes to diversify its gas suppliers. The amount is 16.5% of the share Bulgaria has in the Nabucco consortium and the total amount for the project is 8 bn euro. The Bulgarian minister of the economy, energy and tourism Traycho Traykov also announced that our country will ratify the intergovernmental agreement and has never thought of giving up its share.
He said this after his meeting with Joschka Fischer, a political consultant of RWE and OMV for the Nabucco project. Mr. Fischer was a minister for foreign affairs and vice chancellor in the government of Gerhard Shroeder. He was also a leader of the German Green party. Gerhard Shroeder also got a job after he lost the 2005 elections to Angela Merkel as a consultant in the project company for Nord Stream.
Joschka Fischer is in Bulgaria as part of his tour in the countries, participating in the project for the Nabucco pipeline with the aim to secure that the project will become a priority one for all participating governments. But still the ratification process has not been competed. But, according to Joschka Fischer 2010 will be an important year for the beginning of the realisation of the project. Asked by euinside whether Nabucco is still facing the problem with the gas supplies, Mr. Fischer explained that filling of the pipe will not be a problem because it can take gas from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Northern Iraq. 50% of the pipe is designated for the participating countries and the rest - for whoever wants it. But he admitted that still there are unsolved issues in the bilateral relations of Turkey (through which the Nabucco will pass) - between Turkey and Azerbaijan and between Ankara and Armenia.
To the question of euinside whether the security problems in Iraq might be a threat to the Nabucco plans to use northern Iraqi natural gas, the former first German diplomat responded that no one can say how will the events develop in Iraq bu he assured that the Northern part of the country is stable and it is where the 2 biggest natural gas deposits in the region lay. For this reason Mr. Fischer denounced the participation of Iran as a potential supplier, adding that Iran does not have gas, the country even is an importer.
And regarding the question whether he considers South Stream as a competitive project to Nabucco, Joschka Fischer said that in at some point it might appear that both projects will be equally important. But the fact is, he underlined, that Europe has in January found out that it urgently needs diversification of suppliers.
Beside his short statement that Bulgaria is still supporting the Nabucco project as well as how much money our country will have to pay for it, the Bulgarian energy minister was reluctant to answer more questions. He even proved as a bad host because when journalists started asking about the price, where the money will come from and how can we have money for Nabucco and not for South Stream, minister Traykov suddenly thanked everyone and was on his way to leave the hall. The he was stopped by his guest Joschka Fischer who requested more time for a final statement: "We are talking about 1 gas project that will supply the biggest gas market in the world. This means that this project will pay back. Many times."
But this was supposed to be the remark of the Bulgarian minister and not of the consultant of RWE and OMV on Nabucco. At least because 300 mn euro is 3 times the amount of money that was cut from next year's budget of the National Helath Care Fund for hispitalisation. And if the Bulgarian government really considers that this project a priority one, it needs to "sell" it to the taxpayers instead of avoiding the questions.More than 25 years since its release, Sega's Mega Drive is expected to be a surprise hit this Christmas.
Nostalgic fans of the original console are flocking to buy the re-released machine, with sales having soared by more than 400 per cent in recent weeks.
Despite it not being as advanced as the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the £39.99 ($76) machines are flying off the shelves, according to retailer Argos.
Nostalgic fans of the original Sega Mega Drive are flocking to buy the re-released retro games machine that first went on sale in 1990. It may not be as advanced as the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, but the £39.99 ($76) consoles are flying off the shelves, according to retailer Argos
The Sega Mega Drive introduced a generation to arcade-style games in their living room including the original Sonic the Hedgehog.
It was initially released in Japan in October 1988 and in America and Europe the following year.
Sales of Sega's console peaked in the mid-90s before the arrival of the first PlayStation created a new standard for video games.
GAMING CAFE OPENS IN HAMPSHIRE Last month, entrepreneur Steve Lowe opened the Game Over cafe in a cellar in Old Portsmouth. It took Mr Lowe 30 years to collect the consoles and seven months to make sure the location was secure. Working consoles available to play at the cafe include an original Sega Master System, a SNES, the ZX Spectrum and more recent models, including the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. Games include the biking game Hang-On, Super Mario Bros and Fifa 96, and for people who preferred the arcade machines of the 1970s and 80s, Mr Lowe has installed two large screens with joysticks and controls.
It later went out of production but was reintroduced more than a year ago thanks to a growing fashion for retro products, from Sodastream to Spacehoppers.
The Sega console from Argos comes pre-loaded with 80 games include Sonic and Streets of Rage.
It is compatible with Sega Mega Drive cartridges and is sold with two wireless, battery-operated controllers.
Laura Hamblyn, gift buyer at Argos, said: 'There's a real appetite for nostalgia at the moment, whether it is firing up old consoles, or dusting down old vinyl records.
'The Sega Mega Drive is fondly remembered by the 90s generation who would spend hours helping Sonic The Hedgehog to defeat his arch nemesis Doctor Robotnik.
'It is fantastic to see parents buying this console to relive their childhood and introduce their own kids to some old school gaming.'
The release of the console is part of the rising trend of retro gaming.
Last month, entrepreneur Steve Lowe opened the Game Over cafe in a cellar in Old Portsmouth.
The Sega Mega Drive introduced a generation to arcade style games in their living room including Sonic the Hedgehog (pictured). The console was initially released in Japan in October 1988 and in America and Europe the following year
Sales of Sega's console peaked in the mid-90s before the arrival of the first PlayStation (a PS3 controller is pictured) created a new standard for video games. It later went out of production but was reintroduced over a year ago thanks to a growing fashion for retro products
It took Mr Lowe 30 years to collect the consoles and seven months to make sure the location was secure.
Working consoles available to play at the cafe include an original Sega Master System, a SNES, the ZX Spectrum and more recent models, including the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3.
Games include the biking game Hang-On, Super Mario Bros and Fifa 96, and for people who preferred the arcade machines of the 1970s and 80s, Mr Lowe has installed two large screens with joysticks and controls.Minimum-wage earners will see their hourly pay increase next month for the first time since 2015.
Beginning Oct. 1, the minimum wage will increase from $11 an hour to $11.15 an hour.
The legislated increase has drawn criticism from both sides of the minimum-wage debate — including small businesses that would have preferred a freeze and labour advocates who argue a 15-cent increase still does not provide a living wage.
The increase is part of legislation introduced by the government in May that indexes minimum wage increases to inflation each year, but also includes a provision under which government can freeze the minimum wage in the event of an economic downturn.
Growth, Enterprise and Trade Minister Blaine Pedersen contends the increase is a balance between what is fair for businesses and good for workers.
"[The legislation] ensures Manitobans are able to take home more of their hard-earned money, while providing predictability for businesses that create jobs and generate growth in our economy," Pedersen said in a statement.
"This legislation provides a balanced, common-sense approach. It is in line with other provinces and reflects our government's commitment to workers, their families and small businesses throughout Manitoba."
The Progressive Conservatives drew heavy criticism last year when they chose not the raise the minimum wage after forming government. The previous NDP government had raised the minimum wage each year it was in power.
'A nickel and a dime'
Kevin Rebeck, the president of the Manitoba Federation of Labour, scoffed at the increase.
The MFL, a lobby group which represents the interests of several affiliated unions across Manitoba, has called on the government to move toward a $15-an-hour wage, in line with promises by the Alberta NDP and Ontario Liberal governments.
The provinces have pledged a phased-in approach that will see the minimum wage increase to $15 an hour by 2018 and 2019, respectively.
British Columbia's NDP government has also said it has plans to get to $15 per hour by 2021, and raised minimum wage by 50 cents this year, to $11.35.
"A nickel and a dime, that is what they [minimum-wage earners] are getting this year," said Rebeck.
"[The legislation] allows [the provincial government] to wash their hands of the real problems that they are creating and sustaining. It allows them to just allow the minimum wage to creep along without having to revisit it."
Increases hurt small business: CFIB
In Canada, $15 an hour has become the standard full-time wage that poverty and labour advocates argue is necessary for a household to meet its basic needs.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said it would have preferred the government continued to freeze the wage at $11 an hour.
The small business lobby group has consistently called for a slow down of minimum-wage increases, arguing it is detrimental to businesses and in the end causes job loss.
"Minimum-wage hikes have a significant impact on [independent businesses'] bottom-line and their ability to employ people," said the CFIB's director of provincial affairs, Jonathan Alward.
"We have been very clear, we have asked the government to focus on better ways to help low-income earners before they decide to increase minimum wage."
Alward argues the first step is to increase the basic personal exemption — the maximum annual income someone can earn before they pay income tax. In Manitoba, the amount is $9,271.
"That is the best place to start, is to let low-income earners keep more of their money before they are taxed," he said.
A spokesperson for Pedersen said in a statement that any future changes to the minimum wage will be announced prior to April 1 in order to take effect on Oct. 1 of each year.Keith Hollywood stood beneath the stairs leading up to the electoral office rolling a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, the paper just licked to seal in the tobacco.
“You’re not going to light that up in here, are you?” said the woman as she walked passed him and started to mount the stairs.
“No, no,” he reassured her. “Not at all.”
And then he went back to his thinking, head wrapped in a woolly hat, brow furrowed.
The election – hopes? Expectations?
“I dunno,” he said, “I dunno. I hope...” and his voice trailed off.
The deadline for registering to be able to vote in Northern Ireland’s assembly elections on March 2nd passed on Tuesday. Last week, at the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland in Belfast’s rebranded Cathedral Quarter, there were queues onto the footpath and even yesterday there was still a steady trickle of people dropping in.
They were checking that they were on the register, or hoping to still be able to get onto it (“Sorry, not this time,” they would be told by the official behind the glass screen), or filling in a form for an electoral identity card (“Can’t guarantee it’ll get there in time,” 38-year-old Hollywood was told, but he is hopeful it’ll be all right come the day).
“I’m sick of the other parties not doing much,” he said back down under the stairs, explaining why he was a People Before Profit supporter.
Blocks on change
His big concern is spending on mental health, and he doesn’t believe Theresa May when she proclaims her determination to do more on the issue. In terms of the Assembly, he wants the post-election landscape to be shaken up.
“Hopefully,” he says, “the DUP won’t be the top party.”
Would he prefer Sinn Féin, the second-largest grouping in the now dissolved assembly?
“No,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t mind seeing the SDLP get a few more seats. Alliance too.”
There isn’t much sign of election fever in the centre of Belfast. Apart from a few straggler posters for Seán Burns that proclaim him to be cross-community Labour alternative.
“Don’t vote for dinosaurs!” they shriek, with a silhouette of a foot-stomping T-Rex with a red line drawn through it. “Demand LGBT equality and a woman’s right to choose.”
What many would see as dinosaur attitudes are far from extinct, as is clear from a glance at the North’s media, both traditional and social.
Smelling salts
“I doubt Mike Nesbitt’s even a unionist any more,” she fumed to the Belfast Telegraph, explaining her resignation from the party. While she had no doubt that unionists could “do business with our Catholic neighbours”, there were limits.
There was no shame, she said, in wanting to vote first for “our own people, for fellow Protestants and unionists – that doesn’t make me a bigot”.
Social media was having fun, meanwhile, at Sinn Féin posters demanding “Comhionnanas Anois!” (Equality Now!), with no shortage of loyalists pointing out on Twitter that the correct spelling of equality in Irish was “comhionannas”.
A trolley carrying boxes of postal vote forms arrives at the electoral office and is placed in a secure place. Between 2013 and last year, some 60,000 people disappeared from the electoral register, names that failed to respond to queries as to whether their entry on the register remained correct.
The surge since the election was confirmed at the end of January could be many from that cohort trying to ensure they are able to vote. No one really knows.
“All we can say,” said Virginia McVae, chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland, “is there has been a definite interest in our engagement with the public ensuring they can vote.”Exclusive: In the last debate, Hillary Clinton vowed to follow up the defeat of ISIS in Iraq’s Mosul with a march on ISIS’ capital in Raqqa, except that’s in Syria, a suggestion of a wider war, says Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Attentive viewers may have noticed something curious about last week’s presidential debate. Asked if she would send troops to help stabilize Iraq once ISIS has been expelled from of the northern city of Mosul, Hillary Clinton replied that U.S. intervention would only make matters worse by providing Islamic State with a rallying point.
But then she said: “The goal here is to take back Mosul. It’s going to be a hard fight. I’ve got no illusions about that. And then [we should] continue to press into Syria to begin to take back and move on Raqqa, which is the ISIS headquarters. I am hopeful that the hard work that American military advisers have done will pay off and that we will see a really successful military operation.”
Move on Raqqah? What did that mean – that Clinton wants to follow up victory in Mosul with a push into Syria? That she envisions a coordinated military thrust into Syria from Iraq? The answer is not quite, although the results could hardly be more dangerous than if she did.
While the press focuses on the latest Donald Trump groping scandal, few reporters have noticed the explosion of violence from Mosul all the way to Afrin, a Syrian Kurdish stronghold some 380 miles to the west. What Clinton sees as a simple two-pronged assault – first the U.S. and its allies wrest back Mosul, then they take Raqqah, and then they mop up whatever remains of ISIS in between – is already turning into something far messier, i.e., a multi-sided power struggle among Kurds, Turks, Shi‘ites, and Sunni Salafists. All are terrified that they will be shut out of the new post-ISIS order, and all are scrambling to gain an edge on their rivals.
Ironically, the winner could well turn out to be Islamic State, as ISIS is also known. The group is hyper-alert when it comes to divisions among its enemies and skilled at using them to its advantage. The greater the turmoil, the more likely that ISIS will be able to regain its footing once the battle of Mosul is over.
If so, ultimate responsibility will lie with the U.S. After all, it was the United States that tipped the region into chaos by invading Iraq in 2003 and then did seemingly everything in its power to compound the damage in the years that followed. Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama’s decision to pull American forces out of Iraq in 2011 allowed Al Qaeda to expand and regroup is not entirely incorrect [although the withdrawal timetable was actually negotiated by President George W. Bush’s administration at the insistence of the Iraqi government].
Still, after all but destroying the Iraqi state in 2003, U.S. withdrawal undoubtedly created a vacuum that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was quick to exploit. But the Obama administration’s decision to back an insurgency in Syria that it knew was dominated by Al Qaeda was no less significant in enabling such forces to regroup.
[Recall that ISIS is an Al Qaeda spinoff, originally called “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” although, in Syria, Al Qaeda’s official affiliate has been the Nusra Front, recently renamed Syria Conquest Front, a key part of the militant force holding east Aleppo.]
Making Matters Worse
The crisis in Syria was compounded by the decision under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama to give Saudi Arabia full backing in its growing anti-Shi’ite sectarian war. This was Bush’s policy shift that investigative reporter Seymour Hersh famously labeled “the redirection” toward overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a policy that Obama embraced in 2011 amid the Arab Spring protests.
After the collapse of the 2011 Arab Spring, U.S. support for the Saudi sectarian conflict has been no less important in fueling conflict across the region despite warnings from the Defense Intelligence Agency that the strategy would benefit radical Sunni jihadists in Syria.
[Obama partially shifted U.S. policy again in 2014 when ISIS began beheading Western hostages and capturing cities in Syria and Iraq, causing U.S. public outrage that prompted Obama to target ISIS for destruction but not Al Qaeda, whose jihadists were by then deeply enmeshed with the U.S.-backed anti-government rebels in Syria.]
Now the U.S. has launched its long-anticipated anti-ISIS offensive around Mosul. The problem is not so much the goal as the methodology. War-weary and overstretched, America is loath to commit significant numbers of ground troops. Instead, its strategy is to leverage its imperial power by enlisting a range of local actors to do its bidding.
This is a policy that Hillary Clinton helped craft as Secretary of State when she enlisted more than a dozen states to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and then encouraged Saudi Arabia and others to fund the anti-Assad revolt in Syria. But the strategy has repeatedly backfired. Employing regional actors means empowering them, and that means triggering a host of secondary conflicts as differences multiply.
The most obvious such example is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been on a rampage since last July’s attempted military coup. The U.S. has backed operation Euphrates Shield, the code name for last August’s Turkish incursion into northern Syria, even though it brought pro-Turkish forces into conflict with Kurdish fighters whom the U.S. also supports.
But now, with his “neo-Ottoman” ambitions in full flower, Erdogan is casting his eye on Mosul. He declared last week that the city and its ethnically variegated hinterlands are within Turkey’s legitimate sphere of influence. When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called on him to withdraw from a military enclave that he has established in Bashiqa, a small town seven miles northeast of Mosul, he told him to “know your place.”
“The army of the Republic of Turkey has not lost its standing so as to take instructions from you,” Erdogan said. “You are not my interlocutor, you are not at my level…. It’s not important at all how you shout from Iraq. You should know that we will do what we want to do.”
Sectarian Conflicts
Erdogan’s motives are many – imperial, ethnic, and religious. Not only does he claim a special right to intervene in Mosul, but he also sees himself as a champion of the Sunnis. He is up in arms, consequently, that Shi‘ite militias known as Al-Hashd al-Sha’bi, or Popular Mobilization Forces, are to take part in the “liberation” of a predominately Sunni city of more than 1 million inhabitants.
“They say 30,000 Shia militants are coming,” he warned last week. “They should be prepared for what they will face.”
Unfortunately, Erdogan’s concerns are not entirely baseless. When Iraqi government forces took back the central Iraqi city of Tikrit from ISIS in April 2015, the same Popular Mobilization Forces looted, torched, or blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings, according to Human Rights Watch, and detained some 200 men and boys, at least 160 of whom remain unaccounted for.
Videos circulated of Shi‘ite militants beheading at least two Sunnis and using a sword to slice strips of flesh off the charred and burning remains of a third “like a shawarma.” After taking back Fallujah in June, Shi‘ite militias reportedly executed more than a dozen Sunnis and beat and abused hundreds more taken into custody.
It is hardly reassuring, therefore, that the same groups are now looking to take Mosul or that a Shi’ite militia leader named Qais Al-Khaz’ali recently proclaimed that the battle will provide an opportunity for “vengeance and retribution” against Sunnis responsible for the death of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson who is a major figure in Shi‘ite martyrology, more than 1,300 years ago. It’s as if a Christian warlord had vowed vengeance on the Jews for the death of Christ.
Al-Khaz’ali even suggested that Erdogan, Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, and Atheel Al-Nujaifi, a Sunni former governor of Nineveh province who commands his own militia, were all descendants of those responsible for Hussein’s death, words not likely to calm fears inside Mosul or to dispel passions across the border in Turkey.
Undoubtedly, the Obama administration is now leaning on Baghdad to keep the Shi‘ite militias under control. But Obama would undoubtedly love a clear-cut victory by Election Day, so he’s probably not leaning all that hard. Moreover, it’s not clear what he can do. Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Abadi’s government relies on the Shi‘ite militias for support, so U.S. leverage is limited.
After the fall of Tikrit, a Sunni political leader named Hamid al-Mutlik says he confronted al-Abadi “numerous times” about Shi‘ite abuses, but to no avail: “I told him, ‘you are the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi forces. The militias have kidnapped hundreds of innocent people. What is your role?’ He replied simply, ‘These militias have embarrassed me so much.’”
If Al-Abadi was powerless then, he’s not likely to be more forceful now. So the Shi‘ites are on the march, and the Turks as well.
And then there are the Kurds, the X-factor across the entire region. Kurdish peshmerga forces clashed with Shi‘ites last spring in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurma while Sunni Arabs remember the massive looting that erupted when Kurdish units swept into Mosul on the heels of the U.S. invasion. Neither side is particularly happy to see the Kurds return, and neither is Erdogan.
The Kurdish Clash
But this is nothing compared to how Erdogan feels about the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, across the border in Syria. The YPG is his bête noire because it is closely allied with Abdullah Öcalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party, which heads up the Kurdish revolt inside Turkey. Hence Erdogan sees the Kurdish battle against ISIS in Syria as virtually part of the same insurgency.
Erdogan’s worst fear is that the U.S. will rely on the YPG to spearhead an assault on Raqqah, thereby enabling it to solidify its position in northern Syria and channel aid across the border to its comrades in arms in Turkey. His goal, therefore, is to shut out the YPG by taking Raqqah himself.
Last week, Turkey pounded YPG positions near Afrin with airstrikes and artillery, killing 200 fighters, according to Turkish sources, although Kurds put the losses at just ten. When the assault continued a day later, the YPG accused the U.S. of providing aid behind the scenes. Given the YPG’s long-standing cooperation with the U.S. in the war against ISIS, it was indicative of just how much alliances are splintering and tempers are beginning to fray.
Former Secretary Clinton’s idea about a simple two-pronged offensive is thus pouring gasoline on the ethno-religious fires. So why does the U.S. do it? Why doesn’t it pause and reconsider where it is heading and consider a different strategy?
The answer is that it can’t because all other options are even worse. It can’t abandon the fight against ISIS because that would leave its clients in Baghdad in the lurch and leave them with no choice but to turn to Iran and Russia for aid. The Obama administration also can’t join forces with the Syrian government to defeat ISIS — no matter how logical that might seem — since its regional partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia, want Assad out and Obama has been promising to remove him since late 2011. Reversing course now would be inconceivable.
The U.S. also can’t buck Turkey, a NATO member and an important regional power, and it can’t afford to alienate the YPG either since it is the only reliable anti-ISIS force that is still on the U.S. side.
Deep in the Big Muddy
So America has no choice but to continue with the present strategy. It’s neck deep in the Big Muddy, yet can only push on. Since pushing on is Hillary Clinton’s specialty, she is the perfect choice for the job. As she once told a roomful of angry Pakistani students, according to her memoir Hard Choices: “It is difficult to go forward if we’re always looking in the rearview mirror.”
History, in other words, is irrelevant bunk. So stop dwelling on a long list of foreign-policy disasters and just keep pressing on.
As Gordon Adams and Lawrence Wilkerson, veterans of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, observed recently in The National Interest, Clinton’s penchant for military intervention and her deep belief in American exceptionalism put her in tune with Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, which is “why a large number of neoconservative national security experts have endorsed Clinton over Trump.”
But the fact that foreign-policy experts agree with her doesn’t make her right. Since their view is increasingly at odds with reality, reality, all it means is that hers is as well. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Exceptionalist’ Warpath.”]
“This ‘consensus’ judgment of foreign-policy makers,” Adams and Wilkerson write, “which Clinton’s views reflect and support, not only fails to perceive the changed world we live in correctly, but executing its strategy risks producing precisely the opposite result from what is intended.
“A no-fly zone in Syria seriously risks putting US military forces at the heart of the conflict, creating the third US invasion in the region since 2001. There is no gain to such a step; there is only high risk of more American lives being lost in an unwinnable war as well as exacerbating regional hostility toward the United States.
“Similarly, a direct confrontation with Russia in central Europe and Ukraine increases by orders of magnitude the paranoia already infecting the Russian leadership that the United States intends to put itself right at the periphery of Russia and perhaps beyond. Not for nothing have Russian military exercises for three years running emphasized attacks by NATO – even on Russian territory itself.”
The search for stability, in other words, leads to less rather than more. Yet Clinton forges ahead regardless.
“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria,” she vowed during last week’s debate with Donald Trump, “not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to frankly gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”
Cooler heads may well prevail by the time she gets into office, not only because of the 70,000-plus military personnel who would be needed to institute such a “no-fly” policy, but because the advanced anti-aircraft systems that Russia has recently installed in Syria would raise the stakes immeasurably.
But that doesn’t mean that conflict will have been averted. To the contrary, closing one door merely assures that conflict will enter via another. The United States would have to engage in an immense effort merely to begin undoing the damage it has done since 2003. But if Obama has not been up to the task, a deep-dyed American exceptionalist like Clinton will be even less so. If she is elected, the chaos can only intensify.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).There are a number of traditional martial arts native to Ireland. The Irish language term for "martial arts" is ealaíona comhraic.[1] Traditional styles include Dornálaíocht (boxing), Coraíocht (wrestling), Speachóireacht (kicking), and Batadóireacht (stick fighting).
Boxing [ edit ]
Dornálaíocht is the Irish word for boxing, dorn meaning fist.
The Irish are well known for their bare-knuckle boxing style. Dornálaíocht's stance is often reflected in Irish caricatures such as that of the Notre Dame Leprechaun. The lead hand stays at a greater distance from the body than done in modern boxing. The lead arm's shoulder stays tight against the jaw while the other arm is tucked tightly to the body, using its fist to guard the jaw. This is due to the bare-knuckle nature of the style.
Charlie Mitchell demonstrating the traditional bare knuckle boxing stance.
Without large boxing gloves, it is not recommended to tuck and cover up from an assault. Instead, the lead hand is used to block the incoming attack while side stepping and back stepping to create an angle or swaying the torso away from or towards the opponent. The more distantly placed lead hand is also used to more easily obtain a single collar clinch, so that another valued aspect of Dornálaíocht can then be employed: dirty boxing.[citation needed] In Irish martial arts, dirty boxing is very effective for striking but is also used to set up many grappling-based attacks from collar-and-elbow. In Irish-American schools, Dornálaíocht is sometimes referred to as "Irish Boxing", "Irish Scrapping", or "Scrapping".
Radio Telefís Éireann's Prime Time, which discusses Irish related social and political problems, had an hour-long documentary on the Irish Travellers and also their bare knuckle boxing heritage.
Wrestling [ edit ]
Coraíocht is the Irish word for wrestling. Ireland has its own form of wrestling, notably collar and elbow wrestling. Coraíocht is also the name of a back hold style of wrestling practised in Ireland. Coraíocht can be practised with or without a jacket and features a wide array of trips, mares, takedowns, slams, pins, advancements, submissions, grapevines, and escapes. The most quoted "modern" way of describing the philosophy behind Coraíocht is "use balance and speed to obtain position so that strength can then be applied to the leverage created". In Irish-American–based systems, Coraíocht is sometimes referred to as "Irish Wrestling", "Celtic Wrestling", "Irish Scuffling", "Scuffling", and "Collar-and-Elbow".
Famous Irish wrestlers include Danno O'Mahony of Cork (former world champion), Steve Casey of Kerry (former world champion), and Con O'Kelly, who competed for Britain in the 1908 Summer Olympics. Famous Irish-American wrestlers include Henry Moses Dufur and John McMahon.
Kicking [ edit ]
Speachóireacht is the term used for kicking techniques. Kicking techniques were practised in sports such as Gaelic football and Irish dancing, but specifically for martial arts as well. Shin kicking would have been the main type used in fighting bouts, both kicking the shin and kicking with the shin, like a shin kick seen used in Mixed Martial Arts today. Most techniques attack the opponent's shins, knees, and thigh areas.
Stick fighting [ edit ]
Bataireacht is the traditional art of the Irish shillelagh, which is still identified with popular Irish culture to this day, although the arts of Bataireacht are much less so. The sticks used for Bataireacht are not of a standardised size, as there are various styles of Bataireacht, using various kinds of sticks.
By the 18th century, Bataireacht became increasingly associated with Irish gangs called "factions". Irish faction fights involved large groups of Irish men (and sometimes women) who would engage in melees at county fairs, weddings, funerals, or any other convenient gathering.[citation needed] However, most historians (best summarised by James S. Donnelly, Jr. (1983) in "Irish Peasants: Violence & Political Unrest, 1780") agree that faction fighting had class and political overtones, as depicted for example in the works of William Carleton.
By the early 19th century, these gangs had organised into larger regional federations, which coalesced from the old Whiteboys into the Car |
in the authenticity of Slenderman. They had, in effect, entered a chilling, alternate reality.
Urban legends have been around for a long time, and a few, like Slenderman, have attained a certain credibility — even when they seemed far-fetched. It is as if people wanted to believe.
There are reasons for that desire. These stories can provide the same sort of creepy adrenaline rush as horror movies or Stephen King novels. Since many are collaboratively constructed, like folktales, they give us all an opportunity for — and pride in — authorship. Perhaps most important, they amplify our social terrors by displacing them into these narratives.
That is certainly the case with Slenderman, who embodies our fears that our children are forever endangered, and that there is nothing we can really do to protect them from a host of perils.
At some level, we suspect these nightmares are a projection, not a reality. We suspend disbelief — and we know we are doing so. Not too many people, however, subscribe enough to a myth to be willing to kill for it. That takes legendary to a whole new level.
In the wake of the tragedy in Wisconsin, some psychologists commented on the girls’ possible mental instability and on the extent to which their minds might have been colonized by Internet imagery — the way earlier generations had been colonized by novels and movies. But few of us were unable to distinguish between the page and the palpable — or between the screen and the substantial.
Because we didn’t have the Internet.
It is a commonplace that the Internet has no gatekeepers the way traditional media have. There is no filter on information and in which fictions can be captured before they reach the national conversation. All sorts of effluvia emerge on the Internet. It is basically an open sewer of information out of which we are personally entrusted with determining truth.
What this has done is change our perception of truth and muddled it. Which is why urban legends can now assume a reality. (It is also why even the most outrageous political anecdotes assume a reality too.)
You think of the Internet as a way to connect to the world or purvey information or facilitate collaboration. The site on which Slenderman gained notoriety is “Creepypasta Wiki,” and it allows visitors to invent, revise and embellish stories about the mysterious figure — which meant that they had, in various ways, internalized him.
But the Internet is also a demonstration of what biologists call “swarm theory.” The basic idea is that a swarm of bees, say, has a collective consciousness that is larger than the consciousness of the individual parts or members of the swarm. This mega-intelligence is what enables a swarm of bees or a colony of ants to act as a single, unified entity.
The Internet may very well be to humans what hives are to bees. The collective consciousness created by all who contributed to Slenderman, for example, seems to be larger than the individual contributions. It is not only a separate thing — it creates a separate reality with its own gravitational pull. When things enter the giant maw of that consciousness, one may be unable to detect what is real from what is not. The old lines of segregation melt. We either join or enter a mass mind. We lose ourselves.
So when two susceptible young girls read about Slenderman online and seek, out of some strange, misguided impulse, to join him, they may be caught up in the swarm. Indeed, one could say that the girls really weren’t trying to appease Slenderman, as they claim, so much as they were trying to pacify the Internet itself and the new reality it creates. This also makes the poor victim a casualty not just of deranged “friends” but of a deranged notion of reality — in which Slenderman is an actual creature.
We live in the age of the Internet. But you can die in the age of the Internet too — because it is so far larger than we are and it possesses its own world.
Just ask anyone who believes in Slenderman.
PHOTO (TOP): A screen shot from “Slender: The Arrival” video game shows the Slender Man. Reuters/Blue Isle Studios
PHOTO (INSERT): A colony of honeybees swarm on the ledge of a window outside the Media Center, in Bern June 17, 2013. REUTERS/Ruben Sprich"You can fix Mister Gills, right, Aunty Panny?""Er...Jasper, dearie, Mister Gills is. That's not generally a 'fixable' condition.""B-but you said your magic could do!""Aha...about that. Everypony has limits. I'm not a miracle worker. And even if Imagically resurrect your pet goldfish, it doesn't mean we.""But why? You said chaos isn't about the 'why', it's about the 'why not'!""Yeah well, there's a pretty big 'why not' in this case. Namely, if I go fiddling about in death's domain, there's something like a 50/50 chance the universe will explode my head. As cosmic punishment. And also probably my dad's head, which may or may not throw the forces of the cosmos out of balance, which may or may not tear reality asunder. Foals would cease to be born, lives would cease to be, the universe would crumple inside of itself in a final implosion of cosmic entropy.""...""Now wedestroy the fabric of space and time to save Mister Gills,we could accept that perhaps, it isn't the best idea for young fillies to take their pet goldfish on joy flights. Do you understand, sweetie?""....no?""Eh. Alright, c'mon, Aunty Panny'll buy you a new Mister Gills.""Yay!"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Aw, lookit Pandora, being responsible for onceaw man does it feel good to be drawing Pandora again. Missed drawing mah baby. Even if her color palette is a complete pain in the ass to render every time. check out her glorious horsebutti meant for this to be kinda dark and philosophical but it ended up funny instead, oh wellgoodbye mister gills, hello mister gills v.2To review (take notes, this'll be on the testJasper (Pandora's niece) is the daughter of Spike and Scootaloo. She is officially canon in the Pandoraverse. More on her here:PORTLAND, Ore. — Directly across the Willamette River from this city’s downtown, a small area called Burnside Bridgehead is transforming, in a microcosm of what is happening throughout the city.
Across the four city blocks, several large multiuse sites are under construction in the once-gritty part of town. Artists and other urban pioneers have over the last several years turned the surrounding area into a destination, paving the way for star chefs and luxury apartments.
Portland — Oregon’s largest city, with over 600,000 residents — has been evolving with an artistic bent over the last decade. One east-side project, though, stands out as embodying Portland’s knack for keeping things weird, even as it gentrifies: the building known as Fair-Haired Dumbbell.
The “dumbbell” in the name comes from the project’s design — two six-story buildings connected by sky bridges — to which was added “fair-haired” as a play on “redheaded stepchild,” something neglected or maligned.Heading into another budget battle this fall, the number of Americans who say they have been negatively affected by the sequester budget cuts is on the rise, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Twenty-two percent of Americans in the survey say they have been significantly affected by the cuts, which are a product of Congress’ inability to reach a compromise on a broader budget deal last year. Shortly after the sequester first took place in April, just 16 percent said they had been significantly impacted by the policy.
And one specific group – Americans who earn less than $30,000 per year – say they have been the hardest hit. Among all respondents under that income level, 31 percent say they have been affected by the spending cuts, up from 24 percent in April and the most of any other income level group.
Related: NBC/WSJ poll: Faith in DC hits a low
There is a tale of two sequesters to be told – while the overall economy has weathered it relatively well, the cuts have taken the biggest toll on the nation’s most vulnerable. Those same Americans could face even worse circumstances if Republicans are able to make on their good to extract more reductions to government spending this fall.
Kristen Welker reports on President Obama's attempt to use a series of speeches to gain public support in advance of the next debt ceiling fight; then, MSNBC host Steve Kornacki and MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson discuss how effective President Obama is at using these speeches to underline the critical differences between himself and Republicans on the economy.
“The sequester has really diminished our business,” said Boubakar Diop, a 41-year-old limousine driver in Raleigh, N.C., where he said fewer of the government employees who usually need rides have been passing through town. “We don’t get the customers like we used to.”
NBC News contacted Diop and other working-class poll respondents who described the hardships they or members of their family or friends have experienced as a result of the sequester.
Read the poll here (.pdf)
Robert Deuel, a 61-year-old man in northern Michigan, said that his son has seen his hours cut from his job at Camp Grayling because of the sequester, leaving him, with less money in his paycheck to support his spouse and two-month-old at home.
“They offered him a job on the federal payroll and now they’re only paying him for half what he works,” Deuel said.
Despite the pain, some of the most alarming predictions about the sequester have not come to fruition. The economy has not plunged back into recession as many predicted. And while economic growth remains somewhat anemic, the economy has continued to add jobs every month since the sequester onset.
President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner both voiced concerns about the effect of the cuts on the economy before the sequester went into effect.
But many Republicans have accused the Obama administration of being too alarmist about the overall impact. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., told the Washington Post this month that Obama’s credibility is diminished because “they had the doomsday scenario,” about the sequester, “and the sky didn’t fall.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Fox News on July 10: “The one lesson of the sequester is that there's a lot of fluff that can be cut out before we actually have to get to things that are important, like paying our soldiers, providing for our wounded soldiers. All of that needs to be done, and if you cut out all the extra stuff we're doing, we'd have plenty of money to take care of our soldiers.”
Mayor Mick Cornett. R-Oklahoma, talks about the sequester's impact on local economies and what mayors this weekend across the country can do about it during their meeting in Las Vegas.
Yet Randi Allen, a 21-year-old student in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, said that cuts to education funding for her National Guardsman husband have become a “constant” stress for the two of them.
“The cost of schooling is already enough, when he went in they promised he’d get it paid for,” she said. “He has to pay a lot out of pocket now.”The sequester is also making it more difficult for younger Americans – the unemployment rate for those between the ages of 20 and 24 was 13.5 percent in June – who are struggling to find their footing in an economy still recovering from the Great Recession.
Ben Rhiger, a 28-year-old warehouse worker in Portland, Ore., didn’t lose his job, but said a researcher friend lost his job due to the sequester. And Rhiger voiced outrage that the spending cuts potentially set back a generation of young workers.
“In a time when we could have had more cash in the economy by having the government be a spender, be a customer to the economy, we didn’t do that. In fact, we took more money out of the economy. For that reason, there’s just less job opportunities for everybody entering the job market after college,” he said. “It just decreased any opportunity of getting more work experience, learning a trade or skill on the job, while being able to support ourselves.”
Whether these stories will resonate during the fall’s battles over government spending is another question. Obama, who took his case for less severe spending cuts on the road this week, warned against repeating a similar outcome.
"Right now, what we’ve got in Washington, we've seen a sizable group of Republican lawmakers suggest that they wouldn’t vote to pay the very bills that Congress rang up. And that fiasco harmed a fragile recovery in 2011 and we can't afford to repeat that," Obama warned during a speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. "Rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel... we've got folks who’ve insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that's cost jobs."
This story was originally published onIn the short term, the most important result of the compromise is that, by increasing the debt ceiling by at least $US2.1 trillion ($A1.9 trillion), the threat of an imminent default on US government obligations will not arise again until at least 2013. That means this Damoclean sword will not hang over the global financial system through a bitterly contested presidential and congressional election year in 2012.
Second, $US900 billion of expenditure reductions over the next 10 years have been ''locked in''. This is by no means enough to put the US's public finances on a sustainable footing - the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the US will run up budget deficits totalling $US6.7 trillion over the next decade on unchanged policies, and almost $US9.5 trillion if the administration's 2012 budget were enacted in full. The compromise agreement also includes a commitment to find a further $US1.5 trillion in spending cuts through a bipartisan committee whose recommendations will attract the same ''fast-track'' status as trade agreements - that is, they can be passed or rejected by either house but not delayed or amended in Congress.
True, the record in recent years of efforts to reach agreement on meaningful deficit reduction measures through bipartisan committees or commissions doesn't inspire optimism. But this agreement is backed up by a legislated commitment to ''sequester'' (a congressional expression for ''freeze'') expenditures unless at least $US1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade is agreed by 2013.
Third, the compromise includes - among the $US900 billion of savings committed to ''up front'' over the next decade - some $US350 billion out of the ''baseline'' defence budget (that is, abstracting from savings achieved through the winding down of US troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan). And the ''sequester'' arrangements provide for half of any further savings resulting from the operation of those arrangements, if they are triggered, to come out of defence.
Fourth, the bipartisan committee responsible for finding an additional $US1.2 trillion of deficit reductions over the next decade will be empowered to consider ''tax reforms'' as well as spending cuts. That's critical because - notwithstanding the vehemence of Tea Party Republicans on this score - it's fatuous to think that deficits totalling somewhere between $US6.7 trillion and $US9.5 trillion over the next decade can be substantially reduced, let alone eliminated, solely by spending cuts. Not only is that unfair, by any reasonable interpretation of that often ideologically laden adjective, but it is simply unrealistic.Wages lag inflation and new hires earn 40 percent less.
by Armine Yalnizyan
The Harper government likes to remind Canadians that we’ve done better than most developed nations in bouncing back from the global economic crisis. But digging into the data shows why many people might be having trouble cheering this news: wages have not kept pace with inflation, and new hires are making 40 percent less than the average worker.
Tiff Macklem, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, recently brought home the official storyline: The level of employment is now higher than it was before the crisis; jobs are mostly being created in the private sector, most are full-time and are emerging in industries that pay above-average wages.
These are upbeat metrics, but they are irrelevant to the one thing that matters most to Canadian households and a sustained, broad-based recovery: how much people get paid.
Data reveal that purchasing power is falling for most Canadians since the recovery began.
On that count, the data reveal that purchasing power is falling for most Canadians since the recovery began. The average wage paid to Canadians has not kept up with inflation. Real average wages declined by 0.6 percent between 2009 — the trough of the recession — and 2011, from $23.11 to $22.99.
Thirteen cents difference may not sound like much, but that’s because the bottom half of the wage distribution losing ground faster than the top half. See the attached chart. (Data are from the Labour Force Survey public use microdata file)
It is true that there are 820,000 more jobs now than in the middle of the Great Recession, but there are still 1.4 million people looking for work — a number that is about 25 percent higher than before the crisis started, and not steadily declining.
Given this mass of joblessness, the appropriate comparison is not the number of jobs there are, but the number of jobs there could be if the economy was functioning at its potential. The Parliamentary Budget Office has calculated that Canada’s economy would have 130,000 more jobs if it were operating at capacity. Instead, Ottawa and some provinces are about to slow the economy further, as austerity policies start to kick in.
The Government of Canada is hammering down on this story: We have more jobs than we did before, and most of the new growth is in high paying industries. It’s left to the imagination that Canadians have never done better.
Simple math challenges this narrative: if the majority of new jobs are appearing in industries that pay better than average, average wages should be going up, right? But they’re not. What’s up with that?
If the majority of new jobs are appearing in industries that pay better than average, average wages should be going up, right? But they’re not.
The above-average paying industries in which job growth has blossomed include finance and real estate, construction, and health care. Average wages in health care are skewed up because of doctors; average wages in the financial sector are skewed up because of executives and high end brokers; average wages in construction are skewed up by high-skilled tradesmen. But not every new hire is a doctor, executive or master electrician.
In fact, new hires are getting paid significantly less than the average wage. While there is always an important differential between new employees and ones that have been on the job for some time, this differential has grown since 2007, before the recession began. Back then, a new worker was paid 30 per cent less than average pay; now it’s 40 per cent less than average.
Don’t be fooled by job creation stats. We ducked the “jobless recovery” of the 1990s, but welcome to the new normal, for far too many Canadians: the wageless recovery.
This article was first published at the Globe and Mail’s business feature, Economy Lab http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/welcome-to-canadas-wageless-recovery/article4852286/
© Copyright 2012 Armine Yalnizyan, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.caSUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas ― One week after it became the site of the deadliest mass shooting in modern Texas history, the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs reopened to the public on Sunday.
Gone were the pews.
Instead, 26 handcrafted chairs marked locations where worshippers were fatally shot. Each chair had a name inscribed on the backrest, and a red rose. An audio recording of scripture readings by church staff played on a loudspeaker.
The scene of an unspeakable crime had been transformed into a moving tribute to those who lost their lives.
“Everyone who walks in there will know that the people who died lived for their Lord and Savior,” the Rev. Frank Pomeroy, the First Baptist pastor, said at a Sunday service earlier in the day held under a tent nearby.
Footage from inside the First Baptist Church, which has been transformed into a memorial for those murdered last Sunday. pic.twitter.com/rS1aqIvrKy — Melissa Jeltsen (@quasimado) November 12, 2017
On Nov. 5, Devin Patrick Kelley attacked the church with a semiautomatic rifle. He killed 26, and wounded 20 others. As he exited the church, he was shot by an armed civilian. He fled in his SUV and was later found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
As soon as law enforcement finished processing evidence, a construction team began renovating the church building, according to a media handout. Chairs, pews, and carpet were removed from the small sanctuary. The walls and floors were painted, and the windows were replaced.
Before the media was allowed to tour the church on Sunday, a number of family members of victims were escorted inside to spend a few minutes in silence. One woman had to be held up by a chaplain as she exited the worship hall in tears.
The Rev. Mark Collins, the associate pastor, said in a press release that he hoped it would be healing for the community to be able to enter the church once more.
“This is our church, but it is not just us that are suffering,” Collins said. “This tragedy has rocked our nation, and has had an impact on all Americans and our country as a whole.”
The church will be open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.Matt Ryan had a phenomenal run during the 2016 season, no matter how it ended.
The Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback led an all-time great offense all the way to the Super Bowl and earned the league’s MVP award for his trouble.
Now the Pro Football Hall of Fame is commemorating his awesome campgain. According to Canton’s official Twitter account, one of Ryan’s 2016 jerseys is now on display to signify what he did last season:
Now on display at the Hall, @M_Ryan02 jersey from the 2016-17 season to signify his MVP campaign pic.twitter.com/1nasjCV9M0 — Pro Football HOF (@ProFootballHOF) March 10, 2017
Ryan finished the year with career highs in passing yards (4,944), accuracy (69.9 percent) and touchdowns (38). Also, his 9.26 yards per pass attempt and 117.1 passer rating marks both led the NFL.
Hats off!
Related Falcons seeking contract extension for MVP QB Matt RyanWhat you seek is seeking you, O brother, you are a mere thought and what is left of you is some skin and bones.
This is how the Sufi poet and scholar Jalal El-Din El-Rumi perceived the world.
Born Mohamed ben Mohamed Ben Hussien Bahaa El-Din Al-Balkhi in 1207 AD or 604 AH, but known as Jalal El-Din El-Rumi, the poet is the founder of the Sufi Mawlawia sect. He died in 1273 AD.
El-Rumi, who was born in Balkh in Afghanistan, moved with is father to Baghdad at the age of four. He and his father moved through many countries during his childhood until settling down in the town of Konya in Turkey in 623 AH during the reign of Saljouk.
The famous book The 40 Rules of Love by the Turkish writer Elif Shafk is inspired by Rumi's original manuscript of the same title.
However, the Turkish writer featured two parallel themes, one of an American woman of Jewish origins who is going through a midlife crises and the other the 13th century when Rumi first met his Sufi mentor Shams Al-Tabrizi, describing how both of them managed to create the epic Sufi poetry The 40 Rules of Love, which they managed to write during 40 days of Sufi spiritual solitude.
Writer Mohamed Eid Ibrahim in his translation of Rumi quartets explains: "Rumi was 37 years old when he first met Al-Tabrizi, who was in his sixties.
Rumi then was a traditional Sufi, when Al-Tabrizi took all his books and threw them in a deep well, to show him that he needed to live and experience what he was reading and writing about. After that they became best friends which made many Al-Tabrizi followers jealous of Rumi's closeness to one of the Sufi gurus of the time. Unfortunately in 1248 Al-Tabrizi was assassinated and until today no one knows who killed him.”
Rumi's quartets number 1,659, out of which 331 were translated into English by John Moein and Coleman Barks in 1989.
Rumi was known for his brilliance as a teacher her of fiqh (philosophy of Islamic law).
However after the death of his father in 628 AH, he quit teaching and the whole materialistic world and focused on Sufism. He was into sports, music and reciting as well as composing poetry. Rumi was a pious Muslim but he attracted lots of followers of different religious beliefs because of his flexible and tolerant thoughts.
He respected other beliefs and always adopted a positive attitude as he promoted charity, piety and kindness. Rumi believed that perception ought to be through compassion. To him and his followers, all religions are good, and true in its own right. He also believed that the way to know God could be sought through music and poetry and zikr, spiritual music to him helps the seekers to be closer to God.
This high spiritual state of transcendence developed into the idea of the whirling Sufi dance that became a Sufi ritual. His poetry and other Sufi books that were written in Persian, his mother tongue, left a great impact on Islamic culture especially on the culture of Persia, the Arab world, Turkey and on Bengali culture.
In the modern age, lots of his books have been translated into different languages. His most famous works are the quartets, The Book of Courting, and many others
He died in 1273 AD and was buried in Konya. After his death, his son Sultan as well as Rumi's followers established the famous Mawlawia Sufi sect which is famous for its whirling dervishes.
For the Mawlawias, listening to music is a spiritual journey that escalates one through the self and compassion to a state of perfection (complete harmony with the universe and its maker). This journey starts by whirling which multiplies compassion and decreases selfishness, clearing the path of truth so people can reach perfection. After this act, the mourid (seeker), becomes more mature and full of love and compassion in the service of humanity. This Sufi path is still practiced today in the Ghouri Cultural Centre.
Short link:--- APRIL FOOLS Mavericks owner Mark Cuban fights with an actor/referee while Mavs' Evan Eschmeyer, right, moves in to restrain the two. The staged melee was Cuban playing a joke on fans during the New Orleans Hornets game at the AA Center. photo by MICHAEL MULVEY, DMN
Relive the hilarity, especially the half-shocked, half-panicked look on the face of Mavericks assistant Del Harris, by watching this YouTube video.
"We did it, and I remember thinking, 'I hope this doesn't crater,' " Cuban said. "When I stood up and there was the first shove, I could hear the whole place gasp. Then we went at it and I could hear everybody going nuts. Then I started laughing and blew it."
On April 1, 2003, Cuban hired a fake NBA referee and had a faux shouting/shoving/wrestling match with the ref-impostor during a second-quarter timeout of a Mavericks-New Orleans game at American Airlines Center.
We're not going 10-deep with this list because two sports pranks rank so far above the others that they're in a league of their own. And, yes, one of them is Cuban's. This fact is not debatable, so don't even try.
"Every time there's a list, someone sends it to me," Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said with a smile. "And I'm on it."
On this date every year, various websites compile top 10 lists of the all-time sports April Fools' Day pranks.
Editor's note: This post originally ran on April 1, 2017. Today, along with being Easter Sunday, is the 15th anniversary of Mark Cuban's famous April Fools stunt.
"One of the best things ever," Cuban said. "Especially Del's reaction."
The other great sports prank occurred in 1985. The April 1 Sports Illustrated cover story was about a New York Mets rookie pitching phenom named Hayden "Sidd" Finch, who purportedly could throw 168 mph fastballs without needing to warm up.
Mets fans deluged Sports Illustrated with requests for more information, a New York newspaper sports editor complained to the Yankees media relations department for giving SI the scoop, and a New York talk show radio host claimed to have seen Finch pitch.
Read the 1985 Sports Illustrated "scoop" by George Plimpton here.
And here is Morning News beat writer Eddie Sefko's 2003 account of the Cuban prank:
By Eddie Sefko
Staff Writer
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban got to live out a fantasy Tuesday night, even if it was only an April Fools' joke.
And although his pushes and shoves and punches during a staged stunt came against a faux referee, the big blow the Mavericks landed against the New Orleans Hornets was very much real.
There were no hijinks on the Mavericks' part. Just good old-fashioned defense and a sense of overall urgency as they whacked the Hornets, 95-86, the Mavericks' fifth win in their last six games.
The victory kept them two games ahead of San Antonio in the race for the best record in the NBA and reduced their magic number for clinching to seven.
Although Dirk Nowitzki poured in 30 points and the Mavericks held New Orleans to 25 percent shooting in the third quarter when they took control of matters, it was Cuban who stole the show earlier.
The Mavericks had been nose-and-nose with the Hornets through the early portion of the game, then in the second quarter Cuban went nose-to-nose with the fake ref, who wore a replica of an official referee's uniform, but without a number on the back.
Cuban began by jawing at the imposter, who was standing at the free throw line on the Mavericks' end of the court. Cuban moved close to the ref, apparently to make a point. The crowd at that point got into it, thinking the prank was real.
Cuban backed off, then turned and said something else and shoved the ref in the chest. Another shove got a return push from the ref, then the two began wrestling, with Cuban applying a headlock.
Team personnel, including backup center Evan Eschmeyer, began pulling the pair apart. The skit was real enough - and so few people knew about it ahead of time - that just about everybody on the Mavericks' bench thought it was real, at least for a while.
Assistant coach Del Harris had a terrified look on his face and was trying to restore order.
"I think it's a good thing for all the refs in the league to know that I have their back," Harris said after the game. "They've got a friend in Dallas."
Eschmeyer, like Harris, was suckered in hook, line and sinker.
"It was hilarious," Eschmeyer said. "At first, I just saw Cuban arguing. But he's always arguing with the refs so I didn't think anything of it. Then Shawn [Bradley] said somebody better get him and that's when I went out to get the ref.
"I wasn't worried about the ref getting hurt. I was worried about the guy who signs my paycheck."
The humorless folks at the NBA office might not find the prank quite as funny as the sellout crowd did.
But Cuban said later that the refs at Tuesday's games had been forewarned.
At the very least, it was a creative way to get on SportsCenter.
And it spiced up what was otherwise a blah game in which the crowd seemed to be treating it like the undercard before Thursday's match against the Los Angeles Lakers. The Mavericks led by 13 after three quarters and stretched it to 21 in the fourth.
"At halftime, they were shooting 50 percent and in the second half, they shot 30 percent," coach Don Nelson said. "We were real happy that we were able to sustain a lead long enough to coast in. We got a lot of nicks and bruises.
"Dirk fell on his knee a couple of times on hard fouls. [Steve] Nash got nicked up a bit. [Nick] Van Exel was limping. [Eduardo] Najera, you have to be careful with."
The Mavericks got solid showings from all of the above, save Van Exel - who followed a string of hot games with 1-of-10 shooting. But the Mavs' zone defense was like a stranglehold on the Hornets.
It was that defense that limited Jamal Mashburn to 10 points, less than half his average.
"Defensively, our zone was very good and when we played man-to-man, I thought that group did really good, too," Nelson said. "Basically, we have [eight games] left and we just have to keep the pedal to the metal. We're playing good teams leading into the playoffs, which should be good for us. Our team is going to do the best it can."
Indeed, with the Lakers coming to town Thursday, the time for joking around ended Tuesday.The current referendum will send a strong message about democracy to the unaccountable, unelected and untransparent European Commission and the EU as a whole.
Voting the treaty down would send a clear signal that there is a democratic deficit likely to bring down the already fragile Dutch cabinet.
In short, in a democracy, the Dutch people should have been consulted before ratifying a treaty of this magnitude. That did not happen.
Within a time frame of six weeks, the campaign, initiated and led by the largest Dutch blog, GeenStijl.nl, gathered more than 430,000 signatures, while only 300,000 were needed to mount the referendum. By law, the referendum will have to be held within six months.
Prior referenda have always been reluctantly initiated by their national governments, not by the people themselves.
The Dutch did it! In a development that, apart from Gatestone Institute, very few international media outlets anticipated, the Dutch people have just become the first in EU history to mount an EU referendum -- the subject being the Dutch government's ratification of the Association Treaty between the EU and Ukraine, which took place without consulting the Dutch people.
Prior referenda on the EU, such as the ones held by the Netherlands and France on whether or not to implement a European constitution in 2005 -- as well as future referenda such as the British one about leaving the EU, to be held by the end of 2017 -- have always been reluctantly initiated by national governments, not by the people themselves.
Within a time frame of six weeks, a campaign, initiated and led by the largest Dutch blog, GeenStijl.nl, gathered more than 423,000 signatures, with only 300,000 needed to mount the referendum. By law, the referendum will have to be held within six months.
The referendum concerns the Association Treaty between the EU and Ukraine, ratified by the Dutch government this summer. The process was conducted with next to no debate about the issue and without consulting the Dutch population, even as many Dutch citizens seemed to oppose the treaty.
According to the treaty [art. 453] Dutch citizens will have to pay financial aid to the Ukrainian government - rumored to be among the most corrupt governments of the European continent -- because: "Ukraine [is] eligible for financial assistance through the relevant EU-mechanisms and instruments for financial aid." Strangely, the treaty does not specify how this aid money is to be spent. So why should Dutch taxpayers be keen to write a blank check to a foreign government rumored to be corrupt?
In addition, the treaty [art. 19] would imply the creation of a visa-free travel arrangement between Ukraine and EU member states. As Ukraine is also reported to be a major hub for human trafficking, one of the "largest suppliers of slave labor in Europe" and one Europe's most important transit countries for international drug trafficking, it may be understandable if the Dutch might prefer to oppose an unrestricted travel arrangement between Ukraine and the EU.
In addition, Ukraine is in a state of civil war, and also in a state of war (by proxy) with the continent's strongest military power, Russia. The treaty would therefore imply Dutch involvement in this conflict: as the treaty [art. 2] repeatedly states: "The promotion of respect for the values of sovereignty and national integrity, the impermeability of borders and independence (...) compose the essential elements of this Treaty."
Why do many Dutch citizens seem to oppose the EU-Ukraine treaty? European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (right) has shown the EU's contempt for member-state citizens when he said, "When it becomes serious, you have to lie," and "Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"
Since Russia's annexation of Crimea can very much so be explained as violation of Ukraine's sovereignty, the treaty implies that the Netherlands will have to contribute to the undoing this violation.
Also, Ukraine has a strong far-right political undercurrent that might not be compatible with the Dutch political culture.
In short, in a democracy, the Dutch people should have been consulted before ratifying a treaty of this magnitude. That did not happen. And even more shockingly, some Dutch elected members of parliament didn't bother to read the Treaty either. Alexander Pechtold, leader of centrist D66 Party, one of the biggest opponents of this referendum, and one of the fiercest pro-EU figures within the Dutch parliament, casually admitted on camera that he never read the treaty before voting in favor of it.
Dutch law, regrettably, only allowed this treaty to be subjected to an advisory referendum. This means that even if the |
emy laws disproportionately targets religious minorities, mostly Ahmadi Muslims and Christians.
This kind of blasphemy sentence is not an anomaly. It is a small glimpse into the systematic and state-sponsored persecution of Ahmadi Muslims across the country.
And just four days after this death sentence, Pakistan secured a seat in the United Nations Human Rights Council. To many in Pakistan, it was a cause of jubilation. The Foreign Minister praised God, calling it a “Great Victory.”
Alhamdolillah..Pakistan today won UN General Assembly Human Rights Council election..Great victory...superb team work.. — Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) October 16, 2017
Ms. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, claimed Pakistan’s record of “promoting and protecting human rights” had been vindicated with the victory.
Great win by Pakistan polling over two thirds of votes pic.twitter.com/TkFDyfadKW — Maleeha Lodhi (@LodhiMaleeha) October 16, 2017
With the image of Pakistan in the world today, I felt a certain elated too. After all, Pakistan is my motherland. However, I know this election wasn’t remotely based on our human rights record. It pains me to admit that Pakistan has a depressing human rights record and is behind one of the worst religious apartheids of this age - the #AhmadiApartheid. Here is a snapshot:
Denied Right to Self Identity: Pakistan continues to deny Ahmadi Muslims the basic right to self-identity. In 1974, then Prime Minister Mr. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in an attempt to appease right-wing religious extremists, amended the country’s constitution to declare the Ahmadi Muslims a non-Muslim minority. The Second Amendment was an unprecedented move in recent world history. With its passage, Pakistan became the first State — and remains the only one — to judge the faith (or lack thereof) of its citizens. Pakistan’s passport application requires all Pakistanis to condemn the Ahmadi Muslims to be eligible for a ‘Muslim’ passport.
Denied all Religious Freedom: The discriminatory Second Amendment resulted in further restrictions on religious freedom with President Zia’s promulgation of the anti-Ahmadi laws shortly thereafter in 1984. Known as the Ordinance XX, these laws criminalize the daily lives of Ahmadi Muslims and impose a three year jail term for Ahmadis guilty of ‘posing as Muslims’. Thousands of Ahmadis have been jailed under these opprobrious laws for ‘crimes’ such as praying, saying the salam (Muslim greeting), saying the Kalima (Islamic creed), reading the Quran etc. These laws are a violation of the UN Human Rights Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), of which Pakistan is a signatory.
Pakistan has one of the strictest anti-blasphemy laws in the world, with special clauses that specifically target the Ahmadi Muslims.
Since the inception of these laws, over a hundred Ahmadiyya Mosques have either been sealed by the State, or burned down or forcibly taken over by extremist mobs.
Pakistan arrests Ahmadi Muslims for selling books. Turns blind eye to Mullahs who call for murder! #AhmadiApartheid pic.twitter.com/oWVtcDBUbh — Kashif N Chaudhry (@KashifMD) June 18, 2016
Denied Freedom of Speech: Despite numerous attacks on Ahmadi Muslims (hundreds have been murdered since the passing of the anti-Ahmadi laws), not once has a representative of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community been invited to express the community’s views or state their grievances on air. And while the media regularly publishes and airs conspiracy stories that amount to hate speech and incite violence against the Ahmadis, the books published by the Ahmadiyya community are banned across the country. Numerous book-sellers and publishers have been jailed under the country’s blasphemy laws for hurting the “sentiment of the Muslims.”
Pakistan's Counter Terrorism Force arrests 4 Ahmadi Muslims for "excessive use of Quran, Hadith & Islamic terminology." #AhmadiApartheid pic.twitter.com/VET1QVT1W5 — Kashif N Chaudhry (@KashifMD) December 10, 2016
Denied Right to Peaceful Assembly: While ‘Jihadist’ outfits are allowed to convene across Pakistan, the annual peace convention of the country’s Ahmadi Muslims has been banned since 1984. No government has lifted this ban since, despite repeated requests.
Last #JalsaPakistan (1983, before ban) attended by 250K Ahmadi Muslims. Will tweet #JalsaPakistan again one day IA! pic.twitter.com/o4oU6CYwgN — Kashif N Chaudhry (@KashifMD) September 4, 2016
Denied Right to Vote: Ahmadi Muslims have been systematically disenfranchised for the last many decades and have been prevented from participating in the country’s electoral process. There was quite the anxiety recently in Pakistan when the clause that prevents Ahmadi Muslims from taking part in the electoral process was mistakenly omitted in the new electoral bill. The government was quick to issue an apology and reinstate the clause, assuring the right-wing majority that Ahmadi Muslims would remain disenfranchised.
Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan are forced to live in extremely difficult conditions, with continued threats from religious extremists and militant outfits on the one hand, and the State and its apartheid laws looming over their heads on the other. Hate speech against the Ahmadis is commonplace (including calls for their killings) and associating with them in anyway invites the wrath of the extremist right-wing majority.
Oct 14, 2017: Prominently displayed on a highway across a major hospital in Pakistan’s second largest city of Lahore, this banner reads: “Qadianis (pejorative for Ahmadi Muslims) are blasphemers, hypocrites, and infidels and do not belong here.” In this very part of Lahore, almost a hundred Ahmadi Muslims were gunned down by the Taiban in 2010.
Take this for an example: When Pakistan’s Foreign Minister was recently asked why he took a picture with an Ahmadi Muslim during his recent United States visit, Mr. Khawaja Asif had to apologize and promised never to repeat the offense again. “Now I always ask people about their faith first before I take pictures with them,” he said in apology.
Ms. Maleeha Lodhi is no stranger to this bias herself. Earlier this year, Ms. Lodhi deleted her tweet congratulating Mahershala Ali on his Oscar victory after finding out about his Ahmadi faith.
The Independent Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Maleeha Lodhi deleted a tweet congratulating Ali, after other Twitter users started pointing out he was an Ahmadi Muslim.
Pakistan’s attitude and its support of the discriminatory anti-Ahmadi laws is not fading by any measure. Pakistan’s Law Minister, Mr. Rana Sanaullah, recently reassured the country’s right-wing majority that Ahmadi Muslims will remain second class citizens until they voluntarily denounced their self-identity. In other words, the rights of Ahmadi Muslims were conditional to them denouncing their faith and identity.
“It is our duty to protect minorities of the country but for the Ahmadis, they will first have to stop claiming to be Muslims. There is no other way around it.” (Rana Sanaullah, Pakistan’s Law Minister, October 13, 2017)
This is a stunning admission that #Pakistan does not abide by equal protection under the law; conditioning rights on a matter of conscience: https://t.co/MThtmSQ2Sr — Amjad Mahmood Khan (@AmjadMKhanEsq) October 14, 2017
Shouldn't have to sell out on your beliefs to enjoy equal rights.
Others would do well 2 follow the example of Ahmadiyya MUSLIM Community https://t.co/2xZGYjIxB1 — Margaret Ferrier SNP (@MargaretFerrier) October 15, 2017
This is not what Pakistan started as. Pakistan was founded on the very premise of minority rights protection. The founder of the country promised religious freedom, equal rights to all, and complete separation of State and Mosque.
“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” (Muhammad Ali Jinnah's first Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, August 11, 1947)
Pakistan’s persecution of Ahmadi Muslims is therefore a betrayal of the very founding values of the country.
U.N. just elected Qatar, Congo & Pakistan as world judges on human rights—joining Saudi A. It's like asking the foxes to guard the chickens. — Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) October 16, 2017
The world community must be smoking pot when the son in law of the most powerful politician in Pakistan is calling for genocide. https://t.co/08uihKgOnn — Yasser Latif Hamdani (@theRealYLH) October 17, 2017
150 nations voted for Pakistan 2 be inducted into the UN Human Rights Council,a proud moment 4 us.
And time to see what we do to our people — Mehr Tarar (@MehrTarar) October 17, 2017
Pakistan, where people are sentenced to death for “blasphemy”, is elected UN Human Rights Council #think — Seth Frantzman (@sfrantzman) October 16, 2017In 2007, the Miss Teen USA pageant catapulted Caitlin Upton into fame, but not exactly for the reasons she'd hoped. Upton, then-18-year-old Miss Teen South Carolina, made herself an instant YouTube sensation when she answered, or rather, failed to answer, an albeit tricky question from actress Aimee Teegarden. When asked, "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?" Upton rambled on for a painful 35 seconds about "the Iraq," "South Africa," and "the Asian countries" and how "some people out there in our nation don't have maps." Specifically, she said:
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future [for our children].
Possibly coining the phrase "like such as," Upton proved just how difficult pageant life can be, particularly in the stressful final question segment. But now that nearly seven years have passed since Upton gave her fateful final answer, what is the beauty queen up to now?
Remind Me Again: Who Is Caitlin Upton?
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
It's been a while — high time for a refresher course! The Miss Teen USA competition, the sister competition to Miss USA, has become an annual beauty pageant since its fist occurrence in 1983. It allows young women between the ages of 14 and 19 to vie for the title of Miss Teen USA, and involves the standard Miss USA rounds of competition, including swimsuit, evening gown, and the infamous final question.
In 2007, Miss Teen South Carolina, Caitlin Upton, one of the top five contenders for the crown, was asked for her opinion on the geography crisis. In total, the various YouTube videos showing this answer have received somewhere around 80 million views.
Was That Her Final Answer?
NBC
Well, unfortunately for Upton, contestants aren't exactly allowed to revise their responses during the course of the competition. But so decidedly confusing was Upton's answer that she was invited to give the question another try on the Today show with Matt Lauer and Ann Curry. A few days after the pageant, Upton appeared on the show, whereupon Curry asked her the question again, and received this far more lucid answer:
Well, personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don't know anyone else who doesn't. And if the statistics are correct, I believe that there should be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn how to read maps better.
Of course, part of the challenge of the final question portion is being able to think on your feet, but Upton certainly redeemed herself when given her second change.
How Did She Feel About Her Answer?
NBC
To Upton's credit, she laughed off her admittedly unintelligible answer, telling Lauer and Curry on Today, “I am sitting here laughing at myself. Is that really me? It’s like I’m not in my actual body.” She continued, "I made a mistake — everybody makes a mistake — I’m human. Right when the question was asked of me, I was in shock."
Did She Do Any Other TV Appearances?
CBS
Why yes, yes, she did! While Upton wasn't exactly a shoe-in for Jeopardy, she was invited to participate on Season 16 of CBS's Amazing Race, where she and boyfriend Brent Horne finished third. As a result of the Amazing Race, Upton was given the opportunity to visit some of the Asian countries she spoke of in her initial answer, although South Africa and the Iraq were not destinations on her trip.
What Is She Up To Now?
Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Upton recently made the exciting announcement on her Facebook page that she had joined the network of business professionals found on LinkedIn. According to her profile, Upton has left her beauty pageant days in the past, though she is now in the market of answering questions as a real estate agent for Keller Williams in Brentwood, California. Her profile states that she "truly enjoys helping her clients find the right homes, sell their properties, or find the right type of investment properties."
Her LinkedIn also boasts an impressive resume of TV, commercial, and print appearances both as a television personality and as a model. But for now, it seems that Upton has found her true calling in real estate, and will be helping many Americans find their new homes on maps in her latest profession.Lewis Hilsenteger of YouTube channel Unbox Therapy claims to have gotten his hands on images of Samsung's newest smartphones just days before they're expected to be announced.
The phones look legitimate — we won't know until Samsung holds its press event on March 1 — but the images appear to be the clearest we've seen yet.
Hilsenteger didn't say exactly how he got the images, but they're high-resolution photos of fully assembled phones. Previous leaks have shown components that are believed to be part of the device and renderings.
Here's what the camera will supposedly look like. Hilsenteger says it has a larger aperture so that it can take better photos in low light.
Lewis Hilsenteger/Unbox Therapy (via YouTube)
And here's the alleged Galaxy S6 Edge. It looks almost identical to the Galaxy S6, except for its slightly curved edges.
Lewis Hilsenteger/Unbox Therapy via YouTube
As previous rumors have suggested, Hilsenteger says the phone will come with glass on the front and back and will feature a metal frame. If Hilsenteger's information is legitimate, it seems like the S6 will be much different than Samsung's other phones in terms of design — he says the back won't be removeable, there won't be an SD card slot, and it won't be water resistant.
Check out the full video from Unbox Therapy below.It is a city that lives in the shadow of a volcano. A city of sharp contrasts. A city that is politically radical and socially conservative. A city that met me at the right time, when I was ripe to fall in love with a place.
When I arrived that first time, more than a decade ago, it was dark and I went straight to sleep. In the morning, I walked to the roof of the hotel and looked north. Cotopaxi, one of the world’s tallest active volcanoes, towered over everything else. The near perfect sphere had a gravity to it that seemed to pull the earth up to accommodate its snow-capped peak.
Cotopaxi is the God of Latacunga. It is what created life, and what will take it away. In Quecha, the indigenous language of the Inca’s that is still widely spoken in Latacunga, Cotopaxi means ‘throat of fire.’ The volcano has blessed the surrounding soil with nutrients and the equatorial glacier at its top, up to 1,000 feet thick, has spurned a series of streams created from ice-melt. Latacunga is divided nearly in half by Rio Cutuchi, the largest of the fresh water streams that flow down the volcano, and the city acts as a trading post for an explosion of colors from the countryside—buckets of orange tree tomatoes, piles of dark green broccoli florets and vibrant red roses.
When the volcano erupts again, it will kill Latacunga. A flash flood of melted ice will mix with gravel and ash to form a tidal wave of wet cement and bury the city. It’s happened three times before and it’s only a matter of time until it will happen again. Each time, Latacunga is rebuilt from it’s own ashes. The current municipal building is the only one in the world constructed entirely from pumice—a material formed by cooling lava. The same water, ash and gravel that periodically washes the city away also makes the cement that many of the houses and businesses are made with. It is a city literally born of its own destruction.
Latacunga is socially conservative to the point that any attempt at establishing a brothel downtown—a legal business in Ecuador—is inevitably met with an angry mob that will burn it to the ground. Vigilante justice is also served if anyone dare steal and unknowing tourists who expose their feet in sandals are met with scorn. Yet, it’s citizens also laid siege to the construction of a prison and demand universal education (they won) and the city is the powerbase of Marxist politics in Ecuador. It is a city that struggles with racism, sexism and homophobia but considers the greatest honor, reserved for one male each year, to dress as a black woman (who is purported to have prayed to the Virgin during the last eruption and was saved when lava flowed around her).
It is a place I never tire of learning about and with.I'm currently using an artificially-shaped 256k Internet connection (it resets in a couple days), and over the past few weeks browsing the web, I've very consistently found HN to be one of the fastest loading sites I've come across. I understand that HN is built on top of Arc (http://arclanguage.org), a Lisp variant, and that the code (https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc) uses flat files to store post and vote data. This is generally speaking quite an unusual/unexpected architecture for a site presumed to serve a consistently moderate load, but HN manages to do so remarkably well, presumably because the site itself is so incredibly lightweight. I don't think the minimal HTML is the only factor though, although it probably counts for the majority. I'm interested to understand as much as possible/practicable/relevant about the server(s') configuration, uplink bandwidth, other tunables, etc, so I can get an idea of what makes HN so exceptionally responsive and "a cut above 99% of everything else". Does CloudFlare really make that much of a difference? :P I know there's some "secret sauce" in there somewhere, because virtually-verbatim clones of HN such as http://firespotting.com/ seem almost as fast... but just not as instantaneous as HN. (PS: On the occasions I get hit by it, my ISP's shaping config seems quite involved/nuanced, and I actually want to profile it because it's so catalyzing and would be very useful to apply to my own projects for "worst-case" testing. For the interested, the details I have thus far can be found here: http://serverfault.com/questions/709529/how-can-i-profile-my-isps-bandwidth-shaping-settings)Amid all the wonderful dramatic complexities of past, present and future on FX/Marvel’s Legion stands production designer Michael Wylie’s premium sets, which are an edgy combination of modern and yesteryear vintage design.
The mental hospital with a ’70s meets future flair on ‘Legion’ FX
How that look relates to the show’s leading protagonist David Haller, a diagnosed schizophrenic who is really one of the earth’s most powerful mutants able to traverse several mental zones, is that no one is suppose to have a clear sense of time and place according to Wylie. “Let’s keep people on their back foot visually,” says Wylie about the series m.o. in the first episode of Deadline’s Crew Call podcast.
Here Wylie expounds on the genesis of the rich atmospheres he’s painted for David and his peers as they battle a ruling militant force: Whether the X-Men universe impacted Legion‘s look, “designing a really good mental hospital” and the secret behind that iconic kitchen sequence where David emotionally implodes taking forks, knives and plates with him.
Wylie has been nominated three times before at the Emmys, twice for art direction for a single series for ABC’s Pushing Daisies, winning once in 2009, and
Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Period Program (One Hour or More) for Showtime’s Masters of Sex.
Take a listen.
This episode of Crew Call is sponsored by HBO’s Westworld, for consideration in all Emmy categories.Why Malwa belt? Madhya Pradesh's nine districts of Malwa region are boiling with unrest after 5 farmers died. Farmers are more united in this belt as Indore's Mandi is the biggest trade market of the state. The nine districts are Mandsaur, Neemach, Dhar, Khargaoun, Dewas, Indore, Ratlam, Ujjain, Badwani.
Yogi's farmer loan waiver was the last nail in the coffin. Shivraj Singh Chouhan started his Narmada Yatra which ran in to almost 4 months. It started from January. Various groups of farmers, majorly Bharatiye Kisan Sangh (RSS outfit), Bharatiye Kisan Union started mobilizing farmers. Yogi govt's decision of waving off farmer loans was the trigger point.Farmers announced agitation from June 1st on 2 issues a) complete loan waiver b) cash payment. Over production of onion crop coincided with the agitation. Their procurement remained a big issue as farmers were forced to sell onions at much lower rate of Rs 1.5 while the input cost was between Rs 4-5.
MSP price for onion: Farmers unrest has been simmering from at least over a year. After Madhya Pradesh's image of doing extremely well in wheat production, state government pursued farmers for crop diversification. Result -many farmers moved on to onion production. Due to bumper production last year, farmers didn't get the right prices comparative to their input cost (contrary to what Modi pre-poll promise). After farmers' lobbying and pressure, Shivraj govt had to come up with MSP price (first time in Shivraj's tenure) of Rs 6 per kg as one time MSP(Minimum Support Price) last year. This has been increased to Rs 8 this year after protest.
Demonetisation resulted in delayed payment: After demonetization, govt moved in to complete digitization of all including farmers trading, which resulted in farmers getting payment of their produce through cheques that caused delay. Farmers were ready for this thunderstorm. This is yet to be settled though. Farmers demanded the change to cash payment from then, which govt agreed to pay, but half cash and rest through RTGS mode.
Immediate trigger: Shivraj Chauhan has reached to only RSS-backed Bharatiye Kisan Sangh in Ujjain on Monday and announced MSP price measures for onion, which actually didn`t go down well with other major union Bharatiye Kisan Union in the state. Protest started on the same day later in the night to an extent than some of the farmers have removed fish plates of railway line at Mandsaur. Internet suspended in Mandsaur and next day, Tuesday, 5 killed in the alleged open firing at Pimpariya, Mandsaur.
Intelligence failure: Though Shivraj's govt announced the short term measures of MSP for onion and tur dal, but state intelligence failed to anticipate the big unrest and farmers mobilization as it's been believed that most of the police departments were busy in the security arrangements for Shivraj's trip across the state.
Rise in farmer suicides: In between, continuous suicides in the states, especially by marginal farmers have irked the community. Shivraj Chauhan statement, on many fronts, on suicides also didn't go down well with the farmers. He categorically said that all suicides were not because of loan problem.
Modi failed on pre-poll promise of ensuring 50% profit over the input cost to the farmers. Radha Mohan Singh, agriculture minister, last year showed inability to fulfill the promise and said, "We are trying to reduce input cost, it's not feasible." Before coming to power, the BJP promised to implement the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission report, but nothing has been done. Recently when Modi promised to make the income of farmers double by 2022, Shivraj Chauhan was made the head of the committee, who will formulate the guidelines. Both Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh farmers are demanding to fulfillment Swaminathan Commission report.AMC’s “The Walking Dead” is the biggest zombie TV show of the moment and of all times, as Kanye West would say. Now at its fifth season, it’s becoming an even bigger phenomenon, and the price that the cast and crew have to pay for this success is somehow unexpected.
They seem to be having problems eating any kind of meat after they’re done shooting scenes, with leading man Norman Reedus joking in a new interview that they might be turning vegetarian together.
This wouldn’t be a bad thing, vegetarians worldwide are probably thinking at reading this.
Too much fake blood and guts
If you’ve watched a single episode of “Walking Dead” or even paid attention to news and promo materials released for it, you know that it’s a post-apocalyptic show in which a group of people struggles to survive a zombie invasion.
Naturally, this is the least spoilerish description of the show, and all you need to know to understand why people working on it might consider the vegetarian lifestyle for a change.
“The Walking Dead” is one of the goriest shows on TV right now, with the camera never once shying away from showing a pack of zombies eating people or animals after hunting them down. A lot of fake blood and guts have been used so far, and more will be used in the future.
The cast and crew seem to have had their fill, according to Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon. “I've become a vegetarian and I'm kind of bummed about it,” he says of his instinctive reaction after taking part in one too many bloody scenes.
An insider confirms that, right now, about 80% of the food served on set by a catering service is meat-free because no one wants any of it at the end of a day’s work.
“After watching Walkers realistically look as though they are consuming bloody human flesh or seeing heads and other body parts sliced off, no one was touching the red meat or even chicken,” the insider continues.
“Often, we're talking about hundreds of people who need to be fed on a show that uses an enormous number of extras all made up to look so scary they'd put anyone off eating,” the tipster continues.
Most of the blood used on a set of any project pertaining to the horror genre is usually fun stuff like a mix of corn syrup, chocolate topping, and food coloring (or plain ol’ CGI), while props are not even remotely as harmful as they appear. Still, we assume, working in such an environment can turn off someone from meat, if only for a while.
Going vegetarian is not that bad
Not that turning vegetarian would be the worst thing that could happen to the staff and the crew on the AMC hit show. According to Vegetarian Times, to name just one of the bigger specialized publications, this animal products-free lifestyle has so many advantages that only listing them would take forever.
From better bowel movement and a healthier and longer life, higher energy levels, and less pollution to the knowledge that you’re not hurting other live creatures so you can get the fuel your body needs to work, going veg could be just the thing to turn your life around completely.
Plus, it’s easy and much cheaper and many times healthier, compared to eating meat on a regular basis. There are disadvantages as well to such a lifestyle, but they can be easily overcome. Those working on “The Walking Dead” probably know all about this right now.Nanny dogs, meet the nanny state. Now keep apart, you two.
Six states are considering bills that would put an end to laws restricting dog ownership by breed. Called "breed-specific legislation" -- or BSL -- these laws most often target pit bull type dogs (which are said to have been called "nanny dogs"), often forcing people to choose between their pets and their homes. And most Americans think they're bad laws. Bad laws!
Opposition to BSL comes from sources as diverse as the American Bar Association, animal rescue groups, the Center for Disease Control and even President Barack Obama, who said in August that the laws are largely ineffective while doing nothing to improve public safety, and are often a "waste of public resources."
In addition, a recent poll conducted on behalf of the rescue group Best Friends Animal Society found that a big majority in the United States don't want the government deciding which breeds of dogs we may and may not keep as pets:
A new national survey commissioned by Best Friends Animal Society reveals that 84 percent of those polled believe that local, state or federal governments should not infringe on a person’s right to own whatever breed of dog they choose. This survey, conducted by Luntz Global, is consistent with a growing trend by many state and local governments that have repealed breed discriminatory provisions and enacted behavior-based, breed-neutral dangerous dog laws. Of the 850 polled, 59 percent were dog owners. Only four percent of those polled believed the federal government should dictate what breed of dog a person could own, while six percent supported state government restrictions and 11 percent local government limits.
Seventeen states have already passed laws that stop localities from discriminating against dogs by breed. The six now considering similar prohibitions are Maryland, Vermont, South Dakota, Missouri, Utah and Washington state.
"Today was a good day for dogs," Ledy VanKavage, an attorney with Best Friends, told HuffPost just after the South Dakota Senate's Local Government Committee met to consider its bill about a week ago. "We have 17 states that outlaw it now. We think every state should have it."
VanKavage said that states are becoming more amenable to passing these prohibitions for a combination of reasons. "People view dogs as members of their family. And more and more cities are getting sued. If a city tried to take my dog simply because of its breed, I'd lawyer up in a minute," she said. "In America, responsible dog owners should be able to have whatever breed of dog they choose."
Plus, VanKavage added, "The scientific studies show it doesn't work."
Indeed. In December, the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association published a study looking at the factors at play in fatal dog attacks. Studying 256 dog bite fatalities from 2000-2009, the contributing factors were found to include the failure of an able-bodied person to intervene in the attack and the dog being abused by its owner. Breed was not deemed to be a significant contributing factor; the researchers found, moreover, that breed could not even be reliably determined in most of the cases.
Best Friends also emphasizes the cost of enforcing anti-pit bull bans; the group commissioned an economist to put together a tool that calculates the costs by city. And here's a sample calculation: In Baltimore, there's an estimated 151,105 dogs, of which 10,918 are assumed pit bull type dogs. The costs associated with enforcing laws against pit bull ownership would be $992,606 per year.
Kristen Auerbach, spokesperson for the Fairfax County Animal Shelter in Northern Virginia, says that lifting restrictions against pit bull ownership would have significantly waggy other benefits, as well.
Even though her jurisdiction doesn't have breed restrictions, "people have heard the stories about beloved family dogs being taken from their owners in places where there are full bans on pit bulls. That is every dog owner's worst nightmare," she said. "People don't want to risk it."
Getting rid of these laws would not just let people adopt without fear of their animals being taken away, she said, but would also help counter negative stereotypes.
"BSL not only impacts people in Maryland, but contributes to the overall perception of pit bulls as different, which inevitably works its way into the public conscience and effects adoptions, shelter policies, and even other public policy," she said.
Auerbach cautions that even if these anti-BSL laws are passed, that isn't the end of these problems, since many landlords won't rent to people with pit bulls. One of several anti-BSL bills now under consideration in Maryland would actually address this point: HB 422 is aimed not only at stopping localities from classifying dogs as "dangerous" by breed, but would also apply to landlords and condo associations.
But even if these bills weren't a panacea, their passages would mark a significant step forward, said VanKavage. "If we could get just one or two this year I'd be happy," she said.
There's reason for optimism: Tami Santelli, Maryland state director for the Humane Society of the United States, tells HuffPost she thinks her state is likely to pass pro-pit bull legislation this session.
And on Tuesday, the South Dakota Senate passed its bill, which now moves over to the House.CLOSE Actor/comedian Bill Cosby is due in court Tuesday morning for a hearing that will determine whether he will go to trial in the sexual assault case brought by Andrea Constand. (May 23) AP
Bill Cosby at pre-trial hearing in February 2016 in Norristown, Pa. (Photo11: Clem Murray, AP)
Bill Cosby's preliminary hearing on felony sexual assault charges gets underway in suburban Philadelphia Tuesday with the possibility of a courtroom confrontation between Cosby and his accuser, Andrea Constand.
Both are expected to be there, but there's a slight chance that neither will be.
The hearing, before Magistrate Judge Elizabeth McHugh in Norristown, Pa., and delayed since January, is supposed to decide whether or not Cosby, 79, should be tried on the charges that he drugged and sexually touched Constand, now 43 and back in her native Canada, at his home in 2004.
At the end, possibly an entire day or more, the judge will decide whether the prosecution has established reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed, and if so, will set a trial date.
The case so far: Constand, a former Temple University employee, says Cosby, her former mentor, assaulted her when she visited his home in Montgomery County, Pa., in 2004. He says their encounter was consensual. She complained to police a year later, but then-District Attorney Bruce Castor concluded there was not enough evidence to prosecute.
Constand then sued Cosby in civil court; they reached a settlement in 2006, which was sealed. In 2015, portions of his deposition in the suit, in which he acknowledged obtaining drugs to give to women he sought for sex, were made public.
District Attorney Keven Steele, who won election in November 2015, campaigned on a promise to prosecute Cosby, and charged him in December 2015, just days before the state's statute of limitations ran out.
Andrea Constand in Toronto in December 2015. (Photo11: Marta Iwanek, The Canadian Press, AP)
Earlier legal maneuvers: At a two-day hearing in February, Cosby tried and failed to get the charges thrown out, arguing that Castor had promised not to charge him if he agreed to a deposition in Constand's civil suit. His latest appeal to delay the hearing based on this issue was denied Monday by the state Supreme Court.
What does the prosecutor have to do? Steele must persuade the judge there is enough evidence for trial, either by putting Constand on the stand or introducing her "affidavit of probable cause" — what she told police in 2005, a year after the alleged crime.
"The prosecution needs to meet a minimum threshold to establish facts to support these charges — it's a very low bar and it's almost always met," says Stuart Slotnick, a New York defense attorney and former prosecutor who has been watching the case.
What does the defense have to do? At this stage, it's "unrealistic" for the Cosby legal team to expect they can get the case dismissed, Slotnick says, so the next best thing is get a better idea of the prosecution's evidence and start trying to undermine it.
"It’s much better for the defense to cross-exam the complainant in person and establish inconsistencies (in her complaint) at this early stage," he says. "The documents already available show that Ms Constand has tremendous baggage, inconsistencies and facts that don’t make sense."
What happens next if the judge sets a trial date? The two sides will start filing motions over shaping the evidence that will be allowed at trial. For instance, the prosecution will not want any mention of the defense argument that "the case is a political witch hunt" that was brought only because Steele ran on a campaign that he would charge Cosby, Slotnick says.
The defense will try to preclude any attempt to bring in other accusers — five dozen women have come forward since October 2014 — by prosecutors hoping to establish an alleged pattern of illegal behavior. And the Cosby team will also want to block introducing his deposition as evidence.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1TGLgD4The following article is republished with permission from |
so vague.
Among them is a requirement that certain companies submit their products to the government for cybersecurity checks, which may even involve reviewing source code. How often it would be required, and how the government will determine which products must be reviewed is unknown. This could come into play as part of China’s broader regulatory push to expand law enforcement’s power to access data during criminal investigations.
Another vague directive calls for companies to store certain data within the country’s borders, in the interest of safeguarding sensitive information from espionage or other foreign meddling. The government has delayed the implementation of this change until the end of 2018, however.
The reason for the delay seems to be that China wants its laws governing the cross-border flow of data to be “consistent with accepted international practices,” according to the authors of a recent research brief from the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. Those practices include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, set to take effect next year, and the Privacy Shield, a framework that allows for the commercial exchange of data between the United States and European Union in a way that complies with each government’s respective data privacy laws. Like China’s new law, though, these agreements are still works in progress.
“This is the Chinese government's entry into an emerging field that is going to be a huge area of policy development worldwide,” says Graham Webster, an expert in China-U.S. relations at Yale Law School.
Governments around the world, including the U.S. and in Europe, are grappling with uncertainty over how to maintain digital sovereignty and security while still capitalizing on the lucrative global digital marketplace. While the U.S. has taken a relatively hands-off approach, the EU is pursuing relatively strict data protection policies that are more in line with some of the measures in the new Chinese law, says Webster.Police think a man who tried to rob a golf shop yesterday may have done a similar thing at another golf course last week. In both cases, the robber had a butcher knife and wore tan underwear to hide his face.
At first, Assistant PGA Pro Scott Flick thought it was a bad joke. "[He] comes at me with a plastic grocery bag in one hand and a knife in the other saying, ‘Money. Money.' And I said, 'Are you kidding me?'"
Surveillance video shows the man walk into the pro shop at the Central Valley Golf Course in South Salt Lake. With tan underwear on his head and a knife in his right hand, he encountered Flick in the office.
"He looked intoxicated. He stumbled around. He could barely get the'money' out. He said,'money, money' twice," Flick said.
Flick fought back. "He came at me with one step, and that's when I took his hands up in the air," Flick explained.
Surveillance cameras caught the struggle on tape; the two ended up in the closet. "[I] had his hands here, gave him a bit of a hip check and banged it down here," Flick said.
Flick received cuts on both hands and on his ear from the butcher knife. He described the knife as about 8 to 10 inches long. "It broke off cleanly at the handle. It was laying on the floor," he said.
"Teed off," Flick pushed the man out the door. "I said, 'You have one chance to go and I'm calling the cops,'" he told us.
Outside, two golfers chased the man with golf carts and held him down in the grass until police arrived.
Officers took Barry Kramer to jail. Kramer is also a suspect in another robbery last week. Surveillance video from Mick Riley Golf Course in Murray shows a knife-wielding man, who is also wearing tan underwear on his head. Police say it's possible that man is Kramer.
"To have somebody go into a golf course wearing some type of undergarment on his head and robbing an actual pro shop is odd. We haven't had anything like that before," said Murray police Detective Kenny Bass.
Murray police are still investigating their robbery. Kramer was booked into jail for aggravated robbery.
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Related LinksAfter eight films that have amassed almost $5 billion worldwide, the Fast & Furious franchise now features its first stand-alone vehicle as Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham reprise their roles as Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. Ever since hulking lawman Hobbs (Johnson), a loyal agent of America's Diplomatic Security Service, and lawless outcast Shaw (Statham), a former British military elite operative, first faced off in 2015’s Furious 7, the duo have swapped smack talk and body blows as they’ve tried to take each other down. But when cyber-genetically enhanced anarchist Brixton (Idris Elba) gains control of an insidious bio-threat that could alter humanity forever — and bests a brilliant and fearless rogue MI6 agent ( The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby), who just happens to be Shaw’s sister — these two sworn enemies will have to partner up to bring down the only guy who might be badder than themselves. Hobbs & Shaw blasts open a new door in the Fast universe as it hurtles action across the globe, from Los Angeles to London and from the toxic wasteland of Chernobyl to the lush beauty of Samoa. Directed by David Leitch ( Deadpool 2 ) from a script by longtime Fast & Furious narrative architect Chris Morgan, the film is produced by Morgan, Johnson, Statham and Hiram Garcia. The executive producers are Dany Garcia, Kelly McCormick, Steven Chasman, Ethan Smith and Ainsley Davies.Donald Trump has selected Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions to be the United States Attorney General. Now, you might be asking yourself, “Who the hell is Jeff Sessions?” Well, I’m glad you asked…
Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III. That’s… his actual name. In 1986, when he was nominated by Ronald Reagan to be a Federal Judge, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination because of multiple allegations of racism. Here are a few of the highlights of Jeff Sessions’ history of racism:
He called a white civil rights attorney working with black clients a “disgrace to his race.”
He “joked” with a black attorney that the only problem he had with the Ku Klux Klan was the fact that they smoked marijuana… He made that statement in reference to a case where a Klan member had hung a black man.
He called that same attorney “Boy” on multiple occasions, and used the word the N-word to refer to a black man he considered a political enemy.
He called the NAACP and the ACLU (as well as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) “Un-American” and “communist-inspired,” and he accused them of trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.”
I can’t post all of the pieces of evidence showing Jeff Sessions’ history of racism here, but you can CLICK HERE to see an article with many pieces of evidence, including minutes from the Judiciary Committee’s hearing and the testimony of people who worked with him. Or you could just research it yourself. Google “Jeff Sessions” and “Racism,” and look for articles that have actual evidence. And links to reputable news sources.
After his racism disqualified him from his federal appointment (at that time, only the second time in 50 years the Senate had rejected an appointment), apparently the people of Alabama didn’t think those bullet points were that big of a deal, because they elected him to be a Senator. And Senators in Alabama don’t change very often–He has been in office for 20 years, and he is still the junior Senator. Because despite their calls for “draining the swamp,” republicans keep reelecting the incumbents over and over again. And now Donald Trump has asked him to be the Attorney General.
Most people don’t even know what the Attorney General does. The AG is basically the chief law enforcement officer, the chief lawyer for the United States Government, and the head of the Department of Justice. This is a very big job. And it has very big ramifications for how law enforcement responds to issues of civil rights. Look it up. It is a BIG. DEAL. As Attorney General, Eric Holder investigated use of force by police, financial regulations, voter ID laws, environmental policy (Sessions is a climate change sceptic), and a host of other Constitutional rights that the AG can decide whether or not to focus on. The implications of a person of Jeff Sessions’ character holding that position are–to use a term made popular by a dumpster fire and a national disgrace–YUGE.
So please listen–During his candidacy, Trump said so many outrageously offensive things and completely false things that it overwhelmed anyone’s ability to adequately respond to them… It was basically a war of attrition with horrifying and untrue statements. By the time people could attempt to respond to something awful he had said (and inform people as to why it was dangerous or wildly offensive or false), he would have already said ANOTHER awful thing that was dangerous or wildly offensive or false. Now it seems Trump is applying the same strategy with his Cabinet appointees. A few days after naming Alt Right leader and Breitbart head Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist, he taps Jeff-Fucking-Sessions as his pick for Attorney General. And the thing is, I don’t have time to go into all of the many, many reasons why picking avowed white nationalist Steve Bannon is uniquely horrifying (though, if the words “avowed white nationalist” aren’t enough for some reason, his own wife has accused him of being anti-semitic). And just when people are trying to get organized around opposition to Steve Bannon, Trump names ANOTHER shit show as one of his top Cabinet positions–A name that 95% of the people in this country don’t recognize. And then, as people work to educate the citizens about how disqualified and dangerous Jeff Sessions is, he’ll throw out yet another name… And people will slip through. Already people are forgetting about Steve Bannon. How are people supposed to respond to such a steady stream of disappointment? Honestly, it is so overwhelming that it makes me want to shut my computer, lie in bed, and just cry…
But here is an important difference between the position of Chief Strategist and the position of Attorney General: Attorney General is subject to Congressional approval. And that is where YOU can come in. That is where YOU HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. I read an article recently that said phone calls are the most effective way of getting a message through to your elected representative… That emails and letters can be largely ignored, but PHONE CALLS have to be answered and dealt with by staffers. So here is what I want you to do.
Take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay. It’s a scary time, but maybe this will be the sort of scare that will WAKE PEOPLE UP. Realize that even with this steady stream of garbage our new president elect is throwing at us, WE ARE NOT POWERLESS. I might be powerless… You might be powerless… But WE are NOT powerless! CLICK RIGHT HERE to find out the telephone numbers of your elected representatives. You just need to put in your Zip Code, and it will give you the names and numbers of all your people. Take a couple minutes out of your day and CALL THEM. Be firm and in control and not mean. Tell them you are NOT okay with a person like Jeff Sessions being the Attorney General. Tell them you will put whatever energy you have into electing someone different if they approve him. If you are a Trump supporter, let them know that nominating white supremacists for Cabinet positions is NOT what you voted for. Tell a friend. Share this post. Encourage the people in your sphere of influence to call their representatives as well. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by the garbage in the world… Look for all of the places of love and hope and light.
At a time when only the most overtly racist white supremacists were supporting Trump, Jeff Sessions was one of the first in line. And now, he–and people like Steve Bannon–are being rewarded with Cabinet positions. At a time like this–a time of elevated attacks that are racially and religiously motivated–we cannot have a person with a history of racism being the Chief Law Enforcement Officer in the land. This is the exact opposite of saying “Black Lives Matter.” If Trump wants to have a white supremacist as his Chief Strategist, realistically there is nothing we can do to stop him… I doubt that appealing to a narcissist’s “sense of right and wrong” will have much of an influence. But we CAN stop him from making a man with a long history of racism the Attorney General of the United States of America. We HAVE to. We need to FLOOD the phone lines of our lawmakers and representatives with calls voicing our disapproval of this choice. Please. PLEASE. PLEASE help me keep this man from becoming Attorney General.
If you love this blog, SUPPORT IT. Boost it on PayPal. Share it! Help me get the word out… You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Also, thank you to my newest Patron, Karla Underwood. WE ARE NOT POWERLESS!REPORT FROM THE ACLU AND THE DRUG POLICY ACTION GROUP – HONOLULU, HAWAII – As SB 472 SD2, a bill to decriminalize marijuana, was unanimously approved by the Hawaii Senate, and two bills to improve Hawaii’s medical marijuana program are poised for passage in the House, Hawaii advocates have announced the launch of two statewide coalitions to reform local marijuana laws.
Fresh Approach Hawaii is a group of local organizations, businesses and individuals active on all aspects of local marijuana law reform: informing the community and policy makers, advocating for legislative measures to legalize and decriminalize marijuana, and bills to improve Hawaii’s medical marijuana program. The group can be found on the web at http://freshapproachhawaii.org, and on Twitter and Facebook.
The Medical Cannabis Coalition of Hawaii works confidentially with patients, caregivers and doctors to safely access Hawaii’s 13 year-old medical marijuana program, holds statewide meetings for the medical cannabis community, and advocates at the legislature for improvements to the program. They can be found on the web at http://mcchi.org, and on Twitter and Facebook.
Pam Lichty, President of the Drug Policy Action Group, said: “Hawaii voters want a fresh approach to marijuana laws. Our recent polling reveals that 81% of Hawaii voters support our medical marijuana program, and that 58% think that possession by adults of small amounts should not carry criminal penalty. The trend around the nation is to ditch counterproductive marijuana laws that divert law enforcement resources from addressing violent crime. With today’s action, it’s clearer than ever that Hawaii is right in step with that direction. The formation of these two coalitions creates a more formal channel for people to directly engage with these issues, and to advocate for meaningful marijuana policy reforms.”
Vanessa Chong, Executive Director of the ACLU of Hawaii added: “The coalitions offer interested individuals a way to get the facts about reform and take action including pressing government leaders for change. Hawaii lawmakers have an opportunity to re-direct spending of taxpayer dollars away from costly and discriminatory policies and toward reasonable and more effective measures while preserving public safety. The persistent and disproportionate impact on communities of color can sensibly be reduced by removing criminal penalties for low-level possession (Senate Bill 472 (SD2)). The current price tag to the criminal justice system of $24,000 a day for enforcement could then be focused on other public concerns. This would be a strong step for Hawaii (alongside 14 other states) in the right direction.”
The coalitions are currently working on the three live bills to reform Hawaii’s marijuana laws in the 2013 State Legislature. These bills all passed floor votes on 3/5/13 and will cross over to be heard anew in the House (for SB 472) and the Senate (for HBs 667 and 668). Bills to legalize marijuana for adult use in Hawaii died earlier this session, but are still live for consideration in the 2014 legislature. Updates can be found on freshapproachhawaii.org:
· Senate Bill (“SB”) 472 SD2 to remove criminal penalties for adult possession of up to one ounce of marijuana.
· House Bill (“HB”) 667 HD2 to improve Hawaii’s medical marijuana program.
· HB 668 HD2 to move administration of the medical marijuana program from the Department of Public Safety to the Department of Health.
The Drug Policy Action Group, founded in 2004, is a sister organization to the 20 year old Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii. Its mission is to advocate for effective, non-punitive drug policies that minimize economic, social and human costs and to encourage pragmatic approaches based on science and concern for human dignity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii is our nation’s guardian of liberty working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.
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comments201
I made this for my family tonight. I did not cut the boneless, skinless breasts into chunks, I just left them whole. The batter was good, but too salty, and I like salt more than the average Joe...
I followed this recipe exactly and was very disappointed on the turn out. The flour left the chicken very sticky. The taste was good, not great though. It did leave the chicken moist but I could...
Laura Bildner Roberson-Jones 23 8
I made this for my family tonight. I did not cut the boneless, skinless breasts into chunks, I just left them whole. The batter was good, but too salty, and I like salt more than the average Joe... Read more
MrsHuey10 123 26
These were great, much better than any fast food restaurant. I agree, too much flour. If you are feeding 2 like I was, use 2 breasts, 1 cup flour, 1 beaten egg, 3 TBS garlic powder 1 TBS & 1/2... Read more
Poopsie 401 119
Have you heard of Chick-fil-a? They have thee BEST chicken nuggets and chicken strips. Thanks to this recipe, now so do I! =D Read more
Lou Ann Daughenbaugh Long 361 44
These are delicious but I did make a few changes based on some of the other reviews. I used 3 cups of flour and 1 cup of bread crumbs. I also used 2 tablespoons of garlic salt and 2 tablespoon... Read more
jstacey 74 13
These were great! The chicken was very juicy. I whipped them up for dinner in about 15 minutes. I scaled the recipe down for 2, and I think that there was too much flour. I used about half a cup... Read more
giggletush 290 115
This was good, but I have to admit that I didn't have any garlic salt so I used 6 Tbs garlic powder and I only added 1 Tbs of salt b/c of all the reviews that said it was too salty but clearly t... Read more
Shanda 39 23
I followed this recipe exactly and was very disappointed on the turn out. The flour left the chicken very sticky. The taste was good, not great though. It did leave the chicken moist but I could... Read more
Jcooks 59 9
These chicken nuggets really are the best ever. We are big Chick-fil-a fans and these were definitely comparable. I made Honey Mustard Sauce to go along with it and it was very good too. I follo... Read moreUtah native Seth Wold led the pack at the Boston Marathon on Monday. Well, at least for a short while.
The 30-year-old from Lehi managed to find his way to the front of the race with winner Meb Keflezighi. Wold ultimately finished with an offical time of 02:49:43, good enough for No. 927 out of more than 30,000 racers.
"It was pretty exciting to pace the first American to win the Boston marathon in more than 30 years," Wold said with a laugh.
"I cruised to the lead and paced with the eventual winner, Meb. It was great to get in a solid workout with the best runners in the world. I slowed down to my long run pace after the 2.5 mile mark and loved seeing the top guys speed away. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my running life."
What's more amazing is that Wold injured himself playing soccer just nine days before the Boston Marathon.
Wold has run in many long-distance running events over the years. He competed at Lone Peak High School before running for the University of Utah. His personal best in a marathon is 2:22:51 at the 2009 Ogden Marathon, and he won the Pony Express 50-mile race in 2011 with a time of 7:17:44.Former Cork hurler Conor Cusack has joined his brother Donal Og in revealing that he is gay.
Former Cork hurler Conor Cusack has joined his brother Donal Og in revealing that he is gay.
The Cloyne player, who last year bravely spoke out about his battle with depression, moved to break down taboos about sexuality by revealing that he is attracted to men.
In a post on his blog under the heading 'To Thine Own Self Be True,' Conor (34) wrote: "I've known for a good while now that I have been sexually attracted to men.
"In that time, I've had relationships with women, and enjoyed them immensely but I've always had more fulfilment from being with a man. I'm not sure what label society would categorise me under.
"Life for me is never black or white but more about different shades of grey."
His brother, All-Ireland winning goalkeeper Donal Og, came out several years ago and has spoken with honesty about battling bigots on and off the pitch.
Yesterday younger brother Conor said: "I have been comfortable with this area of my life and I never felt the need to discuss it with anyone. That is until recently.
"I have never denied anything about this part of my life because no one has ever asked me the question. I often use Shakespeare's quote in my talks 'To thine own self be true so to no man can thoust ever be false again'.
"By me talking about this part of my life, I am being true to myself but more importantly right now, I am being true to all of those people that I am interacting with on a daily basis."
He added: "I believe nobody should have to talk publicly about matters to do with their mental health or with issues to do with their sexuality if they don't want to. I have chosen to do both."
He said that he had discussed his decision to go public with his parents Bonnie and Donal Snr and had their support.
He added: "My original blog was written in the hope that it would provide comfort to others that are struggling with issues to do with their mental health and help to break down the stigma and taboo associated with it. It's my firm belief that everyone has the right to be who they want to be in this world."
Conor now devotes a significant portion of his time to helping others battle depression, which he struggled with when he was younger.
He won nationwide praise for a previous blog post last October when he told how he made depression "my friend, not my enemy" and learned to manage his mental health issues.
Gareth Morgan
Irish IndependentAs it was originally published by Patrick Howell O’Neil on The Daily Dot. Matt Edman is a cyber security expert who went from helping develop The Tor Project, to helping the FBI hack The Tor Project.
“It has come to our attention that Matt Edman, who worked with the Tor Project until 2009, subsequently was employed by a defense contractor working for the FBI to develop anti-Tor malware,” Tor confirmed in a statement to The DailyDot.
Edman got with the Tor Project in 2008 to work on software meant to make Tor easier for normal users, called Vidalia. Edman started as a graduate student while he worked for Tor, and was working towards his Ph. D. in computer science.
Upon graduation from Baylor University Matt became part of a pro privacy community, and attended developer meetings, and continued to contribute to the development and progress of Vidalia. According to Tor, “Vidalia was the only Tor software to which Edman was able to commit changes.”
Tor stopped Vidalia in 2013. It was replaced by other tools designed to make user experience easier. Matt Edman and Jacob Appelbaum joined the Tor Project the same day. Appelbaum was a hacker and journalist famous for his work with WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.
Edman starting working at Mitre Corp. in 2012 as a senior cybersecurity engineer assigned to the Remote Operations Unit of the FBI to build or buy custom hacks and malware for spying on potential criminals. With skills that outmatched any of the competition he built working with Tor, Edman became a contractor with the FBI; who made him a key operative in Operation Torpedo which was established to hack three dark net child porn sites.
“This is the U.S. government thats hacking itself, at the end of the day,” ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian told the DailyDot in a phone interview. “One arm of the U.S. government is funding this thing, and the other is tasked with hacking it.”
“They’re supposed to play this important and trusted role in the cybersecurity community,” Sogohain said.”On the other hand they’re developing malware which undermines their trusted role.”
During his time at Mitre, Edman worked alongside Special Agent for the FBI Steven A. Smith. They customized, tested, and fine-tuned malware they refered to as “Cornhusker”. Its main duty was to collect information to help identify users of Tor. While commonly known as a “Torsploit”. Cornhusker utilized a flash application to obtain users actual I.P. address so the FBI could track and trace users of the three sites they were targeting.
Cornhusker got its name due to the University of Nebraska’s nickname being the cornhuskers and was placed on three servers owned by Aaron McGrath of Nebraska whose arrest sparked a larger anti-child exploitation operation. The three servers were known to run multiple anonymous child porn sites.
Cornhusker targeted the Flash Player built inside the Tor Browser; which Tor has warned about using flash inside the Tor Browser because its unsafe. Apparently this warning isn’t heeded by Tor users.
Operation Torpedo landed 19 convictions so far, and resulted in at least 25 de-anonymized users. At his trial, a 45 year old New York man plead guilty to receiving and having accessed one or multiple sites to view child porn. The defense attorneys asked to see the source code of cornhusker, which the FBI kindly replied that they lost it. Special Agent Smith insisted he never gave instruction to anyone to destroy the code. Fortunately for the FBI, the judge who presided over the case ruled the loss of the code unfortunate, but also said it was of little matter to the courts.
Since the retirement of cornhusker, the FBI has put newer, FBI funded malware into use targeting a wider scope of Tor users in they’re investigations.
Edman also helped the FBI work on the case against Silk Road, and the conviction of Ross Ulbricht. The testimony in the Silk Road case stated that it was Edman who did the majority of the work tracing the 13.4 million in BTC from Silk Road to Ulbricht’s laptop.
“He has been recognized within law enforcement and the United States Intelligence Community as a subject matter expert on cyber investigations related to anonymous communication systems, such as Tor, and virtual currencies like Bitcoin. As part of his work, he assembled and led an interdisciplinary team of researchers that developed a state of the art network investigative technique that was successfully deployed and provided critical intelligence in multiple high profile law enforcement cyber investigations,” notes his company biography for Berkley Research Group.
My apologies to Patrick Howell O’Neil, who originally wrote this article.Bob Dole is right.
Bob Dole, left, and Bill Clinton.
During an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," the former Senate Majority Leader gave his fellow Republicans a piece of advice: "I think they ought to put a sign on the National Committee doors that says closed for repairs until New Year's Day next year and spend that time going over ideas and positive agenda."
Ask any Republican and they probably agree with Dole. The party suffered two resounding defeats in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races, and gains made in the 2010 midterms look like the exception rather than the rule. The party continues to feud openly in the Senate over its direction.
But, of course, that's not how politics works. The party has to try and reinvent -- or at least refocus -- itself while continuing to compete in races around the country. They don't have the luxury of shuttering the Republican National Committee to develop a policy agenda around which the broad swath of the party has to rally.
Instead, Republicans have to try to elect Ken Cuccinelli as governor of Virginia and reelect Chris Christie as New Jersey governor. They have to deal with the 2014 election, hoping to avoid -- particularly in the Senate -- the primary problems that have cost them somewhere between two and five seats over the past two cycles. And then there is the already-underway 2016 presidential race.
Unfortunately for Republicans, it's a near certainty that they will remain in this sort of political no man's land until they pick a presidential nominee and he or she provides the policy direction that the GOP so badly needs. "Somebody has to stand up and say, we're going to do this," Dole said, explaining the Senate gridlock, but in a statement that could hold well for the broader party.
But there is simply no one with the profile and power within the party at the moment to do that. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) seem to have the best cases to make, but the former doesn't seem interested in playing that role at the moment and the latter is still a bit politically green.
This sort of inability to lead/be guided out of the political wilderness isn't a new thing. Remember that Democrats were in a similar state for 12 years during the 1980s and early 1990s until Bill Clinton and his "new Democrat" policy agenda emerged out of Arkansas.
Republicans have to hope that they have a Clinton-in-waiting come 2016. In the meantime, they will have to muddle through -- accepting the policy disagreements and warring factions as unavoidable side effects of trying to re-imagine the party while also trying to win races.
Obama, Christie to review storm recovery effort: Later this morning, President Obama will arrive in New Jersey where he will review the effort at the Jersey Shore to recover from Hurricane Sandy. Obama will be joined by Christie, reprising a pairing that caused some controversy shortly before the 2012 election. When Christie joined the president to tour storm damage in the week before Election Day, some Republicans complained about the governor welcoming a political opponent with open arms. But back home, Christie's response to the storm was very well-received.
Today's visit should further boost the governor's bipartisan credentials in the year he faces reelection. But it's also likely to set off a new round of questions about what Republicans outside the Garden State think about another warm reception Christie is giving to Obama.
Fixbits:
Obama reportedly plans to simultaneously nominate three judges to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The president delivered remarks (and a hug) in a Memorial Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery.
Obama was in Moore, Oklahoma on Sunday, to visit the town hit recently by a deadly tornado.
Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman (R) won't run for the Senate in 2014. Expect a potentially wide-open race for the GOP nomination.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) visited rebels in Syria on Monday.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) tweeted a picture of himself walking in a Memorial Day parade with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Who might portray Clinton in an upcoming movie about her?
Another poll shows most Americans oppose the federal health-care law.
Must-reads:
"Conservatives stymied in attempts to weaken immigration reform law" -- David Nakamura, Washington Post
"In North Carolina, unimpeded GOP drives state hard to the right" -- Michael A. Fletcher, Washington PostKangjiashimenzi (康家石门子) is a collection of ancient petroglyphs that were carved into the side of a massive red-basalt rock in China’s remote region of Xinjiang. These carvings have been dated to about 2000 B.C. and they are believed to be the world’s earliest recordings of an ancient fertility ritual.
Some call it an archeological wonder. Others have jokingly labeled it “prehistoric porn”.
This isn’t the kind of place you’ll find listed in any China travel guide or even on most maps of the region.
I had read about these petroglyphs a few years ago and quietly added them to my growing Xinjiang bucket list.
It wasn’t until this summer that I decided to see if I could find this place. So I jumped in my car for yet another fun Xinjiang road trip (check out my first XJ road trip here).
VIDEO: Re-Discovering Xinjiang’s Petroglyphs
As you’ll see in the video below, I was in a race to see if I could find this place before the sun set. I ended up getting there so late that I decided to sleep outside instead of trying to look around for a hotel that was most certainly a couple hours drive away!
I publish awesome, weekly videos…subscribe to FarWestChina on YouTube!
What is Kangjiashimenzi?
Kangjiashimenzi is a collection of Eurasian art that involves 83 figures participating in some odd type of sex ritual. The rock is located within the Tianshan range a few hours west of the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi and was first discovered by Chinese archeologist Wang Binghua.
Almost a decade later, American archeologist Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball studied the location in depth. It is from her writings and drawings that we get most of our current understanding of this ancient petroglyph.
It’s a good thing, too. To my untrained eye, these carvings looked like nothing more than fancy stick figures and a few animals. Little did I know that these petroglyphs are emphatically ithyphallic (a fancy word for ‘erect penis’)!
In fact, four different scenes from this fertility ritual are depicted on the side of the rock, which starts about 30 feet above the ground and progress downward.
Where is this Xinjiang Petroglyph?
Jeannine refers to Kangjiashimenzi as “monumental art located in an awe-inspiring locale” and I agree with her. Facing away from the rock carvings, I could see layer after layer of tree-covered hills that extend far into the distance.
Kangjiashimenzi is buried deep in the heart of Xinjiang’s Tianshan range, a good 4-5 hours west of the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi. After leaving the comfort of the smooth G30 national highway, I followed along the little-known Taxi River (塔西河) for more than an hour as I drove deeper into the mountains.
There is no paved road that leads here, only a series of gravel paths that twist and turn through the mountains. There are no signs to offer direction, so I was left to rely on an outdated map I hoped was accurate.
Nobody I know in Xinjiang had ever been here or even heard about it. Honestly, I had no idea if I would even be able to find this place.
Dreams of Archaeological Tourism
Turning off the gravel road, I came up to a run-down building that looked like it was once a small tourist centre. The place was a bit creepy but it was the first positive indication that I was headed in the right direction.
One sign near the entrance informed me that tickets to see the petroglyphs were 20 RMB. There wasn’t a single soul around to collect the money. A nearby parking lot was overgrown with weeds.
It’s obvious that someone had attempted to turn Kangjiashimenzi into a tourism attraction following its discovery. The project was doomed from the start, though, not just because of a remote location but also because of politics.
You see, the Kangjiashimenzi figures were determined not to be Han Chinese in origin, a fact which seems to contradict China’s historical claim to Xinjiang. It may not seem like a big deal to us, but this simple contradiction was enough to cause officials to limit research and access to Kangjiashimenzi for over a decade.
Keep in mind that during this same period of time, China was facing a similar problem with all of the mummies it was digging up in Xinjiang. It wasn’t until genetics studies confirmed that Xinjiang’s earliest inhabitants were neither Chinese NOR Uyghur in ethnicity that the government breathed a sigh of relief. Research could continue and access to these historical relics granted.
The mummies fared just fine. Places like Kangjiashimenzi became a ghost town.
Carvings on the Wall
Today, a small green fence is the only protection offered these 4,000 year-old petroglyphs.
Standing up against this fence, I initially had a difficult time locating the carvings. Like I stated earlier, I’m not an archeologist and had no idea what I was looking for.
But as I looked closely, the figures became clearly distinguishable. What surprised me most was the size of the carvings. I expected a few inches or perhaps a foot or two in height.
Instead, I came across figures that were taller than I was – up to 9.5 feet! All of the sudden, the entire rock face came alive with figures dancing all around! The hours of driving were worth the effort – how many times can we get up close and personal with art that was created 4,000 years ago?
Conclusion | Xinjiang’s Petroglyphs
Clearly this isn’t a place that the average tourist will have an opportunity to visit. However, it’s yet another indication of the diversity and complexity of Xinjiang’s history.
It’s also a great reminder to me of why I love exploring Xinjiang: ancient history, beautiful scenery, the thrill of discovery…and prehistoric porn.
What more could you ask for?Though most of the attention is on NASA and SpaceX these days when it comes to space travel, it’s easy to forget there’s another project in the works trying to get us to Mars within the next decade — albeit as a reality television series.
Mars One has been quietly plugging along for a couple of years now, having started with 200,000 potential applicants all vying for a spot on a ship eventually |
Have a maximum household income of $90,500.
Be at least 18 years old and currently renting.
Not own or have an interest in a home.
Not owe money to a community housing landlord.
Be a legal resident of Canada.
Intend to have this home as your one and only residence
And the home must be:Though OMG's roster was already known on the Chinese forum, NGA, and on Chinese news publication, 178, the team has officially published the lineup on their weibo page last night.
The OMG official roster is as follows:
Top: Hu "Xiyang" Bin
Top: Gao "Gogoing" Diping
Jungle: Yan "MLZZ" Hong
Jungle: Yin "Loveling" Le
Mid: Yu "Cool" Jiajun
ADC: Jian "Uzi" Zihao
ADC: Guo "San" Junliang
ADC: Zhang "North" Yuze
Support: Hu "Cloud" Zhenwei
Support: Luo "Luo" Cirui
Support: Liu "Amazing" Shiyu
Xiyang has played top for OMG before in the NVIDIA Game Festival 2014. OMG placed fourth, losing out to Team King in the semifinals. OMG played with MLZZ and Amazing, ex-Oh My Dream players, at the International Esports Tournament, where they dropped in the quarterfinals to Invictus Gaming.
OMG play their first Bo2 of the split against Vici Gaming as the last set of the opening night. The match is scheduled for 6 a.m. Eastern on May 22. With Loveling on the bench, this will mark the first LPL game he hasn't played for OMG. He is the last player on the team to have played every LPL game for OMG up to this point.
Kelsey Moser is a staff writer for the Score eSports. You can follow her on Twitter.Stop us if this sounds familiar: Oscar Madison and Felix Unger are two polar-opposite pals who move in together after their marriages fail. Naturally, bickering, bonding, and hilarity ensue. As far as formulas go–differences are funny!–it doesn't get much more enduring than The Odd Couple, originally a Neil Simon play that became a hit movie in 1968 and a '70s-era TV series starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. This latest rendition is a faithful remake, this time with Matthew Perry (Friends)–also a co-executive producer–tackling the role of slovenly sports-radio personality Oscar and Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!) as high-strung neat freak photographer Felix.
Was it obvious which part each of you should play?
Perry: People were surprised–I think because [Friends'] Chandler was more of a Felix–but I'm much more Oscar. It's always been a dream. There's a sports ticker on our set that's actually taken from my house.
Lennon: I am Felix. There's a scene where I have to jump out of bed and run to the door, and I ran back and made the bed. That's basically just me bubbling over into the character.
Perry: He carries Purell at all times.
We have to ask: Felix and Oscar are two employed men in their forties. Do they really need to be roomies, even in New York City?
Perry: On the surface, you'd think Oscar would be doing well, but he's actually blowing all of his money on gambling, drinking, and women. That is where I've had to do most of my research.
Lennon: And as a photographer, Felix is not on the Annie Leibovitz level. We were going to have him work in fashion...
Perry: That was an excuse to have models around!
Lennon:...but instead he's shooting a lot of food. We have beautiful pictures of hamburgers everywhere.
You guys seem to get along.
Perry: We had worked together [in 2009] on 17 Again–which I'm pretty sure is the most successful movie either of us has ever made–so we knew that the chemistry was good, but we didn't know that it would be this good.
What updates will you be making to the series?
Perry: It's going to be much more of an ensemble–we have an all-star team that includes Yvette Nicole Brown [Community] and Wendell Pierce [The Wire], and we're using them. We also want to explore what dating is like for these guys in 2015. I think this possibly has more heart than the original–these guys really miss their ex-wives.
Will there be any wink to the idea that Oscar and Felix could be a couple themselves?
Perry: Yeah, one episode takes place at a wedding, and there are a couple jokes about them being gay--there's no taboo about that anymore.
Lennon: We do function like a highly dysfunctional married couple.
Perry: Also, in the third episode, I think we make love.
Lennon: Spoiler alert!
Premieres Thursday, Feb. 19, 8:30/7:30c, CBSWhile the Chicago Cubs weren’t able to make America’s “Back to the Future Part II” dreams come true, getting bounced by the New York Mets in four games, the Kansas City Royals and Toronto Blue Jays remain locked in a tight and tense series.
There’s been some trash talk off the field, too. Notably among librarians. You read (if you will) that right.
With the Royals ahead of the Blue Jays 3-2 in the American League Championship series, the Kansas City Public Library and Toronto Public Library have been engaged in a bookish back-and-forth on Twitter.
Kansas City kicked it off after the Royals won Game 4 by a lopsided score of 14-2:
Toronto fired off a response:
Ahead of Game 5, the Kansas City librarians tweeted what they were likely hoping would stand up as the final word:
The Blue Jays beat the Royals by a 7-1 score in Game 5, though, to send the series back to Kansas City, Mo., with the Royals up 3-2.
While the teams had an off day Thursday, the M.L.S. holders of Kansas City continued to stoke the fire, triggering an in-kind response from their Toronto peers:
First pitch in Game 6 of the series is at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, and the game is airing on Fox Sports 1. The warring sides went on the “CBC Morning Show” in Toronto to talk about their uncommonly erudite Twitter tête-a-tête:Arvind Kejriwal will go on 10-day medical leave this week
Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi, is likely to take 10 days off from March 5 for naturopathy treatment, sources in his Aam Aadmi Party have said. His second-in-command Manish Sisodia will take charge as acting Chief Minister during that time.
Mr Kejriwal, 46, has been advised the treatment by doctors because of high blood sugar and coughing. He is likely to fly to Bengaluru for treatment
His medical leave comes in the middle of full blown war in the AAP leadership, with two founder members, Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, criticizing Mr Kejriwal and the party's functioning.
On Wednesday, the party's top leaders will meet and decide whether to remove Mr Yadav and Mr Bhushan from the decision-making Political Affairs Committee.
"I am deeply hurt and pained by what is going on in the party," Mr Kejriwal tweeted on Tuesday morning, speaking for the first time on the raging internal battle in the party just days after its record election victory in the capital.
"This is betrayal of trust that Delhi posed in us. I refuse to be drawn in this ugly battle. Will concentrate only on Delhi's governance," he said, shortly after party leader and founder member Prashant Bhushan went public with his criticism of him.In an interview to NDTV, Mr Bhushan said there had been a "breakdown of communication" between him and Mr Kejriwal and he had serious disagreements with how the party is functioning."There is a great danger of AAP becoming a one-man show. We didn't form the party to make it like any other political party where there is a high command and one person calls the shots," he said. Mr Bhushan's internal note was among a series of leaked letters that have exposed the extent of the crisis in AAP, which took power in Delhi last month after winning 67 of 70 assembly seats.Scientists can be utter bastards some of the time. Not content with letting us unwashed masses revel in our ignorance, they systematically poke and prod the world around us, looking for answers to questions best left unanswered.
The latest casualty of this scientific tirade – my childhood. Specifically, the destruction of my faith in man’s best friend, embodied in the iconic form of Lassie.
For decades, Lassie was a symbol for all that was good in the world: unconditional friendship, teamwork, altruism in the face of danger, She was a canine beacon of light in a cynical, selfish world. Lassie was a good boy girl.
Well, not any more. Published in the journal of Animal Behaviour, a team of researchers have emphatically shown that far from being a selfless companion pointing out danger and leading grown-ups to Timmy who fell down a well, dogs are really selfish bitches (the females anyway – the males are selfish dogs).
It’s been known for a long time that dogs are able to pick up on subtle emotional cues given off by their owners. So much so that dogs have been successfully trained to recognise when their epileptic owners are having seizures. And, thanks to TV shows like Lassie, it had been assumed that communication was a two way street – that dogs could relay useful information back to their owners. Well they can’t.
In the experiments, a scientist hid two objects in a room: one was the dog’s favourite toy, the other being an object humans would be interested in that a dog would not (in this case a holepunch). The dogs were made to see where the object was hidden. When another scientist entered, pretending to look for the holepunch, they used cues from the dog to try and discover the desired object. The dogs, however, significantly pointed to their toy more often than they did to the human’s. Even when this human was the dog’s owner – this pattern continued. I’m sure dogs aren’t really as selfish as I’m making out – they have been selected for thousands of years to assist humans. But, their own desire for their toy outweighed their wish to help us.
It seems that Lassie, even if she had seen little Timmy fall down the well, would not have communicated this fact to the kind sheriff. In reality, the end of most Lassie shows would have a contented dog chewing on her favourite bone, and a sad, lonely boy sat in the cold, dark well – unlikely ever to be rescued. Not really a happy ending. Thanks a lot scientists.
Juliane Kaminski, Martina Neumanna, Juliane Bräuera, Josep Calla, & Michael Tomaselloa (2011). Dogs, Canis familiaris, communicate with humans to request but not to inform Animal Behaviour DOI: http://dx..org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.06.015by Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
Oregon will return to practice Monday following a long weekend spent recovering from Thursday's triple-overtime victory at Arizona State, which gave the Ducks their first back-to-back wins of the 2015 season.
The UO football team (5-3, 3-2 Pac-12) now enters a month of November that always figured to be the most harrowing part of the schedule. That's now exacerbated by the Ducks' efforts to overcome their early season inconsistencies, become bowl eligible and – who knows? – perhaps even challenge Stanford for the Pac-12 North, which the Cardinal leads by 2.5 games over Oregon and Washington State.
The wizardry of quarterback Vernon Adams Jr. has been the difference in road victories over the last three weeks at Washington and ASU. Now the Ducks will try to build off that success, and find some consistency in other elements of the game.
“We'll find out tomorrow,” UO coach Mark Helfrich said Sunday, when asked about the impact of the win streak. “… But certainly you want that to create confidence.”
Oregon's November schedule includes a trip next week to play the No. 9 Cardinal, followed by home games against resurgent Southern California and then Oregon State. The month begins this Saturday in Autzen Stadium against California (7:30 p.m., ESPN2), whose quarterback, top NFL draft prospect Jared Goff, will challenge an Oregon pass defense ranked No. 126 out of 128 teams in the FBS this season.
“He's a fantastic player,” Helfrich said of Goff, whom the UO coach scouted as a recruit. “I've been a fan of him for many years – and won't be this week.”
Goff currently ranks ninth nationally in passing touchdowns (22), 11th in yards per game (317.1) and 21st in efficiency (151.68). Oregon is allowing 318 passing yards per game, better only than Kansas and Indiana in the FBS, though the Ducks rate a bit higher with their 142.32 pass efficiency defense – No. 100 nationally.
The UO defense allowed a school record 742 yards by the Sun Devils last week. That ignominy was soothed some by the victory, but in review the team will be encouraged to “take ownership of the film,” Helfrich said. “Coaches owning it, players owning it, and everybody on the same page as far as making it better.”
Some of the defensive breakdowns no doubt have been due to personnel inconsistencies; in part due to injuries, the secondary has featured a different starting group in each of the last seven games. Safety Juwaan Williams was not able to travel to Arizona State, after his breakout performance against the Huskies, with Reggie Daniels returning from a two-game absence and making 10 tackles against the Sun Devils.
Converted receiver Charles Nelson led the Ducks with 15 tackles. “To the point of playing with total confidence, he's still getting there,” Helfrich said. “That's where you hope a guy like Reggie would be a stabilizing force.”
Meanwhile, cornerbacks Tyree Robinson and Arrion Springs each had a late interception that was critical to the outcome. Robinson's gave Oregon possession for its touchdown drive that forced overtime, and Springs' ended the game.
Against Cal this week, that secondary figures to be in the spotlight again.
Nelson was among Oregon's players of the week against the Sun Devils, although not on defense.
Not to be overshadowed by the late-game drama was Nelson's 100-yard kickoff return in the third quarter, after the Ducks had fallen behind 31-20 and seemed in danger of being buried. That earned Nelson special teams player of the week from the coaching staff.
“That was arguably the turning point, that kickoff return, creating some momentum and some emotion on the sideline,” Helfrich said.
Adams and center Matt Hegarty shared offensive player of the game honors, and Tyson Coleman was named defensive player of the game after making nine tackles with a sack, and forcing a fumble.
The scout-team players of the week were receiver Chayce Maday on offense, linebacker De'Quan McDowell on defense and defensive back Michael Manns for his play on special teams.
Helfrich said the Ducks “perhaps” will again employ the set of large white sheets they used Thursday to shield their play signals from the Arizona State sideline.
Helfrich said the staff “got some information” that led them to employ the sheets at ASU, saying they helped provide “operational security.”
“We're just trying to protect our stuff,” he said.Three out of three? That could be the score for the U.S. National Security Agency's cryptographic "most wanted" list of 2012.
In January 2012, it saw Internet traffic anonymizing tool Tor (The Onion Router), Linux distribution Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) and disk encryption system TrueCrypt as the biggest threats to its ability to intercept Internet traffic and interpret other information it acquires.
Since then, flaws have been found in Tor and the FBI has unmasked Tor users and a vulnerability was found in Tails allowing attackers to determine users' IP addresses.
And while a source-code audit gave TrueCrypt a relatively clean bill of health in April, TrueCrypt's anonymous developers inexplicably abandoned the software a few weeks later, warning it was insecure.
That the NSA considered these tools dangerous is perhaps little surprise: In July, it was revealed that the agency's XKeyScore traffic interception tool contains rules for tracking who visited the websites of the Tor and Tails projects.
But now German magazine Der Spiegel has published further documents from the cache leaked by Edward Snowden, including one outlining, on page 25, the tools the NSA most wanted to crack in order to intercept and decrypt its targets' communications.
The tools were ranked by their impact, from trivial to catastrophic, and their use risk, from current highest priority targets down to experimentation by technical thought leaders.
In the slide deck, the NSA explained that, with rare exceptions, it only developed "application-specific solutions" based on those two criteria, impact and use risk. In a resource-constrained environment, it said, the need for responses to current threats would always trump speculative work on threats that might become more widespread. Der Spiegel had something to say about those constraints: Of the NSA's 2013 budget of over US$10 billion, some $34.3 million was allocated to "Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services."
Top of the NSA's list of major or catastrophic threats, capable of causing a majority or near-total loss or lack of insight into the highest-priority targets' communications or online presence, were Tor, Tails and TrueCrypt.
Of course, it's unlikely that the published attacks on Tor and Tails were developed by the NSA -- but with the Tor unmasking attack costing researchers just $3,000, the NSA could certainly have done something similar with its budget over the last three years. Although some of the wilder conspiracy theories linking TrueCrypt's demise to the NSA have evaporated, there is still no convincing explanation for why the developers abandoned a tool that had just come through a code audit with no major flaws found.
Other tools were also considered major or catastrophic threats, but of lesser priority because they were not yet, or no longer, used by the highest priority targets. Among the tools the NSA feared it might need to crack in future was encrypted telephony tool Redphone, which uses Phil Zimmermann's ZRTP secure key-agreement system for RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol) voice communications.
Over two decades ago Zimmermann also developed PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), an encryption tool the NSA is still having trouble cracking, as illustrated by this slide published by Der Spiegel.
That PGP was not top of the NSA's most-wanted list could be down to its usability, which is such as to put off all but the more tech-savvy targets.
However, with ZRTP used to encrypt voice communications in off-the-shelf smartphones like the Blackphone, it's a fair bet that Redphone and its ZRTP-using ilk will be moving higher up next year's list.
The slide deck revealing the most-wanted list also held another couple of technical challenges the NSA faces -- ones that might be more familiar to enterprise users.
One slide lamented that "Excel tops out at a million rows," making Microsoft's spreadsheet inadequate for handling more than a couple of weeks' "summarized active user events" from one of the NSA's data capture programs alone. Using four or five pivot tables to visualize the data from each of thirty target sets, two weeks' data would generate 100 to 150 slides, the NSA presentation said.
Like many other organizations, the NSA apparently had a big problem with unstructured data. Slide 37 warns that "TKB/UTT (Target Knowledge Base/Unified Targeting tool) are victims of years of 'fill in the blank' freeform data entry." As of 2012, this was "very slowly being addressed" with a target date for completion of "~2015."
With Snowden's trove of documents all predating May 2013, when he fled from Hawaii to Hong Kong, we'll have to wait for another leaker to come forward before we find out whether the NSA hit that 2015 deadline, and what progress it has made with its other software challenges.
Peter Sayer covers general technology breaking news for IDG News Service, with a special interest in open source software and related European intellectual property legislation. Send comments and news tips to Peter at peter_sayer@idg.com.The solution to the age-old problem of weakening battery capacity may soon emerge thanks to tech wizzes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Scientists there have discovered an efficient way of powering electronic devices using bacteria-infused batteries.
No, this isn't a late April Fool's joke or a long-lost X-Files plot. It's true; the new batteries use a kind of bacteria that can construct an anode after being protected by a layer of cobalt oxide and gold. Once this process is complete, the bacteria batteries can be formed into a nanowire. This makes them drastically different than your regular old batteries that use a pair of anodes, one positive, one negative.
The genetically engineered battery bacteria poses no threat to human beings. (Source: crn.com)
Over 100 Charges While Maintaining Capacity
In recent tests, the MIT researchers have been able to genetically engineer the bacteria so that it first protects itself with an iron phosphate being attaching to carbon nanotubes. This process makes for a tight network that is highly conductive; according to early reports, to the point where someone can charge and discharge a battery over one hundred times without losing its original capacity.
Some have criticized the research because regular lithium-ion batteries on the market today can, in some cases, be recharged far more than just one hundred times. However, representatives for MIT believe that by the time their 'organic' batteries hit the market they "will be able to go much longer," than their competitors.
The Organic Battery
The fact that these batteries can even get close to their traditional competitors that is truly impressive.
Because the batteries are considered 'green technology' and 'organic,' the expectation is that they not only last longer than other batteries but break down easier once they've been discarded. After all, the primary thrust for the technology is a harmless bacteria that, as far as it sounds, should present only a fraction of the threat posed upon nature by those lithium-ion batteries.
It's hoped that this radical and exciting technology will one day find its way into automobiles, digital media players, and cellphones. However, MIT has been working on this tech for about three years, so its practical, marketable application may still be a ways off. (Source: slipperybrick.com)Sentence Country [Country] declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, but was conquered by Italy in 1939. The [people of what became this country] gained fame in the 13th century when under Chinggis KHAN they established a huge Eurasian empire through conquest. Founded in the 12th century, the Principality of Muscovy, was able...to gradually conquer and absorb surrounding principalities. The regularity and richness of the annual Nile River flood, coupled with semi-isolation..., allowed for the development of one of the world's great civilizations. A land of vast distances and rich natural resources, [country] became a self-governing dominion in 1867 while retaining ties to the British crown. Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, [country] was occupied by Britain during the course of World War I; in 1920, it was declared a League of Nations mandate... The [country, adjective form] Islands became a Spanish colony during the 16th century; they were ceded to the US in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. [Country] was founded as a British trading colony in 1819. [Country] prides itself on being the first nation to formally adopt Christianity (early 4th century). Most [people of this country] consider themselves to be Khmers, descendants of the Angkor Empire... Following more than three centuries under Portuguese rule, [country] gained its independence in 1822... Military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments have dominated national politics since independence from the UK in 1956. [Country] was a province and then a grand duchy under Sweden from the 12th to the 19th centuries, and an autonomous grand duchy of Russia after 1809. Following its heyday as a global maritime power during the 15th and 16th centuries, [country] lost much of its wealth and status with the destruction of Lisbon in a 1755 earthquake [Country] was the center of the first eastern Slavic state, Kyivan Rus, which during the 10th and 11th centuries was the largest and most powerful state in Europe. The [country] has historically played a leading role in developing parliamentary democracy and in advancing literature and science. Established as a Belgian colony in 1908, the [country] gained its independence in 1960, but its early years were marred by political and social instability. Known as Persia until 1935, [country] became an Islamic republic in 1979 after the ruling monarchy was overthrown and Shah Mohammad Reza PAHLAVI was forced into exile. Popes in their secular role ruled portions of the Italian peninsula for more than a thousand years until the mid 19th century... [Country] is the birthplace of Islam and home to Islam's two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina. Modern [country] was founded in 1923 from the Anatolian remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire by national hero Mustafa KEMAL... Britain's [country, adjective form] colonies broke with the mother country in 1776 and were recognized as the new nation of the [Country] following the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Italians supplanted the Ottoman Turks in the area around Tripoli in 1911 and did not relinquish their hold until 1943 when defeated in World War II. The [country, adjective form] Confederation was founded in 1291 as a defensive alliance among three cantons. Unique among African countries, the ancient [country, adjective form] monarchy maintained its freedom from colonial rule with the exception of a short-lived Italian occupation... As Europe's largest economy and second most populous nation (after Russia), [country] is a key member of the continent's economic, political, and defense organizations. Although ultimately a victor in World Wars I and II, [country] suffered extensive losses in its empire, wealth, manpower, and rank as a dominant nation-state. Europeans began to set up trading posts in the area of [country] in the 16th century; eventually the British came to dominate the region and it became part of British India. The site of advanced Amerindian civilizations, [country] came under Spanish rule for three centuries before achieving independence early in the 19th century. A Central Asian country of incredible natural beauty and proud nomadic traditions, most of [country] was formally annexed to Russia in 1876.Our new issue, on what a President Bernie Sanders could actually do in office, is out now. Subscribe today to receive it!
The day after Stephen Jay Gould died, his obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times, testifying to his position as the most famous scientist in the United States. His talent for synthesizing ideas and arguments, his work ethic, and — as he would have been the first to note — luck made him famous. He had not planned to write his monthly column, “This View of Life,” for Natural History for twenty-five years, but, like his childhood hero Joe DiMaggio, Gould became known for this literary streak, which breathed new life into the half-forgotten art of the popular scientific essay, a tradition that dates back to Galileo. Like Galileo, Gould did more than interpret science for laypeople. He was also a path-breaking evolutionary theorist and a canny political organizer for leftist causes. Along with his colleague Niles Eldredge, Gould changed the way biologists view the fossil record. His concept of punctuated equilibrium argued that new species emerge relatively rapidly and then remain mostly stable for millions of years. To his more parochial colleagues’ chagrin, Gould partly credited the inspiration for “punc eq” to the fact that he had “learned his Marxism, literally at his daddy’s knee.” Though he was redbaited for this comment, Gould and Eldredge were speaking as pluralists and historicists not dogmatists. “We make a simple plea for pluralism in guiding philosophies... for the basic recognition that such philosophies... constrain all our thought.” Historical context also acts as a constraint on new ideas. Darwin acknowledged the influence of the classical political economy of Smith and Malthus on his theory of evolution. Gould noted that his leftist upbringing and participation in the revolution of the Civil Rights Movement enabled him to recognize the importance of “punc eq’s” patterns of sudden and discontinuous evolutionary change. Gould also revitalized the study of evolutionary development with his influential historical survey of the subject, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, and made his mark on anthropology by insisting that human evolution looked more like a branching bush with multiple overlapping lineages than a ladder of predictable stages. Raised in a leftist household in Queens, Gould led his local NAACP’s youth chapter. He displayed his writerly talents early on, when he introduced the Little Rock Nine on their victory tour of New York. “They are tormented by racists down South and autograph seekers here,” he noted drolly. He worried his brave fellow teenagers would not get to enjoy New York City and thanked them for enhancing his high school’s curriculum with the day’s most pressing issues. “No event in my memory ever aroused such interest in the Queens teenager,” Gould told the audience. “No event has ever aroused in him such hatred for segregation and all it stands for.” While studying at Antioch College, he participated in desegregation efforts in and around Yellow Springs, Ohio. In 1964, a lone barbershop that had resisted desegregation for four years in nearby Xenia briefly became the Civil Rights Movement’s national focal point. Even while studying abroad at Leeds University, Gould fought for progressive causes, working to desegregate dance halls and joining the campaign for nuclear disarmament. These two facets of Gould’s life regularly intersected. In 1982, he served as an expert witness against “creation science” in McLean v. Arkansas. A year earlier, he had published his most famous political intervention, his prize-winning critique of biological determinism, The Mismeasure of Man. At its core, Mismeasure argues that the twentieth century’s IQ tests share a desire to justify race and class hierarchies with the nineteenth century’s more primitive measures of cranial features and theories of criminal physiognomy. In both eras, researchers rationalized the status quo with the premise of immutable, hereditary intelligence and the fallacy of reification, which held that intelligence can be reduced to a single number and those numbers used to rank people on a linear scale. Mismeasure also addresses the issue of confirmation bias — especially racial bias — in the sciences. In the book and an article in Science that preceded it, Gould analyzed nineteenth-century race scientist Samuel Morton’s two sets of skull measurements, one from 1839 and the second from 1849, to demonstrate that Morton unconsciously manipulated his data to prove that Caucasians had greater cranial volumes than other racial groups. Gould also reminded his readers that eugenics and other consequences of biological determinism remain with us. The United States, nation of immigrants, misused IQ tests to establish quotas on southern and eastern Europeans Jews in 1924 and kept them in effect as millions tried to flee Nazi Germany. The state of Virginia thought it wise to sterilize “idiots” and “morons” until as recently as 1972. Mismeasure came out just as academia was accepting more women and people of color into its ranks. Thanks to Gould’s polemical style and activist stance, the book almost immediately became canonical in undergraduate curriculum.
Refutation and Vindication Or rather, it was — until Gould returned to the Times’s headlines in June 2011. “Study Debunks Stephen Jay Gould’s Claim of Racism on Morton’s Skulls,” the article proclaimed. A team of physical anthropologists, led by Jason E. Lewis, had remeasured roughly half of Morton’s skulls and reanalyzed both his and Gould’s findings. They concluded, “[i]ronically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of bias influencing results,” citing important instances where Morton’s work was more accurate than Gould’s. In the most glaring error, Gould inflated the average cranial capacity of Native American skulls by “arbitrarily” leaving out several smaller crania in his reanalysis. People quickly reacted to the revelation of Gould’s purported bias toward “political correctness.” Writing on his influential blog, anthropologist John Hawks described Gould’s work as perfidious and claimed it “cast doubt on the validity of the scientific enterprise.” Ralph Holloway, a member of the team that reanalyzed Morton and Gould, explained that he “just didn’t trust Gould.” “I had the feeling that [Gould’s] ideological stance was supreme... [and] just felt he was a charlatan.” Far-right “race realists” unsurprisingly trumpeted the news that Gould’s findings had been “refuted.” Even among more measured critics and defenders, a narrative began to take hold: Gould had proved his point, but “it just wasn’t the example he intended.” Morton started to appear more “sinned against than sinning.” At the end of their article, Lewis et al. wrote, “were Gould still alive, we expect he would have mounted a defense of his analysis of Morton.” This is a virtual certainty: Gould openly acknowledged his errors throughout his career and called “factual correction... the most sublime event in intellectual life.” Gould cannot defend himself, but, since Lewis et al. can, it’s curious that they have not responded to more recent peer-reviewed studies that refute key aspects of their work. Though the Times has yet to report it, more recent evidence suggests that the reanalysis of Morton’s skulls makes computational mistakes that favor Caucasians. And as several studies now show, the scientists did not ultimately challenge Gould’s main claim that the inconsistencies between Morton’s measurements in 1839 and 1849 indicate unconscious racial bias. Moreover, the differences between mean values for all races when corrected were, as Gould originally argued, so small as to be statistically insignificant. Why hasn’t the Times reported these more recent findings? The answer also helps explain why they and other outlets so enthusiastically reported the criticism against Gould in the first place. As he would have recognized, it’s politics.
Historical Interpretation as Science Though no one knew it in 2011, Nicholas Wade, the reporter covering the story for the Times, would publish a widely condemned “race science” book in 2014 called A Troubling Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. A purported summary of recent research in population genetics that explains cultural differences between white, East Asian, and African civilizations, Wade’s book inspired an open letter of condemnation, which virtually every expert in the field of population genetics signed. Beyond Wade’s pathetic resuscitation of “scientific racism,” the Gould-Morton controversy has a deeper political dimension. The absence of mainstream reporting on The Mismeasure of Man’s vindication shows how the popular press privileges “hard” science over the “soft” sciences of historical interpretation. Gould himself fought long and hard against this bias, which caricatured paleontologists like him as “stamp collectors.” Gould wrote his 1989 book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, in large part to counteract the bias toward experimental science. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia includes the greatest repository of fossils from the Cambrian explosion, the dawn of multicellular life. As Gould’s book notes, scientists working with these fossils radically changed paleontology’s core concepts. Contrary to earlier studies, many of the shale’s fossils do not have known descendants. This means that life was, in crucial ways, more diverse at the outset of the multicellular period than since. Current species evolved from only a few “lucky” surviving lineages. Because the work involved “mere” description and no experimental work, the new interpretations did not make headlines. Gould contrasts this with the other great paleontological development of the late twentieth century, the “Alvarez hypothesis,” which holds that dinosaur extinction resulted from extraterrestrial impact. The impact theory has everything for public acclaim — white coats, numbers, [Alvarez’s] Nobel renown and location at the top of the ladder of status. The Burgess redescriptions, on the other hand, struck many observers as one funny thing after another — just descriptions of some previously unappreciated, odd animals from early in life’s history. Both discoveries told the same compelling story; both “illustrat[ed]... the extreme chanciness and contingency of life’s history,” yet only the “Alvarez hypothesis” made the cover of Time magazine. The same privileging of “hard” science explains why media outlets picked up the attack on Gould’s analysis but not his subsequent vindication. These reports all emphasized that Lewis et al. had literally remeasured hundreds of skulls in the Morton collection (presumably while wearing white lab coats). As one more recent critique noted, however, “from the standpoint of evaluating Gould’s published claims, the re-measurement was completely pointless.” “Gould never claimed that Morton’s [later] shot-based measurements, which is what Lewis et al. compared their new measurements to, were unreliable.” Confirming their bias toward experimental methods, “Lewis et al. are... falsifying (their word) a claim Gould never made.” Such a glaring conceptual problem should prompt us, as it would have prompted Gould, to inquire into this supposed controversy’s historical context. The return of far-right, racist politics was a depressingly predictable consequence of the election of the first black American president. The Obama administration didn’t help matters, as its failure to respond justly to the 2008 financial crisis only further radicalized some segments of the American population. Rebranded as the “alt-right” and “race realists,” this resurgence culminated in Trump’s election and his appointment of white nationalists to top posts. Only in this climate can Lewis et al. claim without irony that Samuel Morton was a disinterested, |
one of the country’s madrasas – schools that provide religious instruction – and built about 400 mosques.
Albanian followers of largely Arabic schools of Islamic thought – including Wahhabism and Salafism – were criticised by fellow Muslims, who found these ‘imported’ brands of Islam culturally alien.
Others were suspicious of so-called Arab groups whose interpretation of Islam was highly controversial in their home states.
Some believe ‘the Arabs’ brought in a strict, intolerant brand of Islam influenced by Arab countries where Christian minorities were virtually inexistent, such as Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Conflicts arose between opposing factions, young ‘Arabs’ who come of age during the nineties found themselves at odds with their elders, many of whom had secretly practised Ottoman Islam under communism.
Differences in prayer styles, whether joined hands should be placed above or below the navel, became the subject of fierce debate. Other disputes included whether to allow marriage between first cousins, banned by Albanian law and among Ottoman Muslims but permitted in many foreign countries.
“At some point in the early 90s, everyone (young Albanian Muslim believers) went through a Salafi stage,” remarks an imam in Tirana, who prefers not to be identified.
During that period, at least 500 Albanians studied theology in Saudi Arabia who then returned to Albania, a country with just 570 mosques, say sources within the Muslim community.
These Arab-influenced followers are easily identifiable: bearded sombre men, initially wearing pants ending above their ankles, huddling in specific jam-packed mosques in Albania’s capital Tirana.
They dislike ‘the Turk’, who they regard as lax and ignorant in religious practice, believing them to adhere to traditions contrary to Islam. They regard the MCA as corrupt and inept.
‘Turk-Arab’ stand off
A group of ‘Arabs’ defied the MCA last March by creating its own official organisation – the League of Albanian Imams. The split was a result of an old stand-off between them and MCA officials.
In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on America, the government was forced to examine the background of foreign Islamic charities operating in the country. Some appeared on US and UN lists of organisations suspected of having links to, or funding, terrorist groups. These were closed down or expelled from Albania.
Other groups, some of whom were not on the US or UN lists, chose to leave voluntarily.
“The Arab charities responded to emergencies,” says Tahir Zenelhasani, who runs an Islamic cultural centre in Tirana which draws funding from Arab and Turkish sources.
“When the environment here became unfriendly, they felt it was better to pull out. The Turkish approach was more institutional. They clearly know how to manage.”
Islamic traditions Called Madhhabs in Arabic and Islamic scholarship, different Islamic traditions developed, interpreting Islamic law differently. There are four main schools of thought. The largest school, the Hanafi, was predominant in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. The Islamic communities in the Balkans and in Turkey have, by and large, adopted it as their official school. The Hanbali school, prevalent in Saudi Arabia, has some praying differences with the Hanafi, school, which had caused problems between youths and traditionalists in Albania. Most Salafi movements follow the Hanbali legal school, as does Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s brand of Islam. “There was more stress on form in the 90s,” says Roald Hysa, a believer who prays the traditional Hanafi way; hands held together under the navel, kneeling and with the feet kept open at the width of the shoulders. The Shafi school, predominant in parts of Egypt, was also brought to Albania by some Egyptian missionaries in the 90s. Maliki legal interpretation is prevalent in Northern Africa and some parts of the Arab peninsula, but its presence in Albania has been relatively small.
While Arab organizations propped up the cash-starved resurgent Islamic community in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism, Turkish religious doctrines have gained favour since.
Turkish Islam is regarded as culturally more in step with Albania’s Muslims and less vulnerable to radicalized religious interpretation.
Private Islamic Turkish charities established religious and non-religious schools in Albania which have become known for good discipline and high academic standards. Diyanet, the Turkish state’s Muslim affairs department, has representatives in the country who are working with Albanian officials and institutions.
“The battle within the Muslim Community has always been between a pro-Arab faction and a pro-Turk faction,” says Pirro Misha, a Tirana-based secular intellectual who monitors religious developments in the country. “It seems now that the Turkish faction is winning decisively.”
Albania’s European ambitions
While Misha has fiercely criticised the more radical expressions of religion by some of ‘the Arabs’, he is worried that the new Turkish influence might just be one element of Ankara’s increasing political and economic ambitions in the region.
“That might damage the European aspirations of the Balkans,” he says.
None but one of the current 30 members of the MCA administration have studied in Arab countries, a reversed ratio compared to ten years ago. Its three-story headquarters was renovated with a 300,000 euro grant from Turkish government’s aid branch TIKA.
A dozen Albanians study theology in Turkey every year now, and Albanian believers have asked the Diyanet, to arrange their hajj – something that was managed by Arab charities and organisations in the past.
Problems have emerged, however. When SEMA, the religious foundation run by the Turkish Gulen movement, took over the madrasa of Tirana, for example, it imposed intensive Turkish language courses.
Zenelhasani’s association complained these language classes put extra pressure on students already following study programmes crammed with Arabic lessons and religious instruction, in addition to the ordinary school curriculum.
Named after its founder, the 69-year-old Anatolian preacher Fetullah Gulen, the Gulen Movement is one of the most important religious groups in Turkey. It has a controlling interest in the country’s largest newspaper Zaman. Its followers are strongly represented within Turkey’s political administration and business elite.
The Gulen Movement has expanded internationally by building educational systems. Supporters say its stress on education and moderate practices, that emphasise incorporating secular values into Islamic worship, makes it ‘friendlier’ to the West. Gulen’s vehement condemnation of any form of terrorism or violent protest has also earned him many western allies.
Critics, however, say the Gulen Movement is simply a carefully marketed form of Islam that is superficial and presents a romantic view of the Ottoman Empire.
Neo-Ottomanism
This is a view echoed by those who distrust Turkey’s renewed influence in the country – Albania came under direct Ottoman rule for 500 years until the 1912-13 Balkan Wars – as neo-Ottomanism. They believe Turkey merely wishes to expand its influence in former territories of the Ottoman Empire.
In Albania, the Gulen movement has built a chain of non-religious schools, from nursery to university level, which are run by a non-religious foundation. The madrasas are run by the movement’s religious foundation in Albania, Sema.
Five out of seven of Albania’s madrasas are now under Sema’s management. One has been given to another Turkish group, Istanbul Vakfi of Sufi sheikh Osman Nuri Topbas. Another, a madrasa for girls in the second largest city of Durres, is run by the Qatar Foundation.
‘The Turk’, the Albanian believer influenced by Turkish Islam, is most often a youth who has studied at Gulen schools in Albania. Typically, he is a clean-shaven, courteous, jacket-and-pants wearing ‘ordinary guy’ who is integrated in society. He will be a non-drinking Muslim, but would not object to hanging out with bon viveurs at alcohol-serving bars.
The Turkish groups playing a role now, like the Gulen movement, are modern schools of thought that did not exist when Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire. Such movements emerged as Turkey sought to accommodate religious worship within a fiercely secular state, supported by the political class loyal to the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
This renewed religious influence is, of course, understandable. The Ottomans, current-day Turks, brought Islam to Albania and elsewhere in the Balkans, when they ruled an empire that stretched from Iran to the Hungarian plains in central Europe and north-eastern Africa.
On the balcony of a bar in a western suburb of Tirana, the Saudi-trained theologian Justinian Topulli acknowledges there was intolerance in the past, but stresses that the so-called ‘Arab’ faction has mellowed.
“I have friends who think of the stupidities they made back then and laugh in shame,” says Topulli, a 27-year-old father of two with a degree from the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia.
A six-angled star, an ornament that looked like the Star of David, was mysteriously erased from the oldest mosque in Tirana. A group of teenagers studying at a Sudanese-funded madrasa in Cerrik in the mid-90s had scratched Allah is Great across 17th century frescoes in Christian Orthodox churches.
The Sudanese foundation was expelled from the country for inciting religious intolerance among the students, and the madrasa was promptly given to Gulen’s Sema foundation.
‘Arabs’ marginalised
Long-bearded Topulli is one of the founders of the League of Albanian Imams. He says it was created as a reaction to what he believes is the degradation of the image of Albania’s Islamic community.
He is concerned that ‘Arab’ Albanian Muslims have been excluded from the debate, and wants the Islamic community to make room for other views on prayers styles, how to determine the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan and the celebration of Eid al-Fitr.
“We don’t want to impose our own [views], but we want to have our ideas included in the public discourse,” says Topulli.
What the ‘Arabs’ have “is mostly a problem of access,” says Besnik Sinani, who has studied the Islamic communities in Albania for his degree at New York University in the US.
“There will be [problems] if groups like the League of Imams do not have a voice in Muslim affairs,” he warns.
Olsi Jazexhi, a Toronto-based commentator on Islam and nationalism in Albania, calls “the Arabs” the “penniless ones”, who must be reintegrated within the mainstream Islamic community in Albania.
However, Genti Kruja, a senior MCA official, denies that so-called ‘Arabs’ have been excluded. “No one denies Arab-trained clergy access,” he says. “They run Albania’s most important mosques and many of the regional departments.”
The Turkish influence is definitely on the increase, while the so-called Arab one is on the wane. But many see the infighting within Albania’s Muslim community as a straightforward power struggle. The pro-Turk faction is criticised for describing the ‘Arabs’ in terms that imply support for extremism and even terrorism.
The presence of the Albanian president at the ilahi concert this year, sponsored by SEMA and the MCA, demonstrates the government’s active support for Turkish schools of Islam.
At the end of the concert, the MCA’s public relations chief – who is also a product of the Gulen education system – can be seen, along with some stage performers, thanking Topi for attending.
While official support for Turkish Islam may be politically expedient for Albania’s leadership, the MCA is fighting to maintain, even gain, credibility among its believers. Albania’s Muslims are still searching for their own religious path.
“We want an Albanian Islam,” says Ramiz Zekaj of the Albanian Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization, a Tirana-based think tank. “We cannot have one if we don’t even control our own educational institutions.”
This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence’s Alumni Initiative, established and funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation.Butchered: Xulhaz Mannan, the editor of Bangladesh's only LGBT magazine, has been hacked to death by suspected Islamist militants at an apartment in the capital Dhaka
A US embassy worker who ran Bangladesh's only LGBT magazine has been hacked to death by suspected Islamist militants at an apartment in the capital Dhaka.
Xulhaz Mannan, editor of the transgender magazine Rupban, and his friend Tanay Majumde were killed by three people who posed as couriers and attacked them with sharp weapons.
One person was also injured in the attack at an apartment in the Kalabagan neighborhood, police said.
Mannan, a USAID worker, had worked as a U.S. Embassy protocol officer.
Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, paid tribute to her colleague in a statement calling Mannan 'a dear friend'.
She also slammed the'senseless act of violence' and called on the country's government to track down his murderers.
'I am devastated by the brutal murder of Xulhaz Mannan and another young Bangladeshi this evening in Dhaka,' Bernicat said in a statement released on Monday.
'Xulhaz was more than a colleague to those of us fortunate to work with him at the U.S. Embassy. He was a dear friend.
'Our prayers are with Xulhaz, the other victim, and those injured in the attack.
'We abhor this senseless act of violence and urge the Government of Bangladesh in the strongest terms to apprehend the criminals behind these murders.'
Mannan has been behind an annual Rainbow Rally, which since 2014 has been held on April 14, Bengali New Year.
But police this year banned the event as part of widespread security measures.
Ahead of the banned rally earlier this month, Mannan said they had received threats from Islamists who posted messages online.
'They have even set up an online group to threaten us,' he said.
His death comes two days after a liberal and free-thinking professor, Rezaul Karim Siddique, was hacked to death in the northwestern city of Rajshahi.
It was the latest in a series of murders of secular bloggers and liberal activists that has left the country reeling.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack through its news agency, saying the 58-year-old professor who wrote poetry and fiction had been murdered for 'calling for atheism'.
But Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan rejected the terror group's assertion and said 'local militants' were responsible for the murder.
The LGBT community has been heavily persecuted in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
Mannan (left) ran the transgender magazine Rupban (right) and also organised an annual Rainbow Rally which this year had been banned by police as part of widespread security measures
Mr Mannan was killed by suspected Islamist militants at an apartment in the capital Dhaka (file picture, above)
But in recent years some activists have tried to increase awareness and rights.
Following Saturday's attack, hundreds of students and teachers marched on Rajshahi University's campus and blocked a highway, demanding justice.
Amnesty International condemned the killing and said those responsible must be brought to justice.
The attack somes two days after a liberal and free-thinking professor, Rezaul Karim Siddique (pictured), was hacked to death in the northwestern city of Rajshahi
'The vicious killing is inexcusable and those responsible must be held to account,' Amnesty's South Asia director, Champa Patel, said in a statement.
'This attack sadly fits the gruesome pattern established by Islamist extremist groups in Bangladesh who are targeting secular activists and writers.
'The authorities must do more to put an end to these killings.
'Not a single person has been brought to justice for the attacks over the past year.'Night Watch’s Latest Gameplay Footage Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
By Sato. October 26, 2015. 7:30am
Nippon Ichi’s upcoming cute-yet-horrifying PlayStation Vita game Night Watch is releasing in Japan just a couple days before Halloween, and Dengeki recently uploaded their play video, showing us the game’s early stages.
The video starts out with the beginning of the game, where the little girl is with her sister, who goes out to look for their pet dog that just ran off. After the older sister goes away, the little girl is left alone in the eerie night of town.
The player mentions how there’s actually a lot of things to explore, as he approaches cautiously to look for the dog and sister. Starting around the 5:15 mark, things start getting really creepy, when he notices what appears to be silhouettes on the streets.
Moments later, you begin to hear the little girl’s heart beat getting louder and faster, meaning there are monsters nearby. You might not always be able to see them, but they can appear from out of nowhere, so you’ll want to trust her feelings on that.
At the 7:30 mark, we get to see the older sister. She then tells the little girl to “come here,” then tells her to hide in the grass and close her eyes, and no matter what, don’t open them. You have no choice but to agree, and she vanishes after a strange sound. What the heck, sis?
While you can run away from some monsters, you’ll sometimes need to hide behind bushes and other objects. Once the heartbeat sound goes away, it means you’re safe to get out of hiding and back to more searching.
You’ll advance through the game by checking out different objective areas and picking up items that are needed to continue on to the next parts… that is, if you can manage to do so without getting caught by one of its many monsters.
Night Watch will release in Japan on October 29, 2015 for PlayStation Vita.It all seemed perfectly reasonable: tax the low hanging fruit of “fat cat” professional corporations to fund programs for the poor. Who could object to that?
Turns out plenty of people object. A Hurricane Harvey of resentment has landed in Canada and its torrent of political backlash is growing stronger by the day. The Liberal government will look back upon this day as the moment its political fortunes turned; the date the tide of public sentiment began to run against Justin Trudeau.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau looked decidedly uncomfortable at a recent press conference at which he justified the closing of “unfair tax loopholes” by “wealthy” small business owners, although he admitted (after receiving complaints from Liberal backbenchers) he was open to modifications to avoid any nasty unintended consequences.
The prime minister was unapologetic. With mind-numbing unawareness, he reiterated his belief that his government was helping the middle class at the expense of the privileged one percenters.
Small business owners across the country are left shaking their heads in disbelief; “fat cats”, “one percenters”? Who’s he kidding?
Small to medium sized business is the heart and soul of the Canadian economy. Not only do small business owners hire the majority of Canadian workers, they take the most personal risk and work the longest hours in Canada. Moreover, they are vulnerable in ways the Prime Minister seems oblivious to.
As for professional corporations – those corporate vehicles set up by doctors, accountants and other professionals to manage their complex business practices – they are now being singled out as “tax cheats” for pursuing options governments of all stripes have encouraged them to take for decades.
The Liberals are right in one sense: there is a tax revenue problem in Canada. But they’re targeting the wrong group and the problem is much deeper than they’re willing to admit.
The use of the term “unfair” is instructive, because it illuminates the staggering inequity that exists in taxation in our modern economy. In the 1950s and ’60s, large corporations paid approximately half of all government tax revenues, individual taxpayers made up the rest. Today, almost the entire burden of taxation has fallen on small business owners and wage-earning Canadians.
Currently large corporations are the real “fat cats”. According to official records, some of Canada’s largest and most prestigious corporations pay virtually no tax. For example, according to a Canadian Business investigation, Canadian Pacific Railway, in the decade between 2004 and 2014, had total (net) income of $7.7 billion but paid $139 million in tax over the period for an effective tax rate of 1.8 per cent.
If you’re a smart Canadian company, you’ll control your global operation out of Bermuda, the Cayman Islands or some other tax friendly jurisdiction. Manage your affairs prudently and you’ll pay virtually no tax at all on your domestic operations.
There’s two ways to attack the problem of insufficient government revenues. One, grow the economy with as yet unimagined policy changes or attack the tax problem at its source – the growing multi-national tax advantage.
The Canadian economy, like other developed economies, has not adapted to the post-industrial economy. Our capital markets regularly misdirect Canadian savings into unproductive property and stock market investment where these vital resources are unavailable to grow the new ‘intangible’ economy and help fill government coffers.
While multi-national corporations continuing to ship production, jobs and revenues outside the country and beyond the jurisdiction of the Canadian government, they still do business in Canada and present themselves as Canadian. But their contribution to our national treasury and wellbeing are tiny. Even worse, international companies like Uber, Facebook and Amazon which are ‘disrupting’ (i.e. bankrupting) many of our traditional tax paying Canadian businesses, float on a sea of global tax avoidance that is breathtaking in its scope.
Yet, who do the Liberals brand “unfair tax cheats”? Not the real tax avoiders but legions of hard working, middle class Canadian business owners.
Small business owners, particularly university-educated professionals, have been a solid Liberal voting constituency for decades. With strong links into the community and a progressive worldview, they have been essential to the Liberal Party for fundraising purposes, volunteer door knocking and voting on election night.
That’s what makes this so important as a turning point. The political blindness is staggering. Should the Conservatives wrestle this key demographic from the Liberals, it could turn the next election in their favour.
Robert McGarvey is chief strategist for Troy Media Digital Solutions Ltd., an economic historian and former managing director of Merlin Consulting, a London, U.K.-based consulting firm. Robert’s most recent book is Futuromics: A Guide to Thriving in Capitalism’s Third Wave.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.Internet provider Cox Communications maintains that it's not responsible for copyright infringements carried out by its subscribers. The company has announced that it will appeal the $25 million damages verdict in its case against music publisher BMG.
Last December a Virginia federal jury ruled that Internet provider Cox Communications was responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers.
The ISP was found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and must pay music publisher BMG Rights Management $25 million in damages.
The verdict was a massive victory for the music company and a disaster for Cox, but the case is not closed yet.
After a failed motion for judgment as a matter of law earlier this month, the ISP has now informed the court that it will take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Cox denies any wrongdoing and hopes to get a judgment in its favor at the appeals court.
Cox’s appeal notice
Considering the gravity of the case, Cox’s move is not surprising. The liability verdict has come as a shock to the Internet provider industry, as it suggests that providers have to actively disconnect repeat infringers.
At the moment, many ISPs don’t have a solid policy in place where repeat copyright infringers lose their subscription. In fact, the law doesn’t prescribe when and based on what evidence an ISP has to terminate an account.
Up until now, several Internet providers argued that only a court could determine if a subscriber is a repeat infringer, but with the Cox verdict this has now become uncertain.
After the appeal, which is expected to take several months at least, both Cox and BMG still have the option to take the case to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is using the current verdict to threaten other ISPs to forward their notices. Thus far, however, this doesn’t appear to have had much effect.Bengaluru: Kolkata giants Mohun Bagan clinched their maiden I-League title and their first domestic championship in 13 years after managing a 1-1 draw against defending champions Bengaluru FC at Kanteerva Stadium here today.
Bello Rasaq scored the equaliser to give Bagan the much-needed point and pocket their fourth national title. The title also ended their five-year trophy drought.
Incidentally, it was Nigeria's Abdul Saliu, who scored the winning goal for Bagan in the 2001-02 National Football League title, and this time too a Nigerian in Rasaq scored the much-needed goal.
Bengaluru's John Johnson drew first blood in the 41st minute as the hosts hung on to the lead into the first half. Bagan fans were nearly lost for breath when Rasaq scored the equaliser in the 87th minute to bring them back to life.
Rasaq headed the ball past the resplendent Bengaluru goalkepeer Ralte to start the celebrations back home in the City of Joy.
The first half completely belonged to Bengaluru, who made some splendid moves, thanks to their wonderful midfielders constantly feeding the strikers to have a go at the goal.
The second half belonged to Bagan who kept pushing into the defence of the hosts at regular intervals and the hosts went into the shell, defending the lead they had taken in the first half.
Despite the Bengaluru fans dominating the capacity crowd, there was nothing their players could do to stop a rampant Mohun bagan in the second half.
Earlier Ashley Westwood, the Bengaluru coach, made a bold decision to drop international and captain Sunil Chetri and fielded young and pacy Udanta Singh who bolstered the mid-field.
Bengaluru who needed nothing less than a win to lift the crown, started strongly and created a lot of opportunities in the first half.
Defender Johnson put the defending champions with a superb header to the right of the net to give the near-capacity crowd everything to cheer about.
Johnson also defended a beautiful move by Bagan in the box after he successfully denied Balwant Singh from scoring an equaliser in the two-minutes extra time.
The visitors also lost a very good opportunity for taking the lead in 39th minute when Sony Norde blasted a fast one inside the box, but the ball fortunately hit the post, much to the relief of Bengaluru.
It took 82 minutes for Sen to make his first change as he introduced Jeje Lalpekhlua in place of the listless Balwant.
Ralte kept Bengaluru in the tie as he denied Dhanachandra from a Yusa corner-kick. In the following flag-kick by Norde,
Rasaq headed home to score the elusive equaliser.
Bengaluru FC did string together a couple of attacks in the final minutes but Bagan held their fort together to earn a
well deserved draw.
PTI
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.LONDON — Troubled Canadian music retailer HMV Canada has been sold to British restructuring firm Hilco UK for $3.2 million, the company said Monday. Hilco said it will also inject $25 million in working capital to fund the Canadian management team's plans to evolve the business.
Struggling music and games retailer HMV has agreed to sell its Canadian business to restructuring specialist Hilco U.K.for 2 million pounds (C$3.1 million). ( STEFAN WERMUTH / REUTERS )
The proceeds will go to HMV's British parent company, HMV Group PLC, which is struggling to pay down debt as the music industry moves from sales of physical CDs to downloadable digital files. “We plan to immediately begin the next chapter in the growth of our business in the Canadian marketplace. We look forward to sharing more information regarding the future plans of HMV Canada in the coming weeks,” president of HMV Canada Nick Williams said in a statement. The parent company has said it plans to move away from a traditional music retailer and begin adding other consumer electronics products, such as e-readers and tablets.
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“The management team of HMV Canada has built a plan that will extend the period over which the residual hard-copy music and film market can be maintained,” said Hilco UK Chief Executive Paul McGowan. “The new product categories it is introducing to the business will help sustain sales levels during the transition of entertainment sales into the digital realm.” HMV Canada, which operates 121 stores across the country, said it plans to expand its current digital platform for consumers to include streamed content. HMV Canada launched hmvdigital.ca in 2009 where customers can choose from 10 million downloadable MP3 tracks. Hilco UK said it secured the support of all major Canadian suppliers for its plans to fund the business.
McGowan explained: “Our financial and merchandise planning teams will be assisting existing management to optimize the business. The support of the entire industry shows how important it is to extend the residual market, despite the switch to digital.” For the year ended on April 24, 2010, HMV Canada generated sales of $360 million and an operating profit of $3.7 million, and operated with gross assets of $75 million.Top Amateur Boxer Tony Losey Dies in Tank Accident
By Ryan Maquiñana
Tony Losey, regarded as the third best welterweight in USA Boxing’s national amateur rankings, was tragically killed Tuesday in an industrial accident involving a tank he was refurbishing, The Wichita Eagle reported.
Losey, a subcontractor at a steel plate fabricator in Wichita, Kansas, was standing under a tarp when the accident took place, according to the report. As the 22-year-old sandblasted the estimated 12,000-pound tank, it shifted and fell on him in a rare occurrence, per Wichita police Sgt. John Ryan.
“Sometimes the tanks are so heavy that the supports are not adequate to hold it, and starts to move, the supports can no longer hold it,” Ryan told KSN-TV, which reported that rescue crews arrived on the scene within three minutes, but could not save Losey in time.
Losey, a skilled 152-pound southpaw, had taken major steps toward turning his life around following a 2011 aggravated battery case, for which he was serving a 24-month probation sentence.
Finding refuge in the gym, the Kansan won bronze at the 2013 National Golden Gloves, silver at the USA Boxing National Championships, and even represented the United States in international competition, capturing another bronze medal in St. Petersburg, Russia, last October at the SportAccord World Combat Games.
“Tony’s a good kid, a great kid. I love him like a son, and everyone who knows Tony knows he was getting it together,” his longtime trainer Lewis Hernandez said. “His life was moving forward. He was doing good things. Big things were to come from him. It’s just a horrible, horrible thing that happened … It’s still unbelievable.”
Losey is survived by his fiancée and two daughters, per The Wichita Eagle.
Ryan Maquiñana is the Boxing Insider at Comcast SportsNet Bay Area and the Editor-in-Chief of Norcalboxing.com. He is a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Follow him on Twitter @RMaq28 or email him at [email protected].Carbon dioxide can really mess with fishes’ heads. Dissolved in ocean water, the acidic chemical turns timid young reef fish into tipsy little daredevils, researchers report April 13 in Nature Climate Change.
The findings are the first to show that carbon dioxide makes fish in the wild act just as crazy as fish dosed with the greenhouse gas in the lab, says marine biologist Astrid Wittmann of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, who was not involved with the new work.
“These are pretty major behavioral changes,” she says. “They’re absolutely surprising.”
As carbon dioxide pours into the atmosphere, the gas filters down into oceans, slowly but steadily dialing up the waters’ acidity. In laboratory tests, fish exposed to carbon dioxide–infused waters have hearing and learning problems and odd behavior issues: They seek out predators’For the first time in West Africa, a case of Ebola was confirmed on 21 March, three weeks after the first alert of a possible viral haemorrhagic fever emerged from Guinea’s Forest region.Though frightening and very lethal, relatively simple precautions can break the cycle of transmission and stop the epidemic from spreading. The European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) supports MSF, WHO and IFRC in their efforts to contain the epidemic. UPI/FILE/EC/ECHO/
GENEVA, Switzerland, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- As the death toll from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa nears 1,500, the World Health Organization said Friday that its "magnitude... has been underestimated."
The outbreak is likely on a scale larger than realized, says WHO, and attributes that to various factors including keeping infected family members at home to die, denial of infection and fear that medical quarantine will be lethal to ill family members.
"As Ebola has no cure, some believe infected loved ones will be more comfortable dying at home."
In rural villages in particular, locals do not notify health officials when a resident dies from Ebola symptoms, leading to an underestimate of the real number of cases.
Many medical facilities are overwhelmed and ill-equipped to handle the enormity of need.
In Liberia, WHO also noted a new phenomenon of "an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system" but show up at alarmingly high rates whenever a new treatment facility is opened.
WHO cited another issue affecting the accurate reporting of Ebola cases. In some villages WHO has termed "shadow zones," there are rumored Ebola cases "that cannot be investigated because of community resistance or lack of adequate staff and vehicles."
RELATED Doctor with Ebola expected to be released from Atlanta hospital
WHO said its epidemiologists in Sierra Leone and Liberia are working with Doctors without Borders and the CDC and other agencies in order to produce more accurate estimates of infection from Ebola.
As of Wednesday, WHO had recorded 2,615 cases of confirmed, possible and suspected Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, including 1,427 deaths.
RELATED Liberian neighborhood quarantined to stop EbolaVadodara: BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Dr Subramaniam Swamy, who had courted controversy earlier for calling Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) teachers and students ‘naxalites’, once again slammed the varsity terming it a ‘pagalkhana’ (mad house).Talking to media persons at the sidelines of techno-fest ‘Footprints X7’ on Sunday, he said, “Those who talk of dividing the country and removing one state of the nation and giving it to somebody else, should be termed as ‘pagals’. JNU is surely a pagalkhana.”Swamy also hit out at Congress scion Rahul Gandhi being considered as a youth leader by his party. “How can Rahul Gandhi be called a youth leader? A youth is someone whose age is between 17 years to 35 years,” he said.On the recent Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) poll outcome, he said that the BJP and Shiv Sena should forge a post-poll alliance in Mumbai and that he would work towards help build this partnership.“BJP and Shiv Sena must join hands as they are Hindutva blood brothers. I will get to work on that. On March 4, I will be going to Mumbai again,” said Swamy, addressed students on the youth renaissance for India on the last day of the national level the festival.The three-day festival is being hosted by students of M S University’s Faculty of Technology and Engineering.Swamy also said that those who assault or dishonour women should be publicly punished to reduce crime against women.During his visit, Swamy also met MSU’s senate and syndicate members where he stressed on the need of making Sanskrit education compulsory in universities across the country. Swamy was informed that the university has plans to give faculty status to Baroda Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya.As the Canadian military is inviting transgender people to join their ranks, an Ottawa human rights advocate says not all industries are as inclusive.
A Canada-wide study by Dan Irving, a human rights professor at Carleton University, suggests that transgender individuals are more likely to be denied work in customer service industries than in other industries.
Dan Irving, a human rights professor at Carleton University, said his research shows transgender workers face barriers in the workplace. (Dan Irving/Facebook)
His research found that in many cases people were fired, denied promotions or failed interviews because they would have to explain why "they didn't look like a 'normal woman' or a 'normal man.'"
"Their gender performance started to be conflated with the job performance," Irving told CBC Radio's All In A Day. "It has a lot to do with appearance."
Canadian Forces tweet a good step
After President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would reinstate a ban on transgender people from joining the U.S. military, the Canadian Armed Forces had a tweet of their own.
We welcome Cdns of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Join us! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DiversityIsOurStrength?src=hash">#DiversityIsOurStrength</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ForcesJobs?src=hash">#ForcesJobs</a> <a href="https://t.co/572KahN2Zh">https://t.co/572KahN2Zh</a> <a href="https://t.co/9In7HR4Utj">pic.twitter.com/9In7HR4Utj</a> —@CanadianForces
Though public acknowledgements like this are a step in the right direction, Irving said there is still work to be done.
"Part of it is talking to labour activists and people who could defend workplace rights," he said. "[And] part of it is to have wider conversation about how we judge people."
However, not every sour job interview or pink slip can be attributed to gender identity, Irving added.
"It would be bad … to assume that certain employers are acting a certain way because of transphobia," he said. "But these conversations need to be had."
Almost 20 Canadian Forces' members underwent sex reassignment surgery between 2008 and 2015.I support women. Buy Your Song on iTunes!! Reply
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Your Song is an awesome song and ONTD should come together to #supportwomen and get it into the top 10, and I say this as someone who thinks most of your stanning is ridiculous. Reply
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your song is such a cute bop! |
the London School of Economics
Image copyright bbc
Capitalism is alive and well, but not in the Western countries - it has migrated eastwards.
Russian capitalism is somewhat old and in need of urgent repair, but the spirit of capitalism - risk-taking, saving, investing, hard work - all those virtues have now migrated and are happily ensconced in China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan - the countries which we never thought would ever get out of poverty.
Western capitalism probably had half a century of over-indulgence - continued prosperity, full employment, almost guaranteed growth - and that in its turn meant that our costs went up and manufacturing industry migrated abroad, while finance has proved to be a fickle friend.
We have to do something to get ourselves out this crisis but that will have to be in the spirit of capitalism, not against it
We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast.
If Asia has vigorous energetic capitalism and we have tired old capitalism, we will end up paying a huge price and we will trade our prosperity for their prosperity.
Socialism died 20 years ago - capitalism lives on.
It changes its form, it migrates, it is fully global. Now we at last understand what globalisation means - it means we are just as important as anyone else. If we don't work very hard, we will lose our importance.
That is the lesson of the contemporary world.
Capitalism lives through crisis. That is how it renews and invigorates itself.
For our bad luck, capitalism has renewed itself by migrating eastwards. We are left with the debris and we have to do something to get ourselves out this crisis but that will have to be in the spirit of capitalism, not against it.By Eli McVey
Marijuana proved to be about as popular as Donald Trump in red states that voted on cannabis ballot initiatives in November, highlighting the potential for a political backlash if the incoming president looks to crack down on the MJ industry.
Five states that leaned toward Trump in the 2016 elections – Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota – had marijuana-related measures on the ballot.
In each case, with the exception of Arkansas, the cannabis initiatives received almost as many or more votes than Trump garnered.
Even in Arizona, the only one of the five states where marijuana failed at the ballot box, the number of votes in support of recreational cannabis legalization was within 2% of the number of votes for Donald Trump.
In Florida, perhaps the most important state to go for Trump in the election, marijuana legalization passed with a whopping 71% of the vote. Trump, by comparison, received 49% of the vote.
In Montana, approximately 4% more votes were cast in support of marijuana legalization than for Trump, while the count was essentially even in North Dakota.
Arkansas had the largest disparity between votes for Trump and votes for legalization, but only because of the overwhelming amount of support for Trump in the state. Legalization passed with 53% of the vote.
Trump’s position toward the industry remains somewhat unclear, as he has made comments both in support of medical cannabis and critical of recreational marijuana.
That’s created a lot of uncertainty in the cannabis industry.
A December poll conducted by Marijuana Business Daily showed that over half of executives in the cannabis industry are somewhat or very concerned about their business prospects under a Trump administration.
Much of this concern stems from Trump’s selection of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general.
Sessions’ hostility toward marijuana use is well-documented. He did little to assuage the fears of industry executives during his confirmation hearing last week, though the bright spot is that he didn’t come out aggressively against cannabis.
No matter how the new administration handles marijuana, the consequences fall squarely on President-elect Trump – and this election cycle has clearly shown that a federal crackdown would come at a political cost.
Eli McVey can be reached at [email protected]Al Gore Goes Vegan, Following In Footsteps Of Bill Clinton
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mark Lennihan/AP Mark Lennihan/AP
The decision to give up entire food groups can be a radical attempt to reform an unhealthy diet, as former President Bill Clinton demonstrated when he revealed in 2011 that he'd gone vegan, after heart bypass surgery.
But more often in this day and age, eschewing animal products is political.
And so that's why we were interested to read that former Vice President Al Gore, one of the world's most famous environmentalists, had — like his former boss — gone vegan, too.
The news appeared as a side note in an article published in Forbes about Hampton Creek, a San Francisco company that's trying to hawk its plant-based mayonnaise as a tasty alternative to the ubiquitous condiment typically made with eggs. (You can read our own Allison Aubrey's story on the same company here.)
As reporter Ryan Mac noted, Hampton Creek has attracted significant investment from venture capital firms, and "newly turned vegan Al Gore is also circling." (We tried to verify the newfound veganism with Gore himself, but his Carthage Group family company did not respond to our request for comment.)
Gore is, of course, free to eat whatever his heart desires. But since he has previously said that he has been slowly reducing his meat consumption over the past few years because of his concern about climate change, we can only assume that he's gotten more serious (and perhaps guilt-ridden) about how his purchases of meat and dairy products are hurting the planet.
In an interview in 2009, Gore said:
"It's absolutely correct that the growing meat intensity of diets around the world is one of the issues connected to this global crisis, not only because of the CO2 involved but also because of the water consumed in the process."
Gore has been beating the drum about climate change for decades, but his concern seems to be growing ever deeper. Earlier this week, the public editor of The New York Times quoted Gore as saying, "The news media should be making this existential crisis the No. 1 topic they cover."
While veganism probably seems extreme to bacon-and-cheese lovers, Gore is one of many consumers who are seeing the link between their food choices and the destruction of the planet and taking action. There are indicators everywhere, but we've noticed the Meatless Monday movement is getting ever greater traction in the U.S., and even Germany's Oktoberfest now caters to vegans.It's a longshot but it fits
Omega Force's "top secret" project that's going to be revealed on June 13 is heating up, thanks to some alterations on their teaser site. Siliconera has picked up on the blood effects that are now dripping on the logo, as well as the stark similarities of the font and background to the main title of the anime Berserk. Plus, the wording that the game is the "most brutal in [the developer's history]" lends credence to the fact that this will be a violent entry, and what property is more violent than that? Especially when you consider that blood is never a major factor in the Warriors series, we could be getting an M-rated game here.
When I saw this rumor I had to weigh in. Berserk is one of my favorite anime series of all time (definitely top five), and it's been coming back in a very big way. In addition to the fantastic Golden Arc three-part OVA in recent years, there's also a full new series coming in July that will deal with Black Swordsman arc, which was never even touched upon in the original show outside of the first episode. It would be a great fit, and the franchise deserves more than two widely forgotten games on the Dreamcast and PS2 (though it did make an appearance in Dragon's Dogma).
The timing is basically perfect -- announcing a new Berserk game at E3 to drum up interest in the anime, especially after they just tackled a reborn anime project with Arslan.
Omega Force [GameCity via Siliconera]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upA mother has thanked a 911 dispatcher who risked his job to save her young son during a frantic emergency call.
Melissa Grable was beside herself after her 17-month-old son Aidan Walker had a seizure at home in Virginia, United States.
Grandmother Cheri Grable had screamed to her to call 911, according to CBS6.
Luckily for them, Tim Webb was on the other end and he proceeded to show them how to perform CPR on the youngster, who had stopped breathing.
MORE: Violent robber jailed thanks to smoking habit
Mum Melissa Grable (L), Aidan Walker and grandmother Cheri Grable (Picture: CB6)
This was despite the Galax Police Department dispatcher not being allowed to give the instruction because he wasn’t certified to do so.
But he knew the closest ambulance was 20 minutes away and he if he didn’t, Aidan could die.
‘This is my only son, I can’t lose him!,’ mum Melissa said in the emergency phone call.
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Mr Webb replied: ‘I’m not gonna let you lose him. Put him on your kitchen table, OK?’
Aidan survived after his grandmother performed CPR on him under the instructions of Mr Webb, who had received the OK from his chief.
The family visited him in person two weeks later and thanked him for his help.
MORE: Wonga will not face criminal probe for sending out fake legal lettersOn Wednesday (17 February), Essex Cricket rolled into Chelmsford High Street for the launch of the new 2016 replica shirts. The morning was filled with fun and entertainment as the Essex County Cricket Board held bowling activities in the outdoor inflatable bowling net, an appearance from Eddie the Eagle plus ticket and Eagles merchandise giveaways throughout the day. The public also had the opportunity to purchase NatWest T20 Blast tickets which were on general sale exclusively on the day before the being available from Monday (22 February).
Radio Essex also joined the event with free giveaways and music to entertain the crowds of people in the City Centre. There was a great turnout of adults and children of all ages who gathered for the main event, which started in the early afternoon.
Essex First Team players, Tom Moore, Kishen Velani, Aaron Beard, Jamie Porter, Callum Taylor and Dan Lawrence, joined Head Coach Chris Silverwood to launch the shirts, which took place on stage in the back of a lorry provided by Essex Cricket’s Platinum Sponsor, Woodland Group.
Woodland Group were joined by fellow Club Platinum Sponsors and shirt sponsors; D&B Scaffolding, Seven Investment Management and Seetec Skills for the launch, with spectators having the opportunity to pre-order on the day.
The replica shirts this year are manufactured by Surridge Sport and available to purchase in March. However you can pre-order now in person or online here!
The shirt sponsors for the upcoming season are as follows:
County Championship:
Front of shirt & sleeve: D&B Scaffolding
Collar and reverse of shirt: Amlin
NatWest T20 Blast:
Front of shirt & sleeve: Seven Investment Management
Collar and reverse of shirt: Amlin
Royal London One-Day Cup:
Woodland Group
Trainingwear:
Seetec Skills
We present to you the new 2016 replica shirts for Essex County Cricket Club and Essex Eagles…National Geographic
(the gun is a toy). (the gun is a toy).
Recently I was describing to a friend a rather distressing, life disrupting experience I had. Part of his response was to say that he still believed in "a moral universe". I find the idea of a moral universe puzzling.
We would not speak of moral weather or of a moral ocean. Weather is easily explained in physical terms: a combination of the elements and molecules on the surface of the earth and it's atmosphere combined with heating from above and below, and rotation of the earth. There is no doubt that the resulting system is complex and difficult to predict on a small scale and/or at a long time interval. Nowadays we understand pretty well what factors are involved, and we no longer invoke unseen metaphysical entities or forces to explain it. Of course human behaviour does change weather and climate, but this is understood as being a disruption of physical elements rather than the weather as a locus of agency responding.
How then would the universe be moral? This question set off a series of reflections which I will try to trace here.
A Moral Universe?
Since it is not personified the agency of judgement becomes diffuse and vague - it is "the universe" that is somehow moral. The "universe" keeps track of good and bad deeds and ensures that everyone gets their just deserts, even if not in this life. The problem with this is obvious. If that next life person is not me, then someone else is going to experience the consequences of my actions after I'm dead. There is only a slight moral imperative here. If the person in the afterlife is me then a metaphysical soul has been introduced that is explicitly against the metaphysics of Buddhism and thus a contradiction. The vague idea that the next life person arises in dependence on causes is metaphysically more sound, but it makes the connection between the actor and the consequences of their action rather abstract. So metaphysics are often set aside to emphasise that it is "I" who will suffer in the afterlife, particularly in less sophisticated milieus. Religious Buddhists have this idea that karma rewards and punishes everyone according to their deeds - not in a personal vindictive way, but in a purely impartial and impersonal way. Each act has built in consequences that manifest. The Pāli texts warn that trying to work out the precise mechanism will drive us mad. However, various pre-scientific metaphysical mechanisms are proposed by later Buddhists to try to explain it. As far as I know they all involve belief in an afterlife, and some kind of metaphysical continuity between lives. The afterlife in particular is a requirement of any idea of a fair universe because life is patently unfair. So often the wicked prosper and the good suffer. Since this lifetime is very obviously unfair it requires that rewards and punishments be meted out in an afterlife. This basic idea was present in Egyptian religion and was taken up by Zoroastrians in Iran ca 1000 BCE. From there various small and marginal tribes transmitted this Zoroastrian idea to the Central Ganges Valley where it transformed the Vedic and Non-Vedic cultures (See Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism ). The idea of impartial and impersonal post-mortem judgement also seems to come from Zoroastrianism.Since it is not personified the agency of judgement becomes diffuse and vague - it is "the universe" that is somehow moral. The "universe" keeps track of good and bad deeds and ensures that everyone gets their just deserts, even if not in this life. The problem with this is obvious. If that next life person is not me, then someone else is going to experience the consequences of my actions after I'm dead. There is only a slight moral imperative here. If the person in the afterlife is me then a metaphysical soul has been introduced that is explicitly against the metaphysics of Buddhism and thus a contradiction. The vague idea that the next life person arises in dependence on causes is metaphysically more sound, but it makes the connection between the actor and the consequences of their action rather abstract. So metaphysics are often set aside to emphasise that it is "I" who will suffer in the afterlife, particularly in less sophisticated milieus.
The ocean is particularly resonant as a metaphor for me because I used to ride waves several times a week before moving to the UK. Surfing involves sitting out just beyond where the majority of waves are breaking, riding the swell and watching the horizon for the occasional one-off wave which is larger than the rest. Once a suitable wave is spotted one turns to face the beach and attempts to get up enough speed so that as the wave rolls along it lifts you and you end up surfing it it. Too slow and the swell just leaves you behind. Too fast and you risk it breaking on top of you. When you catch a wave the feeling is glorious, like flying. But if you miscalculate, the wave does not make any allowance. It just rolls in according to the laws of physics, oblivious to humans, fish, rocks or beaches.
Waves are the result of friction of the wind moving across the surface of the wind imparting energy to the water. The longer the pathway the bigger the wave can get. The waves I used to mainly surf had a potential path of about 2400 kms, but could get up to about 4 or 5 metres on a big day (and 2 metres was about my limit). There are much longer runs. The gigantic waves of up to 25 metres that break on the North Shore of Maui, travel almost 6000 kms across the Pacific from the Aleutian islands of Alaska. But never does a wave hesitate to break. Never does it arrive at a moment which favours any particular person based on their behaviour. Nothing we do or say can alter the brute facts of waves arriving at beaches, being forced up by the rising seabed or reef, and collapsing to create chaotic turbulent flows thus dissipating some of the energy, before exhausting itself on the shore. Why would we believe that it could? And is this not a microcosm of an impersonal universe?
The sea is not moral. So how is the universe moral? More fundamentally, how can the universe as a whole be moral when parts of it display no sign of being moral?
One possibility is that somewhere between something we perceive as local to us, and something so large it can only be an abstraction there is a transition. Most of us don't see weather in terms of agency any more, even when, as here in England, people take the weather quite personally. However, some people do see the earth as a whole as having agency. Specifically some people have understood that there is agency involved in James Lovelock's idea, the Gaia Theory, that the biosphere of our planet is self-regulating system that maintains optimal conditions for life. Despite Lovelock's objections some have personified Gaia and attributed both agency and sentience to the system that he saw and described in physical terms. So perhaps there is a scale effect?
Morality is a peculiarly human quality. As yet there is no purely physical description of morality. Morality requires that we invoke aspects of human psychology and culture that are still to some extent vague and partially understood. Ideas about what morality is and what it does are still contested across various disciplines.
I can certainly believe that people are moral, and that this affects the way they live and are treated by other people. To be moral is generally speaking to be trustworthy within a particular moral framework. To be moral is to voluntarily follow stated behavioural norms that make one reliable and predictable. To my mind it is this predictability which is advantageous in groups of humans. as well as in groups of other social animals. The stability of groups relies on members pulling together most of the time. And for much of our history this equated with survival as individuals and groups. Predictability is much less stressful. When all around is unpredictable, we benefit from reduced stress when we know we can rely on group members to behave within certain limits under given conditions. And if people don't follow the rules we can be very harsh in inflicting pain upon them.
When we say "the universe is moral" we are projecting the same kind of reliability onto the universe. Certainly the universe behaves in an ordered way to some extent. On the human scale, the behaviour of matter and energy is almost entirely predictable (it's only at the extremes of measurement both large and small that order is less obvious). But is this morality? I would argue that it is not because there is another dimension to morality, which is goodness. The moral person tries to be good, as defined by a system of morality. The norms they follow are not entirely arbitrary, but are some cultural formulation of how a good group member behaves. We know a person is good not just from their following the rules of goodness society has laid down, but also by their response to breaking the rules. A good person expresses remorse for bad behaviour.
But the universe, like the sea, simply follows arbitrary rules that are indifferent to human group survival. Sometimes that behaviour is beneficial to us, sometimes it is not. And yet it is utterly remorseless. Like waves crashing on a rock, or rain pouring down to flood and sweep all before it as a torrent, the universe follows it's own inhuman logic. It's a frightening thought and I understand why people shy away from it, but I see no sound evidence that the universe is moral. And I think this is why we humans are constantly inventing anthropomorphic intermediaries for aspects of the world over which there is no control and no expectation of trustworthiness: weather gods, especially storm and rain gods; fertility and harvest gods; water gods; etc. We've long understood that the universe is indifferent to our struggles and have sought ways to bring it to our will. Without, it must be said, very much success to date.
The Problem of Evil
theodicy (from the Greek and meaning 'God's justice'). In Buddhist jargon we would ask: Why do we suffer? I've asked this question
The problem is less extreme than the problem facing those who belief in an omnipotent Creator God. They face a God who could have designed the universe without evil at all but did not, and who could now eliminate evil but chooses not to. Evil must be part of God's plan, and therefore God must be capable of evil. Indeed some would argue that creating a universe which contains evil is itself an evil act - it certainly leads to a great deal of suffering. However, for the sake of argument let us stipulate a moral universe because this begs the same question that is required by the belief in a moral god. Sometimes called the problem of evil or(from the Greek and meaning 'God's justice'). In Buddhist jargon we would ask: Why do we suffer? I've asked this question before. In this context we might ask: why does the universe even allow for evil if it is moral? If the universe lacks agency then in what sense is it moral? If it has agency and does not act against evil, then is it immoral? I think here my friend might have meant that the universe is moral in the sense that good and evil are rewarded and punished respectively (and eventually). And that this system of reward and punishment is universal, impersonal, and impartial.The problem is less extreme than the problem facing those who belief in an omnipotent Creator God. They face a God who could have designed the universe without evil at all but, and who could now eliminate evil but. Evil must be part of God's plan, and therefore God must be capable of evil. Indeed some would argue that creating a universe which contains evil is itself an evil act - it certainly leads to a great deal of suffering.
Suffering in Buddhism is a result of not being awakened. All the Buddhist theology I have come across portrays bodhi as the natural state of the human being, and suffering as unnatural. Not explicitly in these terms, of course, but this is the gist. So there is a further question: why are we not awakened? The answer is that we are unmindful and indulge in the pleasures of the senses; that we indulge in desire and aversion. But if this is not in our interests then why do we do it? Why are we so ill-adapted to life that most of us go through life causing ourselves and others to suffer through our appalling ignorance?
Buddhists avoid this question by citing the timelessness of saṃsāra, which has no beginning and no end. One of the Dīgha Nikāya suttas describes a cyclic world with near perfect beings gradually descending into vulgarity and error over time until they become like us. Then after a while the world is destroyed and remade as perfect to begin the cycle again. However this is not a Buddhist cosmology, so much as a satire of a Vedic cosmology. It was intended to undermine the idea of a cyclic universe, though it did not entirely succeed.
Some people suggest we are actually eternally pure and perfect already but covered with "adventitious defilements". But how, if we were once perfect and behaved in ways which were perfect, could we possibly fall into the kinds of errors that cause suffering? Such a narrative appears to buy into the very narrative that is mocked in the Dīgha Nikāya. It is incoherent.
The alternative is hardly less satisfying since it says that we start off flawed and are tasked with dragging ourselves with great difficulty towards perfection over uncountable lifetimes. If the universe is moral, then according to this it is only marginally so. The question of why we are flawed at all remains unanswered and is probably unanswerable. All we can do is take stock of where we are, and continue the hard slog towards perfection with little hope of reward in this lifetime.
Sangharakshita has offered a kind of evolutionary account of this process. The lower, or biological, evolution has brought us so far, to the point of self-consciousness and now it's up to us to pursue the higher or'spiritual' evolution. Leaving aside the problematic element of teleology in Sangharakshita's theory of evolution why would we evolve a consciousness of self that lead us into such gross errors? Most evolutionary narratives are about the accumulation of traits which make us better suited to our environment, better suited to survive and pass on our genes. How do we evolve a consciousness that is so fundamentally flawed that we all act in ways that cause harm to ourselves and each other? This is not a question addressed by Sangharakshita. And I suspect he might say that his evolutionary account was a metaphor that ought not to be taken literally.
Evolutionary Religion
did evolve to suit our environment, but that once we began to employ culture, we changed our environment much more quickly than evolution could keep up. The idea is that about 10,000 years ago our lifestyles began to change as we domesticated animals and plants: for example, we lived in much larger groups and began to produce regular food surpluses. And these along with other changes lead to a skewing of our relationship to the drives which motivate us: we have many more opportunities to indulge in the pleasures of the senses. Where once those pleasurable sensations were essential to our survival, they now allow us to pursue pleasure as an end in itself. I suspect that the idea of eating purely for pleasure would not have occurred to any human before about 10,000 years ago. The better off we are, the more we tend to pursue pleasure for it's own sake. Our flaws are thus the downside of civilisation. As we raised ourselves up we simultaneously fell. This is theme in myth around the world: knowledge comes at a price. The results are not so gross as to make civilisation undesirable for the mass of people. On the whole we live longer, our children survive more often, education is widely available, we enjoy leisure to pursue pleasurable activities like the arts and sports. More enlightened societies protect the weak and vulnerable, embrace difference and are tolerant of minorities, ensure basic human rights, follow explicit laws, etc. Civilisation is definitely a step forward, though individual civilisations have a definite lifespan and all tend to follow the same story arc. And that story ends with decadence, hedonism and a general confusion of morality, followed by collapse and/or overthrow by external forces. Some argue that Europe and America show all the signs of end-stage civilisations. In my previous discussion of why we suffer I argued that weevolve to suit our environment, but that once we began to employ culture, we changed our environment much more quickly than evolution could keep up. The idea is that about 10,000 years ago our lifestyles began to change as we domesticated animals and plants: for example, we lived in much larger groups and began to produce regular food surpluses. And these along with other changes lead to a skewing of our relationship to the drives which motivate us: we have many more opportunities to indulge in the pleasures of the senses. Where once those pleasurable sensations were essential to our survival, they now allow us to pursue pleasure as an end in itself. I suspect that the idea of eating purely for pleasure would not have occurred to any human before about 10,000 years ago. The better off we are, the more we tend to pursue pleasure for it's own sake. Our flaws are thus the downside of civilisation. As we raised ourselves up we simultaneously fell. This is theme in myth around the world: knowledge comes at a price. The results are not so gross as to make civilisation undesirable for the mass of people. On the whole we live longer, our children survive more often, education is widely available, we enjoy leisure to pursue pleasurable activities like the arts and sports. More enlightened societies protect the weak and vulnerable, embrace difference and are tolerant of minorities, ensure basic human rights, follow explicit laws, etc. Civilisation is definitely a step forward, though individual civilisations have a definite lifespan and all tend to follow the same story arc. And that story ends with decadence, hedonism and a general confusion of morality, followed by collapse and/or overthrow by external forces. Some argue that Europe and America show all the signs of end-stage civilisations.
Our global civilization now exhibits many of the symptoms of earlier civilizations in their death throes. While we are far better equipped than our ancestors to prevent the collapse of our civilization, this will require a major reconfiguration of our political and economic institutions." -." - Renegade Economist
There's no doubt that our standards of living are, generally speaking, higher as a result of civilisation. But it comes at a cost and many of us are all too aware of the cost and find it too much, or almost too much. We feel uncomfortable in luxury and complaisance. We want to ask "is this all there is?" And we intuit that the answer is "no", without fully understanding the nuances or consequences of that answer.
And here's the catch. Religious dogmas such as 'the universe is moral' or 'god is good' are designed to reassure us that everything is and will be OK. If we are only a little dissatisfied with civilised life but feel trapped within it, then such dogmas will allow us to keep going. We will commit some of our time to religious activities, take on the internal (mental) and external (physical) trappings of religion, and it will help us with the conflict we experience. In particularly corrupt societies religious groups will hive off into enclaves and emphasise their religious affiliations with external signs. The Amish of the USA have limited their connections to the wider world for almost 300 years and by all accounts are much happier than the average American.
If we are thoroughly dissatisfied with civilised life we have a much greater problem, because it leads us to question the platitudes of organised religions as well. A really deep look at society reveals that it not only requires "a major reconfiguration of our political and economic institutions" but that our minds need reconfiguring at a fundamental level to take account of the slowness of evolution and the speed of cultural change. Holding out like the Amish is apparently not enough, because even they will eventually be overrun by modernity.
The role played by religion in appeasing the worries of the dissatisfied waxes and wanes. Societies go through periods of more or less homogeneous belief and periods of heterogeneity. We think the time of the Buddha was a time of diverse religious opinions and probably a time of moral relativity. An influx of Iranian tribes and Brahmins into the Central Ganges Valley where they met earlier Indo-Iranian immigrants along with peoples of Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic stock, created a melting pot. The resulting confusion is to some extent documented in early Buddhist texts. The result was a series of cultural syntheses that resulted in new orthodoxies: Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism, Jainism etc. Some of these broke away from their tribal origins and became so-called 'universal religions'. All were aimed at easing the tensions caused by civilisation. Later in another period of turmoil in India after the Huns destroyed the Gupta Empire, we saw the creation of a great over-arching religious synthesis in the form of the Tantra.
Especially in India the relationship with pleasure became suspect and distrusted. Perhaps more than in any other cultural milieu the religieux of India pursued asceticism to see if it would free them from desire - and we know that on the whole it did not. Mainstream Indian culture eventual embraced aestheticism in the form of the Kāmasūtra and theories of raga. And while Buddhist monks themselves often settle into lives of comfort, the Buddha's central message was not lost. We need to free ourselves of intoxication with the pleasures of the senses, not through pain, but through developing indifference to both pleasure and pain, and thus arriving at equanimity. But it also incorporated mystical experiences such as oceanic boundary loss - the feeling of being at one with everything, and in love with everything. Though these two seem contradictory, the latter experience tends to make people dissatisfied with ordinary pleasures and ordinary life.
Buddhism and Belief
My point here is to argue that the central goals of Buddhism, though historically linked to the idea of karma and rebirth, of an afterlife and a moral universe, do not absolutely require them. One can readjust ones relationship towards pleasure towards a more healthy lifestyle without adopting a system of metaphysics which has almost no bearing on it. Recently more and more people are stepping forward to say that they are liberated in various ways. Liberation after a long hiatus once again seems like a real possibility for Buddhists.
I know the argument against this proposition about abandoning traditional Buddhist metaphysics by rote because any time I mention it some bore pops up to say "if you don't believe in karma and rebirth, you aren't a Buddhist". But this is just as much a partial reading of Buddhism as what I am proposing. Indeed all forms of Buddhism are partial, emphasising some things and denying or suppressing others. I'm not proposing anything which is extra to the Buddhist tradition except the notion of evolution.
My response to the charge that what I propose is not Buddhism is that I do not define a Buddhist be what they believe, but by what they do and with whom they do it. I've engaged in a wide range of Buddhist practices. The Triratna Order is an eclectic synthetic school of Buddhism (i.e. a Buddhism that draws on multiple existing schools of thought, but moulds them into a new whole). And despite my hardcore scepticism I know that these practices, whatever the metaphysics, do help with the Buddhist project. Devotion to the Buddha or a Bodhisattva does help. Puja and chanting do help. Study helps. Being a member of a Sangha helps (even when it involves all of human frailty) Meditation is only the most obvious practice, but it helps too.
A Buddhist in my view is someone who does these kinds of practices, with the goal of liberation in mind, with other Buddhists. What they believe about what they are doing is entirely secondary in my view.
Metaphysics and doctrines are far less important than most people make out. If the universe is moral or not such an important question. My friend and I can disagree about this without ending our friendship. Even the definition of liberation is not particularly important. It is certainly something to constantly question and perhaps even contest, but that questioning should not get in the way of practising. But questions of doctrine are never settled. A glance at Buddhist history ought to make this clear as it is usually presented in terms of doctrinal developments based on disagreements about things people believe. Histories of practice are relatively rare and have started appearing only recently.
Buddhism, in my definition, is practice, not belief. In my experience it is through practice that understanding emerges. My most valuable insights have come in periods of retreat and intensive practice, and through intensive study and reflection. Puja is for me an easy route to bliss and a sense of interconnectedness. While awake I am most likely to lose my sense of self while engaged in an activity like writing or singing.(Updated January 2017 by Dr. Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute)
Scientific understanding of the role of humans in influencing and altering the global climate has been evolving for over a century. That understanding is now extremely advanced, combining hundreds of years of observations of many different climatic variables, millions of years of paleoclimatic evidence of past natural climatic variations, extended application of fundamental physical, chemical, and biological processes, and the most sophisticated computer modeling ever conducted.
There is no longer any reasonable doubt that humans are altering the climate, that those changes will grow in scope and severity in the future, and that the economic, ecological, and human health consequences will be severe. While remaining scientific uncertainties are still being studied and analyzed, the state of the science has for several decades been sufficient to support implementing local, national, and global policies to address growing climate risks. This is the conclusion of scientific studies, syntheses, and reports to policymakers extending back decades.
Because of the strength of the science, and the depth of the consensus about climate change, the scientific community has worked hard to clearly and consistently present the state of understanding to the public and policymakers to help them make informed decisions. The scientific community does this in various ways. Individual scientists speak out, presenting scientific results to journalists and the public. Scientists and scientific organizations prepare, debate, and publish scientific statements and declarations based on their expertise and concerns. And national scientific organizations, especially the formal “Academies of Sciences,” prepare regular reports on climate issues that are syntheses of all relevant climate science and knowledge.
The number and scope of these statements is truly impressive. Not a single major scientific organization or national academy of science on earth denies that the climate is changing, that humans are responsible, and that some form of action should be taken to address the risks to people and the planet.
This consensus is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, this consensus is an extraordinarily powerful result given the contentious nature of science and the acclaim that accrues to scientists who find compelling evidence that overthrows an existing paradigm (as Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Wegener, and others did in their fields).
In a peculiar twist, some have tried to argue that acceptance of the strength of the evidence and the massive consensus in the geoscience community about human-caused climate change is simply “argument from consensus” or “argument from authority” – a classic potential “logical fallacy.” Indeed, the mere fact that nearly 100 percent of climate and geoscience professions believe humans are changing the climate does not guarantee that the belief is correct. But arguing that something is false simply because there is a strong consensus for it is an even worse logical fallacy, especially when the consensus is based on deep, extensive, and constantly tested scientific evidence.
In fact, this false argument has a name: the Galileo Gambit. It is used by those who deny well-established scientific principles such as the theory of climate change as follows: Because Galileo was mocked and criticized for his views by a majority, but later shown to be right, current |
who died in the fire, declares,
"The way things are supposed to work in this country is that if someone is suspected of a crime, even if it is child abuse, even if it's capital murder, we give them a trial. The jury finds them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before they go to sentencing. Then a jury or a judge sentences them and an appeals court makes sure the trial was conducted with due process. We don't kill them first like what happened in Waco, April 19th."
"Denied without comment."
The day before the anniversary of the fire, April 18, 1997, the Branch Davidians asked the Supreme Court for a review but were "denied without comment." The appeal raised questions on instructing jurors regarding gun charges that they said required conviction of murder as well as the potential use of enhanced sentences such as Fatta's after their acquittals for murder.7 The judge chose not to so instruct the jurors. The Court refused to decide the issue of whether a judge or jury should decide if a defendant had an illegal weapon and differing conclusions have come from different circuit courts.
Judge Walter Smith ruled that the Branch Davidians did in fact have automatic weapons based on the FBI labs allegations that there were 48, however, errors have been reported found in FBI lab methods by the Department of Justice's Inspector General Congressional Committees.
In his article, The Legacy of Waco: The Demise of ATF and Justice Department Integrity, Jack Zimmerman describes "a totally incompetent decision (to destroy the building) made by desk-bound Washington bureaucrats. I predict none of their heads will fall. The public ought not to accept such an outcome."
Our part
Within a day or two of the fire, I was one of the few who happened to hear the retraction of allegations of child abuse against the Branch Davidians. Investigated by child protective services the previous year, they were determined to be unfounded. The documents that authorities had used to based their decisions on were null and void. The assault on April 19th "to save the children" was for nothing.
I struggled over the Branch Davidians. Media-formed images of menacing men and subservient women obedient to the demands of a megalomaniac silenced my conscience for brief periods of time, but it all boils down. Public revelation of agents in charge of the raid lying to their superiors and overall incompetence within the Treasury Department followed the candy-coated House inquiry 9 days after the fire.8 Subsequent House and Senate hearings show committee members badgering credible witnesses and further testimonies simply do not equate the proclaimed conclusion by Senator Joe Biden:
"...although mistakes were made, government forces did not do that (cause the fire.) The Branch Davidians burned themselves."
Authorities may have allowed federal agents a search warrant9 from an affidavit based on sloppy intelligence and vindictive claims of a former sect member who found alliance with the Cult Awareness Network.10 Avoiding opportunities for peaceful encounters with Koresh allowed for the over-zealous raid on 135 people under the guise of delivering the missing search warrant.11 Casualties were immediate on both sides and a 51-day siege ensued,12 including sensationalist press to demonize people whose home had been violently invaded and guide our mental images choosing such words as "compound," "fortress" and "sniper tower," as opposed to portraying the structures for what they were: a modest building of no particular strength or protection and a water tower.13 Of specific interest at one hearing was the decision to use CS gas which was banned for military use in the Chemical Weapons Convention in Paris, January 1993 by more than 100 countries, including the United States, for its devastating affects. Although authorities knew that there were no gas masks inside the building that would fit the children, they allowed canisters of CS gas, likely to explode and ignite fires, hurled into frame structure through holes punched in walls with illegally appropriated military tanks. The resulting torture of the children through the inhalation of the gas and its affects, contorting and freezing them into a seizure-like state, is documented by forensic photography.
The decision-makers abandoned their "save the children" campaign in what's been called a "modern massacre," "the bloodiest event in law enforcement history" and the worst abuse of federal authorities by government forces since 200 American Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee in 1890.
Like the Native Americans, the Davidian children have faded from our memory, as has our interest in the deaths of their parents and grandparents under the watch of the federal government. Results of a portion of a WSJ/NBC poll released in June 1995 showed Americans of the opinion that it is more important to hold hearings on militia groups than on Waco, three to one. A Canadian recently gave me his view of Americans.
"Americans would rather take leave of unpleasantness," he said, "than take action and fight for their communities and rights."
We are a nation that once called our leaders to account for, and then to end, an immoral war. The mantra of the 60's, "Question Authority" seems to have lost its punch. We haven't even questioned our media, whose primary function is to sell papers and air time while entertaining us.
The Branch Davidians and their children have become disposable people. Perhaps we are intolerant of belief systems that are "off center" of our own. We may consider the people of Mt. Carmel Center deviants not worthy of our attention. Is it better to sweep their glaring political incorrectness under the rug with the less-than-saintly David Koresh? Are our individual and cumulative consciences seared?
While former Attorney General Ramsey Clark defends the Branch Davidians as symbolizing "the eternal struggle for the right of humans to pray to their God as they see fit," others breathe a cautious sigh of relief.
"The ATF has recovered quite well as an institution—as long as there aren't too many more anniversaries, too many more discussions about Waco." Ron Noble, Undersecretary Treasury Department
Next time: What about those guns?
1Waco, the Rules of Engagement
2LA Times: Reports Say Raid Riddled with Mistakes
3Siege prompts new media policy, limits on advance notice of action imposed Dallas Morning News
4Waco, The Rules of Engagement
5Waco, The Rules of Engagement
6Jury instructions
7Jury instructions
8Video: Inside raid HQ from Waco Freedom of Information Act suit
9Search warrant and affadavit
10Cult Awareness Network
11LA Times: Reports Say Raid Riddled with Mistakes
12Transcript of Koresh/FBI negotiations
13Siege prompts new media policy, limits on advance notice of action imposed Dallas Morning NewsThe RFU is looking to build professional women's rugby in England
Wasps and Saracens are among 10 teams to be offered places in the inaugural season of Women's Super Rugby.
Saracens Women and Wasps FC Ladies have been invited to compete in England's first professional women's competition, which will commence in September 2017.
They are joined by Bristol Ladies Rugby Ltd, Darlington Mowden Park Sharks, Firwood Waterloo Ladies, Harlequin FC, Gloucester-Hartpury Women's RFC, Loughborough Students (Lightning), Richmond FC and Worcester Valkyries.
The competition's structure will see all teams playing each other on a home and away basis, with the top four teams at the end of the home-and-away season qualifying for the play-offs which follow a 1 v 4, 2 v 3 system - the two winners will then meet in the final.
All clubs will have to meet the Rugby Football Union's Minimum Standards Criteria to remain in the competition and there will be no promotion or relegation in the first two seasons of the competition.
RFU Director of Professional Rugby Nigel Melville said: "This is another significant development for women's rugby in this country.
"Women's Super Rugby will drive standards in the game, both domestically and at an elite level, and continue to encourage more women and girls to play the sport.
The Red Roses have won their first three games in the Six Nations and top the table
"I would like to congratulate the 10 clubs on their successful applications which have resulted in them being offered a place in the new competition.
"We now have the opportunity to build a world-class domestic competition, with the backing and funding of the RFU, demonstrating the union's commitment to growing the game at all levels."
RFU Head of Women's Performance Nicky Ponsford added: "We are really excited about the innovative opportunity that Women's Super Rugby gives us to reach new participants and attract new fans to the game, and we are determined to make the most of this opportunity."Rum-Bar Rum is a brand which is part of the Rum-Bar Brand family.
They have two types of rum; Overproof and Gold, plus a Rum Cream Liqueur and even a Vodka all from the Worthy Park Estate in Jamaica.
Rum-Bar Rum is the original core product and is in the Overproof Rum Category.
A direct competitor for the more established Wray & Nephew White Overproof. Similarities between Rum-Bar White Overproof and Wray & Nephew are immediate – both use the colours of the Jamaican flag – Yellow, Green and Black and come in tall clear bottles which display the crystal liquid inside.This offering from Worthy Park has a slightly more contempory feel to it. The Rum-Bar branding and the Worthy Park emblem are striking and give this rum its own clear identity.The rum is currently available in the UK in 200ml bottles at Tesco (who also stock Wray & Nephew) and online from Ashanti drinks.
All three of Rum-Bar offerings can be had including P&P for little over £60.The Worthy Park Estate discontinued rum production in the mid sixties. So not to repeat myself, more information on Worthy Park can be found in my interview with Alexander Kong along with my review of Rum-Bar Gold. Currently in the UK a bottle of Rum-Bar White Overproof 70cl will set you back £28.99. Rum-Bar White Overproof comes in at 63%. It is a blend of 3 unaged rums. Although they don’t capitalize on this fact, it is 100% Pot Still distilled rum which differentiates it from the competing overproof rums. Unlike other Jamaican rum producers Worthy Park do not use Dunder pits and they rely on their unique yeast strains and state of the art technology to produce their rums.
Which may make some of you think that this White Overproof may be refined and slightly lighter on flavour/funk. I’ve deliberately delayed reviewing this rum as I have been comparing and contrasting it to Wray and Nephew but also a Clairin from Haiti.
If you aren’t familiar with White Overproof rums, especially those from Jamaica then I will give you a little background. In Jamaica Overproof White rum accounts for around 90% of all rum sales. If 63% isn’t strong enough for you and you visit the island there are several “rum shacks” that will happlily sell you something stronger from under the counter and albeit not so legal. It is commonly mixed with a grapefruit soda called Ting to make what is often referred to as Sting-Wray. And yes it does have a sting in the tail! Worthy Park have worked very hard to try and capture some of the domestic market and are currently expanding their operations into the Global Market and are currently working on some aged expressions.
The nose on Rum-Bar White Overproof is very pungent, probably due to the 100% Pot Still feature. It is full on Jamaican funk – think Smith & Cross and the obvious Wray and Nephew. It’s vegetal almost like freshly cut sugar cane. It smells of sweet alcohol mixed with freshly cut grass – there is an almost sour slightly fermented note.
The “sweet” does not come from added sugar as sugar addition is not permitted according to the Jamaican Rum Standard.
If you add a little water you get more exotic fruits Papaya and a little Passion Fruit some fermented Pineapple.Like the Clairin’s it is more interesting to sip than outright enjoyable. It’s too much at 63% neat – it just burns and tastes of alcohol. With water you begin to appreciate the depth of flavour. Banana, Papaya, sweet Passion fruit like notes, hints of grassy vegetal agricole like notes. There is a lot going on.
It is long drinks or as an Overproof cocktail float where Rum-Bar really shines. As you can see from my first photo I have enjoyed this rum mixed with cola. It offers a very hearty rummy rum and coke. With the rum being so intense and full of flavour it also pairs very well with a variety of fruit juices. A rum “Screwdriver” (traditionally a Vodka and Orange) works particularly well. It also mixes very well with Ting – though sadly I can’t think of a name as catchy as a Sting-Wray.
As a Tiki-float it also works well giving extra oomph to any cocktail.Rum Nation released a similar rum also from Worthy Park fairly recently (with a slightly higher price tag). This I understand is roughly the same juice.
Rum-Bar White Overproof is an Unaged Overproof Jamaican White Rum – anyone buying this should not view this as a super charged Bacardi. The only similarity is the colour. If you enjoy a Sting-Wray then you might want to consider trying this instead. I personally think this might have just a little bit more flavour.Posted by Chris on October 04, 2016
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Save 20% on Unbirthday Cake and the entire Caterpillar lineup for this week only - use code FOTW at checkout!Story highlights The violin, made by Antonio Stradivari, dates to 1715 and is worth millions
The instrument belongs to Milwaukee symphony concertmaster Frank Almond
Stradivari is the world's most celebrated violin maker
What's almost 300 years old? Worth an estimated $6 million? And missing?
Answer: A Stradivarius violin stolen from Frank Almond, concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
Almond was walking to his car after a performance Monday night when an assailant used a stun gun on him, causing him to drop the instrument.
The attacker then took the violin and fled to a waiting vehicle, which was being driven by a second suspect, according to Milwaukee police. That vehicle was described as a late 1980s or early 1990s, maroon or burgundy, Chrysler or Dodge minivan.
"It appears at this time that the violin was the primary target of this assault and robbery," police said in a statement.
"It is important to note that this violin is valuable to a very small number of people in the world and is not something easily sold for what it is worth."
According to the symphony, Almond plays on a violin made by Antonio Stradivari from 1715, known as the "ex-Lipinski."
A police spokesman declined to comment on the instrument's exact cost, instead putting it in the "millions."
The Milwaukee police are working with the FBI's Art Crime Team, which specializes in high-end art thefts. The FBI team, in turn, works with Interpol to connect art dealers able to help locate stolen items throughout the world.
Antonio Stradivari was born in 1644. He set up shop in Cremona, Italy, where he made violins, harps, guitars, violas and cellos.
Before his death in 1737, Stradivari is thought to have made more than 1,100 instruments -- of which some 650 remain today -- according to the Smithsonian Institution.
He is the world's most celebrated violin maker.This research carries weight.
Millennials spend far more on food than older generations. Indeed, they drop an average of $797 per month on groceries, compared to $724 for those 37 and older, according to data released Thursday by Bankrate. And they spend $233 on both dine-in and take out meals, versus $182 for older generations.
Some of the reason for the higher spending is that millennials eat out -- either by dining at the restaurant or getting takeout -- nearly five times a week, according to a study released in June by Bankrate. That’s compared to an average of just 3.4 times per week for Gen Xers and 2.5 for Boomers, the study found.
That’s a problem for two reasons. First, it takes a bite out of your bank account. “Often, it’s the minor, habitual expenses, such as take-out and alcohol, that wreak havoc on your budget,” says Sarah Berger, a millennial money expert at Bankrate.com. And there’s little doubt that millennials could use the extra money: They’re way more likely than boomers (56% vs. 29%) to report that they often spend more and/or don’t save as much in a month as they want to, according to data from TD Ameritrade.
What’s more, dining out can lead to weight gain. When people eat out, they inhale an average of 200 more calories than when they eat at home, a 2015 study of more than 12,500 people published by Public Health Nutrition found. And government research finds that “when eating out, people either eat more or eat higher calorie foods — or both — and that this tendency appears to be increasing.” Further studies also show that people who eat out more tend to have more body fat.
Also see: Sorry, but you cannot be ‘fit but fat’
Millennials don’t need those extra calories: The proportion of people ages 18-29 who are obese has more than tripled in the past 40 years, and now roughly one in four people in this age group are obese. “The Millennial generation is the first to see rising rates of early-onset obesity-related diseases,” Dr. Susan Blumenthal writes in the Huffington Post -- and those can be expensive to treat even for those with insurance.
Of course, it’s not all bad news for millennials. They still have lower obesity rates than older generations, and there are signs that millennials are intent on saving.
This story was originally published in June and has been updated.
See the world with cash-color glasses. Get a weekly digest of personality finance: features, pop-culture and essays. Sign up here.Crack open the liberty suds, ’cause it’s Friday! Have one on me as you read this Morning Roar, because it’s always happy hour somewhere.
Tax-Exempt Scandal Fallout: Judge Rules For IRS Over Tea Party Groups
Does everyone remember the massive scandal that was uncovered revealing a depth of illegal political bias at the IRS? They discriminated against conservative groups – primarily any group associated with the Tea Party – leading up to the 2012 election by denying them tax exempt status. The Tea Party gr0ups took the matter to the courts, correctly, expecting justice for being wronged by a government agency with a liberal agenda. However, Judge Reggie Walton saw things differently, and provides one of the most ridiculous rulings and rationales that I have ever seen in my 34 years on this earth. From Politco:
“After the plaintiff initiated this case, its application to the IRS for tax-exempt status was approved by the IRS. The allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which delayed the processing of the plaintiff’s tax exempt application and brought about this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiff,” Walton said in his decision to throw out True the Vote’s lawsuit against the IRS.
So let me get this straight…because the IRS later approved the tax-exempt status, after the Tea Party Groups brought the matter to court and after the campaigns were over, they now pay no penalty? How does that make sense in any way? If I beat someone up every day for weeks, then stop when they sue me, by this rationale it’s no-harm no-foul, since I’m not currently beating them and stopped after the matter was made public. This is insanity. And it gets even better:
The judge, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, also said the groups couldn’t receive monetary relief from individual IRS officials, such as ex-IRS official Lois Lerner, because of the chilling effect it would have on tax administration.
Heaven forbid we place a “chilling effect” upon the government’s tax administration! Clearly that should weigh into a Judge’s decision on whether or not a group or groups were wronged. Again – if this was a case in which I had beaten a man, would the “chilling effect” that going to prison for 5 years would have on me permit me to walk free? No, of course not! People everywhere should be enraged by this horrible, nonsensical ruling.
Judge Reggie Walton, you’re garbage and a black mark on our justice system.
UK National Health Service To PAY People to Lose Weight
This is a headline straight out of The Onion – the UK’s National Health Service is actually going to pay people to lose weight. With taxpayer money. Fat people, getting paid by the government with citizen’s money…to go on a diet. I had to type that out again to make sure that even I believed it and I’m the one writing this article. From The Mirror:
Overweight people will receive cash or gift vouchers if they lose weight – as long as they have jobs. Under radical NHS plans to tackle the obesity crisis employers will get funding to offer incentives for staff who slim down. The NHS, which revealed the plan as part of a shake-up of the healthcare system, already pays for seriously obese patients to go to slimming classes. But this would be the first time it gets companies to help tackle obesity. Mr Stevens admitted the NHS would “have to provide” national funding “to get the first employers to do it”.
This is the problem with government getting into healthcare – because so many people in the UK are fat, health costs are rising, which causes the amount the government pays to rise. So, what does it do? It doubles down by offering to pay these overweight people to lose weight, which may help in a tiny way, but is more likely to be a drop in the bucket for overall lowered healthcare costs while putting out far more money than it brings back. And how exactly is this fair to those who are healthy? Tax dollars taken away to pay for those who don’t take care of themselves, yet there is no benefit to those who are already healthy. How about a nice tax cut for them? Not bloody likely.
NEWS TEAM…ASSEMBLE! Rand Paul Convenes 2016 Presidential Strategy Squad
Rand Paul’s chief strategist Doug Stafford has begun to reach out to the top political minds and powers in Rand Paul’s sphere to start the wheels in motion for a 2016 presidential run, according to the National Journal:
Stafford has told invitees to reserve Nov. 12 on their calendar both during the day and into the night. Paul himself is expected to attend some of the meetings. “This is the come-to-Jesus before the planned launch,” said one Paul insider, who has been invited to the gathering. The meeting of the Kentucky Republican’s kitchen Cabinet has been kept under wraps, with most of the invitees not even told who else will be there. Stafford has yet to circulate a formal agenda, though few on “Team Rand,” as Stafford sometimes calls the group, need to be told the talks will focus on a presidential run. “As I understand it, this meeting is to both literally and symbolically change focus after the November election,” said another invitee, “and begin to take deliberate action toward a potential 2016 run.”
The writing has been on the wall for some time now – and if Rand is in the running, 2016’s race should be one that’s not going to be short on fireworks. We recently debated whether or not Rand would get our vote (and the ups and downs of his being President) in our last recent “Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor” podcast.
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Is it chicken feet? Crushed up chicks? Any and every bit of any bird that you could fathom? Er, no, actually - as explained in My Virgin Kitchen's latest YouTube video, 'A DAY WORKING WITH McDONALD'S'.
Stage One YouTube/My Virgin Kitchen
While the video is an #ad and has been sponsored by McDonald's, we're going to make the assumption that the factory the YouTuber visits, and the processes he watches, are legit.
Stage Two YouTube/My Virgin Kitchen
"I was expecting it to be a bit more complex, but the actual structure for how the nuggets are made is very simple, and the stations in the factory replicate that", he begins at around 3.52 minutes in the video.
Stage Three YouTube/My Virgin Kitchen
"The chicken breast comes in and is inspected by hand before being turned into chicken mince. Now the folks at McDonald's are happy to show [this process]. It's exactly the same thing [as mincing chicken at home], just on a bigger scale. Just chicken breast ground up and then marinated.
Stage Four YouTube/My Virgin Kitchen
"Yes, marinated for extra flavour. It is then compressed and flattened to make pressing the nugget shapes achievable. There are a variety of stages here, [including] a gentle breadcrumb and batter, then flash frying, before going through a slow freezer. Then they're ready to be bagged up."
Stage YouTube/My Virgin Kitchen
The chicken nuggets are then fried straight from the blue bags, and then put in a warming cabinet until someone orders them.
Is anyone else very keen for a McDonald's right now? Same.Gameweek 3 Defensive Potential: Form vs Fixture vs Odds
Welcome to our new defensive potential article that compares each teams defensive form, fixture difficulty and bookies odds for a clean sheet ahead of Gameweek 3.
As we’re still at such an early point in the season, the data range isn’t as large as we’d like therefore somewhat distorting the results. In future articles we intend to include each teams last four fixtures (two home, two away) to give a more accurate reading.
Each Premier League team has been rated 1-20 (1 being the best in the league, 20 being the worst in the league) based on form, fixture and odds. They’ve then been totalled up and colour coded to easily visualise which teams have a good chance of a clean sheet in Gameweek 3.
NaturalFootyFan is on hand to walk you through each category whilst sharing his infinite pool of defensive wisdom in the form of tips and strategy.
Gameweek 3 Defensive Potential: Form Vs. Fixture Vs. Odds
Best Defensive Form Ahead of Gameweek 3:
Team Goals Conceded Chances Conceded Big Chances Conceded MUN 1 19 0 TOT 1 15 1 BRN 1 35 2 HUL 1 28 5 LEI 2 16 0
Jose Mourinho hasn’t taken long to stamp his mark on Man United’s back line and they are getting stronger every time they step onto the field. With David De Gea, Daley Blind and Eric Bailly making up the spine of the team, they’ve struck up a partnership which has been fundamental in United’s improved displays.
Not to mention Antonio Valencia and Luke Shaw finding form on the flanks. The attacking pair have been impressive at both ends of the park with the latter picking up an assist and two bonus points in Gameweek 2.
Despite looking a bit lacklustre going forward, Tottenham have carried their defensive solidity of 2015/16 into the new season. Pochettino’s men have conceded just 15 chances in their opening fixtures and haven’t let Hugo Lloris’ absence hamper them.
Kyle Walker and Danny Rose are always a threat going forward with the former already increasing in price after banking 13pts in two matches. Elsewhere, Toby Alderweireld had a point-blank header saved versus Crystal Palace, but will definitely see more opportunities come his way.
Burnley and Hull rank inside the top 4 in our form chart, however, we don’t recommend investing in their sides this week with fixtures versus Chelsea (a) and Man United (a) respectively.
Best Defensive Fixture For Gameweek 3:
Team Vs. Goals Scored Big Chances Created BOU CRY 0 2 CRY BOU 1 0 SUN SOU 1 0 LEI SWA 1 3 SWA LEI 1 4
In terms of which clubs have the most attractive fixture in Gameweek 3, based on statistics, there is a lot of overlap.
Bournemouth and Crystal Palace stuttered through their first couple of matches with just one goal and two big chances created between them. As the sides come head-to-head, we are expecting an open spectacle… not ideal for clean sheet potential.
Nevertheless, if you feel inclined to back either side’s defence, then we recommend Crystal Palace. The signing of Christian Benteke is what swings it for us – there will be a buzz around Selhurst Park and the big Belgian will be desperate to put things right after a poor spell at Liverpool.
Leicester’s home fixture against Swansea will be an interesting contest after both sides have appeared more or less comfortable at the back, but toothless up top. Just like last season, if Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy turn up, then The Swans’ clean sheet chances are wiped.
Despite Sunderland’s surprise inclusion, they aren’t worth considering. They come up against a dangerous Southampton attack featuring the likes of Thierry Henry (Redmond) and Dusan Tadic.
The Black Cats also play in the League Cup three days prior to kick-off, which further decreases their chances of a clean sheet with fatigue setting in.
Clean Sheet Odds For Gameweek 3:
Team Clean Sheet Odds Implied Chance CHE 1.67 59.88% MUN 1.91 52.36% SOU 1.95 51.28% MCI 2.05 48.78% LEI 2.10 47.62%
The bookies odds are always a great source for unbiased predictions and with Antonio Conte’s Chelsea leading the pack, there’s not much to argue about.
The Italian coach obviously knows how to grind out a result, winning his first two Premier League matches by by a single goal. Moving forward he will turn his attention to clamping down on goals conceded against the run of play.
They will dominate possession versus a Burnley outfit who would be content with a 0-0 before kick-off. As we mentioned, the goals Chelsea have conceded thus far have been unforeseen, so there’s a high chance of them securing a clean sheet on the third attempt.
To back up their number one defensive form ranking, Man United come in at second according to the bookies. They make the trip to Hull full of confidence having picked up six points out of six.
Just like United, relegation favourites Hull have also secured maximum points. Mike Phelan’s injury-plagued squad are punching above their weight in third position and don’t have the numbers to rotate properly in their midweek League Cup fixture. Ibra will be ready to pounce!
Southampton and Manchester City are another two of our and the bookies favourites to keep a clean sheet in gameweek 3. The former face a well-drilled, but offensively weak Sunderland side, while City are outright favourites to get the better of West Ham.
Over the last couple of weeks, Fplbet writers: @NaturalFootyFan & @jamieFPL have won a combined amount of just over £500. If you think you know your fantasy football, head over to Bet4theBest, pick your best XI (no budget) for Gameweek 3 and enter one of the leagues. Good luck!A woman requested a "white doctor without brown teeth" at a clinic in Mississauga, Ontario on June 18. (YouTube/Hitesh Bhardwaj)
As the woman stormed through the Canadian medical facility, she was adamant: She wanted a white doctor to treat her son — not a brown one and not one with an accent.
“So you're telling me that my kid has chest pains, he's going to have to sit here until 4 o'clock?” she told an employee at the walk-in clinic in Mississauga, Ontario. “Can I see a doctor please that's white, that doesn't have brown teeth, that speaks English?”
The employee responded that the facility couldn't suddenly summon a Caucasian pediatrician.
But the angry mother was steadfast.
“You're telling me there's not one white doctor in this entire building?” she continued. “Well, what's the closest that you have to speaking English?
“Being white in this country, I should just shoot myself. My kid is part not-white, so can we get somebody to see him that at least speaks English?”
The Sunday afternoon incident was captured on video by a man — himself an immigrant, according to HuffPost Canada — waiting to see a doctor at Rapid Access to Medical Specialists in Southern Ontario, near Toronto.
The episode has sparked outrage throughout Canada.
“I couldn't help but record the video,” Hitesh Bhardwaj told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “This is bad, this is inappropriate and shouldn't go unnoticed. I couldn't stop thinking about it. The whole episode kept on repeating in my head, I was very upset. You know I can't even define the feeling.”
[Yelling ‘I hate white people’ and punching one isn’t a hate crime, Canadian judge rules]
Kathleen Wynne, the premier of Ontario and the leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, called the video “disturbing” and said it raised questions about how far Canada had come in achieving racial harmony.
“I think we all should be shocked,” she said. “If we're not shocked, that is a real problem. Sometimes we make assumptions about how far we have come about being an inclusive society and then when an incident like this happens … we have to step back and say what is going on?”
Today I was asked about a disturbing video recorded in a Mississauga doctor’s office. Racism and hate have no place in Ontario. pic.twitter.com/ScsXSia4OL — Kathleen Wynne (@Kathleen_Wynne) June 21, 2017
Nadia Alam, the president-elect of the Ontario Medical Association, said that the vitriol the woman expressed was extreme, but that her sentiment wasn't uncommon.
“I've seen it through medical school, I've seen it through residency, I've seen it on and off through my practice,” Alam told the CBC. “Sometimes it is openly like, 'I'm not going to see you because you're this skin color or you have this accent. I want to see somebody else.'
“You think that you're a Canadian, that this is your country, this is where you belong. And when someone accuses you that way or treats you that way, you feel like an alien.”
More than half of Mississauga's 700,000 residents are ethnic minorities, according to the Canadian Census, and more than 20 percent hail from South Asia.
Police said they were called about a disturbance at the clinic on Sunday.
Peel Police Constable Mark Fischer told CTV News that a woman at the clinic was “being verbally aggressive” in demanding a white doctor.
“The officer found that no criminal offense has been committed or was in the process of being committed,” Fischer told CTV, so the case was closed.
Police said a doctor at Rapid Access to Medical Specialists eventually treated the boy.
A woman who answered the phone at the clinic on Wednesday said officials there had no comment about the incident.
But RAMS officials distributed a statement to Canadian media outlets, saying: “The clinic is proud of the quality of medical care provided at this clinic.”
In the video, clinic staff were polite to the ranting woman. But at some point, people in the waiting room couldn't take it anymore.
They told her to go to another facility if she didn't like the color of the doctors at RAMS.
They defended doctors with accents.
And at one point, another woman got in the ranting mom's face and said: “Your child clearly has more issues with you being his mother than him needing to see a doctor. You are extremely rude and racist.”
But the ranting woman turned her ire on Bhardwaj and the other people who confronted her.
“You're brown,” she shouted. “You're brown. You're all attacking me because I'm white.”
[‘I was just reading a book’: Canadian cops called on black man reading C.S. Lewis in his car]
The woman in the video has not been publicly identified, though CTV News reported that “two women who were friends with her until a few months ago … recognized who was in the video right away.”
CTV noted that the woman from the video “didn't respond when asked for comment.”
A sociology professor from Ryerson University in Toronto said “everyday racism” is “beginning to resurface” in Canada.
“I think people are feeling that there's a little bit more space now to question who's in positions of power, who's actually getting the jobs, those sorts of things,” Cheryl Teelucksingh told CBC News, which added:
In response, Teelucksingh believes, nonwhite professionals will probably revert to demonstrating their credentials by saying things like “look I went to school this long and did this sort of specialty. “They're legitimizing not just |
ane Juice
Sea Salt
Everything in there is pretty damn good for you minus the organic evaporated cane juice. But even then, there is only 2g of sugar per serving so we are not talking about a lot of sugar here. In addition to being gluten-free, the bars are also free of yeast, dairy, and trans-fats. They are also a good source of Omega-3’s.
The Tosi SuperBites also come in pieces instead of one big bar. I like this because I hate breaking apart these types of bigger bars and having crumbs spill everywhere. Plus it helps me portion properly.
I tried the Tosi Cashew SuperBites first. I had it in the afternoon as a pick me up snack before dinner and before I went to go workout. It was crunchy and hearty and tasted like cashew. Yum. It was pretty filling and I liked the taste. The bar is packed with nuts and seeds, so naturally some got stuck in my teeth and I washed them out with water.
The Tosi Cashew Superbites lasted me a couple days with having a piece here and there as a snack. The next flavor I tried was the Tosi Almond Superbites. I liked the almond flavor a lot better. I generally prefer almonds over cashews so I think its a personal preference. While I am typing this review, my husband is trying a piece of the Almond Superbites. He says it “Tastes very light and has a nice crunch to it.”
Overall I think these Tosi Superbites are an excellent healthy, gluten-free snack option that will give you good, solid energy. Tosi SuperBites are new, so they aren’t on Amazon yet. If you are interested in purchasing them, you can purchase them by visiting the Tosi website here. You can buy a pack of 12 for $30 which I think is pretty good considering one pack lasted me a couple days. If you are interested in purchasing, the kind folks at Tosi have offered 15% off for my readers. Use the code TOSI15 to receive 15% off your order. There is also a flyer below for 10% off. But why get 10% off when you can get 15% off?
Tosi also has several other health related products on their site, but I have only tried the SuperBites so those are the only products I can vouch for.
I’m happy to have another healthy snack like this in my wheelhouse and look forward to seeing them for sale in grocery stores and on Amazon.
What about you? Have you tried Tosi SuperBites? What do you think? Post in the comments and let me know.
**Disclosure: I received a free sample of the Tosi Almond SuperBites and Cashew SuperBites for review. **Whether the state of Colorado should be able to sentence people to die came to the forefront Tuesday afternoon as several dozen people crammed into a House committee room for more than nine hours of emotional testimony on a bill to repeal the death penalty.
At the end of the night, the proposal was laid over until later in the session and no vote was taken.
The measure, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Claire Levy of Boulder and Jovan Melton of Aurora, would repeal capital punishment in Colorado for offenses committed after July 1. House Bill 1264 is also co-sponsored by Rep. Kevin Priola, a Republican from Henderson.
Lawmakers attempted to repeal the death penalty in 2009, but the attempt failed by a single vote.
House Bill 1264 would not impact the three men already on Colorado’s death row, or someone charged with a crime committed before the proposal became law. If passed, the death penalty would no longer be an option for prosecutors, only life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The last person the state put to death was Gary Davis in 1997.
A mixture of proponents, who donned purple ribbons, and opponents sat shoulder to shoulder Tuesday in the House Judiciary Committee room to relay messages on capital punishment that lasted late into the night.
“When someone you love is murdered, it just smashes your soul,” said El Paso County resident Amy Plapp, whose brother Steve was killed in a Texas apartment in 1993.
At the time, prosecutors told Plapp that her brother’s murder was not heinous enough to warrant the death penalty.
“It didn’t matter because another death would have been more damage for our family,” she said. “It would have just been several more years of heartache we couldn’t take.”
Plapp was among several victims’ families, faith-based leaders and even a former death-row inmate who testified Tuesday in favor of the repeal measure, noting racial disparities, costs and the emotional toll as reasons they’re against the death penalty.
“You can release an innocent man from prison, but you cannot release him from the grave,” said Randy Steidl in testimony. Steidl was on Illinois death row for 12 years before he was released from prison because a federal judge threw out his conviction because evidence was withheld in his trial.
Meanwhile, Maisha Pollard, whose brother Javad was killed in 2005, said repeal of the death penalty is not something that should be left up to state lawmakers.
“It’s a decision that should be made by every victim who has had to sit in court. It’s a decision that should be for every mother who has had to bury a child,” said Pollard, the daughter of Rep. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora.
The debate over Colorado’s death penalty is an issue that has divided Democratic lawmakers. Fields on Monday introduced a measure to have voters decide in 2014 whether to repeal the death penalty, which will be heard in a House committee Wednesday.
“The citizens should weigh in on this,” Fields said. “I don’t personally believe this is up to lawmakers to decide.”
Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler said the repeal of the death penalty makes it tougher to seek justice.
“Repeal of the death penalty makes it harder to find justice for the worst-of-the-worst cases,” Brauchler said.
By April 1, his office must decide whether it will seek the death penalty against James Holmes, the man charged with killing 12 people and wounding 58 others in an Aurora movie theater in July.
Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, the ranking Republican on the judiciary committee, said he believes the repeal measure will pass through committee, but he called it a “wrongheaded” decision.
“My problem is that the death penalty is simply appropriate,” Gardner said. “For example, people serving life sentences who murder a corrections officer or a fellow prisoner, what do we do with those people? We have to have a deterrent for these people, and it’s the death penalty.”
Gardner noted Colorado does not frequently impose capital punishment.
“If we were in a state that does it frequently, then the criticism would be it’s done excessively, and we should repeal the death penalty. Since we’re in a state where it’s done infrequently, the argument is, ‘Well, we don’t do it much, so we should repeal it,’ ” he said.
Since 2007, five states — Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York and New Jersey — have repealed capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Last week, legislators in Maryland voted to repeal the death penalty.
Kurtis Lee: 303-954-1655, klee@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/kurtisaleeUntil Friday, if you were a freshman at the U.S. Air Force Academy, you would have concluded your Basic Cadet Training by reciting this Honor Oath:
“We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. Furthermore, I resolve to do my duty and to live honorably, so help me God.”
It’s that last clause that Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation fought to remove for so long and they just got their wish:
On Friday, the AFA released a statement saying they had decided to make the final clause of the honor oath optional. The AFA statement read, in part, “Here at the Academy, we world to build a culture of dignity and respect, and that respect includes the ability of our cadets, Airmen and civilian Airmen to freely practice and exercise their religious preference –- or not.”
This is a completely sensible change. Religious students are welcome to add the clause in if they choose but no one is forced to say it against their will. Who could possibly be against that?!
Oh. Right. Fox News Channel, where Megyn Kelly discussed the story with Mikey Weinstein before the final decision was made:
Oh! And also Fox News Channel, wherediscussed the story with our friendof American Atheists and two other religious blowhards (beginning at the 3:56 mark):
Carlson didn’t seem to understand that no one was prohibiting religious cadets from saying the phrase if they wanted to:
Carlson: “America is 78% Christian. Dave, are you honestly gonna tell me, when we have a fighter pilot up trying to save our nation… that he or she will not be able to say ‘So help me God’ and you’re okay with that?” Muscato: “… there is nothing stopping them from saying that to themselves or even saying it out loud.” Carlson: “But why does one person go to change what the majority of Americans believe?” Muscato: “Because we have the First Amendment… Just because you have a majority of Christians in this country doesn’t mean that Christians get to decide what happens for everybody.”
Dave wins this round by being honest.
Every else loses for making this a bigger deal than it really is.
This change in the oath benefits everybody while the old oath was a slap in the face to atheists who enlist in the Air Force. It’s incredible how offended and outraged the right-wing fanatics get whenever people opt for more tolerance. Inclusion for all means less Christian privilege for them and they can’t take it.
(Image via Shutterstock)APRIL
35.2 IP/22 H/12 R/10 BB/25 SO/5 HR
ERA 3.03/WHIP 0.90
RATES: 16.30% H/8.89% R/7.41% BB/18.52% SO/3.70% HR
PER 9: 5.55 H/3.03 R/2.52 BB/6.31 SO/1.26 HR
PER PA: 6.14 PA/H, 11.25 PA/R, 13.50 PA/BB, 5.40 PA/SO, 27.00 PA/HR
PITCHER RATING: 86.44
Pitcher Rating equals
GOOD
3 Quality Starts in April
3 starts with 4 or less hits allowed
4 starts with 2 or less walks allowed
Complete Game on April 19th, faced the minimum in loss to Cardinals
BAD
Loss on April 19th, pitched a great game and faced Cardinals ace Adam Wainwright in a pitchers duel.
2 starts with 6 or more strikeouts
3 starts with at least a home run allowed, was in consecutive starts
IDEAL MAY START
7.1+ INNINGS
4 HITS
3 RUNS
WALK
4 STRIKEOUTS
NO HOME RUNS ALLOWED
LINE CHARTS
Leake’s Opening start wasn’t one of his greatest starts and the start against the Cubs not much better, but has since has a 44.03% decline in this category and ended the month of April with a 3.03 ERA
The WHIP is something of a surprise as Leake is 6th in the National League in this category and teammate Johnny Cueto is 3rd in the National League, behind leader Max Scherzer and Zack Greinke.
The H Rate has seen a 26.04% decline since April 13th and it’s at 16.30%
The R Rate has seen a 19.26% decline since April 24th and it’s at 8.89%
The BB Rate had a 87.17% decline from April 8th-24th and it’s at 7.41%
The SO Rate has been declining at 8.25% since April 24th and it’s at 18.52%
The HR Rate has been declining at 19.26% since April 24th and it’s at 3.70%
The H/9 has been declining at 39.58% and it’s at 5.55
The R/9 has been declining at 44.03% and it’s at 3.03
The BB/9 has been declining at 104.18% and it’s at 2.52
The SO/9 has been declining at 11.85% since April 24th and it’s at 6.31
The HR/9 has been declining at 22.43% since April 24th and it’s at 1.26
AdvertisementsNEWARK, N.J. (AP) Jalen Brunson has more than held his own in replacing Ryan Arcidiacono at point guard for No. 2 Villanova.
The sophomore had 22 points and a career-high 10 assists and the defending national champions clinched a tie for an unprecedented fourth straight Big East Conference regular-season title with a dominating 92-70 victory over Seton Hall on Saturday.
”I am just stepping into the role that I am comfortable in,” said Brunson, who hit all seven of his shots from the field. ”I had a back seat to Archie last year. It’s what the team needed. It worked out pretty well, but I am just stepping into a role Arch had last year and trying to do the best I can.”
The results have been pretty good.
The win was the seventh straight for the Wildcats (26-2, 13-2), and this one was impressive. They shot a season-high 67 percent from the field and used a 22-1 spurt bridging the halves to take command in handing Seton Hall (16-10, 6-8) a lopsided loss that leaves it on the bubble for the NCAA Tournament.
”As I said, when you make shots like that, any team is going to be good,” Villanova coach Jay Wright said. ”We haven’t shot the ball that well in a while. I think that was the big difference in the game.”
Kris Jenkins added 22 points, Josh Hart had 19 and Mikal Bridges 15 for Villanova, which led by as many 27 points in a game that was basically over early in the second half.
”We are young and we can get a lot better,” said Hart, one of three seniors on the team. ”I think this team has a better ceiling.”
Khadeen Carrington, who had a career-high 41 points in an upset of No. 20 Creighton on Wednesday, led the Pirates with 22. Angel Delgado had 19 points and 12 rebounds.
Delgado said the difference between beating Creighton and losing to Villanova was that the Wildcats didn’t miss any shots.
”It’s a great team, that’s why they won the national championship, and they probably will be in the final (four) again this year, too,” Delgado said.
Remarkably, Seton Hall was in the game in the waning minutes of the first half, drawing within 31-30 on a 3-pointer by Desi Rodriguez with 2:47 to go.
Brunson, who scored 18 points in the first half, then took over. He hit 3-pointers to ignite and end an 11-1 run to end the half, and he had assists on a 3-pointer by Bridges and a layup by Jenkins.
”I thought we were in good position,” Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard said. ”But in the last 3 minutes of the first half, Jalen Brunson flipped the switch.”
Wright said Brunson has a way of controlling games.
”When he sees that we need scoring from that position, he does it,” Wright said. ”When he sees that we need him to organize us, he does it. That’s the beauty of a great point guard. Some guys see it that they need a score but they can’t score, or some guys are scorers but they know they’ve got to run the offense and they struggle with it. But he’s great at both, and I thought that was really apparent today.”
Eric Paschall led the 11-1 run to open the second half, hitting two 3-pointers and converting a three-point play that opened a 53-31 lead.
It was show time for Villanova the rest of the way.
BIG PICTURE
Villanova: The Wildcats lost the Big East Tournament title game to Seton Hall last season, and they have not forgotten. They have blown them out twice this season.
Seton Hall: Willard said the Pirates needed to win two of three on their home stand to have a shot at the NCAA Tournament. After beating Creighton and losing to Villanova, it will come down to Xavier.
OTHER WINNERS. OTHER NUMBERS:
Pittsburgh and Connecticut were the other teams to win three consecutive Big East regular-season titles. The Panthers won in 2002-04, while the Huskies took titles in 1996-98. Pittsburgh is now a member of the ACC. UConn is in the American Athletic Conference.
Villanova’s previous high for shooting from the field was 65.3 percent against Marquette on Jan. 7. Brunson’s previous single-game high for assists was eight against Xavier on Feb. 11.
Delgado has 19 double doubles in his last 20 games.
UP NEXT
Villanova returns home to face No. 24 Butler on Wednesday night.
Seton Hall finishes a three-game home stand, playing host to Xavier on Wednesday night.
—
More AP college basketball: www.collegebasketball.ap.org and https://twitter.com/AP-Top25.WASHINGTON -- The FDA has issued a class I recall for the Animas 2020 insulin infusion pump due to false alarms that may trigger, cease device function, and cause serious adverse events.
All lots of the pump manufactured from March 1, 2012 to Nov. 30, 2012 may contain a malfunctioning component that can trigger a false alarm or warning, which requires the user to "complete the rewind, load, and prime sequence to clear this alarm," according to the agency.
Patients who do not disconnect the pump from their body before undertaking these steps risk an unintended delivery of insulin, which can lead to hypoglycemia or other serious adverse events and death, the FDA stated.
The false warnings indicate "loss of prime," "occlusion," or "no cartridge detected" and may require the user to rewind the motor, load the cartridge, and prime the infusion set to clear the alarm.
The pump also has a software malfunction that will prevent it from working past Dec. 31, 2015.
The device recall was initiated on Jan. 3, 2013, when Animas notified its customers who purchased the pump about the problem and offered a free replacement.
Class I recalls affect devices with a reasonable risk of serious adverse events or death with use.
2013-04-06T17:00:00-0400Warren to head launch of financial protection bureau
Elizabeth Warren, who leads the panel overseeing the federal bank bailout, will take an advisor's role to the Treasury secretary that does not require Senate confirmation, sources say.
Obama adopted the idea last year when he unveiled a sweeping proposal to overhaul financial regulations, and it quickly became the controversial centerpiece of the legislation. He has said that she is a leading candidate to be named as its first director, an appointment for a five-year term that requires Senate confirmation.
Warren, 61, is an outspoken consumer advocate who has gained widespread attention as head of the watchdog panel overseeing the $700-billion bank bailout fund. An expert on bankruptcy, she proposed in 2007 the creation of a federal agency to protect consumers in the financial marketplace.
Elizabeth Warren: An article in the Sept. 16 LATExtra section about President Obama's appointment of Elizabeth Warren to help launch the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included a reference to Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Sanders is not a representative. He is a U.S. senator from Vermont.Warren could still be nominated as the director, but the Treasury appointment will allow her to shape the formation of the agency in the coming months, a top priority of Obama, without waiting for Senate approval, the officials said late Wednesday. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Reporting from Washington — President Obama, sidestepping a possibly heated confirmation battle, will appoint Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to the Treasury Department to launch the government's powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to two Democratic officials familiar with the decision.
Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of Warren's strongest Senate supporters, applauded Obama's decision, which he said effectively makes her the agency's temporary head.
"The American people are tired of being ripped off by large banks and financial institutions and, in professor Warren, they finally will have someone in a position of power who can protect their interests," he said.
But Republicans would strongly oppose her nomination as permanent director.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) has said he opposed Warren's nomination because she is not objective on consumer issues. And Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) wrote to Obama earlier Wednesday urging him not to circumvent the intent of the legislation to have the Senate confirm the agency's head.
"The individual who heads this bureau will be able to make rules, with ultimately no checks and balances, that could have broad-reaching implications for the U.S. economy as it relates to accessing credit, social justice and the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking system," Corker wrote.
Corker and many other Republicans have said an activist such as Warren should not be named to such a powerful position with little congressional oversight.
Warren's expertise and passion were derived from three decades of bankruptcy research. In the mid-1990s, she was chief advisor to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She co-wrote a best-selling book, "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke," with her daughter, and has been a frequent guest on television talk shows, where she is credited with making complex issues understandable.
Congress narrowly approved the financial overhaul package this summer despite Republican opposition that focused on the consumer agency. The bureau will have broad powers to write and enforce rules protecting consumers in obtaining mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.
Republican leaders and leading industry groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the agency would constrict credit and intrude on the rights of people to make their own financial decisions.
As the agency's most vocal advocate, Warren has been touted by supporters of the legislation and consumer advocates as the best choice to be its initial director. Obama and top administration officials have praised her for coming up with the idea and helping push it into law.
"Now, the idea for this agency was Elizabeth Warren's. She's a dear friend of mine. She's somebody I've known since I was in law school," Obama, a Harvard graduate, said last week. "And I have been in conversations with her. She is a tremendous advocate for this idea."Introducing Ted Cruz at an Iowa event this past weekend, Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson spent some time railing about what gay marriage supporters are forcing him to swallow.
Don’t you understand that when a fellow like me looks at the landscape and sees the depravity, the perversion — redefining marriage and telling us that marriage is not between a man and a woman? Come on Iowa! It’s nonsense. It is evil. It’s wicked. It’s sinful. They want us to swallow it, you say.
So what is Robertson’s solution to the “depravity” of same-sex couples having the same rights as him and his wife? Well, obviously, it’s to elect Ted Cruz — and to “rid the earth” of marriage equality supporters.
We have to run this bunch out of Washington, D.C. We have to rid the earth of them. Get them out of there. Ted Cruz loves God.
Naturally, this language of ridding the earth of people who disagree with him didn’t distress Cruz. (Not that we’d expect anything less based on past enthusiasm for endorsements from people who say awful things.)
Think Progress‘ Zack Ford writes,
When Cruz appeared on stage, he reflected praise back at Robertson. “What an extraordinary human being,” the candidate said, claiming that “God makes every one of us unique, but some are uniquer than others.” “What a voice Phil has to speak out for the love of Jesus,” Cruz added. “What a joyful, cheerful, unapologetic voice of truth Phil Robertson is.”
Calling for Christians to “rid the earth” of people who disagree with them might sound a little scary, but as long as it’s done joyfully and cheerfully, we’re cool, I guess.© KOMO-TV Scott Shelton would only return the game-winning ball back to Jermaine Kearse.
The man who luckily caught the football tossed into the crowd by Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jermaine Kearse after he scored the game-winning touchdown in overtime of the NFC Championship Game sure could have used a positive development in his life, and he undoubtedly received it.
Scott Shelton, seated in the end zone seats, obviously was well beyond ecstatic when Kearse hauled in the 35-yard touchdown pass to punch the Seahawks’ second consecutive trip to the Super Bowl. And it got only better for him when Kearse heaved the ball into the crowd and he ended up in possession of the prized piece of pigskin.
Shelton, an unemployed father of two, says he has been offered upwards of $20,000 by a sports memorabilia dealer for the football. But he insists that after he was contacted personally Monday morning by Kearse himself, he has no plans to part with the ball unless he gives it to the wide receiver who joyfully tossed the ball into the stands in the first place.
“My phone rings, and it was Jermaine! Jermaine Kearse, you know? The Man!” Shelton told Seattle’s KOMO-4 TV. “We were just talking about the game. He told me he wanted to trade his game helmet signed by the team and his jersey, for the ball. And then he asked me what (else) I wanted for the ball. And I said ‘honestly, it would be nice to go see you guys whip New England in the Super Bowl.’ So he’s going to see what he can do about that. But I told him I wouldn’t give it up unless it was going to him. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have it.”
If Shelton does somehow manage to make the trip to Arizona to watch his favorite NFL team try to win back-to-back Super Bowl titles, the 32-year-old from Monroe, Wash., will have to hurry back to the Pacific Northwest as he is set to begin serving several months in jail the day immediately following the Big Game.
But for now, Shelton simply is reveling in the moment and enjoying a small something that shed some light into an otherwise dark time in his life.
“Everyone’s going crazy. I can’t believe I got this ball!” said Shelton, before describing the momentous moment. “Wilson drops back. Throws a strike to Kearse. Pulls down the game-winning catch. He got up and chucked it into the stands. And it bounced about four times. And right into my lap. Just right into my chest. Like, just, boom! Just like that. And I jumped up into the seat and just screaming! It was just amazing! Amazing feeling! We just won the game. I got this thrown to me, by Kearse. It was, it was like a dream come true. It still is. I haven’t woke up yet, you know.”Assessment by British army’s warfare branch says Russian weapons are more powerful than UK equivalents
The Russian army can outgun British troops on the battlefield after military advances by the Kremlin, a leaked report suggests.
The assessment by the British army’s warfare branch, seen by the Times, warned that Russian weapons, including rocket launchers and air defence systems, were more powerful than their British equivalents. The report added that UK and its Nato allies were “scrambling to catch up” with Russia’s ability to use electronic means to hijack enemy drones and disrupt other military transmissions.
The publication was produced in March under the direction of Gen Sir Nick Carter, the head of the army, the newspaper said. It is understood the report is based on one training exercise carried out in Ukraine.
An army spokeswoman said: “The British army conducts regular reviews of potential scenarios in order to improve its readiness to both protect UK influence and protect our people.”
UK to increase troops in Afghanistan from 450 to 500 Read more
The report also recommended that soldiers be made more aware of manipulative online tactics used on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and that they should leave electrical devices at home while on exercises.
The publication, Insights to “Training Smarter” Against a Hybrid Adversary, concluded that one of Russia’s goals in Ukraine was to practise “new methods of warfare as well as testing modern and prohibited weapons”, the Times said.
It set out how the UK could counter Russia’s new hybrid strategy of electronic warfare, drones, propaganda and artillery.
Gen Sir Richard Shirreff, Britain’s former top officer in Nato, told the Times: “What we get from successive governments has been that it is all fine and dandy and ‘aren’t we doing well’. Actually, the reality is that our capability has been dramatically hollowed out.”One of the many pitfalls of the internet is the challenge of properly conveying your tone. An innocent comment can easily be read as a sarcastic taunt, and a biting retort can be misconstrued as a compliment. Luckily, comics are here to save the day! Whether you'd like Superman to tell the folks on the internet that tonight, they'll be dining in hell...
...the characters of DC comics are here to help! Here are a few suggestions on how DC's new 52 can help you convey the emotion of your choice!
Displeasure:
Rage:
Drinking an Energy Drink (and liking it):
Drinking an Energy Drink (and not digging it so much):
Happy:
Shocked:
Horrified:
Horrified and Drawn By Rob Liefeld:
It's Time For You to Leave:
Oh God, My Eyes/Ears:
Don't Even THINK About Messin':
Adjusting My Glasses:
I'm Interested:
Disbelief:
Acknowledgement That What You Just Said is Creepy:
Regret:
No:
Hell No:
Awww Man:
Screw This Post, I'm Outta Here:
Marceline with Bywith 2 comments
...or you feel that Batman can do a better job of conveying your disapproval than your words every could...Customers who need to get their iPad 4 repaired might be in for a surprise from Apple —they might get a new iPad Air 2 as a replacement instead, as Apple runs out of stock for the now-discontinued tablet.
Read: iPad 2017 Is Actually the iPad Air Refurbished, iFixit Teardown Reveals
According to an internal Apple memo received by 9to5Mac Saturday, “Starting March 30th, iPad 4th generation whole unit repairs may be substituted to iPad Air 2.”
The memo further asks staff to provide customers information about the color and capacity of their replacement iPad Air 2. The iPad Air 2 comes in a gold variant apart from the regular silver and white ones and offers only 32GB and 128GB models since the 16GB and 64GB have already been discontinued.
Both the iPad 4 and iPad Air 2 have been discontinued by Apple. While the iPad 4 was discontinued in 2014 and replaced by iPad Air 2, the iPad Air 2 was discontinued in March 2017 and was replaced by $329 iPad 2017 model. According to Apple Insider, the iPad 4 could also be replaced by the 2017 iPad in rare cases.
In terms of specs, the iPad Air 2 has a better camera than iPad 4, a better processor, a slimmer form factor and a fingerprint sensor.
Read: New iPad vs. iPad Pro 2
Apple generally supports device repairs up to 5 years after the product is discontinued, which means that iPad 4 user will continue getting support till 2019. Since most Apple Stores do not perform iPad repairs, a replacement is the next alternative.
If you are looking to take advantage of the situation, we would advise you to check your local Apple Store for iPad 4 stock first.In the 1980s, Bruce Morrison saw problems with temporary visas for workers. At the time, he was a Democratic Congressman from Connecticut, and he felt that visas granted under the H1 program — which was created in 1952 — were handed out too liberally. The program allowed entry for too many people who weren't vital to the U.S. economy, he argued.
In response, Morrison helped write the Immigration Act of 1990, which created the H-1B program. "The intent was clamp down on abuse and open the doors to truly exceptional people through a system when they become Americans," Morrison tells 60 Minutes. "And prevent the kind of abuse of the temporary visa system that existed before."
But this week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that the H-1B visa program has since been seriously abused, allowing companies to fire American workers and to bring in cheap foreign labor.
"I'm outraged," Morrison tells Whitaker on the broadcast, excerpted in the clip above. "The H-1B has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans."
Today, Morrison is a legislative advocate for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-U.S.A., a professional group. He believes the problems stem from a change made in a 1998 amendment to the law, after he left Congress. The amendment allows companies that rely on H-1B workers to ignore requirements about protecting American jobs as long as they pay the foreign workers at least $60,000 a year. That's now a paltry salary in the tech industry, making it easy to push out American workers in favor of foreigners who can be hired for much cheaper.
"It's really a travesty that should never have been allowed to happen," Morrison says.
But 60 Minutes isn't new to this story. Problems have plagued the H-1B program since its inception, and 60 Minutes has been reporting on those problems since 1993.
From the archives: The early days of H-1B abuse
In 1993, 60 Minutes reported on computer companies that were firing Americans in order to bring in foreigners making a substantially lower salary. They were doing so, in part, because of the H-1B visa, which correspondent Lesley Stahl described then as "a huge loophole in the immigration law."
While Morrison created the program three years earlier to attract exceptional talent, former U.S. Department of Labor top immigration official Demetrious Papademetriou told Stahl that imported programmers using the H-1B visa didn't fit that description.
"These are basically run-of-the-mill people with a degree and some skills, and it seems to me that it is important that we distinguish between people who are truly skilled—who have unique, specialized skills—and people who simply provide labor," Papademetriou told Stahl.
While the law required that foreign workers be paid the prevailing wage—what an American would make for the same job—Stahl reported it was often completely ignored and never enforced.
According to the report, suppliers of foreign labor, commonly called "body shops," lied when filling out visa forms, and the Labor Department merely checked that the forms were completed. What's more, many of the outsourcing firms and their employees weren't paying state or federal income taxes, Social Security, or unemployment taxes. Companies like Hewlett-Packard, Stahl reported, had a built-in system of deniability, placing all responsibility on the body shops who technically employed the foreign workers.
"Here you have violations of labor laws," Papademetriou said. "You probably have violations of human rights. You have evasion of tax laws, and of course, you have total violation of immigration laws, which of course, suggests that the system needs fixing."
To Papademetriou, the impact of the visa program was clear.
"It's stacking things against the Americans."
The video in the top box above was originally published on March 19, 2017.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt sent a memo to agency employees last week saying that he would recuse himself from lawsuits that he brought against the Agency as Oklahoma Attorney General, according to Reuters. Pruitt sued the EPA more than a dozen times under the Obama administration, challenging policy from the Clean Power Plan to the Waters of the United States rule.
In his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Pruitt hadn’t definitively stated that he would step back from all the lawsuits against the very agency he was about to head. Instead, he said that he would defer to the EPA’s ethics counsel, which stated that he must recuse himself from lawsuits brought against the agency in the year previous.
In a four-page recusal memo sent on Thursday (PDF), which E&E News obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Pruitt said that he would “not participate in any active cases in which Oklahoma is a party, petitioner, or intervenor.” The administrator listed twelve cases, including three involving Murray Energy Corp., one of the largest coal mining companies in the US, as well as a case involving Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” Marketing.
The administrator appointed his chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, to screen EPA matters “to determine if they involve any of the entities” listed in the memo.
Pruitt also tied up some other loose ends last week, issuing a clarification of testimony he gave to senators in January regarding his use of personal e-mail to conduct state matters. At the time, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D- RI) asked Pruitt to respond in writing to a question about whether Pruitt had ever used private e-mail, text, or other communication channels to conduct business in his capacity as Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt initially responded that he hadn’t, but, in a letter obtained by E&E News this week, Pruitt clarified that a “small portion” of his private e-mails from his Oklahoma AG days might have included e-mails relating to state business.
Pruitt explained: “Under Oklahoma law, political matters must be transacted using personal e-mail accounts. That includes e-mails concerning political matters that may arguably also touch on state business.”
The administrator defended his initial response saying that it “was based on the best information available at the time and having only four days to complete approximately 1,100 written questions and subparts.” He added that he had |
player or two away from challenging juggernauts like the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians, shot high a few times but mostly laid low. They entered this offseason needing a closer but came away without one. They had few questions emerge after narrowly missing the National League Championship Series, but they have more uncertainties — and fewer elite prospects — than they did in October. Somehow, the Nationals seem built to contend again anyway.
The offseason began with a priority — the bullpen — and optimism about their ability to address it. The Nationals needed to secure a closer, and three elite closers were available. They prioritized Mark Melancon, the cheapest and most familiar of the three, but their offer to the 31-year-old righty fell short on money and flexibility. So Melancon signed with the San Francisco Giants.
[Svrluga: Now pitching the ninth inning for the Nationals? Good question.]
They leapt into the Jansen race a month or so after that — and did so with an offer higher than what the Dodgers set forth. But Jansen said he wanted to stay in Los Angeles and decided to do so. The Nationals pivoted.
The acquisition of center fielder Adam Eaton, here greeting fans during during an offseason event, was the big move of the offseason. It will have ripple effects throughout the lineup and farm system. But the Nats also stand out for the offseason deals they failed to make. (Bill O'Leary/Washington Post)
Meanwhile, Nationals General Manager Mike Rizzo emphasized his team’s flexibility. Because Trea Turner and Danny Espinosa could play in a variety of places, he could improve his lineup with either a shortstop or a center fielder — or even a corner outfielder, if the right man came along. While discussions with the Pittsburgh Pirates over all-star Andrew McCutchen progressed, Rizzo targeted Adam Eaton, the kind of gritty, cheap, controllable player he covets.
[Boswell: Everyone knows these Nationals’ names, but not their games]
Rizzo also wanted White Sox lefty Sale, the kind of ace who would have lifted the Nationals into World Series conversations like Max Scherzer did two years ago. The White Sox wanted Turner, but Rizzo wouldn’t budge. Sale headed to Boston.
But the ongoing talks with Chicago led to the quick consummation of another deal, a surprising three-for-one in which Rizzo surrendered top-rated prospect Lucas Giolito and playoff roster rookie Reynaldo Lopez, as well as one of the Nationals’ 2016 first-round picks, for Eaton. Such a deal had been unthinkable as recently as the trade deadline, when a package like that might have been competitive for someone like Andrew Miller. But Giolito’s stock had fallen and Eaton’s contract promised five years of team-friendly outfield depth. Rizzo pulled the trigger.
From then on, the Nationals underwent a few roster touch-ups, instead of the kind of makeover an elite closer or a few high-priced relievers or an all-star-type power hitter might have provided. With Wilson Ramos gone to Tampa Bay — a departure the Nationals had planned for all along — Rizzo acquired former farmhand Derek Norris from San Diego, betting $4.2 million on a bounceback season.
Eaton’s arrival bumped Turner back to shortstop, leaving Espinosa out of a starting job. Espinosa’s temperament never jived well with bench life, so Rizzo sent him and the more than $5 million he will make next season to the Los Angeles Angels. Rizzo also non-tendered Ben Revere, a failed and now-dispensable center field experiment, saving around $6 million in arbitration money in the process.
All of the Nationals’ free agent expenditures amounted to less than what Revere would have made in arbitration. They spent $4.9 million on bringing back bench staples Chris Heisey and Stephen Drew, both of whom are pivotal figures. Drew reemerged as an offensive threat last season, and he combined with Heisey’s pinch-hit wizardry to give Dusty Baker a lefty-righty power punch off the bench. With Espinosa gone, Drew also seems likely to serve as the primary backup to Turner at shortstop, a role more important because Turner has never started regularly at shortstop in the big leagues before.
But even in a market inundated with available relievers of all shapes and sizes, the Nationals’ spending ended there. They considered outfielder/first baseman Brandon Moss, Scott Boras pushed catcher Matt Wieters, and Rizzo scoured the league for value, as he tends to do. But as of a day before pitchers and catchers report to West Palm Beach, Fla., the Nationals did not sign a single new big league free agent.
They could still add. Players like Wieters, outfielder Angel Pagan and others have yet to find big league jobs. Free agents they signed to minor league deals — Vance Worley, Neal Cotts, Matt Albers and others — will try to crack the big league roster.
Romero, a hard-thrower whose fate hangs on his command, has a good chance to make the Opening Day bullpen. But that he qualifies as the biggest bullpen acquisition the Nationals made this offseason sums up the ambivalence surrounding their dealings this winter.
Perhaps Romero can help. Perhaps Eaton will emerge as an annual all-star and Norris will rebound. Perhaps Shawn Kelley or Blake Treinen will emerge as an elite closer. Perhaps some non-roster invitees will show more stuff than expected. But the Nationals emerged from an offseason in which so many sure things were available with less certainty than when they entered it. This is not the same team that lost to the Dodgers last October. But as spring training begins, the lingering question for these Nationals is whether different also means better.NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first close-up look at Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989. Like an old film, Voyager's historic footage of Triton has been "restored" and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon. The map, produced by Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, has also been used to make a movie recreating that historic Voyager encounter, which took place 25 years ago, on August 25, 1989.
The new Triton map has a resolution of 1,970 feet (600 meters) per pixel. The colors have been enhanced to bring out contrast but are a close approximation to Triton's natural colors. Voyager's "eyes" saw in colors slightly different from human eyes, and this map was produced using orange, green and blue filter images.
In 1989, most of the northern hemisphere was in darkness and unseen by Voyager. Because of the speed of Voyager's visit and the slow rotation of Triton, only one hemisphere was seen clearly at close distance. The rest of the surface was either in darkness or seen as blurry markings.
The production of the new Triton map was inspired by anticipation of NASA's New Horizons encounter with Pluto, coming up a little under a year from now. Among the improvements on the map are updates to the accuracy of feature locations, sharpening of feature details by removing some of the blurring effects of the camera, and improved color processing.
Although Triton is a moon of a planet and Pluto is a dwarf planet, Triton serves as a preview of sorts for the upcoming Pluto encounter. Although both bodies originated in the outer solar system, Triton was captured by Neptune and has undergone a radically different thermal history than Pluto. Tidal heating has likely melted the interior of Triton, producing the volcanoes, fractures and other geological features that Voyager saw on that bitterly cold, icy surface.
Pluto is unlikely to be a copy of Triton, but some of the same types of features may be present. Triton is slightly larger than Pluto, has a very similar internal density and bulk composition, and has the same low-temperature volatiles frozen on its surface. The surface composition of both bodies includes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen ices.
Voyager also discovered atmospheric plumes on Triton, making it one of the known active bodies in the outer solar system, along with objects such as Jupiter's moon Io and Saturn's moon Enceladus. Scientists will be looking at Pluto next year to see if it will join this list. They will also be looking to see how Pluto and Triton compare and contrast, and how their different histories have shaped the surfaces we see.
Although a fast flyby, New Horizons' Pluto encounter on July 14, 2015, will not be a replay of Voyager but more of a sequel and a reboot, with a new and more technologically advanced spacecraft and, more importantly, a new cast of characters. Those characters are Pluto and its family of five known moons, all of which will be seen up close for the first time next summer.
Triton may not be a perfect preview of coming attractions, but it serves as a prequel to the cosmic blockbuster expected when New Horizons arrives at Pluto next year.
The new Triton map and movie can be found at: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/icy_moons/
In another historic milestone for the Voyager mission, Aug. 25 also marks the two-year anniversary of Voyager 1 reaching interstellar space.
The Voyager mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the New Horizons mission for NASA's SMD.
For more information about the Lunar and Planetary Institute, visit: http://www.lpi.usra.edu
For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
For more information about New Horizons mission, visit: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizonsStory highlights CNN asked a university to test water from a hazardous waste site in Puerto Rico
People had been drinking water from the site after Hurricane Maria left many without water
The test showed the water is safe; the EPA will have results later
Dorado, Puerto Rico (CNN) Water from three wells at a hazardous-waste site in Dorado, Puerto Rico, is safe for human consumption, according to tests conducted for CNN by a university lab.
The Santa Rosa well on the Superfund site, from which water has been distributed by the Puerto Rican water utility, contained only trace amounts of PCE, an industrial chemical, according to the tests run by the Virginia Tech Water Quality Lab. The other two wells at the Dorado Superfund site, called Maguayo 2 and Maguayo 4, showed no signs of industrial contamination.
Marc Edwards, the professor at Virginia Tech who conducted the tests for CNN, said the low level of contamination put even the Santa Rosa well safely within clean drinking water standards. All three wells are safe, he said. "I would drink" this water, he told CNN on Thursday.
JUST WATCHED One month without water in Puerto Rico Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH One month without water in Puerto Rico 03:42
"This water you sent me is meeting all federal safe drinking water standards," said Edwards. "How that happened? It could be the way the water flows on the ground (that's) not bringing contamination from the Superfund site to the well. Or maybe they are using some sort of treatment technology."While the clock is ticking down toward the October 2015 EMV liability shift, an increasing number of analysts are questioning whether the majority of U.S. merchants will convert by that deadline, or at all.
According to reports in Banking Info Security, though the forthcoming shift will mean that issuers or merchant that do not support EMV will assume liability for fraud that is the result of a compromised mag-stripe card transaction after October of next year, that potential cost alone is not acting as a significant enough motivator, particularly for small banks and retailers.
“Community banks are evaluating what the liability shift means for them, and they are balancing that against the cost of issuing chip cards, as well as evaluating the cost of services related to issuing those cards,” says Cary Whaley, vice president of payments and technology policy for the Independent Community Bankers Association.
Smaller merchants face a similar issue – with relatively low card transaction volumes, the costs of upgrading to accept EMV cards could very likely outstrip the potential future costs related to fraud.
EMV enthusiasts however, continue to stress that as long as the badly out of date mag stripe card is out there, payments are just going to be less secure.
“The number of cards and terminals is important, but the more important metric to pay attention to is the percentage of chip-on-chip transactions, meaning the volume of EMV chip cards used at chip-enabled POS terminals,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the EMV Migration Forum. Senior Vice President of Risk Management Policy for the American Bankers Association Doug Johnson predicts 50 percent of the nation’s debit and credit cards will be chip-enabled by year’s end, but others, like Gartner’s Avivah Litan think that is a rather optimistic assessment.
“I don’t buy into projections that 50 percent of U.S. cards will be chip by the end of the year,” she says. “That’s way too aggressive. Maybe 50 percent of the merchant terminals will be chip-enabled, but they won’t be turned on.”
On the issuer end, large banks seems ahead of the EMV curve and are will have chip-enabled cards to market long before most merchants are ready for them.
“But we will see many smaller issuers and many, many retailers fail to be EMV-compliant by the end of this year,” contends Shirley Inscoe, a fraud analyst at the consultancy Aite.
So what are the takeaway stats? Depends on which group you ask. Forecasters’ estimates for how much EMV migration progress will be made this year vary widely. Here’s a sampling:
The EMV Migration Forum estimated that 2014 by its end saw about 120 million of the 1.2 billion credit and debit cards (about 10 percent) in U.S. circulation were EMV-chip compliant. The forum further estimated that 4.5 million of the approximately 12 million U.S. merchant POS devices were apparently EMV-ready by the close of 2014 – or about 38 percent.
Going forward, the group forecasts that the U.S. will have 600 million chip cards in circulation and 7 million EMV-compliant POS terminals in operation by the end of 2015. For those keeping track that is about 50 percent of paycards, and 58.3 percent of terminals.
The Merchant Advisory Group, on the other hand, says only 15 percent of the 13.9 million POS devices at U.S. merchant locations are now EMV-capable, and it predicts that figure will grow to just 20 percent by the end of this year, says CEO Mark Horwedel.
For yet another poke at the numbers, Aite is most optimistic in their projections that by the end of this year, 70 percent of the country’s credit cards and 41 percent of debit cards will be EMV-enabled (55 percent combined pay card average), while about 59 percent of POS terminals will be chip-enabled.
It also bears mentioning that though EMV is very much on the agenda for 2015, an increasing number of those in financial security are already looking past it. Some, like Johnson, think EMV is an important step but also one that he is eager to get beyond.
“Frankly, what I look forward to is getting past EMV and looking toward our move with tokenization,” he added. “That is where the bigger bang for the security buck is going to be. EMV only addresses part of the puzzle.”Welcome to the DesignTO + TorontoUX community. #DesignTO turns our design thinking into design doing & learning across industries and disciplines. Inclusive with a focus on empowering voices in the margins and ideas that disrupt.
If you'd like to contribute by speaking, sponsoring or joining our Organizing Committee, send us a DM on meet-up. We have three meet-ups this Fall:
- September: DesignOPS
- October: VR/AI/Blockchain Design Thinking
- November: Equity in Design
Format: Lightning Talks, demos and un-conference style networking. Come for the Professional Development. #DesignTO is open to students as a safe space to learn about your future industry. Themes include DesignOperations, Equity in design, high-tech design (AI/VR/Blockchain), startups and corporate social responsibility.
Do you have experience to share? Register to speak. Want to get involved? Join our organizing crew.1 Havit HV-KB366L keyboard – Build Quality
The Havit HV-KB366L mechanical keyboard features an aluminium top surface with a fine satin finish. The sides have a matte black 1.5mm thick metal trim with a chamfered edge top and bottom. The top chamfer has a bright machined steel finish, which I think gives a very clean and premium look. The rounded corners of the keyboard are made from a light blue plastic which match the profile of the metal side trims.
The keys are fairly smooth to the touch and have a fractional amount of movement when jiggled with your finger. If compared to more expensive mechanical gaming keyboards from the likes of Corsair or Razor this movement may be noticeable, but for a gaming keyboard in this price bracket it’s perfectly acceptable.
The key characters are bold and clear with a white frosted finish to allow for the LED back-lighting. All the keys are pretty standard except for the additional lighting control button placed between the Fn and Ctrl keys. There’s a small grey “Magic Eagle” logo printed on the keyboard just above the arrow keys.
On the underside of the keyboard are thick rubber pads at the bottom and extremely firm, well made fold-out feet on the top. Anyone who has trouble with their keyboard slipping on their desk will struggle to find a more stable or secure product. This is in no small part down to the weight of Havit HV-KB366L, It’s the heaviest keyboard I’ve owned – by a mile. When the delivery guy dropped it off, I was sure I’d been sent a paving slab by mistake!
The cable is 175cm long and has a neat braided sleeve. It’s non-removable and connects to the rear of the keyboard with a matching grey retainer. The cable is of a good quality, it’s thick yet flexible and the USB plug is gold plated – if that makes a difference?
The overall build quality of the Havit HV-KB366L is very impressive. It’s compact size (440mm x 135 x 40mm) and hefty weight (1350 grams) combined with the attention to detail of it’s metal finishes sets it apart from many other plastic built mechanical gaming keyboards.The announcement brings an end to the amalgamation of Marklund Motorsport’s and Kristoffersson Motorsport’s World RX challenges, which was formed ahead of the 2016 season.
But, while Marklund Motorsport will run a European Championship effort next year, Volkswagen Sweden and the Swedish Volkswagen Dealers that supported the programme this year are still assessing its motorsport options for next term.
As the joint effort in this season, the Volkswagen RX Sweden won the French round of World RX at Loheac, and also finished second in the Drivers’ Championship standings with experienced circuit racer and rallycross driver, Johan Kristoffersson.
“We’d like to thank Marklund Motorsport for a successful year and a good cooperation, and wish them good luck with the European Championship,” said Sten Forsberg, head of Volkswagen Sweden.
“From our side, for many years in different ways we have had a major involvement in motorsport. Whether and in what form we will continue with that for 2017 is something we are currently looking at.”
Having finished third and second in the Drivers’ Championship in the last two years, Johan Kristoffersson is expected to seek opportunities to fight for the World Championship title next year, and has strong links with Volkswagen, together with his father, Tommy Kristofferson, although the Swede has given no indication of his plans.
The European Rallycross Championship takes place at five European rounds of World RX, with Spain, Norway, Sweden, France and Latvia hosting rounds in 2017.
The Volkswagen RX Sweden team, run by Marklund Motorsport, also intends to compete in selected rounds of the RallyX Nordic Championship, which is based predominantly in Sweden and has been won by OlsbergsMSE World Championship driver Kevin Eriksson for the last two years.
“I believe that to be a front-runner in World RX now you need to have factory support. Instead of investing a huge amount in the constant development of the car, I believe it’s better to give upcoming drivers more seat time to improve their skills. The European Championship is a good platform to prove their qualities,” said Marklund Motorsport team owner Jan Marklund in a statement.
“This season the team and our partners have put in an incredible effort to stay competitive throughout the whole campaign.
"With the team members and experience we’ve collected over the last three years, we aim to fight for podium finishes with our drivers in 2017.”Since World War II, the common reaction to the horrendous crimes of the Nazis has been to wonder how such extreme behavior was possible. But the more important point is how the process of killing could be made so mundane, a question that remains relevant today, as Gary G. Kohls explains.
By Gary G. Kohls
A couple of years ago, the iconic sign over the gate to the infamous World War II-era extermination camp at Auschwitz was stolen. (It was later recovered after being found cut into three pieces). At the top of that gate was this classic bit of Nazi propaganda, proclaimed to the millions of doomed incoming victims: “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes One Free).
“Arbeit Macht Frei” is a pretty good summary of what is otherwise known as “the Protestant work ethic” that started in Europe during the Protestant Reformation. Right-wing nationalists, anti-communist, pro-capitalist, pro-war, anti-Semitic, racist and religious reformers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther would have agreed that “Arbeit Macht Frei” supported their dogmatic teachings about fulfilling one’s patriotic duty to the state, the church or the industry that employed the people.
Following Hitler’s fascist takeover and the total destruction of Germany’s liberal democratic government in 1933, Germans were indoctrinated to believe that it was their patriotic duty to defend the Nazi’s Thousand Year Reich by any means necessary, including laboring, killing or dying for the cause.
Indeed, the efforts instituted by the fascist government (including the abolition of labor unions) resulted in virtually full employment in all of the war-related industries that were set up to ensure the success of the Thousand Year Reich, including the military arts, police, fuel, chemical, agriculture, mining and weapons production. All of these industries thrived with willing, reasonably well-paid and grateful “Good Germans” who blindly applauded Hitler for orchestrating his “economic miracle”.
The transportation and communications industries that were essential for war-making – but which were also domestically beneficial – also thrived. Good examples included the building of the Autobahn for rapid troop movement and the increased production of automobiles, including the affordable Volkswagen for the masses and the not-so-affordable Mercedes for the elite.
The provision of cheap mass-produced radios and plenty of entertainment (propaganda) that was overseen by Joseph Goebbels made sure that everybody would be able to hear the demagogues spout their Nazi propaganda demonizing non-Aryan foreigners, Jews and various anti-fascist leftists, such as trade unionists, socialists, liberals and subversive antiwar activists.
Little more than a decade earlier, in 1922, hyperinflation, joblessness and hunger had followed the fiasco of World War I. Then, just as the economy was recovering, the Wall Street Stock Market crash of 1929 sealed German democracy’s doom.
So, after Hitler was appointed to the Chancellorship in 1933, even many of the most ethical Germans were thankful for the war industry work, and they liked the state-sponsored (socialized) medical care, educational opportunities and the paid vacations of Hitler’s “Strength Through Joy” campaign, even though there was essentially no freedom of movement in the labor market.
‘Good German’ Christians
Until Hitler started occupying, colonizing and brutalizing other nations, things were going well for most obedient, white “Good German” Christians. Not so for non-Christians and other minorities who were suffering under the police-state jackboot of Prussian militarism.
“Good Germans” dutifully averted their eyes and closed their ears to keep from seeing the hateful anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination that were happening all around them, including the aggressive building of concentration camps all over Germany and the occupied territories.
The Nazi concentration camps started in 1938 at Dachau. The scores of concentration camps that eventually dotted Germany’s military empire (especially occupied Poland) also provided a lot of work for Hitler’s obedient (and silenced) Volk, for each camp needed, in addition to the SS troops and Gestapo (who beat any resister into submission), numerous citizen-workers to keep them running smoothly.
The notorious extermination camp at Auschwitz employed 60 physicians and 300 nurses and many other ancillary staff members for just the medical facility, much of which was involved in human experimentation. Many of the people involved in those crimes against humanity were professed Christians.
The gulag of camps was good for the economy, though, for each of the camps was aligned with very profitable German corporations, whose bottom lines flourished with the cheap labor costs. The prison camps played a major role in Hitler’s economic boom. Germany’s Gross National Product grew substantially, for the labor was free and the food and lodging expenditures were minimal.
Auschwitz was located in Poland, far away from the eyes of most Germans back in the homeland. It was the most infamous of the camps, but the German occupiers of the newly acquired Polish territories knew what was going on inside. Still, most “Good Germans” averted their eyes and ears and noses. Most of them claimed that they were unaware that mass murder was happening on the other side of the electrified fences.
But it was a time of war and telling the truth in wartime is always a revolutionary act that requires a lot of courage. Witnessing to the truth in a time of war is also frequently regarded by military regimes as an act of treason. And so the Volk lied to themselves and to others.
Cognitive dissonance happened in Nazi Germany, although there was no such phrase back then that described the conscious or unconscious denial of and confusion about unwelcome new truths that contradicted deeply held beliefs. But the truth was obvious to all. Only one conclusion could be drawn from the 24/7 stench of burning flesh and the red smoke that came out of the crematorium’s tall stacks of each of the extermination camps.
After the total collapse of the militarists, financiers, investors and industrialists who had been behind Germany’s attempts to steal the resources of Europe and Asia (especially the oil fields of Eastern Europe and western Russia), more unwelcome truths were to be revealed. Among these revelations was the story of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with Rudolf Hess who was Hitler’s # 2 early in the Nazi regime).
Cruelty in Child-Rearing
The Rudolf Hoess, MD, of Auschwitz infamy was the son of a devout, well-to-do, conservative Roman Catholic family that had wanted him to go into the priesthood. But circumstances were such that he instead chose to serve Hitler in the thuggish Freikorps, that group of traumatized and unemployable World War I veterans who became his street fighters and mercenary soldiers and who believed the lie that leftists, especially Jews, socialists and communists on the home front had “stabbed Germany in the back” and were the real cause of the humiliating defeat in the trenches on the Western Front.
Just like most men who grew up in authoritarian Europe, Hoess learned unconditional obedience to authority early in his life. Cruelty in child-rearing, especially in males, usually elicits the unconscious desire for vengeance, often only acted upon in a delayed fashion, frequently against a scapegoat rather than against the original perpetrator of the cruelty, which is usually an abusive parent-figure.Beach volleyball has been an official Olympic sport since 1996, debuting four years earlier as a demonstration sport. The United States and Brazil have dominated the sport in its five appearances to date, taking eight of ten golds (four each in both the men’s and women’s contests) and twenty of the 30 medals overall. In the last three games — 2004 in Athens, 2008 in Beijing, and 2012 in London — Americans Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings walked off the beach decorated in gold medals.
But, interestingly, they weren’t covered in sand.
If you’ve ever been to the beach, you know that this can’t be possible. Sand gets everywhere — in your shoes, in your food, and in your stuff and on your body generally. That’s because dry sand, if the grains are small enough, adheres to anything wet — including the sweat we naturally release when vacationing on the beach. And, yes, beach volleyball players sweat just like the rest of us (okay, maybe a little less). And they’re out in the sun, on the beach, for hours at a time. Therefore, one would expect that beach volleyball players would be speckled in beige from head to toe, but rather, they look like this. There may be a grain of sand here or there, but if you’re watching on TV or checking out some high-res images later, you’d hardly notice.
The reason: special sand, sourced and filtered for just this purpose. The International Volleyball Federation has strict rules regarding the quality of beach volleyball sand — it has to be free of shells and stones, for example. But that’s mostly for the safety of the players, as one wouldn’t want a jagged edge or hard landing causing an injury, especially not when fans around the globe are watching. But the Federation goes above and beyond that, checking to make sure that the sand is neither too large nor too small. Yahoo called it “Goldilocks style.” It has to be just right — the grains have to be small enough so that the sand is safe and comfortable, but large enough so that they do not stick. The Federation’s rules are below (via this pdf):
Which often means that the Olympic organizers have to import sand. According to Reuters, for the Beijing Games, that meant shipping in 17,000 tons of white sand from Hainan Island, the main island of the Chinese province of the same name — it’s a trip of over 1,500 miles (2,500 km). Hainan Island has a meaningful tourism business due to its tropical beaches but it is still emerging, so the sand found there is generally undisturbed nor influenced by outsiders, leaving it soft. So in the case of the Olympics, the fact that few from the mainland had come to the beaches meant that the beaches could come to the mainland for the Games. Reuters further explained:
The luxuriously soft sand was shoveled into bags on the palm-fringed beaches of Hainan, nicknamed “China’s Hawaii” despite being far less developed as a tourist centre than its U.S. namesake. It was then shipped from China’s island province to Tian Jin, piled on to trucks, driven to Beijing and tipped out in the Chaoyang stadium and practice courts, where it is hosed and raked regularly to keep it from packing down too densely.
The sand, therefore, wasn’t likely to have too much of an effect on the in-game play — or mess up the TV picture quality, either.
Bonus Fact : Starting in 1995, the Broadcast Film Critics Association began awarding honors to the top films, actors, directors, and others who help make movies that come to the theaters. In 2001 (honoring films released in 2000), the Association named Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks and an actual, inanimate volleyball named Wilson, as one of the top 10 movies of the year. Cast Away was also given one other honor — Wilson won “Best Inanimate Object.” It was the debut appearance for the category and, for that matter, the final one to date as well.
From the Archives: Exit Sandman: When some criminals stole a beach.
Take the Quiz : Name the winners of these discontinued Olympic events.
Related: Brookstone’s Sand, with two horizontal dots over the “a.” It’s pretty amazing — it sticks when you want it to but doesn’t when you don’t, and the only explanation is some sort of weird sorcery.Even most residents don’t know Toronto is the global headquarters of the mining industry – but scratch the surface and some uncomfortable truths are revealed
This coming Sunday, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) will host its 85th annual conference in downtown Toronto. With more than 20,000 attendees and 900 exhibitors, the conference is the largest of its kind in the world. During those four days, delegates take over 20 of Toronto’s downtown hotels and spend millions of dollars in its restaurants and bars.
By day they meet in the caverns of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre – an underground pavilion larger than 10 football fields – to make deals. When I attended the conference in 2013, by the end of day one my satchel contained several business cards, glossy brochures and a branded water bottle. I had an overview of mining prospects in Nunavut; surveys of global exploration and investment trends; a guide to investment in China’s mineral industry; maps of every gold-mining project in Alaska and the Yukon; and a series of brochures from the Mongolian ministry of mining promoting the emergence of large-scale coal extraction there.
The most striking find came from the booth of the US Geological Survey, whose material was entirely about extractive prospects in Afghanistan. A message on the back of the reports expressed appreciation for the generous support of both USAid and the Department of Defence.
The next evening in post-conference drinks at the Royal York hotel, I met a young woman who had spent the previous summer prospecting a gold formation in north-western Ontario. When I asked how much her company expected to sell it for, she shrugged and said, without smugness or irony: “Probably for hundreds of millions of dollars.”
On the third day, I left the conference to visit an aboriginal community centre in the east end of Toronto. A lecture was being delivered by a Mayan Q’eqchi’ woman from eastern Guatemala named Angelica Choc, who had initiated a lawsuit against Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals in the Ontario Superior Court.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visitors look at ore samples during the 2016 PDAC International Convention in Toronto. Photograph: Alamy
Choc was suing the company for atrocities allegedly committed between 2007 and 2009, a time when the Canadian mining company Skye Resources was attempting to begin extraction at the Fenix mine, the largest repository of nickel in Central America. Choc says the company was attempting to displace the neighbouring Q’eqchi’ villagers from their land, and that security guards hired by the company reportedly committed multiple atrocities against the indigenous Mayan community. In 2011, she and 12 others in her community filed a civil lawsuit in Canadian courts against Skye, which has since been acquired by Hudbay; the suit is ongoing.
Our 20-person audience sat in silence as she described through a translator how security guards had murdered her husband and gang-raped 11 of the women in a neighbouring village before burning it to the ground. “No puedo entender como estos hombres pueden tener corazon,” she said as she wiped tears from her eyes. “I can’t understand how these men can have a heart.”
In a statement, Hudbay denied the claims are true and points out that its acquisition of Skye “took place more than a year after the events are alleged to have occurred”.
If you aim to create a mining company, you go to Canada Alain Deneault
Unbeknown to most of its residents, Toronto is a city built on mining. Nearly 75% of mining companies globally are headquartered in Canada and almost 60% are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). In 2015, more than half of all capital investment in the mining business travelled through the exchange.
In fact, few – if any – other capital markets around the world are as specialised in a single industry as Toronto is in mining.
“If you want to register a ship for transport, you go to Liberia; if you want to play the stock market in a very aggressive manner, you go to the Cayman Islands,” says Montreal-based author and researcher Alain Deneault. “If you aim to create a mining company, you go to Canada.”
Yet the presence of this massive industry is barely discernible in the city. Unlike oil in Los Angeles, steel in Pittsburgh or automobiles in Detroit, Toronto’s wealth has historically been built by labour outside of the city itself. Because mining is so geographically dispersed, its existence is easily overlooked even in a city that is financially dependent upon it.
The only landmark that really suggests Toronto’s special connection to the business is the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame. Here, in a rather inconspicuous corner of the University of Toronto, we are invited to appreciate the fact that “Canada has been blessed with an abundance of natural resources, and also has been very fortunate to have people with the ability to convert these resources from potential assets into useful products at a price others are willing to pay.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest There are few notable landmarks that represent Toronto’s connection to the mining industry. Photograph: Alamy
If anything, it is the mining sector’s philanthropic endeavours that have a more discernible impact on Toronto’s public spaces. Peter Munk, for instance, is arguably better known to the general public not as the founder of the world’s largest gold-mining company but rather as the patron of the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at the Toronto General Hospital and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
The mining sector, according to PDAC president Andrew Cheatle, is “particularly off the radar of a lot of younger Torontonians. The names are around, but they’re not often associated.”
Those who do know about it tend to work in the financial district. Cheatle suggests that the city’s success in mining is due to developing a classic “cluster” of resources for the industry.
“From Yonge Street to University, and from Queen to Front with some periphery around it, you have the world’s largest mining companies, lawyers, consultancies, all together in one area,” he says. “All the banks are there, too. That’s one of the other areas that I think makes Toronto very successful – it’s very efficient.”
Deneault, however, argues that Toronto has obtained its unique position by offering major concessions to the industry. He points out that the Canadian government supports mining companies through various means, |
vs TitanWednesday, 2/13: Mana vs BlyThursday, 2/14: Socke vs ThorzainFriday, 2/15: Ret vs FeastBroadcast dates for the following matchups will be announced soon:Grubby vs DimagaSen vs MoongladeMC vs AliveTaeja vs VioletHero vs PoltCreator vs NesteaMvp vs CuriousSniper vs SeedMarineKing vs GumihoDongRaeGu vs JjakjiScarlett vs GoswserIdra vs DdoroFenix vs StateVibe vs IllusionSuppy vs MakerKiller vs QxcHuk vs Sasquatch
Winter Season Showdowns Players and Matchups
+ Show Spoiler + KESPA (5) - 10 KESPA players competing for 5 spots
Parting vs. Fantasy
Rain vs. Flying
Innovation vs. TY
Roro vs. Hero
Soulkey vs. Last
ESF (5) - 10 ESF players competing for 5 spots
DongRaeGu vs. Jjakji
MarineKing vs Gumiho
Mvp vs Curious
Creator vs Nestea
Sniper vs Seed
Independent/Western (3) - 6 Western+ Independent Korean players competing for 3 spots
MC vs Alive
Hero vs Polt
Taeja vs Violet
North America (7) - 14 NA players competing for 7 spots
Killer vs Qxc
Huk vs Sasquatch
Scarlett vs Goswser
Idra vs Ddoro
Suppy vs Maker
Fenix vs State
Vibe vs Illusion
Europe (7) - 14 EU players competing for 7 spots
Stephano vs Titan
Nerchio vs BabyKnight
Mana vs Bly
Grubby vs Dimaga
Socke vs Thorzain
Ret vs Feast
Sase vs Snute
Southeast Asia (1) - 2 SEA players competing for 1 spot
Sen vs Moonglade
Winter Season Map Pool
+ Show Spoiler + Akilon Wastes
Bifrost
Cloud Kingdom
Daybreak
Entombed Valley
Korhal City
Newkirk City
Ohana
Planet S
Star Station
Whirlwind
Note: In each Showdown, both Players will veto three Maps. The Map Pool will be trimmed down to seven for the Exhibition Tournament at the Winter Championship.
Exhibition Tournament at the MLG Winter Championship
+ Show Spoiler + Dates: March 15 - 17
Format: Invite-only, exhibition tournament (no open bracket) with all matches taking place on the main stage and one feature station.
32-Player Single Elimination Bracket (Bo5s & 7s) featuring:
28 Players from Winter Season Showdowns
Life, Leenock, Flash, Bomber - Top 4 Players from 2012 Fall Championship
Prizes: $75,000 total
1st = $25,000
2nd = $15,000
3rd = $9,000
4th = $6,000
5th = $3,000 (4 Players)
9th = $1,000 (8 Players)
Broadcast: 31 Matches, 3 Days - all matches will be broadcast via two streams March 15 - 17Invite-only, exhibition tournament (no open bracket) with all matches taking place on the main stage and one feature station.32-Player Single Elimination Bracket (Bo5s & 7s) featuring:$75,000 total1st = $25,0002nd = $15,0003rd = $9,0004th = $6,0005th = $3,000 (4 Players)9th = $1,000 (8 Players)31 Matches, 3 Days - all matches will be broadcast via two streams
Full details available Full details available here YouTube.com/OfficialMLGSC2
Demonhunter04 Profile Joined July 2011 1530 Posts Last Edited: 2013-01-31 17:40:11 #2 MLG Winter starts Feb 4 and ends March 12? Isn't that spring? "If you don't drop sweat today, you will drop tears tomorrow" - SlayerSMMA
hoby2000 Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 883 Posts #3 On February 01 2013 02:02 Demonhunter04 wrote:
MLG Winter starts Feb 4 and ends March 12? Isn't that spring?
This is normal. They tend to do their championships at the very end of the season of whatever it's for. Spring will be in June, summer in September, and fall in november, maybe beginning of december. This is normal. They tend to do their championships at the very end of the season of whatever it's for. Spring will be in June, summer in September, and fall in november, maybe beginning of december. A lesson without pain is meaningless for nothing can be gained without giving something in return.
mrRoflpwn Profile Blog Joined February 2011 United States 2611 Posts #4 Hmm, interesting format, but its so biased to making already popular player even more popular Long live the Boss Toss!
Yhamm Profile Blog Joined December 2012 France 6422 Posts Last Edited: 2013-01-31 17:09:18 #5
Fantasy vs Parting
Ret vs Feast
Stephano vs Titan
etc
quite unfair for some players
edit: sorry, it is explained here : how were the showdown done? random?Fantasy vs PartingRet vs FeastStephano vs Titanetcquite unfair for some playersedit: sorry, it is explained here : http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/competitions/55#event_140_winter-season-showdown-players Liquipedia We will have only each other at the last
mrRoflpwn Profile Blog Joined February 2011 United States 2611 Posts #6 On February 01 2013 02:07 Yhamm wrote:
how were the showdown done? random?
Fantasy vs Parting
Ret vs Feast
Stephano vs Titan
etc
quite unfair for some players
Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo Long live the Boss Toss!
MLG_Adam Profile Joined July 2010 United States 925 Posts #7 On February 01 2013 02:09 mrRoflpwn wrote:
Show nested quote +
On February 01 2013 02:07 Yhamm wrote:
how were the showdown done? random?
Fantasy vs Parting
Ret vs Feast
Stephano vs Titan
etc
quite unfair for some players
Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo
It is clearly mapped out in the main story, regional qualification:
KESPA (5) - 10 KESPA players competing for 5 spots
Parting vs. Fantasy
Rain vs. Flying
Innovation vs. TY
Roro vs. Hero
Soulkey vs. Last
ESF (5) - 10 ESF players competing for 5 spots
DongRaeGu vs. Jjakji
MarineKing vs Gumiho
Mvp vs Curious
Creator vs Nestea
Sniper vs Seed
Independent/Western (3) - 6 Western+ Independent Korean players competing for 3 spots
MC vs Alive
Hero vs Polt
Taeja vs Violet
North America (7) - 14 NA players competing for 7 spots
Killer vs Qxc
Huk vs Sasquatch
Scarlett vs Goswser
Idra vs Ddoro
Suppy vs Maker
Fenix vs State
Vibe vs Illusion
Europe (7) - 14 EU players competing for 7 spots
Stephano vs Titan
Nerchio vs BabyKnight
Mana vs Bly
Grubby vs Dimaga
Socke vs Thorzain
Ret vs Feast
Sase vs Snute
Southeast Asia (1) - 2 SEA players competing for 1 spot
Sen vs Moonglade It is clearly mapped out in the main story, regional qualification:KESPA (5) - 10 KESPA players competing for 5 spotsParting vs. FantasyRain vs. FlyingInnovation vs. TYRoro vs. HeroSoulkey vs. LastESF (5) - 10 ESF players competing for 5 spotsDongRaeGu vs. JjakjiMarineKing vs GumihoMvp vs CuriousCreator vs NesteaSniper vs SeedIndependent/Western (3) - 6 Western+ Independent Korean players competing for 3 spotsMC vs AliveHero vs PoltTaeja vs VioletNorth America (7) - 14 NA players competing for 7 spotsKiller vs QxcHuk vs SasquatchScarlett vs GoswserIdra vs DdoroSuppy vs MakerFenix vs StateVibe vs IllusionEurope (7) - 14 EU players competing for 7 spotsStephano vs TitanNerchio vs BabyKnightMana vs BlyGrubby vs DimagaSocke vs ThorzainRet vs FeastSase vs SnuteSoutheast Asia (1) - 2 SEA players competing for 1 spotSen vs Moonglade Twitter: MrAdamAp
SkaPunk Profile Joined October 2010 United States 471 Posts #8 Don't really want to watch it if there are no open brackets. Team Fallacy
VirgilSC2 Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United States 5748 Posts Last Edited: 2013-01-31 17:17:13 #9 On February 01 2013 02:09 mrRoflpwn wrote:
Show nested quote +
On February 01 2013 02:07 Yhamm wrote:
how were the showdown done? random?
Fantasy vs Parting
Ret vs Feast
Stephano vs Titan
etc
quite unfair for some players
Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo
The selection criteria alone was quite biased in my opinion.
Players like IEM Champion couldn't get an invite while players like retired did.
EDIT: I think it's important to note that it's completely reasonable to set the invitation criteria to "Most Popular" but at least it should be noted as "Most Popular" and not "Best" The selection criteria alone was quite biased in my opinion.Players like IEM Champion WW.Sting couldn't get an invite while players like retired exQuantic-Hawk did.EDIT: I think it's important to note that it's completely reasonable to set the invitation criteria to "Most Popular" but at least it should be noted as "Most Popular" and not "Best" Clarity Gaming #1 Fan | Avid MTG Grinder | @VirgilSC2
kju Profile Joined September 2010 3836 Posts #10 pretty disappointing but I didn't expect anything else from MLG
IPL picked it up at least
MyFirstProbe Profile Joined April 2011 Netherlands 293 Posts Last Edited: 2013-01-31 17:15:49 #11 I think I will watch it, despite there being no open bracket. An open bracket would be a bit pointless anyway imo, since not that many players will have practiced much, due to this event being just after release and not everyone having beta acces.
Edit: It feels weird, seeing parting among the kespa players.
BronzeKnee Profile Joined March 2011 United States 5017 Posts #12 On February 01 2013 02:12 SkaPunk wrote:
Don't really want to watch it if there are no open brackets.
Yeah me too... this replacement of the open bracket is... well nothing really replaced it. Yeah me too... this replacement of the open bracket is... well nothing really replaced it.
BisuDagger Profile Blog Joined October 2009 Bisutopia 16634 Posts #13 On February 01 2013 02:11 MLG_Adam wrote:
Show nested quote +
On February 01 2013 02:09 mrRoflpwn wrote:
On February 01 2013 02:07 Yhamm wrote:
how were the showdown done? random?
Fantasy vs Parting
Ret vs Feast
Stephano vs Titan
etc
quite unfair for some players
Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo Its pretty obvious that they want a bunch of foreigners in so people watch. Pretty biased competition imo
It is clearly mapped out in the main story, regional qualification:
+ Show Spoiler + KESPA (5) - 10 KESPA players competing for 5 spots
Parting vs. Fantasy
Rain vs. Flying
Innovation vs. TY
Roro vs. Hero
Soulkey vs. Last
ESF (5) - 10 ESF players competing for 5 spots
DongRaeGu vs. Jjakji
MarineKing vs Gumiho
Mvp vs Curious
Creator vs Nestea
Sniper vs Seed
Independent/Western (3) - 6 Western+ Independent Korean players competing for 3 spots
MC vs Alive
Hero vs Polt
Taeja vs Violet
North America (7) - 14 NA players competing for 7 spots
Killer vs Qxc
Huk vs Sasquatch
Scarlett vs Goswser
Idra vs Ddoro
Suppy vs Maker
Fenix vs State
Vibe vs Illusion
Europe (7) - 14 EU players competing for 7 spots
Stephano vs Titan
Nerchio vs BabyKnight
Mana vs Bly
Grubby vs Dimaga
Socke vs Thorzain
Ret vs Feast
Sase vs Snute
Southeast Asia (1) - 2 SEA players competing for 1 spot
Sen vs Moonglade It is clearly mapped out in the main story, regional qualification:
There's always going to be people who don't take the time to understand the information available or just choose to hate for no reason. Thankfully Adam is always awesome at replying to these post in good manner.
OT: Can't wait to watch this! There's always going to be people who don't take the time to understand the information available or just choose to hate for no reason. Thankfully Adam is always awesome at replying to these post in good manner.OT: Can't wait to watch this! Moderator Ofiicial Afreeca Starleague Caster: http://afreeca.tv/ASL2ENG2
KiF1rE Profile Blog Joined November 2009 United States 964 Posts #14 How is the showdown thing based on HOTS accomplishments? How many of those players have won a tournament or broke rank 2 GM in HOTS? As ive done both(granted small tournament but w/e there isnt much atm MLG is the first big event for it lol)... Just seems like claiming " top StarCraft II players in the world based on recent performances playing StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm" is kind of flawed and its just a sheer invitational everyone that's popular or did well in MLG with WoL with that player list.
regardless was expecting for some form of announcement to make up for the lack of open bracket, And as a competitor what is my Gold membership now useful for? As clearly I cant compete or sign up for anything now... making my gold relatively useless.
Arevall Profile Joined February 2010 Sweden 1027 Posts #15 I'll watch it. Will be some great matches!
Gladiator6 Profile Joined June 2010 Sweden 7021 Posts #16 PartinG vs Fantasy o_O Flying, sOs, free, Light, Soulkey & ZerO
Vindicare605 Profile Blog Joined August 2011 United States 11342 Posts #17 I'm not sure beta is in a good enough place balance wise for a major tournament yet although the championship will of course be played when the game is actually on live servers.
It's going to be exciting though that's for sure but there's guaranteed to be some frustrating games played as well. The volatility is bound to be high for a tournament like this. @KTVindicare:twitch.tv/ktvindicare
AGIANTSMURF Profile Blog Joined September 2010 United States 1230 Posts #18 I hope this is a one time thing somehow related to HOTS just being released, Following the open brackets was always my favorite part of the MLG, even if I wasnt participating.
I may check this one out, but looking forward to future events with open brackets Thats "Grand-Master" SMURF to you.....
avilo Profile Blog Joined November 2007 United States 4099 Posts Last Edited: 2013-01-31 17:21:03 #19
This invite only bullshit gets old fast. This will stay a niche thing if organizations try and go this invite only route for "quick views" rather than actually building up the player base.
While me, and you here, and the hardcore might enjoy watching top koreans duke it out...guess what the outsider sees from their point of view?
"Oh yeah SC? I've heard of that, those asian guys play it a lot, same ones win all the time. Hey, there's a Raven's game this sunday, let's go see that."
Oh wells, we all heard IPL has an open bracket we can be interested in Invite only, hmm. Looks like IPL will be taking up the mantle of a tournament that wants "e-sports to make it."This invite only bullshit gets old fast. This will stay a niche thing if organizations try and go this invite only route for "quick views" rather than actually building up the player base.While me, and you here, and the hardcore might enjoy watching top koreans duke it out...guess what the outsider sees from their point of view?"Oh yeah SC? I've heard of that, those asian guys play it a lot, same ones win all the time. Hey, there's a Raven's game this sunday, let's go see that."Oh wells, we all heard IPL has an open bracket we can be interested in Sup
PhoenixVoid Profile Blog Joined December 2011 Canada 16290 Posts #20 Seems a bit limited having only invites, but I guess it keeps the quality of players at a higher level. Some cool matches are in the wings though, so I'm definitely watching. I'm afraid of demented knife-wielding escaped lunatic libertarian zombie mutants
1 2 3 4 5 26 27 28 Next AllFourteen families impacted by last weekend’s massive fire in Cambridge received keys to new permanent housing on Friday, less than a week after the blaze ripped through a neighborhood and displaced an estimated 166 people, according to a statement from the city.
Five more families will be able to move into their new units at the beginning of next week, officials said.
“The entire citywide response to this fire has been incredible,” Mayor E. Denise Simmons said in a statement. “From the opening moments when the first fire fighters arrived on the scene, to the next 48 hours as money started flooding in to assist these victims, to this past week as City Hall was converted into a bustling hive of activity, with scores of victims getting connected with the services they need.”
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No one was injured in the 10-alarm fire, which quickly spread through 18 properties in the city’s Wellington-Harrington neighborhood on Saturday afternoon.
An inter-agency team of local and state departments has identified and registered 80 families needing assistance. Cambridge has dispersed $184,000 in donations from the Mayor’s Fire Relief Fund, according to City Manager Louis DePasquale. More than $600,000 have been contributed to the fund via online donations.Back towards the end of summer, I made my first visit to the Leighton Buzzard Railway.
Based around the town of Leighton Buzzard, North of London in the county of Bedfordshire.
This is one of the last surviving 2ft railways that was built in Britain for industrial use.
The Day
I travelled on one of the railways busier days at the end of August. Timetables vary depending on season, so check before you travel to the railway.
The railways starts its journey at Pages Park. This is just outside the town of Leighton Buzzard, directions to the railway can be found here.
Sufficient funds have been raised to redevelop the station here so it will be interesting to see how this takes shape during 2016. Pages Park is where the locomotives are stored, and where the carriages are kept, the railway runs down around the town and makes its way to Stonehenge Works.
At this station I found some old locomotives, and a presentation of what used to happen back when the railway was first built. The railway was used for carrying sand from Stonehenge Works to Pages Park, so this presentation gave a great insight into what happened.
There was a demontration here of loading up the sand into the trucks. (You can see this in action on the Video associated with this blog post) The weather had also taken a turn for the worse!
The railway owns a Baldwin locomotive, like the one that the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway is looking to restore.
Back at Pages Park, the sheds were open to look in, there were a locomotive being restored, and other repair works being taken on, it was a great insight into what goes on behind closed doors.
The last picture above was where I videoed the last train of the day departing, in the picture before you can see The fireman walking up the line, dropping sand on the tracks. This is because this part of the line is one of the steepest parts of the line, and it was also a wet day and the sand help stop the train from slipping.
Thanks for reading my visit to the Leighton Buzzard Railway, the video for this will be uploaded soon.The Mu Rhythm Bluff, by Jonathan Mitchell, features an autistic man named Drake Dumas who is in his late forties and is unlucky at both love and cards. Jonathan Mitchell, the author, is autistic himself in real life, and much of the book’s plot is based off his real life’s struggles.
In the book, Dumas works as a medical transcriptionist, barely making a living in his late forties. He also plays poker as a hobby. Eventually, he gets fired from his transcriptionist job for not working well enough. However, he learns about an experimental treatment for autism called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and signs up for it. Even though the treatment doesn’t seem to help much at first, he finds out that he can now read people’s facial expressions really well at poker, even managing to win one million dollars at a famous tournament. However, his poker skills decline over time, and he must find them out how to get them back. He meets a couple women that claim to be interested in him, but only want his money. As his poker skills decline, those women lose interest in him.
One important theme of this book is the challenge of interacting with women with a profound disability. Dumas is a virgin in his late forties, and it pains him. He flaps his hands in public and rambles about incoherent topics, and as a result, many women mock his disability. After he wins the one million dollars, a journalist named Erin Hobbs exploits his life’s story in the New York Times, portraying him as an untapped genius and trivializing his difficulties. As a result, Dumas is deeply angry.
To fulfill the expectations of masculinity, Dumas is expected to be a provider. It is often said that “a man’s career is his penis”. His boss at the transcription company, Natalie, pushes him around and threatens to fire him over small mistakes. After getting fired, he contemplates suicide, which is often the result of terminal unemployment for men. However, he discovers the experimental treatment for Autism, which changes his mind.
Although he wants to be cured from autism, there is a fad called the “Neurodiversity Movement” which says that autistics are different, not disabled, which serves as an attack on his potential masculinity. To this day, there is no evidence that autistics are truly talented and don’t need assistance. In the book, Dumas clashes with higher-functioning autistics over this issue, and they refuse to give him support for his wish, claiming that he is just asking for attention. The book’s author, Jonathan Mitchell, has written a brilliant essay on the matter in real life, Undiagnosing Gates, Jefferson, and Einstein.
Later on in the book when Dumas becomes rich from poker, a manipulative female journalist takes an interest in him, but she seems overly obsessed. Drake follows her into a limo — where he is held at gunpoint by the leader of a drug dealing gang. To survive, he now has to play poker for them for the rest of his life until he dies. Under a lot of pressure, Dumas must find a way to gain his poker skills back so the gang won’t kill him. He must play along with them while thinking of a method to escape.
The writing style of this book is very detailed and in-depth. The reader will feel like he is being pulled into the story, as he learns about autism, poker, and dating. This book is very suspenseful, with Dumas trying to win endless money at poker with his new talent and having more luck dating women. As Dumas likes to repeatedly say, this book is “Like a Dagger Through the Heart.”HackerRank: Extra Long Factorials
Tim Cotten Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 13, 2016
Grade-school Long Multiplication with Strings
From time to time I enjoy a quick exercise on HackerRank — especially the Algorithms section. After all, those pesky Google interviewers are always asking about Quicksort! 😏
I particularly enjoyed the “extra long factorials” exercise, since it demands some deeper thought if you don’t want to use a BigNum library.
The Setup
Here’s the problem:
You are given an integer N. Print the factorial of this number.
That’s not too bad.
5! would be 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120. Can do.
Input consists of a single integer N, where 1 <= N <= 100.
Oh.
10! is 3,628,800 so I can see this scales quickly.
For an input of 25, you would print 15511210043330985984000000.
Very quickly.
Factorials of N > 20 can’t be stored even in a 64 bit long long variable.
True.
The max unsigned value for a 64 bit integer would be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. (2⁶⁴)
Big integers must be used for such calculations. Languages like Java, Python, Ruby etc. can handle big integers, but we need to write additional code in C/C++ to handle huge values.
We recommend solving this challenge using BigIntegers.
Challenge Accepted
I choose C. I also choose not to use BigIntegers.
My intention for solving the solution was to avoid reinventing the entire BigNum wheel — I figured I’d just implement the Standard Algorithm (grade-school long multiplication) using string manipulations so I could support an absurdly large factorial like 999!.
Strings and Math
Why string manipulations?
My wife is finishing her Masters degree in Math Education Leadership. As someone who was once dubious about our American education system (then I married a teacher and got a significant on-the-ground look) and the usefulness of Common Core it’s been an amazing opportunity to learn about the challenges both students and teachers face when teaching math.
Even something as “intuitive” and “natural” as the positional decimal numeral system we use in daily life (9+1 = 10, 99+1 = 100, …) eluded history’s greatest minds for thousands of years — obviously there’s something special about it, and yet it becomes a rote, reason-less memorization for students often severely lacking in explanation. Students who then become teachers.
I’ll never forget the night Amy came home from one of her graduate classes and told me all about how they’d learned to convert numbers between arbitrary bases: my non-programmer wife came home understanding binary, octal, and hexadecimal and could manipulate them with confidence!
It all came down to having a finite set of symbols, and zero.
Say you have the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 and nothing else. How do you count past 4?
Base 5 | Base 10
0 = 0
1 = 1
2 = 2
3 = 3
4 = 4
10 = 5
11 = 6
12 = 7
13 = 8
14 = 9
20 = 10
All we’re doing is manipulating symbols — when we run out of unique symbols we shift once to the left and insert a zero.
When confronted by this problem it made me ask: “why not try solving it like a human using Base 10 would?”
Thinking Like a Human
A human, when confronted with a multiplication problem, is generally able to solve it either with a tool like a calculator or by hand using the long multiplication method (also called the Standard Multiplication Algorithm).
When performed by hand it’s possible to multiply any two integers together, regardless of length, as long as there’s enough paper to store the work on — just like computer memory.
However, this presupposes certain arithmatic knowledge, particularly a memorization of the times table.
Multiplication Table in Base 10 (Decimal)
In reality the multiplication table we memorize as children is just a lookup table to give us a shortcut for not having to add up the sums for the integers. (Reminder: multiplication is not actually repetitive addition).
Armed with a multiplication table for digits 0 through 9 we can perform multiplication on integers of any length using long multiplication:
Long Multiplication With Explanation of Place Value and Zero
Algorithmic Steps for Long Multiplication
Here’s the Wikipedia pseudo-code for performing long multiplication:
// Operands containing rightmost digits at index 1
multiply(a[1..p], b[1..q], base)
//Allocate space for result
product = [1..p+q]
// for all digits in b
for b_i = 1 to q
carry = 0
//for all digits in a
for a_i = 1 to p
product[a_i + b_i - 1] += carry + a[a_i] * b[b_i]
carry = product[a_i + b_i - 1] / base
product[a_i + b_i - 1] = product[a_i + b_i - 1] mod base
// last digit comes from final carry
product[b_i + p] += carry
return product
We’re going to do two important things with our string version:
Treat single digit multiplication as a native operation in C (e.g. convert chars to ints and multiply) as an analogy to the advantage humans have in knowing the multiplication table Hold the results of operations in strings
First Pass
HackerRank doesn’t really care how well formatted or how well documented your code is. It just runs tests against it for correctness.
The problem with this is that you’re tempted to just blaze through the problem and end up with something like this implementation:
#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main() {
// Support input from 0 to 999
char n[4] = {0};
scanf("%s",n);
// 999! has 2565 digits, plus a null terminator
char expansion[2566] = {0};
// The initial value will be the input (ex: 999 x 998 x 997
// so fill with chars for 999)
for (int i = 0; i < strlen(n); i++) {
expansion[i] = n[i];
}
// Start at one less than the input (ex: 998), and as
// long as we're greater than 1 keep decrementing
// (we don't really need to multiply by 1)
int start = atoi(n)-1;
for (int i = start; i > 1; i--) {
sprintf(n, "%d", i);
int expansion_d = strlen(expansion);
int n_d = strlen(n);
int total_d = expansion_d + n_d;
int totals[total_d];
for (int x = 0; x < total_d; x++) {
totals[x] = 0;
}
int reset = 0;
for (int j = n_d - 1; j >= 0; j--) {
int p = total_d - 1 - reset++;
for (int k = expansion_d-1; k >= 0; k--) {
int top = expansion[k] - '0';
int bottom = n[j] - '0';
totals[p--] += top*bottom;
}
}
for (int p0 = total_d - 1; p0 >= 0; p0--) {
if (totals[p0] >= 10) {
int carry = totals[p0] / 10;
totals[p0] %= 10;
totals[p0 - 1] += carry;
}
}
int notzero = 0;
int position = 0;
for (int p0 = 0; p0 < total_d; p0++) {
if (!notzero && totals[p0] > 0) {
notzero = 1;
}
if (notzero) {
expansion[position] = totals[p0] + '0';
position++;
}
}
}
printf("%s
", expansion);
return 0;
}
999! turns out to be:
402387260077093773543702433923003985719374864210714632543799910429938512398629020592044208486969404800479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669944590997424504087073759918823627727188732519779505950995276120874975462497043601418278094646496291056393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476632889835955735432513185323958463075557409114262417474349347553428646576611667797396668820291207379143853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534524221586593201928090878297308431392844403281231558611036976801357304216168747609675871348312025478589320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151027341827977704784635868170164365024153691398281264810213092761244896359928705114964975419909342221566832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975602900950537616475847728421889679646244945160765353408198901385442487984959953319101723355556602139450399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200015888535147331611702103968175921510907788019393178114194545257223865541461062892187960223838971476088506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780889893964518263243671616762179168909779911903754031274622289988005195444414282012187361745992642956581746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786906117260158783520751516284225540265170483304226143974286933061690897968482590125458327168226458066526769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348344825993266043367660176999612831860788386150279465955131156552036093988180612138558600301435694527224206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657245014402821885252470935190620929023136493273497565513958720559654228749774011413346962715422845862377387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446640259899490222221765904339901886018566526485061799702356193897017860040811889729918311021171229845901641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819372388642614839657382291123125024186649353143970137428531926649875337218940694281434118520158014123344828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278288269864602789864321139083506217095002597389863554277196742822248757586765752344220207573630569498825087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994871701244516461260379029309120889086942028510640182154399457156805941872748998094254742173582401063677404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230560855903700624271243416909004153690105933983835777939410970027753472000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
WolframAlpha agrees about what 999! evaluates to, which is also where the magic number 2566 comes from.
The biggest problem with this code is not the lack of optimization, but the difficulty in proving correctness without executing it. Reading it even a few hours after writing left me scratching my head as I retraced my logic for performing the factorial in place.
Lesson: even if they’re just throwaway toy scripts and programming exercises there’s no excuse for failing to write self-documenting code and providing useful comments.
An Explanation
We’re going to need strlen() and atoi() if we really |
extra flour, 1 maybe 2 tbsps. After another few minutes the dough looked and felt good.
This was left to prove for an hour, and the oven was set to 200c fan with the baking stone in the centre of the oven to heat up.
The dough hadn’t doubled in size in an hour, probably because it wasn’t very warm in the house, but I needed to get a move on to fit cooking them in before a Skype call… so I had to go with the dough as it was!
So I split the dough into 4 rather large balls, and roll then out into rough oval shapes.
The baking stone then comes out of the oven, gets a dusting of course semolina, then the flatbreads go on (they only just fit…) and then it’s into the oven.
They didn’t puff up in the oven like pita breads do, possibly due to the extra chickpeas in the dough, or not rising properly. After 10 minutes they didn’t look done, so I gave then another 5 minutes and then they looked good (although as I hadn’t rotated during cooking the one at the back right had a lot more colour than the ones at the front…).
So we’ll see how they taste tomorrow with the slow cooker tagine. They certainly smell good!Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond the people who are actually interested in analysing data themselves. However, many of the people raising this issue are not aware of what and how much data is actually available.
Therefore, we have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc. We have made a start on this on a new Data Sources page, but if anyone has other links that we’ve missed, note them in the comments and we’ll update accordingly.
The climate science community fully understands how important it is that data sources are made as open and transparent as possible, for research purposes as well as for other interested parties, and is actively working to increase accessibility and usability of the data. We encourage people to investigate the various graphical portals to get a feel for the data and what can be done with it. The providers of these online resources are very interested in getting feedback on any of these sites and so don’t hesitate to contact them if you want to see improvements.
Update: Big thank you to all for all the additional links given below. Keep them coming!When he ran for president last year, Bernie Sanders picked up basically zero support from the Democratic establishment. Only one fellow Senator endorsed him, and even his fellow Senator from Vermont endorsed Hillary Clinton.
The Bernie Sanders single-payer health care plan, released on Wednesday, is a totally different story. First, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) announced her plans to co-sponsor it; then Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) joined in. Then Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ed Markey (D-MA), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) joined in. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) will reportedly co-sponsor it as well, and Pat Leahy (D-VT), who bucked his colleague Sanders in last year’s primary, is reportedly a supporter too.
Warren, Sanders, Harris, Booker, and Gillibrand are arguably the most famous and most-admired Democratic senators in the country among the party’s base; the betting markets give a 63 percent chance that one of them will be the 2020 nominee for president.
The rest of the party is getting on board with single-payer — or “Medicare for all,” where the federal government would provide health insurance for every American financed through taxes — as well. 117 House Democrats (over 60 percent of the caucus) have co-sponsored HR 676, the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act offered every Congress by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).
This is what an emerging party consensus looks like. Over time, some issues become so widely accepted within a party as to be a de facto requirement for anyone aspiring to lead it. No Democrat would run for president, or even for House or Senate minority leader, without supporting the DREAM Act. No Republican would try for a leadership position without supporting repeal of the estate tax.
And the way things are going, soon no Democratic leader will be able to oppose single-payer.
The dynamics making Democratic leaders endorse single-payer
This shift has occurred with astonishing speed. Even the left-most mainstream candidate in 2008, John Edwards, didn’t dare propose single-payer, instead backing an individual mandate, insurance exchanges with subsidies, and a public option (presaging the Affordable Care Act, at least as the Obama administration wanted it to be). Al Gore and John Kerry didn’t even pretend their health plans would lead to universal coverage. A few stalwarts in Congress, like Conyers or former Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), kept the flame alive, but in the mainstream of the Democratic party, the idea was dead.
And there are still holdouts to the new pro-single-payer consensus, for sure. Moderate Govs. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA), Steve Bullock (D-MT), and Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) have all hinted at presidential bids, and none have endorsed single-payer. Nor has Joe Biden, who would be 78 on Inauguration Day but is nonetheless putting out feelers for what would be his third run for president.
But if they want to win, the moderates are going to face the exact same pressures that have led Harris and Warren to embrace Medicare-for-all. Bernie Sanders came shockingly close to winning the 2016 primary with almost zero institutional support from the Democratic party, and he fell short in large part because of his failure to appeal to African-American primary voters, who despite preferring Hillary Clinton are more likely than white Democrats to support single-payer.
That tells prospective national candidates some important things about the primary electorate they’re trying to woo. First, it has a huge stock of voters who flocked to Sanders, a candidate who made Medicare-for-all a cornerstone of his campaign. Second, winning those voters while making more inroads among black voters is almost certainly enough to win the primary, and a populist economic message at the very least won’t hurt attempts to woo black voters.
Put it all together, and the best path to victory in the primary starts to look like mimicking Sanders on policy, and certainly on health care policy. What’s more, if Biden or Cuomo were to run and oppose single-payer, they’d be hit hard by all their opponents for being holdouts offering half measures rather than promising universal health care. By contrast, if they just got on board with single-payer, it would be more or less costless in the primary.
There’s more to elections than primaries, of course, and the crushing defeat that single-payer received when it was on the ballot in Colorado last year suggests that massive payroll tax increases of the kind that the Conyers bill and (from early indications) the Sanders bill would entail are not exactly popular with a general election audience.
But that might also be a fixable problem. Universal health care as a concept polls pretty well with the general public, and it’s possible to design a single-payer or de facto single-payer plan that doesn’t require massive tax increases. And while a victorious Democratic president who supports single-payer would have a hard time passing it, they’d have a hard time passing anything significant on health care. There’s little cost in going big.
This is a significant change. And the success of the Sanders primary campaign, along with his subsequent decision to parlay that organizing into an effort to move his colleagues to the left, deserves a lot of credit in effecting it. While he lost the nomination, Sanders appears to have succeeded in significantly shifting the Democratic consensus on one of the party’s bread-and-butter issues.Timeless.
The men’s Ashby Wax Jacket is a contemporary lined Barbour raincoat with a robust waxed outer, ideal for seasonal use and wet conditions dipping below the freezing mark. It’s built with Barbour's signature 6-oz Sylkoil waxed cotton, which has a matte finish and offers an amazingly comfortable feel. It also features the brands signature Tartan body lining and has its sleeves and dripstrip linings in a smooth and long-lasting polyester. The collar is corded and can be worn up for extra protection. A button-placket front opening covers the durable two-way front zipper. The jacket-front has upper handwarmer pockets and studded lower patch pockets, while the lower-back features snap-button vents. The Ashby has a slightly more tailored fit than the other Barbour models yet still allows room cold weather layering.
Mediumweight 6oz Barbour Sylkoil wax outer
Barbour Tartan lining
Polyester sleeve linings & polyamide dripstrip
Cord fold collar
Two-way zipper covered by button placket
Studded rear vents
Handwarmer & studded patch pockets
Stitched ‘Barbour’ on front left pocket
Slightly tailored fit
SpecificationsIn one of the more curious episodes in Italian carmaking history, Zagato managed to complete development of its own version of the Super Sprint a good six months before Alfa Romeo officially launched the Touring-bodied model, meaning that Signor Ricci's purchase was not only one of the first 1900 SSZs sold, but one of the first Super Sprints of any sort to find an owner.
His car (chassis number AR1900C01845, engine 1308.00917) left the Alfa Romeo factory plant at the very end of July 1954 and was delivered to Zagato headquarters just down the road, where it was dressed and painted in a few weeks. It then left the carrozzeria on September 24, bound for the Grande Garage Internazionale in Lucca, northwest of Tuscany. It was in all likelihood originally painted green, like the majority of the 38 SSZs that followed it, but it is hard to be certain, says Paolo Di Taranto, marketing manager and archivist at Zagato.
View 12 Photos
"Our records of the car are incomplete, and, although its color is noted as green, we're not sure whether the note was written in 1954 or later on, following a respray here at Zagato. The dash and interior metal trim are light blue, and we know that green/blue was a standard combination. So, too, was blue/blue, but looking at the earliest black-and-white photographs of the car, it appears too dark to have been painted light blue."
The odd detail notwithstanding, we know far more about the car than its first owner. "The car was the seventh made, and, despite its SSZ designation, was actually built on a Sprint chassis. It doesn't have the double-bubble roof, incidentally; that feature found its way into only six of the 39 SSZs made. It was first registered LU20404, which tells us that Signor Ricci lived in Lucca, but that's about as much as we've been able to find out about him."
Poring through old issues of Auto Italia, we discover that he was apparently happy to share his new toy with others right away, letting Otello Biagiotti drive the SSZ in the October 24 Florence-Siena race, a 70-km dash along public roads. Biagiotti finished first in his class (1300cc-plus GT cars) and fifth overall, some way behind the victorious Eugenio Castellotti and his 3.3-liter Lancia Sport, but just ahead of the SSZ of Elio Zagato, Ugo's son.
View 12 Photos
Biagiotti must have been impressed with the car, because he bought it from Ruggero Ricci just a few months later, in February 1955, with the intention of racing it in that year's Mille Miglia. For reasons unknown, however, he did not make the start line, and sold the car in June. Fortunately for chassis 01845, it was acquired not by another hell-for-leather racer, but by the family of Maria Laura Pelliccia, and became a seldom-used runabout in Florence.
It changed hands again in '57, '63, and '68 before finally finding a long-term owner in September 1969, when it was snapped up by a Signore Strippoli and transported to Rome. There it was treated to an engine rebuild and new bumpers before being stashed away -- for more than 40 years. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that 01845 remains spectacularly original, nor to discover that it has long been lusted after by Alfa Romeo enthusiasts. "We've known about the car for years," says Lorenzo Marzullo of the Registro Italiano Alfa Romeo. "Plenty have tried to buy it, but Signore Strippoli has always maintained that he has no interest in selling." Upon meeting him through a mutual friend, this writer sensed he might be open to letting the SSZ go to the right home, and there is no better home for a historic Alfa Romeo than the collection of Corrado Lopresto.
Corrado and I arranged to see the car in person and traveled to Strippoli's lock-up in Rome full of anticipation, but when we pulled open the doors to the garage we could see only piles of junk. We shifted boxes, moved decades' worth of odds and ends, and, suddenly, there it was: a dust-covered automotive time capsule of quite extraordinary beauty. We fell head over heels in love.
The garage was dark and dry, so the years had been relatively kind to the car. "When Signore Lopresto first showed us the car, we were really surprised," says Di Taranto. "It's not every day that you see an SSZ preserved as well as this one." Of the 39 examples built, around half are thought to survive, but for every car documented in the Zagato archives, there are two or three more that claim to be original. "Generally it is easy to spot the replicas: The shape of the nose is extremely difficult to get right, as are the plexiglass side windows. You have to be very, very good to produce something that might fool a real expert."
There is no question that 01845 is the real deal, though, and Di Taranto admits that the car has taught Zagato a thing or two about its own production history. "I suspect it will become an important reference point for those restoring other examples, and with a bit of work it could easily become the benchmark example against which others are measured."
Corrado, however, has no intention of turning the car into just another concours peacock. "By the time I got the car home, I had resolved it wouldn't be restored. I changed the oil, water, and battery, and with a little fresh gasoline in the carbs the engine started immediately. I'll clean the tank, change the leaky fuel line, and refurbish the brakes. That's all. As far as we know, this is the most original 1900 Super Sprint Zagato in the world, and it should be kept -- and shown -- that way."
Its first public appearance was at the Louwman Museum in the Netherlands, where it was displayed alongside other significant Alfa Romeos as part of a summer 2013 exhibition titled "Style Icons: Passione per il Design Italiano." No doubt many were drawn in by cars such as the showy 1938 8C-2900B Le Mans Speciale and the gleaming 1940 Count Trossi 6C-2500SS, but I suspect the dusty 1900 SSZ lit up the museum, for Corrado's newest old car has the sort of charisma you can't polish in.
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1954 Alfa Romeo 1900 Super Sprint Zagato Specifications
Engine 120.5 cu in/1975cc DOHC I-4, 2x1-bbl Solex 40 PII carburetors Power and torque 115 hp @ 5500 rpm, 116 lb-ft @ 3700 rpm Drivetrain 5-speed manual, RWD Brakes front: aluminum drum, rear: aluminum drum Suspension Front: control arms, coil springs Rear: live axle, coil springs Dimensions L: 173.4 in, W: 64.2 in, H: 53.1 in (est) Weight 2542 lb Performance Top speed 118-134 mph, depending on gearing Price when new $6100
ASK THE MAN WHO OWNS ONE
Corrado Lopresto is an architect who has been collecting cars since he was 19 and now holds one of the world's finest collections of Alfa Romeos.
WHY IT'S COLLECTIBLE: Zagato-bodied cars of any make are collectible, but a non-bubble-roofed Alfa coupe -- and the seventh of 39 built, in original condition -- qualifies as a blue-chip collectible.
RESTORING/MAINTAINING: With a car like this, restoring is a no-no. Maintaining is the way to go, preserving the patina but making it safe and roadworthy enough to be shared on a very limited basis with other appreciative enthusiasts.
BEWARE: Even maintenance items can be tricky to pin down on an early, original car for which there is minimal documentation. Due diligence in research is essential.
EXPECT TO PAY: Concours-ready, $775,000; solid driver, $725,000; tired runner, $445,000 (Source: Hagerty Price Guide)
JOIN THE CLUB: Alfa Romeo Owners Club of America, Zagato Car ClubSo how much has our financial catastrophe cost taxpayers? Even leaving aside the damage to investment portfolios, job losses, home foreclosures and diminished business prospects, the financial depression of 2008 has been immensely costly for taxpayers. The Treasury Department has had to issue more than three times as much debt than it anticipated even as late as last July.
This afternoon the Treasury announced its renewed estimates for borrowing. From October through December of this year, the Treasury expects to borrow $550 billion from investors, a whopping $408 billion increase over the amount it estimated it would borrow in July.
During the July – September 2008 quarter, Treasury borrowed $530 billion. In July, the Treasury estimated it would borrow only $171 billion over the period. Overall, borrowing for the second half of the year was over $1 trillion dollars. The estimate for had been merely $313 billion.
Why has borrowing skyrocketed? You already know the answers. The government is spending money hand over fist to prop up the financial system at the same time it collects less from depressed taxpayers.
The government also expects to borrow $368 billion in the first quarter of next year. Let’s hope the government is getting better at these estimates. If it’s as bad at estimating future borrowings as it was in July, we’re looking at a government that might need to borrow more than $2.5 trillion over the next two quarters, which would mean that the Treasury would be borrowing more than one-third of total Gross Domestic Product.
That’s obviously unrealistic, and we’re sure the new numbers reflect a better perception of the costs and risks faced by our environment. Because by now these guys who are cooking up these numbers must have learned something about risk, right?Summer is here and the time for early evening strolls through the neighborhood has arrived. Fortunately, a report from Walk Score released earlier this year finds that the city's walkability improved in 2016 and that LA is the nation’s 13th-most walkable city.
The city’s walk score of 66 in 2016 was a two point improvement over the year before. The score is based on a number of factors, including the accessibility of walking routes, how many shops and restaurants walkers are likely to pass by, and the amount of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.
Many of LA’s individual neighborhoods received very high marks this year. Downtown, Central Hollywood, and Koreatown, for instance, all scored above 90—higher than the 89 scored this year by first place city New York.
On the flip side, upscale neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, Porter Ranch, and Bel Air are extremely car dependent and drag down the city’s overall walkability (Bel Air-Beverly Crest registered a walk score of just 14 points in 2016).
Overall, six Southern California cities made the top 50 list this year. The most walkable, according to the report, is Long Beach, which beat out Baltimore in the latest rankings for a place in the top 10. The coastal city ended up with a score of 69 in 2016, up from 66 a year earlier.
Downtown Long Beach has become particularly appealing for pedestrians, with a walk score of 92.
In a statement, Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia says the city’s improved score is due to recent pedestrian-friendly projects undertaken by the city. These include new street lights, signs, and the addition of colorful crosswalks that are difficult for drivers to overlook.
But Southern California continues to lag behind the Bay Area. San Francisco was again ranked the second-most walkable city in the nation, with a score of 86. Oakland wasn’t too far behind, scoring 72 and coming in ninth on the list.Jeff Petersen has joined Linden Lab as the new VP of Engineering. Going under the name of Bagman Linden, Petersen is the second major hire the Lab has made from the gaming community, following-on from the recruitment of Rod Humble as CEO.
He’s certainly an interesting choice, as he notes himself:
For me, the challenges and the opportunities at the Lab are a perfect fit for my background. I come to the Lab with over 20 years of experience as a game developer and engineering lead, primarily in the MMO area. Prior to joining Linden Lab, I spent 10 years working for Sony Online Entertainment doing MMO RPG development (with a focus on the networking, servers, and core technologies), along with PS3 and PSP development. Some of the titles that I worked on include: Everquest, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, Untold Legends PS3, Field Commander PSP, FreeRealms, and CloneWars Adventures.
Old timers may remember an early entry into MMO gaming that I developed in a game called Subspace, published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1996. The unique relationship I had with the player base of this product mirrors the relationship between the Lindens and the Residents in many ways. If there is one thing I’ve learned about MMO gaming over the years it is that MMO products have a life of their own, and the player investment in the product is a key aspect of that. Second Life is no different in this regard. The Residents of Second Life want to see the product succeed every bit as much as Linden Lab does.
Reading this, one cannot help but think that Humble himself had a direct hand in the recruitment of Petersen: the words may be a little different between the two of them, but the sentiment is the same. It is certainly refreshing to hear yet another senior at the Lab talking in terms of player investment in the platform; something that has been a theme of mine for a while now – and to which I’ll be returning.
Another theme that Humble himself has frequently raised in various interviews is the fact that one of the biggest impediments to people getting to grips with Second Life remains the Viewer; and not just new users. From the comments he has made, it’s pretty clear that Humble would like to see the Viewer overhauled for the benefit of the community as a whole. Given this, it is going to be extremely interesting to see what Petersen brings to the table in terms of Viewer development.
Beyond that, it is also interesting to note Petersen’s extensive background in console game development at Sony. There have been more than a few suggestions made that one way in which SL might reach a wider audience might be through the development of a console-based Viewer. It’ll be interesting to see if, over time, any moves are made in this direction as a result of Petersen’s appointment.
AdvertisementsA cardboard bicycle might sound flimsy, but the company behind the idea is backed by a solid business plan, and social and environmental innovation as durable as the string material the company produces. Fairplanet spoke to Cardboard Technologies Founder and Co-CEO Nimrod Elmish.
Cardboard Technologies began as a garage start-up in Israel about nine years ago when Elmish’s childhood friend Izhar Gafni got to work thinking about technology that could transform cardboard into a durable raw material that can be used for producing bicycles en masse.
The first implementation of the material was a cardboard bicycle. Presented to the world in 2013 to much excitement, the bike demonstrated the durability that could be achieved with cardboard.
Cardboard Technologies have spent the last three years speaking with potential partners and honing the technology to develop their first three products: the cardboard bike, the cardboard balance bike (for kids learning to ride) and the cardboard wheelchair.
Elmish says many people have asked 'what's taking so long?'
The team didn't want to reduce the quality of their product by giving in to the pressure to produce their first product quickly. Thankfully their investors and shareholders have been supportive.
Now finally Cardboard Technologies are just about ready to take their products to market.
“The technology is very strong,” says Elmish. “We have over 200 patents in this field for enhancing off-the-shelf cardboard to make it into a strong raw material.”
“What we are doing today is building prototypes of products we think are essential to the market, to the people. Then we turn the prototypes into a complete product and do the testing to show that these products are strong and durable enough to be on the market.”
Bicycles and wheelchairs are simply the first implementation of what they hope will be a wide range of solutions using the recyclable, durable cardboard material.
The innovation comes backed by a strong business model that matches environmental care and social responsibility with profitability.
From the material used to the humans involved – both producers and users – it is clear that great care has been taken to be socially and environmentally responsible without compromising the business’s viability.
The environmental impact of Cardboard Technology’s work is both thoughtful and broad.
In its simplest form, they’re offering an affordable way to avoid CO2 emissions and encourage recycling by producing a bike that costs approximately one quarter of the price of an average metal bike.
Cardboard Technologies also has a vision to be part of bike-sharing programs in cities across the world. They have already been in talks with local governments as well as companies about the possibility of having companies purchase the affordable bikes and donate them to social projects, made affordable by the generous tax break afforded to recyclable materials and the branding an PR opportunities.
As for producing the bikes and wheelchairs, the recyclable materials used in their products – cardboard and plastic bottles – can be found almost anywhere. This contributes to waste reduction.
But further than that, “the materials that we use can be recycled again and again and again, and turned into something else”, says Elmish.
While the products have been designed and tested to run without maintenance – no lubrication needed, or new parts – for 3-5 years, when they do finally wear out, the materials won’t end up in a rubbish dump: they can be turned into something else.
This is particularly notable because Cardboard Technologies is interested in having the bicycles used in social projects, including in third world countries. They want to make sure that the products they send out into the world won’t end up costing the environment at the other end.
Far-reaching social impact
Elmish sees the scope of the company’s social impact running the gamut of users from elderly people in Japan to children in sub-Saharan Africa, and including production line workers as well by creating local production opportunities for the aged and under-employed.
“Because we grew up in a kibbutz, because we are socialist since early education, we designed the production and assembly line to employ senior citizens, handicapped or under-employed populations, so that when we bring the production line to any continent, any country, actually what we do is we create new workplaces and new industry.”
But they’re also interested in solving culturally specific challenges.
Elmish explains that in Japan, which has a vast aging population, the national health system provides a wheelchair for every aging person who needs one. However, because of the Japanese custom of separating footwear for indoor or outdoor use, people don’t want to bring their dirty wheelchairs inside, leaving them to choose between using their wheelchair inside or outside.
“And we’ve learned that in Japan the cost of these wheelchairs can range between $300-350 and even more,” says Elmish, making it unaffordable for the state to provide two wheelchairs for every person who needs one.
However, cardboard wheelchairs, at a B2B cost of around $49 per unit, could make separate wheelchairs for indoor and outdoor use a reality.
If healthcare companies want to purchase the wheelchairs, the impact of being able to brand them and recycling tax breaks should make it possible for companies to provide these wheelchairs to the elderly free of charge, says Elmish.
Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3
It’s hard to imagine cardboard vehicles or wheelchairs standing up to the elements. But the company has put their products through rigorous testing and is confident in the results.
“We had to throw the bikes into the sea, we surfed waves with them, and we take the parts that we make and put them into a dishwasher for hours for testing,” says Elmish. As it turns out, the cardboard is water resistant.
But water isn’t the only concern. “We have testing machinery in our development labs and it runs these products through impossible tests. For example, the balance bike for kids is being bounced by a piston with 140 kilograms for eight constant hours.”
This ensures that when a parent is showing their child how to use the bike, they can put their full weight on it.
So where to start?
Elmish says the balance bike will be their first product on the market, spreading the company’s environmentally-friendly message.
“That’s one of the reasons we chose the balance bike first – because we think that you need to educate a new layer of the population on, ‘what is recycling? Why is it important?’”
“There’s a story in every box about where this bike’s cardboard came from and the impact of using this material over others that are not so environmentally friendly. There are so many ways to use it as a tool for learning about recycling.”
As for the future, Cardboard Technologies wants to get its first products to market.
But Elmish says their long-term hope is to be able to produce housing relief in disaster situations, by developing a machine that can produce walls and roofs from the cardboard material.
“Then we could ship this machine to anywhere it’s needed.”
Cardboard Technologies continues to search for the right partners and investors, to expand and establish the production facilities worldwide.
With a solid vision of the future, we look forward to seeing where they go next.President Trump this week is reportedly hosting six Capitol Hill Republicans for dinner at the White House.
The dinner will be held Tuesday night, according to Politico.
The Republicans who will be attending the dinner include Sens. Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioHillicon 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 Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 MORE (Fla.), Cory Gardner Cory Scott GardnerJon Stewart, 9/11 responders call on Congress to fund victim compensation program The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump Don’t look for House GOP to defy Trump on border wall MORE (Colo.), Tom Cotton Thomas (Tom) Bryant CottonHillicon 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 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington MORE (Ark.) and Todd Young Todd Christopher YoungIndiana gets first national park Ivanka Trump to meet with GOP senators to discuss paid family leave legislation Trade official warns senators of obstacles to quick China deal MORE (Ind.), as well as Reps. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.) and Francis Rooney (Fla.), Politico reported.
Rooney was a mega-fundraiser for Republicans including former President George W. Bush and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
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The dinner comes after Trump this past weekend reignited the debate over his travel ban in the wake of the London terror attack that left at least seven people dead and dozens more wounded.
The president on Monday sent out a series of tweets about the intent of his blocked executive order on immigration now being appealed to the Supreme Court.
Trump said in the tweets that the Justice Department should have stayed with his original travel ban as opposed to the revised version, which he called a "watered down, politically correct version they submitted to the S.C."
The dinner will come days before James Comey, who was ousted as FBI director by Trump last month, will testify publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee.The Syrinscape SoundSet Creator is an easy to use sound design app, which gives you the power to create and customize your own sound environments, soundscapes and music. It’s a massively powerful sound-design tool that includes all of the dials, sliders, parameters, and other functions that you'll need to make Syrinscape sound great. Syrinscape SoundSet Creator will bring your library of sound effects to life using Syrinscape's powerful audio engine. The Syrinscape SoundSet Creator is available via the SuperSyrin Subscription, so once you've got yourself a sub, simply log into the website and you'll find the download links at the top right of your screen.The entire Syrinscape library of thousands of sounds comes unlocked with your SuperSyrin Subscription direct into the SoundSet Creator. Experiment with and manipulate every sound the Syrinscape team have built for you. Even better, add your own recordings for a custom sound experience. The SoundSet Creator allows you to create your own entirely unique soundworld from scratch! Here are just a few ways to use the limitless creativity of the SoundSet Creator: Don’t like the rollicking jigs being played in Syrinscape’s Tavern Brawl SoundSet? Customize the music to your tastes! Turn it into a Heavy Metal tavern, or an Irish pub - it’s up to you. Make a custom monster SoundSet with your best roars and howls! Create custom sounds to accompany your favorite tabletop game! Experiment with homemade sound effects with a professional tool that provides incredible intensity, control and immersion. Make some noise!Once your sound masterpiece is complete, you can upload your new shiny SoundSet to our server and sync it across all your devices, and play it like any other normal Syrinscape SoundSet. Then if your SoundSet is great (and doesn't break anyone's copyright), you'll be able to share it with the whole Creator community. All SuperSyrins will have access to all the great stuff that people make. That'll really see our SoundSet libraries grow!Here's a Playlist of detailed SoundSet Creator Tutorials, covering everything you need to know, from SoundSets to Samples!Professor of Science at Macqarie University in Sydney, a mammalogist, paleontologist, conservationist, and explorer, Tim Flannery wrote The Future Eaters (1994), The Eternal Frontier (2001), The Weather Makers (2005), and Here on Earth: A New Beginning.
Australian biologist Tim Flannery is the renowned author of The Weather Makers, The Future Eaters, and a great ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier. His book Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet was published in 02011.
Humans now engage the Earth at Gaian scale. How did Earth and humans get to this state? Given how we got here, how should we proceed? Tim Flannery finds that the evolutionary perspective of Alfred Russell Wallace offers better guidance than the more familiar Darwinian version of evolution.
Wallace beats Darwin
The great insight of natural selection was published simultaneously by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858, Flannery pointed out, but their interpretations of the insight then diverged. Darwin's harsh view of "survival of the fittest" led too easily to social Darwinism, eugenics societies, neo-classical economics, and an overly reductionist focus on the "selfish gene." Wallace, by contrast, focussed on the tendency of evolution to generate a world of complex co-dependence, and he became an activist for social justice.
At the age of 80 in 1904 Wallace published a book titled Man's Place in the Universe, which proposed that Earth was the only living planet in the Solar System. Flannery regards it as "the foundation text of astrobiology" and, with its view that the atmosphere is an instrument of life, a direct precursor of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis and Earth System Science. The study of Earth systems, in turn, revealed that the atmosphere is 99 percent an artifact of life (minus only the noble gases), that the makeup of the oceans is life-driven (toxic heavy metals were concentrated into ore bodies), and that the whole, in Flannery's terms, constitutes a "commonwealth of virtue," using "geo-pheromones" such ozone, methane, atmospheric dust, and dimethyl sulfide from algae to regulate the stability of a livable planet. It acts like a loosely connected superorganism.
The first tightly connected superorganism came 100 million years ago when cockroaches invented agriculture and the division of labor and became termites, building complex skyscrapers with air-conditioning, highways, and garbage dumps. Only 10,000 years ago, humans did the same, inventing agriculture and the division of labor in cities, becoming the most potent superorganism yet. One cause of that, Flannery opined, may be our astonishing genetic uniformity, caused by a near-extinction 70,000 years ago, when only 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs of humans survived. The 7 billion of us now alive have less genetic diversity than any random sample of 50 chimpanzees in West Africa.
Flannery finds cause for hope in the increasing pace of global agreements to manage the global commons. There was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001, and worthy of an annual holiday on September 16, the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Flannery, who now works full |
's political career started in 1939 with his employment at the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (renamed Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1946). He became the Soviet ambassador to the United States in 1943, leaving in 1946 to become the Soviet Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Upon his return to the Soviet Union he became a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and later the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. He went on to become the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1952.
During his tenure as Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, Gromyko was directly involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis and helped broker a peace treaty ending the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War. Under Brezhnev's leadership, he played a central role in the establishment of detente with the United States through his negotiation of the ABM Treaty, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and SALT I & II, among others. As Brezhnev's health declined during the latter years of his leadership, Gromyko formed a troika with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov that increasingly dominated decision-making in Moscow. Henceforth, Gromyko's conservatism and hardline attitudes towards the West dictated the course of Soviet foreign policy until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
Following Gorbachev's election as General Secretary, Gromyko lost his office as foreign minister and was appointed to the largely ceremonial office of head of state. Subsequently, he retired from political life in 1988, and died the following year in Moscow.
Early life [ edit ]
Background and youth [ edit ]
Gromyko was born to a poor "semi-peasant, semi-worker" Belarusian family[3] in the Belarusian village of Staryya Gramyki, near Gomel on 18 July 1909. Gromyko's father, Andrei Matveyevich, worked as a seasonal worker in a local factory. Andrei Matveyevich was not a very educated man, having only attended four years of school, but knew how to read and write. He had fought in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Gromyko's mother, Olga Yevgenyevna, came from a poor peasant family in the neighbouring city of Zhelezniki. She attended school only for a short period of time as, when her father died, she left to help her mother with the harvest.
Gromyko grew up near the district town of Vetka where most of the inhabitants were devoted Old Believers in the Russian Orthodox Church. Gromyko's own village was also predominantly religious, but Gromyko started doubting the supernatural at a very early age. His first dialog on the subject was with his grandmother Marfa, who answered his inquiry about God with "Wait until you get older. Then you will understand all this much better". According to Gromyko, "Other adults said basically the same thing" when talking about religion. Gromyko's neighbour at the time, Mikhail Sjeljutov, was a freethinker and introduced Gromyko to new non-religious ideas and told Gromyko that scientists were beginning to doubt the existence of God. From the age of nine, after the Bolshevik revolution, Gromyko started reading atheist propaganda in flyers and pamphlets. At the age of thirteen Gromyko became a member of the Komsomol and held anti-religious speeches in the village with his friends as well as promoting Communist values.
The news that Germany had attacked the Russian Empire in August 1914 came without warning to the local population. This was the first time, as Gromyko notes, that he felt "love for his country". His father, Andrei Matveyevich, was again conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army and would serve for three years on the southwestern front, under the leadership of General Aleksei Brusilov. Andrei Matveyevich returned home on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.
Gromyko was elected First Secretary of the local Komsomol chapter at the beginning of 1923. Following Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, the villagers asked Gromyko what would happen in the leader's absence. Gromyko remembered a communist slogan from the heyday of the October Revolution: "The revolution was carried through by Lenin and his helpers." He then told the villagers that Lenin was dead but "his aides, the Party, still lived on."
Education and party membership [ edit ]
When he was young Gromyko's mother Olga told him that he should leave his home town to become an educated man. Gromyko followed his mother's advice and, after finishing seven years of primary school and vocational education in Gomel, he moved to Borisov to attend technical school. Gromyko became a member of the All-Union Communist Party Bolsheviks in 1931, something he had dreamed of since he learned about the "difference between a poor farmer and a landowner, a worker and a capitalist". Gromyko was voted in as secretary of his party cell at his first party conference and would use most of his weekends doing volunteer work. Gromyko received a very small stipend to live on, but still had a strong nostalgia for the days when he worked as a volunteer. It was about this time that Gromyko met his future wife, Lydia Dmitrievna Grinevich. Grinevich was the daughter of a Belarusian peasant family and came from Kamenki, a small village to the west of Minsk. She and Gromyko would have two children, Anatoly and Emilia.
After studying in Borisov for two years Gromyko was appointed principal of a secondary school in Dzerzhinsk, where he taught, supervised the school and continued his studies. One day a representative from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia offered him an opportunity to do post-graduate work in Minsk. Gromyko traveled to Minsk for an interview with the head of the university, I.M. Borisevich, who explained that a new post-graduate program had been formed for training in economics; Gromyko's record in education and social work made him a desirable candidate. Gromyko advised Borisevich that he would have difficulty living on a meager student stipend. Borisevich assured him that on finishing the program, his salary would be at the party's top pay grade – "a decent living wage". Gromyko accepted the offer, moving his family to Minsk in 1933. Gromyko and the other post-graduates were invited to an anniversary reception at which, as recounted in Gromyko's Memoirs:
We were amazed to find ourselves treated as equals and placed at their table to enjoy what for us was a sumptuous feast. We realised then that not for nothing did the Soviet state treat its scientists well: evidently science and those who worked in it were highly regarded by the state.
After that day of pleasantry, Gromyko for the first time in his life wanted to enter higher education, but without warning, Gromyko and his family were moved in 1934 to Moscow, settling in the northeastern Alexeyevsky District. In 1936, after another three years of studying economics, Gromyko became a researcher and lecturer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His area of expertise was the US economy, and he published several books on the subject. Gromyko assumed his new job would be a permanent one, but in 1939 he was called upon by a Central Committee Commission which selected new personnel to work in diplomacy. (The Great Purge of 1938 opened many positions in the diplomatic corps.) Gromyko recognised such familiar faces as Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov. A couple of days later he was transferred from the Academy of Sciences to the diplomatic service.
Ambassador and World War II [ edit ]
Andrei Gromyko (second from left) at Yalta in February 1945
In early 1939, Gromyko started working for the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in Moscow. Gromyko became the Head of the Department of Americas and because of his position Gromyko met with United States ambassador to the Soviet Union Lawrence Steinhardt. Gromyko believed Steinhardt to be "totally uninterested in creating good relations between the US and the USSR" and that Steinhardt's predecessor Joseph Davies was more "colourful" and seemed "genuinely interested" in improving the relations between the two countries. Davies received the Order of Lenin for his work in trying to improve diplomatic relations between the US and the USSR. After heading the Americas department for 6 months, Gromyko was called upon by Joseph Stalin. Stalin started the conversation by telling Gromyko that he would be sent to the Soviet embassy in the United States to become second-in-command. "The Soviet Union," Stalin said, "should maintain reasonable relations with such a powerful country like the United States, especially in light of the growing fascist threat". Vyacheslav Molotov contributed with some minor modifications but mostly agreed with what Stalin had said. "How are your English skills improving?," Stalin asked, "Comrade Gromyko you should pay a visit or two to an American church and listen to their sermons. Priests usually speak correct English with good accents. Do you know that the Russian revolutionaries when they were abroad, always followed this practice to improve their skills in foreign languages?" Gromyko was quite amazed about what Stalin had just told him but he never visited an American church.
Gromyko had never been abroad before and, to get to the United States, he had to travel via airplane through Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to Genoa, Italy, where they boarded a ship to the United States. He later wrote in his Memoirs that New York City was a good example on how humans, by the "means of wealth and technology are able to create something that is totally alien to our nature". He further noticed the New York working districts which, in his own opinion, were proof of the inhumanity of capitalism and of the system's greed. Gromyko met and consulted with most of the senior officers of the United States government during his first days and succeeded Maxim Litvinov as ambassador to the United States in 1943. In his Memoirs Gromyko wrote fondly of President Franklin D. Roosevelt even though he believed him to be a representative of the bourgeoisie class. During his time as ambassador, Gromyko met prominent personalities such as British actor Charlie Chaplin, American actress Marilyn Monroe and British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Gromyko was a Soviet delegate to the Tehran, Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta and Potsdam conferences. In 1943, the same year as the Tehran Conference, the USSR established diplomatic relations with Cuba and Gromyko was appointed the Soviet ambassador to Havana. Gromyko claimed that the accusations brought against Roosevelt by American right-wingers, that he was a socialist sympathizer, were absurd. While he started out as a member delegate Gromyko later became the head of the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco conference after Molotov's departure. When he later returned to Moscow to celebrate the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, Stalin commended him saying a good diplomat was "worth two or three armies at the front".
At the helm of Soviet foreign policy [ edit ]
The United Nations [ edit ]
Gromyko was appointed Permanent Representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations (UN) in April 1946. The USSR supported the election of the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, a former Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, in the opinion of Gromyko, Lie became an active supporter of the "expansionist behaviour" of the United States and its "American aggressionist" policy. Because of this political stance, Gromyko believed Lie to be a poor Secretary-General. Trygve's successor, Swede Dag Hammarskjöld also promoted what Gromyko saw as "anti-Soviet policies". U Thant, the third Secretary-General, once told Gromyko that it was close to impossible to have an objective opinion of the USSR in the Secretariat of the United Nations because the majority of secretariat members were of American ethnicity or supporters of the United States. Gromyko often used the Soviet veto power in the early days of the United Nations. So familiar was a Soviet veto in the early days of the UN that Gromyko became known as Mr Nyet, literally meaning "Mr No". During the first 10 years of the UN, the Soviet Union used its veto 79 times. In the same period, the Republic of China used the veto once, France twice and the others not at all.[40] On May 14, 1947, Gromyko advocated the one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the two-state solution as the second best option in the case that "relations between the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine... proved to be so bad that it would be impossible to reconcile them".[41]
Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom [ edit ]
Gromyko was appointed Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom at a June 1952 meeting with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. Stalin paced back and forth as normal, telling Gromyko about the importance of his new office, and saying "The United Kingdom now has the opportunity to play a greater role in international politics. But it is not clear in which direction the British government with their great diplomatic experience will steer their efforts [...] This is why we need people who understand their way of thinking". Gromyko met with Winston Churchill in 1952 not to talk about current politics but nostalgically about World War II. Gromyko met Churchill again in 1953 to talk about their experiences during World War II before returning to Russia when he was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union [ edit ]
Andrei Gromyko spent his initial days as Minister of Foreign Affairs solving problems between his ministry and the International Department (ID) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) headed by Boris Ponomarev. Ponomarev advocated an expanded role for the ID in Soviet foreign relations; Gromyko flatly refused it. Valentin Falin, a top Soviet official, said the ID "interfered in the activities" of Gromyko and his ministry countless times. Gromyko disliked both Ponomarev and the power sharing between the ID and the foreign ministry.[43] In 1958 Mao Zedong tried to look for supporters within the Soviet leadership for his planned war with the Republic of China (Taiwan). He flabbergasted Gromyko by telling him that he was willing to sacrifice the lives of "300 million people" just for the sake of annexing the Republic of China into the People's Republic of China. Gromyko assured Mao that the proposal would never get the approval of the Soviet leadership. When the Soviet leadership learnt of this discussion they responded by terminating the Soviet-Chinese nuclear program and various industrialization projects in the People's Republic of China.[44] Years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gromyko met John F. Kennedy, then President of the United States, while acting on the instruction of the Soviet leadership under Nikita Khrushchev. In his Memoirs, Gromyko wrote that Kennedy seemed out of touch when he first met him, and was more ideologically driven than practical. In a 1988 interview, he further described Kennedy as nervous and prone to making contradictory statements involving American intentions towards Cuba. During his twenty-eight years as Minister of Foreign Affairs Gromyko supported the policy of disarmament, stating in his Memoirs that "Disarmament is the ideal of Socialism".[45]
Gromyko meeting with Jimmy Carter, the President of the United States, in 1978
Throughout his career as Soviet Foreign Minister, Gromyko explicitly promoted the idea that no important international agreement could be reached without the Soviet Union's involvement.[46] One accomplishment he took particular pride in was the signing of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty whose negotiation could be traced back to 1958. Additionally, in 1966, Gromyko and Alexei Kosygin persuaded both Pakistan and India to sign the Tashkent Declaration, a peace treaty in the aftermath of the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. Later in the same year, he engaged in a dialog with Pope Paul VI, as part of the pontiff's ostpolitik that resulted in greater openness for the Roman Catholic Church in Eastern Europe[47] although there was still heavy persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union.[48] Gromyko also prided himself on the signing of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons on 1 July 1968, the 1972 ABM and SALT I treaties, and the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1973.
After joining the Politburo in 1973 during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, Gromyko gradually assumed control over the Soviet Union's foreign policy.[49] Upon reaching the peak of his power and influence, Gromyko's approach to diplomacy suffered due to the very same qualities that underpinned his early career. His exceptional memory and confidence in his experience now made him inflexible, unimaginative and devoid of a long-term vision for his country.[50] By the time Andropov and Chernenko rose to the Soviet leadership, Gromyko frequently found himself advocating a harder line than his superiors.[50]
Gromyko speaking at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, in 1984
As Brezhnev grew increasingly incapable of governing following a stroke in 1975, Gromyko formed a troika with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov that ultimately became the driving force behind Soviet policymaking. After Brezhnev's death in 1982, Andropov was voted in as General Secretary by the Politburo. Immediately after his appointment Andropov asked Gromyko if he wanted to take over Brezhnev's old office of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Gromyko turned down Andropov's offer, believing that Andropov would eventually take the office for himself. He did not believe that Andropov would take the office because of pure vanity, but rather due to its functions.[52]
After Chernenko's death in 1985, Gromyko nominated Mikhail Gorbachev for the General Secretaryship on 11 March 1985. In supporting Gorbachev, Gromyko knew that the influence he carried would be strong.[53] After being voted in Gorbachev relieved Gromyko of his duty as foreign minister and replaced him with Eduard Shevardnadze and Gromyko was appointed to the largely honorary position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
Head of state, retirement and death [ edit ]
A Belarusian stamp from 2009 depicting Gromyko
Gromyko held the office of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, literally head of state, which was largely ceremonial, and his influence in ruling circles diminished. A number of First World journalists believed Gromyko was uncomfortable with many of Gorbachev's reforms,[55] however, in his Memoirs Gromyko writes fondly of Gorbachev and the policy of perestroika. Gromyko believed that perestroika was about working for the construction of a socialist society and saw glasnost and perestroika as an attempt at making the USSR more democratic.
During a party conference in July 1988 Vladimir Melnikov called for Gromyko's resignation. Melnikov blamed Brezhnev for the economic and political stagnation that had hit the Soviet Union and, seeing that Gromyko was a prominent member of the Brezhnev leadership, Gromyko was one of the men which had led the USSR into the crisis.[58] Gromyko was promptly defended as "a man respected by the people" in a note by an anonymous delegate.[59] After discussing it with his wife Gromyko decided to leave Soviet politics for good. Gromyko recounts in his Memoirs that he told Gorbachev that he wished to resign before he made it official. The following day, 1 October 1988, Gromyko sat beside Gorbachev, Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov in the Supreme Soviet to make his resignation official:
Such moments in life are just as memorable as when one is appointed to prominent positions. When my comrades took farewell to me, I was equally moved as I had ever been when I was given an important office. What I thought most about was that I had finished my duties towards the people, the Party and the state. This memory is very precious to me.
Gorbachev succeeded Gromyko in office as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.[61] After his resignation Gorbachev praised Gromyko for his half-century of service to USSR. Critics, such as Alexander Belonogov the Permanent Representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations, claimed Gromyko's foreign policy was permeated with "a spirit of intolerance and confrontation".[62]
After retiring from active politics in 1989 Gromyko started working on his memoirs.[63] Gromyko died on 2 July 1989, days before what would have been his 80th birthday, after being hospitalised for a vascular problem that was not further identified. His death was followed by a minute of silence at the Congress of People's Deputies to commemorate him. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), the central news organ in the USSR, called him one of the country's most "prominent leaders". President of the United States George H. W. Bush sent his condolences to Gromyko's son, Anatoly.[64] Gromyko was offered a grave in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, but at the request of his family he was not buried near the Kremlin wall but instead at the Novodevichy cemetery.[63][65]
Legacy [ edit ]
Having been a person of considerable stature during his life Gromyko held an unusual combination of personal characteristics. Some were impressed by his diplomatic skills, while others called Gromyko mundane and boring. An article written in 1981 in The Times said, "He is one of the most active and efficient members of the Soviet leadership. A man with an excellent memory, a keen intellect and extraordinary endurance [...] Maybe Andrey is the most informed Minister for Foreign affairs in the world".[63] Gromyko's dour demeanour was shown clearly during his first term in Washington and echoed throughout his tenure as Soviet foreign minister. Ambassador Charles W. Yost, who worked with Gromyko at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, the UN founding conference, and at the United Nations, recalled that the "humorless" Soviet ambassador "looked as though he was sucking a lemon."[67] There is a story that Gromyko was leaving a Washington hotel one morning and was asked by a reporter; "Minister Gromyko, did you enjoy your breakfast today?" His response was "Perhaps."[68]
During his twenty-eight years as minister of foreign affairs Gromyko became the "number-one" on international diplomacy at home, renowned by his peers to be consumed by his work. Henry Kissinger once said "If you can face Gromyko for one hour and survive, then you can begin to call yourself a diplomat". Gromyko's work influenced Soviet and Russian ambassadors such as Anatoly Dobrynin. Mash Lewis and Gregory Elliott described Gromyko's main characteristic as his "complete identification with the interest of the state and his faithful service to it". According to historians Gregory Elliot and Moshe Lewin this could help explain his so-called "boring" personality and the mastery of his own ego. West German politician Egon Bahr, when commenting on Gromyko's memoirs, said;
He has concealed a veritable treasure-trove from future generations and taken to the grave with him an inestimable knowledge of international connection between the historical events and major figures of his time, which only he could offer. What a pity that this very man proved incapable to the very end of evoking his experience. As a faithful servant of the state, he believed that he should restrict himself to a sober, concise presentation of the bare essentials.
On 18 July 2009, Belarus marked the 100th anniversary of Gromyko's birth with nationwide celebrations. In the city of his birth many people laid flowers in front of his bust. A ceremony was held attended by his son and daughter, Anatoly and Emiliya. Several exhibitions were opened and dedicated to his honour and a school and a street in Gomel were renamed in honour of him.[72][73]
Decorations and awards [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Coleman, Fred (1996). The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook The World. St. Martin's Press, Macmillan Publishers. ISBN 0-312-16816-0.
Elliott, Gregory; Lewin, Moshe (2005). The Soviet Century. Verso Books. ISBN 1-84467-016-3.
Figes, Orlando (2014). Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-9131-1.
Hoffmann Jr., Erik P., and Frederic J. Fleron. The Conduct of Soviet Foreign Policy (1980)
(1980) MacKenzie, David. From Messianism to Collapse: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–1991 (1994)
(1994) Stone, Norman. "Andrei Gromyko as Foreign Minister: The Problems of a Decaying Empire," in Gordon Craig and Francis Loewenheim, eds. The Diplomats 1939– 1979 (Princeton University Press, 1994)
(Princeton University Press, 1994) Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–73 (1976)How artificial intelligence, guaranteed income, and virtual reality could construct our future society
Dan Gurney Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 28, 2015
Maybe you’ve heard about Facebook’s “M,” a digital assistant who uses a combination of artificial and human intelligence to complete any task. Or maybe you’ve read the recent New Yorker article about how the arrival of true AI could eradicate humankind. Or did you hear about Viv, an AI from the creators of Siri which can figure out how to solve problems by itself?
The AI field is booming again, and it’s advancing fast.
As machines take over jobs like farming, manufacturing, and medicine, humans may increasingly find themselves with plenty of economic output but nothing to do. AI researchers have suggested that a system that makes sense in this scenario is a guaranteed income for everyone. Even if that happens, we’ll still have a massive population with nothing to do.
How will people choose to spend their time? We know that work can give people meaning. What happens when you can’t work? As attractive as it might sound, not everyone wants to do a hobby all day, every day.
I predict that this is where virtual reality will come in. If your physical world is boring or unfulfilling, the virtual world doesn’t have to be. Want to be a hero? Want to be the leader of a movement? It’s easy in VR — much easier than in the physical world.
I can see a time when robots do all the work and humans get a monthly stipend that covers housing, food, and medical costs. All basic needs are covered. And people jack into VR all day. (Check out Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.)
AI provides the economic output, guaranteed income covers the necessities, and VR provides the meaning.
That might sound like a utopia to some, dystopia to others, but to me it seems like a plausible scenario with the potential to offer a better quality of life than today.After several previous US pushes for a peace initiative in Palestine failed, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is said to have spurned Vice President Joe Biden’s most recent proposal, believing that it wouldn’t lead to any worthwhile progress.
The proposal would’ve seen Israel halting settlement construction, and accepting East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The Palestinians would both recognize Israel as a “Jewish state,” and give up on the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
All four of these points would be tough ones to achieve, with the Israeli government repeatedly ruling out both of their concessions. Abbas would likely face a major backlash from accepting either of their terms too, with the “Jewish state” matter meaning to many an effective endorsement of Israel’s treatment of its Arab minority as second-class citizens.
The likely concern, with Obama so close to leaving office, is that if the Palestinians concede either of their points now,, it will be used against them in future rounds of talks by Israeli officials, while Israel almost certainly would not publicly accept either of their points.
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By Alex Rae
Ryan Lowe is prepared to commit his future to Tranmere Rovers FC – providing those sentiments are shared by the club.
The 35-year-old, who plundered an impressive 20 goals despite Tranmere’s relegation to League Two last season, has 12 months left on his current deal.
But Lowe says he is happy to sign a new contract at a club that has a place in his heart, if it is right for both him and his young family.
“I came home from MK Dons for football reasons and family terms,” Lowe said.
“It is well reported that the club are making cuts and there are going to be cutbacks but I want to stay at this football club provided I am wanted.
“I was one of many players who were sobbing their eyes out on the last day and it is still hurting me now to be honest.
“It’s the third time I’ve been at a club that has been relegated but this one was very painful and I don’t ever want to feel it again. Not only for me but my family suffer as do the fans.
“I was a part of the team that got relegated, it doesn’t matter that I scored 20 goals, I take responsibility as do the other lads.
“I’m not sure what was the catalyst for us going down, may be the off-the-field distractions, the proposed takeover or just players under-performing and not giving enough but I won’t blame anyone in particular.
“The club has a place in my heart but on the other hand the club needs to have a place in theirs for me.
“Bottom line is that I want to stay at Tranmere and all I am asking for is a bit of commitment from the club and I will sign tomorrow.
“Obviously that all has to wait for the new manager to be installed because he may not want me but at the end of the day I’m 35, I’m not getting any younger and I have to do what is best for me and my family.”
Rovers were relegated to the bottom tier of the Football League for the first time in 25 years on the final day, and while work continues behind the scenes to start afresh there is much still to be sorted.
A new manager is yet to be decided and Lowe highlighted the need for changes in the coaching set-up whoever takes the helm.
“John McMahon was doing a lot of the jobs himself and he needed help,” Lowe added.
“Whoever comes in then it is important that there is some investment for bodies on the coaching staff.
“You look at some of the other teams and they have an assistant manager, first team coach and a development coach.
“I’m not saying Tranmere will go out and do that because there are budget constraints there but the need for a proper recruitment team and a few coaches is clear.
“It is hard to manager 20 or so players so if the club are going to start fresh that is one of the areas that needs looking at.”
While the team ultimately lost their battle with relegation, Lowe was keen to thank the fans for their undying support of the club.
He continued: “I have a great relationship with the fans, they have been brilliant with me.
“There are always going to be some ups and downs and that is rightly so because they pay good money to come watch us and they have stuck by us through thick and thin.
“It hasn’t been good enough from start to finish from the players but the fans have been awesome.
“Everywhere I go there are positive comments from the fans and that means a lot. I just hope the supporters can appreciate that I want what is best for me and my family and I just want a bit of commitment from the club to reflect the same commitment that I will show.”The Tea Party has had an up-and-down political ride since the movement helped Republicans take control of the House in 2010, but those elected in the midterm elections still appear to wield considerable power in the fiscal negotiations.
The roughly 50 members elected to the House two years ago have been a challenge for the more moderate House Speaker John Boehner since they took office. Perhaps most memorably, many of them refused last year to support a debt-ceiling bill because they said it didn’t reduce federal spending enough.
Just last week they squashed Boehner’s fiscal plan by refusing to compromise and vote on a tax increase for any American, despite the House speaker -- in his so-called “Plan B” -- having suggested extending tax cuts only for those making more than $1 million annually.
And their most powerful vote might be yet to come, should Tea Party-backed House members reject a possible Senate proposal over the next two days to extend tax cuts and perhaps avert massive federal spending cuts that start January 1.
“They lost in November, rather resoundingly, but still appear to be doubling down,” Democratic strategist Christy Setzer told Fox News on Saturday.
To be sure, the campaigns of several Tea Party-backed Senate candidates imploded late in the 2012 election cycle, which in part resulted in Republicans failing to take control of the chamber and party leaders vowing afterward to take a more active role in future primaries.
Despite liberal-minded political analysts and others repeatedly pronouncing the death of the Tea Party, factions continue to fight and make themselves heard in Washington.
Boehner and other House leaders appeared to send a message to members of the chamber’s smaller-government, less-taxes Tea Party caucus who were reelected in November by taking away key committee seats from three members -- Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, David Schweikert of Arizona, and Justin Amash of Michigan.
However, Huelskamp sounding undeterred after Boehner’s so-called “Plan-B” vote failed, forcing the Senate to try to avert the $500 billion mix of tax increases and federal spending cuts over 2013.
Huelskamp called Boehner pulling the vote from the House floor “a victory for conservative principles.”
However, Boehner supporters that same night expressed their frustration with the Tea Party caucus.
"It's the same 40 to 50 chuckleheads that have screwed this place up all year," complained retiring Rep. Steven LaTourette, R-Ohio. Boehner has “done everything to make nice to them. Bring them along. It hasn't mattered. I don't fault him. He's done his best."
Boehner has passed major legislation in the past two years, but the Tea Party-backed lawmakers have led the opposition on several bills.
Fifty-nine Republicans abandoned Boehner in April 2011 on a package to avert a government shutdown. That number ballooned to 101 on a November 2011 bill to fund the government. Sixty six Republicans vote in August 2011 against increasing the debt ceiling.
In addition, 91 Republicans voted in February against a bill to extend the payroll tax cut. And 52 Republicans voted in June against a bill to pay for the nation's transportation programs.
Though the movement has be characterized as a state-by-state grassroots effort, deep-pocketed Tea Party influenced groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity opposed Boehner’s Plan B and would likely oppose any future plan that does not include spending cuts.
“Conservatives are looking for a leader to fight against tax increases, to push back against wasteful government spending, and address the fiscal challenges in a bold way,” group President Tim Phillips said. “Sadly, this plan leaves conservatives wanting.”I recently spent a fun evening helping out with a historic cooking workshop at the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum, where we made queen cakes, little currant-filled treats that were popular in England and America in the 18th and 19th centuries. These cakes may have been named for Queen Mary, who reigned in Great Britain from 1689 to 1694, or her sister Anne (1702–1714). The earliest known recipe for them was in a book called Court Cookery (1725) by Robert Smith:
Take a Pound of dry’d Flower, a Pound of refin’d Sugar sifted, and a Pound of Currans wash’d, pick’d, and rubb’d clean, and a Pound of Butter wash’d very well, and rub it into the Flower and Sugar, with a little beaten Mace, and a little Orange-Flower Water; beat ten Eggs, but half the Whites, work it all well together with your Hands, and put in the Currans; sift over it double-refin’d Sugar, and put them immediately into a gentle Oven to bake.
Queen cakes probably evolved from Portugal cakes, which were so-called because they were made with sack, or sweet, fortified white wine, from Portugal. The ingredients in the two cakes were similar: flour, sugar, and butter (usually in equal weights), plus eggs and currants. Some queen cakes also contained sack or brandy, but nonalcoholic flavorings became common — the orange-flower water and mace in Smith’s recipe, for example, or rose water and pounded almonds. Some recipes also called for icing, although Elizabeth Moxon advised in English Housewifry (1764), “…you may ice them if you please, but do not let the iceing be thicker than you may lie on with a little brush.”
Like Portugal cakes, queen cakes were made in small pans. Early queen cakes were possibly made in the little tin or stoneware patty pans used for |
the major league level. As for every Mike Trout, there are a Matt Bush and Vince Young. Yeah, I get you may have to look those two names up before you continue on with the article.
These busts are extremely disappointing and can set teams back even further from the bright light at the end of the tunnel that they all strive for. However, with the Yankees’ farm being so deep, they can afford some players to be busts, while still not being set back by much.
I can guarantee you right now, a majority of the Yankees’ top prospects will fail in becoming stars in the league. However, for every 3 or 4 busts, the Yankees could have a star. And if none of them plan out, then they need to focus on firing some scouts.
1. Still One Of Baseball’s Richest Teams
One thing that is always going to be a factor for the Yankees in building or adding on to their team, is their wealth. To many non Yankee fans demise, the team has the ability to lure most free agents to New York with the money that they possess. This is something that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
If certain prospects don’t work out, a void could be left on the team’s lineup and/or rotation. The team will always have their money to back them up, in filling in those holes through the free agency pool.
Players like Bryce Harper, Manny Machado and others could combine with the successful Yankee prospects to once again create a dynasty that would help the team dominate the league once again.
Do you also see a bright future for the Yankees’ or will the Yankees fall into another drought like they have in the past?
Share this: Twitter
FacebookSince it was announced that Mayans MC was the official follow-up to the ever-popular biker drama, Sons Of Anarchy, the details have been a bit hazey. It had been confirmed that Kurt Sutter was producing the spin-off, but he wanted a more accurate voice to run the new show.
Sutter tapped Elgin James to write and lead Mayans MC, and he feels that James will bring a heavy Latino voice to the project.
It seems as though one other person has been a shoe-in for the new series, and that's former Sons Of Anarchy star Emilio Rivera. The actor portrayed Marcus Alvarez on the original series, who was the president of the Mayans. Alvarez is a key character for the club, and it's hard for fans to see a series about the Mayans without the inclusion of Rivera.
Up until this week, Rivera has made it seem like he was already involved with the spin-off. On his social media accounts, he made a habit of posting pictures of his time with the Mayans. His #RollOut has been taken has a hint that he is helping to get the series off and running.
On Monday, however, Rivera started casting doubt in the minds of fans. While he was answering fans questions on Twitter, Rivera said he isn't locked into the series. First, a fan asked about his role as a producer on the show, and he countered by saying he didn't even know if he was on the show.
No I'm not not sure if I'm even on the Mayans yet, https://t.co/VMFTLd9s9R — Emilio Rivera (@EmilioRivera48) November 21, 2016
Later, another fan asked the actor outright if he was involved in the show. Rivera was straight up about his response, and it only took three words. "Talking about it."
Talking about it https://t.co/FbQJpWDvD6 — Emilio Rivera (@EmilioRivera48) November 21, 2016
This is a shock to fans of Sons Of Anarchy, as many were looking forward to Rivera's involvement in the series. This doesn't mean he won't be acting in Mayans MC, but it means nothing concrete has come yet.
His comment about talking also means the network has spoken to him about a role in the show. It looks like they are courting Rivera for a role on the show, but there hasn't been much progress.
Let's hope they get this worked out, becuase Rivera is a vital part of Mayans MC, and many believe the show wouldn't be much without him.
Next Up: Sons Of Anarchy Star Shines In Outsiders Season 2 Trailer
Emilio Rivera Solidifies Mayans MC / Everything We Know About Mayans MC
Kurt Sutter Teases Abel's Future / Sons Prequel In Trouble? / Should Sons Have Lasted Longer? / The Walking Dead vs Sons Of Anarchy / Sutter On ElectionNew US Ambassador to the UK Woody Johnson has promised that when people get to know President Donald Trump, they’ll actually like him.
Read more
During his first speech as ambassador, Johnson defended the Republican US leader, saying: “Many of you do not know the president.
“I have known him for over 30 years.
“Our sons were born three days apart in the same hospital. Our relationship is long-standing, personal and close.
“And I can promise you, when you get to know him, you'll like him,” Johnson said, according to the Telegraph.
Speaking in Middle Temple Hall at the annual event organized by Anglo-American friendship society The Pilgrims of Great Britain, the 70-year-old owner of American football team the New York Jets also took the chance to highlight the strong relationship between the UK and the US.
He said the US would support Britain as it withdraws from the EU and said: “Britain's decision to leave the European Union takes your country into new territory — but you are not heading there on your own.
“It is in everyone's interest that Brexit be transparent, smooth, and orderly.
“But whatever the outcome of the negotiations between the UK and the EU, Britain should know you will have a strong and reliable trade and investment partner in America,” the ambassador said, the paper reported.
Read more
The American billionaire added that he wants the UK to remain a leader in Europe and remain, along with the US, a “strong leader globally.”
Johnson, who inherited the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical empire, then stressed the extent to which the two countries are tied.
“Our countries are among each other’s largest inward investors,” he said.
“Americans and Brits hold roughly 1 trillion dollars of investment and employ approximately 1 million people in each other’s countries — jobs that have increased prosperity and opportunity in all four countries of the United Kingdom and in every American state,” he said.
In an apparent reference to former US President Barack Obama’s statement that the UK would end up at the back of the queue if it chose to withdraw from the EU, Johnson said: “As far as the president is concerned, the United Kingdom, our most enduring ally, is always at the head of the line.”NRS version 0.8.8 released
Nxt Funding Committees
The voting for the members of the Technology, Infrastructure and Marketing Funds has ended. Find the results here.You will soon hear from all of these committees what they do and how they plan to handle their mandates.
Clients
INxt 1.0.8 now available in the AppStore.
Testnet version 0.8.7 of wesleyh’s interface with installer has been released.
Nxt Solaris 2.3 released.
Marketing
Concepts and discussions
Sites
Nxt is listed on the DAC index. (DAC = Distributed Autonomous Companies).
Nxt Kit– an easy way to deplay or update your VPS.
Nxt is listed on crypto-prices.com.
coinpayments.net is closing down.
Nxt has been added to litebit.eu.
Testing of Asset Exchange
If you want to help out, btc2nxt has listed cases that you can test:
Distibution
You can find information on the current distribution of Nxt here and here. Here is a comparison with some other coins.French and Malian flags fly over so-called Pinasse boat on the river Bani, a branch of the river Niger, at the commercial port of the central Malian city of Mopti on March 15, 2013 (AFP Photo/John MacDougall)
Bamako (AFP) - Two hundred young Malian jihadists are ready to lay down their weapons as part of a new government and civil society deradicalisation programme, its organisers said Tuesday.
Some of the youths, aged between 16 and 30, had mounted attacks in the central Mopti region over the past year as members of the Macina Liberation Front, sources within the campaign said.
"For the last few weeks, we have overseen talks with and an awareness campaign for young people who had joined radical armed groups in the centre of Mali," said Hama Cisse, a former mayor of a Mopti district.
"Two hundred of them agreed to lay down their weapons and leave the ranks of the jihadists," he added.
"They are currently still in the Mopti region to convince their peers to give up their weapons," Cisse said.
Mopti borders the northern area of Mali that was overrun by Al-Qaeda-linked extremist groups and Tuareg-led rebels in 2012.
Those involved in central Mali's jihadist demobilisation drive include representatives from central and local governments, religious leaders and other prominent figures, campaigners told AFP.
The young people were not being paid to leave but had received free meals, they said.
Some of them had supplied information about attacks they were involved in, said Ousmane Diallo, a member of the collective, while others admitted they were part of small cells attacking civilians and symbolic government targets.
"These young people are our children. The majority didn't really know what they were doing. It makes sense to have intervened," said imam Hamadou Cisse, a civil society group member.
Malian, French and UN forces are attempting to maintain order over vast stretches of desert where extremist groups roam after being ousted from key northern towns after a French-led intervention in 2013.
The encroachment of armed groups beyond the country's troubled north and into the centre and south of the country was raised as an area of concern by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a report last month.It’s an uncomfortable thought: Human activity causing the extinction of thousands of species, and the only way to slow or prevent that phenomenon is to have smaller families and forego some of the conveniences of modern life, from eating beef to driving cars, according to Stanford University scientists Paul Ehrlich and Robert Pringle.
This extinction—the sixth in the 4-billion-year history of the Earth—"could be much more catastrophic than previous ones," says Ehrlich, author of the controversial Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. That fate was forestalled by the green revolution in Asian agriculture, in which new strains of cereal crops plus enhanced use of fertilizer and irrigation allowed farmers to grow enough food to feed a burgeoning population. But this is a new threat: "Anything in the vicinity of the previous ones," Ehrlich says, such as the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous that killed half of all species, including the dinosaurs, "would wreck civilization."
Right now, at least 2,000 frogs, salamanders and other amphibians are in danger of going extinct, according to a survey by biologists David Wake and Vance Vredenburg, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Coastal seas and estuaries have lost as much as 91 percent of certain species, such as oysters, according to another survey. And nearly 50 percent of all temperate grasslands and forests have disappeared.
But through it all the species responsible for this change—through overuse, pollution and other impacts—has continued to thrive and multiply, reaching roughly 6.7 billion in population and counting.
"The fate of biological diversity for the next 10 million years will almost certainly be determined during the next 50 to 100 years by the activities of a single species," write Ehrlich and Pringle in their proposal for addressing the biodiversity crisis. Adds Pringle: "The world's remaining wild areas and the species in them are being pulverized, and that's a multi-layered tragedy."
That’s why Ehrlich and Pringle call for educating women, which has slowed or stopped population growth in the developed countries of Europe. "Education and employment—for women especially—along with access to contraception and safe abortions are the most important components," they write. Adds Ehrlich: "The most basic response is to get going on stopping population growth and starting a decline. Second is doing something about consumption. If you don't do anything about those, then you are in trouble in all the others: more people, means more greenhouse gases, which means more rapid climate change."
A series of studies in PNAS detail the extent of the sixth extinction. As of the end of last year, more than 16,000 species faced extinction and 785 had already been lost, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. But biologist E. O. Wilson notes that most species remain to be discovered and may be winking out without humans noting their passing; he estimates that at least 12,000 species are dying out every year.
Amphibians are among the most threatened thanks to a lethal combination of climate change, habitat destruction and a deadly fungal infection (chytridiomycosis)—and many unique species, including frogs that reared their young in their own stomachs from Australia, have already disappeared. In fact, last year's prediction by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that amphibians who lived on mountainsides would increasingly go extinct is now reality.
Meanwhile, human use of sea life, particularly overfishing, has emptied the oceans. Longline fishing records reveal that nearly 90 percent of pollock and haddock have disappeared in the last century and cod alone has decreased by 96 percent since 1852. Large sharks continue to dwindle while other species, such as clam-eating cownose rays, have exploded in the absence of predators. Jellyfish are among the only living things to thrive in the oxygen-starved waters of expanding dead zones. Even the Great Barrier Reef has living coral on only 23 percent of its surface, one-half of levels in 1980.
With the human population growing—predicted to reach 9.3 billion by 2050—along with the need for more food, more goods and more resources, the outlook for other species seems grim. But the outlook is also troubling for humans, note Ehrlich and Pringle. In particular, humanity relies on the services provided by the natural world for free, such as clean water. Then there are the bees: Regardless of whether honeybees become extinct as a species as a result of colony collapse disorder, climate change and other threats, the local extinction of various honeybee populations and the pollination they provide could spell disaster for human agriculture.
As a result, Ehrlich and Pringle also call for endowments to perpetually fund conservation areas, such as the Paz Con la Naturaleza initiative under consideration in Costa Rica that would generate $500 million in one-time money from taxpayers and be used to fund conservation in perpetuity for the national park system.
They also call for making agricultural land more hospitable to wildlife, recognizing the economic value of various ecosystem services like pollination and returning degraded lands to a natural state to help stave off this biodiversity crisis, with its attendant effects on humanity. "There are desperately poor people surrounding many of these reserves," Ehrlich notes. "If I was there, I would shoot the hippo and eat it too."Ramgarh police have arrested a BJP leader, Nityanand Mahto on Saturday in connection with the lynching of a Muslim trader Alimuddin by a mob in Jharkhand’s Ramgarh two days back.
The main accused Chottu Rana, who was seen beating Alimuddin with a stick repeatedly in a video, surrendered before the court, Ramgarh superintendent of police, Kaushal Kishore said.
55-year-old Alimuddin alias Asgar Ali was lynched by a frenzied mob of about 100 people for allegedly carrying beef in his car. The incident happened at the Bazartand market of the district on Thursday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that he disapproved killing people in the name of protecting cows.
A video of the brutal incident also went viral following which police have arrested eight of the 13 people named in the FIR. The other five have been identified and would be arrested soon, officials said.
Mahto, who is the BJP’s Ramgarh district media- in-charge, claimed innocence, saying he had visited the spot after the police arrived to take stock of the incident, and demanded a fair investigation into the matter.
The police had also detained a member of Akhil Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP) of Ramgarh district for interrogation but released him later due to lack of evidence, police sources said.
On the arrest of saffron activists, state BJP’s media in-charge Shivpujan Pathak said the party will not defend anybody, but added that all the accused had the right to a fair trial.
He also reiterated chief minister Raghubar Das’s assurance to not spare anyone involved in the case, whatever his/her socio-political stature was. “He (CM) has also instructed the police in this regard.”
On Friday, police had formed a special investigation team (SIT) under deputy superintendent of police (DSP) and constituted four teams to nab the accused.
The criminal investigation department (CID), headquarters, also formed a special team to assist the SIT in Ramgarh.
“We have sought arrest warrants against seven other accused named in the FIR,” said Ramgarh deputy development commissioner (DDC) Sunil Kumar.
Inspector General (IG) ML Meena, also in-charge of law and order in north Chhotanagpur region, took stock of the situation in Ramgarh district along with other officials on Friday.
Meena had said that the prohibitory orders in Ramgarh will not be withdrawn until the situation returns to normal.
Thursday’s lynching was the second attack in June by cow vigilantes in Jharkhand as a 200-strong mob thrashed a 55-year-old Muslim dairy owner and set his house ablaze after a cow carcass was found near his home in Giridih district on Tuesday.
In May, a mob lynched four Muslim cattle traders at a village in Saraikelka Kharswan district after accusing them of being child traffickers.
First Published: Jul 01, 2017 21:02 ISTRegular customer Susan Rogers places her order at a Subway franchise on Oxford Street in the inner-Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst yesterday. Picture: Alan Pryke.
IF it feels like Subway stores are everywhere, it's probably because the sandwich chain has overtaken McDonald's as the world's biggest fast-food brand.
The firm's US parent company has disclosed in a Securities & Exchange Commission filing that at the end of last year Subway had 33,749 restaurants worldwide, compared with 32,737 McDonald's. But McDonald's is still the leader when it comes to sales, with the burger chain reporting $24billion in revenue last year.
Since Subway opened its first store in Perth in 1988, the franchise has grown to about 1260 stores in Australia, exceeding the number of McDonald's stores by about 430 and more than double that of KFC. "We are very happy with the way things have gone," said Subway Australia-New Zealand regional director Brian Tap. "We've got a very good product and a strong value message out there and consumers have reacted positively."
Read Next
Outside of the US, Mr Tap said Australia was Subway's biggest market based on store numbers, serving more than 1.5 million customers a week.
One of those is Susan Rogers from North Sydney. A regular for the past five years, Ms Rogers said she liked it because "it's a healthy option, it fills you up and it's a good price when you compare it to what else is out there".
Shana Tekananal of Bondi Beach also said she liked the healthy aspect of Subway. "Most of the other fast-food outlets serve mainly burgers and food that is quite fatty," she said. "I like that it (Subway) is healthy... it's tasty and there are a million different choices that you can have (as fillings)." Mr Tap attributes much of Subway's local success to "a good product", the smaller footprint of the stores, which range from 80 to 100sq m and a "good business model". All stores are franchise-owned. The cost to set up a new store is between $180,000 and $300,000. "A good design and keeping it small allows us to go into locations that many of our competitors just can't operate out of," said Mr Tap.
Despite the strong store presence, figures from market research firm IBIS World show that Subway's share of the $16.6bn takeaway food market in Australia based on revenue is about 2per cent. McDonald's has the biggest share at 19.5 per cent.Overview
The UEFA Congress is UEFA's supreme controlling organ.
An Ordinary Congress is held every year. A second Ordinary Congress may be called by the UEFA Executive Committee to deal with financial matters and/or matters of particular significance.
Log in for free to watch the highlights The press conference following the 2019 Congress
Matters within its power include:
receipt and consideration of the UEFA Annual Report
acknowledgement of the financial report and the auditors' report, approval of the annual accounts and budget
election of the UEFA President
election of UEFA Executive Committee members, and ratification of the Executive Committee members elected by the European Club Association (ECA) and European Leagues.
election of the European members of the FIFA Council
election of the auditing body
amendment of the UEFA Statutes
consideration and taking of decisions on proposals
consideration of membership applications and the exclusion of a member association
decisions on the lifting or continuation of the suspension of a member association, UEFA Executive Committee member or a member of another body
consideration of proposals for the dismissal of a UEFA Executive Committee member or the UEFA organs for the administration of justice
receipt and consideration of the FIFA Congress agenda
receipt and consideration of the minutes of the previous UEFA Congress
bestowal of honorary membership
An Extraordinary Congress may be convened by the UEFA Executive Committee, or at the written request of one fifth or more of the UEFA member associations, stating the items to be placed on the agenda.
©AFP
Rome, Italy staged the 43rd Ordinary UEFA Congress on 7 February 2019 at the Roma Cavalieri Hotel. The main items on the agenda were:
UEFA Annual Report for 2017/18
Reports of the committee chairmen
Elections:
- UEFA President (for a four-year term)
- UEFA Executive Committee (eight members, including at least one female, for a four-year term)
- FIFA Council (two FIFA vice-presidents for a four-year term, one ordinary member for a four-year term, and two ordinary members for a two-year term)
- UEFA President (for a four-year term) - UEFA Executive Committee (eight members, including at least one female, for a four-year term) - FIFA Council (two FIFA vice-presidents for a four-year term, one ordinary member for a four-year term, and two ordinary members for a two-year term) Ratification of a new representative of the European Club Association (ECA) on the UEFA Executive Committee
Ratification of new members of the UEFA Organs for the Administration of Justice
The full Congress can be watched here
The 44th Ordinary UEFA Congress will take place in Amsterdam on 3 March 2020.
UEFA may, on the proposal of the UEFA Executive Committee, bestow the status of honorary president or honorary membership upon a person for especially meritorious services to European football.
Reports
Honorary members
Honorary presidents may attend the UEFA Congress and UEFA Executive Committee meetings in an advisory capacity, but have no vote. Honorary members may attend the UEFA Congress in an advisory capacity, but have no vote.
UEFA honorary president
Lennart Johansson (SWE)
UEFA honorary members
Gerhard Aigner (GER)
Hans Bangerter (SUI)
Egidius Braun (GER)
Des Casey (IRL)
Şenes Erzik (TUR)
Jean Fournet-Fayard (FRA)
Vyacheslav Koloskov (RUS)
Marios N. Lefkaritis (CYP)
Antonio Matarrese (ITA)
Joseph Mifsud (MLT)
Per Ravn Omdal (NOR)
Giangiorgio Spiess (SUI)
Grigoriy Surkis (UKR)
Geoffrey Thompson (ENG)Tuesday, October 9, 2012 at 10:40AM
A Few Things You Need To Know About Living In New York
by MOLLY YOUNG
Living in New York? Me too. Here is a pocket list of information that may aid you in your quest to take a bite out of the big apple.
Good luck.
Things you will spend money on
Coffee
Laundry
Things you won't spend money on
Gas
Things you will accumulate
Cheap umbrellas
Plastic cutlery
Tote bags
Things you will not have inside your apartment
Clean towels
A kitchen counter
Stairs
Interesting-shaped windows
Subway etiquette #1
Don't trim your nails on the subway.
Social warning #1
Low-income smokers in New York spend 25 percent of their income on cigarettes. Try to quit smoking.
Taxi cabs
Why are you taking a cab? The subway is faster and cheaper.
But okay. The main thing to remember with cabs is this: after you hail your cab, be sure to climb inside before directing the driver to your destination, especially if you are going to a different borough. If you stand outside and meekly suggest your outer-borough destination, the driver will simply shake his head and drive off.
This is crazy. You're a paying customer! You should not need to audition for a cab. It is also unlawful: drivers can be fined $500 for refusing to ferry customers from one part of the city to another part of the city. So get in the cab first and then tell the driver where you want to go.
Do not undertip.
Common sights you will see
Squashed rat
Bottle filled with pee
Mysteriously tiny drug bag (why is it so small?)
Social warning #2
Melodrama wrapped in sophistication is still melodrama.
Social warning #3
Your crackpot radar needs to grow exquisitely refined. This applies to strangers, obviously, but it also applies to acquaintances. Living in any large city means that your social circle grows exponentially, which in turn brings about a statistical increase in the likelihood of encountering iffy types.
Designer juice
Don’t be ridiculous. Unless you are pulling in more than 500K after taxes, you do not have $10 to spend on a bottle of juice.
Subway etiquette #2
SCENE: A man leans against a subway pole on a crowded 2 train at 4 p.m.
Woman: This pole isn’t for you to lean on. It’s for people to hold on to.
Man: Is there a sign that says that? You see a sign?
Woman: I don’t HAVE to. It’s a crowded train. Stand up like a man.
Man: Woman, don’t loud-talk me.
Woman: YOU ARE A WEAK MAN. I CAN SEE IT.
END SCENE.
God, don't let this happen to you. Avoid leaning on the pole.
Subway etiquette #3
Situation: A train pulls into the station. It is packed except for one car, which is curiously empty. Do not board the empty car. It is empty because something truly terrible has happened there.
Social warning #4
Learn to say "no".
Coming soon: Part II.
Nobody died and made Molly Young expert. She writes for GQ and New York magazine. She is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her Twitter here and her tumblr here.South Dakota, Jan 3 (THAINDIAN NEWS) A 45 year old South Dakota woman Marguerite Engle has stunned all, with her astounding.708 percent blood alcohol level in her body. It is a records of sorts and something that, Engle is not going to be proud of when she comes back in her senses.
She was found unconscious slumped over in a delivery van on 1st December, with the high level of alcohol in her blood. And the twist in the tale is that the delivery van was also stolen, in which she was found unconscious. The level of alcohol in her body was said to be around 9 times the permissible legal and safe limit. Hers was an eye-popping.708, when.40 is deadly enough for quite a number of people.
Jesse Sondreal, Meade County State’s Attorney later stated that the woman was found passed out behind the wheels of the vehicle with an astounding.708 percent blood alcohol level in her body. It is also being said that the alcohol found in her body might also be the record for South Dakota.
The state’s legal limit is the usual.08. And the 155-pound Engle was found “drunk and passed out behind the wheel of another stolen vehicle on another highway near Sturgis,” according to the report. She had just missed a court hearing.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- After five games, the Browns are already on Phase 3 of their offense.
The season began without Josh Gordon and with Brian Hoyer as the third-string quarterback. The offense was supposed to feature Brandon Weeden throwing long and with Trent Richardson running the ball.
Two games later …
Think about that for a moment, two games later Richardson was traded. Gordon's suspension ended, but Weeden was out with a sprained thumb. The Browns also were 0-2 and had scored one touchdown in two games. End of Phase 1.
The moment Richardson was dealt to the Colts' for their 2014 first-round pick, the assumption was that the team's new theme was: Wait For Next Year's Draft, 2014 here we come.
Three wins later …
The Browns are 3-0 since trading Richardson. Obviously, far more went into the winning streak than losing Richardson -- but who knew that was coming on the night of the deal?
Phase 2 began with Gordon's return and Hoyer's promotion to starting quarterback and a 31-27 victory at Minnesota. That was when Hoyer became the first Brown to throw three touchdowns passes in a game since 2009.
OK, that quarterback was Brady Quinn, who has been cut a few times and is now the No. 3 quarterback with the New York Jets. But hey, history is history -- and a Browns QB doesn't throw three touchdowns in a game every week … or even every year.
Starting over... again
Hoyer then led the Browns to a 17-6 victory over the Bengals. You know what happened next. If only Hoyer had run out-of-bounds, or at least slid much earlier. Then maybe his knee would not have been crunched in the Buffalo game.
Instead, it's a season-ending ACL injury for the North Olmsted/St. Ignatius product. And the Browns enter Phase 3, which pairs Weeden with Gordon. Most fans don't feel very good about it, despite Weeden helping claim a 37-24 victory over Buffalo in relief of Hoyer.
You must be fair, Weeden did indeed help the Browns. No turnovers. He threw a magnificent 37-yard touchdown pass to Gordon. He led the team on a 14-play, 71-yard touchdown drive ending with Willis McGahee's one-yard plunge.
After the game, Rob Chudzinski praised the play-calling and adjustments made by Norv Turner. Not only did the veteran offensive coordinator have to adapt to a QB change in the first quarter, the Browns also lost running back Chris Ogbonnaya to a concussion. The game plan for that night was for Ogbonnaya to receive more carries, but he wasn't on the field long enough for that happen.
Can Phase 3 work?
Phase 3 really begins with Sunday's game with Detroit.
You can be sure that when the season opened, the coaches never expected Richardson to be traded or to have bounced from Weeden to Hoyer to Weeden in the first five games. If any of us had been told that before the opener, would there be any reason to believe the Browns would be 3-2?
That's why I have some hope for Phase 3, even if most fans seem to believe it will be a flop. Somehow, Chudzinski and Turner must create a game plan that allows Weeden to look like something other than the rather indecisive and mechanical quarterback who has been sacked 16 times in three games.
This season, Weeden has two TD passes compared to three interceptions, a humble 69.2 rating. While Weeden was better in the Buffalo game (13-of-24, 197 yards, 1 touchdown, 95.3 rating), he still was sacked five times. The offense didn't appear as quick or crisp as it was with Hoyer.
Weeden did show off his powerful arm on back-to-back passes of 47 yards (to Greg Little) and 37 yards (to Gordon). Those were two of the prettiest passes thrown by a Brown all year.
Hoyer brought a lot of confidence and even a bit of fourth-quarter magic. Chudzinski called it "a spark." It was evident that Hoyer was more comfortable and perhaps better suited to the offense than Weeden. The Browns seemed to use a greater variety of plays.
But this season has demonstrated not to underestimate the Browns and this staff. To expect the offense to be as fluid as it was with Hoyer is unrealistic. But Chudzinski and Turner have shown the ability to adjust to different quarterbacks with different teams in the past.
Can they do it again?After my brother and I left the police station, two officers drove us to a KFC drive-thru in Santa Fe, while we listened to a top-40 radio station. They ordered fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, then passed two plastic bags to the backseat without turning around to look at us. We were on our way to stay at a hotel for the night since both of our primary guardians were gone: Grandma Betty was dead and Mom was being processed at the county jail.
I was 15 and Nick was 18, so the officers dropped of us off alone because Nick was technically an adult. All three of us had lived in Betty’s house for the past year, but now, it was a crime scene. Nick and I weren’t allowed to return home for 24 hours since the front yard was still partitioned off with yellow tape that read “DO NOT CROSS.” As we drove through the desert with warm bags of food on our laps, Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” played through the car speakers, and the officer who was driving sang along absentmindedly. You cut me open and I keep bleedin’, keep, keep bleedin’ love.
I thought of Mom’s bloody hands, and looked down at my own fingers. They were still stained from pressing each one into black ink, and rolling the tips from left to right against a sheet of paper for my evidence file at the police station. I closed my eyes, and tried not to replay what I’d seen the night before: Mom in a bloodstained shirt, standing over her own mother’s body in the dark. I’d spent hours in an interrogation room, while detectives used words like “lacerations” and “blood loss” and “organ failure” to describe what had happened.
I closed my eyes, and tried not to replay what I’d seen the night before: Mom in a bloodstained shirt, standing over her own mother’s body in the dark.
When Nick and I arrived at our hotel, one of the officers told us that news of our grandmother’s death and mother’s arrest had probably already reached the rest of the small town where we lived. I thought the officers were going to stick around for a while, but they left almost as soon as we swiped the key card to our room. After placing our untouched KFC dinners on the coffee table, Nick and I turned on the TV.
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The first thing that came on the screen was a small adobe house, with a turquoise door and four matching pillars, partitioned off with yellow caution tape. It took me a moment to realize what we were looking at: I could almost see the window to my bedroom, but the police cars parked out front were blocking it. In the top right-hand corner of the screen, Mom’s mugshot appeared, as the words “WOMAN STABS MOTHER 20 TIMES” floated across a blue banner at the bottom.
In the days and weeks after the murder, I tried to avoid watching and reading the news, but a friend from school contacted me after a local paper suggested that the prosecutor in Mom’s case was considering seeking the death penalty in her trial.
“Is that what you want?” my friend asked in a text message. I had no idea what to think. Was I supposed to want my mom to die? Was I supposed to tell people it was what she deserved? Was it supposed to make the death of my grandmother hurt less? The day before the murder, I was just a high school sophomore worried about fitting in, passing math, and applying to college. Now, I was the granddaughter of a murder victim and the daughter of her suspected murderer.
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In the comments sections of news articles about Mom’s case, people said they wanted her to die. They said she was unfit to be a mother. They said they felt scared and sorry for Nick and me. They said justice needed to be served. But justice sounded a lot like revenge, and nobody ever asked what justice meant to us. I had learned about capital punishment in social studies class, and the question that drove students to debate this issue was: Are we supposed to kill the killer? As I read comments saying my mother should “burn in hell,” I realized that in this case, killing the killer would only mean losing another person I loved.
Mom was charged with first-degree murder, but ultimately, the prosecutor didn’t seek a death sentence. More than a year later, I sat behind the stand with my right hand on a Bible and a plastic trashcan next to me in case I needed to throw up again. It was the summer before my senior year of high school in 2009—and three months after New Mexico had abolished the death penalty—but I couldn’t shake that surreal feeling of wondering whether my own mother would be executed.
Two weeks after the murder, I moved to Florida to live with my dad and stepmom. When I finally returned to New Mexico for the trial, I hadn’t seen Mom in 10 long months—time I’d spent waking up in the middle of the night and running out of |
calls for a discussion about the effects of the internet "on society, the loss of communication skills, the possibility of an attention span reduction and so on, rather than blankly dismissing the internet as the cause of all out problems."
Brains navigating information faster
As far as Greenfield's comments about the real and 'cyber' worlds being blurred by IT, Holt points to his own students' experiences as indicating quite the opposite, telling TechRadar:
"The access to information, and the efficiency with which it is navigated by my students amazes me and it improves each year. Rather than getting lazy, they are getting better, more efficient and more able to manage huge amounts of data. What we need to do is teach them how to gain a healthy sense of scepticism rather than instilling a fear in their parents that their brains are turning to mush.
"As for a chip that helps paralyzed people move… Bring it on… As fast as you possibly can. I don't think gaming is evil. I don't think it will turn our brains to mush. They may well excite people to engage in real-life projects or science, or imaginative thinking that they would otherwise not have the motivation or the stimulation to find their way to.
"Embrace the technology I say. I wish we'd had it when I was growing up."Major League Soccer today announced that defending Eastern Conference Champion Columbus Crew SC will host the Philadelphia Union in the club's 2016 home Opening Match on Saturday, March 12, 2016 as MAPFRE Stadium welcomes supporters for its 18th season and the Black & Gold's 21st overall campaign in MLS. Crew SC's first home match against Philadelphia comes six days after the Black & Gold's season-opening contest on Sunday, March 6 (4:30 p.m. ET), in a nationally-televised clash in Portland between the two clubs that played in the 2015 MLS Cup. A complete 2016 MLS schedule will be announced in the coming weeks.
The start time for the Saturday, March 12 Opening Match in Columbus against the Union is to be determined. The season opener in Portland at 4:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 6 is scheduled to be televised nationally on ESPN. 2016 local broadcast information for Crew SC will be announced at a later date.
2016 SEASON TICKET MEMBERSHIPS: http://bit.ly/2016CrewSCSTM
Crew SC's Holiday Package includes four tickets to the March 12 Opening Match against the Union at MAPFRE Stadium along with four limited edition Crew SC Ugly Scarves, all starting at $96. Information on the Holiday Package can be found at http://bit.ly/CrewSCHoliday.
Additional information for purchasing single-match tickets for all Crew SC regular-season home matches will be released at a later date. As of today, supporters can secure their tickets to Opening Match on March 12 by purchasing 2016 Season Ticket Memberships, a 10-Match Plan or a Holiday Package. Ticket information on all three avenues to seats for Opening Match is available by calling 614-447-2739 and online via ColumbusCrewSC.com.
Crew SC is unbeaten (6-0-5) in Opening Matches at MAPFRE Stadium over the last 11 years, dating back to 2005.
In 2015, Crew SC captured the MLS Eastern Conference Championship in its second season under Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter, qualifying for the playoffs for the second consecutive year. The club recorded five regular-season sellouts for the second consecutive season and added two postseason sellouts to set an all-time club record for most sellouts in one year, regular-season and playoffs combined. The Black & Gold also registered three straight home sellouts for the first time in MAPFRE Stadium history, from August 22 versus Sporting Kansas City through September 26 versus Portland. The attendance of 22,719 at that September match against the Timbers was the largest at MAPFRE Stadium since the stage at the north end of the venue was constructed prior to the 2008 season. The club then set club playoff records for MAPFRE Stadium attendance in back-to-back sellouts in the First Leg of the Eastern Conference Championship and the 2015 MLS Cup.The Canadian Press
MONTREAL -- A disgraced Montreal bureaucrat says it wasn't his job to stop corruption at city hall, even if he knew it was going on.
Gilles Surprenant, a retired city engineer, is on the stand Wednesday for a fourth day at an inquiry where he is discussing kickbacks he took on rigged sewer contracts.
Surprenant said the inflated prices were well known in his office -- and everyone was aware, from his own bosses down to low-level administrative assistants.
He was asked by inquiry counsel why he didn't do anything to stop the system.
Surprenant replied that he spoke to his bosses about it but he didn't press further. He said it wasn't up to him to go to the police or blow the whistle publicly.
"I don't think it was my role, as a simple functionary, to call the police about it," Surprenant said.
"My bosses were aware of that situation and, as I've said, for nine years there was not much that was done."
Surprenant said no one at the City of Montreal appreciated the rampant collusion but no one did anything to stop it during the era where the practice was most rampant -- between 2000 and 2009.
"I wanted a normal career like all engineers. I did not want a system like that, I did not need a system like that," Surprenant said, adding that he didn't even know what to do with his ill-gotten gains.
Surprenant has already admitted that he pocketed nearly $600,000 in kickbacks over roughly 20 years. While going through each individual contract at the inquiry, tallying up the amounts he got for each one, the amount appears to be higher than that.
He reminded the inquiry that he returned a good portion of the money. Surprenant recently gave nearly $123,000 to authorities, and he says he lost more than $250,000 at the casino -- which he calls his way of reimbursing the state for the money he took.
The rest he spent on his children and renovations on his house. Also, about $150,000 went to help a construction boss who has having money problems and it wasn't recouped before that man's death.
"I've said it and I'll repeat it: the money that I had, I didn't know what to do with it and I gave back a large part of it," Surprenant said.
The inquiry heard that his kickbacks began to dry up around 2006. Contractors were no longer soliciting him for help. One boss told him he was useless.
Surprenant said he suspects a higher-level city official had become corrupted by then.
"I was told that my services were no longer required and I have to say that I was not unhappy with the situation," Surprenant said.
Surprenant added that he continued to be paid by certain contractors.
In earlier testimony Wednesday, he tried to pin the blame on construction bosses.
"The phenomenon of corruption is a phenomenon that originates with the contractors," Surprenant said. "At the beginning a corrupt official -- in my case anyways -- does not exist. A functionary becomes corrupted."
The commission is spending a second day looking at 91 contracts on which Surprenant was involved in planning and drawing up plans.
The contracts all fall between 2000 and 2009, an era when the price of public-works projects rose exponentially -- by as much as 35 per cent in some cases.
Surprenant had, in most of those cases, taken a kickback that ranged from a few thousand dollars to as much as $22,000. The retired engineer was also showered with gifts such as tropical golfing holidays, hockey tickets, wine and fancy holiday dinners.
He has also described golfing on two occaisons with Vito Rizzuto, the notorious Mafia boss, including on a one-week golfing trip in the Dominican Republic in 1996 or 1997.Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Jose Fernandez has proved to be one of the best young pitchers in baseball. While rumors have suggested he could be available in trade talks, the Miami Marlins claim they have no intention of moving their ace.
However, talks heated up during the winter meetings in Nashville, Tennessee. Marlins president David Samson disclosed that 20 teams have contacted the club regarding Fernandez, per Joe Frisaro of MLB.com.
Continue for updates.
Boras Comments on Fernandez Trade Possibility
Tuesday, Dec. 29
Agent Scott Boras joined MLB Network Radio to address the rumors that Fernandez could be on his way out of Miami:
Dodgers Interested in Acquiring Fernandez
Monday, Dec. 21
Fox Sports' Jon Morosi reported the Los Angeles Dodgers and Marlins "remain in discussions about possible [Fernandez] trade, but no deal close."
Fox Sports' Ken Rosenthal reported Dec. 8 that the Dodgers were entertaining the idea of involving a third team to "satisfy" the Marlins in a potential Fernandez trade. Frisaro of MLB.com reported at the time it would take a package including pitching prospect Jose Urias, third baseman Corey Seager and outfielder Joc Pederson to land Fernandez.
On Dec. 7, Jayson Stark of ESPN.com, citing sources, reported "the Marlins were talking to the Los Angeles Dodgers—and at least two other teams—about potential blockbuster deals involving Fernandez." He added:
Clubs that have spoken with the Marlins say they've put such a high price on Fernandez that any trade would be considered a long shot. An official of one club said the Marlins were asking for as many as five players in return for the 23-year-old right-hander. And another club executive said the Marlins were telling teams they would only consider moving Fernandez if the package in return made them better next season than they would be if they kept Fernandez, as well as putting several young players in place who could solidify their future.... "I don't know if they'll wind up trading him," said an executive of one club that spoke with the Marlins. "But if they do, I'm betting that's where he goes—to the Dodgers."
Yahoo Sports' Jeff Passan cited sources when reporting "the Marlins have asked the Dodgers for Julio Urias and Corey Seager." He added the "Dodgers said no—can't imagine Seager going anywhere for anyone—but the sides have continued talking about plenty, including Fernandez."
Rosenthal reported former Dodgers manager and current Marlins manager Don Mattingly "values certain Dodgers more than [the] front office" as Los Angeles and Miami discuss a potential trade centered around Fernandez.
Hill Comments on Fernandez Rumors
Wednesday, Dec. 9
Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill reiterated Hernandez isn't going to be traded after the calls, rumors and inquires "ran their course," per Frisaro.
This is just the latest example of Hill telling the media Fernandez will not be traded. When asked about Fernandez on Dec. 7, Hill replied, "He's not available," according to Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald.
This is similar to what Hill had said Dec. 3 in regard to Fernandez, per the Associated Press (via Fox Sports): "Jose sits at the front of our rotation. He's a good pitcher, one of the best in the league, so you're going to get asked about him. But we are not shopping Jose Fernandez."
D-Backs Trade for Miller Instead of Potential Fernandez Offer
Tuesday, Dec. 8
Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Dave Stewart confirmed the team had talked about Fernandez internally and with the Marlins, per Nick Piecoro of AZCentral Sports; however, the team would later make a trade for Shelby Miller of the Atlanta Braves, per Rosenthal.
The Braves received Ender Inciarte, Aaron Blair and 2015 No. 1 overall pick Dansby Swanson from the Diamondbacks, which would "not have come close" to landing them Fernandez, per Piecoro.
Marlins Owner Denies Interest in Moving Fernandez
Tuesday, Dec. 8
"There is nothing I am thinking about doing at the moment with him," Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria said of Fernandez, per Rosenthal.
Yankees Willing to Deal Severino for Fernandez
Tuesday, Dec. 8
The New York Yankees would include pitching prospect Luis Severino in a package to land Fernandez, according to Frisaro.
Giants Have Discussed Potential Trade with Multiple Teams
Tuesday, Dec. 8
The San Francisco Giants and have had trade talks with the Marlins in regard to Fernandez, according to Heyman.
Mystery Team Enters Fernandez Mix
Tuesday, Dec. 8
Stark reported an unidentified team—which other clubs say they believe is the Houston Astros—is making a "very strong" bid for Fernandez. Stark also noted that sources who had previously described a potential Fernandez deal as unlikely were no longer willing to say that.
Odds of a Fernandez Trade Increasing
Monday, Dec. 7
A source who spoke with ESPN.com's Buster Olney said the odds of a Fernandez trade were at 1 percent Monday morning and have now risen "into the 40s."
Latest on Marlins' Asking Price for Fernandez
Monday, Dec. 7
Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com spoke to a rival general manager, who said Miami's asking price for Fernandez is so high he is "basically unavailable." Heyman added that the Marlins are looking for "five or six great young players" in return for Hernandez, according to one GM.
Fernandez Comments on Agent's Role in Negotiations
Saturday, Nov. 21
"I do not know what all this is all about, but [Scott] Boras will be there, because he's my agent," Fernandez said, per ESPN.com. "I get to decide who is going to be on my phone calls. It's that simple."
The comments contradict Marlins president David Samson's comments on Nov. 12, who said, "[Boras] will not be involved in any discussion as it relates to Jose Fernandez. We will be in touch with the doctors and Jose as we formulate a plan," per the Associated Press and ESPN.com.
Marlins Reportedly Unhappy with Fernandez's Attitude
Thursday, Nov. 19
Andy Slater of 940 AM WINZ reported the Marlins were displeased with Fernandez's behavior last season:
As I reported last week and on Tuesday, the Marlins front office is not happy with Fernandez's attitude. "Jose talks to management like they are children," another player source told me. I've now learned, it goes beyond that. On at least two occasions in the Marlins clubhouse this season, Fernandez approached [Marlins president of baseball operations Michael] Hill—according to multiple player sources—and openly said "when are you going to trade me?" "There were times this season where, not all, but some players and coaches hoped Jose would go out on the mound and get shelled," a player source told me. "We thought it would get him to be more humble."
Marlins Reportedly Will Deal Fernandez This Offseason
Tuesday, Nov. 17
According to Craig Mish of SiriusXM, there is a "growing sentiment around baseball and internally with the Marlins" that the team will trade Fernandez.
Frisaro reported Fernandez is "not being shopped or discussed to be shopped."
Chris Towers of CBSSports.com noted, "Trying to justify trading Jose Fernandez from a baseball perspective is just silly."
How Fernandez Trade Would Impact Marlins
Fernandez is only 23 and has gone 22-9 with a 2.40 ERA, a 1.01 WHIP and 336 strikeouts in 289 innings pitched over three seasons. He is under club control until 2018 (he's arbitration eligible for the first time this offseason). His best seasons appear to be ahead of him, so trading him seems illogical.
On the other hand, injuries have become a bit of a concern, as he's already had Tommy John surgery and missed a month of this season because of a right biceps strain after returning from that surgery.
If the Marlins don't sign Fernandez to a long-term contract extension or ultimately trade him, it seems likely the feud with Boras will be the cause, per ESPN.com. The Marlins may have a history of making sweeping changes for cost-cutting purposes, but trading a 23-year-old future ace would be surprising unless other factors—like the presence of Boras—play a major part.October 25, 2011
MANY PEOPLE look back now and see the mid-1960s as a time of triumph for the civil rights movement in the U.S. South.
Huge numbers of people participated in demonstrations that are remembered with reverence--like the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. The two landmark laws that abolished legalized discrimination in the Jim Crow South were passed--the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But for Black Americans at the time, it wasn't at all clear that the movement was winning.
There was no let-up in the savagery of the Southern racists. For example, the "Bloody Sunday" assault on civil rights demonstrators trying to march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama took place in March 1965, as the Senate was taking up the Voting Rights Act.
The same summer that the Civil Rights Act passed, segregation triumphed at the 1964 Democratic National Convention when the party, led by northern liberals, rejected a challenge by civil rights activists against the Mississippi delegation elected under Jim Crow laws.
Black Panther Party members rally in 1968
In the North, segregation was already against the law, but African Americans endured racism in forms that seemed at least as deep-seated--workplace discrimination, substandard housing and schools, police violence. These conditions, especially the brutality of police, sparked urban rebellions that struck every major U.S. city over the course of the mid- to late 1960s.
Then there were the assassinations--Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Chicago branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1969, and the list could go on. These were political murders of leaders of the Black struggle, some carried out by the forces of the U.S. state and others with their suspected connivance.
Remembering that, it's easier to understand the words of a young Black woman near the beginning of the new documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 in response to a reporter's question about the future: "I don't think there is much of a future at this point. Not much at all. They're just killing everyone."
Review: Movies The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975, written and directed by Göran Hugo Olsson.
ALL THIS is the backdrop to the era of Black Power--which is revisited in The Black Power Mixtape, a collection of fascinating interviews and images recorded by Swedish television journalists in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Black Power represented a geographic shift of the movement to the northern cities following the civil rights victories against the Jim Crow South. But it was also a political shift, as participants in the Black struggle confronted the need for new strategies that went beyond the civil rights movement's commitment to nonviolence.
In a speech shown in The Black Power Mixtape, Stokely Carmichael--a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and probably the best-known representative of the radicalizing young activists of the civil rights movement--described what was at issue. According to the principles championed by Martin Luther King, Carmichael said:
[I]f you are nonviolent, if you suffer, then your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart...[King] only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.
To meet the new challenges, something more was needed. But what? Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture, is credited with introducing the Black Power slogan to the 1960s movement when he raised it as a chant at a 1966 march in Mississippi.
The phrase electrified the crowd. It seemed to answer the frustration with the slow pace of change--when there was any change at all--and speak to the need to go beyond protests tailored toward appealing to the conscience of "white America." As Carmichael wrote in a SNCC statement published in the New York Review of Books:
For too many years, Black Americans marched and had their heads broken and got shot...After years of this, we are at almost the same point--because we demonstrated from a position of weakness. We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, you're nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out... This is what [Blacks] seek: control...[Black Power] means the creation of power bases from which Black people can work to change statewide or nationwide patterns of oppression through pressure from strength--instead of weakness.
The immediate popularity of the Black Power slogan showed the increasing radicalization of the movement. But it also raised questions. What exactly did Black Power mean?
To some, Black Power was interpreted as an explicit call for Black capitalism. The first major Black Power conference, held in Newark, N.J., in 1967, was organized by a Republican businessman named Nathan Wright Jr. with the message that African Americans needed to organize for their "fair share of the pie."
President Richard Nixon himself could sympathize with this definition of Black Power. He declared in a 1968 speech that "[w]hat most of the militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in--not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs--to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action." Federal government programs, Nixon said, should "be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest--Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and, yes, Black Power."
Another current in Black Power was cultural nationalism. Every part of the movement identified with Black pride and embraced the history and traditions of African American resistance. But the cultural nationalists elevated the establishment of a separate and distinct culture to the sole aim of the movement, explicitly rejecting political struggle.
Also, of course, Black Power represented "the Black radical tradition--a tradition of struggle, of organization," as historian Robin Kelley explains in a contemporary interview that the makers of The Black Power Mixtape unfortunately left to the final minutes of their film.
This is the definition of Black Power that we're more familiar with today, embodied in organizations like the Black Panthers, and later the Revolutionary Union Movements, with their focus on workplace organization.
During the Black Power era, the differences between these currents were explicit--and hotly debated. The Panthers, for example, were devoted to organizing in the community and creating a sense of Black pride, but they were withering in their criticisms of cultural nationalism and Black capitalism.
In The Black Power Mixtape, Panther leader Bobby Seale explains in an interview: "We look at this program as a very international-type program. It's for any human being who wants to survive...Socialism is the order of the day, and not Nixon's Black capitalism. That's out."
The Panthers considered themselves revolutionaries committed to overthrowing capitalism--and they therefore sought to make alliances with other people and forces which shared that common interest, including whites. In a 2010 interview for the documentary, Seale explained the Panthers' aims by referring to the organization's slogan: "All power to all the people, whether you're white, black, blue, red, green, yellow or polka-dotted--in the final analysis, what we wanted was real people's community control and empowerment."
BLACK POWER was one of the most important developments for the left internationally in the 1960s. The movement's actions and ideas inspired a generation--something The Black Power Mixtape helps to illustrate with footage of international demonstrations in solidarity with the Black struggle in the U.S.
These demonstrations weren't just about sympathy for the African American struggle. Radicals around the world were shaped and influenced by the Black Power movement in how they expressed their own grievances and developed their own political strategies.
The most important influence of all was that appealing to the current system to act according to its stated principles of justice and equality wasn't enough--that a more militant form of struggle was needed to fundamentally transform society.
The best part of The Black Power Mixtape is the glimpses it shows of the Black movement at this magnificent high point, as important as the civil rights struggle that came before it.
The segments with Black Power leaders themselves, in both public and private moments, are riveting. There is one interview clip with Angela Davis that would make the movie a must-see even if the film only lasted for that four-and-a-half minutes.
The interview took place while Davis was in prison, facing trial on trumped-up murder charges in California. She was asked by a reporter how she felt about the "violence" of the movement--and any socialist who has had to respond to a similar question will want to try to remember every word:
When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principles and goals that you're striving for, not in the way you reach them. On the other hand, because of the way this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions. You have to expect things like that as reactions. If you're a Black person and you live in the Black community, all your life, you walk out on the street every day, seeing white policeman surrounding you. When I was living in Los Angeles, for instance...I was constantly stopped. The police didn't know who I was, but I was a Black woman, and I had a natural, and I suppose they thought that I might be a "militant"... You live under that situation constantly, and then you ask me whether I approve of violence. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense at all. Whether I approve of guns? I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Some very, very good friends of mine were killed by bombs--bombs that were planted by racists...From the time I was very, very small, I remember the sounds of bombs exploding across the street, our house shaking. I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that at any moment, we might expect to be attacked. The man who was at that time in complete control of the city government--his name was Bull Connor--would often get on the radio and make statements like "Niggers have moved into a white neighborhood, we'd better expect some bloodshed tonight." And sure enough, there would be bloodshed.
Davis then talked about the four African American girls, aged 11 to 14, who were killed in the racist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963:
One of them lived next door to me. I was very good friends with the sister of another of them. My sister was very good friends with all three of them. My mother taught one of them in her class. In fact, when the bombing occurred, one of the mothers of one of the young girls called my mother and said, "Can you take me down to the church? I have to pick up Carole, we heard about the bombing, and I don't have my car." And they went down there, and what did they find? They found limbs and heads strewn all over the place. And then after that, in my neighborhood, all of the men organized themselves into an armed patrol. They had to take their guns and control our community every night because they did not want that to happen again. I mean, that's why when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible. Because what it means is the person who's asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through--what Black people have experienced in this country since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.
isn't a systematic history of the period, and that leads to some problems in the film.
For example, after the Angela Davis trial, the movie veers suddenly into a discussion of the crisis of Black community in the mid-1970s, with a focus on the terrible toll taken by drug abuse. The connection, though it isn't well explained, is that many people believe the Black Power movement was crushed by a government conspiracy to flood the African American community with drugs.
There is strong evidence to back up this allegation--for example, the role of the CIA in heroin and opium trafficking from Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War--but it's only part of the story.
The Black Power Mixtape draws attention to other factors--most importantly, the brute violence of the American state, from the outright murder of Black revolutionaries to the FBI's COINTELPRO program to wreck Black Power organizations.
Another element doesn't get much discussion in the film, even during Robin Kelley's brief commentary: the attempts to co-opt sections of the Black Power struggle into the two-party political system.
Electing Blacks to political office to represent Black people seemed like an obvious expression of Black Power. But this strategy turned about to be almost as appealing to the U.S. elite as Black capitalism. Mainstream institutions like the Ford Foundation devoted large sums of money to encouraging "political action" within the framework of electoral politics.
According to the late historian Manning Marable, there were just 100 Black elected officials around the U.S. in 1964. By 1969, that number was 1,000, and by 1975, it was 3,000. Almost all of these African American officeholders were liberal Democrats--including former grassroots activists.
But in spite of any background in the struggle or radical ideology, Black officeholders found themselves pulled in the opposite direction of the Black Power movement--all the more so the further they rose in politics. The Black Democrats were forced by their position to administer the very policies that caused the crisis of Black America, especially as the conservative shift begun under Democratic President Jimmy Carter and continued under Republican Ronald Reagan took hold.
For a fuller history of the Black Power era, you'll want to turn to some of the excellent books on the subject. Start with Ahmed Shawki's Black Liberation and Socialism to put the 1960s and '70s in the context of the broader African American struggle. After that, look for Manning Marable's Race, Reform and Rebellion and Robert Allen's Black Awakening in Capitalist America. The Black Power Mixtape makes a great accompaniment to these books, along with the second Eyes on the Prize documentary series, covering the years 1965 to 1985.
For anyone involved in the struggles of today, there are rich lessons to be learned from any of these books or movies. That's something The Black Power Mixtape makes clear in an unexpected but fascinating way.
Apparently inspired by Robin Kelley's contention that the legacy of Black Power is being carried on to some extent today in hip hop, The Black Power Mixtape includes, alongside all the historical footage and interviews, voiceover comments from contemporary Black musicians like John Forté and Questlove, who provided the film's excellent soundtrack.
These comments are often as telling as the historical footage. For example, if you happen to miss the on-screen identifications for the voiceovers by the brilliant Erykah Badu, you'll almost certainly assume that you're hearing the razor-sharp observations of Angela Davis from 40 years ago.
But that's the point. The Black Power era may be four decades in the past, but it's crucially relevant to the world we live in today--and most of all to the struggle for a different future.PUNXSUTAWNEY, PA—As a due punishment for the animal having incorrectly predicted an early spring, local residents gathered in a public square today to bear somber witness to the beheading of weather-prognosticating rodent Punxsutawney Phil as part of the region’s traditional Groundhog Slaughtering Day. “Punxsutawney Phil must suffer the consequences of his erroneous and poorly conceived forecast,” said town councilman Kenneth Joachim as he held the rodent’s trembling body against the chopping block and lifted an ax high, bringing it down in a single, assured stroke that cleanly decapitated the animal, a tradition that stretches back to the town’s founding. “Let this gesture stand as a stark reminder to all future groundhogs who seek to presage winter’s end without evidence or merit.” Town council members then announced that Punxsutawney Phil’s headless body would be ceremonially devoured raw by the mayor later that evening.
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Top officials at the Lockheed Martin Corporation in 2009 sought to extend their lucrative contract work managing Sandia National Laboratories for the Energy Department, and expected that their political connections would help them gain an inside track for a noncompetitive contract renewal. This is, after all, how Washington usually functions.
But the Energy Department’s top auditor has asserted in a riveting new report that the firm, and top officials that helped it operate the Sandia nuclear weapons labs in Albuquerque, appear to have violated federal laws when they used some of their contract funds to pay for lobbying and other forms of pressure on DOE to obtain the contract renewal.
The firm argued during the department’s review of its actions that spending federal funds to obtain more federal funds was “allowable” and only was meant to help the department’s leaders make an informed decision, according to the Nov. 12 report by DOE Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman.
But Friedman called that decision “highly problematic.” He said it was not only a violation of government-wide contracting regulations, but also “impermissible” under the precise wording of Sandia’s longstanding, multi-billion dollar contract with DOE.
Friedman’s slender six-page summary of his extensive investigation — many details of his work were declared “For Official Use Only” — is noteworthy because it’s an unusual broadside against what many in the Capitol say is a common way of doing business: Get one federal grant, and then use the profits to hire lobbyists — including former members of Congress — to meet with federal officials, lawmakers and others who can help orchestrate a new, even richer federal grant.
It’s Washington’s own version of a perpetual motion machine — one that has created and enshrined countless fortunes in the Capitol region. “Not only is it explicitly against the law for contractors to use taxpayer dollars to lobby federal officials, it’s galling that in this particular case, the contractor is using taxpayer dollars to try and do an end-around competition,” said Lydia Dennett, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington. “This instance is hardly the first time appropriated funds have been abused this way.”
Lockheed Martin wound up getting a two-year contract extension worth $7.7 billion in March of this year to manage Sandia, rather than the 12-year extension it had sought. But a Sandia official, whose name was not given in the report, acknowledged in a 2010 email obtained by Friedman that its federally-funded campaign for a Lockheed Martin extension was not new.
Sandia used “operating costs” — a budget account funded by DOE — “in the same way in securing” contract extensions in 1998 and 2003, and also coordinated its effort closely with Lockheed Martin, Friedman’s report quotes the Sandia official as writing.
Sandia’s top counsel had specifically warned in 2004 that neither Sandia nor its direct overseers in the Energy Department “could tolerate even the suspicion” that Sandia was using its contract revenues to help Lockheed win a new contract, Friedman wrote. After all, the contract stated that Sandia “shall not have any interface with any present or potential Federal, state, municipal” officials or legislators for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business, his report said. It is, in fact, a standard federal contract rule that recipients of federal funds cannot use those funds “to pay any person for influencing or attempting to influence an officer of any agency or a member of Congress” about an extension.
Sandia’s officials planned nonetheless to use their political connections to get such an extension, beginning in 2009, Friedman wrote. In an internal document prepared that year, officials candidly vowed to try to persuade DOE that no other firms should be allowed to bid on the work, but said if that effort failed, they would attempt “to influence the evaluation criteria” — in effect, to jigger the competition.
Sandia also hired three consultants, who urged an extensive lobbying campaign involving the state’s congressional delegation, a former U.S. Senator, a former governor, and a former head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. None are named in Friedman’s summary, but it says that DOE overseers at Sandia concluded the labs engaged a former Republican congresswoman, Heather Wilson, to participate in the taxpayer-funded campaign for a contract extension.
According to news reports, Sandia’s contract with a firm Wilson created called for payments of $10,000 a month for her strategic advice, but barred her from lobbying. After DOE officials protested the arrangement, Sandia repaid the DOE a total of $226,000 that it paid Wilson.
Wilson, who worked at the White House under President George H.W. Bush and now directs the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, said in a prepared statement that she had done nothing wrong. “I was not a lobbyist for Sandia and I did not contact any federal official — Congressional or Executive — for Sandia to try to extend the Sandia contract,” she said. Wilson is presently on a DOE-organized panel meant to advise the department about how the nuclear weapons laboratories should be organized and paid for by DOE.
According to Sandia documents cited by Friedman, the labs’ message in its lobbying was that allowing competition for a new contract was unnecessary and not in the government’s interest. These points were emphasized in a letter sent by a senior Lockheed executive to then-Secretary of Energy David Chu.
A Lockheed spokesman, Matthew Kramer, said in a prepared statement that “Sandia Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that operates Sandia National Labs, has cooperated with the Inspector General’s review and will continue to do so. Lockheed Martin will cooperate fully with Sandia and the Department of Energy as needed.” Sandia spokeswoman Heather Clark said that while the labs are still reviewing the report, “Sandia takes these allegations seriously and has cooperated fully in the Inspector General’s review of the issue … Sandia is confident that the company and the DOE will be able to resolve these issues.”
Frank Klotz, who became director of the National Nuclear Security Administration this year, affirmed in a written response to the audit that Sandia’s payments to Wilson were “unallowable,” and that officials are now assessing whether other salaries and fees paid to Sandia employees and consultants from DOE revenues should be recovered. He also said that |
& Stretch – 12 Principles of Animation
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The MotoGP Safety Commission, the informal body in which riders talk to Dorna and the FIM about safety issues, made it very clear: unless the two Spanish tracks were resurfaced, it would not be possible to return there for 2018. In the case of Barcelona, there was also the question of the new chicane which replaced Turn 12, the corner where Luis Salom tragically lost his life in 2016.
It now looks like both circuits will make a reappearance on the MotoGP calendar in 2018 and beyond. Both Jerez and Barcelona are to be resurfaced ahead of next year, which should mean they will be ready to host MotoGP in the coming season.
Jerez made their decision relatively early. They assured Dorna that the track would be resurfaced, and the work has now been contracted out to two local construction firms. Work on resurfacing is set to be carried out during the summer, before activity at the track starts again in earnest in September. This means that the WorldSBK series will be the first world championship to sample the new surface when they head there for the Spanish round in October.
The situation was much more difficult for the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo, outside Barcelona. The circuit had set aside funds for resurfacing and an upgrade to be carried out in the winter of 2018/2019. However, the insistence of the Safety Commission that the track be resurfaced before returning forced the track into a decision.
At a press conference held on Thursday, the president of the circuit, Vicenç Aguilera told the press that they had decided to go ahead with resurfacing the track this year. Losing the MotoGP race was not an option, Aguilera said, leaving them no option but to move their plans forward a year.
The track will now be resurfaced over the winter, and as part of the resurfacing, the trajectory of Turn 12 will be modified. The plan is for the original layout is to be restored, and extra runoff created at the corner. Creating the runoff will mean moving the grandstand which currently sits at the corner, placing it further along and before the final corner onto the start and finish straight.
Before the work is done, however, the plans will be presented to Dorna, who will pass it on to the Safety Commission for assessment, before handing over to the FIM Safety Officer Franco Uncini for homologation. Given the desire of the riders to see the original layout restored, creating more runoff at Turn 12 should solve most of their complaints.
Having both Jerez and Barcelona resurfaced could create several headaches for Dorna and for IRTA. First and foremost, complying with the request of the riders to have the tracks resurfaced leaves Dorna little choice but to continue to hold races at the circuits. That means continuing to have four MotoGP rounds in Spain, something which Dorna and IRTA sources have repeatedly commented privately are really too many. However, with well-attended races and circuits willing to pay Dorna the sanctioning fee, there is little reason not to go.
After both tracks are resurfaced, there will have to be tests at the track, for Michelin to assess the tire stress and degradation at the circuit. Both tracks are used extensively by the teams as test tracks, so that should not be an issue, the question will be one of timing. Tests are likely at Jerez sometime later this year, while there could be a test at Barcelona shortly after MotoGP returns to Europe after the early flyaway races. This is exactly what happened this year, and so it is likely to happen again.
With both Jerez and Barcelona resurfaced, that means that the 2018 MotoGP calendar will be expanded to 19 rounds. Thailand is almost certain to be included next season - though MotoMatters.com understands that a few details remain to be hammered out with the Chang International Circuit - which would mean an extra race next year.
While few details of the calendar are currently available, what is known is that the MotoGP season will start on 18th March in Qatar. The calendar will follow roughly the contours of the 2017 season, though with the season starting a week earlier, the Barcelona and Mugello races will probably not be on consecutive weekends.
The bigger change will come at the end of the season. The Thailand race will be added to the three flyaway races, and the flyaways will be split into two back-to-back weekends, with a week off in between. Sepang will be the last of the flyaways, before MotoGP flies back to Europe for the season finale at Valencia, and will likely be paired with Phillip Island. Thailand and Motegi will probably be paired before them, with a free weekend between the two pairs of races.
The accession of Thailand to the MotoGP ranks also means a slight change to the testing schedule. Bringing the season up to 19 races means that one preseason test will be dropped. That may not happen in 2018, though, as the teams will have to head to the Chang circuit for testing in February. Most likely, the Phillip Island MotoGP test will be dropped to make room for the test at Chang. For 2019, then the number of preseason tests will be reduced to just two. If the season expands to 20 races, then the number of preseason tests could even be cut down to just one, at Sepang.Hamad International Airport (HIA), Qatar’s brand new airport to replace Doha International Airport, is being constructed 4km from the existing facility on a 5,400-acre site and will be Qatar’s only international airport.
Formerly known as the new Doha International Airport, the project was undertaken in response to a projected demand for additional international passenger capacity to the region. The new airport handled more than 30 million passengers in 2015.
After completion in 2020, the airport will handle 50 million passengers, two million tonnes of cargo, and 320,000 aircraft landings and take-offs each year.
Phase one was initially scheduled for opening in December 2012, but was postponed and finally inaugurated at the end of April 2014. Phase one allows for a passenger capacity of 24 million people a year and the transportation of 750,000t of cargo.
The airport was constructed near the city of Doha and is approximately two-thirds the size of the city (12 times larger than the old airport).
Qatar Civil Aviation Authority (QCAA) and the New Doha International Airport Steering Committee are the bodies in Qatar responsible for the airport construction.
During the construction process, the old airport was expanded and refurbished at a cost of $140m. This will increase its capacity to 7.2 million passengers a year for the interim period. A new dedicated departure facility named Terminal B was opened at the airport in June 2011.
New Doha International Airport contractors and construction
The contract for the first phase of the airport construction and the planning and design phase was awarded to Bechtel Group. The project started in early 2004 with a detailed planning and design phase, when Bechtel produced a masterplan of the new airport.
The work continued in 2004 with a massive land reclamation project since more than half of the area of the new airport is being constructed on land reclaimed from the sea, amounting to 10.9 square miles.
The land reclamation required more than 62 million cubic metres of ‘fill’ to be completed (needed four large dredgers to complete the project). The reclamation was completed in early 2005 and the reclaimed area required 13km of armoured seawall to protect the construction. The removal of 6.5 million cubic metres of household waste from a dump to a remote engineered landfill was constructed meeting environmental standards.
The new airport features two of the longest commercial runways in the world, an 85m-high control tower, a 600,000m² passenger terminal, one cargo terminal, a 150,000m² aircraft maintenance centre, one separate terminal for the Emir of Qatar, a general aviation terminal, one of the world’s largest airport catering facilities, air traffic control equipment and security systems.
A joint venture of Taisei and TAV was appointed as the principal contractor for the airport project.
Wanzl was contracted to provide 3,800 Voyager aluminium luggage trolleys for transportation of luggage within the terminals. Wanzl was also contracted to supply 3,200 airport shoppers for security-enabled, duty-free areas.
Franke Care System was awarded a contract by the main contractor Big Electromechanical Systems to supply aircraft maintenance stairs for the airport, in 2014.
Phase one of Qatar’s brand new airport
“Qatar Civil Aviation Authority (QCAA) and the New Doha International Airport Steering Committee are the bodies in Qatar responsible for the airport construction.”
The first phase construction of the new airport included two runways 4,850m and 4,250m in length, designed specifically to accommodate the new Airbus A380-800 superjumbo.
A three-storey terminal building was also constructed, including 350,000m² of floor space, of which 25,000m² is dedicated as retail space. In addition, there are seven remote gates and eight hardstand aircraft parking bays.
Three new major road interchanges provide access to the new airport from the city and surrounding areas (the airport itself has 17km of dual-carriageway and single-carriageway roads). To facilitate passengers, the airport has a five-star luxury hotel and a three-star transit hotel.
The complex also includes a centrally located 48,000m² cargo terminal (750,000t/y) with 15m clearance, which is among the 20 largest cargo terminals in the world. There are also hard standing areas for the passenger terminal, an 80m ATC, hangar space for two A380-800s and three A340s, and a 70,000m² maintenance centre with mezzanine levels for access to aircraft top decks.
For the convenience of passengers, there is an automated storage and retrieval system. Major cargo is transported in unit load devices (ULD).
The system has a capacity to accommodate up to 1,000 ULDs. Import cargo consignments and those awaiting loading in the containers are stored in the automated storage system.
The cargo system includes advanced facilities, such as high-bay storage areas for import and export of cargo, workstations for make-up and breakdown of ULD loads, storage areas of special cargo such as hazardous materials, valuable items, cold storage, perishable foods and medicines.
Central maintenance hub for Qatar Airways
HIA is the central maintenance hub for Qatar Airways’ international fleet. Located in the midfield area, it is capable of handling up to eight wide-body aircraft, including A380s and 11 aircraft.
The base features a single large hangar containing heavy and light maintenance bays. The column-free design of the hangar’s interior ensures flexible aircraft parking and optimal maintenance efficiency.
The workshop building at the back of the aircraft hangar bays provides specialised maintenance and automated spare parts storage. This includes specialist workshop areas for the maintenance of engines, avionics, wheels and brakes, structures, interiors, painting, galleys, in-flight entertainment systems and safety equipment.
Airport design and air traffic control (ATC) at the HIA
The design of the roof structure makes it a landmark in international aviation. The roof has a wave-like structure. The transparent façade of the terminal beneath the roof emphasises the roof’s curves.
The elevated crescent-shaped ATC tower, topped by a glazed control room, allows central control, between the two parallel runways and airside facilities. There is also a training room that can double as a control room in case of emergencies.
Advanced airport systems installed
The terminal’s undulating stainless-steel roof is finished with a new non-reflective coating to eliminate glare. The baggage system is monitored through an automated baggage handling system (BHS) by the use of radio frequency identification devices (RFID). It also augments the in-line security system, which incorporates CTX level three for explosive detection.
The airport system is connected by a fibre-optic backbone system, and the airport operational database to enable further need of additional cabling. Air traffic controllers monitor activities using high-resolution LCD monitors.
The check-in and retail areas are about 12 times bigger than the existing check-in and retail facilities. The terminal features digital automated terminal information service system (D-ATIS) and general display system, supplied by Terma.
Environment
Comprehensive technical studies were undertaken to determine the potential effects of the project on natural resources and communities. The reclamation of sediments and the removal of uncontrolled waste from the project site and plantation were some of the initiatives taken.
To maintain water quality and marine ecology, sediment monitoring programmes are underway and an environmental monitoring programme will be undertaken every six months.
Measures include the retention and treatment of stormwater, monitoring of the sewage treatment plant and the implementation of an environmental incident response plan.
During airport operations a solid waste treatment plant (SWTP) reduces and processes solid waste. A treatment plant recycles the wastewater.
Qatar Airways relocated its headquarters and training facilities to the maintenance complex at the new Doha airport. The first phase allows the airport to serve two A380-800 superjumbos at the same time.
HIA signed an agreement with AXA Power to supply ground power units to support the onboard aircraft auxiliary power unit when aircraft are parked. These units help to reduce emissions and noise levels in the airport area, stepping towards a greener environment.
Construction work
In May 2006, Takenaka received a major construction contract from New Doha International Airport. The 24-month $4.34bn (JPY27bn) contract covered the construction of the Emiri terminal (9,100m² with a 1,700m² parking area). This is a terminal for the exclusive use of the royal family and VIPs on state visits, which features a multi-layered, arch-shaped curved design, resembling a yacht sail.
In addition, Takenaka was asked to construct a new car park building (two floors for 1,409 cars) and a mosque (2,000m² with a radius of 47m and a height of 13m, with a 37m-high minaret).
By July 2012, 99.45% of the terminal building and 99.96% of the Emiri terminal was completed. Work on the airfield paving, road tunnel, and utility and fuel systems, was nearly 99% complete.
Construction of an air traffic control tower, airside and landside roadways, aircraft maintenance hangar and automated people mover was completed by July 2012.
Airport technology
The terminal has moving walkways to aid in movement of passengers around the complex. There are also CO 2 and heat occupancy sensors so that services can be tailored according to passenger numbers (regulate air intake). In addition, the wave-like roof of the terminal is tinted to prevent glare from the sun and conserve energy.
“The new Doha airport can service six A380-800 superjumbos simultaneously.”
In May 2007, ARINC and Thales were awarded a $75m contract for the IT, telecommunications and security systems at the airport. ARINC integrated the security systems of the airport by January 2013.
The project consisted of ARINC iMuse common-use terminal equipment (CUTE) at more than 100 check-in desks. In addition, ARINC also installed the information exchange infrastructure for data movement across the airport. Thales worked on the safety and security systems and the local area network (LAN).
Both ARINC and Thales were involved in project design and management. Further technology is installed on the runway and UK defence contractor QinetiQ provided Tarsier, a radar-based runway debris detection system. Three radar systems scan the runway 24 hours a day and locate any debris or objects which could damage aircraft or be sucked into engines.
Smiths Detection was awarded a $132.59m (€100m) contract to provide security scanning equipment, which includes automatic X-ray and trace detection. These systems are used to screen passengers, hand luggage and checked-in bags for explosives, weapons and illegal goods.
E-gates installed at the terminal identify the passenger of a particular trip a day before boarding so that suspicious passengers can be tracked before entering or leaving the country.
In 2012, TransCore was awarded a contract to design and install RFID-based parking and vehicle terminal access control system at the airport.
In 2014, a new security vehicle was launched to achieve the task of security bodies. The new vehicle is capable to identify weapons, drugs and explosives that help to increase the performance of security operations.
Phases two and three at Qatar’s only international airport
The second phase of construction included the addition of a further 16 contact gates and an extension of the terminal building.
In addition, there is a suspended monorail system for passenger transit through the terminal. A further luxury hotel was constructed to accommodate the additional passenger capacity of more than 25 million a year passing through the airport. The third phase will include the addition of a further 40 contact gates, which would bring the final total to 80.
To accommodate the extra gates, the terminal building will be extended and would be capable of handling more than 50 million passengers a year, 320,000 aircraft movements and two million tons of cargo.
The new Doha airport can service six A380-800 superjumbos simultaneously. The airport is the first in the world purpose-built to accommodate these aircraft.In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the sainted Tom Hanks has issued an edict commanding all men to “pipe down” and simply listen to women. At the risk of excommunication, however, I can’t help feeling there ought to be a place for me too in #metoo – the social media movement for women who claim to have been sexually assaulted or harassed. Like the French women who are using Twitter to #BalanceTonPorc, I have an irresistible urge to name my pig.
He was D.J. Coulson, headmaster of Collyer's School, Horsham – the direct-grant grammar school I attended in the 1950s.
Coulson was addicted to thrashing boys’ bottoms with bamboo canes and lashed them so violently that the skin almost broke and the weals and bruises lasted for weeks, gradually fading from black and blue to red, pink and yellow. Out of a school of 600 boys, at least one a week was subjected to these sadistic barbarities which Coulson inflicted irrationally, unjustly and arbitrarily and for which any perpetrator would certainly be imprisoned today. Along with groups of friends, I was twice on the receiving end.Like all runners, Whitney Lasseter had often experienced butterflies before races. But the first time she entered the Caliente Bare Dare 5K, she hid behind her car until just moments before the start.
That’s because the runners in this Florida event compete nude, except for their shoes and the occasional GPS watch.
“I didn’t want everyone to see me naked,” says Lasseter, seen above, who ended up winning among the women and who won again the next year. “There were people there I see at regular races—actual people who I knew. But I just kind of got the nerve up and went out and did it.”
More runners are getting up the nerve to run naked, in a growing number of clothing-optional runs—nearly 30 of them, nationwide—that are beginning to emerge from beneath the radar.
There’s even a National Championship of Nude Running and a 5K Nude Racing Series, consisting of five runs in Texas and Oklahoma, organized by the American Association for Nude Recreation, with another circuit proposed for Florida. And what is apparently the first-in-the-nation naked obstacle race debuted in Burlington, Wisconsin, in June.
“Of course, there’s no razor wire or anything like that to catch on dangly bits,” says Rich Gilbreath, director of the new race, called Mud, Sweat, and Boobs.
Most of these runs are held at nudist resorts or on other private property, but they’re increasingly attracting runners with no experience of nudism who want to try something different.
“There’s no question there’s a bucket-list mentality to this,” says Pete Williams, director of the Caliente Bare Dare 5K, at the upscale Caliente Resort in Land O’Lakes, Florida. This year’s race, held in May, attracted a record 312 runners from 25 states. Williams also directs the Streak the Cove 5K in Kissimmee, Florida in September.
“We get a lot of top runners from around Florida” for the run, Williams says. The course records are a respectable 15:49 and 19:29 for men and women, respectively.
There are some things about these races that differ from conventional events. Participants are allowed to remain anonymous, with results often posted only by first name and last initial, for example. Many are not timed.
But other features are surprisingly similar. Tourist agencies in places like Pasco County, Florida, encourage the nude runs there because of the business they bring in. And, yes, you often get a T-shirt.
What is purportedly the oldest of these clothing-optional events celebrates its 30th anniversary July 27: the USATF-sanctioned Bare Buns Fun Run in Deer Lake, Washington.
So many more have started up since then that some have added new traditions to distinguish themselves. The Color Me Bare run, for instance, in Los Gatos, California, features “paint throwers” who cover the naked runners with a mix of corn starch and powdered tempera along the course.
“More and more people are discovering the pleasure of being outdoors without clothes on,” says Cindy Gregory, special events coordinator for the Lupin Lodge resort, where the race debuted in May with about 60 runners. “They’d always wanted to participate in a nude run and thought this was a great way to do it.”
Many runners with no experience of nudism find they like the idea, and stick around for clothing-optional ice-cream socials, barbecues, live music, and other events that follow, organizers of these competitions say.
“It was interesting to talk to the people who had never done it before. They had a blast. They never put their clothes back on,” says Gilbreath, of Mud, Sweat, and Boobs, which was followed by a roasted turkey cookout.
That was different from their attitudes before the event, he says. “They’re just so nervous. They ask us things like, ‘Should I wear shoes?’” (The answer, at most of the races, is yes.)
“It’s a great introduction to nudism,” says Ashley Beahan, spokeswoman for the American Association for Nude Recreation. “You don’t have to worry about clothes bunching. It’s a free feeling. It’s more relaxing, exciting.”
There’s at least one conventional event, run in public, in which naked participants compete: San Francisco’s annual Bay to Breakers 12K. They use what they call the “Bare to Breakers” event to advocate for nudism.
After years of trying to keep them out, Bay to Breakers officials now tolerate the demonstrators, and the city lifts its ban on public nakedness for them, as long as the naked runners wear an official bib around their necks, a spokeswoman says.
Although they all say they’ve heard the jokes and puns, clothing-optional run organizers say they stand for something serious: body acceptance.
“Until you get out there, you don’t really understand it,” says John Waldron, who organizes the Hidden River 5K in St. George, Georgia, and is trying to start a nude running series in the Southeast like the one in the Southwest.
Lasseter, who no longer hides behind her car before the start of naked races, will likely sign up.
“Everybody always asks me, ‘How do you even do that? Isn’t everything flopping around? Is it uncomfortable?’ For me, it’s not. It’s really free,” she says.
In fact, Lasseter says, she ran her 5K PR of 20:06 at the Caliente Bare Dare.
“I always make the joke, I have less drag. I’m way more aerodynamic with no clothes on,” she says.
“Once I did it once, it was so much fun, and every fear I had just went away,” Lasseter says. After all, she says, “We were born naked. Our bodies were designed to be naked. So when we’re doing an activity like that, it’s not about our bodies. It’s our minds we have to tell to shut up.”*Religious/Superstitious folks: Please understand – this article is not an attack on you (as you will imagine it to be) – it an exposé to understand you and help you understand yourself.
My last article - Confronting Religion in Education - showed why the word ‘religion’ is freely interchangeable with ‘superstition’ – and why the word ‘superstition’ should in fact be used in preference to the word ‘religion’ in order that we raise consciousness of the absurdity in giving superstition so much credit, respect and influence – especially around children.
But, especially for the already-superstitious, it perhaps seems to be a harsh stance to denigrate the mindset without first explaining and understanding it; and, equally important; showing that it can be explained and understood.
In the absence of an explanation, the superstitious would and could be forgiven for thinking that their superstition alone is self-evident proof that superstition is a reasonable position, perhaps evidence that a supernatural realm exists; supernatural realms about which to be superstitious. It is a circular argument, yes – but I guarantee it will be asserted; hence, I head it off here.
So – let’s dig in; if a supernatural realm does not exist, where on earth (pun intended) does superstition come from?
Fact : For hundreds of thousands of generations (not years, but generations) humans were prey animals living on Africa's plains.
Yes - for 10,000 years (with 5 generations per century, 500 generations per 10,000 years), for 500 generations, we've increasingly managed to not be prey animals; but for 10-million years before that (that's 1,000 times more time - for 500,000 generations) we were prey, we were food to predators.
Fact : A pray animal that is not suspicious of every little rustle in the bush or sound in the night, winds up as "lunch" and not as an "ancestor".
Fact : This is natural-selection at work - suspicion is, necessarily, built into and streams through which our very DNA has flowed to us.
Fact : Superstition (imagining what is unseen) is the brain’s projection of suspicion onto the advanced mind.
In addition to these facts; as sentient, self-aware, animals, humans evolved an inquisitive predisposition to ask: "Where do we come from", "What drives complexity and life", etc.
And... We injected these questions into imagined plotting-&-planning super-beings possessed of benevolent or malevolent intent;
> We begged in the darkness of a cave that the thunder outside would abate.
> We pleaded with the river we had to ford, that it allow us safe passage.
> We beseeched the volcano to attack our enemy on our behalf.
(As an aside; individual rivers, volcanoes and other localized features first personified and imbued with human characteristics, quickly gave way to not just a pagan god for each river, but a river god for all rivers, a volcano god for all volcanoes, etc. And then, the notion that there was a hierarchy of gods controlling the forces of nature gave way to a single top-dog-god; monotheism emerged from paganism)
Superstition was born and evolved, and, with it, ritual and ceremony.
Of course – it is not just us ‘higher’ animals that cling to ritual – no. The humble pigeons display the same correlation-misfiring of imagined cause-and-effect conclusions as shown in skinner box experiments. Our human equivalent to pigeons bopping in expectation of a feed pay-day, are rain dances, and, of course, prayers.
So it is that we have a natural default to be curious and superstitious – to ‘recognize’ patterns (many non-existent in reality) – and the two play off of one another until they spin many a philosophical conclusion (3,000 gods and counting, 30,000 versions of just one of those gods… and counting) – none of which has the slightest connection to reality.
But… if you are personally heavily afflicted with superstition, and you’ll know it when you feel the gall rising within as you read this, don’t feel unduly ashamed: These are merely the early days in our age of reason, and we are not very far from ancestors who did not have proper answers to the questions of origins and complexity, so that superstition still governs the majority, and you are merely among them.
We, in this age, are the leading edge of humanity who can replace superstition with knowledge and understanding.
It just happens that many among us either have not been exposed to the answers, or are too fearful or lazy to consider them. I emphasize again; we are not at an "end" point in our human development, we are just starting on the path toward better education and less superstition.
So... Theism is built into those who don't get or accept an education in origins, and theism tends to be evaporated in those who do.
Theists – thank you for reading this far; you have the gist; the main lesson is over, now you are excused to go argue and comment madly below.
###
For the studious and level-headed, a higher level of discovery now continues:
Are notions of god(s) and religion possibly neurological disorders?
I was having a discussion per the above, and one of the theists in that debate posted this link: Losing Religion? Symptom of Parkinson's Disease, hoping to suggest that the article somehow explained that atheism is the neurological disorder (since it appears to come as parcel of Parkinson’s Disease).
In response, I pointed out that a summary of the article is as follows:
"People with Parkinson’s Disease have a tendency to lose their interest in religion… reporting significantly lower levels of interest in religion. Brain scans show that this lack of interest coincides with changes in the prefrontal cortex."
And, from this, we can indeed deduce that when one has a specific brain affliction (within the architecture of the skull), it can kill off that part of the brain that concerns itself with god.
My theistic adversary insisted then that “atheism is a neurological disorder”
But, she did not realize that her link proves quite the opposite: She omitted to appreciate that the main path to atheism has nothing to do with destruction of brain material.
In rational people, the path to “informed atheism” is based simply on having gained a firm understanding of those unknowns that typically lead (in the absence of knowledge) to assuming a supernatural or god figure exists in the first place:
1) Origins and state of the Universe and life
2) Origins and state of morals
3) Predictions into the future
But, conversely, per the link to the Parkinson’s article, the fact that part of the brain can die or be interfered with and, as a consequence, interest in religion is lost, well, that tells us conclusively that god 'lives' in that region of the brain that has died.
And, this is very consistent with evolutionary psychology in that religion and notions of a god are a misfiring of the natural suspicion by a prey animal as described above.
To recap: We took fear of being preyed upon, and superimposed it onto fear of deep dark water, raging rivers, thunder, the dark, etc; and then embroidered these cultural clutter.
The case was pretty much closed in that argument – but… it did continue, and I think you’ll find it interesting:
In the evasive tradition of theism, my rival countered that; “There is still that NEED to belong and questions physicalism (sic) doesn't address. We have to be different as individuals and expect dualism.”
Of course – I agree – I, too, belong and long to belong: I belong to my family, to my community, to my race, to my country, to all primates and the tree of life - I belong to my ancestors, as their genes make me tick and I inherited their memes.
I don't need to belong to something that has never been seen and is demonstrably killed off by a neurological condition.
Clearly the faculty that houses the superstitious (suspicious for a prey animal) part of the brain is suggested by the neural damage (as per the link to Parkinsons above). But, there is an interesting correlation observable in animals: Toxoplasma Parasites that use the power of sexual attraction to trick rats into becoming cat food: Normally rats will flee when the encounter the smell of cat urine. However, rats infected with Toxoplasma parasite show an uncharacteristic interest in cat urine, boldly sniffing, following it, and hanging around it; which is not the smartest evolutionary move for the rat – but precisely what the parasite needs in order to get into the gut of another cat and continue its life cycle.
Interestingly, as an aside, I heard about this on an episode of The Naked Scientists broadcast, where it described how people who have cats often become infected by the parasite, and tend toward elevated risk taking behavior.
The Toxoplasma attacks the Amygdala of the brain, which is associated with various emotional states. Once in the brain, the parasite forms cysts around itself, in which it essentially lies dormant; interfering with normal fear and brain function, and awaiting consumption by a predator (cat).
I introduced this final thought about toxoplasma as an interesting aside, but in order to illustrate further how we see the emotions of faith and belief tied into elaborate and intricate interaction with brain architecture, evolutionary psychology, and the ongoing predominance of superstition even in modern society.Last week, Matt Harrison sent me a copy of his latest Python eBook entitled Treading on Python Vol 2: Intermediate Python. I was intrigued since I rarely get to read Intermediate level Python books. In fact, I would say that some of the stuff that the author talks about goes into the advanced level. Anyway, I thought it was a pretty good little book and if you have a moment, I’ll tell you why.
Quick Review
Why I picked it up: As I mentioned, the fact that it was an intermediate level book made this a must-read for me.
As I mentioned, the fact that it was an intermediate level book made this a must-read for me. Why I finished it: Because the book proved to be very interesting.
Because the book proved to be very interesting. I’d give it to: Python programmers who have a good understanding of the basics but are looking to grow in their Python skills.
Now if you have a few more minutes, you can read my full review after the jump!
Book Formats
This book is available on Amazon as a Kindle book only at the time of writing as far as I can tell. The copy I received was in epub format though, so there may be another version available somewhere…
Full Review
Matt Harrison’s latest book is his best yet. I found the writing to be almost error free with only a smattering of typos here and there, mostly in the 2nd half of the book. The book is split up into 3 sections (not including the Introduction). Harrison doesn’t spend time introducing us to Python; instead he assumes you already know it and dives off into the deep end with functional constructs. Thus begins the first section in which he covers lambda, map, reduce, filter, recursion, list, set and dict comprehensions, and finally, the operator module. He used a lot of the topics that followed the lambda to illustrate advanced uses of the lambda construct. I thought it was intriguing and ended up learning some new tricks that I hope to implement in my own code soon.
The 2nd section is devoted to Iteration and Generators. In it, you will learn the difference between iterables and iterators, how to construct a normal generator and an object generator and the author also gives tips about when to use a generator versus a list. He also shows some real life examples of generators and iterators in |
was a wax merchant from Kalfat who traded in the then imperial capital Istanbul. Ali Kemal, born in Istanbul, went on to become a journalist and diplomat.
He married twice. Once to an Anglo-Swiss woman called Winifred Brun and the other to a Turkish girl called Sabiha.
The Turkish side of the family also took up a career in diplomacy. Sabiha’s son Zeki Kuneralp served in the Turkish foreign service and his son Selim, Boris’ cousin, was a Turkish ambassador until his retirement last year. However, unlike the others in their ancestral village, Kuneralp has spoken out against his cousin and his views, slamming his “little Englander” stance and saying that under Johnson’s policies “his own grandfather wouldn’t have been able to come to the UK”.
Kemal fled to exile in the UK in 1909 following a press crackdown but returned before the outbreak of the World War One. In 1919, he openly advocated for a British protectorate status in Turkey, something which caused him to be seen as a traitor by Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who went on to found the modern Turkish republic, and led to Kemal being lynched by an angry mob in 1922. Kemal’s son Zeki only returned to Turkey from exile in Switzerland after Ataturk’s death in 1938.
In 2015, Johnson also won himself the description of traitor in Turkey after he said that his sympathies lay with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an entity listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the UK and the US. Turkey has been involved in an armed conflict with the PKK since 1984.
Stanley Johnson’s visit in 2008 was not his first to Kalfat village and one man who was there during the first visit is 69-year-old Recep Akdogan.
“It was 1961 or 1962 when Zeki Kuneralp and Boris’ father visited our village. I was in primary school then and didn’t understand what the fuss was about. I hadn’t yet read about Ali Kemal and all that,” Akdogan told MEE.
Akdogan is one of the few residents of Kalfat who says Boris is not welcome unless he retracts his support for terrorists.
“Boris Johnson better not think of visiting here after those things he said about supporting the PKK and posing with their members with a rifle in his hand. The people in our village are patriots and we don’t want him here,” he said.
Kalfat in Cankiri province is the ancestral homeland of Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather, Ali Kemal (MEE / Suraj Sharma)
Yusuf Islam Sekerci, a 19-year-old university student in Kayseri who returns home to Kalfat during the summers, is quick to interject and show that Akdogan is in the minority when it comes to Boris.
“Of course Boris is welcome here even if he said those unfortunate things. This is his village. We will display the legendary Turkish hospitality to him if he chooses to visit,” Sekerci told MEE.
Karaagac, the village headman, is more diplomatic about Boris’s PKK remarks and says it was just a political gimmick.
“He was made to speak such things. It was all part of a political game. The English are good at those kinds of political games,” he said.
“I don’t think Boris is a PKK sympathiser if has even one drop of Turkish blood, which he has plenty of as we know.”
While many in Kalfat were aware of Boris’ remarks concerning the PKK, few knew or appeared to care about the offensive poem he penned about the Turkish president in The Spectator magazine in May.
Bunyamin Mermerkaya, 35, told MEE that the village would gladly host Boris regardless of what he has done or said, and that the village would celebrate his achievement of becoming foreign secretary.
“We will welcome him. We will sacrifice a sheep in his honour. He is from here and he has made our village proud, first by becoming mayor of London and now foreign minister of England.”
On whether village residents would like Boris’ first visit to his ancestral village of Kalfat to be as foreign minister or prime minister, most seem to agree with Karaagac’s view.
“I don’t care if Boris comes here as foreign minister or prime minister. I want him to come here as a son of Kalfat, as a son of these lands. We will greet him dressed in our finest.”You knew you could cure your own bacon, but did you know you can make your own ham as well? It’s actually very easy: all you need is a fresh pork leg, some curing salt, honey, and pickling spice. It’s the perfect solution if you love ham but can’t find a brand at the grocery store that isn’t full of junk. Give it a few days in the fridge to brine, and soon you’ll be carving slices off your very own home-cured ham.
The ingredients might be simple, but at least one of them is very important, and that’s the curing salt (also known as Prague Powder #1). This is not the same as kosher salt, table salt (iodized or not), sea salt, or anything else! You can buy it online or in specialty stores; it’s usually dyed pink to make sure it’s not confused with regular salt. As the ham slowly brines in the fridge, the nitrite in the curing salt prevents the growth of the botulinum toxin in the meat. Botulinum toxin is one of the deadliest poisons in the world, so this is not something you want to mess around with.
If you’re worried about the potential link between nitrites and cancer, take a look here: there’s actually no real evidence that nitrites are dangerous. For one thing, you make more of them in your own saliva than you’d get from eating cured meat every day. If you still don’t want to use nitrites to cure meat, that’s fine – just pick another cooking project to do at home and get your ham at the store.
With the doom and gloom out of the way, it’s time to get into the fun part: ham-making. This is a recipe for a fairly small ham. If you want to modify it for an entire pork leg, that’s fine; just make sure you have the space and equipment to handle it. You’ll just need to adjust the amounts of other ingredients accordingly, and increase the brining time (a typical target is 1 day per pound of meat).
Once your ham is done, scarf it down straight off the bone, chop it up into frittatas, or carve it into slices to make breakfast burritos. Or try your hand at some recipe development of your own: after a taste of home-cured ham tailored exactly to your taste, you’re sure to come up with some creative uses for it.
Homemade Ham Recipe
SERVES: 4 PREP: 10min+1week COOK: 25min/lb.
Protein: 150g / % Carbs: 18g / % Fat: 48g / % Values are per portion. These are for information only & are not meant to be exact calculations.
Ingredients
4-5 lbs. pork leg;
Water;
½ cup sea salt;
¼ cup honey;
4 tbsp. curing salt (Prague Powder #1);
1 tbsp. pickling spice;
PreparationA message from Linus Torvalds - the person behind the Linux kernel - announced that version 4.7 of the software has left release candidacy and has finally been released. The kernel has been in development since May of this year, and since then has had seven release candidates in the lead up to the final version.
The email from Linus detailed that the release was slightly delayed due to his travels, and gave special emphasis to fixes for Intel's Kaby Lake GPU. Other significant changes in version 4.7 are support for AMD's RX480 GPU, improvements for USB/IP, EFI "Capsule" firmware updates, as well as a new security module called "LoadPin" that makes sure all kernel modules are loaded from the same filesystem.
So, after a slight delay due to my travels, I'm back, and 4.7 is out. Despite it being two weeks since rc7, the final patch wasn't all that big, and much of it is trivial one- and few-liners. There's a couple of network drivers that got a bit more loving. Appended is the shortlog since rc7 for people who care: it's fairly spread out, with networking and some intel Kabylake GPU fixes being the most noticeable ones. But there's random small noise spread all over. And obviously, this means that the merge window for 4.8 is open.Judging by the linux-next contents, that's going to be a bigger release than the current one (4.7 really was fairly calm, I blame at least partly summer in the northern hemisphere). Linus
You can download the latest kernel here and a more comprehensive, easy to read changelog for Linux 4.7 is available here.World famous lambic brewers Brasserie Cantillon have announced a nearly complete list of locations for Zwanze Day 2016 and this year’s release of Cantillon Framboise. Zwanze Day is an annual event held in select cities and countries across the world on the exact same day, wherein Cantillon releases a special beer to be tapped simultaneously. This year’s event will be on October 1st, 2016, with select bottles also for sale. Many locations get other Cantillon kegs on draft or tap other special beers, and all are extremely rare.
For 2016 there seem to be some changes, including more countries like Australia getting a release. This year it does not appear that Portland has a Zwanze Day location; De Garde Brewing in Tillamook will be the only location in Oregon, though there are supposedly two more locations in the USA to be announced. In Seattle, the new Slow Boat Tavern is hosting and while Canada has releases in Montreal, Toronto and Victoria, Vancouver, BC, is left out.
ZWANZE DAY 2016 (October 1st) Locations:
AUSTRALIA
– The Scratch Bar — Brisbane
AUSTRIA
– Tribaun — Innsbruck
BELGIUM
– Moeder Lambic Fontainas — Brussels
– Moeder Lambic Saint-Gilles — Brussels
– Mi-Orge Mi-Houblon – Arlon
– Rose Red — Brugge
CANADA
– Dieu du Ciel — Montréal, Québec
– Birreria Volo — Toronto, Ontario
– The Drake – Victoria, British Columbia
DENMARK
– Himmeriget — Copenhagen
FRANCE
– La Fine Mousse — Paris
– La Capsule — Lille
FINLAND
– Stadin Panimo Baari — Helsinki
GERMANY
– Café Herman — Berlin
GREAT BRITAIN
– Kernel Brewery – Bermondsey
– North Bar — Leeds
– Six° North — Aberdeen
ITALIE
– Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà — Rome
– The Dome — Nembro
– LambicZoon– Milano
– The Drunken Duck — Quinto Vicentino
– Ristopub Margherita — Quartu Sant’Elena
– Ottavonano — Atripalda
JAPAN
– To be confirmed
– To be confirmed
NEDERLAND
– De Bierkoning — Amsterdam
NEW-ZEALAND
– Garage Project – Wellington
NORWAY
– Nogne O — Grimstad
SPAIN
– Masia Agullons — Sant Joan de Mediona
SWEDEN
– Akkurat — Stockholm
SWITZERLAND
– Erzbierschof — Zurich
USA
– Anchorage Brewing Co. — Anchorage, Alaska
– Armsby Abbey — Worcester, Massachusetts
– Avenue Pub — New Orleans, Louisiana
– Bagby Beer — Oceanside, California
– Beachwood BBQ — Seal Beach, California
– Crooked Stave Barrel Cellar — Denver, Colorado
– De GardeBrewing — Tillamook, Oregon
– Fool’s Gold — Manhattan, New York
– Green Bench Brewing Co. — St-Petersburg, Florida
– Hill Farmstead Brewery — Greensboro, Vermont
– Holy Grale — Louisville, Kentucky
– Jester King Brewery — Austin, Texas
– Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales — Dexter, Michigan
– Mikkeller Bar — San Fransisco, California
– Monk’s Café — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
– Novare Res Bier Café — Portland, Maine
– Playalinda Brewing Co. — Titusville, Florida
– REAL a Gastropub — Honolulu, Hawaii
– Russian River Brewing — Santa Rosa, California
– Schera’s — Elkader, Iowa
– Side Project Cellar — Maplewood, Missouri
– Slow Boat Tavern — Seattle, Washington
– Spuyten Duyvil — Brooklyn, New York
– The Sovereign — Washington D.C.
– Thin Man Brewery – Buffalo, New-York
– Trillium Brewing Co. — Canton, Massachusetts
– West Lakeview Liquors — Chicago, Illinois
– 1 more place to be confirmedTwo days down, one to go for the Buffalo Bills and their annual mandatory minicamp. And while the Bills started to get a little bit more specific in their practice on Wednesday with the drills they chose to run, there were still plenty of opportunities for players to show the coaches what they bring to the table.
So who, and what stood out during the team’s second practice of minicamp? Seven observations from the day of work:
1) Cardale’s rollercoaster Wednesday
- While Tyrod Taylor was once again the best quarterback on the field — as he should be — the day for Cardale Jones is one that had as many twists and turns as a soap opera. Yesterday, I wrote about just how raw Jones is at this point in time, and that was even multiplied on Wednesday. During team drills, on multiple occasions, Jones basically just kept his feet planted on the ground, and basically just launched it straight up in the air. It created multiple jump ball opportunities for the defense, and likely should have resulted in an interception at least once. But then, Jones just brings you right back in with two of the best plays of the afternoon. He uncorked a beautiful throw over the middle of the field, and then later on, came the real play of the day. Jones dropped back into the pocket, climbed forward, gave a hearty pump fake, and stepped into a throw that went 60-plus yards down the field and safely into the arms of wide receiver Dez Lewis. Only speaking for myself, it was a jaw dropping throw. That’s exactly what the Bills have to unearth with Jones: getting rid of all the bad tendencies, and finding out how to make those big throws more of the norm.
2) Jerry Hughes absent
- Along with a few other starters that didn’t take part in the practice during Day One, the newest notable absence is edge rusher Jerry Hughes. Head coach Rex Ryan didn’t address the media after the practice, so it’s unknown as to why Hughes wasn’t out there at this point in time. The outside linebacker’s lack of attendance forced yet another backup player into the first-team fray on Wednesday, seeing as how rookie Shaq Lawson still has a ways to go before his return from shoulder surgery. In Hughes’ place was veteran linebacker and free agent pickup Lorenzo Alexander, who likely has the most experience of the players the Bills had to choose from. He and Manny Lawson made up the first team edge rushers, with IK Enemkpali filtering in every now and again for Lawson. We’ll find out tomorrow if Hughes’ absence is due to anything significant.
3) Rex goes off
- The entire offseason has featured Rex Ryan clearly stating that the upcoming campaign will be one that features the type of defense that he’s run during his whole career. Usually during practices, Ryan is fairly positive and doesn’t scream at his players. On Wednesday, we actually got to see that side of Rex Ryan. During team drills there was a busted coverage on defense and it allowed an easy reception for the offense, and that set the head coach off. He screamed at the top of his lungs about the players needing to know their individual responsibilities, and then ended it with “I don’t care who the $%^& you are!” It wasn’t clear as to who Rex Ryan was screaming at, but the message is clear: get on board with Rex’s defense, or prepare to find employment elsewhere.
4) Super sleeper tight end
- We all know quite a bit about Charles Clay and his impending role in the offense this upcoming season. It’s quite clear that he’ll be a consistent contributor, as long as he’s healthy, in both the passing and running game. Past him, things are a bit open. The Bills brought in Jim Dray as a blocking specialist tight end, but his spot on the team isn’t guaranteed by any means. Chris Gragg has improved steadily over his first three seasons, and will once again fight to make the roster. Nick O’Leary has been fairly disappointing over the course of his first season and hasn’t really stood out. So now, you’ve officially been warned: keep an eye on Blake Annen to push for a roster spot this summer. In only his third professional season, the Bills are already Annen’s fifth stop since entering the league, but he has shown both an athleticism and consistency with his hands during 11-on-11 team drills. He’ll need to show a lot more as the summer progresses, but put Annen on the list of a player that did everything right during OTAs and minicamp.
5) Minicamp fight between two starters
- It was brewing after a couple of reps of team drills, and then, it finally came to a boiling point. Wide receiver Robert Woods and cornerback Ronald Darby had been getting a little physical during 11-on-11s before it came to blows. Once the next play started, Woods and Darby traded a pair of punches each — with their helmets on, mind you — before helmets were taken off and the players were separated. Woods has been known over his four seasons to be a little temperamental on the field. He has gotten into a few altercations during practices over the years, and even got ejected from a 2013 game for throwing a punch at another player. As for Wednesday, cooler heads prevailed and both players went on with practice without any lingering aftereffects.
6) Defensive lineman making waves
- Without Kyle Williams being available to the Bills during OTAs and minicamp, it’s given a clear opportunity for some of the defensive linemen trying to make the roster to get some time with the first-team. The player that has been the recipient of the most time with the top unit has been Jerel Worthy, a former second-round pick and a castoff from Green Bay, New England, Kansas City, and Detroit. With that time on Wednesday, Worthy certainly made his presence felt, finding his way into the backfield on more than one occasion. He’s been a player that Rex Ryan has brought up with the media during the offseason, and with a clear lack in depth past the top four, has perhaps the best chance to make the team as the fifth defensive lineman. If he continues to show the way he did on Wednesday, he could even carve out some playing time as a rotational player.
7) Kicking competition update
- We didn’t get a chance to see any form of a kicking competition during Day One of minicamp, but luckily that was not the case on Day Two. The Bills practiced field goal kicking near the end of practice, and in a bit of an interesting move, veteran Dan Carpenter was the only kicker to get a chance. Carpenter connected from 30, 33, 38, 40, and 44-yards out, and missed only once when he doinked a 36-yard attempt off the left upright. Curiously, Marshall Morgan and Jordan Gay did not get a chance to attempt a field goal, but they did get reps in kickoff coverage. Morgan got a lot of hang time under his kickoff, which allowed the coverage to get down to the returner. Gay has done a nice job as a kickoff specialist over the last two years, but he completely shanked an attempt on Wednesday. It skidded across the ground, and rolled out of bounds for a penalty, and special teams coordinator Danny Crossman was not happy, telling the kicker that he just wasted a rep. We have yet to see Gay attempt a field goal during practice in the five open practices that we’ve seen, so he needs to be near perfect to make the team as just a kickoff specialist.
Twitter: @JoeBuscagliaExtraTime Radio Podcast LISTEN: There's no better way to prepare for the MLS All-Star Game presented by Target than interviews with Graham Zusi (SKC), Michael Parkhurst (ATL), Kellyn Acosta (DAL), Greg Garza (ATL) and Jelle Van Damme (LA)! Subscribe now so you never miss a show! Download this episode!
CHICAGO – Soccer has led Greg Garza across three continents and many nations since he left his native Texas to pursue a professional career at age 12.
But after six months with Atlanta United, he and his young family are ready to slow down “this gypsy life that we have” and make Georgia their long-term home.
“I think I picked the right place to go,” said the All-Star left back, who is currently on loan with the MLS expansion team from Mexican side Club Tijuana. “I know I have another two years [under contract] in Tijuana, but hopefully Atlanta can make the move permanent here pretty soon. That’s what we’re hoping for, myself and my family.”
Speaking to MLSsoccer.com in the run-up to Wednesday’s All-Star clash with Real Madrid, Garza revealed that he’s been blown away by the size and devotion of Atlanta’s supporters, who have made ATL UTD one of the league’s best-attended teams – and helped vote him into the MLS All-Star Fan XI in his first season stateside.
“Everything fell into place perfectly,” said Garza. “The way Tata [Atlanta coach Gerardo Martino] plays, I think I fit into his scheme pretty well from the very beginning. … I’m very fortunate to get this call-up to the All-Star Game. I think that shows it’s been a pretty good season for me so far. But it’s a long season, it’s a huge roller coaster, so we have to keep the head on straight and keep working.
“I just have Atlanta to thank, for having 45-50,000 people every game and supporting us.”
The Five Stripes concluded their temporary stay at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium with last weekend’s 1-1 draw vs. Orlando City, and will play their first match at glittering Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sept. 10. Garza isn’t concerned about the midseason venue change, as long as the home fans keep flocking.
“We’re going on to [an artificial] turf field, so that’s probably the only change we have to think about,” he said. “As long as these people can go to Mercedes-Benz and do the exact same thing they’ve been doing at Bobby Dodd, I think it shouldn’t be a problem at all.
“Bobby Dodd was an incredible atmosphere, so many fans. It was awesome. I didn’t know that many people in Georgia liked soccer, to be honest! But you talk to so many people – people recognize you on the streets, even, and they tell you they waited years for this. So it feels good to be noticed and in such a cool city like Atlanta.”
Garza and his wife Tauanna, whom he met during his stint in Portugal from 2008-11, had to navigate a challenging adjustment process when they moved from Tijuana to Atlanta earlier this year. But they and their four-year-old son Francesco – and his newborn brother Anthony, who arrived earlier this summer – have made Atlanta their home, and the whole family has accompanied Greg to Chicago for the All-Star festivities.
“It’s definitely a showcase for all of us,” Garza said of the All-Stars’ showdown with Real Madrid on Wednesday. “You’re playing against some of your idols, and even with some of your idols. You’ve got [Bastian] Schweinsteiger and Kaka and those guys on your side now. Those are guys that I dreamed of playing with or against one day when I was 12, 13 years old, and now I get to play alongside them against a team like Real Madrid – something that you dream of as a little kid.”
Garza hopes to play a part in the effort to stand toe-to-toe with the defending European champions, who will pose a fierce challenge to an All-Star squad that has just two training sessions to prepare.
“People probably see this as a show to watch from the outside. But us on the inside, we know we definitely have to compete,” he said.
“We have to showcase what this league is all about … This league is growing tremendously, I think it can be even stronger than it is right now. Coming from Mexico and having played abroad, I feel like this league is in a good moment right now. So hopefully we can continue to keep growing, and hopefully I can stay here a few more years as well.”Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Some 450,000 people protested on Saturday, local police said
The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, says the region will not accept Madrid's plan for direct rule.
He described it as the worst attack on Catalonia's institutions since General Franco's 1939-1975 dictatorship, under which regional autonomy was dissolved.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's plans include the removal of Catalonia's leaders and curbs on its parliament.
An independence referendum went ahead on 1 October, despite being banned by Spain's Constitutional Court.
Mr Puigdemont said the Spanish government was acting against the democratic will of Catalans after refusing all offers of dialogue.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Catalan president's message to Europe
He said he would call for a session of the Catalan parliament to debate a response to Mr Rajoy's plans.
Addressing European citizens in English, he added that the EU's founding values were "at risk" in Catalonia.
Barcelona police said 450,000 people protested in the regional capital earlier on Saturday, with many chanting "freedom" and "independence".
What is the Spanish government planning?
Mr Rajoy said he was triggering Article 155 of the constitution, which allows for direct rule to be imposed in a crisis on any of the country's autonomous regions.
Speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting, Mr Rajoy stopped short of dissolving the region's parliament but put forward plans for elections.
He insisted the measures would not mean Catalan self-government itself was being suspended. Instead, he said, the plan was to remove those people who had "taken self-government outside the law and the constitution".
The measures, which are supported by opposition parties, must now be approved by the Senate in the next few days.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Mr Rajoy said the government would apply Spain's Article 155
Reports say Spain's interior ministry is preparing to take control of Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra police force and remove its commander, Josep Lluís Trapero, who is already facing sedition charges.
The government is also considering taking control of Catalonia's public broadcaster TV3, El País newspaper reports (in Spanish).
What did the Spanish media say?
Image copyright El Punt Avui
"Return to the past" is how Catalonia's Catalan-language, pro-independence El Punt Avui sums up Saturday's developments on its front page. In an opinion piece, Xevi Xirgo argues that Madrid is mounting a "coup d'etat" to submit Catalonia to central rule in a way not seen since the 18th Century.
In an editorial in El Periódico, Spain's fifth-biggest newspaper which publishes both in Spanish and Catalan, Enric Hernàndez argues that Madrid responded in kind to "the aggression of the independence camp", which ignored Spanish law to hold a "sham referendum".
Hernàndez calls on Mr Puigdemont to agree to Mr Rajoy's call for early regional elections as the best way out of the crisis or else face a "social revolt with unforeseeable consequences".
Meanwhile El País, Spain's biggest paper, a left-of-centre daily, endorses the government in an editorial entitled "The democratic state responds" and declares that Mr Rajoy is acting to "restore constitutional legality in Catalonia". "Democracy not only has the right to defend itself but a duty to do so," it says.
What other reaction has there been?
The use of Article 155 has sparked widespread criticism in Catalonia, where many say it amounts to a suspension of the region's powers of self-government.
The Speaker of the Catalan Parliament, Carme Forcadell, called the measures a "de facto coup d'etat".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Police inspector: 'We are not politicians'
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau said it was a "serious attack on the rights and freedoms of all, both here and elsewhere".
But Inés Arrimadas, head of the centrist Ciudadanos party in Catalonia, which is against independence, said holding fresh elections would "restore goodwill and democracy" in the region.
Solution or provocation?
Guy Hedgecoe, BBC News, Madrid
Mariano Rajoy's use of Article 155 had been widely anticipated but his announcement when it came still had a huge impact. The article has never been invoked before, so there was a certain amount of mystery surrounding its potential reach and meaning.
Although Mr Rajoy insists Catalonia's self-government is not being suspended, many will disagree. The removal from office of Carles Puigdemont and all the members of his cabinet, to allow ministers in Madrid to take on their duties, amounts to a major reining in of Catalonia's devolved powers.
The Spanish prime minister said one of his aims was to restore peaceful co-existence to Catalonia with these measures. Many Catalans who want to remain in Spain will approve of this strident action. But those who want independence for their region are likely to see this as a provocation rather than a solution.
How did we get here?
Even though Spain's constitutional court ruled it illegal, Catalonia's regional government held a referendum on 1 October to ask residents of the region if they wanted to break away.
Of the 43% of Catalans said to have taken part, 90% voted in favour of independence. Unionist parties who won about 40% of the vote at the 2015 Catalan elections boycotted the ballot and many anti-independence supporters stayed away, arguing it was not valid.
Mr Puigdemont and other regional leaders later signed a declaration of independence but immediately suspended it in order to allow for talks.
He then defied two deadlines set by the national government to clarify Catalonia's position.This is like Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble (GameBoy Colour) or Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (GameBoy Advance), except it's actually a really
This is like Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble (GameBoy Colour) or Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (GameBoy Advance), except it's actually a really well-designed game... The problem is: no matter how good they are, I tend to dislike games that rely heavily on the "tilt" mechanic.
In TumbleSeed, you alter the angle of a platform in order to guide a seed creature up through a series of obstacle-filled levels. There are various power-ups to help you along the way, but the levels are generated in such a way that (by chance) sometimes the difficulty is very high and sometimes it is normal.
Despite the generated levels, this game is hardly ever easy. If you take your time, it isn't too difficult to get used to the controls. But, when there are enemies flying all over the screen, it's too easy to crash into something or slip down a hole.
I like challenging games, and I do like the challenge in TumbleSeed. But, I don't find it very fun... I feel like I only keep going because I'm somewhat motivated to prove that I can beat it, or maybe I'm just trying to justify spending AUD$18.20 on this game.
I kind of regret buying this, honestly.
I haven't played it much and I got it a week ago.
I'm sure I'll pick it up, now and then when I have nothing else to do...
But, I can't help but think I'd rather be playing Metal Slug or something.
This isn't a bad game, it just isn't for me.
I'm going to give it a 5/10
…NEW DELHI: Veteran Congress leader V C
might well have met the same fate as his party colleagues
Karma and
Kumar Patel had it not been for his quick thinking driver’s ability to speak
.
ShuklaMahendraNandTeluguSpeaking to TOI from Raipur, Bala, who survived the attack with a bullet wound, said he began shouting in Telugu as the heavily armed Maoists approached the SUV – a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado – claiming that Shukla was a businessman returning from Andhra Pradesh.The driver, who has been with Shukla for almost 10 years, hid the former Union minister’s identity and maintained that Shukla was his ‘Seth’ caught in the Congress cavalcade but wasn’t a politician.It is unclear how far the Maoists bought Bala’s story but his speaking in Telugu might have had an effect on the Naxal leaders who are believed to be from Andhra Pradesh.In the event, the extremists spared a profusely bleeding Shukla when they pulled him out of the vehicle, refraining from injuring him further, unlike Patel and Karma who were found dead with several rounds of bullets fired into them.Bala narrated the sequence of events that ended in the carnage at Darbha. He said Shukla started a good half-an-hour after the cavalcade with other leaders left the Sukma rest house “As we neared Jheerum ghati and began climbing it, we heard gun shots from behind and realized someone was firing at our vehicle tyres. Vidya bhaiyya asked me to speed up but we were fired at on every curve,” Bala said.“Within minutes, we reached the cavalcade of vehicles of other leaders which was under heavy fire from all directions. With our SUV stuck in the narrow space, Vidya bhaiyya asked his PSO to jump out of the car and escape. Instead, the PSO took position below the vehicle and began shooting,” Bala said.“VC asked us all to remain still and show no movement. We could see Naxals scanning each vehicle through binoculars from hill tops. But the firing continued, a bullet grazed me and hit VC. He was hit by more bullets which pierced the SUV,” Bala recounted.He said that from his reclined driver’s seat, he could see and hear the Maoists who checked every vehicle, yanked out survivors, took some into the jungle, shot some and asked others to run off.“As they neared our vehicle, I jumped out and shouted in Telugu not to shoot us. I told them I didn’t know Hindi, could only speak in Telugu and my ‘Seth’ and other elders were inside, he was a businessman returning from Andhra Pradesh. I pleaded they should spare us,” Bala recalled.Bala was marched off into the jungle where the extremists questioned him about his Andhra links. They instructed him to remain in the jungle while a team went back to the SUV, pulled out a dazed and bleeding Shukla and left him on the ground. Neither he nor other occupants of the car were attacked further while the PSO had already shot himself after he apparently apologized to Shukla for not being able to save him.It was almost two hours later when the rescue team led by the district SP arrived that Bala informed him that Shukla lay bleeding in his car.“The Naxals took away our mobiles. The SUV was in no position to move. The SP asked me to carry Shukla and other wounded in any vehicle of the convoy which could move so that he could be shifted to the ambulance stationed 2 km away. I then called Shukla’s relative who is a doctor and Vaibhav Mishra in Raipur, his close aide. Later, I accompanied him to Raipur when he was airlifted,” Bala said, adding he still could not believe he survived.Oil (New York Mercantile Exchange: @CL.1) has been on a winning streak recently, gaining almost 9 percent in one week. Now, one trader is trying to capitalize on the recent strength with an options strategy that will pay more than $1 million, as long as crude prices don't fall dramatically in the next few months.
On Thursday, one trader sold 55,000 MRO April 5-strike puts for 28 cents each for a total of $1.5 million in credit. This is a bet that Marathon Oil (MRO) shares stay above $4.72 by April expiration, a threshold 36 percent lower than where the stock closed Thursday. If MRO manages to stay above $5, the entirety of that $1.5 million is retained by the trader.
Shares of the oil company were up more than 6 percent midmorning Friday, following the bounce in crude prices.
Read More Oil gains ease after Brent hits $37 on short covering
According to Dan Nathan of RiskReversal.com, selling put options is a good way to collect a high premium from investors who are worried oil prices will fall even further.
"One of the reasons this trader is probably looking to sell out-of-the-money puts [is that] the price of options, they're very elevated," Nathan said Thursday on CNBC's " Fast Money." "They probably have a long way to go if oil starts to settle."
Nathan also noted that Marathon Oil's stock has fallen steeply from its all-time high, trading near its all-time low of $6.52 that it hit in February.
"It's a bit of a mess," Nathan said. "If you think oil's going to settle and you think this balance sheet's OK," Marathon Oil is the place to sell put options.
More From CNBCAffair between drama student and an older actor will feature in The Lesser Bohemians, due from Faber next autumn following award-winner A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
It took Eimear McBride almost a decade to find a publisher for her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Now, a year after she won the Baileys prize for fiction, the Irish novelist has been signed up by Faber for her second, a work which |
building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty.
+Cellar spiders can disappear before your eyes. When it’s startled by a predator (or by you), they drop down, dangle by the string of their web, and spin so fast that their geeky, spindly bodies seem to vanish, explains Eleanor Spicer Rice, writer and entomologist. Credit: Matt Bertone/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Right now, in the dark cracks and corners of most homes and buildings, the cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides) is performing a dance of death. When it comes across another spider’s web, it will place its lanky legs on the edges and tremble, creating the same kind of vibrations a trapped insect might make—a behavior scientists call “aggressive mimicry” or “death dance.” The hungry web owner creeps out to eat the captured “snack,” but instead finds itself the prey.
“The cellar spider tosses a silk web over it, wraps it up, and eats it,” Dr. Eleanor Spicer Rice writes to SciFri in an email. “Then, to add insult to injury, the cellar spider moves on into its victim’s web, gobbling down all the creatures that got snagged by the work of the deceased spider.”
Related Segment In Defense Of Spiders
The cellar spider is just one of the many common spider species you most likely have encountered if you live in the United States and Canada. Although they are widely feared by the greater public, to scientists like entomologist and writer Spicer Rice (whose phone used to autocorrect to ‘Dr. Spider Rice’), spiders have marvelous lives that are commensal and helpful to our own.
“Spiders are amazing, and they’re necessary. And they’re everywhere,” says Spicer Rice, who co-authored the book Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Spiders with biologist Chris Buddle, set to be released in January 2018 by University of Chicago Press.
When she started writing the book, though, Spicer Rice would jump at the sight of some spiders during her research. But her fear shifted into fascination.
“After I learned more about them and what they did in the world, I started to like them. And then I started to love them.”
In fact, spiders have a trove of traits that benefit humans. You actually may want to keep certain species of common spiders around the home as a natural pest control—cellar spiders, for instance, feast on woodlice and mosquitoes in addition to their spider brethren, while spiky-legged lynx spiders roam over farms eating up agricultural pests. Plus, scientists have taken advantage of spider’s strong silk to develop body armor technologies and explore antiseptics.
[Leonardo da Vinci was a master of both art and science.]
Yet, spiders still have a bad reputation. In human culture, the deck is stacked against them, with childhood horror stories, the venomous fangs, the urban legend that they crawl into your mouth at night (which Spicer Rice debunks in her book with a simple “No”). Experts have even found evidence that some people may be evolutionarily predisposed to fear them, as Spicer Rice explains in her blog. But it’s all for naught.
“Spiders really have no interest in biting people, unlike a lot of other arthropods like mosquitoes, and ticks, and mites that feed on human blood,” Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto, told Science Friday in a previous interview. She is working in collaboration with Spicer Rice on the citizen science project Recluse or Not?, which is trying to better identify brown recluse spiders in the wild. “The only reason a spider would bite you is if you’re crushing it, or sort of otherwise harassing it, and it feels like it’s got no other choice but to try to defend itself.”
Although almost all spiders are equipped with venomous fangs, very few cause significant reactions in humans—the severity varying by person and by spider, explains Spicer Rice. In North America, there are only two kinds of spiders with bites that can sometimes be medically dangerous: the brown recluse and widow spiders. Even so, these spiders do not feed on humans.
[A stellar collision tells of the origins of gold on Earth.]
For the most part, spiders are “just trying to be spiders,” says Spicer Rice. These often tiny arachnids scurry around out of sight, preying on insects and other spiders, and keeping to themselves.
“Spiders are a part of our daily lives, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not,” says Spicer Rice. “They’re doing wonderful and weird things all around us. And once you know about it, the world becomes a little more familiar to you, and a little more beautiful.”
As the temperatures cool this autumn, and common spiders emerge from their outdoor dens and make their way into the warm solitude of your home, think twice before squashing them. Here are some of the more common species you may come across in the wild and in your home, featured in Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Spiders:
Aside from their slightly furry bodies and ability to hunt for food, the wolf spider (family Lycosidae) has little resemblance to the canine animal. They don’t hunt in packs, but rather pounce on prey like a tiger, Spicer Rice writes. Here a mama wolf spider carries her babies on her back. You’re more likely to encounter them during their peak season in the summer. Credit: Sean McCann/courtesy University of Chicago Press
These female wolf spiders captured in vials are bearing eggs. Credit: Chris Buddle/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Pirate spiders (of the family Mimetidae) earn their names from their tendency to commandeer other spiders’ webs—eating the already captured insects and laying its eggs. Credit: Sean McCann/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Spicer Rice’s first encounter with a fishing spider was when she was about eight years old and swimming in a lake in North Carolina. She had mistaken it for a mouse skidding about the edge of a pier. When she swatted it into the water, much to her eight-year-old horror, the spider started to run towards her and her friends on the water’s surface. The fishing spider, one of the largest spiders in North America, can catch insects, spiders, tadpoles and small fish, and even hide underwater without drowning. But don’t worry. They won’t attack you if you leave them alone. Credit: Sean McCann/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Spitting spiders are what Spicer Rice describes as “good-looking spiders.” But these beauties hurl “death loogies” made of glue and silk at their prey, which bog down the victim and make it easy for them to gobble the meal up, explains Spicer Rice. Credit: Matt Bertone/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Goldenrod crab spiders (Misumena vatia) can change colors like little chameleons, says Spicer Rice. They can shift pigment in their cells to blend into their surroundings, like this one perched on a flower. Credit: Sean McCann/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Can you spot the crab spider? Credit: Sean McCann/courtesy University of Chicago Press
The black purse-web spider is a close relative to tarantulas. They are classified as mygalomorphs, or “primitive” spiders that share physical characteristics with early spiders. Credit: Chris Buddle/courtesy University of Chicago Press
Find out what’s happening on Science Friday…on Thursday. Subscribe to our preview newsletter. Leave this field empty if you're human:During early February, German officials would get up 1,500 asylum request from Kosovars every day. However, the daily number of applicants sunk below 100 in April, president of Federal Office for Migration and Refugees Manfred Schmidt said to German Rheinischen Post newspaper.
"The people have understood that asylum system in Germany can not be a solution for their difficult economical situation in Kosovo," Schmidt said.
Number of people from Kosovo asking for asylum in Germany had suddenly jumped in the beginning of the year, reaching some 11.700 applications in March, and putting the small Balkan country at first place when it comes to number of asylum applicants, ahead of Iraq and Syria.
Poverty no reason for asylum
The unexpected wave of immigration is believed to have been triggered by economical hardships. Kosovo is among the poorest countries in Europe, with unemployment reaching 45 percent.
However, political asylum in Germany is reserved for people whose lives are at risk should they return to their countries. This is not the case for the overwhelming majority of Kosovo applicants, leading German authorities to approve only 0.2 percent of their requests for the current year.
Expensive asylum lottery
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, although the move remains disputed by Belgrade and its allies. Since Belgrade's official position is that Kosovo is still part of Serbia, the refugees can move across Serbian territory more or less freely, and attempt to enter EU illegally at the Hungarian border.
People-smuggling remains a lucrative line of work in the Balkans, with refugees paying thousands of euros for a chance to seek asylum in Germany, Austria or Scandinavia.
Easier to reject claims
Faced with a wave of Kosovo immigrants, Germany recently introduced a fast-track procedure of dealing with asylum claims. The authorities are now requested to provide an answer within two weeks, down from an average of four months, leading to faster deportations.
The new, faster procedure is one of the reason for fewer refugees, the German official Manfred Schmidt said. According to him, another reason for the lower numbers is a media campaign by the Prishtina government, which provided information on the chances of getting an asylum.
dj/xx (AFP, dpa, epd)On the information war:
The global information space has been upset these days by wars. The only correct view and interpretation of events is aggressively imposed by the USA and its allies in the MSM, certain facts are manipulated or ignored. We have all become accustomed to labeling and creating the image of an enemy. The authorities in countries that seemed to have always appealed to values of freedom of speech, the free flow of information, as we often heard about have now abandoned them. Now, they try to prevent the dissemination of objective information. On top of that, they declare any other point of view different from their own to be hostile propaganda, which must be fought against and obviously, not by democratic means.
On the refugee crisis:
Today, hundreds of thousands of migrants attempt moving but not integrating into a different society, without profession, not knowing the language, the traditions or culture of the countries, to which they move. And the indigenous people speak angrily about this foreign intervention, a deterioration of the situation with crime, the amount of money spent on refugees from the budgets of these countries. Of course there are many people who sympathize with the refugees and want to help them. The question is how to do that without prejudice to the interests of the indigenous population in the countries, whiere the refugees are resettled? The shock of such a massive and uncontrolled collision of different lifestyles can lead to, and is leading to, the growth of nationalism and intolerance, the emergence of permanent conflict in these societies.
On the support of terrorism:
In recent years, the situation got worse. The number of insurgents has increased and weapons that were transferred to the so called "moderate opposition" are in the hands of determined known terrorists. Entire gangs, with "the music and the orchestra" came over to their side. The problem is not in the lack of military capacity, the USA has the largest one. It is always difficult to play a double sided game: to fight with some terrorists and to use others "as a battering ram to overthrow regimes they find undesirable".
On the "moderate" terrorists:
There is no need to play on words and divide terrorists into "moderate" and "immoderate”. What separates them? I would like to understand the difference. Perhaps, according to some experts, moderate bandits decapitate people in a moderate and gentle way. In fact, we now see a real tangle of terrorist organizations. Yes, sometimes they are rebels of the "Islamic State", "Al-Nusra Dzhabhat", all sorts of other heirs and factions of "Al-Qaeda", they even fight each other. But then, they fight for money, for their share of the money, for the sources of the income flow, for the territory of the income flow - that's what they fight for, not for ideological reasons. But the essence and methods they have are the same – they terrorize, murder, transform the people into a downtrodden, intimidated, docile mass.
On the sanctions wars:
The reality of the today's global economy is trade and sanction wars. Moreover, sanctions are also used as a tool to disadvantage the competition, to oust or even ban rivals from markets. As an example, I recall an epidemic of penalties imposed by the United States, affecting European companies as well. Feeble pretexts are used: those who dared to attempt to break the unilateral US sanctions are sternly punished. Let me ask, is this how one should deal with their allies? No, it’s how you deal with vassals, who dared to exercise their discretion. They get punished for bad behavior.
On missile defense testing:
Recently, the first tests of a US missile defense system took place in Europe. This means that when we disputed with our American colleagues, we were right. They tried to mislead us, to say it more clearly - deceived us and the entire world. It was not a hypothetical Iranian nuclear threat, which has never been the case, in an attempt to destroy the balance, to change the balance of forces in its favor, in a way that will allow them not just to dominate, but to be able to dictate their will to all - to their geopolitical rivals and allies. This is an extremely dangerous scenario for everyone, in my opinion, including the United States itself.
On the actions of the West in the Middle East:
The international community must be wondering: isn’t it time to coordinate our actions in the conflict zones with the people who live there... the ones who know what's taking place in their own countries?
On Russia’s operations in Syria:
After the request of Syrian authorities on giving them support, we decided to launch a military operation in that country. Once again: it is completely legitimate. Its sole purpose is to promote peace.
On the settlement of the Middle East conflict:
What do we think must be done to support a long-term settlement in the region, its social, economic and political revival, to ensure, and above all, to liberate Syria and Iraq from terrorists and prevent them from spreading their activities to other regions? What is necessary is to unite all the forces, the regular armies of Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish militia forces, the various opposition groups that are truly ready to make a contribution to defeating the terrorists. To coordinate the actions of regional and extra-regional countries confronting terrorism...
On the political process in Syria:
It is obvious that military victory over the rebels in of itself won’t solve all the problems but it will create the conditions to be able to achieve the main objective - to start a political process with the participation of all the healthy patriotic forces within Syrian society. Syrians must decide their fate for themselves, at their own accord, with the respectful assistance of the international community and not under external pressure through ultimatums, blackmail and threatsPurse CEO Andrew Lee: ‘People Will Learn to Use Bitcoin Just for Our Discounts’
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Although there has been a lot of hype around Bitcoin and blockchain technology over the past few years, it’s still difficult for some people to see where the real use cases lie for these sorts of systems. One person who does not seem to have a problem understanding potential use cases for this technology is Purse CEO Andrew Lee.
Also Read: BlockNotary Integrates Factom to Optimize Digital Fingerprint Storage
Purse’s unique platform allows consumers to achieve large discounts on Amazon via their marketplace for matching Amazon gift card holders with prospective shoppers. Bitcoin acts as the value protocol that connects the two parties. In a recent interview with Inside Bitcoins, Lee explained how consumers are willing to go out of their way to learn about Bitcoin and use their platform because they want access to the large discounts made available to them.
Consumers Will Alter Their Behavior for Great Deals
Throughout Bitcoin’s history, its adoption has mainly been in areas where there was a desperate need for some sort of frictionless, permissionless form of digital cash. In the early days, Silk Road became Bitcoin’s main use case because it enabled censorship-resistant payments for the online drug marketplace. People were willing to learn about Bitcoin during this time because it was the only (or at least most useful) option for getting around normal ecommerce restrictions. According to Andrew Lee, a similar phenomena can take place with Bitcoin-powered discounts. He noted:
“Purse has the best deals on the internet, and we’re betting that people will learn to use Bitcoin just for our discounts.”
Lee also discussed some of the historic evidence of consumers going out of their way to find great deals:
“There’s strong evidence that people will alter their behavior for great deals. For decades, retailers have convinced customers to clip coupons, pre-purchase Groupons, and buy in bulk at Costco, all just to gain access to great deals.”
When compared with some of the actions consumers have taken to save money in the past, signing up for a Coinbase account and shopping on Purse doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Purse recently took the usability of their platform to the next level by launching their own marketplace that will allow merchants to sell their own goods alongside discounted Amazon products.
Explaining Bitcoin to Non-Technical People is Hard
Although everyone in finance seems to be excited about what blockchain technology could do for the world over the next few decades, Lee believes that Bitcoin adoption will depend on new use cases for the technology that do not simply replace what already exists in the legacy payment industry. He explained:
“We are inspired by blockchain technology and the impact it could have on society, but explaining the advantages of the blockchain to non-technical people can be difficult. Bitcoin adoption will depend on novel use cases and clever business models that leverage the technology’s unique capabilities.”
That last sentence in Lee’s statement has become a key topic of conversation among investors and venture capitalists over the past few months. Although Bitcoin may end up replacing many forms of online payments over the long term, some businesses should focus on what can get people to use Bitcoin right now. Purse has proven itself to be one such business by bringing mainstream users to the peer-to-peer digital cash system via Amazon discounts. Other companies that may fall under this category include Fold App and Abra.
Bitcoin is Not Ready to Compete with Credit Cards
Continuing on the point of creating novel use cases for Bitcoin, Lee also noted that the digital payment system is not yet ready to upend the credit card industry:
“We’re not sure Bitcoin is ready for a head to head battle with credit cards. Companies like Amazon and Uber don’t really have a problem that needs Bitcoin. It’s going to take unique business models to really make bitcoin succeed.”
In a blog post from earlier this year, Lee went as far as to say some Bitcoin merchants may end up dropping the cryptocurrency:
“Bitcoin commerce needs to make economic sense for everyone involved in a transaction. It’s only a matter of time before we see large retailers, such as Expedia or Overstock, exit Bitcoin. They have already cited low usage. And since spending cryptocurrency is harder than a saved credit card, higher shopping cart abandonment rates won’t justify the savings on interchange fees.”
Ciphrex Co-CEO and CTO Eric Lombrozo recently shared similar thoughts regarding Bitcoin’s ability to replace credit cards.
Purse CEO Andrew Lee will be giving a presentation on why Bitcoin commerce is broken on the second day of the upcoming Inside Bitcoins Conference in Seoul. The conference runs from the 9th to the 11th of December.
Kyle Torpey is a freelance journalist who has been following Bitcoin since 2011. His work has been featured on VICE Motherboard, Business Insider, RT’s Keiser Report, and many other media outlets. You can follow @kyletorpey on Twitter.Mad Men returns for a sixth season this weekend on AMC, and even those of us who haven’t seen a frame of the two-hour premiere are nonetheless ready to talk our heads off about what for years now has been a top contender for Best Show on Television. Join us as we relive some of our favorite moments from the past five seasons, in all their bourbon-pounding, chain-smoking, lawnmower-crashing, existential-crisis-having glory. (Obviously, a multitude of spoilers after the jump — you’ve been warned.)
“One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary is running you over with a lawnmower.”
Andy Greenwald: The beauty of Mad Men is that one can pick almost any scene to celebrate. The downsides of creator Matthew Weiner’s micromanaging are legendary and awful — just ask Kater Gordon how she’s enjoying the glow from her Emmy win — oh, that’s right, she lost her job — but the upsides are pretty hard to argue with. Every episode is a glittering jewel box of intricate character work with dialogue stronger than a vermouthless Manhattan and suffused with a warm, dreamy weirdness that separates it from everything else on television.
Anyway, that’s just a pretty way of saying this Hall of Fame totally paralyzed me. A single scene? From my favorite show? Not likely. And since Barnwell took Mrs. Blankenship, and the Ballad of Megan Not Crying Over Spilled Milkshake isn’t on YouTube, and we all sorta agreed to steer away from the biggies (sorry, Carousel; later, Suitcase), I’m left with choosing a moment that could be any moment. It’s not the best, but it’s as good as any other. In this one, Don shares the screen with Joan, an uncommon pairing, probably because the wise folks at AMC are worried about melting your flat-screen. An Englishman has just had his foot run over by a secretary drunk-driving a lawnmower. (The ’60s! You had to be there.) Don arrives because he’s supposed to, and Joan remains because of appearances, but neither of them can keep a lid on the laughter that’s been bubbling up beneath all the violence. And that’s before the English people show up to basically assign a man to the morgue merely because of what the lack of a foot is likely to do to his golf handicap. As always with Mad Men, it’s not the great clothes that make the show. It’s that one way or another — usually figuratively, this time literally — they always seem to end up spattered with blood.
Don Draper Makes Conrad Hilton an Old-Fashioned
Sean Fennessey: Don Draper’s drink of choice, when not suckling straight from that bottle of Canadian Club, is the old-fashioned. And when Mad Men became the subject of so many trend pieces and themed gatherings and absolutely depressing Halloween costumes, the attendant old-fashioned craze began in earnest. There were homemade video tutorials. There were unofficial recipes. And there was an officially endorsed cable network recipe. There were New York Times pseudo-histories. And there were bro-splaining blog posts about said pseudo-histories. (All those blog posts contained links to the true and official recipe of the cocktail in question.)
Here’s the thing about Don Draper’s old-fashioned: It’s a lot of salesman bullshit. After he hops over the bar like some running back scaling an overmatched safety, Draper pulls out two tumbler glasses. Good start. Then he drops in two sugar cubes. Important. That is followed by three drops of bitters — aromatic if you got ’em. He scoops some ice — a must — into a mixing glass. Then, in the absence of bourbon, Don splashes in a healthy pour of rye, an acceptable if uncommon substitute. He is on his way to a solid, if makeshift, old-fashioned. Then something horrible happens: Don Draper cracks open what appears to be a bottle of club soda and pours it into the mixing glass. Or is it a bottle of Evian? Doesn’t matter. Don has watered down the old-fashioned, a stunning turn. Then, continuing with this travesty unabated, he muddles the sugar in the tumbler and combines his elements into one solution for two imperfect drinks. You may be thinking, No big deal, the man’s at a party and he just happens to be shooting the breeze with an august hotel magnate. Lay off of Don. That would miss the point.
Don speaks a language of men. It’s not that that language is the right one or the decent one, but that’s his currency, particularly with an old San Antonio coot like Connie. They communicate with cocktails and in code. If this Hilton were properly rendered, he’d have slugged Draper in that lantern jaw for the watering-down. But it’s important to remember that Mad Men is a fantasy — a toxic concoction. And for a guy who’s swimming in it, Don Draper sure tends weak bar.
“I could have had you.”
Juliet Litman: When it comes to Mad Men‘s five season finales, there are plenty of iconic moments to talk about. Season 1 had Don’s “carousel” speech. Season 3 had the undeniable excitement of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s stealth beginnings. Season 4 featured Don’s sudden engagement, and even the subpar (by Mad Men standards) Season 5 had most of the principals on the precipice of … something. But of the five finales, my favorite scene was from Season 2. Peggy finally reveals to Pete that she gave their baby up for adoption. Or to paraphrase Ms. Olson, she could have had him in her life forever, if she wanted that. The power of this scene is not in the major reveal, though at the time that aspect was thrilling. We’ve watched Peggy transform over five seasons, and underneath that evolution lies a fundamental, physical change that I somehow often forget about. The pregnancy wasn’t her choice, but giving up the baby and part of her self, followed by deciding to tell Pete about it (on a day they think they all might die because of missiles from Cuba), are the choices she made. Watching her explain it to Pete is like watching her tell her own origin story — the origin story that empowers her to leave SCDP. There are certainly other scenes that explain Peggy’s relationships (with people and the world) better, but I think this perfectly explains how Peggy sees herself and it unlocks the motivation behind much of what she has done since. Plus, Pete’s look of utter stupefaction has to rank very high in the Pete Campbell Bitchface Hall of Fame.
The Sterling Cooper Twist
Alex Pappademas: From Season 1’s thematically pivotal “The Hobo Code” — Don Draper’s down in the East Village with Midge and her beatnik friends, getting stoned, listening to Sketches of Spain, and experiencing Great Depression flashbacks; uptown, with Roger and Bert Cooper both away on business, the rest of Sterling Cooper cuts out early to drink and do the cha-cha at P.J. Clarke’s. When somebody drops “The Twist” on the jukebox, the room detonates with permission and possibility and communal joy; for at least the next minute or so, the music renders everything up for grabs, even emboldening Peggy to ask Pete to dance, like that’s going to happen. Meanwhile, downtown, the proto-hippies do a half-assed bunny-hop and then resume loafing. One of the points Mad Men keeps making is that it’s usually only clear in retrospect where the front lines of a culture war were. Here, Chubby Checker has never sounded more like the first shot of a revolution; Miles has never sounded so square.
A Day in the Life of Betty Draper
Katie Baker: Daytime kitchen cigs, divorcée/real estate gossip, sterling mothering … Betty Draper circa 1960 has the life I’ve always wanted.
Don Draper Fingerbang Threat Level: Hot Breath on a Taut Neck
Mark Lisanti: This is just a theory I’ve been kicking around for a couple of years, but do you think that maybe Don Draper has a problematic relationship with women?
I should have enough data by the end of Season 7 to arrive at some kind of answer. Don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions.
R.I.P., Ida Blankenship
Bill Barnwell: Miss Blankenship goes down as one of the all-time great six-episode bit characters, a comedic tour de force that became an integral part of Mad Men just long enough for people to start naming their cats after her. (Matt Weiner isn’t sorry about that, either.) Her demise (a stunt that the actress, the wonderful Randee Heller, performed herself) has some of the show’s best comedy, big and small. The slapstick stuff with Peggy and Pete is pretty wonderful, but there’s some even greater subtle stuff in there. The tiniest, most pitiful bit of incidental music that peeks in once Don realizes what’s happened is so funny, and it’s immediately topped by Don’s look of revulsion when Peggy suggests that they call an ambulance. Sadly, the subsequent eulogy from the partners afterward is missing from YouTube, but it includes that famous line from Bert Cooper: “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut.” That also led to one of my favorite Photoshops of all time, by Grantland’s (and TBJ’s) own J.E. Skeets. Oh, and Miss Blankenship dying led to Megan becoming Don’s secretary and the main narrative thrust of the show occurring.
Joan vs. Peggy, Round 1
Steven Hyden: It’s not like it’s unusual to see Joan and Peggy occupy the same screen space. There they were together in the pilot, unicorn-from-outer space Joan playing mentor to poindexter-from-Jersey Peggy, advising her to make those pretty little ankles sing. Over the years, this teacher-student dynamic has remained pretty much intact, with Joan dispensing knowledge to her Padawan on everything from inter-office gender politics to the mating habits of upper-level ad executives to successful tips for recruiting a roommate. But the Joan-Peggy summit that sticks out most for me comes from the ninth episode of Season 1, previously known as the “You think you’re being helpful” scene, henceforth known as “Mad Men’s version of the De Niro—Pacino tête-à-tête in Heat.” Like all things Mad Men, the scene builds slowly, like a Jaguar campaign — Joan passive-aggressively suggests that Peggy cool it with the lunches, Peggy implies that Joan is threatened by her relatively rapid ascendancy to unpaid copy writer. Then the knives come out. First Peggy: “I know what men think of you. That you’re looking for a husband, and you’re fun, and not in that order.” Then Joan: “Peggy, this isn’t China. There’s no money in virginity.” “I’m not a virgin.” “No, of course you’re not.” (Insert sarcasm here.) The moment ends with an uneasy truce and an unspoken promise that if either of them gets in the other person’s way, sister, you are going down.
Lane vs. Pete, Round 38
Jonah Keri: Top 20 moments from this highly anticipated featherweight bout:
20. Pete tucking his tie in right before the fight.
19. Bert advising Don on the art of politics and warfare: “We don’t stop a war before an election.”
18. Bert massaging Roger’s shoulders, for some reason, while dishing out said advice.
17. “I’m FINE!” — No you’re not, Pete.
16. “Edwin’s wife, her life destroyed, called my wife with GO-ry details” — A show that had nothing other than Lane enunciating everyday household activities would be far more entertaining than, say, The Killing.
15. Everything about Joan and Peggy’s reaction. Especially when the lamp moves.
14. Pete, dismissively, to Lane, his face scrunched up with self-righteousness: “I was doing my job.”
13. The entire “Your account?!” insult string by Pete to Lane. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually felt sympathy for Pete in the five seasons of this show. Every other Pete moment makes me want to punch the little weasel in his stupid, smug face.
12. Roger: “I don’t know about you two, but … I had Lane.”
11. “You want to take your teeth out, or you want me to knock them out?” — Pete’s false bravado = A+++++++
10. Pete, Don, and Roger’s uproarious reaction to the gum reveal.
9. “What, did she just … put it there and forget about it?” — Never change, Roger.
8. Pete’s look of terror after it becomes clear that he’s either going to have to fight Lane or lose whatever esteem he has left in the eyes of the other partners.
7. “You want some more, Mister TOAD?”
6. “Consider that … my last piece of advice.” — OH, NO YOU DIDN’T, LANE!
5. Roger: “I know cooler heads should prevail, but am I the only one who wants to see this?” — Thing is, we know Bert clearly doesn’t, and Don clearly does. This is a subtle fourth-wall moment, where Roger might as well be staring into the camera, pointing at all of us, and yelling, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”
4. Don closing the curtains. Can you imagine this scene playing out at your office today, only instead of breaking things up before any punches were thrown, one of the big bosses closes the curtains to ensure a private viewing party?
3. Roger popping a cig in his mouth just as the fight’s about to start. Roger is the best Mad Men character by a country mile, and I will fight anyone who disagrees (while insulting you with a British accent).
2. “NO. You’re a grimy little pimp.” — Distinctly remember pausing the DVR and cackling like a madman for a good five minutes the first time I heard this line.
1. “BECAUSE HE WAS CAUGHT WITH CHEWING GUM ON HIS PUBIS!”
Don Draper’s Palm Spraaangs Breeaaak
Emily Yoshida: Call me a coastist, but I think Mad Men is at its woozy best when it goes to California. For one thing, the show, which is shot on a soundstage just outside downtown L.A., can actually stretch its legs and shoot on location in Southern California. (Don wading into the ocean in San Pedro in “The Mountain King” was the first time that character really felt like more than a very expensive Ken doll to me.) No episode conveys the alternate reality of California in the ’60s more gorgeously and creepily than Season 2’s “The Jet Set,” a.k.a. when Don Draper accidentally walks into a David Lynch movie.
One of my biggest frustrations with Mad Men is that I often feel like it phones in emotions and lets the art department do the heavy lifting, but few episodes are more guilty of a mid-century fetish than “The Jet Set” and despite that, it’s still in my Top 5. There’s something both terrifying and telling about Don, already something of a phantom, being whisked off by a cabal of sunbathing hedonists who have themselves carved out new social identities in the arid freedom of Palm Desert, and physically breaking down in their presence. SoCal 101: Never drink anything given to you by a witchy woman in the desert, especially after she croaks that it’s “medicinal,” ESPECIALLY not while wearing a wool suit.
Also, that house makes me weak in the knees, obviously.
“The meaner you are, the more I like you.”
Brian Phillips: You probably don’t remember this. It had no bearing on any future plot. It wasn’t even one of the wow-ier moments of the episode it took place in, Season 1’s “Nixon vs. Kennedy,” which brought us not only the Real Don Draper, Blown-Up Korean War Guy flashback but also Bert’s withering “I don’t care,” “I literally can’t even hear you,” “If I were 10 years younger you’d have committed seppuku already” reaction to Pete exposing Don as a war deserter. Presidents were getting elected, a lot of big stuff was going on, and this scene just kind of floated in, like a feather on a current of gin vapor and illicit Republican office sex. You probably don’t remember this. It had no bearing on any future plot. It wasn’t even one of the wow-ier moments of the episode it took place in, Season 1’s “Nixon vs. Kennedy,” which brought us not only the Real Don Draper, Blown-Up Korean War Guy flashback but also Bert’s withering “I don’t care,” “I literally can’t even hear you,” “If I were 10 years younger you’d have committed seppuku already” reaction to Pete exposing Don as a war deserter. Presidents were getting elected, a lot of big stuff was going on, and this scene just kind of floated in, like a feather on a current of gin vapor and illicit Republican office sex. And that’s what’s so great about it. Mad Men has always seemed most itself when it clears out these little spaces between slabs of plot where it can linger on some seemingly extraneous human moment. That’s one reason why one of the show’s most distinctive modes is the late-night, soft-fog-of-alcohol comedown scene where the workday gloss comes off the characters’ identities and you sense that anything might happen. Maybe Harry kisses a secretary. Maybe somebody wrestles Duck Phillips. No show is flat better at convincing you that its scenes have reality’s leisurely open-endedness — that things are free to play out in whatever direction they happen to go. So here’s one of those moments. Kinsey and Joan don’t exist on the same plane either within the show’s world or within its dramatic hierarchy. In the world, Paul is a Princeton man; Joan is a secretary. In the drama, Joan matters; Paul exists to be bittersweetly mocked. But it’s the middle of the night. And for a couple of minutes, the hierarchies blur. They drop some of their normal defenses (not all: Look at the way she keeps her arm down while they’re dancing), and for a couple of minutes, they’re just two people. A world briefly swims into view in which Joan could possibly be sort of attracted to Paul and Paul could possibly sort of deserve it. Then it swims away again. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Who hasn’t had nights like this? Don + Joan 4 Never Megan Creydt: Don and Joan have the most mature relationship on Mad Men |
sing for love.
If you want to understand male ornamentation, then, birds are the animals to study. And there is a lot left to understand, because Darwin merely scraped the surface. He never fully answered his own question about the value of sexual displays. When a peahen chooses a particular peacock with beautiful outspread feathers, what exactly is it that she is choosing? What is the peacock displaying?
Since the early 20th century, myriad theories have been proposed: perhaps the males are signalling their ability to find food, or their resistance to parasites, or their robust genes. All of these explanations make intuitive sense, allowing females to sort between healthy and sickly suitors, and all of them have backing from experimental studies. Each can be cherry-picked to fit a specific species or group of animals. But not one of the theories connects the dots between male ornaments and female preferences throughout all of nature.
In 2010, Geoff Hill, an evolutionary biologist at Auburn University in Alabama, was one of those who kept trying and failing to find the universal code underlying all male sexual display. For two decades he had been studying mate selection in house finches, and he felt himself hitting a dead end. Then he started reading a popular science book called Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (2005) by Nick Lane, a biochemist from University College London.
The book opened Hill’s eyes to a cornerstone of complex life: mitochondria, the microscopic power-factories found within every cell. He learned about them in school, but he remembered being told that, from an evolutionary perspective, mitochondria were neutral, unimportant and uninteresting. They certainly weren’t considered worth considering when talking about sexual selection.
Now a very different set of ideas were taking root in Hill’s brain. Mitochondria might be not just relevant but central to the process of male ornamentation, and energy-production might be the long-sought unifying explanation behind female choice. At long last, Hill realised, his finches and Darwin’s peacock might make perfect sense.
Ever since the German anatomist Richard Altmann peered down his bench-top microscope and first observed mitochondria in 1886, they have been an enduring enigma. As Lane wrote, a common phrase at biochemistry conferences was: ‘Don’t worry, no one understands the mitochondriacs.’ Yet they are ubiquitous. In the cells of every fungus, plant and animal, they can be seen as tiny granules, sometimes numbering into the hundreds of thousands. Roughly 10 per cent of your body weight consists of the mitochondria that reside within your 30 trillion cells.
With a burst of insight, Altmann posited that mitochondria were tiny organisms living harmoniously inside the cells of others, providing them with some vital cellular functions. He regarded them as elementary particles of complex life. His views were quickly criticised and pushed aside, however. Some scientists even claimed that Altmann was seeing things, discrediting the existence of his subcellular cells completely. But, over the past 50 years, advances in biochemistry and DNA sequencing have shown that Altmann was pretty much spot-on.
According to current theory, two billion years ago mitochondria were free-living bacteria, swimming in the primordial seas of an evolutionary stagnant world. Since all life was single-celled and evolutionary change was slow, this period in Earth’s history has been nicknamed the ‘boring billion’. But amid this monotony, something exciting happened. Between 1.5 and two billion years ago, one bacterium became engulfed by an archaeon (another type of single-celled organism) and survived. Two cells became one, forming a nascent eukaryotic cell – the foundation of all complex life today. The two major branches on the tree of life came together and blossomed into a third.
Without this one-off event, life would still be trapped behind a bottleneck of bacterial living, restricted to solitary microbial existence or to relatively simple collectives such as biofilms. ‘Bacteria have been collaborating and competing among themselves for nearly four billion years, and yet only came up with the eukaryotic cell once,’ Lane wrote in 2005. ‘The acquisition of mitochondria was the pivotal moment in the history of life.’ Shortly after this merger, the host went on to evolve a nucleus, the control centre of the cell where the primary DNA is housed. Meanwhile, the mitochondria became specialised in one task, providing energy to their host cell through respiration (the molecular burning of food with oxygen). They are the combustion engines of life.
Sexiness is ultimately a matter of a potential mate’s functional energetics
Inside each mitochondrion, production lines of proteins are ceaselessly at work. All along their inner membranes, electrons extracted from food molecules get passed along four huge protein complexes (I, II, IV, and V) like an electrical current passing down a wire. This subatomic flux across protein stepping-stones is then converted into a molecular energy carrier known as ATP. This universal energy currency can leave the mitochondria and fuel the daily requirements of the cell. Without ATP, the cell would have no power supply.
‘You need ATP for absolutely everything,’ Lane tells me. ‘If you want to have cell growth, if you want to make more proteins, if you want to replicate your DNA, if you want to do anything at all, you better have enough ATP for it.’ Scaled up to the size of an entire organism, that ‘anything’ includes some of the most costly, non-utilitarian traits of all: male ornaments, along with displays of physical and cognitive fitness.
There’s no doubt that ATP and expensive male ornaments are linked. In a sense, that is a trivial insight, since ATP is linked to every aspect of an organism that consumes energy. But Hill started to suspect a deeper connection between sexual display and mitochondria. A vast biomedical literature shows that when mitochondria go awry, the most active cells start to die off first. Degenerating muscle cells in Parkinson’s and failing neurons in Alzheimer’s are both caused by faulty mitochondria, for instance.
Sexiness, Hill theorised, is ultimately a matter of a potential mate’s functional energetics. When females choose, what they are really choosing is mitochondrial health.
The new story of sexual display hinges on the way that mitochondria have evolved over time. After they found themselves cell-bound, these descendants of free-living bacteria started shedding most of their genes. Without their extra genetic baggage, they could replicate faster and become more specialised in ATP production. In modern animals, only 13 genes remain in the mitochondria. The rest – some 1,500 genes – have been shipped into the host cell’s nucleus, still encoding the same proteins essential to the production of energy but now doing their work off-site; those additional proteins then get transported into the mitochondria to finish the job. Of the 400 or so proteins in the stepping-stone process of ATP creation, the majority originate from the nucleus.
The energetic process that powers all of life depends on the close collaboration between two genomes, from the cell and from the mitochondria. And this co-dependency raises a few issues during sex. Mitochondria are passed on to offspring within the egg, from mother to daughter and son. In other words, they are maternally inherited; Dad doesn’t have a say in the matter. But the genes within the offspring’s nucleus are equal parts of each parent, a 50:50 split, so the father’s genes still have a big part to play in ATP production. ‘They had better match the genes in the mitochondria,’ says Lane. ‘They have to work together.’
Research into marine copepods that inhabit isolated tidal pools along the coast of Santa Cruz Island in California reveals what happens if the two sets of genes don’t get along. By breeding females from one population with males from another, Ronald Burton from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been forcing offspring to inherit mitochondria and nuclear genes that haven’t met in thousands of years. Although of the same species (Tigriopus californicus), their genes will have accumulated a few slight DNA mutations over the time they have been separated. What’s the result of this slight mismatch? An enormous drop in energy availability.
Burton found that ATP production falls by 40 per cent in the interbred copepods, reducing their growth rate, fertility and survival chances. Small differences in mitochondrial and nuclear genes, it seems, can have huge ramifications on an animal’s energy supply. And with less energy to go around, the bare necessities of life – growth, reproduction and survival – are stymied. For their offspring’s sake, females need to choose their partners with care. They need to find a good match for their mitochondria.
males are expending so much energy in courtship to prove that they are energetically well-endowed. It’s an honest signal: you either have it or you don’t
In 2013, Hill had an insight that this need for harmonious ATP genes could be a key mechanism that drives males to be showy. He called it the ‘mitonuclear coadaptation’ hypothesis. The premise is simple: the more efficient a male’s mitochondrial production lines are, the more elaborate (and attractive) he can afford to become. With his mitochondrial and nuclear genes working in synchrony, not only can he bear the vicissitudes of survival, but he can invest extra energy in ornamentation and display. It’s a matter of energy economics: the more you have, the more you can allocate in foraging, in resisting parasites, and even attracting a mate.
The requirement for deep molecular functioning ‘pulls everything together’ among the various theories of male sexual display, Hill says. Males that have mismatched genes simply can’t grow ornate ornaments, nor can they forage, sing or dance for as long. Further, even if males are highly energy-efficient, they still might not be eye-catching if they happen to be fettered by disease or parasitic infection. From a female’s perspective, the underlying cause of visual blandness is not important; the only thing that matters is the inner quality of a potential mate. ‘If you avoid those poorly ornamented males you avoid all problems. You avoid any kind of bad genes or inability to deal with environmental problems,’ Hill says. ‘You get rid of it all with one choice.’
The mitonuclear coadaptation hypothesis puts energy at the heart of sexual selection: males are expending so much energy in courtship in order to prove that they are energetically well-endowed. It’s an honest signal. You can’t cheat energy efficiency; you either have it or you don’t. By mating with the most impressive male, a female’s offspring will inherit 50 per cent of the father’s nuclear genes – genes with a proven track record behind them.
Still, the male-ornamentation signal has its limits. During sperm and egg production, nuclear genes are shuffled like a deck of cards, rearranging both male and female DNA. The same goes for mitochondria; the 13 genes are five times as likely to mutate as are the nuclear genes. With both sides of the collaboration changing with every generation, new combinations are perpetually being thrown together. Some work. Others don’t. With every new mating, the females are trying to sort through the mess.
‘It’s not that they are selecting good genes,’ says Hill. ‘They are avoiding those bad genes. They’re eliminating all the males with low respiratory function.’
At the moment, Hill’s theory remains just that: a theory, not yet tested out in the field. ‘One can say that there’s precious little evidence to support the idea, but there’s precious little evidence to disprove it either,’ says Andrew Pomiankowski from University College London, who studies sexual selection in insects. Despite that seemingly lukewarm endorsement, Pomiankowski considers Hill’s work an intriguing step forward: ‘The virtue in what he has done is that he’s brought attention to mitochondria as a possibility.’
And the evidence in support of mitonuclear coadaptation is steadily building. That evidence is looking especially intriguing in the case of biology’s greatest sexual exhibitionists: the birds.
Compared with many other animals, male birds have a larger input towards their offspring’s nuclear genes. The reason for this is rooted in what defines the two sexes. Unlike the case for mammals (including humans), in which the female has two of the same sex chromosomes (XX), in birds it is the male that is the so-called homozygotic sex. They have two Z chromosomes, whereas females have a Z and a W. Any female offspring can inherit only their Z chromosome from their father; he has nothing else to give. Further, unlike the Y chromosome in humans, the Z chromosome is the larger sex chromosome in birds, outnumbering the W in number of genes it contains. Daughters are therefore dependent on their father for a large chunk of their genetic make-up.
Here’s where things get really interesting. At least three genes on the Z chromosome in birds encode proteins that are crucial to ATP production within their mitochondria. ‘They’re involved in the core of respiration,’ says Lane, so a healthy male Z chromosome is hugely important for his offspring’s wellbeing. That factor should make female birds especially picky, which would explain why they seek out males with the most spectacular ornaments and displays – with spectacular evolutionary consequences. ‘Just as man can give beauty,’ Darwin wrote in 1871, ‘so it appears that female birds in a state of nature have, by a long selection of the more attractive males, added to their beauty or other attractive qualities.’
Let’s not take Darwin’s word for it, though. A 2003 study by Hudson Kern Reeve of Cornell University and David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that species with a ZW sex determination system (including butterflies, in addition to birds) are far more likely to be ornamented than those with other forms of sex determination. Hill readily acknowledges that a correlation between ZW sex determination and ornamentation doesn’t prove that the two are linked, ‘but it certainly fits the ideas I have.’
Female house finches prefer the most brilliant hues: the more red a male is, the better his chances of finding a nest mate
Hill has a lot of other support to draw on, too. Looking back to his favoured study species – house finches – he thinks that he might have found the most conclusive evidence for his theory to date.
Males of this small songbird develop bright speckles on their heads and breasts, coloured with carotenoid pigments obtained from their diet of seeds, berries and flowers. Within the bird’s feathers, the yellow carotenoids are modified in structure and shape, altering the wavelengths of light that they absorb and reflect. Yellow shifts toward red. Female house finches prefer the most brilliant hues, Hill found in a landmark study: the more red a male is, the better his chances of finding a nest mate.
Those reds, in turn, depend strongly on a male finch’s energy efficiency. At a basic level, energy is important for taking in a good, pigment-rich diet. More telling, the conversion of yellow carotenoids into red pigments shares some of the same molecular stepping-stones as ATP synthesis. Although widely disparate in function, the two biochemical processes overlap in form at the chemical level. ‘It all fits,’ says Hill. ‘Redness becomes this core indicator of mitochondrial function. If there’s any problem, it literally lights up in the males.’
In Hill’s new view, the red breast of a robust male house finch is just one subtle exemplar of the relationship between mitochondria in male ornamentation. The long train of the peacock and the colourful gardens of the bowerbird likewise function as eye-catching billboards advertising their owner’s energy efficiency. They are beautiful reminders of that marvellous moment two billion years ago when two cells became one.Update: Shocktoberfest has cancelled the naked portion of their Naked And Scared Challenge. Media outlets around the world have picked up on the story from CNN to Jay Leno. This first-of-its-kind experience was reported from Canada to Australia. The buzz was so tremendous that the city of Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania was apparently not too happy being known world-wide for naked people walking through a haunted house. So they asked Shocktoberfest to end the nude option. Not wanting to get into a fight with their local government, the management agreed. There is still an option to go in your underwear (“prude”), but participants can no longer go through in their birthday suit.
Even though this is not illegal according to city or state laws, they hope to be able to work with local government officials and come to an agreement to do the fully nude option next year. Many thanks to our couple who was going to cover the nude option for Theme Park University. They, like many other people, were looking forward to trying such a unique concept in the haunted house industry. Anyone who bought tickets and would like a refund, can do so by contacting Shocktoberfest via e-mail.
As part of Theme Park University’s ongoing series about unique Halloween Haunts, I recently spoke with Patrick Konopelski, President of the Haunted Attractions Association. Patrick also runs an event every fall called Shocktoberfest in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania. 2013 marks Shocktoberfest’s twenty second year of scaring the bajeebers out of horror junkies in unique and interesting ways.
In 2011, Shocktoberfest started The Zombie Mud Run, where runners navigate through a course of flesh eating zombies. Those zombies are paying participants who have chosen to play what is undoubtedly one of the most unique games of capture the flag in the world. Human runners are outfitted with three flags representing vital human organs that zombies… well… love to eat. After your undead captures those three vital organs? You’re a goner for sure. The Zombie Mud Run is so popular that this year, they are doing a total of seven just to please the hungry masses.
It’s a great way to prepare for upcoming zombie apocalypse that we all know is coming. In addition, Shocktoberfest is introducing a similar format in it’s Prison of The Dead haunt. It’s important to know that a normal haunted house is around 2,500 square feet. However, Prison of The Dead is a whopping 50,000 square feet – one of the largest in the country! Starting this year, “prisoners” will walk through with those same flags representing vital organs trying to protect themselves from becoming part of the undead.
For those of you who consider brains to be one of the four major food groups, you can sign up for the zombie experience where you spend time in Shocktoberfest’s make up room to look like a true flesh eater. From there, a special prison transport vehicle will whisk you away to the Prison of the Dead Escape and place you alongside professional actors so you can capture those flags and experience what it’s like to scare the pants off of someone!
As if one first-of-its-kind attraction wasn’t enough, guests will also have a special option to go through Shocktoberfest’s The Unknown haunted house completely naked. As Patrick told me, he has four children, and he asks them to watch the educational channels for entertainment instead of some of the other crap on tv. Low and behold, he walks in and his kids are watching completely nude people on Discovery Channel’s “Naked and Afraid”.
At first it bothered him, but after a few minutes, he couldn’t look away. “It was like watching a train wreck”, he told me. “They take two people and drop them on a deserted island and watch how they react. So I tried how to figure out how I could apply that to a haunt format. And while I can’t drop people off on an island, I can have them take their clothes off.”
As Patrick told me, it’s not about being sexual at all. In the haunt business, their job is to make you as vulnerable as possible. If you think about, because we are so used to clothes, we are often most vulnerable in the nude and what better way to totally be “out there” than to be naked in a haunted house?
Patrick went on to say that 10 years ago, he wouldn’t have even attempted to try this. However, thanks to the internet and social media, you can find pictures of naked people in less than 30 seconds. Society is slowly getting used to the idea that we are all naked under our clothes, as Miley Cyrus demonstrated in her latest music video by singing on top of a wrecking ball in her birthday suit.
The Naked And Scared Challenge brings guests 18-and-older through The Unknown haunted house after all the other guests have left the screampark. Participants buy a special ticket in advance through Shocktoberfest’s website. Once you arrive, you are ushered into a special pre-show area where you can choose to disrobe entirely or take the “prude” way out and go through in your underwear.
Your belongings are placed in a sealed bag and numbered and given to a member of The Unknown‘s staff. That numbered bag is then taken to the exit where you can retrieve your clothing. Instead of the traditional conga line haunted house, the Naked and Scared version will send groups through individually making sure no one sees or touches you that isn’t in your group.
Keep in mind, no sexual activity of any kind will be tolerated. The folks at Shocktoberfest aren’t perverts and no one who goes to the event earlier in the evening will see any kind of nudity. Also, Patrick promised me that the actors will not be touching any of the participants who decide to bare it all. However, there will be some unique scares that those visitors will experience that guests who go through The Unknown haunt earlier in the evening will not!
So who’s ready to drop their drawers and give this a try? I am fascinated by the concept and would love to hear anyone’s reaction who actually goes through this house completely naked. As a matter of fact, I am curious enough to sponsor you. That’s right, if you really want to do the Naked and Scared Challenge, I will pay for you and a friend to experience this on behalf of Theme Park University in exchange for permission to run your story in a future article. If interested e-mail me at JoshYoung@ThemeParkUniversity.com.
For more information on the Naked and Scared Challenge, Prison of the Dead Escape or The Zombie Mud Run, visit www.Shocktoberfest.com!
Also, make sure to follow TPUJosh on Twitter by clicking here and like our Theme Park University Facebook Page by clicking here!
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commentsSouthport's Alan Wright is planning an FA Cup upset at Leyton Orient as he looks to go from Conference manager to Premier League boss in five years.
The 42-year-old former Blackburn, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough full-back took charge of the Sandgrounders in May.
But he wants to follow his former club managers Kenny Dalglish, Graham Taylor and Steve McClaren into the top flight.
Asked about the Premier League, Wright told BBC Sport: "In five years I'd like to think I might be ready."
Alan Wright's 2000 FA Cup final scrapbook: Villa 0-1 Chelsea "I clearly remember it wasn't a good game, not an awful lot happened. Chelsea's winning goal by Roberto Di Matteo came from a mistake by our goalkeeper David James. "The atmosphere in the dressing room afterwards was in stark contrast to the feeling of reaching the final when we beat Bolton on penalties at Wembley. "I love the FA Cup. It is one of the trophies that everyone buys into whether you are Aston Villa or Southport."
He enjoyed a successful playing career at the top level, making 339 Premier League appearances for four different clubs.
In addition to being Dalglish's first signing at Blackburn in October 1991, Wright spent eight years at Villa, winning the League Cup under Brian Little in 1996 and picking up an FA Cup runners-up medal under John Gregory in 2000.
Wright, who also played for Middlesbrough and Sheffield United in the top flight, is one of the shortest players to have graced the Premier League at 5ft 4in, and attracted unwanted headlines while at Villa when he strained his knee trying to reach the pedals of his new Ferrari.
"It just found an old injury that I had so I couldn't drive it and ended up selling it," said Wright. "It happened a long time ago and it's something I've never been allowed to forget."
While former Villa team-mates Gareth Southgate and Simon Grayson started their managerial careers in the Premier League [Middlesbrough] and League One [Blackpool] respectively, Wright is happy serving his apprenticeship in the fifth tier at part-time Southport after a stint in joint charge of Northwich Victoria in the Northern Premier League.
"We actually qualified for the play-offs at Northwich but because of the club's financial situation we were not allowed to take part and actually ended up being relegated," recalled Wright.
Former Football League club Southport have had better days. They train three times a week, but with an average league gate of around 1,000, money is tight at Haig Avenue.
Yet Wright would not have it any other way.
Comedy club Comedian John Bishop made 53 league and cup appearances for Southport between March 1990 and April 1991. The midfielder's only FA Cup victory for the club was a 2-1 win at Armthorpe Welfare in the first qualifying round on 15 September 1990, a tie watched by 186 people.
"I'm thoroughly enjoying it," he added. "I'm not going to name names but there are some players who finish playing and then get jobs in the Premier League, and it's just not working.
"It takes three, four or five years to serve your apprenticeship. Of course I'd like to manage up there, but I'm still learning. I've made mistakes and no doubt I'll make more.
"But it's all about learning from them. Being manager of Southport is a challenge, I inherited a squad of nine players when I took over. But I'm relishing the challenges that this job brings."
Wright is still in touch with Dalglish, who lives in Southport, and Neil Warnock, his former Sheffield United manager.
Man-management skills he picked up from the likes of former England bosses Taylor and McClaren have been used to coax the best out of his players, including former West Bromwich Albion striker Nathan Ellington and midfielder Jamie Milligan, who made four top-flight substitute appearances for Everton.
"I have tried to take a bit from each of the managers I have served," Wright said. "Out of all of them I'm probably more like Brian Little.
"When I look back, Brian was perhaps too quiet at times.
"I'm not the loudest person in the world and I don't usually rant and rave. But if I have to get my point across I will."
Southport striker Nathan Ellington, 32, has commanded an aggregate transfer fee totalling £7.6m during his career and made 31 Premier League appearances for West Brom in 2005-06, scoring five goals.
So does Wright believe Southport, 16th in the Conference table, have any chance of upsetting Leyton Orient, the League One leaders and highest ranked team in the first round?
"If we are on top form and they have an off day, then who knows?" he said.
"I know they had someone here last Saturday when we beat the leaders Cambridge United, who were previously unbeaten, 1-0. They'll have been impressed with what they saw from us.
"We've got a lot of young players with a few experienced players too."Over the past week, I have had several posts on ACTA in the wake of the most recent leaked text, including a scorecard on the major remaining areas of disagreement, one assessing the growing rift between the U.S. and E.U., Canadian positions on ACTA, the changed U.S. position on anti-circumvention rules, and a look at geographical indications, a key issue for the EU. On top of these posts, there is additional information disclosed last weekend that Luc Devigne, the lead EU negotiator is taking on new responsibilities (though the EU says he will continue on ACTA).
Putting the pieces together, I think it may be worth considering whether the EU is prepared to walk away from ACTA altogether, leaving the U.S. with a far smaller agreement that cannot credibly claim to set a standard for the G8 or developed world.
Why raise this possibility?
1. The remarkable comments from European Commissioner Karel de Gucht sent the unmistakable signal that the EU is prepared to walk away. De Gucht told the European Parliament that without the inclusion of geographical indication and industrial designs, the EU would have to reconsider the benefits of the treaty. Moreover, he pointed the finger at the U.S. for maintaining secrecy on the treaty (which leaked a day later). The USTR acknowledged that the negotiating round did not meet its expectations. While de Gucht’s comments were taken by many as posturing for the negotiations, what if they reflect a sincerely held view that an ACTA without a broad scope of intellectual property is not worth the trouble?
2. De Gucht also poured cold water on the next round of negotiations, assuring the European Parliament that he did not expect significant new developments until September. While there were initial rumours of a Washington meeting next week, it now seems clear that will not happen. In fact, hope for a meeting in August in Washington may also be difficult to pull off given the conflict with European vacations that month. There may be urgency on the U.S. side but it is not matched by the EU.
3. Internal EU pressure against ACTA continues to mount. Over the past week, two Dutch ministers raised transparency concerns with ACTA and the EU Article 29 Working Party expressed concerns with the privacy implications of the draft agreement. Moreover, the European Parliament is inching closer toward enough signatories to pass Written Declaration 12, which would send yet another strong signal about its concerns with ACTA, its impact, and the lack of transparency.
4. Tracing the changing text from the last three rounds (Guadalajara, Wellington, Lucerne) it is clear that the U.S. is doing most of the caving in an effort to rally support for the treaty. The dropping of its three strikes language, the inclusion of de minimis, and the changes to the Internet chapter all reflect changes to language initially proposed by the U.S.
5. Most importantly, there remains the seemingly intractable problem of the scope of ACTA. The EU looks to its robust geographical indications system and sees the area it most wants to protect. The U.S., which is undoubtedly more concerned with protecting music and movies, simply can’t agree to the EU demands (which cover over a dozen provisions) without making changes to its domestic laws. That step would run counter to prior commitments that ACTA would not change domestic U.S. law and would require Congressional approval. The inverse situation arises in the context of anti-camcording rules. The U.S. looks at the anti-camcording and sees the area it most wants to protect. The EU sees an issue that would require going beyond current law that would require national approvals.
Put all of this together and the U.S. may face the choice of a major fight to get ACTA approved in Congress (with the EU on board) or the possibility of ACTA without the EU. For the EU, it faces the prospect of an agreement that does not meet its major needs and for which there is mounting internal dissension or the possibility of walking away. While there is no reason to think a breakdown of the talks is imminent – a deal is presumably still more likely than not – the possibility of an ACTA without the EU must be considered as an increasingly desperate USTR looks to save face on an ACTA largely limited to countries with which it already has a trade agreement in place.A few short years later and Taumoepenu is now a legitimate prospect in the 2017 NFL Draft. His journey has been nothing short of improbable, and his miraculous transformation from a Tongan fruit farmer into one of the Pac-12's most-feared sack artists happened in a flash. This is Pita Tauomoepenu's incredible Path to the Pros.
When Pita Taumoepenu caught his first glimpse of American football, he was 17 years old. He didn't know a lick of English, but he knew he liked what he saw. "I was like, 'damn, look at these people. they're wearing helmets, banging into each other. This is crazy," Taumoepenu told STACK.
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When Pita Taumoepenu caught his first glimpse of American football, he was 17 years old. He didn't know a lick of English, but he knew he liked what he saw. "I was like, 'damn, look at these people. they're wearing helmets, banging into each other. This is crazy," Taumoepenu told STACK.
A few short years later and Taumoepenu is now a legitimate prospect in the 2017 NFL Draft. His journey has been nothing short of improbable, and his miraculous transformation from a Tongan fruit farmer into one of the Pac-12's most-feared sack artists happened in a flash. This is Pita Tauomoepenu's incredible Path to the Pros.
Taumoepenu was born in what is perhaps the most football-obsessed state in America—Texas. But when he was 3 months old, his mother made the tough decision to send him to live in Tonga with his grandparents.
"My mom is a single mother. My dad has never been around in my life. My mom was working at the airport at that time so she really didn't have enough time to take care of me, so I moved to Tonga with my grandparents," Taumoepenu said.
Tonga is a Polynesian sovereign state composed of 169 islands in the south Pacific. Its total population is 103,036—about the size of Richmond, Virginia. Agriculture provides the majority of employment in Tonga, which was the case for Taumoepenu and his family. "I worked on my grandpa's farm growing up. We grew manioke [a carbohydrate-rich tuber], taro, watermelons, pineapples," Taumoepenu said. "My grandpa was a hard worker. He basically farmed for the whole village. He fed the whole village, and everyone knew it." Seeing how hard his grandfather worked on the farm day in and day out instilled a relentless work ethic in Pita, who was named after him. As they worked on the farm together, Pita's grandpa would often tell him that he would soon grow up to be a great athlete back in America.
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"He'd tell me, 'one day, you are going to go back to a country that's bigger [than Tonga]. You're going to play sports," Taumoepenu said. "I kept saying, 'hey Grandpa, we're out here working on the farm. I don't know what you're talking about, but in the future I'm going to become like you, one of the biggest farmers in our village.' I didn't even know what he meant, but he kept saying it to me, so it kind of stuck in my mind."
At the time, Pita didn't even know that his grandpa was his grandpa—he believed he was his father. He also wasn't aware that he'd been born inside the United States before he moved to Tonga.
Though Taumoepenu might have regarded his grandpa's predictions as far-fetched at first, he soon began dreaming of becoming a star athlete as a way to provide a better life for his family. He excelled at Tonga's most popular sports—cricket and rugby. "The main reason I played sports was because I wanted something to help my family out. Trying to find a way I can get out of Tonga and go somewhere to get an opportunity to help my family out," Taumoepenu said.
Playing rugby and working on the family farm helped Pita develop a muscular physique and blue-collar toughness. Those traits would soon come in handy.
When Pita was 17 years old, his mother decided to bring him back to the United States. But while his mom, sister and grandparents moved to Monterey, California, Pita moved to Provo, Utah, to live with an aunt and uncle. The family had three sports-loving boys, and Pita often hung out on the sidelines of their Little League practices. Across the street was a field where a local high school football team practiced.
"I remember always turning around and watching [football practice], and I started to like it," said Taumoepenu. "I turned to my uncle and said, 'Man, what are these people doing?' He grabbed me and said, 'that sport right there, if you work hard and become successful in it, they'll be able to pay for your school. That way, your mom won't have to pay for your school.' My mom had done a lot of things for me in my life. She made me feel comfortable my whole life. I wanted a way to help her out. So I told myself, I wanted to do this sport."
That was easier said than done. His uncle introduced him to the football coach of one nearby high school, but the staff wanted nothing to do with a kid who barely knew English and had zero football experience.
Taumoepenu said, "I told the coach all I wanted was an opportunity. He asked me if I'd ever played football before. I said 'no.' Then he was laughing and told me,'maybe you should just go home and play video games.' The whole team was cracking up, laughing. I stood there looking at them, and I knew I was going to have to prove myself. Someway, somehow, I had to."
"The very next day, my uncle enrolled me over at Timpview High School. I didn't even know that Timpview was one of the best teams in Utah," Taumoepenu said. "He wasn't expecting me to make the team. Then one day, their coach [Cary Whittingham] stopped by after my chemistry class. He said, 'Pita, you want to play football? I'd like to help you out.' I was like, 'Man, thank God for accepting my prayers. I'd been praying for that.' That moment really changed my life."
Pita began practicing with the team during the second half of his junior year, knowing he would have just one season at the high school level to prove his worth. His first football practice wasn't exactly a highlight. "It was crazy," he said. "My coach gave me the helmet and the pads, and I thought I was going to die. It was so heavy! He told me to just walk around the whole field while the team practiced. So I just walked around. That was my first practice." Once he got acclimated to the gear, it was time for him to find a position. Whittingham told him to think over what role might suit him best. His inspiration came in the form of Green Bay Packers outside linebacker Clay Matthews.
"I was watching the Packers. Clay Matthews came off the edge at the time |
the city and announcements by Israel of plans to build more settler homes in East Jerusalem.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption President Obama: "We condemn in the strongest terms, these attacks"
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev: "There can be no justification for this wanton violence"
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Palestinian official Mustafa Barghouti: "Today is a failure of the international community"
The Jerusalem compound that has been the focus of much of the unrest - known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif - is the holiest site in Judaism, while the al-Aqsa Mosque within the compound is the third holiest site in Islam.
Orthodox Jewish campaigners in Israel are challenging the long-standing ban on Jews praying at the compound.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967, as the capital of a future state.Yesterday saw an update coming through for the Google app on Android TV. While the app did not bring too much in the way of new or improved features, it was an update which was designed to harmonize the look of the Android TV version of the Google app with that of the the mobile version. An update to bring with it the recent Google branding change which was announced a few months back. Following on from that update and today, YouTube for Android TV also seems to be getting an update. While this one again does seem to bring through a number of more cosmetic-based changes, some of those changes in appearance will prove to be functional changes for the end user as well. Although, the bulk of the changes are indeed cosmetic in nature.
The biggest change worth noting is that the settings tab has been moved to a far more prominent position compared to before and now requires less scrolling to be reached. In fact, it now appears in-view when opening the YouTube app. In addition, the actual contents of the settings has also been increased and there are some new icons now present, including a Cast icon, Feedback icon and a 'Stats for Nerds' icon. The latter of which is designed to provide more in-depth information on videos currently being watched. While this is an interesting feature, it will be one which is unlikely to prove that useful to most users.
It is also worth noting that if you are a subscriber to the newly launched YouTube Red service, then you will also notice quite a significant visual change with the main YouTube logo which is prominently displayed on the app's main page (top right corner). After the update, the logo will include the word "Red" highlighting that you are an actual YouTube Red subscriber. Last but not least, once you play any video after the update, you'll also notice a couple of new icons which offer a shortcut route to subscribe to the uploader's channel or view more of their content. The update should be en route to Android TV devices and therefore, you should see it arrive organically over the next couple of days. If you would prefer to be running the update now, you can pull the APK from the link below and sideload in the normal fashion.
Android TV YouTube APK DownloadIt’s now just three days until IRONMAN 70.3 Arizona in Tempe, AZ, where Ragen claims she will swim 1.2 miles, bike 56 miles, and run 13.1 miles, all in under 8-1/2 hours. She is currently preparing for a speaking engagement this afternoon at Castleton University in Vermont. The excitement kicks off on Friday with a hectic schedule of coordinated travel plans, check-ins, and finally the big day this Sunday.
Ragen likes to assign names and genders to inanimate objects. For instance, her car is male and named “Morpheus”, and her previous bike (of bike jail fame) was named “Clyde”. When she finally managed to locate a bike shop willing to mutilate her road bike to her specifications, the next order of business was of course choosing a name.
After a number of ideas (KITT, after the car in Knight Rider, was in serious contention) I had named the bike Phyxius. It’s Greek for “taking to flight” and is named after the boat owned by Keanu Reeves’ character (Shane Falco) in the movie The Replacements […]
Phyxius or Phyxios is the “god of flight”, one of the minor cult surnames of Zeus in Greek mythology. Ragen thinks this means “flight” as in flying or moving at great speed, somewhat appropriate for a bike. In reality, the name has nothing to do with flying, and everything to do with evading the law. Phyxius is indeed the god of flight… in the sense of escape. He is commonly referred to as the helper or protector of fugitives. “Taking to flight” is all about escape, banishment, and evading responsibility. Phyxios (φύξιος) literally means “of banishment”.
There are a number of boats registered under the name Phyxius, just like the movie example Ragen’s bike name comes from. This is a clever play on the idea of a boat being an escape from everyday life. There are also some good examples of companies and individuals misinterpreting the name and using it to comedic effect in areas like the aviation industry. It’s pretty clear Ragen’s bike falls into the latter camp.
In our opinion, Ragen could not have chosen a better name for her bike. IronFat is one great big flight from reality.
AdvertisementsThat box (ka'aba) displays the vahjayjay of their false-god (allah)-- the 'black stone' meteor remnant)-- which devout sharia-supremacists are obliged by law (sharia) to ritualistically molest during their annual death-cult orgy (hajj).
It is the only (physical) target among Islam's 5 "pillars." Destroy it and the other 4 (ideological) pillars collapse under the weight of lies. Our failed military strategy has been to target their ideological struggle (jihad). This has been proven (uncontroversially) to be an exercise in futility.
If all options remain on the table, then their ka'aba remains most exquisitely vulnerable. Americans get an ideal proving ground for advanced kinetic bombardment weaponry (rods from god); and the oil ticks get to spend their extortion money on more productive endeavors; everybody wins.
Genocidal Shinto-fascists were only pacified the hard way. Thanks to the Greatest Generation, Shinto today are peaceful, prosperous... and pacified.Jeh Johnson, who formally led the Department of Homeland Security, said in hindsight there was more the federal government could have done to prevent hacking and election interference. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)
Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday the Democratic National Committee turned down help from the FBI after its system was hacked — and that he had not known about it for months.
“What are we doing? Are we in there?” Johnson said he asked when he became aware of the intrusion. He said the response he received was that the FBI had spoken to the committee but “they don’t want our help.”
“I should have bought a sleeping bag and camped out at the DNC,” Johnson told the panel about what he would have done differently.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, who is one of three members who has taken the lead on the panel’s widespread Russia investigation, later circled back and said camping out would not have made a difference because the DNC also refused to turn over its servers to law enforcement officials to find the culprit.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who was the chairwoman of the DNC at the time of the hack, said no one at the FBI contacted her at the time.
“At no point during my tenure at the DNC did anyone from the FBI or any other government agency contact or communicate with me about Russian intrusion on the DNC network. It is astounding to me that the Chair of an organization like the DNC was never contacted by the FBI or any other agency concerned about these intrusions. As a member of Congress, I had the unique clearance to hear any classified briefing that would be involved in such an intrusion, and the FBI clearly should have come to me with that information. They did not. If the FBI or any other government agency ever came to me with that information, I would have gladly welcomed their help,” she said in a statement released after Johnson’s testimony.
Johnson also testified he had evidence there were dozens of states targeted by cyber intrusions of voter registration lists and made several public statements on the matter that had been overlooked by a heated presidential campaign.
One of those statements was made the day a 2005 Access Hollywood tape was unearthed that showed Donald Trump making unsavory comments about approaching women.
Despite that hacking, Johnson said he did not see evidence that votes were altered as a result of cyber attacks before he stepped down from his role as Homeland Security secretary.
Johnson’s testimony came as the Intelligence Committee held its third open hearing since launching an investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The panel has also heard from former FBI Director James B. Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.
Absent from Wednesday’s House Intelligence hearing was the panel’s chairman, Devin Nunes, who stepped aside from leading the Russia investigation after he became the subject of an Ethics Committee probe into improperly publicizing classified information.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting its own investigation on the matter and a special prosecutor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, has been appointed by the president’s administration to do his own digging.
Contact Rahman at remarahman@cqrollcall.com or follow her on Twitter at @remawriterGet breaking news alerts and more from Roll Call on your iPhone or your Android.One of the big questions that an Agile Coach may face during his career is: How can I help the team to continuously improve the software development process? In this blog posts series, I have been sharing some of Plataformatec best practices that are helping us deliver better projects through a set of metrics and charts. For more information, I invite you to read:
Today, I will present two techniques that could be valuable if you are trying to get a grasp on the big picture of the team process.
CFD
Quoting Brodzinski, the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CDF) is one of the charts that gives us a quick overview of what’s happening in a project or product activities.
CFD is a valuable instrument for tracking and forecasting agile projects. Using it you can quickly check the current status: how much work has been done, what is in progress and how much is still waiting to be done in the backlog.
In a CFD representation, the horizontal axis represents a period, and the vertical indicates the cumulative count of items in the process (e.g. amount of user stories). Each painted area on the chart relates to a workflow step (e.g. to do, in progress, done). For a better understanding, check out the picture below.
To demonstrate how we are using CFD I will show next an example that happened with a Plataformatec client. In this case, we had a Kanban composed by the following steps:
Backlog: User stories that need to be refined.
User stories that need to be refined. Ready to Dev: User stories with acceptance criteria defined and with an explicit definition of done.
User stories with acceptance criteria defined and with an explicit definition of done. In Developing: User stories in development.
User stories in development. Testing: User stories in QA validation.
User stories in QA validation. Accepted: User stories released in production.
In this project, we used CFD to communicate the project progress, to identify process bottlenecks and to manage process queues. We chose to label time through a week perspective because we needed to report weekly the project status to the client’s CTO. To build the CFD, we tracked the date that a particular user story starts in each step of the workflow.
The next three diagrams represent the project at the beginning (first seven weeks), in the middle (eleventh week) and at the end (week twenty-two).
The beginning
At the beginning of the project, the team dealt with a situation that more user stories arrived to the backlog than departed to production (the team average throughput was three user stories per week and the backlog increased at a rate of seven user stories per week). This type of pattern is not so good because it means that WIP should grow over time. At that moment, the team and the PO discussed solutions for the backlog growth rate according to the team throughout. Just to be clear, it’s common for the backlog curve to grow sharply at the beginning of software projects.
Another piece of information that can be extracted from the graph is some items created but not detailed in the backlog. In this regard, the Agile Coach did an excellent job helping the project PO in the preparation of user stories for the team. At this moment, the team had a stack of user stories prepared for development.
The middle
Looking at the CFD in the middle of the project is possible to see that the development team and the QA didn’t have bulging bands, which is clearly a signal that the process of coding and validation were not overloaded. Comparing to the last follow-up (first six weeks), at this moment, the rate of user stories created and user stories delivered was almost the same (in this case, three user stories per week), but the team knew that the throughput needed to increase. The project was still dealing with backlog problem definition (fifteen user stories were not prepared for development). One of the factors that caused this issue was the high uncertainty caused by visual aspects that accompanied the features that would be created.
The end
An interesting thing that we realized at the end of the project was that work in our Test column flows through all the project very quickly. Looking at the chart, it’s possible to recognize that the blue bands (Testing step) disappear quickly. In this case, this situation happened because the interaction between the development team and QA was intense. Regarding backlog, in a particular moment of the project (more precisely in week nineteen) the team and the PO aligned that no other user story should be created because the end of the contract was arriving and they couldn’t commit to creating new features. The six user stories generated until the end of the project were related to technical debts.
Further information that we can see from this CFD is that the team didn’t conclude all the stories in the backlog (the Accepted band didn’t cover all the diagram). In this case, the client’s development team took over the two user stories that were in development status and three more that were in the validation process. It’s important to share that all the other seventy-nine user stories of this project were released in production which leads the team to a high-quality solution and a client satisfied with the released product.
A good practice that we are carrying on our projects at Plataformatec is to check the CFD weekly, as a process that provides insight to Burnup, Throughput, WIP, bottlenecks and to drive continuous improvement (that diagram is an excellent companion to discussions about limiting/managing work in progress).
Lead time breakdown
Studying a way to improve ceremonies like project follow up or retrospective we created a visualization that we call “Lead time breakdown.”
In short, this chart enables the team to evaluate, compare and deeply review the latency between the initiation and execution of each process step of each team item (e.g. user stories).
We have been using this visualization to evaluate the process with more details than when using a CFD diagram. Usually, we use Lead time breakdown to answer questions like:
What is going on with the WIP items?
Is there any impediment blocking the team flow?
Is the team handling any process bottlenecks (e.g. QA overloaded)?
The mechanism to create this visualization is simple. On the vertical axis, we have worked days. On the horizontal one, we have in progress and delivered items (e.g. the amount of user stories tracked by Kanban board). To represent each step in the process, we use a stacked bar chart.
Let’s see an example. The data that will be presented next is from a real project. The team had a workflow represented on the board below.
In this Kanban board, checkpoint steps were tracked to indicate bottleneck situations created from QA (Waiting for QA) or PO (Waiting for Review) during user story development. The Lead time breakdown chart of this team looked like this.
It’s possible to identify that in almost all user stories of this project the PO needed more than three days to review the features delivered. In this situation, that duration was reasonable, but in some situations, this behavior could block the release of significant product features.
Another interesting thing to look at the example is the high variability from the team coding lead time. In this case, the team worked with unstandardized user stories.
During this project the team suffered with a part time QA (see the height of the parts displayed in yellow on the chart). As the team and stakeholders periodically access the graph, such problem was evident to all and solutions were discussed to solve it. One example of a solution created was that at some periods of the project life cycle the Scrum Master was delegated to execute QA work.
As a good practice, in all projects, we have been checking the Lead time breakdown periodically as an exercise of understanding the team’s current status. This tool has been significant for:
Guiding team discussion about how to remove waste during the development process periodically.
Proposing process improvement based on team data.
Visualizing waiting time during development.
Detailing user stories assessments to increase the number of delivered functionalities.
Assisting retrospective sessions when it’s necessary to look at the process (what does the team need to maintain? what does the team need to change?).
Summary
Visualizing the flow with a CFD or Lead time breakdown gives quantitative and qualitative insight into a potential problem in the software development process. After all, those graphic visualizations will only suggest you a problem. Tracking it in details and finding solutions is a different story.
To learn more about CFD I recommend three great references:
How are you using CFD? What is your opinion about Lead time breakdown visualization? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!Looking for news you can trust?
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Barack Obama is ahead in the polls. Then Mitt Romney is. The president is leading among women. Then the likely Republican nominee is. Romney’s favorable rating is in the dumps. Presto! It’s above water. The volatility of the 2012 presidential race is a boon for pollsters and pundits, who every day, it seems, have new data to dissect and a new shift to explain.
The reasons for the movement in the polls can seem obvious. With Romney no longer being sniped at daily by fellow Republicans—and with him keeping his distance from reporters and no longer appearing at crazy-town debates—it’s no surprise his favorability numbers have crept upward. And with the economic recovery remaining sluggish—and the jobs picture still grim in many regions—Americans have cause to be frustrated with the status quo and the president. But for those who’d like to short-cut much of the nanosecond-by-nanosecond analysis, there is a fundamental dynamic to the race to consider: Many voters tend to like Obama but are disappointed that the economy has not rebounded more robustly on his watch. And many voters—perhaps some of the same voters—don’t like Mitt Romney, the awkward, say-anything quarter-billionaire, but they fancy the idea of a business-savvy Mr. Fix-It who can turn around the economy. Consequently, voters in the middle—those not propelled by partisan or ideological views and those not yet decided—will be tugged in opposite directions over the next five-and-a-half months, as they sort out conflicting impulses. Consequently, poll results will see-saw.
A Gallup poll conducted earlier this month found that 60 percent consider Obama more likable than Romney. And a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll noted that 56 percent held a favorable opinion of Obama; merely 35 percent said the same of Romney. But in other surveys Romney is doing better of late on the favorability front. A USA Today poll noted his favorable/unfavorable rating had flipped back to a net positive of 50/41 percent. This is not a shocker. With the wacky Republican primary contest completed, voters are no longer being subjected to nonstop Romney gaffes and constantly reminded of his 1-percentness and attendant policies.
Obama still retains a slight likability lead, and the recent months suggest that he will be able exploit that gap later in the campaign when Romney will be less avoidable. But the president faces a more daunting challenge with voters regarding who can best produce an economic makeover. From a recent USA Today poll:
55% say the economy would get better over the next four years if Romney was elected, compared with 46% who say it would improve if Obama was re-elected. Twenty-seven percent say the economy would get worse in a Romney first term, compared with 37% who say that of an Obama second term.
A Fox News poll handed Romney a slight edge on the critical question of who would do better creating jobs, 43 percent to 41 percent.
Polls have shown that voters believe Obama understands their lives more so than Romney and cares more about the plight of middle-income Americans than his presumed Republican challenger. And that Fox News survey did ask respondents whether they’d rather have Romney or Obama as an investment adviser managing their money. Romney outperformed Obama 47 to 32 percent. But Fox News also inquired, “Who would you hire as a life coach?” Obama outscored Romney 47 percent to 33 percent.
This may be a glib way of casting the choice for voters. But it does aim at a basic feature of this election: Will voters be yearning for a by-the-numbers, get-the-job-done CEO, or a leader who might better address the aspirations and values of voters and reflect the national story those voters want told?
Many voters probably want both. And it will be tough for some to choose between these two meta-offerings. But Obama can be judged on his results. His policies have raised employment levels by about 4 million jobs. That’s more than his predecessor, but for some voters, it may not be sufficient. Romney, though, will be evaluated on his potential. There will be campaign quarrels over what he did when he led Bain Capital and when he was governor of Massachusetts. But the dominant question will be, can he supercharge the economy if he reaches the White House?
The idea of Romney appears to play better with voters than the actual man. When the issue is what Romney might do in office—rather than what the voters think of him as a person—he tends to score higher. Voters are drawn more to the concept of Romney—a successful business tycoon who can use his corporate know-how to boost the US economy—than the fellow in the suit.
It’s a president you know and like who has not engineered a complete economic turnaround versus a candidate you’re not too hot about but who might do better. For voters not predisposed toward a D or an R—not those who are voting for Obama because they fear right-wing Supreme Court appointees and not those who are voting for Romney to get rid of Obamacare—this is probably a difficult decision. Which means there will likely be much shape-shifting in the race through the summer and fall. It’s complicated—and the polls will reflect that until Election Day.“Because the report raises a lot of controversial positions … it took a while for the Commission, as a bipartisan body, to reach any agreement,” said Brian Walch, a spokesman. “It’s a spine-y issue.”
The report is worth reading, if only because it shows how deeply divided the legal community is about religious liberty and civil rights. A majority of Commissioners ultimately found that “religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights.”
This is a broad finding, more of an orientation than a guiding legal principle. But it’s easy enough to guess what the commissioners may have had in mind: tax-exempt status for religious colleges and universities that don’t admit LGBT students. Laws that let bakers and other wedding vendors refuse to provide services for same-sex-wedding ceremonies. Court decisions about religious pharmacists who decline to stock certain kinds of birth control in their stores.
Federal and state laws often protect religious groups via these kinds of selective exemptions. But some see these carve-outs as an excuse for discrimination—the Commission’s chair, Martin Castro, argued as much.
“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance,” he wrote.
The Commission is intentionally designed to be a microcosm of opposing political viewpoints, with four of the representatives appointed by the president, two by the speaker of the House, and two by the president pro tempore of the Senate. But the dissenting comments in the report go beyond mere partisan division.
“The conflict between religious liberty and nondiscrimination principles is profound,” wrote Commissioner Peter Kirsanow. “The passions involved may be fiercer than in any civil rights struggle since the 1960s.” He added that he found in favor of the report only because he “was concerned that a ‘no’ vote from me would be used as an excuse to further delay the report.”
Religious liberty is more fundamental to Constitutional principles than non-discrimination, Kirsanow argued. “Religious liberty is an undisputed constitutional right,” he wrote. “With the exception of racial nondiscrimination principles embedded in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, nondiscrimination principles are statutory or judicially created constructs.”
Another dissenting commissioner, Gail Heriot, echoed something similar, but in harsher words: “People of faith should not allow themselves to become just another special interest that needs to be appeased,” she said.Building rabbit cages, chicken coops, or any sort of PVC frame is simple, fast, and will last a long time. This rabbit hutch uses 1 1/2 SCH 40 pipe and is about 8′ x 6′ x 3′ deep. It can hold up to six rabbit cages. Why six and not four like most? If you get a sick rabbit or two or ever plan to breed your rabbits you’ll appreciate the extra cages.
There are several PVC rabbit hutch plans online, but really, just go to your local hardware store and stare at the PVC connectors for a while. These rabbit hutches are so easy to build that you can very easily come up with a plan, especially if you’ve ever worked with PVC or are the DIY creative type. You’ll be inspired in no time.
But, if you like instructions and planning before you start then here’s a cool design for you. This design is modular unlike most other PVC frame designs on the web, meaning you can continue building length·wise however long you want. Need 8 cages instead of 6? no problem! How about 12? Easy as pi(p)e.
This is a two tiers design because it’s a very efficient way to stack rabbits. Each cage will need a slanted roof made out of corrugated plastic or other material (not shown). Corrugated plastic is easy to clean, but wood works too. I would avoid metal as it could get pretty hot.
This slanted roof is important. will help protect the rabbits from the elements as well as direct the rabbit droppings from the top tiers. You can add an optional worm bed under the cages by using 2×6 lumber to build a rectangular box underneath the PVC frame.
Here’s what you’ll need
Tools Required:
PVC Saw (or hacksaw)
PVC Cleaner And Cement
Sandpaper or debur tool
Tape Measure
Materials Needed (all is 1 1/2″ PVC):
80 feet – 1 1/2 in. PVC Sch 40. Sch 20 will be too thin.
6 – Caps
2 – Couplers
4 – Elbows
14 – Tees
2 – X’s (4-way couplers)
PVC Cut List:
4 – 17 1/2 inch
4 – 18 inch
4 – 13 1/2 inch
6 – 19 1/4 inch
2 – 37 3/4 inch
2 – 14 3/4 inch
4 – 36 inch
8 – 48 inch
Directions
1. Cut your PVC pipe to correct lengths as per the cut list, and debur all the ends with sandpaper or a debur tool. A debur tool works better.
2. Assemble the middle legs, 2 total:
Start with a cap, then add a 37 3/4″ PVC. Then add a 4-way connector.
Stick a 8 3/4″ PVC into the connector and put a Coupler on and add a 19 1/4″ PVC.
Finally add a Tee, oriented the same way as the 4-way connector. You’re done.
3. Assemble the Style 1 end legs, 2 total:
Start with a elbow, then insert a 19 1/4″ PVC, put a Tee lengthwise on the other end of the pipe 90 degrees from the elbow TO THE LEFT.
. Next insert a 13 1/2″ PVC into the Tee and add a second Tee that is 90 degrees from the first T.
Now insert a 18″ PVC into your second Tee and add one more Tee aligned with the first Tee.
Stick a 17 1/2″ PVC into the Tee and add a end cap. You’re done.
4. Assemble the Style 2 end legs, 2 total:
Start with a elbow, then insert a 19 1/4″ PVC, put a Tee lengthwise on the other end of the pipe 90 degrees from the elbow TO THE RIGHT.
. Next insert a 13 1/2″ PVC into the Tee and add a second Tee that is 90 degrees from the first T.
Now insert a 18″ PVC into your second Tee and add one more Tee aligned with the first Tee.
Stick a 17 1/2″ PVC into the Tee and add a end cap. You’re done.
5. Glue two 36″ PVC piece to a Style 1 end leg and a Style 2 end leg. Repeat on the other set of end legs. This will make two “Double-H” shaped ends (see picture above).
6. Insert and glue two 48″ PVC arms into the top and middle section of an end leg “Double-H” section. Repeat on all four end legs.
7. Insert and glue the middle legs to one set of the 48″ PVC now connected to the “Double-H” sides.
8. Glue the remaining 48″ PVC pieces into the middle legs. Don’t try to get ahead of yourself here, once you get one piece in you have to go for it or the glue will harden before it’s in all the way.
9. (optional) To Make It Modular – If you would like to make a modular design, make two more middle legs and cut four more pieces of 48″ PVC. Add them between the first set of middle legs and one set of the end legs. Do this as many times as you need.
Optionally you can also replace the elbows and middle couplings on the end legs and continue adding 48″ PVC pipes and another set of end legs to build as many as you want. This way you can try not gluing these together so you could add or remove them as your rabbit herd size changes.
Now that your modular frame is finished it’s ready to hold up to six rabbit cages, four if you didn’t go modular.Sex Reassignment Surgery ( SRS ) or Gender Reassignment Surgery ( GRS ) and Facial Feminizing Surgery ( FFS ) are the two major surgical operations frequently sought by male-to-female ( MtF, or M2F ) transgender cliients suffering from gender dysphoria. These represent key elements in their life-changing transition.
Dr Suporn Watanyusakul MD is an aesthetic plastic and reconstructive craniofacial surgeon specializing in the fields of SRS, FFS and Augmentation Mammaplasty (AM) operations, and whose Clinic is in Chonburi, Thailand. With some 25 years' experience of sex reassignment surgery and related operations, as at 2017 Dr Suporn has carried out over 2500 cases of primary SRS on patients from some 40 countries. He currently carries out approximately 130 SRS operations, and 20 "full" FFS operations each year.
This is the Official Web Site of Dr Suporn's Clinic. The following pages describe the surgical procedures and methods Dr Suporn uses in his sex reassignment surgery operations. The site provides a resource for prospective patients and medical researchers alike. It includes extracts from Dr Suporn's surgical presentations to the Royal College of Surgeons of Thailand, and discusses the effectiveness of his proprietary non-penile inversion technique for SRS in detail. The single stage vaginoplasty, labiaplasty and clitoroplasty operation differs substantially from the more traditional penile inversion technique. In comparison with the traditional methods, Dr Suporn finds his methodology gives generally superior results overall in terms of depth, cosmetic appearance and sensation. Detail descriptions of his proprietary SRS or GRS technique are given, along with a downloadable copy of a formal presentation describing his methodology. His reasoning and findings - along with testimonials of many patients in support of that - are documented within these pages.
For patients seeking Facial Feminizing Surgery ( FFS ), Dr Suporn performs the following procedures, all of which are further described in detail:
Scalp Advance - or Scalp Reduction Forehead Reconstruction - Dr Suporn introduced in 2003 a proprietary technique for effectively reducing brow bossing in medium-severity cases Brow Lift Combined hair transplant procedure with above operations Upper and Lower Blepharoplasty Reconstructive and Aesthetic Rhinoplasty and Alarplasty Upper Lip Lift Chin Reduction and Reprofile ( genioplasty ) Thyroid Cartilage Reduction ( Adams Apple ) Otoplasty
Full details of patients' administrative arrangements - support and care before, during and after surgery at the Suporn Clinic, along with the surgical protocols applied - can also be found. To find out more - please click on either the image below, or any of the images at the top of this page, to review the full contents of the web site.
Click to Enter >> << Click to Enter
For the technically minded, this site uses frames. If your browser does not support frames, you can still navigate from page to page by using the links at the bottom of each page. However, we do recommend you upgrade your browser to see all the pages to your best advantage. Frame users wishing to bookmark individual pages may also find the following non-frame links to be of value.
For Non-Frame Users:Researchers at the Behaviour and Health Research Unit analysed a number of studies that looked at whether testing an individual’s DNA for genetic variants that increased their risk of developing so-called ‘common complex diseases’ influenced their health-related behaviour. Complex diseases are those such as heart disease, most cancers and diabetes, where no single gene causes the disease, but rather it is the interaction of dozens – possibly hundreds – of genes together with an individual’s environment and behaviour that leads to the disease.
Genome sequencing – reading an individual’s entire DNA – has opened up the potential to provide individuals with information on whether or not they carry genes known to increase their risk of disease. Such tests are controversial – knowing that an individual carries these variants does not mean that individual will develop the disease; however, proponents argue that if an individual knows that he or she is at a greater risk of a particular disease, they can make an informed decision about whether or not to change their behaviour.
In the early 2000s, several companies launched direct-to-consumer tests for a range of common complex disorders, and these tests continue to be sold in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. In 2013 in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration ordered the company 23andMe to stop selling its health-related testing kits because of concerns about their accuracy and usefulness, but in October 2015 the company resumed selling some health-related services.
The Cambridge researchers examined over 10,000 abstracts from relevant studies and identified from these 18 studies that matched their criteria for inclusion in their analysis. By compiling the data, they found that informing individuals of their genetic risk had little or no effect on their health-related behaviour, particularly for smoking cessation and physical activity.
Professor Theresa Marteau, who led the study, says: “Expectations have been high that giving people information about their genetic risk will empower them to change their behaviour – to eat more healthily or to stop smoking, for example – but we have found no evidence that this is the case. But nor does the evidence support concerns that such information might demotivate people and discourage them from changing their behaviour.”
However, the researchers recognise that DNA testing may still play a role in improving people’s health. “DNA testing, alone or in combination with other assessments of disease risk, may help clinicians identify individuals at greatest risk and allow them to target interventions such as screening tests, surgery, and drug treatments,” explains co-author Dr Gareth Hollands.
The team argue that these results are consistent with other evidence that risk communication typically has at best only a small effect on health behaviour.
The study was funded by the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research.
Reference
Hollands, GJ et al. The impact of communicating genetic risks of disease on risk-reducing health behaviour: systematic review with meta-analysis. BMJ; 15 March 2016; DOI: 10.1136/bmj.i1102Simmering anti-refugee sentiment in the U.S. has blown up into full-fledged xenophobic hysteria since Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
The assaults — conducted largely, it is believed, by French and Belgian nationals — turned into fodder for Republicans to amp up their attacks on the Obama administration’s previously announced plans to accept more Syrian refugees next year.
Even before details of the attackers’ backgrounds had emerged, GOP candidates were screaming that refugees from regions torn by the Islamic State be banned from the United States. Cable news pundits fueled the fire, speculating even before assault was over that the flow of migrants through Europe were connected to attack. By Monday, the backlash to the U.S. long tradition of accepting refugees was in full force and Congress was flirting with the idea of shutting down the government over Obama’s refugee plans.
There is much still to be learned about who conducted Friday’s attacks and how they did it. So far, the attackers who have been identified are nationals of European Union countries, though the names of a few attackers remain unknown. But here is a look at how the very uncertain and contradictory information emerging from the Paris attacks turned into a firestorm over Syrian refugees in America.
The important thing to understand is that Paris’ attacks didn’t occur in a vacuum |
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The Republican Jewish Coalition said the report serves as further proof that the Democratic Party is not the home for pro-Israeli voters.
“Americans learned first hand in 2012 that the Democratic Party is no longer the home for pro-Israel voters. In 2012 the convention booed pro-Israel resolutions,” RJC spokesman Mark McNulty told Jewish Insider. “Now in 2016, one of the Democrats’ options for President is intending to further erode and attack supporters of Israel within the Democratic Party through revisions to their platform. This should serve as further proof to the Pro-Israel community that they have one home, the Republican party, which stand unapologetically and unequivocally with Israel.”
The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) responded: “This year, Democrats will once again approve a platform that speaks to our commitment [to] a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. The alliance between our two great nations is essential to the national security interests of both and under a Democratic president in 2017 that partnership will grow even further. We will work together to continue to enhance Israel’s qualitative military edge, prevent a nuclear-armed Iran and pursue a two-state solution. In the meantime, Donald Trump has personally peddled in anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories and still – as a growing number of more reasonable Republican leaders are working against him – the Republican Jewish Coalition refuses to condemn Trump. At the very least, many of Trump’s foreign policy positions have been inconsistent and erratic, once promising to be “neutral” between Israelis and Palestinians. At this critical time, we urge the RJC to stand unapologetically and unequivocally in support of a strong, unshakeable U.S.-Israel alliance – unfortunately for them, that would involve rejecting their nominee.”
Likud MK Anat Berko told the Washington Post, “Please ask in my name Mr. Sanders why he’s not speaking about the denial by Iran of the Holocaust? The calling of Iran for the destruction of the state of Israel? Stoning in the streets of women? Of gays? To put the blame on Israel? You need to identify your enemy and if you don’t identify your enemy you’ve lost the battle.”
Sign up for Jewish Insider's curated Daily Kickoff newsletter here.It’s already known as ARTFLOP.
On Nov. 6, amid the kind of hype not seen since Michael Jackson floated a statue of himself down the Thames River, Lady Gaga released her third studio album, “ARTPOP.”
And not since Jackson has such a globally famous, white-hot pop star had such a rise and precipitous fall: “ARTPOP” is on track to lose $25 million for her label, Interscope, prompting rumors of imminent layoffs.
But it’s not just album sales. When Gaga opened this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, her performance was eclipsed by the twerking Miley Cyrus. Gaga’s work as both host and performer on a recent “Saturday Night Live” was underwhelming, and her recent ABC special, “Lady Gaga & The Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular,” had a dismal 0.9 rating among viewers ages 18 to 49, with just 3.6 million viewers total.
“That ‘Applause’ Gaga is hearing these days has been reduced to a polite golf-clap,” said The Wrap, referring to the title of her first single from the album.
Just five years ago, Lady Gaga exploded on the scene with her debut album, “The Fame.” She had an invented backstory as an art-school freak (in reality, she was a rich private-school graduate from the Upper West Side), a raft of witty, sophisticated pop songs and an ever-changing visual presentation that pulled from the greatest eccentrics of the 20th century, from Schiaparelli to Leigh Bowery — all thanks to a small, tightly knit team of stylists, collaborators and advisers that she called the “Haus of Gaga.”
“I don’t feel that I look like the other perfect little pop singers,” she told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I think I look new.” Indeed, Lady Gaga felt like the first pop star since David Bowie to approach every aspect of performance sideways. In a landscape populated by earnest, business-minded, on-brand idols like Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry, here was this glorious freak show with mass appeal, a kook with genuine talent.
And, as suddenly, it seems the public at large is now exhausted by Lady Gaga. Even she admits it: “People think I’m finished,” she told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in September.
What’s gone so wrong?
The inner circle flees
When Lady Gaga released “The Fame” in August 2008, she insisted the album — full of songs about boys and booze — was much deeper than the average pop record. It was, she said, a meta-commentary on a culture obsessed with celebrity as the ultimate validation, and the masses loved it all: “The Fame” ultimately sold more than 12 million copies.
“I operate from a place of delusion — that’s what ‘The Fame’ [is] all about. I used to walk down the street like I was a f–king star,” she told Rolling Stone. “I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be — and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.”
She credited the Haus of Gaga — her version, she said, of Warhol’s Factory — with engineering her rise. There was Troy Carter, the brilliant and loyal manager who signed her in 2007; Laurieann Gibson, her choreographer and creative director; and Nicola Formichetti, the visionary stylist who refined her catchall approach to eccentric dressing, turning her into a high-fashion obsession as well as a regular in tabloids, newspapers and gossip blogs. Within months, Gaga was the rare global superstar to toggle high and low.
“I don’t want to take any credit for Nicola’s work,” she told CNN in 2010. “He’s really, really an amazing designer; he’s an amazing creative.”
Formichetti quit this past summer. “I’ve done two albums with her, it’s been like five years, and you know... I cannot do it every day,” he told WWD. “She changes like five times a day; it’s insane.”
Formichetti’s absence is keenly felt; since he quit, Gaga’s looks have become crude, obvious, off-putting. Most recently, she wore a grotesque, disfiguring grill to the YouTube awards, turned her face into a Picasso-inspired funhouse reflection and wrapped herself up like a burn victim.
“She doesn’t know how to do this as well as [Formichetti] did,” says celebrity stylist Robert Verdi. “People think it’s just so stupid and easy to come up with a meat dress — but it’s such a unique way to approach branding talent. The synergy between the music and the way she presented herself actually lets people know how hard the styling was. I think she needs to find partners that understand her the way Nicola did. She’s falling short now — it’s hard to keep up at that level.”
In November 2011, Gaga also parted ways with choreographer Gibson. “No judgment, but it just got a little dark for me, creatively,” Gibson told “Entertainment Tonight Canada.”
The most shocking defection from Gaga’s camp came last month: Carter, the veteran manager who guided her ascent, quit less than a week before ARTPOP’s release. As Page Six reported, Gaga’s label was concerned that the record had no hits and asked her to tweak some of the tracks, or release the record as an EP. She declined, and Carter attempted to intervene, to no avail.
Gaga, according to one source, said she refused to “adulterate my art,” and Carter quit.
“I have a lot of experience in this area,” says one longtime label executive and producer. “Artists have a lot of help on their first albums, and they’re open to a lot of help, and they are very smart collaborators and make great work.”
Once that work results in great success, he says, the artist invariably believes they are solely responsible. “Time and again, they feel like they could have done it themselves, and if they had done it their way, it would have been even bigger,” he says. “So they jettison the people who helped them get where they are and hire people who are less powerful, who let them do what they want. I think that may be where Lady Gaga is.”
And without anyone formidable to guide her, Lady Gaga, for the first time in her career, seems culturally tone-deaf, releasing an album that’s ostensibly about modern art — a “reverse Warholian expedition,” as Gaga so loftily describes it — to a public that doesn’t care.
The release party, dubbed an “artRave,” was held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and included installations by Jeff Koons (who did her album cover), Marina Abramovic and Robert Wilson. Members of Gaga’s audience defaced several sculptures by Koons, whose “Balloon Dog (Orange)” just sold at Christie’s for $58.4 million.
Once a master at spectacle, her artRave entrance, strapped in a gargantuan hovercraft that lifted her about three feet into the air, fell flat. When she performed, she wept for no discernible reason. She declared the event was no mere record-release party, but about something larger than herself: “the youth of the world.” She did not elaborate. She then rambled about her struggles with sobriety and said that by collaborating with her, Koons was “giving a gift to young artists all over the world,” her convoluted logic belying self-congratulation.
“Never before,” said Pitchfork’s Amy Phillips, “have I felt more like I was living a scene from ‘Spinal Tap.’ ”
‘In a dangerous place’
Perhaps the best analogy to Lady Gaga’s trajectory is the rise and fall of the Showtime series “Homeland.”
When it debuted in late 2011, “Homeland” was a wild and unlikely hit, a thriller about a brilliant, bipolar CIA agent who falls in love with the Marine-turned-sleeper terrorist she’s tracking. Like Gaga, “Homeland” was a surprise: culturally relevant and super weird, electrifying in its warp-speed approach to burning through story.
But after that first season, it became clear that the writers had no idea where to take their narrative, and the show’s once-organic outrageousness curdled into patronizing gimmickry.
With her first record, Lady Gaga, too, burned through story — the outsider artist who crashed through popular culture, the “Mother Monster” to all the world’s freaks — and she clearly had no sense where to go next.
She spoke of addiction issues with pot and alcohol, but that narrative never gained traction — perhaps it was too pedestrian, or perhaps no one believed such a dogged careerist would ever lose that much control. Nor did her alleged hip injury, which put her out of commission for months, capture public sympathy or imagination. She didn’t even use it to go away — instead, she commissioned a gold wheelchair, and she began to feel like the guest who just wouldn’t leave.
“She had this incredible origin story emblematic of underdogs everywhere, but she’s no longer that,” says the exec. “She hasn’t found another thing that she can represent. She has to write another great story about where she is in her life — Eminem is really great at that. But when you come out and your new single is called ‘Applause’ and it’s about how you need it — you have to be about more than that.”
The most critical problem, says the exec, is quality control. None of the singles Gaga has released since “The Fame” has reached the same level of critical and commercial success. “I don’t think she’s made groundbreaking music since her first record,” he says. “It’s not enough to be a larger-than-life personality and have marketing muscle behind you.”
With her second release, 2010’s “Born This Way,” Gaga — devoid of the humor that made her so refreshing, that rare famous person in on the joke — began sounding as self-serious and delusional as Kanye West. “This album is the greatest of my career,” she said, calling herself the “voice of our generation” and predicting that “in 20 years, [this record] will be seen as my iconic moment.”
Instead, “Born This Way” was roundly criticized for blatantly ripping off Madonna’s “Express Yourself” on the title track, and for songs that were “thin” (Boston Globe), “boring” (Washington Post) and more concerned with “trite sloganeering” (Village Voice) than the witty lyricism she displayed on “The Fame.”
Her great friend Elton John, who named Gaga godmother to his two children, went public with his concern in September. “I’d like to be able to talk to her right now, but I can’t get through to her,” he said. “And there are times when you have to listen. When your persona begins to take over your music and becomes more important... [when] you have people around you who don’t question you, you’re in a dangerous place.”
They have since made up, as famous people do, on Gaga’s primetime holiday special.
So how does Lady Gaga reclaim her status — if not above, than among — the Taylors and Katys and Mileys? “Lady Gaga has set the bar very, very high for herself,” says the exec. “If her goal is to be more outrageous than she was before — I don’t know that she can surpass it. What she can do? Write a great song.”Vancouver Canucks forward Derek Dorsett has already locked up his 5th 150+ penalty minute season and is on pace to lead the league after finishing third last year (he also led the league in PIM in 2011-12). That would also make a Canuck the champ in that inglorious category for the 2nd time in three years, as Tom Sestito took the crown back in 2013-14 with 213 PIM.
However, fighters in the NHL have fallen from vulnerable to critically endangered, and with the role all but gone in today’s league, it time for the Canucks to follow suit and cut all ties with bottom-six wingers with little value other than their innate ability to hit others in the face.
Derek Dorsett: The Last Canucks Figther
Vancouver has a long history of knuckle-dusters, including most notably Dave “Tiger” Williams, the NHL’s all-time penalty minute king who managed a jaw-dropping 1324 PIM in just 388 games with the club (as well as some fantastic goal celebrations, no it’s not the one you’re thinking of), and franchise leader Gino Odjick, perhaps the most feared man to ever wear a Canucks jersey, who spent 2127 minutes in the box over 444 games in Vancouver.
Since the 2005 NHL lockout, the Canucks have had a number of colorful characters filling the tough-guy role, starting with Jeff Cowan (who was the recipient of a very unusual form of adulation), Shane O’Brien (the rarer defenseman enforcer), Darcy Hordichuk (undersized, but would take on all comers), and Rick Rypien (who is still adored in Vancouver since his passing).
However, as the team rose in the standings to become a contender, their need for an enforcer gradually diminished, and the “superpests” found a more prominent place in the lineup instead. Included on that list would be the likes of Ryan Kesler, Raffi Torres, Alex Burrows, and Maxim Lapierre (a list which could be much longer, depending on which fan base you asked).
The difference of course was that Kesler, Torres, Burrows and Lapierre could actually put the puck in the net, while still racking up fairly high penalty minute totals and just generally driving other teams batty. Though near universally considered dirty players who crossed the line more than once, they still brought more to the table than the typical enforcer in terms of offense, and even special teams ability.
Following the loss in the 2011 Stanley Cup Final and unceremonious exit from the 2011-12 playoffs, the team began to carry a fighter again, first Sestito, followed shortly after by Dorsett and Brandon Prust, to continue the long, storied tradition of Canucks fighters. However, Dorsett looks poised to be the last.
There is no debate that many observers around the NHL have soured on fighting, and it’s not hard to see why. Living in what could humorously be described as a “non-traditional hockey market,” a number of people with literally no idea about hockey have asked me about the game, and the first question is always: “Why do they let the players fight?”
I tell them of course that fighting has played a large role in the game for many years. I tell them fighting serves a purpose, by allowing players to “police the game.” I tell them that fighters protect their teams’ best players. I tell them that fighting is an intimidation tactic and a way to swing the momentum of a game. I tell them it’s entertaining for the fans and a way to carve out a career for a player who maybe lacks a number of the other skills needed to be a professional hockey player at the top level.
I also tell them that fighting has no place in the modern game. Not anymore. And not just because of the potentially injurious nature of fighting, but also because the league has become so fast, so skilled, that leaving a roster spot open for a player who spends more time in the penalty box than on the ice is akin to shooting one’s self in the foot.
So how much longer can the Canucks keep a fighter on the roster?
To be fair, it seems as though management may have finally wised up in this regard. Prust, he of 40 career goals and more than 1000 PIM, was waived back in February, ostensibly to make room for younger players, as General Manager Jim Benning stated, but also because Prust had been, for lack of a better word, abhorrent for the Canucks through his first 35 games with the club, netting just one goal and posting some of the worst possession numbers on the team (and also likely because Benning was unsurprisingly unable to find a willing trade partner).
2-of-2: “This decision was based on the need to provide more opportunity for our younger players. We appreciate Brandon’s contributions.” — Vancouver Canucks (@VanCanucks) February 2, 2016
However, the move by Benning to cut ties with Prust may not be entirely indicative of the Canucks boss’ philosophy on fighting.
Heading into the summer of 2015, Benning made one of his most dismaying moves for Canucks fans since he took the job, inking Dorsett to a four-year contract worth $2.65 million per season after a year in which he netted 25 points and 175 PIM in 79 games.
So far this season, Dorsett has rewarded his boss with four goals, 12 points, and a 46.27 CF% through 67 games. His points per 60 is 0.83, which is around 500th in the NHL, while he’s also averaging $258,000 (real dollars, not cap hit) per point.
You can’t see it in the gif, but Derek Dorsett is providing leadership as he loses his man. pic.twitter.com/tcI2DyMrXl — Wyatt Arndt (@TheStanchion) March 26, 2016
The intention here isn’t to dump on Dorsett, who by all accounts is a great guy off the ice and a leader in the room, something the Canucks sorely need, but it’s clear that what he brings to the team on the ice isn’t helping the team move forward.
Regardless of Dorsett’s performance, or anyone else who might fill it, the role has become superfluous anyways. With the NHL’s transition from a role-based league to one where all four lines are expected to bring speed, offense, and two-way ability, there simply isn’t room for a player of Dorsett’s ilk in the NHL anymore.
So for Canucks fans who love a good old fashioned scrap, enjoy Dorsett while you can, as he will be the last Canucks fighter.
Main Photo:Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco quickly came to a realization Sunday night while trailing the New England Patriots at halftime of the AFC championship game. It was a realization shared by coach John Harbaugh.
Flacco was adamant in his belief that the AFC North champions needed to become much more aggressive in the passing game.
During the second half of a 28-13 victory that propelled them to the Super Bowl, the Ravens attacked the Patriots' secondary as Flacco delivered three second-half touchdown passes.
"We came in at halftime and realized that we would probably have to [open it up] a little bit," said Flacco, who completed just 6 of 12 passes for 81 yards in the first half as the Ravens fell behind, 13-7. "John came over and said, 'Listen, we didn't come all of this way to play it safe and hope to win the football game.' We had nothing to lose and we went up there to win that game. That's what we did in the second half. Guys made plays, and it worked out really well."
In the second half, Flacco connected on touchdown passes of 3 and 11 yards to wide receiver Anquan Boldin, as well as a 5-yard scoring toss to tight end Dennis Pitta.
Flacco completed 15 of 24 passes for 159 yards in the second half, liberally targeting a Patriots secondary missing its top cover cornerback once Aqib Talib left the game in the first half with a hamstring injury.
The Ravens utilized more three wide receiver sets after halftime.
"I think we wanted to put that pressure on them, and that's a good personnel group for us," Flacco said. "We were able to get some matchups inside on some linebackers that helped us move the ball down the field at times. Anquan was able to come up with some big catches.
"We talked about it before the playoffs began. We don't have anything to lose. We have to go out there and lay it all out on the line. We may not win like that, but it's the only chance we're giving ourselves. I think we have put ourselves in a good position now."
Harbaugh indicated that Flacco has significant input into the offensive strategy.
"We had a pretty good idea of what Joe wanted to do," Harbaugh said. "So, I think it was music to his ears. Joe's involved in what we do. He had a lot of check-with-me's throughout the course of the game."
Pollard wants Brady punished
Ravens strong safety Bernard Pollard has a strong opinion about Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady and his actions Sunday night.
He thinks Brady should be punished by the NFL for lifting his right leg and striking Ravens free safety Ed Reed in the leg while sliding as the veteran defensive back slowed down to avoid hitting Brady. Quarterbacks are protected from being hit under the NFL rule book when they go to the ground and slide.
"He knew what he was doing," Pollard said. "So, I'm the type of player it has to go both ways. It really does. It has to go both ways. Hopefully, the NFL will do something about it. If they don't, that's fine. If they do, that's fine.
"We all know emotions are on the field. We're going to say things. We're going to do things. If you want to keep the game clean, if you want to keep this thing going in the right direction, everybody needs to be penalized for their actions."
Harbaugh weighed in on the play, too.
"I saw the same thing everybody saw, so that would be in the league's hands," Harbaugh said. "It's pretty straightforward what happened. I'm going to leave it up to you guys to make those evaluations and to the league to make that evaluation."
Relatively healthy
Emerging unscathed with no serious injuries sustained Sunday, the Ravens appear to be relatively healthy heading into the Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers.
The Ravens reported no new injuries.
Left offensive tackle Bryant McKinnie was noticeably limping after the game, but didn't miss any time in the game and should be fine for the Ravens' matchup against the San Francisco 49ers in New Orleans at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
"We got through very healthy, nothing major," Harbaugh said. "That should clear that up for the next two weeks."
Despite a bone bruise in his right knee, rookie running back Bernard Pierce averaged 5.8 yards per carry with 52 yards on nine runs.
"I think I played well," said Pierce, adding that he didn't aggravate the injury. "I had a couple nice runs, I had a couple nice blocks. I wanted to make sure I helped my team in any possible way I could. I was fine. I pushed through it, that's all that matters. And we're in the Super Bowl."
Big hit redux20th Anniversary: Forth data structures
Jack Woehr
Jack WoehrOctober 06, 2008
The following article first appeared in the September 1989 issue of Embedded Systems Programming magazine.
Whenever I hear some lout claim that Forth code is unreadable, I'm reminded of the tourist who, on returning from Paris, marveled at the French: "Their children are so smart! Why, even the youngest already speak French!" To the Forth programmer, mathematical expressions using reverse Polish notation are no odder than reading right to left is to an Arab; stack-based parameter passing is no stranger than case declension is to a speaker of Czech or Polish.
Having said all that, I must confess that Forth code isn't always as readable as it could be. Often what makes Forth seem incomprehensible is not the language itself but a programmer's poorly factored code or poorly conceptualized data structures. The latter is especially true of Forth programs for control applications. It doesn't have to be this way, of course, and to prove it I'll be presenting several examples of data-structure conceptualization.
All the examples discussed here follow the Forth 83-Standard, with particular reference to the "vanilla" Laxen and Perry F83 public-domain Forth system unless otherwise noted. I'll presume the reader has a working knowledge of Forth and knows about the CONSTANT and VARIABLE words as well as the CREATE...DOES> construct. As we'll be using examples from control applications, an occasional PC@ or PC! is thrown in to fetch and store bytes in the Intel 808x I/O space.
Real-world nightmares
A few years back I did some consulting for an automotive equipment engineer who had left the shelter of the corporate world for the perils of private entrepreneurship. He had built a marvelously inexpensive and useful piece of automotive repair equipment, then mastered the trigonometric calculations necessary to achieve the desired results. After teaching himself assembly language and beginning to write the program, he switched to Forth to increase his personal productivity. He finally decided to hire a full-time Forth consultant to complete his masterpiece, which was "beginning to be difficult." When we began factoring the code, I saw that the program had indeed become difficult; it started out with 10 screens of variable declarations!
2 CONSTANT CELL \ 16-bit processor : CELLS ( n1 --- n2) CELL * ;
and a word that can create other words:
: ARRAY ( #cell-entries ---) CREATE CELLS ALLOT DOES> ( index --- address) SWAP CELLS + ;
We then created the array and its access methods:
4 CONSTANT #FORCES 0 CONSTANT LEFT 1 CONSTANT RIGHT 2 CONSTANT UP 3 CONSTANT DOWN#FORCES ARRAY FORCE
Note that we used symbolic constants in place of numeric literals, even at the level of the number of elements we're going to declare in our array. This practice ensures that future modifications to the program entail simply changing a few constant declarations rather than hunting through the code for a specific occurrence of a number.(CNN) It's easy -- and obvious -- to focus on the high-profile ways in which Donald Trump is remaking American government and, by extension, American culture: His appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, his tax cut plan, his tweeting -- to name three.
And, those things clearly matter. Gorsuch will be on the nation's highest court for life. The tax plan, which Republicans are expected to pass through both chambers of Congress this week, will fundamentally alter the nation's tax structure. Trump's tweeting -- and retweeting -- is changing the way in which a president interacts with the country and the words and images he uses to do it.
But, we know about all of those changes because they are right in front of our faces. What we know far less about -- but are no less important in the structural reshaping of the federal bureaucracy and the populace more broadly -- is how Trumpism is being felt in the myriad federal agencies that are simply not on the national radar.
Take, for example, the reporting by the Washington Post over the weekend that the Centers for Disease Control have been warned not to use 7 hot-button words in future budget proposals. The banned words, you ask? "Diversity," "fetus," "transgender," "vulnerable," "entitlement," "science-based" and "evidence-based."
The Department of Health and Human Services insisted there was no "banned words" list, with spokesman Matt Lloyd adding: "HHS will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans. HHS also strongly encourages the use of outcome and evidence data in program evaluations and budget decisions."
Read MoreUS bombers and fighter jets fly off North Korea coast
US bombers and fighter jets fly off North Korea coast
Last week, US Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers flew with F-35B fighter jets over North Korea coast
US Air Force bombers and fighter jets have flown off North Korea's coast in what the Pentagon has called a "clear message".
The fleet of B-1B Lancer bombers was escorted by the F-15C fighter jets over international waters on Saturday.
The Pentagon called it an attempt to demonstrate the range of military options available to President Donald Trump.
It is also the farthest north of the country's Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that any US military plane has flown over in the 21st century.
Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said it underscores "the seriousness with which we take North Korea's reckless behaviour".
North Korea responds to Trump threats
This isn't the first demonstration of force from the US military in recent weeks.
Last week, Sky News joined troops from the 2nd Infantry Division of the US Eighth Army, the country's major ground combat unit on the Korean Peninsula, for their "Warrior Strike" operation.
The US and South Korea are currently conducting a series of joint drills close to the Korean border.
Pyongyang routinely describes these drills as acts of aggression and rehearsal for invasion.
Saturday's jet patrol comes after officials and experts concluded a small earthquake registered near North Korea's nuclear test site was likely not man-made.
Image: The tremor was detected near where North Korea recently conducted a nuclear test
There were fears Pyongyang could have exploded another nuclear bomb just weeks after its last one.
When the tremors were first reported earlier, China said it believed they may have been caused by an explosion.
But the country's monitoring centre later went on to say the magnitude 3.4 quake was not the result of a fresh missile test.
The flight demonstration follows a week of tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, with Mr Trump calling the North Korean leader a madman", and Kim Jong Un dubbing the US President a "mentally deranged dotard".CES 2012 Victorinox is making a Swiss Army penknife with a 1TB USB stick inside it, claiming it's the world's highest USB stick capacity.
It's being shown at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. You can either buy the stick on its own – the airline-friendly version swings out from a standard-looking Swiss Army penknife container, coloured red or black – or you can get one with a pair of scissors and a knife... but don't expect to get that through airport security.
It has been running the product line for some years; there was a 1GB version in 2008, meaning a 1,000X capacity improvement in four years.
It can be accessed via USB 2.0 and 3.0 or eSATA, and has a 48 x 96 dot monochrome LCD display showing enough text for a device label or some indicator of the drive's contents. It also has AES 256-bit encryption.
On a separate note, just how small can a PC be these days? You could probably get an acceptable CPU, support chips, DRAM and SSD on a motherboard the size of a matchbox. With a keyboard and screen a basic design decision would be whether to stick the little sucker inside the keyboard or the screen enclosure.
Could you get rid of the mechanical keyboard without compromising the screen display area? You could have a clamshell tablet with two screens. One would display a soft keyboard and the other be the main display screen with, say, half the keyboard screen available as well.
Capacities range from 640GB up to the 1TB level and you will pay $470 for the 640GB one and – wait for it and get a tissue handy – an eye-watering $2,000 or so for a 1TB product. Save up your cash to buy one in April when they should be available. ®NJ Transit commuters should brace themselves for possible fare hikes of 25 percent or more in addition to service cuts, a transit advocate warns, as the agency struggles to close an $80 million budget gap.
And while NJ Transit officials insist a fare increase would be lower than 2010's fare hike and is on the table only as a "last resort," the last time the agency faced an $80 million budget gap, in 1981, it jacked fares by 50 percent over three years and introduced significant service cutbacks.
"It's a safe assumption it will be greater than 25 percent by the amount of revenue needed to fill the hole," said Veronica Vanterpool, Tri-State Transportation Campaign executive director. "The funding structure for NJ Transit is broken. What we need is a new funding structure."
Other factors that could affect a fare increase include the cost to settle expired contracts with 20 unions, which make up more than 9,000 of NJ Transit's 11,000 employees. Many of those contracts expired five and six years ago. However, any fare increase under consideration will include those contract costs, said Nancy Snyder, an NJ Transit spokeswoman.
"We recognize the 2010 fare adjustment was a serious burden on customers," Snyder said. "We would not repeat that level of adjustment, which was required because of years of refusing to make tough choices including retraining costs and adjusting fares to meet needs."
NJ Transit officials confirmed last week that they are considering a fare increase and service reductions to deal with the $80 million hole after Gov. Chris Christie proposed a fiscal year 2016 budget that reduces transportation funding by 8.4 percent.
That announcement was followed by the hiring of Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak as the agency's director of policy and strategic planning, a job created for him that pays $147,400. NJ Transit officials said that new position was funded from vacant unfilled positions.
Nearly 1,100 NJ Transit employees earned more than $100,000 last year, the Asbury Park Press reported this week.
The last fare increase, a 22 percent fare hike in 2010, brought in an extra $115 million. Eliminating off-peak and 10-trip bus ticket discounts, the equivalent of a 46 percent fare increase for non-peak riders, generated another $11.3 million. Another $13.9 million was saved through a 4 percent reduction in service.
Those increases took effect in May 2010 in an effort to close a then $300 million gap.
"If the prior increase yielded $115 million, it would still require an across-the-board fare increase of more than 15 percent to close a gap of $80 million," said David Peter Alan, Lackawanna Commuter Coalition president. That doesn't, however, factor in the cost to settle the expired employee contracts.
In addition to making service improvements, NJ Transit officials are "identifying more than $40 million in budget savings and reductions before considering any fare increase as a last resort," Snyder said.
GOT QUESTIONS? Ticked off about mass transit? Wondering about road construction? E-mail your questions to Ticked off about mass transit? Wondering about road construction? E-mail your questions to NJ.com's transportation expert Larry Higgs. He'll answer your questions in an upcoming online feature. You can also Tweet @CommutingLarry
But that doesn't mean a fare hike is off the table.
"As we are developing options for the Governor's consideration to help us close a budget gap, we will be putting everything on the table, including fare and service adjustments," Snyder said.
The $80 million budget gap is due to increasing costs, which have been rising for the last five years and continue to rise, Snyder said. She cited health insurance, workers compensation, pension and other benefit costs which are up this year, in addition to expenses for transportation and other contracts.
If the budget gap explanation sounds familiar to long time commuters, that's because budget gaps were the official reasons for fare increases in 2002, to close a $200 million shortfall, and in 2010, to close a $300 million hole and cover increased operating expenses.
To ease the blow to riders, some advocates suggested NJ Transit could phase in a fare increase over several years. An annual 3 percent increase, phased in over three years was suggested by Les Wolff, a New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers director.
"Remember, the PATH planned a $1 fare increase, but did it a quarter at a time," Alan said. PATH increased fares in 2011, but took the increase over three years to the current $2.75 per trip fare.
Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Fringe Preview: Back to Where You've Never Been By Jesse Carp Random Article Blend Fringe. And not just for the universe crossing characters on the show but for the show itself. Ever since the |
still have their "meat" and be vegan at the same time, if they make the decision to do so.
Sea Shepherd even has vegan chefs that would gladly be advisors to Greenpeace. Three of them have published their own vegan cookbooks.
"You really can't be a credible environmentalist if you consume products from the animal agriculture industry." - Captain Paul Watson
Sea Shepherd does not demand that all crew must be vegans but we do expect all crew to be vegan while serving on the ships.
Some 40% of the fish removed from the sea by commercial fisheries are fed to domesticated animals in the form of fish meal. Chickens on factory farms now eat more fish than all the albatross in the Ocean. Pigs, chickens, cows, domesticated salmon and housecats have now become the largest group of marine predators on the planet.
Animal agriculture is the largest contributing factor in producing greenhouse gases and thus a major contributor to climate change. Animal agriculture is the largest source of groundwater pollution and dead zones in the Ocean.
A person has to be in wilful denial to not see the connections and the reality is that you really can't be a credible environmentalist if you consume products from the animal agriculture industry.
Greenpeace opposes the oil industry yet the reality is that animal agriculture contributes more to producing greenhouse gases than the entire transportation industry.
It is not just Greenpeace. Most of the large environmental organizations do not see the connection or refuse to do so.
For example, I was a national director of the Sierra Club from 2003 to 2006 and was appalled at how hostile the Sierra Club was to vegetarianism. At my very first Sierra Club meeting in Billings, Montana in 2003 we were served buffalo burgers and antelope steak. The high point for many directors of each meeting was the culinary expectations of the dinner in each region. Lobster in Boston, Blue Crabs in Charleston, Steak in Albuquerque etc.
Four of the 15 directors were vegans and in response to our complaints we were begrudgingly served a token vegetarian meal at the dinners and it was almost always the same thing - a Portobello mushroom dish with white rice. Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club made it very clear that vegetarians were not welcome.
By the time I resigned from the Sierra Club, I was referring to it as the Siesta Conversation and Gourmet Club. I resigned because they were sponsoring an essay contest with the subject, "Why I like to hunt?"
"Animal agriculture is the largest source of groundwater pollution and dead zones in the Ocean." - Captain Paul Watson
Back to Greenpeace and their contradictions.
How many more years will Greenpeace continue to review their internal policy on meat consumption?
Veganism and vegetarianism is becoming more popular each year and I assume at some point Greenpeace will be forced to change but it looks like they will do so while kicking and screaming.
They refused to be interviewed for the documentary film Cowspiracy. They refuse to support the argument that meat consumption is a major contributor to climate change despite the United Nations stating very clearly that it is.
The powers that be in the Greenpeace administration are not stupid - they see the contradictions. However their fear is the same as that once expressed to me by Carl Pope and the Sierra Club - the fear of losing donations because the majority of the population, at least in the developed world, eat meat. They see veganism as a radical and dangerous idea to promote and their research convinced them they would lose some support from their existing base.
Greenpeace last year raised some $400 million in donations compared to Sea Shepherd raising around $12 million.
Despite this huge difference in income, Sea Shepherd has nine ships at sea actually doing continuous campaigns and with an average of 100 volunteer crew at any given time. Greenpeace has three ships and much fewer campaigns and far fewer active sea-going volunteers.
Sea Shepherd simply does not make decisions by what is popular or politically correct. Sea Shepherd decisions are based on what is ecologically and ethically correct.
We have had people tell us they refuse to contribute to us because of our vegan policy. We have had people tell us they cannot crew with us because of our vegan policies. Our response is okay, that is your decision, but we have no intention of compromising our values for your donations.
What we have discovered with Sea Shepherd is that a vegan diet can sustain our crew in the harshest environments. We have sent our ships to every sea on the planet from Antarctica to the Arctic, and on voyages that last as long as five months. The incredible vegan cooks on the ships have kept the crews well fed and most importantly, happily well fed.
Sea Shepherd has demonstrated that a vegan diet works very well at sea and there can be no practical excuses to not incorporate a more ecological, and a more ethical regimen.
Sea Shepherd has not only established an example for Greenpeace, we have proven that it can be easily implemented.
Greenpeace likes to promote themselves as non-violent while insinuating and sometimes blatantly accusing Sea Shepherd of violence. However the reality is that Sea Shepherd is much more non-violent than Greenpeace. Yes, we are aggressive and we can be intimidating but we have never caused an injury to any person nor suffered any serious injuries to our crew. Greenpeace has suffered serious injuries and even two deaths.
But what makes Sea Shepherd the more non-violent of the two organizations is that not a single animal has had to die for decades to feed the Sea Shepherd crew, not a single fish, chicken, cow, pig, lamb, or anything else.
Additionally Sea Shepherd's carbon footprint has been significantly lower than Greenpeace despite having three times the number of ships.
"Animal agriculture contributes more to producing greenhouse gases than the entire transportation industry." - Captain Paul Watson
Veganism is the most ecologically positive lifestyle for humanity and the evidence is abundantly clear in supporting this fact.
I am not really sure how much more evidence Greenpeace needs in their on-going review of their policy on meat consumption. They state right at the beginning that they consider this to be an important question yet for more than forty years they have not implemented a policy change on board their ships.
In the BBC documentary Battleship Antarctica the cook on the Esperanza boasted that she had 700 kilos of meat on board for the crew. That's a huge carbon footprint and represents the death of a large number of animals on a campaign to protect a relatively fewer number of animals.
When Sea Shepherd saves a whale or a seal, a turtle or a shark, we want to do so without sacrificing the life of another animal. Otherwise the contradiction is exceptionally disturbing unless one willfully chooses to deny the hypocrisy of the situation.
Therefore, as a co-founder of Greenpeace, my message to Greenpeace today is a simple one: It's been a long time for reviewing this important issue, a very long time. When will the decision be made to change this policy or will this internal review process be doomed to eternal review and continued denial?
Greenpeace needs to convert their ships to veganism, or at the very least to vegetarianism.Depending on circumstances, use different lifestyles that improve one or another mental function.
Experience euphoria without drugs and come up with new ideas, when needed.
Slow down and prevent yourself from making rash, impulsive decisions, when necessary.
Sharpen your wit, become more talkative, and entertain people.
When necessary, lower your mood and increase emotional tension, which can reduce procrastination.
Increase your score on intelligence or general aptitude tests.
Concentrate on reading and writing for many hours daily.
Increase your grade point average if you are a student or improve your job productivity if you are a knowledge worker.
*** Updated in February 2019 ***A shorter, less technical version of this book, "Become Smarter," is available:amazon.com/dp/B00CNUKV22The book describes methods for improvement of mental abilities. Some of the things it can help you to achieve include the following:The proposed methods are brief cooling or heating of the body (water therapy) and three "smart diets," each suitable for a different type of task. The text also describes a "depressant diet," which is not a smart diet but can improve self-control and sleep. Readers don't need to use the strict diets on a permanent basis and the book recommends the conventional food pyramid most of the time. The text also discusses several useful social skills and studying/writing techniques as well as the role of luck in personal achievement.Most authors in this field will tell you that you should read more books, solve mental puzzles, buy their nutritional supplements, sleep well, and exercise in order to get smarter. In contrast, this book is proposing moderately cold hydrotherapy and a smart diet (which involves avoiding all dietary supplements). To give another example, most books on anger management say that you should try to change your thinking in order to overcome anger, while this book suggests hot hydrotherapy and the exclusion of certain foods from your diet. The main focus of discussion in this text is on changing the biological workings of the brain, not on pop psychology. In particular, the book describes various combinations of diets and hydrotherapy that have the following effects: sedative/sleep-promoting, stimulant/wakefulness-promoting, attention-enhancing, antianxiety, antidepressant, mood-stabilizing (mood-lowering), neuroleptic, and euphoriant. In addition, the book presents existing scientific evidence of pain-reducing, fever-reducing, antifatigue, immunostimulatory, antinausea, antihypertensive and anti-inflammatory effects of hydrotherapy. The text also discusses the possible side effects of the diets and hydrotherapy.Despite its technical content, the book is written in an accessible language and has an informative summary for each chapter and a list of key points at the end of each section. Most of the claims in the bulleted list above are supported with a theory and the author's personal experience (a healthy subject). About a half of these claims is directly supported by previously published scientific studies, including the claim about intelligence tests.Look on the bright side: Over 100 people turn up to theme park wearing'morphsuits', but still fail to break bizarre world record
More than a hundred people brightened up a gloomy day in Staffordshire, donning'morphsuits' to a theme park in a bid to break a world record.
The hordes turned out at Drayton Manor Theme Park, near Tamworth, in an effort to break the bizarre world record for the most people gathered in one place wearing morphsuits.
The all-in-one Lycra suits, costing around £30, completely cover the wearer but still allow them to see.
Walk in the park: More than a hundred people brightened up a gloomy day in Staffordshire, donning'morphsuits' to a theme park in a bid to break a bizarre world record
I can see you! A morphsuit wearer takes a picture at Drayton Manor Park where park organisers were trying to get more than 250 people wearing morphsuits together in an attempt to break the world record
Taking it easy: The all-in-one Lycra suits cost around £30. They completely cover the wearer but still allow them to see
Good effort: Despite a campaign on Facebook, prompting 114 people to turn up despite gloomy weather, the current record of 250 people wearing morphsuits in one place was not broken
But despite a campaign on Facebook, prompting 114 people to turn up despite gloomy weather, the current record of 250 people was not broken.
Organisers said after the attempt the 'Morphs' made their way to the park's thrill rides for an afternoon of fun.
Colin Bryan, the park's managing director, said: 'Morphsuits are so popular at different events and locations that we wanted to give fans the opportunity to get together as a big group at Drayton Manor.
Spectacle: They may not have broken the world record, but Organisers said after the attempt the 'Morphs' made their way to the park's thrill rides for an afternoon of fun
On the bright side: Despite the rain, the Morphs made the most of their afternoon at the park, starting a colourful conga at one stage
Keeping up appearances: Let's hope these Morphs brought a change of clothes for the journey home
'The turnout was amazing and it was quite a sight to behold, especially as a lot of people were wearing blue, red and yellow suits, the colour of Drayton Manor's logo.
'It's been a wonderful atmosphere, people really enjoying themselves and it was fantastic to see big groups of brightly coloured Morphs whizzing around on the rides!'
Drayton Mannor had tried to encourage people to attend the world record attempt by offering free admission to the park for those who wore the colours of the park's logo.
Pride and joy! This couple seem to be enjoying themselves in spite of the failed world record attempt
Bizarre: Some Morphs chose to complete their weird and wonderful look with wigs and other accessoriesAt least five dead in suicide attack in Libya's Misrata, and more than 20 wounded at a court complex in the Libyan city.
Libyan media sources reported that ISIS militants conducted a double suicide bombing in Misrata. ISIS has claimed the attack in the Libyan city of Misrata, the militant group's news agency Amaq said.
It said fighters loyal to the group had attacked a court building in the city where shooting and an explosion were reported.
Suicide attack in Libya's Misrata. (Supplied)
The sources said a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest inside the building, which is in the centre of Misrata, a coastal city about 200 kilometres (125 miles) east of Tripoli.
The damage caused by a suicide attack was carried out by two terrorists, reported Libya Al Aan.
Security source Ali al-Ghubaini, said two terrorists blew themselves up following a clash with members of the security in the city, reported Al Arabiya.
Al-Ghubaini added on his facebook page, that the two explosions resulted in minor injuries among police officers, and the clashes are still ongoing.
Suicide attack in Libya's Misrata. (Supplied)
A witness said he believed the attackers had used rocket propelled grenades, and that their identity was not clear.
Local media reported earlier gunfire and an explosion.
Suicide attack in Libya's Misrata. (Supplied)
Suicide attack in Libya's Misrata. (Supplied)
According to local media reports, the bombings and clashes have killed five people, including court employees and injured dozens of others, as these clashes continue in the courtyard surrounding the court complex.
The pictures, which were circulating on social media showed the effects of the bombings on the courthouse and the vehicles parked in its vicinity.
A medical source from Misrata Central Hospital told Al Arabiya that the health sector in the city is in a state of maximum alert, calling on the people to donate blood, as many victims have serious injuries.
(With Reuters and AFP)
Last Update: Wednesday, 4 October 2017 KSA 16:13 - GMT 13:13Cooperatively breeding animals live in social groups in which some individuals help to raise the offspring of others, often at the expense of their own reproduction. Kin selection—when individuals increase their inclusive fitness by aiding genetic relatives—is a powerful explanation for the evolution of cooperative breeding, particularly because most groups consist of family members. However, recent molecular studies have revealed that many cooperative groups also contain unrelated immigrants, and the processes responsible for the formation and maintenance of non-kin coalitions are receiving increasing attention. Here, I provide the first systematic review of group structure for all 213 species of cooperatively breeding birds for which data are available. Although the majority of species (55%) nest in nuclear family groups, cooperative breeding by unrelated individuals is more common than previously recognized: 30% nest in mixed groups of relatives and non-relatives, and 15% nest primarily with non-relatives. Obligate cooperative breeders are far more likely to breed with non-kin than are facultative cooperators, indicating that when constraints on independent breeding are sufficiently severe, the direct benefits of group membership can substitute for potential kin-selected benefits. I review three patterns of dispersal that give rise to social groups with low genetic relatedness, and I discuss the selective pressures that favour the formation of such groups. Although kin selection has undoubtedly been crucial to the origin of most avian social systems, direct benefits have subsequently come to play a predominant role in some societies, allowing cooperation to persist despite low genetic relatedness.
1. Introduction
Approximately 9% of the world's bird species breed in cooperative groups in which several individuals provide parental care to a single clutch of offspring [1]. In the majority of these cases, cooperative groups form when offspring from one brood remain on their natal territory to help raise younger relatives. Nesting groups are therefore primarily composed of family members, and non-breeding ‘helpers’ gain indirect fitness benefits by caring for non-descendent kin. In combination with ecological constraints on independent breeding, such as scarce mates or nesting sites, kin selection provides a powerful explanation as to why cooperatively breeding groups are typically composed of relatives (reviewed in [2,3]).
Social systems composed of unrelated individuals are rarer and more difficult to explain because kin selection cannot maintain their cooperative interactions. Classic avian examples include dunnocks, which nest in polygamous groups with several unrelated co-breeders [4], and pied kingfishers, which have both related and unrelated helpers at the nest [5,6]. However, recent molecular studies, particularly in Australia, Madagascar and the Neotropics, have uncovered a much broader diversity of cooperative breeding systems that involve complex alliances of relatives and non-relatives [7–9]. These cases raise intriguing evolutionary questions that are just beginning to be addressed. How do unrelated individuals assemble into stable social groups? Are these groups maintained by sexual conflict, mutual benefits, or a combination of both? Do societies of non-relatives share common evolutionary origins with kin-based societies, or have they arisen independently?
Despite increasing interest in—and controversy over—the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain non-kin cooperative breeding, its occurrence has not been systematically reviewed. Here, I provide the first survey of kin structure for cooperatively breeding birds based on the empirical literature. Data on genetic relationships among group members, drawn from either molecular genotyping or colour-ringing studies, were available for 213 species (approximately half of the 406 species that have been confirmed to be regular cooperative breeders). Cooperative breeding by unrelated individuals is surprisingly common: even under the most conservative estimate, 44% of species nest in social groups that regularly include unrelated adult helpers or co-breeders. Next, I identify three patterns of dispersal, recruitment and mortality that give rise to social groups with low genetic relatedness. Third, I review the selective pressures that favour the evolution of non-kin cooperation, arguing that in some circumstances, the direct fitness benefits of group membership—including increased survival, access to extra-pair copulations and future breeding opportunities—can equal or exceed the potential indirect fitness benefits derived from staying with kin. Finally, I discuss recent hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of non-kin cooperative breeding. The evidence discussed in this review suggests that non-kin cooperative breeding has arisen several times along separate evolutionary trajectories. In many cases, social groups with low genetic relatedness have evolved from lineages with a phylogenetic history of kin-based cooperation.
2. How common is cooperative breeding by unrelated individuals?
To estimate the occurrence of non-kin cooperative breeding, I used Cockburn's [1] review of avian parental care systems for all 9456 extant bird species. He classified 852 species as cooperative breeders, of which 390 species were suspected or inferred to be cooperative based on phylogenetic relationships. For all 852 species on this initial list, I searched the primary literature for information on the mating system and genetic relatedness of members of breeding groups. Data were available to describe the composition of breeding groups for 213 species, approximately 52% of the total (n = 406) for which cooperative breeding was confirmed to be a regular occurrence (see electronic supplementary material, table S1).
Cooperative species were broadly distributed into two groups with different social systems: those in which breeding was monopolized by a dominant pair and aided by non-breeding helpers (pair nesting), and those in which more than two breeding adults formed stable social groups and shared reproduction in a single clutch, with or without non-breeding helpers (cooperative polygamy). These two categories represent extremes of a continuum rather than an absolute dichotomy, because the extent of reproductive sharing varies greatly in both.
Nuclear family groups, consisting of a breeding pair and their related non-breeding helpers (typically retained offspring), account for the majority of cooperatively breeding species (55%; n = 118; figure 1). These species were defined as those in which unrelated helpers or co-breeders occur in fewer than 20% of groups in the population; or for which genetic data on group composition were not available, and group members were assumed to be relatives based on behavioural observations. Surprisingly, however, many pair-nesting species are regularly aided by a combination of related and unrelated non-breeding helpers (19%; n = 40). These species were defined as those in which at least 20% of helpers are unrelated to any of the breeders in the social group, such that providing alloparental care to unrelated young is a regular occurrence in the population. The remaining species (26%; n = 55) are cooperatively polygamous, breeding in stable social groups with at least three adults that share reproduction and parental care of the mixed clutch. These social groups are sometimes composed entirely of unrelated adults (n = 31), but many species nest in polygamous groups containing a mix of related and unrelated breeding adults, plus related and/or unrelated helpers (n = 24). When pair-nesting and polygamous species are combined, 55% (n = 118) nest primarily with kin, 15% (n = 31) nest primarily with non-kin, and 30% (n = 64) nest in groups that regularly contain both kin and non-kin. Figure 1. Classification of group composition and social mating system for all 213 species of cooperatively breeding birds for which data are available (see electronic supplementary material, table S1).
Several important patterns emerge from this dataset (see electronic supplementary material, table S1). First, non-kin cooperative breeding has originated many times independently in the avian phylogeny: of 62 taxonomic families in which cooperative breeding has been well described, 46 contain at least one species that breeds in non-kin groups. Social groups with mixed kin structures are particularly prevalent in families in which cooperative breeding is thought to have arisen many times, including the Psittacidae, Rallidae, Accipitridae and Timaliidae [1]. Non-kin cooperation also occurs significantly more frequently in species that are obligate cooperative breeders—species in which at least 95% of breeding units are groups rather than pairs—than in facultative cooperative breeders. Seventy-seven per cent of obligately cooperative species nest in groups that regularly contain non-kin (n = 24 of 31 species), whereas only 38% of facultatively cooperative species do (n = 68 of 181 species; two-way contingency test, χ2 = 17.1, p < 0.0001).
Consistent with previous analyses [10], I found that related non-breeding helpers are more likely to be male than female (, p < 0.0001). Of 68 species that breed in kin-based groups for which helper sex is known, help is male-biased in 31 species and female-biased in only three, with both sexes helping in 35 species. However, helping by unrelated immigrants in groups with mixed kin structures is equally male-biased (, p < 0.0001). This suggests that sex biases in helping behaviour are not solely a consequence of male philopatry or higher relatedness between group-living males, but may also reflect differences between males and females in their opportunities for direct reproduction. Males in polygamous groups also share reproduction more frequently than females do. Cooperative polyandry is relatively common, occurring in 55 of 63 polygamous species, whereas multiple females share reproduction in a single nest in only 23 of these (, p < 0.0001). This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that reproductive sharing by females in the same nest may be limited by clutch size, whereas males may compete for paternity within a clutch without increasing the number of offspring [11].
This analysis is, necessarily, an oversimplification: within these categories, social groups vary tremendously in their size, stability, reproductive skew and division of labour, and in the strength and nature of social bonds among group members. Nevertheless, it reveals that cooperative breeding by unrelated individuals is widespread in birds. In the following sections, I discuss how these social groups arise and why cooperative interactions may sometimes be favoured even in the absence of kinship.
3. How do non-kin social groups form?
Group formation is well described for species that breed as extended families: offspring typically remain on their natal territory and provide care to younger kin rather than dispersing to breed independently [3]. Alternatively, offspring may disperse only a short distance to breed independently, then return to a relative's territory to help if their nesting attempt is not successful. This pattern of limited dispersal results in local concentrations of relatives known as ‘kin neighbourhoods’ that can also facilitate kin-based cooperation [12]. However, much less is known about the dispersal and recruitment patterns that lead to groups with low genetic relatedness, and data on group formation are available for only a small minority of species. Here, I outline three paths to group formation that result in variable kin structures.
(a) Delayed dispersal with high mortality and/or promiscuous mating
Delayed dispersal does not necessarily result in close kinship among group members. High rates of adult mortality, copulations outside the social group, or conspecific brood parasitism can erode genetic relatedness to such low levels that the indirect fitness benefits of helping are negligible. These processes have been best described in the fairy-wrens (Malurus spp.), in which apparent ‘family’ groups often contain step-parents and extra-pair young. As a consequence, non-breeding helpers often provide care to unrelated nestlings [13]. Although this pattern was considered surprising when it was first described, recent genetic analyses have revealed similarly high rates of extra-group promiscuity and low relatedness in several other species (e.g. Australian magpies Gymnorhina tibicen [14], Seychelles warblers Acrocephalus sechellensis [15] and pied butcherbirds Cracticus nigrogularis [16]). Older reports of societies with high adult mortality and turnover suggest a similar lack of kin structure among group members in speckled mousebirds Colius striatus [17] and black tits Parus niger [18].
(b) Dispersal to join an unrelated breeding pair
Instead of delaying dispersal or providing help at the nest of a relative, lone birds—usually males—may join an unrelated pair or group on its breeding territory. The immigrant typically appears to be seeking extra-pair copulations with the resident female, often providing food to the female or to the brood in order to gain access to the nest. If the immigrant male is unsuccessful in his attempt to reproduce in the current brood, then he becomes a non-breeding helper and may remain with the group until the subsequent breeding season, when he may inherit a mate or breeding position. This route to reproduction is best described in the pied kingfisher, in which unrelated males join breeding groups and act as helpers until breeding [5,6]; but it also occurs in a variety of less well-studied species, including merlins Falco columbarius [19,20], subdesert mesites Monias benschi [7], hoopoes Upupa epops [21], buff-breasted paradise kingfishers Tanysiptera sylvia [22], stripe-backed wrens Campylorhynchus nuchalis [23], riflemen Acanthisitta chloris [24], rufous vangas Schetba rufa [25] and Puerto Rican todies Todus mexicanus [26]. Similarly, in plural-nesting species, male helpers may attend several nests simultaneously within a single breeding territory, and may be related to only a small minority of the young that they provision [27,28]. In most of these cases, the unrelated male delivers food to the nest as frequently as the breeding male and related helpers do, even when he has not contributed offspring to the clutch.
Alternatively, in other species, the immigrant male copulates with the resident female, competing with the resident male for paternity. The resulting social group is a polyandrous trio (or larger group) in which both males reproduce and provide parental care to the mixed brood, although the immigrant male is frequently behaviourally subordinate to the resident male and may sire fewer offspring [4,29,30].
(c) Dispersal to form a coalition
A slightly different route to cooperative polygamy occurs when two or more unrelated individuals—typically of the same sex—form a cooperative coalition, establish or take over a breeding territory together, and then share reproduction and parental care in a single clutch. Well-studied examples include brown skuas Catharacta lonnbergi [31,32], green wood-hoopoes Phoeniculus purpureus [33,34], Henderson reed-warblers Acrocephalus vaughani [35] and Galapagos hawks Buteo galapagoensis [36,37]. Although these polygamous groups are superficially similar in composition to those that form when an immigrant male joins a breeding pair, their behaviours differ in important details. Conflict between group members is low or absent, and reproduction is divided more equally between same-sex group members. A variant of this system occurs in anis Crotophaga spp. and Taiwan yuhinas Yuhina brunneiceps, in which several mated pairs form coalitions, share reproduction equally in a communal nest and cooperate to defend a group territory [38,39].
These three dispersal patterns are not mutually exclusive; social groups may be formed through a combination of delayed dispersal, coalition formation and immigration, leading to complex aggregations of individuals that vary in age, relatedness, social status and reproductive strategy. However, it is clear that delayed dispersal is not the only option available to young birds that cannot establish an independent breeding territory. Joining an unrelated breeding pair, helping at multiple nests simultaneously or allying with an unrelated individual to form a coalition may be preferable to remaining with kin, even if reproduction is delayed.
4. Why cooperate with non-kin?
Non-breeding helpers have been shown to gain a variety of direct fitness benefits from group membership, primarily by increasing their future reproductive success via increased survival, territory inheritance, access to future mates, acquisition of skills relevant to parental care or the acquisition of helpers in their own future breeding attempts (reviewed in [10]). Although it is clear that unrelated helpers can gain opportunities for future reproduction in cooperative groups, it is often difficult to demonstrate that these opportunities are sufficient to favour non-kin helping over other reproductive strategies, such as helping kin or dispersing to breed independently. The most straightforward examples include obligately cooperative species, in which independent breeding is virtually impossible and helpers profit from group membership in predictable ways. In white-winged trumpeters (Psophia leucoptera), for example, unrelated females join cooperative groups as non-breeding subordinates, then inherit the dominant female's breeding position when she dies; this represents the only route to successful breeding, because young birds are evicted from their natal territories and lone pairs are not able to defend an adequate territory to raise young [40]. However, other studies of facultatively cooperative species have explicitly calculated the direct and indirect components of inclusive fitness and have found that helping non-relatives can be evolutionarily stable even when independent breeding is possible [8]. This is most likely to be the case when individuals in groups have significantly higher survival rates than those that disperse to breed alone [41,42].
Even when the direct fitness benefits of helping are substantial, this raises the question of why helpers should not simply remain on their natal territory and gain both direct and indirect fitness benefits by raising kin. In species with promiscuous mating and high turnover, as discussed earlier, remaining with the natal group does not guarantee high relatedness. In other species, individuals join non-relatives only when they are unable to remain with family, and non-kin helping may be a suboptimal strategy. In gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis), the oldest fledgling in a clutch remains on his natal territory and evicts the younger siblings, who each settle with unrelated pairs [43]. The key lesson from these cases is that helpers may prefer to cooperate with kin when possible—highlighting the role that kin selection is likely to have played in the evolution of these societies—but if relatives are not available, cooperation with unrelated individuals may still be more profitable than floating or attempting to nest alone.
In other species, joining an unrelated pair or group may be favoured over staying with the natal group because it provides a more rapid route to direct reproduction. Many studies have found that unrelated male helpers are likely to take over the territory and mate with the female breeder when her male partner has either died or has been ‘divorced’ and replaced by the helper [6,23,44]. The likelihood of the female accepting the helper as a mate can depend on the amount of food that he provided to the previous clutch [45], which may explain the apparently paradoxical observation that unrelated helpers often deliver food to the nest at equal or higher rates than do related helpers [25,46–48]. Young birds can, of course, remain on their parents’ territory and wait for a breeding vacancy to open there, but their path to reproduction may be delayed by the need to avoid incest with other members of the family group or by older relatives that are ahead in the dominance queue [49,50].
In contrast to helper-at-the-nest societies, cooperatively polygamous species have often been excluded from discussions of avian cooperative breeding on the grounds that they are better explained by conventional mating system theory than by theories of cooperation. For this reason, it is important to distinguish between societies in which polygamy arises through competition for reproduction—in which apparently ‘cooperative’ interactions may actually be detrimental to the fitness of some group members—and those in which group living is favoured by common benefits that accrue to all participants. Between these two extremes lie a large number of species with complex systems of mating and parental care, in which both competitive and mutualistic interactions appear to play important roles in maintaining cooperation.
Dunnocks (Prunella modularis) have served as a model for understanding how cooperative breeding can arise through sexual conflict. A female dunnock paired to one male (the ‘alpha’) maximizes her reproductive fitness by mating with a second, subordinate male (the ‘beta’), because the extra parental assistance increases the number of young that can fledge successfully. From the alpha male's perspective, however, the extra young produced in a polyandrous group do not compensate for the paternity that he has lost to the beta male. As a result, males aggressively compete for paternity, and polyandry benefits only the female. Conversely, males maximize their reproductive success by mating polygynously, which is the least desirable system for a female [4]. Similar conflicts of interest may have favoured the evolution of cooperative polygamy in a number of other species, including Smith's longspurs [51] and stitchbirds [52].
In other systems, however, groups can defend territories or feed young more effectively than lone pairs can, and the benefits of cooperative care are great enough to outweigh the costs of sharing reproduction. Clutton-Brock [2,53] considered these to be instances of intraspecific mutualisms, in which the combined actions of group members generate direct, shared benefits that are not easily undermined by cheating. In anis (Crotophaga spp.), trumpeters (Psophia spp.) and Galapagos hawks (B. galapagoensis), group size—and, crucially, the reproductive fitness of individual group members—is positively correlated with territory size or quality [9,36,37,40]. In all three instances, social groups compete with one another for resources, and large groups are able to displace small groups.
Kokko et al. [54] showed mathematically that when the advantages of being in a large group are sufficiently high, individuals could benefit from raising unrelated young simply in order to increase the group size, a hypothesis known as group augmentation. This is probably the best explanation for the bizarre phenomenon of ‘kidnapping’ in white-winged choughs, in which group members recruit and raise unrelated fledglings to serve as helpers in future breeding attempts [55]. But in most bird species that nest in non-kin groups, fledglings disperse from the social group rather than remaining and increasing the size of the group—in fact, it is usually fledgling dispersal that is responsible for low relatedness among group members. It has therefore been difficult to disentangle the specific benefits predicted by group augmentation from the other types of direct and indirect fitness benefits that maintain cooperation in groups with mixed kin structures. A simpler explanation for most non-kin societies is that group members contribute to a common good from which they derive current or future benefits, and in most cases, the opportunity for direct breeding is probably more important than contributions to the group size per se.
Finally, social nesting can increase the survivorship of group members regardless of relatedness, an effect that can favour nest sharing by non-kin [42,56]. In acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus), related males often breed together and share paternity in a clutch. Within a given breeding season, males in duos produce fewer young per capita than do males breeding alone; however, their survivorship, and hence their lifetime reproductive fitness, is significantly higher. Koenig & Mumme [41] calculated that the benefit of increased survivorship in groups is so high that co-breeding should be favoured even when the two males are unrelated, a result that may help explain the high frequency of unrelated male duos in a different population of the same species [57].
5. What are the evolutionary origins of non-kin cooperation?
The traditional view of avian cooperative breeding is that it has evolved along two main routes: via delayed dispersal of offspring, which leads to the formation of family groups in which kin selection plays a major role in promoting cooperation; or, less commonly, via competition for reproduction by unrelated individuals, which leads to the formation of cooperatively polygamous groups in which all adults potentially reproduce [3]. These two processes certainly represent distinct evolutionary trajectories, and there is little doubt that most cooperative avian societies initially arose along one of these two routes. As reviewed earlier, however, there are many instances of more complex social groups that fit neither model. ‘Family’ groups often include unrelated immigrants that may or may not reproduce, and groups with multiple co-breeders may be maintained by mutualistic benefits rather than |
we're going to vet people before they come into our country. If you disagree with what our country believes in, why in the living daylights are you allowed in our country?"
Scott recalled being on a call with the White House following last November's attacks in Paris, saying that he asked the administration to share vetting information for anyone who comes into "my state, and they said no," with respect to refugees.
"They said, 'Oh, those people have privacy rights,'" Scott said. "What about our security rights? The security of making sure if you live in my state, you're going to be safe. I'm responsible for the safety of the people of my state. I'm fed up with the fact that we're not destroying ISIS, we're not vetting these people, we're not taking care of our own citizens."On July 28th 2011, Sergio Aguero signed for Manchester City from Atletico Madrid for £38 million and it’s proven to be money very well spent indeed.
Of all the big-name arrivals at the Etihad Stadium in recent years, no one has quite lived up to the billing in the way Sergio Aguero has.
Arriving at the club on this very day back in 2011, the Argentine was something else – a player approaching the peak of his powers and hungry to talk about trophies rather than paychecks.
Speaking on the official Manchester City website in quotes carried by the BBC, Aguero said, upon his arrival:
"I think we are a team that in future will be fighting every year to win major trophies.”
They have certainly done that, with two Premier League titles, a League Cup win and a Charity Shield in the bag with Aguero front and centre for all of the action.
Despite nursing numerous injuries throughout his time with the club, the Argentine’s record speaks for itself.
In 162 outings for the Sky Blues, he has managed 107 goals, with so many of these coming in crucial moments for City.
Few will ever forget the composure he showed to snatch the Premier League title back from Manchester United in 2012 while his match-winning hat-trick against Bayern Munich last term was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak season.
Golden Boot winner with 26 top-flight goals last season, it’s hard to believe that Aguero is only 27.
Here’s to four more years of the Argentine doing was he does best... AGUEROOOOOO!!!!!!image by imp kerr
We have not consented to our own constant surveillance, even if the way we live has produced it
One photo from the sometime halcyon days of Occupy Wall Street has come to haunt me. The image, which was used as the cover for the second issue of Tidal, Occupy’s theory journal, at first glance seems to capture a trenchant insurrectionary tableau. A massive mob of protesters appears on the cusp of breaking down a fence, held up by a measly line of riot cops defending the emptiness of Duarte Square, a drab expanse of concrete in downtown Manhattan. Look closer, though, and a different scene comes in to focus: No more than a scattered handful of protesters are actually pushing against the fence. The rest of the crowd, pressed tight against each other, hold smartphones aloft, recording each other recording each other for the (assumed) viewers at home. The fence of Duarte Square was barely breached that December day.
Over two years later, and nine months since Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks have highlighted totalized surveillance as an undeniable fact of the American now, one wonders whether such an image of mutual co-surveillance would make it onto the cover of a self-identifying radical magazine.
For me, the photo captures the problematic, near knee-jerk proclivity many participants had to live-recount every action over smartphones, with the idea that this was inherently bold and radical, taking the narrative of protest into our own hands, our own broadcast devices, refusing reliance on media institutions. Regardless of where you stand on the question of whether social-media platforms like Twitter have helped, hindered, or shaped recent protest, the Tidal cover image carries a different valence in light of the Snowden revelations. The smartphones in that photograph were not only a hindrance to the crowd’s purported effort to swarm Duarte Square; they were, of course, surveillance devices too. The photo’s caption could well read: Unwitting footsoldiers of the surveillance state watch each other for the state.
In that image—where a desire for insurrectionary freedom is paired with advanced technocapitalism’s surveillance-control apparatus—our current problem is crystallized. The devices we rely upon to communicate and gather information and build the solidarity necessary for contemporary protests also offer us up as ripe for constant surveillance. The surveillance state could not be upheld without its always already trackable denizens. To sidestep our tacit complicity in this would be to fail to recognize how deep it runs—it’s how we live. As my Salon colleague Andrew Leonard noted, “In 2013, the negative consequences of our contemporary lifestyles were impossible to ignore.”
But to assert our consent to this circumstance, however, would be unfair—in many ways, we have no choice. The problem of our complicity and consent in a state of totalized surveillance is intractable. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.
Revelations about mass corporate-government spying have given rise to a peculiar sort of popular crisis. Who is to blame? Where are the bad guys? How do we fight back? Popular outrage following the NSA revelations has sought an object, a vessel, a villain. Be it Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA director Keith Alexander, Google, or the PRISM program, we look to blame something we can isolate and locate. But efforts centered on top-down NSA reform and demands for tech giants to be more transparent have largely missed the nuance and gravity of what’s at stake.
Bipartisan lawmaker cohorts have demanded an end to the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ communications data; the preposterously named USA Freedom Act is gaining traction primarily on this point. The White House assembled advisory committees who duly issued lengthy reports and promised more reviews to come. The president gave a speech about reform straight out of the POTUS handbook, immediately enacting minute policy change to earn public “confidence,” while leaving the underlying state of totalized surveillance structurally unchanged. Perhaps worst of all, scrambling for position as the “good guys,” tech leviathans including Google and Facebook have pushed for greater transparency. Google’s old, informal slogan “Don’t Be Evil” would more appropriately read “Be Evil, But Be Transparent About It.”
The boldest executive and legislative reform even notionally on the table would see dragnet hoarding of our communications moved into the hands of telecom firms, or some sort of private third party, but in NSA-surveillable form. The specifics of where these databases would be stored if taken out of NSA hands is not yet clear. But one thing is certain: All communications would remain available for government perusal. Reformers rightly want state spy agencies to provide at least some grounds for suspicion before gaining direct access to phone and online communications records, but what those grounds might be is troublingly unclear (and would likely remain as opaque to the public as the operations of national security tend to be). And to be sure, the corporate-government surveillance nexus is going nowhere—the best these reform efforts have to offer is a surveillance state with mildly different contours.
By focusing on legible seats of power, activist groups and outraged political players have largely sidestepped the question of how surveilled subjects uphold—cannot but uphold—their position as surveilled. It is perhaps unbearable to consider that modes of surveillance undergird the way we live in contemporary capitalism. A state of totalized surveillance serves government interests (in social control) and corporate interests (in an enumerated and trackable populace). And it has become a significant source of growth and value within it. But we who use and rely on the devices that render us ripe, surveillable subjects are trapped by the autonomy they also promise us. As poet George Oppen put it, “We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous”—amassing as individuated, traceable nodes in a network.
The story of this epoch of surveillance is in some ways a formal tragedy, in which those who came of age in the tech boom star as a hydra-headed tragic hero. True to form, the tragic hero was brought down by hubris—our blind embrace of technology, too impressed with our own savvy to see the social control.
A troubling anecdote picked from Snowden’s document trove tells this story as synecdoche. An unnamed NSA analyst produced a smirking slide show for fellow agents about social control and Apple users. One slide recalls the famed 1984 Super Bowl commercial from Apple, announcing the birth of the first personal computer. In the ad, seated, uniformed gray men sit in regimented rows as an Orwellian Big Brother character booms at them through a huge screen overhead. But then, an athletic women in bright orange minishorts bounds forward, evading the grasp of riot police, to swing a sledgehammer into the screen, smashing Big Brother’s visage and freeing his enthralled subjects. “Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984,” the ad proclaimed.
The next NSA slide projected a photo of Steve Jobs some 30 years later, with the accompanying text: “Who knew in 1984 … that this would be big brother … and the zombies would be paying customers?” And the NSA agent was correct: We didn’t need an Orwellian Big Brother. Political management, as Foucault had well predicted, would manifest instead through “tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms … systems of micro-power” that produce and are reproduced by “docile bodies.” While providing an unending font of content, information and opportunity for communication, the apparatuses of technocapitalism at the same time produce docility by reproducing users as networked subjects—a tracked, countable, individuated populace that, by virtue of these qualities, upholds conformity.
While we are unquestionably active participants in upholding a surveillance state, to suggest that we are therefore consenting would be to overstate our choice in the matter. Though we are not all inherently reliant, as a point of economic necessity, on surveillance-enabling devices and interfaces, participation in a surveillance state is inescapable for those who abide by the social and economic spirit of the now, because the networks and interfaces born of the tech boom have become the stage on which the social and commercial—even the political and the revolutionary—is enacted in contemporary capitalism.
Our engagement with the devices of the surveillance state goes deeper than the technological tools we use—indeed these are not simply tools, but apparatuses. In “What Is an Apparatus?” (2009) Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that “ever since Homo sapiens first appeared, there have been apparatuses, but we could say that today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” For Agamben, an apparatus is not simply a technological device, but “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” As such, a language is an apparatus as much as an iPhone. He writes of his “implacable hatred” for cell phones and his desire to destroy them all and punish their users. But then he notes that this is not the right solution. The “apparatus” can not just be isolated in the device, say the smartphone, because apparatuses are shaped by and shape the subjects that use them. Destroying the apparatus would entail destroying in some ways the subjects that create and are in turn created by it.
A mass Luddite movement to smash all smartphones, laptops, GPS devices, and so on would ignore the fact that it is no mere accident of history that millions of us have chosen to live with and through these devices. These devices require and in turn produce trackable, numerable and, therefore, surveillable subjects. As such, technocapitalism is a situation in which the question of whether surveilled subjects consent to their own surveillance is moot.
Which is not to say that anger should not be directed at the corporate-government subterfuge that has undergirded the post-9/11 development of vast spy dragnets. Quite evidently, we did not consent to these bulk collections by government agencies; we didn’t even know about the programs. Just this month, the beleaguered James Clapper admitted that the NSA should have been more open with the public about the ubiquitous hoarding of their communications. “If the program had been publicly introduced in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, most Americans would probably have supported it,” he said. But Clapper cannot help but resort to a perverse conditional logic in which the public would have consented to what they could not, in fact, consent to. Clapper’s post hoc assertion that the public would have agreed to mass government surveillance, had they been given advanced warning, is untestable—we can’t go back to that moment. As Ben Wizner, legal adviser to Snowden and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project commented in response to Clapper, “Whether we would have consented to that at the time will never be known.” We have not consented to our own constant surveillance, even if the way we live has produced it.
The spy chief’s remark truly reflects the issue at hand: We only become aware of the notion that we might have consented or refused to do so in the past tense, when surveillance technologies are so tightly sewn into—and give shape—to the fabric of daily life. The state, in its rhetoric at least, has thus de facto solved the problem of consent when it comes to surveillance: not because consent has been expressly or tacitly given, but because it has been mooted as a fulcrum. The challenge, then, given our hopes and our hubris, is to experiment with whether we can live together, as numerous, without the inescapable fact of being enumerated.MILLSTONE — Dog trainer Scott Krzywicki imitated a Trenton Thunder baseball player as he swung a blue bat inside a training room at Shelly's School for Dogs.
Seconds after the bat hit the green rubbery floor, the Thunder's third generation bat dog, Rookie, was there to snatch it.
"Good boy, Rookie," said dog trainer Shelly Leibowitz as the 1-year-old golden retriever ran with the bat clenched between his teeth. "Drop it, boy."
While pitchers and catchers don't report for another few weeks, the Trenton Thunder bat dog Rookie is already deep into spring training for the 2015 season.
Rookie, who was named last January by fans and supporters, is preparing to carry on his family's bat dog legacy with the team.
He has attended the training school, located at The Green Leaf Pet Resort & Hotel, since May and will join his father "Home Run Derby" at the Thunder's home opener against the Portland Sea Dogs on April 16 at 7 p.m.
"You can see how much he loves that bat. It's his little pacifier now," Leibowitz said, watching as Rookie circled the training room with his tail wagging. "This is the day in the life of Rookie, and he's real happy doing it. He's such a sweet dog."
Rookie visited Thunder games last season to greet fans under the supervision of Eric Lipsman, Trenton Thunder senior vice president of corporate sales, with whom both Rookie and Derby reside.
While in training, Rookie typically stays overnight at Shelly's School for Dogs four days at a time. After two days away from him, Lipsman predicted Thursday that his furry companion would be excited to see him.
As Krzywicki let Rookie off his leash in the training room, Rookie barreled toward him at full speed.
"How's my good boy?" Lipsman asked as Rookie leaped off the floor and then stood on his hind legs to greet him. "I missed you too, Rooks."
Rookie's grandfather "Chase That Golden Thunder" was the first dog to fetch bats exclusively for a minor league baseball team. He spent 11 years with the Thunder before his death in July 2013.
Derby joined the Thunder in 2008 and will accompany his son this season fetching players' bats. Lipsman will bring Derby back to school next month for refresher courses, he said. Rookie is slated to continue in the family business and work in tandem with Derby this season once fully trained.
Leibowitz started with basic obedience skills before refining Rookie’s training to fetch bats at the 56-acre Millstone facility, he said.
"Before we start playing with the bat, I like to have some good basic control, so we build a foundation by teaching him to heal, to sit, to come, to stay, to down, and then we take it a step further," Leibowitz said. "The whole time we’re building drive for him to retrieve, and we try to work him around as many distractions as possible."
Rookie is now ready to put his retrieving skills into context at Arm & Hammer Stadium after eight months of prep work, Leibowitz said.
“When we feel real comfortable all around here, then we take him to the stadium and start working with him,” Liebowitz said. “Even if he does well in the stadium, the big step is when the stands are full with people clapping and screaming."
Lipsman said he is confident Rookie will handle the pressure of the bright lights when the time comes.
“If you look at this picture of Chase and Derby, Rookie looks so much like Derby there,” said Lipsman, pointing to framed photos of the dogs hanging on the walls in the lobby. “He definitely has the genes. They’ve been handed down from Derby to Rookie.”
Nicole Mulvaney may be reached at nmulvaney@njtimes.com. Follow her on Twitter @NicoleMulvaney. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.About
Unfortunately I ran out of finances to finish this product. The company I was making this product with give me a Proto type ( gimmick ) of similar product that has been released. Currently I am trying to develop and manufacture another prototype ( gimmick ) that I can sell with my instructional DVD. Including a gimmick with this instructional DVD is crucial for retail, that's in regards of piracy issues I face with strictly just having an instructional DVD. This is geared for a small marketplace but international.
The overhead that I'm currently faced with is,
A. One more location performance shoot ( new product ).
B. Manufacturing a new prototype gimmick ( Tudor Deck )
C. The production of the instructional part of the DVD
D. The post production services
E. The manufacturing and distribution costShare 0 Tweet 30 Google Plus 0 Share 0
For any business, there’s just only one chance for a first impression. Whether you are a young startup or a large enterprise, the image you put forth at the very first glance is perhaps the most vital. And there’s no often, there’s no opportunity for a “do-over.” Remember, to get your business off the ground right from the get-go, you’ll need to advertise. And to effectively advertise, you’ll need graphic designs that pack in enough punch to take elements of your brand and showcase them to your target consumers in a way that’s even splendid.
But most people will agree that finding the kind of design that can take your business to the next level is easier said than done.
Is Graphic Design That Important for Your Startup?
Many new-age business barons and media moguls believe that a startup without a good design goes nowhere! In fact, several surveys have revealed that start-ups undervaluing the importance of graphic designs often end up missing vital opportunities and fail to survive the competition. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that good graphics designs go an extra mile in ensuring success for a business, especially startups. Check out this video by Ellen Lundgren to understand why graphic design is so important to your business.
Do you Need Graphic Designs or Great Graphic Designs?
But the question here is if good is good enough when it comes to advertising your dream ventures. Remember, if you’re a start-up, just good designs wouldn’t do any good to your business and you’ll have to find out the best designs possible. Even if you aren’t a designer, it pays to keep an attentive eye to understand genuine and artistic designs from bland Photoshop mock-ups. Do well to understand what logo elements will make your brand come alive.
How to Find Great Graphic Designs in a Nickel-and-Dime?
There’s no thumb rule when it comes to finding out great graphic designs in your budget, and all you got to do is to be smart! If you can don that hat of a designer, then great. But what if you can’t? You’ll need a designer or a design agency! But what do you do when you don’t really have the shekels to pay the bulging fees of professional designers or design agencies? Luckily, there are some affordable alternatives in the form of design contests at popular crowdsourcing contest based sites such as Designhill, Hatchwise and 48Hour logo.
These crowdsourcing sites put you in touch with a huge network of graphic artists from all over the world, ready and willing to work for you under the tightest deadlines. In fact, it remains the most convenient and affordable way to generate a wide variety of design concepts to pick from, and pick the ones you like in the end.
Designhill is perhaps the largest and most reliable amongst these custom design crowdsourcing platforms. In just 6 months of it going live, Designhill has helped over 500+ startups and small businesses source creative, durable and professional designs and has paid out more than $38000 to its ever-growing community of 23,000+ graphic designers, logo designers, visual artists and illustrators from all over the world.
Why Designhill?
When it comes to sourcing graphic designs really tickle the fancy of modern-day discerning consumers, Designhill proves to be the best bet for startups! It’s a wonderfully low risk set-up that promises high gains. In case, you’re still thing why Designhill, here’s a list of 5 prominent reasons.
Quick results: If you’re a young start-up, you will definitely agree that the sooner you get the designs, the sooner you can start promoting your business. Designhill puts you in touch with graphic artists, logo designers, illustrators and a whole network of visual artists from all over the world, ready and willing to work for you under the tightest deadlines. With so many hands, you reach the finish line sooner rather than later.
Options aplenty. Diversity drives the machine at Designhill. Launching a design contest at this site means getting as many as a hundred responses—or more in response. With concepts pouring in from left, right and center, you’re not limited in the range of styles to choose from.
Low cost: When working with Designhill, you can find freelance designers who’ll come up with graphic designs for your startup at figures significantly lower than what most professionals charge. So if you’ve got a small budget, then Designhill fits the bill to a tee.
Feedback feature: You may need to run from pillar to post to get any adjustments or changes in your graphic designs when working with design agencies. This is in direct contrast to how quick adjustments and revisions can be made when you launch a design contest at Designhill. It’s just you and the designer so decisions, revisions and the delivery of the final product all happen much quicker.
Money back guarantee: In case you don’t find any designs that suit your taste, preference or choice, you can always get your money back, when working. So, Designhill design contests prove to be a risk-free way of getting a customized graphic design for your startup venture.
How Does The Designhill Design Contest Work?
To get started with Designhill, you need to first carefully mull over and decide what kind of design you are looking for. Fortunately, Designhill features a wide-ranging category of design categories to pick from, each with different price points. Launching a design contest at Designhill is simple, convenient and effective way of getting the graphic designs that will boost your startup brand from the get-go. Don’t believe! Check out this amazing video to see easy it is to run a contest at Designhill.
Here’s a list of 4 easy steps to run a design contest at Designhill.
Launch a contest – You can start by clicking on “Launch a Contest” from the main page. Fill in an easy design brief by selecting the type of design you need. Add little details for the designers to follow. Then, pay the contest posting fee and your contest will be made live. Let designs pour in – Designhill’s thriving community of 23000+ graphic artists, visual artists, illustrators, and freelance designers will then get notification about your contest and they would start designing for you straight away. Designers will submit actual designs directly to your contest and you’ll receive notifications via email. Take your pick – Review the submitted designs, give feedback and interact with designers till you find the design you truly want. Once you find the design you were looking for, simply pick a “winner” and work on final adjustments, ask for revisions, and ultimately get the best design for your budget. Handover Process – Once you’ve picked a winner, move on to the Handover process. Design Handover process helps you get the final tweaking in the winning design. In addition, it also makes it easy for you to get proper rights for designs and download the files.
Getting a design you’ll love for your start-up is as simple as 1, 2 and 3!
Before The Contest
1. Pricing: Quite unlike its competitors, Designhill maintains fair price packages to ensure that clients pay the cheapest possible prices and at the same time, designers get to reasonable dues for their hard work. There are four set pricing packages for each category of design.
Logo Design – Starting from $ 199 Business Cards – Starting from $199 Advertisement Designs– Starting from $149 Social Media Page Design– Starting from $149
2.Design Brief: Experts believe that getting a clear, concise design brief when launching a graphic design contest goes a long way in securing the best designs possible. Writing a brief might seem like a daunting task, but remember, articulation isn’t the issue here. Only clarity is. So, it makes sense to be as clear as you can to give designers a clearer idea of your requirements.
3. Timeframe: Now, it’s time to choose a time-frame for your contest. Standard contests last for as long as 7 days. But, you may even choose to have shorter turnaround time.
During the Contest
Invite designers: It makes sense to proactively invite designers to participate in your contest on the basis of their previous work. Browse through the designer portfolio or the design gallery to “curate” talented designers and invite them to participate in your contest. Designhill gives you the option to filter the design gallery on category, subcategory and industry if you invite a particular designer to work with you.
Provide Feedback: Providing feedback is perhaps the most significant part of a design contest at Designhill. Remember, quick feedback feature allows you to quickly get adjustments and revisions in the designs you like. In addition to feedback, you can also leave star ratings and private comments on design entries.
Complete Handover: The Handover process makes it easy for you procure all necessary copyrights for the design that you like. In this process, you can get updates / revisions to winning design, get copyright for the designs and download the files. When you approve payment, Designhill transfers the prize money to the winning designer.
Conclusion
If you’re at the helm of a startup in need of everything from a logo to a website to business cards, Designhill gives you the expediency of a design agency at the price that’s even lower than what most freelancers usually charge. Plus, you get to save on the operating costs and overhead expenses. The site is easy to use and makes it possible for you to reach beyond boundaries and source creative designs that will help you establish your brand identity, garner media mileage and build a loyal customer base.
Try it today, and see if it works for you.
Get Your Logo DesignJust when you thought there might be some stability to TNA-related stories for the time being, we’ve discovered yet another lawsuit filed against the company over an unpaid debt. While this one, which dates back to June, was filed in the same court as Billy Corgan’s lawsuit, quirks in the court’s online search system made it difficult to find. In this case, TNA has been sued by the company that handles the design, import, and export of their merchandise for ShopTNA.
The plaintiff/creditor, Fraley International, says on its website that it “provides expert resourcing and trading solutions for all of your importing/exporting needs.” In the complaint, it’s explained that “TNA has contracted at various times with Fraley for Fraley to design and order various merchandise for TNA, including, but not limited to, t-shirts, cups, and sunglasses.” They design, source, and order the merchandise, having it shipped directly to TNA from foreign suppliers, fronting all costs and not being reimbursed at all until TNA pays them after receiving the order.
This arrangement went south starting in September 2015, when TNA stopped paying Fraley. This went on for 23 different orders until the relationship completely fell apart after TNA never paid for a December 22nd, 2015 order. Farley insists that “TNA accepted the merchandise without objection or complaint” plus “the merchandise was in good working order and was consistent with TNA’s order.”
According to the complaint, these are the order dates and how much TNA owes from each:
All told, TNA owes a total of $43,348.70. Nothing has been filed in the case since July 19th, when TNA’s attorneys filed their notices of appearance. That’s the procedure for when a lawyer puts him/herself on down as an attorney of record on a given case, and there’s been no official movement since TNA’s lawyers filed their respective notices.As many of you know, the LDS church gave a press conference two weeks ago. The Bloggernacle has since exploded with commentary about what it means, what it doesn’t mean, who said what, who apologized and who didn’t.
I’d like to turn our attention for just a moment to what WASN’T said.
In more than one interview, when responding to questions like, “What about members who support a different political stance than the one you’re outlining?” Elder D. Todd Christofferson offered similar answers.
Quoting from Peggy Stack’s article, We can all be more civil…,
What does the LDS Church think of members who back same-sex marriage? “There hasn’t been any litmus test or standard imposed that you couldn’t support that if you want to support it,” Christofferson said, “if that’s your belief and you think it’s right.“ Any Latter-day Saint can have a belief “on either side of this issue,” he said. “That’s not uncommon.” Problems arise only when a member makes “a public, sustained opposition to the church itself or the church leaders and tries to draw others after them,” he said, and that support swells into “advocacy.”
In a Trib-Talk interview with Jennifer Napier-Pierce: (watch about the 8:00 – 11:00 minute area)
JNP, reading viewer’s questions, “I’m an active member in good standing. I want to understand whether supporting gay marriage or groups like Ordain Women could cause me to lose my temple recommend? If I privately believe in these ideas, would I still be temple worthy, and if so, why would the act of public expression make me unworthy if a privately held belief does not? What is the difference between a belief and its expression?” DTC: “Heavy question. We have members, individual members, in the church who have a variety of different opinions and beliefs and positions on these issues and other issues. You can reflect back on the Equal Rights Amendment years ago…this isn’t the first of that kind of thing where we might have different feelings or different positions but it doesn’t, in our view, it doesn’t really become a problem unless someone is out attacking the church and its leaders, if it’s a deliberate and a persistent effort in trying to get others to follow them, trying to draw others away, trying to pull people, if you will, out of the church or away from its teachings and doctrines. That’s very different, for us, than someone who feels one way or another on a political stance or a particular action to support a group, Affirmation or any of the others that you named.”
(Emphasis mine)
Differences in doctrine aside, Elder Christofferson seems to acknowledge that members of the church may come to their own political views, not necessarily in agreement with the Church’s official stance, and that it “doesn’t really become a problem” (unless you’re also attacking the church while you’re at it.)
So, imagine if you will, what Elder Christofferson, thankfully, did NOT say: “For members who find themselves at odds with the official position of the church, we ask that they fast, pray and counsel with their Bishops in seeking a change of heart so their views may come in line with ours. Those who stubbornly stick to their own opinions may be subject to informal or formal church discipline.”
I’m no Ziff when it comes to finding data and analyzing their statistics, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the above imaginary quote was not so long ago a reality. If not at the general level, then I certainly felt it in my local SoCal ward ’round ’bout Prop 8 time. Interesting also, in his original quote, how he mentions members of the church having a variety of opinions about the ERA. I’m very curious how leaders in that day spoke and acted toward members with diverging views on that legislation…… (Didn’t work out so well for some.) Political neutrality aside, do his remarks from two weeks ago represent a shift in what the church at the general level expects and accepts from its members regarding their official political positions? Is it possible that our own wards may start to trickle down this ability to let others form political views that don’t necessarily agree with the official church position without community shaming or outcasting?
The razor’s edge we all walk is how our local leaders define “advocacy” and to what degree will our good standing in the church be put up against censorship?
Having a divergent view —–> okay
Attacking the church or leading others astray —-> Not okay
Blogging? Commenting on a blog? Podcasting? Posting on Facebook? Starting a website? Chatting with your Visiting Teacher? —–>?????
Especially in the face of their outlining a very specific political position, I find this remark exceptionally encouraging: “if that’s your belief and you think it’s right.” I’m so grateful he acknowledged that some folks may come to different conclusions according to their conscience….and that it’s okay.Although it is not yet official, Ubuntu’s next release looks likely to include a music store service similar to Apple’s iTunes.
The first hint that Ubuntu developers were considering a music store came in September last year when Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth announced plans for Lucid Lynx, the next version of Ubuntu. At the time Shuttleworth made vague references to an Amazon- and iTunes-like music store for the next release.
Since then the noise around an Ubuntu music store has grown into a coherent direction and a number of details suggest that the Ubuntu One Music Store is on track for possible inclusion in Lucid Lynx which is scheduled to be released in April this year.
The most obvious clue to the Ubuntu One Music Store is the wiki page outlining plans for the product. Among other details, the wiki explains the Ubuntu One Music Store objective as such:
“The Lucid music store project aims to deliver the ability to purchase music from within a desktop music player. The overriding requirement of the project is to minimise engineering effort. This will be achieved through the usage of off the shelf solutions with minimal modifications. Only changes classified as blockers will fall within scope of this project. No effort will be expended towards improving the user experience of the default off the shelf components.”
The name of the music store – Ubuntu One – comes from the fact that the music store will be linked to Ubuntu One, the online cloud storage service provided by Ubuntu. According to the specifications users will log into the music store using their existing Ubuntu One username.
Although the service will be linked to the Ubuntu One service users are expected to be able to use a number of existing desktop media players to access the store, including Rhythmbox and Banshee, as well as a Web-based interface. Already a Rhythmbox plugin for the Ubuntu One Music Store is listed in Ubuntu’s blueprints.
Amazon
With plans clearly in place to roll out a music store for Ubuntu the obvious question is whether Canonical will create a brand new music store specifically for the Ubuntu One Music Store or choose to partner with an existing service.
On the one hand it doesn’t really make sense for Canonical to start from scratch with a new music store which is not core to its business. On the other hand, an integrated music store could win a lot of fans for Ubuntu.
Assuming that Canonical doesn’t build its own music store then it is safe to say that a likely partner will be Amazon, rather than Apple.
Apple has done everything it can over the years to thwart iTunes support for Linux, and each new iPod release appears to be designed to break compatibility with existing Linux iTunes connectors. With that history in mind Apple is an unlikely partner for Ubuntu.
Amazon, on the other hand, already offers a version of its MP3 downloader for most popular Linux flavours, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and OpenSuse. This support could presumably be extended to incorporate an Ubuntu One Music Store. The one catch, however, is that the Amazon MP3 store is limited at this point to US customers.
Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx will be released in April this year when questions around the Ubuntu One Music store will be clarified but for now it does appear that Ubuntu’s music plans are more than just speculation.
Ubuntu music service – comments and viewsJapan's atomic turmoil sparks a run on salt in China in the false belief it can guard against radiation exposure.
Chinese retailers were running out of salt this week following panic buying in the wake of the Japan nuclear crisis, as officials moved to calm public health safety fears on Thursday.
"We have no [salt] left," said an employee who answered the phone at a branch of the Carrefour supermarket chain in the eastern city of Hangzhou. "You should try going to Lianhua because they are limiting the amount [each person can buy]."
The salt was "sold out by [Wednesday] afternoon. As soon as they saw the news broadcasts, everyone went out to buy salt. I couldn't even get any myself," the employee said.
Chinese consumers are stock |
, but has run in elections in Pennsylvania and Delaware since at least 2004.
Read or Share this story: http://delonline.us/1VmcyzzSpecialist police'safely remove' suspicious package from Beenleigh train station, reopen affected train lines
Updated
Commuters attempting to take a train ride home south of Brisbane have been held up for almost two hours after a suspicious package was discovered near Beenleigh railway station.
Roads were closed and an exclusion zone was set up near the Beenleigh train station after the item was found in Macs Lane about 5:20pm.
Specialist police, including the Explosive Ordnance Response Team, were called in, and "safely removed the suspicious device without incident" about 7:37pm.
It caused disruptions to the Beenleigh, Gold Coast and Airport train lines in.
Passengers were warned to brace for delays of up to 75 minutes as buses were brought in to ferry passengers between stations.
Earlier in the evening, commuter Andrew McKinnon said it took him two hours to travel from Roma Street station to Kuraby - a trip that normally takes less than 30 minutes.
"A few people are cranky. I was sitting next to one who was swearing at everyone," he said.
He said the hold up would see him miss his final transfer bus of the day from Helensvale train station on the Gold Coast.
"I'll have to walk two and a half hours home."
Commuter Julien Legrand, trying to get home to the Gold Coast from Brisbane, said the buses ferrying passengers to Ormeau station were packed.
"Everyone is handling it well overall," he said.
"Not as chaotic as it could be given the time of day and the weather."
Topics: police, beenleigh-4207
First postedby Judith Curry
Humanity is owed a serious investigation of how we have gone so far with the decarbonization project without a serious challenge in terms of engineering reality. – Michael Kelly
Michael Kelly has published an important new paper in MRS Energy & Sustainability: A Review Journal [link to abstract; link to full manuscript]:
Lessons from technology development for energy and sustainability
There are lessons from recent history of technology introductions which should not be forgotten when considering alternative energy technologies for carbon dioxide emission reductions. The growth of the ecological footprint of a human population about to increase from 7B now to 9B in 2050 raises serious concerns about how to live both more efficiently and with less permanent impacts on the finite world. One present focus is the future of our climate, where the level of concern has prompted actions across the world in mitigation of the emissions of CO2. An examination of successful and failed introductions of technology over the last 200 years generates several lessons that should be kept in mind as we proceed to 80% decarbonize the world economy by 2050. I will argue that all the actions taken together until now to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide will not achieve a serious reduction, and in some cases, they will actually make matters worse. In practice, the scale and the different specific engineering challenges of the decarbonization project are without precedent in human history. This means that any new technology introductions need to be able to meet the huge implied capabilities. An altogether more sophisticated public debate is urgently needed on appropriate actions that (i) considers the full range of threats to humanity, and (ii) weighs more carefully both the upsides and downsides of taking any action, and of not taking that action.
Press release from MRS E&S
Cambridge (UK) professor says much of the effort to combat global warming is actually making it worse
As part of an open discussion on the critical issue of energy, sustainability and climate change, MRS Energy & Sustainability—A Review Journal (MRS E&S) has published a paper in which Cambridge (UK) engineering professor M.J. Kelly argues that it is time to review the current efforts to reduce carbon emissions, some of which “represent total madness.” This paper is one of a series of articles in MRS E&S that, with varying opinions, address this controversial topic.
In his peer-reviewed article, Lessons from technology development for energy and sustainability, Kelly considers the lessons from global decarbonization projects, and concludes that all combined actions to reduce carbon emissions so far will not achieve a serious reduction. In some cases, these efforts will actually make matters worse.
Central to his thesis, which is supported by examples, is that rapid decarbonization will simply not be possible without a significant reduction in standards of living. The growing call to decarbonize the global economy by 80% by 2050 could only foreseeably happen alongside large parts of the population plunging into poverty, destitution or starvation, as low-carbon energy sources do not produce enough energy to sustain society. According to Kelly, “It is clear to me that every further step along the current pathway of deploying first-generation renewable energy is locking in immature and uneconomic systems at net loss to the world standard of living.”
As Kelly notes, it has been 40 years since the modern renewable energy developments began, and yet the fraction of world energy supplied by renewables (wind, solar and cultivated biomass sources combined) has hardly increased. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 reports 3 % for wind, solar and cultivated biomass sources combined, for 2014.
Kelly’s argument is that weaning off fossil fuels will take much longer than postulated by some experts. He suggests that a more viable option is to employ another generation of fossil fuels—during which economic conditions of humankind can be improved and alternate solutions can be explored and developed. As the global population is set to rise from 7 billion to 9 billion in 2050, an altogether more sophisticated debate is needed on appropriate actions that considers the full range of threats to humanity, and carefully weighs the upsides and downsides both of taking action—and refraining from it.
For a counter viewpoint to this article, see Energy and sustainability, from the point of view of environmental physics, by Micha Tomkiewicz.
Excerpts from the paper:
The paper is behind paywall, here are some extensive excerpts (bold mine, except for section titles):
Introduction
I have stressed above the role of individuals in the Royal Society taking a leading role in the debates: it continues to this day with individuals aligned on both sides. The one change from history is that a bylaw of the Society that stood for most of its history has been overturned in recent decades. Whereas once “…it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion as a body upon any subject either of Nature or of Art, that comes before them”, now the Royal Society plays an active role in the debate, coming at it from only one side, without adequate acknowledgement of the lack of unanimity within the fellowship.
Most of the engineering Fellows I have consulted have some reservations about the current stand, reservations that are reflected here. One should be able to look to the academies worldwide for an open, balanced, and full discussion of these matters, with engineering-level integrity when contemplating what actions to take: in practice, the level of ‘post-normal science’ (where the ‘facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent’) gets in the way. There is no such thing as post-normal engineering. There is an abundance of reports focusing on the energy needs of humanity and the sustainability of mass action, but relatively little acknowledgement of the upsides of present cities as a way for allowing large populations to live in some comfort.
Decarbonizing the world economy
I start by accepting the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report at face value, although I shall return to this towards the end.
I am concerned that what is done in the name of decarbonization should leave the world in a better place. I am sure that what has been done so far in the name of decarbonization is set to fail comprehensively in meeting its avowed target, and that a new debate is needed. If our emissions of carbon dioxide are causing the world to warm and lead into possibly difficult times in the future, it is important also to establish the upsides of such emission. Peter Allitt quotes: “The rising carbon dioxide footprint may be troublesome, but it is a side effect of the creation of immense benefits.”
Scale
It is important to note the scale of the perceived problem. The entire history of modern civilization that started with the first industrial revolution has been enabled by the burning of fossil fuels. Our mobility, our health and lifestyles, our diet and its variety, our education system, particularly at the higher level, and our high culture would be quite impossible without fossil fuels, which have provided over 90% of the energy consumed on the earth since 1800. Today, geothermal, hydro- and nuclear power, together with the historic biofuels of wood and straw, account for about 15% of our energy use. Even though it is 40 years since the first oil shocks kick-started the modern renewable energy developments (wind, solar, and cultivated biomass), we still get rather less than 1% of our world energy from these sources. Indeed the rate at which fossil fuels are growing is seven times that at which the low carbon energies are growing, as the ratio of fossil fuel energy used to total energy used has remained unchanged since 1990 at 85%. The call to decarbonize the global economy by 80% by 2050 can now only be described as glib in my opinion, as the underlying analysis shows it is only possible if we wish to see large parts of the population die from starvation, destitution or violence in the absence of enough low-carbon energy to sustain society.
Energy Return on Investment
The debate over decarbonization has focused on technical feasibility and economics. There is one emerging measure that comes closely back to the engineering and the thermodynamics of energy production. The energy return on (energy) investment is a measure of the useful energy produced by a particular power plant divided by the energy needed to build, operate, maintain, and decommission the plant. This is a concept that owes its origin to animal ecology: a cheetah must get more energy from consuming his prey than expended on catching it, otherwise it will die. If the animal is to breed and nurture the next generation then the ratio of energy obtained from energy expended has to be higher, depending on the details of energyexpenditure on these other activities.
Weißbach et al. have analysed the EROI for a number of forms of energy production and their principal conclusion is that nuclear, hydro-, and gas and coal-fired power stations have an EROI that is much greater than wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power in a desert or cultivated biomass: see Fig. 2. In human terms, with an EROI of 1, we can mine fuel and look at it—we have no energy left over. To get a society that can feed itself and provide a basic educational system we need an EROI of our base-load fuel to be in excess of 5, and for a society with international travel and high culture we need EROI greater than 10. The new renewable energies do not reach this last level when the extra energy costs of overcoming intermittency are added in. In energy terms the current generation of renewable energy technologies alone will not enable a civilized modern society to continue!
Feasibility
Suppose the world unites and agrees to provide $1Tpa for ten years to mitigate future adverse climate change. What is the best strategy for spending that money for the reason given, namely to mitigate future climate change, and what will we be able to measure as the outcome of such an investment?
The answer is that no-one knows the latter now, or will ever know on the 2050 timescale. A crude calculation suggests that such a sum would allow the capture of all the CO2 from coal fired power stations over the next year, reducing global CO2 emissions by about 40%. But what difference would that actually make to the future climate, and would we be able to measure that difference as being attributable to the $1Tpa spent, and so even begin to assess the potential value-for-money of the investment?
What if the sun goes cool, or we have a spate of major volcanic eruptions: would we be able to isolate the contribution from the reduced CO2 emissions? No. It is sober to compare the sheer scale of this undertaking in view of the total uncertainty in the outcome. It is a current act of faith that investments in green energy projects are intrinsically good.
The scale of the different specific engineering challenges of the decarbonization project is without precedent in human history. This means that any new technology introductions need to be able to meet the huge implied capabilities. An appreciation of this sheer scale is very rarely admitted or even appreciated in many of the reports that advocate global decarbonization.
Generic lessons learned from introducing new technologies applied to decarbonization
As we decarbonize the world, we must improve the lot of humanity, not degrade it, and we must go with the flow of human progress not across or against it. Failure to appreciate these lessons could result in major investments not realizing their goals, with much of the investment having to be written off, representing lost opportunities to have done something else that was more effective.
Premature roll-out of immature/uneconomic technologies is a recipe for failure
The virtuous role of government funding in R&D is to be contrast with the litany of failure in recent times of subsidies in support of the premature rollout of technologies that are uneconomic and/or immature.
The primary problem is the use of public money, i.e., subsidies, to encourage the roll-out. They have a plethora of unintended consequences in the energy infrastructure sector. The reason so far for these failures is that the technologies are uneconomic over their lifecycles and immature in terms of the energy return on their investment.
There is an unintended and unwanted social consequence of the roll out of these new technologies. There is ample evidence in the UK of increasing fuel poverty (i.e., household spending over 10% of disposable income keeping warm in winter) in the regions of wind farm deployment where higher electricity bills are needed to cover the rent of the land (from usually already rich) landowners, a direct reversal of the process whereby cheap energy over the last century has lifted a significant fraction of the world’s poor from their poverty.
If the climate imperative weakens, so does the decarbonization imperative
In my view, the 2014 IPCC report was somewhat obfuscatory on this issue: there was no expert assessment of one key parameter, the climate sensitivity (the expected actual temperature rise for a doubling of CO 2 in the atmosphere), because of wide disagreements between models and data, and the current debate points to a lowering of the estimated range of values. In addition any prospect of a further reduction of the temperature rise over the next few decades (e.g., from the sun) gives us extra breathing space on new technology introductions.
This weakening of the timescale for future temperature rises has a direct policy implication in the here and now. Since the design lifetime of most fossil fuel plants is of order 40 years, the world would be wise to opt for another generation of fossil fuels to continue the improvement of the lot of mankind, while making a more determined effort over a longer time to develop real workarounds to the currently perceived problem of carbon dioxide emissions.
It is clear to me that every further step along the current pathway of deploying first generation renewable energy is locking in immature and uneconomic systems at net loss to the world standard of living. In view of the level of hard engineering evidence for this point that is already available, the romantic notion of sustainability at any cost, as opposed to hard-nosed sustainability, is indefensible. There should be a calling to account on how these matters came about.
The demographic transition
The population of the world started growing sharply at the time of the industrial revolution. In the 1960s, a qualitatively new feature emerged which will come to dominate demographics in the latter part of last century: the rate of growth of the population started to decline. As of now wherever the majority of people live in urban areas and have access to universal primary education (particularly for girls) the indigenous populations, are in absolute decline. This applies now in Europe, North America, and Japan. The drop in the fertility rates for child-bearing women in Europe is now so severe that Italy’s population will shrink from 61M to 8M and Germany from 80M to 4M over the century.
The population is predicted to grow to 9B by mid-century and to fall back, even to 7B by 2100. In one hundred years, the discourse will be on the possible uses of infrastructure for 2B people no longer alive on the earth. This future can be seen in certain parts of the world where depopulation has already started, as in the east of the former East Germany. Villages are vacated, buildings torn down—if left to decay they collect vermin and detract from the quality of life of the few who remain. This is now a more certain future than possible uncontrolled future climates.
This prospect has a major impact on the contemporary response to the perceived threats of future climate change. The infrastructure being planned now has to last only 100 years and should be designed for dismantling at the end of service life. The increased energy intensity of industry coupled with an eventually declining population is not as yet factored into the climate models.
JC reflections
This is a terrific paper, that I am still digesting, and will be working to incorporate some of this material into my public.ppt presentation on climate change.
I was particularly struck by:
Figure 2 and the EROI argument
The demographic argument, including the population decline in Europe
The idea of sustainability at any cost, versus hard-nosed sustainability
But it is really the integration and exposition of all these points. This is surely a compelling argument for anyone who cares about true sustainability and human well being.
When I have spoken with engineers at Georgia Tech, nearly all of them question the feasibility of a rapid transition away from fossil fuels (the ones that don’t question this have been civil/environmental engineers).
First it was the scientists, then the economists. It is now time for the engineers to drive the discussion and policies on this issue.David and Charles Koch are billionaire brothers whose financial backing of various Conservative (in particular, Tea Party) causes is so infamous it earned them a (parody) appearance in Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis' film The Campaign.
Their little brother William "Wild Bill" Koch is more famous for just really, really, really loving the Old West.
The Denver Post reports that Bill Koch is well on his way to completing construction on Colorado's newest oldest town: a 50-building grown man's imaginarium, boasting a saloon, a church, a firehouse, a train station, and even a jail for those who defy him.
The town sits on a 420-acre meadow on Koch's Bear Ranch property, and was obviously designed by someone high.
The un-settlement, the Post explains, will exist "simply for Koch's amusement."
"Koch's project manager has told county officials that the enclave in the middle of the 6,400-acre Bear Ranch won't ever be open to the public."
Kochtopia reportedly features lots of brass and mahogany and other materials you can't find at IKEA. It is protected by a locked gate, manned by guards, and possibly Cerberus.
Ramon Reed, the chairman of the Gunnison County Planning Commission, described the town's full-scale buildings as "the kind of stuff I guess you would expect a billionare to construct," a polite way of identifying a project as "totally insane and improbable."
Koch will also construct a nearly 22,000-square foot residence on a hill above the town, where he will live as God.
The Post reports he made headlines last year for paying $2.3 million at auction for a photograph of Billy the Kid, an outlaw who likely would have robbed and killed "Wild Bill" if he had been the billionaire's contemporary rather than his fetish object.
The paper adds that Koch already owned "Jesse James' gun, Wyatt Earp's vest, Sitting Bull's rifle and a flag that belonged to Gen. George Custer," probably because he is too poor to buy things that aren't secondhand.
Koch has said that his wife once told him he should go on the television show Hoarders.
He recently bought her the moon to silence her.
[Denver Post via Newser // Image of gallows in Tombstone, Arizona via Shutterstock]Scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have successfully conducted a revolutionary nuclear fusion experiment. Using their experimental reactor, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7X) stellarator, they have managed to sustain a hydrogen plasma – a key step on the path to creating workable nuclear fusion. The German chancellor Angela Merkel, who herself has a doctorate in physics, switched on the device at 2:35 p.m. GMT (9:35 a.m. EST).
As a clean, near-limitless source of energy, it’s no understatement to say that controlled nuclear fusion (replicating the process that powers the Sun) would change the world, and several nations are striving to make breakthroughs in this field. Germany is undoubtedly the frontrunner in one respect: This is the second time that it’s successfully fired up its experimental stellarator fusion reactor, a serious competitor to the tokamak model.
Last December, the team managed to suspend a helium plasma for the first time, and they’ve now achieved the same feat with hydrogen. Generating a hydrogen plasma is considerably more difficult than producing a helium one, so by producing and sustaining one in today’s experiment, even for just a few milliseconds, these researchers have achieved something truly remarkable.
As a power source, hydrogen fusion releases far more energy than helium fusion, which is why sustaining a superheated hydrogen plasma within a stellarator represents such a huge step for nuclear fusion research.
John Jelonnek, a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, led a team that was responsible for installing the powerful heating components of the reactor. “We’re not doing this for us,” he told the Guardian, “but for our children and grandchildren.”
First hydrogen plasma at the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at MPI Greifswald #fusion #energy pic.twitter.com/A754zZcJQb — Mattias Marklund (@MattiasMarklund) February 3, 2016
In order to initiate the fusion process, extremely high temperatures of around 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) have to be reached within the reactor. At these temperatures, atoms of hydrogen become energetically excited and form a plasma cloud.
In order for the plasma to be sustained, it must not touch the cold walls of the reactor, so the stellarator’s 425 tonnes (470 tons) of superconducting, super-cooled magnets are used to keep it suspended in one place. At a high enough ignition temperature – along with the aid of an effect called “quantum tunneling” – the hydrogen particles begin to collide and fuse, releasing energy and forming heavier elements.
This 16-meter-long (52 feet) experimental fusion reactor is one of the largest in the world. It took 19 years and €1 billion ($1.1 billion) to complete. This reactor is not designed to produce any usable energy, but rather recreate the conditions found deep within our own Sun – namely, to create a sustained, super-hot plasma, the energy source of a viable fusion reactor.
By successfully creating and capturing helium plasma last year, the scientists at the Max Planck Institute showed that it was certainly possible. This earlier plasma generation also “cleaned” out the stellarator, removing dirt particles that would have interfered with today’s more important hydrogen plasma-generating test.WASHINGTON — The House Republican leadership faces a Thursday deadline to decide if it will continue to defend laws that limit veterans benefits to opposite-sex couples in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling striking down a similar provision in the Defense of Marriage Act.
"We're reviewing the impact of the Supreme Court's decision, and don't have any announcement to make at this time," House Speaker John Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel, told BuzzFeed on Wednesday when asked if the defense of the veterans' statutes would continue.
The day after the Supreme Court ruled in Edie Windsor's challenge to Section 3 of DOMA that the federal definition of marriage that excluded gay couples in DOMA is unconstitutional, Judge Richard Stearns asked the parties in another lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts and addressing the rights of service members and veterans and their spouses, to give "any reasons why judgment should not enter for plaintiffs in this case."
The plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, filed by Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and Chadbourne & Park, argued in a Wednesday filing in the case that the decision in Windsor's case controls the outcome in their case and that Stearns should decide in their favor.
In addition to challenging DOMA, the plaintiffs — led by Maj. Shannon McLaughlin, a judge advocate general in Massachusetts Army National Guard, and her wife, Casey — challenge two statutes in Title 38 of the U.S. Code regarding veterans' benefits that define "spouse" as "a person of the opposite sex."
As with Section 3 of DOMA, which Attorney General Eric Holder announced in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner in February 2011 that the government would no longer be defending in court challenges because the administration had decided the statute is unconstitutional, Holder informed Boehner in February 2012 that the Justice Department would be not be defending the challenged provisions in Title 38.
"The language of the Title 38 provisions is identical in material respects to the language of Section 3 of DOMA: Those provisions, like Section 3, define the term'spouse' (or'surviving spouse') as 'a person of the opposite sex,'" Holder wrote in the Feb. 17, 2012, letter.
In the Wednesday filing in the Massachusetts case, the plaintiffs argue that Windsor "is plainly dispositive," noting that "the same logic that required DOMA to be invalidated applies with equal force to the definitional provisions for the term'spouse' and phrase'surviving spouse,' as used in [Title 38]."
Since the February 2011 letter, the House Republican leadership, through its control of the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, defended Section 3 of DOMA. It continued with that defense as to the veterans' provisions, in the Massachusetts case and in a similar case brought in federal court in California by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of Tracey and Maggie Cooper-Harris.
Stearns' request in the Massachusetts case contained a 21-day deadline, which is Thursday. Neither the Justice Department nor BLAG have yet responded to his request.
Update - 1:25 p.m., EST: A spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, one of the two Democrats on BLAG, asked Boehner to stop the defense in a statement to BuzzFeed.
"Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, it's time for Speaker Boehner to stop spending scarce taxpayer dollars defending discrimination. The Court was clear: The federal government must respect all marriages equally and fully. Rather than trying to delay justice for particular married gay and lesbian couples and their families, House Republicans should be working with their Democratic colleagues in Congress and the Administration to bring federal government into compliance with Court's ruling as quickly as possible," Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement.As I noted the other day, the release of those Planned Parenthood videos constitutes huge win for the pro-life cause. The reason is simple: When the topic is late-term abortion, the harvesting and selling of organs, or — frankly, anything that unmasks the unseemly “process” of abortion — it’s good for the pro-life cause. And that’s precisely what these videos force us to grapple with.
In a way, this is a return to a playbook that worked for years. During the 1990s, pro-lifers scored points by stressing “partial-birth abortion” — but somewhere along the line (possibly because conservatives were a victim of their own success), talk of transvaginal ultrasounds and “legitimate rape” reframed the debate on much less hospitable terrain. Instead of Democrats being put on the defensive and being forced to defend the killing of a 20 week old “fetus,” it was now Republicans who found themselves getting out over their skis, talking about rape, and losing elections.
Followed to its logical conclusion, though, one could conclude that pro-lifers should devote themselves to producing more videos — and eschewing legislative restrictions on abortion.
This is a dilemma. What good is earning political capital if you’re not going to use it? It seems ridiculous that taxpayer dollars fund Planned Parenthood, and so — with the group now currently on the ropes today — it seems to make perfect sense to renew calls to dufund Planned Parenthood.
…Or is it? Over at Commentary, Noah Rothman argues that
Republicans would be foolish to let the pressure on Planned Parenthood elapse, but nor should they make themselves the focus of this story. Republicans should avoid being drawn into a convoluted debate the legal merits of the defund effort, or its viability in the courts. They would also be well served if they were to ignore arcane whip counting and decline to opine on the politics of a presidential veto. As long as the debate is a philosophical one over whether we as a society should allow this kind of barbarism, conservatives will find themselves on the winning side. In the meantime, let the videos flow and enjoy watching Planned Parenthood supporters squirm in the sunlight.
This is a bit of a Catch-22: You can’t restrict abortions unless you gain public support — but if you gain public support, trying to restrict abortion legislatively will erode some of that support …
One solution might be to abandon the legislative process altogether, and focus instead on fostering a culture of life. In other words, reduce abortions by winning the argument, not the vote. Expose the evils of the abortion industry, make it socially unacceptable to have abortions, encourage adoption, support crisis pregnancy centers, etc. — and reduce abortions (and save babies!) without trying to mandate its abolition.
But the word abolition is actually quite appropriate here. Many pro-lifers view themselves as modern-day William Wilberforces — and their cause as tantamount to a modern-day abolition movement. And just as the notion that slavery would someday simply fade away (and therefore, all the fuss over ending slavery was overwrought) feels like an act of wishful thinking or moral cowardice, people who believe abortion is murder likewise find it unacceptable for American law to support and facilitate this practice. (Should we also legalize murder — and just focus on creating a social stigma around killing your spouse or parents, they would ask?)
This comes down to a strategic disagreement over pragmatism versus principle. And it’s just one more area where conservatives who might share a similar philosophical worldview will have to do some soul searching.Alberta’s climate plan could lead to 15,000 fewer jobs, a $4-billion drop in household income, as well as lower corporate profits, oil exports and overall economic activity.
That’s what Alberta Treasury Board and Finance officials initially projected last November in an internal analysis conducted for the NDP government — data the province doesn’t deny, but insists was based on invalid assumptions that make the information irrelevant.
The province hasn’t released a fully detailed economic impact assessment, but preliminary government analysis from November — dated about a week before the climate strategy was unveiled by Premier Rachel Notley — shows an array of potential consequences.
According to a projection for Finance Minister Joe Ceci and obtained by the Herald, the climate plan would lower the province’s gross domestic product by 1.0 to 1.5 per cent by 2022, “due to the decline in energy investment, weaker production and lower consumer spending.”
Oil exports would be crimped by 0.5 per cent from the business-as-usual (BAU) case in 2018-19, the study says.
Consumer spending would fall by almost two per cent by 2022, “due to the impact on employment and slower wage growth.”
As well, corporate profits would decline about $1.5 billion, or 1.7 per cent, from the BAU scenario by 2022.
These key impacts are based on several assumptions rolled out by the province on Nov. 22, such as implementing a $30-a-tonne carbon tax by 2018, phasing out coal-fired power plants and investing in renewable energy.
However, the NDP government says the study made a number of incomplete or out-of-date assumptions.
Most significantly, it assumed about half of the money raised by the carbon tax would go directly to general government revenues, which didn’t happen.
For a cash-strapped government, this would have been an enticing prospect.
Instead, carbon tax revenue will be spent on consumer rebates, promoting green energy, mitigating the impact on coal communities and other goals.
Provincial officials insist these assumptions would alter the key impacts, but don’t say what the updated figures would be for the final plan’s effect on Alberta’s economy, job numbers or other measurements.
“It was a snapshot in time, and cabinet deliberated and made a number of decisions that are not reflected in this note,” says Environment Minister Shannon Phillips.
“It’s an analysis, quite frankly, of what we didn’t do.”
OK.
But there’s much here the government did do, such as introduce a carbon tax that will reach $30 a tonne within two years, and plan to speed up the closure of coal power.
And the briefing does give Albertans a glimpse of the potential implications tied to a broad strategy of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
It indicates household income would fall by about $4 billion, or 1.3 per cent, from the business-as-usual case by 2022.
“Slower economic activity will impact baseline government revenues,” it notes, with royalties projected to be around $250 million lower than the business-as-usual case in 2020-21.
Income tax revenue for government was estimated to drop by about $450 million in 2020-21.
According to the information, the scenario estimates carbon levy revenue of $3.4 billion in 2018 — increasing to $5.8 billion by 2030 — although the spring budget pegs the climate revenue at $2.4 billion next year.
So, is this an accurate picture of the carbon plan’s real-world effects?
Provincial officials say it reflects a worst-case scenario and was used to mitigate the potential fallout.
They point out the analysis didn’t include several steps taken in the final plan, such as adopting a small business tax cut, exempting farm fuel from the levy, or creating a new petrochemical diversification initiative.
Other measures — such as providing rebate cheques rather than tax credits to consumers, a five-year exemption on oil and gas fuel used in the field, and measures to protect trade-exposed industries — would also alter its conclusions.
“This was one of the pieces that was in the machine at that time — a very small piece containing some assumptions that never happened. So therefore the GDP and job impacts are not going to happen,” Phillips says.
“This is not a prescriptive or a predictive document in any way, shape or form and should not be interpreted as such.”
There is an easy way, of course, to completely discount this information: release an update on the implications of the new strategy.
Government officials say they don’t have updated figures because key policy pieces are still being formed and analysis is ongoing.
Phillips says she expects more data will be included in the next budget and through ministry business plans.
The chair of the province’s climate advisory panel, Andrew Leach, an energy economist, says such analysis also begs the question of what exactly you compare it to.
The business-as-usual case doesn’t take into account the potential costs of not taking action — more energy trade restrictions, for example — or benefits of the strategy, such as improving Alberta’s prospects to get a pipeline built.
“Greenhouse gas policy would be easy if you had magic,” he says.
“If you had access to a magic wand where you could say, ‘I am going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta at no costs to anyone at any time,’ then my job would have been really easy.”
He’s right.
Lowering emissions in a carbon-constrained world will come with a price, especially for a province that produces oil and gas for the world.
But with a carbon tax coming into effect in six months and the province in recession, shouldn’t we be able to accurately and openly assess what those full costs will be in terms of jobs or economic growth?
After all, the entire province is paying the full freight. We should know the best forecast of what the final tab will be.
Chris Varcoe is a Calgary Herald columnist.
cvarcoe@calgaryherald.comSince training camp and preseason have begun, there has been a lot of chatter about both Ryan Murray and Boone Jenner. Both have looked good and both are most likely getting a lot of attention from the front office and coaches as they may be two rookies ready to break through into the NHL.
Ryan Murray played in the first preseason game against the Pittsburgh Penguins and played well, and of course had the game winning goal in overtime. Boone Jenner had a goal and an assist against the Carolina Hurricanes, he played on a line with Marian Gaborik and Brandon Dubinsky.
Both players are showing that they want to play in Columbus and are NHL ready. I know it is still training camp, and early in the preseason, but both have made it through the first set of cuts, which happened earlier today.
I am not sure where there is room on either the defense or offense for either of the players at the beginning of the season, but if the front office and coaching staff feel that either of them are ready then they will get ice time. I would not be surprised if we saw both of them go to Springfield to play in the AHL and gain some more experience though.
Whichever way it goes I do believe we will see both of them in Columbus Blue Jackets jerseys at some point in the regular season.
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Who Is Going To Play More NHL Games This Season? Ryan Murray
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If Christians can pray on the field, so can the Satanists. And that’s what one Bremerton High School student wants to do.
Lilith Starr, chapter head for The Satanic Temple of Seattle, told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that a student gave a formal request for a Satanic invocation on Tuesday morning. Starr said she wouldn’t release the student’s name, but that the Temple is in the planning stages of the event.
“We will be at Thursday’s game doing a postgame Satanic invocation on the field if Coach (Joe) Kennedy continues to pray,” she said. “We won’t step on the field if he is stopped or doesn’t pray.”
Coach Kennedy made headlines when it was discovered that his players joined him in postgame prayers after Bremerton High School football games. Students are free to pray as they wish, but teachers and other district staff are usually banned from such activity. Kennedy has reportedly taken legal action against the high school after the school |
a spokesman for the health authority.
A statement from the health authority says affected areas of the building will be out of use for a prolonged time.
Housekeeping and maintenance at the VG were on site Thursday night to clean up and to find the source of the flood.
Four years ago, the Nova Scotia government said it would send out a request for proposals to replace the Centennial Building, one of two buildings that make up the Victoria General site.The Atlanta Cosplay Meetup has been making a ton of progress on our Marines & Xenos group costume. We have finished up build day #6 so let's take a look and see where things are at currently!We've finished principal construction of the Marine torso armor and are working on finishing it currently. The cardboard masters were coated in fiberglass resin to give them strength, and we are going over them with bondo body filler to smooth them out. After a few more passes they should be smooth enough to use as vacuumforming masters, or to mold and cast in resin and fiberglass mat for strength.We've also started building the leg armor, using the same method as the torso.All that is left for the Marine armor is to 3D print the shoulder parts, and the helmet and various attachments. Adam purchased the same WWII helmet used in the film, which will become the base for our helmet that we will make out of cast resin and fiberglass mat.The Pulse Rifle has been assembled and had a first pass of smoothing and cleanup done on it. The entire gun was 3D printed from a high detail model from the game Aliens: Colonial Marines. Another day or so of work and we'll be ready to mold it in silicone!Adam Keeton lent a hand helping us lathe a test Grenade out of aluminum. This is only a first iteration, we'll need to make a few adjustments and go back and try again. So far the results are very nice looking though!Plus, he looks like a natural holding the Pulse Rifle.The Xeno skull has been started. We built the head using a 3D model from the game Aliens: Colonial Marines and a program called 123D Make. What this program can do is generate a 3D interlocking puzzle, sort of like the wooden dinosaur skeleton puzzles you got as a kid. We can set it to be however many vertical and horizontal slices and the program draws up plans, which we then exported to the laser cutter. 4 hours of cutting and about 60 pieces later, you get this mess.Assembly really is a simple as finding the numbered slots and sliding them together. Once you get the first couple of pieces put together the assembly is a breeze. We took maybe an hour to put the whole thing together. Once it was assembled, we coated the whole thing in fiberglass resin to give it strength, and once that cured we filled all of the holes with expanding foam.Once the foam cures, we will rasp all of the excess off and skin it in bondo, and use that for our sculpting base.Valentin is working on the mechanism for the Xeno tongue. We are 3D designing and printing a rack and pinion gear under tension from a rubber band, and "cocked" with a worm gear connected to a motor. The idea is that the Xeno costumers will have a hidden button to open the mouth and shoot out the tongue via pressure from the band, and the worm gear will retract and cock the tongue to be shot out again.Lastly, I started on the Smartgun for my own Marine costume. Every Colonial Marine group needs a Smartgunner, and I would be lying if I didn't say that Vasquez was a bit of a hero as a kid. The Smartgun and the steadicam arm will be built much the way the rest of the build has been, with several 3D printed parts and laser cut cardboard details. The steadicam arm will have a semi-working interior using custom machined aluminum parts and springs. So far the barrel has been cut and printed, with a few more parts on the way.That's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to our deadline in May!See all of our progress photos on Freeside's Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1045223078825003.1073741829.612557732091542&type=1 Be apart of the Atlanta Cosplay Meetup by keeping an eye on Freeside's Meetup calendar, or our Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AtlantaCosplayMeetup/The Just Label It (JLI) Campaign announced today that a record-breaking one million Americans of all political persuasions have called on the FDA to label genetically engineered (GE) foods. Today, March 27, is the date that the FDA is required to respond to the petition. It took JLI and its more than 500 partner organizations less than 180 days to accumulate an historic number of public comments—a testament to the power of collective voices to demand our right to know what’s in our food. (I’ve written about the campaign before here, here, and here.)
The campaign also announced today a new national survey revealing that more than nine out of 10 Americans across the political spectrum supports labeling food that has been genetically engineered. This new infographic is a compelling visual that shares the results of the survey.
New Survey Results: Motherhood, Apple Pie and GE Food Labeling
Voter support for GE-foods labeling in the U.S. is nearly unanimous, according to the political opinion survey on GE food labeling conducted by The Mellman Group on behalf of JLI. Explained pollster Mark Mellman, “Few topics other than motherhood and apple pie can muster over 90 percent support, but labeling GE-foods is one of those few views held almost unanimously.” The survey found nearly all Democrats (93% favor, 2% oppose), Independents (90% favor, 5% oppose) and Republicans (89% favor, 5% oppose) in favor of labeling. The study also revealed that support for labeling is robust and arguments against it have little sway.
In the era of pink slime, BPA in our soup and deadly melons, we have a right more than ever to know about what’s in our food. The FDA needs to restore confidence in our food and our right to know about the food we eat and feed our families. It’s time for the FDA to give Americans the same rights held by citizens in over 40 nations, including all of our major trade partners, to know whether our foods have been genetically modified.
Stay tuned as the campaign now works to make sure that the FDA and Washington knows that one million Americans are watching to make sure they deliver.SALT LAKE CITY (CN) – Navajos claim in Federal Court that Utah abandoned a $54 million energy income trust for tribal housing, water, electricity and college scholarships, because top state officials don’t want to deal with litigation over the trust’s management.
Lead plaintiff Mary Benally, as a beneficiary of the Utah Navajo Trust Fund, claims that Utah unjustly “resigned” as administrator of the trust in 2008, and put the money in a holding fund.
The trust was established in 1933. “The state of Utah is required by federal law to receive 37.5 percent of royalties paid on oil and gas extracted from certain portions of the Navajo Reservation that extend into San Juan County, Utah. These royalties are to be placed into the Utah Navajo Trust Fund,” the complaint states.
All Navajos who live in San Juan County are listed as beneficiaries, Congress declared by public law in 1968.
The fund was valued at about $54 million in 2011, according to Navajo Times. That money includes a $33 million settlement in Pelt v. Utah, a class action involving the state’s management of the fund.
That 18-year litigation concluded in 2010. The Navajos claimed that the state had squandered $50 million in royalties on bribes, payoffs and shady business deals.
A three-person panel – including Utah’s treasurer, director of finance, and an official appointed by the governor – oversaw the trust until June 30, 2008. That year, the Legislature, via House Bill 352 and “at the request” of then-Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., moved responsibility of the trust to the Department of Administrative Services, resigned as trustee and asked that Congress appoint a successor trustee.
The plaintiff beneficiaries say the governor’s general counsel complained to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008 of the “numerous lawsuits” involving the fund, and that “In providing Congress of Utah’s purported resignation as NTF trustee, and requesting Congress to appoint a successor trustee, the governor’s general counsel testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that litigation regarding Utah’s historically deficient management of the NTR did indeed motivate said resignation.”
[NTR appears to be a typographical error for NTF.]
The plaintiffs add: “Utah sought to resign, in part, because ‘litigation related to those royalties began almost immediately’ following the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the Aneth Extension, and because of the ‘litigious environment surrounding the State’s administration of the [NTF].'” (Brackets in complaint.)
The complaint cites the testimony of the Utah governor’s general counsel Tani Pack Downing to the House Committee on Natural Resources: “‘The Utah Navajo Trust Fund has been the subject of numerous lawsuits over the 75 years since its creation. Each lawsuit has challenged Utah’s management of the royalty fund and has requested an accounting.'”
Gov. Gary Herbert, the lead defendant in this case, took office in 2009, after Utah had “resigned” as trustee. The Navajo plaintiffs say Herbert has done little to respond to their plight.
“Utah is required by federal law to manage and dis[burse] funds from the NTF for the ‘health, education and general welfare’ of the Navajo Nation who reside in San Juan County, Utah. These Navajo are NTF ‘beneficiaries.’ These royalty proceeds do not belong to Utah, or to the Navajo Nation. They are intended for the benefit of the NTF beneficiaries.
“Where, as here, the instrument creating a trust fund does not define the process by which a trustee may voluntarily resign, any such trustee must petition a court for permission to resign. Under no circumstances may a trustee who seeks to resign do so until a successor trustee is in place, able and willing to carry out the terms so as to avoid violation of strict and exacting fiduciary obligations a trustee always owes to beneficiaries.”
The resignation caused “irreparable harm to thousands of beneficiaries,” and blocked funding for “healthcare, housing, roads, law enforcement, and water and power development,” the Navajos say.
The Navajo Nation – which spans Utah, Arizona and New Mexico – formed a tribal government in the 1920s in response to oil discovery on its land, and oil companies negotiated with the tribe over oil leases. A 2011 census estimated the tribe’s membership at more 300,000.
The defendants, as trust administrators, include Herbert, the State of Utah and three state officials.
The plaintiff beneficiaries seek an injunction requiring the defendants to resume administration of the Utah Navajo Trust Fund in compliance with the terms of the trust, and federal common and statutory law. They alleged breach of trust, and also seek costs of suit.
They are represented by John Pace with Lewis Hansen Waldo Pleshe and Flanders.
Like this: Like Loading...Good morning. This is LEADOFF, an early look at Atlanta sports.
After months of filming, NBC Sports is set to present a one-hour documentary profiling Falcons and Atlanta United owner Arthur Blank.
The show, titled “On a Mission: Atlanta Rising,” will cover Blank’s life from boyhood to present-day. It will air at 2 p.m. Sept. 2 on NBC.
“When the idea for the show came about and we started to look at potential subjects across different sports, the one person we kept coming back to was Arthur Blank,” Jon Miller, president of programming for NBC Sports Group, told the AJC through a spokesman. “He wears multiple hats with wide-ranging accomplishments, greatly impacting the community, producing winners in business and on the field, and leading by example.
“Arthur’s accessibility and his team’s cooperation since we began filming in April was crucial to our ability to fully tell his story,” Miller said. “This is a project that we’ll look to continue with compelling subjects across all sports.”
Among the topics that will be covered in the documentary, according to NBC: how a 15-year-old Blank dealt with his father’s death, Blank’s growing pains as co-founder of The Home Depot, his evolving relationship with former Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, the Falcons’ run to (and historic defeat in) last season’s Super Bowl, the launch of Atlanta United, the construction of Mercedes-Benz Stadium and Blank’s philanthropic efforts.
“Viewers will enjoy this look at Arthur’s life,” Miller said.
The show will include interviews with Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Blank’s wife Angela Blank, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan and Vick, among others.
* * *
READ ON...
The first college football game in Mercedes-Benz Stadium will feature two of the nation’s top three teams, according to the Associated Press preseason poll released Monday. The poll ranked Alabama No. 1 and Florida State No. 3, providing a compelling backdrop for the teams’ Sept. 2 showdown in a Chick-fil-A Kickoff game. “There is no doubt about it: This will be the greatest opening game of all time in college football,” Gary Stokan, president and CEO of Peach Bowl Inc., which operates the Chick-fil-A Kickoff event, said after the poll’s release. See full story here.
When the Falcons’ new $1.5 billion home opens with an exhibition game Saturday night, the most expensive and most discussed feature of Mercedes-Benz Stadium will remain closed. The retractable roof isn’t ready to retract, forcing games to be played with it in the closed position until mechanization is completed. The roof has required more money, time, steel and stress than anyone involved expected. See full story here.
[...] ICYMI: For the first time, the Hawks will wear an advertising patch on their uniforms, beginning with the 2017-18 season. The Hawks and Atlanta-based digital health company Sharecare have reached agreement on a five-year deal that will put the Sharecare logo on the front left shoulder of the players’ game jerseys. Hawks chief revenue officer Andrew Saltzman called the deal “a lot more than a sponsorship and a brand on our jersey.” See full story here.
[...]
Suggested video:Clickjacking (classified as a User Interface redress attack, UI redress attack, UI redressing) is a malicious technique of tricking a user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives, thus potentially revealing confidential information or allowing others to take control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous objects, including web pages.[1][2][3][4]
In web browsers, clickjacking is a browser security issue that is a vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms. Clickjacking can also take place outside of web browsers, including applications.[5]
A clickjack takes the form of embedded code or a script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function.[6]
Clickjacking is an instance of the confused deputy problem, a term used to describe when a computer is innocently fooled into misusing its authority.[7]
History [ edit ]
In 2002, it had been noted that it was possible to load a transparent layer over a web page and have the user's input affect the transparent layer without the user noticing. However, this was mainly ignored as a major issue until 2008.[5]
In 2008, Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen had discovered that Adobe Flash Player was able to be clickjacked, allowing an attacker to gain access of the computer without the user's knowledge.[5]
The term "clickjacking" was coined by Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen, [8][9] a portmanteau of the words "click" and "hijacking." [5]
As more attacks of a similar nature were discovered, the focus of the term "UI redressing" was changed to describe the category of these attacks, rather than just clickjacking itself.[5]
"potential clickjacking" warning from the "NoScript" internet-browser addon
Description [ edit ]
Clickjacking takes advantage of vulnerabilities that are present in applications and web pages to allow the attacker to manipulate the user's computer.
For example, a clickjacked page tricks a user into performing undesired actions by clicking on a concealed link. On a clickjacked page, the attackers load another page over it in a transparent layer. The unsuspecting users think that they are clicking visible buttons, while they are actually performing actions on the invisible page. The hidden page may be an authentic page; therefore, the attackers can trick users into performing actions which the users never intended. There is no way of tracing such actions to the attackers later, as the users would have been genuinely authenticated on the hidden page.
Clickjacking is not limited to this type though, and are present in other forms.
Clickjacking categories [ edit ]
Classic: works mostly through a web browser [5]
works mostly through a web browser Likejacking: utilizes Facebook's social media capabilities [10] [11]
utilizes Facebook's social media capabilities Nested: clickjacking tailored to affect Google+ [12]
clickjacking tailored to affect Google+ Cursorjacking: manipulates the cursor's appearance and location [5]
manipulates the cursor's appearance and location Browserless: does not use a browser [5]
does not use a browser Cookiejacking: acquires cookies from browsers [5] [13]
acquires cookies from browsers Filejacking: capable of setting up the affected device as a file server [5] [14]
capable of setting up the affected device as a file server Password manager attack: clickjacking that utilizes a vulnerability in the autofill capability of browsers[15]
Classic [ edit ]
Classic clickjacking refers to when an attacker uses hidden layers on web pages to manipulate the actions a user's cursor does, resulting in the user being mislead about what truly is being clicked on.
A user might receive an email with a link to a video about a news item, but another webpage, say a product page on Amazon, can be "hidden" on top or underneath the "PLAY" button of the news video. The user tries to "play" the video but actually "buys" the product from Amazon. The hacker can only send a single click, so they rely on the fact that the visitor is both logged into Amazon.com and has 1-click ordering enabled.
While technical implementation of these attacks may be challenging due to cross-browser incompatibilities, a number of tools such as BeEF or Metasploit Project offer almost fully automated exploitation of clients on vulnerable websites. Clickjacking may be facilitated by - or may facilitate - other web attacks, such as XSS.[16][17]
Likejacking [ edit ]
Likejacking is a malicious technique of tricking users of a website into "liking" a Facebook page that they did not intentionally mean to "like".[18] The term "likejacking" came from a comment posted by Corey Ballou in the article How to "Like" Anything on the Web (Safely),[19] which is one of the first documented postings explaining the possibility of malicious activity regarding Facebook's "like" button.[20]
According to an article in IEEE Spectrum, a solution to likejacking was developed at one of Facebook's hackathons.[21] A "Like" bookmarklet is available that avoids the possibility of likejacking present in the Facebook like button.[22]
Nested [ edit ]
Nested clickjacking, compared to classic clickjacking, works by embedding a malicious web frame between two frames of the original, harmless web page: that from the framed page and that which is displayed on the top window. This works due to a vulnerability in the HTTP header X-Frame-Options, in which, when this element has the value SAMEORIGIN, the web browser only checks the two aforementioned layers. The fact that additional frames can be added in between these two while remaining undetected means that attackers can use this for their benefit.
In the past, with Google+ and the faulty version of X-Frame-Options, attackers were able to insert frames of their choice by using the vulnerability present in Google's Image Search engine. In between the image display frames, which were present in Google+ as well, these attacker-controlled frames were able to load and not be restricted, allowing for the attackers to mislead whoever came upon the image display page.[12]
Cursorjacking [ edit ]
Cursorjacking is a UI redressing technique to change the cursor from the location the user perceives, discovered in 2010 by Eddy Bordi, a researcher at Vulnerability.fr,[23] Marcus Niemietz demonstrated this with a custom cursor icon, and in 2012 Mario Heiderich by hiding the cursor.[24][25]
Jordi Chancel, a researcher at Alternativ-Testing.fr, discovered a cursorjacking vulnerability using Flash, HTML and JavaScript code in Mozilla Firefox on Mac OS X systems (fixed in Firefox 30.0) which can lead to arbitrary code execution and webcam spying.[26]
A second CursorJacking vulnerability was again discovered by Jordi Chancel in Mozilla Firefox on Mac OS X systems (fixed in Firefox 37.0) using once again Flash, HTML and JavaScript code which can lead also to the spying of the webcam and the execution of a malicious addon allowing the execution of a malware on the computer of the trapped user.[27]
Browserless [ edit ]
In browserless clickjacking, attackers utilize vulnerabilities in programs to replicate classic clickjacking in them, without being required to use the presence of a web browser.
This method of clickjacking is mainly prevalent among mobile devices, usually on Android devices, especially due to the way in which toast notifications work. Because toast notifications have a small delay in between the moment the notification is requested and the moment the notification actually displays on-screen, attackers are capable of using that gap to create a dummy button that lies hidden underneath the notification and can still be clicked on.[5]
Cookiejacking [ edit ]
Cookiejacking is a form of clickjacking in which cookies are stolen from web browsers. This is done by tricking the user into dragging an object which seemingly appears harmless, but is in fact making the user select the entire content of the cookie being targeted. From there, the attacker can acquire the cookie and all of the data that is within it.[13]
Filejacking [ edit ]
In filejacking, attackers use the web browser's capability to navigate through the computer and access computer files in order to acquire personal data. It does so by tricking the user into establishing an active file server (through the file and folder selection window that browsers use). With this, attackers can now access and take files from their victims' computers.[14]
Password manager attack [ edit ]
A 2014 paper from researcher at the Carnegie Mellon University found that while browsers refuse to autofill if the protocol on the current login page is different from the protocol at the time the password was saved, some password managers would insecurely fill in passwords for the http version of https-saved passwords. Most managers did not protect against iFrame- and redirection-based attacks and exposed additional passwords where password synchronization had been used between multiple devices.[15]
Prevention [ edit ]
NoScript [ edit ]
Protection against clickjacking (including likejacking) can be added to Mozilla Firefox desktop and mobile[28] versions by installing the NoScript add-on: its ClearClick feature, released on 8 October 2008, prevents users from clicking on invisible or "redressed" page elements of embedded documents or applets.[29] According to Google's "Browser Security Handbook" from year 2008, NoScript's ClearClick is "the only freely available product that offers a reasonable degree of protection" against Clickjacking.[30] Protection from the newer cursorjacking attack was added to NoScript 2.2.8 RC1.[24]
GuardedID [ edit ]
GuardedID (a commercial product) includes client-side clickjack protection for users of Internet Explorer and Firefox[31] without interfering with the operation of legitimate iFrames. GuardedID clickjack protection forces all frames to become visible.
Gazelle [ edit ]
Gazelle is a Microsoft Research project secure web browser based on IE, that uses an OS-like security model, and has its own limited defenses against clickjacking.[32] In Gazelle, a window of different origin may only draw dynamic content over another window's screen space if the content it draws is opaque.
Web site owners can protect their users against UI redressing (frame based clickjacking) on the server side by including a framekiller JavaScript snippet in those pages they do not want to be included inside frames from different sources.[30]
Such JavaScript-based protection, unfortunately, is not always reliable. This is especially true on Internet Explorer,[30] where this kind of countermeasure can be circumvented "by design" by including the targeted page inside an <IFRAME SECURITY=restricted> element.[33]
Introduced in 2009 in Internet Explorer 8 was a new HTTP header X-Frame-Options which offered a partial protection against clickjacking[34][35] and was shortly after adopted by other browsers (Safari,[36] Firefox,[37] Chrome,[38] and Opera[39]). The header, when set by website owner, declares its preferred framing policy: values of DENY, SAMEORIGIN, or ALLOW-FROM origin will prevent any framing, framing by external sites, or allow framing only by the specified site, respectively. In addition to that, some advertising sites return a non-standard ALLOWALL value with the intention to allow framing their content on any page (equivalent of not setting X-Frame-Options at all).
In 2013 the X-Frame-Options header has been officially published as RFC 7034,[40] but is not an internet standard. The document is provided for informational purposes only.
A security header like X-Frame-Options will not protect users against clickjacking attacks that are not using a frame[41].
Content Security Policy [ edit ]
The frame-ancestors directive of Content Security Policy (introduced in version 1.1) can allow or disallow embedding of content by potentially hostile pages using iframe, object, etc. This directive obsoletes the X-Frame-Options directive. If a page is served with both headers, the frame-ancestors policy should be preferred by the browser.[42]—although some popular browsers disobey this requirement.[43]
Example frame-ancestors policies:
# Disallow embedding. All iframes etc. will be blank, or contain a browser specific error page. Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'none' # Allow embedding of own content only. Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors'self' # Allow specific origins to embed this content Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors www.example.com www.wikipedia.org
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]On numerous occasions in the past year, boxing promoter Bob Arum has insisted the UFC’s audience mirrors the demographic that supports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump: It’s “lily white,” the International Boxing Hall of Famer has said, with little appreciation of diverse cultures.
That has not won Arum a lot of friends in the mixed martial arts world, but one prominent voice agrees with him to a degree.
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Welterweight champion Tyron Woodley, who will defend the title against Stephen “Wonder Boy” Thompson on Nov. 12 in the co-main event of UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden in New York, has first-hand experience that leads him to agree with Arum’s position.
Part of the reason, Woodley speculated, is his race. Woodley is black and feels he has been treated differently as a result of it.
Even more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, black athletes face tougher scrutiny and have a more difficult time than their white counterparts do, Woodley said.
“What I go through from some of the fans, it’s not all about how they might feel about Stephen ‘Wonder Boy,’ ” Woodley said. “I go on my social media and what do I see? [N-word]. Monkey. Anything you can think of. At one point, I was getting 10 per day. … It didn’t bother me because I have a pretty good self-identity. I know who I am. I know what I’m fighting for. It didn’t change my direction, but with that said, it’s factual: Race is an issue in sports.
Story continues
“My issue with race in sports is that we neglect [to admit] it exists. People try to act like it doesn’t exist and they’ll say, ‘Oh, race has nothing to do with it. What about Jon Jones? What about Demetrious Johnson? What about [Anthony] ‘Rumble’ Johnson?’ When you have to pick out three or four people out of 600, that’s like saying, ‘Oh, I’m not racist. I had black meatloaf for dinner last night.'”
Woodley had an inauspicious debut to his welterweight title reign, which began with a devastating first-round knockout of Robbie Lawler on July 31.
He was mocked by a large portion of the fan base for asking to fight former champion Georges St-Pierre or Nick Diaz in his first defense, bouts that would have represented a substantial payday.
Thompson earned a title shot with resounding victories over ex-champion Johny Hendricks and Rory MacDonald. Woodley felt Thompson was a worthy challenger, but he also knew that fights against either St-Pierre or Diaz would pay him substantially more than he’d make fighting Thompson.
It led to a contentious back-and-forth between the two.
“I don’t know why it went that way,” Thompson said. “I don’t know if it was because he was wanting to fight two guys who hadn’t been in the game for a while when he first got the title or what.”
Tyron Woodley is the new UFC welterweight champion. (Getty Images)
But Woodley’s post-title malaise didn’t end with the out-of-nowhere war of words with Thompson.
The UFC last week tweeted a video clip of him being knocked out by Nate Marquardt in 2012 to promote Marquardt’s Oct. 1 fight, which Woodley found offensive. He said UFC president Dana White apologized to his manager because it didn’t come out like the company had planned.
Then, during the UFC 205 introductory news conference on Tuesday at Madison Square Garden, he was booed upon introduction and whenever he was asked a question.
Anyone who personally knows him can attest to the classy person Woodley is, and how much he has overcome in his life to reach the pinnacle of his profession.
But Woodley deeply believes a double standard exists for minority athletes and that the double standard is being used against him.
It’s hard for Woodley to look at what has occurred since he won the title without feeling race is a major reason for the reaction he has gotten.
“You can’t say you don’t want to bring race into sports because it’s there; it’s a part of what is happening in this world,” Woodley said.
Woodley said he felt justified in calling out St-Pierre and Diaz because of the string of big fights he was in and he believes that was the UFC’s plan if Lawler had retained the belt at UFC 201.
“Think of how many No. 1 contender fights I was in,” Woodley said. “Kelvin Gastelum, they said if he beat me he would have fought for the title. [Carlos] Condit, if I would have suffered a knee injury [instead of him], no one would have made anything of it. They’d have said, ‘Oh, it was going to happen anyway.’ ‘He hurt him with a leg kick.’ He would have then gotten a title shot. Rory MacDonald did get a title shot. … I’ve been in three No. 1 contendership fights. How do you get in three No. 1 contendership fights, lose one, and not get a title shot?”
Woodley took advantage when he got that chance, and mused publicly about the big fights. But, he pointed out, a difference. He didn’t hold out when the UFC presented him with a bout agreement to face Thompson, even though he preferred to fight St-Pierre or Diaz.
“I’m the only fighter who did not decline a fight,” Woodley said. “It’s publicly known that Eddie Alvarez did not sign bout agreements [to fight] Khabib [Nurmagomedov]. Deadlines were given and he still didn’t sign them. Chris Weidman just got put on the card because he was fighting to try to get what he deserved. Same thing with [Al] Iaquinta, who is off the card, or [middleweight champion] Michael Bisping, who wanted Dan Henderson. He isn’t the No. 1 contender.
“I was basically ridiculed for things I basically didn’t even physically follow through on. I accepted ‘Wonder Boy’ when they presented me with the offer. I don’t know if it’s race or what, but I pretty much was treated way differently than Conor McGregor. I ain’t lying: I’m happy about [McGregor headlining the card], but I knew it wouldn’t be received negatively like I was.”
More popular MMA video on Yahoo Sports:At the Brooklyn preschool where my wife teaches, the parents of the youngest students, the not-yet-3-year-olds, arrive each fall wide-eyed and. It's the start of their children's grand adventure in and socialization, with all the promise and pitfalls they recall from their own school days.
Fortunately, each of the 2-year-olds is special—at least, that's the understated message their parents try to impart to my wife at pick-up time. They point out how beautifully Belinda twirls—"She should study ballet, don't you think?"—or how intensely Tristan concentrates when he stacks Legos—"He's a born engineer." They all think their children are future baseball All-Stars, Hollywood legends, or Nobel Prize winners. They can't help it: It's in every parent's nature to see his or her children in ways most others don't. In some cases, wearing rose-colored glasses benefits the of parents and kids alike. In others, though, it can foster denial that helps no one.
WHAT PARENTS GET WRONG
Misperceptions are a natural part of. Mothers and fathers see their children as they want to see them—often, as they've seen them since birth. They also persist in envisioning long-imagined futures for their kids. If your mom or dad ever expressed the assumption that you'd follow in their footsteps, you know the drill. Or maybe your parents' "my baby" tag still clings to you like burrs to a sock although you long ago hacked your way through the adult underbrush. If you're a parent yourself, you're most likely of similar misperceptions as well—you may just not realize it.
There is no single cause of parental misperceptions, but one place to start looking, experts agree, is in the mirror. As egocentric creatures, we see the world through the perspective we know best—our own. We have far more information about ourselves than we do about other people, and this influences our assumptions and judgments about the people we interact with every day, our offspring most definitely included.
We also make highly subjective judgments about ourselves. Deep down, most of us believe that we are special in some way, that we possess qualities that set us apart from the masses. "The self-serving gives people an exaggerated sense of their own uniqueness," says psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris, the author of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Such positive illusions provide real psychological benefits: They promote, for example, and give us more of a sense of control over our future.
Parents, for better or worse, can extend these positive illusions to their children, believing, consciously or unconsciously, that their offspring possess special qualities that also happen to reflect favorably on their own parenting skills. "If their kids are turning out well," Harris says, "they may attribute this outcome to something they think is unusual about their childrearing methods, not realizing that what they are doing is almost identical to what most of the other parents in the neighborhood are doing."
Of course, to feed our self-serving bias, it helps to see our children in the best positive light. "Unless they have a conflicted, awful relationship, parents give their kids the benefit of the doubt," says Duke University psychologist Mark Leary. "They think their kids are smarter than they really are and probably more attractive than they really are."
Biology also plays a powerful role in parental bias. From an evolutionary perspective, we are compelled to reproduce to ensure that we pass our genetic line to future generations and avoid extinction. Our offspring represent a biological investment in our own futures, then, and we are driven to engage in strategic behavior to protect that investment.
That may not sound especially sentimental. Shouldn't love and affection factor into how we view our children? The answer is yes, says University of California, Davis developmental psychologist Jay Belsky, but those emotions are not necessarily the motivators we think they are. "We have this misguided notion in Western culture, and certainly in Western psychology, that parents invariably, unconditionally, and indisputably love their children and devote themselves to them," Belsky says, "when in fact the evolutionary analysis is that children are investments that parents make, perhaps unknowingly, as a function of the return they might get on those children."
Following are seven of the most common parental misperceptions, and their sources:
1: "MY CHILD IS A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK"
Jennifer Watson, 47, grew up in rural Camden, North Carolina, near the Great Dismal Swamp. The second-oldest and sole sister of four boys, she eagerly took part in the wrestling, tree climbing, and motorcycle racing that defined her. "I was always around boys and their," says Watson, now a web developer in Richmond, Virginia. "I wasn't afraid to try things that girls at that time normally wouldn't do." She was convinced that if she had any daughters of her own, they'd be as rough-and-tumble as she'd been.
Watson has since given birth to three children, all girls, and also has a stepdaughter. But her oldest, 21-year-old Jenna, and Isadora, one of her 13-year-old, have little interest in her vision of childhood play. "I didn't try to push them one way or another," Watson says. "I just felt |
so the call back to the road feels more and more like an intrusion every time.
"You try to keep an open mind to it, and this time we've been trying to keep a very positive outlook. We've gone to great lengths to ensure the tour is as humanely routed as possible. But inevitably I know there will come a point where the novelty and the challenge wears off and it's really just a routine of going up there and trying to get the energy back night after night.
"We've organised the travel days better this time, made sure there are enough days off, and made sure that we don't work more than three weeks without going home for 10 days. Those kind of things really help a lot. And for myself, I try to make sure my family comes out whenever they can.
"But it's all necessary, and you just fly by saying, 'Well, if I don't do this I'm not gonna last the tour and I'm never gonna want to do it again."
Alex: "I really thought that it would be a slim chance that we'd be going back on the road. But I think taking those seven months off, Presto being the joy that it was to make, rehearsals corning together quickly, everybody being really positive... It's still early but it's changed the whole attitude towards touring. So far it's been a lot of fun, and hopefully it'll remain that way."
Neil: "It was a difficult decision to make, to do this tour or not. But essentially I felt that for me, for a band to be vital, it needs to be playing live, and I really wasn't ready to close that door. To me, Rush was still very much the focus of my life and my work, so it seemed to me that I didn't have a choice! I put aside my misconceptions and doubts and just went for it.
"We're a'musician' band, and all of us love to play. The vitality of this band has always been touring. It's what made us popular. We didn't have airplay, we didn't have media support. It was strictly touring - going out and playing and opening shows for other bands - that drew us a following in the first place. Touring is a tremendous challenge and it keeps the band vital, so I put up with the things about it that I don't like."
Would it be fair comment, then, to say that Rush almost split up after the last tour, even though it would have been more by default rather than a conscious decision?
Alex: "I remember sitting in the control room when we were finishing the live album, A Show Of Hands, and asking Neil and Geddy what we were gonna do about the next tour and saying that we should talk about it now, before we disappear for seven months. But both Neil and Geddy said they just didn't wanna talk about it, and I thought, 'Well, this could be it.'
"The more time we had off, the more I thought, 'Well it's not so bad not touring. We can still make records, and maybe touring just isn't that important. And then everything just fell in place and it came right round again. But I think that's probably the closest that we've come.
"There have been other times, too - other tours where we've come to the end of it and you're just at your wits' end; very stressed out."
One of the complaints regarding playing live that the band have voiced in the past is of having too many things to do on stage on the previous couple of tours - too many 'black boxes' and buttons to push. As you're still touring as a three-piece, has that situation changed at all this tour?
Geddy: "It has changed to a degree, but we're still pretty busy. We toyed for a very long time with the idea of adding another player on this tour, but we just couldn't bring ourselves to do it in the end. We just felt that what our fans have come to expect from us is just to see the three of us. With us, I think it would look odd. And I think it would feel odd, although part of me says, 'But it would be so great just to play bass and sing all night,' y'know?
"Instead of the option of adding another musician, we've just reorganised the electronic side of things to a much better degree. It still keeps me pretty busy, but Alex has taken a lot of those parts - some of the brunt from my shoulders! And Neil's doing quite a lot as well-lots of complicated triggering things. I've been able to have a lot less keyboards physically on stage, so it makes the whole set a little less intimidating. I think it's a nice thing at this stage to get away from those big stacks of junk.
"And fortunately, we've brought back some older songs to the show that have broken it up a bit, so there are some songs that are not nearly as technological, where we can take a bit of a breather from that. I think it's paced the set nicely, so we're not always 'trapped'."
Nevertheless, it's obvious that there's still an awful lot of hardware around on Rush's current tour: back projected thematic'movies', computerised lighting, hi-tech lasers... not to mention sufficient bundles of sound-generating components and wires to make Rush sound at times like a 50-piece orchestra rather than a three-piece rock combo.
In terms of staging, their overall visual display is probably bettered only by the gargantuan productions of Pink Floyd. The audience loved it, often cheering just as much for a particular lighting change as for the music.
Neil: "Yeah, I noticed that, actually. I'm a bit of a fan of opera and I notice when I go to an opera that when the curtain goes up for Act Three and there's a beautiful set, the audience cheers for it. And it seems kinda funny to cheer for the set designer, but... It's a beautiful thing, y'know?
"It's no insult to the music, and I think we're all confident enough about what we do that we don't feel threatened by the lights! Our live performances are really far more than the music. Not to be crass about it, I'd like to think that people go home and think, 'That was really worth spending an evening of my life and 20 dollars,' or whatever it cost them."
After years of putting out albums and touring, Rush have obviously built up a pool of very loyal fans, many of whom are going to react ecstatically to their shows no matter how well they play - and especially with such a'multimedia'-type production of the Rush variety, where the music is only a part of the overall show. So is it difficult to come offstage and know whether they've played a good show?
Geddy: "That's a very good question. I think we know when we've played well. I think the bigger you get, and the bigger your name - or the myth of what you are - gets, and the more spectacular the show is, there's a kind of excitement factor that comes along with it. But I think you inherently know when you haven't played your best. I think all musicians know in their hearts, when they walk offstage, whether they played like bums or not.
"If mistakes are made, they're subtle. I think you do get to a point where the mistakes you make are mostly noticeable by yourself or maybe the sound guy who's mixing you every night. But it's very rare that giant mistakes happen. I mean, I always forget words. I don't think there's a singer alive that remembers all his lyrics. But that's more of a mental lapse than a flub.
"But I really don't know if making anyone clunker is considered making a bad performance. There are certain nights when you just don't feel on top of it, where you feel like you gotta work a lot harder to stay in the pocket. And there are other nights where it's the opposite: you're playing so automatically that you're not really putting much into the show. And I think that's sometimes more noticeable by a crowd than where you make the odd clunker here and there.
"I guess to wrap the question up; I think a musician knows when he's not playing his best. But if he's the right kind of musician, his standards are pretty damn high, and hopefully if he falls short of that, it's still well within the realms of a good performance to the general public."
But with the expense of bringing such a big production to the UK, combined with the previously talked about rethink on touring in general, it looks as if Britain is again unlikely to get the chance to make any judgement on Rush's live performances.
Geddy: "It's important for us to play there. We've got very dedicated fans there, and we do appreciate that. The problem is we only get over there every four or five years, and for all the reasons that we've talked about, it's really inevitable. I'm sure the British fans would like to see us over there every tour. But as much as we'd like to be there, I don't think it's possible. It's a tough thing to organise.
"I feel very good about this tour and this show. I think it's a good show, and I'd like to take it around the world. But whether we can do that sanely still remains to be seen. We agreed to this tour in a 'let's take it one month at a time and see how I long it can last' way, and if everything goes well, we'll keep extending it."
Alex: "It's a long way to go and an expensive way to go with a big show for half a dozen dates. We can't play a lot of those places that we did 10 years ago. And we're not really that big in Europe to go and do big dates there. So you scale down the show and it's not very satisfying to do those kind of gigs. So, unfortunately, we tend to stay away from going over."
Even though I dislike interviewing band members individually, one advantage is that you can let each one have their say about the others. It's a question none of them seem happy with, although - with the exception of Neil Peart - when pressed, they're at least willing to offer basic sketches.
"Alex is very outgoing, very gregarious," says Geddy thoughtfully, and taking time to choose his words carefully, "... a funny guy. There are not very many serious bones in his body. He loves to have a good time and as a musician, he's very instinctive. He's not a premeditative or composition-oriented kind of guy. I think that's one of his strongest attributes. He's also very technical minded - very scientific in his approach to a lot of things. The way his mind works, you could call him a music scientist.
"Neil is very solitary. His interests are wide, varied and exhausting. He's very much the same kind of personality that a long-distance runner or a marathon swimmer would have - almost unquenchable drive. One of the most remarkable people I've ever met, and probably ever will meet. If something's not a challenge, it's not interesting for him. He's incredibly well read. He's certainly not without a sense of humour, but he can be very distant. He's not an easy personality for a stranger to come in contact with, I think. But once you know him, he's a very warm and funny guy."
And where does Geddy Lee fit in?
"You'll have to ask them! They'll tell you. And I'm sure between the two of them you'll get some semblance of what kind of a goof I am."
Alex: "Well, Neil is quite a private person, and a very insular person. But at the same time he can be very open and really, really funny.
"Geddy's also got a really... twisted sense of humour. He's a lot of fun, and he's up for anything. But he tends to be a bit of a worrier. He worries more than any of us about how the show's going, about how this is going or that's going. Everything is very important to him. He can get himself worked up at times.
"I'm probably in the middle somewhere. I think I'm pretty easygoing, and I'm quite a spontaneous person. I don't worry too much about things I don't need to worry about, and I sort of... go with the flow. How American! How Californian!
"It shows in our writing, even. When Geddy and I get together to start working, the stuff that I write always happens very quickly, whereas Geddy's a lot more methodical, and he'll work on something until he knows it's the right thing. But I think we're all a bit perfectionist in our own way. Maybe Neil and I are not perfectionist so much as organisational nuts - both Virgos! Very nit-picking about organisation, but slobs at heart!"
Neil, on the other hand, is having none of it. A'very private person', as Alex put it, he is also noticeably reticent to expose the privacy of his colleagues: "No! That's a nightmare question when you know somebody so well. It's like saying, 'Sum up your wife in a paragraph,' or something. You kind of feel it's futile."
What about whether the differences between the three of you is a strong point regarding how you work together?
Neil: "Yes, I think it absolutely is. To me the most important kinds of people in the world are those who make me laugh and those who make me think. And those two guys certainly exemplify both of those qualities."
Will we ever see Rush playing these shores again? Well, taking into account what's already been said, it's looking more unlikely than ever. And my own impression is there's a strong chance that before long, Rush could well exist only as a recording band. But maybe even that is questionable given Neil Peart's comments that, "For a band to be vital, it needs to be playing live," and Geddy Lee's admission that, "I would say that probably all our goals that we set out to achieve within Rush have been fulfilled."
A lot of between-the-lines reading could point to Presto being Rush's cue to jump into the magician's hat and disappear. So what's the deal, Neil?
"With the last album in particular, we were in a wide open position where our record contract had expired and we were absolutely free to work or not work as we saw fit. And basically the three of us just got together in the most informal way and said, 'Well guys, what do you want to do?' And we decided that we really wanted to make another record. And I can certainly see another one in the future."
Mechanical Animals
Words: Raziq Rauf London, UK, 2012: Clockwork Angels has just hit the shelves and stereos of the world and it seems that
Rush's first concept album has been going down rather well. Prog gets an audience with Geddy Lee on the subject.
When we sit down with Geddy Lee in a plush boutique hotel overlooking Kensington Gardens, Clockwork Angels has just been released and the critical and commercial acclaim is just getting to a digestible, well-rounded level. The Rush frontman is sitting comfortably in a book-lined meeting room as some tea and biscuits are delivered, and is reflecting upon how much attention he pays to what people write about his band.
"Occasionally... Not very often. I've learned from bitter experience," he laughed. "Sometimes it's too painful."
Upon release, their 19th studio album had just flown into the top spot in their native Canada and at Number 2 on the Billboard 200 in America. Clockwork Angels would have hit Number 1 in the UK as well had the Classic Rock fanpack been chart eligible. Ultimately, whatever experiences Lee had endured in the past, at that moment in time, life was good and everyone was saying so.
"They have [been positive]," he said of current reviews. "They've been downright effusive and from unlikely sources too so I'm very pleased that people are digging it.
"Aside from Headlong Flight, which is the first song we released, I'm getting a lot of positive vibe on a song called The Wreckers," Lee continued. "It seems to be getting a real buzz, and there's also a song called The Garden, which is a bit different for us. It's a long, melodic song and both those songs seem to be getting a lot of attention - maybe because with both songs we're stepping outside our typical sound. Of course, we always did the more complicated math-rock songs but I'm glad to see the melodic side of the band get featured a little bit because that's my personal 'thing'; that's where I contribute personally, so I'm glad to see people reacting to that."
While the reception to the more melodic songs on Clockwork Angels was a pleasant surprise, the slight change in direction wasn't an accident as Rush had previously road-tested a couple of songs while on the road in 2010.
"I think the fact that we had released Caravan and BU2B during the Time Machine Tour prepped people for the direction of the record," he explained. "That really helped us finish the record because we knew we had two songs that got such a favourable crowd reaction and it was great to go back and remix those two songs. I'm amazed at the difference. I think that they sound so much bigger than the previous versions of those songs so I think that's a cool bonus."
How about writing? It's an ongoing process for many bands but having just released Clockwork Angels, have they got any new songs ready to play on tour, like on the Time Machine Tour?
"We joked about just keeping writing and maybe putting out a double record because we seem to be in a groove and the songs just keep coming," he laughs.
"Old albums, we used to do about 20 minutes a side, 40 minutes of music, and this album is already 66 minutes of music so it's almost like three sides of vinyl. It wouldn't have been a stretch to write two or three more songs and have a double record, but I expect after a break we'll be writing again and see what kind of direction that points us in."
There was a time - not so long ago, either - when Rush were not the plat du jour. Despite having sold an estimated 40 million records worldwide over their 45 years as a band, amazingly, there was a period when they were not in the elite class. Even more surprisingly, there was a time when the band had a commercial slump.
"When we first came out, we had the misfortune of being in the shadow of the kind of legends that we admired and learned from so we were always kind of... diminished by their existence, and rightly so," he explains. "When you're influenced by big bands like Yes, Genesis and all those bands, why would you turn to these bands who are just learning from that thing? One of the great benefits of not going away, and continuing to work on your craft, is that eventually you get better and better at it and eventually we found our own voice.
"I think 2112 was that album for us," he said without hesitation. "2112 just sounds like us - it doesn't sound like anyone else. Then, as the taste of music changed, we were carrying on with this overcomplicated rock and that wasn't always where the tastes of music were so I think we were relegated to this kind of dinosaur status as a band that liked to play loud, liked to play hard rock, liked to have proggy overtones and tell silly little stories in their music."
"A funny thing happened after 35, 40 years," he continued. "Music goes in cycles, right. I guess a lot of young people discovered us and through our older songs and through our playing and started to appreciate that we do a thing that very few other bands do."
Having already philosophised about the cyclical nature of musical trends and the band's unique style, Geddy Lee is unequivocal about not really paying too much attention to the relative status of Rush.
"We just do what we do," he said. "The beauty and fortune about this kind of revisionist view of Rush is that not much has changed with us. It's external things that have changed and we just enjoy it while it's here because what got us here is just us being us, so we're not going to change now."
The influence of the 2112 album is strong and wide-ranging. For example, in 2011 two members of Swedish metal band In Flames (bassist Peter Iwers
and guitarist Bjorn Gelotte) opened a restaurant in their home town of Gothenburg called 2112. Needless to say, they're Rush fans.
"Somebody brought me a T-shirt and I keep hearing about it. I expect a free drink when I arrive!" Lee laughed before talking about his thoughts on such a bold tribute. "I'm always happy to entertain drunk people. It's a huge compliment when someone thinks so much of your music that they are inspired to name a restaurant after you. I think that's really awesome. The other day I was sent an email from the chef who's putting on a special dinner in Toronto where every dish he's serving is inspired by a different song on Clockwork Angels."
When asked if it was the most effort a Rush fan has made to pay homage to the band, he thought long and hard. "It's one of the more unusual ones, I think. Rush-inspired food is something you don't really think about. I'm afraid of the result. We've had, obviously, pieces of art that fans have been inspired to make and I hear all the time about kids studying our music in school, and that just blows my mind, but Rush-inspired food? That's a new one. It's frightening to think about. Who knows what Carnies tastes like, you know?"
While the album was released in June 2012, Rush weren't touring immediately. Starting their North American tour in September would allow their fans time to get to know the new album first, before arriving in Europe in May 2013. So what does their summer entail?
"Right now we're deeply into pre-production," he explained. "There's daily meetings about designing the look of the show and designing the rear-screen animations that we love to do for our tours, back and forth emails between the three of us: 'Let's try this song in the set. Let's try that song in the set.' So we're at that very nervous stage of planning the tour and when I look at the potential set list right now, it looks about four hours long and that scares the hell out of me! We'll get it done but when I leave London I'll go home and go straight into rehearsals. It's going to be a long summer of rehearsals."
Having been an incredibly successful touring band for the best part of half a century, however, there must be some facets of touring that have become easier.
"I think the fact that we travel on our own schedule and we use a charter plane," Lee explained. "For me, that enables me to get more sleep and recovery because a three-hour show really takes its toll on my voice, and physically. The fact that we have our own schedule means that I can leave a venue and I can be in the next city before 2am and I can get a full night's sleep instead of sleeping on the bus. Sleeping on the bus was always tough for me. Thirty years of that really took its toll.
"Neil still sleeps on the bus - he loves it and bless his heart, I can't do it any more," he laughed. "He's a mental case. He's riding his bike for hundreds of miles every day so he's a driven madman so he manages to function on very little sleep. I don't know how the fuck he does it."
While some things have changed, some of the same problems remain.
"Just keeping my voice in shape - I live in constant paranoia," he said. "Not to diminish the other instruments but being a singer is different. When your voice is your instrument, you're subject to environmental things much more. If I was just a bass player, I could be sick and still do my gig. Drummers, it's a little difficult too because it's so physical I think drumming and singing are the two most fragile aspects of touring so I live in constant fear of the air conditioner, of the environment, of the food I eat. So it's my biggest worry on the road and it's not until that last gig is done where my shoulders come back from up around my ears."
Aside from writing, recording and performing live, there are many tasks that require completing to keep a band going and seeing as Rush have managed to do that for 45 years, they must have found a system that works. Every major band has a strong management team around them but Rush are one of the most proactive groups around. Each member takes personal care of the band. This is why they've survived and thrived for so long. Geddy Lee took us through the various duties that each band member has taken upon himself over the years.
"I co-ordinate a lot of the production for the show. I seem to be the point guy for the lighting designer and the animation people and the script editor and I enjoy it - it's not a drudgery, by all means," he explained. "I try to include the guys as much as possible but we all have our own responsibilities. When we're doing an album, Neil is really involved in the art design of the cover. I don't try to step on his toes because he's really good at it and when it comes to mixing the audio or doing a 5.1 project, Alex likes to take the forefront in overseeing those kinds of things.
"When it comes to the tour, my area's always been organising the look of the show. They leave it to my judgement, but of course I fill them in and keep them in the loop. If they don't like something, we change it. It works out well."
So what's going to be the next challenge for Rush then?
"It's hard to say," Lee ponders. "We've worked a lot over the last five years and we've worked a lot around the world. We have been touring quite a bit so I think it'll probably be time for a bit of a break. It'll enable us to recharge our batteries and figure out what to do next. Something will come along. We've got a few ideas that we've talked about briefly, but there's a lot of work ahead so I think we'll be due a holiday."
Closer to their Hearts!
Words: Paul Elliott 2013 is another landmark year for Rush.
On April 18, the band were finally inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and in August Rush will end a world tour
in support of their current album Clockwork Angels - a tour that has seen the trio break new ground by performing
on stage with a full string section. But what's next for Rush? There has been talk of another tour in 2014
to mark the 40th anniversary of their debut album. And after the phenomenal response to Clockwork Angels,
are they thinking about the follow-up? Prog discusses the future with Geddy, Alex and Neil.
It was Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers who described Rush as "the world's biggest cult band". Rush have sold more than 40 million albums worldwide, and in the US, only two rock bands have had more consecutive gold or platinum albums: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. But there was only one point where Rush had genuine mainstream success - in the early 80s, when The Spirit Of Radio was a Top 20 UK hit, and the Moving Pictures album sold four million copies in America.
What has sustained Rush through such a long career is a large and loyal fan base - specifically, people like Nicky Wire, who has bought every Rush album and is happy to spend hours debating the political content of 1977's A Farewell To Kings or the influence of new wave on 1982's Signals. And for Rush, their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame was a testimony to those fans. "So many of our fans were excited by it," Alex Lifeson says. "They felt vindicated for their support and for their constant harassment and needling of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. And at the end of the day, what it means to our fans is the most important thing."
However, Geddy Lee reckons that there are other bands out there who are more deserving of this accolade. "I don't understand why Deep Purple and Yes are not in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame," he says. "Both of those bands changed rock. Rush would not be here without them. They're important bands and they're ignored, and I don't get it."
But he agrees with Lifeson that Rush owe this honour to their fans. "It's really their award in many ways," he says. "It was the fans that made it happen, and I'm very happy for them."
Lee is also delighted by another award that was bestowed upon Rush this year. In March, Canadian radio station CBC hosted a public vote to find the nation's favourite homegrown rock anthem. The winner was Closer To The Heart, from A Farewell To Kings. "I think that's fantastic," Lee says. "Maybe we should re-record it now. It would be fun to do a new version of it."
But is that likely to happen? "I would guess not," he admits.
Rush have been here before. In recent years, they have worked at remixing their 2002 album Vapor Trails, but they are a long way from finishing the job.
"There are two schools with that record," Lifeson says. "The way it is... is the way it is. It represents that period. But that record has always been a bit problematic in that it doesn't sound great to us. The production on it is not up to the standards that we usually set for ourselves. We get downright anal about recording - although less so now than in the old days. So with Vapor Trails we've remixed a couple of the songs. And we intended to remix the whole record, but other things came along. We've been so busy. It's not a priority."
For Rush, the real priority has been to look forward, not back. And with Clockwork Angels, they created a late-career masterpiece - arguably the band's best album since Power Windows in 1985.
"We had a lot of fun making Clockwork Angels," Lifeson says. "And after so many years of working together, I think we really reached the ultimate in our working relationship. There's such absolute trust in each other. There's such enthusiasm and respect, there's such a joy in working together, and there's no tension, absolutely no ego involved. We've worked towards that. And the reviews of this record have been so positive. I don't know if I've seen a bad review. In the past, the reviews were mostly on the nasty side."
Certainly, Clockwork Angels is one of the most ambitious records Rush have ever made. It's their first fully realised concept album, and in its complex structure there are echoes of the band's classic 70s albums, such as 2112 and Hemispheres. Lee credits their producer Nick Raskulinecz for helping Rush to reconnect with their past.
"Nick is a constant reminder that the best Rush can be is to be Rush," he says. "He gave us confidence to restate some of the very strong tools that Rush already possess that we had a tendency to shy away from. If you have a desire to write a part that's overly complex, just do it. Don't second-guess it. Don't be afraid to be who you are.
"As a songwriter, sometimes you think with the wrong hat. Like, what does this part really say? Should I be serving the melody here, should the bass part be a little simpler to let the melody flow? As a bass player you want to play more. So sometimes a producer is the best one to sit outside that and say, 'The melody sounds great and it won't be bothered by a more complicated bass part, so follow your instincts and do it.'
"That's what Nick brings to the table. And he also has an unflappable amount of enthusiasm, which for a band that's been around the block as many times as us is really important."
According to Neil Peart, every Rush song is written to be played live, and Clockwork Angels was no different.
"We make our songs the way we do because we're going to play them live a thousand times," he says. "And we make them interesting and difficult and challenging, because there's not one song we're playing now that we hate. You're taught in prose writing: what does the reader need to know? When I make a description or recount a dialogue, what does the reader need to understand for what I'm trying to explain here? That's a time-honoured mode of thinking.
"And I describe that as very much part of my drum style too. When people say, 'Why, in a drum part, do you start off simple and then the variations become more and more complex?' I say, 'I want to give the audience what they need to understand this rhythm.'
"If it's a song like Freewill or Subdivisions, with complicated rhythmic changes, I state them as clearly as I can off the bat - for the listener. Okay, here's what's happening here: now watch me play with it. And that's a reason for why my drum parts are arranged that way, and the reason why our songs are arranged that way - it's because they're all designed to be played live."
On the band's current tour, an hour of material from Clockwork Angels is performed in one marathon session. "That demands a lot of patience from our audience," Lifeson says. "But people have really been getting into it. That's very gratifying."
Lee adds: "It's like we're two bands out there. The first set we're the opening act for ourselves. The second set is everything but the kitchen sink. And there's quite a wide variety of stuff that we're doing."
Currently included in the set-list are songs Lee refers to as "deeper cuts" - such as Grand Designs and Middletown Dreams from Power Windows, and The Body Electric from Grace Under Pressure. And Peart is especially happy with the latter. "I love Grace Under Pressure so much," he says. "I love the fact that that album and [1987's] Hold Your Fire are two that are perhaps loved by fewer people but they're loved more, you know? And I think we as a band all share that feeling."
WHAT ALSO helps to make touring "fun" for Rush is a schedule befitting of gentlemen of a certain age. Peart is 60; Lifeson and Lee are 59. Rush tours are now divided into manageable chunks. The days of gigging for months on end, year in year out, are long gone.
"In the beginning," Peart says, "you just want to play all you can for anybody you can anywhere. You're all supply. But we realised early on that the hardest thing for a band to learn is to say no. And then it got to the point where we got a little bit of popularity and suddenly it was, 'Oh, guys, can you do two shows on that day, and can you do a 500-mile drive tomorrow night to the next show, because people want you?' And if you say no, you feel like a creep. Because of the values that you grew up with as a suburban kid, you feel uppity about saying no - you're too 'good' or something. So we would do like 10 shows in a row, driving ourselves night after night after night. And it was soul destroying. But no one told us we could say no."
Even now, they have difficulty saying no to more touring. "This tour finishes in August," Lee says. "And after that, we'd like to take a year off. We need a break. We're a little tired. And to be honest, we've been a little overexposed with back-to-back tours. But there's a lot of pressure from management about doing a 40th anniversary tour in 2014. It will be 40 years since the first album, and they think that we should do something special for that."
Lifeson is not entirely opposed to the idea of a 40th-anniversary tour. "Maybe we'd consider doing one song from each of our 20 albums," he says. "And we could put in some different songs - not always depend on Tom Sawyer and The Spirit Of Radio. But I always say that before a tour and it never happens. It would be a lot of fun to go through the whole history of the band. But in our minds, it doesn't really matter if it's the 40th or the 41st anniversary."
Lee 'agrees. "I wouldn't say no to a 41st or a 42nd anniversary tour," he says, laughing. "I'm not against the idea of doing an anniversary tour - I just don't know why it has to be the number 40. I think a 42nd anniversary tour is much funnier. Or wait till 2015 and do the 40th anniversary of By-Tor & The Snow Dog!"
He is, of course, joking. But there are many Rush fans who would love to see Rush play a set based on their two albums from 1975: Fly By Night (featuring By-Tor & The Snow Dog, Anthem and a title track that Stereophonics occasionally play at soundchecks); and Caress Of Steel, which includes two of the band's most over-the-top prog epics, The Necromancer and The Fountain Of Lamneth, plus Lakeside Park, a tune Wire claim was ripped off by The Clash on the track Lost In The Supermarket from London Calling.
And although Caress Of Steel was the biggest flop of the band's career, selling so poorly that Rush were very nearly dropped by the record company Mercury, it's an album they've learned to love again - Lifeson especially.
"Last summer," he says, "my son came up with some friends to our little cottage out in the country. We were sitting outside and listening to music and chatting over a glass of wine, and they put on Caress Of Steel. It was the first time I'd heard it in I don't know how long, and it made me smile and remember where we were at, how excited we were and how young we were. And the things we wanted to accomplish - I could hear all of that in the music. I was really proud of it."
Rush fans shouldn't get too excited at the thought of the band playing The Fountain Of Lamneth again. Lifeson recently said that the chances of them doing so were "one in a million". But one thing is for certain: whether it's in 2014 |
Loffreda, available from Fence Books.
Here are a few of the tropes you would likely encounter if you started looking at writers writing about race these days. One: I met an other and it was hard! That is lightly said, but that is the essence of the trope: the anxious, entangling encounters with others that happen before anyone even makes it to the page, and that appear there primarily as an occasion for the writer to encounter her own feelings. Another: I needed to travel to “meet” race, I went to Africa or to Asia or to the American South or to Central America to look at race, as if it now mainly can be found in a sort of wildlife preserve separate from ordinary, everyday experience. Another: race is racism. And lastly: the enduring American thing of seeing race as a white and black affair, the scene where the real race stuff goes down. Which is accompanied by the trope of the discount: the one that fails to extend to other people of color an authentic fullness of experience, a myopia that renders them in the terms of the “not really.”
The matter of craft comes up clearly when we encounter the various tropes that white writers take recourse to repeatedly when race is on the table. These tropes are typically heartfelt; but their repetition should be taken as a sign. Here’s one: “The imagination is a free space, and I have the right to imagine from the point of view of anyone I want—it is against the nature of art itself to place limits on who or what I can imagine.” This language of rights is as extraordinary as it is popular, and it is striking to see how many white writers in particular conceive of race and the creative imagination as the question of whether they feel they are permitted to write a character, or a voice, or a persona, “of color.” This is a decoy whose lusciousness is evident in the frequency with which it is chased. The decoy itself points to the whiteness of whiteness—that to write race would be to write “color,” to write an other.
But to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race—that it’s the one region of self or experience that is free of race—and that I have a right to imagine whoever I want, and that it damages and deforms my art to set limits on my imagination—acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made “me.” So to say, as a white writer, that I have a right to write about whoever I want, including writing from the point of view of characters of color—that I have a right of access and that my creativity and artistry is harmed if I am told I cannot do so—is to make a mistake. It is to begin the conversation in the wrong place. It is the wrong place because, for one, it mistakes critical response for prohibition (we’ve all heard the inflationary rhetoric of scandalized whiteness). But it is also a mistake because our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds. To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.
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It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn’t and shouldn’t enter, a space for bodies to transcend the legislative, the economic—transcend the stuff that doesn’t lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination is postracial, a posthistorical and postpolitical utopia. Some writers of color, in the tradition of previous writers like Countee Cullen (a sly and complicated tradition, we acknowledge), don’t want to have race dirtying up the primacy of the imaginative work; want the merits of the work made free by more neutral standards. To bring up race for these writers is to inch close to the anxious space of affirmative action, the scarring qualifieds.
So everyone is here.
Transcendence is unevenly distributed and experienced, however. White writers often begin from a place where transcendence is a given—one already has access to all, one already is permitted to inhabit all, to address all. The crisis comes when one’s access is questioned. For writers of color, transcendence can feel like a distant and elusive thing, because writers of color often begin from the place of being addressed, and accessed. To be a person of color in a racist culture is to be always addressable, and to be addressable means one is always within stigma’s reach. So one’s imagination is influenced by the recognition of the need to account for this situation—even in the imagination, one feels accountable, one feels one must counter. So a writer of color may be fueled by the desire to exit that place of addressability. At the same time one may wish to write of race. And again at the same time one may wish to do any or all of these things inside a set of literary institutions that expect and even reward certain predictable performances of race. There can be a comfort, a place to hole up, a place to rest, found in that performance—that is, if that performance conforms. But even if it conforms, the performance returns the writer of color to an addressability that at any moment may become violent rather than safe—may become violent if the performance steps outside or beyond those comforting conformities, or even if the performance stays within them. Because the “favor” of largely white-run literary institutions is founded on an original, if obscured, amassment of racial power: they can always remind you you’re a guest.
What we seek to detect in these examples above is the presence of a more general situation, the scene of race taking up residence in the creative act. This is what we mean by a racial imaginary, an unlyrical term, but then its lack of music is fitting. One way to know you’re in the presence of—in possession of, possessed by—a racial imaginary is to see if the boundaries of one’s imaginative sympathy line up, again and again, with the lines drawn by power. If the imaginative sympathy of a white writer, for example, shuts off at the edge of whiteness. This is not to say that the only solution would be to extend the imagination into other identities, that the white writer to be antiracist must write from the point of view of characters of color. It’s to say that a white writer’s work could also think about, expose, that racial dynamic. That what white artists might do is not imaginatively inhabit the other because that is their right as artists, but instead embody and examine the interior landscape that wishes to speak of rights, that wishes to move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power, that wishes to inhabit whomever it chooses.
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It should also conversely not be assumed that it is “easy” or “natural” to write scenarios or characters whose race matches (whatever that might mean) one’s own. This is the trap that writers of color in particular still must negotiate; it’s the place where “write what you know” becomes plantational in effect.
We acknowledge that every act of imaginative sympathy inevitably has limits. Perhaps the way to expand those limits is not to “enter” a racial other but instead to inhabit, as intensely as possible, the moment in which the imagination’s sympathy encounters its limit. Or: to realize one might also make strange what seems obvious, nearby, close.
Are we saying Asian writers can’t write Latino characters? That white writers can’t write black characters? That no one can write from a different racial other’s point of view? We’re saying we’d like to change the terms of that conversation, to think about creativity and the imagination without employing the language of rights and the sometimes concealing terms of craft. To ask some first-principle questions instead. So, not: can I write from another’s point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how. What is the charisma of what I feel estranged from, and why might I wish to enter and inhabit it. To speak not in terms of prohibition and rights, but desire. To ask what we think we know, and how we might undermine our own sense of authority. To not simply assume that the most private, interior, emotional spaces of existence—the spaces that are supposed to be the “proper” material of the lyric and the fictive—are most available for lyric and fictive rendering because they are somehow beyond race. To not assume that the presence of race deforms the creative act, renders the creative act sadly earthbound. We are ourselves earthbound. And race is one of the things that binds us there.
Crucial in what we’re saying above is that we don’t want to talk only of writing “across” racial divides. For we wish to also unsettle the assumption that it is easy or simple to write what one “is.” Why might I assume it is easy to write what is nearest to me? How do I know what that is—and what do I miss when I keep familiar things familiar? It should be difficult to write what one “knows”—and if it is too easy, it is worth asking if that is because one is reproducing conventions and assumptions rewarded by the marketplaces of literature. And here again the racial preferences—the particular plots, the particular characters, the particular scenarios and personae—favored by literary institutions put special pressure on writers of color, threaten to deform what such a writer is assumed to know and expected to produce.
Race enters writing, the making of art, as a structure of feeling, as something that structures feelings, that lays down tracks of affection and repulsion, rage and hurt, desire and ache. These tracks don’t only occur in the making of art; they also occur (sometimes viciously, sometimes hazily) in the reception of creative work. Here we are again: we’ve made this thing and we’ve sent it out into the world for recognition—and because what we’ve made is in essence a field of human experience created for other humans, the field and its maker and its readers are thus subject all over again to race and its infiltrations. In that moment arise all sorts of possible hearings and mis-hearings, all kinds of address and redress.
For example: In that moment, writers and readers of color may feel profound and mutual anxieties that all people of color are about to be locked in, locked down, by the representation at hand, no matter who wrote it. But especially if a white writer wrote it. This anxiety is fueled by the fact that racism, in its very dailyness, in its very variety of expression, isn’t fixed. It’s there, and then it’s not, and then it’s there again. One is always doing the math: Was it there? Was it not? What just happened? Did I hear what I thought I heard? Should I let it go? Am I making too much of it? Racism often does its ugly work by not manifesting itself clearly and indisputably, and by undermining one’s own ability to feel certain of exactly what forces are in play. This happens in reading as it does everywhere else. In a sense, it doubles-down the force of race—you feel it, you feel the injury, the racist address, and then you question yourself for feeling it. You wonder if you’ve made your own prison.
Another example: white writers can get explosively angry when asked to recognize that their racial imaginings might not be perfect—when asked to recognize that their imagination is not entirely their own—and in particular when confronted with that fact by a person of color questioning something they wrote. And the target of that anger is usually the person of color who shared with them this fact. The white writer feels injured in this moment—misunderstood and wounded—and believes it is the reader, the person of color, who has dealt the injury. This is how the white mind tends to racial “wounds”—it makes a mistake about who or what has dealt the injury. For it is not the reader of color who deals the injury. It is whiteness itself.
To reconstruct the reader of color as the aggressor is one way that whiteness reasserts its power in its moment of crisis. It has been exposed—it must now perform weakness, helplessness, it must pretend to innocence, to harmless and undefended and shocked innocence, in order to “reveal” the reader of color as motivated by unsavory, irrational, aggressive, “political,” or subjective tendencies that have lashed out at the innocent and harmed him (this is how “the race card” trope works to disqualify the reader bold enough to call up race where it might not be wanted: the trope enacts its dismissiveness by characterizing any mention of race as irresponsible, an injection of race “where it doesn’t belong” when in fact it inheres whether it’s called up or not). The white writer was taken by surprise by this attack—how could she have seen it coming? She meant well—surely this inoculates her against any charges. The attack was unfair. And so we must rally to the victim. And thus whiteness goes only briefly contested.
This repositioning appears to cleanse whiteness of its power, of its aggression—for who can’t hear the aggression in “I have a right of access to whomever I wish?”—and says of whiteness instead “I have been unfairly characterized and misunderstood, I have been assassinated by someone whose motivations are political and who is thus disqualified from the human endeavor that is art making.” Thus the wound is paraded for all to witness, and whiteness gathers to itself again its abiding centrality, its authority, its “rights.” Its sanity.
What the white writer might realize instead, in this moment of crisis, is that she may well be an injured party—but the injury was dealt long before. The injury is her whiteness. By saying “injury” we do not mean to erase from view all the benefits and privileges that whiteness endows; we do not mean to invite an unwarranted sympathy. But we do think white people in America tend to suffer an anxiety (and many have written of this): they know that they are white but they must not know what they know. They know that they are white, but they cannot know that such a thing has social meaning; they know that they are white, but they must not know that their whiteness accrues power. They must not call it whiteness for to do so would be to acknowledge its force. They must instead feel themselves to be individuals upon whom nothing has acted. That’s the injury, that their whiteness has veiled from them their own power to wound, has cut down their sympathy to a smaller size, has persuaded them that their imagination is uninflected, uninfiltrated. It has made them unknowing. Which is one reason why white people take recourse to innocence: I did not mean to do any harm. Or: I wanted to imagine you—isn’t that good of me, haven’t others said that was good for me to try? Or: If I cared about politics, I would write a manifesto—what I’m trying to do is make art. Or: I have a right to imagine whatever I want, and it traduces or dirties art to limit the imagination. Or: I don’t see color. Or: we’re all human beings.
Part of the mistake the white writer makes is that she confounds the invitation to witness her inevitable racial subjectivity with a stigmatizing charge of racism that must be rebutted at all costs. The white writer, in the moment of crisis, typically cannot tell the difference. What a white person could know instead is this: her whiteness limits her imagination—not her reader’s after the fact. A deep awareness of this knowledge could indeed expand the limits—not transcend them, but expand them, make more room for the imagination. A good thing.
For one source of creativity lies in the fact that each individual is essentially strange. There is a deep strangeness, an alterity, in the individual human mind, a portion of ourselves that we never fully comprehend—and this is what writing taps, or is at least one of writing’s sources, one of its engines. This might explain the enigma of writing for so many of us, that the writing so often seems to know more than we do, that we are ‘behind’ the writing (“behind it” in that we make it, but also “behind it” in the sense that we can’t catch up with what it knows and reveals, that it is out ahead of us driven by energies in our possession but not entirely in our deliberate control). This essential strangeness, this unknowability, is a creative resource, perhaps the creative resource, the wellspring of art that shows us things we did not know but that are somehow inevitable and true—true to a reality or a knowledge we don’t yet possess, yet find in the moment of encounter possible, something we accept the fundamental being of even if its nature shocks or startles or repulses or unsettles us (Barthelme’s strange object covered in fur can only break your heart if you have accepted, in the instant of encounter, its essential being, even if you have not yet comprehended its strangeness, its otherness).
But while it might be mystifying how creative impulses and decisions emerge from somewhere within, that doesn’t mean we must make a fetish of that mysteriousness. For that unknowable portion of the human mind is also a domain of culture—a place crossed up by culture and history, where the conditions into which we were born have had their effect. Part of what is unknowable within us, at least until we investigate it, is the structuring of our very feelings and thoughts by what preceded us and is not our “own,” yet conditions our experience nonetheless. So the location of a writer’s strangeness is also the seat of history. A writer’s imagination is also the place where a racial imaginary—conceived before she came into being yet deeply lodged in her own mind—takes up its residence. And the disentangling and harnessing of these things is the writer’s endless and unfinishable but not fruitless task. Another way of saying this: the writer’s essential strangeness is her greatest resource, yet she must also be in skeptical tension with her own inclinations. Because those inclinations are in part an inheritance from a racial imaginary that both is and is not hers.
We want to acknowledge that we have fallen into one of the very traps we mentioned at the start—we are having a hard time talking about race separate from racism. Indeed, we’re not sure if we can or find it believable to imagine otherwise, imagine a time when or a fashion in which race outruns its birth in racism and becomes some kind of neutral, unfanged category. And we want to acknowledge too: this is a nasty business. We should not pretend that our experiences of race are otherwise. As we write, as we read one another, the internal tumult is unavoidable. It might be soft or it might be loud, but it’ll be made up of some admixture of shame, guilt, loathing, opportunism, anxiety, irritation, dismissal, self-hatred, pain, hope, affection, and other even less nameable energies. The particular chemistry may differ depending upon one’s idiosyncratic mix of personal history and social location. For some it is nothing short of an assault, an assault no less painful because it is routine, an ordinary effect of negotiating a life in a world of people largely comfortable watching the assault go on, or at least willing to minimize its existence. It’s messy, and it’s going to stay messy. Because history is not an act of the imagination. Which is the condition from which we start.
What we want to avoid at all costs is something that feels nearly impossible to evade in daily speech: an opposition between writing that accounts for race (and here we could also speak of gender, sexuality, other enmeshments of the body in history) and writing that is “universal.” If we continue to think of the “universal’ as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy. But we are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white. We are captive, still, to a style of championing literature that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it—that it “transcends” its category. To say this book by a writer of color is great because it transcends its particularity to say something “human” (and we’ve all read that review, maybe even written it ourselves) is to reveal the racist underpinning quite clearly: such a claim begins from the stance that people of color are not human, only achieve the human in certain circumstances. We don’t wish to build camps. And we know there is no language that is not loaded. But we could try to say, for example, not that good writing is good because it achieves the universal, but perhaps instead that in the presence of good writing a reader is given something to know. Something is brought into being that might otherwise not be known, something is doubly witnessed.
What we mean by a racial imaginary is something we all recognize quite easily: the way our culture has imagined over and over again the narrative opportunities, the kinds of feelings and attributes and situations and subjects and plots and forms “available” both to characters of different races and their authors. The racial imaginary changes over time, in part because artists get into tension with it, challenge it, alter its availabilities. Sometimes it changes very rapidly, as in our own lifetimes. But it has yet to disappear. We cannot imagine it out of existence. Instead our imaginings might test their inheritances, to make way for a time when such inheritances no longer ensnare us. But we are creatures of this moment, not that one.
Selected art from The Racial Imaginary courtesy of Fence. Feature image: Chinoiserie, by Kyungmi Shin, 2003.Ontario's recycling scraps – dirty peanut butter jars, plastic toys, and unsorted paper – are being shipped to Asia at a rate of thousands of tonnes a month. The blue-box castoffs are sorted by low-paid workers in huge factories, and recycled into inexpensive toys, shoes and colourful cardboard packages, before being sold back to Ontarians, where they fill the blue boxes once again.
Oliver Stephenson drives a forklift into bales of paper at the Dufferin Processing Facility in Toronto Feb. 5, 2009. Toronto sent up to 20,000 tonnes of mixed paper to a China's Nine Dragons mill in both 2007 and 2008. ( AARON HARRIS / TORONTO STAR )
Garbage experts say this revolving door is a necessary evil that will continue until the province has better recycling facilities so cities can process their own garbage. "The question is, how much do we want to transport materials around?" said Glenda Gies, executive director of Waste Diversion Ontario, which oversees the provincial blue-box program. "We really do want to support the Ontario economy, we want to process these materials here." Most residents recycle with the belief they are helping the environment and are unaware that their municipalities are shipping materials to China and South Korea, creating a huge new carbon footprint.
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"It is a contentious issue here," said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario. "We took advantage of (China's) cheaper labour force to have them clean, or re-clean, our recyclables, to sort out the more valuable items from the less valuable." With the downturn in the recycling commodities market, China's demand for low-end mixed paper and plastic "residue" from blue boxes dropped considerably. But, Toronto, which sent up to 20,000 tonnes of mixed paper to China's massive Nine Dragons mill in both 2007 and last year, reports that in January, the mill began requesting more of the city's paper. Toronto gets paid roughly $30 to $40 per tonne of mixed paper sent to China. According to Geoff Rathbone, general manager of Toronto's solid waste department, that worked out to be about $600,000 to $800,000 in 2007 and 2008. In addition to shipping to China, Rathbone said the city sends about 10,000 tonnes a year of its "polycoat" milk and juice cartons to South Korea. If Toronto moves ahead with plans to recycle disposable coffee cups, it will send them to the same South Korean facility, as long as the owners can handle the influx, he said. Still, Rathbone believes local paper mills and recycling facilities are the best option. "In the long term, I don't think (shipping to Asia) is a sustainable way to go," he said.
It is not clear how many tonnes of Ontario's recycled goods are sent to Asia each year. A study published by Waste Diversion Ontario looked at shipping data – voluntarily supplied by municipalities and private recyclers. Based on their information, the authors of the report concluded that four per cent of the 937,979 tonnes of blue-box materials sold in 2006 went to China, and a lesser number to South Korea. WDO's Gies said more ongoing studies are needed before the full picture is known. St. Godard said North American mills generally require materials be properly sorted and clean. But some municipalities, like Toronto, allow all recycled goods to be mixed into the same blue bin, because it is cheaper and easier for residents.
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"You end up co-mingling materials that have to be sorted and re-sorted and re-sorted and by the time they actually reach the end market they are still so contaminated that the mills here cannot take them. But China has an extra layer of labour that can sift through them," she said. To get to China from Toronto, the mixed paper is stacked in bales, placed in shipping containers and sent across country to the port of Vancouver by train, said Jake Westerhof, of Canada Fibres, which sells Toronto's paper to Nine Dragons. From Vancouver, it is placed on a large freighter ship and spends several weeks at sea before arriving in one of China's southern ports. It is moved into a truck a driven several hours before arriving at the massive Nine Dragons paper mill in the province of Guangdong. Rathbone believes the increase in orders from China means the market will slowly rebound. He says Toronto will continue shipping its paper to Nine Dragons, and pointed out the city's contract requires that the mill adhere to environmental standards, along with health and safety rules for its workers.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal announced Tuesday that he intends to sign the ”Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act” into law when it crosses his desk. In a written statement, Jindal spokesperson Shannon Bates Dirmann wrote:
Yes, we support the bill. This is a common sense bill that provides necessary protections for individuals to prevent adverse treatment from the state based on religious beliefs regarding marriage.
The bill was introduced into the Louisiana legislature by State Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Bossier City). The legislation would allow private businesses to refuse to recognize legal same-sex marriages. The law is more far-reaching than the controversial Indiana “religious freedom” law which sparked national outrage. The Louisiana measure would grant a private company the right to deny gay and lesbian couples the same benefits that they provide for straight married couples.
University of Virginia Law Professor Douglas Laycock described the Louisiana bill as more extreme than many similar anti-gay measures passed by other states. Laycock notes:
It would be a license to the private sector to refuse, for religious or moral reasons, to recognize same-sex marriages. It covers not just churches and religious organizations, but also the for-profit sector, and with no limit on size or diversity of ownership.
Governor Jindal may be under the illusion that he can sign the measure without enduring the public backlash that greeted Indiana Governor Mike Pence, when Pence signed Indiana’s “religious freedom” right to discriminate law. Louisiana still lags well behind the rest of the nation in support for marriage equality. A 2015 LSU poll found 51 percent of Louisiana residents oppose marriage equality, compared to 42 percent who support it.
Nevertheless, a substantial percentage of Louisiana residents support marriage equality. Furthermore, a high percentage of visitors to the state also favor marriage equality, so Jindal may be underestimating the potential backlash to passing a discriminatory law.
Jindal spends much of his time surrounded by right-wing ideologues, so he may not have his pulse on public opinion. On Good Friday, Jindal attended an Iowa prayer breakfast with Duck Dynasty celebrity Willie Robertson. The Louisiana Governor even quipped that Robertson would make a fine running mate. Jindal has a point. If he chose Willie Robertson as his running mate, it would be an honest selection, that highlights just how dead serious the Republican Party is about wanting to continue waging a culture war against gay and lesbian Americans.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:But that will only happen should Olympic organisers agree to the inclusion of a mixed relay event to the programme in four years' time.
It is an addition the Brownlees would welcome with open arms, having already been crowned Commonwealth champions at Glasgow 2014 alongside Jodie Stimpson and Vicky Holland.
And for the brothers, should their hopes come to fruition, it could signal a new era for the sport at every level.
"I'd absolutely love to see it in the Olympic programme, I think triathlon deserves more than the individual medals it has at the moment," said two-time Olympic gold medallist Alistair.
British athlete Alistair Brownlee (L) helps his brother Jonathan Brownlee (R) before crossing the line in second and third place during the ITU World Triathlon Championships 2016 in Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico on September 18, 2016.AFP
"I'm a bit biased but I think it is a fantastic sport, and it embodies so much of what the Olympics is about.
"It involves three sports, but it's also mixed gender and great to watch, so I think it is a true Olympic discipline and it would be fantastic to see it in Tokyo."
Jonny, who won bronze and silver in London and Rio respectively, added: "As an athlete, it gives us another chance to win a medal.
"But aside from that, I think it's what the Olympic ideals are all about. It's exciting to watch as a spectator, it's short and fast which I think is important for the Olympics, and also, it's fun for the athlete.
Alistair Brownlee (GBR) of Britain and Jonathan Brownlee (GBR) of Britain celebrate winning the Rio triathlonReuters
"For selfish reasons, it would give triathlon more exposure at the Olympics, which I think it deserves."
While a decision is expected in July this year, the brothers will be showcasing the sport in all its glory regardless come September 2 in the inaugural British Triathlon Mixed Relay Cup in Nottingham.
The race, featuring elite team relays with international stars plus teams from across the UK and a Great Britain Under-23 and Junior squad, will incorporate the city's Victoria Embankment and Trent Bridge.
And with an expected crowd of 20,000 spectators and a live BBC television audience watching the action unfold, Jonny insists there is no better way to capitalise on the sport's ever-growing popularity.
"I can't wait to get involved, I think it's a great format of the sport, it's exciting to race in, exciting to watch, and I think it's just what the sport needs," he said.
"I think it has been a long time coming. A lot of the feedback we got after mixed relay events, particularly after the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, was how much people enjoyed watching it, and how good it is for the sport.
Alistair Brownlee and Jonny Brownlee of Britain on stageReuters
"I think it is a very good year to start a mixed team event like this. London 2012 increased the profile of triathlon massively, and the Glasgow Games moved it on a bit further.
"It brought relay to the general public, and Rio moved the exposure of triathlon on again, so we need to build on that."
But while 2016 saw the siblings continue to dominate the international triathlon scene, questions remain as to what 2017 has in store.
For Jonny, that's the small matter of becoming World champion after missing out in a memorable finish in the Cozumel final last year, but for Alistair, such plans are still somewhat up in the air.
"At the moment, the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games is on the horizon," he said. "I've been lucky enough to go to one Games before and win there, so it would be fantastic to do it again.
"I'm seeing how I enjoy different types of racing this year and then I'll sit down and make a more detailed plan for the next few years.
"I definitely want to keep one foot in the door of the Olympic distance, with the thoughts that maybe Tokyo could be on the horizon, especially if there is a relay in it."
But for his brother, more concrete goals have been put in place.
"It's always a tough year, post-Olympics, to become World champion because it's very busy, but that's the aim," he said.
"I have to start well, but I ideally don't want to race too much, but if you want to become World champion you basically have to podium in each race.
"I'll try my best to do that in the Gold Coast, and after last year's events in Mexico, I'm more determined than ever." Sportsbeat 2017Fixing the Open Sign
Michael Kriegshauser Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 13, 2017
The Open Sign, how did a simple design go so wrong? The simple flip-board or sandwich board that let traffic passing by know that your business is open, has become a blue and red glow in every store ignored by everyone. What business owner dreaming of the constant stream of customers flowing into their business would not grab the eighty dollar open sign on their way to check out from the their local COSTCO? Good karma alone requires you throw that POS (point of sale) open sign into your cart.
Imagine there is a position you are told over and over that must be filled for you to have a successful business. Imagine as soon as you fill that role, that person is never listened to, often has communication issues, and only works for half the hours they were hired for. Taking that description, you roughly described all the problems with the modern open sign.
The usual suspects
Creating a New Open Sign
By itself, the open sign seems like a throw away artifact of the ubiquitous mom and pop shop. However, its sheer ubiquity across commerce in general is what gives the sign its real potential to become a more powerful tool. But first things first, what problems does this pitiful piece of design actually suffer from? The open sign is a singular example of a simple design intent being expressed in the worst way on every level possible. The design ignores form, color, accessibility, and legibility. Overall it fails in its one job: to consistently and effectively communicate to potential customers when its owner’s service is available to the public.
Color Choices that Make Sense
Color would have to be the most obvious of the problems the average open sign suffers from. We can sort these problems into two buckets. 1. Color as the larger population understands it and 2.As the colorblind and low vision population perceives color. For the larger population the red “OPEN,” screams “GO AWAY”. So much so, red is the color of choice for international traffic designers to say “Not Here Folks.”
A deeper dive into color tells us what it means for sufferers of color blindness. The color choices become a bland mess. Giving no other hint what its message is to a customer.
Open Sign for the normal sighted
Open Sign for suffers of Monochromacy-Achromatopsia
Open Sign for suffers of Green-Blind Deuteranopia (note the utter sameness of the green and red sign)
So, how do we fix the color choices of the open sign? Suffers of Green-Blind Deuteranopia will tell you green and red combinations do no good for them. However, the red and blue of the open sign seem to still differentiate from one another across multiple types of color blindness. A quick color study of this theory proves out blue and red continue to be powerful even to the color blind.
Blue, Green and Red as they appear to suffers of Green-Blind Deuteranopia (note blue still differentiates from red strongly)
Blue stays vivid while red and green turn to brown. This takes us back to our traffic signage designer, form must and language must fill in for color. Imagine a non-English speaker or an illiterate person trying do divine what these red characters must be saying. Red symbols on blue are standards for the signage that is meant to discourage entry, so shape and symbolism become true standard bearers of a globally understood open sign.
For anyone who does not understand English, the jumble of red and blue just says nope.
A Shape to Say Open
When color and language fail, we must turn to form to carry the day. International traffic sign design has known this for years. The current open sign borrows its form from an artifact of 90’s graphic design and adds nothing to its functionality.
Want it to look cool? Well, just put it in an oval.
From iconography to color forms, designers who work with wayfinding systems constantly work with these nonverbal visual-first methodologies as a fallback for reinforcing meaning of signage.
What form could a new open sign borrow from to effectively communicate its message to the masses? Stepping back and looking at what global design systems engage the public at a global scale, mass transit sign systems clearly become an option as a metaphor for our new sign to borrow from.
While many signs say “access allowed” or “stop” and “no entry” one shape is understood to have both meanings.
Specifically the no entry sign and the blue circle and arrow of directional road signage. Of all signs these two are clearly legible to pedestrians and drivers alike and share a shape. A shared shape could make for a dual purpose sign that works both open and closed hours.
Exploring the Missing Requirements
So where else does the open sign fail, if we revisit our metaphor of the open sign as an employee; we revisit the idea it only works for half the hours it is needed for. At least the old paper hung sign could be flipped from open to closed. The cumbersome LED COSTCO special can only simply be turned off (if one remembers to turn it off at the end of the day). To expound on that, it only addresses the community with one message. However, if you are a |
to believe that they argue with him out of prejudice against the Old World.
In Bethlehem, the group is shown the cave where Christ was born by a young Franciscan friar named Salvaterra (save the earth in Italian). He seems almost divine to them, as if he were a reincarnation of St. Francis. The monk inspires Clarel’s faith. Clarel’s faith is strengthened after his time with Ungar and Salvaterra, and he views the setting sun as an inspiring beacon.
Ungar leaves the group and Salvaterra remains in the monastery, leaving Clarel to grapple alone with his fledgling faith. He returns to Jerusalem hopeful, eager to rescue Ruth and Agar from their exile in Palestine, and return with them both to the United States. As Clarel approaches Jerusalem during the night before Ash Wednesday, he meets a Jewish burial party. In his absence, Ruth and Agar have died. His newfound faith is rocked to its depths. All through the rituals of Holy Week, Clarel waits for a miracle: for Ruth to return from the dead as Christ did. But Easter passes without Ruth’s resurrection. Clarel is left a lone man in Jerusalem, wondering why, though “They wire the world—far under sea / They talk; but never comes to me / A message from beneath the stone.”
The last canto of Clarel, the epilogue, offers Melville’s commentary on the existential crisis of faith suffered by Clarel in the wake of Ruth’s death. Though Clarel remains beset by troubles and doubts, Melville offers the poem as an exordium to faith:
"Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned—
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow—
That like a swimmer rising from the deep—
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory."
Origins [ edit ]
Melville had visited the Holy Land in the winter of 1856,[1] and traveled along the route he describes in Clarel. The visit followed a trip to England on October of the same year, in which he met his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was working there. Melville gave Hawthorne his manuscript for The Confidence-Man, which essentially amounted to his "farewell to prose". Hawthorne later recorded his concern about Melville, noting how they
Herman Melville.
"took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in the hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other."[2]
Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, Melville's record of the winter voyage of 1856 (which took him five months and 15,000 miles), demonstrates that he did not leave behind his doubts or melancholy. Sailing through the Greek Islands, he became disillusioned with classical mythology. He was still in doubt following his time in Jerusalem. Passing Cyprus on the way home, he wrote: "From these waters rose Venus from the foam. Found it as hard to realize such a thing as to realize on Mt. Olivet that from there Christ rose" (p. 164).
Melville explored the divide between the preternatural, the religious, and historical reality; he also was influenced by the crisis faced by mid-19th-century Christianity in the wake of the discoveries of Charles Darwin. Melville saw these scientific developments as simultaneously fascinating (cf. the focus on natural history in Moby-Dick) and terrifying, representing a challenge to traditional Christianity that was almost apocalyptic in its significance, especially when combined with the more theological attacks of Protestantism. As he writes in the troubled and inconclusive Epilogue to Clarel:
If Luther's day expand to Darwin's year,
Should that exclude the hope — foreclose the fear?
Structure [ edit ]
The poem is composed in irregularly rhymed iambic tetrameter (except for the Epilogue), and contains 150 Cantos divided into four books: Jerusalem, The Wilderness, Mar Saba, and Bethlehem.
Trying to determine the strange appeal of the work's "detuned poetic style", William C. Spengeman has suggested that the "impacted tetrameters of Clarel" reveal the origin of the "modernist note", and that they thus anticipate the "prosody of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams".[3]
Similarly, Walter E. Bezanson notes the "curious mixture of the archaic and the contemporary both in language and materials", leading to the inclusion of antique words such as "kern, scrip, carl, tilth and caitiff", alongside modern technical terms taken "from ship and factory, from the laboratory, from trading, seafaring, and war." Commenting on the rhyme-scheme and the restricted meter, Bezanson responded to the common objection that Melville ought to have composed the work in prose, or at least in blank verse, arguing:
To wish that Clarel had been written in blank verse, for example, is simply to wish for a completely different poem. In earlier years Melville had often set Shakespearean rhythms echoing through his high-keyed prose with extraordinary effect. But now the bravura mood was gone. Melville did not propose a broad heroic drama in the Elizabethan manner. Pentameter -- especially blank verse -- was too ample and overflowing for his present mood and theme. The tragedy of modern man, as Melville now viewed it, was one of constriction... Variations from the basic prosodic pattern are so infrequent as to keep the movement along an insistently narrow corridor.[4]
Reception [ edit ]
Contemporary [ edit ]
The poem was barely noticed on its original publication, and the few reviews that did appear showed that mainstream critical taste in the States leant towards the polished, genteel lines of poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. The New York Times was the first to insist that "it should have been written in prose", while the reviewer for the World complained that he had got "lost in the overwhelming tide of mediocrity". The Independent called it a "vast work... destitute of interest or metrical skill", and Lippincott's Magazine claimed that there were "not six lines of genuine poetry in it". In his collection of these quotes, Walter E. Bezanson suggests that the overwhelmingly negative response was partly due to the fact that none of the critics had "actually read it", noting in particular the Lippincott critic's baffling comment that the poet was evidently a "bright and genial" individual,[5] an observation entirely out of keeping with the tone of the vast majority of the work.
Early 20th century [ edit ]
Subsequent criticism, especially since the so-called "Melville Revival" of the early-20s, has been more positive about the poem. Frank Jewett Mather called it "America's best example of Victorian faith-doubt literature", and Raymond Weaver declared that it contained "more irony, vividness and intellect than almost all the contemporary poets put together." In 1924, amid the rising tide of literary modernism, the British critic John Middleton Murry approvingly noted the "compressed and craggy" quality of Melville's poetic line, and the French critic Jean Simon called the work "an extraordinary revelation of a tormented soul."[citation needed]
Post-World War II [ edit ]
Seeing the whole work as an obscure elder sibling to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, literary scholar Richard Chase has argued that the "sterility of modern life is the central symbolic idea of the poem", and that, after the "extremities of titanism in Pierre", Melville reached the culmination of his later thought: "the core of the high Promethean hero".[6] These remarks paved the way for a generation of critics who saw the poem as the crucial document of Melville's later years, such as Ronald Mason, who reads the poem as "a contemplative recapitulation of all Melville's imaginative life", and Newton Arvin, who calls it "Melville's great novel of ideas in verse".[7] Melville's centennial epic is also his most direct commentary on the era of Reconstruction.[8]
In 1994, Harold Bloom chose Clarel as one of four Melville works to be included in his book The Western Canon.[9]..but i found one today!
got the missed delivery notice on Friday only to have to wait until after the holiday Monday to go to the post office. the suspense was killing me!
i must be honest with you. before doing this exchange i was only "pony curious". the drawing style had caught my attention years ago but with one thing or another i hadn't taken the time to fully explore what the fandom was all about. upon making a Rainbow Dash plushie for my own giftee and researching what this pony business was all about i found myself falling more and more in love with these adorable ponies! then my gifter sent me a concerned message saying i'd ruined my gift by buying the mane 6 for myself, which worried me because i didn't want to belittle anything he had put so much effort into sending me :(
so today i got home from work and my husband had been nice enough to go get the package from the post office for me so that i could open it as soon as i got home :) what a surprise! cute Fluttershy play set and 4 huge posters!! printed on Kodak photo paper! with a hand-written note too! seriously couldn't have hoped for more. my new Fluttershy from Germany now has the place of honour on my desk. i made a backdrop for my display cabinet with the tree playset and forest critters!
next thing on the agenda, look into Fallout: Equestria.
you rock MLP santa! let me know your username so i can give you the credit you deserve :)
thank you!!EMBED >More News Videos The man on the ground cries out in pain, screaming "please stop" as the officer continues to order the man's hands behind his back while striking him repeatedly.
A video filmed in the driveway of a Santa Ana home has sparked an investigation into police officers' use of force during an arrest Sunday.In the video, a Santa Ana police officer can be seen holding a man down as he orders the man to put his hands behind his back. "They're going behind my back, sir. They're going behind my back," the man responds. "I promise."The officer then appears to radio for assistance. As he continues to hold the man down, he orders the man, again, to put his hands behind his back. "They're behind my back. Let me put them behind my back, sir," the man says to the officer, who then begins to strike the man about his head and face as another officer arrives.The man on the ground cries out in pain, screaming "please stop" as the officer continues to order the man's hands behind his back while striking him repeatedly.The second officer begins to struggle with the man on the ground as the first officer climbs on top of him, striking him again before deploying a Taser into the man's side.A third officer arrives as the man continues to cry out in pain. The officers can be seen in the video continuing to punch and kick the man as he screams on the ground."Stop fighting!" one of the officers yells. "I'm not fighting!" the man says. An officer then strikes him in the face. "I can't feel my face," the man screams as one of the officers pulls out a nightstick and begins hitting him across the back of his legs.As the man continues to scream for help, two more officers arrive. "You're overdoing it!" the neighbors can be heard screaming at the officers. "I've got all of this on camera."The Santa Ana Police Department confirmed that the arresting officers used force after an officer attempted to stop a vehicle for traffic violations. According to police, the vehicle failed to stop and a chase ensued. The driver jumped out of the still-moving vehicle and led officers on a foot chase."The driver was taken into custody after a use of force," Santa Ana police said in a statement on the incident.According to police, the vehicle was stolen and officers recovered narcotics and a replica handgun inside. A passenger was arrested without incident when the vehicle crashed into a parked car after the driver fled, police said.Police said both suspects are documented gang members who were booked on grand theft auto, possession of stolen property, felony benefiting street gang, felony evading and felony possession of a controlled substance.Santa Ana's police chief directed that the department's internal affairs division begin the investigation, which will look at the circumstances that occurred before and during the use of force and ultimately determine whether the force was justified.Early this year, my frustrations with Vim reached a boiling point. I was frustrated by slow, synchronous Syntastic checkers that I had come to rely on. I wanted the in-editor feedback the checkers provided but many of those checkers locked up my editor for seconds at a time.
I use Vim and tmux to approximate the feeling of a very light-weight IDE, even moving between the two as if they were the same program. However, tmux is not without it’s issues. My frustrations with Vim made me see that tmux is something I deal with to overcome a shortcoming of my editor rather than a tool I value on its own.
I even started to wonder if those Emacs users among us had it right. I downloaded and installed Spacemacs, probably all while I was waiting on synchronous Vim plugins to complete, and tried to make heads or tails of it all. Emacs quickly proved to be too much of a change and I wasn’t prepared to commit to it.
I then remembered the announcement of NeoVim, a fork of Vim that promised to modernize the plugin architecture, and provide a better out-of-the-box experience for Vim users, including a built in terminal emulator.
I was surprised to find that NeoVim was already reported to be in a very usable state, supporting asynchronous plugins and operating as a drop-in replacement for Vim. I decided to give NeoVim a whirl.
NeoVim has packages available for Homebrew, MacPorts, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, and many other environments. Installing on OS X with Homebrew was a brew install neovim/neovim/neovim away. That’s right, the way to summon NeoVim is to say its name three times. See the installation instructions for details on installing in your environment, but it probably won’t be as much fun as that.
NeoVim does not load your.vimrc file, nor does it use.nvimrc, as I had guessed it might. As a result, none of my configuration was carried over when I launched NeoVim for the first time.
NeoVim supports the XDG Base Directory Specification, which among other things attempts to standardize where user configuration files should live and their order of precedence. With an assist from :help nvim-from-vim, I ran the following commands which allow me to share a configuration between Vim and NeoVim.
mkdir -p ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:=$HOME/.config} ln -s ~/.vim $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim ln -s ~/.vimrc $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/init.vim
Years of editing files with the vim command made learning to use nvim a challenge. For all intents and purposes, nvim is Vim for me, so where it is installed, I want to use it all the time. To make this a reality, I added the following alias to my ZSH configuration:
if type nvim > /dev/null 2>&1; then alias vim='nvim' fi
This allows me to continue to use vim on, for example, my home machine where I hadn’t yet installed NeoVim.
To my surprise and delight, NeoVim worked well with my configuration, which is based on the thoughtbot dotfiles with my own customizations applied. Unfortunately, Syntastic style checkers were still blocking, just as they were under Vim. Syntastic does not take advantage of the asynchronous architecture exposed by NeoVim.
NeoMake was built from the ground up to perform similar tasks while taking advantage of NeoVim’s asynchronous jobs. I added the plugin to my configuration, but due to the fact that I inherit Sytastic from the thoughtbot dotfiles, I had to get creative to keep them both from running. I configured Syntastic and NeoMake like so:
" Run NeoMake on read and write operations autocmd! BufReadPost,BufWritePost * Neomake " Disable inherited syntastic let g:syntastic_mode_map = { \ "mode": "passive", \ "active_filetypes": [], \ "passive_filetypes": [] } let g:neomake_serialize = 1 let g:neomake_serialize_abort_on_error = 1
With that configuration loaded, slow checkers no longer locked my editor. While results may take a moment to be reflected in my editor, I’m free to go about my business in NeoVim while the work is done in the background.
NeoMake does not match Syntastic in terms of the sheer number of checkers supported out of the box. New makers, as they are called in NeoMake, are added regularly and can be added via configuration if desired. The languages and tools I most cared about were supported out of the box.
You can open a terminal emulator from any NeoVim split with :terminal or :te. I tried to use this in place of tmux for a bit, but found there were enough cases where it didn’t behave as I would like that I went back to tmux within a week. Your experience may vary, though other NeoVim users in the office report that they don’t get much use from :terminal either.
I’d like to dedicate some time to the tmux replacement experiment again in the near future. Most of my terminal use while editing is dedicated to git operations, and I bet I could get that to work mighty nicely with NeoVim.
I found that my mapping for CTRL-h did not work from NeoVim when working from tmux. I use this mapping from both Vim and tmux to seamlessly and quickly switch between splits and panes. I worked around this issue with the following in my.vimrc :
nnoremap <silent> <BS> :TmuxNavigateLeft<cr>
The NeoVim FAQ has since been updated with a different workaround that is likely more correct, but I haven’t a clue what it means, so I’ve stuck with my own workaround for the time being.
I’ve been using NeoVim for eight months now without giving it much thought at all beyond the initial configuration. I enjoy that NeoMake gives me asynchronous feedback as I work, but beyond that nothing else has changed about my Vim usage. If you’re not bothered by the things NeoVim purports to fix, then there’s no need to change a thing, but in my case the asynchronous job support was enough to justify the small price of admission.Everybody talks about motivation and goal setting. It’s timeless. Everyone is also trying to make it look very complicated, like it’s a secret. They even came up with a DVD called “The Secret.” Really? Since when did all of this “motivational” stuff became a secret. When did taking care of yourself and taking responsibility for your own actions become a novelty? Nowadays, people need to actually read a book in order to treat themselves with respect and love. Personally, I don’t believe that you can buy motivation. You either have it or you don’t. I’m not trying to motivate you with this article; instead, I will provide you with the tools to make better decisions and as results live the life you always wanted.
I’m going to talk a little about something we make every day: decisions.
I hope you understand that everything about and around you is a result of your own decisions. Your whole life is a result of your own decisions. “Decision” is the bridge between your thoughts and your actions.
We make decisions every day. From simple decisions as brushing your teeth to deciding “with or without crème in your coffee.” Everything you do is a result of a decision.
But what is the definition of a “decision” and why is it so important for you to understand this?
When making any decision, whether you like it or not, you are okay with the consequences. We are instantly and subconsciously validating the outcome of our decisions as we are making them. If you think about it, it only makes sense to make those decisions that will eventually make us happy and achieve our goals; however, that’s not always the case. For example, when we decide to stay up all night drinking, we are immediately accepting the fact that tomorrow we are going to have a hangover. Why would you complain about being sick after consciously and deliberately make the decision to drink all night? Because we also made a decision to ignore the consequences. It’s almost a state of denial. As you take responsibility for the consequences of your decisions, you are also deciding to stay in control, therefore, you cannot complain about the outcome. Remember? You accepted the consequences. By taking responsibility you have the power to change the outcome. If you don’t like or agree with the results of your decisions, change them. For example, when you decide to go for a swim, you understand and accept the fact you are not going to drown. Bottom line, when making any decision we are accepting the consequences. When people fail to understand this, they will complain about the consequences and will not be happy with the results.
There are two types of decisions: conscious decisions and subconscious decisions.
A conscious decision can also be associated with setting goals. When we set a goal, we consciously agree to follow a set of actions that are required to make that goal become reality. Everyone has a goal, from trying to lose weight to wanting to become successful or any other goal. When you set a goal to lose weight, you agree to exercise and eat healthy, right? That is because it is a conscious goal; however, lots of people have a hard time accomplishing this goal. You’re probably asking why? When making a decision to eat poorly, subconsciously, you are immediately accepting the consequences. Subconsciously, you are accepting to look and feel poorly. Somehow, it serves a purpose for you to feel that way. You have probably heard the saying “everything you do is for a reason”. Let me tell you… It is! Your subconscious goal will sabotage your conscious goal. Most of the time, your subconscious goal will prevail. Why? Because it has been there for a long time and it has become part of who you are. You are a walking billboard of your subconscious mind. If you are like me, you’ll find it foolish to set a goal to become successful but somehow allow your actions to lead you in the complete opposite direction. Why? Because somehow being a victim serves a purpose for you.
Once you understand that making a decision means agreeing and accepting the consequences, you’re going to gain more clarity in making decisions and your success rate will increase. It’s going to help you “predict” the future. If you’re aware of the consequences, it will only make sense to make the right decisions that support your goals. My advice to you: “Don’t make decisions based on how you feel. Make decisions based on what your goals are.”
Thank you and good luck.
—-
World Wrestling Champion and successful entrepreneur, Leo came to the US 10 years ago with $10 on his pocket and 4 words of English. Combining his work ethic, knowledge, and adherence to discipline, Leo found a way to share his passion for athleticism and personal growth with people of all ages and walks of life. RESULTS STUDIO and LeoFrincu.com became the embodiment of Leo’s burning desire to contribute to the community by enabling people to overcome personal adversity and reach their best potential.
Photo credit: ‘Two Paths‘ by Big StockWhat You Need
The book examples have been developed under Clojure 1.6.0, although earlier and later versions of Clojure may work as well. You’ll want to use Leiningen 2.x in order to follow along with the examples that use external projects.
Tips for Clojure Macros
As Clojure programmers, we use macros all the time, even if we don’t write them ourselves. So understanding the details of how macros work is a time investment that pays off right away.
As a first approximation, write macros only where functions won’t do.
Use syntax-quoting and gensyms to avoid accidental symbol capture.
Keep track of whether a piece of code will be run at compile time or run time.
Try writing the code you want to generate first (assuming specific inputs), and then the macro that expands to that code.
the macro that expands to that code. If you have the input you need to do work at compile time, you may be able to use macros to speed up your app’s runtime.
Often macros can be replaced by higher-order functions using thunks (functions of no arguments), but you do lose some of the syntax benefits.
Consider the assumptions a new user of your macro will make, and how you can make their jobs easier through error messages, documentation, or other tools.
Read and understand the code for macros that you use from the Clojure language and other open-source libraries. It’ll teach you a lot about what to do, and what to avoid.
Q & A
1. I already know some Clojure and have written some macros. Will this be review for me?
You actually sound like my target audience: someone who knows Clojure but is interested in digging a little deeper into macros. It’s hard for me to say for sure without being in your place, but there should be some interesting challenges for everyone. Take a look at the sample chapters and see what you think!
2. What’s a macro?
You can think of a macro as being sort of like a function, but one that transforms and replaces the code that it’s given at compile time. So it allows you to write code that generates other code: metaprogramming! And in Lisps, since the code is represented just like the data structures in the language, a lot of times it’s pretty similar to regular programming.
3. I’ve heard that you should avoid macros – why write a book about them?
Ah, right, so people say you shouldn’t use a macro where a function will do, which I’m 100% on board with. I think when you start out as a Clojure programmer, it’s easy to go overboard because (among other reasons) they can be sort of contagious. I talk about some of the problems with macros in Chapter 3, “Use Your Powers Wisely.” But back to the question: I actually learned a lot of what I know about macros from a couple of great macro-focused books, On Lisp and Let Over Lambda. And I figured it would’ve been nice to have had a book in Clojure, so I could focus on the ideas I wanted to learn instead of a new language.
4. I noticed a category of macro you left out of the book.
That’s not a question. Yes, unfortunately I didn’t have room to cover all the use cases I’ve seen, so there are a number of interesting use cases that I didn’t talk about. Send me an example and a note, though – I’m compiling some interesting macros at clojuremacros.com and I’d love to consider your macro idea for inclusion there! And if you’ve got any other questions, come on over to forums where I’m happy to discuss the book with you!Facebook launched video comments today, a feature that acknowledges the meteoric rise and continued growth of online video creation and consumption.
By 2020, internet video traffic will represent 82% of all consumer internet traffic, according to forecasts from the Cisco Visual Networking Index.
It could also help Facebook catch up, yes catch up, to Snapchat in terms of daily videos viewed on the social media platform. As per Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report, video consumption on Snapchat outpaced video consumption on Facebook in the first quarter of 2016.
The new feature was developed at Facebook’s 50th Hackathon, according to a company blog post.
The team that built what would become the video comments feature included core hackers: Bob Baldwin who led the initiative with Hermes Pique and Sameer Madan working on iOS, Muhammed Ibrahim focused on the Web, and Billy Ng on Android.
Baldwin previously led teams at Facebook Hackathons who developed features that allowed Facebook users to include photos or stickers in comment threads.
If this feature had been live during the Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral video meme launched to help raise funds to cure ALS, it could have resulted in the world’s longest comment thread.The NFL Referees Association reportedly has a problem with Shannon Eastin officiating an NFL game, and it has nothing to do with the fact that she's a woman.
The union said that it would question her credentials because she had participated in the World Series of Poker, profootballtalk.com reported on Thursday. The league, though, has vetted and accepted Eastin, who will become the first woman to officiate an NFL game Thursday night when the Chargers play the Packers in San Diego (ESPN, 8 p.m. ET).
"The NFL does extensive background checks on prospective officials, including the current group of replacement officials," NFL spokesman Michael Signora said, according to the website. "All of them have passed the NFL's rigorous screening process, including Shannon Eastin. Past participation in an event such as a poker tournament does not disqualify a person from consideration as an NFL game official."
The league is using replacement officials after not being able to reach a new labor agreement with its referees.
Per the NFL's rules on gambling and officials, Signora did say that if Eastin became a regular official she would not be allowed to take part "in a professional gambling event, such as the World Series of Poker, at any time of the year."
Eastin, 42, has been an official at the NCAA Division I-AA for four years. She's also a world-class athlete, having earned six national judo championships.
Eastin will be the line judge for the Chargers-Packers preseason game.Government officials and representatives from anti-piracy outfits from the United States, Europe and Russia met up in Brussels this week. The roundtable, “Combating Internet Piracy: International Practice”, focused on the need for international cooperation and the strengthening of copyright legislation.
With the Internet and therefore online piracy having developed into a truly global phenomenon, anti-piracy groups everywhere are expanding their reach.
What was once a semi-isolated affair has become a multi-agency, cross-continent operation, with governments and rights holders alike striving to share information and pool resources.
An event this week illustrated where things are going, with representatives from around the world descending upon Brussels for a meeting hosted by the Motion Picture Association.
The International Roundtable, titled “Combating Internet Piracy: International Practice”, saw government officials from Europe and Russia join representatives from the United States and the UK to discuss cooperation against piracy.
The meeting (Photo via Роскомнадзор)
According to information released by Russian telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor and translated by the MPA, those gathered agreed that a “lack of intellectual property protection causes significant economic damage to individual rights holders and the global economy.”
Of course, that message certainly isn’t new. Neither are mounting public claims by rights holders that Internet users are being put at risk through their visits to unauthorized sites.
Those assembled agreed that consumers are negatively impacted from enjoying entertainment in a safe environment since pirate sites “are a fertile ground for identity theft, viruses, malware or spyware.”
As mentioned earlier, anti-piracy groups and initiatives of all kinds now understand that collaboration is part of the way forward, whether that’s sharing information or working towards tougher legal frameworks.
“In particular, participants acknowledged the need to strengthen international cooperation in the fight against IPR violations on the Internet and to continue sharing experiences in improving legislation, and law enforcement practice in combating copyright infringement in the digital environment in the EU, Russian Federation, and USA,” a summary of the meeting reads.
Those at the meeting included representatives from the US “six-strikes” Copyright Alert System and the UK’s GetitRight campaign. Details are fairly scarce, but these groups are likely to have shared data on how educational messages affect the behaviors of Internet pirates and how voluntary agreements with industry players such as ISPs can become part of the anti-piracy package.
Another item on the agenda was the role that search engines and user-generated content companies play when it comes to fighting online piracy. While Russia has its own issues with services like Yandex, for the US and Europe the focus is very much on Google and sites such as YouTube.
Service provider liability and related legislative initiatives will continue to be hot topics in the months and years ahead. This is particularly true of the United States, where the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA are under scrutiny alongside a controversial debate on the so-called ‘value gap‘ claimed to be present on YouTube.Ummm, well, this is the LG G4. The phone was supposed to be officially revealed for the first time on April 28, buuuuuuut, a microsite set up for the phone was leaked yesterday and its contents are now everywhere on the web. That means that the phone in all sorts of forms, including versions with leather backs (and butt seams), is ready for you to see. We also know more about some of its specs, like the removable 3,000mAh battery, included SD card slot, a “color spectrum sensor,” and its IPS “Quantum” display.
Yeah, we know a lot.
Ready for it?
Oh, don’t worry, there is more. Ready?
My lord. OK. With that out of the way, let’s talk.
From this microsite, which is of course now gone, we are pretty sure that we can expect two versions of the LG G4 – one with a traditional plastic cover, and another that is fitted with leather. The plastic cover version will come in at least three colors, which appear to be white, grey, and gold. The leather version will then come in black, brown, red, light blue, gold, and yellow.
The back of the phone is removable, as is the battery. There is a micro SD slot, and a “durable, sleek” body that “was designed with an idea user experience in mind.” The phone, according to this microsite, is 8.9mm thick.
The 16MP camera, as you all know, includes an F1.8 aperture lens that LG claims captures more natural images, thanks to its “Color Spectrum Sensor.” It also has a fancy light trail effect mode, and the previously announced manual mode.
As for the display, we already know that it measures in at 5.5-inches and with a QHD resolution, but LG is calling it a “Quantum” display. It’s supposed to deliver “brilliant, crisp images” that are “rich and authentic in color,” while also remaining energy efficient.
We are also pretty sure that LG ditched the Snapdragon 810 for the 808.
So yeah, that’s the LG G4, assuming this is all accurate. It has to be, though, look at all those damn images.
Thoughts?It is a common misconception that the Moon’s surface is a perfect vacuum. It is not! The Moon indeed has an atmosphere, a very tenuous one however. If you could capture the Moon’s entire atmosphere, it would weigh about 10,000 kg. In other words, it would weigh less than a large truck.
Sources of the lunar atmosphere:
There are two main sources of the lunar atmosphere. One of them is outgassing, which is the release of gasses that originate from radioactive decay processes deep inside the crust and mantle of the Moon.
The second source is through a process known as sputtering: atoms are ejected from solid materials on the lunar surface due to the bombardment by energetic particles. The planet Mercury obtains its tenuous atmosphere in the same way.
Another minor source of the lunar atmosphere consists of leaks from space suits and the lunar habitation structures from the Apollo missions, as well as the gases ejected from the rockets during landing and liftoff. While it sounds nice that Humans contributed to the lunar atmosphere, most of it has probably been lost to space since then.
Losses of the lunar atmosphere:
The Moon loses most of its atmosphere to space; however it is replenished at about the same rate, so that the total mass of the atmosphere remains relatively constant on average.
Some of the gases released by sputtering will be re-implanted into the lunar regolith due to the lunar gravity.
Also some of the atmosphere is lost to space either by solar radiation pressure, or if the gasses are ionized, they are swept away in the solar wind’s magnetic field.
Device used by the Apollo astronauts to detect the lunar atmosphere. Photo by NASA.
Composition of the lunar atmosphere:
The average daytime lunar atmosphere consists of the following elements (proportions in atoms per cubic centimeter):
Argon (40,000),
Helium (2,000 – 40,000),
Sodium (70),
Potassium (17),
Hydrogen (less than 17).
Other elements were also detected in much lower quantities. Radon-222 and polonium-210 was inferred from the data obtained by the Lunar Prospector alpha particle spectrometer. Argon-40, helium-4, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon were detected by devices used by the Apollo astronauts. One such device, called the “cold cathode gauge” is pictured above.
Some of those atoms would bind into molecules such as methane, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, since most elements cannot remain stable as single atoms.
In total, the lunar atmosphere consists of about 80,000 atoms per cubic centimeter, slightly more than what is believed to be the size of the atmosphere on Mercury.
Conclusion:
Even though it has been scientifically proven that the Moon does indeed have a tenuous atmosphere, for all practical purposes the lunar environment is considered to be a near-perfect vacuum.Because the genome contains such a wealth of information, and in a language which we don’t quite understand, it is of utmost importance to organize it in meaningful ways. As there is no precedent for this syntax, recognizing and documenting adequate patterns is |
’s because as prices fall, the relative value of the debt actually increases. This is already true of countries like Brazil, which must repay its debts in dollars with a currency that has been sharply devalued. Given the tremendous expansion of debt in the world since the Great Depression, the risk cannot be overstated.
The threat posed by debt became clear with a worldwide crash in commodity prices that began in 2013 and stabilized only in mid-2016 as the Chinese stimulus worked its way through the world system. Oil dropped 75 percent between 2014 and early 2016 from $120 to $30 per barrel before it recovered.63 The pattern was similar for copper, aluminum, and other raw materials. That is an unmistakable indicator of the slowing demand for industrial production on a world scale. Commodity producers’ high profits turned to catastrophic losses almost overnight. Oil production was maintained not because of the prospect of market opportunities, but to pay the interest on loans. The world’s leading oil exporters found themselves in a devastating price war, as Saudi Arabia ramped up production to maintain market share at the expense of not only OPEC members like Venezuela and Nigeria, but also the burgeoning oil and gas boom in the United States.64
The crash in commodity prices soon led to a dramatic drop in the value of the currencies in the economies most affected, such as Brazil, which saw a drop of 30–40 percent.65 And because most commodity-producing countries hold their debt in dollars, a weaker currency means that their foreign debt effectively rises. This is essentially what occurred in 1997-98 in the East Asian financial crisis.
Some of these big changes in exchange rates were competitive devaluations, as one country seeks to steal growth from another by using a cheaper currency to effectively lower the prices of the goods it produces. It’s called “beggar thy neighbor.” Thus Japan orchestrated a steep decline in the yen relative to the dollar in recent years. The ECD did likewise with the euro.66
With the plunge in commodity prices has come a sharp slowdown in world trade, which has never fully recovered from the Great Recession.67 By 2015, Chinese exports began to decline.68 The Baltic Dry Index, the main indicator of world oceangoing freight shipments, dropped 80 percent from December 2013 to January 2016.69
In this context, both the rate and the mass of profits worldwide were declining as 2016 began. With shrinking profits comes the attempt to slash expenses through layoffs and other reductions in labor costs, as well as cuts in capital expenditure. Driving this trend are the oil and mining companies. Anglo-American, the transnational company, announced that two thirds of its 85,000 workers are to be laid off.70
Stimulus: The sequel
China, after trying to rebalance its economy away from export-oriented industry towards domestic consumer goods and services, responded to the economic slowdown in early 2016 by unleashing a $1.1 trillion stimulus program.71 The government once again made credit freely available to heavy industry, apparently calculating that it was preferable to ramp up more debt and overcapacity than to risk the economic and political consequences of a slowdown. To take one telling example: as a result of the stimulus, a bankrupt and shuttered single steel mill complex with the capacity to produce half the amount of the entire British steel industry was reopened in the spring of 2016.72
China’s stimulus managed to put a floor under the much-reduced price of oil and other commodities, and give a push to the world economy. But by mid-2016 it couldn’t deliver the hoped-for rebound in growth.73 The European Central Bank’s multipronged program of low rates and QE also fizzled, with growth in the eurozone barely emerging from a second recession in 2011 with growth expected to be just 1.6 percent in 2016.74 In the United States, the Republican Congress and the Democratic Obama administration quietly moved away from austerity with a $1.1 trillion spending plan to provide an election-year stimulus that both sides judged to be politically beneficial.75
Still, the US economy, despite steady job growth, has struggled to attain a 2 percent rate of growth since the end of the Great Recession, compared to 3.5 percent annual growth in the period since the World War II. Investment remained low by historical standards. The Wall Street Journal noted: “Companies appear reluctant to step up spending on the basic building blocks of the economy, such as machines, computers and new buildings.”76 Low investment begat miniscule gains in productivity, the foundation of profitability. Productivity has increased an average of just 1.2 percent annually since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, compared with a 2.6 percent average rate of increase from 2000 to 2007, and actually declined in 2015.77
All this created a dilemma for Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, who began pushing through a planned series of interest-rate hikes starting in late 2015 in a bid to help bank profitability and provide ammunition for future interest rate cuts in a crisis situation. Then, the faltering job increases of mid-2016 led to fears that the US boom—if the paltry recovery can be given that name—was ending, forcing the Fed to further postpone plans to raise interest rates. The Brexit bombshell put further pressure on Yellen to keep ultra-low rates intact. Yet keeping interest rates low much longer threatens bank profits and the stability of the financial system. Alternatively, a significant rise in rates could stifle growth by tightening credit and driving up the value of the dollar in relation to other currencies, hurting US exports and squeezing the profits of the S&P 500 companies, which get 40 percent or more of their profits from abroad.
The muted impact of the various stimulus efforts have once again highlighted how the policy measures taken to recover from the crisis have not only failed to generate growth, but are now themselves creating new difficulties. The latest Keynesian-style stimulus spending in China may keep the economy from a further slowdown, but only at the cost of adding to growing debts, worsening overcapacity, and tensions over trade, and thus preparing the way for a potentially worse crisis. “[In 2009] the world applauded China’s move and thanked China for boosting world economic growth,” China’s Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said at the annual meeting of US and Chinese government leaders in 2016. “Now the world is pointing at China and saying that China’s overcapacity is a drag on the world, but it didn’t say so at the time China contributed to global economic growth.”78
Friedmanite monetary policy has run out of steam, too. Near-zero interest rates implemented by central bankers in Japan and Europe did succeed in keeping the biggest banks solvent in the 2008 financial crash. But after eight years of ultra-low interest rates, the policy is now a threat to the financial system. The low rates constrain bank profits, particularly in Europe, which means that the banks cannot meet the capital reserve required by regulations imposed in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.79
If the banks are having difficulty in a zero-interest world, other financial institutions are staggering towards crisis. The business model for pension funds and insurance companies requires them to generate income of 7–8 percent per year. Consequently, continued low interest rates threaten their solvency in coming years.80 To try and eke out larger reserves, many pension funds and insurance companies have been compelled to take on more risk, such as collateralized mortgage obligations and bonds from emerging market economies—countries that are now in crisis as the result of the crash in commodities prices. Some of these investments may implode in the next recession, putting the already strapped public employee pension funds at even greater risks.
But the central banks in the advanced countries haven’t come up with an alternative. Countries from Japan to Sweden have responded by imposing negative interest rates—effectively, a tax on deposits. The aim was to try and compel businesses to invest and consumers to spend; but it has had negligible immediate results, leaving Japan, for example, unable to break out of two decades of stagnation.81 The European Central Bank, which must straddle the competing interests of the dominant players in the eurozone—Germany, France, and Italy—in March 2016 launched a program that both pushed some rates further below zero and essentially will pay banks to loan money as well as buy up both government and corporate bonds.82 In Japan, the central bank has bought not only bonds, but stocks as well, making it a top shareholder in Japan’s biggest companies—a move that shattered central bank orthodoxy.83
Europe: From crisis to crackup?
Brexit is a product of the European economy’s average 0.3 percent rate of growth since 2009. Since then, the central focus of European Union policy—driven by Berlin—has been to maintain the German-dominated economic pecking order and the solvency of European banks. Because Britain did not join the euro, it could avoid this pressure. But Greece has been subjected to the worst peacetime social crisis in European history. The objective was threefold: get the bondholders’ money back; maximize the cost of defiance, default, or departure from the EU; and send a message to the Italian and French ruling classes that they had to toe the German line in the eurozone.
Greece’s Syriza government, elected in 2015 to stop such austerity, itself capitulated and backed a deal with creditors that contained still more severe cuts as a condition for renegotiating loans. But that was not enough to end the risk that Greece, unable to meet those terms, may default on its debt anyway. As Greece teetered on the edge in spring 2016, even IMF officials were taken aback at Germany’s relentless drive to squeeze Greece.84
But from the perspective of the German government in Berlin and its allies in the EU headquarters in Brussels, the crucifixion of Greece is a necessary part of a debt resolution process in far bigger European countries. By early 2016, Italian debt as a percentage of GDP was much higher than it was in Greece at the start of the bailout. Italian non-performing loans reached 18 percent of the total, equivalent to more than $400 billion.85 The already weak big Italian banks had to cough up billions for a convoluted bailout fund for their smaller counterparts in order to comply with EU rules against direct government aid.86
At the root of Italy’s problems is Italian industry’s declining competitiveness in relation to Germany. The introduction of the euro in 1999 allowed German industry to take advantage of a currency that was valued far less than the old German deutschmark would have been. At the same time, the German government took advantage of cheap labor from the former East Germany after unification in the early 1990s to squeeze labor costs despite big gains in worker productivity.87 What’s more, Germany shifted its supply chain away from Europe to Asia.88 The result has been a steady decay in Italian industry that has led to mounting bad private debts as well as government budget deficits. In addition, Italian banks remain dependent on near-zero interest rates to stay afloat, leading to a conflict within the EU as banks in Germany and elsewhere see their profits erode by low or negative rates from the ECB. German politicians openly accuse the ECB chief Mario Draghi, an Italian, of fronting for Italian banks.89 EU rules prevent states from bailing out national banking systems unless their bondholders take losses first—a policy that the Italian banking crisis is straining to the limit.
The French economy is also battered by competition with Germany. By 2016 France had still not yet made up for the lost output of the Great Recession, and had a jobless rate of 10.8 percent.90
But Germany was not immune to the crisis. The country’s own flagship financial giant, Deutsche Bank, was forced to take extraordinary measures to stave off financial speculation that it would need a bailout if the economy slowed even further.91 By mid-20016, some 96 percent of Deutsche Bank’s assets were in so-called Level 3 capital, the classification for opaque, hard-to-value holdings such as the derivatives that were at the center of the 2008 financial crisis. When tallying up such assets, bankers call the process “mark to myth.”92 Spain, meanwhile, despite a recovery that helped a conservative prime minister stave off an electoral challenge from the left, in mid-2016 had the highest unemployment in the West.93
All these factors make it highly probable that the economic slowdown or recession in the emerging markets will trigger a financial crisis as well. The only question is when this will occur and how severe it will be. It is impossible to predict, as the unregulated shadow banking system—that is, the nonbank financial institutions that played a central role in the crash of 2008—are now bigger than ever, at an estimated $75 trillion as of 2015.94
The stagnant economy shaped the European response to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. The anti-immigrant backlash, embraced by ruling parties across the board, could end the Schengen open border agreement within the EU and even curtail the mobility of labor. The Brexit debate in the UK was largely driven by anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment and a calculation by sections of British capital that they could get a better deal outside the crisis-bound economies on the European continent.
But the process of the EU unraveling may not end with Brexit. The next crisis may again pressure governments to bail out their own banks and companies using methods that violate EU rules. The price of accepting German dominance may ultimately be too high for French and Italian capitalists who are powerful enough to push for either a looser EU, an exit from the eurozone or even a breakup. A departure from the eurozone may yet occur in Greece, whether the result of a push or a jump. As the crisis unfolds, the previously unthinkable becomes plausible—even likely.
Can the United States escape the crisis?
The United States may be the last major economy to go into recession, a reversal of a century-old pattern. That’s because the United States came out stronger in the 2007–09 crisis compared to its traditional rivals. To be sure, the average of 2 percent growth in GDP per year in the United States is the weakest on record, but it is much stronger than in Europe or Japan. The United States got an edge because its banks were bailed out faster and consolidated and merged so that they could rebuild their reserves. They are probably stronger than their counterparts abroad.
The US economy also got a big boost from an oil boom in the United States making it the leading oil producer in the world.95 The manufacturing revival, much touted by the Obama administration, was relatively limited, given that the expansion was the weakest since the 1930s.96 But it was enough to gradually boost employment, even as wage stagnation endured, benefits became more expensive, and the median family income was less than that of 2007.
Those lower wages were a reflection of a dramatic shift of $750 billion in national income from labor to capital between roughly 2003 and 2013. This, in turned, helped lay the basis for a glorious season of profits for US corporations. In 2013, after-tax profits hit $1.7 trillion, the highest level in eighty-five years, when adjusted for inflation—a figure that corresponds to 10 percent of GDP. Pre-tax profits were the equivalent of 12.1 percent of GDP, tying the previous record set in 1942. “But in 1942, most of those profits were taxed away,” the New York Times’ Floyd Norris observed. “The effective corporate tax rate was nearly 55 percent, in sharp contrast to last year’s figure of under 20 percent.” At the same time, employee compensation was at the lowest level in sixty-five years.97
Jobs growth did improve, with six million jobs created in 2014 and 2015—the best run sine the late 1990s.98 Housing construction returned to levels unseen since 2007 on the eve of the collapse.99 This led to hopes that the United States would avoid the recession that hit the developing world in 2015.
But a closer look reveals contradictions of the US economy. The rise of the dollar has meant that manufacturing began to stagnate and decline slightly by early 2016.100 That is significant, because although manufacturing now accounts for just 12 percent of US economic output, some two-thirds of the profits of the S&P 500 big companies come from manufacturing corporations.101
At the same time, exports declined in early 2016 for the first time since the recession, as the low-wage advantage of US capitalists against Europe and Japan was counterbalanced by the rise in the dollar.102 In this context, factory capacity utilization began to sag in the first half of 2016.103 What’s more, the fracking and oil boom turned to a bust amid the collapse in world energy prices. A series of energy companies went bust, creating the biggest wave of bankruptcies in US history, hitting the balance sheets of the banks that had loaned to them.104 Finally, the ultimate arbiter of the health of the capitalist economy—profits—began to decline. In spring 2016, the S&P 500 reported their third consecutive quarter of declining profits.105
Despite these weaknesses, the US position vis-à-vis its rivals—except for China—has improved. But the situation remains fluid. While the European economies are a weak link in the chain, Germany is still a strong competitor. Some 51 percent of the German economy is based on exports, and in 2015 Germany had an 8.8 percent current account surplus with the rest of the world.106 That means Germany had a surplus of nearly $250 billion in the trade of goods and services—a figure bigger than that of China, despites the latter’s vastly larger population and rapid growth.
Another threat to the US economy comes from the financial system, just as it did during the 2008 crash. The regulations imposed on US banks since then are onerous for individual financial institutions but are nevertheless incapable of preventing a new financial crisis. Moreover, the regulations don’t cover the shadow banking system. As a result, a majority of all mortgages in this country are now done through non-banks, potentially introducing new risks into the financial system.107 Private equity firms—the polite term for the shadow banking system in the United States—have moved aggressively into the mortgage industry, replicating the same rapacious and risky practices the led to the 2007-08 housing crash.108 Further, the Federal Reserve is buying about half the mortgage-backed securities sold by the government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, propping up the housing market. All this raises anew the possibility of a housing bubble and bust.
Since banks are adept at hiding off-balance sheet liabilities and the financial instruments that emerged in the last crisis, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), few outside the banks know what problems may emerge in a downturn in the United States, or what risks American banks may have in relation to their sickly counterparts in Europe or Asia. But in spring 2016, the Federal Reserve made it clear that there is plenty of cause for worry. In a letter to JPMorgan Chase about the bank’s wind-down plan, Fed officials wrote that they had “identified a deficiency” in the plan that could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.”109 In any case, the interconnected nature of global finance means that US banks are inescapably exposed to crises in the rest of the world.
For all these reasons, the next slump could be as bad or as worse as 2007–09, given that there is more overproduction and more debt now. As China has led the world recovery from the Great Recession, a bust-up in the Chinese economy is likely to have a greater impact than the US housing and banking crisis. It is, of course, impossible to predict the severity of the next crisis. But by mid-2016 it is clear the years of relative stabilization are over.
How will governments and capitalists respond to a new slump? Their traditional methods have failed: Keynesianism, austerity, monetarism, and quantitative easing. Capital will have to come up with something else to restructure the system. Those efforts will be further complicated by the rise of economic nationalism exemplified by Trump, Brexit, and Le Pen. In the 2008–09 crisis, the Group of 20 industrialized nations coordinated stimulus spending and bank bailouts, narrowly averting a 1930s-scale slump. Today, however, governments pressured by nationalists and burdened by huge debts may be unable or unwilling to undertake similar measures in concert.
Prospects
There have been three previous periods of protracted economic crises that were resolved by the restructuring of capitalism. The first was the crisis of the 1870s to the 1890s, which was overcome by the rise of monopoly corporations, finance capital, and imperialism, setting the stage for the World War I. It was in this context the Russian revolutionaries V. I. Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin developed the Marxist theory of imperialism, which held that the contradiction between nation-state and world economy led inevitably to military conflict as states intervened to defend their national corporations.
World War I failed to fully resolve those contradictions, either economically or politically, setting the stage for the Great Depression of the 1930s and a second inter-imperialist war. At the end of the World War II and the absolute destruction of capital in Europe and Japan, the United States emerged as the dominant power and used institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to lock in its hegemony.
The third crisis, lasting from 1974 to 1982 as discussed above, was overcome by the neoliberal restructuring of industry and deregulation and the collapse of Stalinism, which dramatically lowered the organic composition of capital on a world scale, opening the way for renewed profitability.
What restructuring will take place as a result of the current prolonged crisis is impossible to predict. In the era of World War I, as Bukharin described it, Western nation-states and finance capital fused in struggle to divide the world to control raw materials to support their rival industrial monopolies. In today’s globalized economy, the picture is very different. The legacy imperialist powers, still dominated by the United States, must now contend with a world economy reshaped by China and the rest of the BRICS, which present new challenges to their dominance.
Despite the transformation of the world system since then, Bukharin’s summation of the contradictions of a globalized capitalist economy provide a framework for the present day:
If we thus consider the problem in its entirety, and take thereby the objective point of view, i.e., the point of view of the adaptation of modern society to its conditions of existence, we find that there is here a growing discord between the basis of social economy which has become world-wide and the peculiar class structure of society, a structure where the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) itself is split into “national” groups with contradictory economic interests, groups which, being opposed to the world proletariat, are competing among themselves for the division of the surplus value created on a world scale. Production is of a social nature; international division of labor turns the private “national” economies into parts of a gigantic all-embracing labor process, which extends over almost the whole of humanity.110
The economic rivalry of national capitalist classes is the foundation of imperialist rivalry, Bukharin showed. Here, too, his analysis, in general terms, fits. The US capitalist class’s aim of maintaining its dominance is further complicated by the impact of its twin military failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. What began fifteen years ago as an effort by the sole superpower to lock in its dominance, today has destabilized the entire Middle East and Southwest Asia. The United States’ “pivot to Asia” to contend with a rising China therefore takes place in a period of disorientation for US policy. The proposed TPP trade agreement and the parallel US military alliances with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries is an effort to create a bloc that can check China’s ascendancy. But success is far from assured.
Yet from the capitalist perspective, there must be a restructuring because the system is in decline. The crisis in mainstream political parties amid the rise of Trump and the European Far Right on one side and the Syriza, Podemos, and Sanders developments on the other is putting pressure on national ruling classes to find competent personnel who can develop a political program to manage the crisis, cope with intensifying class conflict, and navigate international rivalries and wars. In some cases, this will take the form of a co-optation of left-wing parties like Syriza. In other cases, it may mean that capital lets the Far Right off the leash to further scapegoat immigrants and minorities in order to drive a wedge into the working-class movement by whipping up nationalist fervor. Consequently, we are entering an extremely volatile period—economically, politically, ideologically, and in terms of imperialist relations. The Left will be tested internationally.
At the same time, the crisis has opened a way for a renewal of the socialist left. A generation of young people that has come of age amid recession, weak growth, and endless imperialist wars has become politically conscious and active. Already, millions of young people in the United States count themselves as socialists, however vaguely defined. However, the Left is not as well organized or as politically coherent as the Right.
The job of revolutionaries is to help overcome these weaknesses by clarifying the politics and organization the Left needs to meet these challenges. This analysis of capitalism’s crisis today is offered as a contribution to the struggle of a new generation of fighters in order to better understand the battles ahead.An atheist college student who received hate mail and death threats after she spoke out against a monument declaring “In God We Trust” on public property in Alabama said she was helping to preserve religious liberty for everyone.
The Press-Register reported it had verified numerous Facebook comments and emails sent to Amanda Scott, who spoke twice before the Mobile County Commission against the proposed plaque.
The comments suggested Scott “jump off a bridge,” “burn in Hell,” or be “shot for treason,” and another wondered “whatever happened to stoning people in the city square?”
Scott, a Faulkner State student, said Wednesday during an “ask me anything” session on Reddit that WKRG-TV station unintentionally encouraged some of the hateful comments by asking viewers to comment on a Facebook post about the issue.
“Fortunately I have been safe so far,” she said. “The day after the (televised) interview, last Friday, I went to Artwalk in downtown Mobile and the most that happened was a few people looking at me and whispering to each other near the Mobile Atheist Community table, where I was standing. I haven’t been in public since then because I want to lay low.”
Scott said she got involved to challenge efforts by an out-of-state group to set up the religious-themed monument.
“There is a national organization called In God We Trust America Inc. based in Bakersfield, California, that is behind putting up ‘In God We Trust’ plaques in government buildings across the country,” she said. “Hundreds of local government bodies like city councils and county commissions have approved the plaques without any challenge. I wanted our local county commission to know that they would not be able to put up the plaque without a challenge.”
Although she’s an atheist, Scott said her efforts are supported by a Unitarian pastor and a representative from Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“Both of them testified that they thought using the sacred name of God on money and in a government building was sacrilegious and that the separation of church and state also protects religion,” Scott said. “I am willing to work with them again and anyone else who is religious that supports the separation of church and state.”
Scott said she would prefer the national motto be changed from “In God We Trust” back to “E Pluribus Unum” – or “Out of many, one” – as the founders intended.
“The separation of church and state is important to me because it protects the rights of both non-religious and religious people,” Scott said. “The same wall that protects atheists from state-sponsored Christianity is the one that protects Christians from state-sponsored Islam.”
Watch an interview with Scott posted online by WKRG-TV:Biluochun Type Green Origin Jiangsu Province, China Quick description A green tea with a strong aroma and a light floral taste.
Biluochun (Chinese: 碧螺春; pinyin: Bìluóchūn; pronounced [pî.lwǒ.ʈʂʰwə́n]) is a famous green tea originally grown in the Dongting mountain region near Lake Tai, Jiangsu, China. Also known as Pi Lo Chun, it is renowned for its delicate appearance, fruity taste, floral aroma, showy white hairs and early cropping.
The name Biluochun literally means "green snail spring". It is called so because it is a green tea that is rolled into a tight spiral, resembling snail meat, and is cropped in early spring.
Its original name is Xia Sha Ren Xiang (simplified Chinese: 吓煞人香; traditional Chinese: 嚇煞人香; pinyin: xiàshàrénxiāng; "scary fragrance"). Legend tells of its discovery by a tea picker who ran out of space in her basket and put the tea between her breasts instead. The tea, warmed by her body heat, emitted a strong aroma that surprised the girl.
According to the Qing Dynasty chronicle Ye Shi Da Guan, the Kangxi Emperor visited Lake Tai in the 38th year of his rule. At that time, because of its rich aroma, local people called it "Scary Fragrance". The Kangxi Emperor decided to give it a more elegant name, "Green Snail Spring".
Chinese tea experts regard it very highly. Zhen Jun (1857 to 1918), author of tea encyclopedia Cha Shuo, ranked it first among Chinese green tea. Longjing tea came second, Liu An Gua Pian came third. It is so delicate and tender that one kilogram of Dong Ting Bi Luo Chun consists of 14,000 to 15,000 tea shoots.
Today, Biluochun is cultivated in Dongting, Jiangsu. Biluochun from Dong Shan (East Mountain) or Xi Shan (West Mountain) is considered the best. Bi Luo Chun tea is also grown in Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces. Their leaves are larger and less uniform (may contain yellow leaves). They taste more nutty than fruity and smooth.
Biluochun is divided into seven grades in decreasing order of quality: Supreme, Supreme I, Grade I, Grade II, Grade III, Chao Qing I, and Chao Qing II.
See also [ edit ]learning
5 Top iPad Synths You Might Have Missed
View other articles in this series... 1. These synths may be lesser known, but they sound awesome 2. Composing soundtracks? Let us recommend some soundware 3. These iOS synths have the power to rival desktop virtual instruments 4. Multiply your creative processing with these multi-effects plug-ins
If you haven’t looked at iPads lately, you may not realize how powerful they’ve become. In terms of processing speed, the iPad Air 2 is as powerful as most laptops, and the iPad Pro’s 64-bit A9X processor is almost twice as fast as that. App developers have taken notice and are creating synths that take full advantage of faster iPad processors. Some of the best cost just a fraction of what they cost for computers, and they sound as good as computer-based soft synths, too. Let’s take a look at five of my favorites.
BeepStreet Sunrizer ($10)
If you’ve ever played a JP-8000—Roland’s first virtual analog synth, introduced in 1996—Sunrizer’s GUI may look familiar. Like the JP-8000, Sunrizer has two analog-modeling oscillators that can generate multiple sawtooths simultaneously, called supersaw waves, to create thicker sounds than you’d expect from only two oscillators. It also has a noise generator, two filters offering 15 filter types, two versatile LFOs and two ADSR generators. An excellent collection of presets is included, and you can download more from the Web without leaving Sunrizer.
The dockable multi-effects section offers a variety of distortion, delay and modulation effects, as well as EQ and reverb. The onboard arpeggiator lets you design and recall your own patterns, and the real-time audio recorder lets you save a library of phrases and copy them to other apps. Perhaps Sunrizer’s most outstanding performance feature, though, is that it allows you to store two complete front-panel setups in a single preset and dynamically crossfade between them using a modulation wheel.
iTar 2: Sunrizer supplies a collection of presets in a variety of styles.
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Cave Alien: Sunrizer makes good use of its effects section.
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Bit Shape TC-11 ($25)
TC-11 is the kind of radically different synthesizer that wouldn’t be possible without a touch screen. Rather than relying on a keyboard and knobs for input, in performance view, it simultaneously plays sounds and generates parameter control data in response to gestures like where you touch the display, how fast you slide your fingertips around the display and the distance between one touch and another. Some patches also use the iPad’s internal gyroscope, accelerometer and compass as device motion controllers that change parameters as you lift and tilt your iPad. Onscreen buttons and alternate views allow you to load, save, create, tag and modify patches.
For creating and editing patches, TC-11 supplies a collection of synth objects such as wavetable, noise, granular and FM oscillators, waveshapers, filters, resonators, amplitude modulators and effects, as well as parameter control modules that comprise step sequencers, tables, LFOs and AHDSR generators. You can freely connect objects and modules as you would on any modular synth and specify what kinds of actions will affect their parameters. Because using TC-11 isn’t like playing or programming any other synth you’ve used before, it lets you create music that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard.
Bubble Swamp: You control TC-11 by tapping and sliding your fingers on the iPad’s display.
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Hyugens Bells: Because TC-11 supports numerous systhesis techniques, it’s capable of all kinds of sounds.
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iceGear Laplace ($6)
If you want to get your feet wet with physical-modeling synthesis, Laplace is a good place to start. It simulates sounds that result from plucking and bowing stringed instruments, blowing through wind instruments and striking metal objects, as well as sounds that combine these actions. Laplace also features a cool 16-step arpeggiator with user-programmable patterns, MIDI learn functionality, chorus, reverb and a fairly sophisticated delay processor.
A Laplace timbre begins with the Exciter section, which provides various Click and Noise parameters. Shaping the click simulates striking something, and adjusting the noise simulates blowing or rubbing on something. Parameters in the Resonator section control filter and pitch envelope characteristics, and a sine-wave oscillator throws frequency modulation into the mix. Fortunately, though, you don’t need to understand how physical modeling works to create some dynamite timbres simply by fiddling with the knobs. Laplace doesn’t go as deep as some synths, but it makes some very nice sounds you’d be hard-pressed to make without it.
Bottole 2: Laplace library of presets isn’t terribly versatile, but it shows off the basics of what it can do.
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Original: Laplace’s presets are good places to start programming your own sounds.
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iMusic Album Soundscaper ($9)
You’ll be forgiven if you don’t think Soundscaper looks like a traditional synthesizer, because there’s nothing traditional about it. It excels at generating nontraditional sounds: glitchy pulsations, weird textures and bizarre audio backdrops, in particular. Soundscaper’s three sample-playback oscillators import sound files up to 95 seconds long in a broad assortment of data formats. The included sample content ranges from dripping water and animal noises (angry rattlesnakes, anyone?) to clips from a vintage sci-fi movie and a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell from the late ’70s.
Each oscillator has its own state-variable filter, delay processor and random parameter generator. As samples loop, they move around in 2-dimensional space on paths you specify. You can assign three LFOs to modulate filter frequency, resonance, playback speed and spatial location. Soundscaper is most effective, though, at simulating the type of lo-fi audio mangling you can accomplish by circuit-bending electronic toys.
Restrained Buzzer in Recombination: The sample content that comes with Soundscaper is definitely out of the ordinary.
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Bowed Locomotive Trip: Soundscaper models the sound chip you’d find in some electronic toys.
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Wizdom GeoShred ($20)
I think of GeoShred as Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess’s iPad-centric answer to the Continuum, LinnStrument, Seaboard and other multidimensional polyphonic controllers. With a sound engine designed by moForte, GeoShred is a physically modeled guitar that has a level of sophistication I just haven’t seen in other music performance apps. Like TC-11, it relies heavily on multitouch, displaying a grid of clearly labeled buttons you touch to play notes, arranged like strings and frets on a guitar. Pitches ascend chromatically from left to right on six horizontal strings, and by default, vertically in fourths. As you play, you can wiggle your finger for vibrato and slide left or right to bend pitch and execute glisses. Astonishingly, you can perform those actions using more that one finger at the same time, even if they’re moving in different directions and at different rates.
Because GeoShred is physically modeled, you can manipulate characteristics such as body and string type, pinch harmonics, palm muting, pick position and much, much more. You can even control feedback as you play. It also supplies a well-stocked effects pedalboard, an arpeggiator and a collection of presets that includes electric and acoustic guitars, basses, power chords, exotic textures and even synth timbres. GeoShred is a surprisingly versatile music app and a true musical instrument in its own right.
Lead Voices: GeoShred gives you real-time control of feedback and other performance parameters.
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Melodic Voices: GeoShred responds to each finger independently.
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Geary Yelton is Electronic Musician’s former senior editor. He's |
they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.It was another Battle of Stamford Bridge. Spurs were looking for revenge after the Blues ended their title hopes last season while Chelsea were eager to show that London was Blue again. Of late, Spurs had crashed out of the Champions League in midweek and were eager to get back to winning ways while Chelsea meanwhile were aiming to go back to the top of the league.
First half
Chelsea’s initial strategy
Chelsea’s were reluctant to keep the ball straight from kickoff, launching a long ball forward just seconds after kickoff. They were expecting a Bielsaesque press-a high intensity press from Spurs, high up the pitch with semi-man orientations and did not want to lose the ball unnecessarily in deep positions. The hence decided to give Spurs the ball and sit deep to negate Spurs’ pressing.
However, after their early concession, the onus was now down to them to break Spurs down, which meant that they had to take more risks and be more proactive when in possession, leaving them vulnerable to a well drilled pressing side.
Numerical inferiority in the centre
Spurs had a quantitative advantage in the middle of the pitch on paper, with a 3 vs 2 in midfield. Chelsea’s problem was compounded further when Spurs’ wide players drifted into narrow zones, at times making it a 4 vs 2 or 5 vs 2. As a result, Spurs’ attackers were constantly able to find space between the lines, especially when one of the Chelsea midfield pivot would go and press.
This is wonderfully demonstrated by Spurs’ goal finished by Eriksen
Kante (yellow circle) comes out and press Dembele (orange circle) on the ball. Dembele evades the press and is able to play in Alli (blue circle) who is in acres of space.
Alli (blue circle) is subsequently able to drive into space (black box) right in front of the Chelsea backline which was previously vacated by Kante
Luiz (purple circle) who is slow to step out, allows a pass from Alli (blue circle) to find Eriksen (pink circle). Cahill (red circle) is too deep here and allows time for Eriksen to take a shot that leads to a Spurs’ goal.
Spurs’ pressing
Spurs’ Bielsaesque semi man-orientated press was causing problems for Chelsea when they tried to play out from the back. Options were closed down quickly with the use of angled runs and intelligent positioning.
In the snapshot bellow, Alonso (yellow circle) has only one clear passing option to Matic (red circle). Spurs recognize this and hence Wanyama (blue circle) immediately closes him down. More often than not, such instances happened and Chelsea were pinned back, forced to make numerous sideways passes deep in their own half.
To create more options for the player on the ball, Chelsea needed their wider centre backs to push into midfield quickly as soon as the ball was switched to their side but unfortunately instances such as these were far from common from Chelsea during the first half.
Spurs were pretty successful in their efforts, as seen from the diagram bellow. Chelsea were constantly forced wide with few passes between the centrebacks and centre midfielders as shown by the lack of arrows between these 2 units of the team.
Spurs overloading the left
Pochettino decided to overload his left flank and exploit the space behind right wing back Moses on counter attacks. Tottenham would overload Chelsea’s right flank and look to use quick passing between front four to get into the space behind Moses. This kind of movement and overloads created in the left half space of Spurs wreaked havoc between the Chelsea lines with Moses caught ahead of the ball and Kante forced back to cover for his teammate.
This worked well, with Spurs’ players constantly receiving balls between the lines, which eventually led to Eriksen’s goal.
The loss of Danny Rose was a disadvantage for Spurs as Wimmer a natural centre back was unwilling to get forward and supply width to further overload the Chelsea right flank. If he was around Spurs could have hurt Chelsea even more by offering an additional passing option and to take men on.
Second half
Chelsea’s press
With the game level, Chelsea sensed that they could perhaps more from Spurs this game, hence they began be pressing higher up the pitch than the first half. This was shown by the statistics. Comparing the two halves, Chelsea attempted more interceptions (7 to 10), tackles in the opponents’ half (2 to 6). This shows a much higher press from Chelsea, wanting to press higher and disposes Spurs and to force turnovers in Spurs’ half
Changes for Spurs
Spurs had overloaded the left in the first half and exploited Moses eagerness to get forward. It worked pretty well, and Kante was continuously forced backwards to defend his half space. For some reason, Pochettino decided to shift emphasis to the other side of the pitch. Perhaps he was afraid that Moses would sit back after the space behind him was continuously exploited.
Whatever the reason, Spurs increased the use of their right flank after the break, as seen from the diagram bellow.
Spurs were now up against the natural defender Alonso who did well to snuff out Spurs’ attacks that came down his flank. This made it much more difficult for them to break Chelsea down, and create clear cut chances for themselves to score.
Fatigue
In the second half, the intensity of Spurs’ pressing dropped, having played 3 matches in a week, it was understandable. Their defensive ability especially was then compromised. Comparing the two halves, they attempted less ball recoveries (31 to 25), less attempted tackles (15 to 10), less interceptions (6 to 4), showing a decrease in performance defensively. With a dip in intensity, Chelsea had more time on the ball and were able to pick passes out with greater ease. This allowed them to progress up the pitch and pick out better passes to teammates.
Response to going behind
After going behind, Spurs threw on Harry Winks which now meant that Alli played wide. With Alli himself later being replaced by Nkoudou, Pochettino was trying to stretch Chelsea’s with width. With Vincent Janssen thrown on, Spurs went 442/424 which made it comfortable for Chelsea, with 3 vs 2 at the back and 2 vs 2 in centre midfield. Chelsea saw out the game with defensive minded but similar substitutions.
Conclusion
Spurs played well defensively, pressing Chelsea well and pinning them in their half of the pitch. However, they were unable to fashion clear cut chances themselves which contributed their measly Expected Goals tally of 0.39. Chelsea weathered the early storm and fashioned slightly better quality chances in the end, just edging the encounter.
Chelsea in all honesty have not faced a genuine title chasing side yet ever since the change to the 343 formation. United and Spurs are nowhere near the title, 11 and 7 points off the pace. They have passed both tests but other sterner tests lie around the corner, starting with away at City this weekend.
Spurs have not played well ever since the 2-0 victory over City. They have been unable to fashion clear cut chances of late, with shots coming from poor positions as seen from the diagram bellow. If they continue playing this way offensively, they might not have Champions League football next season.
Written by @cityzenforlife
Credits to @11tegen11 and footballytics.com for the diagrams
AdvertisementsPresident Donald Trump has grand plans ahead for next weekend.
A tweet from Trump's personal account Saturday afternoon said that he would hold a "BIG rally" in Pennsylvania on April 29.
A schedule on donaldjtrump.com shows an event planned at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex & Expo Center in Harrisburg at 7:30 p.m. next Saturday. Doors for the rally open at 4:30 p.m. while attendees can register for up to two tickets here.
As Politico notes, the rally will mark Trump's 100th day in office. The event also falls on the same night as the White House Correspondent's Dinner, which Trump has decided to skip, breaking years of precedent.
The president spent much time campaigning in Pennsylvania, and taking the state proved a key victory in defeating Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.
Amidst protests held to show opposition against him after his win, Trump has held several post-election rallies in the "battleground" states that helped take the 2016 election, such as Ohio and Florida.
Saturday's event won't be Trump's first post-election rally in the Keystone State, as the president came to Hersey in December as part of his "thank you tour."The New York Giants will be without running back Ahmad Bradshaw (neck), right tackle David diehl (knee) and wide receiver (Domenik Hixon) concussion when they meet the Carolina Panthers on Thursday night. The three, all injured Sunday against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have been ruled out for Thursday's game, according to the Giants.
The best news, though, is that the Giants have listed cornerback Prince Amukamara (high ankle sprain) as probable. That means the 2011 first-round pick should see his first action of the season Thursday. He will be a welcome addition to a secondary that has given up too many big plays in the first two games.
Full injury report after the jump.
Out
RB Ahmad Bradshaw (Neck - DNP)
T David Diehl (Knee - DNP)
WR Domenik Hixon (Concussion - DNP)
DE Adewale Ojomo (Hamstring - LP)
Questionable
CB Michael Coe (Hamstring - LP)
WR Hakeem Nicks (Foot - DNP)
Probable
CB Prince Amukamara (Ankle - FP)
LB Keith Rivers (Hamstring - FP)
RB Da'Rel Scott (Knee - FP)To read about TIME’s choice in Spanish and Portuguese, click below.
EL ELEGIDO: El Papa Francisco es la Persona del Año 2013 de TIME
A Escolha: O Papa Francisco é a Personalidade do Ano eleita pela Time em 2013
Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.
How do you practice humility from the most exalted throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis. In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power.
At a time when the limits of leadership are being tested in so many places, along comes a man with no army or weapons, no kingdom beyond a tight fist of land in the middle of Rome but with the immense wealth and weight of history behind him, to throw down a challenge. The world is getting smaller; individual voices are getting louder; technology is turning virtue viral, so his pulpit is visible to the ends of the earth. When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.
(PERSON OF THE YEAR: Pope Francis, The People’s Pope)
The skeptics will point to the obstacles Francis faces in accomplishing much of anything beyond making casual believers feel better about the softer tone coming out of Rome while feeling free to ignore the harder substance. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally. At its best it inspires and instructs, helps and heals and calls the faithful to heed their better angels. But it has been weakened worldwide by scandal, corruption, a shortage of priests and a challenge, especially across the fertile mission fields of the southern hemisphere, from evangelical and Pentecostal rivals. In some quarters, core teachings on divorce and contraception are widely ignored and orthodoxy derided as obsolete. Vatican bureaucrats and clergy stand accused of infighting, graft, blackmail and an obsession with “small-minded rules,” as Francis puts it, rather than the vast possibilities of grace. Don’t just preach; listen, he says. Don’t scold; heal.
And yet in less than a year, he has done something remarkable: he has not changed the words, but he’s changed the music. Tone and temperament matter in a church built on the substance of symbols—bread and wine, body and blood—so it is a mistake to dismiss any Pope’s symbolic choices as gestures empty of the force of law. He released his first exhortation, an attack on “the idolatry of money,” just as Americans were contemplating the day set aside for gratitude and whether to spend it at the mall. This is a man with a sense of timing. He lives not in the papal palace surrounded by courtiers but in a spare hostel surrounded by priests. He prays all the time, even while waiting for the dentist. He has retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed-up Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his neck. When he rejects the pomp and the privilege, releases information on Vatican finances for the first time, reprimands a profligate German Archbishop, cold-calls strangers in distress, offers to baptize the baby of a divorced woman whose married lover wanted her to abort it, he is doing more than modeling mercy and transparency. He is embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals. Asked why he seems uninterested in waging a culture war, he refers to the battlefield. The church is a field hospital, he says. Our first duty is to tend to the wounded. You don’t ask a bleeding man about his cholesterol level.
(MORE: Everything You Wanted to Know about TIME’s Person of the Year)
This focus on compassion, along with a general aura of merriment not always associated with princes of the church, has made Francis something of a rock star. More than 3 million people turned out to see him on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro last summer, the crowds in St. Peter’s Square are ecstatic, and the souvenirs are selling fast. Francesco is the most popular male baby name in Italy. Churches report a “Francis effect” of lapsed Catholics returning to Mass and confession, though anecdotes are no substitute for hard evidence, and surveys of U.S. Catholics, at least, see little change in practice thus far. But the fascination with Francis even outside his flock gives him an opportunity that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, never had—to magnify the message of the church and its power to do great good.
The giddy embrace of the secular press makes Francis suspect among traditionalists who fear he buys popularity at the price of a watered-down faith. He has deftly leveraged the media’s fascination to draw attention to everything from his prayers for peace in Syria to his pointed attack on trickle-down economics, which inspired Jesse Jackson to compare him to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rush Limbaugh to wonder whether he’s a Marxist. When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak. Why has he not said more about the priest sex-abuse scandal? ask victims’ advocates. (Just this month, he set up a commission to address the abuse of children by priests.) Why does he not talk more about the sanctity of life? ask conservatives, who note that in his exhortation, abortion is mentioned once, mercy 32 times. Francis both affirms traditional teachings on sexuality and warns that the church has become distracted by them. He attacks priests who won’t baptize children born out of wedlock for their “rigorous and hypocritical neo-clericalism.” He declares that God “has redeemed all of us … not just Catholics. Everyone, even atheists.” He posed with environmental activists holding an antifracking T-shirt and called on politicians and business leaders to be “protectors of creation.”
(MORE: Behind the Pope Francis Cover)
None of which makes him a liberal—he also says the all-male priesthood is not subject to debate, nor is abortion, nor is the definition of marriage. But his focus on the poor and the fact that the world’s poorest 50% control barely 1% of its wealth unsettles those who defend capitalism as the most successful antipoverty program in history. You could argue that he is Teddy Roosevelt protecting capitalism from its own excesses or he is simply saying what Popes before him have said, that Jesus calls us to care for the least among us—only he’s saying it in a way that people seem to be hearing differently. And that may be especially important coming from the first Pope from the New World. A century ago, two-thirds of Catholics lived in Europe; now fewer than a quarter do, and how he is heard in countries where being gay is a crime and educating women for leadership roles is a heresy may have the power to transform cultures in which Catholicism is a growing, even potentially liberating force.
These days it is bracing to hear a leader say anything that annoys anyone. Now liberals and conservatives alike face a choice as they listen to a new voice of conscience: Which matters more, that this charismatic leader is saying things they think need to be said or that he is also saying things they’d rather not hear?
The heart is a strong muscle; he’s proposing a rigorous exercise plan. And in a very short time, a vast, global, ecumenical audience has shown a hunger to follow him. For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year.Custom Printed
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Showroom Open by Appointment Only, Monday thru Friday 9 - 4 © 2018 Fentek Industries, Inc. Quality Computer Input Solutions!Yes, it’s done! Kitten and I present to you chapter 8!
Chapter 8 (Read here)
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Let me take this moment to address a few concerns.
First, the names of some characters specifically Claude’s and Lily’s. We just noticed that in the manga’s second volume’s extra pages, there are character profiles for Claude and Lily detailing their Senses and equipment much like in volume one. Alongside those things, however, is the romanization for their names and it’s spelled as Clode and Lyly. We don’t mind Lyly even though it may lead to pronunciation mistakes (like Lie-lie as in lie down) but Clode? No, just no (no offense to anyone having that name in real life although I just might change my view on the matter if you say your name is Clode :p). And since we’re not gonna follow one, we might as well use whatever we deem fit. So if ever you run into those names in this work’s other forms (Anime, hopefully) in the future, just remember that it’s them.
Second, release schedule. We really can’t give one because real life gets in the way. Always. I feel we have been getting faster and better but as I said, real life. Just know for now that we are working on it everyday on our spare time whenever we have some, often staying up late at night just to get the chapter done.
Thanks for reading all that. We hope you enjoy the chapter!Image copyright Getty Images
Alphabet's Google has struck a $1.1bn (£822m) deal with Taiwan's HTC to expand its smartphone business.
Google will not take a stake in the firm, but some HTC staff will join the Silicon Valley giant.
The Taiwanese company was once a major player in the smartphone market but has struggled to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung.
Google expects the deal to close by early 2018, provided it gets the all clear from regulators.
Shares in HTC were suspended in Taiwan on Thursday.
Betting on hardware
The deal marks the latest move by Google to boost its hardware capabilities.
"It's still early days for Google's hardware business," the firm's senior vice-president of hardware Rick Osterloh said in a blog post on Google's website.
Under the deal, Google will acquire a team of people who develop Pixel smartphones for the US company and receive a non-exclusive license for HTC's intellectual property.
It builds on an existing partnership between the two tech companies.
"These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks we've already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line," Mr Osterloh said.
According to HTC half their smartphone research and development team - about 2,000 people - will go to Google.
HTC manufactures Google's smartphones, the Pixel and Pixel XL. The company will release updated version of the devices next month.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Google will unveil new products including smartphones next month
Analysis - Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter, San Francisco
Yesterday, within just a few hours, most of Apple's millions upon millions of users were using the latest mobile operating system, having tapped on the prompt to download iOS 11.
Contrast that experience on Android, where the company's impressive and innovative updates are greatly hampered as it can take months, sometimes years, for those features to filter to users.
Google knows this disconnect between its software and hardware is a massive problem. And so this curious deal with HTC, which falls short of the rumoured buyout, is about solving that problem. If it can have close control over key premium devices, it can be more ambitious with its software.
In some respects, this $1.1bn deal is like a good friend lending their pal a few quid to tide them over for a while. HTC needs Google's money to keep going. And Google needs HTC's expertise and manufacturing capability to remain competitive with its mobile devices.
Deal benefits
The deal marks Google's second major foray into smartphone manufacturing. In 2011 Alphabet, then named Google, bought Motorola's Mobility for $12.5bn, only to sell it on three years later.
Geoff Blaber from CCS Insight said while the HTC deal might "raise eyebrows" given Google's history with Motorola, it will give the firm valuable design and engineering resources.
"The far bigger risk for Google would be to stand by and do nothing as hardware becomes an all-important means to an end for its core business," Mr Blaber said.
But the big winner is HTC.
"It's a much needed investment as HTC struggles to maintain its smartphone business and grow its early start in virtual reality," he added.
HTC makes Vive, the VR headset favoured by Google, as the alternative Oculus Rift is owned by Facebook.
Vive is reportedly outselling Oculus Rift by a margin of nearly two-to-one, albeit with still modest numbers, and is recognised by many as the superior system.
Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morningThis response adds to Nick’s. I will not repeat the things he has said, but will add a few more observations.
1. One of the themes in some of the feedback is that tobacco control people don’t talk to vapers and should. I agree. However, although I have no doubt we could do more, many of us do talk to vapers both informally and through research (our group has recently carried out a series of in-depth interviews with ANDS users).
However, we sometimes come at things from a different perspective. My perspective is as a doctor (formerly working in respiratory medicine) who has seen at first hand the disastrous and tragic health consequences of smoking, often among people who have desperately tried to stop but can’t due to the addictive nature of nicotine. As a public health practitioner I try to work out how I can best reduce smoking (and its health effects) at a population level. I fully understand that some people will have quit smoking through e-cigarettes and that is a good thing for those people, and they will have an extremely positive view of ANDS as a result. However, I want to know if the overall impact of ANDS is positive and how we can take steps to ensure that is the case.
2. Another theme in some of the posts is that by controlling or over-regulating ANDS availability we are working in the interests of the tobacco industry. In response to that I would say that public health people in tobacco control are usually seen as public enemy number one by the tobacco industry, and furthermore much of the criticism of ANDS regulation and policy put forward by tobacco control people comes from directly or indirectly tobacco-industry affiliated people – so that hardly seems to suggest we are doing their work.
3. Going back to the population perspective.
The main areas where ANDS can result in population health benefit is by helping smokers to quit or if smokers fully substitute ANDS use for smoking. If smokers cut down and use a mix of ANDS and smoking to get their nicotine, that will probably result in a small benefit, but most epidemiological evidence suggests cutting down on smoking has only a modest impact on reducing its adverse health effects. Another potential benefit is if youth who would have taken up smoking instead use ANDS. Several of these benefits assume that long term use ANDS, although probably not completely safe has far less health effects than long term smoking, which seems highly likely.
The possible downsides of ANDS on population health include: (i) gateway effect if use of ANDS by youth results in subsequent smoking initiation which would not otherwise have occurred without ANDS use; (ii) smokers who might have quit smoking entirely but don’t because they decide instead to cut down and use ANDS as well &/or find that they can get their nicotine fix by using ANDS in areas where they previously couldn’t smoke (due to smokefree laws etc) – so have no pressing need to give up; (iii) long term health effects of ANDS on health among youth who use ANDS and continue to use ANDS and who wouldn’t otherwise have smoked (see comment above, long term health effects may be relatively minor, though that is not certain); (iv) ‘renormalising’ effect of ANDS (particularly e-cigs that look like tobacco cigs) in making smoking seem more socially acceptable (v) all of the above effects may be magnified by the tobacco industry using ANDS for their own purposes (e.g. through devious marketing strategies) to promote rather than undermine the continuation of tobacco smoking and nicotine use among new generations in society.
The evidence on much of the above is simply not there yet – we do not know what the impact of widespread ANDS use will be among populations in different contexts (types of ANDS available, patterns of ANDS use and smoking, ANDS and tobacco control regulatory contexts etc etc). However, as public health scientists I think we have to be careful and critical about the evidence, admit where we are uncertain and evaluate dispassionately the evidence for or against the population benefits and harms.
So for example, I think the evidence for a gateway effect of ANDS is pretty thin at best (Poland may be an exception), with in many cases (e.g. US) a possibly worrying increase in use of ANDS by youth, but reassuringly a reduction in smoking in the same groups. So the gateway effect is unproven.
However, the evidence cited about the impacts of ANDS on quitting also needs to be viewed with the same critical lens.
For example, several commentators repeat uncritically the assertion that e-cigarettes have resulted in 1.1million people quitting in the UK, 400,000 in the last year. That is based on some projections in a publication by ASH in England from data from the Smokefree Britain surveys of approx. 12,000 adults in 2010 and 2012-2015, in which an estimated 1.1m out of 2.6m e-cigarette users were ex-smokers. 1 The assumption that is made is that everyone of those 1.1m ex-smokers who use e-cigarettes quit smoking only because of e-cigarettes (i.e. they would not have quit otherwise). That is clearly nonsense. Many would have found another way to quit, but a (uncertain) proportion only quit successfully due to e-cigarettes.
However, an estimated 1.4m current e-cigarette users based on the same surveys were still smoking. Of these around 40% gave as the reason that they wanted to stop smoking entirely, which from a public health perspective is promising. However, over 40% said they were using e-cigarettes to help them reduce their smoking but NOT to stop entirely. Another 25% (the totals add up to over 100% presumably because people could give more than one response) said they wanted to continue to smoke and e-cigs allowed them to get nicotine in areas like bars and restaurants where they couldn’t smoke). For the latter two groups, ANDS use may reduce the motivation to quit and quit rates. Indeed a recent paper reported that quit rates among e-cigarette users in the UK who were followed up were LOWER than in non-e-cigarette users (tank users were slightly more likely to quit, but they were only a small proportion of e-cigarette users in this study). 2 So at a population level, unexpectedly, e-cigarette use may reduce quitting among smokers. Findings in other papers that have examined this have had mixed results.
So, in summary there is widespread uncertainty about the overall public health impacts and impacts on smoking of ANDS, but on the current evidence there is probably pretty good grounds to restrict the availability of ANDS to smokers who are most likely to use them to quit, and who have tried and failed to quit with other methods. The case for making them more widely and easily available is not yet clear. However, we should be open to new evidence and the experience of countries with different approaches, and if it becomes clear that the public health benefits are real and reasonably certain, then we need to think again.
References
1. ASK UK. ASH Factsheet on the use of electronic cigarettes (vapourisers) among adults in Great Britain. London: Action on Smoking and Health (England);2015.
2. Hitchman SC, Brose LS, Brown J, Robson D, McNeill A. Associations Between E-Cigarette Type, Frequency of Use, and Quitting Smoking: Findings From a Longitudinal Online Panel Survey in Great Britain. Nicotine Tob. Res. 2015.The expression "casting out nines" may refer to any one of three arithmetical procedures:[1]
Adding the decimal digits of a positive whole number, while optionally ignoring any 9s or digits which sum to a multiple of 9. The result of this procedure is a number which is smaller than the original whenever the original has more than one digit, leaves the same |
D de modificar la ley electoral en Asturias fue el principal escollo que demoró su pacto de legislatura con el PSOE en mayo de 2012. Su aceptación, aunque a regañadientes, permitió al socialista Javier Fernández ser investido hace 17 meses con mayoría absoluta. El respaldo de los 17 diputados del PSOE, 5 de IU y 1 de UPyD le dio a Fernández un respaldo sólido (23 de los 45 votos) frente a una derecha (12 escaños de Foro y 10 del PP) que, aunque suma los mismos diputados que la izquierda, no había sido capaz de entenderse tras su fractura traumática de 2011 y tampoco había logrado captar el respaldo de UPyD.
La exigencia de reforma electoral del partido magenta y la división fraticida de la derecha fueron dos impedimentos determinantes para la formación de un gobierno conservador. UPyD, convertido en partido "llave" de mayorías en la Junta General del Principado (Cámara legislativa), acabó inclinándose por el PSOE. Los socialistas habían ganando las elecciones, suponían una mayor garantía de estabilidad y además fueron la formación que accedió a sus demandas. Entre ellas, cambiar la ley electoral.
Ahora la renuncia del PSOE a llevar adelante la reforma de la norma que rige los comicios autonómicos, y que también apoya y exige IU, ha colocado al ejecutivo de Fernández en la orfandad, sustentado sólo en la minoría de su propio grupo y supeditado en lo que resta de legislatura a negociaciones ímprobas para superar la insuficiencia de sus votos. El PSOE alega que no se puede hacer un cambio de tanto calado institucional con el rechazo frontal de todas las formaciones de la derecha. Pero el efecto ha sido la retirada inmediata de los apoyos que venían dando estabilidad al Gobierno socialista.
Javier Fernández ha dicho que "no tirará la toalla" y ayer lo repitió el consejero de la presidencia y portavoz del ejecutivo, Guillermo Martínez, quien garantizó "iniciativa política y capacidad de acción". Martínez acusó a Rosa Díez de querer convertir a los asturianos en "rehenes de sus intereses particulares y egoístas".
Los socialistas descartan nuevas elecciones anticipadas. Si las hubiese, los asturianos tendrían que ir cuatro veces a las urnas en cuatro años. Eligieron Gobierno en 2011, volvieron a hacerlo en 2012, tendrían que volver a pronunciarse en 2014 si ahora se disolviese la Cámara y habría que volver a celebrar comicios regionales en 2015 junto con el resto de las autonomías de régimen común. El electorado difícilmente lo soportaría y el daño para las instituciones sería elevado. IU ya ha dicho que actuará "con sentido de la responsabilidad". Y el diputado de UPyD, Ignacio Prendes, también ha descartado la disolución de la Cámara. El PP, Mercedes Fer pidió altura de miras y, como IU; llamó al diálogo de todas las fuerzas. El Gobierno anunció que convocará a IU y UPyD para negociar los presupuestos de 2014. Francisco Álvarez-Cascos (Foro) calificó la crisis como "el derrumbe de la gran pantomima".
La alternativa, una moción de censura promovida por los partidos de la derecha con el respaldo de UPyD, es casi imposible. Foro y PP están enfrentados en una lucha titánica por la hegemonía de la derecha asturiana y no cabe el entendimiento en lo que es una familia rota de modo traumático tras la escisión liderada en 2011 por el ex secretario general del PP Francisco Álvarez-Cascos, actual líder de Foro Asturias. Y UPyD tampoco tiene capacidad de entenderse con Foro y PP, que ya en 2012 se negaron a aceptar su exigencia de reforma electoral y que el jueves votaron en contra de la propuesta que habían promovido UPyD, IU y PSOE. Ayer, la presidenta regional del PP, Mercedes Fernández, fue muy crítica, al igual que el portavoz socialista, con Rosa Diez.
El veto frontal de los partidos de la derecha a la modificación de esta norma básica e institucional fue el argumento en el que se amparó el PSOE para votar con Foro y PP en contra de la toma en consideración por el parlamento de la propuesta de introducir cambios en el sistema electoral.
Javier Fernández ya había declarado sucesivas veces en los últimos meses (por ejemplo, el 17 de abril) que la norma electoral, cuya actual redacción fue consensuada hace 26 años, "es una ley básica y cuya reforma, aunque técnicamente requiere el apoyo de 23 diputados, debería contar con el mayor consenso. Los cambios de este tipo de leyes deben ir más allá de la mayoría absoluta". "No es un asunto central, puede dejarse para el futuro", agregó entonces. "Un cambio que cambia las reglas del juego merece un consenso amplio entre todas las fuerzas parlamentarias", sostuvo.
Para UPyD e IU esto supone un cambio de posición de los socialistas que "traiciona" lo pactado, "dinamita" los acuerdos y genera una profunda "desconfianza".
Los socialistas niegan la mayor y esgrimen el documento de los pactos de legislatura suscritos con UPyD el 18 de mayo de 2012 y que permitieron la investidura de Fernández con 23 de los 45 votos de la Cámara cuatro días más tarde.
En el apartado 3.4 del documento de 15 folios firmado por Javier Fernández y el diputado de UPyD José Ignacio Prendes se lee: "Partiendo de la idea de que el sistema electoral es un elemento estructural del sistema político de la comunidad autónoma (…) parece obvio que tanto su aprobación como su reforma debe ser objeto de un amplio debate previo, y su configuración final, objeto de consenso entre las fuerzas políticas o, al menos, de un acuerdo de amplia mayoría".
Los socialistas interpretan este párrafo como una exigencia que supedita el cumplimiento de este aspecto del pacto al entendimiento con otras fuerzas políticas no firmantes del mismo pero que con las que habría que contar, y más por ser fuerzas con posibilidades de Gobierno, con el fin de garantizar la estabilidad de la norma. Para UPyD e IU, por el contrario, 23 de los 45 diputados de la cámara cumplen el requisito de "mayoría amplia".
La reforma electoral tenía dos pretensiones prioritarias. Una era introducir una mayor proporcionalidad y corregir el efecto distorsionador para las aspiraciones de las minorías de la existencia de tres circunscripciones electorales en las elecciones autonómicas.
"Fortalecer la calidad del sistema democrático puede requerir ajustes en los sistemas de representación ahora vigente. Sin renunciar al principio de reequilibrio territorial, se trataría de avanzar en una mayor proporcionalidad que haga de la Junta General del Principado una institución más representativa", reza el documento pactado el año pasado por PSOE y UPyD. Se trataba, según el compromiso suscrito por ambas fuerzas, de introducir "modificaciones que propicien la corrección de desequilibrios en el valor del voto de cada asturiano, independientemente del lugar en que resida".
Ésta es una vieja reivindicación de IU y que también abandera UPyD. La división de Asturias en tres circunscripciones electorales se hizo para que los extremos occidental y oriental de la región (las dos zonas más rurales, menos industrializadas y con menor densidad de población) no quedaran demasiado relegadas en el parlamento autonómico y confinadas a una ínfima representación frente a la zona central, que aglutina al 80% de la población y a las siete mayores ciudades.
La existencia de tres circunscripciones, y, por añadidura, que se necesiten menos votos para obtener un escaño por las comarcas oriental y occidental que por la central, favorece a las fuerzas mayoritarias y penaliza a las formaciones menores y más cuando tienen su principal implantación en las zonas industriales y obreras del centro de Asturias, caso de IU, y poseen un perfil predominantemente urbano, como UPyD. En los últimos comicios sólo PSOE, Foro y PP obtuvieron diputados por los extremos de la región.
Por la zona central se eligen ahora 34 de los 45 diputados; por la occidental, 6; y la oriental, 5. Esto supone que en la circunscripción central hay un diputado por cada 21.596 electores censados, mientras que la occidental dispone de un representante por cada 17.386 y la oriental (la menos habitada), uno por cada 12.809, con lo que, a menores censo, el coste de obtener un escaño también es menor.
La propuesta a la que habían llegado PSOE, IU y UPyD en los últimos meses consistía en mantener las tres circunscripciones pero corrigiendo la asignación de diputados. La propuesta planteaba que el Occidente tuviera 5 diputados; el Oriente, 3 y el centro, 28. Así se elegirían 35 de los 45 diputados. Los 10 restantes se asignarían, también mediante la ley D' Hont, en función de los votos sobrantes recibidos por cada partido entre los tres distritos electorales y que formarían una "bolsa" única para cada formación. De este forma, 10 escaños se elegirían en un distrito único con los restos que no hubiesen obtenido representación en las tres circunscripciones. Con ello se pretendía combinar la representación territorial con una mayor proporcionalidad.
Los pactos de PSOE y UPyD mantenían la actual exigencia de obtener al menos el 3% de los votos para entrar en el reparto de escaños.
El otro compromiso de los acuerdos de mayo de 2012 era "el desbloqueo de las listas electorales". Para ello, las tres fuerzas concernidas en este propósito se habían concertado en los últimos meses en la introducción de la obligación de primarias en los partidos para la elección de los candidatos a la presidencia del Principado y el desbloqueo parcial del resto de las listas, de forma que los votantes pudieran cambiar el orden de sus integrantes.
El veto de Foro y PP, secundado por el PSOE, vuelve a colocar ahora a Asturias en la inestabilidad e incertidumbre por segunda vez dos años y medio y convierte a esta legislatura en la más accidentada en 42 años de autonomía junto con la de 1995-1999, la única en la que gobernó el PP y que acabó con este partido rompiéndose a mitad de mandato.Close
Privacy issues are at the forefront of Google-owned Nest's acquisition of Dropcam, which the company says will help streamline smart home efforts and integrate more aspects of one's living situation. It comes on the heels of Nest relaunching its smart thermostat after a defect was discovered earlier this year.
Google made the announcement that Nest had agreed to buy Dropcam that aims to extend the search company's control over the home environment further, but it has also increased fears that it could push Google and Nest into territory it might not be prepared for, especially as privacy issues are quickly becoming a tipping point for the general population as tech companies get more and more access to personal information.
Reports indicate that the deal for Dropcam was around $555 million, but Google and Nest have yet to publicly reveal to the public the official deal amount.
The goal is to allow customers to "check in" on their houses or apartments even when they are not in the area. With Dropcam, this should be made easier, by implementing a series of cameras in the house that are wirelessly controlled. According to reports, this can be done cheaply and can be accessed on either Android or iOS devices.
"Eventually, the plan is for us to work together to reinvent products that will help shape the future of the conscious home and bring out shared vision to more and more people around the world," Nest founder Matt Rogers said in a blog post published by the company.
He also added that Nest would ensure that all security and privacy issues will be addressed and that the new service would not include any advertising, which should help to calm any fears that it could be baiting users to get advertisers on board.
"Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest's privacy policy, which explains that data won't be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer's permission," Rogers added.
Google acquired Nest earlier this year for $3.2 billion in an effort to continue to push into new territory and new technologies, but the latest acquisition appears to have been a Nest initiative and was announced by Nest on its website and not by Google, which has many believing Nest has more independence than previously thought.
Still, the privacy issues are unlikely to abate in the near future as more and more technology intertwines with daily lives.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Watch images taken by Nasa's Curiosity rover as it made its descent to the surface of Mars
Images that the Curiosity rover took of the surface of Mars as it made its historic descent on Monday (GMT) have now been released.
Nasa has provided almost 300 thumbnails from a sequence of pictures that will eventually be run together as a colour hi-def movie.
Visible in the timelapse is the heatshield discarded by the vehicle as it neared the ground.
So too is the dust kicked up by the rover's rocket-powered crane.
It was the crane that finally settled the robot on to the surface.
A signal confirming the Curiosity rover had landed on Mars was received here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 05:32 GMT; 06:32 BST on Monday (22:32 PDT Sunday).
The vehicle - also known as the Mars Science laboratory (MSL) - put down in a deep equatorial depression known as Gale Crater.
Pictures from the Mars Descent Imager (Mardi), even in their thumbnail form, have now allowed engineers to work out Curiosity's precise position on the planet - a latitude of -4.5895 and a longitude of 137.4417.
The full set of high-resolution pictures from Mardi will take some weeks to downlink.
The mission team has also got its best view yet of Mount Sharp, the 5.5km-high peak sitting in the middle of Gale.
This comes from a hazard avoidance camera mounted on the lower-front of the vehicle.
Ordinarily, hazcam pictures are very wide-angle in view and therefore distorted, but image processing software has been used to correct the geometry.
Image caption The best image yet of Curiosity's ultimate quarry - the 5.5km-high Mount Sharp
The mountain is the ultimate destination for this $2.5bn (£1.6bn) mission.
Satellite data has indicated that sediments at the base of Mount Sharp were laid down in the presence of abundant water.
Curiosity, with its sophisticated suite of 10 instruments, will study those rocks to try to determine if ancient environments on Mars were ever favourable for life.
On Tuesday, Nasa released the first colour image from the ground, taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli) instrument. In the distance, the image shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater.
The image is murky because it was taken through Mahli's removable dust cover which seems to be coated with debris blown onto the camera during the rover's descent.
The space agency had already shown off a spectacular shot acquired not by the rover but of the rover. This came from one of the US space agency's satellites at the Red Planet - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
MRO played a key role in Monday's landing by recording telemetry from the robot as it approached the ground.
But Nasa also tasked it with trying to get a picture of the new arrival. The rover is seen when still inside its protective shell.
Moments after this image was acquired, the vehicle would have dropped out of the capsule to ride its rocket-powered crane to the base of the crater. The resolution in the picture is such that it is even possible to pick out the discarded heatshield.
The mission team is now in its first full day of Martian operations (Sol 1). One of the key activities will be to deploy Curiosity's high-gain antenna. This unit will allow the vehicle to talk direct to Earth, in addition to relaying data via satellites like MRO.
Another action planned for Sol 1 will be to get a colour shot from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli).
This camera is mounted on the rover's tool-bearing turret at the end of its robotic arm. The picture, which should be released on Tuesday, ought to give us a real sense of being on Mars.
(A) Curiosity will trundle around its landing site looking for interesting rock features to study. Its top speed is about 4cm/s
(B) This mission has 17 cameras. They will identify particular targets, and a laser will zap those rocks to probe their chemistry
(C) If the signal is significant, Curiosity will swing over instruments on its arm for close-up investigation. These include a microscope
(D) Samples drilled from rock, or scooped from the soil, can be delivered to two hi-tech analysis labs inside the rover body
(E) The results are sent to Earth through antennas on the rover deck. Return commands tell the rover where it should drive next
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on TwitterA: I think my athletic background is what has helped me so much. I played sports year round through high school then college football for 5 years. Everyday I was getting into an athletic stance and exploding.
I wanted to establish myself as a world class lifter both raw and equipped. I ended up successfully lifting open IPF World Records in all three events, but two turned down on technicalities.
I wanted to make it a challenge to myself and try to do something I’ve never heard of anyone doing, and the Arnold was the perfect opportunity.
Check out this video of Blaine’s raw meet from The Arnold where he sets the IPF Raw World Record Total!!
A: After the raw full meet, I was honestly feeling alright heading into the equipped full meet. But the third day, for the bench only, I felt wrecked. Elbows and triceps were hurting. And other than my elbows, I feel better than I expected I would now.
This past weekend at the 2014 Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, OH, Team Juggernaut’s Blaine Sumner had a performance for the ages! Blaine competed 3 times in 3 days, breaking the IPF Raw World Record total on Friday, winning the USAPL Single Ply Challenge on Saturday and winning the Single Ply Bench Only competition on Sunday! Blaine is a young lifter based in Oklahoma City, OK and after wrapping up his college football career, which included an amazing 52 reps of 225 at his Pro Day, Blaine quickly took the powerlifting World by storm, squatting a then World Record of 881 raw (belt and sleeves) in the Super Heavyweight division and winning an IPF Raw World Championship. Blaine competes in the ultra-competitive, ultra-strict and drug tested USAPL/IPF and has competed on the international stage on many occasions. Get to know this Juggernaut better…
Q: Give us an overview of your normal training split…
A: I had 12 weeks to prepare for this meet. I would call it high frequency linear periodization. 12 weeks out I was doing sets of 8 in everything, and progressed down to triples the week before the meet. I would also lift in my gear every week, doing singles.
I trained 4X per week and each day was squat, bench, and deadlift.
The high frequency training is absolutely what allowed me to do the 3 for 3 this weekend. When I was training with Mike T, that was my first exposure to high frequency and I’m a big believer in it now. People shouldn’t be scared of high frequency. I think there is a misconception about how long it takes to recover.
I trained 12 weeks for this meet and didn’t take a single “Deload”. I squatted over 1,000 lbs every week, for 12 straight weeks. And there was usually high rep raw squatting going on the day before this.
I also PR’d in the raw bench with an easy 501. My bench was stuck for a long time in the high 400s. But an insane about of volume and frequency is what pushed it above 500.
I plan on releasing a book sometime in 2014. I want it to be different than what has already been put out. I think I’ve got some interesting perspectives and experiences that I can help other lifters with.
Blaine came back the next day to win the Single Ply competition at The Arnold as well…
Q: Training 4 sessions like that each week must make it hard to recover, what does a large land mammal such as yourself eat on a training day?
A: Large animals and small children….. Actually I eat the same thing almost every day. Shake for breakfast, 10 eggs 2 hours later, whatever for lunch, chicken shake 2 hours later, some red meat and potatoes 2 hours later, bunch of pre/during/post shakes. Then a massive dinner. Usually some ice cream too.
Q: When you aren’t squatting 1000 pounds, what do you do for work and fun?
A: For work, I work as a petroleum engineer in the oil and gas industry. And in my free time, if I’m not lifting, then I’m on the lake fishing.
Q: What are the biggest differences between your raw training and your geared training?
A: I like using higher reps for raw training. I hate my life at the time, but after a few weeks of 8s – 5s, I know I’m ready to kill some heavy weight.
Equipped I train strictly using singles.
Raw is about brute strength, but equipped is very technical.
Q: What does the rest of 2014 have in store for Blaine Sumner?
A: I have the biggest, most important meet of my life. In November, the IPF World Championships will be held in Denver, CO. Which is my home state. I’ve won a raw world championship and want to win an equipped one now.
That means winning nationals in June in Pennsylvania.
A: I may also do raw nationals in July in Denver if I don’t think it will interfere with my training for worlds.
Q: Last question…who is the real Vanilla Gorilla?
A: I’m obviously the real Vanilla Gorilla!!!! Spoto and Weech are beasts, but this award goes to the best looking, which I win.Samantha Jury-Dada, of Southwark, south London, and Carl Austin-Behan, a former lord mayor of Manchester, have been deselected as Labour councillors in favour of hard-left Momentum supporters MEN MEDIA
Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing supporters have been accused of carrying out an “aggressive purge” of centrist councillors to put up their own candidates in local elections next year.
Councillors across the country have been deselected in a vote of local members or have faced pressure not to contest their seats in May in favour of candidates more closely aligned to the cause of the Labour leader and the Momentum campaign that supports him.
Tensions in one London borough have become so bad that centrist organisers called for the regional party to take over the selection process. Tim Gallagher, a councillor from Haringey, north London, who decided to step down last week, said that he and colleagues were written off as “zombie Blairites”.
The divisions were laid…Update: CES Works Clamshell Lodge Fire Through The Night
Original Story:
Multiple units from Central Emergency Services are responding to a structure fire at Clam Shell Lodge in Clam Gulch. The building is heavily engulfed in flames.
A large commercial apartment building appears to be involved.
Few details were immediately available about the fire which was reported shortly before 10pm Friday. Witnesses say it was called in by a passerby.
In 2011, the lodge was offered to CES for fire training, but the agency declined, saying it would be too expensive to move their equipment to that location. According to the Redoubt Reporter, it was suggested that the lot would be more valuable as a “view lot,” without the building on it.
The lodge’s ownership was in question that year after its owner, Guy Baker, died while payments were still being made to the previous owner. It was the area’s only restaurant, motel, bar and liquor store.
According to Kenai Peninsula Borough tax records, the property is owned by Sonamu, Inc., and is one of three adjacent properties owned by the organization. In total, the properties are assessed at close to $200,000. Sonamu, Inc.’s business license for the property expired December 31, 2015.Canvassing Tony Soprano's Neighborhood
I visit North Caldwell, N.J., several tiimes a year to see my brother's sister and her husband. The town's claim to fame is the Sopranos. Tony S. and family live in North Caldwell in the show, and much of it is shot in the surrounding area.
Staking out Tony's place like the Feds. (Carol Sottili - TWP)
We did our own short version of the Soprano insider tour this past weekend. We drove past the Soprano family house (I could just picture Tony in the driveway leaning over to pick up the Newark Star-Ledger -- strangely enough, a house on the same cul de sac is where the Unabomber's first victim was killed) and we cruised along Bloomfield Avenue, which Tony calls "Guinea Gulch" (his Sicilian family moved up in the world along Bloomfield Avenue, starting in Newark and then eventually making their way to upscale North Caldwell). I counted 13 ristorantes, trattorias, Italian bakeries and pizza joints along a 2.5 mile long stretch of Bloomfield Avenue, and I bet you can walk into just about any one of them and get a better-than-average plate of pasta fazul or a perfectly stuffed cannoli.
We then headed to my niece's graduation, to Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Didn't get to see much of the surrounding area, but I would very much like to return to the nearby towns of Hyde Park and Rhinebeck, site of FDR's home along the Hudson.
Anyone have any insights into New Jersey for Soprano fans, or the Hudson Valley for FDR fans?
By Carol Sottili | May 23, 2007; 10:52 AM ET | Category: Carol Sottili, Mid-Atlantic Destinations
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The comments to this entry are closed.German police are hunting for a Tunisian refugee in connection with the deadly truck attack at a Berlin Christmas market — identifying him after finding an asylum document under the vehicle’s driver’s seat, according to reports.
The asylum seeker, who was born in the southern Tunisian city of Tataouine in 1992, is named in the document as Anis Amri, German news site Spiegel Online reported.
A German security official told CNN that Amri had been arrested in the southern town of Friedrichshafen in August with forged documents en route to Italy but was released by a judge.
He is a “highly dangerous” member of a large Islamic group and received weapons training abroad before arriving in Germany last year, security sources told the Daily Mail.
Amri, who uses three different names, was arrested in August with a fake Italian passport and released — but his phone was said to be monitored, the Mail reported. He then disappeared in December.
The asylum document found in the truck announced a stay of deportation, the Telegraph of the UK reported. The document was issued in the town of Kleve near the border with the Netherlands and Belgium.
A Facebook profile in his name shows “likes” of Tunisian terror group Ansar al-Sharia, whose jihadists slaughtered 22 people at Tunis’ Bardo Museum in March 2015 and then 39 tourists at a beach resort in Sousse.
Amri, who may be injured, was being sought in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where he had been registered at a refugee shelter in the town of Emmerich on the Rhine, on the Dutch-German border, The Guardian reported.
He had ties to Salafism — an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam — in connection with Islamist hate preacher Ahmad Abdelazziz A, known as Abu Walaa, from Hildesheim in Germany, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported. Abdelazziz was arrested in November.
Police on Tuesday released their former chief suspect, a 23-year-old Pakistani asylum seeker identified as Naved B, for lack of evidence.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière confirmed Wednesday that a new suspect was being sought, but said he could not confirm his identity.
“It is important that we find this suspect, and that’s why it is important to carry out an undercover search,” he said. “We are gathering the data and all the evidence.”
The head of the Association of German Criminal Detectives, Andre Schulz, told local media that police hoped to make another arrest soon.
“I am relatively confident that we will perhaps tomorrow or in the near future be able to present a new suspect,” he said, Reuters reported.
State broadcaster ARD and Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that Amri arrived in Italy in 2012, then moved to Germany in July 2015 and applied for asylum, The Guardian reported.
Since April, his status has been listed as “temporary suspension of deportation” — meaning his application was rejected but he had not yet been forced out of the country.
But another report emerged in the newspaper Der Spiegel, which cited intelligence sources saying Amri was detained to be deported in Ravensburg on July 30, but his whereabouts after that were unclear.
Twelve people were killed and 48 injured in what German authorities have called a “terrorist attack” late Monday when the truck — belonging to a Polish freight company — plowed into a crowd of shoppers.
The Polish driver of the truck, who was found shot dead in the cabin, was alive until the attack took place, Bild reported. An investigator said there must have been a struggle with the attacker.
The ISIS-linked Amaq news agency said “a soldier of the Islamic State” carried out the carnage “in response to appeals to target citizens of coalition countries.”
The site offered no evidence to back the claim and did not identify the attacker.
ISIS also claimed responsibility for a similar attack on July 14, when a Tunisian-born man drove a truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice. Eighty-six people were killed, and the driver was shot dead by police.
Tunisia is one of the biggest suppliers of jihadist fighters — with about 5,500 of its nationals believed to be involved in combat in Syria, Iraq and Libya, AFP reported.
Meanwhile, Passauer Neue Presse quoted Klaus Bouillon, the head of the group of interior ministers from Germany’s 16 federal states, as saying tougher security measures must be implemented.
“We want to raise the police presence and strengthen the protection of Christmas markets. We will have more patrols,” he said. “Officers will have machine guns. We want to make access to markets more difficult, with vehicles parked across them.”
Related Video 0:24 Truck plows into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said it would be particularly repugnant if an asylum seeker seeking protection in Germany was the perpetrator.
Some politicians have blamed her open-door migrant policy for making such attacks more likely.
The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, which has won support in the last two years as Merkel’s own popularity has declined, said Germany is no longer safe.
Some politicians have called for changes to Merkel’s immigration and security policies after she allowed more than a million refugees to enter the country in the last two years — many fleeing countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told German radio on Wednesday that there was a higher risk of Islamist attacks because of the influx of refugees.
In other developments, German President Joachim Gauck visited some of the wounded at a Berlin hospital, where they are being treated for pelvic and other injuries.
Gauck said he spoke with three patients at the Charite hospital who faced operations on Wednesday and he was impressed by their “composure.”
He also met a man who had rushed to help in the aftermath of the rampage and was hit by a steel beam.
The Charite took in 13 patients after the attack, two of whom died. Medical director Ulrich Frei said that four have “severe trauma of the lower extremities and the pelvis.”
One of those wounded in the attack was an Israeli man whose wife is missing, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.
Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said Wednesday that the man is in stable condition after surgery. Israel is in touch with German authorities to try to find the wife.
He declined to disclose the couple’s personal details, saying only that they were in Berlin on holiday and that their relatives had arrived in Germany on Tuesday.
With Post wiresHow The US Is Arming Both Sides Of The Iraqi Conflict
By Tyler Durden
June 13, 2014 " ICH " - Recall a week ago we wrote "US Begins Delivering F-16s To Iraq This Week, A Decade After It Wiped Out Iraq's Air Force" in which we said:... the US will deliver the first of 36 F-16 fighter jets to Iraq in what Baghdad's envoy to the United States called a "new chapter" in his country's ability to defend its vast borders with Iran and other neighbors..... the US earlier in March provided Iraq with some 100 Hellfire missiles as well as assault rifles and other ammunition. Then in April the US sent more arms, providing Iraq with 11 million rounds of ammunition and other supplies. It is unknown how many of these have fallen into Al Qaeda/ISIS hands (we do know that at least one Iraqi Black Hawk chopper was captured during the rush for Mosul). What is known is that as PBS Frontline reported two weeks ago, while the administration has denied arming Syrian "rebels", i.e. the same ISIS militants that have crossed the border and are now fighting in Iraq...... the reality is that it has. From: "Obama Says Not Arming Syrian Rebels, Syrian Rebels Say He Is"... the Syrian rebels themselves say they are already armed and trained by US in the use of sophisticated weapons and fighting techniques, including, one rebel said, "how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush." The interviews are the latest evidence that after more than three years of warfare, the United States has stepped up the provision of lethal aid to the rebels, as PBS notes " it appears the Obama administration is allowing select groups of rebels to receive US-made anti-tank missiles." The commander of the unit also told Ali that their American contacts had asked him to bring 80 to 90 members of his unit to Ankara for training. One of the fighters said they received three weeks of training in how to conduct ambushes, conduct raids and use their weapons. They also said they received new uniforms and boots. “They trained us to ambush regime or enemy vehicles and cut off the road,” said the fighter, who is identified only as “Hussein.” “They also trained us on how to attack a vehicle, raid it, retrieve information or weapons and munitions, and how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush.” To summarize: the US was arming and training the same Al Qaeda/ISIS groups of Jihadists, that it |
.1 million in late January.
So what happens when one divides the total population collecting benefits (I.C.+C.C.+EUC) by the actual UST outlays? We get a very curious chart:
It appears that in March either the government decided to payout an additional roughly 20% per unemployment paycheck, or once again, there is a shadow population of beneficiaries, which are not caught in any of the standard cohorts. Keep in mind that the average monthly paycheck has traditionally been indicated as being about $1,000.
What are we missing here?What's Holding Up Ukraine Aid Bill In Congress? Anger Over IRS
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mike Theiler /UPI /Landov Mike Theiler /UPI /Landov
With members of the House and Senate scrapping over a Ukraine aid bill, Republicans say a magic bullet could break the logjam.
It has nothing to do with the former Soviet republic, its ability to withstand Russia's military intervention in Crimea, or this weekend's referendum in the Ukrainian territory.
It has everything to do with conservatives' fury at the IRS, which they say has waged a partisan, and unconstitutional, war against President Obama's opponents.
First, there was the grindingly slow, intrusive scrutiny the agency gave to Tea Party and other groups seeking tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations. The IRS gave similar treatment to liberal groups, though not nearly as many of them. And then, last year, the IRS proposed new rules that would make it harder for groups to veer from their social welfare missions into electoral politics. Conservatives call it a vendetta targeting them. Then again, liberal 501(c)(4)s are against the proposed rules, too.
This matters — to American politicians if not beleaguered Ukrainians — because social welfare groups are the hot item in campaign finance; they get to raise unlimited contributions from donors they don't have to disclose. So far, conservatives have a big advantage in this realm of secretly funded politics.
But back to Ukraine. The financial package for Ukraine itself has strong support in Congress. But Democrats want to add another element, boosting the lending power of the International Monetary Fund. Many Republicans never liked the IMF, but they might be persuaded to go along on the bill if it also includes a provision forcing the IRS to stop work on its new regulations.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Tuesday, "To get it passed on the floor, the (c)(4) issue is going to have to be dealt with."
He said House Speaker John Boehner is "not going to bring it up on the House floor unless the (c)(4) issue is dealt with. But then maybe those tied together is what pulls through the IMF piece."
It may also be what pulls through the Ukraine aid, which was the original point.NEW DELHI: India’s horticulture production in 2016-17 is estimated at a record 300 million tonnes, which is 4.8% higher than the previous year.The agriculture ministry released its third advance estimate for production of horticulture crops on Thursday, giving record estimates for fruits, vegetables, spices and plantation crops like arecanut, cashewnut, cocoa and coconut.Figures show that horticulture production will beat foodgrain yield fifth year in a row, continuing the rising trend since 2012-13. The increased horticultural production is, however, not an indicator of rise in income of cultivators.This was reflected again this year when farmers had to sell their produce, mainly onion, potato and tomato, at throwaway prices in many part of the country due to multiple reasons, including absence of cold chain.“Being perishable items, horticultural produce needs extra attention during storage and transportation. We don’t have enough storage facilities in many parts of the country, leaving the farmers to struggle to get remunerative prices”, said an official.He said the continuous increase in horticultural production also indicated growing demand of consumers for these items. “It led to increase in the area under horticulture crops”, he said.The area under horticulture crops increased from 24.5 million hectares in 2015-16 to 25.1 million hectares in 2016-17 crop year (July June), recording an increase of 2.6%. The ministry’s estimates show record production of fruits at 93.7 million tonnes (MT) during 2016-17, which is about 3.9% higher than the previous year.Similarly, production of vegetables is estimated to be a record 176MT, which is 4.2% higher than the previous year.Among vegetables, all three major crops — onion, potato and tomato — saw higher production in 2016-17 as compared to 2015-16. Potato production, however, hit a new high, increasing from 43.4MT in 2015-16 to 48.2MT in 2016-17, which is 11.1% higher than the previous year.Spices recorded the maximum jump. Its production is estimated to be around 8.2MT, which is 17.4% higher than the previous year.The deep-seated problems with Metro's power system stem from a lack of follow-through on fixes, and failures in communications, basic design, cleaning and inspection, an internal safety report finds.
WASHINGTON — The deep-seated problems with Metro’s power system stem from a lack of follow-through on fixes, and failures in communications, basic design, cleaning and inspection, an internal safety report finds.
A summary of the draft traction power systems report, to be provided to the Metro Board Safety Committee Thursday, notes that even the information that could lead Metro to the right fixes is “not always available or useful to those who need it for analysis and decision making.”
The problems are exacerbated by an “inadequate” number of “formally trained and experienced cable inspection crews” and a lack of training for other inspectors on how to identify problems with the power system.
Even high-tech thermal imaging data are not reviewed by all the people who might be able to note current or impending problems, and programs that had been suggested or started to mitigate problems “were often not fully implemented or resources dedicated to the programs were not sufficient to be fully effective.”
The report also comes closer than ever before to acknowledging that the so-called “orange boot” power connection system, which in the past did not always include proper seals, needs to be re-examined going forward. Outside experts recently questioned the system, and the National Transportation Safety Board partly blamed water or dirt compromising the protective assembly for Carol Glover’s death last year outside L’Enfant Plaza.
Metro’s new internal review calls the design “adequate and appropriate for the system,” but notes that it “is potentially a point of failure that can be eliminated during new construction.”
Creating a single entity within Metro responsible for all rail power systems is among the 32 recommendations across five broad areas included in the draft report, which has now been submitted to the Federal Transit Administration for review.
In some cases, the recommendations mirror external reviews or safety directives from the Federal Transit Administration.
The report concludes that Metro may have committed a major miscalculation when looking at the power upgrades required to safely run more eight-car trains. The calculations “may not have considered the actual condition” of cables that handle the secondary impacts of increased power draw such as automatic train control systems.
Overall, the report finds those “secondary cables” are “not satisfactorily address[ed]” in replacement work.
In many cases, though, the report finds Metro’s power problems could be greatly reduced by simply cleaning up tunnels, cables and insulators.
“Established insulator cleaning schedule is not adhered to, predominantly due to staffing issues,” the summary of the report says.
Dirtier insulators are more likely to end up providing a path to the ground for electricity, which is the cause of many arcing incidents but also long-term maintenance problems.
The insulators themselves have problems too, with design specifications that do not include the best industry standards for quality control, shipping and testing. The report finds Metro has “insufficient” practices to make sure insulators are up to the quality standards it wants, and there are no guidelines for Metro workers to make sure insulators are not damaged on the way to a work site.
A new insulator design could help Metro replace more of them, the report suggests, if the insulators were easier to slide in and out from under the third rail. It’s not clear how often insulators should be replaced across the system since Metro does not have any specific projections for how long insulators might last in different environments, such as tunnels or open areas above ground.
The process of cleaning up other debris on the tracks that can cause smoke or fire incidents has been hampered by Metro’s vacuum vehicle being out of service. Metro’s safety department suggests a cost-benefit analysis on whether repairing or replacing the vehicle is worth it.
Track crews dedicated to cleaning out drains to clear water from power cables and structures have shown some success on the Red Line between Van Ness and Bethesda, but the department recommends even more dedicated cleaning crews “to improve safety [and] reliability and improve the longevity of system assets.”
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© 2016 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.Which do you think is worse: police officers who don’t know the law, or officers who know the law but deliberately ignore or even mock it?
That question has been on my mind since I saw the video made by Mike Miller, who observed two police officers making an arrest in broad daylight in a Toronto parking lot on Sept. 14. The video, which was published online by the Toronto Star on Oct. 27, shows a police cruiser with two officers standing beside it, apparently arresting two men whose faces have been deliberately blurred by the video editor. Another cruiser pulls up and two officers emerge. One of the officers from the first cruiser points at Miller and says to the new arrivals, “Could you turn the camera on that guy over there?”
I expected the new arrivals to return to their cruiser, pull out another video camera and train it on Miller. But they didn’t. Apparently I didn’t understand the code words used by the first officer, but the two new guys did. They knew he was not asking them to film the videographer; he was asking them to prevent the videographer from recording.
The two officers (identified by the
His intentions are clear: he’ll pay lip service to Miller’s right to record, while actively preventing him from exercising it
Star as constables Brian Smith and Shawn Gill) crowd in on Miller, asking why he is videoing. “’Cause I have the right to,” Miller correctly responds. He was obviously aware of the recurring incidents throughout North America where police have wrongfully attempted to intimidate citizens into turning off their cameras.
But Smith and Gill continue to advance, questioning Miller and advancing towards him, forcing Miller to walk backwards. They got so close that their bodies filled the camera lens, preventing Miller from capturing the events continuing in the background. He asks them to “get out of my personal space” but they don’t back off an inch. In fact, they acknowledge verbally that he has the right to record in a public place, while Smith waves his hand directly in front of the lens for several seconds. His intentions are clear: he’ll pay lip service to Miller’s right to record, while actively preventing him from exercising it.
Miller found the experience daunting. Who wouldn’t? Yet at the same time, the officers’ behaviour was downright childish. Did it never occur to them that they shouldn’t be caught on camera flagrantly violating a citizen’s rights?
A police spokesperson later told the Star that the individuals being arrested were 15- and 16-years old and “their identities are protected by law.” But this is a pathetically lame excuse for the officers’ conduct. The Youth Criminal Justice Act prevents people from publishing identifying information about youths involved with the law, but not from recording it. Smith and Gill had no reason to believe that Miller would break the law by publishing identifying information. When he and the Star did eventually put the video online, they protected the youths by blurring their faces.
Accosting and intimidating someone, even if you don’t lay hands on them, can constitute an assault
But even more egregious, in my mind, is that Smith and Gill seem completely oblivious to the notion that they themselves were probably performing a criminal act. Accosting and intimidating someone, even if you don’t lay hands on them, can constitute an assault. Section 265 of the Criminal Code says you’re committing assault if you attempt or threaten, by an act or gesture, to apply force to someone, if the victim has reasonable grounds to believe that you have the present ability to apply that force. Furthermore, if you’re openly wearing a weapon — and both officers were wearing sidearms — then it’s an assault merely to accost or impede someone. It will be interesting to see whether they are charged.
But someone also needs to investigate the first officer, the one who asked Smith and Gill to prevent the scene from being filmed. Why did he expect the other cops in his unit to understand his murky request?
The Toronto Police Service says its officers know they can be filmed by the public. But it appears they need a refresher course, one that tells them, “We really mean this.”
National Post
Karen Selick is the litigation director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (theccf.ca).Image copyright PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/Getty Images Image caption French troops patrol Timbuktu, that was seized by Tuareg rebels, then Islamist fighters, in 2012
Rebels in Mali have signed a peace deal with the government, offering partial autonomy to the north of the country.
Tuareg-led rebels had refused to sign an initial peace agreement last month, but came on board after their demands were met by the government.
Tuaregs seized part of northern Mali, including Timbuktu, in 2012.
But the area was then taken over by Islamist fighters linked to al-Qaeda, until they were removed in a French-led military operation in 2013.
Mali has seen four uprisings since it won independence from France in 1960.
Tuareg and Arab groups in the north - an area rebels call Azawad - say they are ignored by the more prosperous south.
Azawad is sparsely-populated but includes the historic cities of Timbuktu and Gao.
Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption Mali's president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita embraced an Azawad representative after the deal was signed
In the wake of the most recent uprising, Tuareg groups called for more concessions from the government in Bamako.
The peace agreement, brokered by Algeria, was not signed until those concessions were granted.
New security plans as well as a development programme for the Azawad region will now be agreed. On Thursday, the government dropped arrest warrants against rebel leaders.
The government has also said it is happy to devolve more authority to the region, but not to give it full autonomy.
"Hand in hand, let us make Mali better, more brotherly, more united than ever," president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said at a ceremony in Bamako. "Long live a reconciled Mali! Long live peace!"
Northern Mali continues to be hit by violence and Islamists have made occasional gains in the region. According to the UN, close to 140,000 Malian refugees continue to live abroad.
Since being deployed two years ago, 49 people have died while working for the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali.Jonathan Coulton and Matt Fraction are both something of Renaissance men. The former is a software programmer turned viral folk singer and geek culture magnate who operates a specialty cruise line; the latter is a critically acclaimed comic writer known for his work on such independent series as Casanova, ODY-C and Sex Criminals. Earlier this month, Coulton announced that the release of his latest album, Solid State, would come with a companion graphic novel penned by Fraction and illustrated by Spanish artist Albert Monteys. Paste had the opportunity to speak with Coulton and Fraction about the origins of the project, the synergistic relationship between comics and music and the hyper-real horror that is Celebration, Florida. Solid State, both the album and graphic novel, release on April 28 and can be purchased here.
Paste: Matt, how were you initially approached to work on the graphic novel for Solid State? Did you and Jonathan know each other before?
Matt Fraction: We knew each other and I had done the JoCo Cruise the previous year and we spent a little time together.
Jonathan Coulton: We knew each other’s work and, dare I say, we were fans of each other’s work. We hung out quite a bit on the cruise.
Fraction: As one does on a cruise, you eat and hang out with Jonathan Coulton! So, a few weeks afterwards he reached out and sort of explained this crazy notion of a concept album that maybe had a lot of conceptual space sort of not quite filled in, and this idea he had of tying the record together with a separate thing that could also stand on its own. It was completely unlike anything I had ever been a part of. And being a fan of Jonathan’s music, I really just wanted to hear the new record, so I said “yes.”
There’s something algebraic about it, something very puzzle solve-y about it that appealed to me as a writer. There were problems to solve, there were questions to answer, and there were questions to ask that kind of got to trying to figure this thing out. It was also a nice chance to dive into someone else’s work, but figure out what I wanted to say in that same space. In a lot of ways it was like any other work-for-hire situation, like writing a superhero comic, but at the same time there was room to add a lot more of myself to it—to build with Jonathan, which is extremely exciting. There was something novel to the entire process.
Solid State Cover Art by Albert Monteys
Paste: Jonathan, you wrote in the notes of the book that the instigating idea behind recording Solid State was the feeling that “the internet sucks now.” Unpack that: what sucks about the internet nowadays?
Coulton: Well I think that a lot of that is my own personal journey with the internet. My career wouldn’t exist without the blossoming of independent publishing that happened at the beginning of this century. So I really felt, as all of that was happening, I really felt Oh my god it’s happening, here comes the future! Here comes this beautiful, glorious future where the internet binds us all together and frees us from “The Man,” so now art can just happen…
Fraction: What could ever go wrong?
Coulton: Yeah, what could ever go wrong?! [laughter] I was an internet utopianist. I really felt like we were at the dawning of this new age, and even social media back then felt like a fun and friendly place, which is so hard to imagine now. And of course in the intervening years, the record industry fell apart, all the middle men went away for a couple years and now they’ve sort of been replaced by other middle men. Now you sort of owe your soul to Spotify and it’s not clear if Spotify is really paying you what you’re worth. Not just singling out them, but just streaming music as a consumer I love, and as a human I’m really glad we have it, but as an artist I have to ask, “Hmm, what’s happening here?” And you know of course, the general “humans on the internet” experience has changed, specifically in social media. Now that everybody is on the internet, now that everybody has a voice, it’s wonderful, but also at the same time kind of terrible because it has really amplified who we are for good and for ill. So part of what I was trying to explore in writing these songs and teasing out this larger story was, “What’s happening?” What do we do with this incredible technology, that we so clearly want and which is going to stick with us for a long time and is our future; how do we figure out how to use it, and how are we going to figure out how to be better humans, or are we still going to be just these awful, louder humans? It think that’s basically what I was getting at.
Solid State Interior Art by Albert Monteys
Paste: In the annotated notes of the story, Matt, you wrote, “It has been fascinating and weird to watch the world happen as we’ve been working on this project.” How long did the graphic novel take to complete, and what was going on in your lives during the time of writing it?
Fraction: It was about this time last year—isn’t that crazy? We’re both parents and creative types, so I suspect that any attempt to look back at our year is going to be filtered through instances of life and/or vomiting, parent-teacher conferences or vacations, and of course deadlines we’re not meeting. It was weird to work through the election and the balkanization of social media and the use of doxxing and swatting as the internet equivalent of honking your horn and flipping someone the bird when they cut you off. That became weirder and weirder as we were kind of pretending, what would happen if everybody knew everything? and then suddenly there would be another, Hey look, Hilary Clinton orders hot dogs with no buns and that’s the lead story on CNN tonight. Like holy shit, just every dumb thing anybody has ever written, to watch Twitter become what Twitter has become, to watch what our discourse has become in light of private communication becoming “not-so private” communication. Combine that with everything; our election, Brexit, conventional wisdom going entirely out the window, the Cubs winning the World Series, up was down, black was white, etc. We felt like we were in a moment, This is the start of a thing, this is a time children are going to ask us about someday. Writing and living in a space where information is indeed freed, but is that freedom really “free”?
Paste: Jonathan, while recording the album, you already had some time to come to understand who the protagonist of Solid State was. Did Matt and Albert’s interpretation match with your own image, or did it exceed it? Who is “Bob” to you, in your own words?
Coulton: The interesting thing with that, for me, was that most of the story of the album took place in what I’m calling present day, plus maybe in 15 years, which is Bob now. The bookends of the album visit with “Bob-One,” the far-future Bob. For me, most of the arc of the album was this guy who lives a little bit ahead of us, who starts out as a shitty internet troll person, an angry script kiddie who eventually becomes some kind of tech luminary. He’s still not satisfied, things fall apart for him, and as we trace over the course of his life he comes to understand that the way to feel better as a person is to focus on the people around you, to have empathy for the people around you, and to love other humans. So for me, that was the main arc, and sitting around it was this far-future Bob who was sort of living through this song “All This Time.”
Once Matt had turned the story around for a while, he said, “You know, I think most of the book is going to be about that song ‘All This Time,’” and sort of telescoping out of that far-future Bob who I hadn’t really thought of too deeply as a character. It was kind of amazing to watch that happen first, that character to get created first and then for Matt to trace back to the character that I had imagined as the main character, because the album emphasizes the present-day story a lot more. Matt and Albert did a fantastic job and exceeded my expectations, because I had a sketchy outline as you’ll see in the notes at the back of the book and that’s all I had. To see them come up with all these details and flesh these things out in a way that really maintained the emotional content of what I was thinking of and trying to say, and dare I say even enhanced it. Several times when Matt or Albert would send me pages, I would read them and cry. It’s weird when you write a thing, you’re writing these characters and you realize that you really are writing about yourself in some way. It was spooky to watch them hit all these emotional moments that really affected me and really spoke to exactly the kind of emotional journey I was thinking of when I was writing the album.
Solid State Interior Art by Albert Monteys
Paste: In the comic, Future Bob lives in the “Boojitropoplex,” a high-tech walled off campus governed by an emotional curation system of “upvotes” and “downvotes.” What inspired the idea of a dystopia governed by the principles of social media?
Fraction: Well, just thinking about what if we got everything we wanted and it turned out to be a punishment? I have apocalypse fatigue. I think we all do. I could go the rest of my life without watching another building fall into another building. And I realized in the process of wool gathering for this that I have post-apocalypse fatigue, too. There’s been so much great work in that space, like you’re never going to outdo The Handmaid’s Tale, you’re never going to outdo Children of Men. So what would a soft apocalypse look like? What would the emoji-pocalypse look like? Like those parents who cover every corner of their house with foam so their child can’t get scratched, what if we did that to ourselves, what if we just retreated into the Boojitropoplex?
Paste: What inspired the lingo used in that futuristic society? For instance, every human being referred to as “buddy,” the comical usage of the word “Booji,” etc.
Fraction: [laughter] I wanted everybody to call each other ‘bro,’ but I felt I already covered that pretty well in another book. ‘Buddy’ is such a soft, gender-less, neutral term. You can be sarcastic, you can be genuine, it’s a perfect ‘nothing’ word.
Coulton: And then, you of course connect it to social media and the language of buddy lists.
Fraction: Yeah, it really came down to a question of what we were going to name our community of future people. We just took corporate nonsense into a place of social engineering, literal engineering. We were playing with ideas of what if the volume of your voice could be increased or muted based on the number of up- or downvotes you accumulate. So if people around you disagreed with what you were saying, you physically could not be heard. Just probing how far we could extrude the “Yelping” of culture.
Coulton: The whole thing is so unsettling, to take the conventions of social networking and extrapolating them out into the real world is terrifying. And then you have to ask, why are we doing it in social media then?
Solid State Interior Art by Albert Monteys
Paste: Was “Booji” at all patterned after companies such as Google or Calico (Google’s biotech division devoted to life-extension)?
Fraction: No, what are those? [laughter] But no, it really was more the ones that didn’t make it, sort of Web 2.0 meets Disneyland. My wife did a talk at Facebook while we were making it and came back with reports about what the campus was like. You know what it really is? It’s Celebration, Florida. That was the inspiration, which I will let you search for yourself and discover what that is on your own. “Booji” is what if Celebration, Florida was where we lived and worked.
Paste: The comic touches pretty heavily on the push and pull between information privacy and intellectual property, with the advent of a post-privacy world sparking the dawn of machine intelligence. What are your thoughts on the singularity?
Coulton: I read The Singularity is Near and it was a really interesting experience because it’s a very compelling idea for a kid who loves the future and read OMNI magazine. It’s very exciting to think about this stuff and believe we’re just on the edge of this major technological transformation, right? I feel like people have felt that way for a long time. Except Ray Kurzweil and the rest of the Singularity proponents believe that they’re right, they were just wrong all those other times in the past and it’s all a matter of looking at the right charts, graphs and exponential number schemes. It’s just simple math, right?
It’s incredible hubris to think that you yourself were lucky enough to be on the verge of this thing and everyone behind you was not. On the other hand, looking at graphs, it’s hard to deny something big is about to happen. I don’t know, and I’m certainly suspicious. The thing that makes me suspicious of the singularity, and specifically Ray Kurzweil’s vision, is that it just happens to be the case that Ray Kurzweil himself was old enough to make it across the bridge into immortality. So, maybe he’s right, but that’s convenient, isn’t it? He didn’t write a book saying, Unfortunately, it will happen after I’m dead, he wrote a book saying, This is the thing that will make me immortal. I hope he’s right, but I really don’t know. I feel like we’ve always felt we were on the verge of something great and looking back, it’s not always been true. Jury’s out.
Fraction: I think it’s all dodecahedrons and fart tubes. [laughter] Anyone who calls themselves “Doctor” but can’t read an x-ray is trying to sell you something. Look, my grandmother would look at an iPhone that’s face-timing with her grandchildren with a look of wonder. You know, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But I’m interested in the human cost. I don’t think there’s a difference between intellectual property and privacy anymore. I think privacy is the ultimate intellectual property and if you don’t believe me, look at the things that have just been legislated. Now ISPs can just sell all your information to whoever wants to buy it. Like, case closed. That’s the last and most personal property, what goes on inside your head. Someone’s going to figure out a way to try and sell that.
Solid State Interior Art by Albert Monteys
Coulton: And I guess for me that’s the thing, the potential of all this technology and cultural change is great and I think there are a lot of dark turns this could take. As always, I think it’s important for us humans to figure out what we’re going to do, what we want and take an active role in creating the future we want to have so we don’t accidentally destroy ourselves because we want to stream Fleetwood Mac to all our mobile devices.
Fraction: Shame and embarrassment only work in an asymmetrical situation, right? Any kind of contract only works on this power differential, to have something that someone else wants. If you just carry that out to its logical conclusion, then it becomes about people again. What if anyone could find out everything you ever typed ever? Anyone anywhere could just pull it up on Google, there’s a personal Google that exists just to tell me about you. Alright, but then I have that about you and everyone has that about everyone. We’ve leveled the playing field, and what do we look like as people? How do we get back to work? But mostly, the answer is just dodecahedrons and fart tubes.
Paste: What motivated the decision to structure most of the comic’s expository scenes across a four-by-four panel scheme, with the characters’ expressions filling one-half of the panels and dialogue occupying the other half?
Fraction: 90% of this book wouldn’t exist without Albert Monteys, who is a genius in a way that the word just isn’t used anymore. I wanted to, just as a fan of his, to try to write something that lived up to his ability and his talent. I wanted to write something that I wanted to see him draw. I wanted to serve him as a writer rather than subsume him and treat him as an employee. Comics is a visual medium. I had an intern once who went through a random selection of my scripts because I wanted to find out, of the words that I actually write, how many make it into print? The answer was two-fifths. My artists and editors and collaborators read three-fifths that no-one else ever sees. I think it’s my job to reduce myself, to make myself get out of the way of the visual stuff.
Comics are rectangles. Traditional, American, western English comics are rectangles. Records are squares! This book was going to be shaped like a square because, well no actually, a record is round. [laughter] Wait, what? I quit. This was supposed to be about squares, Jon! So my thought process was okay, this is interesting, I haven’t worked in this format before. Alright, If you treat the entire page like a panel, what does that mean? What does it mean when you look at a rectangle, what does it mean when you look at a square? It’s a different compositional architecture, different flow, a different pace and tempo. Really, it was wanting not to embarrass myself in front of Albert and to try and take advantage of someone with his profound toolkit. There’s a dance in comics always between what’s written, what’s seen and what’s read. There’s the words and the pictures and what you make with the two of them. This had a fourth channel of data which was the record. So, where could I just not speak or not show and let the album do its job? Instead of telling or showing what a character is thinking or feeling, there’s a song about that. The space between two panels is filled in by the record, you make that emotional leap with them over the course of one or however many songs.
Solid State Interior Art by Albert Monteys
Paste: Solid State isn’t the first album to be turned into a graphic novel and likely won’t be the last. Why do you think that that comics and music have such a long and fruitful relationship with one another? How do you explain the synergy between those two mediums?
Fraction: Yeah, Jonathan.
Coulton: [laughter] I think that Matt was getting at it a little bit that there are words and the pictures and there’s this third level of them working together, and the way they tell a story not just explicitly, but by the way they suggest a thing—your brain builds that thing. The connections you make when you are taking it in. And I think that it’s very much a thing music does, too, in particular something like a pop song or love song that is not explicit about what it’s talking about, something that’s more in the space of describing an emotional moment or a state of mind or the nature of a relationship without going into too many details about it. And for me as a songwriter, I think about this a lot; it’s the classic “show me don’t tell me,” and I realize that some of my favorite songs are the ones that don’t really tell me whats going on entirely. I get to have a relationship with that song where I hear it and like it, I appreciate what it’s about and it connects to me in a certain personal way, but the more I listen to it, the more I can imagine on top of that what it’s really about. I think that’s the kind of storytelling that happens in comics and can be very similar. It’s very filmic, where suddenly the dialogue will drop out and you’ll start “hearing” a story in pictures and somehow that’s an even more compelling and clear way of telling a story. That’s the smartest thing I can think to say about it, but that’s what it makes me think about: they are similar kinds of storytelling in that they can dip in and out of specificity and leave a lot of room for the consumer to fill in the gaps that works for them or really resonates with them.
Solid State Interior Art by Albert Monteys
Paste: How much of the album was completed before work on the graphic novel began? Did the course of the novel’s development affect the shape of the album itself? Or do the comic and the album exist as two separate, complementary works?
Fraction: We had close to all the final mixes.
Coulton: I don’t think there were any new songs written after the graphic novel had started.
Fraction: Oh, but there’s that one song that the graphic novel is about that you finished after the book. It’s so good!
Coulton: That song’s still not finished yet! [laughter] But there’s a song I ended up deleting off of the album where the artificial intelligence wakes up and decides that we’re not ready and it has to leave. For some reason it didn’t work for me in the flow of the album, that was originally going to be the last song on the album but I didn’t finish it.Former media baron Conrad Black was resentenced on Friday to 42 months in prison on fraud and obstruction of justice charges, which means he could serve up to 13 more months in prison.
In Federal Court in Chicago, Judge Amy St. Eve also ordered him to pay a $125,000 fine.
Black had already served 29 months in the Coleman federal prison in Florida before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down some of his initial convictions, citing a misuse of the "honest services" provision of the U.S. fraud statute. His original sentence was for 78 months in prison after multiple convictions on fraud and obstruction of justice charges.
The court agreed to accept the time he has already served, 29 months, as part of his new sentence of 42 months.
"This court ruling sent a very strong message to corporate executives that it will not be tolerated when executives steal," prosecutor Julie Ruder Porter told reporters at the courthouse.
"The defendant has never accepted responsibility for his own conduct," Porter said.
Porter said prosecutors were "satisfied" with the court's decision, but by any measure, the original case against Black has disintegrated. After initially being charged with 17 counts, and being accused of absconding with hundreds of millions of dollars, only two charges against him remain — a single count of fraud of $600,000 US, and a more serious obstruction of justice charge.
That stemmed from the security camera video of Black removing boxes from his Toronto office after he had been instructed not to.
It was on those two counts that Black was resentenced Friday.
The new sentence could be reduced for good behaviour. That means in Black's case he could spend as little as nine more months in prison, but no more than 13.
Black can put a recommendation in for where he would like to stay, but ultimately, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons will decide where he will serve out his sentence, and for how long.
Following his release, he must submit to two years probation. That would only apply if he remains in the United States, but Black has expressed his interest in returning to Canada and U.S. |
the agency's collection process used to evaluate jobs numbers? Why didn't the Census Bureau investigate the reports when they first emerged?
Two things about the report seem certain. The first is that Buckmon's reported fabrications probably didn't effect the bottom-line employment numbers very much. In order to generate the monthly percentage of unemployed, the government calls 60,000 households. Manufacturing, say, 500 fake responses in one direction or the other could theoretically have moved the bottom-line number by 0.8 percent, a significant amount. But if it was a more manageable 60? That shifts the number 0.1 percent. And that relies on all 60 of the calls providing the same information. If you had 120 fake interviews showing people got jobs to 100 that didn't, the effect is tiny — 0.03 percent. Buckmon says he wasn't told to fabricate the data one way or the other.
Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers — Jack Welch (@jack_welch) October 5, 2012
The second thing that's clear is that Buckmon's actions are not why the unemployment figure dropped 0.3 percent last September. Buckmon's fraud ended at the latest with his departure in 2011 and, as we noted on Monday, the Post's John Crudele — who also writes "I’ve been suspicious of the Census Bureau for a long time" — has only an anonymous source who claims that it is ongoing. The September 2012 numbers, you'll recall, were questioned by former GE CEO Jack Welch on Twitter, inspiring a ferocious debate over whether or not the Obama administration was cooking the books. But there's no indication that the system Buckmon describes was in place and motivated to boost Obama's chances — especially since the number went back up shortly before Election Day.In theory, 3D printing offers a future where you could easily print just about anything you want. So far, it’s failed to be the miracle consumers were promised, but there’s one believer who’s worth paying attention to.
Eric Sprunk, Nike’s COO, recently attended a summit held by tech news site GeekWire, where he talked about the innovation in Nike’s Flyknit technology and what it suggests about the way sneakers could be made in the future. Based on what Nike is already doing with Flyknit, Sprunk says the ability for consumers to 3D print a pair of sneakers is close at hand.
The way it might work goes something like this: You could head to Nike’s website, customize a sneaker to your specifications, and buy a file containing the instructions for the 3D printer. If you have a printer at home, you could print it yourself and have a new pair of sneakers in a matter of hours. If you don’t, you could take the file to a Nike store and have them print it for you.
“Do I envision a future where [Nike] might still own the file, from an IP perspective—because it’s a Nike product; you can’t have just anybody make a Nike product—and you can manufacture that either in your home or we will do it for you at our store?” Sprunk said at the summit. “Oh yeah, that’s not that far away.”
It’s similar to the process Nike uses to make the uppers on its Flyknit sneakers, which are literally knit—like “a sweater on your foot,” Sprunk says—by machine. Traditionally, Nike would send a “tech pack” containing drawings, fabric swatches, and other specifications to a factory in Asia, where different workers assemble the sneaker. To make a Flyknit sneaker, however, Nike just sends a file, and one person feeds the instructions into the knitting machine to create the shoe. One person is capable of operating several knitting machines.
That change in the manufacturing paradigm is why knit sneakers, which both Nike and Adidas worked on for years, represent one of the biggest advances in sneaker technology since Nike was established. It’s also why Sprunk said at the summit that Nike’s Lunar Flyknit 3 is his favorite sneaker.
Theoretically, 3D printing could be the next extension of that.
Nike Look at that knitting.
Other companies are toying with 3D printing footwear too, such as SOLS, the New York startup backed by Carmelo Anthony of the New York Knicks.
But probably no other player in the space has pockets as deep as Nike’s, or the same record of innovation. Sprunk even says Nike has a “huge initiative” called “manufacturing revolution.” (Maybe it’s the reason for some of Nike’s stranger patent filings, such as this one for a method of designing sneakers with virtual reality goggles.)
There are still hurdles to clear. First, a consumer would need a 3D printer, which is not exactly a small purchase. And right now you can’t 3D print a Nike sneaker’s sole—even Flyknits need a separate sole attached.
But clearly the potential is there.Chinese Lovers Of French Wine Are Snapping Up Bordeaux Vineyards
Enlarge this image toggle caption Eleanor Beardsley/NPR Eleanor Beardsley/NPR
A guide unlocks a heavy wooden door and leads visitors down into a Bordeaux chateau wine cellar. Along the vast network of underground rooms and corridors, thousands of bottles age for decades in the cool darkness.
Today, many of the tourists visiting this French wine making region are Chinese.
Retired couple Wang Jiawei and Cao Juanjuan are visiting Europe for the first time. They are traveling to London and Paris, but say Bordeaux is also a must see.
"We enjoy drinking wine," they say. "And for us Chinese, Bordeaux is wine. Everyone who likes wine wants to come to Bordeaux to experience the long wine history and to see how it's made."
Chinese consumption of wine has increased dramatically over the last 10 years. This is having a profound effect on the world's wine making regions like Bordeaux. But some Chinese are interested in more than just tourism in the region.
Daniel Li is the estate manager for a Chinese industrialist who bought two Bordeaux chateaux five years ago. We meet at the massive Chateau Bel Air, lying about 45 minutes outside Bordeaux in the rolling, vine-covered countryside.
Li said her boss was already importing wine from Bordeaux and loved to drink it. Then he wanted to know exactly how to make it.
Chateau Bel Air produces about 230,000 bottles of wine every year. According to Li, they have kept all the original French workers and are continuing to make the wine in the same way. The only thing that has changed, she says, is the marketing and export strategy, which is now geared toward China.
"China is now a huge focus and we have increased exports there to around 70 percent of our production," Li said.
Li estimates the former French owner exported about 20 percent of his wine to China.
Chinese businesswoman Lina Fan has been in France for 14 years, staying after earning a business and wine management degree.
Fan was one of the first agents to help a Chinese businessman buy a chateau. She says it all began around 2007 when the demand for Bordeaux red wine in China skyrocketed.
"At that moment, more and more Chinese importers began to think: 'Why not buy a chateau in Bordeaux?'" says Fan. "So investors began to ask me questions: 'How much does a Bordeaux chateau and vineyard cost?' And when they found out they were surprised: 'Oh, it's not so expensive!' they told me."
Fan says about 85 percent of Chinese investors purchased chateaux that cost $3 million to $6 million.
According to Fan, there are two kinds of Chinese chateaux buyers: The first kind loves to drink wine, is an importer and wants to learn how to make it. The second is a millionaire looking to burnish their image.
"It's not just about economics," says Fan. "Sometimes it's just for image. France, for Chinese people means the luxury life; the lifestyle."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Eleanor Beardsley/NPR Eleanor Beardsley/NPR
The Chinese are Bordeaux's biggest investors, owning 140 chateaux. Longtime investor Belgium falls in second place with just 40. But with 10,000 wine chateaux spread across the region, 140 remains a drop in the bucket.
Some Bordeaux residents have grown uneasy at the sudden and huge influx of Chinese investment. Anne Largeteau is closing up a wine shop in a 16th century chateau that has a new Chinese owner. Generations of Largeteau's family have worked in the Bordeaux wine business.
"The thing is, you know they've got the money," Largeteau said. "And unfortunately we (French) don't have any. But they invest, they do the restoration of chateaux, etcetera, so that's a good thing. But still, it's unfortunate because the estates are not French anymore. We would have liked to keep our patrimonial treasures."
Journalist Laurence Le Maire said she wrote her book "Wine, Red and China" after becoming disgusted with the tone of the local press towards the Chinese buyers.
"It was always so negative, spouting stereotypes and talking about the 'yellow peril,'" Le Maire said. "Bordeaux's reputation was made by foreigners over the ages – the English, the Dutch – and the Chinese are no different."
Christophe Chateau, head of communications for the Bordeaux Wine Board, agrees the region has always welcomed foreign investors and owes much of its success to them. But he says people were caught off guard by the rise of the Chinese. In the year 2000, Bordeaux exported less than 400 thousand bottles to the small Chinese market. Today, China is Bordeaux's number one export market – at 80 million bottles a year.
"They (the Chinese) are investing a lot, and they are developing tourism," says Chateau. "They are creating a richness for the Bordeaux region. So this is helping Bordeaux, not destroying Bordeaux."
Jean Pierre Leydet, 60, is not so sure. He lives in a tiny house amidst the rows of leafy grapevines, laden with clusters of dark grapes this time of year. Leydet has been working the in the vineyards his whole life. He says Bordeaux wines are top quality, but now other wines are giving Bordeaux competition — South African wines are especially good.
"My big fear is that the Chinese will use what they learn here and cultivate millions of acres of vineyards in China," Leydet said.
Then, he adds, the French market will be flooded with Chinese wine — just as good as a bottle from Bordeaux.I first met Martin Slepcik and his family while taking photos in Cliftonville, England. I would see them out and about almost every time I visited the coastal town, and they became one of the focal points of the project I was working on. Then one day, without any warning, they disappeared.
Neighbors told me the family had returned to Slovakia. Hoping to visit them and continue the photo series, I asked around town for an address or phone number. All I learned was that they'd gone to a place called Lunik IX, and that I shouldn't take my dog there, as he'd be eaten. Some people I spoke to said the area was straight out of District 9.
Lunik IX is built into the hills and woods outside Kosice, a small, picturesque European city. It has everything you could ask for in the way of shopping, entertainment, and infrastructure, which makes Lunik IX even harder to wrap your head around once you arrive.
I'd done some basic online research about Lunik IX, though a lot of articles were a couple of years old and claimed it had been demolished. But it's very much still there. The project was originally built in the late 1970s to house Roma alongside soldiers and policemen, a grand social experiment typical of Communist-era Czechoslovakia. Eventually all but the Roma moved away, and today much of the neighborhood lacks running water, electricity, and heating. Roma experience extreme prejudice in Europe, and opportunities in the ghetto are nil.
Even from a distance you can tell this place shouldn't be standing, let alone occupied—or over-occupied, as it's been for decades. Lunik IX looks bombed out. Burns and smoke stains mark its walls, and household rubbish is stacked well over a story high. Most streetlights and windows are broken, and at night people roam with flashlights and phones to see where they're walking. There's a direct line of sight to Optima, a shiny modern shopping mall that taunts Lunik IX from across a highway intersection.
Over two visits to Martin and his family, I took photos of the project and gave Martin disposable cameras to capture his own experience of this strange, dystopian ghetto. Here's what we saw.Every share makes Black Voice louder! Share To Share To
Nowadays, war against racism and injustice has become much easier than it had been in the times of Martin Luther King Jr., but it is far from being over.
In the days of Martin Luther King Jr., communication was stiff and as a civil rights worker, bringing urgent news about a beating or an arrest of an activist to the public could do it only through a telephone call. You had to walk miles to get to the closest phone booth and you wouldn’t dare to call one of the major national civil rights organizations by dialing a standard long-distance number. Your call would be forwarded first to a switchboard operator who obviously is white and might block your request.
You’d use a Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) or a line to reach a civil rights organization. Then your news could be compiled into mimeographed “WATS reports” and mailed out to organization leaders, the Justice Department, the media, lawyers, and other friends of the movement across the country.
It was really tough for activists in those days, yet they fought hard to bring justice to the people. They didn’t have the technology to fight against the unjust law, but their spirits moved them to the war on racism and injustice. “We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television,” said Dr. King Jr.
In today’s quest to fighting against racism and injustice, one needs just to choose a suitable platform that will help you voice out to millions of people. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Vine are just appropriate if you have something to say or want to share video, photo of a protest or violent arrest.
But with all the media and technology we have today, how close are we to end racism, injustice and police brutality in our communities? We must continue to fight until we win by using the new means of communications to gather people and to express our will.
Share this article help fight against racism and injustice in our societies.The Jacksonville Jaguars defense was a big reason the team ended up winning the game on Sunday against the Chicago Bears, and the return of Jared Odrick meant the rotation overall was more talented. It also meant we got some more good post game quotes from Odrick, who never shies away from giving his thoughts post game, this time about Bears tight end Logan Paulsen.
“I don’t like [No.] 82,” Odrick told Ryan O’Halloran of the Florida Times-Union after the game. “You can put that down. Eight-two doesn’t play the game the right way. He antagonizes. He’s literally a barnacle.”
Odrick was flagged early in the game for a personal foul and clearly he was upset about it, going to the sideline and yelling incredulously at someone still on the field, presumably Paulsen.
Odrick didn’t stop there.
“I probably took out some anger because of watching [Paulsen] on tape,” Odrick continued. “He doesn’t block well. He can’t catch passes. He’s a role player just like I’m a role player, but his role is to antagonize and get in the way. When guys speak to the referees after every time they get touched, that’s why I called him out.”
I can’t really speak to specifically what set Odrick off about Paulsen, but it’s clear there was something going on that got under Odrick’s skin during the game. He is right about one thing though, Paulsen isn’t really a pass catcher and he’s not really known as a good blocker. Paulsen on the season has just two receptions for 10 yards and has never eclipsed more than 28 receptions in a single season, with just 81 receptions in six seasons in the NFL.Election officials say early voting begins Tuesday in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.
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The competitive special election pits Democrat Jon Ossoff against Republican Karen Handel. The district includes parts of Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties.
Voters can check their registration status, find the correct voting location and request an absentee ballot through the Secretary of State’s website.
State law requires that polls be open during normal business hours during the early voting period. State officials recommend checking with your county election agency for details.
Cobb and DeKalb counties also plan to hold Saturday voting hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on June 10. Fulton County plans Saturday voting from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on June 3 and June 10.
The election is June 20.(AFP) France led Europe with the highest fertility rate in 2014 with Greece and other crisis-hit countries suffering the lowest rates on the continent, the EU's latest data showed on Tuesday.
At 2.01 births per woman, France's fertility rate is followed by Ireland on 1.94, Sweden on 1.88 and and Britain on 1.81, the EU's Eurostat data agency said.
All the levels were below the 2.1 births per woman mark considered by statisticians to be the replacement rate in a developed country.
"The good result for France, but also for Europe's northwestern countries in general, is explained by more generous family and social policies than found in southern and eastern European countries," said Gilles Pison, researcher at the INED demography institute in Paris.
Conversely, the lowest fertility rate was observed in Portugal at 1.2 births, just ahead of Greece, Cyprus and Spain.
"These countries were hit hard by the economic crisis and there lacked incentives to build families, contrary to France where social policies cushioned the blow," the researcher said.
Eurostat said France also continued to record the highest number of births in Europe with 819,300 births in 2014, beating out Britain, Germany and Italy.
Pison said that after years of slow birth rates, Germany and Austria seemed to be reversing the trend "no doubt due to these countries also embracing generous incentives as seen in France," Pison said.
In 2014, the average age for a first child in Europe was around 28 years old with the youngest mothers found in Bulgaria at 25.8 years and the oldest in Italy at 30.7 years.
Across the EU, over 5.1 million babies were born in 2014. The total EU population that year stood at 506,944,075 according to Eurostat.Statement posted by the IWW claiming "Act signifies workers’ real desire for change, not just rhetoric". We reproduce it for reference only.
Grand Rapids, MI - Bartertown Diner and Roc’s Cakes a raw, vegan/vegetarian restaurant opening in a couple weeks in downtown Grand Rapids has decided to go “wobbly.” The seven member team which constitutes the worker-run establishment have all decided to join the old and storied Industrial Workers of the World labor union.
“It just seemed like the perfect fit for us. After meeting with members of the IWW it was clear that we all want the same things and being that we really don’t want to be just another restaurant it seemed logical,” said Ryan Cappelletti cook at the new Diner.
Bartertown Diner and Roc’s Cakes, which will be located at 6 Jefferson St., joins a growing list of worker-owned IWW shops. The Red and Black Cafe in Portland, Oregon and Just Coffee in Madison, Wisconsin being two others.
“We are very happy that Bartertown and Roc’s Cakes has decided to go IWW and believe it can only help in our larger campaign to raise the standard of living and benefits for all food and beverage workers in Grand Rapids,” said Shannon Williams, Treasurer of the local IWW branch.
The Grand Rapids Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World has been involved in food service organizing for many years. From the IWW Starbucks Workers Union to the IWW Jimmy Johns Workers Union.
The Industrial Workers of the World is a rank-and-file labor union open to all workers.
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http://grsbuxunion.blogspot.com/
http://www.bartertowngr.com/We're officially old. Can we even believe Mean Girls was released thirteen years ago? THIRTEEN. Sometimes we try to tell ourselves it wasn't that long ago in a bid to cling onto our youth, but the fact Regina George's little sister's now a fully-fledged adult means we can no longer shy away from the perils of time. Yup, Nicole Crimi, who played Kylie, is now 21 and looks completely different. As you'd probably expect, given the whole puberty process we all go through.
As if we didn't feel ancient enough when our little cousin told us they have no idea who the Spice Girls are (excuse us?), Nicole's now a university student and hasn't actually appeared in a movie since 2006 if her IMDb profile's anything to go by. It doesn't feel like five minutes since we first saw her dancing about to Kelis's "Milkshake," does it? Gah. Also we've done a bit of snoopin' on her art account and discovered she's actually bloody brilliant when it comes to the whole drawing thing.
Love her.
This post was written by Carl Smith. It originally appeared on our sister site, heat world.
Love J-14? Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for fun, exclusive videos with your favorite stars.armor_ripper, on 28 November 2012 - 02:35 PM, said:
from my latest experience I have this suspicion, that 95% of players don't know what that red progress bar means... looks like I am always the only one returnig back to base... and if I'm too far, pinging at base does not help either... very weird, must be some graphic bug on their computers...
I had exactly the same feeling in the latest part of my WoT experience... It feels like you're playing with a team of people who do not understand anything about the game and they're still torn between a lot of questions about life, death and universe in general, such as:1. Err... how do I move the tank?2. Wth are those red things that move on map?3. Map? What map?4. How do I shoot?5. What happens if I shoot randomly around me?6. Why is there a circle on the ground?7. What is the siren noise?8. Where do I go?9. Why did I came here?10. Who shot me?11. Why did my tank explode?12. What happens if I go into water?13. Why did the screen turn to sepia color and I can't move?etc, etc...Welcome to the hell of randoms.Image caption Brian Hogg's ear has been made with a piece of his own rib
A piece of rib and a bone conduction implant have been used in a pioneering operation to treat an Edinburgh man's hereditary deafness.
Brian Hogg, 29, was fitted with an implant called a Bonebridge and given the new ear by NHS Lothian surgeons.
Mr Hogg is the first person in the UK to have the procedure.
NHS Lothian said the specialist implant operation was carried out in December 2012 at the Lauriston Building in Edinburgh.
Ear drum
The Bonebridge device is fitted in the ear and is used when a patient is unable to have a conventional external hearing aid fitted.
Alex Bennett, an NHS Lothian ear, nose and throat consultant performed the procedure.
Mr Bennett said: "This is a truly innovative procedure and I'm sure the device will make a significant difference to Brian and many other patients like him.
"The Bonebridge implant is intended to improve hearing by replicating the actions of the ear drum.
Image caption Brian Hogg with surgeon Alex Bennett who fitted the Bonebridge
"A discreet audio processor, which is attached to the patient's head, picks up sound waves which are then amplified by the implant and passed to the inner ear through the skull bone.
"These sound waves are then interpreted by the brain as sound."
Mr Hogg was born with Treacher Collins Syndrome, meaning he could not wear conventional hearing aids as they are styled to fit in and around the top and middle of the ear.
Mr Hogg said: "After the new implant was been fitted I've noticed a huge difference in the range of sounds I can hear.
"The sound quality is much better and I can hear noises at a distance now, which my previous device didn't pick up.
"The Bonebridge implant is so light, it's practically weightless. It's tailored to most closely match my normal hearing range.
"When you think about how far mobile phone technology has come in the last 10 years, there have been similar advances in hearing aids.
"The new implant is a really big step forward in technology and I'm very grateful to the team of consultants for fitting the implant for me."
Dr Ingeborg Hochmair, managing director of MED-EL, which designed the implant, said: "Our innovative development of the Bonebridge will considerably improve the lives of patients.
"We consider this new development a great success. The Bonebridge is the culmination of decades of experience gathered in the development of hearing implant solutions."The following lists were submitted in response to the question, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” All lists have been edited for consistency, clarity, and to fix minor copy errors. Unranked lists are alphabetized by title. In instances where the vote varies somewhat with the Top 115 entry the vote was counted towards, an explanation of how the vote was counted appears below it.
In the case of divided votes, only works fitting the description that received multiple votes on their own received the benefit. For example, in Jessica Abel’s list, she voted for The Post-Superhero comics of David Mazzucchelli. That vote was divided evenly between Asterios Polyp and Paul Auster’s City of Glass because they fit that description and received multiple votes on their own. It was not in any way applied to the The Rubber Blanket Stories because that material did not receive multiple votes from other participants.
Katherine Dacey
Writer, The Manga Critic
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki
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Marco D’Angelo
Writer, Sono Storie
X-Men, Chris Claremont & John Byrne
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Alexander Danner
The Rabbi’s Cat, Joann Sfar
Instructor, Emerson College; contributing writer, ComixTalk
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Mike Dawson
Cartoonist, Gabagool!, Freddie & Me, and Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms
My New York Diary, Julie Doucet
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Kim Deitch
Cartoonist, The Search for Smilin’ Ed, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat
Dick Tracy, Chester Gould
COMMENTS
This is in no particular order.
Well, Genesis by Crumb would be number one.
And Palestine by Joe Sacco might be number two, but then I haven’t read his newest book.
Wimbledon Green was awfully good.
I have not read it yet, but what I have seen so far of Harvey Pekar’s posthumous book Cleveland, illustrated by Joseph Remnant, looks very promising.
Lots of other comic books by Crumb could be included. I think the strip “August 1976,” by Nina Bunjevac, that recently ran in Mineshaft magazine was quite excellent. I know I’m leaving out a ton of things.
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Martin de la Iglesia
Contributing Writer, International Journal of Comic Art
The Walking Man, Jiro Taniguchi
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Camilla d’Errico
Cartoonist, Tanpopo, Helmetgirls
Bakuman, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
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Francis DiMenno
Director, Emily Williston Memorial Library and Museum; contributing writer, The Lemon Basket
Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
COMMENTS
If obliged to select only one [of The Complete Crumb editions], I would select Volume 6, “On the Crest of a Wave”. If this is not suitable, than I would select Robert Crumb’s body of work in Zap Comix.
Watchmen, A Brief Appreciation
I don’t want to brag, but I spotted Alan Moore as a genius right around the time of “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” I showed that particular story to all my friends. You can ask them.
And Watchmen was a signal accomplishment for its time, right up there with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Rônin, and Daredevil: Born Again. It still holds up well over 25 years later. It is still one of the few graphic novels with the density and complexity of a good novel.
Quite frankly, I’ve made this peculiar sub-genre of literature my field of study for over 40 years. (Yup, I’m that old.) Watchmen is at or very near the top of the heap as far as I’m concerned.
Moore himself would probably tell you himself that he is thoroughly steeped in comics lore, and that he borrowed quite a few of the genre’s tropes to tell his story. Harold Bloom called it “the anxiety of influence.” It’s not by any means a bad thing. Nearly all authors draw upon genre conventions of one kind or another to tell their stories. What really counts in the end is how they use those narrative conventions.
Watchmen will stand because it was one of the very first self-aware works of graphic art, and one of the very first graphic novels truly worthy of the name…
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Alan David Doane
Publisher/editor, Comic Book Galaxy; writer, Trouble with Comics, The ADD Blog
Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes
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Randy DuBurke
Cartoonist, Hunter’s Heart; illustrator, Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography, Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty
Master of Kung Fu, Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy
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Randy Duncan
Professor of Communication & Theatre Arts, Henderson State University
Concrete, Paul Chadwick
COMMENTS
This list is not designed to impress anyone with my “good taste.” It is not meant to be a canon-building exercise based on an objective standard of quality. It is a very subjective list of work in comics form that has been (and, in most cases, continues to be) important to me.
Formalist that I am, sometimes I am responding to the intellectual experience of appreciating skillful, even innovative, use of the comics form (3, 4, 5, 8, 9).
In other instances it is an emotional experience of connecting with characters (2, 6, 7, 10).
A couple of the comics provide me with the sublime experience of being transported to fantastic worlds by the audacity of the concepts and the power of the artwork (1, 7).
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Kathleen Dunley
Faculty Chair, English, ESL, Reading & Creative Writing, Rio Salado College
It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth
COMMENTS
[About the vote for The ACME Novelty Library] If I have to narrow it, I’d say Volume 18 [“Building Stories”].
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Paul Dwyer
Cartoonist, I Shot Roy!
Cages, Dave McKean
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Joshua Dysart
Scriptwriter, Violent Messiahs, Unknown Soldier, Neil Young’s Greendale
Wee Willie Winkie’s World, Lyonel Feininger
COMMENTS
But I just can’t do ten. It’s driving me crazy…
11. Journey, William Messner-Loebs; 12. Wasteland, John Ostrander & Del Close, et al.; 13. The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan Talbot; 14. The Spirit, Will Eisner; 15. Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez; 16. American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin; 17. Two-Fisted Tales, Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis, John Severin, Wallace Wood, et al.; 18. Dalgoda, Jan Strnad & Dennis Fujitake; 19. Krazy Kat, George Herriman; 20. Luther Arkwright, Bryan Talbot; 21. The Frank stories, Jim Woodring; 22. Roarin’ Rick’s Rarebit Fiends, Rick Veitch; 23. Bacchus, Eddie Campbell; 24. Kozure Ôkami [Lone Wolf and Cub], Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima; 25. Eightball, Daniel Clowes; 26. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.; 27. Nexus, Mike Baron & Steve Rude, with Gary Martin, et al.
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Joe Eisma
Illustrator, Existence 2.0/3.0, Morning Glories
The Invisibles, Grant Morrison, et al.
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Austin English
Cartoonist, Christina and Charles
The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey
COMMENTS
Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel, by Charlotte Salomon. This work is usually talked about due to the tragic circumstances surrounding its creation and ultimate fate of its author. I remember seeing it before reading about Salomon’s biography and was filled with inspiration for the way Salomon drew figures and poses as I struggled to find my own way to draw characters in a picture story. This is a singular work in so many ways: a long narrative drawn in a rich way that most long comic narratives would shy away from. There is also an intensity of emotion that you can’t miss even before you know the situation the work was born into. So, for its sustained richness of images and unembarrassed emotional force, this work seems to tower above almost every other work of graphic narrative. Somehow its example has been ignored, perhaps because its too strong to grapple with.
Chimera by Lorenzo Mattotti. I enjoy looking at the neat panel borders in this comic, and then shifting my attention to the flurry of lines within those neat borders. I like to imagine the borders sketched out first, as little areas for Mattotti to pour out his heartbreaking work. I don’t know if he comes at those panels unleashing a torrent of jagged lines or if he methodically applies each stroke in a systematic way. Either way, Mattotti’s system is not just thrilling to read and digest, but enriching to anyone who attaches any value to the idea that one can express ones self through drawing.
Der Palast by Anke Feuchtenberger. Hard to narrow down one Feuchtenberger work for this list. As a reader, I prefer her W the Whore work. But this album is something of a perfect object: the long size of the book and the shape of the characters. The imagery is “personal” (who else could it have come from except for Feuchtenberger) but also communicates something that is not about unadulterated expression. As in many of my favorite works of art, the drawings are labored over not to achieve perfection, but to achieve shapes that convey a world of thought and feelings beyond the narrow scope of our brains. These drawings are for our hearts, all the parts of it.
Hero’s Life and Death Triumphant by Frédéric Coché. For the scale, the ambition, and for the heroic achievement, this work has to be on a ten best list, even if I find it somewhat lacking as a story. The overall punch of it is enough: page after page of gorgeous etched comics. Comics are always hard work, and the noble effort of this volume is always inspiring to me.
The White Boy page by Garrett Price from the Smithsonian collection. Specifically, I’m talking about the page with the large bottom portion featuring a richly drawn sky. That single page seems to be a secret influence lurking over the ambitions of many a contemporary cartoonist: the simplicity of the figures combined with the devil-may-care attitude that went into the drawing of the landscape.
The Kin-der-Kids by Lyonel Feininger. I prefer it to Little Nemo by a long shot. I find it more interesting on a technical drawing level, and the shapes to be far more pleasing aesthetically. Most of all, it has the visual bravado of Nemo, but it happens to be full of beautiful writing and stories. A pity that it was out of print for so long, only to be reprinted to mass indifference.
Krazy Kat by George Herriman. My Krazy Kat collections will never be sold when I’m short on money or left behind when I move. I’ll keep going back to them for my entire life. When I’m feeling down, they make me happy. When I want to see some imaginative drawings, I know there will always be something in them that I missed before. When I want to see everything that comics can be—a world totally with its own laws of language, design, and logic that is still more inviting than intimidating—Krazy Kat is what I always want to go to first. As a work of art that makes you feel alive as a human and as an artist, Krazy Kat is still my favorite.
The complete works of Edward Gorey. The last page in the last big Gorey collection is a heartbreak: a ruled page, awaiting detail. Gorey kept making books, and I can’t think of a clunker. Together, they are full of all kinds of stories, all kinds of shapes and figures. The scope of Gorey’s ideas and tones are so vast that I don’t understand why he isn’t talked about more in comics circles. Often, with someone of Gorey’s caliber, I have the sinking suspicion that the work is “too good” to be engaged in comics terms. It has such a distance from the rest of the pack that it becomes to seem like a strange anomaly.
The Walking Man by Jiro Taniguchi. Hard to limit myself to one work of manga, but this one always leaps to mind first. I sometimes have the guilty feeling of liking Taniguchi more than Hergé, and this is the work that usually pushes me into that thinking (Hergé would have never let |
Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.Head coach Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers speaks to an official in the first half against the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium on Sept. 10, 2015, in Foxboro, Mass. (Jim Rogash/Getty Images)
Paul Smith, the chief of Cecil Volunteer Fire Station No. 2 in Washington County, Pa., was in his feelings after Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin decided to keep all the players in the locker room during the national anthem Sunday.
So Smith logged into his Facebook account and got all white-bothered and indignant and posted, “Tomlin just added himself to the list of no good niggers. Yes I said it,” WTKA-TV reports.
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Here’s the thing: Don’t be all gangster on social media and even be so bold as to end your missive with “Yes I said it,” and then get all passive and apologetic when you’re caught. What did you think was going to happen? Be as gangster as you were when you were typing that bullshit.
But of course, now that he’s being called out for his racist and derogatory statement, the chief, who was out of town on vacation, is sending back all kinds of apologies.
“I am embarrassed at this. I want to apologize,” Smith wrote on his Facebook page, according to WTKA-TV. “I was frustrated and angry at the Steelers not standing the anthem. This had nothing to do with my Fire Department. I regret what I said.
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“My fire department should have never been dragged into this,” he added. “It was a bad judgement by me, for which I am very embarrassed, for them and my township.”
The Cecil Township Board of Supervisors issued a statement viewed by WTKA-TV noting that they are “deeply disturbed” by Chief Smith’s comments:
The Cecil Township Board of Supervisors is deeply disturbed by the comments made by Volunteer Chief Smith, and in no way, shape or form condone his comments. In that the volunteer fire departments are independent entities, the board suggests contacting the president of the Muse Fire Department regarding any further comment or action.
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Smith called Tomlin a nigger and he didn’t apologize for calling him a nigger. But this is Trump’s America, so chances are good that nothing will happen to him.
Read more at CBS Pittsburgh.By Michele Brittany
I come into this panel with a severe bias: I think Mouse Guard is a beautiful series and yes, I’m a fan girl. I’ve followed and collected Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 from the first single issues published in February 2006. While I got to meet David Petersen at the San Diego International Comic Con in 2008, I hadn’t seen him since then. So, it was a wonderful opportunity to attend “The World of Mouse Guard” panel.
Hosting the panel was Rebecca “Tay” Taylor, editor at Archaia and BOOM! Studios as well as the man himself, writer and artist David Petersen. Taylor and Petersen announced that Mouse Guard is turning 10 next year – Petersen chuckled saying, “it doesn’t seem like 10 years” – and to honor of the occasion, Archaia has several products planned.
First, Baldwin the Brave and Other Tales will collect the Mouse Guard stories that have been released in limited numbers from Free Comic Book Day the past four years. In addition, the book will include two new stories.
The second edition of the Mouse Guard role playing game will have revised rules and improved graphics. However, there’s a new game planned called Swords and Strongholds and right now, there’s a kickstarter going on. The game costs $30 in the US. The game features new card art and tokens made from his molds.
Volume 3 of Legends of the Guard will collect short stories from several talents in the industry today. Dustin Nguyen, Skottie Young, Nicole Gustafsson, Mark Buckingham, Hannah Christensen, and others that Peterson could not publicly confirm yet. Petersen reminded the audience that the Legends series is based on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Although the stories will not written by Petersen, he did say that he will draw the tavern where the stories will be judged – the best story told will clear their bar tab for the evening.
Art of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard 2005 – 2015 is a collection of Petersen’s early drawings, models, a documentation of his artistic process as well as art and pin-ups from the Legends series.
In addition, The Weasel War of 1149 will be a brand new series that Petersen states will be a big story. In fact, it will be an eight-issue story arc that includes the first meeting with Liam.
If that wasn’t enough to make any Mouse Guard fan squeal with anticipation, Petersen announced he is working with Skelton Crew Studio, yeah the same one that has worked on Locke & Key, to create replica Mouse Guard weapons. Petersen was initially skeptical that fans would want to hang a 5-foot broadsword above the fireplace mantle; however, he was assured the replicas would be more mouse size appropriate. The first replica will be Lieam’s sword and sheath, available for pre-order in about two weeks.
Need something a little softer? Well, the Saxon and Kenzie plushies are coming in two weeks as well. No, too soft? How about the Baldwin marionette, which Petersen explained would be around 7 inches in height. There is also the possibility that there will be customization options, so you can order your own marionette. The marionette will be available around November 7. And that concluded the anniversary plans.
There was one more special announcement: a special reading from Hal Lublin (The Thrilling Adventure Hour), Meredith Salenger (Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Hollywood Heights) and comic book artist Mark Buckingham (Marvelman, Hellblazer and Fables). Each read from the forthcoming Baldwin the Brave. The readings were a wonderful surprise and it was a moving experience to see and hear each story read.
There are exciting times ahead for Mouse Guard fans! I, for one, look forward to the months ahead.
All panel photographs by Michele Brittany.
Michele Brittany is an independent popular culture scholar and semi-professional photographer and editor of the forthcoming title James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy (McFarland & Company). She regularly posts reviews and analysis on the spy/espionage genre on her blog, Spyfi & Superspies.
About Hannah Means Shannon Editor-in-Chief at Bleeding Cool. Independent comics scholar and former English Professor. Writing books on magic in the works of Alan Moore and the early works of Neil Gaiman.
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None foundTaiwan has long been a dormant problem for the U.S.-China relationship, successfully shelved by the Three Joint Communiqués of 1972, 1979 and 1982, with the last serious incident being the 1995 Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s actions in the Asia-Pacific region could signal an end to the modus vivendi that has existed for almost fifty years. While President Trump’s decision to accept a congratulatory call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen did not herald a new understanding of the “One China” policy, as many immediately thought, it is not clear yet what the new administration’s China policy will be. Under Obama, many strategists worried that the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait was moving in China’s favor, as arms deals to the island were delayed and China grew in strength. Trump’s administration appears to be seeking to redress this issue. A new arms package to Taiwan is on the drawing board and among the names being considered for undersecretary of state for policy is Randy Schriver. An Asia expert, Schriver served in the State Department as an aide to Richard Armitage and is currently the president of the Project 2049 Institute, an Asian security think tank based in Washington. Schriver would be a strong pick for any president intent on bolstering its ties with Taipei. However, critics are already pointing out holes in the president’s plan to strengthen relations. There are recent reports that Trump is actually continuing to perpetuate the United States’ lackluster support for Taiwan as the new deal has stalled, seemingly in an effort to appease China.
The U.S.-Taiwan-China Triangle
Beijing’s enduring hostility towards Taiwan has meant that Washington and Taipei have mutual-defense agreements to safeguard its “independence.” In 1979, the United States switched its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing as the legal representatives of China and acknowledged Taiwan as a part of One China. However, that same year Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which had the aim of enabling “Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability,” and the United States is mandated to provide that capability. Both Republican and Democrat presidents have been committed to the relationship and provided Taiwan with a variety of advanced military assets. For instance, in 1992, H. W. Bush sold Taiwan 150 F-16 jets at $6 billion, and the Clinton administration supplied missiles and radar systems to greatly improve Taiwan’s air-defense capabilities.
China always objected to the sale but was never in a position to offer any real opposition until recently. As a result of growing Chinese economic and military strength, U.S. deals have become smaller and met with stiffer backlash. In 2005, Beijing passed the Anti-Secession Law which formalized into policy China’s long-standing rule to use “non-peaceful means” to ensure its territorial integrity should the Taiwanese government declare independence. Signaling that Beijing was no longer afraid to voice its intentions openly and become more assertive in reducing U.S. influence with Taiwan. In 2010, Beijing did not only condemn a $6 billion package, but also sanctioned some participating U.S. companies. It would take until 2015 before Obama authorized another package and it would be a markedly smaller at $1.83 billion. Announced with little fanfare, it still attracted Beijing’s ire. Upon hearing of the deal, the Chinese vice foreign minister said the move “severely damaged China’s sovereignty and security interests.” A year later Obama would even block a smaller $1 billion sale, an obstruction that was reported by the Washington Free Beacon to have considerably damaged Taiwan’s defensive capabilities as it contained spare fighter-jet parts and additional missiles. The move coincided with Trump’s phone call with Tsai, giving the impression that the Obama administration prioritized good relations with China over U.S. obligations of the Taiwan Act.
Randy Schriver and Trump’s China Policy
Trump’s China rhetoric has signaled a significant break with Obama’s Asia-Pacific strategy. A new arms deal on the table could be one such indication that Trump has no intention of going soft on China, as some critics allege. According to sources, the administration may be considering providing to Taiwan rocket systems and anti-ship missiles, with companies such a Lockheed Martin being linked to the deal. Lockheed is the manufacturer of the THAAD missiles system currently being deployed to South Korea, this raises the possibility that the system could also be sold to Taiwan. Even discussions of THAAD could prove troublesome as Beijing has already raised considerable objections to the missiles system in South Korea, even going so far as to apply economic pressure on South Korean companies.
If the rumor mill is to be believed, then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is considering Randy Schriver, a prominent Taiwanese supporter, to fill the position of undersecretary of defense for policy. With a strong network among U.S. allies in the Asia Pacific, Schriver would be a reassuring figure for America’s friends in the region. He is also closely linked to Richard Armitage, having worked as his chief of staff and senior policy advisor when Armitage was deputy secretary of state. Schriver is known to be a vocal proponent of strong U.S. engagement with Taiwan and maintains a tough stance against Chinese expansionism. In a piece he co-authored in The National Interest, after the infamous Trump-Taiwan phone call, Schriver wrote that “higher-level engagement with Taiwan serves U.S. national interests and values,” arguing that the phone call was, in fact, “a good first step” towards rebalancing the trilateral China-Taiwan-U.S. relationship.
Schriver himself has called for the United States to provide submarine technology and vertical, short takeoff and landing fighter jets. If rumors about the new arms package are true, then Schriver could be well placed to carry this particular agreement through, as he is already familiar with the weapon systems and their capabilities. He has long been a proponent of balance as a means of deterrence.
Objectives and Issues
The United States must ensure that deals are no longer deferred and it delivers equipment that fits Taiwan’s defense policy of stopping an invasion force before it reaches the island. Schriver’s appeal for the jets to be supplied to Taiwan could be a bad call. In 2010, Cross-Strait military analyst Mark Stokes told a U.S. congressional commission that “every citizen on Taiwan lives within seven minutes of destruction” and in 2015 Beijing bought from Russia several S-400 Triumf, an antiaircraft missile system. Expected to be fully operational by 2020, the missile launchers, which have a range of 400 kilometers, will allow China to strike aircraft over Taiwan, essentially giving China air supremacy in the territory. The Chinese ballistic-missile buildup was examined in a Taiwanese defense report, which stated that by 2020 China would be in a position to invade the island and successfully repel a U.S. counterattack. With the sheer amount of Chinese missiles pointed at Taiwan, it would be unwise for them to buy large amounts of expensive aircraft, which could be destroyed before getting the chance to take off. It is, however, encouraging that Schriver has also called for the sale of submarine technology to Taipei, something the country has been seeking for some time. Advanced submarine technology alongside the defensive missile systems, alleged to already be part of the arms package, would make a suitable combination for an over-the-horizon defense package. In a way, imitating China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) might be Taiwan’s strongest approach to defense. What’s good enough for the gander should be good enough for the goose.
The administration is struggling at the domestic level. At the moment, while Trump’s foreign-policy focus is concentrated in the Pacific, he has gone over one hundred days and has failed to appoint key Asia policy positions across the U.S. government, hampering strategy and slowing relationship-building in an increasingly heated region. It might well be that the arms package never gets off the table, with figures inside the White House stalling the deal to appease Beijing. On the other hand, for an administration that negotiates across the board, the arms package delay might well be connected to the administration’s Korea strategy. As the situation in the Korean Peninsula is ongoing Trump could be using the prospect of a large Taiwanese arms package as leverage in the crisis. For instance, he could offer to remove items from the package or continue to defer it in exchange for tougher Chinese sanctions on the Hermit Kingdom. After the Syrian strike, Trump has developed U.S. foreign policy with Chinese characteristics, keeping Beijing guessing. China frequently caught America off guard in the past, Trump could be playing the Chinese at their own game.Last week, in response to the deadly terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, gay right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos organized an anti-Islam press conference, during which he kissed fellow anti-Islam activist and self-proclaimed “homophobe” Gavin McInnes as their way of saying “f**k you, Islam.”
Needless to say, this display did not sit well with viciously anti-gay activist Theodore Shoebat, who released a video today calling for both men to be put to death.
“The only thing I can do is conclude that [McInnes] is a sodomite,” Shoebat said, “Gavin McInnes is a sodomite plant, he is a deviant and he is worthy of death … You are lower than the lowest bacteria. Pigs have more decency than you, Gavin McInnis. Swine has more decency, there are dogs that have more decency. What a sick, perverted individual you are! You are on the road straight to hell, Gavin McInnes. You are fooling them. You are full of demons. Your soul has been utterly possessed by the diabolical. You are worthy of execution! You are worthy of death. Bottom line.”
“And that faggot that he kissed, Milo Yiannopoulos, is also worthy of death,” Shoebat later declared. “If I had the power, I would string him up, put a noose around his neck, put him before a firing squad, any means necessary to annihilate these bastards. It’s just so disgusting.”The Top Ten IT Pro-Dictions
The SolarWinds High Council of Head Geeks has gathered their sage and eternally savvy wisdom. You would be wise to heed their words
~ Knowstradamus
SolarWinds 2015 Head Geek Predictions
As 2014 comes to a close and 2015 begins, SolarWinds tapped its band of experts – the Head Geeks – to take a look inside their crystal balls and provide a glimpse into IT trends to watch for this year.
To complement the IT predictions from the Head Geeks, we’d like you to share your view of each (50 thwack points will be awarded for replies!). And don’t be afraid to go out on a limb and suggest a “paranoid perspective” for 2015 – Will networks become so complex that they are nearly impossible to manage? Security vulnerabilities so vast that all companies will experience at least one? Will the hybrid cloud transition create more headaches than benefits? Will business end users stage a revolt? Be sure to @mention each geek to continue the conversation with them about their predictions. Here are each of their thwack handles:
Kong Yang - @kong.yang
Lawrence Garvin – @LGarvin
Patrick Hubbard - @patrick.hubbard
Leon Adato - @adatole
Thomas LaRock - @sqlrockstar
Throughout the year, we plan to revisit these predictions and see how are becoming a reality, or instead, how many are turning out to be a completely paranoid fantasy.Before World War II, the swastika was a sign of strength, luck, and other decidedly un-Nazi-like good vibes. Unfortunately, it only takes one angry little man with a Chaplin mustache to ruin a perfectly nice symbol (and mustache, for that matter) for the whole world. Here we are, almost seven decades after the guy's death, and the swastika is still one of the most recognizable and viscerally despised emblems around.
ManWoman, a Canadian artist and poet, has been trying to reclaim the swastika from cue ball-headed bigots since the 1960s, when he was tasked with the mission via a series of powerful dreams. As he describes it, he fell into a trance and his soul "soared up into the Womb of the Sacred," where an old guy in white robes showed him the symbol and told him to redeem it. Two hundred swastika tattoos, a couple of near-beatdowns, and one failed marriage later, ManWoman's mission is finally starting to pay off. He has written a book, Gentle Swastika, Reclaiming the Innocence, was featured prominently in the 2010 film, My Swastika, and is now the unofficial grandfather of the Reclaim the Swastika movement.
And in case you were wondering, ManWoman is not transgender. The name was given to him by the same "dream people" who gave him his quest. It has been his legal name since 1971, but for some reason Zuck still kicked him off Facebook. You can call him "Manny" for short.
VICE: Can you tell me about the moment when you were given your mission to reclaim the swastika?
ManWoman: I had a whole year where I had all these experiences of my heart being flooded with love and of blowing up through this incredible swerving energy, up into what could only be described as "The Sacred." My spirit was totally liberated from my body, and it was this swirling vortex,which in my later dreams—about 1967—started being represented by a white swastika. There was an old man who came up to me and he had long, white hair, a beard, and white clothes. He marked my throat with a white swastika and said that I needed to take this on as my mission and redeem the symbol. And the words were, "So that it would strike love into all hearts that beheld it."
Of course, my mum was a Polish immigrant and her sister and baby were put into Auschwitz at one point, so I grew up with all the usual prejudices against the swastika because of what it represented to us during the war. So I kinda choked on this mission. But I kept dreaming about little girls with skipping ropes covered in swastikas, waitresses in cafés wearing dresses covered in swastikas, and funny animals shaped like swastikas. And it was all so playful.
Sounds like it. So when did you discover the swastika was not actually shorthand for soulless evil?
Well, my mother thought I was having a nervous breakdown, and all my friends were kind of whispering behind my back. I kept saying, "The swastika's a sacred symbol." Then a friend of mine said, "Oh, I got this beadwork from the Apache Indians down in the southern states," and it had a swastika on it. Then another guy comes along and he says, "Oh, here's a girls’ hockey team from Edmonton," [with swastikas on their uniforms]. His grandmother was one of the girls. And so I just started piecing the history of it together. I found out the Buddhists use it and the Hindus use it and all the North American Indians used it, and it just goes on and on.
OK. I get the mission now, but why the tattoos?
I got one tiny swastika tattoo on my baby finger in 1969, after I was having all these dreams. I thought, “Well, that's my one tattoo!” Then in 1970 I tattooed my hands because I kept dreaming that Hitler had taken the swastika from me and I was an ancient and had to restore it. So I did that and really, really freaked out my wife. And then I'd had dreams about my third eye waking up in a kind of mystical experience, so I started tattooing the third eye on my forehead. That was kind of the end of that marriage because it was just too shocking and too hard. Looking back, would I have done something different? I don't know, I don't know. Some people were calling me obsessed, and that might have been true, but for me I was obsessed in a good way.
So you felt the tattoos were necessary?
Oh yeah. Dream after dream after dream. I've got over 200 swastikas tattooed on my body. There are so many different versions of the swastika around the world from different cultures, so I had them all tattooed on my arms and chest and back.
Have you had any confrontations because of your tattoos?
Oh, man. I was in Venice Beach one time—"Muscle Beach"—where they're all pushing weights and stuff. All of a sudden I'm surrounded by three great big Jewish guys with muscles bulging out everywhere. They were mad. They looked at my arms and they were ready to rip me in three different directions. So I just started telling them about the history of the symbol and my mission and, lo and behold, I guess I've got a golden tongue, because they didn't kill me.
ManWoman says he got the dove-filled swastika on his back because he "was trying to create a swastika even [his] Jewish friends could love."
You’ve recently started to get more positive attention though, right?
There's I-don't-know-how-many thousands and thousands of people who connect with me about the swastika and the history. And now there's swastika blogs and all kinds of pages on Facebook and it's just taking off like crazy. So instead of getting the sand kicked in my face, it turns into people saying, "Thank you for doing this," and honoring me for toughing it out and being kind of the granddaddy of the movement.
And another thing: everybody wants me to tattoo a little tiny swastika on them! Well, I've never tattooed anyone, and now all of a sudden I've tattooed about 30 people with a little swastika, and some of these are very serious, top-of-the-line tattoo artists. But they just want a little token from me because they appreciate and admire what I've done.
Right now, I'm waiting for a guy to show up, his name's Alek Os Beck. He's a longboard racer. He's got a great big swastika tattooed on his chest but it's tipped up at an angle, so people immediately make assumptions. He's passing through Cranbrook and he wants me to modify his tattoo so it looks like more of a sacred swastika. I hope I'm up to the job.
So are you going to get any more swastika tattoos?
When I went to Europe, all these famous artists wanted to give me free tattoos and I just.. I'm 74. I'm done with tattoos. I did it for a purpose, because I was inspired by my dreams. But I'm not having those dreams now, I'm having different kinds of dreams. So it'd be pointless for me to keep it up, I think.
But your mission is coming to life—yay!
It's just been so magical and it's been supported by—you could call it "spirit" if you want, but it's been supported by inner forces beyond our knowledge.
I'm happy now that I have followed that path, because there are so many people who have joined forces with me. They're making my life very exciting right now.
Image by Tas LimurCould Benitez save Newcastle from the drop (Picture: Getty)
Rafael Benitez would consider taking the Newcastle United job if he receives assurances over the club’s ambitions, according to reports.
The Magpies are currently bogged down in a relegation battle under Steve McLaren, who is widely expected to be relieved of his duties in the near future.
Former Everton and Manchester United boss David Moyes is thought to be on the verge of assuming control at the club, with the Scot reportedly indicating his willingness to take the job.
But according to the Shields Gazette, Benitez is also a top target for the Magpies, and the Spaniard would consider succeeding McClaren at St James’ Park.
The former Real Madrid and Liverpool manager does want assurances over the club’s ambition, but is arguably the highest-profile candidate Newcastle could attract at this time.Goatboy takes you through the meanest 4 lists at the recent BAO Tournament and where the game’s meta is right now!
First up, we have this excerpt from TastyTaste over at Blood of Kittens who attended the event about what the 40K meta is look like in summer 2015
What I saw is what I mostly expected: the rise of Demi-companies! Space Marines were out in force, I haven’t seen the break down, but I am sure they represented at least 30% of the field. Most of the Space Marine armies had Drop Pods lots and lots of Drop Pods. Space Marines are certainly here to stay especially with the ITC format, which favors lots of Objective Secured units. I did find a surprisingly high number of Daemonkin armies. This seemed like a hard counter to all the Space Marines, but what it really meant was Heldrakes. SO many Heldrakes! These meta busting flyers are back, providing a surefire way to handle not only marines, but Eldar Jetbikes and host of other typical units. I still felt like their wasn’t a lot of Eldar players, but of the ones who did show up performed well. The nerf to D must have something to do with it.
Below links will take you to the armylist PDF, so you can check them out in detail:
Chaos Daemons Main with CSM Ally
Mr. Alan has won another big GT. This makes 3 in a row and he is looking pretty good utilizing another Daemons based list. It seems other multiple GT winners have utilized the overwhelming power of Chaos Daemons and this time he brings an old favorite – a big MC versions. This list seems to go in and out of favor as people always enjoy playing with MC’s and this is one of the best utilizing that unit type. This list looks so much like the old 6th edition standby it even has the Bastion Jesus in there as well to give Alan something to hide behind. Each MC is a threat in its own right and mixed with a locked in way to give all the MC’s a 2+ save (Shrouding) as well as Invisibility Options and Daemon powers you have a list that will just power up and if rolling hot will be hard to stop. It even has built in Maelstrom generators with Daemon summoning to help ensure he always has fodder to camp out on an objective. I loved playing my old Monster Smash list and it is great to see one do well. Make no mistake Alan could of probably brought a wet moldy sock to the event and won 3 games with it.
War Concovation Detachment (Skitarri/Ad Mech/Knight)/Assassin/Flesh Tearers of Drop Pods
Geoff is a good buddy and it is great seeming him do so well. I wish it was with the Tyranid list but hey – this isn’t a Marine Demi Company or Eldar list so props should be given. It is amazing what a ton of free upgrades will do for you as well as give other battle brother armies access to extremely powerful deployment options (pods). If it wasn’t for such a rapid fire release schedule I think you would see more lists like this show up. It can put out so much damage quickly that an ill prepared opponent can easily get crippled and left in the dust as their superior weapon choices give them all options to deal with any threat. I wonder how many times the Culexus actually was useful. We all knew that drop Grav would be powerful and mixing it with a cheaper unit that benefits from all the extra Ad Mech rules makes for some broken turns.
Eldar CAD with Aspect Host and Dark Eldar Allies
Here is a list that forgoes the magic Combos – non scattering D Scythes, Seer Council, and even massed Warp Spyders – and looks to just utilize the synergy of good troops, consistent shooting, and better then average Elite options. When you play any event except to see 20+ Scatter bikes when fighting most Eldar players. It is interesting only seeing one Venom in the list as I did play a game at War-games con versus Venom’d up Fire Dragons and think that combo is a pretty strong idea. Again I expect to see at least a unit of Warp Spyders in any Aspect host so it is interesting not seeing one in this list. The Wraith Knight is built out in how I think most Eldar players should have theirs. It needs to be utilized as the “oh sh$t” unit versus most armies and force players to make bad decisions when trying to deal with it. There isn’t much to say with the list other then the build is very efficient and will be a pain for a lot of lists.
Tau Farsight Conclave with Firebase Cadre
Israel has probably one of the prettiest Tau armies I have seen and this guy knows how to play them. Bullets, big monsters, and troops that can deploy anywhere makes for an extremely proficient ITC contender. It is great to see him do so well because even though you are getting shot up by bullets you are still playing against a pretty army. I am wondering how much of this build will survive the new Tau book. Big props to getting up there and winning all his matches as well. The Tau book is getting long in the tooth as newer books showcase more bullets, rerollable saves, and other crazy options that bring a tear to the fish man’s eyes.
The other lists in the Top 4 had a Greentide mixed with Bully boyz do well. The Greentide seems to be the defacto good Ork list utilizing a tough as hell unit. I like the Bully Boyz as a fearless counter assault unit as well as objective holder. It can be tough knocking off 8, 2+ armor save wounds. We had a Demi Company Marine army as well and I expect to see them more often in events. Lots of bodies, decent firepower with Cents and the ability to always hold an objective is going to win a lot of games. I do worry on the time frame to complete games with it so it isn’t for everyone. It does make you want to look all over Ebay for built Drop Pods as they are a pain to put together. We had a Khan version of a Demi Company that fits into a list build some buddies talked about. Scouting tanks filled with Grav can do a number on a lot of lists that have to start on the ground. We round other the other top 8 with an Eldar army mixed with a Tau Firebase. Not the most ingenious build but if you like to roll lots of bullets that list will provide it for you. I think if we had ITC allow more GC you would see some multiple Wraith Knight builds showing up – but then I expect massed Grav would be the “counter”. Congrats to all the winners and I wish I was there. Hopefully next year I can make the trip out there as I always enjoy playing events held by those dastardly handsome Frontline Crew.
Which list do like the best?NORFOLK — Two of the questions that have been on the minds of many Norfolk parents: Is Booker T. Washington High School closing and what’s going on with the removal of several principals?
At a crowded school board meeting Wednesday night there were some answers — and plenty more questions.
The meeting, which began at 7 p.m., carried into the later hours of the night as 29 people signed up to speak on issues regarding the demotion of principals in the district and rumors of the possible closing of Booker T. Washington High School, which is suffering from substandard conditions.
Booker T. Washington High School rumored closing
In recent weeks rumors began to spread through social media after an article was published in the New Journal and Guide discussing whether the high school was being set up to fail, leading to its closure.
The rumors were said to be untrue according to School Board Chair Rodney Jordan, who took time at the beginning of the meeting to clarify with members of the Concerned Citizens of Booker T. Washington High School in attendance.
While the news eased a few worries of the crowd of “Bookers,” as some called themselves, speakers still addressed growing concerns regarding the conditions of the school.
According to several speakers, the historic high school has been deteriorating over the years. They said the roofing and lighting is sub-par and mold and mildew have built up in parts of the school.
For Tony Brothers, who graduated from Booker T. Washington in 1982, the current conditions are bleak, resulting in a negative demeanor within current students that he has met.
“When the rumor flies around that Booker T. is going to be closed, the rumor is flying around because the school already looks like it’s already closed,” said Brothers.
According to Jordan, the board has set facilities and maintenance of schools as a priority, working with an educational planning firm to assess the condition and needs of particular schools and recommend repairs and renovations, including Booker T. High School.
“Not only are they doing assessments of Booker T., they are also doing assessments of other facilities, and this is something that we’ve been working on for some time,” he said.
While the school district has received $4 million in maintenance funds from the city in the past, the city allocated half that amount for the incoming school year.
Councilman Paul Riddick acknowledged budgetary issues that have impacted Booker T. Washington.
“I plan to go back to the other seven members of the council as well as the city manager to see what we can do to help you out in that effort to make Booker T. Washington a healthier school in terms of removing mold and things of that nature,” Riddick said. “I’m sure that we could find the money somewhere.”
School approves the reassignment and demotion of 4 principals
Staff members, parents and students from several Title I schools — schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families that receive additional federal funding — rallied once again for their principals who, following a board vote, will be removed from their administrative positions.
Affected schools include Ruffner Middle School, Southside STEM Academy at Campostella, Jacox Elementary, St. Helena Elementary, and James Monroe Elementary.
Jordan said the decision to reassign the principals at the five schools was recommended by Superintendent Melinda Boone and was later voted and upheld by the board earlier this month.
“The superintendent has offered the principals other employment or assignment opportunities within the division,” Jordan said. “The principals have to determine whether or not they want to accept those assignments and those contracts.”
According to Jordan, four out of the five principals accepted their re-assignments while Jacox Elementary’s principal, Dr. Rohan Cumberbatch-Smith, reportedly resigned.
Each school was a part of a list of 15 facilities that were denied accreditation by the
Virginia Department of Education this past school year after failing to meet the requirements for full or provisional accreditation for four consecutive years.
According to the VDOE, in order for an elementary or middle school to become fully accredited, student scores on Standards Of Learning assessments must reach at least 75 percent in English and 70 percent in math, history and science.
Representatives from Southside STEM Academy and Ruffner came in full force to rally for their principals, Dr. Rhonda Ambrose and Sallie Cooke, as faculty and parents took to the podium to address board members.
According to Chareese Cherry, a parent of a Ruffner student, Cooke was principal at Ruffner for two years prior to her removal, which Cherry said was rumored to be caused by low SOL scores and teacher morale.
“I know that SOL scores are important to all of us [because] we all want our students to have this stellar education, but when you have students who aren’t eating at night and students who can’t even have their clothes washed, and you have |
two waves in rough seas, a mascon may be able to yank a ship underwater in 3 seconds or less, and continue pulling it all the way to the bottom. Since air is a much thinner medium than water, a mascon’s effect is even greater on aircraft, as evident with satellites.
3 Aliens
Easy enough to explain, given that they’re still pure science fiction. You could supply your own text to this entry, really. In general, all stories of aliens causing bizarre disappearances in the Triangle center on abductions. Remember, once you say “aliens” anything goes. The aliens are evidently curious about humans and periodically snatch a few from the Triangle for who-knows-what. Spielberg used this theory in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” depicting the airmen of Flight 19 stepping off the mothership at the end.
This theory has been put forth to explain the Mary Celeste, though it sailed a few hundred miles north of Bermuda, not through the Triangle. One of the most mysterious ship disappearances is that of the USS Cyclops, an armed Navy bulk cargo ship transporting 11,000 tons of raw manganese for use in munitions. Raw manganese ore is not flammable, so if there was an explosion, the manganese did not cause it. A boiler might have exploded, and that could easily sink even a huge ship, but if so, the wooden parts of the ship scattered across the water would not have sunk, and the Gulf Stream would have carried them northward along the East Coast, likely washing up on Bermuda’s beaches.
The Cyclops left Rio de Janeiro on 16 February 1918 for Baltimore, Maryland. It stopped in Bahia, Brazil on schedule on 20 February, then stopped in Barbados for a check to see if it was overloaded. It was deemed secure and seaworthy and departed on 4 March, north through the center of the Triangle, and was never seen again. Stories like this one have given rise to the theory of aliens beaming entire ships and planes into spaceships.
2 Rip in the Spacetime Continuum
Even less probable than alien adbuctions, but then, how much do we fully understand about Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity? He theorised that space and time combine to form one entity, and that everything in the Universe sits on this space-time, which, in effect, acts and reacts like a fabric suspended at the ends. A very massive object like the Sun rests on and indents this fabric more deeply than a less massive object like Earth. Black holes are just that, holes in the fabric of space-time. What’s on the other side? Today’s mathematics hit a brick wall at that point. No one knows.
A rip in the space-time continuum is not necessarily a black hole. Many are called Einstein-Rosen Bridges, or more popularly, wormholes. The shortest distance between two points is, in this case, not a straight line, but zero. The wormhole effectively teleports anything that enters it from Point A to B instantly, regardless of the distance, and Points A and B are not necessarily different physical locations, but could be the same location in different time periods. So you can travel from Earth to some planet in the Upsilon Andromedae star system instantly, rather than spending 44 years traveling at the speed of light. According to General Relativity, superluminal (faster than light) travel is impossible unless the laws of physics are first discarded. It also theorises that the laws of physics cease to exist inside a wormhole.
Because a full mathematical description of wormholes has not yet been formulated, it is, at least for now, possible (just not feasible) that a wormhole exists in the Triangle, though not at all times, that this wormhole instantly transports anything entering it to another location in the Universe, or to another time in the same location. Possible credence for this theory centers on Carolyn Cascio, who was mentioned in detail on another list.
In brief, she was a veteran pilot who chartered vacations in the Bahamas. On 7 June 1964, she flew from Nassau for Grand Turk Island, the largest of the Turks Islands, and densely populated. It has lots of houses, condos, hotel resorts, an airport, and many other signs that it is inhabited, but when Cascio reached Grand Turk, she radioed ahead that she thought she was lost. She stated that the island was the same shape and size of Grand Turk, but was utterly bereft of any sign of human habitation. It had nothing but woods and beaches on it.
Her radio transmissions were received by Grand Turk airport, which radioed back that she was at the right island, and could land anytime, but she didn’t. She radioed that she could not find the airport, even though she was flying directly over it. She circled it over a dozen times, being radioed frantically from the tower, but never responded. Her transmissions indicated that her radio was not receiving, though the airport received hers, and though in full view of it for 30 minutes, she finally flew off back the way she had come, and neither she, nor her passenger, nor her plane was ever seen again. The above story is true.
The mathematical theories involved with how wormholes work are not yet fully described, so until the possibility of a wormhole in the Bermuda Triangle is proven or disproven, it must be construed as possible for Cascio to have entered one at Point A sometime during her trip to Grand Turk and exited at the same location in a time, Point B, before humans had inhabited Grand Turk. She was, then, unable to fly back through the same rip in the space-time continuum.
1 Submerged Island of Atlantis
This theory is argued based on the evidence of apparently man-made structures in 15 to 20 feet of water, just off the northwest coast of North Bimini Island, about 50 miles east of Miami, Florida. These structures have come to be called the Bimini Road, and they were only discovered by a scuba diver on 2 September 1968. They are limestone rocks, fairly rectangular for the most part, and all roughly but neatly fitted together as a pavement about half a mile long. There are two other similar structures between this road and the island’s beach, also of limestone blocks. The blocks range in size from 6 feet to 13 feet wide. The other two roads are about 150 feet and 200 feet long, comprised of smaller blocks.
The rectangular shape of most of the blocks, as well as their orderly arrangement in straight lines of up to half a mile lead many to surmise that they are man-made, cut from limestone quarries and set up as either a road or wall. The longer road is arranged as if it were a section of wall surrounding North Bimini Island. It may be possible that the Bimini Road is the only remnant of the sunken Island of Atlantis shallow enough to have been discovered.
Plato theorised that Atlantis flourished about 9,600 BC, and had been far advanced technologically, artistically, and politically beyond his Ancient Greece, the most advanced society in the world at the time. He described it as having lain “in front of the Pillars of Heracles,” which are the Strait of Gibraltar, and that because of a horrible cataclysm, perhaps a volcanic eruption, “in one single day and night of misfortune, the Island of Atlas vanished from the face of the earth.”
It is no secret that there may have been such an island; the Atlantic Ocean is named after the same root, Atlas. If Atlantis is there at the bottom of the ocean, perhaps its civilisation was so technologically advanced as to survive submerging to an average Bermuda Triangle depth of about 3.8 miles. Sonar bathymetry maps do not show any anomalous underwater features in the Atlantic Ocean other than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but Atlantis could have been a very flat Island that would not register on sonar equipment.
The Atlanteans’ technology could have been so far beyond even ours today that they could protect themselves from the pressure of 4 miles of water on top of them, and their descendants continue to live at least partly beneath the Triangle. Their civilization could have the power to disrupt the electromagnetic field, sink ships, down aircraft, and salvage sunken wreckage.Incident On School Bus Exemplifies Dangers Of Using Police In Schools
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
SOUTHAVEN, MS – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Mississippi today filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging Southaven, Mississippi police and DeSoto County school officials with assaulting and racially discriminating against a group of schoolchildren riding home on a school bus.
In an egregious example of excessive and unwarranted use of force by police against students in a school setting, Southaven, Mississippi Police Sergeant Tomas Aguilar and Officer Lee Holiday responded to an argument between three students on the bus by arresting a half-dozen black students, choking and tackling a black female student and threatening to shoot the 30 students on the bus between their eyes. The entire incident was captured on videotape by a surveillance camera on the front of the bus.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi on behalf of the six students who were arrested and their parents, names as defendants Aguilar and Holiday, the city of Southaven, Mississippi, the DeSoto County School District and school district bus drivers Mary Robbins and Belinda Heyman.
"This case is a vivid and disturbing illustration of the dangers of relying on police officers to maintain order in public schools," said Jamie Dycus, an attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. "No sensible person handles an argument on a school bus by having armed police officers threaten, arrest and assault schoolchildren. What happened here was not only unlawful, but unconscionable, and those responsible must be held to account."
On August 12, 2008, an argument broke out between three students on a school bus taking DeSoto County Alternative Center students home after school. Rather than simply attempting to defuse the situation by separating the students, Robbins, who was serving as the bus monitor for the drive home, instead called the police and ordered Heyman, who was driving, to pull the bus over to the side of the road.
When Holiday and Aguilar arrived on the scene, Holiday immediately boarded the bus and verbally accosted the children, threatening to "run all your little asses in." Without making any determination as to whether any arrests were warranted, Holiday arrested the two students of color involved in the argument, telling one girl as he handcuffed her that he was going to take her "little ass down to juvenile hall." A white student who was equally involved in the argument was never arrested or charged by police, and was never subjected to discipline by the school district.
Several minutes later, after Holiday had pulled the two students he was arresting off the bus and placed them in the back of his patrol car, Aguilar boarded the bus and immediately began taunting the students by screaming, "You think this is funny?" and "Who wants to try me?" Aguilar then arrested three black students who had done nothing more than smile or laugh.
Aguilar then identified a sixth and final black student for arrest, despite the fact she had done nothing against the law. As she was walking off the bus in accordance with Aguilar's orders, she said she would be calling her mother. Aguilar responded by grabbing her by the neck, flinging her down into an empty bus seat and using the weight of his body to subdue her by landing forcibly on top of her. Aguilar then screamed into her face, "You don't talk to me like that! You don't talk to me like that! Do you understand?" Finally, Aguilar jerked the student to her feet, handcuffed her and took her from the bus.
Aguilar re-boarded the bus several minutes later and continued yelling at the children remaining on the bus, at one point screaming with his hand resting on the butt of his gun, "Y'all think this is funny? Y'all think this is funny? Wait until you get a bullet between the eyes."
In all, six students – all of them students of color - were arrested and ultimately charged with minor offenses like disturbing the peace. Aguilar is currently employed as a school resource officer at Southaven Middle School.
"The decision by the two school district officials to involve the police in an incident that involved nothing more serious than verbal arguing was irresponsible, and the behavior of the police officers was reprehensible," said Kristy Bennett, staff attorney with the ACLU of Mississippi. "There was absolutely no justification for even a single arrest, and there is no doubt that those who were arrested were singled out because of their race. The actions of the officers caught on video that day are just one more example of the problems our youth are dealing with in the school environment. The abuse of powers rampant in our schools these days is intolerable."
A copy of the ACLU's complaint is available online at: www.aclu.org/crimjustice/juv/39309lgl20090409.html
Additional information about the ACLU Racial Justice Program is available online at: www.aclu.org/racialjustice/index.html
Additional information about the ACLU of Mississippi is available online at: www.aclu-ms.orgLucasfilm just announced a new panel for Star Wars Celebration Europe! This panel is entitled “Ahsoka’s Untold Tales” and Ashley Eckstien, Dave Filoni, and Pablo Hildago will all be speakers at the panel. Check out the description:
“Join The Clone Wars and Rebels Supervising Director Dave Filoni, actress Ashley Eckstein (voice of Ahsoka Tano) and Lucasfilm Story Group’s Pablo Hidalgo to discuss untold tales of Ahsoka’s past, from her discovery by the Jedi Order as a young child, to her adventures in unproduced episodes of The Clone Wars, to the chapters of her life newly revealed in the Ahsoka novel and more!”
The panel will be held on Friday, July 15th. Ahsoka is my favorite character of all time so I’m super pumped about this panel. Hopefully all the panels are live streamed again.No one in Utah’s federal delegation has directly answered this Trump resistance group’s questions. It’s been seven weeks.
Rhett Wilkinson Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 14, 2017
Four of the six politicians have not spoken to the inquiries at all
Madalena McNeil founded Utahns Speak Out. USO has posed 15 topics of questions of Utah’s federal delegation, none of which have been directly answered. (Madalena McNeil)
Time’s up.
That’s what a resistance group to President Donald Trump is saying of the 15 topics of questions it put to Utah’s six federal representatives.
On March 10, volunteers from Utahns Speak Out delivered letters to the all-Republican delegation, “with a response — any response — requested by (March 17),” USO founder Madalena McNeil said.
As of April 26 — 47 days after USO’s one-week period passed — Utah’s senior federal senator, Sen. Orrin Hatch, and three of the state’s representatives, Reps. Rob Bishop, Jason Chaffetz and Mia Love, hadn’t spoken or made comments available to any of the inquiries since they were posed. None of the six have directly.
“We’re still waiting,” McNeil wrote. “Take a look at the questions. Why are our reps unwilling to acknowledge them?”
left to right, Sen. Mike Lee and Reps. Chris Stewart and Rob Bishop. They are three other members of Utah’s federal delegation have been posed 15 questions by the Trump resistance group Utahns Speak Out. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)
On March 15, Mike Lee answered questions during his “tele town hall,” an online function, that spoke to four of the 15 inquiries. And the afternoon of April 3, Rep. Chris Stewart gave answers in a 21-minute, 45-second Facebook video that spoke to seven of USO’s questions.
Three days prior, Stewart held an in-person town hall at West High School in Salt Lake City and perhaps could have further spoke to the questions. But he was cut off in each response to audience inquiries by a relatively raucous crowd, who routinely booed or yelled at the congressman.
The questions were designed to bring attention to USO’s advocacy that the elected officials hold meetings common in American political history. There, the representatives could gain insight as to how their constituents felt on several issues and policies resulting from the three-month-old Trump administration that many find abhorrent, volunteers of USO, Utah Indivisible and Salt Lake Indivisible have said.
Below are the questions, with any related remarks from Lee and Stewart.
1. Do you acknowledge human-caused climate change? Polluted air can cause health issues, including unsafe pregnancies, dementia, heart disease and lung cancer. Utahns need clean water and air — will you commit to keeping Utahns and Americans safe by resisting efforts to dismantle the EPA? What environmental protections will you help put in place for our future generations?
Stewart: “We have … mountains and cold air which hold the inversion in. … we have those mountains that make it very difficult for us. I myself have a personal commitment to reduce our influence on the environment. I don’t have a car in Washington; I walk wherever I go. There in Salt Lake, the vast majority of pollutants come from people who drive cars; the second, from homeowners; the third, from small businesses; and the fourth, from industry. It will take people driving less or driving more efficient cars. … this is something I personally understand; I have children who have had serious respiratory illnesses. … it’s something we would all like to fix.”
2. Efforts made by the Utah federal delegation to rescind the Bears Ears National Monument have cost our state the Utah Outdoor Retailers Convention. What will you do to replace the $45 million dollars we will lose every year and the potential $500 million we could have made with the expansion to five conventions a year?
Stewart: “When I got out of the Air Force, I was writing books. Turns out, as a writer, I could have lived anywhere in the world, but I chose Utah because I love to ski, I love to rock climb and I love to sit in my backyard and look at the mountains. I don’t know anymore… who has suggested that we take these public lands and we sell them. Maybe some lease arrangements for extractment. We want to preserve them; I want to preserve them for my children, like you do. What is the right mix in terms of allowing access? I know ranchers who have been terribly impacted by the federal restrictions… they, too, love the land and have been helped to preserve the land. … it was still pristine enough… let’s allow some of these activities to continue while preserving the lands.”
3. Do you approve of Steve Bannon’s role on the National Security Council? Why or why not? What will you do about it if you oppose the presence of a civilian on the NSC?
4. Do you support a thorough investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election? Do you support an investigation into President Trump’s potential conflicts of interest, including financial ties between President Trump and Russia, which would include a release of Trump’s tax returns? Why or why not?
Stewart: “I said before the election that Russia (was) going to try to interfere with our elections… our first hearing was last September… (intelligence committees investigating the issue) are generally bipartisan; the intel hearings are almost classified and we could do more of a bipartisan work. … we are going to continue those investigations.”
Lee: “The committees investigating (Russia’s election interference) are many.” (He then remarked that the Senate and House has “two or three committees” looking into it. The intelligence committee in each chamber is.)
5. Do you feel it is right that American taxpayers have to pay the additional Secret Service expenses to protect President Trump’s children while they are traveling on business? Why isn’t that something The Trump Organization pays for and claim as a business expense when they file their corporate tax return? Additionally, why should taxpayers pay approximately $1 million per day for the Secret Service while Melania and Barron Trump live in the Trump Tower in New York City?
6. The president has made numerous statements accusing various reputable news agencies of being “fake news” and has gone so far as to ban certain entities such as The New York Times and CNN from press conferences. In light of this, former President George W. Bush recently stated that a free press is “indispensable to democracy.” Do you agree with Bush and what are you doing to oppose the president’s mis-characterization of reputable news agencies and ensure we maintain a free press?
Stewart: “Of course, I support freedom of the press. I hope the press is honest; I hope they are fair, but I don’t know anyone who wants to take away freedom of the press… it is essential to democracy. But when they do lazy or dishonest reporting, they should be held accountable for that.”
7. A study from the Guttmacher Institute showed that the abortion rate in 2016 was the lowest since Roe v. Wade. The study attributes this decrease in abortion to increased availability of birth control, particularly for lower income women. Both the ACA and Planned Parenthood have helped provide affordable birth control to women. What will you do to make sure these programs will continue to receive funding to help provide vital health care to those in need?
8. What do you plan to do to ensure that members of our community are treated with respect and dignity in light of President Trump’s latest adaptation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement regulations and executive orders on immigration?
Rep. Chris Stewart, in a Facebook video, spoke to seven of 15 question topics posed by the Trump resistance group Utahns Speak Out. The video followed an in-person town hall in which Stewart may have spoken more to the inquiries but was cut off in each response to audience questions by a relatively raucous crowd that booed and shouted. (dcclothesline.com)
Stewart: “It’s interesting that President Obama actually expanded deportations more than any other president. And by the way, this was almost a controversial view… because immigration was a very emotional issue at the time. And I said, ‘look, if you have entered illegally, there should be a price for that,’ but never supported… rounding up 11 million people — that’s every man, woman, child in Utah, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and probably a couple of other states. So in my view, (immigrants) are probably unable to achieve citizenship, but a green card and can come out of the shadows and live without fear. And when I met with immigration (reform) advocates, they said ‘we could live with that,’ and those more aggressive… said that. (The green card policy) would satisfy most people and allow us to put this behind us. The first thing we do have to do is secure our border.”
(A constituent asked about Trump’s proposed border wall.) “I think most Americans agree it is essential to secure our borders. I don’t know (if) it is a physical wall (to accomplish that); I think it won’t be,” Stewart said. Look at Israel building around Gaza… they were able to protect themselves from almost continuous terrorist attacks… I will leave that up to the administration and homeland security, but as far as we pay for that… I don’t know if the administration has said ‘this is how we intend to pay for that; we will see, just like we will have to pay for all essential government services, including paying for our borders.”
(The Trump administration requested $1.5 billion in a supplemental spending bill and $2.6 billion in his fiscal year 2018 budget, according to reports.)
Lee: “Are you in agreement… where (the Department of Homeland Security) can detain anyone for suspecting them of criminals?” a Janet asked. “I’m not sure what you are describing,” Lee replied before claiming that there are constitutional limitations on holding even illegal immigrants indefinitely. (He said nothing about DHS deportation authority.)
9. Utah is currently ranked last in funding for students and 38th overall for education. How will dismantling the Department of Education help Utah when we can’t even seem to help ourselves? How will it help the nation as a whole?
10. A recent study by education professor Martin Carnoy of Stanford University examined 25 years of research and found that voucher programs do not significantly improve test scores. Carnoy says vouchers distract from proven policies and programs with proven impact on test scores and graduation rates and contribute to teacher shortages due to lack of funding for public, tenured positions. If you support moving towards a nationwide voucher program, please explain in detail how you feel that will be best for students and teachers in Utah.
11. According to SAMHSA’s 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an estimated 43.6 million (18.1 percent) Americans ages 18 and up experience some form of mental illness. In the past year, 20.2 million adults (8.4 percent) had a substance use disorder. Of this population, 7.9 million people had both a mental disorder and substance use disorder, also known as co-occurring mental and substance use disorders. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, mental health and substance abuse coverage was not required on all plans. The 10 essential health benefits mandated by the ACA requires all non-grandfathered plans to cover mental health and substance abuse treatment. What will you do to make sure that mental health and substance abuse treatment coverage is extended to every insurance plan in America if the ACA is ultimately repealed?
Stewart: (A constituent asked specifically about health care.) “Although the term health care or health care coverage is not included in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution, I believe that we should have all access to health care. The reality is that some have more money than others and others (find) it more difficult to afford health care. And that’s where the Republicans are trying to help… we can actually drive down the cost and… not hurt them in employment or force them to buy coverage…”
(The U.S. Congressional Budget Office projected that 24 million less individuals would be insured by the GOP-supported American Health Care Act, which would have replaced the ACA.)
Lee: A Marcell in Ogden pointed out that Lee, in an email, called a repeal of Obamacare a “laudable pursuit” but asked Lee if doing so was possible since it takes 60 votes in the Senate for a bill to pass, there is only 52 Republicans in the chamber and no Democrats were expected to vote for repeal. Lee then brought up the budget reconciliation process in the Senate, which is meant to permit deliberation of a budget bill with debate kept to 20 hours.
12. Will you commit to preserving Medicare and Social Security?
13. What will you do to ensure low-income people get the same level of health care they have with the ACA if it is repealed? Including the 10 essential health benefits of the ACA, coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and no lifetime caps?
Stewart: (A constituent asked specially about health care.) “Although the term health care or health care coverage is not included in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution, I believe that we should have all access to health care. The reality is that some have more money than others and others (find) it more difficult to afford health care. And that’s where the Republicans are trying to help… we can actually drive down the cost and… not hurt them in employment or force them to buy coverage…”
(The U.S. Congressional Budget Office projected that 24 million less individuals would be insured by the GOP-supported American Health Care Act, which would have replaced the ACA.)
Sen. MIke Lee, in an online town hall, spoke to four of 15 question topics posed by the Trump resistance group Utahns Speak Out. (Hans Koepsell/Deseret News)
Lee: Lee started his town hall not by answering a question but by suggesting that it was OK that folks would lose their insurance if the existing federal health care law, Obamacare, went away.
“Even the most aggressive plans out there dealing with Obamacare wouldn’t immediately pull the rug out from anyone,” Lee said. “Even the most aggressive plans out there would at most contain a delayed implementation clause and delay for a couple of years the cancellation of any government program with the idea that a combination of Congress and the states would decide what comes next.”
(“The practical effect” of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate “(made) the Medicaid expansion optional for states,” according to The Kaiser Foundation. Utah has had five legislative sessions since then and hasn’t expanded Medicaid.)
A Marcell in Ogden pointed out that Lee, in an email, called a repeal of Obamacare a “laudable pursuit” but asked Lee if doing so was possible since it takes 60 votes in the Senate for a bill to pass, there is only 52 Republicans in the chamber and no Democrats were expected to vote for repeal. Lee then brought up the budget reconciliation process in the Senate, which is meant to permit deliberation of a budget bill with debate kept to 20 hours.
14. Do you recognize the tribal sovereignty of Utah’s indigenous populations? Why or why not?
15. When will you hold your next in-person town hall in Utah? (This question is the same for every rep except Chris Stewart.)
(Stewart held the March 31 town hall.)BARCELONA, Spain, March 1, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Global home furnishings retailer IKEA today announced a product launch of Qi-powered bedside tables, lamps and desks that eliminates cable mess and makes it easier to stay connected with always-charged mobile devices.
IKEA said the wireless charging home furnishings will be available in Europe and North America this April, followed by a global rollout. The announcement girds support for Qi – the leading global wireless charging standard from the Wireless Power Consortium.
"IKEA is delivering on its vision of making life at home better with this innovative, stylish and useful new collection that show consumers the beauty and simplicity of wireless charging," said Menno Treffers, WPC chairman. "We applaud IKEA for its unmatched insight and their unique passion for making wireless charging affordable and simple for consumers."
Qi is the most widely deployed wireless power standard, available in 3,000 hotels, restaurants, airports and public locations worldwide. There are now more than 80 Qi-enabled smartphones, 15 models of Qi-enabled cars and countless Qi mobile accessories in the market today.
"Our belief is that mobile phones are vital parts to people's lives at home and their desire to stay connected, and Qi addresses an unmet need to keep devices powered," said Bjorn Block, Range Manager for Lighting and Wireless Charging, at IKEA. "As a member of WPC, we value the access to the leading and most advanced global standard for wireless charging."
During Mobile World Congress, WPC will showcase the latest Qi-enabled products at booth 5C41, Hall 5.
About the Wireless Power Consortium and Qi
Established in 2008, the Wireless Power Consortium is an open, collaborative standards development group of more than 200 company members. WPC's members include Belkin, ConvenientPower, Delphi, Freescale, Haier, HTC, IKEA, LG, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic, PowerbyProxi, Royal Philips, Samsung, Sony, TDK, Texas Instruments, Verizon Wireless and ZTE. These companies -- large and small competitors and ecosystem partners, from all parts of the industry and all parts of the globe -- collaborate for a single purpose: to design and evolve the world's most useful, safe and efficient standard for wireless power. This global standard is called Qi, and it has become the world's leading method for transferring electrical power without wires. Qi is designed into 80+ mobile devices, 15 models of cars, has more than 700 registered products that are enjoyed by more than 50 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com.
SOURCE Wireless Power Consortium
Related Links
http://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.comClose
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or the widespread population loss of honeybees, may have been caused by the use of neonicotinoids, according to a new study out of Harvard University.
Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine. They were first developed for agricultural use in the 1980's by petroleum giant Shell. The pesticides were refined by Bayer the following decade.
Two of these chemicals are now believed to be the cause of CCD, according to the new study from the School of Public Health at the university. This study replicated their own research performed in 2012.
Researchers studied 18 bee colonies, located in three areas of Massachusetts. One of these colonies was treated with imidacloprid, the second with clothianidin, and the third colony was left untreated, to act as a control.
When the cold New England winter came, populations in all three colonies declined. Starting in January, the number of bees in the control hive increased, while the other colonies continued their decline.
"We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter," Chensheng Lu, lead author of the article detailing the study, said.
Colony Collapse Disorder causes bees to leave their hives over the course of a winter. Without their shelter and the warmth from other bees, the insects quickly die. This problem has become more common since 2006.
"Colony losses from CCD are a very serious problem for beekeepers. Annual losses from the winter of 2006-2011 averaged about 33 percent each year, with a third of these losses attributed to CCD by beekeepers. The winter of 2011-2012 was an exception, when total losses dropped to 22 percent," The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) wrote on their Web page about the problem.
This one-year drop is considered to small of a sample to be interpreted as an improvement, according to the agency.
Imidacloprid and clothianidin were both found to cause the population losses.
Researchers, as well as the general public, have been questioning the causes of CCD, since populations began to decline. Many theories were put forward, including insecticides, pathogens, and bee-keeping techniques.
Honeybees are essential to providing food for humans, as well as wild animals. They pollinate around one third of all crops consumed by humans and domestic animals.
Study into CCD was profiled in the Bulletin of Insectology.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Holiday savings from Mehring Books
23 November 2012
Mehring Books is pleased to announce its 2012 holiday sale, offering steep discounts on sale bundles and individual titles. This is an ideal opportunity to build your Marxist library and introduce friends and family to the history, theory and politics of the socialist movement.
Most books and sale bundles are marked down from 10 to 50 percent. The Tsar to Lenin DVD is now just $12.95, with continued free US shipping and discounted international shipping rates. Be sure to get your copy today of this unique and extraordinary film documentary and buy extra copies for friends and family for the holidays.
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Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (now $21.60)
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And much more. Visit mehring.com for full catalogue.'The Trans-Pacific Partnership would be an unmitigated disaster for everything from the environment to internet freedom and working families'
On the heals of NAFTA's "20 years of regret" anniversary, U.S. lawmakers are aggressively pushing legislation to fast-track what has been called NAFTA on steroids: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Three powerful lawmakers —House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI), Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — announced legislation (pdf) Thursday that would allow the Obama administration to fast-track approval of this behemoth trade deal.
Known as "trade promotion authority," the legislation would allow the Obama administration to dodge deliberation and amendments from Congress.
Public Citizen summarizes:
Whether or not the president obtains the listed negotiating objectives, the bill would empower the president to sign a trade pact before Congress votes on it with a guarantee that the executive branch can write legislation to implement the pact and alter wide swaths of existing U.S. law and obtain both House and Senate votes within 90 days. That legislation is not subject to markup and amendment in committee, all amendments are forbidden during floor votes and a maximum of 20 hours of debate is permitted in the House and Senate.
The legislation is being advanced despite broad opposition from within Capitol Hill as well as social justice, labor, and environmental organizations.
“For nearly four years, the U.S. Trade Representative and TPP negotiators have purposely restricted participation and information, keeping members of Congress and citizen groups, unions, environmental and consumer organizations in the dark," said Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen. "There has been no opportunity for public interest groups to meaningfully participate in the negotiations, and under fast track authority, there will be no opportunity for our elected representatives to amend the deal and make it better for Americans."
Said Charles Chamberlain, Executive Director, Democracy for America, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership would be an unmitigated disaster for everything from the environment to internet freedom and working families."
He added, "Let's be clear: A vote for fast track authority on the TPP is a vote for a deal that will hurt hardworking Americans and haunt every single member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who votes for it."People on social media have expressed their disgust after |
) have caused long-term health effects,” a recognition that skeptics have seized upon to cast doubt on the burn pits’ critics. However, less widely reported is the fact the committee was relying on old data and air samples, and that their conclusions, when read in full, were much more damning about the situation overseas. From the full study:
However, the committee’s review of the literature and the data from JBB suggest that service in Iraq or Afghanistan — that is, a broader consideration of air pollution than exposure only to burn pit emissions — might be associated with long-term heath effects, particularly susceptible (for example, those who have asthma) or highly-exposed subpopulations (such as those who worked at the burn pit). Such health effects would be due mainly to high ambient concentrations of (particle materials) from both natural and anthropogenic sources, including military sources. If broader exposure to air pollution turns out to be relevant, potentially related health effects of concern are respiratory and cardio vascular effects and cancer.
If this is the macro view, the micro view of what is actually happening to soldiers is much more grim, indicating strongly that veterans are indeed sick from their service, the remaining question is how.
Balad burn pit
So What Do We Know?
Thousands of veterans have been pouring their stories into unofficial registries and online bulletin boards offered at the Army Times (an interesting snapshot of symptoms here), Burn Pits 360, Disabled American Veterans and the Burn Pits Action Center, started by U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y) in 2009. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., introduced legislation in November that would create an official burn pit registry of veterans who have health problems believed to be burn-pit related.
Staff Sgt. Daniel Meyer, 27, told Antiwar.com in a recent email exchange that he was medically discharged from the Air Force in October. He believes his exposure to burn pits in both Iraq and Afghanistan from 2007-2009 led to his severe health condition, which includes fatty tumors on his legs and bronchiolitis obliterans, a rare, irreversible and life-threatening lung disease that can be caused by the inhalation of toxic fumes.
Staff Sgt. Daniel Meyer
“I have gone from an extremely fit military man to a very limited man who is completely dependent on my wife for help with everything,” Meyer said, pointing out that he’s now carrying around an oxygen tank to breathe, and relying on a wheelchair to get around.
“Since the beginning of my illness, I have been treated quite unfavorably in regards to my health,” he said of the Air Force. “To gain an inch, I have had to fight for a mile. I was ridiculed, punished, and struggled to get anything close to proper medical attention.”
When he finally did, it was through Dr. Robert Miller, one of the pioneering medical professionals in veterans’ lung injury and the burn pit connection today. Miller, an associate professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine, and his former colleague, Dr. Matt King, now an assistant professor at Meharry Medical College, have been conducting biopsies on soldiers’ lung tissue since 2004.
Time and again, they have found that soldiers suffering from shortness of breath and other symptoms, but had otherwise passed all of the standard X-ray and pulmonary fitness tests, had lungs riddled with tiny holes, later diagnosed as constrictive bronchiolitis. The soldiers, all from the 101st Airborne, stationed at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky and suffering from unknown respiratory problems, were exposed to fumes from a 2003 sulfur plant fire in Mosul (the fire raged for a month, pumping an estimated 21,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air), or had lived and worked near a burn pit.
“So far, all but a few of these soldiers we have biopsied have had constrictive bronchiolitis,” Miller told Vanderbilt medical center’s newspaper in 2010. “These are inhalation injuries, suffered in the line of duty.”
“In every war there is a unique health syndrome. It is possible that whatever is causing the shortness of breath will be the ‘agent orange’ of this war,” Miller added.
He and King published their comprehensive findings — that 38 out of 49 soldiers they had biopsied had been suffering from the rare bronchial condition —in the New England Journal of Medicine, in July 2011.
Both men ascertain there is likely a range of exposures related to the condition, not just the burn pits. But they have said — and testified to Congress as much — that the Army should be doing more to test troops before and after their service to diagnose and gauge the pervasiveness of this problem more accurately.
“I don’t think our study links this disorder to burn pits,” Miller said. “Burn pits may be a problem that contributes to this disorder. I think what we can say is that this disorder is linked to service in the Middle East. We haven’t been able to definitively link what the cause is for this.”
According to a June New York Times report, the Army has stopped referring Fort Campbell soldiers to Dr. Miller. The Army says it just wants to maintain its health care in-house, but Miller suspects the Army wants to reduce the number of biopsies that might show serious lung injuries. This would not be surprising, since it has yet to fully acknowledge Gulf War Illness, and it took years (and a class action lawsuit) for the government to start compensating Vietnam-era veterans sick from their battlefield exposure to Agent Orange. In fact, the VA was just forced to ease its standards against which veterans had to prove their illnesses were caused by AO. Now, some 90,000 initially denied AO claims, plus an estimated 150,000 new ones, are flooding a healthcare system overrun by more than 500,000 new Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and nearly one million backlogged claims overall.
The cost is astronomical and it is all coming out of taxpayer pockets — and it’s putting the country more into debt, say critics.
But ignoring or minimizing it won’t make the story go away, as the military has often tried to do. As it tries to maintain the fiction that the current problem is not that bad, the evidence is suggesting otherwise. According to statistics compiled by USA Today last year, since the wars began, the military has seen a 251% increase in the rate of neurological disorders per 10,000 active-duty servicemembers, a 47% rise in the rate of respiratory issues and a 34% increase in the rate of cardiovascular disease. Meanwhile, new registries like Burn Pits 360, has gathered information from some 400 soldiers and veterans, says Meyer, who helps maintain the project. He is excited to hear about the Feb. 13 medical symposium, which he believes will rally more interest to the cause.
“I believe that many (soldiers) have come down with illnesses or diseases and not even realized that it was more than likely caused by a toxic burn pit,” he said. “As far as my confidence that the government will do the right thing in regards to all the veterans who have debilitating conditions as a result of burn pits, I’m hopeful, but not confident.”
As for Lyles, who maintains it’s toxic dust making the soldiers sick, he says he is feeling vindicated these days as more scientists and medical professionals are compelled to take his findings more seriously.
“For me the thing is, it’s not a matter of if, it was always a matter of when we would see the clinical ramifications of this exposure.”
Notes in the Margin
Many of you might be thinking, “What about the Iraqi and Afghan people who most assuredly are suffering from much of these toxic exposures too?” We don’t forget. People I have spoken to with intimate knowledge of the war and the landscape say we have no doubt created an environmental disaster in these places. We have growing evidence of this, as studies in population centers like Fallujah in Iraq, which were heavily bombarded by U.S. airstrikes during the war, are exhibiting high rates of birth defects and cancer. Not to mention the destruction and slow if non-existent reconstruction of key infrastructure like water treatment plants and sewage systems. I wrote about this for The American Conservative in 2011. Our toxifying presence in that country, i.e., depleted uranium, burn pits, etc., has left a radioactive scar on that country for years to come.
Twitter Vlahos @KelleyBVlahos
Read more by Kelley B. VlahosSupply-side economics works, I tell you! It works! Photo: Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Reducing the top tax rate has been the Republican Party’s highest priority for a quarter century. Since the 2012 election, a handful of apostates have gently urged it to change course. Paul Ryan, who remains the most powerful figure within the party, has just given an interview to John McCormack, and he has a message for the reformers who want to change course: forget it. Ryan, reports McCormack, “made it clear that he disagrees with some conservatives who are willing to accept a high top tax rate in order to increase the child tax credit.”
If the significance of Ryan’s statement here doesn’t immediately strike you, let me explain. Starting in the early 1980s, supply-side economics emerged as the Republican Party’s policy doctrine. Supply-side economics holds that the marginal tax rates hold the key to economic growth, and thus that even tiny changes to tax rates can unleash massive changes to economic performance. Accordingly, Republicans have valued low tax rates over absolutely everything else.
In the 2012 election, that commitment turned into a major liability for the party. The Republican ticket ran on a somewhat sketchily defined plan to reform taxes, the impact of which would have been to give the richest one percent a huge tax cut and impose higher taxes on the middle class.
The Republican reformers have, correctly, identified the commitment to reducing the top tax rate as a major (or even the major) liability. The most important theme of “Room to Grow,” a policy manifesto by “reform conservatives,” is that the GOP should abandon supply-side economics. In some ways, this is the key to many other policy choices the party faces. If they keep their traditional commitment to low top tax rates above all else, there’s simply no money to spend elsewhere. On the other hand, if Republicans stop proposing to cut rich peoples’ taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars, they’ll be able to spread that money around on other things — tax credits for middle-class families, maybe some kind of health insurance — that would benefit a vastly larger bloc of voters. The policy champion for this bloc is Utah Senator Mike Lee, who has at least tried (the math is tricky) to craft a tax-reform plan that would hold taxes for the rich constant while expanding the child tax credit.
The reformists cast their argument in the most soothing possible tones. Cutting marginal tax rates was the correct policy in 1980, they agree. (It is axiomatic among Republicans that everything Ronald Reagan did was correct, even the things that contradicted other things he did.) But the world has changed, tax rates have fallen, and what worked for 1980 does not apply today.
Reaganomics, now and forever, amen. Photo: Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis
With predictable fury, supply-siders have denounced this heresy. You can get a flavor of the intra-party debate in columns appearing in places like Forbes or The Wall Street Journal, the later of which retorts, “Good economic policy doesn’t have a sell-by date. (Adam Smith? Ugh. He is just so 1776.)”
Ryan has positioned himself as a reformist in some ways. He acknowledged that calling people who get government benefits “takers” is mean. On the other hand, Ryan is a longtime, deeply devoted supply-sider. As a teenager, he immersed himself The Way the World Works and Wealth and Poverty, the two foundational texts of the supply-side economics worldview (both of which happen to be barking mad), which teach the absolute primacy of marginal tax rates.
So Ryan is cross-pressured here, between a faction that is attempting to excise the party’s weaknesses and his own most fundamental convictions. His answer to McCormack is surprisingly blunt:
“I’m a classic growth conservative. I believe that the best way to help families, the best way to help the economy is to reduce rates across the board,” Ryan said when asked about Utah senator Mike Lee’s plan to increase the child tax credit and create two income tax brackets of 15 percent and 35 percent. “Growth occurs on the margin, which is a wonky way of saying, if you want faster economic growth, more upward mobility, and faster job creation, lower tax rates across the board is the key—it’s the secret sauce.”
That’s Ryan’s conviction. He disagrees with Lee that subsidizing middle-income families with children ought to be the party’s priority. He still believes marginal tax rates are the “secret sauce.” To Ryan’s credit, in this case, he is not hiding it.Source: www.vancouversun.com/news/Vancouver+Aquarium+Beluga+whale+de VANCOUVER - Young female beluga whale Tiqa died early Friday at the Vancouver Aquarium after suffering an infection — and the death appears unconnected to an overnight break-in.Vancouver police department Const. Janna McGuiness said there is no evidence linking the break-in at about 4:30 a.m. to the death of the three-year-old beluga just over an hour later.“This appears to be an unrelated incident,” McGuiness told reporters. “But we’ll just make sure we take every precaution and do a thorough investigation.”Vancouver Aquarium president John Nightingale said that staff monitoring Tiqa’s condition through the night saw a man climb over the wall of the beluga enclosure and challenged the intruder, who climbed back over the wall and ran away.“So it was very quick,” added Nightingale, saying that no contact was witnessed between the dying beluga and the trespasser.Tiqa is the third young beluga whale to die at the aquarium in the past six years. In 2010 calf Nala died just two weeks after her first birthday after her airway became blocked, and in 2005 Tuvaq died at the age of three from heart arrhythmia.Nightingale has instructed his medical staff to find out whether there any links between the three deaths, and to consult with international experts.“We simply have to get to the bottom of what’s gone on,” he said.Clint Wright, the aquarium’s vice-president of operations and animal management, said Tiqa had a “mild sickness” over the previous 10 days and was not eating regularly.Tiqa’s blood test results had appeared normal through the illness but “[on Thursday] we saw a dramatic change in the blood. Certainly, it looked like she got an infection.”Tiqa was placed under a 24-hour watch and staff members monitoring her behaviour early Friday morning noticed the beluga wasn’t “acting quite right,” added Wright. The whale died at 5:45 a.m.The carcass was taken to the Ministry of Agriculture Animal Health Care Centre to undergo a full necropsy by veterinarians Dr. Martin Haulena and Dr. Stephen Raverty.Nightingale said that despite the tragedy, the aquarium plans to operate a beluga breeding program after the aquarium’s current expansion project is completed, adding that the death of young belugas is not unusual, and about 50 per cent of beluga calves in the wild die young.He said that belugas, unlike orca killer whales, adapt well to life in aquariums. “If the killer whale is the Ferrari of the whale world, the beluga whale is the Volkswagen bus,” said Nightingale. “They are a putter-around whale and are pretty ideally suited to living in an aquarium.”Vancouver animal rights activist Peter Hamilton said belugas should not be kept in captivity at the aquarium because it lacks natural flora and fauna. “These animals born in captivity are still naturally wild.”eduggan@vancouversun.com© Copyright (c) The Vancouver SunRead more: www.vancouversun.com/news/Vancouver+Aquarium+Beluga+whale+deIt was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
“Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies,” Dr. Lewis said. She eventually started to explore the yard, inspecting the males and females. “What really struck me was that in this one-acre area there were hundreds of males and I could only find two or three females,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, this is so intense.’ ”
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When a lot of males are competing for the chance to mate with females, a species experiences a special kind of evolution. If males have certain traits that make them attractive to females, they will mate more than other males. And that preference may mean that those attractive males can pass down their traits to the next generation. Over thousands of generations, the entire species may be transformed.
Charles Darwin described this process, which he called sexual selection, in 1871, using male displays of antlers and feathers as examples. He did not mention fireflies. In fact, fireflies remained fairly mysterious for another century. It was not until the 1960s that James Lloyd, a University of Florida biologist, deciphered the call and response of several species of North American firefly.
Dr. Lewis, realizing that other firefly mysteries remained to be solved, switched to fireflies from fish in 1984, when she became a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. She taught herself Dr. Lloyd’s firefly code and then began to investigate firefly mating habits. North American fireflies spend two years underground as larvae, then spend the final two weeks of their lives as adults, flashing, mating and laying eggs. When Dr. Lewis started studying fireflies, scientists could not say whether the females mated once and then laid all their eggs, or mated with many males. “Nobody knew what happened after the lights went out,” Dr. Lewis said.
She searched for mating fireflies in the evening, marked their locations with surveyor’s flags and then revisited them every half-hour through the night. They were still mating at dawn.
“It was cool to watch the sun rise and see the couples breaking up and the females crawling down the grass to lay their eggs,” Dr. Lewis said.
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Many Americans are familiar with the kinds of fireflies Dr. Lewis studies, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the 2,000 species worldwide. And there is enormous variation in these insects. “There are some species that produce flashes when they’re adults, and there are some that simply glow as adults,” Dr. Lewis said. “Then there are a whole bunch of species where the adults don’t produce any light at all.”
In recent years scientists have analyzed the DNA of fireflies to figure out how their light has evolved. The common ancestor of today’s fireflies probably produced light only when they were larvae. All firefly larvae still glow today, as a warning to would-be predators. The larvae produce bitter chemicals that make them an unpleasant meal.
As adults, the earliest fireflies probably communicated with chemical signals, the way some firefly species do today. Only much later did some firefly species gain through evolution the ability to make light as adults. Instead of a warning, the light became a mating call. (An enzyme in the firefly’s tail drives a chemical reaction that makes light.)
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The more Dr. Lewis watched firefly courtship, the clearer it became that the females were carefully choosing mates. They start dialogues with up to 10 males in a single evening and can keep several conversations going at once. But a female mates with only one male, typically the one she has responded to the most.
Dr. Lewis wondered if the female fireflies were picking their mates based on variations in the flashes of the males. To test that possibility, she took female fireflies to her lab, where she has computer-controlled light systems that can mimic firefly flashes. “You can play back specific signals to females and see what they respond to,” Dr. Lewis said.
The female fireflies turned out to be remarkably picky. In many cases, a male flash got no response at all. In some species, females preferred faster pulse rates. In others, the females preferred males that made long-lasting pulses.
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If females preferred some flashes over others, Dr. Lewis wondered why those preferences had evolved in the first place. One possible explanation was that the signals gave female fireflies a valuable clue about the males. Somehow, mating with males with certain flash patterns allowed females to produce more offspring, which would inherit their preference.
It is possible that females use flashes to figure out which males can offer the best gifts. In many invertebrate species, the males provide females with food to help nourish their eggs. Dr. Lewis and her colleagues discovered that fireflies also made these so-called nuptial gifts — packages of protein they inject with their sperm.
Dr. Lewis is not sure why she and her colleagues were the first to find them. The gifts form coils that can take up a lot of space in a male firefly’s abdomen. “They’re incredibly beautiful,” she said.
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Receiving nuptial gifts, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues have shown, can make a huge difference in the reproductive success of a female firefly. “It just about doubles the number of eggs a female can lay in her lifetime,” she said. One reason the effect is so big is that fireflies do not eat during their two-week adulthood. A slowly starving female can use a nuptial gift to build more eggs.
In at least some species, females may use flashes to pick out males with the biggest gifts. Dr. Lewis has tested this hypothesis in two species; in one, males with conspicuous flashes have bigger gifts. In another species, she found no link.
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“In some cases they could be honest signals, and in some cases they could be deceptive signals,” Dr. Lewis said.
Deception may, in fact, evolve very easily among fireflies. It turns out that a male firefly does not need to burn many extra calories to make flashes. “It takes some energy, but it’s tiny. It’s less costly for a male than flying around,” Dr. Lewis said.
If making light is so cheap for males, it seems odd that they have not all evolved to be more attractive to females. “What is it that keeps their flashes from getting longer and longer or faster and faster?” Dr. Lewis asked.
Scanning the meadow, she grabbed her insect net and ran after a fast-flying firefly with a triple flash. She caught an animal that may offer the answer to her question. Dr. Lewis dropped the insect into a tube and switched on a headlamp to show her catch. Called Photuris, it is a firefly that eats other fireflies.
“They are really nasty predators,” Dr. Lewis said. Photuris fireflies sometimes stage aerial assaults, picking out other species by their flashes and swooping down to attack. In other cases, they sit on a blade of grass, responding to male fireflies with deceptive flashes. When the males approach, Photuris grabs them.
“They pounce, they bite, they suck blood — all the gory stuff,” Dr. Lewis said. She has found that each Photuris can eat several fireflies in a night. Photuris kills other fireflies only to retrieve bad-tasting chemicals from their bodies, which it uses to protect itself from predators.
To study how Photuris predation affects its firefly prey, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues built sticky traps equipped with lights that mimicked courtship signals of Photuris’s victims. The scientists found that Photuris was more likely to attack when flash rates were faster. In other words, conspicuous flashes — the ones females prefer — also make males more likely to be killed.
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“At least where Photuris predators are around,” Dr. Lewis said, “there’s going to be a strong selection for less conspicuous flashes.”Perkus Tooth, the wall-eyed former rock critic, awoke the morning after the party he vowed would be his last, the night after the worst blizzard of the winter, asleep on a staircase, already in the grip of a terrific cluster headache. He suffered these regularly, knew the drill, felt himself hunkering into the blinding, energy-sapping migraine by ancient instinct. Nobody greeted him, his hosts asleep themselves, or gone out, so he made his way downstairs, groped to locate his coat in their closet, and then found his way outdoors. Perkus’s shoes were, of course, inadequate for the depth of freshly fallen snow. He’d have walked the eight blocks home in any event—the migraine nausea would have made a cab ride unbearable—but there wasn’t any choice. The streets were free of cabs and any other traffic. Some of the larger, better-managed buildings had had their sidewalks laboriously cleared and salted, the snow pushed into mounds covering hydrants and newspaper boxes, but elsewhere Perkus had to climb through drifts that had barely been traversed, fitting his shoes into boot prints that had been punched knee-deep. His pants were quickly soaked, and his sleeves as well, since between semi-blindness and poor footing he stumbled to his hands and knees several times before he even got to Second Avenue. Under other circumstances he’d have been pitied, perhaps offered aid, or possibly arrested for public drunkenness, but on streets the January blizzard had remade there was no one to observe him, apart from a cross-country skier who stared mercilessly from behind solar goggles, and a few dads here and there dragging kids on sleds. If they noticed him at all they probably thought he was out playing, too. There was no reason for someone to be making his way along impassable streets so early the day after. Not a single shop was open, all the entrances buried in drift. When he met the barricade at the corner of Eighty-fourth, he at first tried to bluster his way past, thinking the cop had misunderstood. But no. His building was one of three the snowstorm had undermined, the weight of the snow threatening the soundness of its foundation. He talked with neighbors he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years of dwelling on the same floor, though gripped in the vise of his cluster headache he barely heard a word they said, and he couldn’t have made too good an impression. You need to find someplace to sleep tonight—that was a fragment that got through to him. They might let you in for your stuff later, but not now. You can call this number... but the number he missed. Then, as Perkus teetered away: Get yourself indoors, young man. And: Pity about that one. Perkus Tooth had already been at a watershed, wishing to find an exit from himself, from his life and his friends, his tatter of a career—to shed it all like a snakeskin. The city in its twenty-first-century incarnation had no place for him, but it couldn’t fire him—he’d quit instead. For so many years he’d lived in his biosphere of an apartment as if it were still 1978 outside, as if placing the occasional review in the Village Voice or New York Rocker gave him credentials as a citizen of the city, but the long joke of his existence had reached its punch line. The truth was that he’d never thought of himself as a critic to begin with, more a curator. His apartment—bursting with vinyl LPs, forgotten books, binders full of zines, VHS cassettes of black-and-white films taped from PBS and “Million Dollar Movie”—was a cultural cache shored against time’s indifference, and Perkus had merely been its caretaker, his sporadic writings the equivalent of a catalogue listing items decidedly not for sale. And his friends? Those among whom he wasted his days—the retired actor, now a fixture on the Upper East Side social scene; the former radical turned cynical mayor’s operative; the once aspiring investigative journalist turned hack ghostwriter—had all used up their integrity, accommodated themselves to the simulacrum that Manhattan had become. Perkus had come to an end with them, too. He needed a new life. Now, incredibly, the storm had called his bluff. This was thrilling and terrifying at once: who would he be without his apartment, without that assembly of brunching mediocrities? There was only one haven. Perkus had one friend who was unlike the others: Biller. (Perkus had never heard a last name. Biller was just Biller.) Homeless in a Manhattan that no longer coddled the homeless, Biller was crafty, a squatter and a survivor, an underground man. Now, as if in a merciful desert vision, the information that Biller had once jotted on a scrap of receipt on Perkus’s kitchen table appeared before him: Biller’s latest digs, in the Friendreth Apartments, on Sixty-fifth near York. Perkus couldn’t remember the numerical address, but he didn’t need that; from Biller’s descriptions of the odd building and its inhabitants he’d surely be able to find it. Yes, Biller was the one he needed now. Trudging sickened through the snowdrifts like a Napoleonic soldier in retreat from Moscow, Perkus was adequately convinced. He had got complacent in his Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Time to go off the grid. Biller knew how to do this, even in a place like Manhattan, which was nothing but grid. Biller was the essential man. They could compare notes and pool resources, Perkus preferring to think of himself as not yet completely without resources. Perkus laughed at himself now: in his thinking, Biller was becoming like Old Sneelock, in Dr. Seuss’s “If I Ran the Circus,” the one who’d single-handedly raise the tents, sell the pink lemonade, shovel the elephants’ shit, and also do the high-wire aerialist act. In this manner, dismal yet self-amused, Perkus propelled his body to Sixty-fifth Street, despite the headache’s dislodging him from himself, working with the only body he had—a shivering, frost-fingered, half-blind stumbler in sweat- and salt-stained party clothes. He trailed a dog and its walker into the lobby, catching the swinging door before it clicked shut, one last act of mastery of the mechanics of outward existence, and then passed out in a melting pool on the tile just inside. Biller would later explain to Perkus that another dog walker had sought Biller out, knowing that the tall black man in the spotted fur hat functioned as ambassador for the vagabond entities sometimes seen lurking in the building, and that this tatterdemalion in the entranceway was nothing if not one of those. Biller gathered Perkus up and installed him in what he would come to know as Ava’s apartment. It was there that Perkus, nursed through the first hours by Biller’s methodical and unquestioning attentions, his clothes changed, his brow mopped, his sapped body nourished with a simple cup of ramen and beef broth, felt his new life begin. Perkus Tooth had twenty-four hours alone in the apartment before Ava arrived. Biller kept close tabs on all the vacancies in the building and assured him that this was the best way, the intended result being that Ava would take him for granted, detect his traces on the floors and walls and in the bed and then unquestioningly settle in as a roommate. So Perkus spent the first night by himself on the surprisingly soft bed, half-awake in the dark, and then was up to pace the rooms at first light. He dwelled in the space alone just long enough to posit some conjunction between his new self—shorn of so many of its defining accoutrements, dressed in an ill-fitting, lumpish blue-and-orange sports sweatshirt with an iron-on decal name, presumably of some star player, his right temple throbbing with cluster, a really monstrous attack, ebbing in its fashion but still obnoxious, yet his brain also, somehow, seemed to have awoken from a long-fogging dream, a blind spot in sight, yes, but peripheral vision around the occlusion’s edges widened, refreshed—between this self and the apartment in which he’d strangely landed, the apartment that had been fitted, like his body, with hand-me-downs, furnishings that would have been rejected even by a thrift shop. The presumption was that if he puzzled at the weird decrepit prints hung over the decaying living-room set, the framed “Streamers” poster, or the Blue Period Picasso guitarist sun-faded to yellow over the nonworking stove in the dummy kitchen, he should be able to divine what sort of person he’d become since the last time his inquiries had turned inward. Who he was seemed actually to have slipped his mind. Yet no. The rooms weren’t going to tell him who he was. They weren’t his. This was Ava’s apartment, only she hadn’t come yet.
Perkus hadn’t encountered another soul in the hours he’d been installed in the Friendreth, had only gazed through immovable paint-sealed windows at minute human forms picking through drifts on the Sixty-fifth Street sidewalk seven stories below, the city a distant stilled terrarium. This corner of Sixty-fifth, where the street abutted the scraps of parkland at the edge of Rockefeller University, formed an utter no man’s land in the winterscape. He listened at the walls, and through the sound of spasmodic barking imagined he heard a scrape of furniture or a groan or a sigh that could be human, but no voices to give proof, until the morning, when the volunteers began to arrive. Perkus sought to parse Biller’s words, a clustery confusion from the night before, working to grasp what form his new roommate might take, even as he heard the volunteers at individual doors, calling each apartment’s resident by name, murmuring “good boy” or “good girl” as they headed out to use the snowdrifts as a potty. Even those voicings were faint, the stolid prewar building’s heavy lath and plaster making fine insulation, and Perkus could feel confident that he would remain undetected if he wished to be. When clunking footsteps and scrabbling paws led to his threshold, his apartment’s unlocked door opened to allow a dog and its walker through. Perkus hid like a killer in the tub, slumping down behind the shower curtain to sit within the porcelain’s cool shape. He heard Ava’s name spoken then, by a woman who, before leaving, set out a bowl of kibble and another of water on the kitchen floor, and cooed a few more of the sweet doggish nothings a canine lover coos when fingering behind an ear or under a whiskery chin. Biller’s words now retroactively assumed a coherent, four-footed shape. Perkus had never lived with a dog. But much had changed just lately, and he was open to new things. He couldn’t think of a breed to wish for but had an approximate size in mind, some scruffy mutt with the proportions of, say, a lunch pail. The door shut, and the volunteer’s footsteps quickly receded in the corridor. Perkus had done no more than rustle at the plastic curtain, preparing to hoist himself from the tub, when the divider was nudged aside by a white grinning face—slavering rubbery pink lips and dinosaur teeth hinged to a squarish ridged skull nearly the size of his own, this craned forward by a neck and shoulders of pulsing and twitching muscle. One sharp, white, pink-nailed paw curled on the tub’s edge as a tongue slapped forth and began brutalizing Perkus’s helpless lips and nostrils. Ava the pit bull greeted her roommate with grunts and slobber, her expression demonic, her green-brown eyes, rimmed in pink, showing piggish intellect and gusto, yet helpless to command her smacking, cavernous jaws. From the first instant, before he even grasped his instinctive fear, Perkus understood that Ava did her thinking with her mouth. The next moment, falling back against the porcelain under her demonstrative assault, watching her struggle and slip as she tried, and failed, to hurtle into the tub after him, as she braced and arched on her two back legs, he saw that the one front paw with which she scrabbled was all she had for scrabbling: Ava was a three-legged dog. This fact would regularly, as it did now, give Perkus a crucial opening—his only physical edge on her, really. Ava slid awkwardly and fell on her side with a thump. Perkus managed to stand. By the time he got himself out of the tub she was on her three legs again, flinging herself upward, forcing that boxy skull, with its smooth, loose-bunching carpet of flesh, into his hands to be adored. Ava was primally terrifying, but she soon persuaded Perkus she didn’t mean to turn him into kibble. If Ava killed him it would be accidental, in seeking to stanch her emotional hungers. Biller had bragged of the high living available at the Friendreth, an apartment building that had been reconfigured into a residence for masterless dogs, an act of charity by a private foundation of blue hairs. Perkus’s homeless friend had explained to him that though it was preferable that Perkus keep himself invisible, he had only to call himself a “volunteer” if anyone asked. The real volunteers had come to a tacit understanding with those, like Perkus now, who occasionally slipped into the Friendreth Canine Apartments to stealthily reside alongside the legitimate occupants. Faced head on with the ethical allegory of homeless persons sneaking into human-shaped spaces in a building reserved for abandoned dogs, the pet-rescue workers could be relied upon to defy the Friendreth Society’s mandate and let silence cover what they witnessed. Snow and cold made their sympathy that much more certain. Biller further informed Perkus that he shared the building with three other human squatters among the thirty-odd dogs, though none were on his floor or immediately above or below him. Perkus felt no eagerness |
assists, although it's worth noting that his time on the power play was limited to just 90 minutes this year.
While the general consensus is that 23-year-old didn't quite reach that lofty goal as a mainstay on the top two pairs, it has to be said that when the opportunity presented itself, Beaulieu played quite well against high-end competition.
In reality, it was a tale of two seasons for Beaulieu. He was first paired alongside Tom Gilbert, and throughout Montreal's historic start to the season they played... terribly. They were just about the only negative aspect of the Habs' hot start.
Once he was paired with better defenders, Beaulieu's play immediately picked up, and that's quite apparent when you look at his rolling average Corsi-for percentage over the course of the season.
I marked his most common partners during certain time frames. As you can see, there's a stark contrast in results from his time with Gilbert, Alexei Emelin and Greg Pateryn compared to when he played alongside P.K. Subban, Mark Barberio, and Jeff Petry.
He seems to elevate his play with skilled partners, and vice versa with weaker ones. All in all, it led to a rather mediocre season in terms of shot-based metrics. Beaulieu ranked fifth on the team among defenders in Corsi-for percentage (50.93%), seventh in Scoring chances for (47.38%), seventh in High-danger chances for (48.58%), and sixth in Shots-for percentage (51.08%).
His offensive and defensive numbers become a lot more encouraging once you focus on his time in the top four.
So why did Beaulieu struggle while playing against weaker competition on the third pairing? Logically anyone that can survive top-four minutes should be able to dominate against third- and fourth-line players.
The first thing that comes to mind is that Beaulieu is a high-event player, and that he's at his best when he's driving the play alongside a partner that can keep up.
When his job is to dump the puck out of the defensive zone blindly, he quickly loses all value as a puck-moving defender. This would also explain why he struggled at times in the AHL under Sylvain Lefebvre's tutelage.
As we all know, usage is key, and in Beaulieu's case the numbers this season seem to suggest that he's more at home in a fast-paced style of play, rather than a collapsing, defence-first ideology. If the Habs hope to maximize his value, they may very well be best off keeping him in the top four. Yes, that means he will lose the puck on occasions, but that's par for the course when discussing puck-moving defenders.
Which brings us to the next question: where does Beaulieu fit next year?
As we touched upon earlier in the article, Markov is no spring chicken, and the ideal situation next year would see Beaulieu's ice time and responsibilities increase, all while alleviating Markov's workload.
He's been very good alongside Subban. Last season he only played 55 minutes with Montreal's best defender, but the two had a 55.4 CF% through their short stint together. Combine that with their 56.63 CF% this season, and it becomes clear that the two have chemistry while facing top competition. They also controlled 63% of the goals scored while on the ice; a nearly two-to-one pace. A longer look at the numbers reveals that Beaulieu has arguably been Subban's most complementary defensive partner in the last two seasons.
It's probably too early to declare Beaulieu's spot in the top-four as cemented, but it does seem like he's destined to play heavy minutes with the Habs.
His good play hasn't only come while he shared the ice with Subban. Beaulieu also put up fantastic numbers with Petry, again lending credence to the theory that Beaulieu's skill set is only valuable if he's playing a high-tempo possession game. He can hit, and he can fight, but the results speak for themselves when he's placed in an important puck-moving role on the blue line.
Once you factor in Beaulieu's incredibly reasonable cap hit of $1M for the upcoming season, it becomes impossible to ignore the possibility of having a very cheap, yet incredibly efficient player logging big minutes in Montreal's defence corps.
There's no guarantee that Beaulieu can play consistently great hockey in the top-four throughout the 2016-17 season, but all signs point to him having the right tool set to perform such a task. With the lack of quality defenders in the Habs' prospect pipeline, the young defender's usage becomes even more important for the organization moving forward.Sen. 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 is just 12 percentage points behind Democratic front-runner 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 in New Hampshire, according to a new online poll.
While the poll has a 6-percentage-point margin of error, it highlights Sanders's strength as a liberal insurgent against Clinton.
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Forty-four percent of Granite State Democratic primary voters back Clinton, who won the state’s primary in 2008, according to poll by Morning Consult. But 32 percent support Sanders, the independent senator from neighboring Vermont. The next closest potential candidate, Vice President Biden, came in third with support from 8 percent of Democratic primary voters.
The poll was conducted online and by phone between May 31 and June 8, just before Clinton gave her first major stump speech at her rally in New York City. Online polls require the survey-taker to affirmatively opt in to the poll, so they are typically considered less representative than those that rely on a completely random sample.
Clinton typically holds a tremendous lead over the field in the vast majority of polls. Other Morning Consult polls released at the same time as the New Hampshire poll show Clinton with a commanding lead in Iowa and South Carolina.
Recent New Hampshire polling has shown Sanders garnering around 14 percent support in the polls, compared to Clinton’s 51 percent, according to a RealClearPolitics average.
But Sanders has seen some momentum for his long-shot bid since he announced in April. He finished 7 percentage points behind Clinton in a straw poll of Wisconsin Democratic convention-goers in June.SNIP
edit on 4/6/2014 by Blaine91555 because: Rude comment removed for TAC violation.
You mean where you postulate that it could be a picture of a cosmic ray lol?? You can't possibly be serious with that assumption right?First, Mars has no atmosphere to interact with incoming particles to cause a cosmic ray on the ground. And even if there was a chance of that happening, I doubt that the Mars Rover was just in the right position at the right time to snap a shot right when a cosmic ray hits the ground. Then you have to factor in that the camera on that Rover does not have the shutter speed to capture a damned cosmic ray emitting light. That would be like me trying to capture a perfect picture of a lightning strike on a TracFone camera.The more obvious answer is that whomever was operating the mast camera saw the light an snapped a shot.The major parties are fooling people into handing over personal information in the guise of applications for a postal vote. Here's how the ruse works -- and how to avoid it.
You receive an official-looking envelope in the mail containing an application form for a postal vote. You fill it out and use the reply-paid envelope to send the form back to an official-looking address. You've just dealt with the Australian Electoral Commission, right? Wrong. You've just dealt with a political party that is harvesting your personal details for its database. You've just told the Liberal Party or the Labor Party your name, date of birth, mobile phone number, email address, enrolled address, postal address, where you were born and who your first employer was, and you've given the party your signature. And you probably don't even know it -- because there's nothing on that reply-paid envelope to indicate that you're sending it to a political party (although there will be some advertising material from a candidate contained in the letter). You'd like to see what personal information political parties have filed on you? You can't. Parties are exempt under the Privacy Act; you have no right to access your file. Next, the political party -- which might use tracking systems to work out whether you're likely to vote for it -- is supposed to send the form on to the Australian Electoral Commission (it's an offence under section 197 of the Electoral Act not to). But it might just sit on your form a for a while, perhaps long enough that you never get that postal ballot paper (the Electoral Act prohibits stockpiling, but studies indicate it takes place). And party officials might "correct" details on your application form before sending it on (that's happened before ). Crikey investigated the postal vote system after receiving many emails from concerned readers in response to Tips and Rumours yesterday. Readers sent us the postal vote forms they'd received from the Liberals and the ALP right around the country -- from Labor candidates Kevin Rudd and Cath Bowtell, and from Coalition candidates Bob Baldwin, Teresa Gambaro, Luke Howard, Bill Glasson, Josh Frydenberg, Jag Chugha, Greg Bickley, Sean Armistead and Peter Hendy. And it works; almost 200,000 voters sent the forms back to the political parties at the 2010 federal election. The letter you receive looks something like this:
And the return, "reply paid" envelope enclosed looks something like this -- nothing to indicate this one goes straight to the Liberal Party:In recent months many tennis stars have expressed their disappreciation for the Olympic Games. Many athletes have even gone as far as withdrawing completely in order to focus on the normal tour events. Following Coco Vandeweghe’s impressive top-ten scalp over Agnieszka Radwanska in Birmingham, she spoke openly about her recent grass court success and the upcoming Olympic Games. Her opinion differed dramatically to the likes of Feliciano Lopez, Dominic Thiem and many more.
Coco Vandeweghe Opens Up About Olympics “Heartbreak”
The big serving American was in great spirits after one of her best victories in 2016, but was brutally honest when conveying the “heartbreaking” feeling at missing out on Rio Olympics qualification.
“I was kind of dealing with a major letdown that I didn’t make the Olympics team. That was one of my biggest goals so it was definitely a hard moment for me that I really internalized. I didn’t talk to anyone on my team. It was just kind of a disappointing moment for myself, heartbreaking moment for myself.”
A reporter later reverted back to question Coco Vandeweghe’s initial reaction to not getting her place on the plane and the American expanded further.
“So I’m number five American. I was kind of very close to the other two of Madison Keys and Sloane Stephens, so it was kind of trying to make headwind into the point deficit that I was dealing. Sometimes it wasn’t much – other weeks it was. It was kind of always inching closer to that. But it’s hard to describe what type of feeling I had besides heartbreaking. I mean, to put it in perspective, my goal from the moment I started playing a sport – any sport – was to be an Olympian, because my mom was an Olympian. An Olympic athlete is the creme de la creme of what they do.”
Vandeweghe then put forward her opinion of where an Olympic medal of any kind ranked in comparison to winning a Grand Slam event.
“So for me, to win a gold medal, to win any medal would be leaps and bounds ahead of Grand Slams for me, because that is always something I have aspired to.”
The opinionated American shed some light on the enormity of an Olympic-winning performance through explaining her experiences from a gala dinner featuring many Olympic medalists. Vandeweghe initially spoke about how prominent women’s tennis is as a sport before exclaiming how powerful the women’s game is globally.
“If you probably walked up to anyone in the street and said, name me three women athletes, they would probably name tennis players. It’s just we are the biggest sport to play. But for me, I was in awe of them [at the gala dinner] because I want what you have. So to kind of put that perspective on that was my feeling of what an Olympian is. That’s what I was dealing with in the heartbreak moment.”
Coco Vandeweghe should have other opportunities to make a name for herself on the Olympics centre circle. For now though, she will have to soldier on after one of the toughest disappointments in her young career.
Main PhotoPerhaps the best way to understand what drove Roland Barthes, then a thirty-nine-year-old professor of literature, to begin writing the series of short essays later published as “Mythologies” is to take a brief glance at the myth of the supposedly decadent influence of French theory on American intellectual life. “He’d met Roland Barthes, at a dinner party, and been converted, over cassoulet, to the new faith,” goes a line about a Brown semiotics professor in Jeffrey Eugenides’s recent novel, “The Marriage Plot.” It’s a sentence that both describes and reënacts the mysterious process by which an essayist and literary critic who would have “interrogated” that dish of duck fat, beans, and sausage, demanding to know what it thought it was doing at his dinner party, somehow came to be seen as just another aspect of the stereotypical Frenchness he’d set out to unmask as a repressive fraud.
Anyone who reads Barthes on the myth of steak frites, or the recipes in nineteen-fifties Elle magazines—“A peasant dish is admitted only on occasion as the rustic whim of blasé city folk”—will immediately understand that the American professor is one more dupe of a consumer mentality that leads us to haplessly confuse our gastronomic, religious, and intellectual experiences of other cultures. An interest in the writing of a gay professor of rhetoric, born to a protestant family on France’s Atlantic seaboard, ought not to be conflated with a taste for Provençal cooking; neither should the lure of French theory be assimilated to the grand tourist’s reverence for the mysteries of Notre Dame or Chartres. That is to say, it’s a good thing we still have Barthes to help us understand what’s always at risk of happening to writers like Barthes.
A new, unabridged edition of “Mythologies,” translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, provides additional antidotes to another stereotype about so-called French theorists. Annette Lavers’s 1970 translation included only twenty-eight of Barthes’s original fifty-three short essays, most no longer than two pages, but the entirety of his afterword, “Myth Today.” (In the longer essay, he explains how the coverage of royal weddings, sensational crimes, jet pilots, and famous writers photographed “on vacation,” set alongside advertisements for cleaning products and food, constituted a language with rules as codified as those of the classical French theatre he’d studied.) The ratio of theory to practice in the original edition could give the impression that Barthes was trying to erect a rigorous social science of semiological analysis on the rather gauzy foundation of a few photographs, articles, and advertisements that he’d arbitrarily selected from Paris Match and L’Express.
In fact, “Mythologies” began as a species of cultural journalism, of which certain blogs (Paul Krugman’s, for example) might be the closest contemporary analogue. Beginning in 1954, Barthes had been asked to write a monthly or bimonthly column for the Paris literary magazine Lettres Nouvelles, which he did, dutifully, for two years. His attempt to synthesize these pieces into a larger statement of methodology came later, as Barthes reread his own closely observed and documented associations. The myth—current since Edmund Burke denounced the Declaration of the Rights of Man—of French intellectuals blinded by their own theories, implicitly contrasted with the more empirical and process-driven Anglo-American mind, thus bites the dust, as Barthes himself hoped it would.
“Mythologies,” like Krugman’s blog, also can be read as a kind of chronicle. Barthes used his platform at the magazine, in part, as a way of tracking his frustrations with social and political landscape of France from 1954 to 1956: a time of increasing middle-class prosperity, coinciding with France’s struggle to hold onto its colonies in North Africa and Southeast Asia, and DeGaulle’s attempts to restore some kind of national pride in the aftermath of the Second World War. Most worryingly for Barthes, these were years that also saw the rise of an explicitly anti-intellectual, racist, and populist political party—the forerunner of today’s Front National—headed by a former French Air Force pilot, rugby player, and gym teacher, Pierre Poujade.
Barthes detects elements of Poujadisme in the press’s fondness for tautologies (“business is business,” “Racine is Racine”); the cult of jet pilots (“the jet man is defined less by his courage than by his weight, his diet, and his habits (temperance, frugality, continence)”); and a brief vogue for the hypnotic spectacle of mass American evangelical “crusades” (“If God is really speaking through Dr. Graham’s mouth, it must be acknowledged that God is quite stupid,” he writes of Billy Graham’s appearance at the Vélodrome D’Hiver, where, thirteen years earlier, thousands of Paris’s Jews had been herded prior to their deportation to Auschwitz). Barthes could be scathing, or sometimes just catty—and much of the pleasure of reading “Mythologies” comes from its archly composed anger—but his intention often seems less to deplore than to understand the habits of mind that led his countrypeople to rise, open-mouthed, to such bait.
The urge to succumb to the mythic appeal of modern products, including politicians and celebrities, as well as to the stories we come to associate with them, affected Barthes. It takes a certain unabashed enthusiasm to begin an essay on car design “I believe the automobile is, today, the almost exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals,” even as he concludes pessimistically that the auto industry has fallen prey to “petit bourgeois annexation.” His piece on “professional” wrestling—“it is no more ignoble to watch a wrestled performance of Suffering than the sorrows of Arnulphe or Andromaque”—was a direct influence on Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and pretty much every subsequent, serious exaltation of low or popular arts and culture. When Barthes writes of the “impassive anonymous” hero or bastard of the ring, leaving with a gym bag and his wife on his arm, like a priest packing up after Mass, he establishes a particular tone of genuine fascination that makes us see the spectacle and its actors in a new way—through style—and also reminds us that the word “theory” really just means a way of seeing things.
Contemporary readers will also detect a hint—in essays like those on Citroens and the marketing of margarine through an early version of the “I can’t believe it’s not butter” campaign—of the current practice of “semiotic brand analysis,” when companies hire intelligent people, usually with an undergraduate background in the classes Eugenides makes fun of, to explain to them how to increase the appeal of their own brands. Barthes may not have looked favorably on what he called “the domestication” of the automobile, but when he notes how “the dashboard looks more like the worktable of a modern kitchen than a factory control room,” he was articulating a change that made cars more acceptable to women and families, of which the Citroen designers themselves may have been only dimly aware.
The legacy of “Mythologies” falls short of the complete smashing of signs, the “semioclasm” Barthes wished for in his 1970 preface—neither he nor anyone else has solved the problem of why certain basic human longings for freedom, or heroes, or cleanliness attach themselves so easily to travel guides, bicycle races, plastics, and laundry detergent. And he probably could not have anticipated how completely the very instruments of his analysis could then be adapted to sell even more of those things, especially in Europe’s former colonial domains. Yet the essays retain a force of example that harden them against being read, with fond nostalgia, as mere articles of an outmoded age of cultural criticism. The very ease with which, as a party game, you can substitute “The Tea Party” for “Poujadisme” in certain sentences without changing the meaning very much should be proof that there are certain myths we don’t outgrow, even if the signifiers change. For another generation caught in the idiocies and contradictions of its moment, these essays reveal how an acutely intelligent and sensitive mind can write its way through and set its own poise against them.
Photograph by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum.7 Best Wheatgrass Juicer Reviews for Green Juice Lоvеrѕ 2018
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How to Chооѕе the Best Wheatgrass Juicer?
A wheatgrass juісеr іѕ somewhat dіffеrеnt frоm the uѕuаl juісеr. Most whеаtgrаѕѕ juісеrѕ specialize in whеаt grаѕѕ only. So іf уоu wаnt tо juісе fruіtѕ as wеll, уоu’ll have tо find a ѕіnglе gear masticating juісеr thаt dоеѕ fruіtѕ, vеgеtаblеѕ and whеаtgrаѕѕ.
But a good whеаtgrаѕѕ juісеr саn bе found аt a muсh cheaper price if уоu dоn’t nееd іt tо do аnуthіng еlѕе except juice wheatgrass.
MANUAL OR ELECTRIC WHEATGRASS JUICER?
Whеаtgrаѕѕ juісеrѕ саn be mаnuаl or еlесtrіс, but frоm whаt I’vе оbѕеrvеd, thе bеѕt juісеrѕ for whеаtgrаѕѕ in thе market аrе manual оnеѕ. Nоt tо ѕау thаt thе electric оnеѕ wоn’t work wеll, but thеу are so еxреnѕіvе that уоu mіght as well ѕреnd thе mоnеу оn a ѕіnglе gеаr mаѕtісаtіng juісеr thаt is vеrѕаtіlе. The manual оnеѕ аrе аlѕо more роrtаblе аnd easy tо store аwау due to thеіr compactness.
METAL OR PLASTIC WHEATGRASS JUICER?
You’re рауіng a lot fоr your whеаtgrаѕѕ machine, ѕо you’ll wаnt to know whether іt wіll lаѕt. The gеnеrаl іdеа is that the mоrе metal раrtѕ, аnd thе less electronic раrtѕ іt has, thе longer it wіll lаѕt. Thеrе аrе whеаtgrаѕѕ juicers thаt соnѕіѕt fully оf ѕtаіnlеѕѕ ѕtееl оr саѕt iron parts, whіlе ѕоmе are рlаѕtіс with a ѕtаіnlеѕѕ ѕtееl аugеr. But I dоn’t advise gеttіng a cast іrоn juісеr because they nееd a lot оf maintenance tо keep thеm from ruѕtіng over tіmе.
EASE OF USE
Read the rеvіеwѕ to see whether uѕеrѕ fіnd it easy to uѕе. You don’t wаnt a juісеr thаt nееdѕ a lоt оf еffоrt on уоur раrt tо set it up, make іt juice, аnd thеn take іt аll apart tо сlеаn іt. Rеmеmbеr thаt the еаѕіеr it is tо uѕе, the mоrе уоu wіll uѕе іt, аnd that means getting your mоnеу’ѕ wоrth.
7 BEST WHEATGRASS JUICER COMPARISON TABLE
IMAGE BRAND DESCRIPTION WARRANTY RATING PRICE Thе Original Healthy Juісеr (Lexen GP27) – Mаnuаl Whеаtgrаѕѕ Juісеr Manual Juicer / 2.43 pounds / 5.5 x 8.3 x 7.5 inches 12 Months Limited Warranty Amazon Price Green Power KPE1304 Twin Gear Juicer Wheatgrass, Vegetable & Fruit Juicer – Black 160 RPMs Masticating Juicer / 20.9 pounds / 16 x 8 x 11.5 inches 10 Yеаrѕ оn Mоtоr, 5 Years оn Oреrаtіоnаl Pаrtѕ Amazon Price Handy Pantry HJ Hurricane Stаіnlеѕѕ Stееl – Manual Whеаtgrаѕѕ Juісеr Manual Juicer / 6.8 pounds / 11.8 x 8.5 x 5.2 inches 05 Years Amazon Price Omega J8006 Nutrіtіоn Cеntеr Quіеt Duаl-Stаgе Slоw Speed Mаѕtісаtіng Juісеr 80 RPMs Slow Masticating Juicer / 17.75 pounds / 14.5 x 6.5 x 15.5 inches 15 Years Amazon Price Aісоk Slоw Mаѕtісаtіng Cоld Prеѕѕ Juicer – Fruits, Vеgеtаblеѕ & Wheatgrass Juісеr 80 RPMs Slow Masticating Juicer / 10.03 pounds / 11.8 x 6.5 x 13.7 іnсhеѕ 03 Years Amazon Price Healthy Juicer Electric- Wheatgrass, Fruits, and Vegetables Easy To Clean Cold Pressed Juice Machine 76 RPMs Slow Masticating Juicer / 16.5 pounds / 11.8 x 11 x 17 іnсhеѕ 50 Years Motor Warranty Amazon Price Trіbеѕt Z-Star Z-510 Mаnuаl Juicer Manual Juicer / 6.45 pounds / 13 x 5 x 11.5 inches 12 Months Amazon Price
Top 7 Best Wheatgrass Juicer Reviews (Recommended)
Thе Hеаlthу Juicer Lеxеn GP27 іѕ a rеаllу соmрасt аnd іt’ѕ оnе of the mоѕt іnеxреnѕіvе оf thе mаnuаl juicers. This dоеѕ not mean thаt іt dоеѕ not dо thе jоb wеll, іt dоеѕ.
This іѕ реrfесt fоr thе реrѕоn whо nееdѕ a juicer to ѕuррlеmеnt thеіr rеgulаr juісеr that doesn’t juісе whеаtgrаѕѕ, оr іf thеу оnlу have a desire tо juice whеаtgrаѕѕ аnd nothing еlѕе.
It’ѕ роrtаblе іf you wоuld lіkе tо tаkе іt with уоu whеn уоu leave hоmе, rеԛuіrеѕ nо еlесtrісіtу tо kеер уоur bіllѕ dоwn, аnd саn bе easily stored wіthоut tаkіng uр muсh саbіnеt ѕрасе. It’s known fоr being еffісіеnt, grеаt to travel wіth and bеіng easy to clean. A good сhоісе wіth a gооd рrісе tаg.
FEATURES
Product Dimensions 5.5 x 8.3 x 7.5 inches
Itеm Weight 2.43 роundѕ
Mаnuаllу operated juісеr
Suсtіоn bаѕе аnd tаblе сlаmр
Stainless ѕtееl designed аugеr
Dеѕіgnеd fоr еаѕу сlеаnіng and еаѕе of uѕе
PROS
Thе juісеr can bе used аnуwhеrе
It hаѕ еаѕу tо сlеаn features
If nоt ѕаtіѕfіеd, уоu саn rеturn it tо thе ѕеllеr
Juісеѕ Whеаtgrаѕѕ, Kаlе, Spinach, Collard Grееnѕ, Chаrd, Parsley, Lettuce – anything lеаfу – еаѕіlу!
CONS
It might break if tоо muсh рrеѕѕurе іѕ аррlіеd
Read More Details…
The Green Pоwеr KPE1304 Twin Gеаr Juісеr hаѕ a ѕlееk black dеѕіgn and іѕ an еlесtrіс masticating juісеr, mаkіng іt реrfесt for whеаtgrаѕѕ juісе.
Onе оf the grеаtеѕt th |
non-profit launched. “We first needed to get a telephone number,” she quips. “But the first year was pretty much getting our foundation and getting off the stage, and then developing a plan so that we weren’t just doing this on a whim.”
That involved Thomas, her assistant Imani Glenn—that’s the whole North Broad Renaissance team—volunteers, and Temple students actually canvassing within community in order to find out exactly what residents and business owners wanted to see in the North Broad’s future. From on-the-ground market research and community engagement, Thomas created a five-year strategic plan for the street and released it this past June.
The first step: Cleaning the corridor, which consists of more than 30 intersections. The non-profit issued an RFP and eventually hired TWB Cleaners to clean up trash and debris along the street Monday through Saturday, as well as power-wash the sidewalks twice a month.
“We can see a difference when they’re out there,” Thomas says. “But what I’ve also noticed is that when they’re done at 2:30 p.m., if I go down at 3, trash has already accumulated.”
Another major component of the five-year strategic plan: More parks. The next year will involve more “greening” of public spaces up and down North Broad. That ranges from small projects like adding about 135 planters and 300 tree pits by 2020 to bigger tasks like turning vacant lots into community parks.
Thomas points to a triangular patch of grass near the corner of North Broad and Lehigh Avenue as an intersection that’s in dire need of attention. It’s adjacent to the now defunct Horace Trumbauer-designed North Broad Street station that once served as an ornate backdrop to the Baker Bowl.
Today, the lot is frequented by the homeless population. Already, current efforts to “green” the space have fallen short: A recent visit to the lot revealed that new planters had turned into glorified trash cans.
“It’s a mess,” says Thomas. “But it’s such a great space and there’s so much you can do with it. With visible improvement, right there on Broad, it could be such a great community hub.”
She’s been working with the community and North Philly grassroots organization Urban Creators to come up with plans to transform the neglected landscape into something special. Ideas range from murals to a movie screen, but Thomas knows it could take awhile to get it off the ground.
“That’s the biggest challenge with implementing things: Getting through the approval process, especially with a land owner who’s not always local,” she says. “But once that’s done, we’re moving on it.”
The tail-end years of the non-profit’s strategic plan will turn from cleaning and greening to improving safety along North Broad and economic growth, something Thomas has experience with as the former executive director of the region’s African American Chamber of Commerce.
In some cases, Thomas won’t be starting from scratch in that arena. Currently, there are nearly 1,500 businesses along the corridor, many of them in the hospital and education realm.
Development is rampant, too, especially around Temple’s campus and near the gateway to North Broad. Construction is well underway at Hanover North Broad, while the Divine Lorraine restoration will bring multiple restaurants to its ground floor and residents to its 100-plus apartments starting in January. Plans are in the works to return the Metropolitan Opera House to a concert venue in the future, too.
“In many ways, North Broad is the whole in the donut,” says Mondlak, whose Commerce department provided the non-profit with $350,000. “Temple is gorgeous, and we still have tremendous development in Franciscville and Brewerytown. North Broad has become little gap in the fabric that so developers see that it makes complete sense to fill it in.”
Still, $375,000 (plus $100,000 from stakeholders) won’t go very far along North Broad, says Thomas. “It’s going to cost money to do all of these services right now. It’s going to cost money to incentive businesses to come to North Broad.”
The total estimated cost to implement the five-year plan is $1.75 million, a chunk of which Thomas hopes to garner with annual end-of-the-year fundraising events. The organization’s first-ever gala takes place on Thursday, December 15, during which the organization’s State of North Broad report will be released, highlighting how far the avenue’s come—and just how far it has to go.
But that’s not stopping Thomas. “I keep saying, ‘Let’s not think normal,’” she says. “Let’s think broad. Let’s think innovative and as crazy as we can.”
Photos by Melissa RomeroMr Papaconstantinou (right) has asked for more bail-out details Greece has been warned by European finance ministers that it must make further cuts to spending and public sector wages or face more sanctions. A joint statement from the 16 eurozone nations it said Greece needed to get its debt under control and calm "irrational" financial markets. Last week, the European Union vowed to help Greece if needed. But the idea of bailing out a euro nation has been badly received, prompting a harsher stance. Rising pressure Greece's woes have sent the value of the euro down to a nine-month low recently. Now the country has been told that further measures will be imposed if its debt reduction plans are not on target by 16 March. We won't abandon Greece
France's Christine Lagarde
Why Greece matters No tax please, we're Greek Q&A: Greece's economic woes Ministers and bank officials from the eurozone met in Brussels on Tuesday. Germany's deputy finance minister, Joerg Asmussen, said Greece should follow the actions of Ireland and Latvia - both of which are making major cuts to spending and wages. "We made it clear the ball is in Greece's court," he said. "Additional measures by Greece are needed". Austrian Finance Minister Josef Proell said: "The pressure on Greece to consider further measures has clearly increased." 'Greek problem' Earlier, Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the 16 nations that share the single currency and also Luxembourg's prime minister, told German radio that Greece must understand that other eurozone members were not prepared to pay for its mistakes. Greece's debt crisis is "first and foremost a Greek problem and an internal Greek problem," Mr Juncker said. The markets are giving the euro a severe stress test because they suspect there are real flaws and uncertainties that have not been addressed
Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor
Read Gavin Hewitt's blog in full "The financial markets are completely wrong if they think they can destroy Greece," he added. Europe's leaders pledged to help Greece last week - without spelling out exactly what they were willing to do. On Monday, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told reporters: "We won't abandon Greece. It's clear that we are all in this together." Greece is trying to reduce its public deficit from 12.7% - more than four times the level that single currency rules allow. It has pledged to reduce this to 8.7% during 2010 under an austerity plan that involves major cuts in public spending. But those plans are hugely unpopular with the Greek public and strikes have already been scheduled. Greek bank shares fell again on Tuesday on the continuing concerns. The country's main stock index is down 14.6% so far this year. On Monday, Greece's Finance Minister, George Papaconstantinou, said that he wanted the other eurozone nations to release details of their planned bail-out for his country to ease market fears that the country could default on its debts. But Mr Juncker said it would be "unwise" to publicly detail "the measures we are putting in place". Mr Papaconstantinou has said repeatedly that his country is not asking for financial help from Brussels.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionReal Madrid Jorge Mendes to meet with Jose Angel Sanchez this week
Real Madrid to renew Cristiano Ronaldo and three others within two weeks
Cristiano Ronaldo will sign a new contract with Real Madrid in the coming week, one which could keep him at the club until June 30, 2021, when he will be 36 years of age.
The duration of the new deal is the only aspect that could yet be altered, with all other details now finalised, and pen is expected to be put to paper in the coming days when the player's agent Jorge Mendes meets with Los Blancos' director Jose Angel Sanchez.
By extending the No.7's deal, the capital city club will be demonstrating just how much the forward still means to them and, with Ronaldo as motivated as ever, the club's hierarchy had no doubts about keeping him at the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu for longer.
The Portuguese forward will remain the best-paid player in the squad, something which no director or player has any concerns about given the respect Ronaldo has earned.
Assuming there are no last minute alterations, the extension - which Radio MARCA reported on weeks ago - should be signed on Monday or Tuesday.Kerry Haggard, 47, of Commerce was sentenced Monday to six and a half years in prison for selling fake horror movie posters and lobby cards which he represented over the Internet as authentic vintage collectibles.
Haggard pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud in Manhattan federal court in October, and was sentenced this week by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon.
According to the indictment, Haggard made and sold posters that he purported to be original horror movie collectibles. Using action sites like eBay, he sold and traded the items from January 2006 to August 2009. He used a New York-based printing company to make high-quality copies of horror movie cards or posters from either hard copies or digital scans of pieces he provided. He then used a restoration company to attach the copies to lobby card stock and alter the resulting product to make it look as real as possible.
He was able to sell numerous fake lobby cards and posters for movies such as "Frankenstein" and "Son of Frankenstein," at prices ranging from $500 to $5,000 to two dozen victims. Haggard also traded his fake reproductions to other sellers who gave him real lobby cards and/or posters in return.
The victims learned of the fraud in various ways, including after providing the lobby card to a restoration expert, or after consigning the piece to a large auction house for sale.
As a result of his fraud, the victims lost more than $1.3 million in money and property.
In addition to the prison term, McMahon sentenced Haggard to three years of supervised release, imposed a $1.38 million forfeiture judgment, imposed a restitution order for $1.38 million, and ordered him to pay a $100 special assessment fee.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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Scott Walker is, of course, running for president. The anti-labor governor of Wisconsin confirmed his candidacy in the clearest way possible last March. Despite the fact that he was getting heat at home for traveling too far and too wide from Wisconsin, he jetted to Las Vegas to participate—with other 2016 Republican presidential prospects—in what was dubbed the “Sheldon Adelson primary.” Ad Policy
Polls have made it clear that Wisconsinites do not want the anti-labor governor to run for president and that they do not think he can bid for the GOP nod and serve effectively as governor. So the Vegas run was risky.
But Walker appears to have hit the jackpot.
On October 23, Adelson inked a check for $650,000 to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. And, on October 23, the Republican Party of Wisconsin made a $450,000 “in-kind” contribution to Scott Walker’s re-election campaign.
Wisconsin, which bars individuals from donating more than $10,000 to a particular candidate in a particular election cycle, used to place strict limits on donations to political parties and transfers of money from parties to candidates. But, this year, Supreme Court and federal court rulings have deconstructed a lot of election law. And, in September, US District Judge Rudolph Randa issued a preliminary injunction that prevents Wisconsin election officials from enforcing limits on individual donations to political parties. That ruling, noted the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “creates an easy way for donors to sidestep the limits they normally face when giving to candidates.”
Mike McCabe, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign was blunter, saying at the time of the ruling, “What’s being done here is empowering a tiny fraction of one percent of the population to have vastly more influence over elections and our government than they used to have.”
The campaign-finance watchdog explained that with the ruling the influence of super-wealthy super donors had “been magnified, and I think that comes at the expense of everyone else.”
Adelson is, indeed, super-wealthy. Estimates of his casino-fueled fortune run in the range of $40 billion—and rising.
Adelson is, indeed, a super donor. He gave in the range of $150 million to Republican candidates and causes in 2012, according to ProPublica. That, Politico noted, was more than anyone else has given in the history of American presidential politics.
He has also been a generous supporter of Scott Walker, using a special recall-election loophole to donate $250,000 to help the governor hold on to his post in a 2012 recall election. Now, he has found another way to influence Wisconsin politics in an election where Walker’s political future is at stake.
Under what remains of Wisconsin campaign finance law, Adelson cannot tell the Republican Party of Wisconsin what to do with his money. He can’t, for instance, designate Walker as the direct beneficiary of his largesse. The party can, however, spend money to help its priority candidates—and no one would question that re-electing Walker is the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s top priority.
That’s also a priority for Adelson, who gave a maximum direct donation of $10,000 to the Walker campaign earlier this year. In all, Walker’s campaign has raised roughly $25 million since early 2013. That’s a good deal more than his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, who has raised roughly $15 million—including $5 million from her own fortune—according to the latest reports. And that’s not counting all the “independent” expenditures that have filled Wisconsin television screens with negative ads.
But, with polls showing him in a dead-heat race with Burke, Walker is griping about not having enough money this year. After all, if he loses this year in Wisconsin, he will have a hard time competing in the real “Sheldon Adelson primary” with all the Republican presidential prospects who will be looking for billionaire backing in 2016.She may only be a rescue cat but this little black cat has travelled more than 50,000kms around Australia in a campervan with her owner.
Willow the cat and me, Rich (read that as chauffeur, cuddle provider, and snack time attendant), have been travelling since we left our hometown of Hobart, Tasmania back in May 2015.
I sold my house, all of my possessions, and quit my job so I could take the trip of a lifetime. But one thing I couldn’t say goodbye of was this little cat so the obvious decision was to take her with me.
In February 2017 we finally made it to South Australia, marking Willow’s official completion of visiting all 6 states and 2 territories of Australia! This is what is known in Aussie adventure cat slang as a Purrfect Eight. We’ve achieved so much together and seen some amazing places. I can’t imagine being on this trip without her by my side. We’ve sailed the Great Barrier Reef, camped up mountains and travelled thousands of kilometers of gravel roads from Bourketown in Queensland, all the way up to Northern Territory.
Some people think it’s odd that I’m travelling with a cat, but Willow is so chilled out and absolutely loves our new lifestyle. Willow is kept safe with a tracking collar which allows me to always know where she is. She spends most of her time off the leash and is always keen to explore around our camp. With the tracking collar, I have the peace of mind that if she decides to go for a hike I will be straight onto her.
It’s been so much fun sharing our adventures with the world. It makes me so happy when someone messages me and says that they saw our photos and it brightened their day. It gives me the motivation to keep on doing what we are doing. We even have a calendar prepared to keep you inspired every day of the year! You can find it here.
We have well and truly settled into the travelling life and spend our days in forests and beaches just soaking it all in. Although we have almost made it back to our home state there is no sign of us stopping anytime soon. We have adapted to life on the road and have made it our life now, you have to choose what makes you happy in this life and while we can keep going, why would we stop?
I’m so proud of Willow, she’s the cat that made my van a home and the whole of Australia her backyard. She’s the best travel buddy ever!
More info: vancatmeow.com | Instagram | Facebook
I’ve been traveling around Australia with my rescue cat Willow in a campervan for 2,5 years now
Together we have travelled more than 50,000kms already
We left our hometown of Hobart, Tasmania back in May 2015
I sold my house, all of my possessions, and quit my job so I could take the trip of a lifetime
But one thing I couldn’t say goodbye of was this little cat so the obvious decision was to take her with me
In February 2017 we finally made it to South Australia, marking Willow’s official completion of visiting all 6 states and 2 territories of Australia!
We’ve sailed the Great Barrier Reef, camped up mountains and travelled thousands of kilometers of gravel roads from Bourketown in Queensland, all the way up to Northern Territory
Some people think it’s odd that I’m travelling with a cat, but Willow is so chilled out and absolutely loves our new lifestyle
Willow is kept safe with a tracking collar which allows me to always know where she is
With the tracking collar, I have the peace of mind that if she decides to go for a hike I will be straight onto her
She spends most of her time off the leash and is always keen to explore around our camp
We have adapted to life on the road and have made it our life now, you have to choose what makes you happy in this life and while we can keep going, why would we stop?
We have well and truly settled into the travelling life and spend our days in forests and beaches just soaking it all in
We’ve achieved so much together and seen some amazing places. I can’t imagine being on this trip without her by my sideAll sides of a society can agree that speech should be free. Until, of course, it isn’t. George W Bush famously said, “There ought to be limits to freedom.” It’s the right to free speech until you say something that some people really don’t like. Often, something that the offended parties find it really hard to criminalise. It’s not quite as easy as it used to be to get libel, slander or malicious communication charges to stick to uncomfortable statements. Luckily for the uncomfortable, conservative countries have an ancient recourse. Something that was invented many thousands of years ago for the express purpose of keeping the uppity in line. Since summer, it’s been used in Russia as a political lever to shut people up, and in Greece too.
Blasphemy. The act of insulting something regarded as holy. Thomas Aquinas characterised it as “a sin against God”. He was big on the idea that sinners needed to be killed, was our Thomas, with the ethical caveat/fig-leaf that it should be secular courts that saw people “exterminated” so that the Church could pretend to have clean hands. Because, apparently, a god is not such a big thing that it cannot be made to feel sad.
Of course, the gods and prophets don’t even notice. The latter are dead and the former never showed any signs of life. Blasphemy, like heresy, is thoughtcrime: a questioning of institutions, authority structures and the way we live. When I wipe shit on the face of your god, I’m not doing it to your god – I’m doing it to you, because it’s you who serve it and you who use it as justification of your position. It’s a political act. It does, however, allow the state to pick up one of its most ancient weapons.
“Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” was the BBC’s translation of the sentence brought against three members of the Russian activist band Pussy Riot, a direct punishment by the state for entering a church and colourfully imploring that Vladimir Putin be removed from office. Many of the words were what some people call obscenities. Obscenities, like gods, are incorporeal things loaded with scary meaning for people who let that happen to them.
In Greece, just a couple of weeks ago a young man was arrested for “malicious blasphemy” against a dead man. Elder Paisios was a monk. He died in 1994. There is apparently a movement to see him canonised, but right now he’s just bones and a beard. The young man operated a Facebook page that satirised Greek Orthodoxy, Elder Pastitsios – Pastitsio is a Greek pasta dish, and the name invoked Pastafarianism. It turns out the Greek police have a “cyber crimes” unit that was, presumably for want of anything better to do, peering at this page. And then Golden Dawn asked questions in Parliament about it, forcing them to act. Golden Dawn, you will recall, is the Greek Nazi party, openly being given power by the police to attack immigrants.
This is power consolidation. Committing blasphemy against a man who is neither a god, a prophet or even a saint is like committing blasphemy against my dog. My dog is not a god, a prophet or a saint, and, in fact, it also doesn’t exist because I don’t own a dog because I fucking hate dogs. But the Golden Dawn has just caused a man to be arrested for blasphemy in protection of the wounded feelings of Greek Orthodoxy in order to present itself as an ally to the Church.
It’s got nothing to do with God. It never did. If there were a god, and it felt mortal pain at the sin of blasphemy, it would be a vain and weak creature, unworthy of sympathy, let alone worship. But there isn’t. There are simply poisonous little men and women who build cages in the night for the people who remember how to think and laugh, and they stack those cages into great black iron walls of monolithic, truthless authority.
Follow Warren on Twitter: @warrenellis
Image by Marta Parszeniew
Previously: Good Morning Sinners... with Warren Ellis - The Death of Fun in PoliticsBibek Debroy said there was nothing to be worried about the state of economy.
Highlights Mr Debroy took a jibe at Yashwant Sinha for article on economic slowdown He said there are minor issues with economy but nothing worrisome Compared the state of Indian economy to be similar to 'having a cold'
Bibek Debroy, who heads the new Economic Advisory Council set up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, took swipes at BJP veteran Yashwant Sinha's critique of the economy and said what the former finance minister called a "serious emergency" was actually a "minor cold".Mr Debroy, who is also a member of the government think-tank Niti Aayog, said while there may be some minor problems with the economy, it was nothing to be worried about.He was speaking at the launch of the book "India @70, Modi @3.5" - edited by him and Ashok Malik - an event where Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also hit back at Yashwant Sinha, who has demolished the government's economic decisions in a stinging article for the Indian Express titled "I need to speak now".Mr Debroy remarked that he had a cold and the Indian economy was also going through something similar."There is a place called Yashwant Place where when I consulted a doctor, he said this is a serious medical emergency... might be chikungunya. You might die," he said, in an apparent reference to Yashwant Sinha's article, which uses terms like distress and "unprecedented existential crisis"."I then went to another more sensible doctor, who said you have just got a minor cold, relax. Give it a few days, and it will pass," Mr Debroy remarked.The Finance Minister also had an acerbic comeback for Yashwant Sinha as he obliquely referred to him as " a job applicant at 80 " and also remarked that he did not "have the luxury as yet of being a former finance minister" or a "former finance minister who has turned a columnist".Alan Tudyk Biographical Full name Alan Wray Tudyk Gender Male Birth date March 16, 1971 Born in El Paso, Texas, U.S. Height 6' 0" (182.88 cm) Eye color Blue Hair color Brown Occupation Actor
Voice actor Role King Butterfly
Ludo [Source]
Alan Wray Tudyk is an American actor and voice artist known for his roles on Firefly, Serenity, and various other shows and Disney animated features.
He voices Ludo and King Butterfly in Star vs. the Forces of Evil.
Early life
Tudyk was born in El Paso, Texas, to Betty Loyce (née Wiley) and Timothy Nicholas Tudyk. His father is of Polish descent and his mother has German, English, and Scottish ancestry. He was raised in Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, where he attended Plano Senior High School. He had a brief experience as a stand-up comic, before quitting after an angry audience member threatened to kill him. Tudyk studied drama at the Methodist-affiliated Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, Texas where he won the Academic Excellence award for drama. While in college, he played Beaver Smith in an eastern New Mexico summer stock theater production of Billy the Kid. Tudyk entered Juilliard but left in 1996 before earning a degree.
Career
In 2000, Tudyk played Gerhardt, a gay German drug addict, alongside Sandra Bullock and Viggo Mortensen in 28 Days. He played Wat in 2001's A Knight's Tale, Steve the Pirate in the 2004 comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Sonny in I, Robot.
One of Tudyk's better-known roles is Hoban "Wash" Washburne in the television series Firefly by Joss Whedon. In 2005, he reprised his role as Washburne in the film Serenity.
In 2007, Tudyk had a supporting role as a strong-willed doctor in the western film 3:10 to Yuma alongside Christian Bale and Russell Crowe along with a brief but memorable role in the film Knocked Up and a highly physical comedic performance in the British film Death at a Funeral.
Tudyk also voiced King Candy in Walt Disney Animation Studios' 2012 film Wreck-It Ralph, a performance for which he won the Annie Award for Voice Acting. He played Ben Chapman in the 2013 movie 42.
Tudyk voiced the Duke of Weselton in Disney's 2013 film Frozen. In 2014, he voiced Alistair Krei in Disney's Big Hero 6, and in 2016, he voiced Duke Weaselton and Hei Hei in Disney's Zootopia and Moana, respectively. That same year, he played the droid K-2SO in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Tudyk is currently a main cast member on the DC Comics-based comedy show Powerless.nGBeast Profile Joined July 2010 United States 900 Posts Last Edited: 2013-05-07 16:40:23 #1 [MOD EDIT:
NoName of Fnatic has written something on his passing.
http://www.fnatic.com/content/95531/in-memory-of-space
http://pgr21.com/pb/pb.php?id=free2&no=51139
WarCraft 3 Progamer Park "Go)Space" Seung Hyun passed away on this Monday. I don't know how many people here followed the WC3 pro scene but I'm sure as fellow gamers we can appreciate a guy who played at an extremely high level with a disease. He never let such a terrible disease hold him back from doing what he loved.
Also, here's an interview with him that was posted on TL a few years ago: Interview
Excerpts:
NoName of Fnatic has written something on his passing.WarCraft 3 Progamer Park "Go)Space" Seung Hyun passed away on this Monday. I don't know how many people here followed the WC3 pro scene but I'm sure as fellow gamers we can appreciate a guy who played at an extremely high level with a disease. He never let such a terrible disease hold him back from doing what he loved.Also, here's an interview with him that was posted on TL a few years ago:Excerpts:
Seung Hyun Go)Space Park is no new name in the international Warcraft community, as he has played for the once commendable Team NoA. However, a large portion of the community does not know that the undead player was diagnosed with a rare inveterate muscle disorder which caused him to be disabled at the young age of 11...
...Space understands that there is no remedy for his disease, hence his only wish is to become the greatest Warcraft player.
^My dream is neither not to become a pro-player nor be healthy. But I hope to be the best player in WC3 which is the only thing I can do now to make my family proud.^
^I know there is no cure for me and I do not believe in miracles. I just want to play this game for fun by doing my best and become an undefeatable player and a strong son for my mom^ he says.
Adding some pictures of Go)Space from KalWarkov post:
On May 07 2013 23:25 KalWarkov wrote:
RIP.
Not only grubby, but the whole wc3 community knew him or at least his play.
Some pictures of him in the spoiler, you wouldnt believe how good he was, top 5 undead in the world for several years.
+ Show Spoiler +
RIP.Not only grubby, but the whole wc3 community knew him or at least his play.Some pictures of him in the spoiler, you wouldnt believe how good he was, top 5 undead in the world for several years. Adding some pictures of Go)Space from KalWarkov post:TV crew member in Indiana Borough helicopter crash dies
A member of a reality television crew who was onboard a helicopter that crashed in Indiana borough last month died from his injuries Monday morning, the Cambria County coroner's office said.
Gregory Allen Jacobsen, 33, of Ontario, Canada was pronounced dead at 6:59 a.m. at Conemaugh Valley Memorial Hospital in Johnstown. Coroner Dennis Kwiatkowski ruled that he died from multiple traumatic injuries suffered in the April 30 crash.
Mr. Jacobsen was part of a film crew that was taking footage of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus for the reality television show "Campus PD," which aims to capture college life mostly through the eyes of police officers on the late-night shift.
The helicopter was flying around some apartment buildings when it plummeted to the ground at around 8:30 p.m., narrowly missing students who were drawn outside when they heard it hovering above.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.
First published on May 26, 2011 at 12:00 amWhen it comes to building Progressive Web Apps, my favourite library has to be the Service Worker toolbox. I’ve previously written about this great library and how it can make life a lot easier for developers by removing boilerplate code and using proven caching strategies that help you build real world PWAs. The truth is, it used to be my favourite library until I discovered Workbox.
Workbox that takes learnings from the Service Worker Toolbox and builds upon it, while at the same time providing a collection of loosely-coupled libraries and tools that focus on different service worker features and use-cases. The great thing about this library is that it helps you simplify your development by making it easy to take advantage of powerful service worker features and automating service worker generation.
At it’s core, Workbox is made up of a module called workbox-sw, which is a service worker library that makes makes fetch requests and caching as easy as possible. However, under the hood, there are a number of lower-level modules that can be used independently or mixed-and-matched depending on your use case. For example, there is a module called workbox-cache-expiration which expires cached responses based on age or a maximum number of entries. Another awesome module is workbox-background-sync, which queues failed requests and uses the Background Sync API to replay those requests when the user comes back online. Awesome stuff!
In this article, I am going to run through some of the basics of the Workbox library, including the Workbox CLI tool, custom caching, improved debugging as well as the offline Google Analytics module.
Getting started
I wanted to experiment with Workbox using an existing Progressive Web App in order to compare the new library side by side. For this example, I am going to use a PWA that I have already built which is called Awesome Typography; essentially it’s a list of resources that help you build beautiful websites using Web Fonts.
The web pages in the Awesome Typography site are static which makes the content perfect for service worker caching. I also use Google Analytics which should plug in nicely with the workbox-offline-analytics package.
The Workbox CLI tool makes life a lot easier
One of the things that I really like about Workbox is that it comes with a CLI tool that you can use to generate a service worker with some smart defaults. No need to manually create each file in your service worker, the CLI tool will loop through your files and add them to your service worker to be precached.
First off, start by installing the Workbox CLI. Open your terminal (or Command Prompt in Windows) and run the following code:
$ npm install workbox-cli --global
In order to generate a service worker and precache the files in your project, run the following code:
$ workbox-cli generate:sw
You’ll be prompted with a list of questions to determine your project’s setup and voilà, the tool will create a ready-to-use service worker that you can add to your project.
It took me less than five minutes to get this running on the Awesome Typography website. The best thing about the Workbox CLI tool is that you can apply this to any project in just a few steps.
Custom caching and routing
Okay, so we’ve got precaching in place, but what about any HTTP requests that aren’t coming from the Awesome Typography site? This site is all about the web fonts, so it only makes sense that we include a few in each page! The fonts used on this site are from Google Fonts, which means if the user is offline or loses their connection, the site will look a bit funny without the fonts in place.
The CLI tool is great for files that exist on my hard drive, but ideally I want to cache these web fonts too. This is where routing comes into play.
In its most basic form, routing is the process of matching an incoming request with the most appropriate route. Once we have matched a request, we can then decide what we want to do with it. I’ve used the following code inside my service worker and included the Workbox library.
Woah - that looks like a lot of code. Let’s break it down step by step.
Firstly, we are including the Workbox JavaScript file using importScripts(). Now that it is included in our service worker, we can start referencing the WorkboxSW() library.
Next, we register a new route for 'https://fonts.googleapis.com/(.*)', which will ensure that any HTTP requests that match the origin "fonts.googleapis.com" will be added to added to and retrieved from service worker cache. The code above won't cache anything that doesn't match our route and this kind of flexibility is great because it really gives you the control over what you would like cache.
You may also notice the strategies.cacheFirst function. Workbox takes a lot of the hard work out of writing your own caching logic. It comes with built-in caching strategies that you can mix and match depending on your own custom routes.
For example, you can choose from:
Cache only
Cache first, falling back to network
Cache, with network update
Network only
Network first, falling back to cache
If you’d like to learn more about the different caching strategies support in Workbox, I recommend checking out this link for more information.
You can also choose to only cache certain HTTP response statuses. Here I am explicitly choosing 200 responses, but you could choose 404’s or other HTTP statuses depending on your needs.
Finally, and probably my favourite feature, is the ability to force the network to timeout after a certain amount of time using networkTimeoutSeconds. Using this is important because it ensures that if the network takes too long to respond, it will simply fallback and your user won’t be stuck waiting for a resource to load. This is also a great step forward in reducing Single Point of Failure in your web apps.
Improved Debug |
expect ( all_email_addresses ). to include "admin@example.com" end scenario "2 emails are sent" do expect ( all_emails. count ). to eq 2 end end end end end def fill_form_with_valid_data ( args = {}) email = args. fetch ( :email, "email@example.com" ) fill_in "email", with : email fill_in "user_password", with : "my-super-secret-password" fill_in "user_password_confirmation", with : "my-super-secret-password" fill_in "age", with : 22 select "Poland", from : "country" check "policy" end def register click_button "Register" end
I like using some helper methods, especially in acceptance tests so I wrote fill_form_with_valid_data and register helpers - these are just some details and I don’t need to know them when reading tests. There are also some helpers like all_email_addresses and all_emails, which come from the MailerMacros :
spec/support/mailer_macros.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 module MailerMacros def last_email ActionMailer : :Base. deliveries. last end def last_email_address last_email. to. join end def reset_email ActionMailer : :Base. deliveries = [] end def reset_with_delayed_job_deliveries ActionMailer : :Base. deliveries = [] end def all_emails ActionMailer : :Base. deliveries end def all_emails_sent_count ActionMailer : :Base. deliveries. count end def all_email_addresses all_emails. map ( & :to ). flatten end end
If you like it, just create spec/support/mailer_macros.rb, put the code there and in your spec_helper.rb insert the following lines:
spec/spec_helper.rb 1 2 config. include ( MailerMacros ) config. before ( :each ) { reset_email }
Also, the select with country might be not clear - the collection with countries comes from country_select gem.
We have some failing acceptance tests, it will take some time to make them all green. Now we can write some migrations:
1 2 rails generate model User email encrypted_password rails generate model UserProfile user_id :integer age : integer country
We also need to add some database constraints, to ensure that users’ emails are unique and fields are not null, the migrations would look like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord : :Migration def change create_table :users do | t | t. string :email, null : false t. string :encrypted_password, null : false t. timestamps end add_index :users, :email, unique : true end end class CreateUserProfiles < ActiveRecord : :Migration def change create_table :user_profiles do | t | t. integer :age t. string :country, null : false t. integer :user_id, null : false t. timestamps end add_index :user_profiles, :user_id end end
Now we have to define some routes:
config/routes.rb 1 2 3 4 root to : "static_pages#home" resources :users do end
For user registration, we have REST actions: new and create. Let’s also add some root page, currently just to get rid of default Rails page:
app/controllers/static_pages_controller.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class StaticPagesController < ApplicationController def home end end
But how to deal with UsersController and form for user registration? We have some fields that are not present in models ( password/password_confirmation and policy ). The popular solution would be using: accepts_nested_attributes_for :profile and some virtual attributes. I don’t really like this solution, accepts_nested_attributes_for sometimes can really save a lot of time, especially with complex nested forms with nested_form gem. But virtual attributes are quite ugly and they make models the interfaces for forms. Much better approach is to use form objects. There’s a great gem for this kind of problems: Reform - we will use it here.
app/controllers/users_controller.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 class UsersController < ApplicationController def new @registration_form = registration_form end def create end private def registration_form UserRegistrationForm. new ( user : User. new, profile : UserProfile. new ) end end
That’s it for UsersController, we will need some views and the actual form object:
app/views/users/new.html.haml 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 % h1 User Registration = simple_form_for @registration_form do | f | = f. input :email, label : "email" = f. input :country, label : "country", as : :country = f. input :age, label : "age" = f. input :password, label : "password" = f. input :password_confirmation, label : "password confirmation" = f. input :policy, label : "I accept the policy", as : :boolean = f. submit "Register"
And the actual UserRegistrationForm :
app/forms/user_registration_form.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 class UserRegistrationForm < Reform : :Form include Reform : :Form :: ActiveRecord include Composition property :email, on : :user property :password, on : :nil, empty : true property :password_confirmation, on : :nil, empty : true property :age, on : :profile property :country, on : :profile property :policy, on : :nil, empty : true validates :email, presence : true, email : true, uniqueness : { case_sensitive : false } validates :password, presence : true, confirmation : true validates :age, presence : true validates :country, presence : true validates :policy, acceptance : true, presence : true model :user end
Reform is not (yet) that popular in the Rails community so some things require explanation (check also the docs out). The Reform::Form::ActiveRecord module is for uniqueness validation and the Composition is for… composition - some properties are mapped to user and other to profile. There is also a mystical mapping with on: :nil - these are “virtual” properties like password, password_confirmation and policy - all properties must be mapped to a resource so just to satisfy Reform API I use on: :nil as a convention, also the empty: true option is for virtual attributes that won’t be processed. And where does the email validation come from? From our custom validator, let’s write some specs but before we should add /forms (and /usecases for business logic) directories to be autoloaded:
config/application.rb 1 2 config. autoload_paths += %W( #{ config. root } /app/usecases) config. autoload_paths += %W( #{ config. root } /app/forms)
spec/usecases/email_validator_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 require'spec_helper' class DummyModel include ActiveModel : :Validations attr_accessor :email validates :email, email : true end describe EmailValidator do let ( :model ) { DummyModel. new } it "validates email format" do valid_emails = %w[email@example.com name.surname@email.com e-mail@example.com] valid_emails. each do | email | model. email = email expect ( model ). to be_valid end invalid_emails = %w[email @email.com email.example.com email@example email@example.] invalid_emails. each do | email | model. email = email expect ( model ). not_to be_valid end end end
You can probably come up with some more examples to cover email validation but these are sufficient cases. I’ve introduced DummyModel here to have a generic object that can be validated so the ActiveModel::Validations module is needed and an accessor for an email. Let’s implement the actual validation:
usecases/email_validator.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 class EmailValidator < ActiveModel : :EachValidator def validate_each ( record, attribute, value ) unless value =~ /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})\z/i record. errors [ attribute ] << ( options [ :message ] || "is not a valid email format" ) end end end
The regexp for email validation comes from Rails guides:). It won’t cover all the possibilities but the actual format of the email is an overkill.
I don’t fell the need to write tests for other validations and composition for UserRegistrationForm : it’s just using very descriptive DSL, the validation are already tested in Rails.
We haven’t set up the associations yet in models:
app/models/user.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base has_one :profile, class_name : "UserProfile", inverse_of : :user validates :email, presence : true, uniqueness : { case_insensitive : false }, email : true validates :encrypted_password, presence : true
app/models/user_profile.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class UserProfile < ActiveRecord : :Base belongs_to :user, inverse_of : :profile validates :user, :country, :age, presence : true end
I added also validations in models. These may seem like a duplication because form object already implements them but these are validations always applicable do these models so it is a good idea to have them in models.
Let’s concentrate on UsersController and create action. I don’t really like testing controllers, especially for CRUD-like stuff, user creation still feels like CRUD but not that typical in Rails, especially when using dedicated form object. So let’s test drive registration process: we are going to use UserRegistrationForm for data aggregation and validation - if the data is valid, the user will be created by UserRegistration service object with redirection to root path, otherwise it will render new template.
spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 require'spec_helper' describe UsersController do describe "#create" do let ( :registration_form ) { instance_double ( UserRegistrationForm ) } let ( :user_params ) { { "email" => "email@example.com" } } let ( :params ) { { user : user_params } } let ( :user_registration ) { instance_double ( UserRegistration ) } before ( :each ) do allow ( UserRegistrationForm ). to receive ( :new ) { registration_form } allow ( registration_form ). to receive ( :assign_attributes ). with ( user_params ) { registration_form } allow ( user_registration ). to receive ( :register! ). with ( registration_form ) { true } allow ( UserRegistration ). to receive ( :new ) { user_registration } end context "valid data" do before ( :each ) do expect ( registration_form ). to receive ( :valid? ) { true } post :create, params end it "executes registration" do expect ( user_registration ). to have_received ( :register! ). with ( registration_form ) end it "redirects to root path" do expect ( response ). to redirect_to root_path end end context "invalid data" do before ( :each ) do expect ( registration_form ). to receive ( :valid? ) { false } post :create, params end it "renders registration form" do expect ( response ). to render_template :new end end end end
Well, it is not really clear, that’s the problem with testing controllers and they should be as thin as possible. We need to implement the assign_attributes method in form object to fill models’ attributes with params and implement the actual UserRegistration usecase. In tests I use instance_double instead of simple double to make sure I’m not stubbing non-existent methods or with wrong number of arguments - that’s a great feature introduced in RSpec 3, which comes from rspec-fire gem. Also, I’m stubbing responses so that I can spy on them using have_received method - It’s much cleaner and easier to read. Compare these two examples:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 before ( :each ) do expect ( registration_form ). to receive ( :valid? ) { true } post :create, params end it "executes registration" do expect ( user_registration ). to have_received ( :register! ). with ( registration_form ) end it "redirects to root path" do expect ( response ). to redirect_to root_path end
and
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 before ( :each ) do expect ( registration_form ). to receive ( :valid? ) { true } end it "executes registration" do expect ( user_registration ). to receive ( :register! ). with ( registration_form ) post :create, params end it "redirects to root path" do post :create, params expect ( response ). to redirect_to root_path end
I really encourage you to spy on a stubbed method, I will make your tests much more readable and DRY them up.
I made also some non-standard design decisions here: why not to implement the persistence logic in the form object and use it like:
1 2 3 4 5 if @registration_form. persist ( user_params ) # populate data, perform validation and persist data if is valid # happy paths else # failure path end
For simple persistence logic I would probably go with that approach but we will also need to send some confirmation instructions, admin notifications etc., I’m not really comfortable with the idea of form object knowing something about sending notifications, persistence alone would be ok, it would be quite convenient to use but this is too complex, I would leave form object for data aggregation and validation. Let’s write code for the controller:
app/controllers/users_controller.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 class UsersController < ApplicationController def create @registration_form = registration_form. assign_attributes ( params [ :user ] ) if @registration_form. valid? UserRegistration. new. register! ( @registration_form ) redirect_to root_path, notice : "You have register. Please, check your email for confimartion instructions" else render :new end end private def registration_form UserRegistrationForm. new ( user : User. new, profile : UserProfile. new ) end end
We need to implement assign_attributes method (we have nice failure message thanks to instance_double that informs us about it):
1 2 3 Failure / Error : allow ( registration_form ). to receive ( :assign_attributes ) UserRegistrationForm does not implement : assign_attributes
and UserRegistration. Let’s start from test for assign_attributes method. It looks like, besides assigning params, it should return itself:
spec/forms/user_registration_form_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 require'spec_helper' describe UserRegistrationForm do let ( :user ) { User. new } let ( :profile ) { UserProfile. new } subject { UserRegistrationForm. new ( user : user, profile : profile ) } describe "#assign_attributes" do it "populates models' attributes with params" do subject. assign_attributes ( "email" => "email@example.com", "country" => "Poland" ) expect ( subject. user. email ). to eq "email@example.com" expect ( subject. profile. country ). to eq "Poland" end it "assigns profile to user" do subject. assign_attributes ({}) expect ( user. profile ). to eq profile end it "returns self" do expect ( subject. assign_attributes ({})). to eq subject end end end
And the code for implementation:
app/forms/user_registration_form.rb 1 2 3 4 5 def assign_attributes ( params ) from_hash ( params ) save_to_models self end
It uses some Reform::Form private methods that I found in source code so this implementation might not be stable but fortunately we have it covered in tests so we will know breaking changes if it happens in next versions. And there’s a gotcha here: The keys in hash must be stringified, symbols won’t work (applies to 0.2.4 version of Reform).
Let’s write some minimal implementation for UserRegistration to satisfy controller’s specs:
app/usecases/user_registration.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class UserRegistration def register! ( aggregate ) end end
And what the UserRegistration should be responsible for? Let’s start with persistence logic: user with it’s profile must be created and the encrypted password should be assigned to the user. We will also need registration profile to be created.
spec/usecases/user_registration_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 require'spec_helper' describe UserRegistration do let ( :user ) { FactoryGirl. build_stubbed ( :user ) } let ( :profile ) { FactoryGirl. build_stubbed ( :user_profile ) } let ( :form ) { double ( :form, user : user, profile : profile, password : "password" ) } subject { UserRegistration. new ( encryption : encryption ) } let ( :encrypted_password ) { "encrypted_password" } let ( :encryption ) { instance_double ( Encryption, generate_password : encrypted_password ) } context "persistence is success" do before ( :each ) do allow ( user ). to receive ( :save! ) { true } allow ( profile ). to receive ( :save! ) { true } allow ( user ). to receive ( :create_registration_profile! ) { true } end before ( :each ) do subject. register! ( form ) end specify "user gets encrypted password" do expect ( user. encrypted_password ). to eq encrypted_password end it "saves user" do expect ( user ). to have_received ( :save! ) end it "creates profile for user" do expect ( profile ). to have_received ( :save! ) end it "create registration profile for user" do expect ( user ). to have_received ( :create_registration_profile! ) end end context "persistence fails" do it "raises RegistrationFailed error" do allow ( user ). to receive ( :save! ) { raise_error ActiveRecord : :RecordInvalid } expect do UserRegistration. new. register! ( form ) end. to raise_error UserRegistration : :RegistrationFailed end end end
Note: keep in mind that you should write one test and then write minimal implementation to make it pass and then another test. I gave the several tests and the actual UserRegistration in advance, just to make it easier to read and follow.
It is quite clear from the tests what should be expected from this class: creation of user, profile, registration profile and assigning encrypted password. Data aggregate ( form ) is just a double with profile and user, we don’t care what it actually is, it should just implement the stubbed interface. I also use FactoryGirl and build_stubbed method for initializing models - I find it more convenient than to use instance_double because instance doubles don’t cover attributes from database tables.
The factories for User and profiles would look like that:
spec/factories.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 FactoryGirl. define do factory :user do email "email@example.com" # I'll explain that later, why it is that long encrypted_password "$2a$10$bcMccS3q2egnNICPLYkptOoEyiUpbBI5Q.GAKe0or2QB7ij6yCeOa" end factory :user_profile do age 22 country "Poland" end end
And the actual implementation:
app/usecases/user_registration.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 class UserRegistration class RegistrationFailed < StandardError ; end attr_reader :encryption private :encryption def initialize ( options = {}) @encryption = options. fetch ( :encryption, Encryption. new ) end def register! ( aggregate ) user = aggregate. user profile = aggregate. profile user. encrypted_password = encrypted_password ( aggregate. password ) ActiveRecord : :Base. transaction do begin user. save! profile. save! user. create_registration_profile! rescue :: ActiveRecord : :StatementInvalid, :: ActiveRecord : :RecordInvalid => e raise_registration_error ( e ) end end end private def raise_registration_error ( errors ) message = "Registration Failed due to the following errors: #{ errors } " raise UserRegistration : :RegistrationFailed, message end def encrypted_password ( password ) encryption. generate_password ( password ) end end
Let’s discuss some design decisions: the constructor accepts options hash so that we can inject dependencies like encryption and to provide defaults if it’s injected. The persistence logic is wrapped in transaction block so that e.g. user won’t be created if profile creation fails. If it fails, RegistrationFailed error is raised with a descriptive message. Also, the encryption is private: we don’t need it to be public.
To satisfy tests, the create_registration_profile! must be implemented and generate_password for encryption. Fortunately, we just need to setup associations for UserRegistrationProfile to have create_registration_profile! implemented. But we need to generate the model first:
1 rails generate model UserRegistrationProfile confirmed_at :datetime confirmation_instructions_sent_at :datetime confirmation_token user_id :integer
let’s set up some database constraints in generated migration:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 class CreateUserRegistrationProfiles < ActiveRecord : :Migration def change create_table :user_registration_profiles do | t | t. datetime :confirmed_at t. datetime :confirmation_instructions_sent_at t. string :confirmation_token t. integer :user_id, null : false t. timestamps end add_index :user_registration_profiles, :user_id add_index :user_registration_profiles, :confirmation_token, unique : true end end
and then write the associations:
app/models/user.rb 1 2 3 4 5 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base has_one :registration_profile, class_name : "UserRegistrationProfile", inverse_of : :user end
app/models/user_registration_profile.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class UserRegistrationProfile < ActiveRecord : :Base belongs_to :user, inverse_of : :registration_profile validates :user, presence : true end
The minimal implementation for Encryption to make the UserRegistration tests happy is the following:
app/usecases/encryption.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 class Encryption def generate_password ( phrase ) end end
To finish the user creation we have to implement the password generation. Bcrypt and it’s create password method is a reasonable choice here. Let’s write the tests:
spec/usecases/encryption_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 require'spec_helper' describe Encryption do subject { Encryption. new } let ( :password ) { "password" } let ( :encypted_password ) { "$2a$10$vI8aWBnW3fID.ZQ4/zo1G.q1lRps.9cGLcZEiGDMVr5yUP1KUOYTa" } let ( :password_generator ) { class_double ( BCrypt : :Password ). as_stubbed_const } before ( :each ) do allow ( password_generator ). to receive ( :create ). with ( password ) { encypted_password } end it "creates password using Bcrypt as default" do expect ( subject. generate_password ( password )). to eq encypted_password end end
The encrypted_password doesn’t have to be that long but looks more genuine that way. The BCrypt::Password is also a class double so that we make sure we don’t stub a non-existent method. And the implementation of Encryption class:
app/usecases/encryption.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 class Encryption attr_reader :password_generator private :password_generator def initialize ( args = {}) @password_generator = args. fetch ( :password_generator, BCrypt : :Password ) end def generate_password ( phrase ) password_generator. create ( phrase ) end end
The pattern for constructor is similar to the one from UserRegistration. The password_generator is also made private - the rule of thumb is that everything should be private unless it needs to be public, just to keep the interfaces clean.
Now we have the basic implementation for user creation with it’s profiles. Still, we need confirmation stuff and notification to tje admin. It is beyond the UserRegistration responsibilities, we also don’t need always to a notification or confirmation instructions or to confirm user at all, just to have the interface flexible enough. Maybe we will have some additional things that will take place during registration - like third party API notification. To keep the responsibilities separate and UserRegistration easy to use, we can implement all the additional actions as the listeners that are being passed to the constructor of UserRegistration. Let’s write specs for it first:
spec/usecases/user_registration_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 require'spec_helper' describe UserRegistration do # same code a before context "persistence is success" do # same code a before # and this is new: context "with listeners" do let ( :user_confirmation ) { double ( :user_confirmation, notify : true ) } let ( :admin_notification ) { double ( :admin_notification, notify : true ) } before ( :each ) do UserRegistration. new ( user_confirmation, admin_notification, encryption : encryption ). register! ( form ) end it "notifies user_confirmation listener" do expect ( user_confirmation ). to have_received ( :notify ). with ( user ) end it "notifies admin_notificaiton listener" do expect ( admin_notification ). to have_received ( :notify ). with ( user ) end end end end
We don’t actually care what the listeners are, the only requirement is that they must implement the same interface: notify method which takes user argument. And the implementation:
app/usecases/user_registration.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 class UserRegistration class RegistrationFailed < StandardError ; end attr_reader :encryption, :listeners private :encryption, :listeners def initialize ( * listeners, ** options ) @listeners = listeners @encryption = options. fetch ( :encryption, Encryption. new ) end def register! ( aggregate ) user = aggregate. user profile = aggregate. profile user. encrypted_password = encrypted_password ( aggregate. password ) ActiveRecord : :Base. transaction do begin user. save! profile. save! user. create_registration_profile! rescue :: ActiveRecord : :StatementInvalid, :: ActiveRecord : :RecordInvalid => e raise_registration_error ( e ) end end notify_listeners ( user ) end private def raise_registration_error ( errors ) message = "Registration Failed due to the following errors: #{ errors } " raise UserRegistration : :RegistrationFailed, message end def encrypted_password ( password ) encryption. generate_password ( password ) end def notify_listeners ( user ) listeners. each do | listener | listener. notify ( user ) end end end
These changes are not that noticeable but they are huge. The constructor now takes some listeners (splat) - we can pass one listener, several or none, it will always be an array. Also, the options is now a keyword argument introduced in Ruby 2.0 which makes the changes really smooth. And the new method: notify_listeners which sends notify message to all the listeners with user argument.
To handle the user confirmation stuff we will need, well, UserConfirmation and UserRegistrationAdminNotification to handle the notifcations.
Let’s start with UserConfirmation. We need notify method which will take care of: assigning confirmation token, which must be unique, setting date when the confirmation instructions were sent and sending the instructions. We will need some mailer here ( UserConfirmationMailer ), clock ( DateTime ) and something to generate token - SecureRandom will be a good fit here with it’s base64 method. Let’s translate the specification to the tests:
spec/factories.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 FactoryGirl. define do # same as before factory :user_registration_profile do # this in new here end end
spec/usecases/user_confirmation_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 require'spec_helper' describe UserConfirmation do describe "#notify" do let! ( :user ) { FactoryGirl. build_stubbed ( :user, registration_profile : FactoryGirl. build_stubbed ( :user_registration_profile )) } let ( :mailer_stub ) { double ( :mailer, deliver : true ) } let! ( :mailer ) { class_double ( UserConfirmationMailer, send_confirmation_instructions : mailer_stub ). as_stubbed_const } let ( :confirmation_instructions_sent_date ) { DateTime. new ( 2014, 2, 23, 21, 0, 0 )} let ( :clock ) { double ( :clock, now : confirmation_instructions_sent_date ) } subject { UserConfirmation. new ( mailer : mailer, clock : clock ) } before ( :each ) do allow ( user ). to receive ( :save_with_profiles! ) allow ( SecureRandom ). to receive ( :base64 ) { "token" } subject. notify ( user ) end it "assigns confirmation token to user" do expect ( user. confirmation_token ). to eq "token" end it "sends email with confirmation instructions" do expect ( mailer ). to have_received ( :send_confirmation_instructions ). with ( user ) end it "sets date when the confirmation instructions have been sent" do expect ( user. confirmation_instructions_sent_at ). to eq confirmation_instructions_sent_date end it "persists new data" do expect ( user ). to have_received ( :save_with_profiles! ) end end end
Like before, we should start with one test, make it pass and then write the next one. Here is the implementation for it:
app/usecases/user_confirmation.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 class UserConfirmation attr_reader :mailer, :clock private :mailer, :clock def initialize ( args = {}) @mailer = args. fetch ( :mailer, UserConfirmationMailer ) @clock = args. fetch ( :clock, DateTime ) end def notify ( user ) assign_confirmation_token ( user ) user. confirmation_instructions_sent_at = clock. now mailer. send_confirmation_instructions ( user ). deliver user. save_with_profiles! end private def assign_confirmation_token ( user ) begin user. confirmation_token = SecureRandom. base64 ( 20 ) end while User. find_by_confirmation_token ( user. confirmation_token ). present? end end
The pattern for constructor is similar to the previous ones: provide the way to inject dependencies and some defaults if they are not specified so it is more flexible, less coupled and the testing becomes easier as a bonus. We have while loop to ensure the confirmation token is unique amongst users. The find_by_attribute methods are deprecated since Rails 4.0.0 and the activerecord-deprecated_finders will be removed from dependencies in 4.1.0 so we have to implement our own finder method. Here are also some important design decisions - we assign both confirmation_instructions_sent_at and confirmation_token to the user, not the registration profile. How is that? The important question is: do we need to expose that the user has registration profile? What if we change our mind and decide to put this data in “normal” profile, not registration profile? Or we didn’t make a decision to create a registration profile at all in a first place and these attributes belonged to the user since the beginning and we later decided to move them to a separated table? From the UserConfirmation perspective, it is just an implementation detail. The save_with_profiles! is provided to make user’s data persistence more convenient. We need to implement mailer as well but let’s start with user’s related stuff.
spec/models/user.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 require'spec_helper' describe User do subject { User. new ( email : "email@example.com", encrypted_password : "password" ) } describe ".find_by_confirmation_token" do let! ( :user ) { FactoryGirl. create ( :user ) } before ( :each ) do FactoryGirl. create ( :user_registration_profile, confirmation_token : "token", user_id : user. id ) end it "finds user with specified confirmation token" do expect ( User. find_by_confirmation_token ( "token" )). to eq user end end describe "#confirmation_token=" do it "assigns confirmation token to user" do subject. confirmation_token = "token" expect ( subject. confirmation_token ). to eq "token" end end describe "#confirmation_instructions_sent_at=" do it "assigns confirmation instructions sent date to user" do date = DateTime. now subject. confirmation_instructions_sent_at = date expect ( subject. confirmation_instructions_sent_at ). to eq date end end end
The find_by_confirmation_token finder method is pretty easy but it involves another table with registration profile so I decided to write test for it. The tests also suggest that we need readers for these attributes, not only the writers. Let’s use delegate macro from ActiveSupport for it:
app/models/user.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base # the same code as before # new code delegate :confirmation_token, :confirmation_instructions_sent_at, :confirmed_at, to : :registration_profile, allow_nil : true def self. find_by_confirmation_token ( token ) joins ( :registration_profile ). where ( "user_registration_profiles.confirmation_token =?", token ). first end def confirmation_token = ( token ) ensure_registration_profile_exists registration_profile. confirmation_token = token end def confirmation_instructions_sent_at = ( date ) ensure_registration_profile_exists registration_profile. confirmation_instructions_sent_at = date end def save_with_profiles! User. transaction do save! profile. save! if profile registration_profile. save! if registration_profile end end private def ensure_registration_profile_exists build_registration_profile if registration_profile. blank? end
Before making any assignment, we have to make sure that the registration profile exists. The same applies to the persistence, which is again wrapped in a transaction. And let’s implement the mailer for sending confirmation instructions:
1 rails generate mailer UserConfirmationMailer send_confirmation_instructions
Some basic tests to prove that the mailer actually works:
spec/mailers/user_confirmation_mailer_spec.rb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 |
thing is just to wait. There are too many “ifs.”
But what I can tell you is that the momentum between the Mexico-Canada relationship is already there. It’s happening. It’s a very close circle. We have what’s called the Canada-Mexico Partnership. This year we met in Ottawa. We were 180 people sitting on both sides of the table. We do more than $32 billion in trade. You are our second-biggest partner in tourism, with almost two million tourists a year.
Q: So, no more travel visas will be necessary for Mexicans entering Canada. What will be the immediate impact?
A: In dollar terms, it will be wonderful for you. In 2009, we had 300,000 Mexicans coming to Canada. After the visa was imposed, we had only 120,000. First of all, it was an expensive process—it was around US$100 per traveller, and of course it went up if you had a family. It was also a process that had a very lengthy questionnaire, and questions that were in all kinds of realms, even in terms of your parents, your sons, your family.
Also you had to have your passport taken from you. That would be from one week to two, three or four weeks. Many businessmen, many investors, academics, people from think tanks wouldn’t be able to do it because they are travelling all the time and cannot just leave the passport there.
I have friends, for example, that would come to Whistler every year, one particular gentleman who loves skiing and loves Whistler. He had been there for years. He had an apartment, but [after 2009], when he tried to get a visa, it was so lengthy … he decided to go elsewhere and sell his apartment. I know for a fact that Whistler has been very [affected] by the fact that Mexicans were not freely coming.
Q: How did this change come about?
A: Your Prime Minister himself made an offer in his campaign. From the beginning, he had a very good dialogue and a good chemistry with my president, Enrique Peña Nieto. They saw each other very soon [after the Canadian election] in Turkey at the G20, then at the COP21 in Paris. My president was the first head of state invited here to Canada.
Q: “Good chemistry” is right. Trudeau and President Peña Nieto famously went jogging together in Ottawa. What prompted that activity?
A: They themselves talked about it on a telephone conversation. When you have ideas like that, it means you’re talking to a friend. This is something we wouldn’t have dared to even think about. I would’ve loved to be part of it but I was not allowed—first of all because I’m a lousy jogger. They had to have their security, protocol people. They had to be good joggers because they had to pick up the pace.
Q: Considering travel in the other direction, there was a shooting at a hotel in Cancun last week. Should Canadian travellers to Mexico be concerned?
A: Of course we have security issues. But to tell you the truth, by the sheer number [of tourists], really we almost do not have cases on that front. The places tourists go are very secure. I [met] the CEO of WestJet. The flow is increasing. Now they have 10 flights to Mexico.
Q: Right when the visa change was announced in October, Mexico lifted its ban on Canadian beef. Was this a return favour?
A: Not an exchange, no. Our animal sanitary institutions worked together. We came here with our technicians. We went to the centres where you produce meat. I have just gone to the Edmonton agricultural farm fair, and I saw your wonderful beef. I saw beautiful red Anguses and black Anguses and Charolais and Herefords. I’m quite a tall guy. They were higher than myself.
I also watched your rodeo, and I also saw all the Mexicans that were there. You may be surprised to know 60 per cent of the stock was bought by Mexican cattlemen. They think the technology you use in Canada is the best in the world. We think your animals are the best for our breeding requirements. And they like doing business with you because you’re friendly and respectful. [At the fair in Edmonton,] you have to wear a black hat. Once you put it on, they have a steam machine so they can mould the wings of the hat, so you look the right way, so you can be really cute. I wanted to be an ambassador of cattlemen. Since I was in Canada, I had to abide by the Canadian cowboy rules.
Q: How are you celebrating the positive developments in Mexico-Canada relations?
A: I know the Canadian embassy in Mexico will [make] this announcement and [have] a party. Normally you do champagne, but in this case I will have a tequila to begin with and then a good Ontario or British Columbia wine—to go with my Alberta beef tacos.Louis C.K. releases a film on his site about a gay and transgender youth gang
Comedian Louis C.K. is helping get some eyes on a 2016 documentary that made a strong impression on him by making it available to download on his website for five dollars. The film is titled Check It and it follows the story of a gang of black gay and transgender youth living on the streets of Washington, D.C. He discovered the feature-length documentary, which was directed by Toby Oppenheimer and Dana Flor, just over a year ago through his friend Steve Buscemi who is the film's executive producer.
C.K. writes:
The film knocked me right over. It was an amazing emotional ride. It was funny and moving, I learned a lot and it gave me a lot to think about after... The film also portrays a wonderful guy who is a social worker and he looks after the gang and tries to influence them to have a better life. That guy is an inspiration. Also a young guy who teaches them fashion and is incredibly patient and focused, trying to teach kids who live on the streets, and give them guidance when all they’ve known is neglect and violence. Also there’s a guy who is teaching one of the kids to box. All these people are examples that show that the will to reach out and help someone with consistency and love is everywhere.
He furthers:
Look, I know this isn’t what you’re expecting from me. Nor am I the guy you’re expecting to get this film from. I guess that’s why I’m doing this... I asked Steve, and Wren Arthur, who produced the film, if I could host "Check It" on my site so that lots of people can see it who may not have had it put in front of them. I do this with great confidence because it’s a powerful film and I know that, whoever you are, you’re going to love it.
Sold.
(reddit)Jury selection gets under way next Tuesday in the bribery trial of New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez. It sets in motion a swirl of speculation about a shift in the balance of Senate power less than a month after Republicans fell one vote short of repealing Obamacare, with the surprise "NO" vote of brain cancer-stricken Sen. John McCain.
Menendez is accused of using his Senate seat to help the financial interests of a friend, Dr. Salomon Melgen, who allegedly returned the favor with almost a million dollars in gifts and campaign contributions. Menendez has repeatedly said he's innocent. After his indictment on April 2, 2015, he told reporters, "these allegations are false, and I am confident they will be proven false, and I look forward to doing so in court.”
On the same day, his high-powered attorney, Abbe Lowell, reminded reporters of the Department of Justice's track record in winning political bribery convictions.
"As we have seen in so many cases, from former (Department of Housing and Urban Development) Secretary in 1999, to Sen. Ted Stevens in 2007, and two years ago in the case of Sen. John Edwards, prosecutors at the Justice Department often get it wrong," Lowell said. "These charges are the latest mistakes," he said.
JUDGE: DEMOCRAT BOB MENENDEZ MUST FACE CORRUPTION CHARGE IN COURT
But even if he is found guilty, a bribery conviction would not force Menendez out of the Senate.
He would have to voluntarily step down or be expelled by a two-third's majority in the Senate. Even if all Republicans voted for expulsion, they would still need 15 Democratic votes, an unlikely outcome given Democrats propensity to oppose virtually all of President Trump's agenda.
New Jersey's governor would be responsible for appointing Menendez’s successor. But the gubernatorial election to replace Republican Chris Christie is only months away, and Menendez could agree to leave after New Jersey's next governor takes office.
"They're going to elect a new governor and the Democratic candidate is heavily favored in that race," says David Byler of Real Clear Politics.
Further bolstering Menendez's chances, since he was indicted, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out the bribery conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, setting an even higher bar for future political bribery convictions.A Pakistani immigrant who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison by a judge who said she hopes he spends time behind bars thinking "carefully about whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people."
A defiant Faisal Shahzad smirked as he was given a mandatory life term that, under federal sentencing rules, will keep him behind bars until he dies.
"If I'm given 1,000 lives I will sacrifice them all for the life of Allah," he said at the start of a statement that lasted several minutes. "How can I be judged by a court that does not understand the suffering of my people?"
Shahzad - brought into the Manhattan courtroom in handcuffs and wearing a white skull cap - had instructed his attorney not to speak, and U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum told prosecutors she didn't need to hear from them. That left Shahzad and the judge free to spar over his reasoning for giving up his comfortable life in America to train in Pakistan and carry out a potentially deadly attack in the heart of Times Square.
Special Section: Terrorism in the U.S.
"You appear to be someone who was capable of education and I do hope you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people," Cedarbaum told Shahzad after she announced his mandatory life sentence.
Shahzad, a 31-year-old former budget analyst from Connecticut who was born in Pakistan, responded that the "Quran gives us the right to defend. And that's all I'm doing."
Afterward, the head of the FBI's New York office, Janice K. Fedarcyk, cited evidence that Shahzad hoped to strike more than once.
"Shahzad built a mobile weapon of mass destruction and hoped and intended that it would kill large numbers of innocent people and planned to do it again two weeks later," Fedarcyk said in a statement. "The sentence imposed today means Shahzad will never pose that threat again."
Calling himself a Muslim solider, a defiant Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts.
For greatest impact, he chose a crowded a section of the city by studying an online streaming video of Times Square, the so-called Crossroads of the World, prosecutors said.
On May 1, he lit the fuse of his crude, homemade bomb packed in a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, then fled on foot, pausing along the way to listen for the explosion that never came, court papers said.
A street vendor spotted smoke coming from the sport utility vehicle and alerted police, who quickly cleared the area. The bomb attempt set off an intense investigation that culminated two days later with investigators plucking Shahzad off a Dubai-bound plane at a New York airport.
Shahzad has said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen.
A few days later, Pakistani authorities arrested three men on charges they helped him meet leaders of the Pakistan Taliban, a militant group based in the northwest of the country that has claimed responsibility for the plot. They also are accused of sending him cash in the United States when he ran short of money.
The men's lawyer says there's no evidence to support the allegations and that the men had been forced to sign confessions. A trial date has yet to be set.
Three other men were detained in the northeastern U.S. on immigration charges in an investigation of an underground money transfer system used by Shahzad, but they were never charged with any crimes.
Prosecutors had introduced a dramatic video of an FBI-staged explosion they said demonstrated how deadly Shahzad's bomb could have been.
The FBI bomb - an identical vehicle fitted with 250 pounds (115 kilograms) of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel, three 25-pound (11-kilogram) propane tanks and two five-gallon (19-liter) gasoline canisters - blew up with a force that ripped the vehicle in half. The explosion caused a giant fireball that overturned and shredded four other cars parked nearby in an open field, obliterated about a dozen dummies posed as pedestrians and shot fiery debris hundreds of feet in all directions.
"Had the bombing played out as Shahzad had so carefully planned, the lives of numerous residents and visitors of the city would have been lost and countless others would have been forever traumatized," prosecutors wrote in court papers.
At sentencing, Shahzad claimed the FBI's interrogation had violated his rights. He also warned that attacks on Americans will continue until the United States leaves Muslim lands.
"We are only Muslims... but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you," he said.
He added: "We do not accept your democracy or your freedom because we already have Sharia law and freedom."
The judge cut him off at one point to ask if he had sworn allegiance to the United States when he became an American citizen last year.
"I did swear but I did not mean it," said Shahzad.
"So you took a false oath," the judge told him.
She also reminded him that he was a failed terrorist.
"What you have done here, although happily, the training you sought in making bombs was unsuccessful and you were unsuccessful in your effort to kill many Americans," she said.
Asked by the judge if he had any final words, Shahzad said, "I'm happy with the deal that God has given me."The total area covered by the world’s cities is set to triple in the next 40 years – eating up farmland and threatening the planet’s sustainability. Ahead of the latest Urban Age conference, Mark Swilling says it is time to stop the sprawl
The curse of urban sprawl: how cities grow, and why this has to change
The curse of urban sprawl: how cities grow, and why this has to change
I have just spent two days in Barcelona, one of the most densely populated urban settlements in the world. There are 103 road intersections per sq km – high compared to Brasilia’s 41 or Shanghai’s Pudong area, which has only 17. Yet despite these high densities, residents of Barcelona will tell you how profoundly liveable their city is.
Visitors are charmed by the pedestrianised streets that thread their way through a maze of buildings constructed over the centuries – between four and seven storeys high, on narrow streets leading to piazzas where people sit at cafe tables or under shady trees. Many residents walk or cycle to work, and public transport functions very well.
For the first time in human history, most of us live in urban settlements – from megacities of 10-20 million, of which there were 28 in 2014, to medium-sized cities of 1-5 million (417 in 2014), and smaller settlements (525 of between 500,000 and one million people in 2014). Looking ahead, the biggest growth will occur not in megacities but these small- and medium-sized cities.
Metropolises expand and contract. It is estimated that 40% of Europe’s cities are shrinking (though this is a trend that migration might help to reverse). Even in Africa, there are some countries where the percentage of the total population living in cities has declined at various times over the past two decades.
Overall, however, our current urban population of around 3.9 billion is expected to grow to around 6.34 billion by 2050, out of a total global population of at least 9.5 billion. If we continue to design and build as if the planet can provide unlimited resources, then this near-doubling of the urban population will mean a doubling of the natural resources required to build and operate our cities – which is not sustainable.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Eixample district in Barcelona, one of the most densely populated cities. Photograph: Amos Chapple/Rex
As cities grow, perhaps our most serious concern should be how they expand out into the surrounding countryside. Contrary to popular belief, over the past century urban settlements have not only expanded demographically, they have also sprawled outwards – covering some of the world’s most valuable farmland in the process.
Continued urbanisation in its current form could threaten global food supplies
The result has been a steady de-densification of urban settlements, by about –2% per annum. Even where inner-city areas have densified over the past few decades (Copenhagen, for example), the citywide trend is still for an overall reduction in average densities.
In 2010, the total area covered by all the cement, asphalt, compacted clay, park areas and open spaces that comprise the footprint of the world’s urban settlements was around 1 million sq km. In comparison, the total area of France is 643,000 sq km.
If the urban population and long-term de-densification trends continue, the area of the planet covered by urban settlements will increase to more than 3 million sq km by 2050. And since the most intensively cultivated farmland is typically located near where the bulk of the food is consumed, much of this additional 2 million sq km is currently our most productive farmland.
In short, continued urbanisation in its current form could threaten global food supplies at a time when food production is already not keeping up with population growth.
Understanding rapid urbanisation
A key determinant of rampant urban sprawl – especially in North America, where it is a particularly serious problem – has been the existence of cheap oil. When oil prices reached record highs in 2008 and exacerbated the global economic crisis, the people who travelled furthest tended to be the first to default on their mortgage payments.
As their fuel expenses for travelling to work and school rocketed, so their capacity to afford urban sprawl drastically diminished. Visiting Detroit a few weeks ago, I found that of the city’s 300,000 buildings, 70,000 currently stand empty – and mostly derelict.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Of Detroit’s 300,000-odd buildings, an estimated 70,000 currently stand empty. Photograph: James Cheadle/Alamy
From the 1960s onwards, the city built more and more ring roads to suburbanise the middle and upper classes into the surrounding countryside – and in the process bankrupted Detroit’s urban core, leaving it unable to manage the economic impact of the closure of its once-giant car factories.
Indeed, most of the extra 2.5 billion people who will be living in urban areas by 2050 will be in cities of the global south, in particular in Asia and Africa; 37% of all future urban growth is expected to take place in only three countries: China, India and Nigeria.
Other than in China, rapid urbanisation in these developing counties has resulted in an explosion of informal urban settlements, or slums. In India, millions of slum-dwellers live within the core urban areas, creating the fairly unique Indian phenomenon of neighbourhoods where the urban poor and middle class live together.
By contrast, in African cities – where 62% of all urbanites are in slums – the majority of slum-dwellers live in expanding urban settlements on the peripheries of cities. With Africa’s urban population (currently around 400 million people) expected to triple to 1.2 billion by 2050, this form of urbanisation will result in massive, sprawling, relatively low-density urban settlements across the continent.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Conflicts of an urban age: Slum conditions have changed in Addis Ababa over the last 25 years, with fewer wooden and mud constructions. Source: Urban Age/LSE Cities
But it’s not happening like this everywhere. Take Ethiopia, an east African country of 99 million people with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. While 80% of the population is still rural, urbanisation is accelerating fast, placing huge pressures on the capital, Addis Ababa.
Government investments have turned this city into a massive building site. Endless cranes are silhouetted against the African sky as a huge number of relatively high-rise buildings emerge in the urban core.
At the same time, with funds and expertise provided by the Chinese, a light-rail system has been built that runs across the city – a remarkable feat in a city where 80% of the population lives in slums. This creates incentives for the middle class to live in high-density, multi-storey apartments that are starting to spring up around the stations – reducing the need to subsidise longer-distance, road-based travel by private car.
Coupled with the building of multi-storey, subsidised housing for the urban poor (some located close to transit nodes), the result is that Addis Ababa is densifying, setting an example for what is possible in other cities facing similar challenges.
Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, provides a very different – but also promising – case study. Under apartheid, the urban poor were forcibly relocated into outer-city settlements – often located between five and 40km from the urban periphery. Many of these turned into slums as population numbers far exceeded what these settlements were designed to accommodate.
After democratisation in 1994, there was a major inward flow of people into the urban core that could not be accommodated, despite a massive housing construction programme. Land invasions took place in all South African cities, including on inner-city land.
Johannesburg’s metropolitan government realised it could not build an integrated city by moving millions of people around, because so many already lived in formal townships. Instead, it identified a set of strategically located urban development hotspots, and then invested in mass transit services to link them together.
The aim is to rapidly intensify job and residential densities in these development hotspots, thus increasing the number of people who can access publicly funded mass-transit services.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Addis Ababa, increasing urbanisation has seen public housing decrease from 57% to 40% of total stock between 1990 and 2015. Source: Urban Age/LSE Cities
This will increase average densities over time, and integrate the city via transit rather than expensive residential relocations. This, coupled with strategies to upgrade informal settlements rather than building new houses on the peripheries, has contributed significantly to enhancing densification, rather than encouraging the sprawl promoted by Johannesburg’s property developers and banks since 1994.
There is no doubt that sprawling, de-densifying cities are a major threat to the future sustainability of the planet. Neither the UN’s sustainable development goals nor the Paris agreement’s climate targets will be achieved if this challenge is not addressed – but it means going up against property developers who tend to prefer greenfield developments on the peripheries to the complexities of brownfield regeneration.
Towards liveable urban settlements
Across the world, it would be a mistake to focus solely on improving the average densities of cities. Los Angeles has a higher average density than New York, for example, yet LA is regarded as a dysfunctional urban form while NY is functional, because it comprises a network of high-density neighbourhoods interconnected by efficient and affordable mass transit systems.
Seoul is similar: a megacity that has avoided sprawl with this approach. When the mayor decided to dismantle the eight-lane highway that used to run through the centre of the city, he said: “Seoul is for people, not cars.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Although Seoul has a population of more than 10 million, it has avoided sprawling outwards. Photograph: Alamy
An alternative road was not built – resulting in an increase in the number of people using mass transit which, in turn, made mass transit financially viable. Building more highways for cars, then introducing trains and buses in the hope that they will be financially viable, simply does not work (the greater Johannesburg region is learning that lesson now).
China, meanwhile, has urbanised hundreds of millions of people over the past three decades. This has tended to be in high-rise, multi-storey buildings located in “superblocks” with wide, traffic-congested streets and few intersections per sq km. The result is relatively low densities in neighbourhoods with virtually no street or community life – in short, not the kind of urban area one would call liveable.
Compare this with the neighbourhoods you find in Barcelona, where buildings are five to eight storeys high, located on narrow streets with pavements, trees and small piazzas for social engagement, and all well connected to both motorised and non-motorised forms of transport.
The rise and fall of great world cities: 5,700 years of urbanisation – mapped Read more
This is what makes for liveable urban neighbourhoods. China has realised its mistake, adopting an urbanisation strategy that breaks away from sprawled-out superblocks in favour of a high-density neighbourhood approach, with narrower streets, a high number of intersections, and improved public transport.
While the population of the world’s cities will likely double in size between now and 2050, rising oil prices and carbon constraints make urban sprawl increasingly untenable. Eradicating it in favour of liveable, accessible, multi-centred, high-density cities should become a shared global commitment.
Mark Swilling is distinguished professor of sustainable development at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He will be speaking at the Urban Age Shaping Cities conference at La Biennale di Venezia on 14-15 July, co-organised by LSE Cities and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen GesellschaftAnf. 50 Johan Pehrson (FP)
Herr talman! Vi har att debattera och senare i dag fatta beslut i mycket svåra frågor om vilka tvångsmedel staten ska få använda för att upprätthålla ordning och trygghet för människor i Sverige. Att flera av lagstiftningarna på det här området har varit tillfälliga beror på att de just är så svåra. Vi har redan vid deras införande velat markera att de ska ha en automatisk utvärdering, så att vi ska se att de fungerar innan vi beslutar oss för att de ska användas permanent.
Sedan ska man vara ärlig och säga att all lagstiftning vi beslutar här är tillfällig, för den kan ändras i morgon om vi i kammaren vill. Men här har alltså lagstiftningen redan funnits på plats, och jag vill påstå att den har gjort nytta. Jag återkommer till det.
Detta med hemlig rumsavlyssning, som flera av ledamöterna från andra partier har tagit upp, är särskilt komplicerat och tangerar verkligen kärnan i integriteten. Många människor som kan vara helt oskyldiga kan komma att få sin personliga integritet kränkt. Dock kan argumenten för en sådan åtgärd ändå överväga, eftersom det skyddsvärde som kan uppstå kan vara större.
Den lagstiftning vi har på det här området kom till genom en proposition som först lades fram av en mycket gammal socialdemokratisk regering under justitieministern Laila Freivalds, men den fick dras tillbaka eftersom den ansågs för undermålig. Sedan kom förslaget tillbaka under en senare socialdemokratisk justitieminister, nämligen Thomas Bodström. Nu har vi haft denna lagstiftning under ett antal år, och den har utvärderats.
Det här är en fråga som befinner sig i skärningspunkten mellan vad som är ett behov, vad som är ett rimligt ändamål och att det ska finnas en proportionalitet. Det ska bara få användas - och det framgår av varenda paragraf i de lagtexter som reglerar tvångsmedlen - när det finns misstanke om mycket grov brottslighet för att man ska kunna skydda mänskliga värden.
Sakfrågorna tycker jag att både Elin Lundgren, Socialdemokraterna, och Anti Avsan, Moderaterna, har gått igenom på ett bra sätt. Jag vill understryka att den utredning som nu ligger till grund till att vi nu permanentar en del av detta och också utvidgar skyddet när det gäller vad man får lyssna på, så att det alltså sker en förstärkning av integriteten, förutsätter att vi har rejält med hängslen och livremmar. Vi ska så att säga ha kontroll över kontrollanterna. Det sker domstolsprövning, och vi har dessutom Säkerhets- och integritetsskyddsnämnden som i efterhand ska kontrollera att verksamheten bedrivs på ett lagenligt sätt och att ingen integritet kränks i onödan.
För Folkpartiets del vill jag understryka att vi är överens om tre andra åtgärder. Som Annika Hirvonen, Miljöpartiet, framhöll och som Folkpartiet också har krävt ska vi nu titta över hur vi ska få en sammanhållen myndighet när det gäller integritetsskydd. Exakt hur den ska se ut vill jag inte föregripa här, och det är det nog ingen som vill. Det pågår också en utvärdering av inhämtningslagen. Det är också väldigt viktigt.
Vi tittar också på det rent straffrättsliga skyddet för att stärka den personliga integriteten: Vad ska ske i det fall någon kränker den? Det är också åtgärder i denna levande materia.
STYLEREF Kantrubrik \* MERGEFORMAT Hemliga tvångsmedel mot allvarliga brott
Det här är en evig diskussion. De nya tekniska möjligheter som kommer används tyvärr inte minst av personer som vill skada andra människor. Då måste staten vara beredd att möta upp det hot som finns mot människors frihet och rätt att slippa utsättas för brott. Den aktiva debatt som Linda Snecker efterlyste är ständigt närvarande, och den kommer aldrig att upphöra. För varje tekniskt framsteg som görs kommer det nya krav på åtgärder för att staten ska kunna matcha detta.
De konventioner om mänskliga rättigheter som vi har skrivit på handlar inte bara om att vi ska skyddas från orimliga ingrepp från statens sida. Staten har också ett ansvar att skydda oss medborgare från helt orimliga angrepp på vår person, våra familjer eller våra hem. Annars måste vi återgå till en mer primitiv ordning med öga för öga och tand för tand, där man själv ska försvara sig. Det är ett mer barbariskt samhälle.
Lagarna reglerar en ordning som ska matcha det som hotar oss. Hur ser det då ut? Det har påståtts att det hela kanske inte gör så stor nytta. Man behöver inte träffa särskilt många poliser, antingen det är den öppna eller den hemliga polisen, eller företrädare för andra myndigheter för att få klart för sig att det är ett ganska tufft klimat där ute. Det finns områden där människor upplever att den svenska rättsstaten har checkat ut och att det är andra regimer som härjar.
Vi vet att terroristresor fram och tillbaka till Sverige är ganska allvarlig verksamhet som kan hota stora mänskliga värden och verkligen kränka integritet. Tänk om någon spränger en bomb här i julhandeln! Det har gjorts försök förr. Då kan man säga att det kommer att kränka personlig integritet så att det heter duga.
Vi har en narkotikatrafik som är utmanande. Vi har spioneri mot staten och mot våra svenska företag. Och vi har ett cyberkrig som pågår.
Jag kan säga att det utan de här åtgärderna är väldigt svårt för nationen Sverige att försvara sig och sina medborgare. De här tvångsmedlen är inget som vi sitter här och hittar på för att vi tycker att de kan vara bra att ha. De används i en verklighet för att värna Sverige, värna det öppna samhället och upprätthålla den här balansen.
Därför vänder jag mig mot att det här skulle vara ett, så att säga, ständigt pågående intrång. Jag tycker att vi har de hängslen och livremmar som behövs och som gör att vi kan säga ja från Folkpartiets sida till förslaget i betänkandet. Och jag lovar Vänsterpartiet att ni inte står ensamma kvar här och pratar om detta, utan vi gör det varje dag. Vi förstärker skyddet i detta betänkande. Vi permanentar lagstiftningen. Rapporterna till riksdagen kommer att fortsätta att komma. Och vi har kontrollmekanismer för den här verksamheten, som per definition är obehaglig för alla, inte minst för oss liberaler.
Det är klart att det är en svår avvägning. Men man måste komma ihåg att det inte är någon annan som står upp för dig, Linda Snecker, om du hotas av en mycket obehaglig person som har för avsikt att förstöra livet för dig, dina nära, din familj eller vem det nu må vara. Då måste staten ha verktyg för att komma åt det här. Det finns en hotbild som är mycket allvarlig i dag. Därför yrkar Folkpartiet bifall till förslaget i betänkandet och avslag på reservationerna.
STYLEREF Kantrubrik \* MERGEFORMAT Hemliga tvångsmedel mot allvarliga brott
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Nov. 1, 2016, 12:56 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 3, 2016, 10:32 AM GMT / Source: Reuters By Alexander Smith
As a show of strength, the earsplitting flyby was unambiguous.
The public got its first glimpse of China's newest fighter jet Tuesday, with two Chengdu J-20 warplanes roaring through the skies at an airshow in the southern city of Zhuhai.
The stealth fighters aroused gasps and applause from the hundreds of spectators, dignitaries and industry executives in attendance, while producing a deafening scream that set off car alarms in the parking lot.
Equally impressed were the country's residents who reacted to the show on Sina Weibo, a social media site similar to Twitter.
"The J-20 is a sharp sword to defend our country and protect our people," one user wrote.
"I am so excited that it has finally taken to the skies," another added.
The J-20 is designed as a rival to America's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 Raptor — the most advanced fighter jets currently patrolling the skies.
A pair of J-20 stealth fighter jets fly in Zhuhai, China, on Tuesday AP
The similarities between the aircraft may not be coincidental.
U.S. officials have accused the Chinese military of hacking into their computer systems and stealing information relating to their cutting-edge stealth fighters.
Experts say that the striking similarities between China's J-20 and America's F-35 and F-22 are clear evidence that this stolen know-how has allowed Beijing to quickly catch-up on these so-called "fifth generation" fighter jets.
"China has been extremely active in stealing design information for many years," said Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think-tank. "It's a Chinese strategy to steal what they can and reverse engineer it."
Bronk said that many features of the J-20 appeared to be nearly identical to either the F-35 or the F-22.
F-35 and J-20 fighter jets. Reuters/AFP - Getty Images
However, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense rejected any suggestion that the design was stolen.
"The J-20 is a new generation of stealth fighter jet independently developed by China," it said in a faxed statement sent to NBC News on Thursday. "The accusation by some people that China stole the technology of others is totally groundless."
While the prospect of a direct war between the U.S and China is currently unlikely, Beijing is in open and heated disagreements with several of Washington's allies over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
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Event P230-71-1 was selected because it expressed GFP well and appeared to be a single-copy integration event. The construct contained the Zea mays 27kDa gamma zein endosperm-specific promoter cloned from inbred Va26 (Genbank accession EF061093), the modified green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene sGFPs65T (Genbank accession ABB59985) [12], and the nos terminator sequence (modified from Genbank accession V00087). GFP and the nos terminator were from the pAct1IsGFP-1 plasmid [13]. Development of segregating populations and seed production The breeding plan is in Fig 1. All plants were grown at the Iowa State University Transgenic Farm in Ames, IA as follows: Year 1 in 2006, Year 2 in 2007, Year 3 in 2009, and Year 4 in 2010. There was no planting in 2008 due to field flooding. In year 1, the transgene was bred into two broad-based synthetic breeding populations: BS11 (derived from the Pioneer two-ear composite [14]) and BS31 (derived from FS8B [15]). This was done by crossing the homozygous transgenic inbred line with about 50 individuals of each breeding population. We tested seeds from the resulting full-sib ears for fluorescence as described below. These breeding populations provided the genetic variability needed for selection. Using two different breeding populations allowed us to determine if the two populations reacted similarly to selection or if any observed effects were specific to a single population. We harvested approximately 50 ears from each population each year and evaluated those ears for GFP fluorescence. To avoid selecting for homozygosity at the transgene locus in the selected populations, we used only ears that were visually segregating for visible GFP fluorescence to advance all populations. We compared selected populations to control populations that were random mated without selection. PPT PowerPoint slide
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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Breeding strategy used to develop selected and unselected populations over three generations. For the selected populations, the most fluorescent ears were the parents for the next generation. For the unselected populations, random ears were the parents for the next generation. The abbreviation fl. is for fluorescence. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148587.g001 In year 1, 50 randomly chosen seeds from each of the five ears with the highest mean fluorescence level were bulked and planted and the resulting plants intermated to create two selected populations (S1), one derived from BS11 and the second derived from BS31. Methods for fluorescence measurement are described below. In addition, we bulked and planted 50 randomly chosen seeds from each of five randomly chosen ears and intermated the resulting plants to create two unselected (control) populations (U1), one derived from BS11 and the second derived from BS31. In year 3, we tested ears from each S1 population for fluorescence, and selected ears were intermated as in year 1 to create S2. The unselected populations were advanced as described for year 2 to create U2. In year 4, the selected and unselected populations were advanced as in year 3 to create S3 and U3. Evaluation of selected populations Twelve populations (two starting populations x selected or unselected x three generations) were evaluated in single plots in one experiment in 2010. Selected and unselected populations were randomly assigned positions in adjacent plots. Plots consisted of four rows of 50 seeds each. Plants within each population were intermated by hand using chain sib pollinations to avoid pollen flow from neighboring populations. We harvested a total of 448 ears, and randomly chose ears from each harvested population for the experiments. For determination of fluorescence, 30 ears from each population were evaluated as described below, for a total of 14,400 measurements. GFP screening A Dark Reader hand lamp (Clare Chemical, Dolores, CO) was used to visually screen seeds for GFP fluorescence. Quantification of fluorescence was conducted by measurement with a spectrofluorometer (Tecan, Mannedorf/Zurich, Switzerland) at 16 points within each well of a 6-well Costar plate (Corning, Lowell, MA), at 485nm excitation and 535nm emission wavelengths. The instrument gain was set to optimize differentiation of samples in the experiment. One well of each plate contained as standard consisting of the same set of kernels to control for instrument drift during the course of measurements. When the standard values were included as a covariate in the analysis, the effect of the standard was not significant so the standard values were not used in the analyses presented here. Wells were filled with random visually positive seeds. Each plate was shaken and measured 5 times for a total of 80 individual fluorescence measurements per sample to ensure a representative measurement of the sample. Throughout the experiment, only ears that were visually determined to be segregating for GFP activity, as shown in Fig 2, were eligible for analysis. PPT PowerPoint slide
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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 2. Maize segregating for various levels of GFP activity. The top panel is in white light and the bottom panel in blue light (485nm) with an orange filter (535nm). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148587.g002 Quantification of seed storage proteins To determine whether selection for GFP with the 27kDa gamma zein promoter resulted in changes in levels of the native 27kDa gamma zein, we used HPLC to quantify alcohol soluble seed storage proteins. Two samples, consisting of either random visually GFP positive or random visually GFP negative seeds, were taken from 20 random ears from each of the 4 populations in generation 3: BS11 S3, BS11 U3, BS31 S3, and BS31 U3. Each sample was ground to fine flour and alcohol-soluble proteins were extracted with an alcohol-based buffer, as described by Flint-Garcia [16]. The proteins were separated with HPLC on a C18 protein and peptide column in a Waters 2695 Separation Module with a gradient of water and acetonitrile, both with 0.01% trifluoroacetic acid. The flow rate was 0.5ml/min and the concentration of water changed as follows: 50% at 0min, 46% at 33min, 40% at 35min, to 20% at 37min which was held for 15min. Absorbance was measured at 200nm with a Waters 2487 Dual Absorbance Detector. Individual peak areas for each sample were integrated using Empower software (Waters, Milford, MA) with a minimum peak width of 30 and threshold of 800. We grouped peaks by retention time and identified the 27kDa gamma zein and the alpha zein region by comparison to known HPLC profiles [17, 18]. A standard sample was run with each analysis batch to control for variation among batches but no significant variation in the standard values was observed so the data from the standard was not used in the analysis presented here. Additional phenotypic evaluation To determine the extent of change of unselected traits in the course of the experiment, we evaluated three phenotypic traits unrelated to the transgene: germination rate, seed mass, and percent nitrogen. Germination rates for each of the 12 populations planted in year 4 were determined by counting the number of plants in each row, not including tillers. Seed mass of each of the 12 populations planted in year 4 was determined by weighing two samples of 50 randomly selected seeds from each ear that was segregating for GFP. Percent nitrogen of 0.5g of two flour samples, consisting of either visually GFP positive or visually GFP negative seeds, from 10 randomly selected ears from S3 and U3 of both breeding populations (40 samples total) was determined by combustion analysis by the Iowa State University Soil and Plant Analysis Laboratory. For all phenotypes, means for each treatment were used for statistical analysis described below. Selection was carried out based on ears rather than seeds, with random mixtures of GFP positive and GFP negative seeds from segregating ears used to advance both selected and unselected populations each year. Each population was expected to have approximately 50% of all ears segregating for GFP, 25% with all positive seeds, and 25% with all negative seeds. To determine whether selection was affecting zygosity of the population, we determined the percentage of total harvested ears per population that were segregating for GFP. Ears with all GFP-negative seeds cannot be visually distinguished from ears with uniform low activity, so only segregating ears were counted for the purpose of determining the percentage of segregating ears in each population. Statistical analysis For each of the three generations, there were two pairs of selected and unselected populations, in two breeding populations. To determine if selection was effective, we used least squares fitting of the data to a linear model. The model used for fluorescence, germination rate, and seed mass is as follows: Where Y is the observed value of the treatment and: μ = the overall mean of the observed values Gen = the effect of generations of selection (1, 2 or 3) SorU = the effect of selection for GFP levels versus the unselected control Pop = the effect of breeding population, BS11 or BS31 All effects were considered fixed effects, limiting the inference space to the observations made in this study. The significance of the SorU term was the test used to determine if selection was effective. For zein peak area and total protein, we examined the variation within the most advanced generations of selection (S3 and U3). ANOVA was carried out with JMP [19], using the following fixed effects model: Where Y is the observed value of the treatment, and: μ = the overall mean of the observed values GFP = visually positive or negative for GFP fluorescence SorU = the effect of selected or unselected Pop = the effect of breeding population, BS11 or BS31 A chi square test was used to determine whether the percentage of total harvested ears per population that were segregating for GFP varied significantly from the expected 50%.
Discussion The objective of this research was to determine if transgene activity could be changed by recurrent selection and we found that it was. These findings provide a new way to increase levels of transgene activity. We also determined the effects of selection for transgene activity on an endogenous gene with the same promoter as the transgene, finding that the protein produced by the endogenous gene was increased. Fluorescence of GFP controlled by the 27kDa gamma zein promoter was significantly increased with three generations of selection in two breeding populations. Even though the native 27kDa gamma zein was not the target of selection, its protein level was significantly increased in the selected populations of both breeding populations. The magnitudes of the increase in fluorescence and 27kDa gamma zein levels in generation 3 are similar. For fluorescence, the selected populations were 17.28 and 48.58% higher than the unselected populations for BS11 and BS31 respectively. For 27kDa gamma zein levels, the selected populations were 14.35 and 31.40% higher than the unselected populations for BS11 and BS31 respectively. We hypothesize that selection acted on regulatory sequences common to the transgene and the native 27kDa gamma zein gene. Since the common element between the transgene and the native gene is the promoter, it seems likely that selection had an impact on transcription, possibly through altered activity of one or more transcription factors. Additional studies, such as RNASeq for known 27kDa gamma zein transcription factors, are needed to determine if this is the case. It is important to note that the 3’ untranslated region of the transgene was not derived from a zein gene. Apparently, sufficient regulatory information resides in the 5’ untranslated region to allow selection for the transgene to impact levels of the zein. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment using the native 3’ untranslated region of the gene as well. In addition to significant increases in 27kDa gamma zein levels, multiple other zeins also had significant increases in the selected populations. These increases may be caused by transcription factors that are shared between the 27kDa gamma zein gene and those zein genes, such as PBF-1, which was shown by Wang et al. to bind to the 27, 22, and 19kDa zein promoters [20]. The 27kDa gamma zein plays a role in protein body formation, and stabilizes other zeins [21], so increased level of the 27kDa gamma zein in the selected populations may be contributing to higher stability of other zeins. This effect has been seen in quality protein maize, where higher level of 27kDa gamma zein is associated with seed vitreousness [22]. Alternatively, the significant differences in zeins could be due to genetic drift or to genotypic differences. For example, gamma zein level is highly variable across genotypes [16]. However, the lack of significant differences between selected and unselected populations for germination rate and seed mass indicates that genetic drift is not occurring for these traits, or that it is occurring at the same rate and in the same direction in the selected and unselected populations. Notably, there were no significant differences in 27kDa gamma zein level between GFP positive and negative seeds on ears segregating for the transgene. GFP negative seeds in the selected populations had elevated levels of 27kDa gamma zein that were just as high as levels in GFP positive seeds, indicating that genetic changes resulting from selection are not dependent on the presence of the transgene. This change in protein level of one gene through selection of another gene could be thought of as selection by proxy, or proxy selection. Proxy selection could be a way to use a reporter transgene as a breeding tool to alter the expression of a native gene that shares regulatory elements with the reporter transgene. The transgene can be segregated out after selection, leaving no transgene in the final product. In this study, the level of the native 27kDa gamma zein gene was increased by recurrent selection for activity of a GFP transgene with the 27kDa gamma zein promoter. Proxy selection has the potential to be a useful tool to alter expression of native genes whose products are difficult to quantify.
Acknowledgments We would like to express great appreciation to Adrienne Moran-Lauter for providing technical assistance. The BS11 and BS31 populations were developed by Dr. Kendall Lamkey of Iowa State University, who provided them for this study. Product names are necessary to report factually on the available data; however, the USDA neither guarantees nor warrants the standard of the product, and the use of the name by the USDA implies no approval of the product to the exclusion of others that may be suitable. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: MPS ALB. Performed the experiments: ALB MNS. Analyzed the data: ALB MPS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MPS ALB MNS. Wrote the paper: ALB MPS MNS.IF GOOD timing is a gift, Britain’s chief central banker is a talented man. Mark Carney, the Canadian picked to run the Bank of England for the next five years, left his home country on a high. Since he took office in July the British economy, for so long in the doldrums, has looked much bouncier.
So far Mr Carney’s judgment seems as sound as his luck. His first big move—a commitment to keep interest rates low at least until unemployment falls to 7%—will ensure Britain’s economy continues to grow. That is a good start. But Mr Carney’s big challenge is to get credit flowing to Britain’s firms. Failure will put the recovery and his own reputation at risk.
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Summertime, and the credit ain’t easy
A sunny bundle of numbers certainly suggests that Britain’s economy is on the mend. Surveys that measure consumer confidence show shoppers are feeling positive: vital in an economy in which consumption makes up two-thirds of spending. Surveys suggest managers’ purchasing plans are at record highs across construction, manufacturing and services.
Much of the upswing comes from better news on housing. Prices are rising across the country. Mortgage costs are lower. Britons with a big deposit can now borrow at 1.5%; even those on higher loan-to-value ratios have seen rates plunge. With interest payments down, disposable income is up. That explains the rosy outlook of shoppers and rising consumption. Since estate agents, lawyers and banks make up a decent chunk of services output, it also helps explain why managers in the service sector are feeling optimistic.
The question is how long it will last. Interest rates are one pitfall. With good news in the bag and more expected, central-bank watchers have been wondering when official rates might rise. The fact that inflation is above the bank’s 2% target fuels the view that a rate rise is justified. But this kind of chatter becomes self-fulfilling: when investors begin to worry that rates will rise, the yields on government bonds tend to go up. Since these yields set a floor for borrowing costs, interest-rate uncertainty can lift the rates on mortgages and corporate debt, even if the central bank has not done a thing.
This is why Mr Carney has followed the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank in offering “forward guidance”. His commitment to keep official rates at 0.5% until at least 750,000 people are back in work aims to strip uncertainty from the system. With unemployment forecast to fall slowly, that could take until 2016, perhaps longer. Special “knockout” clauses allow Mr Carney to put a rate rise back on the table if inflationary pressure builds or if markets look unstable.
Such clarity is welcome. Britain is not ready for higher interest rates. A depressing 11.5m Britons are jobless, with 2.5m of them actively seeking employment. Many of those in work are part-timers who would gladly work longer hours (see article). And it is not just the labour market that has slack. Both the manufacturing and construction sectors are still more than 10% below their 2008 peaks. With this level of spare capacity, a bout of growth is unlikely to lead to runaway inflation.
Indeed, the big risk is that an unrelenting credit crunch for businesses snuffs out growth. The latest data show household lending is just 0.3% below its 2008 peak. But lending to firms is 22% lower. Accounting for inflation, the drop is more like 32%, and the decline is accelerating. In January lending to businesses was falling at an annualised rate of 3%. By June the pace had more than doubled to 7%.
Some of the credit cutbacks are a natural response to companies’ past excesses. Commercial-property firms borrowed on a whim in the mid-2000s. But while the party was in one sector, the hangover has been widespread. Credit to the manufacturing sector has been cut sharply, with lending to firms that make chemicals and electronics 30% lower than the peak. In fashion and food the crunch has culled 39% and 47% of loans. None of these was a particularly bubbly sector.
Loans let firms bridge the gap between buying inputs and making sales; they finance outlays on machines that must be made before revenues can rise. The crunch explains why Britain’s rate of new-firm creation is oddly low, and why business investment has fallen 34% in five years. Britain’s investment-to-GDP ratio was a dreadful 159th in the world in 2012. Its R&D spending puts it towards the bottom of a rich-world table, too.
Adjusting the taps
Powerful forces underpin the business-credit squeeze. Banks are cutting costs to raise shareholder returns. Since commercial loans require time-consuming scrutiny of business plans, they are costly to extend. Granting mortgages from a call centre is far cheaper. Lenders also need to boost capital levels: banks must hold up to four times more capital against business loans than against the safest residential mortgages. A daft new government-subsidy scheme—Help to Buy—further encourages mortgage lending by providing banks with insurance against default for borrowers with small deposits.
To offset these forces, Mr Carney should do more to make corporate lending more attractive. With the mortgage market in good health, the Funding for Lending scheme that gives banks access to cheap money should be restricted to those that provide fresh loans to firms. The scheme could also cover more of the outstanding business loans on banks’ books. A really radical Mr Carney would buy up pools of business debt. Any of these steps would free up lenders’ balance-sheets.
These ideas are not without risk. By buying or holding more volatile assets the central bank could end up losing taxpayers money. But inaction carries bigger risks. Britain’s house prices are rising again, and household debt is starting to swell. This is sustainable only if workers’ future wages justify the mortgages granted against them. They will not if Britain stays on a path of low investment, poor productivity and weak wage growth.
Mr Carney may have left Canada at just the right time, for its housing market is widely seen as frothy. If he fails to help put Britain’s economy on a more sustainable path, he risks gaining a reputation as a central banker who only knows how to pump up housing markets.A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Charlottesville targets a Virginia law that automatically suspends the drivers licenses of people who don't pay court fines and costs.
The law, passed in 1994, is unconstitutional, according to a group of legal aid attorneys hoping to win class-action status for the hundreds of thousands of Virginians whose licenses have been suspended. Because these indefinite suspensions are put in place regardless of a person's ability to pay outstanding fines, they violate a number of constitutional principles, the suit argues.
"The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held that punishing a person solely for his or her inability to pay, rather than willful refusal to pay or make bona fide efforts to acquire the resources to pay, violates principles of due process and fundamental fairness," the suit states.
Suspending a person's license makes it more difficult for people to work, the suit argues, forcing people to choose between breaking the law and supporting a family. Driving on a suspended license is a criminal offense, punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Among other things, the 56-page complaint filed Wednesday quotes a Brookings Institution report that found only 15 percent of jobs in the Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Newport News areas accessible by public transportation within a 90-minute travel window.
Road crews continue clearing the median strip westbound from Bland Blvd past Denbigh Blvd. overpass in Newport News. Dirt is being moved out of the median strip where two new lanes will be built. Road crews continue clearing the median strip westbound from Bland Blvd past Denbigh Blvd. overpass in Newport News. Dirt is being moved out of the median strip where two new lanes will be built. SEE MORE VIDEOS
The suit was filed Wednesday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. It names Department of Motor Vehicles Commission Richard Holcomb as defendant.
An email seeking comment from a spokesman for Attorney General Mark Herring, whose office will be expected to defend this case, was not immediately returned Wednesday. A DMV spokeswoman said the department is aware of the suit, but deferred to the attorney general's office for comment.
The suit names four plaintiffs, all described as indigent. One is a 28-year-old former National Guardsman from Richmond who has been hospitalized at times for bipolar episodes, the lawsuit states. The lawsuit says he has accumulated more than $5,000 in medical expenses, owes more than $10,000 in student loans, hasn't had a regular income since starting medical leave from his job with a cell phone company in June 2015 and "has had to rely on the kindness of friends to put a roof over his head."
He owns nearly $4,400 in costs and fines, including interest that accrues at 6 percent after 41 days in Virginia, to at least four separate court systems, the lawsuit states.
His license was suspended over an unpaid debt stemming from a 2013 conviction for improper license plates, and he racked up more fines in 2014, when he was pulled over for running a red light and found to be driving on a suspended license, the suit states.
State figures quoted in the lawsuit indicate that 65 percent of all outstanding license suspension and revocation orders are for failure to pay a court debt, as opposed to dangerous driving. In 2015, the DMV said more than 900,000 people fit this category, the suit states.
"In that snapshot in time, approximately one in six Virginia drivers was unable to legally drive a car to and from work, to buy groceries, attend medical appointments, or go anywhere else the needs of their families required," the suit states.
The lawsuit also notes that, in reckless driving cases resulting in a death, Virginia law says licenses can be suspended up to 12 months. Suspensions over court costs are indefinite, running until the debt is paid, or each court system owed money agrees to a payment plan.
State law requires courts to establish community service programs that allow people to work off their debts, but courts aren't required to offer that option to defendants, the suit states.
The suit was filed by attorneys attached to the Legal Aid Justice Center.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe has tackled the issue of court costs before in his administration, dropping payment requirements last year as a prerequisite for felons who want their right to vote re-instated. The governor's spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the DMV lawsuit Wednesday.
Fain can be reached by phone at 757-525-1759.Do we even have to pretend this is a coincidence? There's a reason why so many politicians vote the interests of the wealthy and retire as millionaires -- because they're playing the system. Maybe it's time for a new system, one in which their investments are put in a blind trust until the day they leave:
Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market in their personal investments, according to a new academic study.
Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call "significant positive abnormal returns," with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.
What's their secret? The report speculates, but does not conclude, it could have something to do with the ability members of Congress have to trade on non-public information or to vote their own pocketbooks -- or both.
A study of senators by the same team of researchers five years ago found members of the higher chamber even better at beating the market -- outperforming it by about 10 percent, an amount the academics said was "both economically large and statistically significant."
"Being one of 435, as opposed to one of 100, is likely to result in a significant dilution of power relative to members of the Senate," the researchers wrote.The researchers, Alan J. Ziobrowski of Georgia State University, James W. Boyd of Lindenwood University, Ping Cheng of Florida Atlantic University and Brigitte J. Ziobrowski of Augusta State University, noted that the circumstances are ripe for abuse.
[...] The House ethics manual clearly states that "all Members, officers, and employees are prohibited from improperly using their official positions for personal gain" and members must disclose their holdings annually.
But the House's official position is that demanding that members either divest themselves of potential conflicts or recuse themselves when there is a conflict is "impractical or unreasonable" because it "could result in the disenfranchisement of a Member‘s entire constituency on particular issues."
Ever since 2006, a small coterie of Democrats has been trying to officially prohibit members of Congress and their staffs from using non-public information to enrich their personal portfolios.The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act was most recently re-introduced in March by Reps. Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) and Tim Walz (Minn.).
It has not been heard from since.When Angela Sbano and her husband decided to sell their Queen Anne home in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, this past spring to move to a large beachfront home in Sea Gate, they encountered a range of reactions. Naysayers questioned why they would ever want to live by the sea, considering the viciousness inflicted on so many coastline communities in the area by Hurricane Sandy, whose two-year anniversary is coming up in October.
The comments they’ve heard over the past few months represent two schools of thought regarding the best course of action in the wake of Sandy. On the one hand, real estate brokers, homeowners, developers and the government—from local municipalities all the way to the federal level—appear confident that the new regulations requiring greater flood protection will go a long way toward reducing the damage if (or when) another Sandy rears its head. On the other hand, a chorus of geologists, oceanographers and other science-minded folks warn that Sandy is just an overture. With climate change and the rising sea, they urge caution when it comes to building on the coastline or even retreating from it altogether.
But something about the allure of living by the sea just makes the risk seem worth it, at least for some, especially when both local governments and FEMA, whose lead everyone follows, are encouraging buyers to buy, builders to build and owners to renovate and elevate. Thanks to this optimism, not to mention huge injections of federal cash, real estate markets in some of the hard-hit areas, like the Rockaways, Long Beach Island and parts of Long Island’s South Shore have bounced back.
“People are buying rapidly out here,” said Lisa Jackson, a veteran broker in the Rockaways who has sold three-dozen properties on or near the water this year, with 20 more under contract. “The market is very strong.”
The biggest concern among buyers has been over their ability to get flood insurance, which they most definitely can, she said, and not necessarily for an arm and a leg. Of the waterfront properties she has sold, most were lots where the houses had been destroyed by Sandy. “You’d think being on the ocean is where people would be afraid, but no—they’re paying top dollar for sand,” she said.
As in other storm-damaged areas, the construction of new houses must follow revamped regulations, established by both FEMA and local municipalities, that require them to be one foot or more above base flood elevation—how high the water might go in a storm—depending on the zone, the property and a host of other factors. Some places, like Long Beach Island, a narrow 18-mile strip along the coast of New Jersey, put updated elevation standards in place decades before Sandy struck, explained Rick Jones, a broker salesperson at G. Anderson Agency.
“Any home that was built to the height requirements prior to Sandy didn’t take water,” he said, whereas the ones that were damaged had mostly been built earlier. Even so, the new regulations, which are still being ironed out, will be even more stringent, well above FEMA guidelines.
“It takes the gamble out of the equation,” Mr. Jones said, so homeowners can breathe easy as well as save on flood insurance because the higher you go above the flood line, the cheaper it gets. Right after the storm, some homeowners rushed to put their houses on the market and good as-is deals could be had, he said. But now, even though there still are people working out their insurance claims and figuring out what to do, “the market has recovered and the fire sale inventory has dwindled,” he said.
The same can be said for some parts of the South Shore of Long Island, where last year there was also a thriving market of discounted distressed homes, said Steven J. Rainone, a broker at Netter Real Estate. The key to preserving the value of the property is elevation, he explained, which turned out to be quite a boon for the house lifting business. “Elevating is really not optional,” he said. “The most desirable position is when a home is elevated because you avoid Mother Nature and on top of that you avoid the high insurance premium.”
But ultimately, it depends on the particular property and the numerous factors at play in each area. In Angela Sbano’s case, back in Sea Gate, a gated community on the edge of Coney Island, she and her husband decided against raising their 1920s style three-story bungalow to keep renovation costs down, for now at least. The robust dark red-brick house fared pretty well in Sandy, unlike its immediate neighbors to the right and left, which were destroyed and are now being rebuilt. The basement filled up with water, which rose six inches on the ground floor, but overall the damage was not so severe.
***
On a recent sunny morning, Ms. Sbano, a 42-year-old classical singer and designer, stood on her back porch looking out at the sea as electricians got to work. “I never thought this existed in New York City,” she said of her new house that sits just a stone’s throw from the water, right where she’s always dreamed of living. “It’s like being on vacation every single day.”
She and her husband, Vincent Sbano, an attorney and train operator, paid $1.4 million and closed in August. They hope to start moving in within a few months with their three small children. They anticipate spending around $300,000 on rehabbing, which includes anti-flood measures such as adding an extra three feet to the five-foot bulkhead where the sand meets the backyard and putting all the utilities in the garage, several feet off the floor (with the basement kept empty as a buffer zone). Also, she mentioned that the Army Corps of Engineers will soon install T-shaped groins out in the water to keep surging waves at bay.
“I have no doubt that another big storm will come,” she said. “Who knows when? Maybe 50 years from now or maybe five years from now. When it comes, I won’t be here. I’ll be at a hotel in Manhattan.” She feels the house’s 100-year track record of defying storms along with the steps they’ve taken will keep the cost of future damage to a minimum, and insurance will take care of the rest.
Another post-Sandy purchaser of an as-is distressed property, Robert Zirkel, got an even better deal when he bought a beach block home last year for just $250,000 on the border between the towns of Ortley Beach and Lavallette, New Jersey. The house, sitting on less than a quarter acre of land, was not salvageable since Sandy knocked it off its foundation, so he started from scratch and put up a spacious beige three-story beach house, whose construction has run $200,000 to date. Nearly complete, it will serve as his family’s summer home next year, replacing their current one that was damaged in the storm, which he fixed up and will eventually put on the market.
Mr. Zirkel, 54, a construction superintendent based in Rockaway, New Jersey, said that he doesn’t foresee the beach home, which stands seven feet above the flood line, facing a great threat from future Sandys. “Many of the homes weathered the storm if they were built correctly,” he said. “And we’re building this new house correctly, so I have no fears of any storm damage at all.”
James Bouler, an architect on the South Shore of Long Island who has had lots of experience with reconstruction, shares this sentiment. He has worked on dozens of lift projects and has designed plans for demolishing and rebuilding Sandy-damaged homes, many of which are in the New York Rising program, established last year to help with post-Sandy restoration. “With the houses I’ve elevated,” he said, “we’ll be fine for another Sandy if water comes in at the same level.” Depending on the property, a lift project could cost as much as $100,000—for the lift and a new foundation—but can end up paying for itself in reduced damage as well as annual insurance premiums that cost just hundreds of dollars rather than tens of thousands.
He’s a specialist in high-end waterfront architecture, and none of the houses he designed suffered water damage in Sandy due to prior FEMA specifications that stipulate a certain height above sea level, depending on which FEMA zone the home is located in. Taking a long-term view, he would like to get them two to four feet higher, despite the height limits imposed by building departments. “I have concerns about climate change,” he admitted, and would like for his houses to withstand the rising sea levels for a long time to come.
But according to John Englander, an oceanographer and author of High Tide On Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis, which came out a week before Sandy struck, greater elevation is only a temporary remedy.
“It is hard to say what height of building will be safe for how many years,” he said in an email. “What we do know is that sea level will just keep climbing.” It’s irreversible, he went on, and will go on for a millennium. Despite this, insurance rates are kept affordable thanks to generous government subsidies; however, he explained, this is unsustainable because, along with all that money FEMA pumps into rebuilding after storms, the cost to taxpayers will become too high. And when insurance rates have to go up, property values will take a hit.
When these real estate markets start to suffer as a result is anybody’s guess, but the long-term forecast appears to be grim. “One way to think of it is that all coastal low elevation property is more like lease-hold,” Mr. Englander said, “rather than something we own for perpetuity, to pass to future generations.”
The good news for homeowners, he added, at least for the time being, is that this is unlikely to happen quickly as “coastal areas will tend to keep their value despite the long-term risk.” But Mr. Englander cautioned that given that the current rate of sea level rise is unprecedented, it’s tough to predict how things will play out in the coming decades.
Eventually, it seems, the “lease” on coastal land will be up. But until then, it looks like property on the sea will continue to be as choice as it gets.Recently, an inmate who has been incarcerated in the United States city of Amarillo in Texas, published a damning article in the independent news analysis outlet, Truth Out.Org, detailing how inmates in prisons across the state have been made to work for long hours without any pay.
Jason Renard Walker titled his article “Unpaid Labor in Texas Prisons Is Modern-Day Slavery.” Walker revealed how Texas prisoners work as electricians, maintenance workers, cooks, janitors, painters and dog trainers. Again, they take care of more than 10,000 head of cattle, raising and processing beef |
of almost any shape or size, and can be moved around in relationship to other structures containing bacterial microcommunities.
The method should enable an entirely new class of experiments that better approximate the conditions that bacteria encounter in actual biological environments, such as those in the human body.
“It allows us to basically define every variable,” said Jodi Connell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Natural Sciences. “We can define the spatial features on a size scale that’s relevant to what a single bacterium feels and senses. We can also much more precisely simulate the kinds of complex bacterial ecologies that exist in actual infections, where there typically aren’t just one but multiple species of bacteria interacting with each other.”
Recipe for cooking and using a cage for bacteria
Here’s how Connell and her colleagues, including Jason Shear, professor of chemistry, and Marvin Whiteley, professor of molecular biosciences, do it:
Identify which bacteria you want to cage and in what shape. Start with a gelatin-based reagent. Bacteria can live and reproduce comfortably within it. When warm it’s a liquid solution but at room temperature becomes firm like JELL-O. And it has within it photosensitive molecules that cause gelatin molecules to react and link together when struck by laser light. Put the bacteria in the solution and cool it, causing the bacteria to become fixed in place. Fire the laser (it uses a chip adapted from a digital movie projector to project a two-dimensional image into the gelatin). Wherever it focuses, a solid matrix forms. Do another layer, and another, and so on, building up. After the structure is completed, feed the bacteria nutrients and allow them to reproduce within a confined space to a controlled density. Optional: take other caged microcommunities and put them close enough together for the communities to signal to each other. Or wash away the excess gelatin, arrest the growth of the bacteria, and store them for later transport to labs in other parts of the world.
“It’s very simple, said Sheer. “We’re basically making pictures and stacking them up into 3-D structures, but with incredible control. Think about the thickness of a hair on your head, and take 1 percent of that, and then take about a quarter of that. That’s about the size of our laser when it’s brought to its smallest point.”
Bio-friendly
“What’s key is these structures aren’t just controllable in terms of their geometries; they’re also very bio-friendly,” said Shear. “The walls that we make out of these protein molecules are linked together tightly enough to prevent the bacteria from escaping, but they are porous enough to be chemically permissive. Nutrients can come in. Waste can go out. Signals can be exchanged. They’re trapped in these tiny houses, but they function like they do in biological environments.”
Shear said the new technique should enable a vast range of experiments. Growth can be arrested at any point to do gene expression analyses of bacteria, to see which genes are turned on or off in response to conditions. Multiple bacteria can be forced to interact in different configurations, at different densities, over varying timescales.
Bacteria such as Staph and Pseudomonas can be arranged in a “core-and-shell,” with a core of Staph surrounded by a shell of Pseudomonas, to see what happens when they’re both confronted by an unwelcome intruder.
Bacterial conversations
“These are really common bacteria that are often found together in infections, and it makes sense that they would have mechanisms to sense each other,” said Shear. “What the technology allows us to do is put them in conversation with each other, in very precise ways, and see what happens. In this case the Staph sensed the Pseudomonas, and one result was that it became more resistant to the antibiotics.”
Among the long-term goals are to use the insights gleaned from such experiments to better combat infections in humans.
“Think about a hospital, which we know is not a good place to be to avoid infections,” said Shear. “There are studies that seem to indicate that infections are transmitted by very small microcolonies of bacteria, which are likely transported by equipment or staff from one part of the hospital to another.
“We currently know little about how this is happening. How many cells does it take? Do these microcommunities become particularly virulent or antibiotic resistant precisely because they’re small, and then in turn change the properties of bacteria on our skin or in our bodies? Now we have a means to start asking these questions much more broadly.”
When can we see these in use in hospitals and labs?
“The innovation here is a platform for conducting basic scientific studies into how polymicrobial communities may function, and specifically, how spatially dependent interactions between bacterial microclusters affects the virulence of microorganisms at infection sites,” Sheer told KurzweilAI.
“The time frame is now — we are already discovering differences between isolated bacteria/bacterial populations, and those organized within more complex communities. The technology builds on previous strategies for arranging bacteria in 3D within culture, and now allows one to organize essentially any set of geometries (e.g., nested colonies of desired shape) within walls that physically isolate distinct populations while maintaining chemical connectivity.
“This aspect is critical to our goals, as it allows free exchange across containing walls not only of nutrients and waste chemicals (necessary to enable colony growth) but also signals and ‘bio-warfare’ agents that bacteria use against each and against their multi-cellular hosts.”
Abstract of PNAS paper
Bacteria communicate via short-range physical and chemical signals, interactions known to mediate quorum sensing, sporulation, and other adaptive phenotypes. Although most in vitro studies examine bacterial properties averaged over large populations, the levels of key molecular determinants of bacterial fitness and pathogenicity (e.g., oxygen, quorum-sensing signals) may vary over micrometer scales within small, dense cellular aggregates believed to play key roles in disease transmission. A detailed understanding of how cell–cell interactions contribute to pathogenicity in natural, complex environments will require a new level of control in constructing more relevant cellular models for assessing bacterial phenotypes. Here, we describe a microscopic three-dimensional (3D) printing strategy that enables multiple populations of bacteria to be organized within essentially any 3D geometry, including adjacent, nested, and free-floating colonies. In this laser-based lithographic technique, microscopic containers are formed around selected bacteria suspended in gelatin via focal cross-linking of polypeptide molecules. After excess reagent is removed, trapped bacteria are localized within sealed cavities formed by the cross-linked gelatin, a highly porous material that supports rapid growth of fully enclosed cellular populations and readily transmits numerous biologically active species, including polypeptides, antibiotics, and quorum-sensing signals. Using this approach, we show that a picoliter-volume aggregate of Staphylococcus aureus can display substantial resistance to β-lactam antibiotics by enclosure within a shell composed of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Getty Images
Hercule Poirot is unlikely to share the sleeping cabin next to yours, but nevertheless, the next time you board a long-distance European train, you'll probably think of Murder on the Orient Express. Or The 39 Steps. Or The Lady Vanishes. That's because we romantics are convinced that each new train ride holds the potential for intrigue, mystery, or even—perhaps—an unexpected dalliance.
Unfortunately, those atmospheric night trains, once a staple of long-distance Continental travel, are fast disappearing. To think that such a mode of transport—iconic, celebrated, even revered—may soon be nothing more than a nostalgic novelty is nothing less than a travesty. All of which is why on a recent Eurail Pass trip through Portugal and Spain, I've chosen to travel from Lisbon to Madrid via the Trenhotel, a deluxe sleeper service operated by Renfe, the Spanish train company.
It's a warm, autumn Wednesday evening. My travel companions and I prepare to board the sleek rolling stock of the Trenhotel Lusitania at Lisbon's Oriente Station, a modernist, airy terminal designed by Santiago Calatrava. The train has pulled in right on time, as European trains generally do, and we board in an unnecessary pothering bustle, as European train travelers generally do. I search out my sleeper, only to find a large French family encamped in my reserved space. The Frenchmen should have known better; their assigned roomette is in the next car back. No big deal, except for the fact that I don't speak French and they don't speak English. But the car attendant soon sorts it all out and gets everyone pointed in the right direction.
I drop my bag on the floor and look around my new home. I adore railroad sleeper cars. (This from a man who never uses the word adore.) I love the efficient use of space, the coziness, the seats that transform into berths, the privacy. I rode in my first sleeper, in Mexico, nearly 40 years ago, an antiquated American Pullman that had been decommissioned and sent south of the border for secondary service. Since then I've traveled in sleepers from New York to Orlando on the Silver Meteor and from New York to Chicago on the Lake Shore Limited, but this ride is my first in a European wagon-lit.
When I'm in a sleeper I feel as if I'm in a Bond movie, as if some secret plan is afoot.
It's dispiriting to consider that overnight trains are vanishing from European timetables. I've always loved the concept of taking a sleeper to save money on a hotel and waking up in the city center instead of arriving at some distant airport. But cheap intra-European flights and super-fast day trains are diminishing the need for sleepers.
Flash forward two weeks. I'm chatting with Nadine Koszler, a spokeswoman for Eurail, about the decline in sleeper trains. How can this be happening, I ask? It doesn't make sense. Nadine shrugs, not unsympathetically. "Some people don't sleep well on a train and can find it tiring," she says. "Plus it can be a bit cramped compared to a hotel room." Hmm… This is more honesty than I want. Come on, Nadine, help me out. "But for a younger generation especially, it's a good way to save money. It's a very efficient way to travel." Okay, that's more like it. Keep going… "The Austria-Switzerland route that closed is reopening." Yes! "I know that within Europe there's been a lot of lobbying against the closing of the night lines."
Sleeper car accommodations on a Trenhotel Courtesy of Renfe
I realize none of this merits Champagne and festoons, but I'm glad to hear any optimistic news about the future of nocturnal rail service. And yet the dwindling number of night trains is a lamentable trend. The French government in 2016 announced a drastic cut in its Intercité de Nuit service. In the fall of 2016 Germany's Deutsche Bahn announced it would cease operation of its comprehensive City Night Line service (though, thankfully, Austrian Railways is taking over some of those routes). Other night trains have devolved into basic daytime service or have been eliminated altogether. Irrespective of the bad news, when I'm in a sleeper I feel as if I'm in a Bond movie, as if some secret plan is afoot.
With that, after settling into my compartment, I wander over to the café car. The trouble is that the café car looks like a 1950s Times Square luncheonette, not unlike the sad, stark coffee shop in Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, but without the charm—overlit, Formica-like countertops, uncomfortable stools mounted in place, nothing sexy or noir-ish or Hitchcockian about it. And yet, we do what we do with what we have. One of my traveling buddies has ordered some food—a selection of cheeses, some sausages, and a beer—and I join him with a beer of my own, the Portuguese lager Super Bock.
Soon our little space becomes a snug haven; the distant lights roll past and the bungla-bungla-bungla of the train wheels plays a soothing chorus to our conversation. Complete strangers settle in along the counter, various languages compete with one another, and the empty beer bottles and wine glasses pile up faster than the attendant can take them away. At one point the café car is two deep (there isn't enough room for three).
You're surrounded by people you've never met, whose patois you don't savvy, whose ultimate destination on the train or in life is utterly unknown to you.
People you've never met, whose patois you don't savvy, whose ultimate destination on the train or in life is utterly unknown to you, are reaching over your shoulder to pay for their drinks, placing a hand gently on your back so as not to lean against you. A small discordant polyglot brotherhood begins to blossom in that warm compartment as you sail across the Spanish frontier. You set down your third (and now empty) bottle of Super Bock and realize there are only four or five people in the once-crowded café, and so, reluctantly, you toddle off to bed.
My compact domain is maybe seven feet long by seven feet wide, including an en suite bathroom. My lower bunk is down and the bed made up; the upper bunk is folded against the wall, almost unnoticeable. The bathroom is as trim as a head in a cabin cruiser, no wasted space, with a sink, a toilet, and even a shower with surprisingly good hot-water pressure. There are plenty of lights, including a powerful bedside reading lamp. I lie in my berth and try to focus on The Rough Riders, a memoir by Theodore Roosevelt, but my eyes keep drifting to the moonlit landscape rushing by.
It's all very cosseting: the soft swaying of the train, the rhythmic clacking of the wheels, the cozy little room. But ultimately it's time to fall asleep, so I turn off all the lights except the powerful reading lamp; I can't find the switch. Even after three beers I should be able to find a simple light switch, but it simply isn't there. So I take an extra pillow and push it in front of the light and try to ignore it. The pillow slips out of place in the middle of the night and the glare wakes me, so I turn on all the lights and systematically turn them all off again. This time the reading light goes out.
And so do I.
Until 7 a.m., that is, when a hearty knock wakes me. It's the conductor, alerting me and the other sleepers that we will arrive in Madrid in the next hour or so. I'm already packed, so I slip on some fresh clothes and walk to the diner, where I find one of my travel pals.
"They don't have a full breakfast menu on this train, for some reason," he says. "All they have is toast and sausage. That's disappointing."
I think about it for all of five seconds. "Not really." Then I look at the man behind the counter. "Toast and sausage," I say. "And coffee." The server says, "Anything else?"
"Nah," I reply. "I'm fine with toast and sausage." And at that moment, not a truer word was ever spoken.
How to Book:
Overnight accommodations on European trains are usually booked by paying for a seat, then purchasing a sleeper-cabin upgrade. Prices vary depending on the number of people in the cabin and the luxury level (for example, whether you have a private WC and shower or just a washbasin). You can book the Trenhotel Lusitania on the Renfe website or get help from Eurail, whose Eurail Pass network extends to more than two dozen countries and is particularly useful when taking multiple train trips and, especially, trips in adjoining countries.City meters upgraded to accept chipped bank cards
City meters upgraded to accept chipped bank cards
Work has begun on upgrading credit/debit card readers in the City’s parking meters to enable motorists to use bank cards that contain a chip.
The meters have a change in instructions for inserting chipped credit and debit cards.
“Previously, you had to insert a card with the magnetic strip down and on the left” says Graeme Tong, roading manager for Palmerston North City Council.
“With the new meters, the card needs to be inserted with the magnetic strip on the left-hand side and facing up. If you hold card in front of you, you will see that the chip end will be inserted first and facing down,” Graeme said.
“The way the card is inserted into the meter will affect all debit and credit card users, regardless of whether their card has a chip or not”.
It is expected that the change will cause minimal disruption to people parking in the City. Council staff have been briefed to help residents with the change.
The upgraded meters have a symbol sticker top and bottom of the card slot to guide users through the process.
The move will bring the meters into line with new banking technology, and is anticipated to be completed before Christmas.
ends
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ABC's The View will be broadcasting from Disney's Animal Kingdom as part of the show's season 20 celebrations.
The View co-hosts (Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Jedediah Bila, Sunny Hostin and Paula Faris) will be visiting Walt Disney World March 6 to March 10, with the show airing 11am - 12pm ET each day.
The Tree of Life will serve as the backdrop for the show.
You can be part of The View audience at Walt Disney World with free tickets available online.
The View is also offering the chance to win a a Walt Disney World vacation. The View’s Magic is Endless Sweepstakes presented by American Tourister is offering the chance for three lucky viewers to win grand-prize packages including a Walt Disney World vacation for themselves and up to three guests and attend the taping of “The View” at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Winners will also receive a $500 Disney gift card.
The entry period ends January 29 at 11:59 p.m. ET. The View’s “Magic is Endless” Sweepstakes is open to legal residents of the 50 United States & District of Columbia, 18 or older. No purchase necessary. Winners must travel between March 3-8, 2017. Viewers can learn more and enter for a chance to win at www.TheViewMagicIsEndlessSweepstakes.com or by visiting The View’s homepage at abc.com/theview, which contains full details and Official Rules.
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Article Posted:Image caption A spokesman for Liam Payne said he was unharmed
One Direction star Liam Payne escaped unharmed after a fire broke out in his east London home.
The singer was at home in the flat on the 34th floor of a luxury block in Canary Wharf when firefighters were called on Monday night.
Two men and a women were treated for burns after the blaze started on the balcony but a spokesman for the star said he was unharmed.
The cause of the fire is being investigated.
Station manager Laurie Kenny, from London Fire Brigade, said: "Around 30 people left the building before we arrived and were not injured.
"Two of the occupants had superficial burns to their hands and the third had burns to his hands and face. All three have been taken to hospital."
Six fire engines and 35 firefighters took about 45 minutes to put out the blaze which caused severe damage to the balcony.
Last month Liam and the rest of the band were at the premiere in Leicester Square of the band's film This Is Us.SAN ANTONIO, TX—Explaining that the character trait does not seem to suit her well, acquaintances of local woman Mary Randolph told reporters Wednesday that the 32-year-old accountant really has no business being an extrovert. “She’s great at putting herself out there, but then as soon as she starts talking to people it’s like she doesn’t even register a single response or social cue she gets from anyone else in the room—I’m not sure if having an outgoing personality is really the best fit for her,” said coworker Jenna Hospodor, adding that Randolph routinely attempts to initiate friendly conversations with colleagues who are clearly too busy for a casual chat and will excitedly speak up in meetings one beat after everyone else has inferred a discussion is over. “She’s always launching into these really personal anecdotes in public areas like the break room or the elevator, and she doesn’t seem to notice when she’s making everyone around her uncomfortable. In a sense, it’s great that she’s so confident, but she’d probably be much better off if she was a withdrawn and reserved kind of person.” Hospodor added that her coworker also had no business being so nice, as it makes it hard to criticize her without coming off as catty.
AdvertisementLet's face it parents, buying all those school supplies for your kids can really add up, especially if you're already having trouble making ends meet.
RELATED: The end of summer break: here’s when metro schools re-open
Luckily, organizations around the Atlanta area understand how expensive it can be to make sure your little ones have everything they need.
They've put together special back-to-school events offering free backpacks, school supplies, health screenings, haircuts and more so that your children can start their school year off right.
If you're still figuring out how to get all the things on your child’s school supplies list, make sure to stop by one of the back-to-school events −which are full of freebies− taking place in metro Atlanta:
DeKalb
Let's Move! DeKalb Expo. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, July 29. Free. Exchange Multipurpose Center. 2771 Columbia Drive, Decatur. 678-819-3663. www.choicesforkids.org.
Help your family learn how to lead a more healthy lifestyle while gearing up for school at the Let's Move! DeKalb Expo. Along with passing out over 750 free backpacks filled with school supplies to children, visitors will also take part in fitness activities, see cooking demonstrations and look at nutrition exhibits.
Back to School Block Party. Noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 29. Free. GELC of Atlanta. 6330 Lawrenceville Highway, Unit A-11, Tucker. 914-479-2140. www.eternallight.org.
Join GELC for their annual Back to School Book Bag Giveaway. Children will receive a filled book bag will all the supplies they will need for school.
2017 Back to School Back to Work Expo. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday, Aug. 4. Free. Antioch AME Church. 765 South Hairston Road, Stone Mountain. 404-299-3388. www.eventbrite.com.
Helping both school children and their parents, the 2017 Back to School Back to Work Expo provides services for the whole community with resume writing and interviewing workshops, giveaways, a career fair, raffles and the first 100 people will receive free supplies for school.
RELATED: Flashback photos: First day back to school for Atlanta students
Grace and Mercy Back to School Bash. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 5. Free. Salem Park. 5280 Salem Road, Lithonia. www.events.accessatlanta.com
Don't miss the Grace and Mercy Back to School Bash in Lithonia, which will include free backpacks filled with school supplies, free haircuts and hairstyles for both boys and girls, uniforms for all the kids in a chosen household, a bouncie house, live music and more.
Back-2-School Jamboree. Noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 6. Free. Midway Recreation Center. 3181 Midway Road, Decatur. 404-294-3150. www.dekalbcountyga.gov.
The Back-2-School Jamboree returns with free, supply-filled book bags, 100 free uniforms for students, live entertainment, food and giveaways.
Fulton
ReNew Atlanta Back to School Festival. 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, July 22. Free. Capital Gateway Apartments. 89 Woodward Ave. Atlanta. 404-549-3823. www.renewatlanta.org.
Each registered student at the ReNew Atlanta Back to School Festival will receive a filled backpack, free health screenings, free haircuts and hair styling, dental screening and care pack, games, food and more.
Columbia Residential 3rd Annual Back to School Bash. 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, July 22. Free. Carver High School. 55 McDonough Blvd. SE, Atlanta. 404-874-5000. www.columbiares.com.
This free community event will provide backpacks filled with school supplies to over 1200 students, but registration is required in order to take part.
Back to School and Health Fair. 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, July 22. Free. West End Church of Christ. 1303 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd., Atlanta. Contact. www.thewestender.com.
The Back to School and Health Fair takes place at West End Church of Christ and will supply pre-K through college-age students with supply-filled backpacks, gently-used uniforms and books, free haircuts, health and wellness education and a mini festival.
ROLLING MEADOWS, IL - JULY 26: Crayola markers are seen in the back-to-school section in a Wal-Mart store July 28, 2003 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Wal-Mart said that sales in the month of July at its U.S. stores that were open at least one year could top expectations. Warm weather has helped turnaround slower retail sales following the cooler weather of May and June. (Photo by /Getty Images) Photo: Tim Boyle
Walmart Vision Center Back to School Health Fair. Noon to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, July 22. Free. Walmart Supercenter. 1801 Howell Mill Road NW, Atlanta. 404-587-3504. www.americankineticsllc.com.
Join American Kinetics for the 9th Annual Walmart Vision Center Back to School Health Fair. Fulton County students and their families will have access to free school supplies, health screenings and giveaways.
Flexx Old Skool Back 2 School Extravaganza. Noon to 3 p.m. Friday, July 28. Free. Kingdom of God Evangelistic. 4590 Welcome All Road, Atlanta. www.flexxcars.com.
At this fun back-to-school event, adults are encouraged to dress up like it's 1975 while attending students receive school supplies. Everyone can take part in activities and games, enjoy live music and shop from vendors onsite.
Back to School Bash. 10 a.m. Saturday, July 29. Free. Divine Unity3385 Harrison Road, East Point. 404-766-4272.www.divineunitymbc.org
Divine Unity in East Point will celebrate the 1st Annual Back to School Bash with free school supplies for kids, live entertainment, giveaways, food and more.
MetroPCS Back-to-School Meet 'n Greet. 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 5. Free. Cascade Heights MetroPCS. 2296 Cascade Road, Atlanta. 404 500-3371.www.metropcs.com.
Join the Cascade Heights MetroPCS team for a Back-to-School Meet 'n Greet, featuring a live DJ and gaming station, as well as free backpack and school supply giveaways.
Contagious Back 2 School Giveaway. 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 12. Free. Magnificent Inc. 4485 Fulton Industrial Blvd. Suite B, Atlanta. www.eventbrite.com.
Stock up on your child's school supplies by attending the Contagious Back 2 School Giveaway, hosted by Magnificent Inc. in Atlanta.
Gwinnett
Youth of Gwinnett's Back 2 School Bash. 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, July 29. Free. Berkmar High School. 405 Pleasant Hill Road, Lilburn. yogwinnett@gmail.com.www.yogwinnett.org.
Join Youth of Gwinnett for the 1st Annual Back 2 School Bash, which will include free school supplies, giveaways, live entertainment, vendors and more.The Dutch government has presented a long-term energy plan that stipulates that no new cars with combustion engines may be sold from 2035 on. In addition, in the Netherlands – for over 50 years the largest natural gas producer in the EU – all houses will be disconnected from the gas grid by 2050. The plan has broad parliamentary support – in fact, many political parties believe it does not go far enough.
Perhaps the most striking part of the “energy agenda” presented by Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs Henk Kamp on Wednesday 7 December (see here for more information in Dutch) is that it received such a critical response from both green NGOs and left-leaning parties in Parliament. They complained that it is not ambitious enough.
More neutral observers may feel differently. With this plan, the Netherlands – home country of Shell, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world – may be one of the first countries in the world to put a specific date to the end of the combustion engine car. The “agenda” states that from 2035 on all cars sold should be zero-emission, i.e. either electric or hydrogen-driven.
A majority in the Dutch Parliament had earlier asked for 2025 as a starting date for this transport revolution, but according to Kamp – a Minister for the right-wing VVD, which is part of a coalition government with the Dutch Labour party PvdA – this is too early.
Gas grid
Another revolution is to take place in the built environment. Newly built houses will not be connected to the gas grid anymore, according to the plan. Existing houses will be gradually disconnected from the gas grid. By 2050 houses will not use gas at all anymore. They will be heated in part with waste heat from industrial processes as well as geothermal sources. A new infrastructure for waste heat distribution will be built for this. Local governments are assigned a leading role in this transition process.
For the Netherlands the change will be huge. Since the early 1960s, the country has been the largest natural gas producer in the EU and a major gas exporter. It probably has the most extensive gas distribution infrastructure in the world. Virtually all houses are connected to the gas grid – indeed, they must be, according to the law.
The energy-intensive industry will not be able to do entirely without gas, says Kamp. For this reason, the Netherlands will pursue possibilities for carbon capture and storage (CCS).
CO2-driven
The “energy agenda” comes with a cost-benefit analysis prepared by McKinsey (English version here). This concludes that: “Reducing the energy system’s CO2 emissions while accommodating a 37 percent increase in the demand for electric power represents a major challenge. We have modeled one way of meeting this challenge: by increasing the system’s renewable power generation capacity to 80 percent and introducing flexibility measures, such as demand-side management and energy storage. All in all this would lower (energetic) CO2 emissions by about 55 percent. These changes will require capital and operational expenditures of approx. EUR 10 billion per year. This amounts to some EUR 2.5 billion more than for a fossil-fuel-reliant system.”
The new Dutch “energy agenda” says that European energy and climate policy should be CO2-driven. Targets for energy efficiency and renewable energy should be secondary to CO2 reduction targets. The EU Emission Trading System is “in principle a good instrument” to reduce CO2 emissions, says the plan, although the Dutch government acknowledges that CO2 prices in the EU ETS are “too low” and will likely remain so for some time to come. The Netherlands wants to reinforce the ETS by an annual reduction of the emission cap and reducing the surplus of allowances in the system.
The energy agenda nevertheless promises continued support for renewable energy and energy efficiency. In particular, it wants to continue the “large scale expansion” of offshore wind in the North Sea after the current stimulus plan – which runs till 2023 – ends.
However, it does not include any plans to close existing coal-power stations, which has been demanded by NGO’s and left-leaning parties.
Dutch energy and climate policy is currently driven by a broadly based “energy accord”, which was signed in September 2013 by the government with forty organisations, including NGO’s and industry associations, and which runs until 2023. The new “energy agenda” is intended as a long-term perspective for the period after 2023.
The only party to have reacted negatively to the green ambitions of the Dutch government is the nationalist right-wing party of Geert Wilders, the PVV. A spokesman for the PVV has said the plan is “simply insane”, because it will cost too much. The PVV wants to see construction of thorium-based nuclear power stations.
Editor’s Note
This article was amended on 14 December to correct the earlier assertion that the costs calculated by McKinsey pertained only to the switch from gas to waste heat infrastructure. The current version of the article refers directly to McKinsey’s cost estimate.“Oh my god, you killed Kenny!”
“You Bastards!”
We all recognize this popular catch-phrase, and dozens more, from South Park. We have only been captivated by this purposefully poorly animated show for about 15 years now, and the kids have only grown one year. Although South Park started (and continues) as a fairly crude cartoon, it evolved into something far more elegant (even if its language didn’t). Now the episodes cover current events, trends, fads, controversies and issues. It may not be very accurate (Ninja Sarah Palin comes to mind), but we get a lot of laughs nonetheless.
More than most things, however, South Park has consistently paid homage to the trends of geeks. Videogames, science fiction, and cult films have all been well documented. We have seen appearances by many gaming consoles, as well as geeky literature, video game, and movie references. So I have compiled a list of the most geeky episodes and assembled the top-ten most awesome points of geekiness shown by South Park. Feel free to comment on any of your favorite episodes I might have missed, but keep in mind this is my definitive version.
So here we go, starting with the honorable mentions:
Season 4 – Episode 12: 4th Grade – In this episode, some local geeks are enlisted to build a time machine. It actually works, but the kids miss the boat and only one is able to time-travel, with expectedly geeky consequences. Also, the geeks argue about how many episodes are in the original Star Trek, a most worthy topic of discussion.
Season 8 – Episode 1: Good Times with Weapons – After acquiring some ninja style weapons, the boys become anime-style characters and engage in fantasy combat with Butters with real, and painful, consequences.
Number 10
Season 3 – Episode 10: Chinpokomon – Obviously playing off the Pokemon fad during the late 90’s, South Park’s students buy Chinpokomon products and are subsequently brainwashed by the Japanese message to destroy the American government. I myself remember a friend whose backpack had about 20 Poke-Balls attached to the back in grade school. South Park was still cruder at this point, but a very ironic take on children’s trends and how debilitating they can be.
Number 9
Season 11 – Episode 13: Guitar Queer-o – Playing on the Guitar Hero fad, Stan becomes amazing at the game and goes through an archetypal rock star life cycle. The song “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” from the series actually later became a playable download track…on Rockband 2.
Number 8
Season 13 – Episode 2: The Coon – A tribute to “Watchmen” style vigilantism. Cartman decides to help rid the town of crime by dressing up as a raccoon, he becomes upset when someone else is also dressing up and doing a better job. Since there are so many graphic novels, comic books, cartoons, and big-screen movies about masked vigilantes, it is only natural that South Park’s vigilante episode makes the list.
Number 7
Season 14 – Episode 4: You have 0 Friends – Have you ever tried to delete a Facebook account? It’s hard, and even if you manage it, they send you countless emails telling you that you clearly need them and should restart your account. I loved the “Tron” references too, as it exemplified the difficulty of deleting your account.
Number 6
Season 12 – Episode 6: Overlogging – No more Internet? I myself lost my computer for 3 days and by the end of the first day was rocking back and forth on the couch snapping at people and getting anxious about who some actor was and what else he had been in. It has become a huge part of our lives, so going without it is like going without cigarettes for a smoker. Another point to note is Shelly’s hilarious relationship with her “boyfriend”.
Number 5
Season 6 – Episode 13: The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers – My personal favorite, and not just because my grammar background makes me ecstatic to see how they managed to get all three names of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy into one title. Stan’s dad accidentally switches the cases of the Fellowship of the Ring with a porno he rented. Stan’s dad realizes his mistake and enlists Cartman (Gandalf), Stan (Frodo) and Kyle (Legolas, maybe) to take the movie from Butters and return it to movie store, called The Two Towers. Meanwhile, they consult their group of elders in a large council, are pursued by a group of 9 sixth grades riding on bikes.
Number 4
Season 11 – Episodes 10-12: Imaginationland – Countless awesome references. The boys climb into a magical hot air balloon that transports them to Imaginationland, where all creatures and beings that were thought up by human minds live. We have many of our childhood characters present like Sesame Street, Where the Wild Things Are, etc. as well as some characters from geeky literature and movies like Luke Skywalker, Morpheus, Gandalf, and Aslan. When the wall keeping in the evil creatures breaks down, however, we also see characters from horror movies, like Freddy and Jason.
Number 3
Season 10 – Episode 12: Go God Go! – Cartman freezes himself because he cannot stand waiting for the Nintendo Wii, only to end up going about 3000 years in the future. I know we all waited in high anxiety for the Wii, but this was a bit extreme. Did anyone consider anything extreme while |
, and people with numbers as high as 195 could be drafted, according to the Selective Service.
Photo
Two months after the lottery, in February 1970, Mr. Blumenthal obtained a second occupational deferment, according to the records. The status of people with occupational deferments, however, was growing shakier, with the war raging and the Nixon administration increasingly uncomfortable with them.
In April 1970, Mr. Blumenthal secured a spot in the Marine Corps Reserve, which was regarded as a safe harbor for those who did not want to go to war.
“The Reserves were not being activated for Vietnam and were seen as a shelter for young privileged men,” Mr. Curry said.
But Mr. Blumenthal’s campaign manager, Mindy Myers, said Monday that any suggestion that he was ducking the war was unfounded, saying he was engaged in important work. When he worked for Ms. Graham, for example, he helped teach children in a public school in the Anacostia section of Washington, for a project she had started there.
“It’s flat wrong to imply that Richard Blumenthal’s decisions to take a Fiske Fellowship, teach inner-city schoolchildren and work in the White House for Daniel Patrick Moynihan were decisions to avoid service when in fact, while still eligible for a deferment, he chose to enlist in the Marine Corps Reserves and completed six months of service at Parris Island, S.C., and then six years of service in the Reserves.”
Mr. Blumenthal landed in the Fourth Civil Affairs Group in Washington, whose members included the well-connected in Washington. At the time, the unit was not associated with the kind of hardship of traditional fighting units, according to Marine reports from the period and interviews with about a half-dozen men who served in the unit during the Vietnam years.
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In the 1970s, the unit’s members were dispatched to undertake projects like refurbishing tent decks and showers at a campground for underprivileged Washington children, as well as collecting and distributing toys and games as part of regular Toys for Tots drives.
Robert Cole, a retired lieutenant colonel who did active duty overseas in the 1950s and later joined the unit as a reservist, recalled the young men who joined the unit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “These kids we were getting in — a lot of them were worried about the draft,” he said.
After entering Yale Law School in the fall of 1970, Mr. Blumenthal transferred to a Marine Reserve unit in New Haven, Company C of the Sixth Motor Transport Battalion, Fourth Marine Division, which conducted occasional military drills, as well as participating in Christmas toy drives for children and recycling programs in neighboring communities, according to the unit’s command reports from the time.The “Workhouse” is, essentially, a medieval torture facility built in 1966 to warehouse working class black people who can’t afford to pay exorbitant bail and court fees. If you can’t pay, they throw you in here. Once you are in here, you are forced to fight for the amusement and gambling of guards, deal with black mold, infestations of vermin such as rats and roaches, and food unfit to be fed to animals. The general line of those who have had the misfortune (imposed by capitalism) of ending up in this hellhole is “Close It!”. This month’s storm was brewed by the revelation that incarcerated comrades are forced to survive in this facility in conditions without air conditioning in temperatures that have reached all time highs for our area. Saturday, July 22, saw record breaking temperatures outside of 108 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside, the temperature is 10 degrees higher due to the fact that the facility is built out of brick. Reports from comrades who have been incarcerated as recently as a week ago have informed us that people have been fighting for access to the trifling popsicles, ice, cold water, and access to “the hole” where there is cool air. All showers are hot. Comrades inside called for those on the outside to “help”, and help we did. On Friday, July 21, revolutionary minded and progressive elements from a variety of organizations and ideological tendencies ranging from anarchism to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to “this shit is fucked up-ism”, along with the advanced masses, many of whom have been inside or have relatives inside this facility showed up to shut it down.
This was a noise demo, and make noise we did. The fence was weak. Our comrades raised the motherfucker and a few brave comrades scaled the fence and breached the first perimeter. There were roughly 300 comrades there that night, and we had great success. There was real solidarity built between those on the inside and outside. Messages of support were exchanged, and we witnessed several family reunions, mothers bringing their children to meet fathers that they had never seen before, forced to communicate between two fences and a brick wall. This is what capitalism does to us. There were various opportunist local political elements present, but the militancy of the crowd and the adherence to the “Close the Workhouse” line neutralized them and they were forced to stand back and shake their heads at us. Let them shake, because they’re shook. We also had the presence of family members of Vinny Hammett, a victim of police murder on the South Side last month, who was killed when a SWAT team barged into his residence, shared with his grandfather, a Vietnam Veteran, and riddled the house with bullets. The police then proceeded to manufacture several lies, all of which were easily disproven. Justice for Vinny Hammett, Mike Brown, Vonderrit Myers, and Kajieme Powell will not be served truly until the people rule, and to ensure that the people rule, a mass movement and a revolutionary party is needed. The police were woefully unprepared for the rebellion that we had in store, and could not get organized and mobilized until 45 minutes after the demonstration began. They waited until nightfall and began their usual fuckery, bringing out the riot gear and making the “this is an illegal gathering” announcement. They brought out a tow truck to frighten and intimidate comrades who had parked their vehicles on Hall Street. We have reports that they punctured the tires of comrades who parked further out of the way. They then proceeded to bash with riot shields, use pepper spray indiscriminately, and attack/single out presumed “leaders” and advanced elements, especially black women, for attack. A comrade was hauled off brutally, all while being called homophobic slurs by our notoriously homophobic pigs. Pushed us all out into Hall Street so that we would get hit by cars. Essentially, they tried to kill us. But they fail to realize that even if they get rid of everybody that was out Friday, the struggling spirit runs deep in this city and the building of the revolution in this city will continue until final victory. Comrades returned Saturday night, the hottest night of the year, and there was an increased riot police presence and brutal attacks on individuals who were out the night before were done with disregard to the fact that cameras were present. STL Pigs don’t care, as we learned from Ferguson. They had sealed off access to the Workhouse grounds, forcing comrades to demonstrate across the street.
We were also treated to a display of blatant hypocrisy. The pigs were given an entire Metro bus to sit in and stay cool when they felt the need. Who missed work for the pigs, that is the question! Pigs began to mock and torment comrades, and would routinely make feints across the street to try and provoke fear. It began to rain, and the pigs turned on floodlights, causing at least one auto accident. Once again trans comrades and comrades who were seen Friday were singled out, manhandled and arrested for no reason whatsoever. Once again the world saw the pigs and their class nature. The demo dispersed, all determined to strengthen ties to those on the inside, all determined to close the workhouse, all determined to link up and strengthen ties and build a united front to close the Workhouse across racial boundaries, across geographic area, across ideological spectrums. This is a class struggle and a class war and our cadre and mass members are being sharpened, trained, and built up through participation in mass struggles like that to close the Workhouse. Saint Louis dares to struggle, and we shall win whether it takes us a day or 3 million days. We have received a temporary “victory” in the form of “temporary” AC units (costing the city $40,000/day) installed Monday. This is not a temporary struggle, and even if they make the workhouse so cool that ice forms on the floor in July, we will never be satisfied until we are dismantling it brick by brick. This is one step on the road to inevitable victory.
Sunday saw the demonstration called by the city’s Muslim community against the Zionist siege of al-Aqsa Mosque. Comrades from PYO-STL responded in solidarity and the desire to build stronger ties of anti-imperialist solidarity with our Muslim comrades. Comrades used their discipline and training to successfully drive away and neutralize the impact of Zionist and fascist trolls who had shown up to attack and disrupt the demonstration and the public prayer. The masses of the Muslim community extended their heartfelt thanks at the fact that we displayed international solidarity and material support as one of their holiest sites falls under attack from imperialist occupiers. This shows that the correct decision for the revolutionary at all times is to stand firmly alongside the people, to unite with their interests, and to defend their right to religious expression and their land. Long Live Palestine! End the siege on al-Aqsa!
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!
Close the Workhouse, Free the People Immediately!
Justice for Isaiah Hammett, Vonderritt Myers, Mike Brown, Kajieme Powell, and all who have been murdered by the police nationwide!
We Will Make Revolution in Our Lifetime!
End the siege on Al-Aqsa!A new program to help people learn a language for a free is coming to the Massanutten Regional Library (MRL), thanks to Rosetta Stone, Inc.
It's called the 'Rosetta Stone® Library Solution' and it will be available to any patron of the library, whether they're looking to learn a brand-new language, further their ESL learning as non-native English speakers, or brush up on a language for travel.
Access to 'Rosetta Stone Library Solution' is made possible by a generous gift from Rosetta Stone, Inc., a company now based in Arlington, but which was founded and has offices in Harrisonburg.
This gift will provide Rosetta Stone Library Solution to Massanutten Regional Library for three years, which represents a $48,000 investment in the Library and its patrons. To mark this important partnership between the library and Rosetta Stone, the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Chamber of Commerce will host a Ribbon Cutting and Open House at the Central Library in downtown Harrisonburg on Tuesday, August 30th from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
“This gift from Rosetta Stone is a great example of the way that business and individual support of MRL reaches well beyond the walls of the Library to benefit all the residents of the diverse communities that we serve,” said Lois Jones, Library Director.
MRL patrons will use their library cards to access Rosetta Stone Library Solution through the MRL website. According to Paul Frankel, a reference librarian at Central Library, patrons will have the ability to study 30 different languages, including English.
“Rosetta Stone will be a great resource for our patrons who are interested in learning a new language. It will be especially useful for our immigrant and refugee population to improve their existing English language skills,” Frankel said.
*****
But what exactly is Rosetta Stone Library Solution? This is how Rosetta Stone describes the language-learning tool:
"Rosetta Stone Library Solution offers libraries and their patrons the proven immersion method that more than 22,000 schools and 12,000 businesses have trusted for over the last 20+ years. The award-winning interactive approach has been used by millions of learners around the world and now is accessible in the library--or anywhere, anytime.
This vital resource includes 30 languages to meet a range of cultural interests. Learning is structured around core lessons to build reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills and also includes focused activities to refine grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and more. Patrons can also take advantage of available mobile apps that enable learners to reinforce their language learning wherever they may be. For more information about Rosetta Stone, Inc., visit their website at www.rosettastone.com."I wanted to sit down and write a post about T-Mobile’s aggressiveness against former would-be suitor AT&T without it sounding silly, but I can’t. That’s on account of T-Mobile is suing AT&T because its new low-cost and pre-paid service, Aio, has dared to use a shade of purple on its website. I like T-Mobile quite a bit and appreciate that they're trying to disrupt the wireless market, but I feel like I need to point this out again: T-Mobile is suing AT&T because it’s subsidiary’s shade of purple is too close to its own trademark Magenta.
I would feel dumb typing that again, so if you would please re-read it, and then we’ll go on.
To be fair, it’s not just about the color; T-Mobile feels that Aio was created specifically to take aim at its own “un-carrier” ways, and that by offering similar no-contract plans as well as using purple, consumers may be confused.
According to the complaint filed with the court, T-mobile says, “With full knowledge of T-Mobile’s use of magenta, AT&T’s subsidiary chose — out of all the colors in the spectrum — magenta to advertise, market and promote its wireless services in direct competition with T-Mobile. Aio does not use the orange coverage map of its parent company, but instead uses in its stores and on its website a magenta coverage map that is strikingly similar in color to the one used by T-Mobile.”
Separately, a T-Mobile rep told me via email that, “When consumers see magenta in the wireless world, they think T-Mobile. But AT&T, through its subsidiary Aio Wireless, has been trying to get a free ride from T-Mobile’s success as America’s Un-carrier by using magenta in its marketing. We filed this lawsuit to stop them, and to protect T-Mobile’s powerful magenta trademark.” In an unrelated note, I'll now be using "Powerful Magenta" as my hip-hop name.
When asked about the possibility that Aio could be trying to ride T-Mobile's coattails with its branding, a spokesperson for Aio said, "T-Mobile needs an art lesson. Aio doesn't do magenta." When pressed on what color Aio does use, the spokesperson told me, "not magenta".
Let’s take a look at those colors. Here are the Aio and T-Mobile logos side by side:
I’m actually red-green colorblind, so I’m having a hard time telling where the magenta ends and the other purplish color begins, so I took to Photoshop, which does a very nice job of quantifying the colors in something I can see well: Math.
Here are the color sampler’s picks for both logos:
As you can see, they’re not the same. Aio uses #972A51, whereas T-Mobile uses #F50181, which, to those who can see color, are likely quite different, as they have different numbers. In fact, they are #5dd730 different, if that’s how that stuff is measured. Maybe it’s not, I don’t know, I write about technology and never went to art school.
Is my comparison here silly? It is. And this lawsuit seems to be, too. But besides not being an artist, I’m also not a a federal judge, so instead of deciding if this is magenta or not magenta, I’m just going to sit back, make some popcorn, and see how this one unfolds. I would recommend you do the same, as well.Since my wife became pregnant with our first child in 2007, I’ve created 2 different lifestyle businesses, an ecommerce store selling handkerchiefs and a blog about entrepreneurship.
And these businesses were created so my wife and I could spend more time with these two.
For all of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, a lifestyle business is a business that you can run on the side to earn extra money so that you don’t feel obligated to work your day job.
And the primary difference between a “lifestyle business” versus what I call a “true startup company” is that a lifestyle business requires a much smaller time commitment and can be heavily leveraged to make the best use of your resources.
The best part is that if all goes well, you can make enough money to quit your day job altogether and focus on doing the things that you love.
However, the one downside with a “lifestyle” business is that it will probably never result in you becoming filthy rich. Sure it’s possible but highly unlikely. But who needs to be filthy rich anyways?
The most important things in life come from spending time with those that you love, not slogging away at some company…unless of course your startup company happens to be what you are the most passionate about.
Editor’s Note: If you are interested in learning how to start your own business, click here to take my FREE 6 day mini course on ecommerce.
The Power Of A Lifestyle Business
My wife and I started our ecommerce store so that she could stay at home with our kids and be there for them as they grew up.
Our store made over 100K in profit during our first year and has grown in the double and triple digits since. (This same store now generates 7 figures per year).
I started my blog in 2009, and while it did not make much money in the first two years, it made a decent chunk of change starting in year 3.
Two years later, my blog exceeded my day job income and fast forward to today, MyWifeQuitHerJob.com will generate close to 1.4 million dollars in revenue this year.
Even though I quit my job in 2016, I was actually running both businesses while working full time for many years.
And the truth is that I never felt like I was overexerting myself. I always had plenty of free time to spend with my kids and I hung out with my family and friends a heck of a lot.
Even though I’m pretty happy with where I am right now, it was definitely not a smooth and easy path. So today, I thought that I’d share with you 12 things that I learned while creating my online businesses.
Editor’s Note: If you are interested in learning how to start an ecommerce business which is what my wife and I started out with, click here to take my FREE 6 day mini course on how to start an online store.
Also if you’re curious, you can click here to check out our little online shop that started it all.
Find Out What You Are Good At And Focus On It
Most businesses try to spread themselves too thin and as a result, they don’t do anything particularly well. The key to starting a successful lifestyle business is to be hyper focused on one thing and be the best at it.
With our online wedding linens store, we decided to focus our product selection on handkerchiefs and became the largest seller of hankies on the Internet.
With my blog, I positioned myself as an ecommerce entrepreneur because I noticed that there were very few blogs out there that wrote about ecommerce in the context of running a real online shop.
With my online store course, I decided to focus on teaching ecommerce instead of going broad and showing people how to start a generic online business.
Every lifestyle business needs to find its thing, the one thing where you have a decent shot of being the best at. Otherwise, you will simply blend in with the rest of the pack.
Related: How To Figure Out What You Should Do For A Living If You Hate Your Job
Work With People Who You Love And Will Challenge You
There’s no one I can think of who I love more than my wife (except for my kiddos) so working with her was a natural choice for me.
Though I can’t wholeheartedly recommend working with your spouse, there is no one else out there that you will be able to trust more.
Plus, your spouse will never hesitate to challenge you or make you sleep on the couch when push comes to shove:)
No matter who you decide to work with, the key is to find someone with a complementary skill set who will push you harder than you are normally comfortable with.
Starting any business can be a lonely path and it helps to have someone by your side to keep you motivated so you never give up.
Related: How To Run A Business With Your Spouse And Still Maintain A Happy Marriage
Make Decisions And Execute
In the beginning when you have no clue what you are doing, it’s easy to sit on the sidelines until you are sure which path to take. The problem however is that you’ll never know which path to take unless you pick something and go for it.
So whenever you feel indecisive, take action regardless of how you feel about your decision. By getting off your butt and jumping into the ring, you will obtain valuable data that you can learn from and make adjustments accordingly.
When I first wanted to teach an online course, I waited on the sidelines for over 6 months because I wasn’t sure where to begin. I just couldn’t get myself motivated.
But one day I decided that things had dragged on long enough so I launched my class with ZERO content. Basically, I presold the class to 35 students at $299 a pop with NOTHING.
With actual money on the line, I forced myself to pump out content on a weekly basis and today, this class has generated millions of dollars in revenue.
Remember, you’ll never get anywhere by staying on the sidelines. Go out there and gather some data points!
Related: Starting A Business: Convincing Yourself To Take Action And The Key To Behavioral Change
Build And Own As Much As You Can
Many people who start their own online business want to outsource as much as they can. As a result, many would be entrepreneurs take shortcuts and rely on third party services to run their websites for them.
While going this route may reduce your time to market, relying on a 3rd party will limit your flexibility and potentially put you at their mercy in the future.
For example, many entrepreneurs who used to rely on Ebay as their primary sales channel got shafted when Ebay drastically increased their prices.
Similarly, many Etsy users saw drastically reduced sales when they decided to change their product display and ranking algorithms.
Amazon continues to raise prices and change the rules on a quarterly basis. Not only that but the marketplace is extremely cutthroat and many sellers are using underhanded tactics to cheat and get ahead
Do you want to be at the mercy of someone else? That is why it’s important to own your own website.
Sure, it takes a little more work to understand how websites work. But it is valuable knowledge to have and will make you more self sufficient.
Related: 6 Simple Strategies To Get Repeat Customers And Why You Must Look Beyond Amazon
Understand The Underlying Principles Of What You Are Outsourcing
Sometimes it makes sense to outsource certain parts of your business if it will save you time. But make sure you understand the underlying principles of what you are outsourcing!
I’ve had friends who have hired website developers and wasted a ton of money because they had no clue what they were doing.
Every time they wanted to make a simple change, they would have to contact their developer and pay an additional fee to get things done.
The problem was that they had no clue how much time or effort was required for each task and as a result they were taken advantage of by their contractors.
Take some time and understand the underlying principles of what you are trying to outsource! And try to learn as much about the technology as possible so you understand the effort involved and what is actually feasible to implement.
Related: Outsourcing Pros And Cons – How To Decide When To Hire Or DIY As A Small Business Owner
Establish A Routine And Stick With It
The key to starting a successful business is to not burn yourself out by pulling a bunch of all nighters and trying to finish things all at once.
Instead, you should establish a set routine and plan on slowly making progress over time.
For my wife and I, we devoted Sunday mornings and various nights during the week towards working on the business. And our only objective was to accomplish one thing per day.
By creating a priority list and checking off our goals one at a time, we always made consistent progress and our shop was ready to launch before we knew it.
Related: 6 Simple But Effective Habits That Improve Your Productivity
Treat Your Customers Like Royalty
To this day, I’m still shocked by how fast word of mouth travels. When you treat a customer with the utmost of respect, they will return the favor and tell all of their friends about your business.
On the flip side, if you treat a customer poorly, you will lose a lot more than just a single customer.
Here are some interesting statistics courtesy of the Research Institute of America for the White House Office of Consumer Affairs
The average business does not hear from 96% of unhappy clients.
does not hear from 96% of unhappy clients. Each and every dissatisfied customer will, on average, tell at least 9 other people.
Let’s put these statistics in perspective with a few numbers.
Every customer complaint that you receive means that you really have 24 other dissatisfied customers.
Those 24 customers will then go on to tell a combined 216+ people of their negative experience with your business.
Here are some other statistics that are really interesting. Of the customers who register a complaint…
Up to 70 percent will do business with the organization again if their complaint is resolved.
will do business with the organization again if their complaint is resolved. Up to 95 percent will do business if the problem is resolved quickly.
Moral of the story: Treat all of your customers like royalty and your business will be guaranteed to grow. Never underestimate word of mouth and social media.
Related: Customer Service Tips: How Would You Handle These Awkward Situations?
Get Some Exercise
When my wife and I were working our butts off starting our first business, I stopped exercising and it took a tremendous toll on my psyche.
I’d feel listless from a lack of energy.
I’d lose focus easily.
But once I set aside some time to lift weights, run and play sports, I found that I was way more productive afterwards.
If you don’t treat your body right, your mind will gradually deteriorate. Don’t neglect your health!
Related: What A Six Pack Taught Me About Starting A Successful Online Business
Just Ship It
I remember wasting a ton of time tweaking the aesthetics of my website and having endless debates with my wife about the “right” way to do things.
There’s no way to find out how good your business is until you actually go live and get feedback from real customers.
If you find yourself making too many minor tweaks or second guessing yourself, then you are likely stalling your business on purpose because you are afraid.
Break things down into small obtainable goals and constantly work towards your launch!
Related: What Successful Entrepreneurs Do Differently And Why Beginners Fail
Don’t Be Too Cheap
I’m probably one of the cheapest, most conservative entrepreneurs that you’ll ever meet. But over the years, I’ve started to factor in the costs of my time when it comes to making purchases that make things more efficient.
These days, if a piece of software or a tool will save me a decent chunk of time, I’ll usually pull the trigger..
Don’t neglect the costs of your own time and efforts!
Related: Every Must Have Tool I Use To Run My Ecommerce Store
Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
I’m not that intense of a person and I rarely take myself too seriously, but I know a lot of people who do.
Hell, I sell wedding linens. I can barely say that with a straight face! As you are running your business, take some time out and simply enjoy the process.
Chances are, you are learning way more than you ever have before so take a break every now and then and just take it all in.
You are doing something that 90% of other people never dream of doing! Enjoy it while it lasts!
Related: How To Find What Makes You Happy And My Reflections On Life After Quitting My Job
Be Inspired
My final tip is to hang out with the right people and get inspired. If your current social group is bringing you down, find some other like minded entrepreneurs and start a support group.
After all, the best way to stay motivated is to be amongst those who inspire you to push yourself beyond your comfort zone!
Anyway, I hope that this post inspired you to take action today. As I mentioned earlier, if you are interested in learning how to start your own lifestyle business, then click here to take my FREE 6 day mini course on ecommerce.
Ready To Get Serious About Starting An Online Business?
If you are really considering starting your own online business, then you have to check out my free mini course on How To Create A Niche Online Store In 5 Easy Steps. In this 6 day mini course, I reveal the steps that my wife and I took to earn 100 thousand dollars in the span of just a year. Best of all, it's free and you'll receive weekly ecommerce tips and strategies!
Note: This post above may contain affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase when clicking a link. Please consult our privacy policy for more information.
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Have you read these?London: Mars Food plans to label some of its Dolmio pasta sauces, macaroni cheese and other products as fit for consumption only once a week due to high levels of salt, sugar or fat.
The scheme is part of a larger initiative by the privately held US food company to encourage healthier eating at a time when large food multinationals, or Big Food, are coming under increasing pressure from public health advocates and regulators struggling to fight a growing obesity epidemic.
The plan, however, does not extend to Mars’ chocolate or sweets businesses, whose brands include M&M’s, Snickers and Starburst.
Products that are particularly high in salt, sugar or fat, including Dolmio lasagne meal kits and lasagne sauces, will come with a label advising “occasional" consumption, meaning once a week. However, the company said most of its products in the UK would still be for consumption everyday. It did not give details for other countries but plans to introduce the labelling in all markets where those products are sold.
Nearly all packaged food makers are reformulating products as they try to keep up with changing tastes of increasingly health-conscious consumers.
Mars Food, which also produces Uncle Ben’s rice, said it plans to post on its website within the next few months a list of “occasional" products, and “everyday" products, including ones to be reformulated over the next five years to reduce sodium, sugar or fat.
It has also set targets to reduce sodium and sugar in some products and boost the use of whole grains and vegetables.
Some countries including Britain, France and Mexico have announced levies on sugar-sweetened drinks, while others are considering them. ReutersAvenue Mohammed V, a wide street that runs directly through Rabat’s centre-ville and past Morocco’s parliamentary headquarters, is the site of nearly daily protests against the country’s government.
Living in Morocco in late 2012, most days I saw the protesters tussle with the police, grow bored, and disperse, laughing over the chase like American children playing tag during recess.
But last November, I witnessed something different: hundreds of unsmiling protesters blocking both sides of the street, demanding government jobs in an economy with massive unemployment.
The crowd screamed as 40 or so policemen rushed at them with heavy batons. A brazen man chanting phrases in Darija, Morocco’s Arabic dialect, was hit hard in the leg and fell to the ground, his mouth stretched open in pain.
A day later, the protest was written up in one of Morocco’s largest papers, Assabah, with an inexplicable headline, “Protesters Plan to Kill Policemen and Explode Military Barracks.”
Though Morocco is technically a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the king holds all of the power, including power to dissolve parliament. Government control also extends to Assabah, and most of the public spaces in Morocco.
But the country was not immune to the protest movements that have swept across North Africa and the Middle East over the past two years. In fact, on a single day in February 2011, tens of thousands of Moroccans took to the streets all over the country to challenge the king’s power.
And to hear that demonstration’s leaders talk today, and to see the daily protests continue, the fervor behind the initial protest remains quietly, patiently alive.
The February 20 movement
“I have just now regained feeling in my cheek,” says Hamzah Mahfoud, a leader of Morocco’s February 20 Movement, which organized the initial protests. We were sitting at Café du France, a Casablanca establishment filled with cigarette smoke and half-empty glasses of café noir.
The injury Mr. Mahfoud was referring to was the result of a beating he received in March 2011 for writing slogans critical of the government.
He pulled out his phone to show me a photo of himself just before the beating. He is against a wall as seven policemen in dark blue uniforms surround him with batons raised. His own hands are empty, his face panicked. It was his third police beating, he recounted, and the worst so far.
After Mohamed Bouazizi, a frustrated street vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire in December 2010, sparking the so-called “Arab Spring,” tens of thousands of Moroccans like Mahfoud protested on Feb. 20, 2011 to challenge the power of King Mohammed VI.
But the movement was cast into the shadows almost as quickly as it erupted when the king reformed the Constitution less than a month later, promising a new rule of law that instituted parliamentary elections. Many were surprised by the king’s immediate responsiveness to the movements, and waited in anticipation when elections were held the following November, and a moderate politician named Abdelilah Benkirane was named prime minister.
The king and prime minister are not the primary object of the activists’ concern. What does worry people like Mahfoud – and what the February 20 Movement is still seeking to reform – is the makhzen, the king’s inner circle of a wealthy elite, composed primarily of royal notables, businessmen, affluent landowners, secret service bosses, and top-ranking military personnel.
Although the breadth of their power is difficult to measure, the makhzen serves as the king's intimate coterie, controlling the economy, policy decisions, and press. It is a group as ambiguous and discreet as it sounds.
Mahfoud began to protest against the opaque power of the makhzen two years ago. Standing on a moving platform with a microphone, primarily in Casablanca, he chanted slogans and wrote out signs for people to carry,
“Our people want freedom and dignity,” his signs read in Arabic. “We want a popular democratic constitution.” “Prosecute violators of human honor.” “If you talk, you die. If you don’t talk, you die. So you’d better talk and die.”
Soon after, three to four government men began to follow Mahfoud wherever he went.
“They parked a car outside of my apartment and stayed there night and day. They started rumors on the Facebook and Twitter that I was gay, and that I was using the movement to rape little girls,” he said.
Moroccan activists tell me that the king’s interior circle is the brains behind the police, the people who decide the caliber of beating someone should receive, when to take someone to jail, when to relent, what can be published by the Moroccan press, when to stir fear, and how far to go in creating paranoia.
Being followed
I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I moved into an apartment on Avenue Mohammed V, in the center of Rabat, with a view of the daily protests outside the parliament building. For the previous three months I had been living with a Moroccan family in Rabat’s ancient medina, studying journalism and Arabic.
Then, for a story on Moroccan journalists as political activists, I began interviewing people in public cafes of their choosing. The terrace of the Hotel Balima, they suggested. The garden cafe. The cafe by the flowers. I soon learned that these were the popular venues where activists, especially the young February 20 leaders, liked to hang out, a passive-aggressive way of remaining present.
I began noticing the company of older, well-dressed men who would sit a little too close to my table as I conducted interviews, and a little too quietly to be typical Moroccan men. I also realized that the activist-as-journalist angle was not the most interesting or important story I could be doing.
One afternoon I walked into the sun-filled street to find two men standing outside my apartment door, a tall, middle-aged man in a tan coat who looked familiar and a shorter man in a black suit who didn’t. They looked at me in a way I will never forget. It was a look that said, “We do not like what you are doing.”
I walked slowly to my favorite yogurt vendor and they remained behind me as I stood in line, then behind me as I walked down Mohammed V, unsure of where I was headed. I began to window shop, hoping they would grow bored and pass me, hoping it was all in my head.
Keep calm and carry on.
That slogan began in 1939 in Great Britain, when the British government tried to raise the public’s morale in the event of a Nazi invasion. I wrote it out and put on my nightstand and made it my personal slogan for the days of paranoia and uncertainty that were to follow.
I lost my two followers in the walled-in medina. It’s a place with winding alleyways smelling of fresh fruit and frying fish, dirty streets with little boys playing futbol, and toothless beggars holding up their leathery hands asking for dirhams. It had never felt more comforting.
“You are fine. They just want to know what you are up to,” my journalism professor had said in response to my concerns, after making some calls to investigate.
My host family’s friend explained the system as we sat eating harira and sipping sweet tea the next evening.
There is a hierarchy of policemen, he explained in French. They must know what is going on at all times. If they don’t, their superiors will punish them. They are just trying to intimidate you. They won’t hurt you, he assured me.
Even so, I found myself overstaying teatime and eating dinner that night with my host family, scared to exit the blissful comfort of their tiled walls and Turkish soap operas that ran on their television screen 15 hours a day.
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alt-grid that will, as one addicted to clichés might say, shift the energy paradigm.
Here’s what’s happening: Solar panels and batteries have gotten both better and cheaper, to the point that the developing world’s mini-grids (for communities) and micro-grids (villages or individual homes) can afford them. Such systems are easier and cheaper to set up than legacy systems dependent on big, centralized power plants and tower-supported transmission lines festooned around the countryside. Ultra-efficient appliances—everything from TVs to refrigerators—also are now widely available, as is LED lighting (which uses minimal power).
“What’s making this new system possible is the merging of information and energy technologies, of aggressive innovation in both the power production and smart phone worlds,” says Kammen, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and the director of UC’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.
Kenya was once an energy black hole. Today Masaai moran (warriors) herd their livestock while simultaneously checking cattle prices in Mombasa on their cell phones, which they holster in beaded pouches worn around their necks.
The abrupt and massive spread of cell phone technology has encouraged virtual banking systems that allow small-scale energy producers and their customers to do business from anywhere, and on a pro-rata basis. Customers are able to buy power in exceedingly small increments—say, enough to recharge their cell phones and power an LED light or two, or a tiny refrigerator and a high-efficiency hot plate. That’s a big deal in the developing world, where even a few such amenities make a gigantic difference in the quality of life—and where cash always is in short supply. It allows customers in rural Africa and Asia to analogously do with energy what they do when they visit a village store: buy a single stick of gum or a matchbook.
Indeed, Kammen says, trusted e-banking systems are essential for the support of the mini-grid network, and he notes that the developing world has led in creating apps for such services.
He cites Kenya as an especially shining example. Fifteen years ago, the country was a communications black hole. Hard-line telephony was the rule, and spotty at best. Outside Nairobi and Mombasa, people made do with CB radios or word of mouth. Then mobile technology arrived, and within a few years everyone was connected. Today, when visiting the country’s wildlife reserves, you’ll see Masaai moran (warriors) herding their livestock while simultaneously checking cattle prices in Mombasa on their cell phones, which they holster in beaded pouches worn around their necks.
“In the 1990s I helped start up Mpala Research Center in Laikipia [in northern Kenya],” recalls Kammen. “We had to wait for a satellite to pass overhead so we could make our 35-second phone calls. Now researchers are receiving streaming data on individual lions and African wild dogs that they’re tracking.”
In 2007, a proprietary mobile system known as M-Pesa was launched in Kenya. Originally promoted as an easy way to post payments for microloans, it was soon used by working urbanites as a means of sending money to relatives back on the rural shamba. M-Pesa is now Kenya’s preeminent banking system. As of late 2013, 19 million of the country’s 44 million people were signed up, with 25 percent of the national economy flowing through M-Pesa’s virtual conduits. In terms of energy development, that means small-scale power providers can receive payment for specific services from customers seamlessly, bypassing everything from poor infrastructure (people don’t have to walk miles over cattle trails to pay their bills) to government and corporate corruption.
“And we’re seeing other IT applications all around the developing world,” Kammen says. “In Bangladesh, for example, phones are being used to test battery [arrays]. Keeping battery systems fully functional is critical for mini-grids, and it’s a big problem in Bangladesh, where a third of the country floods each year. Mini-grids don’t have maintenance teams regularly checking the systems, but you can upload data on cell phones when there’s a specific problem, and the provider can deal with it.”
“We’re moving from an era that has remained under-innovated for decades—the system where you pay a big utility for your energy—to decentralized systems…. It’s essentially the democratization of energy.”
Decentralized electrification also reduces the causes of deforestation. When people have electricity, the rate of charcoal and wood burning typically decreases dramatically, Kammen observes.
And decentralized energy isn’t just an accelerating trend in the developing world. In America, solar panels are sprouting on suburban homes like chanterelle mushrooms in Mendocino after a winter rain; cell phones are ubiquitous. The United States, in short, is experiencing its own decentralized energy revolution.
“I have solar panels on my roof, and I can use my phone to track how much power each one is producing,” Kammen says. “I can determine which ones are dirty and may need a cleaning to improve performance. I can see how green my energy consumption is at any moment.”
That points to a shift in power (political, not electrical) from the energy producer to the consumer. In fact, Kammen contends that the “Big Grid” of the existing utilities must adapt, melding with the growing mini- and micro-grids, to thrive.
“We’re moving from an era that has remained under-innovated for decades—the system where you pay a big utility for your energy—to decentralized systems that have a lot of networked components and consumer input, all driven by powerful IT,” Kammen says. “It’s essentially the democratization of energy.”
But to really accelerate the trend, Kammen says, a big dog must emerge from the pack of alt-energy advocates.
“We’re working with a number of start-ups that are wrestling with the best way to put this all together,” Kammen says. “Nobody has hit on the right approach yet, but I anticipate somebody will do a Facebook kind of breakout sooner or later, come up with an off-grid version of Tesla. Our paper has been getting a lot of response in the week since its publication, in part because it demonstrates just how negative the impacts of poor energy access are. We show how it stymies educational opportunities and exacerbates gender inequality. It accelerates deforestation and can increase carbon emissions. But we also identify a goal: providing electricity to the 1.5 billion people who don’t have it by 2030. And with the systems we discuss, we think that’s achievable.”When archaeologists opened an 18th Dynasty Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, they made a startling discovery. There, amid furniture, vehicles and other funerary artifacts they discovered vessels full of honey. It had crystallized but was still edible. Honey that was over three thousand years old was not only still in the tomb it was still edible and had not spoiled in any way.
Honey was used in many different ways by the ancient Egyptians. As well as being used as a natural sweetener for baked goods and other food, it was also a component in the mummification process used by the Egyptians to preserve their dead. Honey was also a part of the religious life of ancient Egypt. It was used as an offering to Min, an Egyptian god of fertility.
Honey was also used in other cultures besides the ancient Egyptians. People have been searching for this natural sweetener for at least ten thousand years. Cave paintings that were discovered in Valencia, Spain showed the process of collecting honey. In the painting, two women are collecting both honey and honeycombs from the nests of wild bees. The painting has been dated to the Mesolithic period.
While many cultures simply looked for honey in the nests of wild bees, the ancient Chinese actually developed beekeeping. It has been mentioned in texts dating from the Spring and Autumn period which lasted from 771 BCE to 453 BCE. In the books, which were written by Fan Li, tips for keeping bees successfully were mentioned. Fan Li, an advisor living in the Chinese state of Yue, stated that the quality of the wooden box used to house the bees was important. He stated that it could affect the quality of the honey that the bees produced.
Honey was used as more than just a sweetening agent or as a food. It was put on wounds by Roman legions as a way to speed up the healing process. Honey contains natural antibacterial properties that can help prevent infection so it was no wonder that it would be used for healing. Even now, many ointments and skin creams contain honey because of its healing properties. Honey was also used to treat skin rashes and burns for the same reason. In Mesoamerica, stingless honey bees have been revered by the Mayan people for thousands of years. They considered the bees to be a sacred animal and cultivated them, a practice which has continued to the present day.
Honey has also appeared in many different ancient religious texts including the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an. In Buddhism, honey plays a major role in some religious festivals. One in particular, Madhu Purnima, celebrates the retreat of Buddha into the wilderness as a way of making peace among his various disciples. During this retreat, religious legends state that a monkey brought honey to Buddha so that he could eat. The gift that the monkey brought is one that is common to many pieces of Buddhist art.Focus Better and Get More Done
FocalFilter is a free productivity tool that helps you focus by temporarily blocking distracting websites. After the block timer runs out, your websites are available for you to view again.
Run FocalFilter. You choose which websites to block. Set how long they should blocked for. Get more work done.
One Block, All Browsers
FocalFilter was built to work with every Windows web browser including
Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge
Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Chrome
Chrome Firefox
Firefox Safari
Adding a Website to FocalFilter
Just copy and paste the address from your browser's address bar.
Examples
Correct: http://www.facebook.com
Also correct: www.facebook.com
(If you don't see a "www" in the address bar, then don't add it when you paste into FocalFilter.)
The list of blocked sites is saved for the next time you run FocalFilter.
You can't reach FocalFilter's controls while it is blocking sites, and terminating it or uninstalling it before the time runs out will not remove the blocks. If FocalFilter is still installed, you can remove the blocks early by rebooting your computer.
Installation Instructions
FocalFilter works on Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP.
You can download it for free here (the latest version was released August 2015).
To run FocalFilter, your PC must have Microsoft's.NET Framework version 4. If you don't already have it on your PC, our installer will let you know. You can install.NET here.
If you are having trouble with FocalFilter, or you are using it on a tablet device, please read more about how to use FocalFilter on your version of Windows: Windows 10, 8, 7, or XP.
Note: Some security or antivirus software may stop FocalFilter from working because it modifies your system settings. Please let us know if this happens. For example, if you have this problem with Kaspersky Anti-Virus, you can add FocalFilter to its list of trusted applications.
Related Productivity Tools by Other Authors If you have any problems with FocalFilter, the site-blocking tools Leechblock for Firefox and StayFocusd for Chrome should always work, because they are browser add-ons. And they have many extra features compared to FocalFilter. LeechBlock is harder than StayFocusd for a sophisticated computer user to sneak around while it is blocking sites. Cold Turkey for Windows blocks across all browsers like FocalFilter but has many extra features and also can block applications and games. If you have problems with FocalFilter, Cold Turkey may work for you. Note that Cold Turkey may prevent FocalFilter from working. Freedom for Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad blocks across all browsers like FocalFilter and has many extra features. If you have problems with FocalFilter, Freedom may work for you. SelfControl is a Mac tool with similar features to FocalFilter.Get the biggest rugby 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
We've given you the 50 hardest rugby players in history... but what about the teams they played for?
While some of the human wrecking balls listed in our rugby hardmen were tough hombres in their own right, the clubs they played for perhaps didn’t meet their exacting standards in taking out a mortgage for the house of pain.
So we give you the sides who set the benchmark in dishing out their own particular brand of medicine, the clubs who rivals felt a little trepidation boarding the team bus for a journey to their battleground and the ones who sometimes saw fixtures cancelled for their over-aggressive attitude.
We’ve ranked them to give you Welsh rugby’s ultimate threshing machine....
8: Maesteg
In the 1970s they weren't just a side riding high at the top of the Merit Table, but one you knew could dish out the physical stuff. With players nicknamed 'Cowboy' and 'Billy the Kid' you wouldn't have expected anything else.
Tough nuts Billy Howe and John Morgan was their enforcers back in the day and one Pooler player remembered one particular a clash in the 70s.
'They came up to the Park early on the reign of Ray Prosser as the Merit Table champions. It was a 9-9 classic."
7: Tredegar
The Gwent valleys club may be down on their luck these days, but that wasn’t always the case and in the 1970s teams venturing up the Recreation Ground knew the man with the magic sponge was about to put in a request for time-and-a-half plus a lieu day for the overtime he was about to put in.
Tredegar’s tough nut side centred around a certain Paul Woods, who would later go on to carve out a fearsome reputation in rugby league with Widnes, Rochdale Hornets and Hull.
And he played among the backs.
“He was very tough and very aggressive,” recalls renowned hardman Jim Mills, who played with him for Widnes and Wales, and was himself sent off more often than any player of his era. “You wanted him on your side, not against you.”
With fellow tough as teak Tredegar clubmates Mel Bevan and Charlie Butler, a trip to Tredegar in the 1970s was certainly not for the faint-hearted.
6: Ebbw Vale
It was said the Ebbw Vale and Tredegar matches back in the 70s provided enough bumps, bruises and cuts along the way to give Elastoplast shareholders a lavish lifestyle. Vale would have the lions share of wins, but Tredegar would not go down without a fight.
In the rock-hard stakes the two clubs couldn’t be separated by a Rizla paper as the Tredegar tough guys had to contend with the Ebbw men who brought steel to the town... players like granite hardened Gareth Howls, renowned Welsh international mauler Clive ‘Budgie’ Burgess, John Short and Elwyn Morris.
5: Newport
The Black & Ambers developed a steely edge with the arrival of one Mike ‘Spike’ Watkins in the early eighties. Their scrummaging firstly alongside the likes of England international prop Colin Smart and then Rodney Parade cult heroes Rhys Morgan, John Rawlins and then the early years of Frankie Hillman ensured opposing front rows knew they were in for 80 minutes of torture, while flanker Roger Powell gave no respite in the loose.
Never afraid to take a backward step in the fisticuffs stakes, Newport’s most notorious match came at Bristol in 1985 when referee and police officer Supt George Crawford walked off in the first half complaining that it was like “street violence” on the field, and never came back. A replacement referee was found to complete the game.
Weeks later a visit by Fiji to Rodney Parade was again marred with violence. Fijian second row Savai was sent off after a huge fight broke out among four different sets of players. Savai was seen butting Newport captain Watkins and was dismissed by referee Owen Jones.
Shortly afterwards, Watkins was flattened by a kick to the stomach, which led to an exchange of words between the officials of both teams.
4: Treorchy
Another side that has seen the giddy heights of top class rugby only to fall on harder times.
But whether on a peak or a trough opposing teams knew they were in for one hell of battle visiting the Rhondda Valley club.
And none more so than in the 1970s when Chris Jones was ruling the Treorchy roost.
He was the man whose disciplinary rap sheet had more weeks on it than the Julian calendar.
“You had the Treorchy back row of the early 1970s whose boast was that no half-backs had scored against them for three years and they put 11 outside-halves off the field during that time,” said Jones.
“So all you did was wait for the referee to turn his back and then boot, punch, stamp, gouge and whatever you wanted to. That was the way it was and every team had its hard men.”
‘The Dream’ in the mid-1990s brought the rugged fortress days back to the Oval when the Zebras invested heavily into players like Welsh stars Dai Evans, Chris Bridges and Lyn Jones.
Related: The new definitive list of rugby's bad boys
3: Pontypridd
They don’t call Sardis Road ‘The House of Pain’ for nothing and though you could go all the way back to the 60s and 70s when firstly the likes of prop Wayne Evans and later on flankers Chris Seldon, Mike Shellard and Tommy David were ruling the roost before the arrival of Jim Scarlett and Adrian Owen, one era readily springs to mind when discussing Ponty in their pomp.
It’s the era when ‘The Chief’ Dale McIntosh, Steele ‘Stella’ Lewis, Phil John, Nigel Bezani, Denzil Earland earned their stripes for the Valley Commandos.
The 1997 ‘Battle of Brive’ when Ponty refused to take a backward step on the pitch and in Le Bar Touzlac afterwards epitomised the ‘15’ Musketeers attitude that made the club the force they were with tight-knit team spirit the envy of others.
Related: Is this the most violent incident ever on a rugby field? Prop faces potential life ban for viciously kicking opponent in the head
2: Neath
The current Welsh All Blacks, sitting uncomfortably bottom of the Principality Premiership, is a far cry from some golden eras when trips to the Gnoll for Welsh players didn’t figure highly on their bucket list.
You could go back to the 1950s when brutal scrummager Courtney Meredith strutted his stuff to the following decade when in 1967 fixtures with Cardiff were put on hold after one infamous match that left Welsh legend Gareth Edwards fearing someone could get killed.
“I honestly thought someone was going to be killed,” recalled the Lions great. “There was a great closeness among us as player but also a great rivalry between our clubs. It was hard to believe that you could batter yourselves to death one week and then be comrades in arms the next Saturday.”
But perhaps the cream of crop came under the watch of the late great Brian Thomas when the likes of Phil Pugh, Brian Williams, John Davies, Kevin Phillips and Mark Jones were at the peak of their physical powers.
Their infamous match was the 1992 clash with the touring Wallabies at the Gnoll when respected coach Bob Dwyer described the town as the “bag-snatching capital of the world” accusing the home players of grabbing the Wallabies’ testicles in a bruising affair.
1: Pontypool
Pooler were so notorious in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s under the reign of Ray Prosser and then Lions hooker Bobby Windsor, some chose to break off fixtures with them.
London Welsh did so in 1973 after one infamous game at Old Deer Park when the Exiles ended the game with 12 men and later on Bristol were said to be incensed by one match at the fortress named Pontypool Park when a young outside-half among their ranks by the name of Stuart Barnes was subjected to some rough stuff.
They didn’t even have a full fixture list among the top Welsh clubs back in the day.
Former Wales and Bridgend centre Steve Fenwick recalled in the book ‘Nobody Beats Us’: “In between internationals we played Pontypool away. It was a bastard of a fixture. They were ruthless and games against them were like the Alamo.
“They would pound us for 80 minutes and it was the one game I would tell my wife not to book anything for the Saturday night as I might be in hospital of limping back home.”
Related: The 50 hardest Welsh rugby players who ever livedCasa Di Amici board plans to reverse measure it says was meant to keep out corporations, not people
Facing a backlash from gay-rights activists, a local condominium association is reversing a recent policy that barred unmarried couples from the complex.
The Casa Di Amici Condominium Association Inc. held a special meeting Thursday to amend a rule allowing only singles and husband-and-wife couples to buy or lease units within the community.
The policy, approved in a July 17 meeting as part of 34 pages of amendments, generated anger among some who saw the measure as discriminatory against gay couples, who cannot legally marry in Florida.
Outrage over the decision put the quiet condo complex in the public eye, generating not only local attention, but stories in newspapers in Miami and New York, as well.
As the controversy frothed, the board at the 160-unit complex, which is near Jacaranda Boulevard and U.S. 41, remained silent, refusing to explain the new policy.
But on Thursday board member Bill Moniz said the intent was never to discriminate. Moniz and attorney Dan Lobeck, who represents the condominium association but did not write the controversial amendment, said the purpose of the amendment was to keep corporations from coming in and buying up multiple units in the neighborhood.
“We never wanted to prevent anyone from living here,” Moniz said. “I intend to make this right.”
Lobeck said some attorneys do not realize the repercussions of far-reaching language, especially when they constitute only a few paragraphs in a much larger document.
“When I drafted one of my first condominium declarations, it required everyone to go out and buy a dog over 45 pounds,” Lobeck said. “Mistakes are made and this is a notably regrettable one.”
The changes approved Thursday replaced all references to individuals and husband-and-wife couples with the phrase “two natural persons,” which is legal language for two human beings.
Condominium owners must approve the amendments. They will vote within 45 days, Lobeck said.
The original wording was flagged by Julia Nowak, a Realtor who owns a condominium in Casa Di Amici.
Although she said there are some other parts of the condominium declaration she would like to see tweaked, Nowak said she was glad the association took out the discriminatory language.
“The end result was great,” Nowak said. “We need a law to protect people and keep this from this happening again.”
Nowak hopes Sarasota County will pass a human-rights ordinance that would prohibit discrimination in housing on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status.
Currently, there is no state or federal law banning discrimination in housing on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status.
Although gay-rights advocates hope to propose a human-rights ordinance to the Sarasota County Commission soon, some are celebrating what they see as a small victory.
Jennifer Cohen, who heads the Sarasota-Manatee chapter of the National Organization for Women, protested outside of Casa Di Amici last week after she heard of the discriminatory policy.
She said she is elated with the new changes.
“I'm very happy for the people in (Casa Di Amici) and Venice,” Cohen said. “I hope other complexes will check their policies to make sure they allow all people to purchase a home or condo in Venice or in any other part of our county.”BUFFALO, NY-- The World's Largest Rubber Duck is coming to Buffalo
Canalside announced Wednesday "Mama Duck" will part of the Maritime Festival, which runs August 26-28.
"Mama Duck" is over six stories high and weighs 11 tons. She floats on a steel pontoon.
"Mama Duck", who was created by Craig Samborski, first started at Tall Ships in Los Angeles and has traveled to Philadelphia and Long Island. In addition to Buffalo, she will also be visiting Syracuse and Erie, PA this summer.
Samborski says while Canalside called him to ask him to bring her here, he's known about the Maritime Festival for a couple of years and it's always intrigued him.
Mama Duck arrives by truck, and it takes about eight hours to attach her to her steel pontoon. Then, she's lifted into the water and it takes three high intensity blowers another three hours to inflate her.
Samborski says once she's inflated, you can get close, but not too close.
"She's the equivalent of probably sixty sailboats at once in her sail area, so if there's a breeze blowing, she moves around a little bit and at 23-thousand pounds she can do some damage of she hits something, so we try and encourage boaters to keep a relatively safe distance. We like people to certainly get close, but depending what weather and wind conditions are, we do our best to enforce that 25 foot safety zone around her," says Samborski.
"Mama Duck" won't be traveling to Buffalo alone. Her duckling Timmy will be in town as well. He stands 10 feet tall.(CNN) On the streets, in small gatherings and in the halls of government, people around the globe weighed in on US President Donald Trump's inauguration Friday, anticipating how his policies may play out on the international stage. But it was Russia's officials who tweeted some of the most celebratory messages, with one senator calling the day "a defining moment in history."
Here is some of the reaction from around the world, from opposition to support -- and even indifference:
Belgium
A Women's March in Brussels elicited criticism of Trump's offensive comments about women and alleged cases of sexual harassment. The demonstration drew participants from a range of countries, including Norway and Spain.
Katrine Steinfeld, a Norwegian-Hungarian who works for gender equality in Brussels, said she fears that Trump's election will legitimize the ill treatment of women.
"It's crazy that this man can lead a country and assault women," Steinfeld said.
"His behavior creates legitimacy for attitudes that is not appropriate and that is a threat for women," she added.
Signs at the women's March in Brussels as Donald Trump gets sworn in as 45th President of the United States. January 20th 2017 A photo posted by margothaddadproducer (@margothaddadproducer) on Jan 20, 2017 at 9:47am PST
Rebecca, who did not give her last name, was critical of Trump, but expressed cautiously optimism.
"I came because I don't want Trump to be the new normal," said Rebecca, a Spaniard residing in Brussels. "It's a threat for moral and human rights. I'm not against him. I'm against what he says."
"We need to watch and see what he will do," she added. "I give him credit and I will wait and see, but I fear it would be bad."
Cuba
Cuba's state media paid little attention to Trump's inauguration, perhaps wary of his promises to take a harder line on the communist-run island, CNN's Patrick Oppmann reports.
Granma, the official communist party newspaper, ran articles Friday on birth statistics, the end of the baseball season and a new, experimental strain of cigar tobacco, but made no mention of Trump's swearing-in.
During the presidential campaign, Trump pledged to reverse Obama's historic opening with Cuba if Havana didn't make concessions on human rights and religious freedom. Privately, Cuban officials have said they are waiting to see if Trump's action will match his rhetoric and so far have avoided criticizing him.
China
A wary China watched one of its toughest critics assume the presidency Friday, marking the start of what could be a more contentious bilateral relationship between the world's two largest economies.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Friday before Trump was sworn in. Chunying emphasized constructive bilateral relations between the two countries to "propel further development of China-US ties at a new staring point."
"We would like to join hands with the new US administration to uphold the principles of non-confrontation, non-conflict, mutual respect and win-win cooperation," Chunying said.
During his inauguration address, Trump took a populist tone, saying, "We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs."
Though he didn't mention China by name, he has vowed to be tougher on the country by renegotiating trade agreements and has even proposed imposing tariffs on Chinese imports.
State-run communist media did not shy away from criticizing Trump last year, calling the then-candidate a "clown" and "big-mouthed." But tabloid-style newspaper Global Times wrote in a Friday editorial, "A favorable Sino-US relationship represents great progress in human political civilization, and it is hoped that Trump will consolidate this trend."
India
Trump received a warm congratulations from India's prime minister and minister for information and broadcasting.
Looking forward to working with President @realDonaldTrump to further deepen India-US ties & realise the full potential of our cooperation. — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 20, 2017
"Looking forward to working with President @realDonaldTrump to further deepen India-US ties & realise the full potential of our cooperation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted.
Congratulations president @realDonaldTrump! Looking forward to enhanced Indo US ties. The two are natural allies in fight against terrorism. — Rajyavardhan Rathore (@Ra_THORe) January 20, 2017
"Congratulations president @realDonaldTrump! Looking forward to enhanced Indo US ties. The two are natural allies in fight against terrorism," Minister for Information Rajyavardhan Rathore tweeted.
Iran
JUST WATCHED Iran fears Trump presidency Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Iran fears Trump presidency 02:15
There was little love for Trump at the Grand Mosalla, a complex of religious halls and other facilities in Tehran, as people gathered for their usual fiery Friday prayers, CNN's Fred Pleitgen reports. Instead, they ripped the US for its policies toward Iran and its role in Syria.
"It makes no difference which president is in power," a young man wearing a scarf depicting Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told CNN. "Whoever is in power will have that same outlook on Iran, which is a pity."
The main topic on the minds of many of those in attendance was the future of the nuclear agreement between Iran, the US and other nations, aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions in return for sanctions relief.
Trump has called the agreement a bad deal, and said he wants to renegotiate it. Iran's government has rejected that idea, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has insisted that one man cannot repeal the deal or change its terms.
Israel
Even before Trump's inauguration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent him a welcome tweet.
"Congrats to my friend President Trump. Look fwd to working closely with you to make the alliance between Israel&USA stronger than ever."
Congrats to my friend President Trump. Look fwd to working closely with you to make the alliance between Israel&USA stronger than ever. 🇮🇱🇺🇸 — PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) January 20, 2017
Netanyahu has made it exceedingly clear that he's ready to work with Trump, especially as the relationship with President Obama deteriorated rapidly in its final weeks, CNN's Oren Liebermann reports.
Israeli leaders are already expecting Trump to follow through on one of his biggest campaign promises -- to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Israel's ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said shortly after Trump's inauguration: "We look forward to your visit to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel."
Jerusalem's Mayor, Nir Barkat, even launched a campaign just before the inauguration, calling on Trump to move the embassy.
Japan
A woman holds a sign supporting Barack Obama during a Friday march in Tokyo organized by Democrats Abroad of Japan.
Scores of people -- mostly American expatriates, but also a few Japanese citizens -- marched in Tokyo on Friday evening to highlight what they say needs to be fought for during Trump's presidency. The event was organized by the group Democrats Abroad of Japan.
"I just want to make sure that Trump knows that we are here," event organizer Erica Summers said. "Women are not going anywhere. I want to make sure we have our reproductive rights. I want him to know we (women) are equal, and he cannot get rid of us."
Japanese conservatives celebrate Trump's inauguration at a restaurant in the city of Fukuoka on Friday.
About 550 miles to the southwest, a few hours before the inauguration, a few dozen Japanese conservatives enjoyed a celebration of the new American president at a restaurant in the city of Fukuoka.
Since the swearing-in would be happening too late for their gathering, diners watched Election Night footage on a big screen.
"Trump is such an honest, outspoken person who has the same way of political thinking as us," event organizer Yoko Mada said.
"What conservatives in Japan have been wanting is to bring this nation out of the so-called post-war regime, and one symbolic thing would be us owning our own military again, which Trump supports."
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday extended his "heartfelt congratulations" to Trump.
In a letter, Abe reflected on their November "candid exchange of views" at Trump's home in New York.
"I look forward to working hands in hands with you to ensure peace and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region and to address various challenges the international community faces," Abe said.
Mexico
President Enrique Peña Nieto tweeted nearly two hours after Trump's address, congratulating the new leader and expressing a desire to strengthen the relationship between the countries.
Former President Vicente Fox wasn't nearly as gracious. An outspoken critic of Trump's pledge to have Mexico pay for a border wall, the former head of state kept up his long-running taunting of Trump.
During Trump's address, Fox tweeted: "Speaking of allegiance, Trump? Speaking of greatness? America was already great and succesful, then you happened!"
Speaking of allegiance, Trump? Speaking of greatness? Speaking of success? America was already great and succesful, then you happened! — Vicente Fox Quesada (@VicenteFoxQue) January 20, 2017
And: "Prosperity comes in compassion and friendship. We will thrive, we will be succesful. Let the US lock themselves up!"
Earlier in the morning, Fox tweeted this: "Today we turn into an era of uncertainty. If Donald the Unready doesn't learn to behave, the rest of the world needs to come together."
Today we turn into an era of uncertainty. If Donald the Unready doesn't learn to behave, the rest of the world needs to come together. — Vicente Fox Quesada (@VicenteFoxQue) January 20, 2017
Mexican Sen. Armando Rios Piter had some choice words for Trump: "Happiness is a good thing to work on and Mexico and the United States should be working in that way -- not in the way that Donald Trump has been talking."
Trump's address did little to calm tensions or improve his reputation among protesters in Mexico City. The roundabout marked by Mexico's Angel of Independence was surrounded by protesters calling Trump a fascist, racist and xenophobe. Carrying signs that said "Make America human again" and "Love trumps hate," protesters chanted "Get out Trump."
Protesters gathered in Mexico City to protest the election of US President Donald Trump.
Juan Carlos Guerrero wore a souvenir T-shirt from Barack Obama's first presidential inauguration and asked two things of Trump: respect and a change in tone on NAFTA, the free-trade agreement Trump has threatened to eliminate to keep US jobs from moving to Mexico.
Marquis Staples traveled to Mexico City from Wisconsin to make sure Mexicans know there is opposition to Trump in the United States. Holding a sign that read "F*ck Trump," Staples said Mexicans appreciated his presence, giving him thumbs up, high fives and honking their horns at his sign.
Palestinians
Palestinian leaders offered few -- if any -- statements after the inauguration, but their primary concern echoed the mood on the streets.
Thursday, thousands of Palestinians demonstrated across the West Bank, protesting the potential move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Demonstrators held up pictures of Trump and waved Palestinian flags.
Philippines
Protesters burn a mock US flag during a rally outside the US Embassy in Manila on Friday.
Well before dawn in the United States, about 200 people marched Friday against Trump in the Philippines' capital, Manila, Reuters reported.
Demonstrators burned a mock, paper US flag before lighting an actual one. Chants included: "US troops out now!"
"Filipinos from Manila to Washington to New York are joining protest actions against what they believe to be... a fascist and racist regime, and now the chief representative of US imperialism," Renato Reyes Jr., secretary-general of the Philippines' left-wing New Patriotic Alliance, told Reuters.
Some protesters carried signs labeled Bayan Muna, the leftist alliance's political party.
People also held signs with messages such as "Donald Trump, pullout US troops in the PH!" and "Fight Trump. Resist fascism and imperialism."
Russia
Late Friday, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a Facebook post: "In a world of many things can happen, except one: President Obama can't say anything anymore about Russia."
This follows a series of tweets from Alexei Pushkov, an outspoken Russian senator and former chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Relations Committee.
Pushkov's tweets seems to pave the way for "improved" Russia-US relations.
"Аfter Mr.Trump inauguration his meeting with President Putin will be the most important event in world politics. A defining moment in history," he tweeted.
Аfter Mr.Trump inauguration his meeting with President Putin will be the most important event in world politics.A defining moment in history — Алексей Пушков (@Alexey_Pushkov) January 20, 2017
Pushkov also said the United States would need Russia to solve |
he colluded with Russians.
So how did this fiasco happen?
I fear the answer probably lies in that lethal combination of commercial greed and laziness.
CNN has enjoyed soaring ratings with its relentless, mostly negative focus on Trump’s presidency. That, in turn, has led to soaring profits.
The equation is simple: Trump-bashing = $$$.
They are not the only ones to do this; from MSNBC to Stephen Colbert, there are myriad media entities and shows currently cashing in big time by whacking Trump.
But with that success comes complacency.
CNN reported this story because it was desperate to report this story.
It was proof, finally, that a key Trump ally was up to his neck in financial filth with the Russians.
‘Follow the money’ was the Watergate journalists’ mantra, and it finally got them their man.
CNN’s own versions of Bernstein and Woodward clearly thought they were doing the same.
CNN's self styled Woodward and Bernsteins were all ousted. Thomas Frank, pictured,wrote the retracted story
Eric Lichtblau, left, and Lex Haris, right, also left. Lichtblau, who only joined CNN three months ago was an editor on CNN Investigates and Haris, who previously oversaw CNNMoney oversaw the unit
But they cut corners, apparently relying on just one anonymous source.
And that source turned out to be wrong - gifting Trump a PR touchdown he won’t stop triumphantly ball-spiking for a very long time.
When he shouts ‘Fake News’ at CNN now, it will carry some factual weight.
But there’s a wider issue here, and that’s the increasingly hostile relationship between the White House and the US mainstream media.
Both sides are to blame.
The White House, for flying too economically with the truth and playing silly point-scoring games with the media.
And the media, for its unprecedented hysterical bias against Trump, and its endless self-aggrandizing ‘Gotcha!’ antics in pressers and on air – most of which is designed to command the journalists viral video adoration on social media.
The effect of this mutually assured poison is to ratchet up the already appallingly febrile political atmosphere in America between left and right.
The kind of partisan rage that leads a mentally unbalanced man to shoot a Congressman on a baseball field.
It’s got to stop.
Donald Trump is the President of the United States, a title he won in a fair, democratic election. He’s not perfect but nor is he the monster some of his critics portray him to be.
CNN remains a great news network, notwithstanding this terrible error.
Both need to treat each other with more respect and fairness.
I suggest this would be a very good time for them to start.This crater, or pingo, opened up 30 miles from a massive gas field on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, in 2014.
In Siberia, the summer of 2017 is on, even though it’s barely started, officially. Which brings up a problem: much of Siberia is permafrost. That’s frozen soil, a dirt and ice matrix, cemented by the cold hard as rock. The growing season is really short, and dead plant and other material builds up, giving off methane. Theory has it that the methane can become concentrated and, under the pressure of overburden and warming temperatures, it can detonate and blast out. It would be a sign of serious climate change, a visceral example of a warming Arctic:
Scientists have located two fresh craters formed on Yamal peninsula this year, with the latest exploding on 28 June with the eruption picked up by new seismic sensors specifically designed to monitor such events, The Siberian Times can disclose. First pictures of the large craters - or funnels as experts call them - are shown here, and add to four other big holes found in recent years and examined by experts, plus dozens of tiny ones spotted by satellite. The formation of both craters involved an explosion followed by fire, evidently signs of the eruption of methane gas pockets under the Yamal surface.
Reporting from Siberia isn’t the fastest or even the most reliable. There’s not many journalists assigned to that frigid beat! But this article is consistent with past, similar events that came to the world’s attention in 2014. The features are called pingos. The problem isn’t just that pingos may signal climate change is happening, fast, the problem is they contribute to it. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Depending on how you measure, it’s dozens of time more greenhouse-y than carbon dioxide. Worse still, methane breaks down into other compounds, like water vapor and carbon dioxide, which are also greenhouse gases.
There would have to be a lot more of these kinds of “burps” before it would significantly add to our planetary thermal imbalance. But that stuff can leak out of the ground without a dramatic explosion, in fact that’s probably how most of it will get out as the icy ground warms up. And there is a lot of thick, thawing permafrost in the Arctic.The complaint marks the latest turn in the Paxton saga.The attorney general, a Collin County Republican, is accused of two counts of securities fraud and one count of failure to register as a securities agent. The charges stem from Paxton’s actions in 2011 and 2012, when he was a member of the Legislature.Paxton’s legal team has fought back against the charges, in part by questioning the integrity of the process that led to the indictments.They asked Tarrant County District Judge George Gallagher, who’s now overseeing the case, to quash the indictments over issues with how Oldner selected the grand jury. They also accused Oldner of leaking information about the indictment to his wife.Oldner has said previously that he didn't do anything wrong. And while Gallagher did not address the claims against Oldner, he denied a motion last month which raised Oldner's actions as a reson to throw out the indictments Harris’ complaint echoes the concerns outlined by Paxton’s legal team. He focused on an interview that Oldner gave to WFAA-TV (Channel 8) in which the judge accused Paxton’s defense team of having “reached a desperate place.”“As citizens, we have to hold our elected officials – judges or not – accountable,” Harris said. “And Judge Oldner’s behavior in this case is troublesome.”It typically takes the State Commission on Judicial Conduct around six months to resolve a complaint, executive director Seana Willing said. Most cases are resolved privately, although the commission can chose to publicly discipline a judge, she said.Getty Images
DeAndre Jordan was one of the most sought-after free agents this offseason, and the All-Star center has found a new home with the Dallas Mavericks on a four-year, $80 million deal, per Brad Turner of the Los Angeles Times.
Turner also noted the contract has a player option after the third season.
Dan Woike of the Orange County Register reported Jordan is joining the Mavericks because "he wants to be the man."
Earlier in the day, the Clippers were confident Jordan would return to the team, according to Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders. Jordan met with L.A. head coach Doc Rivers, owner Steve Ballmer and president of business operations Gillian Zucker on July 2, per Wojnarowski.
Dallas pulled out all the stops recruiting Jordan, and ESPN.com's Tim MacMahon detailed the role Mavericks small forward Chandler Parsons played in the effort to recruit Jordan:
Parsons has been relentlessly recruiting Jordan for the last six weeks, probably calling and texting the third-team All-NBA center as much as he contacts his supermodel girlfriend. Parsons made a recent trip to Houston to hang with Jordan. Parsons hopped a flight to L.A. immediately after the draft to get more face time with Jordan as free agency approaches—and free agent shooting guard Wesley Matthews has also been spotted with them.
Jordan also considered the Lakers and Knicks along the way, but eventually settled on Dallas as his new home over returning to the Clippers' fold.
Despite his former team rolling out the red carpet and being able to offer more money, Jordan, as Woike pointed out, chose to become more of a focal point on both ends of the floor by choosing the Mavericks.
Follow @MikeChiari on Twitter.This article is about the land in North America. For other uses, see Acadia (disambiguation)
Acadia (French: Acadie) was a colony of New France in northeastern North America that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and modern-day Maine to the Kennebec River. During much of the 17th and early 18th centuries, Norridgewock on the Kennebec River and Castine at the end of the Penobscot River were the southernmost settlements of Acadia.[2][3][4] The actual specification by the French government for the territory refers to lands bordering the Atlantic coast, roughly between the 40th and 46th parallels. Later, the territory was divided into the British colonies that became Canadian provinces and American states. The population of Acadia included members of the Wabanaki Confederacy and descendants of emigrants from France (i.e., Acadians). The two communities intermarried, which resulted in a significant portion of the population of Acadia being Métis.
The first capital of Acadia, established in 1605, was Port-Royal. A British force from Virginia attacked and burned down the town in 1613, but it was later rebuilt nearby, where it remained the longest serving capital of French Acadia until the British Siege of Port Royal in 1710.[a] Over seventy-four years there were six colonial wars, in which English and later British interests tried to capture Acadia starting with King William's War in 1689. During these wars, along with some French troops from Quebec, some Acadians, the Wabanaki Confederacy, and French priests continuously raided New England settlements along the border in Maine. While Acadia was officially conquered in 1710 during Queen Anne's War, present-day New Brunswick and much of Maine remained contested territory. Present-day Prince Edward Island (Île Saint-Jean) and Cape Breton (Île Royale) as agreed under Article XIII of the Treaty of Utrecht remained under French control.[6] By militarily defeating the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French priests, present-day Maine fell during Father Rale's War. During King George's War, France and New France made significant attempts to regain mainland Nova Scotia. After Father Le Loutre's War, present-day New Brunswick fell to the British. Finally, during the French and Indian War (the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War), both Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean fell to the British in 1758.
Today, the term Acadia is used to refer to regions of North America that are historically associated with the lands, descendants, or culture of the former French region. It particularly refers to regions of The Maritimes with French roots, language, and culture, primarily in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands and Prince Edward Island, as well as in Maine.[7] It can also be used to refer to the Acadian diaspora in southern Louisiana, a region also referred to as Acadiana. In the abstract, Acadia refers to the existence of a French culture in any of these regions.
People living in Acadia, and sometimes former residents and their descendants, are called Acadians, also later known as Cajuns, the English (mis)pronunciation of 'Cadiens, after resettlement in Louisiana.
Etymology [ edit ]
The origin of the designation Acadia is credited to the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who on his 16th-century map applied the ancient Greek name "Arcadia" (note the inclusion of the r) to the entire Atlantic coast north of Virginia. "Arcadia" derives from the Arcadia district in Greece, which since Classical antiquity had the extended meanings of "refuge" or "idyllic place". The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says: "Arcadia, the name Verrazzano gave to Maryland or Virginia 'on account of the beauty of the trees,' made its first cartographical appearance in the 1548 Gastaldo map and is the only name on that map to survive in Canadian usage."[8] In 1603 a colony south of the St. Lawrence River between the 40th and 46th parallels was chartered by Henry IV, who recognized the territory as La Cadie.[9] Also in the 17th century, Samuel de Champlain fixed its present orthography with the r omitted. William Francis Ganong, a cartographer, has shown its gradual progress northeastwards, in a succession of maps, to its resting place in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.
Also of note is the similarity in the pronunciation of Acadie and the Míkmawísimk suffix -akadie, which means "a place of abundance." The modern usage is still seen in place names such as Shunacadie (meaning "place of abundant cranberries") or Shubenacadie (meaning "place of abundant wild potatoes"). It is thought that intercultural conversation between early French traders and Mi'kmaq hunters may have resulted in the name l'Arcadie being changed to l'Acadie.
Territory [ edit ]
The borders of French Acadia have never been clearly defined, but the following areas were at some time part of French Acadia :
17th century [ edit ]
The history of Acadia was significantly influenced by the warfare that took place on its soil during the 17th and 18th century.[2] Prior to that time period, the Mi'kmaq lived in Acadia for centuries. The French arrived in 1604, claiming the Mi'kmaq lands for the King of France. Despite this, the Mi'kmaq tolerated the presence of the French in exchange for favours and trade. Catholic Mi'kmaq and Acadians were the predominant populations in the colony for the next 150 years.
Early European colonists, who would later become known as Acadians, were French subjects primarily from the Pleumartin to Poitiers in the Vienne département of west-central France. The first French settlement was established by Pierre Dugua des Monts, Governor of Acadia, under the authority of King Henry IV, on Saint Croix Island in 1604. The following year, the settlement was moved across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal after a difficult winter on the island and deaths from scurvy. In 1607 the colony received bad news: King Henry had revoked Sieur de Monts' royal fur monopoly, citing that the income was insufficient to justify supplying the colony further. Thus recalled, the last of the Acadians left Port Royal in August 1607. Their allies, the native Mi'kmaq nation, kept careful watch over their possessions, though. When the former lieutenant governor, Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just, returned in 1610, he found Port Royal just as it was left.
During the first 80 years, the French and Acadians were in Acadia, there were ten significant battles as the English, Scottish, Dutch and French fought for possession of the colony. These battles happened at Port Royal, Saint John,[b] Cap de Sable (present-day Port La Tour, Nova Scotia), Jemseg, Castine and Baleine.
During the next 74 years, there were six colonial wars that took place in Nova Scotia and Acadia (see the French and Indian Wars as well as Father Rale's War and Father Le Loutre's War). These wars were fought between New England and New France and their respective native allies before the British defeated the French in North America (1763). After the British Siege of Port Royal in 1710, mainland Nova Scotia was under the control of British colonial government, but both present-day New Brunswick and virtually all of present-day Maine remained contested territory between New England and New France.
The war was fought on two fronts: the southern border of Acadia, which New France defined as the Kennebec River in southern Maine. The other front was in Nova Scotia and involved preventing the British from taking the capital of Acadia, Port Royal (See Queen Anne's War), establishing themselves at Canso (See Father Rale's War) and founding Halifax (see Father Le Loutre's War).
Acadian Civil War [ edit ]
Siege of Saint John (1645) – d'Aulnay defeats La Tour in Acadia
From 1640 to 1645, Acadia was plunged into what some historians have described as a civil war. The war was between Port Royal, where the Governor of Acadia Charles de Menou d'Aulnay de Charnisay was stationed, and present-day Saint John, New Brunswick, where Governor of Acadia Charles de Saint-Étienne de la Tour was stationed.[12] There were four major battles in the war, and d'Aulnay ultimately prevailed over La Tour.
King Philip's War [ edit ]
During King Philip's War (1675–78), the governor was absent from Acadia (having first been imprisoned in Boston during the Dutch occupation of Acadia) and Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin was established at the capital of Acadia, Pentagouêt. From there he worked with the Abenaki of Acadia to raid British settlements migrating over the border of Acadia. British retaliation included attacking deep into Acadia in the Battle off Port La Tour (1677).
Wabanaki Confederacy [ edit ]
In response to King Philip's War in New England, the native peoples in Acadia joined the Wabanaki Confederacy to form a political and military alliance with New France.[13] The Confederacy remained significant military allies to New France through six wars. Until the French and Indian War the Wabanaki Confederacy remained the dominant military force in the region.
Catholic missions [ edit ]
There were tensions on the border between New England and Acadia, which New France defined as the Kennebec River in southern Maine.[3][14] English settlers from Massachusetts (whose charter included the Maine area) had expanded their settlements into Acadia. To secure New France's claim to Acadia, it established Catholic missions (churches) among the four largest native villages in the region: one on the Kennebec River (Norridgewock); one further north on the Penobscot River (Penobscot); one on the Saint John River (Medoctec);[16][17] and one at Shubenacadie (Saint Anne's Mission).[18]
King William's War [ edit ]
During King William's War (1688–97), some Acadians, the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French Priests participated in defending Acadia at its border with New England, which New France defined as the Kennebec River in southern Maine. Toward this end, the members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, on the Saint John River and in other places, joined the New France expedition against present-day Bristol, Maine (the Siege of Pemaquid (1689)), Salmon Falls and present-day Portland, Maine.
In response, the New Englanders retaliated by attacking Port Royal and present-day Guysborough. In 1694, the Wabanaki Confederacy participated in the Raid on Oyster River at present-day Durham, New Hampshire. Two years later, New France, led by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, returned and fought a naval battle in the Bay of Fundy before moving on to raid Bristol, Maine again.
In retaliation, the New Englanders, led by Benjamin Church, engaged in a Raid on Chignecto (1696) and the siege of the Capital of Acadia at Fort Nashwaak.
At the end of the war England returned the territory to France in the Treaty of Ryswick and the borders of Acadia remained the same.
18th century [ edit ]
Queen Anne's War [ edit ]
During Queen Anne's War, some Acadians, the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French priests participated again in defending Acadia at its border with New England. They made numerous raids on New England settlements along the border in the Northeast Coast Campaign and the famous Raid on Deerfield. In retaliation, Major Benjamin Church went on his fifth and final expedition to Acadia. He raided present-day Castine, Maine and continued with raids against Grand Pre, Pisiquid, and Chignecto. A few years later, defeated in the Siege of Pemaquid (1696), Captain March made an unsuccessful siege on the Capital of Acadia, Port Royal (1707). British forces were successful with the Siege of Port Royal (1710), while the Wabanaki Conferacy were successful in the nearby Battle of Bloody Creek (1711) and continued raids along the Maine frontier.[19]
The 1710 conquest of the Acadian capital of Port Royal during the war was confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The British conceded to the French "the island called Cape Breton, as also all others, both in the mouth of the river of St. Lawrence, and in the gulph of the same name", and "all manner of liberty to fortify any place or places there." The French established a fortress at Louisbourg, Cape Breton, to guard the sea approaches to Quebec.[20]
On 23 June 1713, the French residents of Nova Scotia were given one year to declare allegiance to Britain or leave the region.[21][22][23] In the meantime, the French signalled their preparedness for future hostilities by beginning the construction of Fortress Louisbourg on Île Royale, now Cape Breton Island. The British grew increasingly alarmed by the prospect of disloyalty in wartime of the Acadians now under their rule. French missionaries worked to maintain the loyalty of Acadians, and to maintain a hold on the mainland part of Acadia.
Dummer's War [ edit ]
French map of 1720 North America. Acadie extends clearly into present-day New Brunswick.
During the escalation that preceded Dummer's War (1722–1725), some Acadians, the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French priests persisted in defending Acadia, which had been conceded to the British in the Treaty of Utrecht, at its border against New England. The Mi'kmaq refused to recognize the treaty handing over their land to the English and hostilities resumed. The Mi'kmaq raided the new fort at Canso, Nova Scotia in 1720. The Confederacy made numerous raids on New England settlements along the border into New England. Towards the end of January 1722, Governor Samuel Shute chose to launch a punitive expedition against Sébastien Rale, a Jesuit missionary, at Norridgewock.[24] This breach of the border of Acadia, which had at any rate been ceded to the British, drew all of the tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy into the conflict.
Under potential siege by the Confederacy, in May 1722, Lieutenant Governor John Doucett took 22 Mi'kmaq hostage at Annapolis Royal to prevent the capital from being attacked. In July 1722, the Abenaki and Mi'kmaq created a blockade of Annapolis Royal, with the intent of starving the capital. The natives captured 18 fishing vessels and prisoners from present-day Yarmouth to Canso. They also seized prisoners and vessels from the Bay of Fundy.
As a result of the escalating conflict, Massachusetts Governor Shute officially declared war on 22 July 1722. The first battle of Father Rale's War happened in the Nova Scotia theatre.[c] In response to the blockade of Annapolis Royal, at the end of July 1722, New England launched a campaign to end the blockade and retrieve over 86 New England prisoners taken by the natives. One of these operations resulted in the Battle at Jeddore.[28] The next was a raid on Canso in 1723.[30] Then in July 1724 a group of sixty Mikmaq and Maliseets raided Annapolis Royal.
As a result of Father Rale's War, present-day central Maine fell again to the British with the defeat of Sébastien Rale at Norridgewock and the subsequent retreat of the native population from the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers.
King George's War [ edit ]
King George's War began when the war declarations from Europe reached the French fortress at Louisbourg first, on May 3, 1744, and the forces there wasted little time in beginning hostilities. Concerned about their overland supply lines to Quebec, they first raided the British fishing port of Canso on May 23, and then organized an attack on Annapolis Royal, then the capital of Nova Scotia. However, French forces were delayed in departing Louisbourg, and their Mi'kmaq and Maliseet allies decided to attack on their own in early July. Annapolis had received news of the war declaration, and was somewhat prepared when the Indians began besieging Fort Anne. Lacking heavy weapons, the Indians withdrew after a few days. Then, in mid-August, a larger French force arrived before Fort Anne, but was also unable to mount an effective attack or siege against the garrison, which had received supplies and reinforcements from Massachusetts. In 1745, British colonial forces conducted the Siege of Port Toulouse (St. Peter's) and then captured Fortress Louisbourg after a siege of six weeks. France launched a major expedition to recover Acadia in 1746. Beset by storms, disease, and finally the death of its commander, the Duc d'Anville, it returned to France in tatters without reaching its objective. French officer Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Roch de Ramezay also arrived from Quebec and conducted the Battle at Port-la-Joye on Île Saint-Jean and the Battle of Grand Pré.
Father Le Loutre's War (1749–1755) [ edit ]
Acadians at Annapolis Royal, by Samuel Scott, 1751; earliest known image of Acadians
Despite the British capture of the Acadian capital in the Siege of Port Royal (1710), Nova Scotia remained primarily occupied by Catholic Acadians and Mi'kmaq. To prevent the establishment of Protestant settlements in the region, Mi'kmaq raided the early British settlements of present-day Shelburne (1715) and Canso (1720). A generation later, Father Le Loutre's War began when Edward Cornwallis arrived to establish Halifax with 13 transports on 21 June 1749.[d][33] The British quickly began to build other settlements. To guard against Mi'kmaq, Acadian and French attacks on the new Protestant settlements, they erected fortifications in Halifax (Citadel Hill) (1749), Dartmouth (1750), Bedford (Fort Sackville) (1751), Lunenburg (1753) and Lawrencetown (1754). There were numerous Mi'kmaq and Acadian raids on these villages such as the Raid on Dartmouth (1751).
Within 18 months of establishing Halifax, the British also took firm control of peninsular Nova Scotia by building fortifications in all the major Acadian communities: present-day Windsor (Fort Edward, 1750); Grand Pre (Fort Vieux Logis, 1749) and Chignecto (Fort Lawrence, 1750). (A British fort already existed at the other major Acadian centre of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Cobequid remained without a fort.) Numerous Mi'kmaq and Acadian raids took place against these fortifications, such as the Siege of Grand Pre (1749).
French and Indian War [ edit ]
In the years after the British conquest, the Acadians refused to swear unconditional oaths of allegiance to the British crown. During this time period some Acadians participated in militia operations against the British and maintained vital supply lines to Fortress Louisbourg and Fort Beausejour. During the French and Indian War, the British sought to neutralize any military threat Acadians posed and to interrupt the vital supply lines Acadians provided to Louisbourg by deporting them.[36][37]
This process began in 1755, after the British captured Fort Beauséjour and began the expulsion of the Acadians with the Bay of Fundy Campaign. Between six and seven thousand Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia[38] to the lower British American colonies.[40] Some Acadians eluded capture by fleeing deep into the wilderness or into French-controlled Canada. The Quebec town of L'Acadie (now a sector of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu) was founded by expelled Acadians.[41] After the Siege of Louisbourg (1758), a second wave of the expulsion began with the St. John River Campaign, Petitcodiac River Campaign, Gulf of St. Lawrence Campaign and the Île Saint-Jean Campaign.
The Acadians and the Wabanaki Confederacy created a significant resistance to the British throughout the war. They repeatedly raided Canso, Lunenburg, Halifax, Chignecto and into New England.
Any pretense that France might maintain or regain control over the remnants of Acadia came to an end with the fall of Montreal in 1760 and the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which permanently ceded almost all of eastern New France to Britain. In 1763, Britain would designate lands west of the Appalachians as the "Indian Reserve", but did not respect Mi'kmaq title to the Atlantic region, claiming title was obtained from the French. The Mi'kmaq remain in Acadia to this day. After 1764, many exiled Acadians finally settled in Louisiana, which had been transferred by France to Spain at the end of the French and Indian War. The demonym Acadian was corrupted to Cajun, which was first used as a pejorative term until its later mainstream acceptance. Britain eventually moderated its policies and allowed Acadians to return to Nova Scotia.
Notable military figures of Acadia [ edit ]
The following list includes those who were born in Acadia or those who became naturalized citizens prior to the fall of the French in the region in 1763. Those who came for brief periods from other countries are not included (e.g. John Gorham, Edward Cornwallis, James Wolfe, Boishébert, etc.).
17th–18th century [ edit ]
Others [ edit ]
Government [ edit ]
Acadia was located in territory disputed between France and Great Britain. England controlled the area from 1621 to 1632 (see William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling) and again from 1654 until 1670 (see William Crowne and Thomas Temple), with control permanently regained by its successor state, the Kingdom of Great Britain, in 1710 (ceded under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713). Although France controlled the territory in the remaining periods, French monarchs consistently neglected Acadia. Civil government under the French regime was held by a series of Governors (see List of governors of Acadia). The government of New France was located in Quebec, but it had only nominal authority over the Acadians.
The Acadians implemented village self-rule. Even after Canada had given up its elected spokesmen, the Acadians continued to demand a say in their own government, as late as 1706 petitioning the monarchy to allow them to elect spokesmen each year by a plurality of voices. In a sign of his indifference to the colony, Louis XV agreed to their demand. This representative assembly was a direct offshoot of a government system that developed out of the seigneurial and church parish imported from Europe. The seigneurial system was a "set of legal regimes and practices pertaining to local landholding, politics, economics, and jurisprudence."[46] It should be noted that many of the French Governors of Acadia prior to Hector d'Andigné de Grandfontaine held seigneuries in Acadia. As Seigneur, in addition to the power held as governor, they held the right to grant land, collect their seigneurial rents, and act in judgement over disputes within their domain.[46] After Acadia came under direct Royal rule under Grandfontaine the Seigneurs continued to fulfill governance roles. The Acadian seignuerial system came to an end when the British Crown bought the seigneurial rights in the 1730s. The Catholic parish system along with the accompanying parish priest also aided in the development Acadian self-government. Priests, given their respected position, often assisted the community in representation with the civil government located at Port Royal/Annapolis Royal. Within each parish the Acadians used the elected "marguilliers" (wardens) of the "conseil de fabrique" to administer more than just the churches' affairs in the Parishes. The Acadians extended this system to see to the administrative needs of the community in general. The Acadians protected this structure from the priests and were "No mere subordinates to clerical authority, wardens were "always suspicious of any interference by the priests" in the life of the rural parish, an institution which was,..., largely a creation of the inhabitants."[46] During the British regime many of the Deputies were drawn from this marguillier group.
The Acadians occupied a borderland region of the British and French empires. As such the Acadian homeland was subjected to the ravages of war on numerous occasions. Through experience the Acadians learned to distrust imperial authorities (British and French). This is evidenced in a small way when Acadians were uncooperative with census takers. Administrators complained of constant in-fighting among the population, which filed many petty civil suits with colonial magistrates. Most of these were over boundary lines, as the Acadians were very quick to protect their new lands.
Governance under the British after 1710 [ edit ]
After 1710, the British military administration continued to utilize the deputy system the Acadians had developed under French colonial rule. Prior to 1732 the deputies were appointed by the governor from men in the districts of Acadian families "as ancientest and most considerable in Lands & possessions,". This appears to be in contravention of various British penal laws which made it nearly impossible for Roman Catholics and Protestant recusants to hold military and government positions. The need for effective administration and communication in many of the British colonies trumped the laws. In 1732 the governance institution was formalized. Under the formalized system the colony was divided into eight districts. Annually on October 11 free elections were to take place where each district, depending on its size, was to elect two, three, or four deputies. In observance of the Lord's Day, if October 11 fell on a Sunday the elections were to take place on the immediately following Monday. Notice of the annual election was to be given in all districts thirty days before the election date. Immediately following election, deputies, both outgoing and incoming, were to report to Annapolis Royal to receive the governor's approval and instructions. Prior to 1732 deputies had complained about the time and expense of holding office and carrying out their duties. Under the new elected deputy system each district was to provide for the expenses of their elected deputies. The duties of the deputies were broad and included reporting to the government in council the affairs of the districts, distribution of government proclamations, assistance in the settlement of various local disputes (primarily related to land), and ensuring that various weights and measures used in trade were "Conformable to the Standard".
In addition to deputies, several other public positions existed. Each district had a clerk who worked closely with the deputies and under his duties recorded the records and orders of government, deeds and conveyances, and kept other public records. With the rapid expansion of the Acadian populace, there was also a growing number of cattle and sheep. The burgeoning herds and flocks, often free-ranging, necessitated the creation of the position of Overseer of Flocks. These individuals controlled where the flocks grazed, settled disputes and recorded the names of individuals slaughtering animals to ensure proper ownership. Skins and hides were inspected for brands. After the purchase by the British Crown of the seigniorial rights in Acadia, various rents and fees were due to the Crown. In the Minas, Piziquid and Cobequid Districts the seigniorial fees were collected by the "Collector & Receiver of All His Majesty's Quit Rents, Dues, or Revenues". The Collector was to keep a record of all rents and other fees collected, submit the rents to Annapolis Royal, and retain fifteen percent to cover his expenses.[51]
Demographics [ edit ]
Main Acadian communities of Acadia before the deportation
After a 1692 visit, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, described the Acadian men as "'well-built, of good height, and they would be accepted without difficulty as soldiers in a guards' regiment. [They are] well-proportioned and their hair is usually blond. [They are] robust, and will endure great fatigue; [they] are fine subjects of the king, passionately loving the French of Europe'". Charles Morris describes the Acadians as being "...tall and well proportioned, they delight much in wearing long hair, they are of dark complexion, in general, and somewhat of the mixture of Indians; but there are some of a light complexion. They retain the language and customs of their neighbours the French, with a mixed affectation of the native Indians, and imitate them in their haunting and wild tones in their merriment; they are naturally full cheer and merry, subtle, speak and promise fair..."[51] Most Acadians were illiterate, and many of the records, including notarial deeds, were destroyed or scattered during the Great Expulsion. For a time, Port Royal did have schools, but these were closed when the British excluded Roman Catholic religious orders from operating in Acadia. Despite their nominal faith, Acadians often worked on Sundays and religious holidays.
Before 1654, trading companies and patent holders concerned with fishing recruited men in France to come to Acadia to work at the commercial outposts. The original Acadian population was a small number of indentured servants and soldiers brought by the fur-trading companies. Gradually, fishermen began settling in the area as well, rather than return to France with the seasonal fishing fleet. The majority of the recruiting took place at La Rochelle. Between 1653 and 1654, 104 men were recruited at La Rochelle. Of these, 31% were builders, 15% were soldiers and sailors, 8% were food preparers, 6.7% were farm workers, and an additional 6.7% worked in the clothing trades. Fifty-five percent of Acadia's first families came from western and west-central France, primarily from Poitou, Aunis, Angoumois, and Saintonge. Over 85% of these (47% of the total), were former residents of the La Chaussée area of Poitou. Many of the families who arrived in 163 |
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On the reverse face of the coin is the latest panda image to feature in the series. The traditional wall of bamboo is featured in the background of the design, while a loveable panda bear is shown grasping the trunk of a fallen tree. The face value, weight, metal content, and purity of the coins are engraved on this side.
The obverse features the Temple of Heaven from central Beijing as the heart of the design. Above the design are Chinese characters that translate into English as Peoples Republic of China. Below the design is the year of issue.
The Chinese Mint is a government-run facility that coordinates with the Peoples Bank of China to produce bullion, proof, and circulation coinage for the country. Chinese Mint facilities do not issue mint marks to denote where products are struck and distributed from.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to JM Bullion at 800-276-6508. You can also connect with us online using our live web chat feature or by submitting your questions to us via email.Pope Francis’s crusade against corruption has made him a target for Italy’s all-powerful mafia clans, a leading anti-mob prosecutor has warned.
Nicola Gratteri, who has battled Calabria’s shadowy ‘Ndrangheta mafia, said on Wednesday that Francis’s attempt to bring transparency to the Vatican was making the white collar mobsters who do business with corrupt prelates “nervous and agitated”.
He told the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano: “Pope Francis is dismantling centres of economic power in the Vatican.
“If the bosses could trip him up they wouldn’t hesitate. I don’t know if organised criminals are in a position to do something, but they are certainly thinking about it. They could be dangerous.”
Francis, who has called for “a poor church”, has backed reform at the Vatican’s bank, which has been suspected for years of being a channel for the laundering of mob profits. This week police impounded a luxury hotel on Rome’s Janiculum hill – formerly a monastery – which the ‘Ndrangheta allegedly purchased from a religious order.
In a fiery sermon on Monday, Francis railed against corruption and quoted the bible’s advice that practitioners be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck.
“The mafia that invests, that launders money, that therefore has the real power, is the mafia which has got rich for years from its connivance with the church,” said Gratteri. “These are the people who are getting nervous.”
Gratteri attacked priests and bishops in southern Italy who legitimise mobsters. “Priests continuously visit the houses of bosses for coffee, which gives the bosses strength and popular legitimacy,” he said. A bishop in Locri in Calabria had excommunicated mobsters after they damaged fruit trees owned by the church, he said. “But before that episode, the bosses had killed thousands of people” without being sanctioned, he added.
Boosting the strong links between mob and church is the fierce religious devotion of the gangsters themselves, he said, adding that in his 26 years as a magistrate he had never raided a mafia hideout which did not contain a religious image. “There is no affiliation rite that does not evoke religion. ‘Ndrangheta and the church walk hand in hand,” he said.
A survey of jailed mobsters had revealed that 88% were religious, he added. “Before killing, a member of the ‘Ndrangheta prays. He asks the Madonna for protection.”
Gratteri said mobsters did not consider themselves wrongdoers, and used the example of a mafioso putting pressure on a business owner to pay protection money, first by shooting up his premises, then by kneecapping him. “If the person still refuses, the mobster is ‘forced’ to kill him. If you have no choice, you are not committing a sin.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013Authorities arrested Raif Badawi (pronounced Ra-eef Ba-da-wee) on 17 June 2012. They charged him with insulting Islam and creating the “Saudi Arabian Liberals” website for social and political debate. The charges related to articles Raif wrote criticizing religious figures.
Raif Badawi’s case bounced back and forth between courts until 7 May 2014. On that day, the Criminal Court pronounced a sentence of 10 years in prison, 1000 lashes and a fine of 1 million riyals (about $290,000 CDN). After he serves a decade in jail, he is also forbidden to travel for the following decade and from participating in the media.
While international pressure appears to have brought a halt to the flogging after the first 50 of 1,000 lashes in January 2015, Raif Badawi remains behind bars facing an uncertain future. By the end of April his case had been transferred from the Criminal Court back to the Supreme Court.
Raif Badawi isn’t the only person in Saudi Arabia detained for simply exercising his rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. In August 2018, Raif's sister was arrested, along with Nassima al-Sada, who had been campaigning for women's right to drive. Amnesty International is extremely concerned about the intensified crackdown on freedom of expression in the country.This past weekend, Ted Cruz put out a political ad that was actually good and funny. The ad first aired in Iowa during a broadcast of “Saturday Night Live,” a fun take on their ad parodies. You can watch it here:
It features Cruz reading to his family such festive and timeless classics as “How Obamacare Stole Christmas” and “Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer.” It’s well written and well produced, so of course some people got upset. But no one got quite as upset as Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist whose work is frequently featured at The Washington Post. So mad, in fact, that she inexplicably portrayed Cruz as an organ grinder whose children were monkeys on leashes. To make a long story short, The Washington Post ended up pulling the cartoon, which was actually an animated GIF for the full “Ted Cruz’s children are monkeys!” effect.
As @AnnTelnaes now realizes with perhaps some small regret, @GPollowitz: The Internet is forever. pic.twitter.com/738xxsWyJU
GuardAmerican (@GuardAmerican) December 23, 2015
There are so many things wrong with Telnaes’ cartoon and the subsequent defense of it that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s just dig in.
1) All Politicians Put Their Families In Their Ads
Telnaes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, so I’m surprised she didn’t know this, but something approaching 100 percent of all politicians feature family members in political ads. So unless Telnaes was born on Saturday, there is no excuse for being ignorant of this. Maybe she should read her own newspaper for an explanation of this thing she thinks Cruz invented:
A Washington Post story from 2012 on Obama using his kids as a “political asset” in ads: https://t.co/knlasRbO8I pic.twitter.com/34FkcRQyzs
Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) December 23, 2015
2) Children Are Off Limits
You don’t have to abide by these rules, of course, but one key rule governing civilized behavior by the media is that kids are off limits. Many hours before anyone had noticed Telnaes’ cartoons (her cartoons are boring and usually not worth paying attention to), she tweeted out a pre-emptive defense and pre-emptive justification for why she broke this rule.
Ted Cruz has put his children in a political ad- don’t start screaming when editorial cartoonists draw them as well. https://t.co/7hafBacOiK
Ann Telnaes (@AnnTelnaes) December 22, 2015
Again, I believe this was many, many hours before the cartoon was noticed by anyone — perhaps before it was even published — so the defensiveness on display was probably some vestigial conscience showing up. She was also quoted by CNN as saying she thought that the kids were, and I quote, “fair game” because of the ad that showed them being cute and funny. Since all politicians put their kids (and grandkids!) in ads, and this was just a particularly effective featuring of the same, this makes you wonder just how ideologically blinded Telnaes might be. Gabriel Malor had an interesting series of tweets on this matter that I will condense here:
The core problem here is that Ann Telnaes has no moral foundation. She knows there are rules, but she doesn’t know *why* there are rules. So Telnaes simply thought she could reason her way to an exception to the rule: kids are off limits. But her reasoning — Cruz did it, so they’re fair game — does not actually address the reason for the rule. The reason, in case you were wondering, why kids are off limits is because they lack culpability AND the capacity to respond. That Cruz cast his children in a good light does not mean that Telnaes is relieved of the rule protecting them from being cast negatively. Telnaes doesn’t understand this bc, again, she doesn’t know *why* we have the rule, only that there is one. She lacks a moral foundation.
Just because the Cruz kids are adorable and funny doesn’t mean you can go after them any more than you can go after Sasha and Malia for being adorable when pulled out on stage at political events either.
3) Monkeys? Really?
As if going after children weren’t enough, Telnaes thought it would be a grand idea to portray the daughters of the first Hispanic senator from Texas as monkeys. I’m not sure if the dehumanization was done because of that, because of their father’s politics or some other reason, but it compounds the error in ways that make you wonder how in the heck the cartoon received editorial approval from The Washington Post.
@MZHemingway “His kids were in ads so I can portray them as dancing monkeys. I seriously don’t see the problem.”-@AnnTelnaes Just wow.
CDB (@quietnolonger) December 23, 2015
I’m not a Ted Cruz apologist, but could you imagine if Sasha and Malia were depicted this way? Not cool. https://t.co/CCPjA42S3J
Ellen L. Carmichael (@ellencarmichael) December 22, 2015
Just in general, journalists should avoid portraying and mocking the kids of politicians, including the kids of Hispanic politicians, as dancing monkeys. Does this really need to be said to Pulitzer Prize-winning elites? I guess so.
4) It’s Not Funny
This is actually quite important. The Washington Post has always been a bad page for editorial cartooning. For something like 60 years they featured the ghastly work of HERBLOCK, whose distinctions were drawing like a particularly uncreative five-year-old and labeling literally everything in said drawings. Partly he needed to label because he lacked any imagination at all and kept pushing out the same clichéd metaphor for…everything. Partly, some suspected, it was because he was huffing airplane glue. If you’d like some delicious take-downs of HERBLOCK (his name was Herbert Block, so this all-block-letter-combo-name thing gives you an indication of his dazzling intellect), I’d recommend “Cartoons Without Humor: The underwhelming oeuvre of Herblock, America’s worst political cartoonist” and “Washington’s Blockheads: The perpetual adulation of Herblock.” From the latter, by the great Andy Ferguson:
Vampire bats sweep across a skyline, their bellies covered in writing: “takeover tactics,” “raiders,” “greenmail specialists,” “junk bond finances,” and “stock manipulations.” (This must be Wall Street!) And there’s always a caption, too, another 15 or 20 words. “If you don’t get my meaning,” Block seems to be saying to his reader, “I’m going to make you sit here until you do.” It was his politics, mostly, that lifted Herblock above his lack of technical skill to the Pulitzers and the medals and the honorary degrees. His ideas were as simple as his draftsmanship, and perfectly matched to the prejudices of the powerful journalists he hoped to please.
All of which to say, Telnaes reminds me a lot of HERBLOCK. She can draw better than he could (all humans can), but her ideas are just as predictably progressive, clichéd, hyper-partisan, and so on. She obsesses over the same, few causes (supporting abortion is her favorite and disdaining Christians is right up there, too). In fact, her attacks on pro-lifers are so hackneyed that nobody will be surprised that she’s been given awards by the country’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. (Interestingly, this pro-abortion cartoon, which passes for perceptive at The Washington Post, also features children on strings, which says nothing about pro-lifers but a great deal about Telnaes.)
5) It’s Overexplained
Another way that Telnaes is as bad as HERBLOCK is the way she has to explain her cartoons. The cartoon makes no sense on its own because normal people know that all politicians have their kids help them pardon turkeys, appear in campaign ads, and whatnot. So she kept trying to explain it in all of these tweets and remarks she made. If your cartoon doesn’t work on its own, scrap the idea. Also if it’s racist, scrap it.
6) Did Any Other Politicians Feature Children In Their Campaigns Yesterday?
Wait, what’s this?
Meanwhile, in the category of ‘candidates using their family in political situations’… https://t.co/6McIVMPD02 pic.twitter.com/0KaiIVCpQd
Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) December 23, 2015
Oh, Hillary Clinton put out a picture of herself with her older grandchild (the second one is due this summer) as part of a campaign called “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela”? I can’t wait for Telnaes to take her to task for exploiting these grandchildren!
is Hillary clinton’s grand-baby now “fair game”? Bear in mind she’s currently running a #JustLikeYourAbuela campaign. @anntelnaes
The Scandalous DJT (@AceofSpadesHQ) December 23, 2015
7) It’s The Ghastly Double Standards
Last year, a low-level Capitol Hill staffer made some critiques on Facebook of how Obama’s daughters were handling themselves during a political event. The Washington Post more or less lost its mind. I wrote about it a few days after the story broke in the piece, “Dear Media, This Nonsense Is Why Everybody Hates You.” They had already run something like 14 stories on the matter, including having a reporter dig up dirt from the staffer’s adolescence. It was disgusting. As I wrote then:
I’d like someone to go ahead and circle back with [Post Executive Editor Martin] Baron and have him explain himself. In what world — in what mother-freaking world — does he justify taking a foreign affairs reporter and having him dig up dirt on a low-level former staffer who said nothing worse about presidential children than the Post’s own columnists did in the Bush era? One of the items linked above is a Ruth Marcus column where she bashes this low-level staffer for critiquing the daughters, then notes she herself did it to the Bush girls –including attacking them for showing so much “cleavage,” being churlish, and their speaking style — but that it was OK because she did it under the guise of parody and they had notable busts. I’m not joking. You can read it for yourself. As John Podhoretz said, “Ruth Marcus’s double standard FOR HERSELF is absolutely astonishing.”
It’s so tiring, so unbelievably tiring. Everyone knows that there is one standard for how you may treat the children of Democratic candidates and an entirely separate and unrelated one for how you treat the children of Republican candidates. The disparity of standards is even more dramatic for progressive versus conservative candidates and their families.
8) Media Coverage
Another tiring thing is the frame offered by the media for covering this. When a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist with media elite friends pens a cartoon portraying the children of a Hispanic senator as dancing monkeys, what should the headline and lede be? CNN went with “Washington Post pulls cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s daughters.” I guess they thought adding the words “as monkeys” would have made it too descriptive. But note the lede: Yes, the newsworthy thing is that Cruz obtained new ammo to shoot at the media. Wait, what? I…I… I…honestly don’t know what to say to this. Also, in what sense are they portrayed as “monkey-like” creatures and not “monkeys”? I have no idea what is meant by this, although the reporter goes on to describe them as being portrayed as “two hatted creatures,” which is, again, quite weird. Many media outlets were reticent to mention the monkey problem. For example:
No. It retracts cartoon that DEPICTS THEM AS MONKEYS!! https://t.co/qAJcCBTY9S
Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) December 23, 2015
.@TedCruz lashes out at Washington Post cartoonist for drawing his daughters https://t.co/Ev7oln4at3 | Getty pic.twitter.com/CZY0qYll7K
POLITICO (@politico) December 22, 2015
Why would Cruz be upset at a cartoonist for drawing his daughters? Oh, she caricatured them crudely as “chained dancing apes“? Why, that changes everything and should probably be what you lead with, eh? (In Politico’s defense, they later updated the story to not only mention the monkeys, unlike the first version online, but to emphasize it.) In any case, this focus on Cruz being inexplicably upset (or is it “gaining ammo”?) instead of on the fact that a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist portrayed his children as chained monkeys is part of a pattern of disparity. The initial story should be the fact of the cartoon running, not Cruz’s reaction to it.
9) Ridiculous Defenses
Telnaes was deleting tweets last night as she managed to convince no one of her cause (I’m sure Vox or Salon or The New Republic are working on it as we speak), but she put a note on Facebook telling people to stop complaining about the cartoon. And she put these tweets on Twitter: Um, no. The lower tweet looks like an attempt to portray herself as a victim, something made ever-so-slightly difficult by going after a pre-schooler and a seven-year-old in that day’s work. The upper is so stupid — yet presented as if it’s somehow informative if not erudite — as to be hilarious. But perhaps more disconcerting is the editor’s note for why they pulled the cartoon:
Editor’s note from Fred Hiatt: It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it. I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published. I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree.
What’s this “I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted” business? That’s, again, just stupid. Politicians feature their children in ads all the time, as the easy-to-find examples of Obama and Clinton demonstrate above. What is there to “understand” about Ann’s perspective, exactly?
What the hell is that? He understands??? https://t.co/IkBmCFPSlr
J.B. White (@RattlerGator) December 23, 2015
Further, is the only thing worth noting about this cartoon that it went after children? I mean, the same editorial page wrote a story just a few short months ago about how it was pretty sure Cruz was using a racial dog-whistle in an ad, although it couldn’t quite figure out exactly how. (I’m actually making the editorial seem like it made more sense than it did.) It said the ad only seemed to be about terrorism but was probably also a racist attack on Latino immigrants, Syrian refugees, or Iranian Muslims. They didn’t know which, but they were pretty sure that it was one of them enough to call the ad “revolting.”
But portray some Latino kids as dancing, chained monkeys and the only thing you can say is “leave children out of it”? Really? Such funny dog-whistle-hearing capabilities at the Post there, eh? Almost seems to fit a pattern, no? I’ll only add that a search for “dog whistle” on the Post’s search mechanism returns more than 500 results since 2005 alone.
10) Problems At The Washington Post
In Hiatt’s odd note that raises more questions than it answers, left unnamed are the editors who did look at it prior to publication. I have no reason to doubt Hiatt that he didn’t personally review the cartoon before it ran. Sometimes editors can’t review everything. But some editors reviewed it before it ran, even if they aren’t named Fred Hiatt. Presumably many eyes were on that cartoon before it ran.
The @washingtonpost editorial process giving rise to @anntelnaes cartoon, illustrated with monkeys. pic.twitter.com/lFpoRPDqdx
Festive Holiday Hat (@Popehat) December 23, 2015
Was there no one to say, “Maybe we shouldn’t publish the racist thing”? Is everyone reviewing what goes up so far left that they didn’t see the problem with this unfair attack on the Cruz family? Is everyone so stupid and uninformed to not know that 100 percent of all politicians feature family members in ads?89 years ago today, air power advocate General Billy Mitchell sank the battleships USS New Jersey and USS Virginia in his third demonstration of the potential of air power in naval warfare. General Mitchell proved that only a handful of bombers and airmen could render impotent 2 former crown jewels of the US Navy.
Two years earlier, in July of 1921, General Mitchell had successfully sunk the former German dreadnought SMS Ostfriesland and vindicated his theory that precision bombing could sink naval vessels. General Mitchell followed up several months later with further tests on the USS Alabama. While tactical bombing had been performed on both sea and land during World War I, no naval vessel had yet fallen prey to air power until Mitchell’s successful tests off the Virginia coast.
After World War I, General Mitchell returned to the US convinced that air power could fundamentally change the way naval warfare was waged. Facing opponents both within the military and in the halls of Congress, Mitchell’s tests on the Alabama, New Jersey, Ostfriesland and Virginia helped pave the way for the age of the aircraft carrier and the obsolescence of the big-gun battleship. General Mitchell was later court-martialed for statements he made about the competence of certain Army commanders. Although Mitchell passed away prior to World War II, his foresight proved prescient as numerous battleships succumbed to air power during the war, most notably HMS Prince of Wales & HMS Renown and the Japanese super-battleship Yamato. The North American B-25 Mitchell bomber was named for General Mitchell – 16 of which would later be launched from the USS Hornet in the Doolittle Raid against the Japanese home islands in 1942.
AdvertisementsOBJECTIVE:
Past studies have shown that many individuals who use antidepressants have no current or lifetime history of mental disorders. However, recent studies suggest that the one-time retrospective evaluation of mental disorders commonly used in such studies may substantially underestimate the true lifetime prevalence of mental disorders. We examined the prevalence of mental disorders, assessed prospectively over multiple interviews, among individuals currently using antidepressants in a community sample.
METHOD:
Using data from the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Study Wave 1 (1981) through Wave 4 (2004-2005) (N = 1,071), we assessed lifetime prevalence of common mood and anxiety disorders according to DSM-III and DSM-III-R criteria, based on 4 interviews, among participants who reported current antidepressant use. Furthermore, we examined factors associated with current antidepressant use.
RESULTS:
Thirteen percent of participants at Wave 4 reported currently using antidepressant medications. Among antidepressant users, 69% never met criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD); and 38% never met criteria for MDD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, social phobia, or generalized anxiety disorder in their lifetime. Female gender, Caucasian ethnicity, recent or current physical problems (eg, loss of bladder control, hypertension, and back pain), and recent mental health facility visits were associated with antidepressant use in addition to mental disorders.
CONCLUSIONS:
Many individuals who are prescribed and use antidepressant medications may not have met criteria for mental disorders. Our data indicate that antidepressants are commonly used in the absence of clear evidence-based indications.
© Copyright 2015 Physicians Postgraduate Press, Inc.About two months before he sat wild-haired, bug-eyed and dazed as a judge told him he faced murder charges, James Eagan Holmes was supposed to give a presentation on a topic so complex that most people would barely understand its title.
Near the same time he would have been discussing “microRNA biomarkers” with doctoral students and faculty, authorities say, Holmes began amassing the cache of guns and ammunition he used to carry out one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.
University of Colorado Denver officials won’t say whether he gave that presentation, listed on the syllabus for a class called “biological basis of psychiatric and neurological disorders.” In any case, Holmes was by then already slipping out of the rarefied world of intellect and scientific discovery that for much of his 24 years had seemed embedded in his DNA.
Holmes took an oral examination June 7 and dropped out of the elite CU Denver neuroscience graduate program June 10.
He is now accused of murder and attempted murder in the deaths of 12 people and the injuring of another 58 during a midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20 at an Aurora movie theater.
“Aspiring scientist”
In Holmes’ 2010 résumé, he calls himself an “aspiring scientist.” The student experience he listed then, as he applied for lab-technician jobs online, is an impressive catalog of research in neuroscience: the study of the brain and nervous system.
Digitization of mouse muscle. Neuronal mapping of the zebra finch. Dissection, staining and photography of hummingbird flight muscles.
As a lab assistant at the University of California, Riverside, Holmes picked up skills such as dissecting cells and using dye to stain biological tissues before examining them under a microscope, according to the résumé.
No one at CU Denver and few in the broader neuroscience community would talk about Holmes directly. But directors of CU’s neuroscience graduate program described the environment Holmes had entered, and was withdrawing from, as intellectually demanding and rewarding.
Every year, 100 or so budding scientists apply to the CU Denver doctoral program in neuroscience. Ultimately, only about six are admitted, said program director Angie Ribera.
In 2011, Holmes was one of the six.
Then Holmes was chosen for inclusion in a National Institutes of Health grant program designed to train the best and brightest for careers as neuroscience researchers.
Each year, Diego Restrepo, co-director of CU Denver’s NeuroScience Center, and a group of faculty select three of the most promising first-year doctoral students and three second-year students to split the grant.
It covers tuition and fees, and provides a stipend for living expenses, in part because the rigorous neuroscience program hardly leaves time for students to work.
The NIH awards the grant, in Restrepo’s name, to the university. The intent of the grant is not to support any particular research but to train future neuroscientists, Restrepo said.
How the brain works
Neuroscience is a relatively new discipline, becoming more attractive to doctoral students over the past decade or so because of the intrigue of the as-yet unexplained. It is the study of how nerve cells communicate with one another, and how the brain generates thoughts and ideas, controls movement and processes vision, smell and hearing.
“One of the great mysteries is how our brain works,” said Dr. James Ashe, director of the graduate program in neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. “We have a fair idea how the kidney works; we know a lot about the heart. There are far more unknown areas in brain research than in many fields.”
Some who earn doctorate degrees in neuroscience go on to run their own research labs, either at a university or in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries. Others end up teaching or going to medical school, Ashe said.
Their work is complex, to say the least. Ashe, for example, is trying to help people with prosthetic limbs. The goal is to implant an electrode in a person’s brain that would collect signals that tell an arm or leg to move. The signals would be interpreted by a mini-computer and broadcast to another device that would understand the signal and tell the prosthetic what to do.
At CU Denver, first-year doctoral students take courses that include cellular and molecular neurobiology and biomedical core courses, Ribera said. Most of the roughly six years it takes to earn that Ph.D., though, are spent working — sometimes night and day — in a lab.
First-year students, such as Holmes, rotate through three labs, working with a different researcher in each for 12 weeks.
At the end of that first year — the program continues almost year-round — “the student sits down with three faculty members, for 45 minutes to an hour. The three faculty members represent the three courses,” Ribera said.
The goal is not to pass or fail the student, or even to grade them.
“It’s an oral exam — a discussion, really,” she said. That discussion includes a student’s research strengths and weaknesses.
The students’ work is scrutinized not to see whether they made any scientific discoveries but to make sure they are on the right track to understanding how to design research that will lead them to answer the scientific question they are asking, Ribera said.
By the time they are ready to defend their doctoral dissertation, students are expected to have their research published in a peer-reviewed journal, Ribera said.
It’s a rigorous, demanding program.
“But if this is what you want to do, if it’s your passion,” the load isn’t crushing, Ribera said.
Of those admitted, nearly 90 percent will earn their Ph.D., she said.
Federal stipends, common at neuroscience graduate programs across the country, allow students to devote their time to coursework and lab work, Ashe said.
“It’s very unusual for students in our program or most other neuroscience programs to have jobs,” he said. “It’s unrealistic.”
In Minnesota, first-year students typically spend up to 60 hours a week on coursework, in class and in lab rotation. Competition among the chosen few in the program — at Minnesota, that’s about nine to 12 students each year — can become an issue if students are vying for lab spots with a particularly popular faculty researcher.
Quiet and reserved
By many accounts, Holmes would have appeared to be an excellent candidate for a doctoral program.
People in the comfortable San Diego suburb where Holmes grew up have described him as quiet and reserved back then. A classmate from Westview High School told The New York Times that Holmes played soccer and ran track for a while but gave up those sports to devote himself to academics.
Holmes won merit scholarships to the University of California, Riverside and graduated in 2010 as an honors student in neuroscience, school officials said.
At UC-Riverside, Holmes “was at the top of the top,” Chancellor Timothy White said at a news conference after the shootings. “He really distinguished himself.”
The world of neuroscience research is small enough that some resented its recent link to an accused mass murderer and declined to comment for this story.
“The neuroscience community, like all of the public, is deeply saddened by the tragedy that occurred in Aurora, and (I) am sorry to say that we can’t do an interview at this time,” Todd Bent-sen, director of public information and outreach at the Society for Neuroscience, said in an e-mail.
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or twitter.com/karenauge
Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost“Thor” actor Tom Hiddleston will replace Benedict Cumberbatch in Legendary’s horror pic “Crimson Peak,” helmed by Guillermo del Toro.
Cumberbatch left in the middle of August and Legendary worked fast to find his replacement. Hiddleston joins Charlie Hunnam, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska in the pic.
SEE ALSO: Tom Hiddleston Shows Off Sinister Side at Super Bowl with Jaguar
Plot details are unknown as del Toro and Lucinda Coxon work through a rewrite on a script del Toro and Matthew Robbins originally penned.
Legendary will produce and be a participating financing partner on the movie, with Universal Pictures retaining an option to finance at a later date. The film is set to begin shooting in February 2014.
The WME repped Hiddleston can be seen next in “Thor: The Dark World.”By Karlie Marrazzo
The route from M’Hamid to the dunes of Erg Chigaga is rocky, the vast landscape stretching endlessly beyond. The air was dry and already hot at 9 am. Dave and I silently bounced around in the back seat of the Land Cruiser, anticipation building. The view of the flat desert was unbroken aside from sporadic glimpses of nomads, slowly passing through with their donkeys and camels in tow. Their journeys seemed endless, out there in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t help but wonder where they were coming from and where they were going. They weren’t coming from anywhere and they weren’t traveling to any specific destination – their lives were about the journey.
Mohammed drove on over the hard-packed sand, the paved road a distant memory. Whisps of pure white clouds streaked through the bold blue sky, forming a perfect contrast to the burnt orange sand. An oasis appeared in front of us and we pulled over for a look and to stretch our legs. There was a cluster of palm trees around a miniscule stream. Mohammed crouched down to point out how the stream was full of frogs and asked us if we ate frogs back home in Canada – I couldn’t tell if he was serious or being cheeky. Huddled around one lone tree were a pile of sharp, jagged rocks covered in fresh blood, and nearby there was a dilapidated old Land Rover covered in graffiti.
The transition from flat ground to dunes was not a steady or gradual one. The sand turned from hard-packed to soft powder, and suddenly the 300ft dunes appeared, sharply rising out of the nothingness, a mere 25km from the Algerian border.
We pulled up to the camp at high noon, the African sun blazing. The camp was deserted and once again, the staff outnumbered us. A dozen tents were set up in a loose circle, along with a dining tent and a tea tent. Ours was well equipped with a queen sized bed and another smaller bed covered in thick blankets, a full length mirror, which struck me as a bit hilarious, and a little washroom add on, with a rudimentary toilet, shower and sink.
It was winter at home and the weather on most of our trip thus far had been cool, so it took some time to adjust to the 30C temperature. We walked around the camp and some of the smaller dunes in the immediate area, orienting ourselves and taking it all in, trying to wrap our heads around where we were.
Dave had asked if he could go sand boarding and was excited to try it out. Images of soaring down a majestic dune were quickly shattered when one of the guys rustled up a snowboard that looked like it was about 20 years old and completely wrecked on the bottom. Dave tossed it onto the top of a dune and stepped on. Nothing. It couldn’t even slide a couple of inches. It was worth a shot.
We settled into the low pillows of the tea tent to wait for lunch and to attempt to catch up on our writing. “I might be hallucinating, but is there an orange cat coming out of our tent?” Dave asked. I lifted my gaze and there was, in fact, a skinny orange tabby bounding straight towards us. One of my first pet cats was a big fat tabby named Clem, who I got when I was seven years old and who only lived to be nine. I currently have a slightly less fat orange tabby named Oliver who is 11 years old, so you might say I have a bit of an attachment to orange kitties. I usually feel like it’s a good omen when I spot them on my travels, and I certainly did not expect to see one in the literal middle of nowhere. This one was svelte and had an Egyptian nose, so I nicknamed him Cleo.
We were ravenous by the time lunch was served and were excited when we were presented with huge serving platters covered in food. Once we laid eyes on it, we looked at each other and just had to laugh. Served to us, in the middle of the desert, was a platter of fish surrounded by a colourful display of chopped vegetables. One of |
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SAPS spokesman Major Thulani Zwane said: “On Thursday, at about 2pm, an operation was conducted in Manguzi by Durban Organised Crime assisted by the task force.
“Three suspects between 45 and 50 years old were arrested. One of the suspects was shot and wounded while attempting to disarm a task force member’s gun.
“Dockets of conspiracy to deal in rhino horn, dealing in rhino horn, attempted murder, and resisting arrest were opened. Six vehicles were seized as they were suspected to be from the proceeds of crime.”
Two suspects appeared on Friday in the Ingwavuma Magistrate’s Court.
Sunday TribuneNoah Syndergaard gave up a homer in the first inning that put the Mets in an early hole and another in the sixth inning, which sealed a loss Saturday. In his last seven games, Syndergaard has a 5.09 ERA and has allowed 9 HR in 40.2 IP. Despite this recent struggle with the long ball, the big rookie should still be in the playoff rotation.
It seems a given that Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey will be in the playoff rotation. After that there are four guys vying for two spots. Let’s run some numbers on those four guys. First for some traditional numbers:
From these it seems pretty easy to eliminate Niese. He has the worst ERA, WHIP and K/BB ratio of the quartet and it’s not like he started off poorly and is pitching lights out down the stretch. After that, it’s not so cut-and-dry. Colon may have fattened up against the dregs of the NL East and been in Niese territory against the rest of MLB but can you see Terry Collins bumping him for two rookies? Let’s dig a little deeper and see if there’s a case to be made for Colon and if not, which of the rookies will get the short end of the stick.
BABIP K/9 BB/9 LOB% HR/FB FIP xFIP Colon.309 6.47 1.14 72.4 10.8 3.86 3.95 Matz.247 7.80 3.00 98.6 13.3 4.25 3.98 Syndergaard.287 9.64 2.00 73.9 13.8 3.34 3.05
It’s easy to see how Matz has that sparkling ERA. He’s having great fortune in both batters getting on base via a hit and with runners getting on base but not scoring. His peripherals paint a picture of a pitcher no better than Colon.
Meanwhile, Syndergaard has the best peripherals of all, even with the rough patch he’s experienced lately. His ERA and his FIP are nearly identical and his xFIP is even better, thanks to the now higher-than-normal HR rate. He’s the pitcher most likely to be able to give you a strikeout when you need one and he’s not likely to get burnt with allowing a walk.
But before we declare the final two starters as Colon and Syndergaard, we should also keep in mind that Collins has said that Matz in the bullpen is not an option. The manager has seemingly put the kibosh on Harvey and Matz pitching out of the pen, not wanting to subject either of his pitchers coming off surgery to the up-and-down nature of relieving.
Two things come to mind here. One is that it’s far better to judge Collins by what he does, not what he says. Whether it’s because he changes his mind or gets overruled by his GM, we shouldn’t consider this “no Matz in the pen” as written in stone.
And the other is that we have no idea how Harvey will perform in the playoffs. Will the gloves be off in the postseason and Harvey be allowed to function like a normal pitcher? Or will the Mets employ the piggyback approach in the playoffs? Collins may not want Matz getting up and down but how would he feel about anointing him as the guy to replace Harvey after he reaches his sub-90 pitch count?
This way, Matz knows which day he’s going to pitch and it should be fairly easy to see how Harvey’s doing and to get him ready in time to come into the game when Harvey reaches the club-imposed limit. We can argue that same thing for using Colon as a reliever, too.
Part of me wants to see Syndergaard as a reliever, just wondering how high he could reach on the radar gun if he didn’t have to pace himself to throw 100+ pitches. But hopefully the back end of the pen has been stabilized with the acquisitions of Tyler Clippard and Addison Reed to go along with the season-long dominance of Jeurys Familia.
If the concern is innings one through six, then Syndergaard should be starting. With Colon likely to be gifted a starting spot, Syndergaard has performed well enough over a long enough sample of MLB hitters to deserve the rotation bid over both Matz and Niese. But if he wants to solidify his spot the final two weeks of the season by eliminating the gopher ball, that would be okay, too.
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GoogleThere’s a good chance that Nazem Kadri will not make the trip to Calgary with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
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It was only a matter of time in the Toronto Maple Leafs 2014-15 season until the controversies started sprouting their own sub-controversies.
And so, the latest spot of bother for the Leafs, a late arrival for a weekend team meeting that netted centre Nazem Kadri a one-game suspension, and was thought to already be a burnout on the larger smouldering tire fire of Toronto’s season, instead flared anew on Wednesday morning when president Brendan Shanahan announced that Kadri would be suspended for another two games. Then, metaphorical gas can in hand, Shanahan said that the earlier suspension wasn’t really about sleeping in late and being tardy for a meeting.
“There’s more to this, obviously,” Shanahan said, ominously, declining to go into further details. But he did allow that Kadri, a 24-year-old in his third full season in the NHL who happens to be by far his team’s most offensively gifted centre, was guilty of certain “incidents” — note the plural — and that the tough punishment was plainly an effort to shock the player into better behaviour.
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Which is disappointing to Joe Colborne. The two pals and former Toronto Marlies teammates always make an effort to meet up when they cross paths on the National Hockey League circuit.
But because of off-ice issues — most recently, a late appearance at a team meeting — Leafs president Brendan Shanahan announced that Kadri would not be playing Friday’s road game against the Calgary Flames, and also missed Wednesday’s home game against the Buffalo Sabres. It was undetermined as of Wednesday if Kadri would travel with the Leafs to Calgary after their skate in Toronto on Thursday.
“I love Naz,” Colborne said. “He’s a very good friend of mine. You don’t wish that (situation) on anyone. I think it’s a case of the Toronto media looking for something, anything, to talk about other than the way the team has been playing.
“It just seems like they love to latch on to the extra curricular stuff. Whether it’s warranted or not, I’m not sure what the whole situation is.”
Kadri was healthy scratch against the New York Islanders on Monday, but had apologized to teammates and coaches for what he called an “uncharacteristic” mistake.
Colborne agreed.
“Naz... that’s not really him,” said the 25-year-old Flames centre who was traded from the Leafs to Calgary prior to the 2013-14 season, but was in Toronto’s AHL farm system from 2010 to 2013.
“He’s come a long way from the time I’ve known him — from when I first met him to the time I got traded. He had matured so much. He really cares about that team. He wants to be a Maple Leaf so bad. It’s tough to watch that because I just know how much it’s turned him up inside.”
Colborne was not surprised to see Kadri own up to his mistake.
“That’s Naz,” he said. “He’s not going to try and hide behind it. He’s not going to make excuses. He realized he made a mistake and I guarantee you he’s already moved on from it and is chomping at the bit, ready to get back.”
Since the incident occurred, Kadri, who wasn’t available to the media Wednesday, has been the subject of daily conversation and scrutiny in Toronto, where Colborne knows all too well how the local media react to things.
“You’re either a step under a God out there or you’re right at the bottom of the garbage bin,” Colborne said.
“There’s no in between. Naz, he’s a pretty big personality and when something like that happens, it’s just magnified even more by the media.
“He’s a very confident guy, so I’m sure he’ll be able to bounce back no matter what happens.”
Shanahan did the talking Wednesday at Air Canada Centre and said Kadri’s problems go beyond being late for a team meeting.
“It’s time for him to start making better decisions,” Shanahan told the Toronto media. “There’s a history here and there comes a point in the careers of many hockey players in similar situations, there comes a point where you’ve got to grow up. Naz is 24 now. This is not something that we felt would benefit him if we swept it under the rug.
“So he understands our decision, he understands how serious we are about him taking the next step. And incidents like this won’t be tolerated.”
When Colborne arrived on scene in Toronto midway during the 2010-11 season, Kadri had split time between the AHL and NHL and had just turned 20 that fall.
The two are the same age — both with 1990 birthdays — and were both still wide-eyed rookies. Colborne admitted it took Kadri some time to find his way.
“He’s not afraid to speak his mind,” Colborne said. “He had to learn over the first couple years how to work his way into a situation where you’re allowed to (speak your mind). Again, he’s one of the most well-liked guys in that room. I know for a fact. He’s a guy that puts a smile on my face every time I see him. He’s a guy who’ll bounce back from it and come out with a good attitude.
“He’s a real honest, genuine guy who gets put in a tough situation every now and then. That’s part of being in Toronto.”
Calgary HeraldEach Valentine’s Day, I start off feeling happy. My contentment grows as my husband and I put our five children to bed and we enjoy a quiet dinner in the kitchen. I’m still happy when we plop ourselves onto the sofa for an hour of television before bedtime. But then my mood changes and I can’t help thinking about divorce. I don’t mean for me. It’s the shows we watch. The romantic twists and miserable turns of the characters; their many heartbreaks and only occasional highs reflect a deeper truth about modern life.
The fact is, in the United States the probability of a first marriage lasting for 20 years has decreased to about 50-50. (Before anyone blames Western decadence for the breakdown of the family, it should be pointed out that the Maldives occupies the number one spot in the divorce league tables, followed by Belarus. The United States is third.) Furthermore, these grim statistics don’t even touch on the reality that for an increasing percentage of the population, life is a series of short cohabitations punctuated by the arrival of children. For a country that makes such a fuss about love on the 14th of February, America has a funny way of showing it on the other 364 days of the year.
This may be my XX chromosomes doing the talking, but it seems to me that divorce is, and always has been, a women’s issue par excellence. Multiple studies have shown that women bear the brunt of the social and economic burdens that come with divorce. The quickest route to poverty is to become a single mother. This is awful enough, but what I find so galling is that the right to divorce was meant to be a cornerstone of liberty for women. For centuries, divorce in the West was a male tool of control—a legislative chastity belt designed to ensure that a wife had one master, while a husband could enjoy many mistresses. It is as though, having denied women their cake for so long, the makers have no wish to see them enjoy it.
There is no point trying to pin down where things went wrong for women because, when it comes to divorce, it’s not clear that things were ever right. Still, that shouldn’t prevent us from exploring how the modern concept of a legal divorce came into being, or from dismantling many of the myths that surround the history of divorce.
The most celebrated divorce case in history remains that of Henry VIII versus Pope Clement VII. The battle began in 1527, when Henry tried to force the pope into annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to provide him with a male heir. Determined to make the younger and prettier Anne Boleyn his wife, Henry finally broke with Rome in 1533 and declared himself the head of a new church, the Church of England. The collateral damage from Henry’s unilateral decision was a way of life that stretched back for more than a thousand years. Gone forever was not just a system of patronage or the ancient rites, but the vast network of religious schools, hospitals, convents and monasteries that maintained the social fabric of the country.
If Helen’s face is said to have launched a thousand ships, then Anne’s closed a thousand churches. Yet her ascendancy over Henry did not survive the stillbirth of a male heir. A mere three years after the controversial marriage, Anne was convicted of treason, adultery and incest, and beheaded. Her enemies were legion by the time of her death, and even today some still regard her as the original home-wrecker, the woman whose unbridled social ambition destroyed the sanctity of marriage. It is generally assumed that she caused the floodgates of divorce to be opened in England, never to be closed again.
As with most assumptions, appearances can be deceiving. Henry’s marriage to Anne led to precisely one divorce—in 1552. The term was not even used again until 1670. In fact, while Protestant Europe was beginning to embrace the idea that there could indeed be justifiable reasons for ending a marriage, England actually made a lurch backward. Not only did Henry VIII’s new church come out against divorce under any circumstances, but it also far outstripped Catholic Europe in the restrictions on the granting of annulments. The liberal consanguinity rules of cousinhood, for example, which allowed even distantly related couples to part, were scrapped entirely.
The Church of England’s resistance to divorce was so strong that the only route to a divorce was via an act of Parliament—a law voted through by both houses. Not surprisingly, few people had the means or inclination to expose their private unhappiness to the press, the public and 800-odd politicians. When a divorce law was finally enacted in 1857, and the “floodgates” were opened, the number of divorces in English history stood at a mere 324.
Only four of the 324 cases were brought by women. A husband needed to prove adultery to obtain a divorce. By contrast, a wife was required to prove adultery and some other especially aggravating circumstance to have the same grounds. Over the years, women learned that brutality, rape, desertion and financial chicanery did not count. In fact, Parliament seemed hard pressed to say what did, until Jane Addison launched her case in 1801. She won on the basis of Mr. Addison’s adultery and incest with her sister in the marital home.
Before Mrs. Addison’s successful suit, the best a woman could hope for was a legal separation. Such arrangements were under the jurisdiction of the church courts. Litigants of either sex could sue for separation on the basis of life-threatening cruelty or adultery. Women who obtained a divortium a mensa et thoro (separation from bed and board) could live apart from their husbands, often on an allowance fixed by the court. The process was expensive and tortuous—hence there were only a few dozen cases a year—and at the end, no matter what the grounds for the separation, a wife was still required to be chaste and obedient to her husband. Unless there were truly extenuating circumstances, she could expect to lose custody of her children, too.
The paucity of options available to women did not mean that they simply stopped trying. The grounds for annulment included inability to consummate the marriage. The sheer ordeal of providing proof—the wife was always subjected to physical examinations of the most intrusive kind—was enough to deter most women. But in 1561, Willmott Bury of Devon requested an annulment on the grounds that her husband, John, was physically incapable of consummating the marriage. The examining midwives agreed that Mrs. Bury was a virgin, and a physician testified that a kick from a horse had left Mr. Bury with just one testicle, the size of a tiny bean. The court duly granted an annulment. Unfortunately, on his release from Willmott, John married again and fathered a son. Matters came to a head when the next in line to inherit Bury’s estate challenged the validity of the annulment, and tried to have the son proclaimed illegitimate. The suit ultimately failed.
The embarrassment caused by the Bury case led to a far stricter interpretation of the rules, including the new stipulation that if an ex-husband suddenly “found” his potency, the annulment became invalid. Nevertheless, in 1613, Frances, Countess of Essex, and her family cited impotency in their nullity suit against the Earl of Essex. As the countess’ father put it, “the Earl had no ink in his pen.” Essex did not dispute the fact that the marriage had never been consummated. But, eager to avoid dishonor and humiliation, he claimed that the difficulty was only with Frances.
Aristocratic society did not know what to make of the case. Meanwhile, Frances had fallen in love with King James I’s favorite courtier, the Earl of Somerset. She was desperate to marry him, and prepared to do anything to win her case—a dangerous state of affairs that would come back to haunt her.
Frances’ lawyers believed they had found a solution in the form of an obscure pronouncement by the 13th-century saint Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas, a man could be rendered temporarily impotent if witchcraft were involved. The Earl of Essex, claimed Frances’ lawyers, had been the victim of malevolence by a person or persons unknown. An annulment was therefore possible with all honor intact.
Few people were taken in by the Aquinas argument, and certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury, who headed the panel of ten judges. But Frances and Somerset had a powerful ally in the form of the king. The suit was granted by a majority vote, and the couple were married in December 1613 in the society wedding of the year.
This was not the end of the story, however. Two years later, the king received a letter that he could not ignore. It accused Frances of having poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury, one of the loudest critics against the annulment, who conveniently died just ten days before the court decision. If that were not damaging enough, Overbury had died while a prisoner in the Tower of London—sent there on the orders of the king. Behind the obvious scandal lay a possible conspiracy that reached all the way to the throne. Suspects were rounded up with bewildering speed. Frances was arrested and pleaded guilty to attempted murder. The disgraced couple was permanently banished to the country, where they lived out their days in bitterness and mutual recrimination.
The Essex affair had a dampening effect on annulment suits. Subsequent litigants invariably failed unless they had an incontrovertible case involving, for example, two women and a deception, such as the 1680 suit of Arabella Hunt, who thought she married “James Howard” only to discover “he” was a woman named Amy Poulter. A woman married to a castrato could also claim valid grounds, as in the doomed 1766 love affair between Dorothea Maunsell and the Italian opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci. This left two grounds open to women: bigamy and being underage at the time of the marriage. Both were easy to prove and surprisingly common until the 1753 Marriage Act established a set of rules for the performing and recording of marriages. Before then, a woman married to a scoundrel could only hope that he had a secret marriage somewhere in his past.
In 1707, Barbara Villiers, one of Charles II’s favorite mistresses, was rescued from years of misery after she discovered that her husband of two years was already married. Barbara had been long pensioned off with a handsome allowance and the title of Duchess of Cleveland when, at the age of 64, she fell for a man ten years younger named Robert “Beau” Fielding. She married him on November 25, 1705, despite his reputation as one of London’s worst rakes. But what Barbara did not know was that two weeks earlier, Fielding had married Anne Deleau, a widow with a fortune of £60,000. Fielding kept the deception going for six months until he discovered that an even greater deception had been practiced on him. “Anne Deleau” was actually Mary Wadsworth, a friend of the real Anne Deleau’s hairdresser. Fielding turned his rage on the Duchess of Cleveland, beating her so badly that she jumped through a window to escape his violence. She brought a successful suit against him in December, by which time he had already run through a great deal of her money and seduced her granddaughter, leaving her pregnant with his son.
Since the hideous violence Fielding inflicted on Barbara would not, in itself, have been sufficient to secure a divorce, it raises the question whether there was ever a case so extreme that the courts intervened. The answer is just once, but not in the manner traditionally associated with divorce. In April 1631, a grand jury indicted the Earl of Castlehaven on the capital charges of rape and sodomy. The list of his alleged crimes included hiring his male lovers as his servants and giving them full control of the household, marrying off his eldest daughter to one of his lover/servants, colluding in the seduction of his adolescent stepdaughter, and finally, holding down his wife while she was raped by one of his servants. Castlehaven’s chief defense was that a wife’s body belonged to her husband, to dispose of as he saw fit. According to English law, the prosecutors could not disagree with the first part of his statement, but they rejected the logical conclusion of the latter. The earl was sentenced to death.
Castlehaven was beheaded on May 14, 1631, almost exactly 100 years after the execution of Anne Boleyn. The irony was that in both cases, death had been easier to achieve than divorce. Contrary to popular belief, Henry VIII did not divorce any of his wives. He had sought an annulment from Catherine of Aragon—which he finally awarded to himself after the pope’s continued refusal. When it came to Anne’s turn, Henry took the easy route by having her found guilty of treason. Two days before her execution he became anxious and ordered his bishops to decree an annulment as well. Henry did not like to think of himself as a wife killer. If Anne Boleyn was guilty of starting any sort of trend, it was in adding new significance to the line “till death do you part.”The Camino de Santiago is much more than just a pair of boots and a spare raincoat, we agree. But we also know that the best way to get ready to this adventure implies to meticulously prepare the trip, and this necessarily implies choose the best equipment to walk to Santiago de Compostela.
What to include in your backpack
That mostly depends on the general plan of the trip. It is not the same history to walk or cycle the Camino, or to have the possibility of package transfer between the stages.
In any case you should obey some recommendations, which could definitely mean the difference between the trip of your life, or a some day’s nightmare.
Here you have some of the “must” for any possibility of trip you decide to join:
– Do not purchase a backpack too big: Between 35 and 45 kg will fit well, remember that the bigger it is, the more things you will pack on it.
– Spare clothes and extra socks: Although in other circumstances could sound strange for you, in walking 8 hours per day, change your socks becomes a necessity.
– Comfortable spare footwear: apart from some mountain boots, or specific cycling footwear, it is convenient to use some sneakers for your feet to rest after the walk.
– Raincoat easy to pack: No matter the season you decide to walk this Way, rarely this item won’t be used. An easy-to-pack raincoat can set the difference.
– Plastic bag: to pack food, clothes or your muddy boots, they will be so useful in different moments.
– Flip flops or waterproof sandals: Although the hostels and facilities in the Camino usually have high quality, it is convenient to bring with you waterproof footwear. They will be very useful in common toilets.
– Pilgrim first-aid kit: Your feet will be the most affected, so always take interest on them. Do not forget sticking plaster, needle for blisters, topical antiseptic and betadine.We haven’t heard a peep out of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) since June, when he appeared in court to be arraigned on criminal charges stemming from his alleged agreement to pay millions in hush money to an individual he reportedly sexually abused. But that doesn’t mean his legal troubles are out of sight and out of mind.
A U.S. district judge on Thursday reopened a civil case alleging Hastert misappropriated public funds from his post-speakership transition office for private business. The civil suit was originally filed in 2013 by a former business associate of Hastert’s, J. David John, and had been dismissed twice previously by the same district judge, Charles Kocoras.
But Kocoras wrote in a new filing that John has established that he told the FBI in 2011 of his “knowledge that Hastert was using federally funded offices, staff, office supplies and vehicles for personal business ventures,” allowing the suit to move forward.
A 2012 investigation by The Chicago Tribune spelled out how employees in Hastert’s Yorkville, Illinois transition office coordinated travel and meetings and conducted research on business ventures the former speaker worked on with John. One employee also accompanied Hastert and John on trips to Southern California to discuss a proposal for a Formula One racetrack. The newspaper investigation was shored up in part by documentation John produced in a separate lawsuit against Wheaton College, where he and Hastert both attended school.
Politico reported last week that the movement in John’s case could be a headache for the team defending Hastert against criminal charges. John’s legal team plans to press for further testimony to support the case, likely from the FBI and Hastert himself, according to Politico.
It’s possible that the two cases are even more closely intertwined. Politico noted that the FBI inquiry that led to Hastert’s indictment began in 2013, around when John first filed his lawsuit. Since John filed the suit as a private party on behalf of the government, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago looked into his case, even though it ultimately declined to join the suit.
John’s attorney, Michael Goldberg, told BuzzFeed News last month that he had no reason to believe that the two cases were related, but said the federal indictment “only serves to enhance our case and is a positive step for our case.”
Hastert’s attorneys did not respond to Politico about the lawsuit being revived.This post was written by guest contributor Rana S.
I no longer feel awkward saying it out loud – some may think I’m too blunt about it. You know, like, about my period.
Menstruation is one of the factors that nullify a person’s fast (regardless if it is during the month of Ramadan or not) – it automatically “breaks” it. Every Ramadan, I get asked by at least a few people I know (and a few strangers have asked as well) about why I’m not fasting whenever I get “caught” eating or drinking a beverage. I would also get teased with “Ha! You’re cheating!” or “I caught you red-handed!” I suppose some people feel obliged to say something due to the fact that I do wear the hijab, and thus it is assumed I am also the Ramadan fasting type. Sometimes these are people that I have already told that I fast during Ramadan, but then they suddenly see me “breaking” it.
During my high school and college years, I felt awkward confessing to guys that I was on my period. I would reply vaguely with something along the lines of “well, you know, there are circumstances in which Islam prohibits fasting, and I’m in one of those situations.” Some of the guys would look confused and simply reply with “Oh…okay.” If they inquired further, I would then explain that a person may break his/her fast for health reasons. I would lie that I had a health issue, but never say what that health issue was – I’d basically hint that I did not want to discuss the matter any further.
That changed seven years ago. I was on the metro drinking an iced cappuccino on a Ramadan day, when a Muslim guy I knew got on. When he spotted me, he walked over and said hi. Then he stared at the iced cappuccino in my hands. “Oh, you’re not fasting?” he asked casually.
“Not today…” “I guess you don’t feel like fasting today?” “It’s not that. I just can’t.” “Why?” “You do realize that there are exceptions to the fasting rule?” “Well I know illness is one of them. Are you feeling okay?” “I’m fine…” “Then how you come you just can’t?” “Um, I’m a woman?” “Huh?” “You do know, right, that the rules of fasting differ for women?” “Really?” “Yes…” “Like what?” “Like, a woman’s period. It nullifies the fast. And yes, I’m on my period. ” “Oh…I didn’t know that.” [silence] “I honestly didn’t know that…”
The incident with the Muslim guy was my trigger of change. The fact that even some Muslim guys either don’t know or forget that anyone menstruating is exempt from fasting (an ignorance largely due to the taboo of “exposing” men to it) is simply…not right. To be fair, the metro guy wasn’t the only Muslim guy who asked – but he was the only one who kept asking to the point where I confessed that I was on my period.
The metro incident made me realize that the taboo of talking about menstruation or admitting that one is on her period to guys – even when it would be for educational purposes (as in the case of Ramadan) – was only because patriarchal societies devalue and censor women’s bodies whereby only some aspects are fully acknowledged while others are taboos. Menstruation is a defining symbol of womanhood for many women. It is human – yet I have always felt that I should be as secretive about it as possible, to the point as if it does not exist. I did not want to hide that unnecessarily anymore.
I have some Muslim girlfriends who would still prefer lying to guys during Ramadan than confess their menstruation status. A few even go as far as only abstaining from food and beverages in public so as to not be “caught.” A few others abstain from food and beverages only whenever they are at home, so as to fool their fathers and brothers. The taboo nature of periods, and the extent to which some Muslim women will go to hide it, is perhaps why some Muslim guys either don’t know or forget.
Fast forward six years later. I spent the next six Ramadans bluntly telling anyone who asked, man or woman, that I was on my period whenever I got “caught.” With guys, it always occurred on a one-to-one basis. That changed one day in Ramadan 2014. I was at work, and it happened to be an employee’s birthday. After the birthday cake was divided unto plates, I casually picked one up. One of male co-workers asked, while the kitchen was still crowded with all employees, “hey, how come you’re not fasting? I thought you were really into that.” All eyes turned towards me. I looked around the kitchen, then responded with “Okay, now that I have your utmost attention, I want to say: I’m on my period. I can’t fast when I’m on my period.” One of my other male co-workers laughed and said “Oh yeah! I remember last Ramadan when you told me. I knew when it started and ended!” The conversation ended thanks to a third male co-worker who cautiously said “Okay…this is getting awkward. Can we change the conversation?”
The work incident still makes me laugh. It also made me realize that I no longer feel awkward about explaining my period status during Ramadan to men, regardless of who they are or how many men are in the same room as me.
Just for the record, not every Muslim breaks his/her fast due to exceptions to the fasting rule. There are Muslims that don’t fast simply because they don’t want to. Others choose to fast on only some Ramadan days, but not all. Then there are those that were obliged to break their fast for a number of days, but don’t make up for them before the next Ramadan – or not do them at all. Fasting is a spiritual journey – not everyone is on the same pace with it.
I procrastinate horribly when it comes to making up my period days. Every year I get lectured by my mom about why I fast them anywhere between one to four weeks before Ramadan – especially since Ramadan these past few years has been in the summer, and thus the days are long. I half-heartedly convince myself that at least I’m preparing myself for Ramadan. That’s still smart, right?…Right?
Muslim girls: Take advantage of your period days in Ramadan. Organize an outing that involves food nearly every day before you return to your fasting routine. You should especially do this with other Muslim girls that are on their period. You deserve a break! How about even a dance party? Call it “The Period Party” and invite all your menstruating Muslim friends. That is, if you don’t think it sounds too cheesy. I have yet to try this. Or how about even a one week trip to somewhere around the world? You know like, during your period days.
Will I have any period stories this Ramadan? I probably will. Since I was 14, I’ve never fasted a whole Ramadan (one month) without getting my period and without getting “caught”!
Happy Ramadan and Happy Break-Fasting!Roy Hodgson’s worst fears over the quality of the playing surface at Wembley stadium appear to have been realised after a member of Slovenia’s backroom staff condemned the turf as “completely ruined”, a factor the visitors hope will count in their favour.
Saturday’s Euro 2016 quaifier comes just six days after Wembley hosted an NFL game between Jacksonville Jaguars and Dallas Cowboys, an event which, combined with poor weather over the past few days, has left the turf badly damaged in some areas. The stadium’s managing director, Roger Maslin, had admitted earlier this week that the pitch would “not be of the very highest standard” for the qualifier, with Hodgson having been critical of the decision to play American football in the arena so soon before the Slovenia tie. His side have conducted their preparations at St George’s Park, but the visitors trained at Wembley evening with one member of their backroom staff offering a frank assessment of the quality of the surface. “Down the wings it is fine,” he said, “but there is a 10-metre square patch right in the middle where the pitch is completely ruined. There is no grass there at all.” Water appeared still to be pooling in some areas after heavy rainfall earlier in the day.
Hodgson had dispatched his assistant, Gary Neville, to inspect conditions and the manager attempted to paint a positive picture of the situation. “It wasn’t as worrying as some of the other reports which have come my way,” he said. “The bottom line is the pitch is the pitch. We’ve prepared to play the game tomorrow. I’ll leave any further discussions until after the game. I will wait and see, but I was encouraged by Gary – who is instinctively a critical person – not coming back damning its condition totally. We’ve been all week preparing for the worst, but let’s see.”
Yet the Slovenia coach, Srecko Katanec, is hopeful his side – ranked 36 in the world and second in Group E behind their hosts – could exploit the situation. “The pitch will be in the same condition for both teams,” he said. “Even if it is not in perfect condition the better team will still have an advantage. If there is rain or it is muddy it is, up to a point, an advantage for the team that is defending because the ball is harder to control. I don’t care, we must play here and we can’t change.”
Hodgson will select Kieran Gibbs at left-back for the fixture having fallen foul of the new Uefa regulations which demand national federations submit their match-day squad the day before a qualifying game, with the governing body rejecting a late request to be able to replace the injured Leighton Baines in the England party.
The Everton full-back hurt his hamstring early in the national team’s final training session at St George’s Park and has returned to Merseyside for treatment, effectively leaving Hodgson with a squad of 22 for the Slovenia fixture.
England had already opted to omit Luke Shaw, the third left-back in their original 26-man party, from the trimmed 23-player squad registered with Uefa by the 11am cut |
to legalize marijuana on their reservations.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is still evaluating whether to move forward with legalization, Principal Chief Michell Hicks said.
According to a national Gallup poll conducted in October, 51 percent of Americans supported legalizing marijuana. A Gallup poll in 1969 showed such support at only 12 percent, but the numbers have steadily increased over the years.
Despite national trends, Duncan said he remains strongly opposed to legalization.
"A lot of people think it's no more harmful than alcohol," he said. "I completely disagree with that. I would argue that marijuana is one of the most destructive drugs out there, especially when it comes to adolescent-age children.
"In an adolescent brain that's not fully formed, it does damage to that brain that you don't see in a fully formed adult brain. I've seen case after case after case where young people are using that as a crutch to deal with normal adolescent stress. They become extremely dependent on it."
Eddie Caldwell, executive vice president and general counsel of the N.C. Sheriffs' Association, didn't want to speculate on whether legalization would come to North Carolina.
"I don't have a crystal ball," Caldwell said. "But there are things that have happened that I never believed would have."
The Sheriffs' Association hasn't taken an official position on the issue because legalization hasn't been proposed, he said, but he noted, "I've never heard a sheriff say he thought the laws on marijuana ought to be relaxed."
Asheville attorney Ben Scales, long a proponent of easing marijuana restrictions, disagrees with Duncan's assessment on the effects of the drug on youths, noting "The jury is still out on that. But I'm comfortable with restrictions on age."
"I support regulation and taxation," said Scales, who's been a member of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws since the early 1990s. "It's a plant that has many beneficial uses. We're distracted by the intoxicating parts of it. It's not dangerous to be treated as it is now."
State-regulated access to marijuana would make it less available to young people, he said.
"I think regulation would allow us to keep it out of kids' hands. Drug dealers don't check IDs," Scales said.
Like Duncan, Scales predicted marijuana would be legalized in North Carolina at some point.
"I think it will happen in some way," he said. "I'm not sure we'll ever have a system like we're seeing out West."
Scales said he planned to join medical groups in a meeting with state legislators in Raleigh in February in hopes of gaining support for a medical marijuana bill.
Scales was the architect of a medical bill introduced in the General Assembly six years ago that failed to gain traction.
Against a backdrop of growing public acceptance of marijuana, the illegal marijuana market is thriving in the Asheville area. Buncombe County has seen a spike in large-scale busts starting in early December, with local officers confiscating more than 100 pounds of pot.
Brent Culbertson, SBI special agent in charge in the Asheville area, pointed to increasing collaboration between local, state and federal law enforcement agencies as a key to catching those suspected of drug trafficking.
"We are making more marijuana arrests and seizures in the past few years because of the increased working relationships and partnerships that we have had in Western North Carolina," Culbertson said.
"Investigations often exceed county and state boundaries, and these partnerships are critical in continuing an investigation when we might otherwise come to an impasse," he said. This has been the greatest factor in the increase in our arrests and seizures over the last few years."
SBI statistics show a steady increase in the number of arrests statewide of people charged with marijuana sales and/or manufacturing over the past decade.
Those arrests climbed by 38 percent from 2004 through 2013, the most recent year from which figures are available.
Sheriff Duncan said marijuana in the Asheville area is coming from three main sources — from local growers who maintain elaborate indoor operations, from Mexico and from states such as Colorado where pot is legal.
Despite laws against exporting marijuana from legal states, a new trend involves shipping large amounts from those states through carriers such as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS and FedEx, he said.
The marijuana from legal states is the best quality, Duncan said.
"You have people who have botany degrees who learn how to maximize the THC content in that marijuana," he said. "Then you have some local folks who are pretty good and know what they are doing and grow a high quality marijuana.
"And then you have what's commonly referred to as dirt weed, which is imported marijuana that generally comes from south of the border that has a lot of plant product with it, not just the bud of the marijuana plant but much of the whole plant ground up and packaged."
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THC — tetrahydrocannabinol — is the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
In states where marijuana is legal, a wide range of related products are emerging, complicating enforcement in other states.
"You have everything from baked goods to cannabis oils that are being produced and sold out of these states," Duncan said.
The average sale price for illegal marijuana is about $2,400 a pound, but that can vary depending on quality, Duncan said.
"There's huge money in it," he said. "And I think the reason we see such a prevalence of it is that, for a fair amount of the population, it's accepted like alcohol."
Asheville area busts
Large marijuana busts in the Asheville area since December:
• Dec. 3: A Black Mountain man was charged with possessing more than 18 pounds of marijuana.
He's also accused of maintaining a house at 2 Arbutus Road for drug activity, according to warrants. Buncombe County Anti-Crime Task Force officers investigated.
• Dec. 16: A Leicester man was charged with possessing more than 50 pounds of marijuana.
He's also accused of using a home at 98 Gibbs Road for drug activity, according to warrants. Buncombe County Anti-Crime Force officers investigated.
• Dec. 31: A Fairview man was charged with possessing 12 pounds of marijuana. Buncombe County Anti-Crime Task Force officers investigated.
• Jan. 8: An Asheville man was charged after police say he was found with more than 10 pounds of marijuana.
He also was accused of manufacturing, selling, delivery or possession of a controlled substance within 1,000 feet of a school — the Irene Wortham Early Learning Center at 916 W. Chapel Road. State Alcohol Law Enforcement officers investigated.
• Jan. 15: A Fletcher man was charged after police say he was found with 9.6 pounds of marijuana. Buncombe County Anti-Crime Task Force officers made the arrest.
NC marijuana sales/manufacturing arrests The number of arrests in North Carolina on marijuana sales or manufacturing charges, from data provided by law enforcement agencies in the state and compiled by the SBI. Statistics are not available yet for 2014. Arrests Year
NC marijuana possession arrests The number of arrests in North Carolina on marijuana possession charges, from data provided by law enforcement agencies in the state and compiled by the SBI. Statistics are not available yet for 2014. Arrests Year
Marijuana sales/manufacturing arrests
The number of arrests in North Carolina on marijuana sales or manufacturing charges, from data provided by law enforcement agencies in the state and compiled by the SBI. Statistics are not available yet for 2014.
2004: 2,604
2005: 2,761
2006: 2,705
2007: 2,642
2008: 2,914
2009: 3,123
2010: 3,425
2011: 3,213
2012: 3,493
2013: 3,581
Source: State Bureau of Investigation
Marijuana possession arrests
The number of arrests in North Carolina on marijuana possession charges, from data provided by law enforcement agencies in the state and compiled by the SBI. Statistics are not available yet for 2014.
2004: 21,601
2005: 21,772
2006: 21,113
2007: 24,057
2008: 23,432
2009: 22,658
2010: 21,260
2011: 21,085
2012: 22,883
2013: 20,225
Source: State Bureau of Investigation
Read or Share this story: http://avlne.ws/1JCspQwAfter being ravaged for years, Mumbai is finally dying. There is only so much a city can take, and Maharashtra’s glittering capital with towering buildings, sprawling slums and crumbling infrastructure cannot bear the burden any further. The signs of decay became pronounced in the wake of liberalisation, when India’s financial capital emerged as the darling of business houses, attracting millions of migrant workers from all over the country. As profits soared for a minuscule, Mumbai’s descent into filth and squalor became rapid. Today, the stark contrast between jaw-dropping wealth and acute deprivation is more than a defining feature for the city as it grapples with urban poverty and dangerous levels of pollution.
The government, of course, would point to a raft of infrastructural projects it has undertaken to resuscitate the city, but by the time they are up and running, what remains of the metropolis would be beyond redemption. The recently inaugurated 11.4 km-long Mumbai Metro, delayed by several years and now mired in fare controversy, is a cosmetic intervention for a terminally ill city. Apart from mere administrative approval for a new international airport in Panvel, a slew of projects such as metro lines linking Charkop-Bandra-Mankhurd and in the Colaba-Bandra-Andheri route, the coastal road along the western seafront are still at the wishful-thinking stage. Like the rest of India, infrastructural initiatives in Mumbai take a long time to take off, and when they finally do, work moves at snail’s pace.
Long time in the making, but trapped in procedural delays with an indecisive leadership of the ruling Cong-NCP government rarely rising to the challenge, there is finally some movement on the Dharavi Redevelopment front. But, interest in Dharavi is triggered by its real estate value. Private builders would carry out bulk of the work, making more than a tidy sum in profits by redeveloping four out of the five sectors in Asia’s largest slum in the heart of the city.
If only the civic authorities realised the enormity of the disaster the city has been struck with. By 2017, Mumbai would be home to 20.5 million slum dwellers, most of them migrating from the countryside and the districts in search of livelihood. According to the recently released Maharashtra Human Development Index (HDI) report, this mass migration, the result of a non-agricultural and urban-centric growth, would precipitate a crisis on an unprecedented scale. The harrowing effects it would have on space-starved Mumbai’s frail infrastructure do not seem to stir the civic corporation and state government. This could perhaps be the worst form of urbanisation of poverty and lowering of the basic standards in life — primarily literacy and health care. Mumbai’s housing problem has long ago acquired monstrous proportions leading to a profusion of slums. One shudders to think what’s going to happen in the next three years. Life in a Mumbai slum is characterised by open sewers, lack of toilet facilities and drinking water as well as a complete disregard for hygiene. Yet thousands flock to the city every month in the desperation to escape poverty and starvation in the villages.
Ironically, the very factors that propelled Mumbai to the global stage also brought about its decline. The abysmal conditions of livelihood in the rest of the country conspired to bring down this once great island of opportunities.Deprenyl, used clinically in Parkinson's disease, has multiple pharmacological effects which make it a good candidate to treat neurotoxicity. Thus, we investigated deprenyl's ability to attenuate methamphetamine-induced dopamine neurotoxicity. We also examined deprenyl's effect in changing markers associated with psychostimulant sensitization. A potential therapeutic effect on either pathological domain would be a boon in developing novel treatments for methamphetamine abuse. Adult male Sprague–Dawley rats were split into 6 groups. Three groups received a 7-day saline minipump with saline, 0.05 or 0.25 mg/kg SC deprenyl injections given for 10 days before, during and 5 days after the 7-day saline minipump implant. Similarly, 3 groups received methamphetamine pumps (25 mg/kg/day) with escalating daily injections of methamphetamine (0–6 mg/kg) in addition to the minipump treatment. These rats also received saline, 0.05 or 0.25 mg/kg deprenyl injections given before, during and the 7-day minipump treatment. Rats were killed on day 28 of withdrawal and brain samples taken. HPLC analysis for dopamine and 3,4-Dihydroxy-Phenylacetic Acid (DOPAC) revealed a loss of dopamine in the caudate and accumbens which was partially reversed by high dose deprenyl. Tyrosine hydroxylase immunostaining in the midbrain was unaffected by methamphetamine, suggesting that dopamine neurotoxicity was localized to the caudate. Western blot analysis of the caudate after methamphetamine revealed little change in Alpha-Amino-3-Hydroxy-5-Methyl-4-Isoxazole Propionic Acid (AMPA) GluR1 or N-Methyl-d-Aspartate (NMDA) NR2B subunits, or their phosphorylation state. However, methamphetamine increased levels of GluR1 and its phosphorylation state in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), and these increases were attenuated by deprenyl. Methamphetamine also increased levels of PFC NR2B subunit, but these increases were not attenuated by deprenyl. We suggest that deprenyl may be effective in reducing the neurotoxic effects of methamphetamine and may also attenuate changes in prefrontal AMPA receptor function, presumably more associated with addiction rather than neurotoxicity.2009, Yankees over Phillies
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This was the sight that greeted New York Times subscribers yesterday morning after Hideki Matsui powered the Yankees past the Phillies for the World Series crown. It was the twenty-seventh time that the Yankees were World Champions and it was the twenty-seventh time that the New York Times memorialized the victory on their front page.
One of the greatest things about the Times is that its entire 150+ years history is available online. Much of it is behind a paywall, but, if you have access to the archives, there’s a ton of information to be found.
I thought it’d be fun, then, to take a look through the Times’ archive to see how the various Yankees’ titles were celebrated. I originally wanted to create a slideshow of all twenty-seven front pages, but that seemed like it might be pushing things a little bit. Instead, I chose a select few to feature here that hopefully show how the front page celebrations have evolved over the last 80+ years.
Enjoy!
(Click “Read More” to continue reading.)
1923, Yankees over Giants
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Here’s the Times’ front page from October 16, 1923, when the Yankees won their first ever World Series. As you can see, the Yanks earn the first column, but nothing more. I’m no newsprint expert, but this tells me that, while the victory was big news, it wasn’t profound – it was not important enough to dominate the front page. Or maybe the technology wasn’t there to expand the article across multiple columns. I can’t say. It certainly seems rather small when compared to what we see today.
1950, Yankees over Phillies
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Twenty-seven years and twelve World Championships later, the Yankees defeated the Phillies for their third Series title in four years. As you can see, the Times has expanded their feature to cover two full columns and even included a nice action shot of Whitey Ford. This seems to reflect a higher level of interest in the Yankees (which only makes sense, of course), but it still is nothing close to today.
1977, Yankees over Dodgers
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From 1951 through 1962, the Yankees would win seven more championships before going into a funk. Over the next fifteen years, they would go 0-for-3 in the Series. But then 1977 and Mr. October rolled around. Reggie’s three-homers in Game 6 secured the Yankees’ first Series title in fifteen years and landed him a prime spot on the cover of the Times. It’s impossible to say for sure, but you get the feeling that, if not for the terrorists/hostage drama that played out that day, the Yankees would’ve dominated the front-page even more. As it is, they take up a pretty good amount of real estate – much more so than ’23 or ’50. It’s starting to look familiar.
2000, Yankees over Mets
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When the Yankees won Game 5 of the 2000 Subway Series, they clinched their third consecutive World Series title and fourth in five years. It was the exclamation point on the franchise’s 1990s dynasty and everyone knew it. Needless to say, it was a big deal. The real estate that they gave the Series on the front page, from the four-column-wide victory hug to the smaller picture of a dejected Mike Piazza, is remarkable, and it says a lot about its importance. This is the kind of thing that we expect to see in this day and age, but it was a long time coming. I don’t imagine it’ll ever regress, but it’s hard to say. Maybe we’ll appreciate simpler things in the future…
Make of this little exploration what you will, but I think this evolution of front page celebrations clearly shows two things: the growing importance of both major league baseball and the Yankees to New York fans, and the country’s steady progression of how we consume our news, from a dense, varied view in the early-’20s to a more streamlined, local viewpoint today. It certainly makes for a nice presentation, though. It’ll be interesting to see how the Times’ presents the Yankees’ future titles in the next twenty-seven or fifty years.Women belonging to Iraq’s Yazidi minority, who follow a religion that is neither Christian nor Muslim, have borne much of the worst of the horrors to which Islamic State terrorists subject so-called “infidels.” Turned into sex slaves for and sold as wives to jihadists, the Iraqi doctors who treat them say the abuse is often beyond anything they have seen.
Speaking anonymously to Niqash, a publication focusing on Iraqi issues, doctors working in and around Mosul, the largest city in Iraq under Islamic State control, say Yazidis are among the most abused of those facing extinction at the hands of the terrorist group.
“It is a public, collective act of rape,” said one doctor, who remained anonymous for fear of retribution from Islamic State terrorists. “I treated about ten women and I was stunned to find one who was just 13 years old. Her mental and physical health were very bad,” he noted.
Another woman arrived in a such a state that doctors almost pronounced her dead. “She had been on a hunger strike after being raped by several of the IS gunmen and if she had not been brought to hospital, I am sure she would be dead by now,” the doctor said.
Another doctor in Mosul told the story of “Layla,” a Yazidi girl who is the focal point of the article, perhaps because hers was the story doctors could tell with the most detail. Layla was not a sex slave, but married off to a jihadist, one who forced her to convert to Islam and was clearly abusive. Layla was brought to live in the small town of Tal Afar, where her Arab neighbors noticed her deterioration, and finally one woman requested that her husband let her travel to Mosul for medical treatment. He, surprisingly, acquiesced, though demanding another Islamic State jihadist accompany the women.
A doctor described Layla as “pale and she had physical and psychological pain,” yet by virtue of being relatively intact, he said, “she was in better condition than some of the other Yazidi women we have treated here. Those women were beaten because they did not yield to the demands of the IS group members.”
The plight of Yazidi women during the Islamic State takeover of northern Iraq has become one of the most catastrophic humanitarian disasters of this war. The few that have escaped tell of a miserable existence in terrorist-run brothels, in which the jihadists force themselves by the dozen on the women, some barely adolescents. The brothels are often run by women, the wives of Islamic State jihadists or recruits to the Islamic State themselves, many from Western countries. While the number of Yazidis being subjected to this abuse remains unknown, it is estimated that it may be in the thousands, with reports of hundreds of Yazidi women being abducted in individual attacks on towns.Legislation that Gov. Scott Walker says will create jobs would provide hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to insurance companies, while giving control of a $250 million fund to out-of-state financial management companies that would not have to pay back the fund's principal and would keep up to 80% of its profits.
The proposal is supported by a group of Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac) and Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel). But some others - including at least one Republican legislator - are calling it a massive corporate giveaway.
The program is called the Jobs Now Fund and represents part of the $400 million Wisconsin Jobs Act. It aims to jump-start job creation in Wisconsin by promising $200 million in future tax credits in exchange for $250 million raised from insurance companies.
The money would be invested in Wisconsin businesses through management companies known as certified capital companies, or "CAPCOs." Those companies have been lobbying hard for the legislation; at least five lobbyists hired by the companies are registered in Madison.
Opponents say the proposal to give tax credits that guarantee the insurance companies will recoup at least 80% of their investment is no more than a handout from taxpayers. Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) said the legislation mirrors an unsuccessful proposal in 2003 by then-state Sen. Ted Kanavas, who led discussions about Walker's venture capital strategy.
"The bill... is the most dubious giveaway I've seen since I've been in the legislature," said Grothman, who has been in the Legislature for 17 years. Grothman was the only one of 26 people who testified at a joint committee hearing in Madison last week to voice objections to the plan.
In written testimony submitted for the hearing, Tom Hefty, the former chief executive of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Wisconsin, called the program "the largest special interest Wisconsin tax cut in history masquerading as an economic development initiative."
The $200 million in tax credits would never have to be repaid to the state. The payback, supporters say, would come from the job creation and business growth that would result from the investments.
"At the end of the day, we try to move toward that point where we can have a strong economic development impact, a strong job creation impact, and also hopefully provide a return to our investors," Jeff Craver, a senior vice president at one of the capital companies, Advantage Capital of St. Louis, told legislators.
Previous effort
Wisconsin put $50 million into a similar program in 1999 that was slated to last for 10 years. Two years past the end of that term, however, the state Department of Commerce has been unable to provide investment performance information about the program.
Instead, David J. Volz, a department spokesman, directed a reporter to a July 2010 study paid for by the Coalition for Capital, the Washington trade group for the certified capital companies. Study author Don Nichols, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor, updated his work on May 13 to reflect that 33 state companies that received loans or investments under that program were indirectly responsible for at least 944 and perhaps as many as 1,758 new workers in the state.
Under the proposed Jobs Now program, the state would get 20% to 25% of any profits from the capital companies' investments, but it would never get back the $200 million it put up in the form of tax credits. The capital companies would get to keep the principal at the end of the life of the fund, and also would collect management fees (capped at 2%) and as much as 80% of any profits.
"The bottom line is this is a $200 million toilet Wisconsin is buying," said Julia Sass Rubin, an assistant professor of public policy at Rutgers University. "The question is not 'Does it flush?' It's 'Why the hell are you paying $200 million for a toilet?'"
Venture alternative
Rubin and other critics say capital companies run expensive, inefficient programs that they sell to states with aggressive marketing and intense lobbying efforts - and some point out that better, less-costly alternatives exist.
For instance, Wisconsin-based venture and angel capital groups, at least six of which are in fundraising mode and evaluating investments, have been creating an infrastructure with investing expertise, willingness to collaborate on bigger deals and knowledge of the state's emerging companies. These groups, in fact, could benefit from the other half of the state's venture capital proposal: the Badger Jobs Fund, which would provide $200 million in state money to a mix of venture capital funds. The funds would have to match each dollar of state money with $3 from other investors, and invest the state money in Wisconsin companies.
The existing venture/angel infrastructure could actually be hurt by a program that uses capital companies, according to a study prepared last year by the Minnesota assembly's research department. The study suggested Wisconsin's 1999 program might have had no effect at all, "likely displacing venture capital financing that would have otherwise occurred."
The proposed Badger Jobs Fund would give the state a 100% return of its principal and 80% of any profit on its money. But backers of the two-pronged approach contend that while the Badger Jobs Fund is a good long-term strategy, the Jobs Now Fund would allow capital companies to put money to work in the state more quickly - even though several venture and angel groups in the state would be ready to make investments under the more taxpayer-friendly Badger Jobs Funds very soon.
Local venture and angel groups currently can receive a 25% tax credit after they make their investments, as opposed to the proposed 80% tax credit that's guaranteed to the insurance companies.
"The state can serve a facilitating role and provide incentives, but here they're just providing cash. I don't think that's the role of the state," said Kenneth U. Johnson, managing director of Kegonsa Capital Partners LLC, Madison.
At a news conference Friday at University Research Park, Walker said he was open to "tweaks along the way" but was committed to an investment proposal that could quickly provide capital to emerging businesses. Proponents of capital companies say their relationships with insurance companies allow them to raise funds quickly, so they can get money working faster.
"We needed to jump-start the economy," Hopper said.
Walker portrayed the legislation as collaborative.
"We worked with members of the Legislature and business leaders looking at new and emerging businesses and tried to model something where we had a couple different options, and we avoided some of the challenges that other states have had through this process," Walker said.
Gingee Prince, managing director of Enhanced Capital Partners, a certified capital company in New York, said Walker's office approached them. "We've been asked to help them move it along," Prince said. "The governor's office said, 'This is something we want to do.'"
A dozen states have used capital company programs, she said.
Some have negotiated better terms than Wisconsin's proposal would provide.
Tennessee's TNInvestco program returns 50% of its original principal and 50% of the profits to the state.
The InvestMaryland program, which cut out the capital companies but uses insurance tax credits, gives that state 100% of its principal back along with 80% of the related profits.
To Rubin, the Rutgers professor, the mere act of handing out millions of dollars will stimulate Wisconsin's economy. So the state needs to consider carefully the terms it gets when it contracts to hand out that money, she said.
"I'm all for venture capital, but the state should be treated like every other investor in venture capital," Rubin said. "Is Wisconsin such a dump that you have to get bled to get people to invest in the state?"
***
The Wisconsin Jobs Act
The Jobs Now Fund would issue $200 million in state tax credits to insurance companies that would provide $250 million to certified capital companies. The funds would be invested in state companies, and the tax credits could be used starting in 2016.
The Badger Jobs Fund would raise up to $200 million from the sale of bonds, then invest the money in venture capital funds. The funds would be required to raise money from other sources as well, and would have to invest all the money received from the state in Wisconsin companies.
Jason Stein and Cary Spivak of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this article.Shares
Here’s a question anti-vaxers may want to consider:
Can the parents of an unvaccinated child be held liable if their child becomes infected with a vaccine-preventable disease which then spreads from their child to another child or children?
Yes, they can.
In fact, for over 125 years, courts in this country have recognized a cause of action for negligent transmission of an infectious disease. In the first reported case (New York, 1884) the defendant infected the plaintiff with whooping cough. Cases since then have run the gamut: smallpox, tuberculosis, unspecified “venereal disease,” typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, hepatitis, herpes, gonorrhea, HIV. If your favorite infectious disease is not on this list, don’t worry. The disease may vary, but the legal principles remain the same.
You’ve got WHAT?
As the previous paragraph suggests, one need look no further than plain old negligence for an entrée to the courts — the same legal principle that forms the basis of actions arising out of automobile accidents and slip and fall cases.
Here’s how the Court of Appeals of Maryland described the basic law of negligence and its application to infectious diseases:
The traditional elements of a cause of action in negligence may be stated as: A duty, or obligation, recognized by the law, requiring the person to conform to a certain standard of conduct, for the protection of others against unreasonable risks. A failure on the person’s part to conform to the standard required: a breach of the duty …. A reasonably close causal connection between the conduct and the resulting injury …. Actual loss or damage resulting to the interests of another …. The notion of duty is founded on the ‘responsibility each of us bears to exercise due care to avoid unreasonable risks of harm to others.’ … ‘When a reasonable person knows or should have known that certain types of conduct constitute an unreasonable risk of harm to another, he or she has the duty to refrain from that conduct.’ …
One who knows he or she has a highly infectious disease can readily foresee the danger that the disease may be communicated to others with whom the infected person comes into contact. As a consequence, the infected person has a duty to take reasonable precautions—whether by warning others or by avoiding contact with them—to avoid transmitting the disease. ‘[As an example] if defendant knew that he was afflicted with smallpox it then became and was his duty to keep away from other persons, or should other persons approach him to notify them of the fact so that they might protect themselves.’
B.N. v. K.K., 538 A.2d 1176 (Md. Ct. App. 1988)(citations omitted)(emphasis added).
In this case, K.K., a doctor, transmitted genital herpes to B.N., a nurse with whom he worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital. (Hence the discrete initials instead of the names of the parties, although that privilege is not always granted to the litigants in STD cases.) Dr. K.K. and Nurse B.N. had a sexual relationship of several months’ duration during which time Dr. K.K. — rather ungallantly — failed to tell Nurse B.N. about his infection, even though he knew his diagnosis and on at least one particular occasion knew that he had an active case.1
While the facts were unique to the case under consideration, the Maryland appellate court correctly stated the law of negligence generally applicable in the 50 states. Some courts have added that the duty to exercise due care not to infect others is also grounded in the state’s interest in the prevention and control of disease. (Caveat: each state’s courts have the jurisdiction to create variations on the law of negligence, so, as has been said on this blog before, your results may vary.)
But what if one doesn’t know he has a contagious disease?
Actual knowledge is not required, although it makes for easier proof. Courts have found that in certain circumstances the infected person should have known, or, as it is sometimes put, he had constructive knowledge of his disease. This can be established on the basis of symptoms alone, without a confirming medical diagnosis, particularly where symptoms of the disease are well publicized, such as is true of HIV/AIDS infection and genital herpes.
Note that a “reasonable person” is the standard — what a reasonable person knew or should have known. Thus, being merely unaware (in cases where the “reasonable person” would have known) or willfully ignorant of the disease is no excuse.
Once a duty to act with due care is established through actual or constructive knowledge of one’s disease, the infected person is charged with, at the least, warning those with whom he comes in contact that he has a communicable disease (allowing them to choose to stay away) or himself choosing not to engage in activity which would spread the disease to others. If he fails to do so, the second element of negligence — breach of his duty — is established.
A tougher problem might be to show that the diseased person’s conduct was the cause in fact of the plaintiff’s injury, the third element of proof in a negligence case. Even though she catches the same infectious disease as is suffered by the defendant, the plaintiff must still show the defendant was in fact the source of her disease. Depending on the disease, this can be accomplished through expert testimony concerning, for example, how contagious the disease is, the incubation period, and DNA testing of the disease strains.
Finally, there must be actual damages, and there usually are, in the form of medical expenses. (The collateral source rule prevents the offset of health insurance payments against the plaintiff’s recovery.) In cases where the defendant’s conduct was particularly egregious, punitive damages might be awarded. Other types of damages are discussed below.
No two negligence cases are exactly alike. There will always be factual variations to weigh in determining liability. In general, however, negligent transmission of infectious disease cases will turn on two issues: (1) Did the defendant know, or should he have known, he was contagious, and (2) Was he the cause in fact of plaintiff’s disease. Once those two are established, the defendant’s lack of due care will almost always be a given, as will at least some damages. Of course, in some cases the facts may show contributory negligence, or even consent, by the plaintiff.
While negligence is the most common, and easiest to prove, claim against a defendant who has transmitted an infectious disease, it’s not the only one. Actions for fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, the tort of battery, other forms of intentional tort, and actions based on premises liability (for failure to warn of a communicable disease on one’s property) have all been the subject of suits based on the contraction of an infectious disease.
Some states have a law making it a crime to intentionally transmit HIV to another through sexual contact. If that is not the case, the crimes of battery and reckless endangerment may offer the possibility of prosecution for any infectious disease transmission given the requisite proof of intentional or reckless conduct.
So sue me!
So let’s apply these lessons to a perennial topic at SBM — parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because of unwarranted fears about vaccine safety. What part such children might be playing in the current pertussis epidemic is a question under investigation by public health authorities, as pointed out in a recent post by Dr. Steve Novella.
First, note that in the case of vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, it’s not the child who is calling the shots. (Sorry!) Children under a certain age (usually 18) are deemed legally incapable of making decisions about their health care. The parents make those decisions and it is the parents who are legally responsible for the consequences of their decisions.
Of course, as the standard for determining negligence is what a “reasonable person” in the same or similar circumstances would do, how could that standard ever be applied to children? The “reasonable toddler?” No such thing.
Second, it does not matter WHY the parent chose not to vaccinate in establishing liability. The parent may have exercised his statutory privilege of opting out for religious or philosophical reasons, but that’s not the equivalent of a “get out of jail free” card for all the consequences of that decision.
In fact, it can help the plaintiff establish liability by showing that the parent knew, or should have known, her child was vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases and that this, in turn, made it more likely that her child would transmit these diseases to unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated and even vaccinated children.
In one New England Journal of Medicine2 article the authors point out:
Children with non-medical exemptions are at a greatly increased risk for acquiring and transmitting vaccine-preventable diseases;
are at a greatly increased risk for vaccine-preventable diseases; In one study, at least 11% of nonexempt children who acquired measles were infected through contact with an exempt child ;
; Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease often start among persons who refused vaccination, spread rapidly within unvaccinated populations, and then to other subpopulations, such as vaccinated children.
In cases where there is not a confirmed diagnosis, I would argue that reasonable parents should have been on high alert for symptoms, given their child’s increased susceptibility. While the parent of a vaccinated child could be excused for not thinking his child, broken out in little blisters, might have chicken pox, the argument can be made that the parent of an unvaccinated child shouldn’t be given that consideration.
As one treatise states:
The defendant |
and utter dementia and loss of bodily functions, and finally death. The onset of this disease is typically identified around age 50-65 and 5.4 million Americans suffer today. This figure is said to reach 11 million by the year 2040.
Stats retrieved from here.
The good news:
While stem cell treatments can potentially pave the way for a cure once-and-for-all, it’s going to be at least another 10 years before the FDA approves of any such remedy. Fortunately, research has shown that marijuana has a very powerful effect on the development of the amyloid peptides that cause this disease. We found some scientific sources with great information and thought it’d be worth-while to summarize, cite, and share with our readers.
Read on, enjoy, and spread the word.
Cannabinoids can fight Alzheimer’s
It seems that some of the chemicals found in marijuana inhibit a particular enzyme in the brain that forms the bio-chemical known as beta-amyloid. The notorious beta-amyloid plaques are what initiate and perpetuate the neuro-degeneration of Alzheimer’s.
Furthermore, the beta-amyloid plaques are toxic to brain tissue, and it seems that cannabis acts as a protective sheath against this toxicity.
Finally, the research suggests that cannabis introduction to brain tissue prior to beta-amyloid plaque formation is more powerful and effective than consumption after the onset of the disease. Since the enzyme that produces these plaques is inhibitied, cannabis is potentially a powerful natural remedy to prevent the development of Alzhiemer’s disease. Even after the onset, cannabis can act as a natural and relatively effective means for reducing further plaque buildup and possibly even neutralizing existing plaque formation.
The science behind all this is somewhat complicated to articulate in simple terms, but we’ve provided some of the sources if you’re interested in the neuroscience of all this.
Some of the Sources we used
“Treatment of the cells with cannabidiol prior to β-amyloid peptide exposure significantly elevated cell survival”
– From the Journal of Neurochemistry by Luvone T., et. al
“Our results indicate that cannabidiol exerts a combination of neuroprotective, anti-oxidative and anti-apoptotic effects against β-amyloid peptide toxicity”
– From the Journal of Neurochemistry by Luvone T., et. al
“Here, we demonstrate that the active component of marijuana, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), competitively inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) as well as prevents AChE-induced amyloid β-peptide (Aβ) aggregation, the key pathological marker of Alzheimer’s disease.”
– From the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics by Eubanks, L, et. al
“The propensity of cannabinoids to reduce β-amyloid-evoked oxidative stress and neurodegeneration, whilst stimulating neurotrophin expression neurogenesis, are interesting properties that may be beneficial in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. “
– From the British Journal of Pharmacology by Campbell V. A. and Gowran A.
A thought to consider:
While we DO NOT condone the consumption of marijuana, we want to leave you with this thought to consider;
If these sources suggest that the consumption of marijuana inhibits the development of beta-amyloid plaques, and the consequential development of Alzhiermer’s disease, especially when consumed BEFORE the brain is completely plagued with these neural-peptieds, would it be wise to regularly (once a month?) consume various strains of cannabis to prevent the development of this disease?
Please consult with your doctor or shaman before attempting to self medicate. 🙂Meet Justin Snow!
Embarking on a artist’ journey is to be a permanent state of vulnerability. Subjecting oneself to criticism and praise. Never wanting to be the front man, Justin Snow has always worked with artists behind the scenes on music, from producing to songwriting. That was until a close friend of Justin’s urged him to use his musical talents and become the artist, weeks later that friend passed away. That friend was Steven Rodriguez better known in the hip hop community as A$AP Yams.
Those strong words from his influential brother in music left a lasting impression on snow. The new track “White on White” is an uptempo melody driven record produced by Kamoshun, with Cool & Dre behind the mix engineering. Justin Snow serves a staccato-driven hook and melodic verse before going into a harmonious breakdown, showcasing his versatility.Public parks are now off-limits to dogs in a northwest Chicago suburb.
Rosemont Park District's board decided this week to ban man's best friend from the village's parks in response to what a district spokeswoman said has been a series of recent safety issues.
Though signs have been up for some time, the district is now enforcing the rule, Director of Rosemont Parks & Recreation Karen Stephens said.
"During baseball games, people tie their dogs to the bleachers, and that's not safe," Stephens said. "People should have control of their dogs."
In one gated playground, people use the space as a dog park instead of the child safety zone it's intended to be, she said.
Second City Animal Stories
Stephens said the issue has previously been brought to the park district board, and the board took action Tuesday.
She emphasized the new rule isn't meant to be a cash grab, and district's staff won't be on the lookout for violators. Residents whose dogs are spotted in Rosemont's parks will be warned, she said, and if the behavior is repeated, a citation may be issued. The ticket likely wouldn't top $25, she said.
"We're not out here to fine people," Stephens said. "We're not that type of park."While a clear majority of Swedes support their country's open immigration policy, just 10 percent agree that integration efforts are working well, according to the survey by pollsters Ipsos commissioned by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
"The results should serve as a lesson for our politicians. Swedish people give a clear disapproval of how integration works,” David Ahlin, Head of Research at Ipsos told the newspaper.
Criticism of integration policies came from across bloc boundaries.
Among centre-right voters who support the four Alliance parties that formed Fredrik Reinfeldt’s previous coalition government, 66 percent said that these efforts were working poorly.
54 percent of those who back Sweden’s left wing and green parties offered criticism.
Unsurprisingly, supporters of the nationalist Sweden Democrats were the least supportive of integration efforts, with 85 percent slamming current policies.
"Most Swedes agree - across party lines, generations, in all parts of Sweden, different levels of education and so on. It seems that there is a fairly broad consensus,” noted Ahlin. The most common complaint among respondents was that immigrants in Sweden can end up segregated or isolated from other Swedes, due to problems with housing, jobs and education. Those polled also cited growing racism and xenophobia as a key issue as well as slow processing times for paperwork linked to migration. But despite these concerns, the report’s authors argued that Swedes should still be proud of their open borders. "We have long been an immigration country and it has been of major importance for society. The results confirm what other studies have shown. For example, Eurobarometer, which shows that Swedes are the most positive nation about immigration in the EU", said Ahlin.
There has been a growing debate about integration and immigration since Sweden’s last general election in September 2014, when the nationalist Sweden Democrats (SD) became the third largest party in parliament. The group is the only political party in openly in favour of cutting immigration to Sweden.As noted in my pieces on MITx, edX, Udacity and other Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, online education is driving today's higher education revolution. Though the flurry of attention around MOOCs may lead one to conclude that distance learning is a recent phenomenon, it actually dates back over 120 years.
According to a team of Ph.D's and NASA scientists assembled by Post University, distance learning began in 1892 when the University of Chicago created the first college-level distance learning program. Expanding from this initial use of the U.S. Postal Service for course correspondence, distance education moved towards live radio shows in 1921 and then televised broadcasts in 1963.
In 1970, Coastline Community College became the first college without a physical campus, offering exclusively televised college courses. Many other schools followed Coastline's lead with televised courses of their own. And, in 1985, National Technological University became the first school to offer online degree courses via satellite transmission.
In the 1990s and 2000s, distance learning over the Internet became the dominant remote learning craze. As more schools embraced online education, smaller, less well-known colleges and for-profit universities drove further innovation in the online education space. For instance, in 1993, Jones International University became the first fully online university accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. And, in 2002, MIT launched its popular OpenCourseWare initiative.
Babson Research Survey Group and College Board estimate that in the fall of 2010 6.1 million students took at least one online education course. In addition, according to Babson and College Board, 65 percent of higher education institutions say online education is now a critical part of their long-term strategy.
However, what has really blown the virtual lid of online education numbers was the 2011 introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). As noted in a previous Crotty on Education column, in the fall of 2011 Stanford University Professor, Sebastian Thrun, launched a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on artificial intelligence that attracted more than 160,000 students. Thrun's success inspired other universities -- such as Princeton, Penn and the University of Michigan -- to join the Stanford MOOC fiesta.
Now a full-blown race to become the dominant MOOC is well underway, with Coursera, World Education University, Udacity, edX and many others competing for critical mass and first-mover advantage.
With the tremendous increase of students participating in MOOCs and sundry online courses, distance learners are forced to become even more self-directed, engaged, and collaborative than ever before. As educational technology and students inevitably evolve, distance learning design will need to evolve as well.
I have no doubt that it will, since it's been doing so since 1892.
Let me know your thoughts in the Comments area below. And, if you like a piece, kindly promote it using the social media icons at the left and bottom of every post. Moreover, please track me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, and follow me on Forbes to receive regular dispatches from the front lines of global education.
Also, I now have free email newsletters on Education, Politics, Culture, and Travel. Besides summaries and article links, subscribers receive market-moving news before anyone else. My "Crotty on Education" newsletter, in particular, includes links to videos and podcasts by experts in the field, high-level research reports, plus the invaluable Crotty on Education Stock Index. Please subscribe to Crotty Newsletters here.
Finally, I am eager to learn how I can improve this column to better serve your needs. To contact me directly, please go here and click on "Email Me Tips."
Related on Forbes:Dependency diagrams for KDE Frameworks 5
For a long time we have been missing diagrams for KDE Frameworks, to make it easier to grasp the dependencies of the various frameworks. Since I like working with images I decided to tackle on this.
I did some research and found out CMake comes with a --graphviz option to generate.dot files, which can then be fed to the dot tool from Graphviz to generate pngs, svgs or other formats.
Armed with this, I put together two scripts :
kf5dot-prepare runs cmake --graphviz on all frameworks, generating.dot files,
kf5dot-generate then massage the.dot files, aggregate them and generate new.dot files which can then be piped to dot for final rendering.
My initial goal was to generate one diagram showing all the frameworks, but this is way too messy, so I ended up extending kf5dot-generate to be more versatile. Right now the output can be customized to generate a diagram of all the dependencies of one framework, to include or not Qt libraries, and to show or hide targets within frameworks.
I also used tred, another tool from Graphviz, to remove unnecessary links. For example if you have this graph definition:
digraph G { A -> B -> C # A depends on B, which depends on C A -> C # A depends on C }
You get this output:
With tred, the link from A to C is removed, since you can already go from A to C through B:
This helps making dense diagrams more readable, but it also hides some dependencies. Depending on the reason you are looking at the diagrams, it may or may not be a problem.
Examples
Here is a selection of the generated diagrams. The "simplified" versions have been run through tred.
Some tier 1 frameworks
Mostly useful to check which Qt libraries they use:
KWindowSystem
Solid
Some tier 2 frameworks
KAuth
KCompletion
KJobWidgets
Some tier 3 frameworks
To reduce clutter I removed the Qt libraries for tier 3 frameworks.
Some of them are readable:
KDESu
KIconThemes
Others are too crowded unless they are simplified:
KIO
Simplified:
KCMUtils
Simplified:
All of KF5
The big, crowded, overall diagram (and this is the simplified version!):
Useful.dot files
I took some extra care to ensure the generated.dot files are readable enough to be useful even if the resulting diagram is not: the code is correctly indented and relations are placed close to their relevant targets. For example, here is the.dot file for all frameworks: kf5.dot.
Under the hood
The scripts currently live in a git repository: kde:scratch/gateau/kf5dot. kf5dot-prepare is a shell script. kf5dot-generate is written in Python and uses yapgvb, a Python lib to read.dot files.
What's next
In the long term I would like to include these tools in our API documentation generation procedure so that when you browse the API of a framework on api.kde.org you get a diagram of its dependencies.Forum Forums Share Share
Walls down around Maria & Enzo's, The Edison, Enzo's Hideaway and Pizza Ponte
Construction walls are now down around the four new venues opening soon at Disney Springs in The Landing.
The entrance to Enzo's Hideaway is now complete with signage.
Maria & Enzo's now has all of its signs.
Pizza Ponte, the quick service location, is still to receive its signage, but preparations are well underway inside for opening.
Finally at The Edison, we now have a clear view of the entrance and its outdoor patio.
Click the gallery for more pictures of the new Disney Springs restaurants.
The Edison will host a Grand Opening Gala on December 31 2017, with dates still to be announced for the other venues. All are expected to be fully open in very early 2018.
Learn more about all four new venues in our sneak peek preview tour post.
Discuss on the Forums
Article Posted:Midvale Episode Features New Kara & Alex 9/5/2017 10:00 am
Supergirl is pulling an Arrow! If you don't get the reference let me explain. The show that started it all (Arrow) is famous for their flashbacks showing how Oliver became the man he is today. While Arrow likes to do this intermittently throughout a season, Supergirl is going to jump in head first with a flashback in episode 306! We'll get to see how, the best sisters on TV, acted when they were growing up together. Furthermore, the two will have to put aside their popularity asymmetry to solve a mystery at their high school!
According to Entertainment Weekly, taking over the lead character role as a younger teenaged version of Kara Danvers is actress Izabela Vidovic.
Of course that is only half of the equation! Supergirl.tv can independently confirm that an older yet still teenaged sister Alex Danvers will be played by actress Olivia Nikkanen, known from her roles on HBO's Boardwalk Empire and FX's The Americans.
Melissa Benoist spoke to EW about the episode and talked about how you'll get to see the evolution of the Danvers sisters:
You’ll get to see, through the way they interact, how their relationship started when Kara first came to Earth, how it grew, how it became so close and why they’re so close nowadays.
The episode is titled Midvale and is described as:
The Danvers sisters take a road trip to their childhood home of Midvale, where they relive a murder mystery from high school that shaped their relationship as we know it.
For more on what is in store for this episode, head on over to our spoilers page to get some awesome and revealing details (read at your own risk)! Let us know what you think of this major sister-themed episode and a flashback to Midvale high in our comments below and in the forum! Keep us the #1 source for Supergirl news and advertisement free and visit the support page too! Supergirl returns for season 3 on October 9th, 2017 at 8pm only on The CW.The Canadian government has not lived up to its responsibilities to stop disapperances, critics say [GALLO/GETTY]
As human rights activists around the world marked the International Day of the Disappeared by focusing on Peru, Iraq, Nepal and Mexico, Leslie Spillett sat in her office in Winnipeg, contemplating the fate of more than 500 indigenous women who have disappeared in Canada.
The violence, primarily targeting young women from disadvantaged backgrounds over the past three decades, is "truly appalling" according to Amnesty International and, say human rights groups, has not been properly addressed by security forces in one of the world's richest countries.
When framed purely in numerical terms, the disappearances in Canada pale in comparison to the 15,000 who vanished during Peru's battle with Shining Path fighters in the early 1990s and come nowhere near to the estimated one million who have disappeared in Iraq during 30 years of dictatorship and occupation.
But these facts provide little comfort to the families of the missing women.
"The measurement of what is worse is a pointless question," Jessica Yee, an indigenous youth activist in Ontario province, says. "Do you really brush something off because it is not open war?"
'Disappeared'
Disappeared, as a pejorative verb, first entered the popular lexicon in the 1970s, during a series of dirty wars in Latin America, notably Argentina, says Marieke Van den Berg, a spokesperson for the International Coalition against Enforced Disappearances.
"Since the 1970s hundreds of thousands have disappeared and most have not resurfaced alive," Van den Berg says.
"Families must be able to retain the remains to mourn" Nicole Engelbrecht, ICRC
Enforced disappearance, in its most basic definition, refers to actions undertaken by a state, or its proxies, and while there is no systematic campaign by Canadian security forces to murder indigenous women, Nathan Derejko, a doctoral fellow in international humanitarian law at the University of Galway, says: "If there are a specific group of individuals who are going missing, the state has an obligation to investigate."
"Canada has both negative and positive obligations under international human rights law," Derejko says.
"Negative obligations [include] refraining from taking certain action [such as torture or extra-judicial killings].
"For its positive obligations, the state must take legislative and judicial steps [to deal with abuses] even if they are committed by non-state actors."
'Starlight tours'
Most of the disappeared indigenous Canadians are thought to have been killed by sexual predators or serial killers like William Pickton, who was convicted of murdering six women and is thought to have killed dozens more.
But there have been isolated cases of security forces actively attacking indigenous people - hauling them to the outskirts of cities and leaving them to freeze in a process that has become known as the "starlight tour".
In 1990, 17-year-old Neil Stonechild was found frozen to death in a remote field outside Saskatoon. The temperature was -28C that night and Stonechild was found wearing only one shoe.
His mother and indigenous leaders believe police drove him out of the city and left him for dead, in what could be considered an extra-judicial killing.
After years of stalling and bad press, the government called an inquiry into the teenager's death.
Police admitted to bungling the investigation, and closing his case file without interviewing the proper witnesses.
The two officers blamed for driving him out of the city were fired from the force, but no one was charged over his death.
In 2000, two veteran police officers admitted to picking up Darrell Night, an indigenous man, and driving him to the outskirts of Saskatoon, leaving him alone in -22C weather.
A jury found the men guilty of unlawful confinement, not murder, and sentenced the pair to eight months in jail. They served half that sentence.
Law undermined
These cases do not count as enforced disappearances because the bodies of those involved were found, but comparisons have been drawn with extra-judicial killings.
However, even if Canada was considered to have participated in enforced disappearances, it could not be held accountable under international law as it has not signed the 2006 International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance - joining Algeria, Colombia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and a host of other countries.
"We are calling on states to ratify the convention, because it still has not entered into force," Nicole Engelbrecht, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), says.
Women have been holding protests and memorials for their missing'sisters' [GALLO/GETTY]
Canada is particularly troubled by article 33, which demands that states "adequately investigate... those responsible for the death and disappearance of indigenous women" and article 26 which calls for taking "measures to combat socio-economic discrimination which is a cause of continuous violence against Aboriginal women".
While international treaties on forced disappearance are often not worth the paper they are printed on, signing conventions at least signals a willingness to address the issues.
Presently, 19 countries have signed the agreement.
But it does not come into force until 20 states ratify, meaning that Canada's lack of participation plays a role in undermining the entire framework.
"As soon as 20 countries have signed on, states that have ratified have to [follow through with their obligations]," Van den Berg says.
Canada and the US have also refused to sign the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which does not help the situation for disappeared women.
History of colonialism
Spillett believes the current violence must be framed within the history of colonialism.
"We have been displaced from out land, so people come to the cities thinking there might be some opportunities, but there aren't any," she says.
When young women leave their families in search of work or a better life, they can become vulnerable to predators, addiction and other forms of marginalisation.
But regardless of the historical roots, not knowing what has happened to their loved-ones is often the hardest part for family members.
"It is a universal phenomenon and something needs to be done," Engelbrecht says. "The families must be able to retain the remains and mourn."
After military rule in Argentina, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo - women who had lost their children to fates unknown - played an important role in pressuring the government to find out what happened to the disappeared, to seek justice and to preserve the memories of their children.
And despite the many differences between the plight of missing indigenous women in Canada and those who have been made to disappear by violent governments, the desire to know what happened and to seek justice transcends ethnicity, class and national divisions.He is the architect and very public face behind Saudi Arabia’s boldest military campaign in nearly 100 years. But Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s young, newly-minted defense minister, remains a virtually unknown figure at home and abroad.
With a swift and sudden rise to power two months ago, the machinations of Mohammed, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz’s favored son, remain elusive and his skill untested, even as he leads an aggressive—and escalating—Arab coalition intervention against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. In just a week of fighting, he’s become a poster boy for the Saudi-led military campaign, known as “Operation Decisive Storm,” as well as an embodiment of his country’s recent shift toward a more hawkish foreign policy in the region.
Yet he is a man whose youth and inexperience has left him almost invisible until now. Even the prince’s age is a matter of speculation and debate. Some peg him as young as 27. Others say he could be as old as 35.
“He is a mystery,” says Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. More than a half-dozen other analysts and Middle East experts interviewed by Vocativ paint the prince in equally ambiguous terms.
As questions about Prince Mohammed grow, at least one thing is clear, observers say. He’s emerged as one of the most influential players in the House of Saud, and likely the youngest to yield any real influence. After ascending to the Saudi throne in January, his father, King Salman, moved swiftly to consolidate power, appointing the prince to three key cabinet posts. He made Mohammed defense minister and head of a newly-formed economic council. He also placed the prince in the role of chief of the royal court, the equivalent of White House chief of staff.
Saudi Defence Minister, Prince Mohammad bin Salman (C), visits the International Defense Exhibition and Conference in Abu Dhabi February 22, 2015. REUTERS
“The fact that King Salman has bestowed these three extremely important positions on one of his younger sons is indicative of the trust that the king has in Prince Mohammed’s abilities,” says Fahad Nazer, a terrorism analyst at JTG Inc., a US-based consultancy, who has worked for the Saudi embassy in Washington. But, he says, “The truth is that [Mohammed] is something of an unknown commodity in Saudi Arabia as well. People don’t seem to know that much about him.”
Though a longtime confidant and special advisor to his father, the prince—who studied law at King Saud University, according to the Saudi Embassy, and is one of the few members of the Al Saud family in his generation not to be educated abroad—has never held a significant government position. Significantly, he has no prior military experience.
Prince Mohammed’s role as chief of the royal court could prove problematic as well, says Thomas Lippman, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. and author of Saudi Arabia on the Edge: The Uncertain Future of an American Ally. As his father’s gatekeeper, he may end up butting heads with men who are older and hold tremendous political clout, a difficult proposition in a country where respect comes with age.
“Imagine if a person in Washington simultaneously became the secretary of defense and the president’s chief of staff overnight,” Lippman says. “Then imagine if that same person was a 33-year-old unknown.”
Thus far, the prince has not held back. In an article published last week, Lippman hinted that King Salman’s final decision to intervene in Yemen may have arrived after Mohammed convinced him to do so, despite vocal concerns from the country’s foreign minister, Prince Saud Faisal. And as the Saudis launched their first airstrikes last week against Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, Prince Mohammed moved to smooth diplomatic relations abroad.
Mohammed bin Salman meets with U.S. House Speaker John Boehner Speaker.gov
This week, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, credited the defense minister with easing tensions between his country and the Swedish government, whose foreign minister publicly criticized the Saudis over alleged civil rights abuses. The paper also reported that Prince Mohammed managed to persuade Sudan, an Iran ally, to join his country’s military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. On Tuesday, he hosted U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and a delegation of Republican lawmakers in Riyadh, which made for a nice photo opportunity.
Experts say that the prince’s forceful role coincides with a marked departure in Saudi foreign policy. Despite spending billions to develop military facilities, the country has long exercised its influence through its financial wealth and diplomacy. Some believe the shift speaks to a desire among younger Saudis who, more than their predecessors, are eager to assert the kingdom’s power and influence over the region.
“They seem to be a generation that’s more confident of themselves,” says Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political science professor at United Arab Emirates University. “They see there’s a need for flexing military muscle and drawing a line in sand. The message seems to be: ‘We’ve had enough of being pushed around by Iran. It’s time to defend our own turf.’”
اجمل صورتين لسيف سلمان الامير محمد بن سلمان قاهر المجوس وزير دفاعنا #عاصفة_الحزم #السعودية pic.twitter.com/LtYuDdaztJ — الــقـنـــــاص ksa (@al8nas_ksa) March 29, 2015
Prince Mohammed’s youthful gravitas seems to perfectly embody this belief, and his display of military might has already endeared him to many at home. Since Decisive Storm began, Saudi television has continuously broadcast looped footage of the young defense chief directing the war campaign, according to reports. Vocativ reported Tuesday that Saudi social media users have created Prince Mohammed fan pages and uploaded hundreds of photos of him on Twitter, solidifying his role as a poster boy for the military operation.
Yet even with 100 fighter jets, 150,000 soldiers and a growing coalition, a Saudi victory in Yemen is no foregone conclusion. Fighting among Saudi troops and Houthi rebels has only intensified in the last week, stoking fears that a long, drawn out war may be inevitable. Prince Mohammed’s future may hinge on the outcome.
“If this turns out to be a success, if Saudi Arabia achieves its political objective, it will be time to start promoting the man behind it,” Abdulla says.
And if it fails?
“Prince Mohammed’s position would become untenable,” says Lippman. “Which will come back to haunt King Salman.”The father of the bomber who killed 22 concert-goers in an attack in Manchester told Reuters in the Libyan capital on Wednesday that he had last spoken to his son some five days ago, by phone, and "everything was normal."
The father of the bomber who killed 22 concert-goers in an attack in Manchester told Reuters in the Libyan capital on Wednesday that he had last spoken to his son some five days ago, by phone, and "everything was normal."
Ramadan Abedi, who was detained by a Tripoli counterterrorism force during the interview, said his son Salman had told his family that he was heading on pilgrimage to Mecca.
"I spoke to him about five days ago... there was nothing wrong, everything was normal," Abedi said. He did not say where his son was at the time.
Another of Abedi's sons, Hashem, was detained on Tuesday evening in Tripoli on suspicion of links to Islamic State, said Ahmed Bin Salem, a spokesman for the Special Deterrence Force, also known as Rada.
"We have evidence that he is involved in Daesh (Islamic State) with his brother. We have been following him for more than one month and a half," Bin Salem said. "He was in contact with his brother and he knew about the attack."
Rada said Hashem, 20, had travelled from London to Tripoli on April 16.
British interior minister Amber Rudd said earlier that the bomber had recently returned from Libya. Her French counterpart Gerard Collomb said the man had links with Islamic State and had probably visited Syria as well.
But Ramadan Abedi said he was sure Salman had not been a member of the jihadist group.
"Salman doesn't belong to any organisation," he said. "The family is a bit confused because Salman doesn't have this ideology, he doesn't hold these beliefs."
"I didn't expect that to happen, never," Abedi said, adding that he thought there were "hidden hands" behind the attack.
"We condemn these terrorist acts on civilians, innocent people," he said.
Abedi also said he was certain Salman had not been in Syria. "I checked his two passports and there wasn't anything in them, he didn't travel to Syria," he said.
While Reuters was interviewing Abedi, several unmarked vehicles carrying heavily armed Rada forces drove up to the family home in the Tripoli suburb of Ayn Zara and detained him.
Family members shouted at the Rada men, calling them "dogs", as Abedi was handcuffed and driven away.
Rada did not give a reason for his arrest. Libyan media and bloggers reported alleged connections between Abedi and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant Islamist organisation formed by Libyans who travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight Soviet troops and later plotted to topple former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. A Facebook page that appears to belong to Abedi shows links to several former LIFG members.
Some LIFG members and supporters fled Libya in the 1990s to Britain and like Abedi settled in Manchester, home to a large Libyan community. Abedi reportedly returned to Libya in 2008.
"I condemn anyone who says I belong to the LIFG, but I praise them," Abedi said.
Rada is one of the largest of the armed groups that have held power on the ground in Tripoli since the 2011 uprising that overthrew Gaddafi.
Nominally aligned with the United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), it has specialised in breaking up Islamic State cells in the Libyan capital.
Online EditorsOn Monday, the Ultimate Fighting Championship's 2018 pay-per-view debut was revealed with UFC 220 bound for Boston in January. Less than a full day later, the promotion is teasing some high stakes for in a new location for its second PPV of the forthcoming year.Tuesday, it was announced that UFC 221 will take place on Feb. 11 -- Feb. 10 for North American viewers -- at the Perth Arena in Perth, Western Australia. It will be the UFC's 12th show in Australia, but the Octagon's debut in the country's fourth-largest city; the state of Western Australia had outlawed the use of the cage as an fighting venue for MMA competition under former premier Colin Barnett in 2013. This past June, under incumbent premier Mark McGowan, the cage ban was lifted, paving the way for the UFC's entry into the state.While far from confirmed and contingent on the outcome of the main event of this weekend's UFC 217 card at Madison Square Garden in New York, the promotion is targeting a main event between current UFC interim middleweight champion Robert Whittaker and the winner of Saturday's middleweight title showdown between Michael Bisping and Georges St. Pierre. Whittaker took his interim slice of the title at UFC 213 in July, defeating Yoel Romero by unanimous decision. “The Reaper” sustained a knee injury early in the Romero clash, necessitating surgery that put him out for the rest of 2017.“This isn’t just huge news for UFC, but for the sport of MMA in Western Australia. Finally, MMA can be competed nationwide in the field of play specifically designed for the sport,” said Whittaker in a press release.“Anything can happen between now and Sunday, February 11. With that said, fighting on home soil is always a dream come true and I’d love to unify the UFC middleweight title here in Australia,” the UFC interim champion continued. “My next stop is New York City to be Octagon-side for UFC 217 -- let’s see what happens in that main event between Michael Bisping and Georges St. Pierre.”Runner spells out 'Warriors 2017 NBA champs' with 50-mile route through SF
A man ran the route depicted here to spell out "Warriors 2017 NBA Champs." A man ran the route depicted here to spell out "Warriors 2017 NBA Champs." Photo: Jim Plunkett-Cole Photo: Jim Plunkett-Cole Image 1 of / 99 Caption Close Runner spells out 'Warriors 2017 NBA champs' with 50-mile route through SF 1 / 99 Back to Gallery
Jim Plunkett-Cole ran across San Francisco, unnoticed.
He was sweaty. He was tired. He wore a U.S flag and a California state flag on his back. But in the bright city lights, people celebrated around him. It was about 10 p.m. on June 12, and the Golden State Warriors had outlasted the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals, winning the championship and avenging last season's loss.
He saw the euphoria a city feels when its team wins a championship: Cheering. Drinking. Strangers hugging. Fans dancing. Horns honking.
"The whole city just went absolutely bonkers," Plunkett-Cole said in a recent phone interview. "I could just see this was such a huge, huge thing, and I felt quite inspired to do some sort of tribute in my normal way."
WATCH: Golden State Warriors victory parade in Oakland (story continues below):
Plunkett-Cole's normal way is not everyone else's normal way. So the 48-year-old Englishman ran 50 miles through the streets of San Francisco following a route that spells out "Warriors 2017 NBA Champs."
The run was part of a larger goal. Plunkett-Cole is trying to duplicate the run from "Forrest Gump" - not the route, but the distance, about 20,000 miles. According to his calculations, he has to run 17 miles a day for three years.
Plunkett-Cole - whose Twitter handle is @JimGumpUK - started the journey on Oct. 1, 2016, and said he runs about 20 miles a day at a 12- to 15-minute pace, moving from city to city. Along the way, he promotes healthy living and fights childhood obesity with visits to elementary schools to encourage kids to be active.
He's been to Colorado and Louisiana, Texas and California, and countless states in between. When he arrived in California, he went first to San Diego. Then Los Angeles. Then San Francisco. He arrived in the Bay Area in the middle of the NBA Finals. Since Plunkett-Cole usually runs his 20 miles a day in the afternoon and evening, he was typically running while an NBA Finals game was going on. He checked the score every time he ran past a television at a bar. He noticed how people were behaving. How they were cheering. It was nuts.
"It seemed to be something that was bringing people together," |
of species richness for the set of species modelled here in the current period is shown in Figure 2. Projecting species’ distributions under climate change predicts altered patterns of global species richness by 2050. High intensities of species invasions are projected to occur in higher latitude regions, such as the Arctic Ocean, South Pacific, and South Atlantic Oceans (Figure 3 While global average latitudinal invasion intensity is predicted to be 6% of the initial species richness for RCP 2.6, this increases to 15% at latitudes >60° north, and 10% between 40 and 60°S (the Southern Ocean), but decreases to only 2% in equatorial regions (10–10°N). Under the high emissions scenario, invasion intensity remains low in the Equatorial regions (at 8%) but increases to 26% in the Arctic Ocean (>60°N).
Contrasting the latitudinal pattern of invasion intensity, hotspots of local extinction intensity are concentrated in lower latitude regions around the equator. Local extinction intensities measure 8% between 10 and 10°S compared with 2% globally, with estimates increasing to 12 and 4%, respectively, under RCP 8.5. Although the magnitudes of species invasion and local extinction intensities are higher in RCP 8.5 than those in RCP 2.6, the patterns of species invasions and local extinctions are similar between the two scenarios. The variation in invasion intensity is also highest in the Southern Ocean in both scenarios, highlighting relatively higher uncertainty of the projections in this region.
Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Latitudinal average of total number of species predicted to invade and go locally extinct per 0.5° latitude between 2000 and 2050 under climate change scenarios (a) RCP 2.6. and (b) RCP 8.5. The shaded area represents confidence intervals at 1 standard deviation (s.d.). Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Latitudinal average of total number of species predicted to invade and go locally extinct per 0.5° latitude between 2000 and 2050 under climate change scenarios (a) RCP 2.6. and (b) RCP 8.5. The shaded area represents confidence intervals at 1 standard deviation (s.d.). Presenting predicted changes as the total numbers of species invading or going locally extinct per degree latitude shows that, while species invasions continue to be more common at the poles, there are regionally fewer species invading than those going locally extinct in equatorial regions (Figure 4 ). Specifically, in tropical regions between 10°N and 10°S, our study predicted an average of 6.5 species becoming locally extinct per 0.5° latitude compared with 1.4 species per 0.5° latitude globally under RCP 8.5. Average invasions were predicted to be 2.0 species per 0.5° latitude in the Arctic Ocean, 1.5 species per 0.5° latitude in the Southern Ocean, and 1.3 species per 0.5° latitude globally.
The degree of geographic variation in projected species local extinction varies between SDM (Supplementary Data). For example, total numbers of projected local extinction by latitude are most concentrated in the lower latitudes using the DBEM (an average of nine species per 0.5° latitude at 10°N–0°S compared with one averaged globally), whereas Maxent predicts the most even distribution of local extinctions (average of three species per degree of latitude at 10°N–10°S compared with one averaged globally).
Model agreement
Supplementary Data Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Hotspots of (a) local extinction and (b) invasion intensity of 20% of more, between 2000 and 2050 averaged across AquaMaps, Maxent, and the DBEM under scenario RCP 8.5 and using the minimum presence point threshold, the minimum relative habitat suitability at a species occurrence data-point. Shading shows areas of high (3 models) and moderate (2 models) agreement. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Hotspots of (a) local extinction and (b) invasion intensity of 20% of more, between 2000 and 2050 averaged across AquaMaps, Maxent, and the DBEM under scenario RCP 8.5 and using the minimum presence point threshold, the minimum relative habitat suitability at a species occurrence data-point. Shading shows areas of high (3 models) and moderate (2 models) agreement. Predicted local extinction hotspots with high agreement (i.e. all three models) between SDMs are concentrated in tropical oceans. Under the high emissions scenario, areas that are predicted to experience ≥20% local extinction using all three distribution models are relatively rare and mostly located in the tropical Pacific Ocean (Figure 5 a). When agreement between two or more SDMs (instead of only three) was considered, the hotspots of ≥20% local extinction spread throughout the tropical regions on the central and eastern Pacific, extended towards Malaysia and into the central Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Guinea. When a more restricted threshold for species occurrence was applied (occurrence of the species was included when habitat suitability values ≥0.7 percentile for each species), the areas of high agreement of ≥20% local extinction are more extensive, in particular expanding into the equatorial regions of major oceans, including the central Indian and Atlantic Oceans and the East Pacific ().
Conversely, high agreement in hotspots of ≥30% invasion intensity was projected to occur in the northern Barents Sea, Greenland Sea, Bering Sea, and East Siberian Sea in the Arctic (Figure 5b). When species invasions are restricted to the new occurrence of species in the most suitable areas (habitat suitability ≥0.7), the invasion hotspots in the Arctic Ocean generally move coastward, in particular in the Barents and Greenland Seas (Supplementary Data). Although small, localized patches of invasion intensity ≥20% are predicted to occur in the Southern Ocean and North Pacific, these areas are more extensive when assessing areas of moderate agreement (two or more models). Under the RCP 2.6 scenario, hotspots of agreement show similar patterns of distribution but are more localized (Figure 5b).
Sensitivity analysis
Projected patterns of species richness in 2000 and 2050 varied only slightly with different habitat suitability thresholds (Supplementary Data), while the variation between richness calculated using different SDMs was greater using the fixed thresholds (0.1, 0.5, and 0.7). Restricting species distributions to only those most suitable areas resulted in an overall decrease in richness across latitudes. The general patterns of local extinction and invasion intensity were not sensitive to the threshold applied, although the magnitude of projected changes averaged for each 0.5° latitude, and their variations across SDMs increase as more restrictive thresholds are applied (Supplementary Data).
Discussion
This study shows a general signal of potential future climate change impacts on biodiversity that is robust to characteristics of the modelling procedures. Previous analyses using the same set of SDMs that were applied here advocate the need for a multi-model approach, thereby encompassing uncertainties due to differences in validated modelling methodologies and algorithms (Jones et al., 2012, 2013a). The multi-model approach allows us to assess the uncertainties associated with the lack of knowledge surrounding many marine organisms and their responses to change. Particularly, the skills of different modelling approaches may vary between species and regions. In our case study of historical changes in the Bering Sea, the DBEM and Maxent are shown to be slightly more accurate in simulating the community level response to climate change (mean percentile differences = 7.0 and 6.7, respectively). Such difference between SDMs may be attributed to the ability of Maxent to weight variables, while no weighting of variables was applied in AquaMaps, or further variations in modelling parameterizations and characteristics (Jones et al., 2012). This overestimation of latitudinal shifts in the Bering Sea may cause AquaMaps to bias the multi-model average. However, this study only allows comparison at a regional scale within a relativity small climatic gradient. Undertaking similar assessments within tropical, temperate, and polar regions would allow the capability of all models to project range shifts to be more comprehensively assessed. Global scale comparisons would also allow the overestimation of the highest observed distribution shifts by all models to be more adequately assessed. Furthermore, we do not know whether species at different latitudes vary in their relative sensitivities to change in particular climate variables, or whether the SDMs vary in their ability to reflect this sensitivity. Until data can be obtained to undertake this global scale assessment, using a set of SDMs enables us to bracket uncertainties in exploring the response of marine organisms to climate change at a global scale, reducing the potential bias from applying a single model. This is particularly important when applying a generalized approach to many species.
Latitudinal shifts
This study predicts that large numbers of commercially targeted marine fish and invertebrates will exhibit poleward shifts in distribution, agreeing with distribution shifts observed for marine species in the last few decades (Stebbing et al., 2002; Macleod et al., 2005; Perry et al., 2005; Simpson et al., 2011; Poloczanska et al., 2013). For example, six species in the North Sea were found to exhibit boundary shifts in relation to climate and time at a rate of 22 km decade−1 (Perry et al., 2005). Although this shift is similar to that projected using a high emissions climate change scenario (RCP 8.5), this is consistent with the relatively shallow depth and thus higher rates of warming in the North Sea relative to the global average. There is variation, however, between rates of shift projected here and those obtained from a meta-analysis of 1 735 marine responses (Poloczanska et al., 2013), which found the leading, trailing edge, and centre of marine species’ ranges to be shifting at a rate of 30.6 ± 5.2 km decade−1. This higher rate of range shift is likely due to the inclusion of shifts of range edge, as well as the set of species examined. The species used in this study are predominantly commercially exploited species. Because these are also, in general, wide-ranging, extinctions are concentrated in the tropics, with fewer local extinctions in sub-Arctic regions. This study supports the higher rates of latitudinal shift in the marine environment than on land that have been observed (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003) and predicted elsewhere using a single SDM (Cheung et al., 2009), likely due to higher velocities of climate change (Burrows et al., 2011) and lower constraints on dispersal in the sea. However, it should also be noted that, as mentioned above, comparing results with observations in the Bering Sea indicated a slight overestimation in projecting latitudinal shifts. While the extent of this difference might vary with species and region, the uncertainties in projections should be considered.
Changing patterns of species richness
Projected species’ distribution shifts will likely affect global latitudinal patterns of biodiversity, with the greatest levels of change in species richness predicted to be at the poles and tropics, which will become hotspots of invasions and local extinctions, respectively. This supports the hypothesis that the intensity of climate change impacts will vary geographically, consistent with the distribution of climate change impacts on land (Sala, 2000) and predictions of faster rates of warming near the equator and poles than the global average (IPCC, 2013). In addition, results are consistent with the theory proposing that the response of biodiversity to changing environmental variables, such as temperature, will depend not only on the magnitude of change but also on the physiological sensitivity of organisms to change (Pörtner and Peck, 2010; Scott and Johnston, 2012) and the position of that change within an organism’s characteristic tolerance limits. For example, species in tropical and polar regions have narrower thermal tolerances and live closer to their tolerance limits than those in temperate regions (Deutsch et al., 2008). Furthermore, the strongest ocean warming signal is predicted to be in subtropical and tropical regions, with SST data used in this study projecting warming between 1951 and 2069 by 0.98°C in the Arctic Ocean (>60°N), compared with a 2.08°C increase around the equator (10°S–10°N) and a 1.36°C global average SST increase, under RCP 8.5 (GFDL ESM 2.1). Therefore, in addition to tropical species exhibiting high sensitivities to environmental change, the high level of exposure to warming in these areas increases their vulnerabilities and the likelihood of high local extinction intensities in tropical regions. This overall vulnerability in the tropics, and the relatively shallow depths of seas surrounding Indonesia, explain the hotspot of extinction in this area.
Conversely, it has been suggested that species living in thermally stable environments have reduced acclimatory ability (Portner et al., 2000; Nguyen et al., 2011). In polar regions, for example, this might be caused by cold-adaptation, which has led to fewer red blood cells, oxygen-binding proteins (Nikinmaa, 2002), and enzymes that are particularly sensitive to temperature (Portner et al., 2000). In addition to pronounced increases in surface waters near the equator, future projections of ocean warming are characterized by heat uptake in the deep Southern Ocean at the end of the century (IPCC, 2013). This combined exposure and organism sensitivity to exposure at their upper thermal limit likely explains the areas of local extinction projected there, although the total numbers of local extinctions are shown to be relatively small. For other polar species, warming temperatures will reduce the likelihood that organisms will be exposed to their lower thermal limits, therefore allowing increases in both numbers and extent of populations previously at the edges of the lower thermal range. In addition, melting sea ice will open up habitats in the high latitude reaches of their ranges, leading to the projected increases in species richness predicted here, as indicated by the higher invasion intensity. The greater prevalence of invasion in the Arctic than the Antarctic is likely due to the greater rate of warming in this area (0.98°C compared with 0.72°C increase in SST and 0.60°C compared with 0.24°C in SBT, respectively). Furthermore, the higher invasion intensity in the Arctic Ocean may reflect the closer distance of the Arctic to other land masses. For example, if a species is restricted to coastal regions for feeding or spawning, dispersal towards the Antarctic may be restricted, despite seemingly favourable habitat. As an environmental layer indicating the presence of critical habitat, such as shelf regions required for spawning, was not available, depth was here used as a proxy.
As estimates of invasion and local extinction intensity indicate the percentage loss or gain in species per 0.5° latitude × 0.5° longitude grid cell, the initial species richness in an area contributes to the perceived relative levels of change and biodiversity impact. As the species set assessed in this study was weighted to exploited species, and data were more scarce in certain regions (such as the Southern Ocean) than others (such as the Northeast Atlantic), local invasions at the poles may appear relatively common simply because fewer species are being projected there. For this reason, total numbers of species invading and going extinct were also assessed. However, a small number of species in regions such as the Southern Ocean also attributes high levels of uncertainty to projecting general patterns of biodiversity change. For example, the projected low levels of extinction might be misleading if resulting from changes in a couple of key species. It would thus be beneficial to extend this work as data become available, exploring how warming Polar Waters might impact the distributions and persistence of cold-adapted species.
Exploring how areas predicted to be hotspots of change in species richness coincide with agreement between models allows an assessment of how robust particular scenarios of change are to aspects of the modelling procedure. This may be interpreted as the risk posed by climate change to different geographic areas (Jones et al., 2013b); those areas showing both relatively high levels of extinction, for example, and agreement in a level of extinction or higher, may be described as being areas at high risk of climate change impacts. The level at which agreement of change is cut off (here 20%) may then be altered to further explore the geographic localization of particular levels of local extinction, or invasion, intensity. However, the analyses carried out here aimed to make projections of future patterns of species richness, local extinction, and invasion intensity. They were thus limited in their scope to estimate factors such as when local extinction might lead a particular species’ range to decrease below a minimum viable size, or when a change in community structure in a particular area might lead to loss of species or traits vital to ecosystem function.
There are also limitations and uncertainties associated with the approaches applied here that should be considered when extending analyses and interpreting or applying model projections, for example, to inform conservation priorities or management plans. Variability and uncertainty will, for example, be introduced into the modelling procedure through variations in the data used to train and project a model as well as the SDM itself (Jones et al., 2013a). Although the multi-model approach attempts to partly assess structural uncertainty of the models and incorporate this variability, input data may also affect model accuracy and interpretation through the inherent assumptions of species distribution modelling. For example, SDMs assume that species are in pseudo-equilibrium with their environment, and that occurrence data used represent the entire ecological niche of a species (Svenning and Skov, 2004; Guisan and Thuiller, 2005). In reality, if these data only reflect a subset of a species’ true niche space due to the impact of, for example, adaptation, species interactions, and dispersal on a species’ distribution, both the estimated climatic envelope, and the way that it might be projected to estimate a potential current or future distribution, may be inaccurate (Soberón, 2007; Jiménez-Valverde et al., 2008; Warren, 2012). However, it has been suggested that marine ectotherms conform more closely to their thermal tolerance limits than terrestrial species and are more likely to fulfil their potential latitudinal ranges (Sunday et al., 2012). To overcome, as far as possible, the problem of temporally changing realized climatic space and its implication for estimating a species’ potential current and future distributions, all available valid occurrence data on each species were included to obtain as near as possible an estimate of a species’ absolute tolerance limits and climatic envelope. Even if a species’ exact climatic niche is known, however, further inaccuracies may be introduced into estimates of species’ future potential distributions if biotic interactions, which are not taken into account by the models, prevent a species occupying otherwise suitable habitat (Araújo and Luoto, 2007). As a recent study using the DBEM found projections of species distribution shifts changed little following inclusion of competitive interactions (Fernandes et al., 2013), it may be the case that the parameterizations of the model, such as the inclusion of natural mortality, may already account for some of the effects of trophic interactions. However, further work would benefit from exploring predator–prey interactions, and how they might change or limit responses to climate change and projected range shifts. For commercially targeted marine species, realized responses to climate change may further be influenced by the impacts of fisheries (Planque et al., 2010). The interaction of fishing pressure, and its impacts on the demographic structure of a population, and the integrity of breeding grounds and habitat, with stock reactions to environmental change may thus have implications for the accuracy of future distribution predictions. For example, if north and south regions of the North Sea are home to different abundances of particular commercial species due to higher rates of fishing mortality in the south, rather than a causal difference in habitat suitability, predictions based on the assessment of habitat suitability may be incorrect, with consequences for any management plans and conservation actions they might inform (Dulvy et al., 2008). In addition, species in the North Sea have been observed to be adapting to increasing temperatures through a shift in depth (Dulvy et al., 2008). Depth and SBT were here included as predictor variables, thereby accounting for the influence of depth in determining habitat suitability. However, allowing species to adapt by shifting their distribution to deeper, cooler waters and thereby potentially reducing predicted latitudinal shifts in distribution would require data on projected temperature changes throughout the water column, which is not currently available over a global extent. Developments have been made, however, in the three-dimensional modelling of marine species’ distributions (Bentlage et al., 2013). Thus, although the multi-model ensemble approach provides a way for broadly assessing the impact of climate change on species for which knowledge and data may be scarce, the challenge in their development would seem to be the incorporation of the influence of changing climate and the changing distributions and abundances of species with which they interact. However, their improvement and continued validation and assessment with observed data and knowledge of species biology and ecology that might impact the realization of predicted range shifts remain important.
There are also uncertainties in the climate data input into the SDM procedure. Although the world’s continental shelf regions and coastal waters account for most known marine biodiversity (Mora et al., 2008), modelling continental shelf seas presents particular difficulties in climate modelling as the present generation of climate models does not have sufficient resolution to resolve the shelf topography and many of the processes that influence primary production in the shelf sea ecosystem (such as run-off, seasonal stratification, tides, and nutrient recycling; Ådlandsvik, 2008; Holt et al., 2009). For example, Holt et al. (2010) used a regional model to predict that the climate change effects on the Northwest continental shelf would be very different from those in the open ocean over the next 100 years (Holt et al., 2010). However, these predictions still contained unexplored uncertainty and differed from those made using a regional climate model by Ådlandsvik (2008). Exploring the sensitivity of projected changes in biodiversity in coastal regions to downscaled data and regional climate models may therefore be useful, although an ensemble of regional models may be needed to enable a reliable assessment of the effects of future climate change in shelf seas, and the uncertainties involved.
Although model outputs here reflect species-specific environmental tolerance limits, and results are consistent with regional differences in vulnerability due to alternative physiologies, differences between species in traits that might impact their overall response to climate change, or adaptability, have not themselves been accounted for. Species may, however, vary considerably in the extent to which changes in their biophysical niche space impact their local, or overall, extinction risk due to particular life history characteristics, or traits (Foden et al., 2013; Garcia et al., 2014). For example, if a species exhibits narrower thermal tolerances or has highly specific habitat requirements at particular life cycle stages that have not been accouted for in these modelling aproaches, the impact of climate change on a particular species may be underestimated (Petitgas et al., 2013). There may also be interactions between the impact of fisheries on species’ traits and abundances and their response to climate change. For example, both fisheries and warming waters are thought to have caused the decline in sandeel in UK waters (Pinnegar et al., 2012). Developments are also being made in linking impacts from these two sources in species distribution modelling. However, given the lack of knowledge frequent for marine species, this study provides a first step in indicating key areas where further vulnerability assessment on a set of species, for which there are sufficient data, would be beneficial. For example, these might be in regions predicted to experience high levels of extinction intensity, or those that show medium risk from climate change, but which have high economic or social dependence on fisheries. Future studies will also account for the uncertainties associated with the projections of ocean conditions by applying different Earth System Model outputs to the SDMs.
Conclusions
This study is the first to apply a multi-model SDM approach to assess the potential impact of climate change on marine biodiversity at a global scale. Using generalized approaches to elucidate the averaged signal of response in latitudinal patterns of species richness gave average results consistent with previous observations and empirical projections of a trend for poleward shifts in species’ distributions and altered patterns of biodiversity under climate change. Analyses presented here allow the identification of hotspots of biodiversity impacts, with hotspots of local extinction intensity occurring mostly notably in the tropical Pacific ocean, and hotspots of invasion occurring in Arctic regions such as the Barents Sea, East Siberian Sea, and Greenland Sea. In addition, we indicate where identified hotspots of change, and the extent of change, are robust within the multi-model approach, coinciding with high levels of agreement. This study therefore expands on previous global assessments of climate change impact by providing an initial framework to incorporate particular aspects of projection uncertainty and depict the risks to biodiversity of climate change in the oceans.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Nippon Foundation-University of British Columbia Nereus programme and is a product of Nereus’ international and interdisciplinary effort towards global sustainable fisheries. WWLC is also supported by the National Geographic Society and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the provision of Earth System Model projections by Jorge Sarmiento and Thomas Frölicher.
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Identifying the world’s most climate change vulnerable species: a systematic trait-based assessment of all birds, amphibians and corals, PLoS ONE, 2013, vol. 8 pg. e65427, vol.pg. Froese R. Pauly D. 2011 Garcia R. A. Araújo M. B. Burgess N. D. Foden W. B. Gutsche A. Rahbek C. Cabeza M. Matching species traits to projected threats and opportunities from climate change, Journal of Biogeography, 2014, vol. 41 (pg. 724 - 735 ), vol.(pg. Guisan A. Thuiller A. Predicting species distribution: offering more than simple habitat models, Ecology Letters, 2005, vol. 8 (pg. 993 - 1009 ), vol.(pg. Harley C. D. G. Randall Hughes A. Hultgren K. M. Miner B. G. Sorte C. J. B. Thornber C. S. Rodriguez L. F., et al. The impacts of climate change in coastal marine systems, Ecology Letters, 2006, vol. 9 (pg. 228 - 241 ), vol.(pg. Hiddink J. G. ter Hofstede R. Climate induced increases in species richness of marine fishes, Global Change Biology, 2008, vol. 14 (pg. 453 - 460 ), vol.(pg. Holt J. Harle J. 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Predicting the impact of climate change on threatened species in UK waters, PLoS ONE, 2013a, vol. 8 pg. e54216, vol.pg. Jones M. C. Dye S. R. Pinnegar J. K. Warren R. Cheung W. W. L. Modelling commercial fish distributions: prediction and assessment using different approaches, Ecological Modelling, 2012, vol. 225 (pg. 133 - 145 ), vol.(pg. Jones M. C. Dye S. R. Pinnegar J. K. Warren R. Cheung W. W. L. Applying distribution model projections for an uncertain future: the case of the Pacific oyster in UK waters, Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 2013b, vol. 722 (pg. 710 - 722 ), vol.(pg. Kaschner K. Tittensor D. P. Ready J. Gerrodette T. Worm B. Current and future patterns of global marine mammal biodiversity, PLoS ONE, 2011, vol. 6 pg. e19653, vol.pg. Kaschner K. Watson R. Trites A. Pauly D. Mapping world-wide distributions of marine mammal species using a relative environmental suitability (RES) model, Marine Ecology Progress Series, 2006, vol. 316 (pg. 285 - 310 ), vol.(pg. Levitus S. Antonov J. I. Boyer T. P. Stephens C. Warming of the world ocean, Science, 2000, vol. 287 (pg. 2225 - 2229 ), vol.(pg. Macleod C. Bannon S. Pierce G. Schweder C. Learmonth J. Herman J. Reid R. Climate change and the cetacean community of north-west Scotland, Biological Conservation, 2005, vol. 124 (pg. 477 - 483 ), vol.(pg. MacNeil M. A. Graham N. A. J. Cinner J. E. Dulvy N. K. Loring P. A. Jennings S. Polunin N. V. C., et al. Transitional states in marine fisheries: adapting to predicted global change, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 2010, vol. 365 (pg. 3753 - 3763 ), vol.(pg. Macpherson E. 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Choice of threshold alters projections of species range shifts under climate change, Ecological Modelling, 2011, vol. 222 (pg. 3346 - 3354 ), vol.(pg. Nguyen K. D. T. Morley S. A. Lai C-H. Clark M. S. Tan K. S. Bates A. E. Peck L. S. Upper temperature limits of tropical marine ectotherms: global warming implications, PloS One, 2011, vol. 6 pg. e29340, vol.pg. Nikinmaa M. Oxygen-dependent cellular functions—why fishes and their aquatic environment are a prime choice of study, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, A, 2002, vol. 133 (pg. 1 - 16 ), vol.(pg. Orr J. C. |
-all frost or snow, but it could get chilly and damp. The extra poof of her winter coat helped, and the sky glow of low clouds reflecting the city lights made the nights not nearly as ominously dark as one might expect.
However, she made sure she got actual solstice night off. As it was a clear night, it was pretty dark, even in the heart of the city, fitting the traditionally longest, darkest night of the year.
A faint tapping on the side of Finn's van let him know Ruby-Butt was outside. He hadn't heard much from her since she went legit, a terrible waste of talent. He had found himself a legit gig himself, without her creativity, he had to admit he didn't have the chops to do the kind of street hustles that made the kind of money he had gotten used to partnered up with her.
He cracked the back door, baseball bat ready, just in case. And, shock and surprise. The van was surrounded by little LED 'candles', and there stood the crazy Fox, holding an oversize picnic basket. "Happy Night of Lights."
Night of Lights. He hadn't done anything with that tradition since - well too long ago to comfortably recall. "How did you know?"
Nichole rolled her eyes, "Remember, I kept telling you about how you sing sometimes when you're not totally passed out? Over the years you'd done just about the whole hymnbook.
"Oh really?" Finn was surprised, he didn't know if he could think of a single one at the moment.
"Well, let me in and we can break out the feast." Nichole held out the basket.
Inside the van, Nichole insisted that they turn off the overhead and she set out an array of additional LED candles. She then began to lay out the feast. She'd done her homework and had the array of special delicacies that a Fennec of his ilk would include for that special night.
Finn was gob-smacked. He'd come from an unhappy home that had little enthusiasm for the holidays, and had only the sketchiest notion of what was 'normal' was for such. He knew his traditional cuisine, but it was too obscure or expensive to pursue, so his appreciation had been largely lost and all but forgotten.
"Dang, Nichole! What, how?"
"You can find anything on the interweb. Besides, what else was I going to do tonight?"
"Your cop shit. Or hang out with your bunny boy."
Nichole sighed, "No, Bunny Boy is having Hallmark moments with his five gazillion kin back in Bunny Burrow. So I got tonight scheduled to be with the most miserable little sand dog in the city."
Finn stuck out his tongue then dove into the delights before him.
After an orgy of lip smacking, finger licking, and drink guzzling, the pair were delightfully bleary. "This has been the best, Ruby-Butt, thanks."
"Well, what else was I going to do tonight? You can watch 'Its a Wonderful Life' only so many times.
"Yeah, what's up with that? It always ends the same."
Nichole yawned and snuggled into a pile of cushions. "Happy Night of Light, you little dog."
"Hey, you gonna crash here?" Finn was a bit surprised. She had only slept in the van in the first few days he had gotten it way back when, before she got her own place.
"Sure. It's too cold and dark and late to be staggering around with a belly full of wine and food." Not that she was that full and definitely not that drunk.
Finn considered. In all the years together they had never really groomed or cuddled, and definitely never tried to get more intimate. And they hadn't shared a sleeping space in years, but he had to admit, the notion of having her here tonight, the prospect of just the sound of her breathing and the clean scent of her, was more touching, more precious in the moment than anything she'd ever done.
"Okay, Nichole, and a good New Year to you too."by Andrei Butnari
One week ago the Kiev baseball Championship (Ukraine) concluded the 2014 season. www.kievbaseball.com.ua
7 teams from Kiev played baseball each Saturday from April till August, nearly 200 baseball players from Kiev tried to win the medals.
And the final results are:
1 place : Shmely
2 place: Almaz
3 place: Alligators
4 place: Yayabaten
5 place: Angels
6 place: Telbin Bandits
7 place: Legionaries
Official distributor of brand Wilson in Ukraine offered special prizes for the best players in the league in 2014
• MVP – Vishnyak Dmitrii (Yayabaten)
• Best pitcher – Vinogradov Yaroslav (Alligators)
• Best hitter – Butnari Andrei (Angels)
• Best fielder – Bibikov Vladimir (Alligators)
• Best HR – Nikitchuk Artem ( Legionairs)
• Best RBI – Butnari Andrei (Angels)
• Best stolen base – Makovii Valerii (Shmely)
A few lucky faces and great baseball moments of the league can be watched at short photo-movie:
This season was very difficult for Kiev baseball league, as a country of war. Some of the players of the Kiev baseball league left the teams and went to go to the army to safe our lifes and borders of our country from occupation. We wish to all nations and countries to live without war.If Major League Baseball expands to 32 teams, don’t rule out one being in Mexico. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told me in an interview that while U.S. locations are on the table, and Montreal continues to pursue bringing a team back, Mexico City and other Mexican markets possess qualities that suit the league.
“We see Mexico as an opportunity internationally,” Manfred said. “We also think a team in Mexico and a larger number of Mexican players in the big leagues could really help us continue to grow the Hispanic market in the United States.”
Manfred also said that the choice of expansion locations in the U.S. would not be affected by clubs with regional networks that blanket the country.
“As a general proposition, I do not see the television territories for the clubs as a significant issue in considering expansion in domestic markets,” he said.
The last time a team relocated to another club’s broadcast territory was 2004 when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, D.C., and were rechristened the Washington Nationals. Then, Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos threatened to sue the league over what he saw as the Nationals cannibalizing the Orioles fan base and television market. The solution, crafted by Commissioner Bud Selig and the league, was the creation of a new regional sports network, Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) that airs both Orioles and Nationals games, that is majority-owned by the Orioles. That relationship has been problematic as the two clubs seek to increase media rights. The issue has become so contentious that the sides have gone to court.
When asking Manfred if he saw the same problem occurring should MLB decide to expand domestically, he said it was a matter of how close the teams would be.
“I think the Baltimore/Washington matter was just too tight in terms of proximity,” said Manfred. “I don’t think that if there was relocation into a club’s outer territory that it would be such a problem.”
Manfred touched on other issues around expansion…The US Supreme Court has always been known as the “Highest Court of the Land,” but there’s one more court that sits even above the Supreme Court, literally—a basketball court.
Aptly named “The Highest Court in the Land”, the U.S Supreme Court’s basketball court sits on the fifth floor of the United States Supreme Court Building, which is much higher than the actual courtroom, located on the fourth floor.
The court was once a spare room to house journals, but sometime in the 1940s, it was converted into a workout area for courthouse workers. Wooden backboards and baskets were installed later, which led to the court’s current use as a basketball court used by clerks, off-duty police officers, and other supreme court employees.
A few notable names that have played in the smaller-than-regulation-sized court aren’t NBA stars, but Supreme Court Justices, such as Byron White and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Sandra Day O’Connor also used the gym, but for women-only yoga classes, not b-ball. While not all employees are spry enough for basketball, many of them do use the full service gym and weight room, adjacent to the basketball court on the fourth floor. A few of the current justices themselves are known to lift weights during the day, as well!
A sign at the court’s entrance tells would-be players to make sure that they aren’t playing during a court day, and not to assume court is not in session. If there is a disturbance during court, a court justice would send a Marshal’s Aide upstairs to kindly remind players of the rules on court days. No one wants to be on the record for disrupting court functions.
Unfortunately, the Highest Court is not open to the public. However, if you listen close enough while in the courtroom, you just might hear the squeaking of shoes and the dribble of a basketball.‘How to be a Super Secretary’ Guide From 1945
The ‘How to be a Super Secretary’ guide from 1945 was at first a pamphlet which consisted out of a list of the bosses’ pet peeves. However, this pamphlet was more in line with how women were perceived during the 40’s and 50’s, right after World War II and during the Korean War.
A woman’s place was in the kitchen. That was almost a rule. If a woman did decide to step outside her kitchen boundaries, what else could she do than to start working as a secretary. It was definitely a man’s world back then and the ‘How to be a Super Secretary’ guide created by Remington Typewriters simply states the obvious.
Hagley Museum and Library managed to get this 1945 guide and digitized it for the whole world to enjoy.
“You might ask your boss from now until doomsday to help you find your flaws, and still he’d be reluctant to admit you had them,” the pamphlet begins. “Bosses are mighty loyal.” “Miss Olga Elkhouri, renowned typist and secretary”, reads the brochure.
“You save your glamour for evenings”; “You are pleasant, even under strain”; “You are truly humble”; “You hide your light” – these are just a few of the things a super secretary has to do in order to obtain and hold her ‘super’ status.
Remington Rand started manufacturing typewriters in 1927 and it had to design user manuals for them. They possibly didn’t realize the full potential of their pamphlet for secretaries and their bosses when they first created it, but shortly after it became incredibly popular throughout offices across the US.
Read the full 1945 pamphlet guide about secretaries on Hagley Digital Archives.RELATED STORIES The best and worst of fall TV Fall TV preview 2004 Today's Top Life Stories • Comedy fest names Colbert person of year - • Redstone wants to mend ties with Cruise - • Elizabeth Hurley weds at British castle - • Comedy fest names Colbert person of year - • Everett leads gay Mardi Gras in Sydney - • Add USATODAY.com RSS feeds What's this? Click here to shop! What are you shopping for? Browse over 8 million products Clothing & Jewelry Computers & Electronics Home & Garden Kids & Family
Hugh Laurie gets into 'House' By Bill Keveney, USA TODAY House, premiering tonight (9 ET/PT). (Related review: A very, very fine House) LOS ANGELES Hugh Laurie wouldn't seem like the first choice to play an ill-mannered American medical genius in the Fox drama, premiering tonight (9 ET/PT). ( Laurie's own dad was a doctor, and he feels a twinge of guilt at "being paid more to become a fake version of my own father." Fox He is English and made his name in the United Kingdom in sketch comedy. And he's quite hospitable during an interview on the Fox studio lot. "Just a bit of housekeeping here," he says, spraying cleaner and wiping down a table outside his trailer before sitting down to talk. Laurie, 45, says he's fascinated by the character of Gregory House, an infectious-disease specialist at a New Jersey hospital who brutalizes colleagues and patients with his harsh honesty. But he likes House — he'd have him as his doctor — and applauds Fox for taking a chance on an unconventional lead who chooses intellect over empathy. "The boldest thing they've done is put such a mean, unsympathetic character at the center of it," says Laurie, whose wife and three children remain in England as he nears the end of a four-month shoot. House's producers took a chance, too, by picking Laurie, known primarily to U.S. audiences as Mr. Little in the Stuart Little movies. Initial casting efforts failed to deliver the "quintessentially American person" producers were looking for, so they cast a wider net, House creator David Shore says. That eventually yielded Laurie, who auditioned via video shot in a hotel bathroom ("It was the only place with enough light," the actor says) in Namibia, where he was shooting the upcoming film Flight of the Phoenix. He was persuasive, if not exactly a household name. Shore says that director Bryan Singer, one of the executive producers, said, " 'See, this is what I want: an American guy.' Brian was completely unaware of the fact that Hugh was English." Laurie, who has received early critical praise for House, is self-deprecating about his skilled American accent, attributing it to "a misspent youth (watching) too much TV and too many movies." Although Laurie's comedy background might seem an odd fit for a dramatic character, Shore says it's good training for an offbeat doctor on a show with comedic touches, including House's Sherlock Holmesian diagnoses of clinic patients. Laurie, who has appeared in the English Blackadder series and Kenneth Branagh's film Peter's Friends, became known in the U.K. for sketch comedy with Cambridge classmate Stephen Fry. He says drama makes more sense than comedy at this point in his career. "I just feel like that's a young person's game. It's partly because you spend your whole time mocking authority figures, and once you reach the age where you could be a general or a bishop or a politician, it means something different. It stops being the kid in class doing impressions of the teacher," he says. Laurie says he's still learning the nature of the complex and contradictory House, whose medical mastery is countered by life challenges, including a leg disability, a reliance on painkillers and seemingly non-existent social skills. He admires House for not worrying about what others think of him. "It's a wonderfully liberating thing. I wish I could be more like that," he says. "I think all actors care (what others think). They want to be loved. They want applause. It's pathetic, but here it is." Shore says he's pleased with Laurie. But the actor has one reservation about his character's occupation. "One of the things that makes me feel guilty about playing this role is that my dad was a doctor," Laurie says. "He was a very gentle soul and, I think, a very good doctor. And I'm probably being paid more to become a fake version of my own father."POLL: Do you watch streaming movies and videos? Yes
No Submit Results Yes: 55.74 % (102) No: 44.26 % (81) Total Responses: 183
Document: Comcast 300 GB notice Sample notification from Comcast to customers about the 300 GB data cap plan. Source: Comcast
Comcast will begin charging extra next month for Chattanoogans who stream too many movies or otherwise use more than 300 gigabytes of data a month.
The new data cap will initially impact only about 8 percent of those who rely upon Comcast for their Internet connections in the Chattanooga area and Comcast is offering a three-month courtesy program that won't bill users extra for the first three times a user exceeds the monthly cap.
Thereafter, however, heavy data users of Comcast's Xfininity Internet data plan will be charged an extra $10 for every 50 gigabytes of data used above the monthly 300 gigabyte-allowance, Comcast spokeswoman Sara Jo Walker said today.
The Comcast logo is displayed on one of the company's vehicles. The Comcast logo is displayed on one of... Photo by Associated Press /Times Free Press.
Comcast customers will have the option of buying unlimited data plans for an extra $35 a month.
Comcast, the biggest cable provider in America and in the Chattanooga region, joins the No. 4 player in the industry, Cox Communications, in offering tiers that vary in price depending on data use.
"Very few of our customers are impacted by data plans, but for those who are we are offering an unlimited data plan for only $35 a month," Walker said.
Walker said the change is designed to better align the costs of providing service with those who use the most of that service. Currently, about 10 percent of Comcast Xfinity Internet users consume 50 percent of the data carried by Comcast.
Xfinity customers that stream a lot of movies or games or download data for at-home businesses are most likely to hit the data caps.
The new fees for heavy data users in Chattanooga, which begin next month, are similar to what Comcast has already implemented in Nashville, Atlanta and several other cities.
Three years ago, Comcast lifted its previous 250 gigabytes cap on data.
In a mailing to Comcast customers today, the cable giant advised customers that it will give notice to users when they approach or exceed the new 300 gigabytes monthly cap.
"If you are on the 300 gigabytes plan, we will send you a courtesy "in-browser" notice and an email letting you know when you reach 90 percent, 100 percent, 110 percent and 125 percent of your monthly data usage plan amount," Comcast said in its customer notice. "You can also elect to receive notifications at additional thresholds as well as set up mobile text notifications."
EPB Fiber Optics, which also offers high-speed Internet services in Chattanooga, charges a basic monthly fee for its data plans and has no plans to meter such service.
"We have never had data caps and we have no plans to adopt them," EPB spokesman John Pless said today.Online Articles
Suhrawardi on Sacred Symbolism and Self-Knowledge *
by Mohammed Rustom
Amongst the writings of the founder of the school of Illumination and key figure in post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (d. 587/1191) 1, are a series of mystical/philosophical narratives or ‘recitals’ written in Persian. In the context of each of these narratives Suhrawardi employs numerous symbols which take his readers through the multiple levels of initiation into the very depths of their being. As is the case with all of his symbolic recitals, the narrator of these tales is Suhrawardi and is not Suhrawardi. It is he because he relates the tale in the first person. But it is not he insofar as those reading the tale follow the footsteps of the narrator and become initiated into the esoteric significance of its symbols. Through unveiling the text by ‘becoming’ the narrator, its readers unveil and therefore ‘become’ their true selves.
At the beginning of perhaps his most famous symbolic treatise, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il (The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing) 2, Suhrawardi speaks of his being freed from the womens’ quarters and from some of the shackles and limitations experienced by children. 3 In a state of discomfort as the result of what he calls “the onslaughts of a dream” (hujum-i khwab), 4 he takes a lamp and goes towards the mens’ quarters of his home. This entire scene takes place against the background of the setting of darkness, which is referred to as “the hand of the brother of non-existence” upon the regions of the lower world. 5 Suhrawardi encircles these quarters until the break of dawn, at which time he wishes to enter his father’s khanaqah or Sufi lodge. One of its doors leads to the city and the other door leads to an open field (sahra) and a garden (bustan). 6 After closing the door that leads to the city he proceeds towards the field and the garden. Once outside, he encounters ten beautiful Sages (piran) seated upon a bench. With great hesitation he approaches them and greets them. 7
The Angel and the Interior Temple
The meeting that takes place with these Sages is indeed mysterious. Ten, which is the number assigned to them, would seem arbitrary if it were not known that in the classical Islamic philosophical conception of the cosmos there were ten Intellects, one proceeding from the other in a series of emanative descents from the First Intellect (the first descent from the Godhead) all the way to the tenth or Active Intellect. These Intellects were identified with the Angels by Avicenna, and the tenth or Active Intellect was identified with the Angel Gabriel. In The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing, Gabriel is the Sage seated at the furthest end of the bench. He is the Angel who brings revelations to the Prophets and acts as the guide of humanity since he is the ‘link’ between Heaven and Earth.
When Suhrawardi approaches these Sages he addresses the Angel Gabriel, asking him where the Sages have come from. Gabriel replies in the following manner:
‘We are a group of disengaged Folk who have come from the direction of No-Place-Estan (na kuja abad).’ I did not understand the reference, so I inquired, ‘To which clime does that city belong?’ He replied, ‘That clime which cannot be pointed out by the index finger.’ Thus I came to know that the Sage was extensive in knowledge. 8
The Angel reminds Suhrawardi of the eighth clime, 9 that place “which cannot be pointed out by the index finger.” The place which is no place is, in fact, where this very encounter takes place. By meeting the Angel he becomes initiated into what he always has been in divinis. The Angel, as celestial guide, orients him to his own situation by ‘pointing’ out to him that place from whence they came, which is the place that cannot be ‘pointed out.’
The meeting with the Angel implies initiation at the very moment of the encounter, but it also requires one to re-turn to one’s true self in its entirety. The Angel is a guide for Suhrawardi because he will cause him to re-trace those steps leading him back to himself. The Angel will allow him to perform the necessary ta’wil or spiritual exegesis of his own soul so that he may re-turn to his primordial nature. His perfect nature or true self is, from this perspective, distinct from him, which is why it can function as his guide. In reality they are not different. However, because his soul is still trapped in the world he must re-learn what he always has known, so that he may know once again who he truly is.
As Henry Corbin notes in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, a fundamental change must take place within the individual which allows it to re-cognize itself as a prisoner in the cosmic crypt, thus acting as an impetus for its awakening for the encounter with the Angel. 10 That there needed to be a fundamental shift in Suhrawardi’s being is confirmed by the Angel when Suhrawardi asks him why it is that these Sages who are characterized by immobility have in fact descended into the lower world, “How is it that you have descended (nuzul) upon this khanaqah after you just said that motion and change does not proceed from you?” 11 The Angel provides Suhrawardi with an analogy of a blind man who does not see the light of the sun. The sun never changes. It is always in its ‘place.’ If the blind man does not perceive it, it is not because of the sun. Rather, it is because he does not possess that faculty which will allow him to see it:
We, too, have always been seated upon this bench, yet your [prior] inability to see is not a proof of our non-existence, nor does it indicate [that we] have changed or moved. [Rather,] a change has come about in your spiritual state (hal). 12
This ‘meeting’ could only have taken place in a semi-dream state, when Suhrawardi was imaginally positioned between waking and sleeping. In the beginning of the narration of The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing Suhrawardi provides precisely this background for what will pave the way for the meeting with his celestial archetype. When man ‘awakens’ to the situation of imagination there arises within him a desire to transcend the ephemeral realm and join his celestial archetype, 13 which is what he always has been and never ceased being but of which he had been heedless on account of his material existence. The desire to move inward is occasioned precisely by this awareness, without which one can never turn inward because of being deluded by the outward, the zahir. Yet in order to enter the inward, the batin, one must proceed from the zahir but not be of it. The cosmic situation is therefore perfectly set up for us at the beginning of this tale. The semi-dream state in which Suhrawardi finds himself is that realm in which he has never ceased to be, but of which he is only now aware by virtue of his realization of his being trapped within the cosmic crypt.
It will be recalled that Suhrawardi encircled the mens’ quarters- here symbolizing his state of contemplation- until the break of dawn, which symbolizes illumination. He then states, “the intense desire to enter my father’s khanaqah came about.” 14 Corbin notes that the term khanaqah is to be understood here as “the interior temple as the ‘place’ for the encounter with the Angel.” 15 It is precisely in this interior temple that Suhrawardi has this encounter. The ‘father’ referred to by Suhrawardi is the Angel of his own being, his personal celestial guide. By entering the temple of his ‘father’ he turns towards himself: he turns inward.
This initial step Suhrawardi takes towards himself is instantiated from outside of himself, hence the symbolism of illumination. It is an inner illumination, but one which proceeds from without; that is to say an illumination from his archetype forever fixed in the divine ‘mind’ impels him from without to turn within. This ‘from without’ is not to be understood in terms of physical space. I use it here to denote the complete dependency the spiritual aspirant has upon the divine volition (in this sense ‘outside’ of him) for him to turn to himself, which is nothing but an image of the divine Self. The Angel whom Suhrawardi encounters is none but his own true self in divinis. Suhrawardi enters the temple in order to contemplate, that is, in the etymological sense of the term, to enter that place where one may witness God’s divine signs. By entering the temple of his father, who is responsible for bringing him up and for guiding him, Suhrawardi is able to concentrate upon the one whose image he seeks and who seeks him. By concentrating, he returns to his centre, which is his own image in divinis, being none other than his father, his Angel and guide.
The Art of Tailoring and the Tablet of One’s Being
The Angel continues to initiate Suhrawardi after his initial initiation into the different orders of cosmic reality to which his soul, in its pure luminous substance unbounded by matter, truly belongs. The different levels of initiation which the Angel takes him through allow him to understand the text of the cosmos with greater clarity. As he increases in knowledge, he re-cognizes more of himself and his situation in divinis. The Angel goes on to teach Suhrawardi the art of tailoring (‘ilm-i khiyatat), telling him that knowledge of this science will allow him to repair his own patched frock (muraqqa‘ah ) whenever it needs to be stitched. 16 This patched frock worn by the Sufis symbolizes their orientation in the world. The science of tailoring therefore can be taken to be a type of spiritual method in which the Angel instructs Suhrawardi so that he may never go about without his Sufi frock, that is, so that he may never be without his fundamental orientation in the world. This spiritual method which the Angel teaches him is nothing other than the invocation (dhikr). So long as the soul is tied to the material world, the ‘frock’ of one’s being will be torn. It is only through the dhikr that the dhakir (invoker) may mend the substance of his soul, thus transcending himself into the presence of the madhkur (Invoked).
Suhrawardi then asks the Sage to teach him the Word of God (kalam-i khuday). 17 When Suhrawardi met the Sage at the beginning of the tale the latter told him that both he and the other nine Sages were “preservers of the Word of God.” 18 The Sage responds to Suhrawardi’s request by telling him that so long as he is “in this city” he could only learn so much of God’s Word. 19 “This city” is to be understood as the material world. This explains why Suhrawardi, when describing the inner temple, speaks of it as having two doors, one which leads to the city and the other which leads to an open field and a garden. By closing the door which leads to the city he closes himself off to the materiality of this world, to the ‘city’ full of distractions, and enters through the door leading to the open field, which symbolizes that infinite interstitial space known as the world of imagination (‘alam al-khayal). When one enters the open field of imagination the city is seen for what it truly is: a place engrossed in materiality and within which its adherents- whom Suhrawardi shall at the end of the tale refer to as merchants 20, that is, the merchants of the material world- are imprisoned by virtue of their distance from the open field, and hence their true selves. At the end of the tale we encounter this city once again, where Suhrawardi cites a verse from Q 4:75 in which the people dwelling in the city (qaryah) are oppressors. 21 Yet so long as man is embodied in the city, so long as he is characterized by some type of material framework, the city is ‘inhabited.’ It is to the degree of man’s detachment from the city that he will learn the Word of God.
Recounting how the Angel taught him God’s Word, Suhrawardi says:
Quickly, he took hold of my tablet (lawh-i mara), and then taught me a rather mysterious alphabet (hija’) with which I could know whatever sura [i.e. a chapter of the Qur’an] I wanted [to learn]. He said, ‘Whoever does not know this alphabet, those secrets (asrar) of God’s Word which one should know will not be grasped by him. And whoever understands the spiritual significance of this alphabet will attain nobility and constancy thereby. 22
Suhrawardi goes on to say that numerous unexplainable wonders (‘aja’ib) were revealed to him and that whenever he was unable to understand a ‘passage’ from the sura of the cosmic text, the Angel would teach him the answer. 23 The reference in this passage to the tablet of one’s own being immediately calls to mind the lawh al-mahfuz or the Preserved Tablet mentioned in Q 85:22. The Preserved Tablet is the primordial, celestial archetype for all the Words of God. The Qur’an, which is the Word of God, is in the Preserved Tablet, as are the other Words of God. Yet here we are also told that Suhrawardi has his own tablet upon which the mysterious alphabet taught by the Angel was transcribed and with which he was able to read the suwar of the Word of God.
The tablet of one’s being is nothing other than a reflection of this primordial Tablet: there is a direct correspondence between the archetype and its symbol. The Words inscribed upon the Preserved Tablet are also to be found in the cosmos and upon the tablet of one’s being. That Suhrawardi had in mind this correspondence between the metacosom, the macrocosm and the microcosm is made perfectly clear in the lines which follow, where he asks the Angel about the correspondence (munasabat) between the blowing of the Spirit (nafath-i ruh) and the Holy Spirit (ruh al-qudus). 24 As will become clear from the Angel’s answer, the correspondence between the blowing of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit is the same as the correspondence between the spirits of humans and the Holy Spirit.
The Words of the Cosmos
The Angel answers Suhrawardi’s question concerning the correspondence between the blowing of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit by stating that everything in the four corners of the world proceeds from Gabriel’s wing. 25 Suhrawardi asks him how he is supposed to understand what this means. The Angel replies in the following manner:
Know that the Real great and glorious has several Great Words which are luminous Words [proceeding] from the august glories of His noble Countenance, some of which are above others. The First Light is the Highest Word, beyond which there is no greater Word. Its relation in light and manifestation to the other Words is like the relation of the sun to the other stars. 26
The Angel then says that the ‘rays’ of the Highest Word (kalimah-yi ‘ulya) form another Word, whose rays then form another Word and so until their number becomes complete. 27 The Angel states that these Words are collectively to be referred to as the Engulfing Words (kalimat-i tammat). 28 We also learn that the last of these Great Words(kalimat-i kubra) is none other than the Angel Gabriel and that the spirits of human beings proceed from this Great Word. The Great Words above Gabriel are therefore the nine Angelic Intellects of Neoplatonic Islamic cosmology and Gabriel is the tenth or Active Intellect.
The Angel offers an exegesis of several key Qur’anic passages to prove that the Word and the Spirit have the same reality. He cites, for example, Q 19:17, And We sent to her Our Spirit. Then he cites Q 4:171, in which Jesus is referred to as the Spirit of God (ruh Allah) and His Word which He conferred upon Mary. After equating the Spirit with the Word the Angel demonstrates how the spirits which proceed from the last Great Word are the ‘Small Words’ (kalimat-i sughra). 29 The question of the correspondence between the blowing of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit is thus answered by the Angel through his long exposition of the descent of the great Words of God down to the last Great Word and ultimately to the Small Words which are the spirits of human beings.
What is elucidated here by the Angel is the essential divine nature of the things in the world. If the spirits of human beings are Words and the Angel is a Spirit and the last of the Great Words, then there is an intimate relationship between this Angel and the spirits which proceed from it. The blowing of the Spirit is, therefore, the coming about of human spirits from the last Great Word. They are not only related to the Angel. Through the emanative descent beginning with the Greatest Word or the First Intellect in the language of Islamic philosophy, the Small Words or breaths of the Spirit are also related to the other Words. Ultimately, all the Words are rays issuing from the divine Light. But insofar as the last of the Great Words is a ray proceeding from the divine Light, the Small Words which come from the last of these Great Words are rays of its light. It is with this image in mind that we shall now turn to Suhrawardi’s exposition of Gabriel’s wing.
Gabriel’s Wing
Suhrawardi had to be initiated into all the others symbols before he could be informed of the function of Gabriel’s wing. The myth which the Angel presents to him is not simply a recasting of the Neoplatonic structure of the cosmos. There is something deeper at work here. It was mentioned above that the Great Words, taken as a whole, form the ‘Engulfing Words.’ It is the function of the Angel’s wing which will enable us to understand these ‘Engulfing Words.’ The Angel addresses Suhrawardi:
Know that Gabriel has two wings, one of which is right and is pure light (nur-i mahd), the entirety of whose being is completely devoted to [the side facing] the Real. And [he has] a left wing, upon which are some traces of darkness, like the spots on the surface of the moon [or] the feet of a peacock. This is a sign that its being has one side towards non-being. [Yet] when you consider the relation of its existence with respect to the Being of the Real, it is characterized by His Being. 30
The Angel’s right wing, characterized by pure luminosity, faces the world of pure Light, that is, the ‘side’ of the Great Words. The left wing is not ‘dark’ as such. Its traces of darkness result from a depravation of the light coming from the side of the Great Words. In other words, the window into the prison of the world only allows for a certain amount of light from the garden of pure luminosity to seep through. From the shadow cast by the Angel’s left wing emerges “the world of falsehood and delusion.” 31 Hence, the spirits which appear in this world proceed from the light of the right wing of the Angel which is pointed towards the world of Light, “Every ray of light which falls upon the world of delusion is from its light.” 32
As Suhrawardi has already shown, the Spirit and the Word share the same reality. Therefore, the ‘reverberations’ of the wing of Gabriel are the same as the patches of darkness upon its left wing. Just as the imperfection of light is cast as a shadow |
given Man his first step into the ever-widening field of Cultural Xenology.
Dave Turnbull finished his sherry, got up from the breakfast nook, and walked into the living room, where his reference books were shelved. The copy of Kleistmeistenoppolous' "City of Centaurus" hadn't been opened in years, but he took it down and flipped it open to within three pages of the section he was looking for.
"It is obvious, therefore, that every one of the indicators points in the same direction. The City was not—could not have been—self-supporting. There is no source of organic material on the planet great enough to support such a city; therefore, foodstuffs must have been imported. On the other hand, it is necessary to postulate some reason for establishing a city on an otherwise barren planet and populating it with an estimated six hundred thousand individuals.
"There can be only one answer: The race that built the City did so for the same reason that human beings built such megalopolises as New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and London—because it was a focal point for important trade routes. Only such trade routes could support such a city; only such trade routes give reason for the City's very existence.
"And when those trade routes changed or were supplanted by others in the course of time, the reason for the City's existence vanished."
Turnbull closed the book and shoved it back into place. Certainly the theory made sense, and had for a century. Had Duckworth come across information that would seem to smash that theory?
The planet itself seemed to be perfectly constructed for a gigantic landing field for interstellar ships. It was almost flat, and if the transhipping between the interstellar vessels had been done by air, there would be no need to build a hard surface for the field. And there were other indications. Every fact that had come to light in the ensuing century had been in support of the Greek-German xenologist's theory.
Had Duckworth come up with something new?
If so, why had he decided to discard it and forget his new theory?
If not, why had he formulated the new theory, and on what grounds?
Turnbull lit a cigarette and looked sourly at the smoke that drifted up from its tip. What the devil was eating him? He'd spent too much time away from Earth, that was the trouble. He'd been too deeply immersed in his study of Lobon for the past year. Now all he had to do was get a little hint of something connected with cultural xenology, and his mind went off on dizzy tizzies.
Forget it. Duckworth had thought he was on to something, found out that he wasn't, and discarded the whole idea. And if someone like Scholar James Duckworth had decided it wasn't worth fooling with, then why was a common Ph. D. like Turnbull worrying about it? Especially when he had no idea what had started Duckworth off in the first place.
And his thoughts came back around to that again. If Duckworth had thought enough of the idea to get excited over it, what had set him off? Even if it had later proved to be a bad lead, Turnbull felt he'd like to know what had made Duckworth think—even for a short time—that there was some other explanation for the City.
Ah, hell! He'd ask Duckworth some day. There was plenty of time.
He went over to the phone, dialed a number, and sat down comfortably in his fat blue overstuffed chair. It buzzed for half a minute, then the telltale lit up, but the screen remained dark.
"Dave!" said a feminine voice. "Are you back? Where on Earth have you been?"
"I haven't," said Turnbull. "How come no vision?"
"I was in the hammam, silly. And what do you mean 'I haven't'? You haven't what?"
"You asked me where on Earth I'd been, and I said I haven't."
"Oh! Lucky man! Gallivanting around the starways while us poor humans have to stay home."
"Yeah, great fun. Now look, Dee, get some clothes on and turn on your pickup. I don't like talking to gray screens."
"Half a sec." There was a minute's pause, then the screen came on, showing the girl's face. "Now, what do you have on your purported mind?"
"Simple. I've been off Earth for a year, staring at bearded faces and listening to baritone voices. If it isn't too short notice, I'd like to take you to dinner and a show and whatever else suggests itself afterward."
"Done!" she said. "What time?"
"Twenty hundred? At your place?"
"I'll be waiting."
Dave Turnbull cut the circuit, grinning. The Duckworth problem had almost faded from his mind. But it flared back up again when he glanced at the mail tubes on his desk.
"Damn!" he said.
He turned back to the phone, jammed a finger into the dial and spun it angrily. After a moment, the screen came to life with the features of a beautifully smiling but obviously efficient blond girl.
"Interstellar Communications. May I serve you, sir?"
"How long will it take to get a message to Mendez? And what will it cost?"
"One moment, sir." Her right hand moved off-screen, and her eyes shifted to look at a screen that Turnbull couldn't see. "Mendez," she said shortly. "The message will reach there in five hours and thirty-six minutes total transmission time. Allow an hour's delay for getting the message on the tapes for beaming.
"The cost is one seventy-five per symbol. Spaces and punctuation marks are considered symbols. A, an, and, and the are symbols."
Turnbull thought a moment. It was high—damned high. But then a man with a bona fide Ph. D. was not exactly a poor man if he worked at his specialty or taught.
"I'll call you back as soon as I've composed the message," he said.
"Very well, sir."
He cut the circuit, grabbed a pencil and started scribbling. When he'd finished reducing the thing to its bare minimum, he started to dial the number again. Then he scowled and dialed another number.
This time, a mild-faced young man in his middle twenties appeared. "University of California in Los Angeles. Personnel Office. May I serve you?"
"This is Dr. Dave Turnbull, in New York. I understand that Scholar Duckworth is on leave. I'd like his present address."
The young man looked politely firm. "I'm sorry, doctor; we can not give out that information."
"Oh, yap! Look here; I know where he is; just give me—" He stopped. "Never mind. Let me talk to Thornwald."
Thornwald was easier to deal with, since he knew both Duckworth and Turnbull. Turnbull showed him Duckworth's letter on the screen. "I know he's on Mendez; I just don't want to have to look all over the planet for him."
"I know, Dave. I'm sure it's all right. The address is Landing City, Hotel Byron, Mendez."
"Thanks, Thorn; I'll do you a favor some day."
"Sure. See you."
Turnbull cut off, dialed Interstellar Communications, sent his message, and relaxed. He was ready to make a night of it. He was going to make his first night back on Earth a night to remember.
He did.
The next morning, he was feeling almost flighty. He buzzed and flitted around his apartment as though he'd hit a high point on a manic cycle, happily burbling utter nonsense in the form of a perfectly ridiculous popular song.
My dear, the merest touch of you
Has opened up my eyes;
And if I get too much of you,
You really paralyze!
Donna, Donna, bella Donna,
Clad in crimson bright,
Though I'm near you, I don't wanna
See the falling shades of night!
Even when the phone chimed in its urgent message, it didn't disturb his frothy mood. But three minutes later he had dropped down to earth with a heavy clunk.
His message to Mendez had not been delivered. There was not now, and never had been a Scholar James Duckworth registered at the Hotel Byron in Landing City. Neither was his name on the incoming passenger lists at the spaceport at Landing City.
He forced himself to forget about it; he had a date with Dee again that night, and he was not going to let something silly like this bother him. But bother him it did. Unlike the night before, the date was an utter fiasco, a complete flop. Dee sensed his mood, misinterpreted it, complained of a headache, and went home early. Turnbull slept badly that night.
Next morning, he had an appointment with one of the executives of U.C.L.I.—University of Columbia in Long Island—and, on the way back he stopped at the spaceport to see what he could find out. But all he got was purely negative information.
On his way back to Manhattan, he sat in the autocab and fumed.
When he reached home, he stalked around the apartment for an hour, smoking half a dozen cigarettes, chain fashion, and polishing off three glasses of Bristol Cream without even tasting it.
Dave Turnbull, like any really top-flight investigator, had developed intuitive thinking to a fine art. Ever since the Lancaster Method had shown the natural laws applying to intuitive reasoning, no scientist worthy of the name failed to apply it consistently in making his investigations. Only when exact measurement became both possible and necessary was there any need to apply logic to a given problem.
A logician adds two and two and gets four; an intuitionist multiplies them and gets the same answer. But a logician, faced with three twos, gets six—an intuitionist gets eight. Intuition will get higher orders of answers from a given set of facts than logic will.
Turnbull applied intuition to the facts he knew and came up with an answer. Then he phoned the New York Public Library, had his phone connected with the stacks, and spent an hour checking for data that would either prove or disprove his theory. He found plenty of the former and none of the latter.
Then he called his superiors at Columbia.
He had to write up his report on the Lobon explorations. Would it be possible for him to take a six-month leave of absence for the purpose?
It would.
The following Saturday, Dr. Dave F. Turnbull was on the interstellar liner Oriona, bound for Sirius.
If ever there was a Gold Mine In The Sky, it was Centaurus City. To the cultural xenologists who worked on its mysterious riches, it seemed to present an almost inexhaustible supply of new data. The former inhabitants had left everything behind, as though it were no longer of any value whatever. No other trace of them had as yet been found anywhere in the known galaxy, but they had left enough material in Centaurus City to satisfy the curiosity of Mankind for years to come, and enough mystery and complexity to whet that curiosity to an even sharper degree.
It's difficult for the average person to grasp just how much information can be packed into a city covering ten thousand square miles with a population density equal to that of Manhattan. How long would it take the hypothetical Man From Mars to investigate New York or London if he had only the City to work with, if he found them just as they stand except that the inhabitants had vanished?
The technological level of the aliens could not be said to be either "above" or "below" that of Man: it could only be said to be "different." It was as if the two cultures complemented each other; the areas of knowledge which the aliens had explored seemed to be those which Mankind had not yet touched, while, at the same time, there appeared to be many levels of common human knowledge which the aliens had never approached.
From the combination of the two, whole new fields of human thought and endeavor had been opened.
No trace of the alien spaceships had been uncovered, but the anti-gravitational devices in their aircraft, plus the basic principles of Man's own near-light-velocity drive had given Man the ultralight drive.
Their knowledge of social organization and function far exceeded that of Man, and the hints taken from the deciphered writings of the aliens had radically changed Man's notions of government. Now humanity could build a Galactic Civilization—a unity that was neither a pure democracy nor an absolute dictatorship, but resulted in optimum governmental control combined with optimum individual freedom. It was e pluribus unum plus. Their technological writings were few, insofar as physics and chemistry were concerned. What there were turned out to be elementary texts rather than advanced studies—which was fortunate, because it had been through these that the cultural xenologists had been able to decipher the language of the aliens, a language that was no more alien to the modern mind than, say, ancient Egyptian or Cretan.
But without any advanced texts, deciphering the workings of the thousands of devices that the aliens had left behind was a tedious job. The elementary textbooks seemed to deal with the same sort of science that human beings were used to, but, at some point beyond, the aliens had taken a slightly different course, and, at first, only the very simplest of their mechanisms could be analyzed. But the investigators learned from the simpler mechanisms, and found themselves able to take the next step forward to more complex ones. However, it still remained a fact that the majority of the devices were as incomprehensible to the investigators as would the function of a transistor have been to James Clerk Maxwell.
In the areas of the social sciences, data was deciphered at a fairly rapid rate; the aliens seemed to have concentrated all their efforts on that. Psionics, on the other hand, seemed never to have occurred to them, much less to have been investigated. And yet, there were devices in Centaurus City that bore queer generic resemblances to common Terrestrial psionic machines. But there was no hint of such things in the alien literature.
And the physical sciences were deciphered only slowly, by a process of cut-and-try and cut-and-try again.
The investigations would take time. There were only a relatively small handful of men working on the problems that the City posed. Not because there weren't plenty of men who would have sacrificed their time and efforts to further the work, but because the planet, being hostile to Man, simply would not support very many investigators. It was not economically feasible to pour more men and material into the project after the point of diminishing returns had been reached. Theoretically, it would have been possible to re-seal the City's dome and pump in an atmosphere that human beings could live with, but, aside from every other consideration, it was likely that such an atmosphere would ruin many of the artifacts within the City.
Besides, the work in the City was heady stuff. Investigation of the City took a particular type of high-level mind, and that kind of mind did not occur in vast numbers.
It was not, Turnbull thought, his particular dish of tea. The physical sciences were not his realm, and the work of translating the alien writings could be done on Earth, from'stat copies, if he'd cared to do that kind of work.
Sirius VI was a busy planet—a planet that was as Earthlike as a planet could be without being Earth itself. It had a single moon, smaller than Earth's and somewhat nearer to the planet itself. The Oriona landed there, and Dave Turnbull took a shuttle ship to Sirius VI, dropping down at the spaceport near Noiberlin, the capital.
It took less than an hour to find that Scholar Duckworth had gone no farther on his journey to Mendez than Sirius VI. He hadn't cashed in his ticket; if he had, they'd have known about it on Earth. But he certainly hadn't taken a ship toward the Central Stars, either.
Turnbull got himself a hotel room and began checking through the Noiberlin city directory. There it was, big as life and fifteen times as significant. Rawlings Scientific Corporation.
Turnbull decided he might as well tackle them right off the bat; there was nothing to be gained by pussyfooting around.
He used the phone, and, after browbeating several of the employees and pulling his position on a couple of executives, he managed to get an appointment with the Assistant Director, Lawrence Drawford. The Director, Scholar Jason Rawlings, was not on Sirius VI at the time.
The appointment was scheduled for oh nine hundred the following morning, and Turnbull showed up promptly. He entered through the big main door and walked to the reception desk.
"Yes?" said the girl at the desk.
"How do you do," Turnbull said. "My name is Turnbull; I think I'm expected."
"Just a moment." She checked with the information panel on her desk, then said: "Go right on up, Dr. Turnbull. Take Number Four Lift Chute to the eighteenth floor and turn left. Dr. Drawford's office is at the end of the hall."
Turnbull followed directions.
Drawford was a heavy-set, florid-faced man with an easy smile and a rather too hearty voice.
"Come in, Dr. Turnbull; it's a pleasure to meet you. What can I do for you?" He waved Turnbull to a chair and sat down behind his desk.
Turnbull said carefully: "I'd just like to get a little information, Dr. Drawford."
Drawford selected a cigar from the humidor on his desk and offered one to Turnbull. "Cigar? No? Well, if I can be of any help to you, I'll certainly do the best I can." But there was a puzzled look on his face as he lit his cigar.
"First," said Turnbull, "am I correct in saying that Rawlings Scientific is in charge of the research program at Centaurus City?"
Drawford exhaled a cloud of blue-gray smoke. "Not precisely. We work as a liaison between the Advanced Study Board and the Centaurus group, and we supply the equipment that's needed for the work there. We build instruments to order—that sort of thing. Scholar Rawlings is a member of the Board, of course, which admits of a somewhat closer liaison than might otherwise be possible.
"But I'd hardly say we were in charge of the research. That's handled entirely by the Group leaders at the City itself."
Turnbull lit a cigarette. "What happened to Scholar Duckworth?" he said suddenly.
Drawford blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
Again Turnbull's intuitive reasoning leaped far ahead of logic; he knew that Drawford was honestly innocent of any knowledge of the whereabouts of Scholar James Duckworth.
"I was under the impression," Turnbull said easily, "that Scholar Duckworth was engaged in some sort of work with Scholar Rawlings."
Drawford smiled and spread his hands. "Well, now, that may be. Dr. Turnbull. If so, then they're engaged in something that's above my level."
"Oh?"
Drawford pursed his lips for a moment, frowning. Then he said: "I must admit that I'm not a good intuitive thinker, Dr. Turnbull. I have not the capacity for it, I suppose. That's why I'm an engineer instead of a basic research man; that's why I'll never get a Scholar's degree." Again he paused before continuing. "For that reason, Scholar Rawlings leaves the logic to me and doesn't burden me with his own business. Nominally, he is the head of the Corporation; actually, we operate in different areas—areas which, naturally, overlap in places, but which are not congruent by any means."
"In other words," said Turnbull, "if Duckworth and Rawlings were working together, you wouldn't be told about it."
"Not unless Scholar Rawlings thought it was necessary to tell me," Drawford said. He put his cigar carefully in the ashdrop. "Of course, if I asked him, I'm sure he'd give me the information, but it's hardly any of my business."
Turnbull nodded and switched his tack. "Scholar Rawlings is off-planet, I believe?"
"That's right. I'm not at liberty to disclose his whereabouts, however," Drawford said.
"I realize that. But I'd like to get a message to him, if possible."
Drawford picked up his cigar again and puffed at it a moment before saying anything. Then, "Dr. Turnbull, please don't think I'm being stuffy, but may I ask the purpose of this inquiry?"
"A fair question," said Turnbull, smiling. "I really shouldn't have come barging in here like this without explaining myself first." He had his lie already formulated in his mind. "I'm engaged in writing up a report on the cultural significance of the artifacts on the planet Lobon—you may have heard something of it?"
"I've heard the name," Drawford admitted. "That's in the Sagittarius Sector somewhere, as I recall."
"That's right. Well, as you know, the theory for the existence of Centaurus City assumes that it was, at one time, the focal point of a complex of trade routes through the galaxy, established by a race that has passed from the galactic scene."
Drawford was nodding slowly, waiting to hear what Turnbull had to say.
"I trust that you'll keep this to yourself, doctor," Turnbull said, extinguishing his cigarette. "But I am of the opinion that the artifacts on Lobon bear a distinct resemblance to those of the City." It was a bald, out-and-out lie, but he knew Drawford would have no way of knowing that it was. "I think that Lobon was actually one of the colonies of that race—one of their food-growing planets. If so, there is certainly a necessity for correlation between the data uncovered on Lobon and those which have been found in the City."
Drawford's face betrayed his excitement. "Why... why, that's amazing! I can see why you wanted to get in touch with Scholar Rawlings, certainly! Do you really think there's something in this idea?"
"I do," said Turnbull firmly. "Will it be possible for me to send a message to him?"
"Certainly," Drawford said quickly. "I'll see that he gets it as soon as possible. What did you wish to say?"
Turnbull reached into his belt pouch, pulled out a pad and stylus, and began to write.
I have reason to believe that I have solved the connection between the two sources of data concerned in the Centaurus City problem. I would also like to discuss the Duckworth theory with you.
When he had finished, he signed his name at the bottom and handed it to Drawford.
Drawford looked at it, frowned, and looked up at Turnbull questioningly.
"He'll know what I mean," Turnbull said. "Scholar Duckworth had an idea that Lobon was a data source on the problem even before we did our digging there. Frankly, that's why I thought Duckworth might be working with Scholar Rawlings."
Drawford's face cleared. "Very well. I'll put this on the company transmitters immediately, Dr. Turnbull. And—don't worry, I won't say anything about this to anyone until Scholar Rawlings or you, yourself, give me the go-ahead."
"I'd certainly appreciate that," Turnbull said, rising from his seat. "I'll leave you to your work now, Dr. Drawford. I can be reached at the Mayfair Hotel."
The two men shook hands, and Turnbull left quickly.
Turnbull felt intuitively that he knew where Rawlings was. On the Centaurus planet—the planet of the City. But where was Duckworth? Reason said that he, too, was at the City, but under what circumstances? Was he a prisoner? Had he been killed outright?
Surely not. That didn't jibe with his leaving Earth the way he had. If someone had wanted him killed, they'd have done it on Earth; they wouldn't have left a trail to Sirius IV that anyone who was interested could have followed.
On the other hand, how could they account for Duckworth's disappearance, since the trail was so broad? If the police—
No. He was wrong. The trouble with intuitive thinking is that it tends to leave out whole sections of what, to a logical thinker, are pieces of absolutely necessary data.
Duckworth actually had no connection with Rawlings—no logical connection. The only thing the police would have to work with was the fact that Scholar Duckworth had started on a trip to Mendez and never made it any farther than Sirius IV. There, he had vanished. Why? How could they prove anything?
On the other hand, Turnbull was safe. The letters from Duckworth, plus his visit to Drawford, plus his acknowledged destination of Sirius IV, would be enough to connect up both cases if Turnbull vanished. Rawlings should know he couldn't afford to do anything to Turnbull.
Dave Turnbull felt perfectly safe.
He was in his hotel room at the Mayfair when the announcer chimed, five hours later. He glanced up from his book to look at the screen. It showed a young man in an ordinary business jumper, looking rather boredly at the screen.
"What is it?" Turnbull asked.
"Message for Dr. Turnbull from Rawlings Scientific Corporation," said the young man, in a voice that sounded even more bored than his face looked.
Turnbull sighed and got up to open the door. When it sectioned, he had only a fraction of a second to see what the message was.
It was a stungun in the hand of the young man.
It went off, and Turnbull's mind spiraled into blankness before he could react.
Out of a confused blur of color, a face sprang suddenly into focus, swam away again, and came back. The lips of the face moved.
"How do you feel, son?"
Turnbull looked at the face. It was that of a fairly old man who still retained the vitality of youth. It was lined, but still firm.
It took him a moment to recognize the face—then he recalled stereos he'd seen.
It was Scholar Jason Rawlings.
Turnbull tried to lift himself up and found he couldn't.
The scholar smiled. "Sorry we had to strap you down," he said, "but I'm not nearly as strong as you are, and I didn't have any desire to be jumped before I got a chance to talk to you."
Turnbull relaxed. There was no immediate danger here.
"Know where you are?" Rawlings asked.
"Centaurus City," Turnbull said calmly. "It's a three-day trip, so obviously you couldn't have made it in the five hours after I sent you the message. You had me kidnaped and brought here."
The old man frowned slightly. "I suppose, technically, it was kidnaping, but we had to get you out of circulation before you said anything that might... ah... give the whole show away."
Turnbull smiled slightly. "Aren't you afraid that the police will trace this to you?"
"Oh, I'm sure they would eventually," said Rawlings, "but you'll be free to make any explanations long before that time."
"I see," Turnbull said flatly. "Mind operation. Is that what you did to Scholar Duckworth?"
The expression on Scholar Rawling's face was so utterly different from what Turnbull had expected that he found himself suddenly correcting his thinking in a kaleidoscopic readjustment of his mind.
"What did you think you were on to, Dr. Turnbull?" the old man asked slowly.
Turnbull started to answer, but, at that moment the door opened.
The round, pleasant-faced gentleman who came in needed no introduction to Turnbull.
Scholar Duckworth said: "Hello, Dave. Sorry I wasn't here when you woke up, but I got—" He stopped. "What's the matter?"
"I'm just cursing myself for being a fool," Turnbull said sheepishly. "I was using your disappearance as a datum in a problem that didn't require it."
Scholar Rawlings laughed abruptly. "Then you thought—"
Duckworth chuckled and raised a hand to interrupt Rawlings. "Just a moment, Jason; let him logic it out to us."
"First take these straps off," said Turnbull. "I'm stiff enough as it is, after being out cold for three days."
Rawlings touched a button on the wall, and the restraining straps vanished. Turnbull sat up creakily, rubbing his arms.
"Well?" said Duckworth.
Turnbull looked up at the older man. "It was those first two letters of yours that started me off."
"I was afraid of that," Duckworth said wryly. "I... ah... tried to get them back before I left Earth, but, failing that, I sent you a letter to try to throw you off the track."
"Did you think it would?" Turnbull asked.
"I wasn't sure," Duckworth admitted. "I decided that if you had what it takes to see through it, you'd deserve to know the truth."
"I think I know it already."
"I dare say you do," Duckworth admitted. "But tell us first why you jumped to the wrong conclusion."
Turnbull nodded. "As I said, your letters got me worrying. I knew you must be on to something or you wouldn't have been so positive. So I started checking on all the data about the City—especially that which had come in just previous to the time you sent the letters.
"I found that several new artifacts had been discovered in Sector Nine of the City—in the part they call the Bank Buildings. That struck a chord in my memory, so I looked back over the previous records. That Sector was supposed to have been cleaned out nearly ninety years ago.
"The error I made was in thinking that you had been forcibly abducted somehow—that you had been forced to write that third letter. It certainly looked like it, since I couldn't see any reason for you to hide anything from me.
"I didn't think you'd be in on anything as underhanded as this looked, so I assumed that you were acting against your will."
Scholar Rawlings smiled. "But you thought I was capable of underhanded tactics? That's not very flattering, young man."
Turnbull grinned. "I thought you were capable of kidnaping a man. Was I wrong?"
Rawlings laughed heartily. "Touché. Go on."
"Since artifacts had been found in a part of the City from which they had previously been removed, I thought that Jim, here, had found a... well, a cover-up. It looked as though some of the alien machines were being moved around in order to conceal the fact that someone was keeping something hidden. Like, for instance, a new weapon, or a device that would give a man more power than he should rightfully have."
"Such as?" Duckworth asked.
"Such as invisibility, or a cheap method of transmutation, or even a new and faster space drive. I wasn't sure, but it certainly looked like it might be something of that sort."
Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. "A very good intuition, considering the fact that you had a bit of erroneous data."
"Exactly. I thought that Rawlings Scientific Corporation—or else you, personally—were concealing something from the rest of us and from the Advisory Board. I thought that Scholar Duckworth had found out about it and that he'd been kidnaped to hush him up. It certainly looked that way."
"I must admit it did, at that," Duckworth said. "But tell me—how does it look now?"
Turnbull frowned. "The picture's all switched around now. You came here for a purpose—to check up on your own data. Tell me, is everything here on the level?"
Duckworth paused before he answered. "Everything human," he said slowly.
"That's what I thought," said Turnbull. "If the human factor is eliminated—at least partially—from the data, the intuition comes through quite clearly. We're being fed information."
Duckworth nodded silently.
Rawlings said: "That's it. Someone or something is adding new material to the City. It's like some sort of cosmic bird-feeding station that has to be refilled every so often."
Turnbull looked down at his big hands. "It never was a trade route focus," he said. "It isn't even a city, in our sense of the term, no more than a birdhouse is a nest." He looked up. "That city was built for only one purpose—to give human beings certain data. And it's evidently data that we need in a hurry, for our own good."
"How so?" Rawlings asked, a look of faint surprise on his face.
"Same analogy. Why does anyone feed birds? Two reasons—either to study and watch them, or to be kind to them. You feed birds in the winter because they might die if they didn't get enough food."
"Maybe we're being studied and watched, then," said Duckworth, probingly.
"Possibly. But we won't know for a long time—if ever."
Duckworth grinned. "Right. I've seen this City. I've looked it over carefully in the past few months. Whatever entities built it are so far ahead of us that we can't even imagine what it will take to find out anything about them. We are as incapable of understanding them as a bird is incapable of understanding us."
"Who knows about this?" Turnbull asked suddenly.
"The entire Advanced Study Board at least," said Rawlings. "We don't know how many others. But so far as we know everyone who has been able to recognize what is really going on at the City has also been able to realize that it is something that the human race en masse is not yet ready to accept."
"What about the technicians who are actually working there?" asked Turnbull.
Rawlings smiled. "The artifacts are very carefully replaced. The technicians—again, as far as we know—have accepted the evidence of their eyes."
Turnbull looked a little dissatisfied. "Look, there are plenty of people in the galaxy who would literally hate the idea that there is anything in the universe superior to Man. Can you imagine the storm of reaction that would hit if this got out? Whole groups would refuse to have anything to do with anything connected with the City. The Government would collapse, since the whole theory of our present government comes from City data. And the whole work of teaching intuitive reasoning would be dropped like a hot potato by just those very people who need to learn to use it.
"And it seems to me that some precautions—" He stopped, then grinned rather sheepishly. "Oh," he said, "I see."
Rawlings grinned back. "There's never any need to distort the truth. Anyone who is psychologically incapable of allowing the existence of beings more powerful than Man is also psychologically incapable of piecing together the clues which would indicate the existence of such beings."
Scholar Duckworth said: "It takes a great deal of humility—a real feeling of honest humility—to admit that one is actually inferior to someone—or something—else. Most people don't have it—they rebel because they can't admit their inferiority."
"Like the examples of the North American Amerindian tribes." Turnbull said. "They hadn't reached the state of civilization that the Aztecs or Incas had. They were incapable of allowing themselves to be beaten and enslaved—they refused to allow themselves to learn. They fought the white man to the last ditch—and look where they ended up."
"Precisely," said Duckworth. "While the Mexicans and Peruvians today are a functioning part of civilization—because they could and did learn."
"I'd just as soon the human race didn't go the way of the Amerindians," Turnbull said.
"I have a hunch it won't," Scholar Rawlings said. "The builders of the City, whoever they are, are edging us very carefully into the next level of civilization—whatever it may be. At that level, perhaps we'll be able to accept their teaching more directly."
Duckworth chuckled. "Before we can become gentlemen, we have to realize that we are not gentlemen."
Turnbull recognized the allusion. There is an old truism to the effect that a barbarian can never learn what a gentleman is because a barbarian cannot recognize that he isn't a gentleman. As soon as he recognizes that fact, he ceases to be a barbarian. He is not automatically a gentleman, but at least he has become capable of learning how to be one.
"The City itself," said Rawlings, "acts as a pretty efficient screening device for separating the humble from the merely servile. The servile man resents his position so much that he will fight anything which tries to force recognition of his position on him. The servile slave is convinced that he is equal to or superior to his masters, and that he is being held down by brute force. So he opposes them with brute force and is eventually destroyed."
Turnbull blinked. "A screening device?" Then, like a burst of sunlight, the full intuition came over him.
Duckworth's round face was positively beaming. "You're the first one ever to do it," he said. "In order to become a member of the Advanced Study Board, a scholar must solve that much of the City's secret by himself. I'm a much older man than you, and I just solved it in the past few months.
"You will be the first Ph.D. to be admitted to the Board while you're working on your scholar's degree. Congratulations."
Turnbull looked down at his big hands, a pleased look on his face. Then he looked up at Scholar Duckworth. "Got a cigarette, Jim? Thanks. You know, we've still got plenty of work ahead of us, trying to find out just what it is that the City builders want us to learn."
Duckworth smiled as he held a flame to the tip of Turnbull's cigarette.
"Who knows?" he said quietly. "Hell, maybe they want us to learn about them!"
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So we were able to pass emergency action with the stimulus, but we had to get two votes from Republicans…
Obama’s response is misleading. Republicans made no such filibuster threat at the outset of his first term. He refers to remarks made by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in late 2010, not in late 2008 or early 2009. Republicans in fact attempted to work together with the then-popular Obama before being rebuffed (“I won“).
In addition, as journalist Bob Woodward points out in The Price of Politics, McConnell’s remark about his “top priority” being to deny Obama a second term was taken out of context (McConnell had stressed a desire to work with Obama if he changed his approach). Even MSNBC’s Morning Joe (!) felt compelled to apologize on the air for misreporting McConnell’s remark. Obama has no such scruples, and simply repeats the lie as an excuse.
Even if they had wanted to, Republicans could not have imposed a filibuster anyway. Obama is correct that Democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for a period of several months in 2009-2010, but that was no great obstacle to his agenda. The additional vote or two needed to break Republican opposition to the stimulus, for example, had been remarkably easy to obtain. And when Republicans did recover their ability to filibuster, with the surprise election of Scott Brown from Massachusetts in 2010, Democrats simply used reconciliation to pass Obamacare, avoiding the filibuster altogether. The fact is that Obama wielded power not seen in decades.
Obama attempts to describe the overhaul of the health care system as “a central economic priority for the country,” but that is a giant stretch, and is an opinion not widely shared by Americans at the time–or since.
In fact, it is arguable that the passage of Obamacare dramatically slowed job creation and economic recovery. A graph from the Heritage Foundation makes a compelling case that Obamacare was a dramatic economic drag:
No regrets for putting the economy on hold for two years while pursuing a deeply ideological, profoundly unpopular, and completely ineffective agenda. No wonder voters are skeptical of Obama’s second-term agenda.In the early days of the HTML5 movement, I wrote the first major cross-browser compatibility shim for HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags. It was called html5media.js.
At the time, I assumed that the shim would be obsolete within a few years, just as soon as major browsers adopted a common standard and video codec. Unfortunately, the shim is still used by hundreds of thousands of people each day, and embedding video is just as confusing as ever.
So how do I embed video in my site?
Please, just save yourself a headache, and host your video on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other third party service. They employ some very clever people who’ve solved all the problems with embedding video.
Haha… no, really. How do I embed video in my site?
Take a deep breath. In order to embed video in your site, there are four major groups of people you need to keep happy:
Modern browsers using commercial codecs (Chrome, Safari, IE9+) Modern browsers using open-source codecs (Firefox, Opera) Legacy browsers (IE8) Under-powered mobile devices (iPhone 3GS, cheap Android)
For the rest of this post, I’ll take you through the steps required to allow an increasing number of people to watch your video.
Embedding video for modern browsers with commercial codecs
The simplest video embed code you can possibly use is as follows:
1 2 3 4 5 6 <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <body> <video src= "video.mp4" width= 640 height= 360 controls > </body> </html>
Congratulations! Your video will now play in:
Chrome
Safari (inc. Mobile Safari on iPhone 4+)
IE9+
Adding support for legacy browsers
In order to make your video work in legacy browsers, you need to add a script tag to the <head> of your document. This script, the venerable html5media.js, will provide a Flash video player fallback for legacy browsers.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <script src= "https://api.html5media.info/1.1.5/html5media.min.js" ></script> </head> <body> <video src= "video.mp4" width= 640 height= 360 controls ></video> </body> </html>
Note: The syntax of the <video> tag has changed to include an explicit closing tag, to avoid confusing older browsers.
Fantastic! Your video will now play in:
Chrome
Safari (inc. Mobile Safari on iPhone 4+)
IE9+
IE8 (via Flash)
Firefox (via Flash)
Opera (via Flash)
At this point, the vast majority of internet users will be able to play your video. The only people who’ll be left out will be:
Firefox or Opera users without Flash
Owners of under-powered mobile devices.
Adding Flash-free support for modern browers with open-source codecs
To allow Firefox and Opera users to view your video using their native players, you need to transcode your video into an open-source format, and embed both files in your page. I’d recommend using the free Miro Video Encoder to transcode your video to WebM format. You can then embed it using the following code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <script src= "https://api.html5media.info/1.1.5/html5media.min.js" ></script> </head> <body> <video src= "video.mp4" width= 640 height= 360 controls > <source src= "video.mp4" ></source> <source src= "video.webm" ></source> </video> </body> </html>
Note: We’re adding explicit closing tags to <source> elements to avoid confusing legacy browsers.
Unbelievable! Now your video will play in:
Chrome
Safari (inc. Mobile Safari on iPhone 4+)
IE9+
IE8 (via Flash)
Firefox (via Flash)
Opera (via Flash)
It’s just the owners of under-powered mobile devices who’ll struggle to play your video now.
Adding support for under-powered mobile devices
The latest mobile devices support high-resolution video, but cheap Android phones and iPhone 3GS will refuse to play anything higher-resolution than about 320 x 180 pixels. To keep these devices happy, you need to transcode your video to this lower resolution. Miro Video Encoder has a built-in iPhone 3GS setting, so just use that.
Now you can embed your video using the following code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <script src= "https://api.html5media.info/1.1.5/html5media.min.js" ></script> </head> <body> <video src= "video.mp4" width= 640 height= 360 controls > <source src= "video.mp4" media= "only screen and (min-device-width: 568px)" ></source> <source src= "video-low.mp4" media= "only screen and (max-device-width: 568px)" ></source> <source src= "video.webm" ></source> </video> </body> </html>
OMG! What a monster! But now everyone will be able to play your video!
Chrome
Safari (inc. Mobile Safari on iPhone 4+)
IE9+
IE8 (via Flash)
Firefox (via Flash)
Opera (via Flash)
Mobile Safari (iPhone 3GS)
Android Browser (inc. cheap Android phones)
Help! My video still isn’t playing!
The most common causes of problems are:
Video encoding errors.
Incorrect server configuration.
There’s a page full of troubleshooting information on the html5media video hosting wiki. Your problem is almost certainly covered there.
I want to customize the player UI, and make it look consistent across all browsers!
Ahahahahahahahaha!
Ahahahaha!
No.The Old Trafford boss has maintained his close bond with the winger who developed into the best player in the world under Ferguson’s tutelage. Sir Alex – who admitted being disappointed for Ronaldo (right) after Real Madrid went crashing out of the Champions League in midweek – said: “Cristiano knows the value of Manchester United. That’s the thing. What the players have got here is protection. They come to training every day and there is nobody here to disturb them.
“I don’t think Real Madrid is an easy club to play for. There is a circus attached to it. There are often loads of fans and an intensive media always filming them.”
Ronaldo has confided to friends that he misses life at Old Trafford and in particular Ferguson’s guiding hand. Ferguson revealed: “You would like to think that one day he will come back, but you never know. I don’t think he will stay at Real Madrid for life or anything like that.The potential for 3D printers is quite mind-blowing, especially when considering their role in biotechnology. The latest breakthrough in this regard comes from Cornell University researchers who showed that it's possible to create a replacement ear using a 3D printer and an injection of living cells. Once refined, the technique will allow biomedical engineers to print customized ears for children born with malformed ones, or people who have lost theirs to accident or disease.
Normally, prosthetic reconstructions are suboptimal; they don't look realistic and they lack the qualities of real tissue. Current techniques are also fairly invasive and demanding on the patient, most of whom are children.
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Looking to change this, researchers Alyssa Reiffel, Lawrence Bonassar, Jason Spector, and colleagues employed a 3D printing technique they refer to as high-fidelity tissue engineering. Their results now appear in PLOS One.
In this experiment, the researchers used the cartilage from a cow, but they envision they day when it'll be possible to cultivate enough of a person's ear so that the growth and implantation can happen right there in the lab.
AP tells us how it works:
The Cornell team started with a 3-D camera that rapidly rotates around a child's head for a picture of the existing ear to match. It beams the ear's geometry into a computer, without the mess of a traditional mold or the radiation if CT scans were used to measure ear anatomy. "Kids aren't afraid of it," said Bonassar, who used his then-5-year-old twin daughters' healthy ears as models. From that image, the 3-D printer produced a soft mold of the ear. Bonassar injected it with a special collagen gel that's full of cow cells that produce cartilage - forming a scaffolding. Over the next few weeks, cartilage grew to replace the collagen. At three months, it appeared to be a flexible and workable outer ear, the study concluded.
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Looking ahead, the researchers will attempt to use a patient's own cells in the 3D printing process.
It's also important to remember that cartilage is probably the easiest body part to generate with a 3D printer, as it doesn't require blood vessels growing inside it to survive. Growing more complex tissue and organs will be significantly more challenging for biomedical engineers.
Image: AP Photo/Lindsay France.5.10pm: It's macabre, but a lot of people are asking us about the death toll. It's a natural question. Thus far today it's been extremely difficult to get an accurate number on this. US media are currently reporting anything from 10-13 confirmed dead. The New York Times reported seven in the New York region, and there were two killed in Philadelphia by falling trees, which the Inquirer said had still not "officially" been recorded as storm deaths. At least one crewmember of the sunken Bounty has died, with another crew member missing. Canada’s Globe and Mail is reporting the death of a woman in her 50s, who was hit by debris in Toronto. These are, of course, on top of the nearly 70 people confirmed dead after Sandy cut a swathe through the Caribbean earlier this week. 4.58pm: Here is a roundup of various news reports from the northeast US, compiled in the past half hour. The New York Times said there had been at least seven deaths in the local region, including two boys, aged 11 and 13, who were killed in North Salem in Westchester County, when a tree fell on the house they were in.
said there had been at least seven deaths in the local region, including two boys, aged 11 and 13, who were killed in North Salem in Westchester County, when a tree fell on the house they were in. The mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, has called on the National Guard to help rescue people in the mile-square city on the Hudson River, The Wall St Journal reported. Mayor Dawn Zimmer said at least four live wires were down — including two under water — and that firefighters were unable to respond to calls. “We’re in a very difficult situation,” Zimmer said. “The Hudson River has breached us at the north and and the south end.”
reported. Mayor Dawn Zimmer said at least four live wires were down — including two under water — and that firefighters were unable to respond to calls. “We’re in a very difficult situation,” Zimmer said. “The Hudson River has breached us at the north and and the south end.” NJ.com said Jersey City was dealing with a "full-fledged disaster" that had both City Hall and the Jersey City Medical Center surrounded by water. Meanwhile, officials said they were investigating reports of numerous collapses in buildings throughout the city, including a facade collapse at a Newport highrise.
said Jersey City was dealing with a "full-fledged disaster" that had both City Hall and the Jersey City Medical Center surrounded by water. Meanwhile, officials said they were investigating reports of numerous collapses in buildings throughout the city, including a facade collapse at a Newport highrise. The Philadelphia Inquirer said two deaths had reported in the wake of the storm - an eight-year-old boy who was crushed by a fallen tree limb, and a 62-year-old Berks County man died in a house collapse caused by a downed tree.
said two deaths had reported in the wake of the storm - an eight-year-old boy who was crushed by a fallen tree limb, and a 62-year-old Berks County man died in a house collapse caused by a downed tree. Boston.com described Sandy as one of the largest storms to ever hit the East Coast, saying it "pummeled Massachusetts with punishing winds and dangerously high seas, flooding some coastal areas, and cutting power to some 385,000 homes".
described Sandy as one of the largest storms to ever hit the East Coast, saying it "pummeled Massachusetts with punishing winds and dangerously high seas, flooding some coastal areas, and cutting power to some 385,000 homes". Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy told the New Haven Register there was “no doubt” that thousands of residents could be stranded in their homes as further flooding appeared imminent, threatening lives. Malloy said he would worry later at “who should have done what. What I’m most concerned with right now is the loss of human life and what we can do to prevent it.”
there was “no doubt” that thousands of residents could be stranded in their homes as further flooding appeared imminent, threatening lives. Malloy said he would worry later at “who should have done what. What I’m most concerned with right now is the loss of human life and what we can do to prevent it.” The Washington Post said President Obama and Mitt Romney tried to navigate the tricky politics of dealing with the historic storm. "It remained unclear which candidate, if either, would benefit, but their somewhat differing responses on Monday gave voters more insight into two men who have offered starkly different visions for America." 4.43pm: This latest Google 'crisis map’ shows the current location of Sandy, and its projected direction. The orange markers represent power outages. More than 3 million Americans are believed to have lost power.
4.37pm: Despite mother nature throwing everything at the United States, the storm's effect on next week's presidential election is not far from the minds of many, as Paul McGeough reports from Washington: Obama couldn’t possibly say that, but The New York Times is shrieking in its Tuesday editorial about what Republican challenger Mitt Romney would do with the National Response Coordination Center, the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency which at times like this plays a critical response management role. The editorial says: "At a Republican primary debate last year, Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further. 'Absolutely,' he said. 'Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.'"
Ouch! 4.31pm: We've got more on the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant concerns here. There are fears a further rise in water levels at the New Jersey plant could force operators to use emergency water supplies from a fire hose to cool spent uranium fuel rods. The concerns about the spent fuel pool at Oyster Creek were reminiscent of the fears that followed the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year, when helicopters and fire hoses were enlisted to ensure the pools remained filled with fresh, cool water. 4.22pm: Cleveland’s Plain Dealer (seriously, how cool are newspaper names in the US?) is warning residents to “get ready for a whallop” as Ohio expects wind gusts of more than 110km/h. About 44,000 homes were without power in Cleveland, about 480km inland from New York City.
3.55pm: A woman rescued after superstorm Sandy sank a tall ship off the US has died, while the captain is still missing. Claudene Christian was found ‘‘unresponsive’’ at sea and taken to hospital amid a dramatic rescue operation in wild Atlantic Ocean swells whipped up by the storm. Her death was later confirmed by the hospital. Meanwhile, it is estimated Sandy knocked out power to some 3.6 million homes and businesses, according to the US Energy Department. There are warnings that figure may increase overnight, and that power blackouts may eventually affect as many as 10 million people in the region for as long as 10 days. The blackouts left homes in the dark, closed the stock market, and disrupted operations at refineries, pipelines and power plants.
Damaged power lines, substations and other infrastructure will contribute to the $20 billion in total storm costs estimated by Eqecat, a risk management company in Oakland, California. 3.50pm: From AAP - A nuclear power plant in New Jersey has declared an alert from superstorm Sandy as water passed a minimum level but no safety concerns were reported. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the Oyster Creek power plant, in Ocean County just north of the resort of Atlantic City, was already on a scheduled outage as the massive storm made landfall nearby on the Atlantic coast. The regulator said that all plants in the storm’s way were in safe condition and that inspectors were working to verify independently that operators underwent proper procedures. 3.41pm: Brisbane woman Mia Inglis, who is holed up in her seventh-floor apartment in Washington DC, has been glued to television news reports since Sandy made landfall.
Fortunately, she was able to enjoy a hearty meal of steak and vegetables for dinner, because her apartment building still has power. But she said she has experienced some early symptoms of cabin fever. “Streets are deserted. I haven't seen a single person since this morning. The wind is howling through the city. Sounds very scary,” she said. “I am looking forward to leaving my apartment on Wednesday.” 3.18pm: As the clock ticks past midnight in NYC, New Yorkers are still in for a long night. Local television is reporting the NYU Hospital is being evacuated after a power failure that also affected back up generators.
But there's some good news, with flood levels starting to recede. 2.44pm: The reported death toll from Sandy continues to rise, with CNN now reporting 11 deaths and CBS News "at least 10". It may take some time to get a definitive figure. 2.36pm: Don't believe everything you see. With thousands of spectacular images of Sandy all over social media, it can be easy to get fooled. So how do you spot a fake? We've got some tips for you right here.
2.30pm: The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has produced the following table comparing Sandy to Cyclone Yasi: 2.27pm: Atlantic City in New Jersey looks to have copped a caning. This pic from AP.
2.24pm: Paul McGeough, in Washington DC, has been watching the responses of local officials dealing with Sandy's onslaught. "We’ll never forget ‘Heckuva job’ Brownie, the hapless and soon-after resigned head of disaster relief in the US, when a seemingly delusional President George W Bush congratulated Brown for the mess that he was making of the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina – as the cameras rolled.
"Natural disasters are a time when second-tier political leaders can shine – or not. In this context first judgments shape the public sense of how these guys perform – even if they have failed to change the course of the hurricane.
"Here then is the New York Times' take on three men with very sharp elbows in the greater New York area: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg – “[He] played the stern parent, chiding the kids not to surf and offering sensible suggestions like staying home to eat a sandwich.”
New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo - “[He] exuded a cool confidence in his [public] appearances, detailing preparations for the arrival of Hurricane Sandy… a confident but unhurried everyguy: the hunky local fire chief.”
New Jersey State Governor Chris Christie – “[He] was characteristically blunt discussing storm preparations, deriding those who resisted evacuation orders as ‘selfish and stupid.’ But he showed a softer side too.” 2.08pm: Some pretty spectacular footage from New York's Con Edison power plant, with several explosions captured on camera.
Meanwhile, Peter Hannam reports Australian atmospheric scientists and the Bureau of Meteorology are closely monitoring Sandy for what it tells them about climate risks in our own region. 2.02pm: Cameron Atfield here, taking over the reins from Conal Hanna. We’re getting some conflicting reports on casualties, with CNN reporting up to 10 deaths in the United States. Over the border, Canada’s Globe and Mail is reporting the death of a woman in her 50s, who was hit by debris in Toronto.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said his city was bracing for winds of up to 90km/h. 1.41pm: There's one name dominating the Twitterverse today and that's Sandy. (Can anyone else hear John Travolta warbling to Olivia Newton John in Grease about now? No, it's just me. Fair enough.) Here's a Twitter Trendsmap showing who in the world is tweeting about #sandy. Weirdly, there are two Australias, one that cares and one that doesn't... 1.35pm: Australian atmospheric scientists and the Bureau of Meteorology are closely monitoring the US response to Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy for what it tells us about climate risks in our own region and the best way to communicate the dangers to the general population, reports Peter Hannam.
"Everybody’s tracking it here closely," said Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre. Sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic region when Hurricane Sandy formed are between 3-5 degrees Celsius higher than average levels, helping to increase the storm’s ferocity as it joins with other storm systems to batter the north-eastern US. Scientists are reluctant to attribute any single weather event to the effects of global warming. Climate models, though, predict fewer – but more intense - major storms when they form. “This is the sort of thing we’re warning about increasing over time,” Dr Braganza said. “We are breaking records across metrics where we’d expect to break records as the planet warms.” 1.24pm: Fires are breaking out across New York City, even as it floods, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has told a briefing. Mayor Bloomberg called on householders in flooded areas to move to higher rooms in their homes and stay put and to avoid calling 911 unless their life was in danger. He said the water had peaked and the surge should recede by midnight (3pm AEDT). Much of Manhattan is in darkness as the power company cut supply in an effort to save the infrastructure.
1.18pm: Fairfax correspondent Nick Miller has just braved the inclement outdoors for this report from Brooklyn. He writes: "Just went for a walk around Williamsburg at the height of the storm surge, down to East River foreshore. Wind is gusting at hold-onto-a-tree strength. River has broken its banks here as well, submerging a ferry terminal, flooding nearby streets and isolating an MTA (subway) power plant. Other streets strewn with debris, fallen branches, etc. Furious cops are corralling drunken youths - 'I put my life at risk for you idiots?' says one. 'Go home!'. Manhattan skyline is eerie. Almost entirely dark south of the Empire State Building at 34th St. Occasional flashes from exploding transformers light clouds. Won't be going out again til wind dies down." 1.05pm: Paul McGeough reports from Washington how workers from the much maligned local power company Pepco ventured out to start reconnecting darkened homes - but were driven back in by high winds.
"Optimistic prediction by DC metro bosses that trains and buses will start coming back into service as early as Tuesday afternoon [Wednesday morning Australian time]. I'll believe that when I see it and even if it happens, still a lost day for the hundreds of thousands who will not get to work in the morning." Meanwhile, McGeough writes some people are eager to apportion blame for the storm: "Idiot, idiot, idiot - in the land of freedom and liberty no surprise that on the night that Sandy comes ashore John McTeman, wacko fundamentalist Christian preacher, claims the storm is more proof that “God is systematically destroying America” as punishment for the “homosexual agenda”. 12.58pm: Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy had not even crossed the New Jersey coastline when the political fallout began. Governor of the state, Chris Christie, accused Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford of causing residents to become stranded by providing poor advice. "This has become particularly problematic in Atlantic City, where for whatever reason Mayor Langford urged people to stay in shelters in the city.
"For those of you who are on the barrier islands who decided it was better idea to wait this out than to evacuate, and for those elected officials who decided to ignore my admonition, this is now your responsibility." 12.54pm: The crane left dangling in the New York breeze earlier today by Sandy is reported working on a project being managed by Australia's Lend Lease. The crane is in such a precarious state nearby buildings, including the Parker Meridien Hotel, have been evacuated. 12.40pm: The city that never sleeps has gone unusually dark, at least south of 26th Street. The below AFP photo shows the financial end of town, as taken from Brooklyn. The power outage has stemmed from flooding and the probably loss of a transmission feeder. There are estimates more than three million people are without power across the US.
And in this other Getty Images photo below, you can see some of the flooding affecting Lower Manhattan. 12.27pm: It may no longer be a hurricane, but Sandy is reportedly causing hurricane-force wind gusts over Long Island and the New York metropolitan areas, according to the latest update from the US National Hurricane Center. Their most recent update says the centre of Sandy is 24 kilometres northwest of Atlantic City, heading west northwest at 33km/h. 12.22pm: Amazing new photos of Manhattan building damage coming through. This is the building we reported on earlier, on the corner of 8th Avenue and 14th Street. There are no reported injuries.
12.20pm: Fairfax chief correspondent Paul McGeough is on the move in Washington DC and finding the streets spookily deserted. Eerie, eerie, eerie - driven out of (my) home by power cut. Drove 8km drive to hotel in Arlington, in DC suburbs. Any other night would be hundreds of cars on the road; tonight, just six and all of them crawling with care. Steady rain, bitumen carpeted with autumn leaves which have been shredded from trees. 12.15pm: Nick O'Malley has filed another update from where he's holed up in Maryland, plugged into coverage in the US. Manhattan has been isolated and darkened by the biggest storm to hit the north east of United States.
All the bridges and tunnels onto the island have been closed and the Brooklyn to Battery tunnel is flooding. There are reports of bright explosions, suggesting either lightning strikes are hitting the area, or more ominously, electricity conductors are blowing up.
Power has been cut off across lower Manhattan, while over three million people across 11 states and the District of Columbia are now without power.
Sustained winds of 130 kilometers an hour are battering the region as the storm moves slowly inland. While a storm surge of over 3.5 metres is deluging the coastline from Atlantic City to New York.
At least five people have so far been killed, according to reports, including a 30-year-old man trapped by a fallen tree in Flushing New York, a second struck by a tree in Connecticut and a third person killed after a car hydroplaned in the suburbs of Washington.
Late on Sunday night (US time) the storm struck and sunk the HMS Bounty replica tallship. One person is missing while 15 crewmembers have been rescued. One of them is in hospital.
Government offices, schools, universities, public transport and airports have all been closed, while hospitals have enacted disaster plans, instructing staff to bring clothes and personal supplies to last several days.
Residents have been warned to expect to lose power for up to 10 days and were directed to stock up on torches and batteries as well as nearly 20 litres of clean water per person. 12.08pm: Foreign Affairs minister Bob Carr has given an update on Australians caught up in the region affected by Sandy, Daniel Flitton reports. Senator Carr said some 2800 Australians were registered as living or travelling in the region affected by the storm - with an estimated 24,000 other Australians thought to be in the area. The Australian consulate in New York is closed, with staff expected to go back to work in a day or two after the storm has passed. Senator Carr urged Australians to stay indoors and take no risks. The Foreign Affairs helpline is 1300 555 135.
11.52am: Massive seas associated with Sandy have reportedly destroyed parts of the famed Atlantic City boardwalk. Water has also begun flooding downtown New York, as this photo of the corner of 34th Street and 1st Street shows. 11.37am: Reports now of a rapidly increasing death toll in New York. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Governor Andrew Cuomo's office has confirmed at least five storm-related fatalities in New York. 11.29am: New Yorkers are providing unprecedented updates of the storm's progress via social media channels. Our technology team have just pulled together this wrap of some of the best webcam coverage you can watch.
11.17am: The New York Times is reporting that Sandy has claimed the life of a 30-year-old man in Queens, killed when a tree fell on his house. The man lived in East Flushing. It is the first death attributed to Sandy in New York. The body of a woman crew member of the Bounty, which sank off North Carolina, has been transported to hospital, in an unresponsive state.
11.09am: Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy has made landfall. The US National Hurricane Center advised at 11am AEDT that Sandy had crossed the coast of southern New Jersey. Maximum sustained winds of 130km/h. It is moving west-northwest at 37km/h.
11.05am: Former Fairfax Media journalist Mat Murphy is bunkered in a 25th-floor apartment inside the lower Manhattan evacuation zone and reports trees at 45 degrees, water rising in the East River and an imminent power failure. He says the decision to stay or go was, for many, influenced by the dramatic build-up to, and anti-climax of, Hurricane Irene, which caused mass destruction in the Caribbean but had weakened to a strong rain storm when it hit New York last year. ‘‘I was here for Irene and we literally did batten down the hatches and it was a real non-event and a lot of people here are saying it’s gonna be pretty much the same again this time around,’’ Murphy tells us.
‘‘I was doing a bit of a survey in the lift - and this is a pretty big building, 32 floors - and I’d say half the residents were leaving, and half were staying. I think the people leaving were more concerned about flooding and not being able to get out of the building for a couple of days.’’
Murphy says he’s taped his windows and is preparing for a possible ‘‘slumber party’’ in the hallway with neighbours. ‘‘I was kind of feeling a bit nervous about the decision not to evacuate, but there’s a family across the hallway and I could hear their little one this morning, so they’re still here, which makes me feel a bit better.’’
10.59am: Fairfax US correspondent Nick O'Malley says the wind has suddenly picked up in Maryland, where he's holed up. He's provide a few updates, courtesy of local media in the US: NBC reports the water level at the Battery in New York has just risen over the 1821 record of 11.87 feet (3.62 metres).
More than 2.2 million people are now estimated to be without power over 11 states and the District of Columbia, CNN reports.
Traffic and street lights are out in Atlantic City, where a 12 hour curfew has begun. Governor Chris Christie has told those who have not already evacuated to stay put.
The combative Governor Christie has also blamed the stranding of some people in Atlantic City on the mayor, Lorenzo Langford, AP reports. Christie says Mayor Lorenzo Langford erred by allowing people to shelter on the barrier island rather than moving them inland. 10.56am: More on the Australian travel situation. Virgin Australia’s flights between Australia and Los Angeles have not been affected. Virgin Australia’s partner is Delta Airlines in the United States. It, along with American Airlines and United Airlines, have cancelled all flights in to and out of the three area airports in New York. Qantas travel info can be found below (10.02am). More than 12,000 flights have been grounded overall. 10.32am: So if you're trying to put Sandy into some sort of Australian context, this newly posted article should help. Sandy is 15 times the size of Cyclone Tracy, or three times as wide as the more recent Cyclone Yasi. It is, however, less intense at its core at present, with winds of up to 140km/h compared to 217km/h-plus for Tracy and 285km/h for Yasi. 10.27am: Fairfax's chief foreign correspondent, Paul McGeough is in Washington DC. He writes on how a hurricane-turned-tropical-storm has mixed with an Arctic jetstream to create something "bigger than Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm".
"One of several intimidating meteorological characters in the mix, Sandy has been churning up the Atlantic since last week and just now, as I write, has shrouded my home in the drab darkness of a greater Washington afternoon without electricity. Now scratching this by torchlight as Sandy steps up speed – on Sunday afternoon she was making a sedate 20 km/h; 24 hours later she's stepping out at 45 km/h." Read the full piece here.
10.20am: Hurricane Sandy is no longer a hurricane. The US National Hurricane Center says in its latest advice issued at 10am AEDT that Sandy is now a Post-Tropical Cyclone. The maximum winds have decreased slightly and are now near 140km/h. The storm has not yet made landfall, despite some US TV networks jumping the gun. The 10am update said the hurricane was expected to make landfall in the "next hour or so". 10.13am: More details are emerging of that building "collapse" in Manhattan. It appears the Fire Department may have jumped the gun - the front facade of a four storey building has collapsed, by the looks. Here is a photo taken by @MegRobertson and posted on Twitter. There are no reported injuries.
10.02am: Qantas has cancelled its Los Angeles-to-New York flights for Monday and Tuesday. Up to 600 passengers are stranded after Qantas cancelled its Monday and Tuesday daily return flights, affecting four flights in total. Flights from Australian airports at Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to the west coast of the US are still operating. Qantas spokesman Thomas Woodward said it would announce on Wednesday morning, Australian time, whether it would cancel more flights travelling on Wednesday in the United States. Flight-tracking service FlightAware claims that nearly 12,500 flights have been cancelled on the north-west coast of the United States. 9.54am: The New York Fire Department has tweeted about a building collapse in Manhattan, at the corner of 8th Avenue and 14th Street. They have described it as a "multiple dwelling building". (This post has been corrected, see 10.13am). 9.49am: Alas, Hurricane Sandy's death toll seems set to grow. One of the two people missing after a tall ship sank off the US coast has been found, but is "unresponsive". The US Coast Guard’s Lieutenant Mike Patterson said crews were taking 42-year-old Claudene Christian to hospital. The Coast Guard is still searching for the captain of the HMS Bounty. Sandy has killed more than 60 people on its journey through the Caribbean. 9.42am: More than 1.5 million Americans are now without power, according to this update from CBS. The majority of the outages are in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. 9.29am: Our man in New York, Nick Miller, just took a wander down to the East River foreshore. He writes: "A bunch of spectators pose and take pix of each other |
-built in Los Angeles by one of the true guitar gurus of our generation, Dave Friedman, the Buxom Betty uses only the finest components and neat and careful hand-wiring. Dave's compiled a list of clientele including like EVH, Steve Stevens and Jerry Cantrell, before developing his own signature amps. Features of this model include 50-watt single channel all-tube with hybrid U.S. and U.K. voicing, dual EL-34 power, 3-band EQ, Presence control, 3-position bright switch, custom transformers and capacitors and tube-driven spring reverb. There are a bunch of YouTube demos online. Click this link for a list. Sells new for $2699 but this one's immaculate, never gigged, and just $1879. Includes original footswitch.
Ampeg SVT-VR (Vintage Reissue), (top), (side), (back), (back panel), (stock pic). Never gigged, only a few hours of home use. Perhaps the most iconic bass amp of all time is the Ampeg SVT. It’s been seen on more stages than any amp, usually accompanied by its equally oversized 8X10” cabinet and is still extremely popular among touring artists today. Cranking out an impressive 300W (4 ohms or 2 ohms), and these are hard-hitting tube watts, the SVT blew away the competition for sheer power, plus tone shaping that was fairly extensive for its day. The SVT-VR has all the coolness of the original including six 6550 power tubes plus eight preamp tubes (12AU7/12AX7), original blue-lined graphics and cosmetics, and original EQ rocker switches. Make no mistake about it; this is one great sounding bass amp with a tone that holds up very well today. Other features include side handles to heft this 85 lb. monster into position, Neutrik Speakon and 1/4" outputs, and balanced line out. Although this model was born in a time when the average bass amp was probably 100W or so, bass amp power, specifically clean headroom, has soared since the 70’s and it’s not uncommon to find solid state amps cranking out 600-800-1000 watts or more. The SVT, however, is very hard-hitting and it sounds louder than most modern amps with 3 times the output rating. This amp only has a few hours of use on it and has never been played outside the home. It’s like getting a brand new floor model. If you want the best, get the best. New ones are running $2199 but you can get this beautiful barely-used one for $900 less, just $1299. Includes original manual.
2009 Martin 000X1 Acoustic, (front), (back), (headstock), (label/ser.). I haven’t had a lot of these but I’m impressed by the tone. I find it compares very well to other spruce tops with non-wood bodies. It sounds more natural than an Ovation and not too far from a Rainsong, which costs around 4X as much. It’s a remarkable flattop for the money. Although it's a solid Spruce top, the sides, back, and neck are high pressure laminate. I wouldn't have though that alternative source guitars would sound so natural; so "woody". The tone is nearly indistinguishable from a mahogany or rosewood body. Similarly, the projection is excellent and even with the smaller auditorium body style it sounds very big and is quite loud. It’s very comfortable to play with the scaled down 000-size body, while featuring a full-scale 25.4”. You've probably noticed that Martin guitars' action has come down over the past few decades and this guitar is no exception. Action is low and comfortable, although it can easily be raised if you tend to practice very hard strumming. For the money, this is a hard guitar to beat. Excellent condition and an excellent value at $335 (note: I also have a 2010 000X1AE if you need something with electronics). Got it without a case of any kind but you can add a new high quality Gibson Blues King gigbag for $35 (pic).
Ca. 1969 Teisco E-110, (front), (back), (headstock). True museum piece - as clean as it looks in the pics. So many of these old Teisco and Teisco Del Ray guitars are beaters that it's very unusual to come across one that's in pristine condition, especially one without any finish checking. For many players in the 60's, this was their first guitar and since so many were sold to kids, and the fact that they weren't very expensive, most did not receive the care of a fine musical instrument, rather, they were treated as a toy that Junior outgrew and they went out in the shed with the chemistry set and Chutes and Ladders game. Teisco was one of many Japan factories that flourished during the guitar boom of the 60's. Unlike many others, they tended to use their own designs rather than building copies. Most of their guitars before this year featured a 4+2 headstock, for instance, and they had some very unusual body shapes. This one is referred to as the "Tulip" body, due to its resemblance to the flower. Beginning the year after this one was built, Teisco jumped on the bandwagon and began building more and more copies, and most of their unique shapes went away. I've come across many old Teisco's which were horrible players and since they don't have an adjustable truss rod, most were relegated to becoming slide guitars. That is not the case with this one. The action is very comfortable throughout the fretboard. With its single toaster style pickup, located in the middle position, it has a rather mellow tone that sounds like a cross between a Jazzmaster neck and Strat middle pickup. Dating Teisco's is ambiguous, but the Teisco (without the "Del Ray"), the tulip body in an E-110, and the 6/side headstock, pretty much puts it at a '69. There are a few good web sites on Teisco's, here's one on Facebook with links to old catalogs and another one called Teisco Twangers. If you're a collector of guitars in the finest condition, or simply want a cool, feather weight guitar that's fun to play, this one's hard to beat for $219.
Takamine C128 Classical, (front), (headstock), (back), (label/serial). Nice playing, inexpensive classical. Martin spent around 4 hours on this one taking it from a typical mediocre playing nylon string, to something much nicer. Japan-made Takamine's are among the best acoustic guitars you can get for the money. The C128 is Japan-made Takamine's entry level classical but the quality is better than high-end models from other Asian manufacturers, and much better than Tak's non-Japanese classicals such as the G-Series. Features include 14-1/2" body, spruce top, rosewood back and sides, 5-stripe bound body, wooden Marquettery rosette, 12-fret mahogany neck with rosewood fretboard, no fret markers, 12/19 frets, 25.5" scale, 3-on-a-plate gold tuners with white pearloid buttons, and 2" nut width. This one is marked "second" on the label, probably due to some milky finish at the neck joint (shown here), which is strictly cosmetic and doesn't affect the tone in the least. The guitar is extremely clean and appears to have seen very little use. The C128 had a very long run for Tak but was discontinued in '03 with a list price of $700. This used one's in nice shape all around and has no issues. It’s an excellent value for the beginner/intermediate on a Japan-made Tak at $229. Includes gigbag.
2013 Taylor 312ce Grand Concert with Expression System, (front), (back), (side), (headstock), (controls), (case). Taylor's most popular grand concert - where quality tonewoods and fine craftsmanship combine with a modest price, at least for a Taylor. Taylor's 100- and 200-series are good guitar for the money but the USA-made 300-series is really in a different class and in my opinion, the best value in their line. For amplified tones it uses Taylor's Expression System, the improved 9V system, which uses a behind-the-saddle pickup, featuring three uniquely positioned and individually calibrated pickup sensors. The different locations of these sensors delivers a wider dynamic range of acoustic tones. When combined with Taylor’s custom-designed “professional audio” grade preamp, this guitar is capable of exception reproduction of its acoustic tone and superb responsiveness. The 312 features all solid woods including solid Spruce top with a gloss top and satin-finished Sapele back and sides. Sapele is an excellent tone wood with characteristics similar to mahogany, very warm and cozy sounding which, although slightly smaller than a dreadnought, fills the room with sound. Other features include black-bound 20-fret ebony fingerboard, 5-ply B-W-B-W-B binding,14-fret mahogany neck, pearl dot inlays, 1-3/4" nut width, 25-1/2" scale, ebony bridge, black plastic pickguard, and chrome Taylor tuners. This model is a great choice for fingerstyle work but it projects enough to hold its own for loud strumming. Offered in perfect condition with typically superb Taylor action. If you're looking for a quality smaller body size, don’t pay $1999 for a new 312ce when you can have this immaculate ’13 model for just $1299.
Vox AC30 HW2 Hand Wired 2X12 Combo, (top), (panel), (back), (cover), (speakers). THE classic British tone of all time and like the originals, this baby is hand-wired AND in the coolest of Vox colors, Fawn. The Vox AC-30 defined the British tone of the 60's and later, most prominently by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, as well as Brian May, The Edge, The Shadows, The Kinks, Rory Gallagher, and countless others. With a quad of EL84 power tubes, a GZ34 rectifier and three 12AX7 preamp tubes, the AC30 cranks out 30 watts of beautiful and chimey tone. This Fawn-covered beauty is one of the nicest models you can get, commanding a premium to offset the cost of building a handwired amp. With a tone that can easily cover the old hits, this model also has modern enhancements which allow you to cover more musical ground. It starts with the traditional Vox two-channel design: Top Boost and Normal, with High and Low inputs for each channel. The clean-sounding Normal channel as a bright switch for increased brilliance while the Top Boost channel features a Hot/Cool switch to achieve even more gain (controlled by included footswitch). It also adds a Master Volume option which is easily bypassed via the MV/BYPASS switch on the panel. Want full breakup in smaller venues? Just use the OP Mode switch which cuts the output power to 15 watts. A pair of 25W Celestion Greenbacks were chosen for this amp for their ability to deliver great tone and allow a bit of speaker breakup at full volume. Sweet. Included is the footswitch and custom-fit dustcover. Prices on original '60 Fawn AC30's are out of site. This one has all the looks and none of the problems, at around 20% of an original. These sell online for $1699. This one is dead mint, with only a few hours of home use for the killer price of $1050.
Lace Alumitone "Deathbucker". Might have 2 of these available, please inquire. Using Lace's own "current driven" technology, the Deathbucker was designed for high output with a heavy metal drive. Extreme output with thunderous bottom end, yet crisp highs allow the player the most versatile of high output pickups. The passive design yields active pickup performance with zero noise and no battery needed. Even In split mode, the unique Alumitone design is dead quiet with full range sound. Additionally, there is no volume drop in split mode and working as a single coil; noise is virtually eliminated in comparison to standard split-coil pickups. They're an easy drop in replacement and the 4 conductor design needs only 250k pots. It is excellent for any playing situation from live to direct to board recording. For full specs and clips click here for Lace's site. Sells new for up to $115/each. These are just $59/each.
Custom Made Mahogany Strat Head w/Dove inlay, (front front2 inlay), (back), (neck/headstock), (back-side). For the player who wants something truly unique...this is a one-off Custom made guitar. Very unique looks, quality parts and quality woods. The body style is a cross between a Les Paul Single Cutaway, although with a much rounder upper bout and deep & pointy cutaway - while the lower bout is something straight out of the builder's imagination - there really isn't a comparison that I'm aware of. The neck was on the guitar when I got it and we believe it’s an older LaSiDo, featuring a rosewood board and Strat headstock. Excellent electronics all around with a cool blend of Fender and Les Paul. Pickups are a DiMarzio DP-181 Fast Track in the bridge and a Gibson PAF in the neck controlled by 3-way selector and mini-toggle coil tap for the bridge pickup. Control knobs are master volumes and master tone. Body is one-piece(!) mahogany which yields a very warm and full tone. Control cavity is shielded and neatly wired. Output jack is conveniently located out of the way, in the cutout area at the end of the body which also features a bird in flight Abalone inlay. This is a great playing guitar and should appeal to players who want versatility but, especially, want to strap on something that's truly unique and a hand-built one-of-a-kind instrument with top quality components. It plays superbly and is a very cool piece for $599 including hardshell case.
1986 Fender Stratocaster 1967 Reissue, (front), (back), (headstock back), (serial), (inside stamps body cavity electronics). Thinest neck profile I’ve seen on a Strat! The look, the vibe, the tone, and superb playability of a Vintage Series, for a lot less. The finish on these early Fender Japan reissues is actually closer to the actual 60’s finish than the Vintage series, with thin coats of paint and clearcoat. It has the patina of a 50-year old guitar, rather than the 30+ year old guitar it really is. Tone and playability are certain excellent, with a nice spanky Strat sound, good sustain, and low, comfortable action. It features '67 specs with proper 3-tone style sunburst with just the right amount of red in the burst (the pics look messed up in comparison to how it really appears). Also features transition logo on large non-bullet headstock, stamped steel saddles with the heavy trem block, 3-ply white pickguard, Kluson style vintage tuners, and dual string trees. Proper neck/body markings identify this as a '67. If you’re looking for a shallow neck this is the one for you. It’s also a tiny bit more narrow at the nut, 1 9/32”, which is 1/32” under the usual 1 5/8”. It’s as thin a profile as an Ibanez and very easy to get your hand around. It also has a vintage radius 7/25” and vintage frets. The finish on this body is very thin, looks like nitro but I don’t know, but it does have a very small area on back where it is worn through (pic). Front and the rest of the guitar is very clean. All original other than volume pot replaced with a CTS, but we can change to a MIJ pot if desired. The older MIJ models are commanding higher models than the recent "Crafted" in Japan models, perhaps because they’re 10 years older or if you believe the hype, they’re better guitars. I don't know that the quality is better on the earlier ones but I do know that this is an exceptional guitar and '67's are very hard to come by. Considering rarity, quality, and condition, a pretty good buy for $750(HOLD-Andrew M in CA 2/8), hardshell case and trem arm included.
Retro-King Tremtone 5G9 1X12 Combo, (top), (panel), (spkr/label), (back), (hand-wired circuit), (footsw). Hand-wired and designed after one of the holy grail of amps, the brown early 60’s Fender Tremolux. Built in nearby Marcellus NY, the Tremtone isn’t what you want if you want your amp to have massive breakup, but you probably already have pedals that do that for you. What it does have is massive clean headroom and it takes pedals extremely well. At 18 watts, it’s the perfect choice for home or studio work – and it’s also a great club amp, possibly mic’d for larger venues. The circuit is identical to the original Fender 5G9 circuit with the exception of a standby switch and bias control on the Tremtone, plus a lower value on a few caps to make it accommodate both single coils and humbuckers. Features include hand-wired point to point eyelet board, lacquered pine tweed cabinet, Weber 12" Alnico 12" 12A150(B) speaker, Jupiter tone and bypass caps, carbon comp resistors, classic tone original spec transformers, tremolo foot switch, 2 Channels (bright and normal) each with two inputs, tone control, tremolo speed and depth controls. Tube complement includes all JJ tubes with two 6V6 power, three 12AX7 preamp, and a 5U4 rectifier. For a full review it’s hard to do better than ToneQuest so click here if you want the full skinny. This one’s serial #0004 if that’s important to you. Sells new for $1795 but get this one, in beautiful shape and never used outside the home, for just $1150. Includes original footswitch that was never taken out of the box.
Korg K61P USB Midi Keyboard Controller, (pic2), (close-up). Recording solution for the home recordist. A lot of features for the money and while it's tailor made for USB recording, it works great as a simple performance keyboard just plugged straight into an amp. Unlike the budget controllers it features 5 full octaves plus solid, full-size keys. It features a selection of four velocity curves (including a fixed level — great for mimicking organs and early mono synths) that tailor the keyboard response to match any performer. Includes Korg's M1 Le software (screen shot) that contains all of the preset sounds and all of the PCM waveforms of the original famed M1 keyboard virtually turning the K61 into an M1. List price on these was $450 which made them an excellent buy for the home recordist. I have a few, brand new in the box, for just $149.
Sony BVD-IS1000 Home Theater System w/Blu-Ray, (stock pic), (patch bay), (accessories), (rear speaker amp), (Manual). I’ve had this for 10 years but only turned it on around a dozen times. It includes Blu-ray Disc player/receiver, remote control, 5 micro satellite speakers (left/right/center and 2Xrear), wireless rear speaker kit, and subwoofer. The receiver has AM/FM, HDMI inputs, and every other kind of in/out imaginable. Each speaker is 35 watts, with the 75 watts X 2 for the dual-driver sub woofer. Includes all the accessories, many of which have never been used, plus the manual. The rear speakers are called “wireless” which means no wire is needed from the receiver to the speakers, however, they each use a wire from the satellite amp. Sony is top of the line when it comes to consumer home audio and this is an excellent sounding system. I paid $799. $175 and it’s yours.
OFF-HOLD is this killer USA Customs Tele w/Floyd Rose, (front), (back), (headstock), (Floyd), (case). One of the coolest custom made guitars we’ve had in a while, this is a pro-assembled Tele with reverse Strat headstock; top notch parts all around. The body and neck are from the good folks at USA Customs. Finishing and assembly were done by Southbound Custom in Nashville, including nitrocellulose finish on the body and headstock. The alder body was first whitewashed before the translucent blue finish was applied. It’s stunning finished, done perfectly. The rest of the parts are equally impressive: German-made Original Floyd Rose, Schaller locking tuners, DiMarzio Super Distortion with blue bobbins to match the body, chrome metal pickup ring and chrome metal dome volume knob, and finally an engraved Mick Mars neckplate. My customer says the finish work alone was near $500 and that his total investment approached $2K. Although built nearly 10 years ago, this guitar presents in “as new” condition and appears to have sat in the case for its entire life. It plays fantastic and should appeal to hard rock/metal players who like the vibe of a Kramer Baretta, but in a guitar that’s actually better. Includes case pictured which is sort of a brown suede finish, plush lined interior, in similarly perfect condition. Great deal for a guitar with this vibe and options at $999.
Rio Grande Vintage Tallboy Strat Pickup. Robin Guitars is gone but thankfully their Rio pickups have endured. This Vintage Tallboy is a flat pole Strat for your middle/neck position, delivering the vintage tones of the 50’s. New from Rio they’re $88. This one’s just $45.
Rio Grande Tele Bridge Pickup. Excellent vintage Tele tone with loads of quack and twang. I think this is a Muy Grande but it’s been a while so I can’t swear to it. Don’t sell your lame sounding Tele until you’ve tried a cheap and easy upgrade. $45.
Gretsch Synchro-Sonic "Melita" Bridge. Used in nice shape. The Synchro-Sonic was an engineering marvel when it was first introduced in 1951. It produces perfect intonation via 6 moveable string rests. Each string is allowed to find its own true octave and true intervals in all positions and all strings can be accurately tuned and locked in place without a screwdriver. Specs are 3 3/8" spacing post to post, 2 1/32" string spacing, height range 7/8" to 1 1/8". These sell for $129 new but get this very clean used one for $79.
Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff With Top Boost. The EH Muff series has been highly regarded fuzz pedal since the 70’s. The Metal Muff takes the same idea, i.e. a huge sound, but retains only a bit of the fuzztone characteristic. In addition, it gives you a three band eq to dial in the perfect tone, especially the mid-tone which defines most metal songs. In addition, it offers a top boost function which controls a narrow band of highs to make your tone jump out just a bit more, primarily for leads. Here’s a quick demo. Like most EHX pedals it’s built like a tank so it should offer years of hassle-free use. Sells new for $90 but this clean used one is just $49.
Shure Beta 58A Vocal Mic. The “new” industry standard performance mic. Shure has owned the performance mic market for over 40 years, primarily with the venerable SM57 and SM58 mics. Although they still make the 57/58, for more than two decades most pro's have switched to the Beta 58, with its powerful Neodymium magnets and better all around performance. You can't watch a concert on TV without seeing most of the vocalists now using the Beta series, easily identifiable by the thin blue band around the grill. The 58A sells new for $159 and never goes on sale. This one's in nice shape and just $99(SOLD-Drew H 2/25). Add the Low/Hi Z transformer pictured for $10 and/or a new 20' cable for $8, if desired.
2009 Schecter Classic C-1, (vine of life), (front), (back), (headstock), (Tonepros). A remarkable guitar in terms of features, playability, and drop dead good looks, at an incredible price. The Classic is the high end C-1 with the most obvious difference being a beautiful abalone "vine of life" fretboard inlays and quilted maple top with PRS style maple "binding" along the top edge. It also features *real* Seymour Duncan pickups (JB bridge, SH-2N Jazz neck), 5-way switching for a choice of humbucker and single coil tones, Tonepros Tuneomatic TOM bridge; string-thru body tailpiece, locking tuners, chrome hardware, neck-thru design with "ultra access" design for easy playing to the top frets, 24 extra jumbo frets, 25.5" scale, mahogany body with quilted maple top in Vintage 3-Tone Sunburst, 3-piece mahogany neck-thru, maple bound body edge, cream binding on neck, bound headstock, and most notably, an intricate Abalone "Vine of Life" inlay running the entire length of the fretboard. There was one minor mod done to this guitar - the back of the neck had the gloss finish removed (shown here) for a smoother, non-sticky feel. I like it a lot better than the poly finish but if desired, we can probably buff it back to a shine. A quality Korean neck-thru, with top-quality hardware and real Duncans, the Classic C-1 retailed at $1119, remarkable for a guitar of this quality. Get this one, with our killer in-house setup, for just $429(SOLD-Chris C 2/21) with quality gigbag.
1983 Ibanez AM-100 Artist Stagemaster - Metallic Black, (front), (back), (headstock), (label), (hardware), (case). Fine Japanese Ibanez in museum quality and a great semi-hollowbody. In its 36 years it appears to have been rarely played and well taken care of. The Artist Stagemaster was created to be smaller version of their AS (Artist Semi Acoustic) series, many years before Gibson got the idea and started producing the CS-356 and ES-339. This guitar is comfortable and lightweight, yet retains the rich tone of a semi-hollow. Like its name implies it’s a fantastic stage guitar. The AM series consisted of the budget AM-50, the AM-100 and the fancy AM-205 with burled maple and ebony board. Like the 335 it features an arched laminated maple top and body with dual f-holes, except in a scaled down 14” body. Other features include 3-ply maple neck, rosewood fretboard, a pair great sounding Super 58 pickups, dual volume/tone controls and 24 ¾” scale. It also features Ibanez’s finely engineered hardware of the era including Smooth Tuner machine heads, Sure Grip II knobs, Gibraltar II bridge, Quik Change II tailpiece and Dead End strap posts. This model was only offered in Metallic Black and it's a very striking finish with the advantage of not showing smudges the way a regular black finish does. It will look freshly buffed at the end of a gig. There's not a hint of player's wear on this guitar. Hardware is still fresh and shiny, glossy finish shines like it did out of the factory, frets look new, even the pickguard barely has any scratches. Set up is low and comfortable with no dead spots anywhere on the neck. For a quality MIJ archtop in this condition, I consider this a really sweet find at $1099(HOLD-Kenny M 1/18). Includes original case in similarly beautiful condition.
PRS HFS/Vintage Bass Set. THE classic PRS pair. Work perfectly. Removed from 90’s Custom 24. HFS is ceramic with an output of 14.92K, VB is Alnico with an output of 8.48K. $110/pair.
2015 Martin CEO-7, (front), (back), (headstock), (label), (case). Seventh in the series of Martin’s CEO series, the CEO-7 harkens back to the pre-War models of Martin's “Golden Era”. It features a stunning sunburst finish, golden age tuners and authentic headplate lettering on a 14-fret 00 “sloped shoulder” body with a solid Adirondack spruce top and solid mahogany back and sides for wonderfully complex tonality. Cosmetically it's beautifully understated, featuring a lovely shaded top, grained ivoroid binding and black Boltaron inlays. Other features include 00-14 fret slope shoulder body with Adirondack spruce top, solid mahogany sides and back with gloss finish all around, dovetail neck joint, scalloped X-bracing, 24.9" scale, 1 3/4" nut width, modified V neck shape with standard taper, ebony fingerboard and bridge, 1.75" nut width, Old Style 18 inlays and 20 frets. This guitar sounds fabulous right now, with a beautiful richness with plenty of complexity, and this Adirondack top will only get better with age. To my ears, this is the best sounding 00/000 guitar we've had in stock in over a decade. The neck should appeal to modern players who prefer a thinner neck as well as low action that everyone seems to want these days. Sells new for $2629 but this one is perfect and just $1799. Includes similarly clean Geib case and paperwork.
Boss RC-1 Loop Station. Boss's simplest and most user-friendly Loop Station. The RC-1 is a straightforward looper that is easy to operate and with 12 minutes of stereo recording, it's powerful enough for most casual looper fans. Does all the usual stuff, and easily: record, playback, overdub - and undo or redo loops. There are plenty of performance uses for these but I just use one as a second guitarist to practice with. Lay down a chord pattern…work on my leads. On the top panel, there is an innovative loop indicator consisting of a 24-segment LED in a circular pattern. These LED's allow you to easily determine the current status of the Rec/Overdub/Play modes. Stereo in/out jacks can be used with stereo effects and amplifiers and there's a jack for external AC power and footswitch in. This unit is mint and includes manual and box. Lots of fun for $69.
1983 Alvarez 5048 Dreadnought with K&K Pickup, (front), (back), (headstock), (label), (case). 35 years+ and an excellent value on a quality Japan-made acoustic. Easy to play with a crisp, musical tone thanks to a solid spruce top on a mahogany body with a satin finish. The neck is nicely rounded on the back and not at all thin; fills out your palm. The acoustic tone isn’t overly bassy but well balanced. Where it really shines is amplified. The K&K Pure Mini is the best passive system going. Installed on the guitar's bridge plate (as shown here), it uses three small sensors wired to the endpin/output jack without the headache of changing batteries. The bridge plate positioning provides the perfect balance of sound, picking up all the strings without sounding harsh or percussive and "listening" to the sound board to amplify the unique characteristics of your guitar. The result is a warm, full-range signal that represents the true character of your guitar. Cosmetically it’s in very clean shape for its age with no bad scratches, nothing through to the wood. It’s nice. Also included is a hardshell case. All for $399(HOLD-Ian C 2/7), which is quite reasonable for a Japan-made acoustic with K&K and case.
Weber Classic British C1225 Speaker Quad for 4X12. Just found in the shop after missing for a year! Weber's take on the classic 25W Greenback and this set of 16 Ohm 12's will let you nail the tone of a vintage 100W Marshall cab. As many of you know, part of the "magic" of guitar tone involves overdriving not just the amp, but the speakers as well. With a 100 watt cab you'll be able to achieve this overdrive, something not possible with a 280W or 300W cab. These use 30oz ceramic magnets with a 1-3/4" voice coil, with a British Kurt-Mueller aged and treated ribbed cone. Its tone is aggressive, yet has a smoother overdrive distortion characteristic with good detail and midrange complexity. It has more headroom and sounds less compressed than the AlNiCo 1225. For players wanting to upgrade any of the budget Chinese amps that use 16 ohms, just one of these and you’re sounding 30% better. These will run you $117/each direct from Weber (link for price/specs), but this set of 4 have seen just a few hours of bedroom use and are in mint condition. These are mint in box for $75/ea. Buy the set of 4 and get free shipping.
Fender Special Design 8 ohm 10” Speaker. Bought and never installed. 0 hours use. If you blew yours, here you go. $29.
2004 Danelectro 6/12 Double Neck, (front), (back), (headstock back), (case). I haven't had one of these in 9 years. They're fairly rare and long out of production, having a brief production from ca. 98 to around ‘04. This one, finished in white pearl, is in beautiful shape and both of the guitars play exceptionally well. This model features Dano's stacked pots, which gives you a volume and tone control for each pickup, rather than the master volume/tone on some other years. It also features the quality Gotoh tuners, which are the best tuners Dano has ever used. Each guitar features a pair of lipstick pickups and they share the volume/tone controls. A pair of heavy duty switches controls (1) which guitar tone is sent to the output jack and (2), pickup selector for bridge-both-neck. The 6 string features Dano's classic wooden bridge which, remarkably, intonates very well, while on the 12-string side there are 6 individual saddles, each one adjustable. Dano has only been building one model at a time for the past decade and it's hard to say if they'll ever get around to building the double neck models again since they don't have the mass demand of a straight 6-string. For you guys and gals who want to do the Jimmy Page thing but don't want to shell out a couple of grand for a Gibson 6/12, here's a very good quality alternative that plays as good as Gibsons I've had and the tone is actually more jangly making it very well-suited for Byrds/Petty/Beatles type music. Includes similarly clean Dano “tweed” case. For $749, it's the best bang-for-the-buck double neck on the market and it’s easy to play and lighter than most double necks.
Boss VE-8 Acoustic Singer Guitar/Vocal Processor, (pic2), (back), (stock pic). Killer multi-effect for singer/songwriter types or anyone who wants a single device to amplify their acoustic guitar, add vocal harmonies, and sweeten the mix in numerous ways. Like the TC Helicon units I’ve had, this is a very intuitive device and in its most basic form you can just punch-in harmonies on the fly, which automatically match the guitar chord you’re playing. Singing along with the harmonizer for 3-part harmony you can hit, for instance, an A chord and the harmonies for an A; switch to an Am and the middle harmony automatically goes down a ½ step for a perfect minor harmony. Unlike the Helicon units the VE-8 also has a built in 80-second looper which you can easily punch in/out, layer, recall, etc. and have the ability to loop guitar and vocal parts independently. You can also save 50 of your patches for instant recall. Rather than go through a full page of description, click here for a nice YouTube demo from Boss. Sells new for $299; get this one in perfect condition in the box with power supply and manual for $219.
2018 Fender Classic 50's Stratocaster - Surf Green, (front), (back), (headstock), (case). Acquired from the same guy who had the Surf Deluxe Reverb below. Get the 50's vibe and tone with this very nice Classic 50's in one of the all-time cool custom colors, Surf Green. The pastel custom colors such as Shell Pink, Daphne Blue and Sonic Blue are the best sellers we get in so I guess a lot of folks feel like I do. Features of this model include vintage soft V-shaped maple neck, solid Alder body, vintage-style single-coil Strat pickups with staggered Alnico magnets, small headstock with spaghetti logo and vintage-tinted gloss neck, vintage synchronized tremolo with stamped steel saddles, aged plastic pickup covers-knobs-tips, synthetic bone nut and vintage 7.25" fretboard radius. This guitar appears to have seen no playing time and is offered in immaculate condition. It has a superb setup, especially for a vintage radius. These sell for $824 with a gigbag but get this one for less with a genuine Fender accessories tweed case. Just $675 includes center dual-pocket tweed case.
Fender ’65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue - Surf Green, (panel), (back), (spkr), (cover). Check tomorrow, I’m listing a matching 2014 Classic 50’s Strat in Surf. Immaculate condition, a scant few hours of use. One of a small run |
some older, denser inner-ring suburbs such as Renton and Burien. Beyond that, the suburbs would have nothing but school services and express buses to Seattle at rush-hour. In the dense urban fabric of Seattle, on the other hand, you’d have buses or streetcars every three minutes on every major street, with lots of rapid-bus overlays, etc, etc.
The outcry would be tremendous, the politics toxic, the prospects for implementation zero. I would never propose it. But there’s no question that such a service change would dramatically increase ridership, dramatically reduce the number of empty buses, and thus improve how transit scores on the kind of tally that Cox and his allies propose.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, transit agencies have to balance contradictory demands to (a) maximize ridership and (b) provide a little bit of service everywhere regardless of ridership, both to meet demands for ‘equity’ and to serve the needs of transit-dependent persons.
One analysis that I’ve done for several transit agencies is to sort the services according to whether they serve a “ridership” related purpose or a “coverage” related purpose. Ridership services are justified by how many people ride them. Coverage services are justified by how badly people need them, or because certain suburbs feel they deserve them, but not based on how many people ride. I encourage transit agencies to identify which are which. Once a transit agency can identify which of its services are trying to maximize ridership, you can fairly judge how well those services are doing in meeting that objective, including all the environmental benefits that follow. Until then, the Cox argument is smoke and mirrors.
My 2008 Journal of Transport Geography paper on transit’s multiple purposes, exploring how transit agencies can get control of this narrative, is here.
Photo from lantzilla via Flickr, via Streetsblog Los AngelesThis morning brings news from Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Daily Telegraph of ‘cash for access’ allegations against senior MPs Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw, two of Westminster’s grandees. Another lobbying scandal that features a total of zero lobbyists, it’s worth noting that had it happened at the Scottish Parliament, the register proposed by the SPPA Committee would have been no help whatsoever.
Many people will remember when then-MP Neil Hamilton was caught up in what became known as the ‘cash for questions’ scandal, in which it was alleged that Hamilton took money from Mohammed al-Fayed to ask questions in Parliament; more recently, some will recall secretly filmed footage of Conservative treasurer Peter Cruddas seemingly offering access to the Prime Minister in exchange for a significant donation, or Stephen Byers, a former Labour Cabinet minister, describing himself as a ‘cab for hire’.
Despite the fact that many of us undertake lobbying of some sort?—?writing to our MSP, MP or Councillor about a local issue, joining a campaign to keep a school open, or even signing a 38 Degrees petition?—?few people think very much about lobbying beyond a raised eyebrow and a quick tut when stories like these break, if indeed they think about it all.
The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments (SPPA) Committee of the Scottish Parliament, on the other hand, has been thinking about it a great deal since the Scottish Government, perceiving a problem, announced in 2013 that it was co-opting Neil Findlay MSP’s intention to introduce a Bill on lobbying and the regulation thereof. Following a period of evidence-gathering and several meetings on the matter, the Committee has now published a report detailing a number of recommendations on how to regulate lobbying of the Scottish Parliament.
Principal among these is the recommendation that a lobbying register should be established. The register, which would be online, would be aimed at “organisations that undertake significant lobbying” and would be free to join and to update. Information to be provided would include the names of lobbyists, details of events and meetings aimed at or with MSPs, hospitality provided to MSPs and the aims of the lobbying efforts. A new code of conduct should be introduced for lobbyists, and this code would mirror an updated code for MSPs.
So far, so good; because it’s really only the scandals that impinge on the public tetracycline online uk consciousness, lobbying is often both poorly perceived and poorly understood. But lobbying is just a tool (and, when done well, a skill) and like any tool or skill, it can be used for good or bad.
After all, as the recent US Senate report on torture by the CIA showed, even medical training can be ill-applied; and in Scotland, where we have a limited set of devolved powers, a very substantial proportion of the lobbying of Holyrood is actually undertaken by charitable and third sector organisations, although few might realise it.
A register, along with an accompanying awareness campaign, should therefore be a good thing for lobbying and lobbyists; although it has been argued by some that, in Scotland, it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, a little more transparency?—?if the process of registering and updating isn’t too onerous?—?can’t do any harm and could well do some good.
The thing is, the proposals don’t go far enough, because they don’t include one of the essential elements of lobbying?—?the politicians. Without politicians, we have no lobbying, and, therefore, no problems with lobbying. If we accept that transparency is a good thing, which of course it is, then transparency on the part of both parties involved must surely be the logical conclusion; in fact, given that ultimately MSPs will make the decision on how to regulate lobbying themselves through the legislative process, choosing to make such an obvious omission could actually damage the public perception of our Parliament and politics. I’d also hazard a guess that voters will be interested in the actions and activities of the people they’ve chosen to represent them before they’re interested in what lobbyists are up to.
Stewart Stevenson MSP, the Chair of the SPPA Committee, does choose to publish many of his own meetings on his website, using a Google calendar widget; I’ve even seen him do it in real-time during a meeting, which tends to suggest it’s a fairly straightforward process. So why the reticence to hold his colleagues to the same standard? If the logic?—?transparency is a good thing and the public provision of information isn’t too much of a burden on the information-provider?—?works for lobbyists, who are only one half of the equation, then surely it also works for politicians, the other half of the equation. It takes two to tango.It sounds like the stuff of nightmares: feed a black hole, and it might just sprout hair. That’s the bizarre-sounding conclusion of calculations for the way black holes behave when they consume matter. Though the hair is metaphorical, the results could open a window into physics beyond the traditional picture of the universe.
With an immense pull and the ability to gobble up stuff, no one can deny that black holes are captivating. They are also hugely important as places where new physics, such as an extension to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, might be on display. Most recently, this potential was explored via a very strange question: do black holes have hair?
The hair in question isn’t physical, but a metaphor for individuality. To understand where it comes from, first think about the generic black holes predicted by Einstein’s relativity. These can be described completely by their mass, charge and spin. Defined by only those three values, black holes all look basically the same from the outside, even if different objects formed them, or they swallowed different stuff.
This lack of individuality has led them to be called “bald”. But many physicists hope that black holes are not bald, and instead have other properties that arise from parameters other than those three. These would be known as hair – and would offer clues as to why Einstein’s equations aren’t the whole story, something that needs to be solved more generally if relativity is ever to be reconciled with quantum mechanics.
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Getting wiggy with it
Now Vitor Cardoso of the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal and his colleagues have a new way to give black holes hair. They added some better-known but still unproven extensions to general relativity – called scalar-tensor theories – to black-hole models and found that in-falling matter can induce extra charge on a black hole.
As the charge does not arise from any predictions of general relativity, it counts as hair. “The black hole grows a wig,” says Cardoso.
“It is an interesting result,” says Avi Loeb of Harvard University, who was not involved in the new work. “I am most curious if we can apply it to real black holes.”
Cardoso says that an imprint of the extra charge should show up in gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that can be created when black holes collide and merge.
Black hole silhouette
“It would be one of the clearest smoking guns of deviation from general relativity,” says Cardoso. Although gravitational waves have yet to be directly detected, most physicists are confident they exist and should be found soon. For his part, Cardoso predicts upgrades to current detectors will reveal the waves – and perhaps black hole hair – within the next five years.
Another way to test the theory would be to look closely at the silhouettes of black holes as they feed using direct imaging techniques, says Loeb. The extra charge from a hairy black hole would affect the orbits of objects nearby, like the very massive stars that orbit the supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy. “A hairy black hole would have a different silhouette from the one predicted by general relativity,” says Loeb.
It is still a theoretical scenario, but if the extra charge can be detected, then an already weird object will be well on the way to solving one of the biggest problems in modern physics – thanks to its hair.
Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, doi.org/n3cWith Cal transfer Charlie Moore at Kansas, the Jayhawks' 2018-19 starting five could be all transfers.
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KU AthleticsMalik Newman transferred from Mississippi State to Kansas last season. Andrew Doughty @Adoughty88
In 14 years at Kansas, Bill Self has landed just seven scholarship transfers. And the Hall of Fame coach has used multiple transfers in key roles during the same season only once. His entire starting five in 2017-18 could be transfers.
Former Cal guard Charlie Moore committed to the Jayhawks on Monday, telling Scout's Evan Daniels, "I'm going to attend Kansas. I just thought it was the best decision for me. It's closer to home and it's a winning program and the coaches were good to me."
Moore, a freshman who will sit out next year and have three years of remaining eligibility, becomes the sixth player to transfer to Kansas in the last 12 months, joining center Evan Maxwell (Liberty), guard Malik Newman (Mississippi State), guard Sam Cunliffe (Arizona State) and forwards Dedric and K.J. Lawson (Memphis).
Maxwell left the team last season while he sitting out; Newman is eligible in the fall after sitting out last year; Cunliffe is eligible the second semester of the 2017-18 after transferring mid-year; and the Lawsons are both eligible in 2018-19.
"We could lose multiple guys next year, so I think this is a great fit for the University of Kansas," Self said in a release, referencing the Lawsons and Moore. "Not only will we get better down the road but this will certainly make us better in practice next year.”
If Self is unable to find a reliable frontcourt in 2018 -- as was the case last year -- there is a chance his five transfers could fill the starting lineup.
Junior-to-be Carlton Bragg Jr. already announced his transfer. Even if Svi Mykhailiuk withrdaws from the 2017 NBA Draft, he'll graduate next year, as will Devonte' Graham and former Ole Miss transfer Dwight Coleby.
Shooting guard Lagerald Vick's NBA stock is rising and he could bail after a strong 2017-18 junior season. Same goes for sophomore center Udoka Azuibuike -- who missed most of last season with a wrist injury but must return for another year due to his age -- and Newman.
MORE: Swanigan, Motley Lead Players Who Hope Withdraw From NBA Draft
If incoming freshman forward Billy Preston plays well, one year might be enough. And while incoming freshman Marcus Garrett is expected to replace Graham at point guard in 2017-18, who knows if he'll develop quickly enough to unseat Moore (or Newman if he stays and plays the point). Lastly, sophomore small forward Mitch Lightfoot showed good energy and versatility late last season and could compete for a bigger role in 2017-18 and beyond, but he's far from a sure bet to crack the starting five.
Future additions are the biggest wild card. If Mykhailiuk remains in the draft, a 13th scholarship will be available. What if Self adds five-star point guard Trevon Duval to the 2017 class and, albeit unlikely, he stays for more than one season? Or another recruit or transfer this year? Plus at least a recruit or two in the 2018 class.
After last year's frontcourt debacle, it's hard to see Self being comfortable with an undersized three-guard (or four-guard depending how he uses K.J. Lawson) lineup. Nonetheless, it's a very real possibility Kansas could roll out five transfers in their 2018-19 starting lineup.The spatial organization of cells depends on their ability to sense their own shape and size. Here, we investigate how cell shape affects the positioning of the nucleus, spindle and subsequent cell division plane. To manipulate geometrical parameters in a systematic manner, we place individual sea urchin eggs into microfabricated chambers of defined geometry (e.g., triangles, rectangles, and ellipses). In each shape, the nucleus is positioned at the center of mass and is stretched by microtubules along an axis maintained through mitosis and predictive of the future division plane. We develop a simple computational model that posits that microtubules sense cell geometry by probing cellular space and orient the nucleus by exerting pulling forces that scale to microtubule length. This model quantitatively predicts division-axis orientation probability for a wide variety of cell shapes, even in multicellular contexts, and estimates scaling exponents for length-dependent microtubule forces.Protection of Intellectual Property
This is one of the top priorities for our organization. All our project leaders and engineers are trained on key aspects of protection of intellectual property. Here are some of the precautions we implement:
- Signing of NDA (Non Disclosure Agreements) is the first step to bind our designers and customers to mutually keep every piece of exchanged information secret and only within "Need-To-Know" basis.
- All our computer hardware and software is protected by most reliable and up to date spyware and virus protection programs.
- Company telephone communication system is special for avoiding any eavesdropping.
- Computer servers are protected against hacking and infiltration.
- Our team members are not allowed to use laptop computers in high risk areas where surveillance can take place electronically. Interception of signals from our computers is prevented using state of the art tools and precautions.
- To protect against human intelligence (HUMINT), team members do not discuss any confidential projects with each other in public areas, tradeshows or anywhere that is of high risk. Confidential information is never revealed to anyone outside of the appointed key persons. Customers prototypes, work areas such as laboratory cannot be entered by strangers or visitors. Prior to any visit, work areas are prepared so that only materials related to the particular project can be seen.
- Portable computers and laptops are never left unattended anywhere. Highly sensitive information is only kept on secure company servers and cannot be copied or taken out of building except with special access.
- Communication with customers takes place using various techniques and media. For highly sensitive data, we may choose one of a variety of techniques such as having our customer login into a part of our secure servers to follow up on their project or download data. For communicating and transferring highly confidential data we may occasionally use an advanced technique like steganography to hide encryped data behind pictures which can only be seen by the recipient who has our special software. Both sides can then safely exchange information only visible to them using the special software downloaded on each sides' computers. We may also choose to send stored information on magnetic media appointing a reliable courrier.
- Every team member is trained against a variety of security risks such as sabotage, espionage and else.
These precautions and even more should be taken by every technology company operating in todays' business World where highly sophisticated methods are being used by perpetrators every second to steal one of your most valuable assets, namely intellectual asset.“An index makes the query fast” is the most basic explanation of an index I have ever seen. Although it describes the most important aspect of an index very well, it is—unfortunately—not sufficient for this book. This chapter describes the index structure in a less superficial way but doesn't dive too deeply into details. It provides just enough insight for one to understand the SQL performance aspects discussed throughout the book.
An index is a distinct structure in the database that is built using the create index statement. It requires its own disk space and holds a copy of the indexed table data. That means that an index is pure redundancy. Creating an index does not change the table data; it just creates a new data structure that refers to the table. A database index is, after all, very much like the index at the end of a book: it occupies its own space, it is highly redundant, and it refers to the actual information stored in a different place.
Clustered Indexes (SQL Server, MySQL/InnoDB) SQL Server and MySQL (using InnoDB) take a broader view of what “index” means. They refer to tables that consist of the index structure only as clustered indexes. These tables are called Index-Organized Tables (IOT) in the Oracle database. Chapter 5, “Clustering Data”, describes them in more detail and explains their advantages and disadvantages.
Searching in a database index is like searching in a printed telephone directory. The key concept is that all entries are arranged in a well-defined order. Finding data in an ordered data set is fast and easy because the sort order determines each entry's position.
On my Own Behalf I make my living from training, other SQL related services and selling my book. Learn more at https://winand.at/.
A database index is, however, more complex than a printed directory because it undergoes constant change. Updating a printed directory for every change is impossible for the simple reason that there is no space between existing entries to add new ones. A printed directory bypasses this problem by only handling the accumulated updates with the next printing. An SQL database cannot wait that long. It must process insert, delete and update statements immediately, keeping the index order without moving large amounts of data.
The database combines two data structures to meet the challenge: a doubly linked list and a search tree. These two structures explain most of the database's performance characteristics.Lakruwan Wanniarachchi / AFP / Getty Sri Lankan airforce guard the wreckage of a Tamil Tiger light aircraft at Katunayake, near the international airport on February 20, 2009.
Related The Last Days of the Tamil Tigers
The Sri Lankan Army announced with some fanfare two weeks ago that it had destroyed the last air strip used by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), its adversary in a 25-year-long conflict that appears to be coming to an end. However, the Tigers made it clear tonight, with an air attack punching into the heart of the capital, that it's not over yet.
The assault began at about 11 p.m. local time, when two light aircraft burst into Colombo. One bomb hit the Inland Revenue Department, but the real target may have been the Sri Lankan Air Force building, which is directly behind it. The government of Sri Lanka says that 27 people were injured and two people died; other sources reported that has many as 40 people were injured. Both planes were shot down, one of them crashing down next to Colombo's international airport, according to the Sri Lankan government.
This is not the first time that the LTTE, which is fighting for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils, has targeted the Sri Lankan Air Force headquarters. On Jan. 1, the same day that the Army announced the capture of Kilinochchi, the Tigers' de facto capital in northern Sri Lanka, a suicide bomber killed three military personnel in the building, which sits among a cluster of government offices in Colombo's Fort neighborhood, one of the busiest in the city. This is also not the first time that the LTTE has struck Colombo by air. The Tigers started using aerial bombing as a tactic in March 2007, with an attack on another air force base near the airport.
What all these attacks have in common is their psychological impact. The 2007 air strike established that the LTTE had become the first guerrilla organization in the world to have its own air force. These aren't fighter planes, however. They are light propeller planes reportedly put together from parts smuggled into the country. But they are enough to carry out small-scale bombing raids. "Even though the government claimed that the Tiger's air attacks inflicted little damage, the psychological advantage the LTTE has won has served to significantly boost the rebels' morale and could embolden them to step up attacks," wrote New Delhi-based defense analyst Animesh Roul on the website International Relations and Security Network. The Jan. 1 suicide bomb, furthermore, showed the world that, even after losing its capital, the LTTE was still capable of striking the government's capital, hundreds of miles away.
Tonight's bombing raid came as the world's media clustered in Colombo to cover what many expected to be the end of a conflict that began in earnest in 1983. The Army contends that it has cornered the LTTE in a shrinking patch of territory around Mullativu on the northeastern coast. With this attack using a do-it-yourself plane and a couple of bombs the whole city was plunged into darkness (the power was cut) and fear, as tracer bullets and anti-aircraft fire punctured the sky. With two planes down, this might be the last sortie from the Tamil Eelam Air Force; but it may be the beginning of a new phase of guerrilla warfare in Colombo.The sawing-off of Manhattan Island is an old New York City story that is largely unverified. It describes a practical joke allegedly perpetrated in 1824, by a retired ship carpenter named Lozier. According to the story, in the 1820s a rumor began circulating among city merchants that the weight of the urban district was causing southern Manhattan Island to sink, near the Battery. It was believed that by cutting the island, towing it out, rotating it 180 degrees, and putting it back in place that Manhattan would be stabilized, and that the thin part of the island could be condemned. Surprisingly, the main concern was not the futility of the idea but of Long Island's being in the way. Lozier finally assembled a large workforce and logistical support. At a massive groundbreaking ceremony, Lozier did not show up, but hid in Brooklyn and did not return for months.[1]
The story did not appear in any known newspapers (although the press supposedly did not report on such pranks in that era) and no records have been found to confirm the existence of the individuals involved. This has led to speculation that the incident never occurred and the original report of the hoax was itself a hoax, which is the conclusion Joel Rose suggests in his book, New York Sawed in Half: An Urban Historical (2001).[2] The hoax was first documented in Thomas F. De Voe's (1811-1892) [3][4] volume The Market Book (1862), as conveyed by his uncle who was Lozier's supposed associate, and was told again in Herbert Asbury's work All Around The Town: Murder, Scandal, Riot and Mayhem in Old New York (1934, reissued as a Sequel to Gangs of New York). Another condensed retelling occurs in the 1960s Reader's Digest book, Scoundrels and Scallywags: 51 Stories of the Most Fascinating Characters of Hoax and Fraud (1968).[5][6][7]
References [ edit ]Use interfaces for java development they said. It will be more flexible they said. Well, that all might be true but for library projects that doesn’t necessarily has to be true as well. In this post I will explain you why I have switched from interface to an abstract class as base class in one of my library projects called AdapterDelegates 3.0.
To give you some background information: AdapterDelegates is a small library I have written to create composable Adapters for Android’s RecyclerView (favor composition over inheritance). I have described the idea and the reason why we need such a library in a previous blog post: Joe’s great adapter hell escape.
AdapterDelegates (before version 3.0) had an interface called AdapterDelegate like this:
/** * @param <T> the type of adapters data source i.e. List<Foo> */ public interface AdapterDelegate < T > { /** * Called to determine whether this AdapterDelegate is the responsible for the given data * element. * * @param items The data source of the Adapter * @param position The position in the datasource * @return true, if this item is responsible, otherwise false */ public boolean isForViewType ( T items, int position ); /** * Creates the {@link RecyclerView.ViewHolder} for the given data source item * * @param parent The ViewGroup parent of the given datasource * @return The new instantiated {@link RecyclerView.ViewHolder} */ @NonNull public RecyclerView. ViewHolder onCreateViewHolder ( ViewGroup parent ); /** * Called to bind the {@link RecyclerView.ViewHolder} to the item of the datas source set * * @param items The data source * @param position The position in the datasource * @param holder The {@link RecyclerView.ViewHolder} to bind */ public void onBindViewHolder ( T items, int position, RecyclerView. ViewHolder holder ); }
So for every view type you want to display in a RecyclerView you had to define your own class implementing AdapterDelegate interface and then you could plug-in multiple AdapterDelegates into a RecyclerView’s Adapter to display different kind of items (view types). Moreover, you could reuse the same AdapterDelegate for multiple Adapters.
class vs. interface
One may ask: Why have you defined interface AdapterDelegate<T> and not simply class AdapterDelegate<T>? Well, an AdapterDelegate is just a contract (or a protocol) that says this methods have to be implemented. That is exactly what interfaces are good for. Furthermore, we should program against interfaces, right? Instead of writing your classes in a way that says “I depend on this specific class to do my work” with interfaces it’s more like “I depend on any class that does this stuff to do my work”. By doing so we don’t rely on implementation details, are more flexible and loosely coupled.
interface vs. abstract class
That is a little bit more tricky although the same arguments as in the “class vs. interface” paragraph from above are still valid. I would like to add that an abstract class let you define some behaviors and forces your subclasses to provide others (abstract methods). Unfortunately that is also a problem at the same time. Inheritance (in contrast to implementing an interface) might introduce a shared state and behavior relation between super class and subclass because the state of the overall object relies on implementation of both, the super class and the subclass. Moreover, that means that if your are extending from an abstract class and you are not implementing the abstract methods as intended by the author of the super class (which might not be you) you may break internal state and behavior of your subclass. What I’m trying to say is: if you don’t know all the implementation details of your super class, you can’t be sure that your subclass is working correctly. I’m pretty sure you have extended from abstract classes and have implemented the missing abstract methods before but have you ever checked the source code of the super class to be sure that your implementation of those abstract methods are as intended by the author of the super class? By the way, the source code of a super class could have been changed with every update. You might have to look at the source code again to verify that your subclass implementation still conforms with the intention of the super class.
Abstract classes allow default implementations
With that said, you are wondering why I have switched from interface AdapterDelegate<T> to abstract class AdapterDelegate<T> in AdapterDelegates version 3.0, aren’t you? For a library abstract classes do make sense if your libraries public API changes frequently and if you are not under full control of how and when the API will be changed.
That is exactly the case for my AdapterDelegates library. I depend on the RecyclerView’s Adapter API which, obviously, is not designed nor maintained by me. Concrete example: Few releases back a new method onBindViewHolder(VH holder, int position, List payloads) has been added to RecyclerView.Adapter class to support payloads. AdapterDelegates 2.0 interface only contained the method signature onBindViewHolder(VH holder, int position) (without payloads). If I want to add this method to interface AdapterDelegate<T> in version 2.1 everybody using my library would have to go into his source code and implement this method too. Otherwise his / her code wouldn’t compile.
What if you decide to update your app to version 2.1 (with payload support) but a third party library of your app still depends on version 2.0 (without payload support)?
Then your code will compile but your app will crash at runtime. Why? Because the third party library is already compiled. Hence, no compile time error will be thrown but gradle will pack version 2.1 (can’t pack both 2.1 and 2.0 in the same apk, therefore uses the newer one) into your final android APK file. When invoking onBindViewHolder(VH holder, int position, List payloads) on a third party library component a NoSuchMethodError will be thrown at runtime. The android SDK faces the same issue. LINT warns you to add a check like if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= 21) but there is no such mechanism for libraries packed in your code.
To avoid such problems Jake Wharton suggested to change package name and maven group id in his blog post Java Interoperability Policy for Major Version Updates. That is a very good strategy you should follow when publishing your own library. But what is a major version update? In my case, every time RecyclerView’s Adapter API changes that would be a major version update for my AdapterDelegates library too because I may have to add new methods to the interface AdapterDelegate<T>. That wouldn’t be very convenient for the users of my library.
Therefore, I have decided to switch to abstract class AdapterDelegate<T> because most likely the development team behind RecyclerView will add new methods to introduce new optional features. At least that was the case in the past. By using abstract class instead of an interface I can add this methods “silently” in a minor version update (not major version update) by providing a default implementation, which abstract classes allow me to do, but interfaces don’t (before java 8, available in android starting at API level 24).
Now you may roll your eyes and ask: What about all that inheritance shared state and behavior nonsense you told me before and that I can’t be sure that by inheriting from a super class I am not breaking something without checking the source code of the super class.
Well, that still is true. However, I as a library developer restrict myself to define abstract class AdapterDelegate<T> just like I would define an interface by using abstract methods except the fact that for newer optional features I will provide an empty default implementation:
public abstract class AdapterDelegate < T > { protected abstract boolean isForViewType ( T items, int position ); protected abstract RecyclerView. ViewHolder onCreateViewHolder ( ViewGroup parent ); protected abstract void onBindViewHolder ( T items, int position, RecyclerView. ViewHolder holder, List < Object > payloads ); protected boolean onFailedToRecycleView ( RecyclerView. ViewHolder holder ) { return false ; } protected void onViewAttachedToWindow ( @NonNull RecyclerView. ViewHolder holder ) { } protected void onViewDetachedFromWindow ( RecyclerView. ViewHolder holder ) { } }
So you, as user of this library, can checkout the source code and understand easily that there is no shared state or behavior with your own subclass.
TL;DR: For a library project it is okay to use abstract class instead of interface, if you restrict yourself to design abstract classes like interfaces and only add empty default implementations but no default implementation that changes state or behavior of this class (and in consequence of all subclasses).The van carrying supplies stopped at the Rafah crossing. (Eva Barlett)
EXPOSED
Ten days after setting out from Edinburgh, and five days past their projected 15 July arrival, Scottish humanitarian Khalil al-Niss and his wife Linda Willis finally arrived in the afternoon of 20 July to the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border only to be denied entry to Gaza.
The Gazan side, just over 100 meters from the Egyptian gate and Israeli-built wall, is visible from where the couple’s van sits idle; doctors inside Gaza wait for the expected delivery of essential medical aid.
Having arrived by ferry from Jordan after 11pm, al-Niss and Willis were made to wait over 24 hours at the border town of Nuweiba, where Egyptian authorities repeatedly sent them to six different departments to fill out form after form.
Once again, the van was unloaded as Egyptian officials inspected its contents to only reload them seemingly satisfied the couple really was bringing in vital medicines and equipment.
“Egyptian bureaucracy is amazing. We sat, had tea, filled out forms and were told, ‘okay, you’re ready to go now. Just go over to that office there and fill out one more form,’” Willis told Daily News Egypt.
Just after 1pm on 20 July they drove into al-Arish, the pair weary but pleased to have made it to their second-to-last destination. “We’re completely exhausted. Since Wednesday morning until now we’ve only slept a cumulative 10 hours,” said Willis.
Willis and al-Niss have driven day and night in a van crammed with urgently-needed medical supplies and equipment to reach northeastern Sinai town of Rafah on the Gaza border.
They are part of a growing trend of international citizens who have decided to help end the Israeli siege on Gaza where residents are denied the most basic necessities — including vital medicines and hospital equipment parts.
Willis, a native of Scotland and al-Niss, a Palestinian from Jerusalem living in Scotland, took time off from their jobs to deliver the medical supplies by first ferrying to Belgium, and then driving through Germany, Austria, and Slovenia.
Although the team anticipated difficulties crossing borders with a van decked out in the Palestinian and Scottish flags and filled with medicines, they hadn’t expected a flat-out denial of entry. Arriving at Croatia’s border, the pair was refused entry, causing them to backtrack and alter their route, driving instead through Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to cross via Turkey two days later.
Turkish authorities also initially turned the van away, yet eventually relented some 17 hours later, having partially unloaded and searched the van’s contents, and permitting the van to pass. “I was surprised,” Willis explained, “because Turkey is a Muslim country and I had thought they would support and empathize with Gaza.”
Thankfully for the pair, travel was easier after Turkey.
“Syria was fantastic,” al-Niss said, praising the country’s aid in expediting travel through and on to Jordan. “Syrian authorities even provided us with a security convoy, all the way to the border.”
In Jordan, the duo once again faced excessive red tape and an unwillingness to allow them passage, a reticence which again surprised them given Jordan’s large population of Palestinian refugees. After again partially unloading the van, four hours later they were allowed to pass and boarded a ferry bound for Egypt.
Greater Obstacles
Khalil al-Niss and Linda Willis at the Rafah crossing. (Eva Bartlett)
“It’s just been such a long journey. It would be fantastic if we could enter and deliver the medicine, save some lives,” Willis explained. “But I don’t think it will be easy, I think we’ll need to get help from our Scottish Parliamentarians.”
Arriving at 2pm at Rafah’s closed gates, Willis and al-Niss were told they must first return to al-Arish to fill out border-crossing forms with officials based there before their crossing into Gaza would be considered.
The two, having been on the road for 10 days and already having faced days of bureaucracy and waiting, refused to leave the area, afraid that roadblocks might prevent their re-entry the following day. After a warning from Egyptian authorities that the area in front of the border was now a closed military area forbidden to foreigners, the couple relented, leaving the van parked at the border crossing, waiting to enter and deliver the goods.
Willis, a nurse in Scotland, explained the coordination with Gaza’s doctors:” We spoke with a doctor in one of Gaza’s hospitals. He’s desperate for the medicine and equipment we’re bringing. He’s particularly thrilled about the endotracheal tubes used in surgery that we are bringing as he says they are re-using the only tubes they have right now.”
The van also carries desperately-needed medication for heart conditions and diabetes, as well as syringes, bandages, swabs and antibiotics.
An Egyptian humanitarian who wished to withhold his name traveled to the border to support the Scottish effort condemned what he called the complicity of the Egyptian government in the siege. “Egypt shares in this crime,” he said. “The officers here denying you entry are taking orders from higher powers.”
Impact of siege
The Gaza-based Popular Committee Against the Siege (PCAS) last reported the number of victims who had died preventable deaths as a result of unattainable medical care under the siege as 212, the latest two victims including an 11-month-old infant and a 44-year-old father of eight. Both died after being denied permits to exit Gaza for treatment.
PCAS lists 107 classes of basic medicines that are depleted in Gaza, 97 more nearing depletion, 136 halted or not functioning medical instruments and over 1,500 patients who need to leave the Strip for medical treatment.
Despite the 19 June agreement to halt Israeli military operations, invasions, and indiscriminate shelling on Gaza, in return for an end to the launching of homemade rockets from Gaza towards Israel, Israel has not met its obligations in opening the borders with Gaza and allowing in adequate amounts of food, medical supplies, construction materials, fuel, and other vital elements denied to the civilian population for over one year.
Instead, the opening of Rafah, and the passage of goods into Gaza via other crossings, has been put on hold, used as a bargaining tool for the release of the Israeli solider being held in Gaza, even though his release was not part of |
observatory is slated for full capability by 2014 with about 100 flights per year.[10][30]
Scientific research and observations [ edit ]
The primary science objectives of SOFIA are to study the composition of planetary atmospheres and surfaces; to investigate the structure, evolution and composition of comets; to determine the physics and chemistry of the interstellar medium; and to explore the formation of stars and other stellar objects. While SOFIA aircraft operations are managed by NASA Dryden, NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, is home to the SOFIA Science Center which will manage mission planning for the program.[10] On 29 June 2015, the dwarf planet Pluto passed between a distant star and the Earth producing a shadow on the Earth near New Zealand that allowed SOFIA to study the atmosphere of Pluto.[32]
In early 2016, SOFIA detected atomic oxygen in the Atmosphere of Mars for the first time in 40 years.[33] In early 2017, its observations of 1 Ceres in the mid-infrared helped determine the large asteroid/dwarf planet was coated with a layer of asteroid dust from other bodies.[34] In July 2017, SOFIA observed a star occultation of the distant asteroid 2014 MU69 while ground based observatories failed this observation, preparing the probe New Horizons visiting this asteroid.
Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors Program (AAA) [ edit ]
SOFIA was designed from the beginning to support a robust public education and outreach effort that can, during the planned 20-year mission lifetime, directly involve more than a thousand educators of all types — K-14 teachers, science museum and planetarium educators, and public outreach specialists — as partners with the scientist, and reach hundreds of thousands of people across the nation through these educators.[35]
The "SOFIA Six" are the first set of educators selected in United States to participate in SOFIA's AAA "Pilot" program, and flew during the summer of 2011. Germany has a separate application process, but also flew two teachers that summer.[36] Educator teams plus alternates were selected in a highly competitive application process. NASA and DLR (German Space Agency) selected educators came from a variety of backgrounds, and their institutions included a school for the deaf, an alternative education site (developmentally challenged), highly underserved student populations, rural schools, and a Native American school. Since the "Pilot" cycle the AAA program has flown over 20 teams and is now in its Cycle 5 phase.[35][37]
Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols flew aboard SOFIA on September 17, 2015.[38]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California on Tuesday released draft rules for its landmark greenhouse gas cap-and-trade plan that will be the most ambitious U.S. effort to use the market to address global warming.
State law requires California to cut its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Measures will range from clean vehicle and building rules to the cap-and-trade system that lets factories and power companies trade credits to emit gases that heat up the earth.
Federal rules under debate by Congress could eclipse and preempt regional plans, but California and other local governments see themselves as the vanguard of addressing climate change, especially in light of slow national action and setbacks for international talks scheduled in Copenhagen next month.
The draft released on Tuesday shows California, seen as an environmental trend-setter, may take on even more than expected in its first round of cap-and-trade, which will start in 2012.
Gasoline and residential heating fuel suppliers could be included in the first cap-and-trade phase, which had been expected to focus on big pollution sources like power plants and refineries.
“California is the first out of the box,” state Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols told reporters on a conference call. The draft rules kick off a comment period that will lead to final regulation next fall.
A less comprehensive northeastern U.S. regional trading system is already under way, focusing on carbon dioxide emissions by big emitters. California by contrast plans to include nearly every source of emissions to reach its goal.
California businesses regularly criticize the plan as going too far too fast — and costing too much. Whether the net effect of the plan will be a new green economy or disaster for overburdened businesses is still hotly debated.
OUTSIZE ATTENTION
New estimates of plan costs, including suggestions on how much support to give industry, won’t be available until an independent advisory group issues a report next year.
The draft avoids what may be the toughest issue — how much to rely on auctions of credits, which would require power companies and the like to buy permission to pollute. The emitters want allowances given to them, especially early on.
But Nichols said California had shown a strong preference for moving to auction as quickly as possible and that its 2006 global warming law provided clear guidance while politicians in the U.S. Congress were still raising support for a bill.
“Congress started this, you know, as a political exercise to see how many allowances you had to give out to which groups to get them to buy into the program. They didn’t have a climate bill,” she said.
“We know how many emissions we have to reduce. The question is how do we do it in a way that costs less,” added Nichols, whose Air Resources Board was appointed by state law as the main regulator deciding on how to cut greenhouse gases.
The cost of a ton of carbon dioxide initially could be around $10, based on how other programs operated, she said. That is about half the current European price. The average American has carbon production of about 20 tons per year, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The cap-and-trade system will account for only about a fifth of California reductions but it draws outsize attention, in part because the state, with the largest U.S. economy and population, is part of the 11 member Western Climate Initiative, which includes U.S. states and Canadian provinces.
China, too, will watch California’s action, partly by virtue of the state’s partnerships with Chinese provinces, said Environmental Defense Fund California Climate Change Director Derek Walker.
“In many ways this is similar to what you are hearing from international circles now. Everybody is coming to the table with their opening bets,” he said. But unlike most, California has committed to cuts and now is working out the details.30 Reasons in 30 Days to Vote for Donald Trump – #1 Trump Will Make America Great Again!
Guest post by Joe Hoft
As we counted down to the November 8th election, we listed 30 reasons in 30 days to vote for Donald Trump for President of the US. Here is our number one reason –
Reason #1 – Trump Will Make America Great Again!*
Make America Great Again (MAGA) was Trump’s slogan throughout his campaign. Perhaps the below video explains MAGA best –
* Below is our entire list of 30 reasons to vote for Donald Trump for President. One reader commented 30 days ago that we could have started a year ago on this list. Our purpose in putting this together was to provide you with an inventory of reasons to vote for Donald Trump for President.
We believe that after reading and viewing the posts below you will agree that only one person deserves your vote for President of the US in 2016 – Donald Trump.
See also –
Reason #2 Only Trump Can Stop Corrupt Clinton Machine
Reason #3 The Supreme Court
Reason #4 Corrupt Hillary’s Criminal Email Activities
Reason #5 The Criminal Clinton Foundation
Reason #6 Hillary is Really Sick
Reason #7 The Benghazi Massacre
Reason #8 Trump Will Build a Great Border Wall
Reason #9 Trump’s Massive Tax Cuts
Reason #10 Obamacare
Reason #11 Obama’s Disrespect for the Military and Vets
Reason #12 Obama’s Massive $20 Trillion Debt
Reason #13 Obama-Clinton Created ISIS
Reason #14 Trump Loves New Media – New Media Loves Trump
Reason #15 Obama’s Abysmal GDP Growth Rate
Reason #16 Trump – The Law and Order Candidate
Reason #17 Trump’s America First Trade Strategy
Reason #18 Hillary’s Attack on the 2nd Amendment
Reason #19 The Candidate’s Children and Abortion
Reason #20 Obama-Clinton’s Libyan Catastrophe
Reason #21 Obama’s 94 Million Jobless Americans
Reason #22 The Trump Train
Reason #23 Bill Clinton’s a Rapist
Reason #24 Obama-Clinton’s Absurd and Dangerous Iran Deal
Reason #25 Obama’s Food Stamp Nation
Reason #26 Vince Foster and Filegate
Reason #27 Beautiful Melania Trump
Reason #28 Obama’s Historical Low Home Ownership Rates
Reason #29 Syrian Quagmire
Reason #30 Whitewaterwhen you perhaps have a spare moment could you show me how you colour and line? it isn't an immediate request but I love your style and take inspiration from it, and I would quite like to see how it's done. thanks :)
Hey! Sorry I took so long, but I figure I can answer your question now. My, uh, process can be quite kludgy, but it’s just how I do things. I kinda forgot to take inprocess screenshots, so hopefully these layer arrangements will make some sense…
Anyway, lets use the Royal Guards card in this example.
I also saved a gif of my process, more or less:
And for completeness sake, here’s one of Mettaton I did earlier:
For the record, I mostly use Manga Studio 5, occasionally dipping into photoshop for more specific filters and effects. I hope this helps!Chimpanzees are not people, no matter how they are dressed up for commercials, but perhaps they are close enough that they deserve some of the same rights humans have.
That is what an animal rights group claimed on Monday when it filed a classic writ of habeas corpus, that revered staple of American and English law and tired cliché of detective fiction — not for a human being held unlawfully, but for Tommy, a chimpanzee in Gloversville, N.Y.
This is no stunt. The Nonhuman Rights Project has been working on this legal strategy for years, sifting through decisions in all 50 states to find one that is strong on what is called common law, and one that recognizes animals as legal persons for the purpose of being the beneficiary of a trust.
The leader of the project, Steven M. Wise, who has written about the history of habeas corpus writs in the fight against human slavery and who views the crusade for animal rights as a lifelong project, said New York fit the bill. His legal action added a milestone to a year that has already been remarkable for chimpanzees, with one federal agency taking steps to retire most chimps owned by the government and another proposing to classify all chimps as endangered, an action that would throw up new obstacles to experiments even on privately owned chimps.Last month, I posted a list of 11 lies about homosexuality from Tim LaHaye‘s 1978 book The Unhappy Gays. (LaHaye later co-wrote the Left Behind series.)
Turns out LaHaye and his wife Beverly also wrote a book all about dating and sex: Against the Tide: Raising Sexually Pure Kids.
So you know I had to check it out.
Here’s what I learned:
1. Your greatest achievement as parents will be knowing nobody got inside your daughters’ pants until their wedding day.
Leaning forward she surprised us with the words, “Mom and Dad, you can be proud of yourselves. You raised two daughters in Southern California and both of us were virgins on our wedding day!” Tears of joy ran down both our faces as we realized that this dedicated Christian young woman of twenty-four had set the goal many years before to be a virgin bride, and she had achieved it.
2. Only losers have sex before marriage.
Saying yes to premarital sex does nothing for one’s character. It weakens one’s resolve, unleashes adult passions in a child’s body, and destroys self-esteem through guilt. Young people who say no to premarital sex tend to feel good about themselves and are prone to become winners in life.
3. If you have premarital sex, you may have to kill yourself. But not before giving your kid a sexually transmitted infection.
When I was a teen I had a friend (I’ll call him Phil) whose father, like mine, was dead… his father committed suicide when Phil was four. He could barely remember him. Phil had a scar on the side of his face that he eventually explained was the result of several operations to repair a hole in his cheek. Doctors said it was a birth defect caused by his father’s syphilis contracted before he married. In his youth Phil’s dad “sowed his wild oats” and incurred a sexually transmitted disease that disfigured his son for life. The father’s guilt became so intense he hung himself — a high price to pay for a few minutes of illicit pleasure.
4. When you kids ask you where babies come from, be honest and tell them, “God did it.”
For example, note the difference in the following answers to the childish question: “Where did I come from?” The old answer was, “The stork brought you.” A better answer is, “God gave you to us… and we are very glad He did!” Avoid teaching too much in response to these innocent questions.
5. If you start fooling around in a relationship, it’ll go from holding hands to “necking” to “mutual sex play” to sex to a break-up. It’s the law.
6. Wet dreams are caused by God making too much sperm. Your homemaker mother will tell you all about it when she’s changing your sheets.
The “wet dream” is God’s method of releasing the buildup of sperm and sexual energy in an adolescent boy or in a man. It is easier for a boy to learn about this from his father, but frequently a mother discovers the signs of a wet dreams when changing her son’s sheets. You should reassure your sons that this is very normal and they need not feel embarrassed.
7. If your parents love you, you won’t become a homosexual. Also, lesbians are created by fathers who are angry they didn’t have sons.
the family most likely to produce a homosexual comprises a very intimate, possessive and dominating mother and a detached, hostile father. Many mothers of lesbians tend to be hostile and competitive with their daughters. The fathers of female homosexuals seldom appears to play a dominant role in the family and have considerable difficult being openly affectionate with their daughters. … Some fathers rejected their daughters, particularly for not being boys, which has caused some girls to view themselves as boys and thus to take on male characteristics. Proper parental love is one of the best preventatives of homosexuality.
8. We are all homosexuals. Every one of us.
Most of the homosexuals I know indulged in masturbation early and frequently. This seems to be a crucial step in adopting a homosexual lifestyle. As frequent masturbators, they learn to associate their genitals with sexual pleasure. This association can overcome heterosexual leanings and destroy a natural attraction toward females. Masturbation can divert a child from normal sexual desires and serve as a catalyst that will provide him with a mental attitude favorable to homosexuality.
9. Because fathers own their daughters, you have to ask for daddy’s permission before borrowing her. Kind of like a boat.
When a young man dates your daughter, it is serious business; he is going out with one of your most treasured possessions. If a person borrows your car or boat, you would set some guidelines for its use. It is even more important when a young man “borrows” your daughter. This may frighten some prospects away, but they represent the group you want your daughter to avoid. Any boy who lacks the courage to look a girl’s father in the eye when asking permission has no business dating her.
10. When interviewing your daughter’s prospective boyfriend, make sure he ain’t no Jew.
Father: “What can I do for you, Kevin?” Kevin: “Mr. Petersen, I came over tonight to ask you if I can take your daughter out on a date.” Father: “I appreciate you taking the trouble to come by for a talk. There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask you, if I may. First, are you a born-again Christian?” If he says yes, you can follow that up with, “Where do you go to church and how active are you in the church?”
11. Don’t you dare think about French kissing.
Never French kiss! Sooner or later, even among the most wholesome young people who indulge in kissing, one of them will resort to French kissing. This can be very stimulating and, therefore, should be saved for marriage. Rarely will a couple who does not French kiss indulge in sex.
12. Make sure your daughter never lets anyone (except her husband) touch her in “no man’s land.”
Until marriage, all girls should consider the area from her neck to her knees as “no man’s land.” All sensory feelings between those spots of the body point to sexual arousal. Fondling of that area can heighten her emotions and, at certain times of her monthly cycle (particularly the seventy hours of highest fertility) make her so passionate she could lose control of her will. Only one man should ever have access to that area: her husband.
13. A man should never let a young jezebel rape him. If she does, it’s always his fault.
… He may date a girl sometime who is far more experienced than he, who may urge him to go to a remote place to “make out.” He can be polite yet firm only if he has established in advance principles that he will not violate under any circumstances. He needs to be reminded that an aggressive girl or woman is almost impossible for the average man to resist unless he is deeply committed to purity. He alone is responsible for his behavior, and he will bear the responsibility. Girls cannot rape unwilling men; they can seduce them, which only proves that a man who allows himself to get into a bad situation is unwise (Prov. 5).
14. Authors of a pro-abstinence book should really think twice about the title of their closing chapter.Share
Using a 29-pound (13 kg) fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Zipline International this week officially launched a medical service in Rwanda, delivering vital medical supplies to remote parts of the country.
Fifteen custom-built “Zip” drones operate from a distribution center, with the autonomous flying machine able to make round trips of up to 93 miles (150 kilometers), a distance that allows it to cover much of the small African nation. Medical facilities around the country can order blood, vaccines, or medication via text message. A team at the center then loads up the battery-powered drone and sets the flight plan before catapulting it skyward to begin its journey.
Consignments can weigh up to 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg), and the drone’s top speed of 60 mph (97 kmh) means it can reach any of 20 designated hospitals in good time, dropping off supplies using a biodegradable parachute. It then returns to base where it’s carefully brought safely back to terra firma (check out the landing in the video above).
“One delivery, one life saved. It’s that simple,” Zipline says on its website.
The California-based robotics company has received funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and earlier this year struck a deal with the Rwandan government to use its technology to deliver medical supplies to isolated communities.
“It’s really hard to make sure people have access to the medicine they need and so Zipline is designed to allow public health care systems to be able to always make a delivery when someone’s in trouble,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told the Associated Press earlier this year.
Having launched its operation in Rwanda following months of testing, Zipline is now hoping to take a similar service to the U.S., focusing initially on remote communities in Maryland, Nevada, and Washington.
Of course, there are still many regulatory hoops to jump through, but now that it’s proven its ability to operate a safe and efficient service in Rwanda, Zipline hopes it can convince the authorities to allow it to do the same in the U.S.Merge Sort
Merge sort is based on the divide-and-conquer paradigm. Its worst-case running time has a lower order of growth than insertion sort. Since we are dealing with subproblems, we state each subproblem as sorting a subarray A[p.. r]. Initially, p = 1 and r = n, but these values change as we recurse through subproblems.
To sort A[p.. r]:
1. Divide Step
If a given array A has zero or one element, simply return; it is already sorted. Otherwise, split A[p.. r] into two subarrays A[p.. q] and A[q + 1.. r], each containing about half of the elements of A[p.. r]. That is, q is the halfway point of A[p.. r].
2. Conquer Step
Conquer by recursively sorting the two subarrays A[p.. q] and A[q + 1.. r].
3. Combine Step
Combine the elements back in A[p.. r] by merging the two sorted subarrays A[p.. q] and A[q + 1.. r] into a sorted sequence. To accomplish this step, we will define a procedure MERGE (A, p, q, r).
Note that the recursion bottoms out when the subarray has just one element, so that it is trivially sorted.
Algorithm: Merge Sort
To sort the entire sequence A[1.. n], make the initial call to the procedure MERGE-SORT (A, 1, n).
MERGE-SORT (A, p, r)
1. IF p < r // Check for base case
2. THEN q = FLOOR[(p + r)/2] // Divide step
3. MERGE (A, p, q) // Conquer step.
4. MERGE (A, q + 1, r) // Conquer step.
5. MERGE (A, p, q, r) // Conquer step.
Example: Bottom-up view of the above procedure for n = 8.
Merging
What remains is the MERGE procedure. The following is the input and output of the MERGE procedure.
INPUT: Array A and indices p, q, r such that p ≤ q ≤ r and subarray A[p.. q] is sorted and subarray A[q + 1.. r] is sorted. By restrictions on p, q, r, neither subarray is empty.
OUTPUT: The two subarrays are merged into a single sorted subarray in A[p.. r].
We implement it so that it takes Θ(n) time, where n = r − p + 1, which is the number of elements being merged.
Idea Behind Linear Time Merging
Think of two piles of cards, Each pile is sorted and placed face-up on a table with the smallest cards on top. We will merge these into a single sorted pile, face-down on the table.
A basic step:
Choose the smaller of the two top cards.
Remove it from its pile, thereby exposing a new top card.
Place the chosen card face-down onto the output pile.
Repeatedly perform basic steps until one input pile is empty.
Once one input pile empties, just take the remaining input pile and place it face-down onto the output pile.
Each basic step should take constant time, since we check just the two top cards. There are at most n basic steps, since each basic step removes one card from the input piles, and we started with n cards in the input piles. Therefore, this procedure should take Θ(n) time.
Now the question is do we actually need to check whether a pile is empty before each basic step?
The answer is no, we do not. Put on the bottom of each input pile a special sentinel card. It contains a special value that we use to simplify the code. We use ∞, since that's guaranteed to lose to any other value. The only way that ∞ cannot lose is when both piles have ∞ exposed as their top cards. But when that happens, all the nonsentinel cards have already been placed into the output pile. We know in advance that there are exactly r − p + 1 nonsentinel cards so stop once we have performed r − p + 1 basic steps. Never a need to check for sentinels, since they will always lose. Rather than even counting basic steps, just fill up the output array from index p up through and including index r.
The pseudocode of the MERGE procedure is as follow:
MERGE (A, p, q, r )
1. n 1 ← q − p + 1
2. n 2 ← r − q
3. Create arrays L[1.. n 1 + 1] and R[1.. n 2 + 1]
4. FOR i ← 1 TO n 1
5. DO L[i] ← A[p + i − 1]
6. FOR j ← 1 TO n 2
7. DO R[j] ← A[q + j ]
8. L[n 1 + 1] ← ∞
9. R[n 2 + 1] ← ∞
10. i ← 1
11. j ← 1
12. FOR k ← p TO r
13. DO IF L[i ] ≤ R[ j]
14. THEN A[k] ← L[i]
15. i ← i + 1
16. ELSE A[k] ← R[j]
17. j ← j + 1
Example [from CLRS-Figure 2.3]: A call of MERGE(A, 9, 12, 16). Read the following figure row by row. That is how we have done in the class.
The first part shows the arrays at the start of the "for k ← p to r" loop, where A[p.. q] is copied into L[1.. n 1 ] and A[q + 1.. r ] is
copied into R[1.. n 2 ].
Succeeding parts show the situation at the start of successive iterations.
Entries in A with slashes have had their values copied to either L or R and have not had a value copied back in yet. Entries in L and R with slashes have been copied back into A.
The last part shows that the subarrays are merged back into A[p.. r], which is now sorted, and that only the sentinels (∞) are exposed in the arrays L and R.]
Running Time
The first two for loops (that is, the loop in line 4 and the loop in line 6) take Θ(n 1 + n 2 ) = Θ(n) time. The last for loop (that is, the loop in line 12) makes n iterations, each taking constant time, for Θ(n) time. Therefore, the total running time is Θ(n).
Analyzing Merge Sort
For simplicity, assume that n is a power of 2 so that each divide step yields two subproblems, both of size exactly n/2.
The base case occurs when n = 1.
When n ≥ 2, time for merge sort steps:
Divide : Just compute q as the average of p and r, which takes constant time i.e. Θ(1).
Conquer : Recursively solve 2 subproblems, each of size n/2, which is 2T(n/2).
Combine: MERGE on an n-element subarray takes Θ(n) time.
Summed together they give a function that is linear in n, which is Θ(n). Therefore, the recurrence for merge sort running time is
Solving the Merge Sort Recurrence
By the master theorem in CLRS-Chapter 4 (page 73), we can show that this recurrence has the solution
T(n) = Θ(n lg n).
Reminder: lg n stands for log 2 n.
Compared to insertion sort [Θ(n2) worst-case time], merge sort is faster. Trading a factor of n for a factor of lg n is a good deal. On small inputs, insertion sort may be faster. But for large enough inputs, merge sort will always be faster, because its running time grows more slowly than insertion sorts.
Recursion Tree
We can understand how to solve the merge-sort recurrence without the master theorem. There is a drawing of recursion tree on page 35 in CLRS, which shows successive expansions of the recurrence.
The following figure (Figure 2.5b in CLRS) shows that for the original problem, we have a cost of cn, plus the two subproblems, each costing T (n/2).
The following figure (Figure 2.5c in CLRS) shows that for each of the size-n/2 subproblems, we have a cost of cn/2, plus two subproblems, each costing T (n/4).
The following figure (Figure: 2.5d in CLRS) tells to continue expanding until the problem sizes get down to 1.
In the above recursion tree, each level has cost cn.
The top level has cost cn.
The next level down has 2 subproblems, each contributing cost cn/2.
The next level has 4 subproblems, each contributing cost cn/4.
Each time we go down one level, the number of subproblems doubles but the cost per subproblem halves. Therefore, cost per level stays the same.
The height of this recursion tree is lg n and there are lg n + 1 levels.
Mathematical Induction
We use induction on the size of a given subproblem n.
Base case: n = 1
Implies that there is 1 level, and lg 1 + 1 = 0 + 1 = 1.
Inductive Step
Our inductive hypothesis is that a tree for a problem size of 2i has lg 2i + 1 = i +1 levels. Because we assume that the problem size is a power of 2, the next problem size up after 2i is 2i + 1. A tree for a problem size of 2i + 1 has one more level than the size-2i tree implying i + 2 levels. Since lg 2i + 1 = i + 2, we are done with the inductive argument.
Total cost is sum of costs at each level of the tree. Since we have lg n +1 levels, each costing cn, the total cost is
cn lg n + cn.
Ignore low-order term of cn and constant coefÞcient c, and we have,
Θ(n lg n)
which is the desired result.
Implementation
void mergeSort(int numbers[], int temp[], int array_size)
{
m_sort(numbers, temp, 0, array_size - 1);
}
void m_sort(int numbers[], int temp[], int left, int right)
{
int mid;
if (right > left)
{
mid = (right + left) / 2;
m_sort(numbers, temp, left, mid);
m_sort(numbers, temp, mid+1, right);
merge(numbers, temp, left, mid+1, right);
}
}
void merge(int numbers[], int temp[], int left, int mid, int right)
{
int i, left_end, num_elements, tmp_pos;
left_end = mid - 1;
tmp_pos = left;
num_elements = right - left + 1;
while ((left <= left_end) && (mid <= right))
{
if (numbers[left] <= numbers[mid])
{
temp[tmp_pos] = numbers[left];
tmp_pos = tmp_pos + 1;
left = left +1;
}
else
{
temp[tmp_pos] = numbers[mid];
tmp_pos = tmp_pos + 1;
mid = mid + 1;
}
}
while (left <= left_end)
{
temp[tmp_pos] = numbers[left];
left = left + 1;
tmp_pos = tmp_pos + 1;
}
while (mid <= right)
{
temp[tmp_pos] = numbers[mid];
mid = mid + 1;
tmp_pos = tmp_pos + 1;
}
for (i = 0; i <= num_elements; i++)
{
numbers[right] = temp[right];
right = right - 1;
}
}
Update: January 14, 2010.In a rare interview, Alternative Nation sat down with late Alice In Chains frontman Layne Staley’s mother, Nancy Layne McCallum, for an in-depth exclusive feature. In this interview Nancy discusses Layne’s childhood, how his voice continues to speak for new generations, his tragic final days, whether there is any unreleased music, Demri Parrot, Layne’s religious views, and a possible Layne Staley poetry book.
Also remember to check out the 2015 Layne Staley Tribute Weekend later this month including a fan gathering at Seattle Center International Fountain on August 20th, acoustic night on August 21st at The Central, and the big birthday celebration on August 22nd at The Crocodile.
Nancy, you obviously have some musical talent. Were you the one who first exposed Layne to his musical abilities?
Everybody in our family has really nice voices (except for a couple of people) and we all just sang. There was always music. My parents had beautiful voices. Layne first heard the most beautiful voice in his environment when I was pregnant with him and I was taking voice lessons at Cornish School in Seattle. My voice teacher had been a voice coach in New York on Broadway for forty years. That was the first really big, full, male voice that he ever heard. I think I would credit that voice more than anybody else’s. I was in choir six years with very demanding choir directors. Thank God for them. David Sanarud was my junior high choir teacher and boy, I’m telling you, my choir teachers expected a lot. If your eyes left them, they stopped the whole practice and said, “From the beginning…” We got A++ for our regional competition. Then I took the year of voice at Cornish. I was chosen to be in the first musical to open The 5th Avenue Theater, but I was pregnant with Layne and it just wouldn’t have worked with me climbing on a ladder. So somebody else got the part and I got Layne.
What were your thoughts when you heard the first Alice in Chains album?
When Facelift came out, and he and I were talking on the phone about it (because, I had listened to the tape several times) I said, “Layne I think there’s a sleeper on this album.” He said, “Which one, Mom?” and I said, “Man In The Box.” And he goes, “Oh that’s our next single.” And I said, “Oh Layne, it’s so beautiful.” And he’s like, “I wrote that, Mom”. So I am very proud of him for that song. He wrote the lyrics, I’m sure, is all I thought he meant. But I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know how much he participated in making the music. So, you’d have to ask another band member about that.
I understand that Layne may have played drums before he started singing.
First he took trumpet, because, in fifth grade everybody got an instrument, and he used Uncle Bob’s trumpet. Our friend, Fred, had a set of drums and Layne was interested and he gave them to us. He loaned them. Then Layne bought a set of drums from the neighbor boy. So that’s how his interest in drums progressed, but I don’t remember him taking lessons.
So he had his own drum set, set up in the house?
Yeah. In the living room, the bedroom and the garage. It depended on where they got the best sound.
My take on Layne was that he was not a very judgmental person. I never heard about him ever getting in fights or even having an enemy. Does this sound accurate?
Pretty much. Yep. He was pretty mild-mannered about that even though he certainly had his opinions about people and things and events; but, he wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t make trouble. Nothing I knew about. I heard later funny stories about naughty things he did. And I went, “What!? I can’t believe that.” But you know, boys don’t tell their mothers all the naughty things they do. I knew of a few things that he did around the junior high age that make me angry. But I guess that’s to be expected.
In your opinion, do you think Layne would have married Demri Parrot?
Layne and Demri loved each other dearly. They wanted to be clean and sober.
Tell us something we don’t know about Layne.
I think people would be surprised that he was raised in the Christian Science Sunday School for twenty years. They asked if he believed in God? And I thought, oh, for heaven sake, listen to his music. Of course he did. And we’re all challenged to demonstrate our understanding, and I’m sure that he was very shocked to find that God isn’t going to dig you out of every tunnel that you put yourself in to. You’ve got to do that yourself. And I think that was where he was – that was probably in my world, if he is at all like me, he would’ve been very disappointed in himself for getting himself in something that he couldn’t dig himself out of. And we hear about miracles every day. I even struggled with why didn’t our prayers work? Well there’s, you known, there’s – the universe has a bigger novel to write. And we don’t know about the afterlife, and we do not know what he’s up to these days; but, I’m sure it’s full of humor and trying to make things better for himself and others. If indeed there is an afterlife, and I tend to think there is, he better be behaving, because when I get there I’m checking on him.
Tell us something about you that we don’t know.
You know, I spent fifty years taking care of children…and people think, well…? Well, that includes a lot! It’s a really important job. And I worked with five women friends and started the first parent co-op in a public school in the United States (Mountlake Terrace Elementary). We were on national news when we started it, and then again years later when the kids were now going into junior high. That all grew out of the Edmonds Community College Family Life Program, where we had preschool. We had kids in preschool as they were the little lab rats. And the parents were the students. And it’s a fabulous program. I would recommend to young families to get involved in your community college family life program. It’s amazing. And it just took off from there. There’s PTA and there’s Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and all the things that moms do. And camping, well we didn’t go camping but we went on vacations. And mom’s jobs are huge. They’re huge. And they |
for encouraging students to discuss and debate the issue of gay and transgender rights in class. One of the professors under investigation had specifically asked his students to confront positions with which they disagreed.
After another “Bias Response” investigation, school officials ordered a student to remove a Confederate flag from his dorm room.
As a result of the public school’s investigations, two state senators sent letters of inquiry to school officials.
The officials quickly folded.
Students “sometimes have concerns that don’t rise to the level of law-based complaints, and if we truly want to be a welcoming and inclusive campus, we need to listen to these concerns as well,” University of Northern Colorado president Kay Norton, who brought home a sweet $316,000 salary in 2016, admitted in a speech, according to FIRE.
Currently, a link to a school website link for information “about UNC’s process to address discrimination, harrassment [sic], retaliation, and sexual misconduct” leads to a webpage saying “Error 404 – Page Not Found.”
In 2015, the “Bias Incident Reporting” unit and administrators at Santa Clara University in the heart of Silicon Valley rescinded an official school policy instructing students to clog up the regional 9-1-1 emergency reporting system to report “bias incidents.”
As most people who have aged into the high single digits know, the 9-1-1 telephone number is a special, serious service reserved for emergencies which require immediate assistance from the police, the fire department or an ambulance.
Until August 2015, however, officials at the Jesuit school had been instructing students to report “bias incidents” using the emergency service reserved for dispatching police, firefighters and ambulances. (RELATED: University Decides To Stop Instructing Students to CALL 911 To Report OFFENSIVE SPEECH)
“If the bias incident is in progress or just occurred: ALWAYS CALL 911 IMMEDIATELY,” the Santa Clara website instructed students in fierce, all-capital letters.
The language no longer appears on the website but the Internet Archive has a cached version because school officials appear to have quietly changed it this month.
The cost for a single year of tuition, fees and room and board at Santa Clara is $61,077.
The newly-christened “Bias Education and Response Team” at the taxpayer-funded University of Oregon investigated The Daily Emerald, the school’s student newspaper, during the 2014-15 academic year because someone anonymously claimed to be greatly offended because the newspaper wasn’t providing sufficient coverage to the causes of transgender students.
The “Bias Education and Response Team” then explained “community standards and expectations” to a reporter and an editor at the newspaper, according to FIRE.
The University of Oregon’s “Bias Education and Response Team” shrewdly changed its name from the equally Orwellian-sounding “Bias Response Team” in 2016. (RELATED: Crafty! University Of Oregon Unveils Totally New Name For Speech-Chilling Bias Response Team)
The all-star, very best “bias incident” in the history of American college campuses is and will always be that time back in 2013 when an unidentified student at Dartmouth College allegedly walked past two students of some Asian background, made eye contact and spoke a bunch of gibberish that the students perceived as mock Chinese.
Dartmouth’s impressively large “Bias Incident Response Team” sprung futilely into action, looking for a young male who possibly spoke gibberish, Asian-sounding syllables.
As far as The Daily Caller knows, he remains a fugitive even to this day. (RELATED: Dartmouth Student Who Spoke ‘Mock Chinese’ Remains On The Lam)
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In-story photos: YouTube screenshot/University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, YouTube screenshot/App State Football, YouTube screenshot/University of Michigan, YouTube screenshot/colbycollege, YouTube screenshot/Florida Gators, YouTube screenshot/Framingham State University, YouTube screenshot/Calder Wilson, You Tube screenshot/University of Wisconsin-Platteville, YouTube screenshot/University of Northern Colorado, YouTube screenshot/Santa Clara University, YouTube screenshot/UOregon, Shutterstock/VanHartCorrection: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of the weapons involved in Sunday’s shooting in Orlando as an AR-15. Orlando Police officials first classified the weapon used in the rampage as an “AR-15-type assault rifle.” On Monday, officials said the weapon used was a Sig Sauer MCX. While in many ways similar to the AR-15 family of rifles, the MCX relies on a different gas system to operate and cannot be fairly classified as an AR-15. Both weapons can fire the same type of ammunition at roughly the same speeds and share a similar history.
Assault rifles similar to the one used in the deadly mass shooting in Orlando on Sunday have lately become the weapon of choice for gunmen intent on harming the maximum number of people in a minimum amount of time.
Gun-rights advocates have fiercely resisted any calls for tighter regulation of these weapons in response to mass shootings, particularly AR-15 assault rifles. The NRA estimates there are around 5 million AR-15 rifles in circulation, with hundreds of thousands more manufactured each year. They point out that the vast majority of the weapons are never used to commit a crime.
The heated discussions over gun control and gun rights that inevitably follow mass shootings like the one in Orlando typically revolve around interpretations of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. In full, the amendment reads, rather murkily, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." The wording leaves plenty of room for legal and political wrangling over the meaning of words like "well regulated," "militia," "right," "people," "keep," "bear" and "arms."
[The average gun owner now owns 8 guns — double what it used to be]
The National Rifle Association has explicitly embraced a message of Second Amendment "absolutism" in recent years. "Absolutes do exist," NRA President Wayne LaPierre said after the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. "We are as ‘absolutist’ as the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. And we’re proud of it!"
For LaPierre, this absolutism means opposition to universal background checks and national gun registries. It also means a wide latitude in allowing gun owners the choice of weapons to defend themselves. "We believe in our right to defend ourselves and our families with semiautomatic firearms technology,” LaPierre said.
Here's what you need to know about the guns some are calling "the gold standard for mass murder," after Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used the assault-style rifle Sig Sauer MCX to kill at least 49 people. (Editor's note: This video has been updated with more specific information.) (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Of course, semiautomatic firearms technology didn't exist in any meaningful sense in the era of the founding fathers. They had something much different in mind when they drafted the Second Amendment. The typical firearms of the day were muskets and flintlock pistols. They could hold a single round at a time, and a skilled shooter could hope to get off three or possibly four rounds in a minute of firing. By all accounts they were not particularly accurate either.
Compare those specifications with the capabilities of a modern-day AR-15. According to the makers of one model of the gun, a good shooter can effectively fire 45 rounds per minute. The guns are stable and accurate at distances five to 10 times farther than a typical Second Amendment-era gun. Standard magazines can hold 30 rounds, and shooters can swap out magazines and continue firing in just a matter of seconds.
In short, guns today are capable of inflicting far more carnage than anything the framers could have imagined. That's a point that's driven home with chilling effectiveness by this brief video by States United to Prevent Gun Violence.
In itself, that isn't an argument for banning everything other than muskets. Technology evolves. It makes no more sense to say an AR-15 isn't protected by the Second Amendment than it does to say that computers or ballpoint pens aren't protected by the First.
But evolving technology does call for evolving regulation. And, in practice, the implementation of the Second Amendment has never been strictly "absolute." Most gun owners accept that civilians typically can't own fully automatic rifles or tanks or nuclear weapons. Our understanding of the "arms" of the Second Amendment has evolved over the years, subject to shifts in political and legal norms.
In recent years, at least, public perception of what the Second Amendment permits has changed. In December of last year, for the first time, a majority of Americans opposed a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons according to ABC/Washington Post polling.
That poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, in which two shooters used semiautomatic AR-15-style rifles to murder 14 people. Two months later, a man walked into a plant in Hesston, Kan., armed with an AK-47, killing three people and injuring 14 more. A few months later, another individual walked into an Orlando club armed with an assault rifle similar to an AR-15, killed 49 people and injuring dozens more.
As the NRA says, the overwhelming majority of semiautomatic assault-style rifles are never used in crime. But they make it exceedingly easy for the criminally inclined to kill and wound dozens of people.
More from Wonkblog:
We've had a massive decline in gun violence in the United States. Here's why.
Guns are now killing as many people as cars in the U.S.
White resentment is fueling opposition to gun control, researchers sayThe Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism (Arabic: al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya[1]) is a book by Mahmoud Abbas,[2] published in 1984 in Arabic.[2] It is based on his CandSc thesis,[3] completed in 1982 at Patrice Lumumba University (now the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia) under the title The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement, and defended at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.[citation needed]
In the book, Abbas argues that the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Zionists created "the myth" of six million murdered Jews, which he called a "fantastic lie".[4][5][6] He further claimed that those Jews who were killed by the Nazis were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot aimed to fuel vengeance against Jews and to expand their mass extermination.[7] The book also discussed topics such as the Haavara Agreement, in which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to facilitate Jewish emigration from Germany to Mandate Palestine.[3]
Portions of The Other Side have been considered as Holocaust denial by some critics,[8] especially the parts disputing the accepted number of deaths in the Holocaust as well as the accusations that Zionist agitation was the cause of the Holocaust,[9] a charge that Abbas denies.[10]
When Abbas was appointed the Palestinian prime minister in 2003, he wrote that the "Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind" and that he does not deny it,[11] and said that "When I wrote The Other Side … we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks".[12] In 2014, he stated the Holocaust was the "most heinous crime in the modern era".[13]
In 2013 Abbas reasserted part of his thesis to the extent that "the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis".[14][15]
Study at Patrice Lumumba University [ edit ]
Abbas attended at Patrice Lumumba University to prepare and present his doctoral thesis. The institute's director at the time, Yevgeny Primakov, appointed a Soviet specialist on Palestine, Vladimir Ivanovich Kisilev as Abbas' dissertation adviser. They communicated mostly in English and Arabic.[3] In an interview with the magazine Kommersant 20 years later, Kisilev remembers Abbas as a well-prepared graduate student, who came to Moscow with an already chosen research topic and a large amount of already prepared material.[3]
The title of Abbas' thesis is The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement or, in Russian, "Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933–1945".[16] In 1984, a book based on Abbas' doctoral dissertation was published in Arabic by Dar Ibn Rushd publishers in Amman, Jordan under the title al-Wajh al-akhar : al-`alaqat al-sirriyah bayna al-Naziyah wa-al-Sihyuniyah.
Content of the thesis and book [ edit ]
In the doctoral thesis, Abbas describes the number of Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust as agreed upon by mainstream historians, six millions, as a "fantastic lie".[4][5][6] In the book, he wrote:
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.[9]
In the book, he wrote:
Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews... The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller, below one million.[17]
Abbas quotes historian Raul Hilberg to support his allegations that fewer than one million Jews were killed.[17][18][19][20] However, Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies denied the assertion that "The historian and author, Raoul Hilberg, thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000", and said this is "utterly false". He wrote that "Professor Hilberg, a distinguished historian and author of the classic study The Destruction of the European Jews, has never said or written any such thing."[9]
Abbas raised doubts regarding the existence of the gas chambers, quoting Robert Faurisson, on the nonexistence of gas chambers.[17]
Additionally, he stated that the much smaller number of Jews which he reportedly admitted that the Germans did massacre were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot:
The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government's hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination.[7]
The thesis also discussed topics such as the Haavara Agreement of 1933, in which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to enable Jews to emigrate from Germany directly to Mandate Palestine, which he sees as evidence of collaboration.[3]
A global survey of Holocaust denial, published by David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2004, describes the book as "denying the Holocaust".[21]
Political controversy and Abbas' clarifications [ edit ]
After Abbas was appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003, the Israel Defense Forces removed excerpts from the Abbas book from its website, including quotes questioning the use of gas chambers and talking of less than one million victims.[7]
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for Abbas to clarify his position on the Holocaust in 1995, but he did not do so at that time.[22] Abbas' reported defence when asked about the book was telling: "When I wrote The Other Side… we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks… Today there is peace and what I write from now on must help advance the peace process."[12][23]
In his May 2003 interview with Haaretz, Abbas stated:
I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were twelve million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it.[11]
According to the Ma'an News Agency, in an interview in 2013, Abbas defended his doctoral thesis regarding the relationship between the Zionists and the Nazis and said he "challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis before World War II."[14]Death Curse Sample
Cosmic Doom
If the user dies within a long duration after activating Cosmic Doom, the user’s body cracks open. This reveals a grotesque void rift, which has gathered power from magic abilities used by enemies in the vicinity of the user over the course of Cosmic Doom’s duration. The rift then erupts, expelling horrific waves that ripple out as an aura and distort the effects of subsequent magic abilities used by enemies it has gathered power from, within range. Affected enemies have their magic abilities deal an equal amount of void damage to themselves as they deal damage to enemies or healing to allies. This consumes the power of the rift with each ability used until it is all expended, or until the rift expires after a long duration. If the rift survives its full duration, it explodes on expiration, inflicting its remaining power as void damage to each enemy over a large area and corrupting the ground for a long duration, inflicting void damage to enemies as they move across it.Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign rally on Saturday in Daytona Beach, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Twenty-four hours after FBI Director James Comey shook up the presidential race with a letter to lawmakers revealing it had discovered emails that could be related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, investigators still hadn’t been able to read any of the material. As of Saturday night, the FBI and the Justice Department were still in discussions about obtaining a warrant to let agency officials read the emails that were found on the laptop of disgraced former lawmaker Anthony Weiner, according to Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff.
“We do not have a warrant,” a senior law enforcement official said. “Discussions are under way [between the FBI and the Justice Department] as to the best way to move forward.” Isikoff’s reporting echoes stories published by both Bloomberg and CBS News that said the FBI had still not been able to secure a warrant to examine the emails by Saturday afternoon.
Although Donald Trump and some of his supporters have suggested that Comey wouldn’t have sent the letter if he didn’t at least have a hint that the information was significant, the truth is he has no clue. When he wrote the letter, “he had no idea what was in the content of the emails,” an official tells Isikoff.
Clinton doubled down on her aggressive response to Comey on Saturday night, calling the FBI director’s behavior “deeply troubling” as she continued to demand he release more information about the potentially incriminating material. “It is pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” Clinton said. “It’s not just strange, it’s unprecedented and it’s deeply troubling because voters deserve to get full and complete facts.”
Other Democrats also joined in on the demands for more information, with four U.S. senators calling on Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Comey to provide more details by Monday to minimize any impact on the presidential campaign. The Congressional Black Caucus also demanded more information at a press conference in Columbus, Ohio.
Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.Editor’s note: Second of a two-part series featuring Broncos general manager John Elway. Today Elway discusses the team and his expectations. Sunday, we shared his reflections on his first five years in the front office.
John Elway has always had this habit of trying to make the impossible possible. Five years into his tenure as the head of Broncos football operations, little has changed.
Most mornings, about an hour into his team’s training camp practices, he saunters over to the sideline, clad in his usual navy Broncos shorts and aviator sunglasses, and quietly finds a spot at the 30-yard-line. He folds his arms, crosses his legs and sets in to watch drills, occasionally welcoming small talk with assistant coaches and even hosting a few guests, all while keeping his eyes fixated on the 90 men in front of him.
Elway is trying to blend in, an all-but-impossible feat for the face of a franchise. Related Articles February 26, 2019 From Nolan Arenado to Kenneth Faried: The biggest contracts in Denver sports history
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“Just to be around them, because I don’t get them in meeting rooms,” he says. “I just try to hang, and you get a feel for guys and personalities and how they fit.”
Nearly 20 years after leading the Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowl championships as a quarterback, Elway has a shot at another repeat, this time as a general manager. The man who just wants to blend in is now searching for the perfect blend of talent and character to lead his team out of the Peyton Manning era and into the “To Be Determined” era.
The transition plan that was put in place nearly four years ago fell apart in March when quarterback Brock Osweiler bolted Denver for riches in Houston. The hole at quarterback was filled with the arrival of veteran Mark Sanchez, the rise of second-year pro Trevor Siemian and the first-round draft selection of Paxton Lynch.
“That’s why you can never lock into one solution,” Elway said. “You always have to have several options and go with what’s best. I haven’t talked to Brock about it. I’ve only kind of heard about it, of why he may have been a little bit upset about the way things went.”
Osweiler was benched in the second half of the Broncos’ final regular-season game, against San Diego. Manning took over from that point, taking every snap in the playoffs.
“I can understand that he didn’t want to sit down and have Peyton come back in that San Diego game, but it wasn’t the fact that Brock was playing bad,” Elway said. “We needed a change of something. So I was a little surprised just how he seemed to be a little bent out of shape about that. But he had an opportunity to make a tremendous amount of money in Houston, and for us, it just didn’t fit.”
The right fit at quarterback is still to be decided. Elway and coach Gary Kubiak insist the competition for the starting QB job remains open, dependent on myriad factors from running the huddle to overall grasp of the offense and beyond. But the two leaders in the race were declared early: Sanchez, who arrived with an edge in the form of having played in six postseason games that included a pair of AFC championship games, and Siemian, a Northwestern product whose strong arm and year-over-year leap continue to impress the coaching staff.
“To be able to get Mark and then have Trevor that we drafted last year who’s having a good camp and a guy that we believe can be the future in Paxton — it’s just a matter of him coming along and continuing to improve,” Elway said. “It may not look as good from the outside as people want it to look. But we feel pretty good about how it looks from the inside. We feel good about that spot in the years to come and of what Mark can do. We think he’s got the ability, if we get him in the right situation, to be a very sufficient and adequate quarterback.”
The identity of this year’s offense is still being formed, but the Broncos remain a defense-first group, a dynamic Elway created after taking office in 2011. Although the Broncos lost a pair of starters — defensive end Malik Jackson and inside linebacker Danny Trevathan — their exits as free agents were expected and the core of the defense remains intact, if not improved.
The secondary gained Justin Simmons, an athletic and versatile rookie safety. The line welcomed veterans Jared Crick and promising first-year end Adam Gotsis. And the pass rush still has its star in all-pro outside linebacker Von Miller, Elway’s first draft selection who is now a handsomely paid Super Bowl MVP.
On paper, the Broncos of 2016 may have more talent than their championship roster from only six months ago. But as Elway knows, it’s all about finding the perfect blend.
“That’s how I look at our team this offseason: Did we get better as a football team? I believe we did,” he said. “And the other thing is, when people are doubting you, it adds that incentive. We’re kind of in that situation right now. Hopefully we can continue to use that chip and keep ourselves mentally on the right track.”
Roster movement
General manager John Elway has said he enjoys the challenge of finding the right pieces for a championship roster. Here’s a look at some of the Broncos’ roster moves since winning Super Bowl 50:
Gone
Peyton Manning, QB, retired
Brock Osweiler, QB, free agency
Malik Jackson, DE, free agency
Danny Trevathan, LB, free agency
David Bruton, S, free agency
Ryan Clady, OT, trade
Evan Mathis, G, free agency
Ryan Harris, OT, free agency
Louis Vasquez, G, waived
Owen Daniels, TE, contract expired
Arrived
Mark Sanchez, QB, trade
Paxton Lynch, QB, draft
Donald Stephenson, OT, free agency
Russell Okung, OT, free agency
Jared Crick, DE, free agency
Adam Gotsis, DE, draft
Justin Simmons, S, draft
Devontae Booker, RB, draftSure, it sounds like the flimsiest of fad diet ideas, but a few studies have shown that taking your time with some water before eating any meal can stave off overeating—especially if you're over 35.
Image via ex_magician.
The New York Times cites a few different studies that looked into water consumption and weight or calorie control. In one study, a group of 55-and-older people, placed on restricted calorie diets as a weight loss intervention, fared notably better at losing weight than a group that didn't drink two cups of water before meals. Two other studies held that finding generally true, but often with the caveat that preemptive water seemed more effective among older test subjects.
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It might seem like most restaurant experiences would put the lie to the water-before-food hunger reduction—but, then again, this editor's too young to fall in the middle of the most improved subjects. File this one, then, under a good idea that can't really hurt.
Does Drinking Water Before Meals Aid Weight Loss? [NYTimes.com]poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201703/1388/1155968404_5349643626001_5349638121001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Carson has long history of referring to slaves as immigrants
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, under fire for referring to American slaves as "immigrants," insisted his remarks were misinterpreted, calling the two experiences “entirely different.”
But his words to HUD employees on Monday were nearly identical to those he has used over the past two decades.
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In his 2000 book, “The Big Picture,” Carson quoted a 1997 speech he gave at a United Way conference in Alabama, in which he said immigrants came to America “not for themselves, but so that their sons and daughters, their grandsons and granddaughters, might have an opportunity for success in this land.”
“Hundreds of years before that, other immigrants came here in the bottom of slave ships,” he quoted himself as saying. “They worked even harder for longer hours for even less. They too had a dream. That one day their great-grandchildren could pursue the dream of freedom and happiness in this land.”
In his 2012 book “America the Beautiful,” he made the same point: “Long before the Statue of Liberty landed in America, however, other immigrants came here in the bottom of slave ships who worked even harder for no wages, but they too had a dream that one day their great-grandsons and great-granddaughters might pursue freedom and prosperity in this land.”
Those comments track with his speech to HUD employees, his first since being confirmed last week. Carson referred to “other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less,” but dreamed of a better life for their children and grandchildren.
In a Facebook post Monday night, he sought to clarify his remarks, saying the slave and immigrant experiences could not be equated.
“Slaves were ripped from their families and their homes and forced against their will after being sold into slavery by slave traders,” he wrote. “The immigrants made the choice to come to America. They saw this country as a land of opportunity. In contrast, slaves were forced here against their will and lost all their opportunities. We continue to live with that legacy.”
On the "Armstrong Williams Show," however, Carson stuck by his use of the word “immigrant.”
“You can be an involuntary immigrant,” he said Monday on the radio program, responding to an African-American caller who said her son was concerned about Carson “dumbing down our struggle.”
“We should be proud to have ancestors that had the mental strength to endure what so many others had not been able to endure,” Carson said. “They tried to enslave all kinds of people but they were not able to survive it. And that requires a tremendous amount of toughness and willpower and strength and hope and faith, and they had that.”
Carson did not elaborate on which other people weren't able to survive slavery. America’s history with slavery is complex, including the chattel trade of Native Americans.
The HUD secretary said his employees understood his real meaning in his address to them. “Everybody in that auditorium was with me,” he said on the radio show. “It’s only those people who are always trying to stir up controversy. … It’s really kind of sad what the media has degenerated into.”
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
This article tagged under: Immigration
HUD
Ben CarsonWith Sam Hinkie crafting and reshuffling a roster to fit his long-term vision, he has found a few fresh apples in the orchard he’s trying to build. The Elliot Williams, James Anderson and Jakarr Sampson projects that Hinkie took fliers on flopped, but Robert Covington has emerged as a staple on the perimeter for the Sixers.
Like many Sam Hinkie free agent signings, otherwise known as the “Hinkie Special,” Covington joined the organization, in 2014, on a team-friendly contract with little risk attached. He previously tore up the D-League in the 2013-14 season, to the tune of 23.2 points, 9.2 rebounds and 2.4 steals per game on Houston’s D-League affiliate Rio Grande.
Rewarded with a three-year deal as a free agent after being waived by Houston before the 2014-15 season, Covington, initially, had a limited role as an unknown NBA commodity. D-League MVP isn’t a label that will propel you to consistent minutes on a drastically more rigorous level. Covington had to fight for playing time in the NBA, even on a historically inept Sixers team.
As Brett Brown started to utilize the 25-year-old combo forward off the bench as a second unit volume shooter, the Sixers started to become more competent on the court. Covington recorded a career-high, at the time, 31 minutes in Philadelphia’s first victory in 18 games last season. Dropping 20 or more points in four out of the five games after the contest forced Brown’s hand.
Covington’s confidence evidently grew with the heightened role as Brown would name him the starting small forward on Dec. 10. Covington would go on to average 13.5 PPG and 4.5 RPG, while shooting 39.6 percent on the season. The productions of the Tennessee State product stood out in the 18-64 nightmarish campaign, but Covington’s two-way impact showed that promise existed outside of just Nerlens Noel’s development.
Per basketball-reference.com, the Sixers had a plus-6.5 offensive rating with Covington on the court-as opposed to him sitting. The team’s steal percentage, block percentage and rebounding percentage all increased with Covington flashing the No. 33 jersey on the court and making plays for the team. He became the ideal three-and-D wing Philadelphia had to pillage for on the free agent market. However, Covington hasn’t replicated his 2014-15 campaign numbers. Covington still is green to the NBA game, in just his second professional season, so regression was likely.
It’s been arduous 2015-16 seasons for both Covington and Philadelphia, currently 8-54 on the season. The forward is averaging 11.8 PPG while shooting an unsightly 38.4 percent from the floor and 34.2 percent from deep. Evidenced by the chart below, Covington is having difficulty shooting efficiently from many areas on the floor-outside of near the basket.
Even in the midst of a positive 10-game stretch offensively (13.5 PPG, 6.1 RPG, 41.2 percent field-goal percentage), the sporadic offensive efficiency is a product of his supporting cast and his deficiencies.
Covington is considerably limited offensively due to his inability to drive to the basket and for his teammates’ inability to create efficient looks for him. Covington regularly has to use a ball screen in order to generate a semblance of offense outside of a jump shot.
Ish Smith, who has thrived in spurts since joining Philadelphia, usually dribble penetrates and looks for a big down low, whose defender slides over to help. Unless Covington slides around the perimeter in order for the journeyman to locate him, the forward is completely left out of the play.
On offense, Covington is the prototypical catch-and-shoot wing-taking just over 70 percent of his shots without putting the ball on the floor. He regularly gets passes dished out on the perimeter in order to hoist and subsequently fire. Since his teammates lack creativity on offense, Covington usually has his defender located relatively near him when he shoots.
This is vintage Robert Covington. Per nbastats.com, 57.6 percent of his shots come off of catch-and-shoot attempts. With only Jahlil Okafor commanding consistent double teams on offense, Covington is devoid of marginal space to operate with. For any three-point marksman, this is obviously pivotal. However, his issue is twofold.
Covington is the Sixers’ bulkiest wing, operating with a 6’9”, 215-pound frame. He needs Smith, and Philadelphia’s bigs, to set ball screens that allows him to catch the ball in fortuitous scenarios to launch triples. Covington won’t circulate throughout the perimeter as much as guards Nik Stauskas or Hollis Thompson do and cut to the basket. The failure to be a threat off-ball has relegated Covington to expand his range and take shots from basically North Broad Street.
With added talent, via free agency and through the draft, Covington will have less of a burden to create offense. He can be one of the primary three-point aces for Brett Brown, which could help ease his transition into a long-term role player. Defensively, he has more upside on the less glamorous end.
Covington’s 6’9” frame plays at both forward positions defensively. He can rotate against slashing guards, stifling them usually with an obvious height advantage. Against burly power forwards, Covington rarely gets bullied in the post and has a chiseled frame made for contact. His impact, on the defensive, is shown via statistics.
He’s second on the team with a 105 DRtg (Defensive Rating), per sports-reference.com, to defensive savant Nerlens Noel. Basically, Covington only lets up 1.05 points per possession, tying Boston’s Avery Bradley and fellow combo forward Tobias Harris. Covington also has continued being a pest on the defensive end, with a career-high 1.5 SPG. Here, Covington reacts appropriately to Nicolas Batum’s lax offensive approach, swipes the ball and takes it the distance for the opposite end flush.
Despite lacking ideal athleticism for a wing, Covington can make plays solely based on his build. He won’t block shots (0.6 BPG) and be an enforcer on the boards for Brett Brown, but the third-year forward is an instinctual athlete that will fight for loose balls and be in the right spot for a rebound or steal.
Even though Covington has started recently at the 4 with Okafor sidelined with a shin injury, his long-term position might be at small forward, as Dario Saric expected to join the team this offseason. He’s more adept at handling wings defensively instead of more imposing bigs, and is Philadelphia’s primary source of production at the 3 on offense.
Moving forward, Covington should continue to be a spot starter at power forward in case of an injury to one of the frontcourt options. Primarily, he looks to be Philadelphia’s three-and-D talent, whether he comes off the bench, if Philadelphia lands either Ben Simmons or Brandon Ingram in the draft, or as a starter. Making $1.015 million next season, the Sixers will get a cost-controlled look to see if Covington is a legitimate high-end role player.
With more weapons around him, Covington will generate open and efficient shot attempts from behind the arc and continue to provide stout defense. Even with an intentional lacking supporting cast, that will likely be upgraded vastly this offseason, Robert Covington looks to be a long-term fit as a two-way wing.Stephen A. Smith does not believe the |
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Processor: Core i3 (Haswell)
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Processor: Core i3 (Skylake)
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ScreenshotsCLOSE It took nearly two hours for convicted murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood III to die by lethal injection. A reporter witnessing the execution said he heard Wood gasping. The family of Wood's victims had strong words for anti-death penalty advocates.
A fence surrounds the state prison in Florence, Ariz. where the execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood took place on Wednesday. (Photo11: AP)
The execution of a convicted murderer in Arizona on Wednesday took nearly two hours, confirming concerns that had been raised by his attorneys about a controversial drug used by the state.
Joseph Rudolph Wood III remained alive at Arizona's state prison in Florence long enough for his public defenders to file an emergency motion for a stay of execution with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, after the process began at 1:53 p.m. CST.
MORE: Federal judge urges return of firing squads
GRAPHIC: How lethal injection works
The motion noted that Wood "has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour" after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
According to Arizona Republic reporter Michael Kiefer, who witnessed the execution, lines were run into each of Wood's arms. After Wood said his last words, he was unconscious by 1:57 p.m. At about 2:05, he started gasping, Kiefer said.
"I counted about 660 times he gasped," Kiefer said. "That petered out by 3:33. The death was called at 3:49," Kiefer said.
EARLIER: Ariz. top court allows execution to proceed
Another reporter who witnessed the execution, Troy Hayden, said it was "very disturbing to watch... like a fish on shore gulping for air."
Typically, executions by lethal injection take about 10 minutes.
Family members of the victims had a less sympathetic take on Wood's final moments Wednesday.
Jeanne Brown, sister of Debra Dietz and daughter of Eugene Dietz, whom Wood was convicted of murdering, witnessed the execution. She said it sounded more like Wood was snoring than gasping for air.
"What I saw with him today being executed -- this was nothing," she said.
Joseph Rudolph Wood (Photo11: AP)
Brown said what Wood experienced Wednesday did not compare to the pain her family has suffered for the past 25 years.
"You don't know what excruciating is -- seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood... This man deserved it," she said.
Gov. Jan Brewer issued a statement Wednesday saying she was concerned about the length of time it took for the drug to complete the lawful execution. She said she has ordered the Department of Corrections to conduct a full review of the process.
"One thing is certain, however, inmate Wood died in a lawful manner and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer," her statement said.
Reached via text message, state Attorney General Tom Horne's spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said the office had no comment.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona issued a statement calling for a moratorium on executions.
"What happened today to Mr. Wood was an experiment that the state did its best to hide," Executive Director Alessandra Soler said. "Now we see that our government officials cannot be trusted to take seriously our Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment."
The Arizona Supreme Court had lifted a temporary stay of Wood's execution shortly before noon Wednesday, clearing the way for his execution later in the day. Wood had been scheduled to die at 10 a.m. Wednesday, but the court halted the process long enough to consider a last-minute petition for post-conviction relief. Witnesses were told when the stay was issued to return by 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Wood, 55, was sentenced to death for killing Debra Dietz and Eugene Dietz in 1989 at the family's automotive shop in Tucson.
Wood and Debra Dietz had a tumultuous relationship in which he periodically assaulted her. Dietz tried to end their relationship and got an order of protection against Wood.
Wood went to the auto body shop and shot Eugene Dietz in the chest. He then hunted down Debra Dietz and shot her twice.
He was sentenced to death twice and lived quietly on death row until his appeals ran out.
In recent years, many states that still have capital punishment, including Arizona, have passed or expanded laws that shroud the procedures in secrecy.
The Arizona Department of Corrections planned to use a controversial drug, and it favors a controversial method of administering it, so Wood's attorneys demanded to know the qualifications of the executioners and the origin of the drugs to be used in the execution, claiming that Wood had a First Amendment right to the information.
On Saturday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which lifted the stay without addressing the First Amendment issue.
State officials said in court filings that they need to maintain secrecy because publicity has made it more difficult to obtain the drugs needed to carry out executions.
Drug manufacturers have begun refusing to sell to departments of corrections, forcing the departments to experiment with new and less reliable drugs or to specially order them from compounding pharmacies, which in turn are harassed by anti-death-penalty activists.
Last October, a Florida man was executed with a three-drug protocol starting with midazolam. The Associated Press reported that the prisoner "remained conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than other people executed recently by lethal injection under the old formula."
In January, an Ohio prisoner who received a cocktail of midazolam and hydromorphone gasped for air and took more than 20 minutes to die, compared with the usual 10 minutes or so when prisoners are executed with thiopental or pentobarbital.
And during an April execution in Oklahoma, the condemned man at first appeared to be unconscious, but then began "writhing and bucking," one eyewitness wrote.
The execution was stopped, but the man subsequently died of an apparent heart attack.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1mG5oA7He is the soft-spoken player with little or no emotional expression in his game. His gaze reveals very little about the man inside. But for all those cool exterior, his game is full of fire. His drives are explosive even if his reactions aren’t. His putting is legendary for it’s consistency in high-pressure situations. He’s one of the best players under pressure but you will never know it by watching him play. But he hasn’t always been this way.
For the past twenty years, Steve Rico has been a high profile regular on the PDGA tour, and since his first few years he has consistently pushed the sport forward with his “Do I look like I give a %#@!” approach to the sport he dominates. No player in the history of the sport has maintained the same level of success for as long as Steven Rico. He may not have the number of titles of a Ken Climo or a Barry Schultz, but he has maintained a more consistent dominating presence. And all of this while working construction, finishing high school and starting his own disc golf company.
For many years, Rico was the standard bearer for the disavowed pro player who dared to carry a mixed bag. With each success, he embarrassed the disc golf companies who strictly demanded homogenized bags of their sponsored players. Eventually, Rico started his own company but he still maintains a mixed bag. Oh, and most of those other pros from the homogenized teams, very few of them are with those teams today.
Let’s talk to the man they call, “The Kid.”
So let’s start off with the basic stuff; Where were you born and where did you grow up?
“I was born in Sylmar, California and I grew up there. I still live there today.”
Tell me about growing up in Sylmar.
“I am the middle-child. I have an older brother, Bamba who is five years older that me, and a younger sister. My dad is JR Rico and he works construction and my mom is a stay at home mom. She’s the best. She raised us all up and took care of us. My father works with my cousins and uncles in concrete construction and when I was 18 I started working with them. I still do that today. It’s a family business.”
When did you start playing disc golf and who introduced you to the game?
“I was seven years old and my dad took me and Bamba out to play at Veterans’ park in Sylmar. He said, ‘Here you go’ and we were instantly hooked. That’s all I have done since. I didn’t play any other sports in school. I didn’t do band or any of that stuff. I loved disc golf from the start, I mean it was automatic how much me and Bamba loved it. My dad would take us out to play as soon as he got home from work and then we played until he made us leave.”
Seven? What was your first disc? Do I even dare ask if you still have it? And when did you start playing competitively?
“My first tournament was when I was nine. It was the Wintertime Open. But I didn’t turn Pro until I was 15. I played AM worlds when I was 14 and I was going to play again the next year but I started playing Open tournaments and I wasn’t going to accept cash but then I won a tournament and I decided to take the cash and just turn Pro. And my first disc was… an Ace. A 91 mold. I think they both busted. They used to crack really easily back then so I know I don’t have them. I wish I did.”
You were known as “the kid” back then. What was it like for you?
“I toured a lot back then. My final two years of high school I was home-schooled because I was on tour so much. I finished school that way. I loved it. I loved touring.”
Was there someone who guided you or coached you back then?
“My brother and I really pushed each other in those early days. He was really good and we pushed each other to get better. He took some time off for his family and I just kept going. And there was Sam Ferrans and Steve Valencia and Jeff and Johnny Lissman, Jay Earnhardt and Kenny (Climo). All those guys were around and were showing me stuff and pushing my game forward. But if there was someone who really helped me out it would be Jeff and Johnny.”
How did they do that?
“They didn’t really show me a style – I had my own style. They just taught me about course management and having a game plan. How to play the course. That was really important. Coming up in So Cal if you wanted to win you had to beat all these guys and you had to do it being smart.”
Is that your game?
‘Yeah. I would say so. You gotta have a game plan and know when to attack a hole or to play smart. Most players don’t have that part of their game and that’s why I am still successful. They just go after everything and it costs them. I know when to take chances and when not to.”
What is your practice regime?
“I try to learn something new in the off-season. I go out to a field and learn how to throw a new disc or a new throwing technique. This last year I figured out how to throw a good sidearm. I had one before, but I learned how to throw one for distance and how to be accurate with it. You need all types of shots to be competitive on these bigger courses. I can throw a sidearm about 350 feet now. I’m confident in that throw, so that’s what I do. I try to learn something new to improve my game.”
Is it hard to keep up with this new generation of pros?
“Definitely. You have to have a full game and you have to be in great shape. You have to exercise and stay healthy because you can’t get fatigued out there and expect to win. You have to eat right and build your endurance.”
What do you do to exercise?
“I started doing jujitsu about five years ago and it’s awesome. It’s a serious workout and it has made a huge improvement in my game. Mentally and physically. I’m not big on pushing weights or running but martial arts really gives me a work out. I love it. I’ve lost twenty pounds this past year and I feel so much better. The mental exercise is awesome. I just feel more focused and in control after I work out.”
You were recently named Runner-up in the World Rankings. How did you feel about that?
“That was so awesome. I mean, after all this time and with all these new players out there just playing at such a high level. To be in the top five was a big deal and when they said I was at 2 I just couldn’t believe it. I had so many people call me and send me messages congratulating me. It was incredible. I almost cried. It meant a lot to me. Now I just have to win Worlds and I will be number one.”
Is that the goal?
“It’s everyone’s goal. It’s mine. I still haven’t won it. I have some Japan Open titles and some other big wins but Worlds and the USDGC are the two I really want to win. I’ve been close so many times – I lost USDGC by one stroke last year – so I just really want to get both of those.”
You’ve been to Japan but not to Europe. Any reason why?
“No. Just never got over there. I’m going to Europe next year. I should have skipped Japan this year and gone to Europe instead. I just haven’t gotten around to getting over there. I want to though.”
How has the game evolved during your time on tour?
“Well, there used to be a family of us. We were all touring together, we played the same events and we hung out all the time. We played during the weekends and then we would have ‘Monday Fun Day’ where we would always do things together. But now, that’s all gone. People don’t hang out together and there is a lot of people on tour who have drifted apart. There’s some tension. It’s just not the same. No one tours together like they used to. People play different events so there just isn’t that family feeling anymore. That’s gone. It’s a shame.”
Family is important to you.
“Family is everything. I love my whole family. We work together all day and then we do the Legacy thing at night. My mother works with us and helps out. My cousin Freddy does the hot stamping and my parents are always at the warehouse. It’s a family. Legacy is all family. The team is a family.”
Let’s talk about the birth of Legacy Discs.
“What do you want to know?”
Whose idea was it?
“Some dude that I don’t know. Me and Bamba were at a tournament in San Diego in late 2011. We were sitting there and some dude walked up and said, ‘You have this pro shop and all this other stuff, why don’t you make your own Frisbees?’ Then he walked off. I wish I knew who he was. Anyways, Bamba looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, why don’t we make a Frisbee?’ and that was it. We looked up injection molding places around where we live and we set up some meetings with them. We picked the one we liked and we started designing a disc. We wanted it to be the fastest disc out there. They made the first ones and they were stiff as dinner plates. So I started looking into plastics and mixtures and all that stuff and eventually we got one we liked and felt good. We sent it into the PDGA and they approved it. That was the Rampage. We went with a fast driver first because we knew people don’t like to change out their putters that much but with a new driver that is something most people will try and give a chance. So we marketed it as the fastest disc on the market and it worked. We pushed the limits and we got what we wanted.”
How did you get Legacy off the ground?
“I knew a lot of people around the country who owned stores and I was like, ‘Help me out and buy some of these discs’ and they did and that got everything started.”
How many discs do you have now?
“Ten molds and we have one coming out in a few months called, ‘The Outlaw.’ It’s an over stable driver, not as fast as the Cannon and Rampage but more stable and with a smaller rim. And then we have a few putters coming out after that.”
Where do you come up with the names?
“I don’t know where Rampage came from but my friend said, ‘You gotta have one called the Cannon.’ So that’s where that came from. The Outlaw got its name from a Monster Truck I just happened to see. It was the name of one of the trucks and I liked it.”
Probably the most well-known “Rico” image is that VooDoo bag of yours. Just how many discs are in that bag?
“25 to 34 depending on where I’m going. I will use about 33 here in Portland. I will take out a few at some courses but others like Trojan, where there’s a lot of water, I will take extras. It just depends.”
Have you always carried so many?
“It’s been a recent thing. Probably when I started Legacy. I have had discs in my bag that I’ve had for five or ten years. I just know them so well and I can’t take them out. I have some discs that I use on specific courses and they only get put in the bag when I need them on that course. I wouldn’t use them anywhere else but I gotta have them. I just know them so well and I trust them.”
Prior to Legacy, you were well-known as one of the best players without a sponsor. How did they all overlook you?
“I was sponsored, briefly, by Discraft but that ended badly. I don’t want to get into that but I left the team and I just said to myself; You don’t need a sponsorship. You know what you throw and I had a job so I didn’t need money. So I went out without a sponsor. Other companies made me offers but I was okay without it. I won’t lie, when I was young and first started I thought it was extremely important to have a sponsorship. I think everyone does, but I know better now. I think you should use the right disc for your game, whatever it is. You don’t need that sponsor to be a good player.”
A lot of young players emphasis sponsorship as a form of validation for their game. What advice do you have for them as a player and as a sponsor?
“Be patient. Stick to your game. Do what you know works for you and don’t worry about playing with just one brand or that brand. Use what works for you. And be patient.”
What is your policy on sponsorships?
“Legacy has an application you can fill out at our website. We look at those and I have my eye on some players. I know who I want.”
What criteria do you use for picking team members?
“Loyalty. That’s first. After the big team shake-ups a few years ago I realized that loyalty is pretty rare in our game. Things got nasty. I like our team because they’re loyal and in return I’m loyal to them. That’s what I like. I also like people who represent the game well. People who are easy to talk to, people who are willing to help and are good ambassadors for the game. There are a lot of talented players who are in it for themselves and they are horrible ambassadors for the game. There are Pros who are like that.”
Care to name any names?
“(laughing) Nope.”
So if you want to be on team Legacy…
“Be a good ambassador first. Player second. I wasn’t always the best ambassador for the game when I was younger and I acknowledge that now. But I changed and I know now what I need to do. I’m a much more modest guy and I will always promote the sport.”
So when you left Discraft, you kept the Magnet in your bag and you used that for the inspiration of the Clutch.
“Yes. But we made it better. That’s part of what I was talking about – use a disc that works for you. I’ve tried Aviars and other putters but the Magnet really worked for me and I used it for years until I got the Clutch. I still carry a Firebird and a Wraith in my bag. I won’t lie. Others might lie about what they use but I don’t.”
Is this sport growing?
“The sport is growing but not all of it. There are more companies, more discs, more tournaments, more players, but there isn’t more money. The World’s money is the same as it was ten years ago, and the USDGC money is half of what it used to be. And there is no new money coming into the sport. The only ones making money are the disc companies and that doesn’t get shared. I have some ideas that I want to work out. One is making some big tournaments out there – charity events. That would bring in more media coverage, which will raise awareness of the sport. There are too many people in positions of power who don’t know about this sport. What if our ICE BOWLS all went to one charity at the same time instead of a bunch of different ones? A big problem with the sport is that there are people in our sport who don’t want the sport to grow because they want to keep control of it.”
What are some of the changes you want to see in the sport?
“I think safety has to be our biggest concern. It has to be issue number one. The courses are getting bigger and not everyone knows what’s going on. A lady got hit in the eye on a course here in Cali, and I think she went blind in that eye. Just some casual lady walking through the park and she lost an eye. We can’t have that. Safety has to be the number one issue when designing new courses. Some of the older courses are becoming sorta sketch. That hurts the sport when a course isn’t safe.”
“We also need to work on etiquette. Players need to learn how to play with others where they don’t put each other in harm’s way. We have too many casual players that throw at other players or players that don’t know how to be polite out on the courses. That sort of thing is going to cause more problems if it isn’t dealt with. In ball golf, players know the rules and they abide by them. You see too much stuff in disc golf that makes us look stupid. Tournament Directors should be taking more time to talk to the new players about how to play. I don’t think we’re ready for the growth yet. There are too many players who don’t learn the rules and there are too many Pros who don’t act right. That makes us look bad. No one is going to put us on TV acting like that.”
How often do you think about this stuff?
“Oh man, my mind is always coming up with new ideas. Mostly it’s stuff for Legacy but I never stop thinking about disc golf. I come up with stuff all the time. New ideas. We do a lot of brainstorming at Legacy about different stuff. We have new disc ideas, we have a bag coming out soon, tournaments we want to run, all kinds of things.”
Which direction are you going in with Legacy?
“We don’t think you need a lot of gimmicky discs. We just want a good line that we know people will use. We make solid discs and we take a lot of pride in what we have. We want all our discs to be consistent and reliable.”
Consistency is tough in disc golf.
“Yeah. There are like twenty things that go into a run of discs, from mixes to colors to the process. The plastic company might send over plastic that they say is the same but it’s not and you got to stay on top of them about being consistent.”
Is there any truth to the rumor that certain colors are more stable than others?
“Yes… Yeah… I don’t know why, but yeah, it’s true.”
So what is the goal for Legacy? Are you going to sell it? Do you want to get to a point that it runs itself and you can tour full time?
“I want to be on tour and playing all the time. But I’m a hands on type of guy with everything we do at Legacy and it would be hard for me to walk away from that. I love it and my whole family works with me. But I would love to get to twenty discs and still be able to go back out on tour. I think next year I will be able to leave the construction job for good and dedicate myself full time to Legacy. We’ve grown that much. And I want to run more tournaments. I just ran my first – The Summertime Open. I want to make it bigger next year. I want to increase the money. And make it an event. That’s a long-term goal for me.”
I ask everyone this mostly because it surprises me that Pros have a part of their game that they’re not confident with. What is the part of your game you don’t feel 100 percent certain of?
“Right now? Straight midrange shot to a gap 300 feet away. It’s a tough shot for me. That is the hardest shot for me right now. Some shots you just believe in or you don’t and right now I’m not feeling that shot in my bag.”
I played at Sandy Point in Wisconsin a few years ago and there is a hole there that’s about 400 feet across a deep ravine. A narrow, wooded hole that most people can’t make. I was playing with someone who said, “Rico threw his putter here and parked it.” Now that’s a 400-foot shot with a putter. Can’t you lay off a midrange a little and still get the job done?
“I remember that shot too. Man, that was a long time ago. When I was younger and I could just throw what ever. I bet I power gripped that Magnet and just bombed it too. I’m not sure I could do that throw now.”
As someone whose been around the game for so long, what advice do you want to share with new players who are hoping to get better?
“Work on form first. Get out to a open field and work on your form. Try different shots with a few different discs, figure out what works.”
Lots of Pros talk about form. What do you mean specifically by that?
“Start with your grip. Work on a good power grip, then a fan grip. Learn how to hold the disc. That’s everything. Next. Work on the proper footwork. Work on a decent cross-step making sure you get proper rotation. You want your weight to transfer from your back leg to your front leg. And then your follow-through. You want to throw all the way across your body. Not just pulling forward.”
And the best method for improving?
“Throwing those shots over and over for hours. Eventually it will begin to feel right and you will see more distance and consistency. When it all works out and you have the timing of your throws down, you’ll see a big change in your game.”
“I also recommend watching YouTube videos of Pro players who look like you. If you’re a bigger guy, maybe you watch Avery (Jenkins). If you’re shorter, then you can watch me. Then you build your style off of that. Watching a Pro is a good way to improve. It’s important that people know that you don’t have to look one way or another to be a good player to get distance. A short guy might not be able to relate to Avery but he could to me. If you look at Paige Pierce, she’s not that big but she can crush. She has perfect form, probably the most fluid form of any player – man or woman – out there.”
What was your first big win as a pro?
“It was the Caldecott Open in 1994. I was 15 and I beat some great golfers.”
How old are you now?
“35.”
Because you started so early, do you think there needs to be more emphasis on getting kids involved in the sport?
“I think the EDGE program is doing a great job with getting kids involved with the sport. Also, I see a lot of clubs and players that are doing lots of school projects with disc golf and that is awesome. That will make a big difference.”
This is the million dollar question these days: What can we do to grow the sport?
“The best way to grow the sport is for the PDGA to teach their players on how to run events within their communities. It seems to me that at this stage of our sport the player have the biggest role in growing our sport. There is no better way to be introduced to a new sport than hearing about it from someone who is passionate about what they do.”Photo via Flickr user Steve Isaacs
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
In September of 1999, Rina Radloff, a 51-year-old millionaire businesswoman, was found dead in her luxury South African estate. She'd been stabbed to death after answering a knock at the door, and a trail of blood was found leading to her study upstairs. A nonsensical riddle was left in a note on her desk. "Strange pictures" were found in a downstairs room by investigating police—images of five-point stars and shadowy figures.
Two weeks after the murder, notes containing details that only the killer could know were faxed to the police. Suspicion fell on Radloff's ex-husband, who had subsequently married a famously eccentric local woman with a penchant for the "occult," Antoinette Radloff. Investigations began, and Antoinette was taken in for questioning. It was a long process fraught with sensational reports in local tabloids that she was capable of "transforming" and "moving things with her eyes," and it ended with her suicide in December 2000.
Two years later, two young men from the neighboring township were sentenced to life in prison, having been convicted of Rina's murder and confessed to being hired by Antoinette. A strange case came to a mundane conclusion, though local media had missed one fact: It was South Africa's Occult-Related Crime Unit's head, Dr. Kobus "Hound of God" Jonker, who'd initially brought Antoinette in for questioning due to the case's "occult" nature.
Related: For more on the occult, watch our doc 'The Real True Detective?' below.
The Occult Unit was—and possibly is—the first and only of its kind in the world. Jonker founded it in 1992 at the behest of former minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok during the last days of Apartheid. But it had its origin in the 1980s, specifically the notorious Dungeons & Dragons–inspired global satanic panic.
The phenomenon had hit white South Africa—a community with a rich vein of Calvinist and conservative religious heritage—harder than anywhere in the world, bar, perhaps, the United States. As late as the early 2000s, many Afrikaans kids were still banned from reading the Harry Potter novels, with their depictions of witchcraft, or buying Lay's chips, which contained novelty Pokémon collectibles that children were said to have killed one another for. What had been an almost forgotten occurrence of global paranoia had crystallized into a state-sponsored, community-sanctioned witch hunt in South Africa; the original Occult Crime Unit channeled all of this existing paranoia, fanaticism, and fear into its mandate.
Jonker is a born-again Christian; an apparent ritual sacrifice during his career shocked him into the world of occult investigating. The Radloff case hadn't been his first jaunt into what he believed was the dark underbelly of South African Satanism, but it would be close to his last—he retired in an official capacity after suffering a heart attack in 2000. Before then he'd written several books on the subject, toured the country speaking at schools, penned articles for the community police mag Servamus ("We Serve") on how to identify satanists, and investigated cases of murder that had alleged satanic links.
According to Jonker, he was investigating upward of 250 such cases a year in the 90s. He believed that there were "thousands" of Satanists active in South Africa. According to another piece in Servamus, quoted by Sunday Paper City Press in September 2000, Jonker had been receiving death threats from Satanists and was sent a pair of severed baboon hands by post. The Occult Unit's section on the South African Police Service's (SAPS) website was only removed in 2006. However, thanks to the magic of the internet, it's still available.
The official webpage makes for baffling reading. Warning signs of "possible destructive occult-related discourse" included "changes to the appearance of the child's bedroom," "child experiences sudden gender confusion," "child plays/loves fantasy games," "rejection of parental values," "draping hair across left eye," and other descriptions of the kind of things plenty of teenagers tend to do while also not being Satanists.
Predictably, Christianity was a prerequisite for joining the unit.
Magazine features during the time of the Radloff case paint a holistic picture of Jonker, one of a man who considers all sides and remains reasonable and steadfast amid a cloud of skepticism, even from his peers. Apparently, Jonker broke up seven satanic rings in the Eastern Cape, with only two eluding him. Tales from those times include finding the severed head of a Chinese woman in a cupboard in a flat, several episodes of what Jonker calls demonic possession, and allegations of Satanist police officers breaking into Jonker's offices to sabotage his work.
Kobus Jonker while he was working in the Occult Unit. Screen shot via
Jonker moved his offices (and so presumably those of the Occult Unit) from main headquarters in Pretoria. His commissioner would refuse to enter his office, which was filled with creepy souvenirs from his adventures, like candles made from human fat, chained Bibles, and animal skulls. A plaque above the entrance read: " Onde Jesus Bloed," which means "Under Jesus's Blood [protection]" in Afrikaans.
A documentary series called Witness followed Jonker and his deputy, Rietta Everton, around for a spell toward the end of the millennium, during the beginnings of the Rina Radloff case. In the show the two first inspect the house before Antoinette is filmed being arrested. It's not really clear in which capacity Jonker and Everton are operating, but the narrator does describe their positions within the Occult Unit—they work from offices in Pretoria but are called across the country to other police districts, where detectives meet them to discuss individual cases, none of which are conclusive of supernatural involvement or the like. The pair operate in plainclothes, and no mention is made of the size, budget, or mandate of the unit. They're certainly not parading about as some kind of Ghosbusters-esque squad, merely as detectives called in on specific cases.
The point here, however, is that South Africa did—and still does, to a large extent—take Satanism very, very seriously, at least among certain parts of the population. The fascination with the occult hasn't disappeared, even since Dr. Attie Lamprecht—who succeeded Jonker in 2000—announced in 2006 that the Occult Unit had been officially disbanded and reabsorbed into other departments within the Detective Services as a result of a potential infringement of the right to freedom of religion, guaranteed by South Africa's famously progressive 1996 post-Apartheid constitution. This came in the wake of outrage from several pagan and other alternative religious groups in the country, who were accusing the unit of conflating pagan practice and identity with harmful Satanic rituals.
Despite these groups' protestations, however, the fear lives on. Case in point: Some in the country tried to boycott Lady Gaga's Born This Way Ball, because of what they believed was the tour's Satanic influence, back in 2012, and local pop star Toya Delazy was accused of Satanism for her album cover last year. The tragedy is that in between the complex net of alternative belief systems that encompass paganism, Satanism, and traditional African cultures involving alternative medicine practices, people do get murdered, assaulted, and brainwashed. Murders with ritualistic or Satanic undertones almost always make headlines in South Africa—like here, and here, and here. In many of these cases, Jonker has been called as an "expert" to give evidence.
The sad reality of the situation is that there truly is a need for a specialized unit dealing with ritual murders in South Africa.
In 2012, a leaked internal police memo revealed that the dissolved Occult Unit appeared to have been revived, albeit under a different name: the SAPS Harmful Religious Practices Unit.
By redefining occult crime as "crime that relates to or emanates primarily from an ostensible belief in the supernatural that formed a driving force in the crime," the new unit lends itself to a more practical, less fanatical air. Emphasis is placed on preventing (literal) witch hunts, a common occurrence in rural sectors, as well as ritualistic abuse. However, all this effort to appear sensible is sort of undermined by the inclusion of "curses intended to cause harm," "vampirism," "spiritual intimidation, including astral coercion," and "allegations of rape by a tokoloshe spirit."
And then reports surfaced that Jonker himself had returned to train detectives and equip them with the necessary skills to combat the occult. The focus this time seemed to have been shifted to tangible and real occult threats and not factually dubious underground conspiracies, but seeing as the "Hound of God" had trained the officers and the list of occult crimes still echoed traces of early-90s sentiment, how could anyone be sure?
What made the deal even more unclear was the fact that Parliament was unable to supply questioning members of the opposition with official statistics about the number of |
relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Drudge becoming a fully-owned subsidiary of the presidential campaign of a liberal conman and a common depository for the most insane theories of “9/11 Truther” conspiracy nut-jobs like Alex Jones would have been more unthinkable than even Trump himself becoming president. Although, in retrospect, the seeds for this transformation into lunacy were planted years ago.
My experience with Matt Drudge was a fill-in for his old national Sunday evening radio show (a time slot which, not coincidentally, my current program occupies) and as a then close friend to the late Andrew Breitbart back when he was effectively running the Drudge Report.
I learned a lot from Breitbart about how it is that the Drudge Report operates, or at least used to before the recent “conspiracy” take over (people would be shocked to know that he and Matt almost never spoke and rarely communicated). Andrew saw the Drudge Report as about the only viable option to inject a “conservative” news narrative into the bloodstream of the mainstream news media. He was acutely aware that you could not achieve such an objective with the use of sources which were overtly “conservative,” or which clearly lacked credibility.
Breitbart basically set up a system where he had several “go to” reporters at news sites which were at least somewhat respectable (Mike Allen, then of Politico, was a favorite). He would feed them stories from shakier sources and, with a “wink and a nod,” let them know that if they did the story, thus cleansing it of “conservative stench,” it would be linked on Drudge. This created more than enough incentive for stories otherwise ignored by the liberal mainstream media to make their way up the food chain in a way that they otherwise never would have.
In short, it was a brilliant way to leverage the traffic power of the Drudge Report to force the liberal media to stop systematically ignoring “conservative” narratives (the financial/career bias in the news media is far stronger than the liberal variety, something Hillary Clinton seems to be finding out, yet again). While Andrew certainly knew how to harness this clout for his own personal benefit, Breitbart also never lost sight of that ultimate political goal, nor would he have threatened the long-term health of the Golden Goose by constantly linking, in prominent ways, to blatantly bat-shit crazy conspiracy websites like InfoWars.
The first sign of real trouble to the overall political purpose of the Drudge Report (other than to obviously make boatloads of money for its founder based on the greatest business model in Internet history) came during the 2008 primaries. This was when both Breitbart and I became completely convinced that Matt Drudge was taking a dive on Barack Obama, as Drudge, out of the blue, routinely blocked Breitbart from posting negative stories about him, specifically with regard to the “Reverend Wright” controversy. I have been derided in conservative circles for making this accusation, but after what Drudge has so clearly done for Trump, any sane person (meaning non-Trump fanatics) who looks objectively at the evidence will see that I am absolutely right.
The negative impacts of the “conservative” media selling their souls to Trump will likely be profound, especially if he loses by a large margin. However, the long-term impact of losing the Drudge Report as not only a force for combating the liberal media (which it has proven itself to no longer be), but also as a remotely credible news source, may have even more profound implications.
After this election is finally, mercifully, over, mainstream sources will no longer see a prominent Drudge headline as something they can’t ignore. After all, Drudge accused Hillary of wearing an earpiece during a live TV interview and, through Julian Assange, effectively claimed she murdered a DNC staffer over her emails. Not just in a single link, but as the site’s main headline for an extended period of time.
I can somewhat understand how “conservative” media stars are afraid to harm their careers by properly attacking Donald Trump. At least in that realm there is the principle of party loyalty and, of course, “Hillary is the devil” and must be defeated at ALL costs. But the complete lack of willingness for anyone in the “conservative” media to stand up to the cancerous blight on our cause that the Drudge Report has become is nothing but craven career cowardice.
The fear among media types to cross Drudge and forever lose access to his remarkable traffic is, especially for conservatives who have nowhere else to go, completely debilitating. Such a devastating personal loss would be far too much for conservatives to endure for our cause. Of course, in this depressing election cycle, we have learned for sure that ANY semblance of sacrifice for the cause by those in the media claiming to be conservative is simply far too much to ask.
John Ziegler is a nationally-syndicated radio talk show host and documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud or email him at johnz@mediaite.com.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.- Authorities in Indian River County, Florida say a Vero Beach man who was high on the synthetic drug flakka attempted to break into the county jail on Monday night.
Investigators say Patrick Rempe, 24, rammed his 2002 Toyota into the front doors of building C at jail complex, barely missing a deputy. The glass on the doors shattered, but maintained integrity, a jail spokesperson said. Rempe then drove at a high rate of speed, ramming into the fence outside of building E causing damage to the fence.
Rempe then climed up the fence and became entangled in the razor wire on the inner perimeter of the jail. Indian River County Emergency Medical Services were called to remove Rempe from the fence and was transported to Indian River Medical Center for treatment from injuries. Scroll down for photo.
Deputies said Rempe admitted that he was "high on Flakka" and that he just wanted to visit friends who were in the jail. "This is what drugs do to you. Flakka is poisoning our youth. Fortunately, none of our deputies were injured and our facility wasn't compromised," said Indian River County Sheriff Deryl in a statement sent to FOX 35.
Rempe is currently being held under supervision at the Indian River Medical Center. He faces charges of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, battery on a law enforcement officer, three counts of felony criminal mischief, leaving the scene of a crash with property damage, driving under the influence, and possibly more.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, flakka (also known as gravel) often takes the form of a white or pink, foul-smelling crystal that can be eaten, snorted, injected, or vaporized in an e-cigarette or similar device. Vaporizing, which sends the drug very quickly into the bloodstream, may make it particularly easy to overdose. It can cause hyperstimulation, paranoia, and hallucinations that can lead to violent aggression and self-injury.Gfinity announced Epsilon as the fourth and final team to attend their CS:GO Invitational that will take place from September 23-25.
The announcement of Epsilon concludes the list of teams that will be competing in Birmingham, UK for their piece of the $100,000 prize pool.
The Swedish roster recently parted ways with Jerry "xelos" Råberg, but have been having solid results using Escape's André "BARBARR" Möller - who will travel with them to this event as well.
draken and disco doplan will be competing at Gfinity
The list of teams that will compete in Gfinity CS:GO Invitational by Omen by HP is now as follows:
As announced earlier, the four squads will compete in a single-elimination bracket, meaning only three matches will be played over the course of the tournament.
The semi-finals will be held on Friday and Saturday, while Sunday is reserved for the grand final - all of which will be played at the EGX gaming expo.LONDON — Perhaps befitting a battle that ended French hegemony in Europe, Paris, it seems, has been outflanked once again.
After it objected to a decision in March by Belgium to introduce a new 2 euro coin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Belgians retreated, scrapping 180,000 coins they had already minted.
But victory for France is proving elusive.
This week, Belgium decided to circumvent French resistance by invoking a little-known European Union rule that allows countries to issue euro coins of their choice, provided they are in an irregular denomination.
That led to the unveiling of a €2.50 coin — a first in Belgium — and 70,000 of them have now been minted. The coins, which can only be spent inside Belgium, display a monument of a lion atop a cone-shaped hill on the site of France’s humiliation, as well as lines indicating where troops were positioned when forces led by Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon in the countryside near Brussels.94 crore has been spent by the government for spreading awareness about digital payments.
Nearly Rs 94 crore has been spent by the government for spreading awareness about digital payments and popularising less-cash economy post demonetisation, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Thursday.Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rahtore also said that till date, the DAVP has paid over Rs 14.95 crore for advertisements released between November 9, 2016 -- a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced scrapping of Rs 1000 and Rs 500 denomination notes -- and January 25."DAVP has the practice of making cashless payments to newspapers, generally through NEFT. Bill submission period is 60 days from the date of publication of print advertisement.Till date, DAVP has paid Rs 14,95,84,691 for the advertisements released between November 9, 2016 and January 25," he said in a written reply.Responding to the question on details of total amount spent by the government for publicity of demonetisation, he said "total committed expenditure for awareness regarding digital payment and popularising action on less cash economy is Rs 93,93,28,566." The government had claimed that the action would curtail shadow economy and crack down on the use of illicit and counterfeit cash to fund illegal activities, including terrorism.Americans are having fewer kids. The U.S. fertility rate is at an all-time low, with more single and coupled people choosing to delay or forego parenthood. However, remaining child-free still isn't socially accepted.
That conclusion was reconfirmed in a study detailing the stigmatization, social backlash and "moral outrage" toward child-free people.
RELATED: TRENDING LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR
In the study, Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, a psychology professor at Indiana University, asked 197 college undergraduates from a large Midwestern university to read a vignette about a married graduate from the school who was described as male or female, with either zero or two children.
Asked to assess their feelings toward the graduates on a scale of 1 to 5, Ashburn-Nardo wanted to discern whether her participants - who had an average age of 20 - would view the child-free alums as more or less psychologically satisfied than their parent peers.
What she found was astonishing, Ashburn-Nardo wrote in an email. She discovered that the child-free alums were "perceived to be significantly less psychologically fulfilled" than those who were parents - and that participants experienced such reactions as disgust, disapproval, annoyance, outrage and anger when evaluating the child-free folks.
There was no gender gap in how the nonparents were viewed; participants believed both child-free men and women were less likely to lead happy lives. Ashburn-Nardo's findings indicate that at least some young people see parenthood as more of a moral obligation than a personal choice - and that people who don't have kids should prepare to be judged, even stigmatized.
"The (moral outrage) was the most surprising," Ashburn-Nardo wrote. "It's still shocking to me that people can report such feelings toward a person they've never met, and never could meet."
As a single 40-year-old woman who has long waffled about wanting kids, I found this research disheartening. I've always despised being the subject of others' pity, and this study confirmed that people like me are ripe for others' scorn. But being child-free is not a decision I've reached lightly. In fact, it was never a concrete decision at all.
As an adopted child, I've always longed for a more cohesive sense of family (a boyfriend once told me I wouldn't be able to "heal my childhood wounds" until I became a mother myself). And though I've never been especially maternal, for years I harbored a fantasy of finding the perfect partner - the kind of mate who would make having a child feel like an inevitability instead of a question mark. I believed that if I was "in love enough," I'd feel that primal push toward motherhood that seemed to grip so many of my friends.
That ideal partner hasn't come along yet, and neither has an unwavering desire to be a mom. But after some soul-searching, I realized that even as a child, when I imagined my grown-up future, I didn't necessarily picture motherhood. I saw a warm, passionate long-term relationship with a man I loved, plus good friends, glamorous travels, a cozy home and lots of animals. In addition to a few relatives, that might be all the family I need. Why that very personal - but also painful - realization would offend others makes me feel even further stigmatized.
Though Ashburn-Nardo, who typically studies racism and how to combat it, is married, she's all too familiar with feeling judged. She recalled how strangers at dinner parties have often assumed that she and her husband were parents and have even asked about their nonexistent kids. "I understand that... most people our age have children," she acknowledged. But when she corrected them, strangers' reactions - "a look of disdain, like we'd done something wrong" - were what drove her toward this research.
That disdain is correlated with the umbrella term "moral outrage" used in Ashburn-Nardo's study. "People experience moral outrage when they perceive someone has violated a morally prescribed behavior, something we're'supposed to do' because it's what we see as right," she explained. "In this case, there's a societal expectation that people should desire to have children."
What does this outrage on the part of the college-aged participants say to other young people who choose to forego child-rearing? And what does it say to child-free adults like me? According to Ashburn-Nardo, it sends the message that "parenthood is not only something we all should want, but that it is the (only) recipe for happiness and fulfillment." However, most scientific literature shows that's, well, not true. "Meta-analyses of hundreds of studies demonstrate that having children negatively affects relationship satisfaction," Ashburn-Nardo pointed out.
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Millennials are called a lot of things — lazy, attention-seeking, entitled, etc. But murderous? The internet, in all its glory, is home to countless articles about the age-old products, businesses and traditions millennials have sent to the gallows. Canned tuna? Gone. The mayonnaise you mix with it? Gone. Hooters? Say it isn’t so! We investigated some of the more prevalent claims to see which have merit and which don’t. (Lauren Hill) (Lauren Hill)Pro Wrestling Sheet has learned Tammy Sytch — aka WWE Hall of Famer Sunny — has been arrested in Pennsylvania … this according to police officials.
Sytch was taken into custody by Carbon County officers around 10:30 pm EST, and a sergeant on duty tells us it was due to a parole violation.
We exclusively reported back in April when Sunny checked into a rehab facility … and according to TMZ, she avoided 90 days in jail from her multiple DUI cases last month because she got clean.
In addition to being put on parole, Tammy agreed to undergo bi-weekly alcohol testing — and the judge said there would be a zero tolerance policy if she slipped up.
We’ll keep you updated once we get more information from police.This collection contains 352,404 issues comprising 4,357,522 pages and 25,425,787 articles.
The California Digital Newspaper Collection is a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California, Riverside.
The CDNC is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.
The CBSR has received three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize California newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program. Titles digitized as part of the NDNP are available both here and at the Library of Congress Chronicling America website.
We are eager to know what users think of this site. Please email your comments to cbsrinfo@ucr.edu.
Like the CDNC on Facebook.Old 50 and 20 rupee notes will continue to be valid, Reserve Bank of India has said.
The Reserve Bank of India has said it will soon release new notes of Rs 20 and Rs 50 denomination. All old notes, however, will continue to be valid, the bank has said.The notes, which will be issued shortly, will be in the 2005 Mahatma Gandhi series. They will bear the signature of RBI Governor Urijit Patel and the year of printing, 2016, printed on the reverse. The design and security features of the notes will be similar to the earlier banknotes, the bank said.The RBI's move comes less than a month after the Government's shock announcement of scrapping high denomination notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000.The weeks since has witnessed huge queues outside banks and ATMs. The matter has become a full-blown political controversy, with the opposition citing the distress of the common man. PM Modi has said that a survey on the notes ban conducted on his app has proved that the people back his effort to crack down on black money and corruption. The opposition has dismissed the survey as "fake and sponsored".“Corsi doesn't tell you everything,” said Jets coach Paul Maurice. "Or anything, possibly.”
Saturday was a rough day for the advanced stats advocates, or the “analytic nerds,” as Edmonton Oilers coach Todd McLellan called them.
McLellan used that term in his defence of Oilers defenceman Kris Russell, who scored into his own goal to cost his team a win, Thursday.
Like Russell, the Jets’ Matt Hendricks is a target of those who point to his shortcomings when it comes to advanced stats.
“You just can’t compare apples and oranges,” Jets coach Paul Maurice began, when asked what his fourth-line centre brings to the table that statistics don’t show. “And a hockey team has to have both. You can’t win with only one style of player.
“Corsi doesn’t tell you everything. Or anything, possibly.”
Hendricks scored his third goal of the season in Winnipeg’s 7-4 win over Las Vegas, Friday, after getting cut on his face by a skate blade.
“He’s done that everywhere he’s been since his first time in the NHL,” Maurice said. “There wouldn’t be a guy in that room who wouldn’t be able to tell you how important Matt’s role is and what he’s done for our team.
“Because of that… we’re hopeful that all the other players in that role see a value to what they do, above and beyond the stats, the goals and assists.”A 12-year-old member of the popular Japanese all-girl singing group 3B Junior fell into a coma after inhaling helium while filming a TV show, a local TV network said Wednesday.
The girl has regained consciousness since the incident on Jan. 28 but has limited mobility and still can’t speak clearly, according to Japan Today. Other members of the group, all under 18, also inhaled helium for the show, 3B Junior Stardust Shoji, but were not hurt.
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The network, TV Asahi, has apologized over the incident and said that proper safety precautions were inadequate. The container of helium is marked with a warning “For adult use only.”
[Japan Today]
Write to Noah Rayman at noah.rayman@time.com.Arkansas To Host Minnesota On Marquee Saturday
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Arkansas men’s basketball team is set to host a consensus preseason top 15 team during the first month of the 2017-18 season, welcoming Minnesota to Bud Walton Arena on Saturday, Dec. 9.
In what will be one of the strongest home schedules of the Mike Anderson era, the Razorbacks will host the Golden Gophers on a premier Saturday in December during the heart of the non-conference schedule.
Arkansas will play Minnesota for the second consecutive year after traveling to “The Barn” last year as part of the Golden Gopher Invitational. Minnesota is coming off a fourth place finish in the Big Ten Conference and returns its top four scorers from a team that made an appearance in the NCAA Tournament.
In addition to Minnesota, the Razorbacks are also scheduled to host Oklahoma State on Saturday, Jan. 27 in the Big 12/SEC Challenge, Colorado State and a full slate of nine Southeastern Conference showdowns.
Arkansas will be one of the most experienced teams in the country next season, returning six seniors, including three of its top five scorers in Daryl Macon, Jaylen Barford and Anton Beard. The Razorbacks also welcome the top three high school players in the state of Arkansas, as Daniel Gafford, Darious Hall and Khalil Garland make up a top 20 recruiting class according to ESPN.
Seat deposits for new season ticket holders for the 2017-18 campaign can be made by calling the Razorback Ticket Office at 1-800-982-4647 or by clicking here. Current season ticket holders have already received renewal forms in the mail and can renew online today.
The Games We Know
Saturday, Dec. 9 – Minnesota (BWA)
Thursday, Nov. 23 – at Phil Knight Invitational
Friday, Nov. 24 – at Phil Knight Invitational
Sunday, Nov. 26 – at Phil Knight Invitational
Saturday, Jan. 27 – Oklahoma State (BWA)
For more information on Arkansas men’s basketball, follow @RazorbackMBB on Twitter.Lord and Miller Are Better For Superheroes Than “Star Wars”
Brandon C. Kesselly Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 5, 2017
Written By Brandon C. Kesselly (@bckesso) — July 5, 2017
Han Solo, portrayed by Harrison Ford. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
On June 20, 2017, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy fired Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, the directors of the 2018 young Han Solo film. Lord and Miller, who were previously tapped by Warner Bros to direct The Flash (2020), apparently clashed one too many times with Kennedy, as well as the film’s screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens). After news of their firing became public, I breathed a brief sigh of relief. They were never a good fit for Han Solo in the first place.
The two filmmakers are mostly known for their work on 21 and 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. Their typical style of comedy is rooted in parody: it tends to be referential or self-aware in ways that often break the fourth wall. Look to 22 Jump Street, when undercover officers Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) go to visit Captain Dickson, portrayed by Ice Cube. Upon seeing Dickson’s new glass encased office, Schmidt remarks that, “It looks like a giant cube of ice.” There are also several running gags in The Lego Movie regarding Batman such as his love for “black or very, very dark grey” or his theme music literally saying things like “Darkness/No parents.”
This kind of humor doesn’t work for Star Wars, which takes place in its own universe rather than one even partially adjacent to ours. It certainly doesn’t work for Han Solo, even though the character was in The Lego Movie. Han is mostly known for his charm, bravado, and sarcasm. Comedy involving him is typically either situational or plays off his personality traits and/or flaws.
He’s the guy who charges a group of stormtroopers head first only to turn tail because he forgot he was outnumbered. He’s the guy who’s genuinely offended when someone calls him “scruffy looking.” He’s the guy who sarcastically thanks a protocol droid for interrupting his first kiss with Princess Leia. He’s the guy who, after witnessing that it was more than just some “hokey religion,” will tell you that faith alone is “not how the Force works.” At best, his humor might be self-referential, like the trash compactor joke in The Force Awakens — but even that was pushing it.
Where Lord and Miller would do wonders, however, is in the realm of comic book movies — especially superhero movies. Their style of comedy would be perfect for Spider-Man, who quips so much he annoys his allies as much as his adversaries. Marvel seems to agree; the two have worked on an animated film featuring the character slated to release next July.
Deadpool, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
Their humor would be perfect for Deadpool, a character with a long history of breaking the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience or acknowledging his own existence as a fictional character. They would be fantastic with Plastic Man who, like Spider-Man, mixes comedy and heart in ways that could easily mesh with the audience. His powers also lend themselves well to situational comedy.
Personally, I would love to see them return to direct The Flash. While I feel Wally West would be a better fit for the two than Barry Allen, Flash characters have enough variety for them to have a lot to work with — especially The Rogues. Warner Bros are still on board for Lord and Miller. Are you?
Want to keep up with Rising Young Minds? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter!CTVNews.ca Staff
A couple of cougar sightings have put a sleepy neighbourhood in North Vancouver, B.C. on high alert.
Andrew Smith of Deep Cove, B.C., said an adolescent cougar attempted to break into his home on Thursday.
"I look out the door and there's the cougar: completely calm, unfazed. (He was) trying to get in, trying to pull the handle. Then (it) climbs up … and tries to get into the window," Smith told CTV Vancouver.
Smith snapped some photos of the big cat and called B.C.'s Conservation Officer Service. The agency hunted it down and killed the animal later that day. It said that relocation was not an option.
"There was very threatening and aggressive behaviour noted … (It is) very unusual," said Sgt. Todd Hunter of the Conservation Officer Service.
But on Friday, the cat was back. Or it was another cat. Smith's family spotted a second cougar outside their home.
"When I looked out my kitchen window he was sitting at the stairs at the kitchen window," said Jessica Smith.
Warning signs about the cat have been posted in the area, and Hunter believes that the two animals were likely siblings.
"The other cougar came right back to the area. It's probably looking for the other one," Hunter said.
Smith's photos of the incidents have put residents on high alert. "That shocked me. I've never seen anything like that," one man said.
Local Laela Ateah also said it was "sad" that one of the cougars was killed.
"It's mostly our fault that it had to get hurt. If it weren't for all these buildings and everything. It's just curious," said Ateah.
With a report from CTV Vancouver's Sheila Scottby Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
AR5 SOD leaked
Andy Revkin comments:
A WikiLeaks-style Web dump of drafts of the 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides fresh evidence that the organization’s policies and procedures are a terrible fit for an era in which transparency will increasingly be enforced on organizations working on consequential energy and environmental issues.
I’ve downloaded the SPM and a few of the chapters. The extreme overconfidence of many of their conclusions is bewildering. More on this in future posts.
Bill Clinton and Richard Muller
For those of you that are Richard Muller watchers, you will find this interesting: Bill Clinton Praises His New Climate Change Hero. Excerpts from the article:
On December 7, President Bill Clinton appeared in Silicon Valley and talked at length about climate change, referring to Berkeley scientist Dr. Richard Muller as “a hero of mine.”
In a Fresh Dialogues interview, Muller agreed to share his reaction to the hero worship and answer some climate change questions.
You might be surprised to learn three things about Dr. Muller:
1. He says Hurricane Sandy cannot be attributed to climate change.
2. He suggests individually reducing our carbon footprint is pointless — we need to “think globally and act globally,” by encouraging the switch from coal to gas power in China and developing nations. He’s a fan of “clean fracking.”
3. He says climate skeptics deserve our respect, not our ridicule.
Muller said he hopes that Berkeley Earth will be able to coordinate with the Clinton Foundation on their mutual goal of mitigating global warming.
Here’s a summary of our interview: (more at Fresh Dialogues)
van Diggelen: You wrote in the New York Times that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes — how so?
Muller: Science is that small realm of knowledge on which we can expect and obtain agreement. I felt that many of the skeptics had raised legitimate issues. They are deserving of respect, not the kind of ridicule they have been subjected to. We have addressed the scientific issues in the most direct and objective way, and just as I have adjusted my conclusions, I expect that many of them will too.
van Diggelen: What’s your message to climate change skeptics?
Muller: Most of your skepticism is still valid. When something extraordinary happens in weather, such as the accidental occurrence of Hurricane Sandy hitting New Jersey and New York City just at the peak of tides — many people attribute the event to “climate change.” That’s not a scientific conclusion, and it is almost certainly wrong. Hurricanes are not increasing due to human causes (actually, they have been decreasing over the past 250 years). Tornadoes are not increasing due to human causes. (They too have been decreasing.) So please continue to be skeptical about most of the exaggerations you will continue to hear! Proper skepticism is at the heart of science, and attempts to suppress such skepticism represent the true anti-science movement.
JC comment: I like Bill Clinton’s ‘climate hero’ a lot more than I like Al Gore’s climate heroes.
NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco to step down
From Science:
Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), announced on Tuesday that she plans to step down from her post in February.
In an open letter to the NOAA family, she cites the following accomplishments (presented in summary form):
1. Ending over-fishing, rebuilding depleted stocks, and returning
fishing to profitability;
2. Strengthening the Nation’s environmental satellite infrastructure
because it underpins national security, economic activity and public
safety by providing data essential to our short- and long-term weather
forecasts;
3. Delivering life-saving weather forecasts and warnings and
strengthening our ability to do so in the future
4. Helping create the first National Ocean Policy
5. Leveling the playing field for our fishermen
6. Creating a new generation of climate services to promote public
understanding, support mitigation and adaptation efforts, enable smart
planning, and promote regional climate partnerships;
7. Investing in coastal communities and their future resilience through more strategic and better integrated conservation and restoration;
8. Better serving recreational anglers and boaters
9. Strengthening science with our first Scientific Integrity Policy,
doubling the number of senior scientific positions, establishing a new
Council of Fellows, reinstating the Chief Scientist position, supporting
AAAS and Sea Grant Fellows and promoting climate, fishery, ocean
acidification, weather and ecosystem science;
10. Responding effectively as “one-NOAA” to disasters such as Deepwater
Horizon, the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/radiation/marine debris
catastrophe, Hurricanes Irene, Isaac and Sandy
11. Bringing experience, scientific and legal expertise to bear on the
federal response to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe
12. Championing NOAA’s lean, but effective, education program
13. Creating NOAA’s first Aquaculture Policy and a National Shellfish
Initiative;
14. Setting a stronger course for endangered species conservation.
15. Streamlining regulations to save taxpayers time and money and improve
efficiency.
16. Increasing effectiveness and decreasing costs of corporate services
such as acquisitions and IT
17. Developing and implementing a “One-NOAA” Arctic Vision and Strategy
and Task Force
18. Strengthening NOAA’s fishery enforcement program by implementing
policy, oversight, personnel and procedural changes to increase
effectiveness and transparency;
19. Embracing social media, effective communications and communications training to share NOAA science, information and decisions with our diverse constituents, stakeholders and partners
20. Ensuring all our policies, regulations and statements are consistent with the law and legal best practices.
JC comment: Oh my. The nation’s weather satellite observing system is in a shambles, the weather forecasting capability has fallen far behind the Europeans, Climate Services is dead. NOAA is not in good shape.
CLOUD
Yale Environment 360 has a really nice article entitled Creating Clouds in the Lab to Better Understand Climate. The article is about the CERN cloud nucleation experiments, and consists of an interview with British particle physicist Jasper Kirby, who leads the project. The whole interview is fascinating, here are some excerpts:
e360: You were saying that aerosols and clouds are the biggest uncertainty right now in our knowledge of mankind’s influence on climate change.
Kirkby: The big warming contribution of mankind is greenhouse gases. At the same time, mankind has been increasing aerosol particle production by emitting various gases into the atmosphere, and these have been cooling the planet. But we don’t know how much they’ve been cooling the planet, because we really don’t understand the fundamental science behind how these vapors turn into particles and then grow into the cloud condensation nuclei. So CLOUD will help reduce that uncertainty and really sharpen the scientific basis and understanding of the subject.
Now, the other area where CLOUD will reduce a very big question mark in current climate change is to what extent there can be a natural contribution to the current warming. The current understanding is that natural warming is very, very small. There’s a short-term contribution from volcanoes, which only lasts a few years. There’s also thought to be a small brightening
CLOUD will help clear up to what extent there is a natural contribution to current warming.”
of the sun over the course of the twentieth century. But apart from that, there’s thought to be nothing else going on — natural contribution — to climate change. On the other hand, if you look at earlier times, you do see changes in the climate that are comparable to the warming that is going on now. But we don’t know what the mechanism is. So at the very least this is a question mark. And at the very most, there could be a contribution that is just unaccounted for at the moment. Whatever it is, we don’t know what the answer is. And we have to settle it before we can really with certainty say we understand what’s going on now.
e360: And what does settling it require?
Kirkby: It requires a lot of observations. I was at an international conference on aerosol in September and I made a comment that we’re getting to the stage with CLOUD where we will understand the processes extremely well, but we still won’t be able to reduce the errors because we don’t have good enough atmospheric observations of what the concentrations of these vapors are in the atmosphere versus altitude. So, there has to be a combined approach where the lab experiments like CLOUD improve the scientific understanding, but at the same time the observational measurements sharpen the knowledge of what’s in the atmosphere. We’ll take care of the laboratory side, I believe, but other people have to also take care of the observations in the atmosphere.
e360: Let’s assume that cosmic rays don’t have an effect on clouds. What does that mean?
Kirkby: It will settle a particular question, which to my mind can only be settled by experimental data. There’s a huge amount of opinion one way or another on the blogosphere that says “cosmic rays have no effect on the climate” to “cosmic rays do everything in the climate.” And no matter how passionately people believe this view or that view, we can’t settle it by energetic debate. We have to settle it by experimental measurements. We will settle that question, so there will be a firm scientific basis for answering that question by the end of CLOUD, as opposed to a gazillion opinions…
There have been many observations for solar climate variability, but no established mechanism. Cosmic rays are essentially one of the leading candidates — for me, the leading candidate — but if we find that there’s nothing there, we simply eliminate that as a mechanism. Who knows? We really don’t know at this stage.Usher and Tomeka Foster Expecting Second Child
and wifeare expecting baby number two.
Usher, 29, and Tomeka, 38, were wed in a civil ceremony in Atlanta in August, 2007, and welcomed their first child, Usher Raymond V, in November, 2007.
The singer says his son, nicknamed Cinco, as an "extension of his union" with Foster.
"I'm so proud to be a father by the time I'm 30," he told PEOPLE magazine last month. "I'd hate to be 80 years old and not be able to run with my kids. I need to still be able to do flips when they're in high school!
Usher recently announced that he will kick off a ladies-only tour called One Night Stand later this fall. Now that he's a married family man |
clist had shoved him before the officer tackled him back, but the video shows no such incident.
Critical Mass is held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities across the world. Bicyclists join together for a cross-city ride moving as one unit and often disobeying traffic laws. The movement is intended to allow bicyclists, who typically must watch out for cars on the road, to be the traffic themselves.
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[Via: Gawker]
Photo Credit: Doug Letterman on Flickr under Creative Commons license.A shortage of nuts in Russia’s Far East this autumn spells bad news for the region’s Siberian tiger population. The World Wildlife Fund say boar and deer, which the big cats feed on, are starving due to a lack of pine nuts and acorns.
“The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has launched a fundraising drive to help to feed these ungulate animals, as there has been a pine nut and acorn failure in the Far East’s taiga, which is their main source of nutrition,” a statement from the organization read.
Large mammals found in the taiga include wild boars, deer and Manchurian wapitis.
“If these ungulate animals don’t get the necessary nutrition, starvation will also threaten Siberian tigers this winter,” the statement continued. The WWF warns that this could also threaten the local human populations as the hungry Siberian tigers could go into inhabited areas in search of food.
Wild boar, deer and other large animals will need to be fed from December until March or even April this year to ensure they do not starve. This process will cost around two million rubles ($15,000).
“Drawing on our experience, the best feed is hominy (a form of dried maze). However, the animals also eat other foods, such as soybeans and oats. We are going to buy 300 tons of food, which are needed for about a quarter of the hunting areas in the Primorsky Krai. This though, is not enough,” Pavel Fomenko, the WWF’s Russia program coordinator said.
The WWF points out that this is not the first time the animals have faced nutrition problems. Last winter the taiga experienced abnormal snowfalls, with snow up to a meter deep. The large animals got bogged down in the snow and were unable to find things to eat.
The WWF put up a number of feeding posts in the taiga, as well as creating paths leading to them.
Siberian or Amur tigers are extremely rare. Their habitat lies in the border region between Russia and China. In the 1940s, there were only about 30-40 Siberian tigers left in the wild, but due to the efforts of the state and ecologists, their numbers have risen to 500.
The Amur tigers conservation fund was created in 2013 as an initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The fund targets poachers, and aims to double the tiger population over the next decade.Xerath. What better way to ring in the new week than with a red post collection?Continue reading for several red posts, discussing when custom item sets will be back, why we don't yet have updated splash arts for visually updated skins, more on MR itemization, and even more discussion on
When will Custom Item Sets be back?
Damiya
"Custom sets are still usable you just can't edit them in PVP.net
I believe the plan is to reenable the functionality in the client with the release of 3.8 (potentially sometime later this week). Please note that this is an off the cuff estimate on my part; we've not announced a hard date."
Where are the Updated Splashes?
Grumpy Monkey
"Yeah the splashes need to be updated, its a bandwidth issue. Those splashes can take a while, and the team responsible for them also has to do all the new skins and champions. Its something they are painfully aware of, and they are doing thier best to prioritize so they can attend to the older splashes."
More on MR Itemization
Morello
Xypherous
"There's a couple instances of dissonance in this thread which I'd like to see if I can address and clear up.
Quote:
There's a lack of choices for tanks. If they want to build magic resist, they would literally HAVE to get Aegis and/or Spirit Visage in general. I would suggest you bring back Force of Nature or add in a few other items.
The answer for a lack of choices for tanks by introducing one single huge tank MR item doesn't introduce more choices. It simply offers one single best choice. It is slightly odd that the proposal to add more MR options for tanks involves first locking them to a completely different MR item - especially one that can be used by both fighters and tanks.
Quote:
Tanks have no options against sustained AP damage, hence why Health is insufficient.
In general, sustained AP damage comes from a magic damage source with some very special properties. Not all AP mages can actually output high sustained magic damage at all. Karthus and Cassieopeia certainly fit this bill but they have very nuanced play / skill required as that is their primary strength. Orianna outputs sustained magic damage but her DPS is abysmal compared to any other mage.
So who are these sustained AP damage characters that are frequently referenced? The answer: Sustained AP Fighters - Elise, Diana, Rumble.
The lack of decent MR options against these characters is quite punishing, I agree but this is an entirely new class of characters - One that I'm not convinced should actually exist at the strength they do or if a dedicated MR item would actually help in this case. These characters are extremely punishing mid-game, for example - but tend to start suffering late game due to being closer range fighters.
Quote:
Resource-less champions and Magic Resistance
Yes, resource-less champions don't have the greatest itemization pool - as the existence of Mana and MP/5 seems to drive you away from a large portion of the item pool.
This is, at once, a controversial and yet obvious statement: Playing a resourceless champion is not a pure benefit - there are tradeoffs. For example - the advantage of being able to be completely resourceless in lane, you pay a cost in that your starting item pool is far more limited. You have enormous strengths that are also easy to plan for by your opponent.
Similarly, for the late game, it is going to mean that your champion might waste statistics. It is going to mean that some purchases will be suboptimal for your character - and it will mean that you will feel bad in that stage of the game as your strength now no longer matters.
In general, I'm okay with how the current model works because the alternative is to simply take a lot of power away from resourceless champions across the board to the extent that being resourceless is actually a penalty and then providing itemization to get around that penalty.
Quote:
Why not make a massive Health + Magic Resistance Item
Let's think about the goals here for a second: If the goal is to make tanks feel better about fighting mages - why is the solution presented to create one of the most powerful defensive fighters items?
Don't get me wrong, this would be a good tank item. However, at the end of the day - it would be an even better fighter item - no matter how you look at it. Intrinsically, durability alone does not make a tank item - because two classes are defined by durability - Fighters and Tanks.
That's the crux of a lot of the issue with raw durability statistics - the desire is to be more durable and to not have to 'waste' a whole lot of statistics to get there. However, if there's any class that prizes durability even more so than tanks - it is fighters, because they, not only have to initiate - but they have to frequently stay in the fight much much longer to actually contribute, because their power in a fight is typically sheer time and presence - while a tank's purpose can be fulfilled by an overwhelming initiation or a clutch peel.
For example, contrast how much longer Udyr has to stay in a fight to contribute meaningfully versus a character like Sejuani or Malphite. If Sejuani only survived to throw her ultimate and follow it up with Perma Frost, how long does Udyr have be able to live in a fight to actually match that?
Quote:
Tanks and the current environment
Lastly and this is the most interesting one for me - there doesn't seem to be any evidence right now that tanks are doing poorly in the current environment, nor does it seem that tanks are unable to perform in order to win a game. Jungle Tank characters such as Sejuani, Zac and Nautilus contribute heavily towards their team's success - even if they fail to be invulnerable late game.
As for more traditional tank characters that lane - for example, Singed or Jarvan - perform excellently in the current environment. If the environment were shifting towards a dominant double or triple AP strategy - it certainly hasn't impacted their abilities to win games."
More on future Xerath changes
( Remember, this stuff is all tentative and, Xelnath has warned us the numbers certainly aren't finalized yet )
Xelnath continued discussing his future changes to Xerath. See continued discussing his future changes to. See this post and this post for the rest of the discussion.
Xelnath
"Perfect storm of time, opportunity and resources. We've still got a while before he shows up on PBE. I just feel like communicating about these topics now gives everyone visibility into our process and input into our decision making.
I generally have good instincts when it comes to the direction a design needs to go and Morello, Volty, Xypherous and I also were pretty aligned about what Xerath should be. That helped short-circuit a large number of "back to the drawing board" iterations that often happen. However, the remaining details are the crumbly bits that still need a lot of polish work. This is my weak area and it will probably consume the majority of the rework time.
This process is very similar to ones I've used in the past. The primary risk is that it people start expecting to see the rework soon. I feel confident in our direction now, but the final numbers remain to be seen."
"Locus of Power is being moved to a long cooldown + supermassive range for a simple reason:
With the change to allow hold Q to charge-up to its old 1300 range, you no longer need Locus of Power to do poke/sniping on a regular basis.
Thus the "concept" of a stationary, super-range steroid on your basic spells becomes available, now that we've concentrated the cool parts of W->Q into just Q."
"8 sec at rank 1, 5 sec at rank 5.
However, Q's cooldown doesn't start until you release the attack, so your sustained DPS over time will be less if you are always max-distance charging it. (Max charge-up time is 1.5 sec currently)
You can move while charging, but your movement speed is reduced."
"This is more about giving you the option to build mana to become "I care less about any given spell, but I am spamming spells all of the time" guy vs "I build raw AP. Every spell *must* count since I will hit like a truck, but I go oom sooner" guy.
In practical terms, I expect most players to pick-up archangels as a 2nd or 3rd item. I don't expect to see many people stack only mana, based on current tuning. This is mostly gum & guesswork though. We've got a lot of testing to do to prove if this works or not."For supporters of Donald Trump, they will believe any and every word that comes out of his mouth. Despite attempts by the #NeverTrump crowd to educate them, they continue to buy into The Donald’s lies. In order to be helpful, Trump has decided to debate himself on the issues.
You just have to watch this:
On everything from Iraq, the Clintons, healthcare, minimum wage, and more, Donald Trump has changed his positions so drastically that one would find it near impossible to discern what he actually believes. Most importantly, though, for those in the “but Hillary” camp, Trump praised her and Bill for years. Trump called Clinton a Secretary of State that was “above and beyond everybody else” AFTER the attack in Benghazi. That’s right, Cheeto Jesus has been singing her praises even after she allowed four Americans to die and then lied about it to their families.
Many of us have always claimed that Donald Trump is a conman and a liar, but no one proved that better than Trump himself.WHEN THE SUPERPOWERS FACED OFF IN THE AIR OVER KOREA, EACH SIDE WANTED WHAT THE OTHER ONE HAD. The U.S. Air Force was able to determine precisely how the Soviet-built MiG-15 compared with its own premier fighter, the North American F-86 Sabre, because on September 21, 1953, two months after the cessation of hostilities in Korea, North Korean Lieutenant No Kum-Sok defected, flying his MiG-15 to Kimpo Air Base, South Korea. (The pilot earned a $100,000 reward, and his aircraft is now on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.) The next day, the Air Force airlifted the MiG to Okinawa and sent two test pilots—Major Charles “Chuck” Yeager and Captain H.E. “Tom” Collins—to take its measure. During 11 test flights, the two pilots answered a question that is still being asked 50 years later: Which is better, the Sabre or the MiG?
At the start of the Korean War, the F-86 was the fastest airplane in the world: Its maximum speed was a blistering 685 mph. The MiG, at 670 mph, was not far behind. The Sabre had higher roll and turn rates than the MiG. But the test pilots found that the MiG had better acceleration, could climb faster, and could fight at a higher altitude.
With two 23-mm and one 37-mm cannon, the MiG packed a harder punch than the Sabre’s six.50-caliber machine guns. But the Sabre had sharper aim. Its AN/APG-30 radar gunsight gave its pilots the advantage in ease of use and accuracy.
The Soviets had learned all this even before the Americans did. They had conducted comparisons of their own, thanks to a rare combination of circumstances and a focused opportunism.
Although U.S. Air Force Second Lieutenant Bill N. Garrett didn’t know it at the time, the MiG-15 that took him out of the fight on October 6, 1951, was flown not by a Chinese or North Korean pilot, but by a Russian. The MiG pilot had hit Garrett’s F-86A behind the cockpit and had damaged its J-47 engine and ejection seat. As Garrett struggled westward toward the Yellow Sea, where he planned to ditch and, with luck, get rescued, another MiG pilot spotted his stricken aircraft. This pilot too was Russian.
Throughout the Korean War, U.S. pilots traded rumors about the enemies they faced in the air; they were never briefed that they were flying against Soviet pilots, but they suspected as much. What U.S. pilots didn’t know was that every MiG flown in North Korea between November 1950 and December 1951 had a Soviet pilot at the controls. They didn’t know that a veteran Soviet unit, the 324th Fighter Air Division, had arrived in China in April 1951. They didn’t know that the ranks of the 324th were filled with some of the highest scoring Soviet pilots from World War II or that by October those pilots would down so many B-29s that the U.S. Far East Air Force would have to restrict the big bombers to night missions. And Garrett didn’t know that a pilot of the 324th was following him to finish him off.
Captain Konstantin Sheberstov was patrolling in a formation of four when he spotted easy prey: a lone, wounded F-86. Sheberstov remembered the incident 45 years later for the Russian aviation journal Mir Aviatsii: “This F-86 was descending at an angle of 45–50 degrees with black smoke [trailing]. I started chasing him at the maximum speed. I caught up with him at an altitude of [3,300 feet] and from a distance of [975 to 1,150 feet] opened fire….” In trying to evade his pursuer, Garrett lost more altitude and was barely able to reach the mud flats along the coast, where he ditched the airplane. Here, on October 6, 1951, the Russians were presented with the trophy they had been trying to snare for months.
In the month before the first F-86s got to Korea, MiGs ruled the sky. Although World War II F-51 Mustangs were holding their own, they were no match for the Russian-built jets, and the U.S. straight-wing jets, Republic F-84s and Lockheed F-80s, were almost 100 mph slower than the MiG-15. But in December 1950 the Sabre arrived, like a Hollywood sheriff come back to town; they had barely joined the war when they shot down six MiG-15s in a single engagement on December 22.
The Soviets immediately set out to learn everything they could about the new enemy fighter. In the months that followed, Soviet intelligence agents monitored F-86 radio transmissions, interrogated Sabre pilots who had been shot down and taken prisoner, and reported their findings to the Soviet leadership. Premier Joseph Stalin himself gave the order to capture an F-86.
How the Soviets first attempted to carry out the order is not a proud moment in Russian aviation history. In April 1951, the Soviet Central Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute, a flight research center located at what is today Zhukovsky Airfield near Moscow, dispatched a special group of test pilots to a training base in Manchuria. The team practiced precision formation flying in MiGs, with the outlandish goal of boxing in an F-86, escorting it to Manchuria, and somehow forcing it to land. After a month of practice, the pilots joined the 196th Fighter Air Regiment, part of the 324th Fighter Air Division, at Andun, on the Manchurian side of the Yalu River, which formed a border between China and North Korea.Among the data WWE listed underneath today's headlines about record revenue was a small dip in paid subscribers to their over-the-top (OTT) streaming service.
For the fourth quarter of 2015, subscribers actually declined approximately 1% from the previous quarter - 1,233,000 to 1,217,000 - despite international expansion into Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan during the period. There was, however a 34,000 rise in international subscribers, and average paid subscribers trended up slightly.
(For more information on this, follow Wrestling Observer on Twitter - being manned for today's financials by Chris Harrington)
Growth plans for the service, which remains key to the company's future strategic plans, include more geographic expansion - China, Thailand and the Philippines are specifically mentioned - and additional content. The report mentions that more than 1000 hours of old event footage will be added this quarter, plus 300 hours of new content.
That includes live events like traditional pay-per-views & next month's March to WrestleMania special from Toronto, but also the debuts of the animated Camp WWE & comedy variety program Edge & Christian's Show That Totally Reeks of Awesomeness, and returning series like Stone Cold Podcast and Swerved (that last one being a bit of a surprise considering reports production had ceased on it due to Superstars complaining about being pranked on the job).
Is that enough to keep getting your $9.99? We'll know more in another three months when 2016 Q1 numbers hit.'Class Popularity' and 'Hardcore Deaths' Charts Expanded Overhauled charts show more data, including the Surviving to 60 class competition
Barbarians dominate in the class popularity charts, to no surprise. They are the most popular class for both hardcore and softcore characters. This is especially seen in the updated Paragon Level Class Popularity charts. Barbarians now make up 38% of the softcore characters who have reached Paragon Level 50 or higher, even greater than the 28% rate for all softcore Paragon Level characters. They also make up 32% of all hardcore characters with Paragon Levels; there are too few hardcore characters at 50+ Paragon Levels to make it worth trying to split out those numbers.
dominate in the class popularity charts, to no surprise. They are the most popular class for both hardcore and softcore characters. This is especially seen in the updated Paragon Level Class Popularity charts. Barbarians now make up 38% of the softcore characters who have reached Paragon Level 50 or higher, even greater than the 28% rate for all softcore Paragon Level characters. They also make up 32% of all hardcore characters with Paragon Levels; there are too few hardcore characters at 50+ Paragon Levels to make it worth trying to split out those numbers. For class popularity, the Wizard and Demon Hunter classes are two peas in a pod, with a significant split between the hardcore and softcore modes. Both classes are well represented in softcore in all areas, in leveling up and with Paragon Levels. The hardcore side is the opposite; there are not many Wizards or Demon Hunters in those ranks, especially at the high end. Fewer Wizards or Demon Hunters get Paragon Levels than the other classes.
and classes are two peas in a pod, with a significant split between the hardcore and softcore modes. Both classes are well represented in softcore in all areas, in leveling up and with Paragon Levels. The hardcore side is the opposite; there are not many Wizards or Demon Hunters in those ranks, especially at the high end. Fewer Wizards or Demon Hunters get Paragon Levels than the other classes. Witch Doctors are at the other end of the spectrum, compared to those two classes. Witch Doctors make up the fewest characters of any of the classes; they start out doing well in the softcore leveling process, and then just fade away. By level 60, Witch Doctors make up only 12% of the softcore level 60 population. There aren't many of them in hardcore, as far as total numbers leveling up. But they're just so impressively durable, that they stick around and do incredibly well in hardcore mode at level 60. Of all the classes at level 60 in hardcore, Witch Doctors make up the second highest percentage behind Barbarians.
are at the other end of the spectrum, compared to those two classes. Witch Doctors make up the fewest characters of any of the classes; they start out doing well in the softcore leveling process, and then just fade away. By level 60, Witch Doctors make up only 12% of the softcore level 60 population. There aren't many of them in hardcore, as far as total numbers leveling up. But they're just so impressively durable, that they stick around and do incredibly well in hardcore mode at level 60. Of all the classes at level 60 in hardcore, Witch Doctors make up the second highest percentage behind Barbarians. Monks fall right between those two extremes - they do moderately well in both the softcore and hardcore modes. They are the class with the closest representation between both softcore and hardcore, and between the groups of softcore players who reach Paragon Level 50+, and those who aren't that far along in Paragon Levels.
The main new section there is something we call Surviving to Level 60. This is calculated by comparing the number of hardcore characters in a class who made it to level 60, to the amount of characters in that class who died at levels 1-59.
. This is calculated by comparing the number of hardcore characters in a class who made it to level 60, to the amount of characters in that class who died at levels 1-59. The big winners there are the sturdy Witch Doctors, with a remarkable 68% survival rate! This is a combination of the Witch Doctor durability, and the smaller overall number of them being leveled up compared to the other classes; the players who level up hardcore Witch Doctors really want to survive!
, with a remarkable 68% survival rate! This is a combination of the Witch Doctor durability, and the smaller overall number of them being leveled up compared to the other classes; the players who level up hardcore Witch Doctors really want to survive! See all the charts in the Hardcore Deaths section for further details on what class dies when, and other tidbits of hardcore death stats.
Our daily scans of Diablo III characters recently passed 1.5 million. In celebration, we've gone through and dramatically updated two sections with interactive charts of a ton of data: the Hardcore Deaths section, and the Class Popularity set of charts.Click through to read some interesting tidbits from the new and improved charts!Thesection grew from just a handful of charts on the Paragon Level distribution between classes. It now features expanded versions of those charts, along with data on which classes are the most popular through the entire leveling process, for both character and Paragon levels.See the charts in thesection for all the statistics of leveling, both to level 60 and the grind through Paragon Levels.Thesection delves into all the data of when hardcore characters bite the dust.The numbers listed here are a snapshot of the current data, but the charts are updated every day with fresh results, as we scan over 1,500,000 characters to gather more data.See the Popular Builds and Skills overview for information on how we gather the data, and adding your account to our database! Check back regularly for more info, and feel free to Contact us if you have any suggestions on other interesting charts to make.Philip Hammond vowed to 'write a new chapter' for Britain today as he unveiled a package to help struggling families and prepare us for Brexit.
The Chancellor said his Autumn Statement would focus on'supporting the economy' ready for cutting ties with Brussels.
A ban on the fees charged to tenants by letting agents and another increase in the Living Wage will be the centrepiece of efforts to help the so-called JAMs - 'just about managing' families.
Philip Hammond, pictured leaving Downing Street for the Commons today, said he is writing a 'new chapter' for the country
Mr Hammond will also plough an extra £1billion into welfare spending in a decisive break with the era of his predecessor George Osborne.
The Chancellor told the Cabinet this morning that his Autumn Statement 'is focused on preparing and supporting the economy as we begin writing a new chapter in our country’s history'.
He said the measures will have a ‘particular emphasis’ on raising productivity as well as a focus on ‘living within our means’ and ensuring economic ‘flexibility’ for the challenges ahead.
Mrs May told her senior ministers the package would be 'balanced and prudent'
‘This is an Autumn Statement which will deliver on the Government’s commitment to build an economy that works for everyone an which sets the economy on the right path for the long term,’ she said.
Ministers greeted Mr Hammond’s briefing with several rounds of banging on the Cabinet table.
In a controversial move, letting agents will be banned from imposing charges, averaging around £340 each, on young people and families seeking to rent a home.
Officials said the upfront fees – which are charged in addition to deposits and demands for the advance payment of rent – were making life hard for the lower paid and students.
Theresa May (seen leaving Downing Street for PMQs this morning) has been urging Mr Hammond to bring forward measures to help hard-pressed workers
But landlords last night reacted with fury to the ‘unworkable’ plans, which they warned would have a ‘boomerang’ effect.
Critics said the charges would simply be passed on to buy-to-let landlords – many of whom are middle-class families who own a second property as a nest egg – or to the tenants themselves.
The measure will be unveiled in Mr Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, which parks Theresa May’s Government firmly on the centre ground of British politics and is intended to squeeze the life out of Labour.
A ban on the fees charged to tenants by letting agents and another increase in the Living Wage will today be at the centre of a Government package to help families who are ‘just about managing’. Philip Hammond is pictured making his final preparations in No11 yesterday
Ministers were assembling at Downing Street today to be briefed on the final details of the Chancellor's Autumn Statement. Pictured, Home Secretary Amber Rudd
Other measures will include: an extra £1.4billion to provide 40,000 new homes; £37million of handouts to military charities and other groups funded by fines on bankers; a £1billion investment in broadband and the mobile network; £1.3billion for roads and other transport projects.
Insiders said that, apart from spending on infrastructure such as roads and broadband, the package will be ‘fiscally neutral’.
This means that any new spending commitments intended to help families who are ‘just about managing’ – nicknamed JAMS in Whitehall – will be funded by tax rises elsewhere. Mr Hammond is also expected to unveil measures to crack down on tax avoidance and a raid on some of the ‘salary sacrifice’ perks enjoyed by middle-class workers.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, left, and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon were among those gathering at Downing Street today
£1BILLION TO REVERSE OSBORNE CUTS TO UNIVERSAL CREDIT An extra £1billion will be ploughed into the welfare budget to reverse George Osborne’s cuts to Universal Credit. The cash will be used to soften the impact of £3billion of reductions in the value of state handouts to those on low-paid jobs. Insiders said this will be paid for by raising taxes elsewhere, rather than new borrowing. A key aspect of Universal Credit – the brainchild of former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith – is encouraging the unemployed to return to work by not removing all of their benefits straight away. Ex-chancellor Mr Osborne fixed the so-called taper rate at 65p in March, meaning for every pound a worker earns over a fixed threshold, they will keep 35p of their benefits. Today Chancellor Philip Hammond will announce he is lowering the taper to 63p at a cost of £1billion. Treasury officials said it amounted to a ‘significant investment … which will increase work incentives for approximately three million families’.
Education Secretary Justine Greening (left) and Brexit Secretary David Davis are being filled in on the Autumn Statement measures, which include a ban on letting agent fees
The ban on letting agent charges – which was first suggested by former Labour leader Ed Miliband – was dismissed as unworkable by the Cameron government only six months ago.
Last night Richard Price, of the UK Association of Letting Agents, said: ‘A ban on agent fees may prevent tenants from receiving a bill at the start of the tenancy, but the unavoidable outcome will be an increase in the proportion of costs which will be met by landlords, which in turn will be passed on to tenants through higher rents.’
Richard Lambert, of the National Landlords Association, said: ‘Banning letting agent fees will be welcomed by private tenants, at least in the short term, because they won’t realise that it will boomerang back on them.’
But Campbell Robb, of Shelter, said: ‘Millions of renters have felt the financial strain of unfair letting agent fees for far too long, so we’re delighted with the Government’s decision to ban them.’
Business Secretary Greg Clark and Justice Secretary Liz Truss arrive in Downing Street for the Cabinet meeting this morningTexas Gov. Greg Abbott says he expects the Legislature to pass an anti-sanctuary city bill this year, opening a new front in the battle over “local control.”
Weighing in on the intensifying national immigration debate, the Republican governor pledged to sign Senate Bill 4, which would require municipalities to enforce migrant detainers at local jails and withhold state grants if they don’t comply.
“I will work with the Legislature to compel government bodies and employees to live up to their oath of office,” Abbott declared.
Cities, counties or universities that violate the law will face a “multitude of consequence, ranging from financial penalties to removal from office,” the former state attorney general said.
Abbott, who has clashed with Sheriff Lupe Valdez over sanctuary policies in Dallas County, took aim at newly elected Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez, who vowed to remove Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from the Austin jail.
Click for more from Watchdog.orgEarly Voting and Registration
● Connecticut: When it comes to election reforms intended to make voting easier, the motto for progressives should be “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Connecticut Democrats are considering just that by debating whether to put a state constitutional amendment before the voters that would enable early voting. Democrats previously placed just such a referendum on the 2014 ballot, but the measure narrowly failed by a 52-48 margin during the Republican wave.
Democrats just barely have total control over state government thanks to Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman’s ability to break ties in the state Senate. If the party is unified, they could pass the amendment this year without any Republican support. However, Connecticut’s constitution requires the legislature to pass proposed amendments in two consecutive sessions before a referendum can take place unless the legislature can obtain three-fourths majorities. Given Republican opposition, Democrats would have to pass the measure this year and then again after the 2018 elections before it could head to the ballot again in 2020.
● Idaho: The Gem State’s Republican-dominated state House passed a bill that would effectively limit the availability of early voting in certain jurisdictions by setting a statewide standard for when early voting may take place. The bill would confine early voting to the period from between one and three weeks prior to Election Day. Some counties, however, have allowed early voting to commence even even sooner. The bill now moves on to the state Senate, where Republicans also hold an overwhelming majority.
● Mississippi: Legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn is reputed to have once said, “The Republicans are the opposition. The Senate is the enemy." That’s not a bad spin on what’s happened to voting reforms in Mississippi, where Republicans dominate all levers of state government. The state House, however, had nearly unanimously passed bills that would have created an early voting period, allowed online registration, and set up a study committee on reforming felony disenfranchisement. But just as they did when the lower chamber passed similar measures last year, the state Senate killed the bills by refusing to even give them a hearing thanks to opposition from the relevant committee chairwoman.
Mississippi is one of just 13 states that does not offer in-person early voting or excuse-free absentee voting, and at the same time, it disenfranchises a staggering one in 10 citizens due to past felony conviction, the second-highest rate of any state.
● Nevada: The Silver State is one step closer to enacting automatic voter registration for eligible voters who interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles. A committee in the Democratic-controlled state Senate passed a bill on a party-line vote to implement the policy, while the state Assembly, which Democrats also hold, approved of the measure last month. Reformers had filed signatures to put the measure on the 2018 ballot, but Nevada law gives the legislature a chance to pass such proposals first in lieu of a statewide vote.
However, Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval says he is undecided about whether to sign or veto the law. Given unanimous opposition from Republican legislators, a veto would be unsurprising. However, even if Sandoval thwarts the legislature, automatic registration would still appear on the November 2018 ballot, meaning Nevada could become the second state to pass the policy via the initiative process after Alaska did so in 2016.
● New Hampshire: Republicans assumed a unified grip on state government after the 2016 elections, and almost immediately plotted new voting restrictions. Current law allows any eligible voter living in the state to vote as long as they don’t do so in another state, too. However, the latest GOP proposal would tighten residency requirements for voting by mandating voters provide more proof documenting that they intend to live in the state long-term. Most disturbingly, the measure would authorize election officials to send the police to voters’ homes to verify that they live there, which could result in voter intimidation.
Disappointingly, longtime Secretary of State Bill Gardner lent his support to the bill. Gardner is nominally a Democrat, but he has long history avoiding partisan battles in his four decades in office. Unless a few Republican legislators defect, this bill will become law, and Democrats’ only hope of stopping it would be legal challenges.
Redistricting
● Georgia: Without warning, Georgia’s Republican-dominated state House rammed through a bill last week that would re-gerrymander the chamber’s districts in order to protect their already lopsided majority. Donald Trump won Georgia by just a 50-45 margin, but Republicans captured nearly two-thirds of the seats in the state House thanks to the ultra-partisan map they drew at the start of the decade. Yet apparently even that huge 118-to-62 majority isn’t enough for the GOP. Redistricting normally only takes place immediately after the decennial census, so redrawing the lines in the middle of the decade simply because they were at risk of losing seats is nothing short of an attempt to nullify elections.
If the similarly GOP-dominated state Senate agrees to these alterations and Republican Gov. Nathan Deal signs off on them, Georgia would redraw the lines for eight Republican-held seats and one Democratic district. These changes would reduce the proportion of black voters—who lean heavily Democratic—in certain districts with vulnerable Republican incumbents. This new map could even lead to Republicans regaining a veto-proof majority in the legislature, preventing Democrats from blocking gerrymanders in the 2020s even if Team Blue wins the critical 2018 election to succeed the term-limited Deal.
Georgia Republicans are no strangers to just this sort of attack on democracy. After they won unified control over state government in 2004 for the first time since Reconstruction, the GOP swiftly passed a mid-decade gerrymander of the state’s congressional map in order to target two Democratic incumbents. Republicans similarly replaced the state Senate map, which had been draw by a court, with their own gerrymander, in order to protect their newfound majority in that same election.
If these changes become law, expect to see Democrats and civil rights groups launch a barrage of lawsuits challenging these plans as illegal racial gerrymanders in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Given the recent string of court victories against racial gerrymandering, and the possibility that the Supreme Court could soon impose limits on partisan gerrymandering, |
China's Smart Money is Staying in Bitcoin This Time
“We are starting to see a lot of smart money enter into the space and stay there” says Ryan Rabaglia, Head Trader for Octagon Strategy, a Commodity and Digital Asset Trading firm based in Hong Kong. “In the form of small to medium sized institutions taking much larger positions in [bitcoin], and a natural progression to larger ones is sure to follow. With all the uncertainties surrounding us in traditional product spaces, alternatives are being sought and although this space is still foreign to most, it’s not preventing the capital inflows we’re seeing”
Also Read: Price Reports And Tales from China Dizzy Bitcoiners
What’s more, the veteran Chinese-based bitcoin trader observes, the smart money seems to be staying in bitcoin.
Smart Money is Staying in Digital Assets
The demand picked up over the summer, around the time of the bitcoin halving. Ryan says the trading desk he oversees has seen an increase of 70% in business growth month-over-month for the last three to six months.
“It is a bit surprising we’ve had this type of growth persist at this level, ” the experienced trader says.
Though he has seen institutional smart money come and go, Ryan notices that – this time – the trend is persistent. “It’s been a very consistent trend over the last year,” he says. “Larger traders and position takers have entered into the market.”
By now it’s no secret wealthy Chinese investors use bitcoin to get bitcoin out of the country as the Chinese government and regulators restrict the outflow of capital and limit the purchase of insurance and real estate abroad.
As Beijing reportedly struggles to manage yuan depreciation, and the nation’s reserve to sink to new lows, smart money in China has entered into the digital asset space, which is led by the digital currency bitcoin.
Why do the Chinese Turn to Bitcoin?
China and bitcoin have seem inextricably linked since the digital currency’s release in January 2009. 90% of bitcoin trade takes place in China, and a robust network of miners, thanks to inexpensive electricity and hardware in the country of 1.35 billion, has made the nation a bitcoin epicenter.
“China is of course on the forefront in digital payments and sort of migrating over to a cashless society,” Ryan reasons. “The growth of cashless payments here is extreme.”
Seeing bitcoin as a safehaven, Feng Xin’an, 43-year-old sales manager with Shanghai-based Maoxin Trade Ltd, claimed to have invested approximately 135,000 yuan ($19,515) into the bitcoin market. “The young generation, like my son and his friends, love to pay with digital currencies,” he told China Daily.
Demand for bitcoin is largely credited with driving the price to near record highs throughout 2016.
People’s Bank of China Makes Statement on Bitcoin
Throughout last year, as China implemented capital outflow controls, demand increased for bitcoin.
The People’s Bank of China Shanghai Head Office made a statement late Friday about bitcoin, calling the volatility in the digital currency “abnormal” and advising companies operating in the country on bitcoin-related business conduct, including limitations on marketing and discussion of the yuan’s decline.
BTCC, popular bitcoin services company based in China, stated the PBOC wanted to warn of the “significant volatility in bitcoin trading, and also quoted from a notice released in 2013 saying that bitcoin is a virtual good and doesn’t have legal tender status.”
According to BTCC’s release, the mining company “regularly meets with the People’s Bank of China, and we work closely with them to ensure that we are operating in accordance with the laws and regulations in China.” Beijing-based business and finance publication, Caixin stated of the PBOC release:
“…[T]he two [Bitcoin] trading platforms in Beijing were required to comply with central bank requirements and were told that the promotion should not mention the depreciation of the yuan.”
Yuan Decline Worsens
In late November, the Wall Street Journal reported China was having troubles steadying the yuan’s decline. Goldman Sachs discovered in December the real world amount of Chinese FX outflows. Beijing, the US investment bank determined, had disguised how much capital was leaving the country.
Goldman calculated that from August 2015 to November 2016, Chinese FX outflow totaled roughly US $1.1 trillion. The overall data implies China has depleted its reserves faster than PBOC reserve data suggests.
China’s foreign currency holdings declined for the sixth straight month in December. In an attempt to stabilize the yuan, Beijing drained its reserves of $320 billion in 2016, a $41.1 billion decrease. Reserves are at a five-year low of $3.01 trillion, according to the People’s Bank of China on Saturday, just as the institution made it’s bitcoin comments.
China’s reserves have fallen for the past ten quarters from its $4 trillion record peak in June 2014. It’s economic news like this that ensure smart Chinese money enters, and stays, in bitcoin.
The Bitcoin price in Chinese yuan terms reached an all-time high of approximately 8,575 CNY before correcting. At press time, one bitcoin is worth approximately 6,498 CNY.
Will western smart money follow institutional money into bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Bitcoin Wisdom.
Have you seen our new widget service? It allows anyone to embed informative Bitcoin.com widgets on their website. They’re pretty cool and you can customize by size and color. The widgets include price-only, price and graph, price and news, forum threads. There’s also a widget dedicated to our mining pool, displaying our hash power.Daydream XI Premieres New Song "A Cup Of Agony"
Brazilian outfit Daydream XI recently signed to Sensory Records and is gearing up to release "The Circus Of The Tattered And Torn" on six-panel digipak CD with a 28 page booklet and via digital formats on September 22nd.
This high octane mixture of full force metal with power and prog sounds is highly recommended for fans of Dream Theater, Symphony X, and Pain Of Salvation.
Ahead of next month's release, today we're excited to exclusively premiere new song "A Cup Of Agony." Think you can drink all the way through to the last drop? Find out below!
Vocalist / guitarist Tiago Masseti comments: "We are very excited that our first live appearance in the U.S. will be at ProgPower USA. The festival's audience and crew have been supporting us since we released our first album and it couldn't be more appropriate to bring this new material to them first hand.
"In the song 'A Cup Of Agony' we join the Stuntman, one of the attractions of the Circus, as he reflects about the concept of pain. He draws a parallel between physical and psychological pain and how either affects us and get us addicted.
"Doing his stunts, he deals with physical pain on a daily basis, turning it into entertainment. And as a performer and someone who takes such an aggressive element of human life and turns it into art he deals with a great deal of psychological pain. And he drinks from this cup, feeding his pain in the quest for attention and recognition. And he nurtures it, endlessly."
The Circus Of The Tattered And Torn by Daydream XI
For new album "The Circus Of The Tattered And Torn," Daydream XI embraces the progressive side of music in a dark concept album. The concept is a metaphor to express that we are drawn to each other more by our weaknesses and our flaws than our strengths and virtues.
It’s portrayed through a journey, where Phillip, the Circus master, takes his new apprentice, Circe, across the various acts of this Circus. Like what you hear? Pre-orders are online here.
1. Ticket 000011
2. Open The Curtains
3. Trust-Forged Knife
4. Painted Smile
5. Windblown
6. A Cup Of Agony
7. Overhauling Wounds
8. Collector Of Souls
9. Forgettable
10. The Love That Never Was
11. The Circus Of The Tattered And TornSpeaking at the Diocesan Synod of Cork, Cloyne and Ross in the Rochestown Park Hotel in Douglas, Co. Cork on Saturday 10th June 2017, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Bishop Paul Colton, noted the decision earlier in the week (8th June) of the Scottish Episcopal Church to amend its Canon on marriage, making same-sex marriages in church possible, while also recognising that there are ‘differing views of marriage in our church … and that we are a church of diversity and difference, bound together by our oneness in Christ’ (quoting phrases used by the Primus of Scottish Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend David Chillingworth).
Bishop Colton suggested that ‘it may well be the Scottish approach represents a way forward for us too that recognises all integrities.’ ‘It is worth considering in our debate here Irelnd’, he said.
In this section of his Synod address, Bishop Colton said:
‘Change is signalled also by the decision two days ago, on Thursday, 8th June, of our sister Church in Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, to alter its canon on marriage by removing the doctrinal clause which states that marriage is between a man and a woman. Clergy who wish to conduct same-sex marriages will have to opt in, and no priest is to be compelled to do so.’
‘As we saw at our own General Synod recently arising from a private members motion, there are many in the Church of Ireland who are anxious to debate such issues here too. Equally many are determined that this is not a matter which is up for debate at all. There is a debate, and, however tentatively, it has, in fact, started.’
‘That such things are open to debate in this Church has always been the case. If there had been no questioning or discourse, the Reformation itself would not have happened, nor would many other developments have unfolded over the centuries, in ministry, in liturgy and in belief, the most recent examples being our change in approach to suicide, to the marriage in church of divorcees, and also the ordination of women, and there are many others.’
The Most Reverend David Chillingworth, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, who is from Ireland and ministered for most of his life here, said:
The new Canon itself affirms that there are differing views of marriage in our church. Nobody will be compelled to do anything against their conscience. We affirm that we are a church of diversity and difference, bound together by our oneness in Christ …
‘The reality is that there is such diversity and difference throughout the Church of Ireland too. Those differences and that diversity cannot be ignored. We will have to engage with one another to find a way forward. There are in the Church of Ireland ‘differing views of marriage’, and ‘…we are a church of diversity and difference, bound together by our oneness in Christ.’ It may well be the Scottish approach represents a way forward for us too that recognises all integrities. It is worth considering in our debate here.’$\begingroup$
The conversion factor from physical entropy to information entropy (in random bits) uses Landauer's limit: (physical entropy)=(information bits)*kb*ln(2). The number of yes/no questions that have to be asked to determine which state a physical system is in is equal to Shannon's entropy in bits, but not Shannon's intensive, specific entropy H, but his extensive, total entropy of a data-generating source: S=N*H where H=1 if the n bits are mutually independent.
Landauer's limit states that 1 bit of information irreversibly changing state releases entropy kb*ln(2), which is a heat energy reelase for a given T: Q=T*kb, implying there was a stored potential energy that was the bit. This shows that entropy is information entropy: the ln(2) converts from ln() to log2(). kb is a simple conversion factor from average kinetic energy per particle (definition of temperature) to heat joules which has units of joules/joules, i.e. unitless. If our T was defined in terms of joules of kinetic energy (average 1/2 mv^2 of the particles) instead of Kelvins, then kb=1. So kb is unitless joules/joules. It's not a fundamental constant like h. c also does not have fundamental units if you accept time=i*distance as Einstein mentioned in appendix 2 of his book, allowing use of the simpler Euclidean space instead of Minkoswki space without error or qualification and in keeping with Occam's razor.
Shannon's "entropy" (specific, intensive) is H=sum(-p*log(p)) and he stated 13 times in his paper that H has units of bits, entropy, or information PER SYMBOL, not bits (total entropy) as most people assume. An information source generates entropy S=N*H where N is the number of symbols emitted. H is a "specific entropy" based on the probability of "n" unique symbols out of N total symbols. H is not a "total entropy" as is usually believed, finding its physical parallel with So=entropy/mole. Physical S=N*So and information S=N*H. It is rare to find texts that explain this.
An ideal monoatomic gas (Sackur-Tetrode equation) has an entropy from N mutually independent gas particles of S=kb*sum(ln(total states/i^(5/2)) where the sum is over i=1 to N. This is approximated by Stirling's formula to be S=kb*N*[ln(states/particle)+5/2]. I can't derive that from Shannon's total entropy S=N*H even though I showed in the first paragraph the final entropies are exactly the same. I am unable to identify an informatic "symbol" in a physical system. The primary problem seems to be that physical entropy is constrained by total energy which gives it more possible ways to use the N particles. 1 particle carrying the total energy is a possible macrostate (not counting the minimal QM state for the others), but information entropy does not have "check sum" like this to use fewer symbols. Physical entropy seems to always(?) be S=kb*N*[ln(states/particle)+c] and the difference from information entropy is the c. But in bulk matter where the energy is spread equally between bulks, physical entropy is S=N*So. Information entropy is perfectly like this (S=N*H), but I can't derive So from H. Again, S bits =S/(kb*ln(2)).
So Shannon's entropy is a lot simpler and comes out to LESS entropy if you try to make N particles in a physical system equivalent to N unique symbols. The simplest physical entropy is of independent harmonic oscillators in 1D sharing a total energy but not necessarily evenly is S=kb*ln[(states/oscillator)^N / N!] which is S=N*[log(states/particle)+1] for large N. So even in the simplest case, the c remains. Shannon entropy is of a fundamentally different form: S~log((states/symbol)^N) = N*log(states/symbol) when each symbol is mutually independent (no patterns in the data and equal symbol probabilities). For example, for random binary data S=log2(2^N) = N bits. So it is hard to see the precise connection in the simplest case (the +1 is not a minor difference), even as they are immediately shown by true/false questions to be identical quantities with a simple conversion factor. Stirling's approximation is exact in the limit of N and Shannon's H depends in a way on an infinite N to get exact p's, so the approximation is not a problem to me.
I have not contradicted anything user346 has said but I wanted to show why the connection is not trivial except in the case of looking at specific entropy of bulk matter. QM uses S=sum(-p*log(p)) but Shannon entropy is S=N*sum(-p*log(p)). They come out the same because calculating the p's is different. Physical's p=(certain macrostate)/(total microstates) but the numerator and denominator are not simply determined by counting. Information's p=(distinct symbol count)/(total symbols) for a given source. And yet, they both require the same number of bits (yes/no questions) to identify the exact microstate (after applying kb*ln(2) conversion).
But there's a problem which was mentioned in the comments to his answer. In an information system we require the bits to be reliable. We can never get 100% reliability because of thermal fluctuations. At this limit of 1 bit = kb*ln(2) we have a 49.9999% probability of any particular bit not being in the state we expected. The Landuaer limit is definitely a limit. The energy required to break a bond that is holding one of these bits in a potential memory system is "just below" (actually equal) to the average kinetic energy of the thermal agitations. Landauer's limit assumes the energy required to break our memory-bond is E=T*kb*ln(2) which is slightly weaker than a van der waals bond which is about the weakest thing you can call a "bond" in the presence of thermal agitations.
So we have to decide what level of reliability we want our bits. Using the black hole limit also seems to add a problem of "accessibility". It is the information content of the system, but it is not an information storage system.New Westminster has a great LGBTQ Pride scene, led by (obviously) New West Pride. 2015 Pride Week is coming August 8th to 15th, capped with a huge street party on Columbia Street on the 15th.
New Westminster is putting in curb extensions around town, with the most-recent being installed at Fourth Street and Carnarvon Street.
So what do these two have to do with each other? In a discussion regarding these curb extensions, City Councillor Patrick Johnstone said, “I actually hoped there’d be a paint treatment on the slope as well to make the crossing more visible from below.” He’s right, it’s difficult to see the crosswalk when you’re driving up Fourth Street. And while he’s probably thinking of an X marking (like in Figure 7.46), I’m thinking we can do that and go one step further: Pride crosswalks.
They’re getting pretty common these days (Vancouver, Victoria, Philadelphia for example). To help celebrate Pride in New West, let’s make one (or two!) happen in our little city.
Fourth and Carnarvon would be a great place for a four-way Pride crosswalk (similar to Victoria’s). It would definitely make the intersection more visible to drivers, and provide a nice focal point for a pair of relatively quiet streets downtown.
But I think the perfect place for a permanent Pride crosswalk in New West would be the pedestrian-controlled crossing at Columbia Street and Church Street. One, it would brighten up and bring back a little life to that end of downtown. Two, it’s right outside of The Heritage Grill, which has supported the gay community for a number of years, right outside the Steam1 gay bath house, and steps from The Met Bar & Grill, which is also highly supportive of Pride.
So come on New Westminster, let’s gay up our city a bit!The Assembly of First Nation Chiefs in New Brunswick is speaking out against plans to build a deep water marine terminal in Saint John for the proposed west-east oil pipeline.
TransCanada Corp. and Irving Oil Ltd. have formed a joint venture to build and operate a new $300-million terminal at Canaport if the EnergyEast pipeline project proceeds.
The chiefs "have serious concerns over negative environmental impacts" the terminal could have on on the aboriginal fishery in the Bay of Fundy, including endangered salmon, according to a statement issued on Thursday.
They are also worried about the possible impact on their ability to exercise constitutionally protected aboriginal and treaty rights to generate a "moderate livelihood" from fishing, it states.
"But this isn’t just a First Nations issue, nor is it limited to just the salmon," said Chief George Ginnish, the assembly’s Mi’kmaq co-chair.
"There are a lot of people in non-aboriginal fishing villages along the Fundy coast who could suffer if the protection of the environment is not at the forefront of this Canaport expansion," he said.
Premier promised consultations
Chief Joanna Bernard, the assembly’s Maliseet-Wolastoqiyik co-chair, said Premier David Alward vowed during the EnergyEast pipeline announcement to work with First Nations to ensure environmental and safety standards are followed.
"The expansion of the Canaport Marine terminal which is expected to be completed by 2018 will require First Nations consultation, and we take the premier at his word that he will deliver on his promise," she said.
TransCanada Corp. officials have also promised to engage with First Nations and other communities as its $12-billion west-east pipeline project moves through the regulatory approval process.
Chief executive officer Russ Girling has said talks with First Nations communities are "absolutely critical."
The pipeline proposal, which still needs regulatory approval, would send 1.1 million barrels of oil per day from Western Canada to refineries and export terminals in Eastern Canada.
TransCanada is proposing to convert roughly 3,000 kilometres of natural gas pipeline on its existing Canadian Mainline route so it can carry crude oil.
The company would also construct 1,400 kilometres of new pipeline to carry crude oil into Saint John, where it will end at the Canaport LNG terminal.
The Irving Oil Ltd. refinery in Saint John is the largest in Canada and can process 300,000 barrels of oil per day. Saint John also has a deep-water port and a liquefied natural gas facility.
TransCanada is expected to file its regulatory application with the National Energy Board by the end of the year.
The proposed Canaport Energy East Marine Terminal would connect TransCanada's Energy East Pipeline to an ice-free, deep water port.
Design work on the terminal, which would be located next to Irving Oil's existing import terminal, is expected to begin in 2015.Reports out of Minnesota say it is not clear whether quarterback Sam Bradford will start for the Vikings on Sunday.
From the outside, it seems clear to me that he will not. And if my deductions are correct, he could easily be out another month.
The Vikings are sticking to their day-to-day mantra regarding Bradford, as they have all along. Clearly, week-to-week would have been more accurate. Bradford was out four weeks between games, and that clearly still was not enough time for him to be fully ready. In his start Monday night, he was favoring and protecting the knee and was rightfully removed before the end of the first half.
Back on Sept. 18, our analysis was that Bradford could easily be out six weeks or longer. That was based on Tom Pellisero’s report of a bone bruise and our video confirmation of subsequent non-contact periarticular bone bruise on a play in the season opener out of the Vikings end zone.
Since the Vikings have only said the current injury is not related to his two previous ACL tears but have never actually explained what this knee issue is (and they are not required to), this is the only diagnosis that fits the fact patern.
The Vikings should be applauded for attempting to address the issues, as some would just stay mum.
The team said Bradford aggravated the knee during Monday’s game against the Bears but that there is no new damage.
That is walking a fine line, which is not unique for NFL teams to do when talking publicly about injuries.
So what was aggravated that caused Bradford’s early departure on Monday?
The good news is with the MRI. The team reported the MRI shows no new injury. The operative word is “new.” If there is no “new” damage, we can only assume the “old” damage is causing the knee the problems.
Undoubtedly, Bradford still has edema from the bone bruise suffered in the season opener on Sept. 11. That sometimes takes months to resolve.
The Vikings are correct in saying he does not have a bone bruise "from a direct hit.” But he has the non-contact type of bone bruise. We pointed out three weeks ago that there were two types of bone bruises.
By video (and reports) Bradford does have the non-contact (periarticular) bone bruise where the femur and tibia violently jam together without the muscle or ligament dampening the blow. The fact he wore an unloader brace on Monday supports the notion of just such a bone bruise.
That the team says "wear and tear" does not make me feel any better about the injury. Having an acute bone bruise is a better prognosis than early arthritis from football and two ACL injuries in a 29-year-old QB.
As I make this analysis from the outside, we have no evidence that Bradford has been mismanaged. It takes a joint decision of player, medical staff and coach/GM to make decisions about playing. Also, Bradford received an outside second opinion along the way.
But because a bone bruise is not a day-to-day injury, I don't see how Bradford plays this next week.
In fact, it would not be a surprise to see him sitting through the Vikings’ bye in Week 9.
By then, Teddy Bridgewater may be ready. He is eligible to begin his three-week practice window next week. Thus, both he and Bradford might be ready at the same time and competing for the starting job.Returning the 298 victims from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 to their families with dignity and respect is a major priority for each nation involved.
Disaster victim identification (DVI) is a difficult task, but will be made even more challenging in this instance given the delays in body recovery and the interference of the crash site that is said to span over a 10km area including within a combat zone.
Recovering the bodies
The most important phase of an identification operation is the Recovery Phase, which should be conducted by highly trained police and scientific officers. This involves thorough documentation, preservation and collection of bodies, personal property and other forensic evidence at the disaster site.
If the highest possible quality standards are not implemented at this stage of the identification operation, it may significantly delay or prevent accurate identification of victims.
Given the pictures of seemingly untrained military personnel trampling over the crash site and rummaging through the wreckage, it appears that the site has been contaminated and vital evidence has been removed.
Untrained searchers may not recognise items of forensic value to collect or overlook smaller body parts.
The need to document
Each item of property and body part should be given a unique identifying number at the crash site before removal, which should stay with it throughout the entire victim identification process. This forms a chain of continuity that prevents loss or destruction of bodies and items and maintains the value of forensic evidence.
Given the criminal nature of this disaster, these are also vital steps in any future legal proceedings.
For any multi-national victim identification process, the nation in charge of the crash site — and that’s still in dispute — should secure participation of forensic experts from all nations who suffered victims and ensure international standards are used.
Malaysian Airlines has so far identified the passengers and crew from the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Philippines, Canada and New Zealand.
Protecting the bodies
MH17 disaster will require forensic DVI experts to conduct autopsies, fingerprint, dental and DNA analysis of the victims and compare the evidence to records such as dental charts, medical records, personal photographs and fingerprints from personal belongings.
As the remains of victims deteriorate in fields under baking sun, vital forensic clues will start to disappear such as fingerprints, tattoos, scars, birthmarks and the opportunity for visual identification.
Over the past 20 years DNA has been used in disasters such as the World Trade Centre Attacks in New York in 2001 and the Bali Bombings in 2002 and technologies have improved much over time. DNA samples should be taken of all bodies and body parts recovered from the MH17 crash site so these can be compared against DNA from the victim’s personal items or their close relatives.
The delay in recovering the bodies shouldn’t have an impact on obtaining DNA profiles from victim’s bone samples, but the delay will significantly limit DNA profiling from blood and soft tissue.
The explosion
The explosion and fire from the missile attack is another challenge for forensic experts. The associated heat and destructive forces of the initial explosion and resulting crash will make the bodies more difficult to recover and identify.
Despite the successful use of forensic science in many previous disasters, unfortunately there is always the possibility that not all victims can be identified.
To give families of MH17 passengers the best chance of having their loved ones returned, international experts need access to the entire crash area across multiples sites to conduct a thorough recovery using INTERPOL DVI standards.
Open access to evidence already collected from the crash site by pro-Russian separatists needs to be given to forensic experts. This evidence is most likely to contain valuable identification information and provide additional context to the forensic investigation.
Looking for evidence
Despite reports that bodies are now being refrigerated, forensic experts need to start autopsies on them immediately. Not only will these experts look for and recover evidence that will lead to identification, they will also search for evidence that will help to uncover what caused the crash of MH17.
The evidence will be used at Identification Boards and ultimately at a criminal court to help prosecute those responsible for such a heinous attack on innocent people.
The most important aspect of DVI is having access to evidence that can lead to fast and accurate identification and this process should be done while treating victims with respect and dignity.
Source: the Conversation[ Watch the Video: Fossil Skull Of Ancient Big Cat Unearthed In Tibet ]
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The evolution of big cats has been nearly as mysterious as the cats themselves, but a new discovery will likely lead anthropologists to a better understanding of when and where big cats originated.
During a 2010 paleontological dig in Tibet, a husband-and-wife team who were part of a larger expedition discovered the fossilized partial remains of what appeared to be a type of cat. University of Southern California (USC) graduate Z. Jack Tseng and his wife Juan Liu made the discovery in the Zanda Basin near the border of Pakistan and China.
Tseng, who now works with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, said the discovery was a surprise. In a Smithsonian Magazine blog, Tseng explained that the team had been driving trail after trail in the Tibetan “badlands” before discovering a patch of fossils protruding from the ground on one particular hillside.
“In the little concentration of fossils, there were lots of limb bones from antelopes and horses obscuring everything else,” said Tseng. “It wasn’t until we started lifting things up, one by one, that we saw the top of a skull, and we thought, from the shape, that it looked something like a cat.”
FILLING THE GAP
And after a few years of analysis, Tseng and his colleagues have published a paper today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B explaining that this cat fossil is no ordinary cat, rather a totally new species, which has been described as Panthera blytheae by the team. This discovery also represents the oldest known “big cat,” a group that includes lions, tigers, leopards, etc., ever found and by a pretty significant margin. Of all the felines, the big cats were the first to split off into their own group from a common ancestor. As such, big cats are vital in the understanding of cat evolution.
Previously, the oldest big cat fossil ever found came from Africa and placed the group at about 3.8 million years old. However, some theories, based on geographical patterns and genetic data, suggest that Asian cats originated much earlier, at least six million years ago.
Theories can now be considered fact now that Tseng and his team have made and shared their exciting discovery. This new cat species fills the massive gap that existed within the fossil record and places the evolution of the big cat to around the Late Miocene-Early Pliocene.
“This find suggests that big cats have a deeper evolutionary origin than previously suspected,” Tseng said in a USC statement.
The new DNA evidence suggests these big-cats diverged from their nearest evolutionary cousins, Felinae, which includes cougars, lynxes, domestic cats, etc., about 6.37 million years ago.
In order to date the fossil, Tseng and colleagues relied on a technique called magnetostratigraphy. This method requires analysis of the magnetic orientation of the rocks around the site of the discovery and compare it to known reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field. However, this technique can only provide a rough estimate of an item’s actual age – in this case between 4.10 and 5.95 million years old.
So even if the fossil is at the latest point of 4.10 million years old, it is still nearly a half-million years older than the previous discovery.
DIGGING DEEPER
But the researchers were not happy with just this conclusion, so they dug deeper. This discovery, said Tseng, suggests that big cats branched off from smaller cats much farther back than previously thought. The team compared the skull of P. blytheae to fossils from other extinct big cats, the anatomy of living cat species, and DNA samples taken from both living and some more recently extinct Ice Age-era species (cave lions). With this evidence in hand, the team was able to build a new evolutionary family tree for all big cats.
Using known rates of anatomical changes over time and the observed anatomy of P. blytheae, the team estimated that the earliest big cats branched off from the Felinae subfamily between 10 and 11 million years ago.
The new discovery also helps researchers answer an old question in evolutionary geology. In previous research, DNA analysis of all living big cats and fossils from various sites around the world had indicated that the most likely common ancestor of big cats originated in Asia. However, the oldest known specimens were only found in Africa, leaving some skeptical of the Asia link.
Tseng’s discovery, however, provides the first direct evidence that central Asia was indeed the ancestral home of big cats, at least as far back as the fossil record currently goes.
ANATOMY OF A KILLER
The team acknowledged that based on the fossil remains, it is difficult to describe a lot about the behavior and lifestyle of P. blytheae, but the team was able to draw some conclusions based on skull anatomy.
“It’s not a huge cat, like a lion or a tiger, but closer to a leopard,” Tseng said.
Tseng speculated that the habitat of the cat was very similar to what we see today on the Tibetan plateau. The area today is home to snow leopards, and like these cats, Tseng said it is likely P. blytheae did not hunt on the open plains, but rather on cliffs and in valleys. Evidence in tooth wear patterns suggests similarities to the snow leopard. The rear teeth, which appeared sharp, were likely used for cutting soft tissue; the front teeth were heavily worn, suggesting they were used to pry open carcasses and picking meat off the bones.
STILL NOT COMPLETE
Tseng and colleagues plan to return to Tibet to hunt for more evidence. Tseng noted that while the current fossil represents the earliest of its kind, it is not the final piece of the puzzle in the evolution of big cats. He maintains that it cannot be the oldest big-cat fossil out there.
“The gap still isn’t completely filled yet,” he said. “We need to find older big cats to put the picture together.”
“It points us to look for more ancestral big cats in the Miocene rocks of central Asia,” Tseng, a National Geographic Young Explorer grantee, told NatGeo’s Jennifer Holland in an interview.
He added that the timeline of big-cat evolution has more than just historical significance.
The more that can discovered about the successes of ancient big cats and their prey in ever-changing environments, the better equipped scientists will be in predicting how today’s big cats will respond to change, said Tseng.
Among the many coauthors of this study from several colleges and institutions, perhaps Tseng’s closest colleague is his wife Juan Liu, of the University of Alberta and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
The research was funded by National Basic Research Program of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History), and the National Geographic Society.
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commentsMasahiro Sakurai is the mastermind behind Smash Bros. who is also known for creating the Kirby franchise. He has overseen the development for every Smash Bros. game to date and is known to be heavily involved with every detail of the creation of his games… and by that I mean he is a total control freak. Now I’m not saying this to insult him or put down his work, his games have all been excellent for the most part (Kid Icarus: Uprising was fantastic for example), but he is definitely your textbook control freak. A lot of what we see in Smash Bros. is a direct reflection of what goes on in Sakurai’s mind. This is probably why he’s almost like a cult personality among Smash fans, with countless people either worshiping him over the internet or fearing him like an angry God who can do the worst thing imaginable to them. Because Sakurai is the face of Smash Bros. people have come to love him or despise him to the core.
When it comes to roster decisions, Smash fans are… obsessive to say the least. The hope for one’s favourite character to be in Smash is a powerful thing, and when that hope is shattered people often turn to bitter resentment. There are a lot of words like “deserving” and “owed” thrown around when it comes to characters being made playable, but what it all honestly comes down to is what Sakurai decides. He gets final say, and while he does consider things like popularity, moveset potential, and the success of a series, it’s clear that his personal tastes affect the content that actually makes it in. The often used term “Sakurai Bias” has reached memetic status among Smash communities and there’s a good reason for that. Sakurai’s perceptions do clearly affect the roster, and as often as people mindlessly like to bash the high amount of Kid Icarus content in Smash Bros., it’s clear that the series has been given preferential treatment due to Sakurai’s own love for it (and the available assets he has on file from developing Uprising). So when a large amount of people who believe that the characters they love will make it into Smash due to a combination of significance and popularity, get crushed with the brutal reality that it really just comes down to something more random and subjective, they lose their tempers big time. All their anger and frustration get’s burned into a man who makes it a point of handling every major decision that goes into making his beloved games.
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on their purchases after discovering—as Richardson did—that they had badly overpaid for their gold coins. Richardson is one of 44 people across the country who have filed complaints against Goldline with the Los Angeles BBB in the past three years; customers have also griped about their dealings with the company on message boards such as Ripoff Report and PissedOffConsumer.com. Regulators in Missouri have sanctioned the company for pressuring an elderly couple to liquidate their other investments to buy overpriced coins.
The Federal Trade Commission received 17 separate complaints about Goldline's sales tactics between early 2006 and May 2010, according to information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Many of those stories mirror Richardson's.
Equally important, the Mother Jones article clearly establishes that Beck is a major part of what allows this to happen:
Beck has assured fans that Goldline's sales reps are "not going to pressure you." I called to find out. When I dialed the company's toll-free-number from my office to request one of its free "investor kits," the salesman's pitch came right off a Beck script. In fact, he informed me right away that Beck was one of the company's best clients. "We're the only company he buys from," he told me. After learning that I had never invested in gold before, he plugged "investment grade" coins by assuring me, "That's what Glenn buys."
Please read the whole thing. If nothing else, it will help you understand why Beck has been going a little crazy -- that is, crazier than usual -- these last few days.The Nevada Wolf Pack have agreed to hire LSU assistant Eric Musselman as the school's new coach, he told ESPN.com in a text message Wednesday.
The five-year deal needs to be approved by the state Board of Regents on Thursday, athletic director Doug Knuth said in a statement. A news conference has been scheduled for Thursday afternoon after the meeting.
The 50-year-old Musselman, who replaces David Carter, was previously an NBA head coach with the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings and also was an assistant at Arizona State.
Eric Musselman, who has coached the Warriors and Kings in the NBA, will take over as Nevada's coach. AP Photo/Fernando Llano
"The University of Nevada has made an incredible hire," Chicago Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said in a statement released by the school. "He is a great leader, communicator and teacher."
Musselman's career record as a head coach in the NBA is 566-340.
The Kings fired Musselman in April 2007 after a 33-49 season. Musselman was arrested on a drunken-driving charge after Sacramento's first preseason game in October 2006. He immediately issued a public apology, later pleaded no contest to the charge and served a two-game suspension.
Musselman also led the Warriors to two surprisingly successful seasons from 2002-04 as one of the game's most impressive young coaching minds. Golden State fired him after the franchise missed the playoffs for the 10th straight year in his second season at the helm.
After being dismissed by the Warriors, Musselman spent two seasons with the Memphis Grizzlies as an assistant under Mike Fratello.
His first NBA coaching experience came with the Timberwolves under his late father, Bill, in 1990-91. Musselman also worked as an assistant coach for the Atlanta Hawks under Lon Kruger and as an assistant for the Orlando Magic under Chuck Daly and Doc Rivers.
Carter, who was fired in March after five seasons at the helm of the Wolf Pack, took over after Mark Fox left for Georgia in 2009. Carter led Nevada to two NIT appearances and was 83-80 during his time in Reno.
Nevada went 9-22 this past season, including a 5-13 mark in the Mountain West.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Peak Oil Review Commentary: Interview with Richard G. Miller
Dr. Richard G. Miller, trained as a geologist, joined BP as a geochemist in 1985. He studied peak oil matters since 1991, when BP asked him the following year to devise a wholly new way to estimate global oil resources. In 2000, he was tasked with creating an in-house projection of global future oil demand and supply to 2030. The model he created was updated annually through 2008; then the effort was disbanded and he moved on to his present work consulting on peak oil. Most recently, Dr. Miller co-authored The Future of Oil Supply, which was published by The Royal Society (on-line December 2, 2013), in a thematic issue of Philosophical Transactions entirely devoted to future world oil supply; he also served as co-editor of that 12-article publication.
Steve Andrews touched base with him last week for the Peak Oil Review.
Q: Andrews: BP has recently said definitively that “peak oil is dead.” How does an oil super-major reach such a conclusion, at least for purposes of public policy dialogue?
Dr. Richard Miller: I can’t shed any light on why they’re saying that today because it hasn’t been their consistent position in the past. A CEO like Lord John Browne clearly at least kept his options open on the idea; and he was the one who started to steer the company into alternative energy. The one who really didn’t have any sympathy with peak oil was Tony Hayward; it was really sad to see him bring the company’s investments in photovoltaics and other non-conventional energy almost to a screeching halt, deciding that the company was going to become a pure hydrocarbons company. That did seem very short-sighted. What’s odd of course is that he’s a geologist, and a very good geologist. You would think that someone like that could at least see that peak oil is not only coming, it’s quite probably here, in terms of conventional oil.
Q: The third-hand story from someone at the 2001 World Economic Forum is that Daniel Yergin was on a panel with Lord Browne and convinced him, right after his presentation, to doubt peak oil.
Miller: Daniel Yergin is a rubbish scientist. He’s a very good flak, he’s a very good writer, he’s very perceptive in many ways, but I’m not convinced that he has grasped the underlying science of anything. I’ve read The Prize cover to cover; it’s a lovely history. But he seems to fall into this camp that says if you’ve got over 50 years of reserves in the ground, at current supply rates, how could there possibly be a problem?
Q: In your paper, you mention the difficulties of accessing the relevant oil data, the unreliability of the data that are available, and the pervasive influence of powerful political and economic forces. How good or bad are the data?
Miller: At a national level, the data is reasonable in terms of production. There are some things that you can’t hide. Even if you are a Saudi Arabia or Iran or Iraq and you don’t want people to know too much about your industry, you still can’t hide how many super tankers are moving out of your country. You know how much is being exported, and you can have a good stab at how much is being consumed internally, so the national production numbers are pretty good.
Where it falls down is looking at field-by-field data because this is how you see what is going on. That’s important, that’s how you start to learn the reality and rate of decline. That data is frankly terrible. There are a few western countries that are quite open. The UK for example is entirely open. You can go online and find all that data, month by month and field by field. For most fields though, you have to turn to the commercial databases, and the biggest of those is IHS. If you’re looking for full access to that, you’re talking about a price, when I last looked, of well over a million just to study their field-by-field production data.
While I was at BP I was able to look at IHS data, and it’s increasingly clear that a lot of their data is very old. It was good when it was obtained, it was the best in the world, but some of it dates back 20 years and more. It’s still the best data there is, there is no other comprehensive source for it. At the same time, you know the data that goes into IHS is not really audited; there are no sources that you can cross-check for a lot of this stuff.
For example: There were an awful lot of tiny fields that appear to be included in their grand sum of reserves; you’re talking about fields from 1/10 of a million barrels to 10 million barrels in places where you can’t imagine that they would be economic to produce. So you have to wonder if those are included in IHS’s global reserves numbers and forecasts.
The model I built for BP’s internal forecasts was a bottom-up model, one which tried to get right down to that field-by-field level. Unfortunately, the more important the data were, the less reliable they were. But it did at that time suggest that there was a large quantity of undeveloped resource in the ground which looked like it provided a comfortable hump of supply into the future with no real supply difficulties. I have a colleague who refers to this as the Miller Hump. That was basically derived from IHS data. If memory serves, there was something on the order of 250 billion barrels which hadn’t been developed.
I still run this model, doing it year by year for many years. The funny thing is that that hump of undeveloped oil keeps moving forward. It never got developed. That was what got me thinking that that oil doesn’t exist as a reserve as we would generally understand it—something that is economically and technically worth producing. Some of those reserves are actually discoveries that are probably not recoverable.
I should add that BP had access to one or two other databases plus its own internal data base.
Q: You mentioned that between 2000 and 2007, additions to global reserves were over twice as large from reserves growth (33 gigabarrels) as from new discoveries (15 Gb). What’s the significance of that point?
Miller: If you look at total reserve increases, they exceed global consumption and thus reserves year by year are growing. And this is why economists like Peter Odell just point at the reserve numbers and laugh at people like me, “We’re not running out of oil, we’re running into oil.” However, increasing the reserves in a field, by better technology and craftier drilling and better data, doesn’t actually increase the rate of production from that field. It just slows down the rate of decline. What is important to realize is that the crop of fields that we have today is losing production every year by natural decline. For arguments’ sake, let’s say it’s 3 million barrels/day every year being lost. That decline cannot be reversed by reserves growth to older fields; reserves growth is making them last longer but it isn’t making them produce faster, it’s just holding global decline to that 3 million barrels/day per year. If you want to replace that 3 million barrels per day lost every year, you have to do most of it with new discoveries. And new discoveries equal basically only half of annual consumption.
This is why I use the ATM analogy: it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got in your account, you’re still limited by the daily withdrawal limit.
It’s also fair to point out that although reserves have been growing year by year, it hasn’t stopped the price from jumping, which suggests that there is a supply issue there somewhere.
Q: You refer to the widely used phrase—“it’s not so much the size of the tank as it is the size of the tap.” Care to comment on what the bottom line message is there?
Miller: Nobody should be misled by discussion of the size of global reserves. What matters is the speed at which you can get them out, and that speed is limited by physics and engineering and money. Very basic stuff. If you really really wanted to get the existing reserves out faster, it would cost too much to buy. So there is a rational size to the tap that you can have.
Q: You were quoted as saying we can’t grow the supply at the average rate of 1.5% per year at today’s prices. What sort of price do you think it would take to grow supply at that rate?
Miller: The kind of number that comes to mind is about $150 a barrel, but it’s a complete spectrum. The marginal new barrel at the moment might be in the Canadian oil sands or Venezuelan heavy oil, and starting new production could cost $130 or $140 a barrel.
To grow by 1.5% per year, I don’t think it would be long before you got up into the $180 range. And that’s a price that breaks economies.
Q: You mention in your paper that natural gas liquids can’t fully substitute for crude oil because they contain about a third less energy per unit volume and only one-third of that volume can be blended into transportation fuel. In terms of the dominant use of crude oil—in the transportation sector—how significant is the ongoing increase in NGLs vs. the plateau in crude oil?
Miller: The role of NGLs is a bit curious. You can run a car on it if you want, but it’s not a drop-in substitute for liquid oil. You can convert vehicle engines in fleets to run on liquefied gas; it’s probably better thought of as a fleet fuel. But it’s not a substitute for oil for my car. By and large, raising NGL production is not a substitution to making up a loss of liquid crude.
Q: You’ve also been quoted as saying that “we’re probably in peak oil today, or at least in the foothills. Production could rise for a few years yet, but not sufficiently to bring the price down. Alternatively, continuous recession in much of the world could keep demand essentially flat for years at today’s price of $110” [the Brent price]. Yet there are several commentators who believe that prices are setting up for a modest decline. If prices did drop, say $20 over the course of a year, what impact do you think that would have on world oil supply on down the road?
Miller: I think you first have to ask yourself, why would the price fall? You have two possible reasons. One would be an increase in supply of cheap oil. The other would be a decline in demand—a continuation of the current recession. If the price does drop $20, I think it will be more of a signal that world economies are floundering and demand is sinking.
I suspect what we’re looking at into the future is a long set of short-term oil price and economic cycles. At the moment, the US economy is pulling a bit ahead, and the extra oil that involves is probably being produced by shale oil, so it’s not putting an extra load on global demand. But if the European economy tried to pull ahead, it would pull up oil demand, and that would be enough to raise the world oil price. And I think we’re probably operating at the maximum price that we can afford at the moment. If the price goes up, the economy slips into recession, demand goes down, oil price goes down, people start buying more oil and the economy goes up again. It becomes an oil price saw tooth that will probably never quite fall as low as it was before, it always keeps the price generally trending up.
Q: A sobering point you make in your paper is the following: there is a substantial risk of a sustained decline in global conventional production that begins before 2020. Why do you think that point is so under-appreciated, especially by policy makers?
Miller: Policy makers are only in there for the short haul. Policy makers answer to politicians and politicians answer to the electorate, and the electorate votes its pocketbook. Politicians have to say whatever’s going to keep them in power, to get them re-elected; only when re-elected can they “do something useful” for the country. To be re-elected, they have to grow the economy. In the UK today that’s why whenever there’s a conflict between the Dept. of the Environment and the Treasury, the Treasury wins. That’s also why the government wants to go fracking in the UK. They will do anything to try to reduce the price of energy because that will help the economy to grow. All of which means they cannot acknowledge the longer term problems.
The Chinese are more rational about all this. They get peak oil and they get climate change. But they also get that they have to finish hooking up their far-flung populations to electricity supplies and to create a bit more personal mobility. Without that they have civil unrest, with people still flooding in from the countryside where they might become useless and uncontrollable. So their bigger problem for now is also growing their economy.
It’s just a mess. Bottom line: we don’t have a shortage of resources, we have a longage of people and a serious longage of their expectations.
Q: Tight oil in the U.S. seems to be viewed by many commentators as a long-term savior in the energy realm, at least on this side of the Atlantic. How would you characterize the role of tight oil, both for the U.S. and elsewhere around the world?
Miller: For the U.S. case, I’m fairly certain that tight oil is going to be quite a transient bubble. Tight gas, I think, might have more legs to it.
I say transient because of things such as the decline characteristics of the oil wells, the fact that it seems to be the oil sweet spots that make the difference—all the stuff that’s well known. The sheer rate at which you have to drill new wells simply to have production stand still, and to keep paying dividends, is quite amazing.
I think some of the early US forecasts of just 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day from shale oil were pessimistic; the industry will probably do better than that. But I also think that seeing it top out and decline in the early 2020s looks to me like a good guess at the moment. It’s still very much guesswork.
When you move out to the rest of the world, there aren’t so many places where shale oil might work for you. It might work in parts of Australia, China, Russia, South America, but not in any place like Western Europe or parts of Asia which have high population concentrations because this is not an industry that is compatible with high population density. That’s because the upheaval involved in the process affects far more people, and because the economic benefits are spread out among far more people, so there is less benefit per head. I think that is one of the factors that may even stop shale development in Europe.
Q: In your paper you wrote, “The multiple forecasts of regional and global peaks that have been made since the 1950s have frequently proved premature. More optimistic forecasts have often proved equally incorrect, but it takes longer for their errors to become evident.” Where does this leave the broader energy dialogue in terms of the role of peak oil and the world economy?
Miller: First, I don’t think that anyone’s past forecast has got anything to do with current forecasts. The fact that someone else made a call, based on the best information that was available at the time, and that call has subsequently turned out to be wrong, is an interesting fact. But what has it got to do with any new estimate? There’s just no connection. I’m sure some people will say, “Well you’re connected because you’re using the same methodologies.” Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, but we’re using better data and have much more experience. We should be getting closer and closer to a good estimate.
But we don’t even know what the shape of the peak is going to be—whether a sharp peak or a long, undulating plateau. I suspect it’s going to be the latter.
The charge that—because all previous estimates have been wrong, therefore all future estimates are going to be wrong as well—is just ludicrous and completely unscientific. I can’t be bothered to listen to that anymore.
Consider this: if you did a distribution curve of all estimates of the date of peak—say from the early ones in the 1990s to the most forward estimate of a peak in 2100—and you’ve got a bell-shaped distribution, then somewhere in the middle of that bell shape is the correct answer, but we won’t know it until we’ve gotten there. Of course, at the peak all the premature estimates will already have been proven premature because you’ve already passed the dates and been proven wrong. But how do you prove someone wrong who says it won’t be until 2100? You can’t prove him wrong by direct experience; you can only prove him wrong by argument, at which he just shrugs his shoulders and dismisses it.
Where people have got it demonstrably wrong is folks like the IEA and EIA when they make price forecasts into the future and extrapolate demand into the future. Now it’s not the same as forecasting volume and supply, but nevertheless they are forecasting into the future. And they have been just horribly wrong, when you look how prices have deviated from their predictions, projections, forecasts, scenarios—whatever word they use. And you can see that they are no better today than the old peak oilers of the past who got the date wrong.
Q: About the IEA’s forecast of global liquids supply growth through 2035, you commented “The IEA projection assumes adequate investment, no geopolitical interruptions and prices that do not significantly constrain global economic growth.” How do you view the odds of those three trends not impacting global liquids supply growth for the next 20 years?
Miller: The IEA’s brief, of course, is not just to follow problems but to supply answers to governments, and the best answer they can come up with to maintain supply is probably the only possible answer for them—there will be sufficient investment. As I mentioned earlier, you could increase supply for a while longer if you threw enough money at it. But it seems inevitable to me that that would raise the price to a level that we can’t afford. And their price forecasts in the past have been horrible, so I don’t think their price forecasts in the future will necessarily be any more reliable. So I don’t think they’re going to get away with a nice scenario—prices we can afford, no geopolitical conflict and sufficient investment. That is a trio that has not happened in the past and isn’t likely to happen in the future either.
Here’s an interesting little fact: next year, 2015, might be the first year in a century that Britain hasn’t been at war, so don’t talk to me about lack of geopolitical conflict.
Q: Anything you want to add?
Miller: I’ve had little or nothing new to say. What I’ve said above is all words that have been used before. I’m just another grain of sand in the pile.
I would like to see more solid reliable papers printed on this topic; there is far too little about that. People say policy has to be driven by evidence; okay, we have to give them sizable, quantifiable, peer-reviewed evidence.
Perhaps there’s one more point to add, a despairing observation—we’re not going to get this one right until we get a government in place that is prepared to take these issues seriously and act as genuine statesmen, instead of being driven by short term goals set for them by economists who really don’t understand the problem.
I’m starting to diverge out of the oil and energy arena here to say things like: why do we have to have an economy that grows continually? It’s not the only model. It may be the model that’s worked for the last 150 to 200 years but it’s not the only model. And it’s the model that’s going to fail when the less expensive energy sources dwindle. But you just cannot get a democratically elected politician to take notice of that because it’s against his short-term interests. The only people who can do it tend to be folks like the Chinese and Russians who really don’t care about the democratic process and as a consequence can take very much longer views of things. That’s the kind of comment that makes me persona non grata to anyone who’s reading this. I’m not calling for dictatorships, tyranny or the rest of it. I am saying that we have to find a way to get a democracy to take a meaningful look into the future that includes worrying about things like climate change and energy supply and the fact that you cannot grow an economy forever and to look at possible intelligent responses. Are there truly “solutions” or are there just some responses that smarter than others, under the circumstances?
To get there, what I really hope is that we do not experience a sharp peak in oil supplies. I would like to see a slow but inexorable rise in price that constrains consumption and lasts for decades. That would be a more controllable situation than one in which populations rise up and, essentially, tear each other limb from limb.
Over here in the UK we’ve had essentially two months of unending storms, the worst since records were kept over 200 years ago. Now what this has done is that it has gotten newspapers to start saying on the front covers: “this is climate change, this is happening and what are you going to do about it?” Well, if the same thing happened for fuel supplies—if one day we could see a headline that says “This is what peak oil feels like; what are you going to do about it.”… It’s not that you couldn’t get fuel; you just couldn’t afford so much of it any more.
The worst case scenario is that we keep desperately trying to find and produce more oil such that it brings us to a sharp peak. If we get a sharp peak, we would simply get civil unrest and collapse, maybe in the space of a couple of years because that’s how quickly it could be. A loss of 5+% of global supply in two years would just be awful. But if we have a long slow decline in production with slowly rising prices—a bit like being in a war situation—none of the price change points would be sufficient to cause riots in the streets. So, that’s what I hope.
And remember in the meantime, when people say “peak oil is dead,” ask them “has the price gone down?”
Thanks for your time and your thoughts.
—————————— ————————
Steve Andrews is a retired energy consultant and a contributing editor for Peak Oil Review. He can be reached at [email protected].
Oil tap image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.Cliff Kluge and his wife were recently going through a box of old letters and believe that they discovered the original formula for Coca-Cola among them. The Atlanta resident immediately put the recipe up for auction on eBay with an opening bid of $5 million. If you don't want to get involved in a bidding war you can buy it now for $15 million.
"You don't stumble on things like this very often," Kluge told WXIA. "It's a letter, and a formula, and the processes to make it. I think it's a little deeper than having fun; I think it's the recipe for Coca-Cola."
Much like how Colonel Sanders protected the 11 secret herbs and spices that made his fried chicken special the Coca-Cola company has gone to great lengths over the years to make sure their recipe remains known only to them. In a statement the soft drink manufacturer said that their secret remains safe.
"Throughout the years, many have tried to crack the secret formula, but no one has been able to reproduce 'the real thing,'" the statement read. "The real formula is safely tucked away in a vault at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta."
The recipe found by Kluge is dated 1943 and Coca-Cola says its recipe has been a secret since the 19th century, according to Yahoo.
On eBay there is a picture of the recipe, although Kluge has redacted the actual ingredients from the picture.
Kluge works as an antiques dealer and seems to enjoy finding items that are of unique value like this recipe.
"It's just excitement," Kluge said. "It's an Easter egg hunt, looking for eggs out there. And when you come up with something like this, it's Christmas."
After a look at the eBay page it appears as if no one has made an opening bid of $5 million dollars on the recipe and the auction will end at 6 p.m. EST on Tuesday.
$5 million is a lot of money to pay for a recipe, even if it is the recipe for Coca-Cola, so if purchased shipping on the item is free.REGINA — If you’re taking your clothes off for charity or a community benefit, proceed.
So says the Saskatchewan Party government, which on Thursday announced further changes to the province’s stripping regulations.
Stripteases can now occur in licensed theatres, concert halls, casinos and exhibition facilities, as long as the proceeds support a charitable or community organization. Each venue can host one striptease per year.
“The whole point is to get away from it being a business,” said Don McMorris, minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority (SLGA). “It’s an issue that for charity we’re accepting of, but when it starts being on a regular basis where people can look at doing that as a business is where we want to limit. … We wanted to restrict it as much as possible.”
The news doesn’t sit well with Jasmin Bieber, who owns and manages Bare Essentials, a Regina company that promotes burlesque and strip shows.
“They’re taking away from small businesses; they’re taking away from bigger businesses; they’re taking away from a lot of businesses just because they don’t like that industry,” said Bieber.
“It just seems to me that they’re saying … ‘We don’t want you to make a living this way.’”
“I know there will be individuals who will say, ‘This is my employment and I should be able to practise that employment,’” said McMorris. “I guess what I would say is you can in other jurisdictions, just not here in Saskatchewan.”
Three weeks ago, the provincial government decided to reverse its January 2014 decision to allow stripping in bars. It reasoned that licensed strip clubs would promote organized crime and human trafficking in Saskatchewan.
NDP MLA Cathy Sproule, critic for SLGA, sees merit in that argument, though says details of the new regulations are sketchy.
“In terms of who, how many venues, and what charities and what a community organization is — all of the very specific details — we just don’t have any information here that we can sort of even judge this by,” said Sproule.
“We haven’t named the exact number — is it 50 per cent or whatever — but proceeds have to go toward charity … or a community good, so it doesn’t necessarily restrict it to tax-receiptable (organizations),” said McMorris.
The definition likely won’t apply to Don Verstraeten’s hotel 260 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon.
This weekend is the last time the Codette Hotel owner will bring striptease dancers to his small-town bar.
The dancers have been a popular draw to the hotel since Jan. 1, 2014, when the province changed its legislation to allow striptease performances in licensed establishments.
“I have to quit bringing in the girls. I’m not going to shut the doors, but this will affect the numbers, no question about it,” said Verstraeten, who received a call from SLGA Thursday morning to inform him of the changes. “It was super popular. People would come in from all over the place — Prince Albert and busloads of guys from Saskatoon.”
Smaller communities that don’t have a theatre or a like venue can obtain a special-occasion permit for an approved venue under the new regulations.
The government’s reversal is disappointing, said Verstraeten.
“I’m not doing anything wrong and the girls aren’t even technically stripping. They’re still wearing g-strings and pasties. It’s pretty tame,” Verstraeten said.
“Usually people are really respectful and comply with the rules and are really nice, so I don’t know what Brad Wall’s freaking out about,” said Bieber. “It’s essentially the government saying we don’t know how to be adults in the presence of pretty ladies and alcohol.”If the world's largest economy wishes to avoid full-blown conflict with North Korea, President Donald Trump may need to adopt the measured style of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson instead of engaging in a war of words with the rogue nation.
Two days after Trump's "fire and fury" ultimatum to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which shook the international community and increased fears of military confrontation, the president has once again dialed up the pressure.
The fire and fury statement "wasn't tough enough," Trump said on Thursday, adding that "if he [Kim] does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody's seen before, what will happen in North Korea."
In an attempt to soothe concerns of armed altercations, the president's team has insisted war remains the least desirable option.
Tillerson highlighted diplomacy on Wednesday, telling reporters that "nothing I have seen and nothing I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours. Defense Secretary James Mattis also sought to clarify Washington's strategy, saying late on Thursday that the U.S. preferred a diplomatic approach to the current predicament.
"Tillerson has the right line, he's trying to dial down the pressure to make it clear that the U.S. doesn't want regime change in North Korea," said Daryl Kimball, executive director at U.S.-based Arms Control Association. "Donald Trump needs to follow the lead of his secretary of state."After countless speculations, rumors, live shots and even a hands-on video, the Samsung Galaxy A8 is now finally official.
The handset is now listed on the Korean manufacturer's China website and we can finally say that the company's thinnest phone to date is a reality and relieve ourselves of the sea of information that has been bombarding the rumor mill.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a metal frame with a curvature very similar to that of the Galaxy S6, but the glass on the back has been replaced by aluminum, as is typical for the A-series. The handset has a profile of just 5.9mm and packs a 5.7-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display, yet still manages to keep thinks on the light side weighing in at 151 grams - quite modest for a phablet.
Samsung Galaxy A8
Under the hood, there is a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC, with one cluster of Cortex-A53 cores working at 1.0 GHz and another ticking at 1.5 GHz. RAM is 2GB, onboard storage can be either 16GB or 32GB and there is also a microSD card slot. The memory expansion slot is shared with the second SIM slot so you can't get both dual-SIM and microSD at the same time, though.
In terms of connectivity the Samsung Galaxy offers 4G LTE, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS with Glonass and Beidou support, as well as NFC.
Samsung Galaxy A8
The camera setup consists of a 16MP main shooter, which, according to previous rumors is not identical to the one in the S6 and S6 edge and has a reduced pixel size of 1.0 µm to conserve space. It still has OIS and a bright f/1.9 aperture.
Another high-end feature present in the Galaxy A8 is a fingerprint reader, just like the flagship models. The unit is powered by a 3,050 mAh battery and Samsung promises 304 hours of standby time. As far as we currently know, color options include white, black and gold.
Samsung Galaxy A8
Source (in Chinese) | ViaThe superstorm that devastated the U.S. East Coast left its mark on Canada after one woman in Toronto was struck and killed by flying debris.
CBC News reports the woman died after being hit a large piece of sign that was dislodged by winds that reached speeds of 100 km/h.
The heavy winds of Hurricane Sandy also downed trees and caused power outages across the Toronto area overnight, leaving the region bracing for further impact on Tuesday.
Some 200,000 people lost power in southern Ontario and Quebec overnight as the storm pounded the region with high winds and heavy rain. CBC reported the brunt of the storm is expected to reach Ontario on Tuesday, but the storm has already caused major issues around the Toronto area.
Some 45,000 people remained in the dark Tuesday morning after losing power to downed power lines. CBC reports that East York, Scarborough, Upper Beaches, Leaside and the Junction were most affected by power outages.
Toronto Hydro was still reporting wide swaths of outages from Etobicoke to Scarborough, including thousands of residents affected in the downtown core.
Streetcar wires were also ripped down by heavy winds in the west end, forcing the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) to shut down service on three lines during Tuesday morning's commute. The TTC said streetcar service on King and Queen Streets were been replaced by shuttle buses between Bathurst Street and the western termination point until the system could be repaired.
About a quarter of all flights out of Toronto's Pearson International Airport on Tuesday were cancelled in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, with many flights out of Billy Bishop airport also grounded until further notice.
Meantime, the Toronto District School Board closed several schools due to power outages, including DA Morrison, East York Collegiate Institute, East York Alternative, Parkside, Oak Park CTR, Jesse Ketchum, Keele St Public School, West Preparatory, Rippleton, Owen Public School, St Andrew's Junior High School, CR Marchant, Weston Collegiate Institute, Weston Memorial, Westmount and Hilltop.
The Toronto Catholic District School Board also reported that a handful of schools lost power and said classes could be cancelled if it wasn't restored by mid-morning.
Toronto fire crews were also kept busy overnight after a Roots store at Queen Street and Spadina Avenue caught fire shortly after midnight. Fire officials told the Toronto Star that the blaze could not be blamed on Hurricane Sandy, but said the wind could have made the blaze worse.
Elsewhere in southern Ontairo, Hamilton police told CBC that the effects of the storm were limited overnight, with only a few downed trees and traffic collisions reported.
In Mississauga, hydro poles and trees were knocked down, and police told Mississauga News a water main broke and sent water gushing into the streets. Similar damage was reported in Oshawa.Hi, Nick here.
Roger's at 31c3, so I'll post his statement about that article you might have seen:
Tor hidden service traffic, which Dr. Gareth Owen discussed in his talk this afternooon, is only 1.5% of all Tor traffic. Tor gets about 2 million users per day total.
The researcher ran a set of Tor relays for a six month period, and recorded how many times somebody attempted to look up a hidden service (this |
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